Agreed. I've always felt like the proper climate change bill isn't cap&trade, but something closer to cap & trade & impose massive duties on anything from a country not invoking compliant enough regulations. With regards to your plan, you can't inspect each factory in a foreign country, but you don't want to anyways. Simply apply tariffs on any foreign goods where the manufacturing nation doesn't enforce strict enough environmental regulations. If the rivers leaving the country are toxic and the atmosphere is too, then you already know they've failed. Seems like this approach would appease the hippies, the isolationists, and regular americans who would prefer to keep their jobs...
Of course, the CEOs would HATE it, so that's why it can't happen.
Fact: how your fact got modded insightful I'll never know, because it's actually clueless. Military spending uses a free market, but it's a distorted one for three reasons. 1) The military buys products that don't exist yet, so it's working on promise deliver and 2) the military seldom fully spec their product before opening a bid 3) the product is almost certainly unique.
So, you've got a bunch of sellers saying "we can do that, and here's what it will cost", but because of #2 they don't know what "that" is and because of #1 you don't really know if the seller can deliver anything. Because the buyer is taking such a risky approach per above, they attempt to mitigate risk by buying from the same 2-4 sellers for every contract. So, in addition to a distortion causing purchasing model, you've got a market distorting ogliopoly situation.
Sure, defense contractors split projects into as many key districts as they can, but that's meant to keep the cow producing milk, which is different than awarding the original contract.
As for democrats -vs- republicans, it's pretty obvious that our high military spending is being mostly pushed by republicans. Democrats prefer spending on entitlements.
Games I make an exception for as those are entertainment not tools I need.
I'm all for FOSS, but your comments actually make negative sense.
If you should be willing to pay for anything, it's the things you need and not the games. Based on your logic, you should pay to play basketball at your local park, but your home should be free because it's something you need.
It's definitely rational to choose LibreOffice for free if it does everything you need rather than pay MSFT for a comparable tool. And it's certainly a valid argument than copyright laws, which were always designed to create artificial scarcity, seem even more out of place in the digital world we've adopted over the last 20 years. But, at the same token we will need to figure out a way to compensate creators for their labor.
It was one thing when the main product being stolen was music (not that musicians don't deserve to be compensated), because at least there was an obvious way to continue paying them (through live performances) and musicians want to make music even when they won't be well paid. In other words, it really doesn't take much to compensate someone for the effort to write a song. When it spread to movies, and software, it got a little dicier just because the production costs of those products are generally so much higher. But things are really going to come to a head when CNC/makerbots reach a maturity level where if you can get your hands on the iphoneX specs you can make one at material cost.
Not sure what will happen, because a world where the specs are free for all could be wonderful, but I think society will need to find some alternative financial policy aside from capitalism/socialism to make it work.
That's self-evidently not true by an objective measure. Lots of people play them, ergo, to many people it IS fun.
Kind of a false assumption. Lots of people could play because they feel compelled (I want to stop but can't). They could play because they feel pressured (I don't really like the game, but all my friends are doing it). They could play because it smooths relationships (hey, thanks for watering my pumpkins). Or they could play because they feel driven to complete things (gotta catch 'em all).
A quick rule of thumb is that if you won't look back on the activity fondly in a few years time, it probably never was fun for you.
if people didn't enjoy the games, wouldn't they move on and find other ways to amuse themselves?
Short answer - no.
Slightly longer answer - you can exploit human behavior in such a way that they become obsessed with doing something, even when all the actual rewards (fun) from that behavior have disappeared. If I create an activity with the goal of it being fun, and some people become addicted to where they participate long after it's still fun, you might forgive me. I have done some harm (through causing addiction) but it was accidental. If, however, I create an activity with the goal of forming addiction, then you could rightly consider me a slimeball. I am exploiting people even if I do not physically force them to participate. Most (but not all) "Social gaming" was clearly created with the intent to sink as much time as possible, as opposed to producing an activity people would find enjoyable. And that's why you see so much anger her on/.
Isn't it about time to get those Tesla Files out that the FBI snagged from his estate when he died? Broadcast power was something he was into, but they couldn't figure out how to bill for it. With broadcast power you can run the world on goofy cheap energy, clean as well. Except I do have some questions what that kind of RF would do to organisms on the planet?
I'm totally confused on this one. Are you a real crazy person, or are you pretending to be one? I really hates the interwebs sometimes!
If you're serious about this, the reason broadcast power doesn't work is because it's so wasteful. The power of an RF signal's strength decreases as a square of the distance. So, broadcast power might work well enough to charge your mouse from a plugged in mouse pad (the distance is really tiny), but it's rather less effective at powering all your appliances from a central beam in your basement, and it's even more ridiculous to beam power across cities. And that's if you ignore all the problems radio waves have getting to certain locations, like basements or behind hill sides.
C++ obviously doesn't NEED a garbage collector, just like it didn't need lambda expressions. They can, however, be incredibly useful if you want to write algorithms in certain ways. Here's a simple example. You've got an object you want to pass through your system, and you don't know who all owns it at any given time. It's a complex object, that even passes itself into some of its own member data.
So, how do you manage that without a GC? You want to at least use smart pointers (shared_ptr), but that doesn't deal with the circular reference of A points to B points to A. You also don't know the lifetime of the object, because it's been passed all over the place in your program.
Without a GC, you are forced in this situation down some paths you might not like. You can refactor your algorithm to prevent the cyclic references. You can hack in some code to look for this specific case and deal with it by removing one of the cyclic references. I guess you could write your own garbage collector. The point is, you may be forced to write a more awkward or less efficient algorithm just for lack of a GC.
What I think C++ really needs is more of an optional garbage collector. Use gcnew (like the old managed C++ did) and you get back an object like gc_ptr. The gc_ptr is different that the other smart pointers, because you can't get the underlying pointer or reference object out of it, even though the -> operator would function about as expected. That would make the feature annoying enough to use, that hopefully people would pick another approach when applicable and use the gc_ptr only when necessary. It might give you the best of both worlds.
Other posters already said it, but why not Go instead of Java? Instead of a virtual machine, just distribute the source and let a compiler optimized for that specific phone build it into an executable when it's loaded? One of the main points of Go is how fast it compiles.
> At least these 'nudging technologies' are intended to -help- the person affected.
Said he who considers himself superior to the lesser beings being nudged. I'll be the judge of what is good for me and you figure out what is best for you. Now toss me another Brawndo will ya.
I think you're saying this sarcastically, but I never really understood the people who actual make these kinds of arguments. Sure, there are many topics where we may all disagree. But if there's a simple nudge that helps people eat more vegetables and less sweets, then who can honestly be against that. And, I'm not just saying it because I think all those fat people need the help. As a decently healthy adult, I don't think it is a bad thing if I am nudged towards a healthier diet or a little more physical activity or using less electricity. Those are all things I want to do, but I can still use the help so long as it doesn't feel intrusive.
What do you even think that means? Pushing technology. Pfft. Do you mean new technology? I hate to break it to you, but almost all consumer grade technology is old stale bread crumbs. Do you think I mean, is anything that Facebook, Twitter, Groupon, or Amazon doing cutting edge?
The fact of the matter, Google exists to make money for their shareholders and employees. If they decide to train a billion squirrels to sort nuts in such a fashion that when my query is received it provides 10,000 relevant matches in 0.5 seconds, then more power to them.
As disappointing as this fact is, there are two kinds of technology companies: successful companies which leverage mature technology (hopefully in novel or innovative ways), and those force their customer base to use bleeding edge technology until they go out of business. Go down the lists. MSFT, Oracle, Intel, Sony. Those companies rarely do anything but iterate their products. Apple and Nintendo use established safe technology; what innovation they provide is almost exclusively in user interfaces. IBM makes money from established technology and generally uses the bleeding edge stuff as a commercial for how great they are.
Even Xerox and Bell from back in the day, with their vaunted research labs, sold the stable products.
You can't profit off of bleeding edge stuff. You can just hope to be involved in it, so that when the day comes that it is mature your company is in a place to be the first entrant.
You're jumping to the wrong conclusion. Watson and similar systems are not intended to replace humans. At least, not in the sense of removing them completely. They fall into the typical garbage-in-garbage-out situation where you need a real expert, like a doctor, to describe the symptoms so the system can produce a valid diagnosis.
Here's how it's actually going to work. The doctor will spend more time talking to the patient to get an accurate understanding of symptoms. The expert system will then tell the doctor what the diagnosis is, and the doctor will always take that recommendation because his malpractice insurance will say that if he does a good job collecting symptoms and he follows Watson's advice, then he is not liable for incorrect diagnoses. Overall, health care will regress to the middle, as good doctors let the system do their work (but see more patients) and bad doctors have a system helping fix their mistakes. Costs will also come down some due to the increased efficiency and because the system will not be influenced by the number of specialists living nearby like human doctors are.
This is a bit rantish, but I still wish I had mod points. The people who think unbridled capitalism will solve all problems strike me as perhaps the most naive large segment of the population.
are you suggesting that you should be able to just have software like a book.
That's a fine idea. I should start a publishing company that sells you books; but, if you want to read all of the book, you're going to have to come to my website, agree to a 9000 word EULA, and bind your book serial key to your facebook account so I can verify that you are the only reader who gets to read the whole book.
After all, both products are only covered by copyright (meaning only I can copy, but anyone can resell), so the only way I can prevent you from loaning or reselling the book I sold you is to add "features" to your purchase where I circumvent copyright law. Happy reading.
I have never understood the point of decaf coffee. It's not the grandest tasting beverage in the world. If you want a drink with no caffeine that tastes a little bitter and has zero calories, try one of the many uncaffeinated varieties of tea. If you want a hot beverage that tastes good, how about hot cider or hot chocolate. If you're just thirsty, drink some water.
Alright, cue the karma destruction, since I just dissed something about coffee. It's alright, I live in the Pacific Northwest, so I'm used to being shunned for my disinterest in coffee.
Is your point that the PISA test is either a useless measure or intentionally slanted to favor China ?
Generally speaking, yes standardized tests are nearly useless. A nation's total economic package will always be improved if its youth are better at reading, science, and math. But doing well on such tests does not prove the citizenry actually are informed in a useful way in those subjects, nor does it inform you about what trade-offs were made to make those scores.
Here's a dumb example. Let's say every child from age 3-18 spends 15 hours a day sitting at a desk studying. They score great on those tests, in fact not only do they test well in science, they are exemplar in their scientific knowledge. However, their health suffers greatly for it. Most are obese, all have cardiac problems (even thin people who are sedentary have increased cardiac risk), and none of them have the stamina for simple tasks like an afternoon of gardening. Also, they never developed the social skills required to collaborate effectively or the creativity that is trained during play time.
So, do you want those guys as your nations future, even if they get perfect scores on all the tests? They'd all die in their thirties or forties, and contribute little of use during their brief stint as working adults. I know that's not what's actually happening in China, but my point is just that a test score tells you very little about anything that matters.
We don't even really know that being better at math is always better. Much of our "rational thought" is actually carried out by emotions. Perhaps, if too many people were too good at math, they would spend the time calculating rates of return and interest rates and comparing various factors that might be important in each decision they make. If you do none of that, you get ripped off, but if you do it too much you waste your time in the minutia.
There are millions of game consoles out there - millions - and yet there aren't very many revisions of hardware per model. It's not hard for the manufacturers to test how these required updates are going to affect their hardware.
To be fair to Microsoft, I'm sure they they wanted to test some of the older XBox360s, but all theirs had already RRODed. Plus, how many first edition 360s are even still out there? Microsoft can easily afford to replace the 7 guys who bought a 360 on day one and it finally failed them during this latest firmware update.
I always looked at it the other way. If you could install a device that "burned" say an extra 100 calories a day for you, well that's another half a snickers bar. In an obese society, even a device that did nothing useful (say a OLED monitor on your back instead of a tattoo) would probably become chic very quick.
Likewise, books are language. Can books be copyrighted? No one owns language.
Yes, but they cannot be patented. It's important to keep in mind that patents, copyright, and trademark are not natural phenomena of a market. They are things we have decided improve the innovation of the market, at least under certain circumstances. If a class of patents hurt innovation, or harm innovation, then we should eliminate them.
Gee, I don't know. Free, nearly limitless energy and it literally falls out of the sky? I find it hard calling that awful even when the efficiencies are poor.
I agree. We always look back at the old and think it was great because we've forgotten the mediocre and only remember the truly great or truly bad. For instance, we know music was amazing in the 60s/70s because look what you had: The Beatles, Led Zepplin, The Who, etc. Contrast that with me not naming anyone great making music today and you can see how the times have changed.
That said, the transition of prime time TV from sitcoms towards reality programming does seem worse to many of us than what came before. I'd take the A-Team over American Idol any day. And even when the reality show is of good quality, which the A-Team was not, programming today tends to be meaner. And I don't really need to watch more mean things.
Finally, there is a far more logical reason why they would stay mum about their next release cycle (after all, assuming you were correct, they may as well commit to selling the current platform for the forseeable future, no?): they simply don't want to give the competition too much of a chance to "one up" their specifications.
No, the most logical reason for withholding announcements is that once you announce your next console people who are thinking about buying the current one will wait.There are, of course, other good reasons why they might be withholding information about their next consoles.
1) They just released major mid-life input upgrades. A new announcement might detract from developers using these new inputs. 2) They have too much sunk cost in this generation and need more time to amortize development costs. 3) Maybe they have no real clue what the next console will look like. In 2003 you could announce a console with nearly the same controller as the last one, but way more power and you'd be good. Today, you have to actually anticipate what new gaming features your competitors will include.
Slashdot Mirror
Finally a slashdotter I can relate to!
Agreed. I've always felt like the proper climate change bill isn't cap&trade, but something closer to cap & trade & impose massive duties on anything from a country not invoking compliant enough regulations. With regards to your plan, you can't inspect each factory in a foreign country, but you don't want to anyways. Simply apply tariffs on any foreign goods where the manufacturing nation doesn't enforce strict enough environmental regulations. If the rivers leaving the country are toxic and the atmosphere is too, then you already know they've failed. Seems like this approach would appease the hippies, the isolationists, and regular americans who would prefer to keep their jobs...
Of course, the CEOs would HATE it, so that's why it can't happen.
Fact: how your fact got modded insightful I'll never know, because it's actually clueless. Military spending uses a free market, but it's a distorted one for three reasons. 1) The military buys products that don't exist yet, so it's working on promise deliver and 2) the military seldom fully spec their product before opening a bid 3) the product is almost certainly unique.
So, you've got a bunch of sellers saying "we can do that, and here's what it will cost", but because of #2 they don't know what "that" is and because of #1 you don't really know if the seller can deliver anything. Because the buyer is taking such a risky approach per above, they attempt to mitigate risk by buying from the same 2-4 sellers for every contract. So, in addition to a distortion causing purchasing model, you've got a market distorting ogliopoly situation.
Sure, defense contractors split projects into as many key districts as they can, but that's meant to keep the cow producing milk, which is different than awarding the original contract.
As for democrats -vs- republicans, it's pretty obvious that our high military spending is being mostly pushed by republicans. Democrats prefer spending on entitlements.
Games I make an exception for as those are entertainment not tools I need.
I'm all for FOSS, but your comments actually make negative sense.
If you should be willing to pay for anything, it's the things you need and not the games. Based on your logic, you should pay to play basketball at your local park, but your home should be free because it's something you need.
It's definitely rational to choose LibreOffice for free if it does everything you need rather than pay MSFT for a comparable tool. And it's certainly a valid argument than copyright laws, which were always designed to create artificial scarcity, seem even more out of place in the digital world we've adopted over the last 20 years. But, at the same token we will need to figure out a way to compensate creators for their labor.
It was one thing when the main product being stolen was music (not that musicians don't deserve to be compensated), because at least there was an obvious way to continue paying them (through live performances) and musicians want to make music even when they won't be well paid. In other words, it really doesn't take much to compensate someone for the effort to write a song. When it spread to movies, and software, it got a little dicier just because the production costs of those products are generally so much higher. But things are really going to come to a head when CNC/makerbots reach a maturity level where if you can get your hands on the iphoneX specs you can make one at material cost.
Not sure what will happen, because a world where the specs are free for all could be wonderful, but I think society will need to find some alternative financial policy aside from capitalism/socialism to make it work.
That's self-evidently not true by an objective measure. Lots of people play them, ergo, to many people it IS fun.
Kind of a false assumption. Lots of people could play because they feel compelled (I want to stop but can't). They could play because they feel pressured (I don't really like the game, but all my friends are doing it). They could play because it smooths relationships (hey, thanks for watering my pumpkins). Or they could play because they feel driven to complete things (gotta catch 'em all).
A quick rule of thumb is that if you won't look back on the activity fondly in a few years time, it probably never was fun for you.
if people didn't enjoy the games, wouldn't they move on and find other ways to amuse themselves?
Short answer - no.
Slightly longer answer - you can exploit human behavior in such a way that they become obsessed with doing something, even when all the actual rewards (fun) from that behavior have disappeared. If I create an activity with the goal of it being fun, and some people become addicted to where they participate long after it's still fun, you might forgive me. I have done some harm (through causing addiction) but it was accidental. If, however, I create an activity with the goal of forming addiction, then you could rightly consider me a slimeball. I am exploiting people even if I do not physically force them to participate. Most (but not all) "Social gaming" was clearly created with the intent to sink as much time as possible, as opposed to producing an activity people would find enjoyable. And that's why you see so much anger her on /.
Isn't it about time to get those Tesla Files out that the FBI snagged from his estate when he died? Broadcast power was something he was into, but they couldn't figure out how to bill for it. With broadcast power you can run the world on goofy cheap energy, clean as well. Except I do have some questions what that kind of RF would do to organisms on the planet?
I'm totally confused on this one. Are you a real crazy person, or are you pretending to be one? I really hates the interwebs sometimes!
If you're serious about this, the reason broadcast power doesn't work is because it's so wasteful. The power of an RF signal's strength decreases as a square of the distance. So, broadcast power might work well enough to charge your mouse from a plugged in mouse pad (the distance is really tiny), but it's rather less effective at powering all your appliances from a central beam in your basement, and it's even more ridiculous to beam power across cities. And that's if you ignore all the problems radio waves have getting to certain locations, like basements or behind hill sides.
C++ obviously doesn't NEED a garbage collector, just like it didn't need lambda expressions. They can, however, be incredibly useful if you want to write algorithms in certain ways. Here's a simple example. You've got an object you want to pass through your system, and you don't know who all owns it at any given time. It's a complex object, that even passes itself into some of its own member data.
So, how do you manage that without a GC? You want to at least use smart pointers (shared_ptr), but that doesn't deal with the circular reference of A points to B points to A. You also don't know the lifetime of the object, because it's been passed all over the place in your program.
Without a GC, you are forced in this situation down some paths you might not like. You can refactor your algorithm to prevent the cyclic references. You can hack in some code to look for this specific case and deal with it by removing one of the cyclic references. I guess you could write your own garbage collector. The point is, you may be forced to write a more awkward or less efficient algorithm just for lack of a GC.
What I think C++ really needs is more of an optional garbage collector. Use gcnew (like the old managed C++ did) and you get back an object like gc_ptr. The gc_ptr is different that the other smart pointers, because you can't get the underlying pointer or reference object out of it, even though the -> operator would function about as expected. That would make the feature annoying enough to use, that hopefully people would pick another approach when applicable and use the gc_ptr only when necessary. It might give you the best of both worlds.
Other posters already said it, but why not Go instead of Java? Instead of a virtual machine, just distribute the source and let a compiler optimized for that specific phone build it into an executable when it's loaded? One of the main points of Go is how fast it compiles.
> At least these 'nudging technologies' are intended to -help- the person affected.
Said he who considers himself superior to the lesser beings being nudged. I'll be the judge of what is good for me and you figure out what is best for you. Now toss me another Brawndo will ya.
I think you're saying this sarcastically, but I never really understood the people who actual make these kinds of arguments. Sure, there are many topics where we may all disagree. But if there's a simple nudge that helps people eat more vegetables and less sweets, then who can honestly be against that. And, I'm not just saying it because I think all those fat people need the help. As a decently healthy adult, I don't think it is a bad thing if I am nudged towards a healthier diet or a little more physical activity or using less electricity. Those are all things I want to do, but I can still use the help so long as it doesn't feel intrusive.
In short. Libertarians - BAH!
What do you even think that means? Pushing technology. Pfft. Do you mean new technology? I hate to break it to you, but almost all consumer grade technology is old stale bread crumbs. Do you think I mean, is anything that Facebook, Twitter, Groupon, or Amazon doing cutting edge?
The fact of the matter, Google exists to make money for their shareholders and employees. If they decide to train a billion squirrels to sort nuts in such a fashion that when my query is received it provides 10,000 relevant matches in 0.5 seconds, then more power to them.
As disappointing as this fact is, there are two kinds of technology companies: successful companies which leverage mature technology (hopefully in novel or innovative ways), and those force their customer base to use bleeding edge technology until they go out of business. Go down the lists. MSFT, Oracle, Intel, Sony. Those companies rarely do anything but iterate their products. Apple and Nintendo use established safe technology; what innovation they provide is almost exclusively in user interfaces. IBM makes money from established technology and generally uses the bleeding edge stuff as a commercial for how great they are.
Even Xerox and Bell from back in the day, with their vaunted research labs, sold the stable products.
You can't profit off of bleeding edge stuff. You can just hope to be involved in it, so that when the day comes that it is mature your company is in a place to be the first entrant.
You're jumping to the wrong conclusion. Watson and similar systems are not intended to replace humans. At least, not in the sense of removing them completely. They fall into the typical garbage-in-garbage-out situation where you need a real expert, like a doctor, to describe the symptoms so the system can produce a valid diagnosis.
Here's how it's actually going to work. The doctor will spend more time talking to the patient to get an accurate understanding of symptoms. The expert system will then tell the doctor what the diagnosis is, and the doctor will always take that recommendation because his malpractice insurance will say that if he does a good job collecting symptoms and he follows Watson's advice, then he is not liable for incorrect diagnoses. Overall, health care will regress to the middle, as good doctors let the system do their work (but see more patients) and bad doctors have a system helping fix their mistakes. Costs will also come down some due to the increased efficiency and because the system will not be influenced by the number of specialists living nearby like human doctors are.
This is a bit rantish, but I still wish I had mod points. The people who think unbridled capitalism will solve all problems strike me as perhaps the most naive large segment of the population.
Pro Tip: how many petrol based cars we have on the streets is does not define the majority of our civilization.
are you suggesting that you should be able to just have software like a book.
That's a fine idea. I should start a publishing company that sells you books; but, if you want to read all of the book, you're going to have to come to my website, agree to a 9000 word EULA, and bind your book serial key to your facebook account so I can verify that you are the only reader who gets to read the whole book.
After all, both products are only covered by copyright (meaning only I can copy, but anyone can resell), so the only way I can prevent you from loaning or reselling the book I sold you is to add "features" to your purchase where I circumvent copyright law. Happy reading.
I have never understood the point of decaf coffee. It's not the grandest tasting beverage in the world. If you want a drink with no caffeine that tastes a little bitter and has zero calories, try one of the many uncaffeinated varieties of tea. If you want a hot beverage that tastes good, how about hot cider or hot chocolate. If you're just thirsty, drink some water.
Alright, cue the karma destruction, since I just dissed something about coffee. It's alright, I live in the Pacific Northwest, so I'm used to being shunned for my disinterest in coffee.
Is your point that the PISA test is either a useless measure or intentionally slanted to favor China ?
Generally speaking, yes standardized tests are nearly useless. A nation's total economic package will always be improved if its youth are better at reading, science, and math. But doing well on such tests does not prove the citizenry actually are informed in a useful way in those subjects, nor does it inform you about what trade-offs were made to make those scores.
Here's a dumb example. Let's say every child from age 3-18 spends 15 hours a day sitting at a desk studying. They score great on those tests, in fact not only do they test well in science, they are exemplar in their scientific knowledge. However, their health suffers greatly for it. Most are obese, all have cardiac problems (even thin people who are sedentary have increased cardiac risk), and none of them have the stamina for simple tasks like an afternoon of gardening. Also, they never developed the social skills required to collaborate effectively or the creativity that is trained during play time.
So, do you want those guys as your nations future, even if they get perfect scores on all the tests? They'd all die in their thirties or forties, and contribute little of use during their brief stint as working adults. I know that's not what's actually happening in China, but my point is just that a test score tells you very little about anything that matters.
We don't even really know that being better at math is always better. Much of our "rational thought" is actually carried out by emotions. Perhaps, if too many people were too good at math, they would spend the time calculating rates of return and interest rates and comparing various factors that might be important in each decision they make. If you do none of that, you get ripped off, but if you do it too much you waste your time in the minutia.
There are millions of game consoles out there - millions - and yet there aren't very many revisions of hardware per model. It's not hard for the manufacturers to test how these required updates are going to affect their hardware.
To be fair to Microsoft, I'm sure they they wanted to test some of the older XBox360s, but all theirs had already RRODed. Plus, how many first edition 360s are even still out there? Microsoft can easily afford to replace the 7 guys who bought a 360 on day one and it finally failed them during this latest firmware update.
I always looked at it the other way. If you could install a device that "burned" say an extra 100 calories a day for you, well that's another half a snickers bar. In an obese society, even a device that did nothing useful (say a OLED monitor on your back instead of a tattoo) would probably become chic very quick.
It makes me sad to see this cited as insightful. At least in the US, a typical local budget (city/state) is broken down something like the following.
70% - Education
15% - Law Enforcement/Fire Services
10% - Infrastructure (almost entirely roads and bridges)
5% - Everything else, including those annoying bureaucrats.
The reason city's threaten to cut education or police is because that's what they spend most of their money on.
Likewise, books are language. Can books be copyrighted? No one owns language.
Yes, but they cannot be patented. It's important to keep in mind that patents, copyright, and trademark are not natural phenomena of a market. They are things we have decided improve the innovation of the market, at least under certain circumstances. If a class of patents hurt innovation, or harm innovation, then we should eliminate them.
it's a lot like free republic but with more teabagging
Maybe you're from someplace other than the states then...?
Gee, I don't know. Free, nearly limitless energy and it literally falls out of the sky? I find it hard calling that awful even when the efficiencies are poor.
I agree. We always look back at the old and think it was great because we've forgotten the mediocre and only remember the truly great or truly bad. For instance, we know music was amazing in the 60s/70s because look what you had: The Beatles, Led Zepplin, The Who, etc. Contrast that with me not naming anyone great making music today and you can see how the times have changed.
That said, the transition of prime time TV from sitcoms towards reality programming does seem worse to many of us than what came before. I'd take the A-Team over American Idol any day. And even when the reality show is of good quality, which the A-Team was not, programming today tends to be meaner. And I don't really need to watch more mean things.
Finally, there is a far more logical reason why they would stay mum about their next release cycle (after all, assuming you were correct, they may as well commit to selling the current platform for the forseeable future, no?): they simply don't want to give the competition too much of a chance to "one up" their specifications.
No, the most logical reason for withholding announcements is that once you announce your next console people who are thinking about buying the current one will wait.There are, of course, other good reasons why they might be withholding information about their next consoles.
1) They just released major mid-life input upgrades. A new announcement might detract from developers using these new inputs.
2) They have too much sunk cost in this generation and need more time to amortize development costs.
3) Maybe they have no real clue what the next console will look like. In 2003 you could announce a console with nearly the same controller as the last one, but way more power and you'd be good. Today, you have to actually anticipate what new gaming features your competitors will include.