While I mostly agree with you, you have the Ruby Ridge situation a little wrong. The US 9th circuit court of appeals decided that Idaho COULD prosecute the FBI sniper who shot Randy Weaver's wife, but the new Boundary county prosecutor decided not to.
Also, when it comes to "the bottom line", the bottom line is you don't have any idea what really would have happened in any of these situations if this or that decision had been different.
It was largely the girls idea...that and marketers. I remember when things like this first started (at least, I think I do). The quake 1 "all female tournament" was started by Anna Kang, now John Carmack's wife. It turned out that girls who couldn't necessarily win the tournaments for everyone could win the girls-only tournaments, and get prize money. I'm good friends with one of the best female Quake 1 players, and she was able to parlay it into a decent amount of money, even though she wasn't able to win a tournament with the best male players. If people are willing to put up prizes for it, why wouldn't people play?
I didn't see anything about girls only or boys only servers in the article, and I've never heard of them existing - how could you enforce something like that? This is about live tournaments which seperate men and women. And truthfully, I have never heard of a tournament that excluded women from playing in it. While there is often a smaller "girls only" tournament on the side, there is nothing keeping the girls from playing in the main tournament, other than perhaps scheduling issues which prevents playing in both. The fact that there are prizes that exist for the girls with much lower competition (at least in terms of total teams) makes it a no brainer for the girls to play in the girls only tournaments. More teams means more rounds in the tournament and more chances to lose. Why do that when you can win doing less? Personally, I think the girls only tournaments aren't going to help the girls get more recognition - they will never have the same prize money or level of competition due to the lower overall talent level (explained in my previous post). If the best girls instead played in the main tournament every time, they'd face tougher competiton and actually be able to prove themselves instead of complaining about the seperation that only exists becaus they created it.
I hate to bring this up, but there is some reason that it is advantageous for the "girl gamers" to have their own, seperate competitions.
I remember attending the "all female tournament" for quake 1, and other than the top two or three players, I wouldn't say any of the other girls had any business being in any tournaments. In theory, there is nothing seperating men from women in skill in these games. In practice, it doesn't work that way. The girls, at least so far, are never the top players. Having seperate events for the women gives them a huge advantage in terms of exposure and, well, being in news articles or potentially winning money.
The reasons for the disparity in skill seem pretty simple. While there is nothing specific keeping any individual girl from being at the top of the heap (that I can think of), the fact that there are umpteen (we'll say 99) times more men playing than women means statistically likely one per 100 of the top players will be a girl, and one per 100 of the top teams will be all girls. Here, we have 7 out of 57 teams. Even if the ratio is not 99:1, I doubt it is anywhere near 7:1. The women are just pulling talent from a smaller pool.
There is nothing wrong with it, there is just no motivation for the spammers to go along with it, so it would never happen. Trying to enforce that would be just as futile as trying to enforce CAN-SPAM.
Of course the response is that every one of those things are illegal, with reasonably enforceable laws. So long as the risk of being caught/killed is high enough, people don't do these things. If it was perfectly legal and very profitable to kidnap bums and sell their organs, you'd see a lot less bums.
Not to say I disagree with your general point, but like every every attempt to compare two (or more) seperate events as the same, important differences are left out. For one example, when it comes to Pakistan vs Iraq, Pakistan never signed the Nuclear Non-Proliferation treaty, and hasn't defied a whole host of UN resolutions and acted as guilty as possible while doing so. Even if you believe there is no justification for the war in Iraq, the situation there is not especially comparable to that of Pakistan.
Re:I thought I would do this...
on
WB Cancels Angel
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· Score: 1
Here, it's really simple. Shows cost money to make, and they make money by selling advertising during the shows. The amount of money they can charge for advertising depends on the ratings in various demographics and the time slots. The goal is to make money. The "quality" of a show is not particularly important, unless enough people are willing to actually watch it when it is on.
The entire formula is make "cost of show" "amount that can be charged for advertising". There may be other things in here of course, such as a shows ratings bleeding into the next timeslot, but this is what they go for.
If you make the greatest show ever, and it is too expensive and no one watches it, why in the world would the network keep it? Shows that last longer tend to consistenly increase in cost. Unknown actors become more famous and demand higher salaries, production values may improve, etc.
As much as I like science fiction and fantasy, I do not assume that a very large percentage of the television watching public does. If they don't get ratings, it doesn't happen. If the show gets too expensive (or starts that way), it doesn't happen. I think I read that farscape was costing a million dollars an episode. Even if it's only 100k that is a pretty big chunk of change for some television shows, I doubt "The Parkers" costs that much, and it can't get much worse ratings than Farscape or Angel, terrible as it is.
Being "well known" does not equate to "earning lots of cash", or even being very big. It just means you're well known. Disney, really, has not been doing very well recently, and it's market capitalization is only around 2/3ds that of Comcast.
Comcasts stock price may be high, but those stock prices are based, at least in part, on actual information (such as earnings).
"Buying" a company doesn't necessarily require you to be much bigger than (or even as big as) the company you are buying - you can always get new investors to foot the bill if the investment looks like a good idea.
No. The Newscorp purchase of Directv only happened because the government got Newscorp to agree to (among other things) not start telling Comcast or Dish or whoever they couldn't have FOX programming, or that they had to pay some crazy prices while Directv got it for "free". This merger/buyout wouldn't happen without a similar agreement.
I used to play counter strike off and on on a friends server, which had mostly good players and I was average at best.
While most of the players on the server were regulars, and many of them were real life friends, often new players would just appear, as the server was listed publicly.
One of these players was named Bizzaro. We're not sure to this day if Bizzaro was an actual human being or a family dog enlisted to play counter strike. He didn't move much; When he did he'd invariably find a way to get stuck in a corner. He definitely used the mouse, you could tell because he would occasionally spin wildly, and was almost constantly either looking at the sky or at his feet. Any round his team lost would typically culminate in the winning team trying to find Bizzaro.
I tell this story because, if you play the games like Bizzaro does, it won't matter what game it is. You need time to practice. You mention cheaters in your question, but for all I know the people you think are cheating are actually that good.
My recommendation is to find a game like Quake III where there is not necessarily teamplay involved, and you can just run around killing, to practice things like aim and dodging/moving in the world. Until you can do these things reasonably well team games are going to be pretty pointless and frustrating.
This guy is about as disconnected from reality as the "Dean is the frontrunner" belief turned out to be. How did the media networks defeat Dean, when *everything* up to Iowa was Dean Dean Dean Dean Dean. I never heard jack squat about any other candidate, ever. Unless Howard Dean tried to run television campaigns in Iowa and New Hampshire and was *refused*, then I don't see what their deal is.
Arguing that he was picked on by CNN and others after his Iowa concession speech may be correct, but that doesn't change the fact that he gave them the target to aim at, and it was HUGE. That was not "just being a normal person". The thing that lost Dean this election was Dean himself.
Howard Dean spent more money and had more visibility than any other candidate until kerry started winning. I have a pre-caucus Economist showing Dean and Bush as the candidates; To many, it seemed all but decided. There was always some doubt; every conversation I had about Dean moving towards the elections was "Sure he's winning, but could he beat Bush in a million years?". The answer, sadly, was no, and people realized this. Sure he opposed the Iraq war, and with today's data he can look back and be proud. But had the president/CIA/whoever not been lying/stretching the truth, who knows how acceptable that stance would be now.
I think this is accurate, but I believe it is due more to Americas social/military/financial dominance than just basic "financial globalization". I think if the US didn't happen to have such a seemingly strong barganing position with the rest of the world we wouldn't see this, at least not with more negotiation.
Of course, this assumes that other countries even believe that the US's laws are bad, but they just have to take them. As much as you or I might hate the DMCA or Patriot act or something, there are people who *do* like them, in every country, not just the US. I wouldn't put it past other governments to use "america made us do it" as a reason to pass maybe unpopular laws that the legislators actually want.
I don't normally get this annoyed by the blurbs by the editors, but Taco this time stretches it a ridiculous amount. All the article says is that Roxio spent a lot of money getting Napster ready, and launching it. First line of the article:
Napster-owner Roxio more than doubled its net losses year-on-year thanks mainly to increased spending on the relaunch of the music download service, which went live in October.
Wow, a business loses money in its first three months of launch. News at 11. They also say:
Roxio said in December that it expects to significantly reduce Napster-related spending as its moves away from the launch quarter.
While maybe we don't want to believe them and they won't reduce these costs, it seems pretty likely. So saying "they don't" make any money is patently ridiculous, we don't have anywhere near enough data or time invested.
Diablo II also was able to keep all the information on their own servers. Unless you want Valve running all the servers comparisons to Diablo II are pointless.
Re:What kind of students were they?
on
Darl Goes to Harvard
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· Score: 4, Insightful
I don't know, I think that this is mixed in with the on-going backlash against corporate litigation, ridiculous patents, and CEO compensation. People feel that SCO has no case, and that while the courts may be the place to sort it out, if SCO loses and the lawsuit is shown to be ridiculous absolutely nothing will happen to the architects of the lawsuit. Darl will make a lot of money, all for playing with the law. This is a nation steeped in the mantra of accountability, regardless of recent flirtations with "political correctness", but in cases like these it is hard to see. There is a real fear that even if/when Darl and SCO lose, they will have won, and that any company can take a similar nothing-to-lose roll of the dice with other peoples money.
Uh, I work for DirecTV, and there is porn all over the place here. I was under the impression we were actually broadcasting it too. If not, I'm going to really have to change my opinion about some of the people in this place.
I'm sorry, but I'm really getting tired of the whole "[the US] really did give him all that stuff he gassed the kurds with..." crap. It just isn't true. here is a good starting point for a little more realistic idea of where and how Saddam was armed. Most of our support was in terms of intelligence and training, not weapons and money, dating back to before the Iraq-Iran war. If you have any actual information to the contrary I'd like to hear it.
Truly, if you have no job and are very much interested in getting one, why wouldn't you treat looking for a job as a full time job? The goal is to be employed, not to be employed by doing the least possible work. This reminds me of when I was in high school and instead of trying to get an A, I'd do the minimum amount of work I needed to get an 89.5% A-. Sometimes that just isn't a good idea. If you're too lazy to take any care when applying for a job, how hard are you going to work once you get it?
Assume for a second that Intels P4 design was really meant to boost GHz numbers easily (to guarantee victory in the GHz war if not the performance war). If so is the Prescott design now due to having to keep up with themselves? Obviously they could design a chip that is "faster" but runs at a lower clock speed than the P4s, but they've pushed the GHz number so much that now they're kind of hamstrung in their design options.
A true Capitalist would be outraged at the thought that someone engaged in a transaction to sell property for money and didn't walk away happy. Capitalism is supposed to be about a willing exchange between entities for the benefit of both. Your example demonstrates that Microsoft is corrupting the capitalistic process; using the threat of a lawsuit (or the costs involved in settling one) to fulfill an "obligation to their shareholders".
I don't get this. There are plenty of instances where one side would be unwilling to sell a piece of property for any price, or only for a price that one side would be unable to afford, or for nothing resembing a fair market price due to things like personal attachment. Both sides aren't ever going to be completely happy in these instances.
In this case, however, the problem is that under trademark law Mike Rowe may actually be infringing. Lets just assume for a moment that he is. If this is the case, then Microsoft really has no obligation to even offer him $10 - it's straight to court for him. It's really not much different than if Mike Rowe backed into Bill Gates's car. If Mike Rowe personally estimates the damage to be $10, and that is all he offers Bill, Bill has no recourse but to go to court. The courts exist partly to protect property rights of all sorts. No capitalist would be outraged in this situation, as the transaction that is occuring is completely due to damages (real or percieved). If mikerowesoft is actually infringing, offering him anything at all is really above and beyond what Microsoft needs to do.
Now, there is a problem with this, and it's the fact that for Mike Rowe to defend himself, the costs will be exorbinant. The legal system as it is definitely favors those with the deep pockets. But that doesn't make it abuse of the system if there really is a violation, they have no other recourse. Paying Mike Rowe when he likely deserves nothing makes little sense, happy as it might make him.
Slashdot Mirror
While I mostly agree with you, you have the Ruby Ridge situation a little wrong. The US 9th circuit court of appeals decided that Idaho COULD prosecute the FBI sniper who shot Randy Weaver's wife, but the new Boundary county prosecutor decided not to.
Also, when it comes to "the bottom line", the bottom line is you don't have any idea what really would have happened in any of these situations if this or that decision had been different.
It was largely the girls idea...that and marketers. I remember when things like this first started (at least, I think I do). The quake 1 "all female tournament" was started by Anna Kang, now John Carmack's wife. It turned out that girls who couldn't necessarily win the tournaments for everyone could win the girls-only tournaments, and get prize money. I'm good friends with one of the best female Quake 1 players, and she was able to parlay it into a decent amount of money, even though she wasn't able to win a tournament with the best male players. If people are willing to put up prizes for it, why wouldn't people play?
I didn't see anything about girls only or boys only servers in the article, and I've never heard of them existing - how could you enforce something like that? This is about live tournaments which seperate men and women. And truthfully, I have never heard of a tournament that excluded women from playing in it. While there is often a smaller "girls only" tournament on the side, there is nothing keeping the girls from playing in the main tournament, other than perhaps scheduling issues which prevents playing in both. The fact that there are prizes that exist for the girls with much lower competition (at least in terms of total teams) makes it a no brainer for the girls to play in the girls only tournaments. More teams means more rounds in the tournament and more chances to lose. Why do that when you can win doing less? Personally, I think the girls only tournaments aren't going to help the girls get more recognition - they will never have the same prize money or level of competition due to the lower overall talent level (explained in my previous post). If the best girls instead played in the main tournament every time, they'd face tougher competiton and actually be able to prove themselves instead of complaining about the seperation that only exists becaus they created it.
I hate to bring this up, but there is some reason that it is advantageous for the "girl gamers" to have their own, seperate competitions.
I remember attending the "all female tournament" for quake 1, and other than the top two or three players, I wouldn't say any of the other girls had any business being in any tournaments. In theory, there is nothing seperating men from women in skill in these games. In practice, it doesn't work that way. The girls, at least so far, are never the top players. Having seperate events for the women gives them a huge advantage in terms of exposure and, well, being in news articles or potentially winning money.
The reasons for the disparity in skill seem pretty simple. While there is nothing specific keeping any individual girl from being at the top of the heap (that I can think of), the fact that there are umpteen (we'll say 99) times more men playing than women means statistically likely one per 100 of the top players will be a girl, and one per 100 of the top teams will be all girls. Here, we have 7 out of 57 teams. Even if the ratio is not 99:1, I doubt it is anywhere near 7:1. The women are just pulling talent from a smaller pool.
A very large percentage of them (at least at the federal level) are already rich before they become senators, making the 154k salary a moot point.
How about just not allowing people to be elected twice? Perhaps a single 6 year term.
There is nothing wrong with it, there is just no motivation for the spammers to go along with it, so it would never happen. Trying to enforce that would be just as futile as trying to enforce CAN-SPAM.
Of course the response is that every one of those things are illegal, with reasonably enforceable laws. So long as the risk of being caught/killed is high enough, people don't do these things. If it was perfectly legal and very profitable to kidnap bums and sell their organs, you'd see a lot less bums.
Not to say I disagree with your general point, but like every every attempt to compare two (or more) seperate events as the same, important differences are left out. For one example, when it comes to Pakistan vs Iraq, Pakistan never signed the Nuclear Non-Proliferation treaty, and hasn't defied a whole host of UN resolutions and acted as guilty as possible while doing so. Even if you believe there is no justification for the war in Iraq, the situation there is not especially comparable to that of Pakistan.
Here, it's really simple. Shows cost money to make, and they make money by selling advertising during the shows. The amount of money they can charge for advertising depends on the ratings in various demographics and the time slots. The goal is to make money. The "quality" of a show is not particularly important, unless enough people are willing to actually watch it when it is on.
The entire formula is make "cost of show" "amount that can be charged for advertising". There may be other things in here of course, such as a shows ratings bleeding into the next timeslot, but this is what they go for.
If you make the greatest show ever, and it is too expensive and no one watches it, why in the world would the network keep it? Shows that last longer tend to consistenly increase in cost. Unknown actors become more famous and demand higher salaries, production values may improve, etc.
As much as I like science fiction and fantasy, I do not assume that a very large percentage of the television watching public does. If they don't get ratings, it doesn't happen. If the show gets too expensive (or starts that way), it doesn't happen. I think I read that farscape was costing a million dollars an episode. Even if it's only 100k that is a pretty big chunk of change for some television shows, I doubt "The Parkers" costs that much, and it can't get much worse ratings than Farscape or Angel, terrible as it is.
Being "well known" does not equate to "earning lots of cash", or even being very big. It just means you're well known. Disney, really, has not been doing very well recently, and it's market capitalization is only around 2/3ds that of Comcast.
Comcasts stock price may be high, but those stock prices are based, at least in part, on actual information (such as earnings).
"Buying" a company doesn't necessarily require you to be much bigger than (or even as big as) the company you are buying - you can always get new investors to foot the bill if the investment looks like a good idea.
No. The Newscorp purchase of Directv only happened because the government got Newscorp to agree to (among other things) not start telling Comcast or Dish or whoever they couldn't have FOX programming, or that they had to pay some crazy prices while Directv got it for "free". This merger/buyout wouldn't happen without a similar agreement.
I used to play counter strike off and on on a friends server, which had mostly good players and I was average at best.
While most of the players on the server were regulars, and many of them were real life friends, often new players would just appear, as the server was listed publicly.
One of these players was named Bizzaro. We're not sure to this day if Bizzaro was an actual human being or a family dog enlisted to play counter strike. He didn't move much; When he did he'd invariably find a way to get stuck in a corner. He definitely used the mouse, you could tell because he would occasionally spin wildly, and was almost constantly either looking at the sky or at his feet. Any round his team lost would typically culminate in the winning team trying to find Bizzaro.
I tell this story because, if you play the games like Bizzaro does, it won't matter what game it is. You need time to practice. You mention cheaters in your question, but for all I know the people you think are cheating are actually that good.
My recommendation is to find a game like Quake III where there is not necessarily teamplay involved, and you can just run around killing, to practice things like aim and dodging/moving in the world. Until you can do these things reasonably well team games are going to be pretty pointless and frustrating.
This guy is about as disconnected from reality as the "Dean is the frontrunner" belief turned out to be. How did the media networks defeat Dean, when *everything* up to Iowa was Dean Dean Dean Dean Dean. I never heard jack squat about any other candidate, ever. Unless Howard Dean tried to run television campaigns in Iowa and New Hampshire and was *refused*, then I don't see what their deal is.
Arguing that he was picked on by CNN and others after his Iowa concession speech may be correct, but that doesn't change the fact that he gave them the target to aim at, and it was HUGE. That was not "just being a normal person". The thing that lost Dean this election was Dean himself.
Howard Dean spent more money and had more visibility than any other candidate until kerry started winning. I have a pre-caucus Economist showing Dean and Bush as the candidates; To many, it seemed all but decided. There was always some doubt; every conversation I had about Dean moving towards the elections was "Sure he's winning, but could he beat Bush in a million years?". The answer, sadly, was no, and people realized this. Sure he opposed the Iraq war, and with today's data he can look back and be proud. But had the president/CIA/whoever not been lying/stretching the truth, who knows how acceptable that stance would be now.
I think this is accurate, but I believe it is due more to Americas social/military/financial dominance than just basic "financial globalization". I think if the US didn't happen to have such a seemingly strong barganing position with the rest of the world we wouldn't see this, at least not with more negotiation.
Of course, this assumes that other countries even believe that the US's laws are bad, but they just have to take them. As much as you or I might hate the DMCA or Patriot act or something, there are people who *do* like them, in every country, not just the US. I wouldn't put it past other governments to use "america made us do it" as a reason to pass maybe unpopular laws that the legislators actually want.
Wow, a business loses money in its first three months of launch. News at 11. They also say:
While maybe we don't want to believe them and they won't reduce these costs, it seems pretty likely. So saying "they don't" make any money is patently ridiculous, we don't have anywhere near enough data or time invested.
You can't short it, a huge amount of it is already shorted.
Diablo II also was able to keep all the information on their own servers. Unless you want Valve running all the servers comparisons to Diablo II are pointless.
I don't know, I think that this is mixed in with the on-going backlash against corporate litigation, ridiculous patents, and CEO compensation. People feel that SCO has no case, and that while the courts may be the place to sort it out, if SCO loses and the lawsuit is shown to be ridiculous absolutely nothing will happen to the architects of the lawsuit. Darl will make a lot of money, all for playing with the law. This is a nation steeped in the mantra of accountability, regardless of recent flirtations with "political correctness", but in cases like these it is hard to see. There is a real fear that even if/when Darl and SCO lose, they will have won, and that any company can take a similar nothing-to-lose roll of the dice with other peoples money.
Uh, buy an xbox and chip it and replace the HD.
Uh, I work for DirecTV, and there is porn all over the place here. I was under the impression we were actually broadcasting it too. If not, I'm going to really have to change my opinion about some of the people in this place.
I'm sorry, but I'm really getting tired of the whole "[the US] really did give him all that stuff he gassed the kurds with..." crap. It just isn't true. here is a good starting point for a little more realistic idea of where and how Saddam was armed. Most of our support was in terms of intelligence and training, not weapons and money, dating back to before the Iraq-Iran war. If you have any actual information to the contrary I'd like to hear it.
Truly, if you have no job and are very much interested in getting one, why wouldn't you treat looking for a job as a full time job? The goal is to be employed, not to be employed by doing the least possible work. This reminds me of when I was in high school and instead of trying to get an A, I'd do the minimum amount of work I needed to get an 89.5% A-. Sometimes that just isn't a good idea. If you're too lazy to take any care when applying for a job, how hard are you going to work once you get it?
Assume for a second that Intels P4 design was really meant to boost GHz numbers easily (to guarantee victory in the GHz war if not the performance war). If so is the Prescott design now due to having to keep up with themselves? Obviously they could design a chip that is "faster" but runs at a lower clock speed than the P4s, but they've pushed the GHz number so much that now they're kind of hamstrung in their design options.
I don't get this. There are plenty of instances where one side would be unwilling to sell a piece of property for any price, or only for a price that one side would be unable to afford, or for nothing resembing a fair market price due to things like personal attachment. Both sides aren't ever going to be completely happy in these instances.
In this case, however, the problem is that under trademark law Mike Rowe may actually be infringing. Lets just assume for a moment that he is. If this is the case, then Microsoft really has no obligation to even offer him $10 - it's straight to court for him. It's really not much different than if Mike Rowe backed into Bill Gates's car. If Mike Rowe personally estimates the damage to be $10, and that is all he offers Bill, Bill has no recourse but to go to court. The courts exist partly to protect property rights of all sorts. No capitalist would be outraged in this situation, as the transaction that is occuring is completely due to damages (real or percieved). If mikerowesoft is actually infringing, offering him anything at all is really above and beyond what Microsoft needs to do.
Now, there is a problem with this, and it's the fact that for Mike Rowe to defend himself, the costs will be exorbinant. The legal system as it is definitely favors those with the deep pockets. But that doesn't make it abuse of the system if there really is a violation, they have no other recourse. Paying Mike Rowe when he likely deserves nothing makes little sense, happy as it might make him.