You can play that game forever though. Did you east breakfast this morning?
I'm sympathetic to the suggestion that we could fund this and not be terrible people, but you're being absurd. There's a huge difference between... er... easting breakfast and spending a billion putting a pointless thing on the moon.
In fact I can think of no better use for a tiny drop in the total sum of money floating around the planet, than a mass exercise in artistic expression. It's kind of the ultimate way of saying, here we are.
I can. For one thing, an -actual- artistic expression rather than just an expensive tribute to a book/movie.
For another thing, the moon has been done decades ago. True, we planted a flag, and it was more a show of nationalism, but a monolith to say "we are here" is still redundant, and a billion to make a redundant expression is in my book too much. I might give some money to put it on Mars, but not the moon.
I'd be more inclined to fund another "bottle in the cosmic ocean" as Carl Sagan put it, similar to the Voyagers even though it would be the third. After all, there are a lot of directions to send probes, right?
Well, lots of people seem to enjoy masturbating. But I am sure you don't. You spend every penny towards bettering the world and helping your fellow man, right?
What do pennies have to do with... wait... it isn't free? I'm supposed to be paying a licensing fee or something to someone?
Well, that explains about half of the national debt... sorry guys.
Is there something about writing about videogames that makes logic fall out of people's heads? Seems like every month I see an article on the theme of "Oh god, cheap/crappy/casual/wii/motion controlled/sex video games are going to be THE ONLY VIDEO GAMES YOU'LL BE ABLE TO BUY AND IT WILL DESTROY GAMING!!!!" At least this one had an actual mechanism for how that would happen. Typically it's just along the lines of "Since the Wii came out, motion controlled games have increased 30000%. These trends WILL CONTINUE FOREVER! Say goodbye to food and water, because motion controlled games are taking over!"
As long as humans are in control of a system in any way, those humans can be corrupted to bend the system to a large entity's will. That means that logically, the only way we can have a global information network that remains free and open is to have it designed, built, and run, entirely by machines.
I agree that an internet built by and managed by humans can never be free, but I think you're mistaken when you assume that means it has to be run by machines. You're overlooking an obvious, not to mention awesome, alternative:
Yes, that's right. An internet run and managed by monkeys. We already have internet over avian carriers, I'd like to see internet over flung poop.
To get semantic for a moment, polarity means just that there are two opposite sides that are different in some way, so there are many ways a pool could be polarized. The depth is usually "polarized," with one end being shallower and one end deeper. You could have a pool polarized in terms of color, like painting one end red and the other blue. North and south are also possible.
The summary seems to be talking about electricity or something dangerous, which yeah, doesn't make sense to me.
I think it's odd how this is taken as a cause rather than a symptom. If a game changes hands several times, it's going to be a mess when it comes out for -that- reason, and because it might have a dated feel, not simply because of the time. If the leaders of the project are idiots, it might take a lot longer than it should and won't be very good either, but that's because it had bad management, not because of the time. Longer development times makes the bean counters push to rush it out the door. I'd argue it's a bad decision to put a game out too soon, and that too has nothing to do with lengthy development.
If you're making a gigantic game at a reasonable pace, has one unifying, competent visionary guiding it throughout development, and manages to not feel dated when it finally comes out, I don't see why there would be a time limit for whether a game is going to be good or not. Half life 2 for example, took forever to get here, but was worth the wait.
The reverse is true too. Under the good examples section, the article mentions Uncharted, and the first 2 things it says the sequel did right are
"1) This took only two years to make; nowhere near six. 2) Two years, and they still improved the engine. It was also developed in-house, so Naughty Dog knew how to use it."
Seems stupid to me to suggest that a 2 year development made the sequel good. I've never heard anyone rave about how Uncharted 2 was so good because they didn't have to wait very long after playing the first one to play it.
In DNF's case, it really depends on what happens with the development. I liked Gearbox's "Borderlands," but that had very little to do with the plot or characters. If they throw out all the ancient junk and start fresh, maybe it won't be bad. If they try to use art that 3d realms made in the 90's, that doesn't seem like it could possibly work. If they try to use an old game engine, the game might be broken on arrival. In any case, I think it has very little to do with time directly.
I hear you. I'm still running windows ME. It's safer really. Few blackhats bother to check compatibility of their viruses or malware with older operating systems. Some rogue antivirus popped up a message saying "Scanning: You have... Windows ME? Shit, I wouldn't touch that with a 10 foot pole. Uninstalling..."
China would probably answer by selling their $2.5 trillions in foreign exchange reserves, most of them US Dollars. That would devalue the USD and EUR to virtually zero, bringing about economic turmoil of unprecedented magnitude. Let's face it: China got us by the balls, and they are ready to squeeze [telegraph.co.uk] them.
A few things
1. "Nuclear option" as mentioned in that link is more descriptive than you give it credit for. Just as we could not have nuked the soviet union without getting destroyed ourselves, so too would China be bringing about mutually assured economic destruction with such a move.
2. How would the Euro be affected?
3. Ready to squeeze? You might use a more recent article than 2007 when making such a claim. I mean, it IS interesting how this will affect Hillary Clinton's chances of getting elected and all...
I've flown quite a bit on pretty much any US carrier you care to mention and they're all pretty much equally crappy.
But like the two politically parties, they're -differently- crappy, and a choice is better. Frontier may have delayed 10 hours getting me to my wedding, but that only happened one time and they did let us watch cable FOR FREE so I won't hold that against them.
Southwest's"choose your own seat" policy may ensure that some f#(!ing midget will get the extra leg room while my knees are banging into the seat in front of me for hours, but at least I'm not automatically assigned the middle seat at the very back of the plane between two fat people and my seat can't recline.
And Delta... well... at least any time I'm choosing who to fly with, there is a clear "wrong" answer, which is Delta.
I got swine flu on one of their planes though (the PAX strain.) No other airline has gotten me sick with anything the cable news networks would deem a major threat to humanity.
"I can't recall ever seeing something like what you're talking about getting published."
Then you haven't been paying attention. It is common. Even in medicine and clinical trials.
I guess what I was asking is "does it happen anyplace OTHER than clinical trials?" After all, clinical trials for medication is only a small subset of research.
When talking about studies with a company poised to sell something based on the outcome, maybe in a few cases. Most research though there is no such company and no product. You're talking specifically about clinical trials, please don't suggest all research is tainted that way.
The numbers and statistics apply ONLY TO THE HYPOTHESIS being tested, so you cannot hunt for a statistical significance just somewhere in the data and then re-formulate your hypothesis. The need to publish (a scientist's income relies on what he publishes in most cases) as well as funding issues force scientists to try to find some usable results from their science, and by trawling through their data they can often salvage what would otherwise have been a failed bit of research
Where does this happen? Clinical trials? With my specific field within basic cell biology research, I don't see this happening much. Experiments and research goals fail frequently of course, but when researchers think they find something in the ashes of those failed experiments, they seem to use that as a starting point for a new hypothesis and a new round of experiments. I can't recall ever seeing something like what you're talking about getting published.
Maybe. I think though it's actually over reaching conclusions (which may be increasing), the fact that any time you study humans you're working with nightmarish heterogeneity, and some fairly specific examples of bias.
On the subject of bias, TFA talks about several clinical trials of drugs. There are consistent reports finding problems with clinical trials, so that's no surprise that there's bias there and it's going to throw things off. I consider clinical trials to be a special class of research though. Finding bias in clinical trial findings doesn't implicate all research for me. A fruit fly geneticist who has no direct financial interest in a specific result before the research starts is not likely to suffer from the same bias that the researcher for a clinical trial has. Sure, he might be unscrupulous, and he still has an interest in finding a result rather than finding nothing which might introduce bias, but in general it's probably more likely he's just interested in the truth.
Basic research does still have bias though towards finding big results. It's not enough to publish real results, they have to be extremely important results now, and that leads to over interpretation. There's a definite pull toward "this example illustrates a UNIVERSAL PRINCIPLE!" rather than "This example might be a fluke." I think that's the case both with the assymetry example TFA mentions and TFA itself. The researcher studied barn swallows and found symmetry was selected for, or something similar. That lead to the conclusion that symmetry was always preferred, and then it turned out not to be true for absolutely everything. Duh. He studied barn swallows, not all life everywhere. It was over interpretation to assume it would go for flies, humans, etc. Similarly, it's overreaching to imply that all scientific results decline over time, or that a few studies which proved misleading are anything more than isolated errors.
Lastly, people are complex psychologically, physiologically, and in all ways, and there are going to be results that hold true for some people but not all.
You and GP seem to be playing a game of "trolling by pretending that whatever works for me obviously would work for everyone else." Seems fun, so I'll jump on:
Why would anyone need to "wake up?" I just contracted fatal familial insomnia and won't go to sleep for several months until I die.
I don't understand why you use a phone as an alarm clock. For one it depends on a single power supply, or you have to charge it overnight next to your bed. Second, it uses software prone to bugs. I use a normal alarm clock on 220V, with a backup battery. It invariably goes of in time...
Because it is there, is an alarm clock, and that is good enough for those of us who aren't alarm clock elitists.
Also what is this "single power supply" business? Most alarm clocks you plug into the wall don't have backup power or aren't actually using the backup power option (who actually puts backup batteries in?), phone alarm clocks do. Power goes out on my alarm clock that plugs in, it won't go off. My phone would though.
No they don't. Mouse and keyboard are better for aiming, true, and would give an advantage were the tasks based on that. They're not though, from TFA:
...perform 69 million collective team actions... Team actions, for those unfamiliar with the game, include spotting, performing repairs, and healing, reviving and resupplying your fellow soldiers
Presumably because making the challenges things like "Get 10 headshots in a row" would give PC gamers the advantage. That it's team based stuff more likely represents real differences in the players themselves, not the tools. If you've ever dabbled on xbox live and then tried an online PC game, this may not come as a shock (depending on the games of course.) In general, I'd have expected console gamers would be younger, and more interested in shooting things rather than actually playing as a team and winning.
Halo 3 for example. Didn't matter what the actual goal was, pretty much everyone went for "shoot the other team." Guard the flag? Well, sure, we'll do that by jumping in a warthog, driving to the opposite side of the map, and shooting the other team. If that doesn't work, shoot some more. If that doesn't work, quit in the middle of the round.
You'll see that to some extent in any game, I've been frustrated in some TF2 matches on the PC where my team was more interested in trying to snipe the other side rather than accomplish the objective of pushing the cart, but it doesn't happen every single time, like it tends to on xbox live.
If I'm in the market for rare earth metals, why would I buy from this US source?
Illiterate troll is illiterate. From the first line of the summary: "With increasing prices on rare earth ore, tariffs raised by the Chinese government, and the threat of embargoes that would damage United States high-tech manufacturing..."
So if China wants to drive the price back down and run them out of business, they can do so.
The point of the embargo would be to threaten the US with. "Don't push us on human rights / Taiwan / copyright bullshit / economy stuff / national pride / corporate stuff or we'll stop selling you your precious metals." If we can credibly respond with "Fine, we'll just dig up our own in our backyard," that makes the threat pointless. We could go back and forth with it, China says we won't sell, we start digging, china sells, we stop digging, china stops selling etc, but that's not really in anyone's interests to stress the market like that, you'd just be introducing chaos to a big economic sector.
Whether or not the right actors realize that and are mature enough to deal with the problems rather than playing games with billions of dollars is one thing, but assuming the Chinese diplomats and government isn't completely bullheaded about it, they'll either back off from threatening the embargo once they see it won't be that big of a deal for us, the US will the the mature one and not make too big a fuss out of too many issues (ideally focusing on human rights rather than unimportant corporate/copyright issues, though that's doubtful), or both will compromise.
Sending that info to the "mothership"" (sic), without my knowledge or permission, is bad because they have no reason to need that data; other than to sell it or use it for marketing.
Sorry for being a stickler, but I think it's not bad because they have no good reason for that data, I think it's bad because 1. They don't make it obvious and 2. It's not theirs.
If they were somehow compiling data to fight cancer or find missing children, that would be a good reason to take data, and I would maybe willingly opt into that, but if they did it without my consent (and by that I mean real consent, as you say, not a TOS) then the ends do not justify the means, it's still theft.
Ideally this streisand effect multiplier will force them to change, and that will be good, but how is it in this day and age that large institutions are still trying to suppress news stories? It implies that not only did they totally miss one of the big lessons of wikileaks, they didn't see "Serenity" either ("you can't stop the signal") and that's just sad.
What was going on in the board room or exec room when that decision was made? "Well, gee, this is bad. Our strategy guy and media guy are both out on holidays, but I think our action is pretty clear: murder the guy. Oh, we don't have an assassin on retainer? Well, lets get on that and in the meantime we'll just try to keep it from press. That will probably work, no harm there."
Feel free to get mad at the author for that strawman argument he's making, but he's not advocating deregulation. A few clues would have been:
- The Fucking Article extensively analyzes why deregulation has failed in the past to do much good.
- All the pictures are of people getting mad after deregulation screwed them over.
- The title is "How the Free Market Rocked the Grid" rocking not necessarily being a good thing.
- The one line version under the title is "It led to higher rates and rolling blackouts, but it also opened the door to greener forms of electricity generation"
The article specifically mentions natural gas prices as being part of the problem, so I think he's aware of them: "That's why electricity prices in many places rose so sharply when natural gas prices skyrocketed at the turn of the millennium." The summary is a bit misleading, so I can't exactly blame you for only reading the first few lines before concluding it was pro-deregulation, but it wasn't.
No, the solution is MORE regulation, not less. The rates need to be regulated, and the private companies need to be taken over by nonprofit public organizations. Every time deregulation is tried, consumers get shafted.
The summary is misleading. TFA does not endorse deregulation, at least not in the sense of "Deregulation is a magic solution to all our problems!"
Clearly, deregulation hasn't been at all successful in bringing prices down. But has it made the companies that provide electricity more efficient? Very probably. Their labor costs have fallen, mostly through reductions in staff, while the reliability of their power plants has improved.
It points out that prices are erratic, and you're damned if you do regulate, damned if you don't regulate. You can't regulate well you're going to have short-sighted politicians doing things like freezing the rates despite increases in costs, risking utility companies going out of business. On the other hand with deregulation, you're going to get energy cartels screwing over everyone else and getting rich, and
...because companies generating electricity in a free market need to demonstrate a return on investment within 5 to 10 years, building big nuclear and coal plants, which usually take over a decade to complete, just isn't an option. So more and more of the grid's power comes from gas turbines, despite the high fuel costs.
Many of the problems and solutions seem like they lie with government, bad lawmakers are going to lead to consumers getting screwed over no matter which direction you go. And there's also the public which is part of the problem beyond voting for said bad lawmakers: they don't tolerate price spikes well, nor do they like the inefficiency that would go with government regulation, and of course they're ignorant and scared on the topic of nuclear power.
Slashdot Mirror
You can play that game forever though. Did you east breakfast this morning?
I'm sympathetic to the suggestion that we could fund this and not be terrible people, but you're being absurd. There's a huge difference between... er... easting breakfast and spending a billion putting a pointless thing on the moon.
In fact I can think of no better use for a tiny drop in the total sum of money floating around the planet, than a mass exercise in artistic expression. It's kind of the ultimate way of saying, here we are.
I can. For one thing, an -actual- artistic expression rather than just an expensive tribute to a book/movie.
For another thing, the moon has been done decades ago. True, we planted a flag, and it was more a show of nationalism, but a monolith to say "we are here" is still redundant, and a billion to make a redundant expression is in my book too much. I might give some money to put it on Mars, but not the moon.
I'd be more inclined to fund another "bottle in the cosmic ocean" as Carl Sagan put it, similar to the Voyagers even though it would be the third. After all, there are a lot of directions to send probes, right?
Well, lots of people seem to enjoy masturbating. But I am sure you don't. You spend every penny towards bettering the world and helping your fellow man, right?
What do pennies have to do with... wait... it isn't free? I'm supposed to be paying a licensing fee or something to someone?
Well, that explains about half of the national debt... sorry guys.
Is there something about writing about videogames that makes logic fall out of people's heads? Seems like every month I see an article on the theme of "Oh god, cheap/crappy/casual/wii/motion controlled/sex video games are going to be THE ONLY VIDEO GAMES YOU'LL BE ABLE TO BUY AND IT WILL DESTROY GAMING!!!!" At least this one had an actual mechanism for how that would happen. Typically it's just along the lines of "Since the Wii came out, motion controlled games have increased 30000%. These trends WILL CONTINUE FOREVER! Say goodbye to food and water, because motion controlled games are taking over!"
As long as humans are in control of a system in any way, those humans can be corrupted to bend the system to a large entity's will. That means that logically, the only way we can have a global information network that remains free and open is to have it designed, built, and run, entirely by machines.
I agree that an internet built by and managed by humans can never be free, but I think you're mistaken when you assume that means it has to be run by machines. You're overlooking an obvious, not to mention awesome, alternative:
Yes, that's right. An internet run and managed by monkeys. We already have internet over avian carriers, I'd like to see internet over flung poop.
To get semantic for a moment, polarity means just that there are two opposite sides that are different in some way, so there are many ways a pool could be polarized. The depth is usually "polarized," with one end being shallower and one end deeper. You could have a pool polarized in terms of color, like painting one end red and the other blue. North and south are also possible.
The summary seems to be talking about electricity or something dangerous, which yeah, doesn't make sense to me.
Wait, someone -not- talking in extremes? ... (brain explodes)
I think it's odd how this is taken as a cause rather than a symptom. If a game changes hands several times, it's going to be a mess when it comes out for -that- reason, and because it might have a dated feel, not simply because of the time. If the leaders of the project are idiots, it might take a lot longer than it should and won't be very good either, but that's because it had bad management, not because of the time. Longer development times makes the bean counters push to rush it out the door. I'd argue it's a bad decision to put a game out too soon, and that too has nothing to do with lengthy development.
If you're making a gigantic game at a reasonable pace, has one unifying, competent visionary guiding it throughout development, and manages to not feel dated when it finally comes out, I don't see why there would be a time limit for whether a game is going to be good or not. Half life 2 for example, took forever to get here, but was worth the wait.
The reverse is true too. Under the good examples section, the article mentions Uncharted, and the first 2 things it says the sequel did right are
"1) This took only two years to make; nowhere near six.
2) Two years, and they still improved the engine. It was also developed in-house, so Naughty Dog knew how to use it."
Seems stupid to me to suggest that a 2 year development made the sequel good. I've never heard anyone rave about how Uncharted 2 was so good because they didn't have to wait very long after playing the first one to play it.
In DNF's case, it really depends on what happens with the development. I liked Gearbox's "Borderlands," but that had very little to do with the plot or characters. If they throw out all the ancient junk and start fresh, maybe it won't be bad. If they try to use art that 3d realms made in the 90's, that doesn't seem like it could possibly work. If they try to use an old game engine, the game might be broken on arrival. In any case, I think it has very little to do with time directly.
I hear you. I'm still running windows ME. It's safer really. Few blackhats bother to check compatibility of their viruses or malware with older operating systems. Some rogue antivirus popped up a message saying "Scanning: You have... Windows ME? Shit, I wouldn't touch that with a 10 foot pole. Uninstalling..."
China would probably answer by selling their $2.5 trillions in foreign exchange reserves, most of them US Dollars. That would devalue the USD and EUR to virtually zero, bringing about economic turmoil of unprecedented magnitude. Let's face it: China got us by the balls, and they are ready to squeeze [telegraph.co.uk] them.
A few things
1. "Nuclear option" as mentioned in that link is more descriptive than you give it credit for. Just as we could not have nuked the soviet union without getting destroyed ourselves, so too would China be bringing about mutually assured economic destruction with such a move.
2. How would the Euro be affected?
3. Ready to squeeze? You might use a more recent article than 2007 when making such a claim. I mean, it IS interesting how this will affect Hillary Clinton's chances of getting elected and all...
I've never understood why someone would spend hours online finding a site when a travel agent can do it all for you for almost nothing.
Hours online finding A site? Man, you really need to upgrade from dialup.
I've flown quite a bit on pretty much any US carrier you care to mention and they're all pretty much equally crappy.
But like the two politically parties, they're -differently- crappy, and a choice is better. Frontier may have delayed 10 hours getting me to my wedding, but that only happened one time and they did let us watch cable FOR FREE so I won't hold that against them.
Southwest's"choose your own seat" policy may ensure that some f#(!ing midget will get the extra leg room while my knees are banging into the seat in front of me for hours, but at least I'm not automatically assigned the middle seat at the very back of the plane between two fat people and my seat can't recline.
And Delta... well... at least any time I'm choosing who to fly with, there is a clear "wrong" answer, which is Delta.
I got swine flu on one of their planes though (the PAX strain.) No other airline has gotten me sick with anything the cable news networks would deem a major threat to humanity.
"I can't recall ever seeing something like what you're talking about getting published."
Then you haven't been paying attention. It is common. Even in medicine and clinical trials.
I guess what I was asking is "does it happen anyplace OTHER than clinical trials?" After all, clinical trials for medication is only a small subset of research.
When talking about studies with a company poised to sell something based on the outcome, maybe in a few cases. Most research though there is no such company and no product. You're talking specifically about clinical trials, please don't suggest all research is tainted that way.
The numbers and statistics apply ONLY TO THE HYPOTHESIS being tested, so you cannot hunt for a statistical significance just somewhere in the data and then re-formulate your hypothesis. The need to publish (a scientist's income relies on what he publishes in most cases) as well as funding issues force scientists to try to find some usable results from their science, and by trawling through their data they can often salvage what would otherwise have been a failed bit of research
Where does this happen? Clinical trials? With my specific field within basic cell biology research, I don't see this happening much. Experiments and research goals fail frequently of course, but when researchers think they find something in the ashes of those failed experiments, they seem to use that as a starting point for a new hypothesis and a new round of experiments. I can't recall ever seeing something like what you're talking about getting published.
Maybe. I think though it's actually over reaching conclusions (which may be increasing), the fact that any time you study humans you're working with nightmarish heterogeneity, and some fairly specific examples of bias.
On the subject of bias, TFA talks about several clinical trials of drugs. There are consistent reports finding problems with clinical trials, so that's no surprise that there's bias there and it's going to throw things off. I consider clinical trials to be a special class of research though. Finding bias in clinical trial findings doesn't implicate all research for me. A fruit fly geneticist who has no direct financial interest in a specific result before the research starts is not likely to suffer from the same bias that the researcher for a clinical trial has. Sure, he might be unscrupulous, and he still has an interest in finding a result rather than finding nothing which might introduce bias, but in general it's probably more likely he's just interested in the truth.
Basic research does still have bias though towards finding big results. It's not enough to publish real results, they have to be extremely important results now, and that leads to over interpretation. There's a definite pull toward "this example illustrates a UNIVERSAL PRINCIPLE!" rather than "This example might be a fluke." I think that's the case both with the assymetry example TFA mentions and TFA itself. The researcher studied barn swallows and found symmetry was selected for, or something similar. That lead to the conclusion that symmetry was always preferred, and then it turned out not to be true for absolutely everything. Duh. He studied barn swallows, not all life everywhere. It was over interpretation to assume it would go for flies, humans, etc. Similarly, it's overreaching to imply that all scientific results decline over time, or that a few studies which proved misleading are anything more than isolated errors.
Lastly, people are complex psychologically, physiologically, and in all ways, and there are going to be results that hold true for some people but not all.
You and GP seem to be playing a game of "trolling by pretending that whatever works for me obviously would work for everyone else." Seems fun, so I'll jump on:
Why would anyone need to "wake up?" I just contracted fatal familial insomnia and won't go to sleep for several months until I die.
I don't understand why you use a phone as an alarm clock. For one it depends on a single power supply, or you have to charge it overnight next to your bed. Second, it uses software prone to bugs. I use a normal alarm clock on 220V, with a backup battery. It invariably goes of in time...
Because it is there, is an alarm clock, and that is good enough for those of us who aren't alarm clock elitists.
Also what is this "single power supply" business? Most alarm clocks you plug into the wall don't have backup power or aren't actually using the backup power option (who actually puts backup batteries in?), phone alarm clocks do. Power goes out on my alarm clock that plugs in, it won't go off. My phone would though.
No they don't. Mouse and keyboard are better for aiming, true, and would give an advantage were the tasks based on that. They're not though, from TFA:
...perform 69 million collective team actions... Team actions, for those unfamiliar with the game, include spotting, performing repairs, and healing, reviving and resupplying your fellow soldiers
Presumably because making the challenges things like "Get 10 headshots in a row" would give PC gamers the advantage. That it's team based stuff more likely represents real differences in the players themselves, not the tools. If you've ever dabbled on xbox live and then tried an online PC game, this may not come as a shock (depending on the games of course.) In general, I'd have expected console gamers would be younger, and more interested in shooting things rather than actually playing as a team and winning.
Halo 3 for example. Didn't matter what the actual goal was, pretty much everyone went for "shoot the other team." Guard the flag? Well, sure, we'll do that by jumping in a warthog, driving to the opposite side of the map, and shooting the other team. If that doesn't work, shoot some more. If that doesn't work, quit in the middle of the round.
You'll see that to some extent in any game, I've been frustrated in some TF2 matches on the PC where my team was more interested in trying to snipe the other side rather than accomplish the objective of pushing the cart, but it doesn't happen every single time, like it tends to on xbox live.
If I'm in the market for rare earth metals, why would I buy from this US source?
Illiterate troll is illiterate. From the first line of the summary: "With increasing prices on rare earth ore, tariffs raised by the Chinese government, and the threat of embargoes that would damage United States high-tech manufacturing..."
So if China wants to drive the price back down and run them out of business, they can do so.
The point of the embargo would be to threaten the US with. "Don't push us on human rights / Taiwan / copyright bullshit / economy stuff / national pride / corporate stuff or we'll stop selling you your precious metals." If we can credibly respond with "Fine, we'll just dig up our own in our backyard," that makes the threat pointless. We could go back and forth with it, China says we won't sell, we start digging, china sells, we stop digging, china stops selling etc, but that's not really in anyone's interests to stress the market like that, you'd just be introducing chaos to a big economic sector.
Whether or not the right actors realize that and are mature enough to deal with the problems rather than playing games with billions of dollars is one thing, but assuming the Chinese diplomats and government isn't completely bullheaded about it, they'll either back off from threatening the embargo once they see it won't be that big of a deal for us, the US will the the mature one and not make too big a fuss out of too many issues (ideally focusing on human rights rather than unimportant corporate/copyright issues, though that's doubtful), or both will compromise.
Sending that info to the "mothership"" (sic), without my knowledge or permission, is bad because they have no reason to need that data; other than to sell it or use it for marketing.
Sorry for being a stickler, but I think it's not bad because they have no good reason for that data, I think it's bad because 1. They don't make it obvious and 2. It's not theirs.
If they were somehow compiling data to fight cancer or find missing children, that would be a good reason to take data, and I would maybe willingly opt into that, but if they did it without my consent (and by that I mean real consent, as you say, not a TOS) then the ends do not justify the means, it's still theft.
Ideally this streisand effect multiplier will force them to change, and that will be good, but how is it in this day and age that large institutions are still trying to suppress news stories? It implies that not only did they totally miss one of the big lessons of wikileaks, they didn't see "Serenity" either ("you can't stop the signal") and that's just sad.
What was going on in the board room or exec room when that decision was made? "Well, gee, this is bad. Our strategy guy and media guy are both out on holidays, but I think our action is pretty clear: murder the guy. Oh, we don't have an assassin on retainer? Well, lets get on that and in the meantime we'll just try to keep it from press. That will probably work, no harm there."
What better place? Why start one in a country full of already educated people?
Feel free to get mad at the author for that strawman argument he's making, but he's not advocating deregulation. A few clues would have been:
- The Fucking Article extensively analyzes why deregulation has failed in the past to do much good.
- All the pictures are of people getting mad after deregulation screwed them over.
- The title is "How the Free Market Rocked the Grid" rocking not necessarily being a good thing.
- The one line version under the title is "It led to higher rates and rolling blackouts, but it also opened the door to greener forms of electricity generation"
The article specifically mentions natural gas prices as being part of the problem, so I think he's aware of them: "That's why electricity prices in many places rose so sharply when natural gas prices skyrocketed at the turn of the millennium." The summary is a bit misleading, so I can't exactly blame you for only reading the first few lines before concluding it was pro-deregulation, but it wasn't.
No, the solution is MORE regulation, not less. The rates need to be regulated, and the private companies need to be taken over by nonprofit public organizations. Every time deregulation is tried, consumers get shafted.
The summary is misleading. TFA does not endorse deregulation, at least not in the sense of "Deregulation is a magic solution to all our problems!"
Clearly, deregulation hasn't been at all successful in bringing prices down. But has it made the companies that provide electricity more efficient? Very probably. Their labor costs have fallen, mostly through reductions in staff, while the reliability of their power plants has improved.
It points out that prices are erratic, and you're damned if you do regulate, damned if you don't regulate. You can't regulate well you're going to have short-sighted politicians doing things like freezing the rates despite increases in costs, risking utility companies going out of business. On the other hand with deregulation, you're going to get energy cartels screwing over everyone else and getting rich, and
...because companies generating electricity in a free market need to demonstrate a return on investment within 5 to 10 years, building big nuclear and coal plants, which usually take over a decade to complete, just isn't an option. So more and more of the grid's power comes from gas turbines, despite the high fuel costs.
Many of the problems and solutions seem like they lie with government, bad lawmakers are going to lead to consumers getting screwed over no matter which direction you go. And there's also the public which is part of the problem beyond voting for said bad lawmakers: they don't tolerate price spikes well, nor do they like the inefficiency that would go with government regulation, and of course they're ignorant and scared on the topic of nuclear power.