Any company who uses the word 'unlimited' does so at their own risk. An example would be the behavior by Comcast which claimed 'unlimited' and the customers found out that 'unlimited' really meant 'unlimited up to 5gb/month' which, I have to agree, is total crap. And so the market will respond based on consumer reaction to the statement of 'unlimited' usage. And Comcast will get what they deserve.
I personally like the idea of a metered payment model. That way I could see paying the minimum connection fee, having extremely high bandwidth, and enjoying that bandwidth, while paying for what I use. The way they do it now it seems like they tie high bandwidth with high usage and hence higher prices. As far as the consumer is concerned that is not always the case.
You must be talking about the Crash Bandicoot series of video games that sell very well...
I guess a lot of people might debate the 'really good' status of a game that hasn't been released yet... But I think there's a word for those kind of people;p
People should not confuse 'unlimited' with 'infinite'. Everything humans do is finite.
According to the context you agree with when you get the broadband account your account really is 'unlimited'. In the context of broadband it only means that the company is not going to single you out and limit what you can do. That's all it means. There is legal precedence to use this word in this context. It's not fraud of false advertising.
The problem I think is one of defining the value of information. How does one measure the value of streaming video from YouTube against the value of someone researching their family history? Or the value of someone doing a video conference with their son in Iraq against the value of a teenager watching porn?
Clearly this is a much more complex issue than just giving people 'unlimited' transfer.
I'm not really aware of a good solution, but I'll be thinking about it now -- maybe you or someone else can offer an idea?
This was expected. It's a common concept in resource application. It applies in all sorts of things, ranging from development to things like battle and war. It's called "focus fire" by some.
They are simply focusing their resources on the most important (they think) projects in order to release the best possible ones they can and maximize their business potential.
Fallout? Is that the right word? I guess... Unless you see it like I do: We're going to get a few really good products instead of a bunch of just ok products. I'll take the former every time.
At least partly, they don't get it. They are right that it's a business model that we use. It's called "You get what you pay for." As long as that is the case, AND you realize what it is you are actually paying for, then how exactly is this business model about to 'explode'? In a free market competition defines the minimum quality of the products. The broadband companies need to be more clear I guess. When I sign the contract for broadband I am not getting 100% of my theoretical maximum bandwidth or minimum latency 100% of the time. That's just part of the clause. I understand that. I expect that. If you go into it expecting to get those things then you had better damn well be paying a hell of a lot more than I am, because that kind of level of service is just not part of the agreement in a day-to-day contract.
You know what, fuck all of what I just said. It overcomplicates the issue. It's simple: You pay for 'unlimited' usage, and that means you get usage that is as unlimited as the resource permits. It's the only way this sort of resource distribution should ever work. It's fair: if you want to take your share, then go out and take it. But don't sit there and cry that other people are doing what they are paying for. Don't try to get the government involved in something that they should stay the hell out of.
Hey there, nice setup. Question though... It looks like you are projecting onto a bare wall with no screen? Maybe it's just the pic but that is what it looks like.
But from looking at your photo it appears that you have a slight problem with black levels. The amount of ambient light bouncing around in there seems to be a factor also.
Is that how it looks during 'movie time' or was that picture taken during higher-than-normal light levels?
Anyway just curious, and again, nice setup! I have thought about getting the same projector but only runnin it at about 110"
That sure is a great theory about how the LHC cannot work. Wonderful, actually.
And completely ridiculous.
When the LHC does start the kooks are going to come out and say that it just simply doesn't have the power to create these particles -- yea, that's why it's working now.
And then we'll get our first pictures of the boson. And yet, for some strange reason, hardly anyone will remember that a bunch of people were behaving like total fools, and the world will go on. And the kooks will claim we're not looking at what we think we're looking at.
And the world will go on.
Call me when the LHC actually accomplishes something.
No, wait, scratch that. I'll be happy enough just waiting until whatever it might accomplish actually reaches my doorstep in one manner or another.
I'm all for it, don't get me wrong. But I'm pragmatic -- there's nothing about it that I can change one way or another. So, I say bring it on, and let the amazing world-changing events happen. I'm just not holding my breath nor am I doubting it in the meantime.
Assuming this does in fact happen in the future... when will it happen?
First let's be clear that by "it" I mean the complete disappearance of the GPU market.
To answer, first ask: who will be among the last ones to be willing to part with their GPU?
I think the answer to this question is: gamers.
Which leads me to the condition of the 'when' (not the date of course).
And that condition is: when the integrated GPU/CPU is capable of performing under the JND (just noticeable difference) threshold of what the separate GPU itself could do.
In other words, once they start to output graphics which aren't discernibly different (which are so realistic that you cannot tell the difference) then at that point the separate GPU will perish because there is no longer a motive for it to continue to exist, as no human perception can tell them apart.
The key here is healthy debate. While I think creationism is not even worth being called science, what is worse is the knee jerk reaction to not teach it. The US education system needs to teach critical thinking and you can not teach critical thinking by ignoring or banning things you disagree with.
"Creationism is the idea that a higher intelligence created all things. Using critical thinking one recognizes that Creationism offers precisely zero utility within the discipline of Science nor in application of the Scientific Method."
There, I taught it. With one paragraph. It's not about ignoring it, or banning it, really, it's about the fact that it's not relevant to Science in any way. It belongs in a Science class about as much as Hannah Montana.
Only Microsoft haters make these absurd allegations. These are hardly the first commericals in history to barely acknowledge their product, and yet they are labeled as 'without equivocation the worst commerical in history'. Apparently everyone who is complaining so much hasn't seen that some very high dollar ad campaigns do the exact same thing. Just off the top of my head...razors, axe body spray, and miller high life...And I'm sure those are just a few of the MANY.
I find it appropriately ironic that 'without equivocation one of the worst ads in history' finds itself as a topic of discussion on the front page of one of the largest internet news sites in the world.
Yes, it's such a horrible ad that everyone is talking about it.
I'm not exactly a super-hacker here... So I was wondering: is there a way to sort of mask P2P packets so that Comcast's current detection methods no longer work? If so, is there a way to continue changing that masking/morphing method so that Comcast is forced to constantly try to adapt, which would make it more expensive for them to do than to just let the damn traffic through?
What other sorts of passive aggressive responses to this can you network experts think up?
IMHO the only reason you wouldn't want to run Vista on this machine is system requirements. I have run Vista for months now, and yes, it takes up more resources. But in those six months, how many times has my PC (which I built myself) crashed? Zero.
Yep. Zero crashes in six months. And I leave the PC on for weeks at a time.
Windows XP never did that on any of my previous machines.
Maybe I've been lucky. But I used to be like you: scared to try Vista. Now that I've been running Ultimate 64bit with 8gb of RAM for six months.. I'm never looking back to XP.
This is coming from someone who helped run a successful business on selling Diablo 2 items. Trust me, duplicated items were small-time. We sold thousands upon thousands of duplicated Soj (stone of jordan) rings at a HUGE profit of over $30,000.
But the real interesting stuff was the IST hacked items and the rarely generated bugged items that you could get the game to produce under certain circumstances. Like a cloth cap that reduces physical damage by 103%. Yep, you were invulnerable to physical damage. In fact, physical damage HEALED you.
And the IST items, they were made by exploiting runes and the socketing code. You could make items that were absolutely GODLIKE compared to anything else in the game. And yes, we sold those too. For outrageous profit.
Just an FYI that even on the "closed" realms, things were not as peachy-keen as you think.
I find the Primary and Secondary worlds thing fascinating. Even more so, I find it fascinating that as humankind advances there will probably be a merger of the two. For instance, if you've read Alastair Reynolds' The Prefectyou probably know what I mean. In this story a huge community of habitats orbit a central planet. This community is called the Glitterband. Within it, each habitat is different. And I don't mean different in that one is painted grey and the other is blue. Every habitat has an abstraction core, which when combined with the right wetware and advanced technology in the citizens bodies allows them to live in virtually any sort of environment they please. Similar to being able to queue up anything on the Holodeck, even including changing your basic body type, or having no body and being a floating wisp of energy, or whatever you can imagine.
The cool part here, to me, is that this was originally a Secondary world as taken from Tolkein's theory. But for these people their Secondary world has become integrated with a democracy and a community of other Secondary worlds, all of which participate in this democracy (if they choose to). So in effect, their Secondary and Primary worlds have merged, and if they want... for good.
This is where I see games starting to take hold of this possibility of a merger. You can almost pay for your bills by playing WoW, if you choose to sell gold. What am I say, almost. People do. Lots of them. They literally live off of WoW. I'd even wager that for some of them their Primary world is WoW and their Secondary world is having to feed themselves and sleep, because they probably don't do much else outside of WoW.
No, things aren't nearly to the point where I'd say there can be a true merger. But when it happens, are you going to call these people addicts? What if they are richer, happier, and live longer than you? At what point does it stop being an addiction to WoW, and become YOUR addiction to the 'old ways'?
Obama is self-centered!? Are you serious? I guess all the good he did in Chicago was for himself then. You want to talk about self-centered, let's talk about McCain's VP Sarah Palin who chose to travel on a self-promotion tour while she was late into a pregnancy (without telling anyone) and her child wound up to have down syndrome. But no, Obama is the one who is self-centered! LMFAO! Instead of making such ridiculous claims how about you back them up?
So let me get this straight, you want to elect people who aren't 'hyper-ambitious'. You think that by holding an electoral 'lottery' we'll be better off, and yet by doing so we have no fucking clue who we might end up with and whether or not they might be even worse than the people there now? LMFAO AGAIN. Yea, +Interesting, insofar as a piece of steaming shit that looks like a horse is interesting.
Anyway, I don't understand your argument against my characterization that free will is a moral property. What's "forcing" you to do anything? Is it your physical system of particles typically referred to as the "brain"? If so, wouldn't you want this "determining" what you do rather than something else that is external to yourself?
The human brain is a product of, and is a part of, the environment. The environment is a product of the expression of the laws of physics in mass/energy. One cannot say the brain is 'internal' while the rest is 'external' and make any sort of useful sense. To do so implies that the brain can be separate, when in fact it cannot be. So, to talk about things that are external to myself is to talk about part of myself that I cannot 'feel' with nerve endings and tissue, but that nevertheless is completely integral to who I am. People are quite eager to make the distinction between themselves and the environment, instead of realizing how connected they are. I suspect this is a survival or evolutionary mechanism.
We do not blame the man who performed an immoral act with a gun to his back, because he was not free to act as he chose.
We certainly would if the immoral act was of enough consequence. If someone had a gun to my back and told me that unless I effectively killed the entire world, or chose to die myself, I think the choice would be fairly easy. Take the bullet. Were someone to make the choice to destroy the entire world instead of the bullet you would not argue, I hope, that the man was without blame. I think most people would say that the man who killed the world so that he could live is at fault.
The use of 'free will' as a way to assign blame to criminals is in itself practically a criminal act. There is no evidence that a person has free will, yet we are quite ready to blame someone based on their supposed (mis)use of it. Some people realize the problem with that and go, correctly, after the root cause of the behavior instead of simply saying it was a free will decision and leaving it at that.
I feel as if I'm getting off in the weeds here. My main point is only that the existence of free will has nothing at all to do with morality. It may be perceived as affecting moral choices, but in itself it a separate idea than morality and should not be said to come from morality. I am not supposing that it exists or that it does not, I am saying that whether or not it does it is an independent entity and not dependent on morality.
Free Will is not a 'moral property'. IMHO it has absolutely nothing at all to do with morals. When I decided to get up today and went to the bathroom to take a shit I certainly wasn't considering the moral implications of this.
Furthermore, had I used my 'free will' to NOT take a shit, eventually I would've been forced to anyway (free will be damned), and likely it would've been at a bad time, because I chose not to earlier when I had the chance.
Honestly, throwing around big words like 'supervenient' and talking about incoming influence and 'time symmetry'... To me you just sound like a kook.
I actually really liked IJ: KotCS. I have to admit though, I have a really nasty weakness for seriously unexpected plot twists, especially when they involve !! SPOILER ALERT !! SPOILER ALERT !! SPOILER ALERT !! aliens.
Where I work (in what you might say is the largest industry in the world) it is *widely* accepted that the abbreviation for "million" is not in fact "M" but "MM". "M" has *always* been considered the abbreviation for "thousand" and, yes, this hails back to Latin. Thus, "MM" means "thousand thousand" or, for those nerds here who are mathematically challenged, "one million" or "the amount of girls you'd need to ask out before one says yes."
Anyway, the Kindle looks interesting. The problem is of course content. I perused, at great length, the selection of SF books available for the Kindle. I was pleasantly surprised at the amount of them available (when I checked it was around 4,600 SF books out of about 145,000 Kindle books total). However, it still wasn't quite enough to warrant me spending the up front cash for the Kindle.
When the price comes down to about half of what it is now though... I'm sold.
So supposedly your loan becomes easier to pay off because inflation has *supposedly* put more money that is worth less in your pockets... Meanwhile the loan is for the same principal, in money that is worth less now, but you have already used it at the higher value which it had before. Fair enough. Except that I would guess the majority of US citizens do not have incomes that stay ahead of inflation. I would guess that most people are actually falling behind inflation. I would even wager that they track your 'bizarro' rate of gain to a proportion wherein there is either no difference or they are in fact still falling behind.
I of course have no solid numbers to support my claims. Call it a gut feeling.
This is in fact already a game mechanic. When one drinks enough alcoholic drinks in game one begins to swerve erratically. The logical solution, then, is to make every player in the game always drunk. Forever.
The side of effect of everyone slurring their chat text is a minor one, imho.
Slashdot Mirror
Any company who uses the word 'unlimited' does so at their own risk. An example would be the behavior by Comcast which claimed 'unlimited' and the customers found out that 'unlimited' really meant 'unlimited up to 5gb/month' which, I have to agree, is total crap. And so the market will respond based on consumer reaction to the statement of 'unlimited' usage. And Comcast will get what they deserve.
I personally like the idea of a metered payment model. That way I could see paying the minimum connection fee, having extremely high bandwidth, and enjoying that bandwidth, while paying for what I use. The way they do it now it seems like they tie high bandwidth with high usage and hence higher prices. As far as the consumer is concerned that is not always the case.
I seriously doubt the November release is in danger. I'm wondering more about Diablo 3's release.
You must be talking about the Crash Bandicoot series of video games that sell very well...
I guess a lot of people might debate the 'really good' status of a game that hasn't been released yet... But I think there's a word for those kind of people ;p
People should not confuse 'unlimited' with 'infinite'. Everything humans do is finite.
According to the context you agree with when you get the broadband account your account really is 'unlimited'. In the context of broadband it only means that the company is not going to single you out and limit what you can do. That's all it means. There is legal precedence to use this word in this context. It's not fraud of false advertising.
The problem I think is one of defining the value of information. How does one measure the value of streaming video from YouTube against the value of someone researching their family history? Or the value of someone doing a video conference with their son in Iraq against the value of a teenager watching porn?
Clearly this is a much more complex issue than just giving people 'unlimited' transfer.
I'm not really aware of a good solution, but I'll be thinking about it now -- maybe you or someone else can offer an idea?
This was expected. It's a common concept in resource application. It applies in all sorts of things, ranging from development to things like battle and war. It's called "focus fire" by some.
They are simply focusing their resources on the most important (they think) projects in order to release the best possible ones they can and maximize their business potential.
Fallout? Is that the right word? I guess... Unless you see it like I do: We're going to get a few really good products instead of a bunch of just ok products. I'll take the former every time.
At least partly, they don't get it. They are right that it's a business model that we use. It's called "You get what you pay for." As long as that is the case, AND you realize what it is you are actually paying for, then how exactly is this business model about to 'explode'? In a free market competition defines the minimum quality of the products. The broadband companies need to be more clear I guess. When I sign the contract for broadband I am not getting 100% of my theoretical maximum bandwidth or minimum latency 100% of the time. That's just part of the clause. I understand that. I expect that. If you go into it expecting to get those things then you had better damn well be paying a hell of a lot more than I am, because that kind of level of service is just not part of the agreement in a day-to-day contract.
You know what, fuck all of what I just said. It overcomplicates the issue. It's simple: You pay for 'unlimited' usage, and that means you get usage that is as unlimited as the resource permits. It's the only way this sort of resource distribution should ever work. It's fair: if you want to take your share, then go out and take it. But don't sit there and cry that other people are doing what they are paying for. Don't try to get the government involved in something that they should stay the hell out of.
These Australians are wrong.
Hey there, nice setup. Question though... It looks like you are projecting onto a bare wall with no screen? Maybe it's just the pic but that is what it looks like.
But from looking at your photo it appears that you have a slight problem with black levels. The amount of ambient light bouncing around in there seems to be a factor also.
Is that how it looks during 'movie time' or was that picture taken during higher-than-normal light levels?
Anyway just curious, and again, nice setup! I have thought about getting the same projector but only runnin it at about 110"
That sure is a great theory about how the LHC cannot work. Wonderful, actually.
And completely ridiculous.
When the LHC does start the kooks are going to come out and say that it just simply doesn't have the power to create these particles -- yea, that's why it's working now.
And then we'll get our first pictures of the boson. And yet, for some strange reason, hardly anyone will remember that a bunch of people were behaving like total fools, and the world will go on. And the kooks will claim we're not looking at what we think we're looking at.
And the world will go on.
Call me when the LHC actually accomplishes something.
No, wait, scratch that. I'll be happy enough just waiting until whatever it might accomplish actually reaches my doorstep in one manner or another.
I'm all for it, don't get me wrong. But I'm pragmatic -- there's nothing about it that I can change one way or another. So, I say bring it on, and let the amazing world-changing events happen. I'm just not holding my breath nor am I doubting it in the meantime.
Assuming this does in fact happen in the future... when will it happen?
First let's be clear that by "it" I mean the complete disappearance of the GPU market.
To answer, first ask: who will be among the last ones to be willing to part with their GPU?
I think the answer to this question is: gamers.
Which leads me to the condition of the 'when' (not the date of course).
And that condition is: when the integrated GPU/CPU is capable of performing under the JND (just noticeable difference) threshold of what the separate GPU itself could do.
In other words, once they start to output graphics which aren't discernibly different (which are so realistic that you cannot tell the difference) then at that point the separate GPU will perish because there is no longer a motive for it to continue to exist, as no human perception can tell them apart.
Obama -- Buy from Newegg and pay the sales tax. You should believe in what it stands for.
McCain -- Buy from Mwave or ZipZoomFly.
"Creationism is the idea that a higher intelligence created all things. Using critical thinking one recognizes that Creationism offers precisely zero utility within the discipline of Science nor in application of the Scientific Method."
There, I taught it. With one paragraph. It's not about ignoring it, or banning it, really, it's about the fact that it's not relevant to Science in any way. It belongs in a Science class about as much as Hannah Montana.
Only Microsoft haters make these absurd allegations. These are hardly the first commericals in history to barely acknowledge their product, and yet they are labeled as 'without equivocation the worst commerical in history'. Apparently everyone who is complaining so much hasn't seen that some very high dollar ad campaigns do the exact same thing. Just off the top of my head...razors, axe body spray, and miller high life...And I'm sure those are just a few of the MANY.
LMAO @ the typical nerdrage response.
I find it appropriately ironic that 'without equivocation one of the worst ads in history' finds itself as a topic of discussion on the front page of one of the largest internet news sites in the world.
Yes, it's such a horrible ad that everyone is talking about it.
How dare they.
I'm not exactly a super-hacker here... So I was wondering: is there a way to sort of mask P2P packets so that Comcast's current detection methods no longer work? If so, is there a way to continue changing that masking/morphing method so that Comcast is forced to constantly try to adapt, which would make it more expensive for them to do than to just let the damn traffic through?
What other sorts of passive aggressive responses to this can you network experts think up?
IMHO the only reason you wouldn't want to run Vista on this machine is system requirements. I have run Vista for months now, and yes, it takes up more resources. But in those six months, how many times has my PC (which I built myself) crashed? Zero.
Yep. Zero crashes in six months. And I leave the PC on for weeks at a time.
Windows XP never did that on any of my previous machines.
Maybe I've been lucky. But I used to be like you: scared to try Vista. Now that I've been running Ultimate 64bit with 8gb of RAM for six months.. I'm never looking back to XP.
Mod parent down.
This is coming from someone who helped run a successful business on selling Diablo 2 items. Trust me, duplicated items were small-time. We sold thousands upon thousands of duplicated Soj (stone of jordan) rings at a HUGE profit of over $30,000.
But the real interesting stuff was the IST hacked items and the rarely generated bugged items that you could get the game to produce under certain circumstances. Like a cloth cap that reduces physical damage by 103%. Yep, you were invulnerable to physical damage. In fact, physical damage HEALED you.
And the IST items, they were made by exploiting runes and the socketing code. You could make items that were absolutely GODLIKE compared to anything else in the game. And yes, we sold those too. For outrageous profit.
Just an FYI that even on the "closed" realms, things were not as peachy-keen as you think.
You can't get bedsores on your butt if you don't have a butt ;p
I find the Primary and Secondary worlds thing fascinating. Even more so, I find it fascinating that as humankind advances there will probably be a merger of the two. For instance, if you've read Alastair Reynolds' The Prefectyou probably know what I mean. In this story a huge community of habitats orbit a central planet. This community is called the Glitterband. Within it, each habitat is different. And I don't mean different in that one is painted grey and the other is blue. Every habitat has an abstraction core, which when combined with the right wetware and advanced technology in the citizens bodies allows them to live in virtually any sort of environment they please. Similar to being able to queue up anything on the Holodeck, even including changing your basic body type, or having no body and being a floating wisp of energy, or whatever you can imagine.
The cool part here, to me, is that this was originally a Secondary world as taken from Tolkein's theory. But for these people their Secondary world has become integrated with a democracy and a community of other Secondary worlds, all of which participate in this democracy (if they choose to). So in effect, their Secondary and Primary worlds have merged, and if they want... for good.
This is where I see games starting to take hold of this possibility of a merger. You can almost pay for your bills by playing WoW, if you choose to sell gold. What am I say, almost. People do. Lots of them. They literally live off of WoW. I'd even wager that for some of them their Primary world is WoW and their Secondary world is having to feed themselves and sleep, because they probably don't do much else outside of WoW.
No, things aren't nearly to the point where I'd say there can be a true merger. But when it happens, are you going to call these people addicts? What if they are richer, happier, and live longer than you? At what point does it stop being an addiction to WoW, and become YOUR addiction to the 'old ways'?
Just food for thought..
Obama is self-centered!? Are you serious? I guess all the good he did in Chicago was for himself then. You want to talk about self-centered, let's talk about McCain's VP Sarah Palin who chose to travel on a self-promotion tour while she was late into a pregnancy (without telling anyone) and her child wound up to have down syndrome. But no, Obama is the one who is self-centered! LMFAO! Instead of making such ridiculous claims how about you back them up?
So let me get this straight, you want to elect people who aren't 'hyper-ambitious'. You think that by holding an electoral 'lottery' we'll be better off, and yet by doing so we have no fucking clue who we might end up with and whether or not they might be even worse than the people there now? LMFAO AGAIN. Yea, +Interesting, insofar as a piece of steaming shit that looks like a horse is interesting.
The human brain is a product of, and is a part of, the environment. The environment is a product of the expression of the laws of physics in mass/energy. One cannot say the brain is 'internal' while the rest is 'external' and make any sort of useful sense. To do so implies that the brain can be separate, when in fact it cannot be. So, to talk about things that are external to myself is to talk about part of myself that I cannot 'feel' with nerve endings and tissue, but that nevertheless is completely integral to who I am. People are quite eager to make the distinction between themselves and the environment, instead of realizing how connected they are. I suspect this is a survival or evolutionary mechanism.
We certainly would if the immoral act was of enough consequence. If someone had a gun to my back and told me that unless I effectively killed the entire world, or chose to die myself, I think the choice would be fairly easy. Take the bullet. Were someone to make the choice to destroy the entire world instead of the bullet you would not argue, I hope, that the man was without blame. I think most people would say that the man who killed the world so that he could live is at fault.
The use of 'free will' as a way to assign blame to criminals is in itself practically a criminal act. There is no evidence that a person has free will, yet we are quite ready to blame someone based on their supposed (mis)use of it. Some people realize the problem with that and go, correctly, after the root cause of the behavior instead of simply saying it was a free will decision and leaving it at that.
I feel as if I'm getting off in the weeds here. My main point is only that the existence of free will has nothing at all to do with morality. It may be perceived as affecting moral choices, but in itself it a separate idea than morality and should not be said to come from morality. I am not supposing that it exists or that it does not, I am saying that whether or not it does it is an independent entity and not dependent on morality.
Free Will is not a 'moral property'. IMHO it has absolutely nothing at all to do with morals. When I decided to get up today and went to the bathroom to take a shit I certainly wasn't considering the moral implications of this.
Furthermore, had I used my 'free will' to NOT take a shit, eventually I would've been forced to anyway (free will be damned), and likely it would've been at a bad time, because I chose not to earlier when I had the chance.
Honestly, throwing around big words like 'supervenient' and talking about incoming influence and 'time symmetry'... To me you just sound like a kook.
I actually really liked IJ: KotCS. I have to admit though, I have a really nasty weakness for seriously unexpected plot twists, especially when they involve !! SPOILER ALERT !! SPOILER ALERT !! SPOILER ALERT !! aliens.
I guess I'm the only one... oh well.
Where I work (in what you might say is the largest industry in the world) it is *widely* accepted that the abbreviation for "million" is not in fact "M" but "MM". "M" has *always* been considered the abbreviation for "thousand" and, yes, this hails back to Latin. Thus, "MM" means "thousand thousand" or, for those nerds here who are mathematically challenged, "one million" or "the amount of girls you'd need to ask out before one says yes."
Anyway, the Kindle looks interesting. The problem is of course content. I perused, at great length, the selection of SF books available for the Kindle. I was pleasantly surprised at the amount of them available (when I checked it was around 4,600 SF books out of about 145,000 Kindle books total). However, it still wasn't quite enough to warrant me spending the up front cash for the Kindle.
When the price comes down to about half of what it is now though... I'm sold.
So supposedly your loan becomes easier to pay off because inflation has *supposedly* put more money that is worth less in your pockets... Meanwhile the loan is for the same principal, in money that is worth less now, but you have already used it at the higher value which it had before. Fair enough. Except that I would guess the majority of US citizens do not have incomes that stay ahead of inflation. I would guess that most people are actually falling behind inflation. I would even wager that they track your 'bizarro' rate of gain to a proportion wherein there is either no difference or they are in fact still falling behind.
I of course have no solid numbers to support my claims. Call it a gut feeling.
2) put some random drift into movement
This is in fact already a game mechanic. When one drinks enough alcoholic drinks in game one begins to swerve erratically. The logical solution, then, is to make every player in the game always drunk. Forever.
The side of effect of everyone slurring their chat text is a minor one, imho.