The counterargument is that a history of accumulated trade deficits results in a situation like today where large amounts of the US marketable government debt are held by foreign sovereigns, for example China or Saudi Arabia. These holders have a good bit of influence on our governmentâ(TM)s ability to finance itself and can (and have) use it to extract concessions as they see fit.
What is rent seeking about disposing of your personal property as you see fit ? If I own a single family home I expect to be able to do with it whatever I damn please.
So youâ(TM)re advocating people not being âoeallowedâ to leave a city or neighborhood of a city lest their tax money also be gone? So basically any time an above average income person spends more than x days/weeks/months/years in a place then they become prisoners to that place and cannot leave unless they pay some sort of ransom? So the moment someone becomes a little better off they also lose their human rights as well?
I am no Bill Gates fan by any means. I think Microsoft's domination of the PC industry through aggressive business practices set the IT landscape back 10 years. That being said - the money is now his and he can do whatever he wishes with it.
The Washington Post is strangely bothered that someone is trying to improve the horrid state of American education - at least in a way that is not simply "more cowbell." "This has raised questions about whether American democracy is well-served by wealthy people pouring so much money into pet education projects — regardless of whether they are grounded in research — that public policy and funding follow." Is our current educational policy eminently "grounded in research" and producing extraordinary outcomes? I think we can agree that is not the case. Furthermore, I think this line of questioning "raises questions" whether the Washington Post has an even rudimentary understanding of the American constitution, or at least of the first few amendments.
Mr Bill Gates is free to engage in the pursuit of his happiness as he sees fit. The people and institutions choosing to work with Mr Gates or his charities are equally free to do the same. And we are free to not encourage clickbaity low quality content from the WaPo.
The two body problem has been solved for hundreds of years and it is one of the foundational results in physics. A lack of familiarity with it is damning. Being pedantic and obnoxious while proving you have no idea what you are talking about is unforgivable.
The voice recognition systems employed on the typical automated phone service are horrendous. This quickly leads to frustration.
"Q: Would you like to: pay your bill, check your balance... A: Pay my bill. Q: Sorry I did not get that. Would you like to: pay your bill,... A: Pay my bill! A:Sorry, I still did not get that. Let's try something else. Please enter your 27 digit personal code followed by your social security and take a few minutes commenting on modern issues in Middle East politics. A: #$%^&*( &^ %$% ^&* &^% $# $%^&
Having a 'system' that detects if your voice is getting louder, i.e. more pissed off, is not the answer. The answer is to improve the actual voice recognition algorithms, if possible.
As a proponent, advocate, and consumer of free open source software, I cannot help but wonder what is wrong with the community... I had read some many vitriolic comments about Unity before I ever tried it that I was profoundly skeptical of it and expected a massive failure. The reality has been completely different. If anything the extent of differences is fairly underwhelming, and I generally find it mildly more polished than the previous interface. It's almost the same in many respects, and I could not care less if I run Gnome 2 or 3 or Unity. As long as I can quickly bring up a terminal and they don't crash, they're all interchangeable.
...does a phone really require an OS of that complexity? Don't get me wrong, I have a current generation Android smartphone I bought 2-3 months ago, 4G enabled, it even has an HDMI out, and I completely comprehend that a modern smartphone is essentially a fully fledged computer.
That being said, it's still a phone. And in fact, it's horrible at it. To redial the last number I have to press 3 buttons (1 physical, 2 virtual) and suffer through 3s+ of erratic lag or more. On my 4 year old boring but functional Blackberry, it took under 1s and all I had to do is press the same button twice. Hanging up, redialing, going back to the home screen is slow as molasses. Yes, I can browse the web, access my Google Docs, open PDFs, read books, play chess, watch Youtube HD, etc. etc.
The smart- part of the phone is great and a step forward, however the -phone part of the phone is actually a big step back in my opinion.
I will proactively go out and buy the game. The first Crisis remains the best looking FPS to date, although it was released almost 4 years ago. Computational power has continued to increase. As someone said here a few days ago, with a $150 GPU you can run any game on the market at maximum settings. Think about that! A few years ago that would have been unheard of. Game developers kept pushing the envelope, forcing gamers to constantly stay on top of the hardware arms race. Expensive? You bet. But a recipe for innovation.
There will be a cost. Companies like NVIDIA and ATI may slow their development pace since they can't monetize as well any future advancements. Who is willing to shell out $300 to run MW2 at 90fps vs. 50fps...? Are we done generating real time photo-realistic images? Does this look like a screenshot from an action movie yet? I for one don't think so.
We need the next Crisis. That game that will bring to a halt all but the top 1% of existing PCs on maximum settings. The industry needs it. I need it. You need it too - you just don't know it.
Your comment betrays ignorance I am afraid. More precisely, it is a great example why "research by Wikipedia" does not work when it is not backed by an actual intimate understanding of the subject matter.
Specifically your ill informed comparison with "Romania", that backward, not "actually civilized" banana republic that you use as a boogie man only reveals your ignorance. Yes, Romania is a relatively poor country, the GDP per capita is about $12k/year (compare to $46k/year in the US) as per wikipedia.
However, the level of health services available is not immediately obviously worse than in the US, once adjusted for the purchasing power of the median citizen, and especially the less affluent. People there can have high quality cancer treatments and heart surgery that would cost hundreds of thousands of dollars or more in the USand possibly bankrupt them and their families - all paid for by the public health plans. Expensive drugs are often covered. Extended hospital stays - of the orders of weeks or even months - are also very often covered. I have had friends from Europe who had surgery in the US and were shocked to be kicked out of the hospital hours after the doctor sowed the last stitch. That would be unheard of even in a backward place like Romania.
You are guilty of oversimplification. I wish not to make the same error, only with a different sign. I will be the first to remark that, not price adjusted, the quality of Romanian health care is often not great especially for non life threatening diseases. The bureaucracy is often suffocating. Petty bribes are common. I wish not advocate for a "single payer" health care system.
However, people who live in glass houses most definitely should wield their stones carefully.
"It won't be long before video from the Internet is always within reach."
I am so confused. Why is a huge leap in comprehension required to go from a typical computer monitor with a diagonal increases of 17-24'' to a standard TV with a diagonal of 35-50'' or more? It is the same LCD based technology. It is not a different type of tool. It does not require a separate cultural upbringing or years of additional technical training to understand the other once you understand one.
Your college age movie watching experience on a tiny laptop in a cramped dorm room neatly maps onto a more leisurely experience staring at your obscenely large TV from the comfort of your living room couch. You don't like staring at a big black box underneath your precious media center? Fine, then get an HTPC form factor computer, and hide it behind the TV itself. You don't want a keyboard? Then get a bluetooth remote control. All this should be straight forward. You don't need a box with a prominent 'CPO stamp of approval' (Cable Provider Oligopoly) and ridiculous price and limitations. Essentially all you need is a $10 HDMI cable to connect your computer to your TV. How atrophied is the American consumer's capacity to reason and think independently...?
You may well be referring to several categories of Nobel prizes (e.g. peace prize, or economics) which indeed have become (or have always been?) an avenue for the Nobel Committee to make political and cultural statements. That is rather transparent to any reader willing to go beyond CNN's coverage of the matter. However, the hard sciences' Nobel prizes are highly credible and are taken quite seriously. It is reasonable for people to expect a high standard, in my opinion. Factual inaccuracies in rendering the decisions cast an undesirable cloud on the decision making process.
I am afraid you're exposing yourself somewhat to potential ridicule with your emphatic statement that you've 'been trying to build an HTPC for a decade'. As other posters have mentioned, it's quite easy to either buy or build an HTPC these days. Most TVs have HDMI inputs for years now, and that is generally a plug and play affair. The only point I will grant is the remote control - you need a smart one that knows to power off when unused. In Linux that can be a bit challenging - Bluetooth in Linux is an exercise in self-flagellation. I for one found ended up using a wireless keyboard that looks very sleek has a high WAF (wife acceptance factor). Either way, all in, an HTPC is borderline mainstream these days, far from an adventure into the unknown.
While your general argument may be reasonable (it is not always trivial to detect irrationality and researchers are often sloppy about it), your specific argument here is wrong. The payouts are fundamentally the same under the two scenarios. Whether the coin is loaded or not, it will have the same impact in either case. The fact that the human/monkey chooses differently under different characterizations of the payout is indeed a sign of lack of rationality. As to what exactly it means - whether it is just symptomatic of a mental shortcut, or a deeper evolved trait when dealing with uncertain outcomes, that is not clear from this one experiment (despite the speakers overeagerness to generalize).
Science notwithstanding, the findings of this committee are about as surprising as a special Vatican research council concluding that God indeed exists or a Soviet Central Committee economic report showing USSR GDP growth growing at ever higher rates.
I wish I could mod this up. You may be more right than anyone would like to admit. The only legitimate academics that I know who dare openly take a skeptical stance are people like Freeman Dyson or William Happer - both of them in their 70-80s, with nothing to lose. The rest are staying quiet, keeping their eye on the ball (i.e. tenure and funding).
Merely making bold statements forcefully does not render your arguments correct... You have stated, yet failed to prove, that the polarisation of news reporting is indeed responsible for the polarisation of the political system. It could just as well be an effect, or a corollary, rather than a cause.
Furthermore, who is to decide what 'fair' news reporting is? I, as a reader, can adjust my interpretation of Fox News or New York Times editorials and news pieces based on years of experience with those media sources, and my assessment of their veracity and objectivity. Why would I want to outsource that job to some faceless bureaucrat? The risks in my view far outweigh the benefits. A government controlled media yearns for an ambitious political leader and organisation to wield it as a powerful tool of propaganda.
I submit to you that an apparently unbiased source of news which in fact has often times a agenda (possible examples NPR and the CNN) is substantially more pernicious and dangerous than an openly partisan one. The former is much more likely to manipulate and sway public opinion than the latter.
First sensible comment all day. Let's also remember the source: PBS. Remember how they make their money? No performance driven financial incentives for them.... Let's also not forget the openly alluded to whiff of Marxism. Enough said.
There definitely is something to the thesis that people can underperform under pressure. However form there to generalize to: 'all performance compensation is worthless' is like saying 'because I got shortchanged today at the grocer's, we should ban all cash transactions as being inherently unfair, and we should all have to use credit cards'.
Furthermore, abolishing sales commissions is a guaranteed way to triple sales for essentially any company (and that no one has thought of it before in the history of business) because it removes the pressure to perform and releases the creative side of the brain?? That is a patently ridiculous statement for anyone who has managed even a small group of people. It can be true in some circumstances, but it is hardly a Law of Nature. And referencing the overused metaphore of the two brain hemispheres only lends the argument a pretentious air of faux science, but does little to strengthen the argument.
All in this article is absolutely shameful with its breathless over-enthusiasm to overreach to implausible and poorly argued conclusions.
...but despite glowing reviews, I couldn't quite get into it. The atmosphere is very polished. The little girls are quite spooky and they're the highlight of the game by far. What I did not like so much was the actual combat. The worst thing about it is that what you're really fighting is the scarcity of resources (I was playing on hard). The challenge thus is not killing the creatures, but saving money. There are several things you have to keep track of, and you're constantly out of all of them. The water effects are best in class, but that's about it. The engine brings nothing new. Crysis, a 3 year old game, is more revolutionary even today than BioShock 2. I wanted to like it but in the end I just gave up.
Agree with you on the superiority of PC input control vs. consoles. I also agree that there is something to be said for being able to jump into a game without going through thousands of options. However I disagree with everything else you state. I say this as someone who though MW was one of the top 5 games of all time, and one of the top 3 multiplayer games of all time. For me MW2 has been an enormous disappointment and I refuse to purchase another Infinity Ward game in the future.
1) The single player mode in MW2 is a marginally updated version of MW, more like an expansion pack. The textures have higher resolutions, and they have a few gimmicks like the ice climbing scene, but that's about it. There's no 'wow' moment like when you controlled the AC130 for the first time in MW (the Predator drone in MW2 is too similar to the AC130 to be considered innovative). There's no new groundbreaking revolutionary ideas.
2) The multiplayer is entirely compromised due to hacking. I originally also thought that the lack of dedicated servers was not an issue, since I also never really played on the modded servers. However, as 50% of MW2 games end in a tactical nuke, I've learned that the key benefit for dedicated servers is that the server admin polices and bans cheaters. And if a server got overrun by cheaters you could just flee to another one that was better managed. Clearly the automatic anti-cheating provisions do not work - hackers can always side step whatever protection the game has, much like computer viruses constantly evolve and find new ways to side-step the anti-virus protection. What's happening is simple: they're looking for ways to monetize the multiplayer franchise (think WoW), and that starts with controlling it.
In summary: single player is too short and not innovative enough, and multiplayer is overrun by cheaters and too restrictive for the end user. The COD franchise is being monetized ruthlessly by the parent company - good for their shareholders, bad for the gaming community. Interestingly, the PC community has responded the strongest to these issues (look up the GameSpot average user rating for COD6 on the PC - it is mediocre - and compare it to COD4). The console community has been much less capable of independent critical thought, partially because cheating is probably much less of a problem. Perhaps they're just trying to kill the PC version - they may think they can make more money off consoles.
Slashdot Mirror
The counterargument is that a history of accumulated trade deficits results in a situation like today where large amounts of the US marketable government debt are held by foreign sovereigns, for example China or Saudi Arabia. These holders have a good bit of influence on our governmentâ(TM)s ability to finance itself and can (and have) use it to extract concessions as they see fit.
What is rent seeking about disposing of your personal property as you see fit ? If I own a single family home I expect to be able to do with it whatever I damn please.
So youâ(TM)re advocating people not being âoeallowedâ to leave a city or neighborhood of a city lest their tax money also be gone? So basically any time an above average income person spends more than x days/weeks/months/years in a place then they become prisoners to that place and cannot leave unless they pay some sort of ransom? So the moment someone becomes a little better off they also lose their human rights as well?
I am no Bill Gates fan by any means. I think Microsoft's domination of the PC industry through aggressive business practices set the IT landscape back 10 years. That being said - the money is now his and he can do whatever he wishes with it. The Washington Post is strangely bothered that someone is trying to improve the horrid state of American education - at least in a way that is not simply "more cowbell." "This has raised questions about whether American democracy is well-served by wealthy people pouring so much money into pet education projects — regardless of whether they are grounded in research — that public policy and funding follow." Is our current educational policy eminently "grounded in research" and producing extraordinary outcomes? I think we can agree that is not the case. Furthermore, I think this line of questioning "raises questions" whether the Washington Post has an even rudimentary understanding of the American constitution, or at least of the first few amendments. Mr Bill Gates is free to engage in the pursuit of his happiness as he sees fit. The people and institutions choosing to work with Mr Gates or his charities are equally free to do the same. And we are free to not encourage clickbaity low quality content from the WaPo.
I have deleted my account precisely for this reason. I am now on Voat.
The two body problem has been solved for hundreds of years and it is one of the foundational results in physics. A lack of familiarity with it is damning. Being pedantic and obnoxious while proving you have no idea what you are talking about is unforgivable.
The voice recognition systems employed on the typical automated phone service are horrendous. This quickly leads to frustration.
...
"Q: Would you like to: pay your bill, check your balance...
A: Pay my bill.
Q: Sorry I did not get that. Would you like to: pay your bill,
A: Pay my bill!
A:Sorry, I still did not get that. Let's try something else. Please enter your 27 digit personal code followed by your social security and take a few minutes commenting on modern issues in Middle East politics.
A: #$%^&*( &^ %$% ^&* &^% $# $%^&
Having a 'system' that detects if your voice is getting louder, i.e. more pissed off, is not the answer. The answer is to improve the actual voice recognition algorithms, if possible.
As a proponent, advocate, and consumer of free open source software, I cannot help but wonder what is wrong with the community... I had read some many vitriolic comments about Unity before I ever tried it that I was profoundly skeptical of it and expected a massive failure. The reality has been completely different. If anything the extent of differences is fairly underwhelming, and I generally find it mildly more polished than the previous interface. It's almost the same in many respects, and I could not care less if I run Gnome 2 or 3 or Unity. As long as I can quickly bring up a terminal and they don't crash, they're all interchangeable.
...does a phone really require an OS of that complexity? Don't get me wrong, I have a current generation Android smartphone I bought 2-3 months ago, 4G enabled, it even has an HDMI out, and I completely comprehend that a modern smartphone is essentially a fully fledged computer.
That being said, it's still a phone. And in fact, it's horrible at it. To redial the last number I have to press 3 buttons (1 physical, 2 virtual) and suffer through 3s+ of erratic lag or more. On my 4 year old boring but functional Blackberry, it took under 1s and all I had to do is press the same button twice. Hanging up, redialing, going back to the home screen is slow as molasses. Yes, I can browse the web, access my Google Docs, open PDFs, read books, play chess, watch Youtube HD, etc. etc.
The smart- part of the phone is great and a step forward, however the -phone part of the phone is actually a big step back in my opinion.
There will be a cost. Companies like NVIDIA and ATI may slow their development pace since they can't monetize as well any future advancements. Who is willing to shell out $300 to run MW2 at 90fps vs. 50fps...? Are we done generating real time photo-realistic images? Does this look like a screenshot from an action movie yet? I for one don't think so.
We need the next Crisis. That game that will bring to a halt all but the top 1% of existing PCs on maximum settings. The industry needs it. I need it. You need it too - you just don't know it.
Your comment betrays ignorance I am afraid. More precisely, it is a great example why "research by Wikipedia" does not work when it is not backed by an actual intimate understanding of the subject matter.
Specifically your ill informed comparison with "Romania", that backward, not "actually civilized" banana republic that you use as a boogie man only reveals your ignorance. Yes, Romania is a relatively poor country, the GDP per capita is about $12k/year (compare to $46k/year in the US) as per wikipedia.
However, the level of health services available is not immediately obviously worse than in the US, once adjusted for the purchasing power of the median citizen, and especially the less affluent. People there can have high quality cancer treatments and heart surgery that would cost hundreds of thousands of dollars or more in the USand possibly bankrupt them and their families - all paid for by the public health plans. Expensive drugs are often covered. Extended hospital stays - of the orders of weeks or even months - are also very often covered. I have had friends from Europe who had surgery in the US and were shocked to be kicked out of the hospital hours after the doctor sowed the last stitch. That would be unheard of even in a backward place like Romania.
You are guilty of oversimplification. I wish not to make the same error, only with a different sign. I will be the first to remark that, not price adjusted, the quality of Romanian health care is often not great especially for non life threatening diseases. The bureaucracy is often suffocating. Petty bribes are common. I wish not advocate for a "single payer" health care system.
However, people who live in glass houses most definitely should wield their stones carefully.
1) Pull aggro
2) Clickfest
3) Pro$it
I am so confused. Why is a huge leap in comprehension required to go from a typical computer monitor with a diagonal increases of 17-24'' to a standard TV with a diagonal of 35-50'' or more? It is the same LCD based technology. It is not a different type of tool. It does not require a separate cultural upbringing or years of additional technical training to understand the other once you understand one.
Your college age movie watching experience on a tiny laptop in a cramped dorm room neatly maps onto a more leisurely experience staring at your obscenely large TV from the comfort of your living room couch. You don't like staring at a big black box underneath your precious media center? Fine, then get an HTPC form factor computer, and hide it behind the TV itself. You don't want a keyboard? Then get a bluetooth remote control. All this should be straight forward. You don't need a box with a prominent 'CPO stamp of approval' (Cable Provider Oligopoly) and ridiculous price and limitations. Essentially all you need is a $10 HDMI cable to connect your computer to your TV. How atrophied is the American consumer's capacity to reason and think independently...?
You may well be referring to several categories of Nobel prizes (e.g. peace prize, or economics) which indeed have become (or have always been?) an avenue for the Nobel Committee to make political and cultural statements. That is rather transparent to any reader willing to go beyond CNN's coverage of the matter. However, the hard sciences' Nobel prizes are highly credible and are taken quite seriously. It is reasonable for people to expect a high standard, in my opinion. Factual inaccuracies in rendering the decisions cast an undesirable cloud on the decision making process.
Mod parent up.
I am afraid you're exposing yourself somewhat to potential ridicule with your emphatic statement that you've 'been trying to build an HTPC for a decade'. As other posters have mentioned, it's quite easy to either buy or build an HTPC these days. Most TVs have HDMI inputs for years now, and that is generally a plug and play affair. The only point I will grant is the remote control - you need a smart one that knows to power off when unused. In Linux that can be a bit challenging - Bluetooth in Linux is an exercise in self-flagellation. I for one found ended up using a wireless keyboard that looks very sleek has a high WAF (wife acceptance factor). Either way, all in, an HTPC is borderline mainstream these days, far from an adventure into the unknown.
Don't confuse matters. Water fluoridation is a well known Communist plot.
While your general argument may be reasonable (it is not always trivial to detect irrationality and researchers are often sloppy about it), your specific argument here is wrong. The payouts are fundamentally the same under the two scenarios. Whether the coin is loaded or not, it will have the same impact in either case. The fact that the human/monkey chooses differently under different characterizations of the payout is indeed a sign of lack of rationality. As to what exactly it means - whether it is just symptomatic of a mental shortcut, or a deeper evolved trait when dealing with uncertain outcomes, that is not clear from this one experiment (despite the speakers overeagerness to generalize).
Science notwithstanding, the findings of this committee are about as surprising as a special Vatican research council concluding that God indeed exists or a Soviet Central Committee economic report showing USSR GDP growth growing at ever higher rates.
I wish I could mod this up. You may be more right than anyone would like to admit. The only legitimate academics that I know who dare openly take a skeptical stance are people like Freeman Dyson or William Happer - both of them in their 70-80s, with nothing to lose. The rest are staying quiet, keeping their eye on the ball (i.e. tenure and funding).
Merely making bold statements forcefully does not render your arguments correct... You have stated, yet failed to prove, that the polarisation of news reporting is indeed responsible for the polarisation of the political system. It could just as well be an effect, or a corollary, rather than a cause.
Furthermore, who is to decide what 'fair' news reporting is? I, as a reader, can adjust my interpretation of Fox News or New York Times editorials and news pieces based on years of experience with those media sources, and my assessment of their veracity and objectivity. Why would I want to outsource that job to some faceless bureaucrat? The risks in my view far outweigh the benefits. A government controlled media yearns for an ambitious political leader and organisation to wield it as a powerful tool of propaganda.
I submit to you that an apparently unbiased source of news which in fact has often times a agenda (possible examples NPR and the CNN) is substantially more pernicious and dangerous than an openly partisan one. The former is much more likely to manipulate and sway public opinion than the latter.
First sensible comment all day. Let's also remember the source: PBS. Remember how they make their money? No performance driven financial incentives for them.... Let's also not forget the openly alluded to whiff of Marxism. Enough said.
There definitely is something to the thesis that people can underperform under pressure. However form there to generalize to: 'all performance compensation is worthless' is like saying 'because I got shortchanged today at the grocer's, we should ban all cash transactions as being inherently unfair, and we should all have to use credit cards'.
Furthermore, abolishing sales commissions is a guaranteed way to triple sales for essentially any company (and that no one has thought of it before in the history of business) because it removes the pressure to perform and releases the creative side of the brain?? That is a patently ridiculous statement for anyone who has managed even a small group of people. It can be true in some circumstances, but it is hardly a Law of Nature. And referencing the overused metaphore of the two brain hemispheres only lends the argument a pretentious air of faux science, but does little to strengthen the argument.
All in this article is absolutely shameful with its breathless over-enthusiasm to overreach to implausible and poorly argued conclusions.
...but despite glowing reviews, I couldn't quite get into it. The atmosphere is very polished. The little girls are quite spooky and they're the highlight of the game by far. What I did not like so much was the actual combat. The worst thing about it is that what you're really fighting is the scarcity of resources (I was playing on hard). The challenge thus is not killing the creatures, but saving money. There are several things you have to keep track of, and you're constantly out of all of them. The water effects are best in class, but that's about it. The engine brings nothing new. Crysis, a 3 year old game, is more revolutionary even today than BioShock 2. I wanted to like it but in the end I just gave up.
OK, I suspect most people who play COD multiplayer play deathmatch. That's where the nuke rate is about 50%. It is ridiculous.
Agree with you on the superiority of PC input control vs. consoles. I also agree that there is something to be said for being able to jump into a game without going through thousands of options. However I disagree with everything else you state. I say this as someone who though MW was one of the top 5 games of all time, and one of the top 3 multiplayer games of all time. For me MW2 has been an enormous disappointment and I refuse to purchase another Infinity Ward game in the future.
1) The single player mode in MW2 is a marginally updated version of MW, more like an expansion pack. The textures have higher resolutions, and they have a few gimmicks like the ice climbing scene, but that's about it. There's no 'wow' moment like when you controlled the AC130 for the first time in MW (the Predator drone in MW2 is too similar to the AC130 to be considered innovative). There's no new groundbreaking revolutionary ideas.
2) The multiplayer is entirely compromised due to hacking. I originally also thought that the lack of dedicated servers was not an issue, since I also never really played on the modded servers. However, as 50% of MW2 games end in a tactical nuke, I've learned that the key benefit for dedicated servers is that the server admin polices and bans cheaters. And if a server got overrun by cheaters you could just flee to another one that was better managed. Clearly the automatic anti-cheating provisions do not work - hackers can always side step whatever protection the game has, much like computer viruses constantly evolve and find new ways to side-step the anti-virus protection. What's happening is simple: they're looking for ways to monetize the multiplayer franchise (think WoW), and that starts with controlling it.
In summary: single player is too short and not innovative enough, and multiplayer is overrun by cheaters and too restrictive for the end user. The COD franchise is being monetized ruthlessly by the parent company - good for their shareholders, bad for the gaming community. Interestingly, the PC community has responded the strongest to these issues (look up the GameSpot average user rating for COD6 on the PC - it is mediocre - and compare it to COD4). The console community has been much less capable of independent critical thought, partially because cheating is probably much less of a problem. Perhaps they're just trying to kill the PC version - they may think they can make more money off consoles.