Maybe the tragedy of the commons problem isn't so bad after all. Maybe we should just reduce parking enforcement to the barest minimum - have a guy with a piece of chalk walk around marking tires - pay his salary from the property taxes of the stores along his route. If a car is in place for more than a couple of days, tow it. Leave it at that and forget about all the expense - monetary and socially - of massively complex and invasive enforcement systems.
You might want to read Don Shoup's The High Cost of Free Parking before you go advocating that position widely. Turns out, we know quite a bit about what happens with different street parking regulation approaches.
That isn't why I don't like PvP, but it definitely is an issue I hadn't thought about. Economics plays an enormous role in the playability of MMOGs to be sure.
Well, true, it wouldn't have happened... but mostly because he wouldn't have been able to annotate an actual copy of the book anywhere near as effectively. He would have had to underline or highlight and then make notes elsewhere, including specific page references. Then if the book was lost or stolen, some of the information (the highlighting/underlining) would have been lost, but if he managed to obtain the same edition again, he could reconstruct his notes.
If he could read his own handwriting. That'd be my biggest obstacle...
This is not about deleting the book as much as it is about his annotations. Regardless of anyone's position on deleting the book, Amazon should never have deleted the customers notes. Those notes were created by the customer, and should not have been subject to deletion.
Wow, RTFS. They didn't delete the notes. The notes are still saved on his Kindle. But by breaking the link between the text and the notes, the notes lost most of their meaning and value.
He's looking for other people who have the same problem (destruction of information due to breaking the link between annotations and the deleted book) to sue in a class action.
However, given that they only deleted one instantiation of one book, the number of people affected in this manner is likely to be too small to achieve class status.
Using admin account without password is the computer equivalent of having your door slightly ajar. Rendering the contents of your server in HTML and serving them up on Port 80 is the computer equivalent of leaving your door wide open and a written invitation in large script next to it.
In fatherless households, female children reach menarche and display secondary sexual characteristics sooner, too.
Is that somehow due to discipline style also? Or is it POSSIBLE that gene expression is influenced by environmental characteristics like presence of one or both parents?
Every new MMOG seems to think that they will be the ones to make PvP "work" at long last. But it's not likely to happen, for one simple reason: most people don't want PvP. Those who like PvP really, REALLY like it, and there's nothing wrong with that... but it's a small subset of the population. 46% of World of Warcraft's servers are PvP (or RPPVP) by default, which is pretty impressive... but when you look at the server populations, you see that doesn't translate into nearly half of the players preferring a PvP environment. On the "Normal" servers, 63% have a "Medium" population, and 29% have a "High" population; the plain RP servers are only slightly less populated, with 59% "Medium" and 17.6% "High." The PVP servers (and here I've just looked at the straight PVP servers... there's only 6 RPPVP servers, and they sorted to a different part of the spreadsheet, and I'm lazy) have the lowest proportion of "High" population servers, at 17%, but only 41.5% are "Medium". More than 40% of the PvP servers are "Low" population.
And that's a game that has spent a lot of effort on PvP. Granted, PvE is the first emphasis, but there's a lot of specifically PvP content. There's also a lot of PvP activity on the "Normal" and "RP" servers on an opt-in basis, but it operates almost like a separate game-within-a-game.
I don't think it's a coincidence that every game that's put PvP first has had relatively low adoption. I don't doubt that it's fun if that's what you like, but it's just not what most people like, and MMOGs do need a pretty large customer base to succeed.
There's a lot more to PvE class balance than "Making the player feel powerful." Truth is, people will ALWAYS bitch about class balance; if every class is bitching pretty equally, you've done it right.;-) But if player characters are overpowered to the environment, the game isn't fun... and it sorta sounds like they're leaning that way.
I'd love to be wrong... I'm still waiting for a really good sci-fi genre MMOG to come along. I'm not a dragons-and-fairies type. But so far, they've all disappointed me.:-(
For all those who don't play a Paladin in WoW, here's the Executive Summary of the above post:
Jumpgate Evolution is going to have its own balance considerations that are not necessarily related to balance issues in other MMOs, but stating that balancing classes in PvP makes PvE balance "easy" (when the goal is making the player "feel powerful" in PvE) is nonsense.
Take a look at what Blizzard is going through with WoW patch 3.2. Blizzard's attempt to balance Retribution Paladins in PvP has totally screwed up their PvE damage per second. It's now conditional based on the fight, and they do less area of effect (AoE) damage to groups of monsters than before due to the seal changes. So, no, balancing things on the PvP side did not make Retribution Paladins on Blizzard's public test realm (PTR) "feel powerful", at least not compared to how they felt in 3.1 on Live servers. The rest of the Paladins will suffer if/when the changes go live. Patch 3.2 has, allegedly, been significantly delayed as Blizzard struggles to get things right on the PvE side without giving back too much of the PvP power that they took away.
(Note: I play a rogue, a druid, a shaman, and a mage regularly, and have been playing WoW since release. I've got nothing against people playing, loving, and going on at length about WoW. But I think you overestimate your audience's interest in the intricacies of Paladin Seal mechanics.)
Too bad you left out the best free option, but at least now we know you don't know what you're talking about. Not that it's massive, but it's persistent and allows ~32 players per server.
32 != Massively Multiplayer. That's not even half a monkeysphere.
You didn't say "It isn't legal for it to be done at the Federal level," you said "It shouldn't be done at the Federal level." As a thought experiment, why should the Federal government be constrained against making this legislation?
True, though market externalities and market failures (such as tragedy of the commons or the prisoner's dilemma) are (1) not exactly the same thing; and (2) often a result of the impossibility of perfect information, competition, and mobility. Public goods (the commons) cannot be offered in a competitive manner; it's impossible to block access to them. They also suffer from imperfect mobility; you can't just pick up your cow and go find somewhere else to graze that easily. The prisoner's dilemma, another classic market failure, is a result of imperfect information; you can't know for sure what decisions other actors are making, so you can't make the optimal decision yourself.
Externalities can also be viewed as a lack of perfect information. When we compare costs, we often only consider the out-of-pocket costs that we bear directly, and don't have sufficient information or experience to weigh the total costs, especially when they don't directly accrue to us. A sufficiently enlightened consumer, given all the relevant information about the supply line of two competing products, could take into account that Product A, which is slightly cheaper, also resulted in the destruction of more rain forest or expenditure of fossil fuels. But since we haven't yet found a feasible way to present that information to consumers (much less to teach them how to weigh it against their out-of-pocket cost), we are left with regulatory remedies to control negative externalities.
There has been no evidence of cartels or collusion in the wireless industry. What there is evidence of is that all the carriers have decided, for themselves, that $0.20 per text message is the price (currently) where they maximize their profit.
When all providers of a service offer extremely similar options at extremely similar prices, that implies either commoditization or collusion. Given the rate of innovation and change in the cell phone industry, and the statistics that imply the market isn't quite saturated yet, commoditization is less likely, so it would make sense to investigate collusion.
The investigation would either provide evidence or fail to find evidence (which either means that it's a natural market phenomenon, or that they're really, really good at keeping their communication secret).
So its ok for AT&T to make false claims to get business, but its not ok for Verizon?
The US economy has been built upon the god-given right of corporations to make false claims. We don't want to go messing with that now, or we'll all end up wearing mao jackets and having to ride bicycles everywhere, like in Europe. You know what comes after that, right?...Socialism and soy-based diets.
HELLZ NO. The soy industry is owned by Monsanto, who are lying sacks of dung. If we're going to hold corps to making only true claims, we'll all be eating grassfed beef and free-range chicken!
During Dubya's reign, Federally-funded sex education programs had to adopt an abstinence-only curriculum, which included many assertions that were contrary to scientific evidence.
California didn't take the money, and kept teaching accurate materials. They were the only state that did this, but many large school districts also gave up Federal funding in deference to teaching real sex ed.
So, yeah, states can do it if they feel it's really important to protect the rights of their citizens to send text messages while hurtling down the highway. It's unlikely they will, though.
Er, no. Free market capitalism has nothing to do with competing for customers, it only has to do with competing for profits.
Either way, it has to do with competing. Without competition, you don't have a free market. Therefore, when required, the government steps in with regulation to ensure competition.
The goal is the efficient distribution of resources. Cartels and collusion work against that end, so they're illegal.
Easier than that: Say you're PARKED talking on the phone, and get hit by an uninsured driver (or it's a hit-and-run). Prove you weren't moving, so your insurance kicks in? Uh, no.
I'd much rather just have a car that could drive itself. That's not practical at the moment, either.
Sure it is. It's just terrifying to ride in, and the infrastructure isn't widely deployed. But if we could all just get over our silly fears about hurtling down the highway at 70 MPH just a few feet from the car in front of us, we'd have it already!
I am sure there should be laws against text messaging while driving, but I agree it shouldn't be at the federal level
Why not? What changes the impact or outcome of text messaging while driving depending on what state you're in? Does it make sense to be driving down the road, legally texting, and you cross a border and now what you were doing legally is illegal?
Unless we want to put up gates across every road that crosses a state border, we really should standardize most of the laws that pertain to driving. After all, drivers should be concentrating on the road, not on what legislation changed when they crossed an invisible line.
No, it didn't. It came from US citizens and residents. The states get their own revenues from other sources, including from Federal appropriations.
Maybe you'd rather the Federal government abandon maintenance of the highway infrastructure completely, and leave it to the individual whether to pave over the pothole in Route X that he takes home from work?
Exactly what? The PP basically said that T-Mobile competes on service rather than shinies. That's why we're with them after ditching the nightmare that is Ma Cell. My BB Pearl is just fine, thank you.
People who are more interested in the gadgets will go with AT&T or Verizon, but people who want solid service will drop them for T-Mobile. (And then there's the folks who think Sprint is a good idea, and I pity them.)
Since switching from AT&T to T-Mobile, I can receive cell phone calls at home. My house, BTW, is in a flat part of a dense urban area. Not like it should be HARD for AT&T to get service there, but they weren't interested in our complaints.
Slashdot Mirror
Maybe the tragedy of the commons problem isn't so bad after all. Maybe we should just reduce parking enforcement to the barest minimum - have a guy with a piece of chalk walk around marking tires - pay his salary from the property taxes of the stores along his route. If a car is in place for more than a couple of days, tow it. Leave it at that and forget about all the expense - monetary and socially - of massively complex and invasive enforcement systems.
You might want to read Don Shoup's The High Cost of Free Parking before you go advocating that position widely. Turns out, we know quite a bit about what happens with different street parking regulation approaches.
Hm, interesting.
That isn't why I don't like PvP, but it definitely is an issue I hadn't thought about. Economics plays an enormous role in the playability of MMOGs to be sure.
Here's the first hit on a scholar.google.com search for menarche father absent. If you want more, you now know how to find it.
Well, true, it wouldn't have happened... but mostly because he wouldn't have been able to annotate an actual copy of the book anywhere near as effectively. He would have had to underline or highlight and then make notes elsewhere, including specific page references. Then if the book was lost or stolen, some of the information (the highlighting/underlining) would have been lost, but if he managed to obtain the same edition again, he could reconstruct his notes.
If he could read his own handwriting. That'd be my biggest obstacle...
This is not about deleting the book as much as it is about his annotations. Regardless of anyone's position on deleting the book, Amazon should never have deleted the customers notes. Those notes were created by the customer, and should not have been subject to deletion.
Wow, RTFS. They didn't delete the notes. The notes are still saved on his Kindle. But by breaking the link between the text and the notes, the notes lost most of their meaning and value.
He's looking for other people who have the same problem (destruction of information due to breaking the link between annotations and the deleted book) to sue in a class action.
However, given that they only deleted one instantiation of one book, the number of people affected in this manner is likely to be too small to achieve class status.
Using admin account without password is the computer equivalent of having your door slightly ajar. Rendering the contents of your server in HTML and serving them up on Port 80 is the computer equivalent of leaving your door wide open and a written invitation in large script next to it.
FTFY.
In fatherless households, female children reach menarche and display secondary sexual characteristics sooner, too.
Is that somehow due to discipline style also? Or is it POSSIBLE that gene expression is influenced by environmental characteristics like presence of one or both parents?
Every new MMOG seems to think that they will be the ones to make PvP "work" at long last. But it's not likely to happen, for one simple reason: most people don't want PvP. Those who like PvP really, REALLY like it, and there's nothing wrong with that... but it's a small subset of the population. 46% of World of Warcraft's servers are PvP (or RPPVP) by default, which is pretty impressive... but when you look at the server populations, you see that doesn't translate into nearly half of the players preferring a PvP environment. On the "Normal" servers, 63% have a "Medium" population, and 29% have a "High" population; the plain RP servers are only slightly less populated, with 59% "Medium" and 17.6% "High." The PVP servers (and here I've just looked at the straight PVP servers... there's only 6 RPPVP servers, and they sorted to a different part of the spreadsheet, and I'm lazy) have the lowest proportion of "High" population servers, at 17%, but only 41.5% are "Medium". More than 40% of the PvP servers are "Low" population.
And that's a game that has spent a lot of effort on PvP. Granted, PvE is the first emphasis, but there's a lot of specifically PvP content. There's also a lot of PvP activity on the "Normal" and "RP" servers on an opt-in basis, but it operates almost like a separate game-within-a-game.
I don't think it's a coincidence that every game that's put PvP first has had relatively low adoption. I don't doubt that it's fun if that's what you like, but it's just not what most people like, and MMOGs do need a pretty large customer base to succeed.
There's a lot more to PvE class balance than "Making the player feel powerful." Truth is, people will ALWAYS bitch about class balance; if every class is bitching pretty equally, you've done it right. ;-) But if player characters are overpowered to the environment, the game isn't fun... and it sorta sounds like they're leaning that way.
I'd love to be wrong... I'm still waiting for a really good sci-fi genre MMOG to come along. I'm not a dragons-and-fairies type. But so far, they've all disappointed me. :-(
For all those who don't play a Paladin in WoW, here's the Executive Summary of the above post:
Jumpgate Evolution is going to have its own balance considerations that are not necessarily related to balance issues in other MMOs, but stating that balancing classes in PvP makes PvE balance "easy" (when the goal is making the player "feel powerful" in PvE) is nonsense.
Take a look at what Blizzard is going through with WoW patch 3.2. Blizzard's attempt to balance Retribution Paladins in PvP has totally screwed up their PvE damage per second. It's now conditional based on the fight, and they do less area of effect (AoE) damage to groups of monsters than before due to the seal changes. So, no, balancing things on the PvP side did not make Retribution Paladins on Blizzard's public test realm (PTR) "feel powerful", at least not compared to how they felt in 3.1 on Live servers. The rest of the Paladins will suffer if/when the changes go live. Patch 3.2 has, allegedly, been significantly delayed as Blizzard struggles to get things right on the PvE side without giving back too much of the PvP power that they took away.
(Note: I play a rogue, a druid, a shaman, and a mage regularly, and have been playing WoW since release. I've got nothing against people playing, loving, and going on at length about WoW. But I think you overestimate your audience's interest in the intricacies of Paladin Seal mechanics.)
Too bad you left out the best free option, but at least now we know you don't know what you're talking about. Not that it's massive, but it's persistent and allows ~32 players per server.
32 != Massively Multiplayer. That's not even half a monkeysphere.
You didn't say "It isn't legal for it to be done at the Federal level," you said "It shouldn't be done at the Federal level." As a thought experiment, why should the Federal government be constrained against making this legislation?
True, though market externalities and market failures (such as tragedy of the commons or the prisoner's dilemma) are (1) not exactly the same thing; and (2) often a result of the impossibility of perfect information, competition, and mobility. Public goods (the commons) cannot be offered in a competitive manner; it's impossible to block access to them. They also suffer from imperfect mobility; you can't just pick up your cow and go find somewhere else to graze that easily. The prisoner's dilemma, another classic market failure, is a result of imperfect information; you can't know for sure what decisions other actors are making, so you can't make the optimal decision yourself.
Externalities can also be viewed as a lack of perfect information. When we compare costs, we often only consider the out-of-pocket costs that we bear directly, and don't have sufficient information or experience to weigh the total costs, especially when they don't directly accrue to us. A sufficiently enlightened consumer, given all the relevant information about the supply line of two competing products, could take into account that Product A, which is slightly cheaper, also resulted in the destruction of more rain forest or expenditure of fossil fuels. But since we haven't yet found a feasible way to present that information to consumers (much less to teach them how to weigh it against their out-of-pocket cost), we are left with regulatory remedies to control negative externalities.
There has been no evidence of cartels or collusion in the wireless industry. What there is evidence of is that all the carriers have decided, for themselves, that $0.20 per text message is the price (currently) where they maximize their profit.
When all providers of a service offer extremely similar options at extremely similar prices, that implies either commoditization or collusion. Given the rate of innovation and change in the cell phone industry, and the statistics that imply the market isn't quite saturated yet, commoditization is less likely, so it would make sense to investigate collusion.
The investigation would either provide evidence or fail to find evidence (which either means that it's a natural market phenomenon, or that they're really, really good at keeping their communication secret).
It's like saying you're the cleanest hotel in town. The rooms may be dirty, but all the other hotels are caked in shit.
Wow, which town is that? I'd rather leave it out of my vacation plans (unless I'm going camping I guess).
The US economy has been built upon the god-given right of corporations to make false claims. We don't want to go messing with that now, or we'll all end up wearing mao jackets and having to ride bicycles everywhere, like in Europe. You know what comes after that, right? ...Socialism and soy-based diets.
HELLZ NO. The soy industry is owned by Monsanto, who are lying sacks of dung. If we're going to hold corps to making only true claims, we'll all be eating grassfed beef and free-range chicken!
Well, car manufacturers have tried to block people from working on their own cars, by withholding the reset codes for the maintenance light.
I believe they were successfully sued though, and have to release them to anyone who requests them.
And besides - if every AT&T tower melted into a heap of slag tomorrow, wouldn't we all be cheering?
Well, no. They'd probably smell bad and be eyesores. And molten metal might drip on nearby buildings.
During Dubya's reign, Federally-funded sex education programs had to adopt an abstinence-only curriculum, which included many assertions that were contrary to scientific evidence.
California didn't take the money, and kept teaching accurate materials. They were the only state that did this, but many large school districts also gave up Federal funding in deference to teaching real sex ed.
So, yeah, states can do it if they feel it's really important to protect the rights of their citizens to send text messages while hurtling down the highway. It's unlikely they will, though.
Er, no. Free market capitalism has nothing to do with competing for customers, it only has to do with competing for profits.
Either way, it has to do with competing. Without competition, you don't have a free market. Therefore, when required, the government steps in with regulation to ensure competition.
The goal is the efficient distribution of resources. Cartels and collusion work against that end, so they're illegal.
Easier than that: Say you're PARKED talking on the phone, and get hit by an uninsured driver (or it's a hit-and-run). Prove you weren't moving, so your insurance kicks in? Uh, no.
I'd much rather just have a car that could drive itself. That's not practical at the moment, either.
Sure it is. It's just terrifying to ride in, and the infrastructure isn't widely deployed. But if we could all just get over our silly fears about hurtling down the highway at 70 MPH just a few feet from the car in front of us, we'd have it already!
I am sure there should be laws against text messaging while driving, but I agree it shouldn't be at the federal level
Why not? What changes the impact or outcome of text messaging while driving depending on what state you're in? Does it make sense to be driving down the road, legally texting, and you cross a border and now what you were doing legally is illegal?
Unless we want to put up gates across every road that crosses a state border, we really should standardize most of the laws that pertain to driving. After all, drivers should be concentrating on the road, not on what legislation changed when they crossed an invisible line.
No, it didn't. It came from US citizens and residents. The states get their own revenues from other sources, including from Federal appropriations.
Maybe you'd rather the Federal government abandon maintenance of the highway infrastructure completely, and leave it to the individual whether to pave over the pothole in Route X that he takes home from work?
exactly,...
Exactly what? The PP basically said that T-Mobile competes on service rather than shinies. That's why we're with them after ditching the nightmare that is Ma Cell. My BB Pearl is just fine, thank you.
People who are more interested in the gadgets will go with AT&T or Verizon, but people who want solid service will drop them for T-Mobile. (And then there's the folks who think Sprint is a good idea, and I pity them.)
Since switching from AT&T to T-Mobile, I can receive cell phone calls at home. My house, BTW, is in a flat part of a dense urban area. Not like it should be HARD for AT&T to get service there, but they weren't interested in our complaints.