I'm not familiar with the last two, but a scientist is the star of at least the first three series. I don't know much about Criminal Minds, but I gather science and smart people (instead of action or magic) are also central to that show. Presumably Medium is just about mysticism though:-P
So I don't know about how this value was calculated, but 2.50 will definitely buy you more stuff in a poor country
You could have just clicked the link and read how it was calculated: according to purchasing power parity. This means $2.50 number is adjusted for how much a dollar buys in each country.
Good point, TFA was on cell phones, but no one reads TFA. The Slashdot story was titled "Cell Phone Industry's" failures, and Motorola was definitely in that industry.
Every last one of them is, from my vantage point, legalized extortion.
Uh huh, every single one of the thousand insurance companies in the US is crooked. Also, you know this for a fact. Why do people keep buying from them? Why doesn't a single honest company get started? Why doesn't anyone know this except you? It's all a mystery.
Which is inevitably used to justify rate increases. Never in recorded history has an actuary's new work been used to reduce insurance rates.
This is provably false. In most states, insurance levels are a matter of public record, so you can walk into the office of your state's Department of Insurance and look at ratefilings (some put theirs online, like Florida. There you fill find many, many filing for rate decreases.
You obviously know nothing about the industry. Many insurance lines (especially liability) are in a "soft market", and effective rates have been decreasing for several years, often by 5%+ a year.
If you don't buy liability insurance you may not get that example. But you probably know something about car insurance. On a loss ratio basis, companies like Progressive and Geico attacked the auto market and won market share from companies like State Farm and Allstate. Their secret? More sophisticated and efficient pricing algorithms, which enabled lower prices for many drivers.
Your whole post doesn't make any sense anyway—insurance is a competitive market; if they were really screwing their customers, new companies could just enter and take their profits. It only takes a few guys to start an insurance company and there are about 1000 registered in the US.
No, BitterOak's post already said that it would be trivial under the assumption of constant acceleration, but the average acceleration in the absence of that assumption depends on the shape of the curve.
To give a simple example, suppose the aircraft is given a small impulse at t=0 to give it an infintesimal velocity. A year later it reaches the end of the rail and is given a huge impulse to get it to 240mph. The average acceleration is quite small because it took the jet a year to only accelerate 240mph total.
You're going back a ways because Wickard v Filburn was in 1942. Then the Dred Scott slavery decision might be in the running for worst SCOTUS decisions.
The strange thing is that what Rosling is doing isn't really statistics at all. He is presenting a lot of data in a vivid and striking manner, but he hardly even uses any statistical techniques (in the sense of testing different models, assessing the significance of his data, etc.).
In my experience (as a scientist), many, many more people understand statistics and data analysis than understand the power of presentation.
In my experience in industry it's the opposite. People spend a lot of time on the formatting and presentation, but any actual statistics used is elementary. And of course our salesman basically don't know anything about statistics.
The problem is that if you start looking at things that way, every game fits into the same category.
No, it doesn't. The Jonathan Blow video in the post you're responding to addresses all this through some interesting thought experiments.
The differences between chess and a slot machine are matters of degree to some extent—so what, chess is still a deeper game. People choose to consume both cocaine and vegetables—there is still a very important difference between drug dealers and organic farmers.
Sure, you're probably right that if jobs were more satisfying fewer people would use cocaine and more would eat broccoli. But there are still ethical issues with drug dealing (to put it mildly).
But most importantly, you become FAR more aware of your surroundings.
Why would people with guns be more aware of their surroundings than people in the same surroundings without guns? They are on the lookout for people to shoot? Or the people without guns are just less rational and capable?
But resources are finite, and QA testing can be expensive. It's easy to say "OMG there are bugs in this game, there shouldn't be bugs. Let's boycott until they take the bugs out!!" but in the real world there are tradeoffs.
Bug testing in a game like this probably has an exponential profile—twice as much QA time might only get rid of half the existing bugs (4x the time, 75% of the bugs, etc.). If they got rid of most of the bugs, perhaps the game would cost twice as much, or there would only be half as many quests, etc. The author doesn't mention any tradeoffs, he just wants more stuff.
Anyway, I'm in the process of playing Fallout: New Vegas and really enjoying it despite the couple times it has crashed on me. I don't know whether the QA tradeoffs were managed effectively (and I doubt most commenters do either) but I do know I like the game.
My point is simply that the product is rendered unusable without piracy if internet access is not ubiquitously available.
Nope, the product is rendered unusable only when internet access is not available. If internet access is not ubiquitous, that doesn't mean the product is unusable.
Is this hair-splitting? I don't think so. I agree it would be nice to play in a hotel room or whatever. But how often do these cases happen to their player base? Being generous, I'd say 10% of the time max? Then you should still be willing to pay 90% of the price. So if you'd be willing to pay $60 without internet activation, perhaps you'd only be willing to pay $54 now.
I agree DRM lowers the value of the product, but Slashdot's quantification of this decrease is way off. That's why you see everyone complaining and buying the game anyway—they care about DRM, but Blizzard's titles are still a good value even with the DRM.
I still see GP's point. You should have quit riding your bicycle for a few weeks while you were on your diet. Assuming you lost weight anyway and that was clear to everyone, you could start riding again.
Anyone care to comment on the history or future of RSS? RSS seemed like a great idea: an open format that allowed users to scan sites (Blogs, news sites, web comics) for updates. Also the privacy issues were limited because the list of sites was only kept locally.
RSS seemed like a great idea but it seems it never reached mainstream popularity. Most (?) internet users have never heard of RSS. Instead people turned to third party aggregators and closed sites like Facebook. What happened?
In that case, Bobbs-Merill sold books to wholesalers their copyrighted book including a "shrinkwrap" license saying retailers shall not sell the book below a certain price. Wholesalers sold the books to retailers. Retailers sold the books below the certain price to consumers. The Court held that the license was not binding upon the retailers because there was no privity of contract between the retailers and Bobbs-Merill. This is true: there was only privity of contract between Bobbs-Merill and the wholesalers. And as the license only purported to bind retailers, the wholesalers did not violate the terms of the license either.
Thank you for the excellent explanation. However, you seem to be proving the GP's point for him. If you are correct, it would be trivial for Bobbs-Merill to implement their original strategy. They would simply have to license their books to wholesalers under a restriction that the wholesalers were only permitted to re-license those books to retailers under a relicensing agreement that forbade the retailers from selling the books under the desired price floor.
CTA later resold the software in violation of this agreement. This revokes CTA's license, which means the copies Vernor sold on eBay were unlicensed, infringing copies from the moment he purchased them.
Under the scheme this article describes, if any retailer sold the books under the price floor, they would be violating their required license with the wholesalers, not their (non-existent) license with Bobbs-Merill. The consequence would be as you describe for the CTA—once the retailer violates its license, the final customer has an infringing copy.
Slashdot Mirror
I'm not familiar with the last two, but a scientist is the star of at least the first three series. I don't know much about Criminal Minds, but I gather science and smart people (instead of action or magic) are also central to that show. Presumably Medium is just about mysticism though :-P
You could have just clicked the link and read how it was calculated: according to purchasing power parity. This means $2.50 number is adjusted for how much a dollar buys in each country.
Good point, TFA was on cell phones, but no one reads TFA. The Slashdot story was titled "Cell Phone Industry's" failures, and Motorola was definitely in that industry.
Great, it's bad enough when I have to stay in the office past 3AM. Now I have to worry about getting attacked by automated cleaning robots...
They missed one of the biggest failures of all, Motorola's attempt to build a global satellite-based network. It cost the company over $5 billion USD. Some more details here.
Can you give sources for your Washington and Jefferson quotes? These websites claim those quotes were actually fabricated by pro-gun websites.
Uh huh, every single one of the thousand insurance companies in the US is crooked. Also, you know this for a fact. Why do people keep buying from them? Why doesn't a single honest company get started? Why doesn't anyone know this except you? It's all a mystery.
This is provably false. In most states, insurance levels are a matter of public record, so you can walk into the office of your state's Department of Insurance and look at ratefilings (some put theirs online, like Florida. There you fill find many, many filing for rate decreases.
In fact, for entire industries, rates have been going down.
You obviously know nothing about the industry. Many insurance lines (especially liability) are in a "soft market", and effective rates have been decreasing for several years, often by 5%+ a year.
If you don't buy liability insurance you may not get that example. But you probably know something about car insurance. On a loss ratio basis, companies like Progressive and Geico attacked the auto market and won market share from companies like State Farm and Allstate. Their secret? More sophisticated and efficient pricing algorithms, which enabled lower prices for many drivers.
Your whole post doesn't make any sense anyway—insurance is a competitive market; if they were really screwing their customers, new companies could just enter and take their profits. It only takes a few guys to start an insurance company and there are about 1000 registered in the US.
No, BitterOak's post already said that it would be trivial under the assumption of constant acceleration, but the average acceleration in the absence of that assumption depends on the shape of the curve.
To give a simple example, suppose the aircraft is given a small impulse at t=0 to give it an infintesimal velocity. A year later it reaches the end of the rail and is given a huge impulse to get it to 240mph. The average acceleration is quite small because it took the jet a year to only accelerate 240mph total.
There they have a different system where creators have more control of their works.
It's Kelo v. New London, not New Haven.
You're going back a ways because Wickard v Filburn was in 1942. Then the Dred Scott slavery decision might be in the running for worst SCOTUS decisions.
The strange thing is that what Rosling is doing isn't really statistics at all. He is presenting a lot of data in a vivid and striking manner, but he hardly even uses any statistical techniques (in the sense of testing different models, assessing the significance of his data, etc.).
In my experience in industry it's the opposite. People spend a lot of time on the formatting and presentation, but any actual statistics used is elementary. And of course our salesman basically don't know anything about statistics.
Looks like mostly the Palestinian Media Watch and the Militant Islam Monitor.
No, it doesn't. The Jonathan Blow video in the post you're responding to addresses all this through some interesting thought experiments.
The differences between chess and a slot machine are matters of degree to some extent—so what, chess is still a deeper game. People choose to consume both cocaine and vegetables—there is still a very important difference between drug dealers and organic farmers.
Sure, you're probably right that if jobs were more satisfying fewer people would use cocaine and more would eat broccoli. But there are still ethical issues with drug dealing (to put it mildly).
Yes, but he still sounds better than the other people he works with.
Linux was originally developed on a 386. 4MB of RAM was about right I think.
Why would people with guns be more aware of their surroundings than people in the same surroundings without guns? They are on the lookout for people to shoot? Or the people without guns are just less rational and capable?
But resources are finite, and QA testing can be expensive. It's easy to say "OMG there are bugs in this game, there shouldn't be bugs. Let's boycott until they take the bugs out!!" but in the real world there are tradeoffs.
Bug testing in a game like this probably has an exponential profile—twice as much QA time might only get rid of half the existing bugs (4x the time, 75% of the bugs, etc.). If they got rid of most of the bugs, perhaps the game would cost twice as much, or there would only be half as many quests, etc. The author doesn't mention any tradeoffs, he just wants more stuff.
Anyway, I'm in the process of playing Fallout: New Vegas and really enjoying it despite the couple times it has crashed on me. I don't know whether the QA tradeoffs were managed effectively (and I doubt most commenters do either) but I do know I like the game.
Here you go. Perhaps they are saving bandwidth by putting the basic information about their product on another site.
Nope, the product is rendered unusable only when internet access is not available. If internet access is not ubiquitous, that doesn't mean the product is unusable.
Is this hair-splitting? I don't think so. I agree it would be nice to play in a hotel room or whatever. But how often do these cases happen to their player base? Being generous, I'd say 10% of the time max? Then you should still be willing to pay 90% of the price. So if you'd be willing to pay $60 without internet activation, perhaps you'd only be willing to pay $54 now.
I agree DRM lowers the value of the product, but Slashdot's quantification of this decrease is way off. That's why you see everyone complaining and buying the game anyway—they care about DRM, but Blizzard's titles are still a good value even with the DRM.
I still see GP's point. You should have quit riding your bicycle for a few weeks while you were on your diet. Assuming you lost weight anyway and that was clear to everyone, you could start riding again.
Anyone care to comment on the history or future of RSS? RSS seemed like a great idea: an open format that allowed users to scan sites (Blogs, news sites, web comics) for updates. Also the privacy issues were limited because the list of sites was only kept locally.
RSS seemed like a great idea but it seems it never reached mainstream popularity. Most (?) internet users have never heard of RSS. Instead people turned to third party aggregators and closed sites like Facebook. What happened?
Thank you for the excellent explanation. However, you seem to be proving the GP's point for him. If you are correct, it would be trivial for Bobbs-Merill to implement their original strategy. They would simply have to license their books to wholesalers under a restriction that the wholesalers were only permitted to re-license those books to retailers under a relicensing agreement that forbade the retailers from selling the books under the desired price floor.
Under the scheme this article describes, if any retailer sold the books under the price floor, they would be violating their required license with the wholesalers, not their (non-existent) license with Bobbs-Merill. The consequence would be as you describe for the CTA—once the retailer violates its license, the final customer has an infringing copy.