I'm telling you a fact: 99% of academic code is written precisely what you'd expect from the training, experience and incentives of the people writing it. Chances it works on the student's machine until the next update. Good luck getting it run elsewhere. I have downloaded "released" software which I was utterly unable to get running despite considerable effort.
"Show the code" is kind of useless if the code doesn't run.
Knowing about that problem seems valuable to me. Isn't that a failure of reproducibility? Plenty of non-software people have written software with defects in it and not even known it. Having the software at least run on even one other machine seems like the absolute bare minimum before the paper is even acceptable. "Not experts" at writing code is no longer an acceptable excuse. The work product depends on the code. Even if the authors of the code aren't experts, their work is utterly dependent on their ability to write that code correctly. If the result is such a shambles that no one can even run it outside of the original environment, that's a pretty firm indicator that it probably doesn't run correctly even in the original environment.
Did you use google to translate from Russian to English?
I doubt it. Google Translate is generally more coherent than that if it starts with complete sentences in another language.
Not sure why it has become fashionable to accuse the legion of Anonymous Coward trolls on Slashdot of being Russian disinformation campaigners. You have only to read Youtube comments to conclude that there are plenty of home grown total morons available to generate all this crap.
I have this concept I created called "smart dust" which could be used to build swarms of mesh networks of these small computers. They could be dropped from airplanes for example to monitor oil moisture for crops. Eventually these swarms would be self organizing and AI could be introduced. If you are interested in funding my concept, please contact me.
You mostly just troll everything now, don't you...
Its certainly possible it could happen, but what incentive would Amazon actually have to do so?
Not having to expand their collection activities to all those states in which they don't have a physical presence. Which is quite a few still. Which is also a cost for them for no gain, and I bet it's a bigger cost than putting up a voice recognition system. Especially since they already HAVE voice operated ordering that's massively popular, by all accounts, in Alexa.
In the odd event phone and fax orders make a big comeback, I'm sure a state would seek to tax it like SD did here... and I'm sure SCOTUS would follow the precident they set here.
I'm sure. But it could take a decade, if the lawyers work at it. That's a long time protecting a taxless advantage.
Milk trucks, glass bottles, and the milk delivery thingamawhatsit with the inside and outside doors. You don't see those much anymore except in older houses...
Which is amazing to me. I'd have thought in the brave new Amazon world that the double doored delivery receptacle thing would be making a resurgence. Maybe with a more modern design that doesn't equate to basically a gaping hole in the wall.
The 1st Amendment disagrees. There are no cases where you must be truthful except one: under legal oath. I'll be the first to tell anyone, liars suck shit. But the 1st protects them from answering for their lies, at least while they're on this plane of existence. It does not, however, protect them from karma.
British court, British judge. US First Amendment not in play. Requirements for truth notably more stringent.
This being Slashdot, I thought sure someone would point out my truncated misspelling of "contraction". I guess everybody was busy with their Hallmark Holiday.
Obama isn't president anymore. We aren't starting new wars every other month to distract from blatant government corruption. (IRS / DOJ / FBI / State Dept / etc)
We now have a president not creating corruption and ending things like the 60 year Korean war.
The sky must be a lovely shade of purple in the world you live in.
We now have a president who doesn't give a fuck if his own corruption is visible to the world because he doesn't think it's corruption. Giving jobs in the Whitehouse to your adult children is perfectly normal, right?
Meanwhile the rest of the Executive Branch is just as corrupt as its always been, because all the same people are still there (minus the heads of the departments, who never know what's actually happening anyway because they're political appointees) and because all the laws under which they operate are the same.
And the 60 year Korean war has not ended. The agreement between North and South Korea (Trump's "agreement" is totally irrelevant) says they will seek an agreement to establish permanent and solid peace, including promises to pursue arms reduction, cease hostile acts, and make unspecified changes to the fortified border. And that's all it says. "We're gonna agree to do a bunch of stuff." It doesn't say exactly what or when or how or who, and not one single land mine is being removed from the border, not one single artillery piece is being moved away from the north side of the border, and not one single US service member is coming home one minute sooner than scheduled.
That was a complete sentence. "We" is the subject. "Don't", a contract of "do not", is the predicate. That's a sentence. "No" is an interjection, sentence word, or sentence-modifying adverb, depending on who you ask. Depending on how you count it, that was either one or two complete sentences.
This has been your Grammar Nazi service announcement for the evening.
Human language naturally fragments. It's the way our brains work. There are more dead languages than there are live ones, and it will only get worse. Even this language we call English isn't English. Old English is so dead it can't be interpreted without training. Middle English is dead, but you can at least guess at the meaning as a modern English speaker. Eventually "modern" English will also be dead. Give it a thousand years.
Meanwhile, the history of vanished nondescript agrarian cultures is in no way important. Throughout history there have been millions, if not billions (depending on your definition of what's a human), of tiny little subsistence enclaves of humans that never did anything other than subsist. It's not bad. It's just not important. Salvaging the language recordings themselves might be useful to linguists and people studying the human brain, but it's not important history. We're just being told it's important because "Aborigines!"
Manifestly not. I haven't really been following the story in detail, but I do know China. Ivanka's company had been trying to get that trademark for years, and the Chinese government was dragging its feet, then denying it, repeatedly. China's protectionism extends to all parts of their economy, including trademarks. They did not want to grant that trademark to a foreign-owned business. Them suddenly granting it is rather blatantly a payoff, under the circumstances.
After 12 month I deliver a product that is no longer adequate for a market that has changed over the course of said 12 months.
If the "market" you were chasing is gone in 12 months, it wasn't really a market to begin with. It was a stupid me-too fad you should never have wasted a second of time on after you got off the toilet.
Re giving money to Musk, while Tesla has been losing money, investors' money, Musk's personal fortune has been increasing by $1 billion each year. Where do you think that money is coming from?
The same accounting that says Bill Gates is worth $93.4 billion. Just like Bill, the vast majority of Elon Musk's net worth is balance sheet money, based on the nominal market price of Tesla stock and the even flimsier notional value of SpaceX after their most recent round of private financing. It's not like he's squirreling money away in a mattress somewhere. Just like Bill, his cash worth is substantially less than that, as Tesla's stock especially would plummet if he tried to liquidate 100% of his holdings tomorrow.
Net worth of billionaires is largely fictional from the household money man-on-the-street perspective.
Only if someone else decides to keep financing Tesla. Tesla currently loses money on every car they sell. At a burn rate of $2 billion a year, someone would have to be willing to finance Tesla with $10 to $20 billion, minimum, to keep them going. In fact, Tesla lost $17,000 per vehicle sold in Q1, 2018. That means that vaunted backlog of 500K cars represents $8.5 billion in losses at today's rates...
Ramp up of a company in a capital intensive industry really has become completely foreign to 90% of spectators. It's been so long since it last happened in the auto industry, Generation X can't remember it because they were toddlers, if they were even born yet.
You fail at accounting. It does not cost $20 billion to make half a million cars. They do not lose $17,000 "per vehicle", and the rules of accounting make that quite clear. Per vehicle, after parts and labor and amortized design labor, they make a 25% profit. They then plow that profit, plus even more money, into capital equipment, which is a completely different part of the balance sheet that's expected to be negative. A third Model 3 production line was finished and brought online just a couple of weeks ago. Do you think all that equipment is free? I'll give you a hint. It's not. In fact, surprise surprise, it costs billions of dollars. And after they use it to make half a million cars, they will still have it, to use to make another half a million cars. It's not like they're going to just stop, and it's not like a car production line mysteriously evaporates once the backorders are filled.
Oddly enough, spending those billions on new equipment is the fiscally responsible thing to do. They have 500,000 preorders for a car, something that has never happened in the history of the world. Those preorders actually had to put money down, so they're not trolls or fakes. There really is that much demand. Meeting that demand is exactly what Tesla's board and Tesla's shareholders expect Tesla to do. The fact that costs money is a shock only to people who never buy anything but blue chip stocks.
Tesla will be profitable the moment they stop buying new production equipment. That's expected to happen in the third or fourth quarter of this year, according to Elon Musk at the most recent shareholders meeting. Knowing Elon, that means more likely fourth than third, but it's a forward looking statement by a company executive at a regulated financial meeting, so they're required by law to make their best effort to make it true. I expect them to succeed—for about 9-12 months, at which point they will once again start buying equipment, this time to spin up production lines for semis and 2020 Roadsters.
Me, I think Tesla is going profitable for the sole purpose of smashing the short sellers. There are institutional investors waiting for Tesla's next profitable period to buy even more shares, which will push the price to new heights.
This is different from "Last Thursdayism Creationism" which supposes the universe was created as is 6000 years ago, with buried dinosaur skeletons and starlight already in transit for several billion light years to give the "appearance" of very old Earth.
Which is effectively indistinguishable from solipsism, at which point why does anybody bother to listen to these clowns? They're as useless as college freshman philosophers.
Chinese coal plants produced 3,573 MT of CO2 in 2017 American coal plants produced 1,056 MT of CO2 in 2017
It's no wonder your CO2 emissions are so much more than every one elses.
Wat?
Do you even math, bro? That was pure, unadulterated bullshit right there.
3573 > 1056
China has higher CO2 emissions than the US by.... 3573 - 1056 = 2517 MT. Their CO2 emissions are higher than everyone else. Period. Full stop. Because their number is BIGGER.
I'm really tired of this ignorant bullshit that fails 3rd grade arithmetic being spewed all over the Internet. How much energy any individual American uses is irrelevant when talking about nations and treaties. China emits more CO2 than all of North and South America combined. So stop with this bullshit about which nation emits more CO2. It's China.
The article is talking about commercial power plants, not your silly little roof covering.
Commercial power installations don't use remotely like 460 kg of steel per panel either. There are hundreds of such installations around the world, and none of them have giant steel edifices in them.
(Heck, a blob of bird crap or a leaf can slash a panel's output by 33%, frequently leading to the inability of the string to maintain bus voltage, thus causing the loss of that entire string's generating capacity!)
Panels and strings built that way are old and shitty, at this point. (Pun intended.) Modern panels are built with the requisite wiring harness between cells incorporating appropriate diodes so that only some fraction of the cell's outputs are lost and the rest of the panel continues to work at nominal power. Panels are no longer simply ganged together in DC strings, either. These days each panel has a either a maximum power point tracking (MPPT) charge controller connected to it or a microinverter and therefore the output doesn't sag nearly as badly under high thin cirrus clouds, and a trailing cloud edge obscuring a panel doesn't affect the adjacent panel anymore.
4) I've moved on. Can we get a good Last Starfighter remake? Maybe a limited run series like Battlestar Galactica. Or how about Babylon 5?
Sadly, the Babylon 5 we knew and loved is dead. Literally.
Richard Biggs is dead, Michael O'Hare is dead, Andreas Katsulas is dead, Jerry Doyle is dead, Stephen Furst is dead, even Robin Sachs, Tim Choate, and Jeff Conaway are dead. J. Michael Straczynski has said that neither Dr. Stephen Franklin nor G'Kar will ever be recast, and he has sole control of the rights. I'd say Michael Garibaldi and Vir Cotto should never be recast either.
Mira Furlan, Claudia Christian, and Patricia Tallman are still alive, as are Bill Mumy and Peter Jurasik, but with half the major characters gone (and nobody cares about Bruce Boxleitner (sorry Bruce)), there's not much left except the universe to mess around in, and Babylon 5 Crusade was a miserable failure. (Though of course that's because it was a traditional episodic shitfest with zero budget...) Babylon 5 would be difficult to extend outside of the original story arc because it suffers from the epochal story. Much like nobody cares what happens in Tolkein's Fourth Age, nobody cares about what happens after the Shadow War (though people were so willing to give J. Straczynski the benefit of the doubt that season 5 only suffered a ~1% drop in ratings). Going back to the Babylon 5 universe would hard simply because the original series was such a neat package (despite being mangled by production doubts).
With these particular games, there are too many choices, and too much delay between making a choice and the consequence, making it very hard to detect patterns between a specific action and the outcome.
Fonseca, Miguel A., and Hans-Theo Normann. "Explicit vs. tacit collusion—The impact of communication in oligopoly experiments." European Economic Review 56, no. 8 (2012): 1759-1772.
The money quote from the paper: "...the n=4 oligopolies exhibited the highest frequency of explicit cartels...".
I completely believe that Makan Delrahim isn't smart enough to know how many competitors are required before a functional market emerges, but plenty of other people are smart enough. Funnily enough, the problem has been studied.
This is why the whole "there are only two Sith" thing was just so fucking stupid, and really does hamstring things.
I always took that to mean "there are always two Sith" but no more than two will cooperate. So there may be any number of Dark Jedi, but they will have a marked tendency to come in pairs, and the pairs will not cooperate with each other. There will be no such thing as a Dark Jedi Counsel or such. Just master and apprentice marauding across the galaxy, at times coming into contact and conflict with other pairs doing the same thing.
Slashdot Mirror
Neuromancer? Snowcrash?
Exceptions that prove the rule.
Though '80s sci fi was stuck in a cul-de-sac of existential crap anyway, regardless of Star Wars distorting the general public's view of sci fi.
I'm telling you a fact: 99% of academic code is written precisely what you'd expect from the training, experience and incentives of the people writing it. Chances it works on the student's machine until the next update. Good luck getting it run elsewhere. I have downloaded "released" software which I was utterly unable to get running despite considerable effort.
"Show the code" is kind of useless if the code doesn't run.
Knowing about that problem seems valuable to me. Isn't that a failure of reproducibility? Plenty of non-software people have written software with defects in it and not even known it. Having the software at least run on even one other machine seems like the absolute bare minimum before the paper is even acceptable. "Not experts" at writing code is no longer an acceptable excuse. The work product depends on the code. Even if the authors of the code aren't experts, their work is utterly dependent on their ability to write that code correctly. If the result is such a shambles that no one can even run it outside of the original environment, that's a pretty firm indicator that it probably doesn't run correctly even in the original environment.
I have this concept I created called "smart dust" which could be used to build swarms of mesh networks of these small computers.
You mostly just troll everything now, don't you...
"Now"?
Has he always been this bad? I hadn't really noticed him until the last couple years.
Did you use google to translate from Russian to English?
I doubt it. Google Translate is generally more coherent than that if it starts with complete sentences in another language.
Not sure why it has become fashionable to accuse the legion of Anonymous Coward trolls on Slashdot of being Russian disinformation campaigners. You have only to read Youtube comments to conclude that there are plenty of home grown total morons available to generate all this crap.
I have this concept I created called "smart dust" which could be used to build swarms of mesh networks of these small computers. They could be dropped from airplanes for example to monitor oil moisture for crops. Eventually these swarms would be self organizing and AI could be introduced. If you are interested in funding my concept, please contact me.
You mostly just troll everything now, don't you...
Its certainly possible it could happen, but what incentive would Amazon actually have to do so?
Not having to expand their collection activities to all those states in which they don't have a physical presence. Which is quite a few still. Which is also a cost for them for no gain, and I bet it's a bigger cost than putting up a voice recognition system. Especially since they already HAVE voice operated ordering that's massively popular, by all accounts, in Alexa.
In the odd event phone and fax orders make a big comeback, I'm sure a state would seek to tax it like SD did here... and I'm sure SCOTUS would follow the precident they set here.
I'm sure. But it could take a decade, if the lawyers work at it. That's a long time protecting a taxless advantage.
Milk trucks, glass bottles, and the milk delivery thingamawhatsit with the inside and outside doors. You don't see those much anymore except in older houses ...
Which is amazing to me. I'd have thought in the brave new Amazon world that the double doored delivery receptacle thing would be making a resurgence. Maybe with a more modern design that doesn't equate to basically a gaping hole in the wall.
The 1st Amendment disagrees. There are no cases where you must be truthful except one: under legal oath. I'll be the first to tell anyone, liars suck shit. But the 1st protects them from answering for their lies, at least while they're on this plane of existence. It does not, however, protect them from karma.
British court, British judge. US First Amendment not in play. Requirements for truth notably more stringent.
That was a perfect response. Very well done.
This being Slashdot, I thought sure someone would point out my truncated misspelling of "contraction". I guess everybody was busy with their Hallmark Holiday.
Obama isn't president anymore. We aren't starting new wars every other month to distract from blatant government corruption. (IRS / DOJ / FBI / State Dept / etc)
We now have a president not creating corruption and ending things like the 60 year Korean war.
The sky must be a lovely shade of purple in the world you live in.
We now have a president who doesn't give a fuck if his own corruption is visible to the world because he doesn't think it's corruption. Giving jobs in the Whitehouse to your adult children is perfectly normal, right?
Meanwhile the rest of the Executive Branch is just as corrupt as its always been, because all the same people are still there (minus the heads of the departments, who never know what's actually happening anyway because they're political appointees) and because all the laws under which they operate are the same.
And the 60 year Korean war has not ended. The agreement between North and South Korea (Trump's "agreement" is totally irrelevant) says they will seek an agreement to establish permanent and solid peace, including promises to pursue arms reduction, cease hostile acts, and make unspecified changes to the fortified border. And that's all it says. "We're gonna agree to do a bunch of stuff." It doesn't say exactly what or when or how or who, and not one single land mine is being removed from the border, not one single artillery piece is being moved away from the north side of the border, and not one single US service member is coming home one minute sooner than scheduled.
No we don't.
Write in complete sentences, please.
That was a complete sentence. "We" is the subject. "Don't", a contract of "do not", is the predicate. That's a sentence. "No" is an interjection, sentence word, or sentence-modifying adverb, depending on who you ask. Depending on how you count it, that was either one or two complete sentences.
This has been your Grammar Nazi service announcement for the evening.
Human language naturally fragments. It's the way our brains work. There are more dead languages than there are live ones, and it will only get worse. Even this language we call English isn't English. Old English is so dead it can't be interpreted without training. Middle English is dead, but you can at least guess at the meaning as a modern English speaker. Eventually "modern" English will also be dead. Give it a thousand years.
Meanwhile, the history of vanished nondescript agrarian cultures is in no way important. Throughout history there have been millions, if not billions (depending on your definition of what's a human), of tiny little subsistence enclaves of humans that never did anything other than subsist. It's not bad. It's just not important. Salvaging the language recordings themselves might be useful to linguists and people studying the human brain, but it's not important history. We're just being told it's important because "Aborigines!"
I don't know anything about Chinese trademark...
Manifestly not. I haven't really been following the story in detail, but I do know China. Ivanka's company had been trying to get that trademark for years, and the Chinese government was dragging its feet, then denying it, repeatedly. China's protectionism extends to all parts of their economy, including trademarks. They did not want to grant that trademark to a foreign-owned business. Them suddenly granting it is rather blatantly a payoff, under the circumstances.
Exactly, why would I want to be drive around by a depressed suicidal middle aged man that was just fired?
Pretty sure that's Uber's entire business model.
After 12 month I deliver a product that is no longer adequate for a market that has changed over the course of said 12 months.
If the "market" you were chasing is gone in 12 months, it wasn't really a market to begin with. It was a stupid me-too fad you should never have wasted a second of time on after you got off the toilet.
Re giving money to Musk, while Tesla has been losing money, investors' money, Musk's personal fortune has been increasing by $1 billion each year. Where do you think that money is coming from?
The same accounting that says Bill Gates is worth $93.4 billion. Just like Bill, the vast majority of Elon Musk's net worth is balance sheet money, based on the nominal market price of Tesla stock and the even flimsier notional value of SpaceX after their most recent round of private financing. It's not like he's squirreling money away in a mattress somewhere. Just like Bill, his cash worth is substantially less than that, as Tesla's stock especially would plummet if he tried to liquidate 100% of his holdings tomorrow.
Net worth of billionaires is largely fictional from the household money man-on-the-street perspective.
Only if someone else decides to keep financing Tesla. Tesla currently loses money on every car they sell. At a burn rate of $2 billion a year, someone would have to be willing to finance Tesla with $10 to $20 billion, minimum, to keep them going. In fact, Tesla lost $17,000 per vehicle sold in Q1, 2018. That means that vaunted backlog of 500K cars represents $8.5 billion in losses at today's rates...
Ramp up of a company in a capital intensive industry really has become completely foreign to 90% of spectators. It's been so long since it last happened in the auto industry, Generation X can't remember it because they were toddlers, if they were even born yet.
You fail at accounting. It does not cost $20 billion to make half a million cars. They do not lose $17,000 "per vehicle", and the rules of accounting make that quite clear. Per vehicle, after parts and labor and amortized design labor, they make a 25% profit. They then plow that profit, plus even more money, into capital equipment, which is a completely different part of the balance sheet that's expected to be negative. A third Model 3 production line was finished and brought online just a couple of weeks ago. Do you think all that equipment is free? I'll give you a hint. It's not. In fact, surprise surprise, it costs billions of dollars. And after they use it to make half a million cars, they will still have it, to use to make another half a million cars. It's not like they're going to just stop, and it's not like a car production line mysteriously evaporates once the backorders are filled.
Oddly enough, spending those billions on new equipment is the fiscally responsible thing to do. They have 500,000 preorders for a car, something that has never happened in the history of the world. Those preorders actually had to put money down, so they're not trolls or fakes. There really is that much demand. Meeting that demand is exactly what Tesla's board and Tesla's shareholders expect Tesla to do. The fact that costs money is a shock only to people who never buy anything but blue chip stocks.
Tesla will be profitable the moment they stop buying new production equipment. That's expected to happen in the third or fourth quarter of this year, according to Elon Musk at the most recent shareholders meeting. Knowing Elon, that means more likely fourth than third, but it's a forward looking statement by a company executive at a regulated financial meeting, so they're required by law to make their best effort to make it true. I expect them to succeed—for about 9-12 months, at which point they will once again start buying equipment, this time to spin up production lines for semis and 2020 Roadsters.
Me, I think Tesla is going profitable for the sole purpose of smashing the short sellers. There are institutional investors waiting for Tesla's next profitable period to buy even more shares, which will push the price to new heights.
This is different from "Last Thursdayism Creationism" which supposes the universe was created as is 6000 years ago, with buried dinosaur skeletons and starlight already in transit for several billion light years to give the "appearance" of very old Earth.
Which is effectively indistinguishable from solipsism, at which point why does anybody bother to listen to these clowns? They're as useless as college freshman philosophers.
Chinese coal plants produced 3,573 MT of CO2 in 2017 American coal plants produced 1,056 MT of CO2 in 2017
It's no wonder your CO2 emissions are so much more than every one elses.
Wat?
Do you even math, bro? That was pure, unadulterated bullshit right there.
3573 > 1056
China has higher CO2 emissions than the US by .... 3573 - 1056 = 2517 MT. Their CO2 emissions are higher than everyone else. Period. Full stop. Because their number is BIGGER.
I'm really tired of this ignorant bullshit that fails 3rd grade arithmetic being spewed all over the Internet. How much energy any individual American uses is irrelevant when talking about nations and treaties. China emits more CO2 than all of North and South America combined. So stop with this bullshit about which nation emits more CO2. It's China.
The article is talking about commercial power plants, not your silly little roof covering.
Commercial power installations don't use remotely like 460 kg of steel per panel either. There are hundreds of such installations around the world, and none of them have giant steel edifices in them.
(Heck, a blob of bird crap or a leaf can slash a panel's output by 33%, frequently leading to the inability of the string to maintain bus voltage, thus causing the loss of that entire string's generating capacity!)
Panels and strings built that way are old and shitty, at this point. (Pun intended.) Modern panels are built with the requisite wiring harness between cells incorporating appropriate diodes so that only some fraction of the cell's outputs are lost and the rest of the panel continues to work at nominal power. Panels are no longer simply ganged together in DC strings, either. These days each panel has a either a maximum power point tracking (MPPT) charge controller connected to it or a microinverter and therefore the output doesn't sag nearly as badly under high thin cirrus clouds, and a trailing cloud edge obscuring a panel doesn't affect the adjacent panel anymore.
4) I've moved on. Can we get a good Last Starfighter remake? Maybe a limited run series like Battlestar Galactica. Or how about Babylon 5?
Sadly, the Babylon 5 we knew and loved is dead. Literally.
Richard Biggs is dead, Michael O'Hare is dead, Andreas Katsulas is dead, Jerry Doyle is dead, Stephen Furst is dead, even Robin Sachs, Tim Choate, and Jeff Conaway are dead. J. Michael Straczynski has said that neither Dr. Stephen Franklin nor G'Kar will ever be recast, and he has sole control of the rights. I'd say Michael Garibaldi and Vir Cotto should never be recast either.
Mira Furlan, Claudia Christian, and Patricia Tallman are still alive, as are Bill Mumy and Peter Jurasik, but with half the major characters gone (and nobody cares about Bruce Boxleitner (sorry Bruce)), there's not much left except the universe to mess around in, and Babylon 5 Crusade was a miserable failure. (Though of course that's because it was a traditional episodic shitfest with zero budget...) Babylon 5 would be difficult to extend outside of the original story arc because it suffers from the epochal story. Much like nobody cares what happens in Tolkein's Fourth Age, nobody cares about what happens after the Shadow War (though people were so willing to give J. Straczynski the benefit of the doubt that season 5 only suffered a ~1% drop in ratings). Going back to the Babylon 5 universe would hard simply because the original series was such a neat package (despite being mangled by production doubts).
With these particular games, there are too many choices, and too much delay between making a choice and the consequence, making it very hard to detect patterns between a specific action and the outcome.
Humans have big problems with that too...
Four isn't nearly enough.
Fonseca, Miguel A., and Hans-Theo Normann. "Explicit vs. tacit collusion—The impact of communication in oligopoly experiments." European Economic Review 56, no. 8 (2012): 1759-1772.
The money quote from the paper: "...the n=4 oligopolies exhibited the highest frequency of explicit cartels...".
I completely believe that Makan Delrahim isn't smart enough to know how many competitors are required before a functional market emerges, but plenty of other people are smart enough. Funnily enough, the problem has been studied.
This is why the whole "there are only two Sith" thing was just so fucking stupid, and really does hamstring things.
I always took that to mean "there are always two Sith" but no more than two will cooperate. So there may be any number of Dark Jedi, but they will have a marked tendency to come in pairs, and the pairs will not cooperate with each other. There will be no such thing as a Dark Jedi Counsel or such. Just master and apprentice marauding across the galaxy, at times coming into contact and conflict with other pairs doing the same thing.