What makes the practice unethical is requiring some people to become addicted for the game to be profitable. The reason this is unethical is it provides an incentive to make the game more and more addictive. Not necessarily more fun, mind you, but designed to exploit psychology to promote or enhance addiction.
Please understand that I'm not accusing the game devs of being unethical here. I do genuinely hope that the game obtains more of its revenue from a broader range of players, instead of relying upon a few addicts. I do not have any knowledge one way or the other on this specific game. I'm just saying that relying on cosmetic-only microtransactions is in and of itself not sufficient for microtransactions to be ethical.
I think it generally depends upon the person. I am a software engineer in a company that has (mostly) open-floor layouts, and I quite like it. The Internet (slashdot included) is vastly more distracting than my coworkers, and I far prefer the feeling of working in a more open space. If I really need the sound isolation, I have some nice noise-canceling headphones that do a pretty good job. But that's pretty rare.
Hmm. I don't think that makes it ethical. If the business model relies upon so-called "whales", it's fundamentally unethical. And cosmetic-only microtransactions can do that just as well as other sorts of microtransactions:
http://www.gamasutra.com/view/feature/195806/
Yes. That and the primordial density fluctuations were nearly scale-invariant. That is, originally, there were structures of all scales. Gravity over time amplified some of these scales (the most significant being at around 240 million light years), but the natural expectation is still structures at all scales. It would take finding a few extremely large structures that are in excess of the number expected to really throw the standard cosmology into question.
It's not that people are afraid of defining some people as "less smart," it's that pretty much every time some person comes up with a test that shows group of people A are smarter than group of people B, a more clever person demonstrates that once you come up with a way to get around the cultural differences between the two groups relevant to the test, the differences disappear.
I don't think there's ever been an estimate of "smarter" as an inborn ability that has ever held up under scrutiny, aside from certain genetic disorders (e.g. microencephaly).
Logically, there absolutely must be some differences in intelligence that are down to differences in genes, but in practice we have successfully attributed a tremendous fraction of differences in intelligence between people to environmental differences, and nearly all of the differences in intelligence between populations to environmental differences.
For companies that engage in such agreements, these agreements help to limit the ability of companies to compete with one another on products (due to lower overlapping expertise), as well as lowering the expected wages for employees. The net effect is to reduce competition, which tends to increase profit margins.
In fact, lots of people profit from that. The insurance companies because they can weasel out of many insurance cases due to loopholes, exceptions and formalisms.
Much of that is now outlawed in the current legislation. As I said, the Affordable Care Act makes the market for health care insurance much simpler. It's still far more complex than it needs to be or should be, but it's simpler than what we had.
Except the competition is not just against another insurance plan, but also no plan at all. The vast majority of people buying insurance on the exchange currently have no insurance. A person, seeing the unsubsidized number, might be misled and think they cannot afford the insurance, and then go on to simply eat the extra tax fee next year instead of getting insurance.
In part. But there are frequently hard to quantify systematic errors that can be corrected for by using a larger sample size with more diverse representation. For example, a study might pick up a spurious correlation due to focusing on white men of western European descent between the ages of 20-29, and that correlation may not hold when a larger study uses a more diverse group of people.
There's also the issue of smaller studies being quicker and easier, which reduces the desire to publish even if the findings are negative.
Pretty sure that anti-poaching agreements actually lead to people getting paid less, as there isn't as much competition between companies for salaries.
The correct take-away from this kind of study is not that a specific field of science is "broken" (also, cancer research is not all of science), but rather that there is room for improvement.
There is no question whatsoever that cancer research has made leaps and bounds over the last few decades in terms of improving the lives of many people with cancer, both by helping them to live longer, and by helping them to live better. What this kind of study shows is that we can do even better still, if we can find ways to fix the flaws that remain in cancer research.
It's complicated because the insurance industry is complicated. It's complicated because we didn't have the political will to simply go for Medicare for all. That would have been simple. Instead, we have this complex cluge that has to work with an even more complex private insurance industry. It actually does make the market for private insurance simpler, but that really isn't saying much.
You're confusing feminism with right-wing conservative nutjobs. Feminists generally prefer sex-positivity, meaning they don't want any ban on erotic fiction of any sort. While there are some feminists that do want to ban pornography, believing it is degrading to women, in my experience those are a minority among feminists. Many of the feminists I know, for example, would like to see brothels made legal everywhere (and regulated to prevent exploitation of the sex workers).
The shutdown would end today if Boehner called to a vote a bill to end it with no preconditions. There are now enough Republicans who would vote for this bill for it to pass. So right now, there is one and only one man responsible for the continuation of this shutdown: John Boehner.
At least, it won't scale in the way the article suggests.
It's possible that the tech involved might make for a more efficient acceleration mechanism than the current superconducting electromagnets, but I sincerely doubt it will lead to significantly smaller accelerators: accelerators are large not because it isn't possible to accelerate the electrons in a shorter distance, but because it's extremely inefficient to do so.
Large accelerators are limited by the fact that rapid accelerations of charged particles cause lots of radiation to be emitted. The amount of radiation emitted increases dramatically as the particles approach the speed of light, making it harder and harder to push the particles faster (or even just to keep them going at speed in a ring for circular accelerators). Even if this mechanism of electron acceleration is a hundred-fold more efficient energetically than the SLAC accelerator, it still couldn't accelerate electrons to SLAC speeds in 100 feet, because it would need vastly higher acceleration and that higher acceleration would lead to lots of radiation, limiting the pace of acceleration. Personally, I doubt it's 100 times more efficient. I bet most of that efficiency difference comes from this small device not operating on electrons moving anywhere near the speed of light.
I don't think this is possible. Once it goes into effect, people will pretty much love it. Already a strong majority of Americans either like the legislation or wish it were stronger, and many of the remainder will come on board the second the legislation goes live. Even more support the individual parts of the legislation. The actual implementation of the healthcare exchanges will be differently-named in many states, so that a lot of its details will not carry the stigma of "Obamacare". Very soon, we'll have Republicans standing up and saying, "Keep the government's hands off my Obamacare!" Well, they won't say Obamacare, but they'll name a part of the legislation that they probably don't realize is a part of it.
The end result is still measurable in terms of profit. If there is no climate change, or it really isn't impacting severe weather, and insurance companies raise rates, then their profits will soar. If, instead, we have more severe weather and the insurance companies accurately predict it, their profits will remain about the same.
I'm actually betting that they're going to have some severe financial troubles in aggregate, because I think the impact of global warming will be significantly worse than anybody's predicting. But we'll see.
That's just a lack of imagination on your part. Why is it that we have to use this one, specific model (copyright/licensing/royalties) to ensure artists get revenue?
There's always a choice here between shorter working hours and higher pay. I wouldn't be much concerned with either solution, but we should have one or the other. We need some strong government regulation to ensure that the workers receive their fair share of the increases in productivity that automation brings. We also need to have support for worker training programs so that workers whose jobs are displaced can learn to work in new jobs.
Slashdot Mirror
You're miles away from my point. I recommend reading the linked article.
What makes the practice unethical is requiring some people to become addicted for the game to be profitable. The reason this is unethical is it provides an incentive to make the game more and more addictive. Not necessarily more fun, mind you, but designed to exploit psychology to promote or enhance addiction.
Please understand that I'm not accusing the game devs of being unethical here. I do genuinely hope that the game obtains more of its revenue from a broader range of players, instead of relying upon a few addicts. I do not have any knowledge one way or the other on this specific game. I'm just saying that relying on cosmetic-only microtransactions is in and of itself not sufficient for microtransactions to be ethical.
I think it generally depends upon the person. I am a software engineer in a company that has (mostly) open-floor layouts, and I quite like it. The Internet (slashdot included) is vastly more distracting than my coworkers, and I far prefer the feeling of working in a more open space. If I really need the sound isolation, I have some nice noise-canceling headphones that do a pretty good job. But that's pretty rare.
Hmm. I don't think that makes it ethical. If the business model relies upon so-called "whales", it's fundamentally unethical. And cosmetic-only microtransactions can do that just as well as other sorts of microtransactions: http://www.gamasutra.com/view/feature/195806/
Yes. That and the primordial density fluctuations were nearly scale-invariant. That is, originally, there were structures of all scales. Gravity over time amplified some of these scales (the most significant being at around 240 million light years), but the natural expectation is still structures at all scales. It would take finding a few extremely large structures that are in excess of the number expected to really throw the standard cosmology into question.
Yup. But sadly, I imagine the movie studios will take away the opposite conclusion: that their anti-piracy efforts are working.
It's not that people are afraid of defining some people as "less smart," it's that pretty much every time some person comes up with a test that shows group of people A are smarter than group of people B, a more clever person demonstrates that once you come up with a way to get around the cultural differences between the two groups relevant to the test, the differences disappear.
I don't think there's ever been an estimate of "smarter" as an inborn ability that has ever held up under scrutiny, aside from certain genetic disorders (e.g. microencephaly).
Logically, there absolutely must be some differences in intelligence that are down to differences in genes, but in practice we have successfully attributed a tremendous fraction of differences in intelligence between people to environmental differences, and nearly all of the differences in intelligence between populations to environmental differences.
For companies that engage in such agreements, these agreements help to limit the ability of companies to compete with one another on products (due to lower overlapping expertise), as well as lowering the expected wages for employees. The net effect is to reduce competition, which tends to increase profit margins.
In fact, lots of people profit from that. The insurance companies because they can weasel out of many insurance cases due to loopholes, exceptions and formalisms.
Much of that is now outlawed in the current legislation. As I said, the Affordable Care Act makes the market for health care insurance much simpler. It's still far more complex than it needs to be or should be, but it's simpler than what we had.
Except the competition is not just against another insurance plan, but also no plan at all. The vast majority of people buying insurance on the exchange currently have no insurance. A person, seeing the unsubsidized number, might be misled and think they cannot afford the insurance, and then go on to simply eat the extra tax fee next year instead of getting insurance.
In part. But there are frequently hard to quantify systematic errors that can be corrected for by using a larger sample size with more diverse representation. For example, a study might pick up a spurious correlation due to focusing on white men of western European descent between the ages of 20-29, and that correlation may not hold when a larger study uses a more diverse group of people.
There's also the issue of smaller studies being quicker and easier, which reduces the desire to publish even if the findings are negative.
And this lawsuit is far less effective at improving working conditions than a union would be. Your point?
Pretty sure that anti-poaching agreements actually lead to people getting paid less, as there isn't as much competition between companies for salaries.
So, you are complaining that the White House decided that the website shouldn't be misleading? Why?
And by the way, this specific complexity that you mention would not exist if we'd simply done Medicare for all.
The correct take-away from this kind of study is not that a specific field of science is "broken" (also, cancer research is not all of science), but rather that there is room for improvement.
There is no question whatsoever that cancer research has made leaps and bounds over the last few decades in terms of improving the lives of many people with cancer, both by helping them to live longer, and by helping them to live better. What this kind of study shows is that we can do even better still, if we can find ways to fix the flaws that remain in cancer research.
It's complicated because the insurance industry is complicated. It's complicated because we didn't have the political will to simply go for Medicare for all. That would have been simple. Instead, we have this complex cluge that has to work with an even more complex private insurance industry. It actually does make the market for private insurance simpler, but that really isn't saying much.
You're confusing feminism with right-wing conservative nutjobs. Feminists generally prefer sex-positivity, meaning they don't want any ban on erotic fiction of any sort. While there are some feminists that do want to ban pornography, believing it is degrading to women, in my experience those are a minority among feminists. Many of the feminists I know, for example, would like to see brothels made legal everywhere (and regulated to prevent exploitation of the sex workers).
Even with the problems and difficulties, it's still vastly, vastly easier than the old system.
Steaming pile of crap? Maybe. Still better than the dumptruck full of crap that people depended upon for individual insurance before this.
The shutdown would end today if Boehner called to a vote a bill to end it with no preconditions. There are now enough Republicans who would vote for this bill for it to pass. So right now, there is one and only one man responsible for the continuation of this shutdown: John Boehner.
It is appallingly sexist. I don't know if that's a factor, but it's certainly a joke that many people will not enjoy.
At least, it won't scale in the way the article suggests.
It's possible that the tech involved might make for a more efficient acceleration mechanism than the current superconducting electromagnets, but I sincerely doubt it will lead to significantly smaller accelerators: accelerators are large not because it isn't possible to accelerate the electrons in a shorter distance, but because it's extremely inefficient to do so.
Large accelerators are limited by the fact that rapid accelerations of charged particles cause lots of radiation to be emitted. The amount of radiation emitted increases dramatically as the particles approach the speed of light, making it harder and harder to push the particles faster (or even just to keep them going at speed in a ring for circular accelerators). Even if this mechanism of electron acceleration is a hundred-fold more efficient energetically than the SLAC accelerator, it still couldn't accelerate electrons to SLAC speeds in 100 feet, because it would need vastly higher acceleration and that higher acceleration would lead to lots of radiation, limiting the pace of acceleration. Personally, I doubt it's 100 times more efficient. I bet most of that efficiency difference comes from this small device not operating on electrons moving anywhere near the speed of light.
I don't think this is possible. Once it goes into effect, people will pretty much love it. Already a strong majority of Americans either like the legislation or wish it were stronger, and many of the remainder will come on board the second the legislation goes live. Even more support the individual parts of the legislation. The actual implementation of the healthcare exchanges will be differently-named in many states, so that a lot of its details will not carry the stigma of "Obamacare". Very soon, we'll have Republicans standing up and saying, "Keep the government's hands off my Obamacare!" Well, they won't say Obamacare, but they'll name a part of the legislation that they probably don't realize is a part of it.
The end result is still measurable in terms of profit. If there is no climate change, or it really isn't impacting severe weather, and insurance companies raise rates, then their profits will soar. If, instead, we have more severe weather and the insurance companies accurately predict it, their profits will remain about the same.
I'm actually betting that they're going to have some severe financial troubles in aggregate, because I think the impact of global warming will be significantly worse than anybody's predicting. But we'll see.
That's just a lack of imagination on your part. Why is it that we have to use this one, specific model (copyright/licensing/royalties) to ensure artists get revenue?
There's always a choice here between shorter working hours and higher pay. I wouldn't be much concerned with either solution, but we should have one or the other. We need some strong government regulation to ensure that the workers receive their fair share of the increases in productivity that automation brings. We also need to have support for worker training programs so that workers whose jobs are displaced can learn to work in new jobs.