Trying to put stockholders in jail is of course impractical but holding them financially liable beyond their investment according to how much they own isn't
I'd agree that a long dev time does not translate to "bad". Morrowind was in development for over 5 years and it was very good.
I can think of more than a few other games which were in dev for more than half a decade which turned out great.
I think part of the problem with sequels may be the "design by committee" aspect that creeps in after the company does well on the first game and either expands or gets bought up.
The origional game might have kept the players attention with quirky humor, inuendos, injokes, easter eggs and game aspects which were probabaly the brainchild of one or 2 level designers.
Then along comes some management type who thinks he "knows games" because he liked arcades as a kid and insists on "contributing" or some marketing drone who did some focus groups or more accuratly decided the game needs whatever craptastic feature EA has been including in their games recently or the parent company is deathly afraid of controversy or making the game a hair too racey or missing out on a market segment by making the humor too intelligent.
and so the humor gets watered down the inuendos get removed for fear of getting a higher age rating, the in-jokes get cut because the marketing drone doesn't get them, the easter eggs get banned because with the bigger dev team they might cause bugs as do the little additions some team member might decide to add off the cuff because they'd be cool.
The management type keeps making sugestions like "hey, we should have quick time events" "hey we should have limited lives"
"hey we should have limited saves" "hey you know what's cool? when you're playing a sandbox game and every 2 minutes you get called to come defend your teritory/empire/home (I'm looking at you spore/GTA)" and to avoid pissing him off they end up including some of the crap, then finally the new parent company also has decided that the game HAS to be finished in time for christmas so it gets shoveled out the door with the last few levels slapped together and a pile of bugs still unfixed.
As long as they own 49.999% of a company or less it doesn't matter how many people the company kills while making money for them, it doesn't matter how many crimes are committed with the money they've handed over to the company owner when buying stock, it doesn't matter if they've made absolutely no effort whatsoever to check if said money is going to be used for criminal activity of any scale.
They only thing they can possibly lose is that money, they have no responsibility to control their property or to ensure they aren't materially supporting illegal activities by the company directors.
thus there is little or no incentive to avoid companies doing things risky or illegal enough to cause billions in damage beyond the net worth of the company or tens of thousands of deaths morein favor of companies doing merely mildly risky things which might leave the company at a net worth of zero. In fact if the potential payout for the former is higher then there's an incentive to invest in the worse company.
the difference in risk between investing in a company which has the potential to drop to zero value and a company which has the potential to drop to a massive negative value due to some really massive fuckup is zero.
So if you're going to take the risk on investing in a company which might get such down for shady dealings or might kill people might as well go for one which might kill a LOT of people since the potential payoff could be larger.
I've always been a bit puzzled by why the owners of a company are so utterly sheltered from damage cause by or crimes committed by that company. It gets waved away with claims like "well of course then people might not want to invest in those companies" which while true would also be the point. If to protect themselves people demanded reasonable proof that a company was behaving ethically and within the law before investing in it then we might see companies breaking the law less and behaving more ethically.
If I own an old building which collapses and hurts a bunch of people because I'm too greedy to invest money in repairs, I'm liable. If I own a dog and it bites someone because I'm too greedy to invest in a fence or muzzle, I'm liable. If I own a corp and it kills a load of people because in order to keep me an an investor because I'm too greedy to accept a 0.1% lower dividend rate it didn't put money into the safety systems.... I'm off scott free.
"We're awfully close to meta, to a plurality of powers, grants made by a government that confers upon the creator of an invention the sole right to make, use, and sell that invention for a set period of time."
When doing research in one particular area I did find that even in an area with very few people working in it many of them would have a large number of citations for papers by
1:themselves 2:their former/current students 3:their former/current teachers
but at the same time that isn't very surprising. citing yourself can make sense when expanding on an earlier pieces of research and you're vastly more familiar with the work being done by people you know well like your students or teachers.
"and be in some way as good or better than the current state of the art, or should not be bothered to be published."
lots of valuable research is done on things which are far worse than the current state of the art but which have the potential to lead to something vastly superior.
examples: DNA computing, quantum computing and production/doping of diamond to create processors.
in all those cases the current state of the art in any of those fields of research can be beaten hands down by current state of the art in silicon consumer electronics.
but they have the potential to one day be far better with enough research.
when someone tries to invent the wheel don't stop them simply because their first few rough uneven wheels don't let you go faster over rough ground than someone riding a horse.
as for number 4 I'd recommend emailing the researchers in question: you might be surprised how many people are quite willing to answer questions about their research.
no, it's more subtle than that. the problem is that boring research doesn't get published in really top notch journals. So if your trial finishes and you end up with results which don't hit the 95% significance threshold then you don't change the numbers, you just keep changing how you look at them until they look interesting. think shooting at a barn wall with your eyes closed then walking over and drawing your bullseye around the hole.
You don't care about where you hit, just that people were very impressed at how unlikely you were to hit the bullseye with your eyes closed.
there's a simple solution: the big name journals just have to set out a framework where if you want to get published in them then before any results at all are in you have to provide exact details of your methods and how you're planning to analyze the data. As it were forcing people to draw the bullseye first.
Out of interest what was the breakdown of that increase?
I was aware he made heavy cuts into environmental research but what areas benefited the most? Weapons research? social sciences? medical research? etc etc
which is great for the richest 1 percent of the population but unfortunatly with the exception of a handful with really exceptional skills everyone else is stuck buying from the company store in the company town earning less in a week than it takes to live for a week.
"You load sixteen tons, what do you get? Another day older and deeper in debt."
The moltav cocktail allowed lighty armed people to do real damage to tanks. of course modern tanks are significantly more resistant to such things but then hand held arms can be bought on the black market which can do serious damage to a modern tank.
Technology doesn't permanently change that kind of power balance. Knowledge spreads, people come up with homemade versions of equipment that used to be purely military and people come up with way to combat whatever the latest tech is.
Knowledge is incredibly widespread now, hell the formula for nerve gas was touched on by one of my professors while talking about enzyme inhibition and I don't doubt that detailed instructions for producing almost any explosive or chemical agent you could want could be found by anyone interested with a little digging.
this is somewhat slanted because any well organised rebellion will sooner or later fit the definition of "rebel army" and well organised groups are more likely to succeed no matter the level of tech in warfare.
peasants traditionally fared quite badly against mounted knights in full armour or well trained soldiers.
The leaks could reveal that the president slept in a bathtub full of childrens blood and personally murdered millions and the right would keep maintaining that the cables had revealed nothing.
it's an article of faith. it's simply been repeated so much that fox news viewers believe it.
hell even the claims that the internet was the US's military gift to civilisation is a load of nationalistic tripe.
Arpanet was not the first packet switching network, it was not the first internet because you need to have multiple networks connected before you have an internet and there were multiple networks in multiple countries being run as part of research funded my multiple governments which contributed to the early internet.
Funding from the US government helped some of the early development of the net and packet switching but it wasn't the only source of funding or researchers.
Sorry for the rant but I run into far too many idiots who believe the internet belongs to america/was created solely by america or americans or that in various other ways the internet is americas to do with as it wishes.
Yes people aren't as perfectly rational as we assume, either they simply ignore the risk of something fairly unlikely like getting caught on any one occasion or they don't know the actual risks.
"Over the last decade, London's CCTV cameras have cost taxpayers there around £200 million (US$308 million)"
So... over 200 million over 10 years comes out at £54794.52 per day.
assuming the claim in TFA is correct then that's £9132.42 per crime. I have no idea if they include trivial ones like shoplifters but knowing politicans I'd bet they do if they want it to sound better.
What's a police officers salary? Would it be less than 55K per year? Would an individual police officer be reasonably expected to be able to solve/stop more than 6 crimes per year?
Slashdot Mirror
Trying to put stockholders in jail is of course impractical but holding them financially liable beyond their investment according to how much they own isn't
So who pays the debt?
Alice 50% of it
Bob 40% of it
Eve 10% of it
wasn't that easy?
I'd agree that a long dev time does not translate to "bad".
Morrowind was in development for over 5 years and it was very good.
I can think of more than a few other games which were in dev for more than half a decade which turned out great.
I think part of the problem with sequels may be the "design by committee" aspect that creeps in after the company does well on the first game and either expands or gets bought up.
The origional game might have kept the players attention with quirky humor, inuendos, injokes, easter eggs and game aspects which were probabaly the brainchild of one or 2 level designers.
Then along comes some management type who thinks he "knows games" because he liked arcades as a kid and insists on "contributing" or some marketing drone who did some focus groups or more accuratly decided the game needs whatever craptastic feature EA has been including in their games recently or the parent company is deathly afraid of controversy or making the game a hair too racey or missing out on a market segment by making the humor too intelligent.
and so the humor gets watered down
the inuendos get removed for fear of getting a higher age rating,
the in-jokes get cut because the marketing drone doesn't get them,
the easter eggs get banned because with the bigger dev team they might cause bugs as do the little additions some team member might decide to add off the cuff because they'd be cool.
The management type keeps making sugestions like
"hey, we should have quick time events"
"hey we should have limited lives"
"hey we should have limited saves"
"hey you know what's cool? when you're playing a sandbox game and every 2 minutes you get called to come defend your teritory/empire/home (I'm looking at you spore/GTA)"
and to avoid pissing him off they end up including some of the crap, then finally the new parent company also has decided that the game HAS to be finished in time for christmas so it gets shoveled out the door with the last few levels slapped together and a pile of bugs still unfixed.
the spelling and grammer is not strong with me today.... I really should sleep....
limited liability.
As long as they own 49.999% of a company or less it doesn't matter how many people the company kills while making money for them, it doesn't matter how many crimes are committed with the money they've handed over to the company owner when buying stock, it doesn't matter if they've made absolutely no effort whatsoever to check if said money is going to be used for criminal activity of any scale.
They only thing they can possibly lose is that money, they have no responsibility to control their property or to ensure they aren't materially supporting illegal activities by the company directors.
thus there is little or no incentive to avoid companies doing things risky or illegal enough to cause billions in damage beyond the net worth of the company or tens of thousands of deaths morein favor of companies doing merely mildly risky things which might leave the company at a net worth of zero.
In fact if the potential payout for the former is higher then there's an incentive to invest in the worse company.
the difference in risk between investing in a company which has the potential to drop to zero value and a company which has the potential to drop to a massive negative value due to some really massive fuckup is zero.
So if you're going to take the risk on investing in a company which might get such down for shady dealings or might kill people might as well go for one which might kill a LOT of people since the potential payoff could be larger.
assuming that a company has more assets than debts the stocks have a theoretical lower limit to their value?
I've always been a bit puzzled by why the owners of a company are so utterly sheltered from damage cause by or crimes committed by that company.
It gets waved away with claims like "well of course then people might not want to invest in those companies" which while true would also be the point.
If to protect themselves people demanded reasonable proof that a company was behaving ethically and within the law before investing in it then we might see companies breaking the law less and behaving more ethically.
If I own an old building which collapses and hurts a bunch of people because I'm too greedy to invest money in repairs, I'm liable.
If I own a dog and it bites someone because I'm too greedy to invest in a fence or muzzle, I'm liable.
If I own a corp and it kills a load of people because in order to keep me an an investor because I'm too greedy to accept a 0.1% lower dividend rate it didn't put money into the safety systems.... I'm off scott free.
to borrow a little from AI: you mean a training set and test set?
no no, haven't you ever read a patent?
the way to say it is
"We're awfully close to meta, to a plurality of powers, grants made by a government that confers upon the creator of an invention the sole right to make, use, and sell that invention for a set period of time."
When doing research in one particular area I did find that even in an area with very few people working in it many of them would have a large number of citations for papers by
1:themselves
2:their former/current students
3:their former/current teachers
but at the same time that isn't very surprising.
citing yourself can make sense when expanding on an earlier pieces of research and you're vastly more familiar with the work being done by people you know well like your students or teachers.
I'd disagree with you on one point:
"and be in some way as good or better than the current state of the art, or should not be bothered to be published."
lots of valuable research is done on things which are far worse than the current state of the art but which have the potential to lead to something vastly superior.
examples:
DNA computing, quantum computing and production/doping of diamond to create processors.
in all those cases the current state of the art in any of those fields of research can be beaten hands down by current state of the art in silicon consumer electronics.
but they have the potential to one day be far better with enough research.
when someone tries to invent the wheel don't stop them simply because their first few rough uneven wheels don't let you go faster over rough ground than someone riding a horse.
as for number 4 I'd recommend emailing the researchers in question: you might be surprised how many people are quite willing to answer questions about their research.
no, it's more subtle than that.
the problem is that boring research doesn't get published in really top notch journals.
So if your trial finishes and you end up with results which don't hit the 95% significance threshold then you don't change the numbers, you just keep changing how you look at them until they look interesting.
think shooting at a barn wall with your eyes closed then walking over and drawing your bullseye around the hole.
You don't care about where you hit, just that people were very impressed at how unlikely you were to hit the bullseye with your eyes closed.
there's a simple solution: the big name journals just have to set out a framework where if you want to get published in them then before any results at all are in you have to provide exact details of your methods and how you're planning to analyze the data.
As it were forcing people to draw the bullseye first.
Out of interest what was the breakdown of that increase?
I was aware he made heavy cuts into environmental research but what areas benefited the most?
Weapons research? social sciences? medical research? etc etc
if it looks like a cow, moos like a cow, produces milk like a cow but the government declares that it's a duck it's still probably not a duck.
The actions and policies of the USSR and similar tend to have little if anything to do with the labels they applied to them.
I was following you right up to:
"Why? Because science said so!"
please elaborate.
which is great for the richest 1 percent of the population but unfortunatly with the exception of a handful with really exceptional skills everyone else is stuck buying from the company store in the company town earning less in a week than it takes to live for a week.
"You load sixteen tons, what do you get?
Another day older and deeper in debt."
stop listening to fox.
The moltav cocktail allowed lighty armed people to do real damage to tanks.
of course modern tanks are significantly more resistant to such things but then hand held arms can be bought on the black market which can do serious damage to a modern tank.
Technology doesn't permanently change that kind of power balance.
Knowledge spreads, people come up with homemade versions of equipment that used to be purely military and people come up with way to combat whatever the latest tech is.
Knowledge is incredibly widespread now, hell the formula for nerve gas was touched on by one of my professors while talking about enzyme inhibition and I don't doubt that detailed instructions for producing almost any explosive or chemical agent you could want could be found by anyone interested with a little digging.
this is somewhat slanted because any well organised rebellion will sooner or later fit the definition of "rebel army" and well organised groups are more likely to succeed no matter the level of tech in warfare.
peasants traditionally fared quite badly against mounted knights in full armour or well trained soldiers.
Sure, nobody should ever try to improve anything.
Just try to grab as much as you can for yourself and ignore the blood spatters and torn fingernails.
The leaks could reveal that the president slept in a bathtub full of childrens blood and personally murdered millions and the right would keep maintaining that the cables had revealed nothing.
it's an article of faith.
it's simply been repeated so much that fox news viewers believe it.
because they do redact and hold information back.
I read it in the voice of someone with a bloody knife saying "now look what you made me do"
or possibly in the voice of someone saying "stop hitting yourself, stop hitting yourself, stop hitting yourself"
hell even the claims that the internet was the US's military gift to civilisation is a load of nationalistic tripe.
Arpanet was not the first packet switching network, it was not the first internet because you need to have multiple networks connected before you have an internet and there were multiple networks in multiple countries being run as part of research funded my multiple governments which contributed to the early internet.
Funding from the US government helped some of the early development of the net and packet switching but it wasn't the only source of funding or researchers.
Sorry for the rant but I run into far too many idiots who believe the internet belongs to america/was created solely by america or americans or that in various other ways the internet is americas to do with as it wishes.
Yes people aren't as perfectly rational as we assume, either they simply ignore the risk of something fairly unlikely like getting caught on any one occasion or they don't know the actual risks.
ok... time for a few sums....
http://www.pcworld.com/article/137459/cctv_cameras_dont_solve_crimes_say_london_politicians.html
"Over the last decade, London's CCTV cameras have cost taxpayers there around £200 million (US$308 million)"
So...
over 200 million over 10 years comes out at £54794.52 per day.
assuming the claim in TFA is correct then that's £9132.42 per crime.
I have no idea if they include trivial ones like shoplifters but knowing politicans I'd bet they do if they want it to sound better.
What's a police officers salary?
Would it be less than 55K per year?
Would an individual police officer be reasonably expected to be able to solve/stop more than 6 crimes per year?
Is opening a spouses physical mail a crime?