No they can't. You've got at most two pipes going into the average home and they maximize their profitiability by doing the tiered service. They would actually be in the position of being accused of mismanagement if they didn't develop such tiered services. If there was legitimate competition in most markets, then maybe net neutrality wouldn't be necessary, but so long as the majority of people in this country only have one or two options for network service, we need it.
Unfortunately for Ted Stevens' tubes, it doesn't work that way. Right now the broadband providers have a motivation to create larger amounts of generally available bandwidth. What would happen under a regime that doesn't include net neutrality is that they'd make more money, but there's no reason to believe they'll invest that money in bigger pipes on the consumer end.
Right now, how does a broadband provider get more money from a customer? Offering more bandwidth or providing additional services like VOIP, IPTV, etc. But if net neutrality isn't protected, then that's no longer where they make their money. They will make their money in creating tiered services and charing external providers to get different levels of service through their network. So rather than competing for your dollar, they'll be competing for Google's dollar, or simply pricing superior service in such a way as to eliminate competition for those services mentioned above.
As soon as subscribers become nothing more than a pool of consumers for broadband providers to sell to service providers, bandwidth will stop increasing. What incentive would they have to offer 10Mbps to you if 5 is sufficient to provide the services they want to offer? They'll be investing in equipment to tier their network services, not in putting fiber into your house.
Furthermore, consumers will be paying for this tiering through more expensive services. The bandwidth providers will either charge too high of a fee to use their tiered service and force out competition or they'll simply charge a fee to the competitors just below the level that forces them out and the consumer will pay for it in higher subscription fees and more ads. So what you'll see if your monthly bill will slowly creep up due to lack of local competition, but your bandwidth will not increase significantly and your overall cost for network based services will go up.
Facebook is a private company that, so far as I know, does not sell the personal information of the people who visit the site. If they sell their information, which isn't suggested in this article, then what I'm about to say is moot. Even for a security clearance, the investigation does not involve issuance of subpoenas or other extraordinary searching. The clearance involves interviewing the person, their friends and family, and thoroughly scouring public records. In some cases it might involve a polygraph test.
What really disturbs me though is how the article just glazes over the fact that Patriot Act was being used to investigate an intern for a government job. They just go on about how you should be careful what information you put out there. That's not the issue. Here we have a situation where information is on a public service but is kept private and it has been obtained through the Patriot Act for purposes clearly not realted to a terrorism investigation.
Also, Wikipedia marks articles that involve current events and controversey as such to make it clear that it's not necessarily an objective and concise source of information. So long as they are forthright about that, I don't see a problem.
Well that and wifi isn't a big deal really. What makes the Ipod so nice is that it's simple. It plays music/videos and that's it. The interface is minimalist but totally effective. Once you start making a device into a game playing wifi enabled gadget, it becomes harder to make it elegant. I mean, think for a moment what the device has to have available on it just to connect to a wifi network. You have to be able to enter an SSID, WEP key, etc. Already you're making things needlessly complicated.
The one advantage I can see to wifi is the ability to buy and download music directly to the device. But how do you do that? How does the interface work? How do you pay for songs, etc? It's a simple problem to solve on a computer with a keyboard, etc, but on a compact device, it's really difficult.
Frankly I think Microsoft's product is going to be a dud because it'll be too complicated.
They just make a deal with the music cartels to let them do this at minimal or zero cost. Now you might wonder what interest the cartels have in this. Well think about it. Somebody's already bought the song, so it's not like they'd otherwise get money for another sale. On the other hand, right now, Apple's market share is a problem for the cartels. If everybody buys musing through Apple, then Apple gets to control the prices.
On the other hand if MS gets involved, there's competition for Apple and that provides more leverage for the cartels to negotiate price. That is, they can threaten to give MS better pricing if Apple doesn't behave like they want. So the cartels have every incentive to facilitate this for MS.
Itunes on mac works pretty well. On windows is REALLY sucks. Among other problems:
Very slow and processor intensive
I have some podcasts that require a password to access them. When I get prompted (which it does every time in spite of telling it to remember my password), if I don't click the "ok" quickly enough, it crashes ITunes.
If you move your files around it forces to rediscover the files one by one. So if you move a whole directory, you have to tell it where each file is even though all the files were moved to the same place. Not too bad, but then try to see what fun you have if you mount your files off of a shared drive and the letter gets changed.
Lots of other general bugginess. The concept is good with the music store and all that, but the Itunes software itself is possibly the worst piece of crap I've ever used.
My understanding is that they can do that right now, but they wouldn't dare - because google could tell them to go to hell and all their customers would eventually too when they turn on the throttle. What the telcos want is the ability to not throttle, but the ability to let google use up whatever google will use and have the law force google to pay them and not give google the option of telling them to go to hell. So then google turned arround and tried to get the law to "force" net neutrality, and not let them tier service at all.
Actually no. What it is, is that the telcos want to be able to give preferential service to their own content. So you can get VOIP through some third party but the service will be better through your local telco's service. You can get Internet TV through anybody, but it will be choppier than through your local telco. Then the next step is permitting third parties to take advantage of that but then charging them a fee to do it.
They aren't going to cut google, or anybody else, they are going to boost other things. This sounds okay on it's face, but it has the same result: multiple tiers of Internet service. It puts anybody who doesn't own pipes at an innate competitive disadvantage when selling services. Worse, the companies that own the pipes are usually a monpology or at best have a single competitor. So there's no way to bypass whatever fees they want to extract.
The thing is, to be a good hacker, you kinda have to spend a lot of time and energy on hacking. At the end of the day, it's probably easier and equally lucrative to just sell your exploits to other people rather than using them yourself. It's also a much safer route legally speaking because you aren't directly involved in the criminal act, you're just selling the tools.
My answer is simple. What reason does he have to make this shit up? What reason does he have to distory the reality of this. Has being interested in this subject bought him anything in his political career? On the other hand, the people who argue the opposite point stand to gain a hell of a lot from making this all seem like BS.
Now, you say 2005 had the hottest year on record, yet the official temperature record of the Climate Research Unit shows otherwise. He was pointing this out. Are you going to ignore the official temperature record of the Climate Research Unit at the University of East Anglia?
they were "clearly" hucksters, where is your evidence to prove it? I discussed global warming with a guy on IRC a while back, and every time I quoted any scientific opposition to the idea we're headed to a global warming apocalypse, he said it was "petrol-funded" and acted as though that magically meant he had offered a valid counterpoint.
It actually is a valid counter point because anybody who is getting their funding from the oil industry has an innate bias towards conclusions that benefit the oil industry. This is obvious. Show me one valid scientific study that agrees with what the "petrol-funded" people are saying and it's worth a discussion.
Aside the fact that many scientific journals are blinded by groupthink and won't publish alternative viewpoints on global warming (just look at your attitude toward Bob Carter for referencing the official temperature record!), there is growing concern that many young scientists today have examined the evidence and don't believe we're headed toward a human-created cataclysm, but do not want to risk their careers expressing that viewpoint because of the politics involved.
Not a single one. Not one in all of those piles of papers, not one damn paper. I could see a strong bias as being indicative of group think, but not a single one?
It does mean there is not an official, unquestioned consensus. In the 1970s, there was also a consensus that we were all going to be in a new Ice Age by now.
Hell, one guy even put out a book called The Skeptical Environmentalist
The "one guy" was a political scientist name Bjørn Lomborg. How is he qualified to make judgements about climate science?
I ask you, what benefit does anybody have for making this up? What possible benefit does any environmentalist get from telling people they may need to stop driving cars? It's political suicide to support reduction of CO2 emissions because it leads to sacrifices people are unwilling to make. On the other hand the detractors all seem to fall into two categories:
1) Industry funded pseudo-scientists 2) People who don't know jack about climatology
I just ask for one. One legitimate paper that really shows valid evidence to discredit the consensus. I assume said paper will be delivered by Godot.
A telling statistic about this is in Gore's movie. They did a random sample of scientific peer reviewed papers on global warming. Of 932 samples, ZERO disagreed with the conclusion that global warming was happening and was man made. On the other hand 56% of the articles on the subject they randomly surveyed said the jury was still out.
This is the long standing problem in the media of false equivalency. They take any issue and assume that there are two sides and that both sides have similar standing. So if 932 peer reviewed scientific papers say that global warming is happening and humans are causing it, and there's 932 articles written by crackpots and industry lobbyists saying the opposite, the media treat this as being two equivlanet sides of an issue. It makes good copy, but it's incredibly desceptive.
I always find it helpful to track the sources of information they are siteing. For example, there's Professor Bob Carter. This is a professor who claimed that global warming stopped in 1998 when it turns out that 2005 was the hottest year on record (since we began tracking such things).
I saw a similar article making similar claims yesterday and the "experts" they sited weren't even in the field of climatology, and had gone so far as to fake a letter from the National Academy of Sciences to give their position a supposed credence.
Show me one peer reviewed scientific paper that says anything other than global warming is happening and it's caused by human emissions of CO2. To my knowledge, this does not exist. I recognize that peer review is somewhat prone to group think, and in that you might expect a leaning one direction or another. But to have ZERO? That seems rather dramatic to just be a group think issue.
A lot of the "scientists" that I've seen taking a position on this are clearly hucksters working for the likes of Exxon Mobile, etc. I have little doubt that there are some scientists who are legitimate who don't buy into the common thinking, but that doesn't mean the common thinking is wrong. They need to back up their beliefs with sound evidence and method. But they don't.
The thing we keep hearing is that the PS3 is too expensive. Beyond that point, we've heard no criticism of the device itself. Everything you hear about the hardware is good. Yes it's pricier, but does it mean they won't sell millions of them? That's the big question.
I have little doubt that Sony would like to trim $100 off the price of the PS3 but I suspect they realize that for that extra $100 the won't sell enough consoles to make up for their losses. So yeah it'll initially cost more, but so long as Sony sells enough of them, they'll be in really good shape because it will lock in Blu-ray as the standard for high-def video.
If Blu-ray becomes the standard, Sony is in a very good position. Right now, a DVD player costs what, $50? Manufacturers aren't making much money on those, but if you're the company with the royalties, you don't have to fight for the crumbs, you get a cut of everybody's profits off the top. Furthermore, the existence of a HD video player has been a big hinderance to adoption of HDTV. Sony sells HDTV's, so if this pushes sales of those, it's yet another benefit especially if they can use some proprietary interface that makes Sony HDTV's more attractive to PS3 owners.
My dad was a commercial airline pilot. This meant that he was home for a few days a week and then would be gone for a few days at a time. Provided that it's a fairly predictable few days a week rather than a situation where you end up spending weeks away, it's not too bad. Besides, you'll have airline miles out the wazoo when you want to take the kids to Disney:)
Where you get into trouble is when you become a road warrior where you fly home on saturday and then fly out on sunday night or monday morning. If you live that kind of life, you're probably better off just filing for divorce in advance. I've known people who have tried to live that life where their home is an airline gate. It rarely works out.
The truth of the matter is that most people wouldn't buy that software if they couldn't get it for free. I'm sorry but the average home user doesn't have the cash for a copy of Photoshop, so yeah, they pirate it. If they couldn't pirate they wouldn't go out and buy photoshop, they'd download the Gimp.
"To them another high level dungeon is a complete new challenge with an AI that uses different spells and rewards that give different benefits. To you it is just another dump AI wich you can learn with a few tries and dumps yet more loot that gives a few stat boosts so you can do it all over again."
This is why I can't stand MMORPG's. They all seeme so much the same. Different environments and such but the basics are the same. In Everquest you cast magic spells. In City of Heroes, you cast spells or invoke technology, or whatever. You kill rats, or thugs, or whatever, but it's all pretty much the same crap.
Then you get the tedious and predictable AI's. All you have to do is either overwhelm them with sheer power, or use some trick.
I like games where I actually work against people. People think. They can be predicatble too, but sometimes they aren't. There's a challenge to it like Chess. Trying to figure out how they think and trying to change your patterns to throw them off.
There seems to be very little appreciation anymore for the notion of having a stable business. You must always be growing and raking in more and more money. There's little room for a company to just keep delivering what they've been delivering consistently.
So if you sell a million copies of a game this year you have to sell two next year. Then four, then eight, then you have to start having upgrades and expansions that have lower productions costs but cost nearly as much to improve your margins and increase your growth.
People will buy the PS3. In fact, a lot of people will buy the PS3. The price is high yes, but not so high that it's pricing people out of it. Yes, 425 pounds is $800, but then the dollar has been tanking.
Are people going to buy PS3 as a blu-ray player? No. But then that's not the point. The point is that when movie studios are looking to support HD-DVD or Blu-Ray, and there's already millions of Blu-Ray players out there because of all the PS3's, what are they going to choose.
Practically speaking very few people are out there are buying HD-DVD or Blu-Ray right now. Most people I know don't even have HDTV yet. Of those that do I can't imagine many of them shelling out $800-1000 for a HD movie player yet. However, of those people I can imagine many of them buying a PS3. They won't buy it to be a player, of course, but hey, if it will play those, why shell out the money for an HD-DVD player when you've got a Blu-ray player sitting in your living room already.
It's going to be probably 3-4 years before either HD format becomes vaguely mainstream. DVD players are dirt cheap right now and since most people don't have HD, it's not worth investing in the format (especially if all the HD players will be backward compatible with DVD's). However if you have a PS3, expect to upgrade to HD at some point, and have a choice between a Blu-ray and a DVD version of a movie, why not get the higher quality now? Then you won't feel a need to upgrade later.
The PS3 will be expensive relative to what's out there now, but people will buy it. And because it'll be in millions of living rooms unlike HD-DVD players. Sony's probably losing a fair bit on the PS3 but if it lays the ground work for winning the format war on HD video, they'll be rolling in the licensing fees for at least a decade.
It would be rather a strange thing for a company totally dependent on the sales of proprietary closed source software to go out and talk up how wonderful open source is. It would be similarly looney to expect say, RMS, to talk about the advantages of closed source software. News for Nerds: Stuff that's obvious.
As you point out, there's really not an obvious political benefit here. Maybe there's some under the table deal where a lobbyist from Dell is getting them to do this. But overall I can see at being a valid security concern. The US government has a long history of using our technical reach to subvert other governments. I remember during the first Gulf War a story that printers the Iraqis bought were installed with a trojan such that when the war began a number of their AA batteries were rendered useless.
So why would the Chinese be any different?
As for Halliburton, etc, yeah they may be defrauding the government, but that's par for the course in government contracting. They don't care about how much things cost, they just care about making sure their secrets stay secret. I mean can you imagine what would happen if the government was spying on american phone conversations and e-mail and knowledge of that got out? Oh.... nevermind.
Frankly I don't mind ads as long as they don't distract from the game environment. If I walk past an ad in the game and it starts making noises or the overall content doesn't really fit the game, it bugs me. I've been playing PlanetSide since it came out and they added the in-game ads a little while ago. I actually have them blocked because they annoyed me so much.
The basic problem with the ads was three things:
1) Some ads were intrusive, making loud noises, etc 2) Almost all the ads didn't fit into the context of the game 3) I was still paying $13/month for the game AND getting ads
To can't say I'd reject a game outright based on ads, but it's all a matter of context. The game will have to have that much more to offer or be cheaper because of them. Also, I'm really not cool with the notion of paying a monthly fee then having to see ads on top of that.
The truth is, health care costs less when the exact opposite is the case. If people can get maintenance care for little or no cost, they are far more likely to avoid the extreme costs of critical care. There are countless people, lacking insurance, that avoid going to the doctor for seemingly minor problems. Then they end up having to go to the emergency room when those minor problems turn out to be major.
Ummmm... okay see here's the thing. I'd rather that medicare was paying out too much than paying out not enough. I'd rather that when I needed a medical procedure that I didn't have to fight with my insurer to get the work done. I'd rather try to improve medicare's efficiency in such matters than to try to convince private insurers to make less profit.
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No they can't. You've got at most two pipes going into the average home and they maximize their profitiability by doing the tiered service. They would actually be in the position of being accused of mismanagement if they didn't develop such tiered services. If there was legitimate competition in most markets, then maybe net neutrality wouldn't be necessary, but so long as the majority of people in this country only have one or two options for network service, we need it.
Unfortunately for Ted Stevens' tubes, it doesn't work that way. Right now the broadband providers have a motivation to create larger amounts of generally available bandwidth. What would happen under a regime that doesn't include net neutrality is that they'd make more money, but there's no reason to believe they'll invest that money in bigger pipes on the consumer end.
Right now, how does a broadband provider get more money from a customer? Offering more bandwidth or providing additional services like VOIP, IPTV, etc. But if net neutrality isn't protected, then that's no longer where they make their money. They will make their money in creating tiered services and charing external providers to get different levels of service through their network. So rather than competing for your dollar, they'll be competing for Google's dollar, or simply pricing superior service in such a way as to eliminate competition for those services mentioned above.
As soon as subscribers become nothing more than a pool of consumers for broadband providers to sell to service providers, bandwidth will stop increasing. What incentive would they have to offer 10Mbps to you if 5 is sufficient to provide the services they want to offer? They'll be investing in equipment to tier their network services, not in putting fiber into your house.
Furthermore, consumers will be paying for this tiering through more expensive services. The bandwidth providers will either charge too high of a fee to use their tiered service and force out competition or they'll simply charge a fee to the competitors just below the level that forces them out and the consumer will pay for it in higher subscription fees and more ads. So what you'll see if your monthly bill will slowly creep up due to lack of local competition, but your bandwidth will not increase significantly and your overall cost for network based services will go up.
Facebook is a private company that, so far as I know, does not sell the personal information of the people who visit the site. If they sell their information, which isn't suggested in this article, then what I'm about to say is moot. Even for a security clearance, the investigation does not involve issuance of subpoenas or other extraordinary searching. The clearance involves interviewing the person, their friends and family, and thoroughly scouring public records. In some cases it might involve a polygraph test.
What really disturbs me though is how the article just glazes over the fact that Patriot Act was being used to investigate an intern for a government job. They just go on about how you should be careful what information you put out there. That's not the issue. Here we have a situation where information is on a public service but is kept private and it has been obtained through the Patriot Act for purposes clearly not realted to a terrorism investigation.
Also, Wikipedia marks articles that involve current events and controversey as such to make it clear that it's not necessarily an objective and concise source of information. So long as they are forthright about that, I don't see a problem.
Well that and wifi isn't a big deal really. What makes the Ipod so nice is that it's simple. It plays music/videos and that's it. The interface is minimalist but totally effective. Once you start making a device into a game playing wifi enabled gadget, it becomes harder to make it elegant. I mean, think for a moment what the device has to have available on it just to connect to a wifi network. You have to be able to enter an SSID, WEP key, etc. Already you're making things needlessly complicated.
The one advantage I can see to wifi is the ability to buy and download music directly to the device. But how do you do that? How does the interface work? How do you pay for songs, etc? It's a simple problem to solve on a computer with a keyboard, etc, but on a compact device, it's really difficult.
Frankly I think Microsoft's product is going to be a dud because it'll be too complicated.
They just make a deal with the music cartels to let them do this at minimal or zero cost. Now you might wonder what interest the cartels have in this. Well think about it. Somebody's already bought the song, so it's not like they'd otherwise get money for another sale. On the other hand, right now, Apple's market share is a problem for the cartels. If everybody buys musing through Apple, then Apple gets to control the prices.
On the other hand if MS gets involved, there's competition for Apple and that provides more leverage for the cartels to negotiate price. That is, they can threaten to give MS better pricing if Apple doesn't behave like they want. So the cartels have every incentive to facilitate this for MS.
Lots of other general bugginess. The concept is good with the music store and all that, but the Itunes software itself is possibly the worst piece of crap I've ever used.
If that's true what will end up happening is that anybody who makes a player to play both will end up paying twice as much in royalties. Good times.
My understanding is that they can do that right now, but they wouldn't dare - because google could tell them to go to hell and all their customers would eventually too when they turn on the throttle. What the telcos want is the ability to not throttle, but the ability to let google use up whatever google will use and have the law force google to pay them and not give google the option of telling them to go to hell. So then google turned arround and tried to get the law to "force" net neutrality, and not let them tier service at all.
Actually no. What it is, is that the telcos want to be able to give preferential service to their own content. So you can get VOIP through some third party but the service will be better through your local telco's service. You can get Internet TV through anybody, but it will be choppier than through your local telco. Then the next step is permitting third parties to take advantage of that but then charging them a fee to do it.
They aren't going to cut google, or anybody else, they are going to boost other things. This sounds okay on it's face, but it has the same result: multiple tiers of Internet service. It puts anybody who doesn't own pipes at an innate competitive disadvantage when selling services. Worse, the companies that own the pipes are usually a monpology or at best have a single competitor. So there's no way to bypass whatever fees they want to extract.
The thing is, to be a good hacker, you kinda have to spend a lot of time and energy on hacking. At the end of the day, it's probably easier and equally lucrative to just sell your exploits to other people rather than using them yourself. It's also a much safer route legally speaking because you aren't directly involved in the criminal act, you're just selling the tools.
My answer is simple. What reason does he have to make this shit up? What reason does he have to distory the reality of this. Has being interested in this subject bought him anything in his political career? On the other hand, the people who argue the opposite point stand to gain a hell of a lot from making this all seem like BS.
Now, you say 2005 had the hottest year on record, yet the official temperature record of the Climate Research Unit shows otherwise. He was pointing this out. Are you going to ignore the official temperature record of the Climate Research Unit at the University of East Anglia?
r dtemp2005.html
http://www.ucsusa.org/global_warming/science/reco
they were "clearly" hucksters, where is your evidence to prove it? I discussed global warming with a guy on IRC a while back, and every time I quoted any scientific opposition to the idea we're headed to a global warming apocalypse, he said it was "petrol-funded" and acted as though that magically meant he had offered a valid counterpoint.
It actually is a valid counter point because anybody who is getting their funding from the oil industry has an innate bias towards conclusions that benefit the oil industry. This is obvious. Show me one valid scientific study that agrees with what the "petrol-funded" people are saying and it's worth a discussion.
Aside the fact that many scientific journals are blinded by groupthink and won't publish alternative viewpoints on global warming (just look at your attitude toward Bob Carter for referencing the official temperature record!), there is growing concern that many young scientists today have examined the evidence and don't believe we're headed toward a human-created cataclysm, but do not want to risk their careers expressing that viewpoint because of the politics involved.
Not a single one. Not one in all of those piles of papers, not one damn paper. I could see a strong bias as being indicative of group think, but not a single one?
It does mean there is not an official, unquestioned consensus. In the 1970s, there was also a consensus that we were all going to be in a new Ice Age by now.
Wrong: http://www.realclimate.org/index.php?p=94
Hell, one guy even put out a book called The Skeptical Environmentalist
The "one guy" was a political scientist name Bjørn Lomborg. How is he qualified to make judgements about climate science?
I ask you, what benefit does anybody have for making this up? What possible benefit does any environmentalist get from telling people they may need to stop driving cars? It's political suicide to support reduction of CO2 emissions because it leads to sacrifices people are unwilling to make. On the other hand the detractors all seem to fall into two categories:
1) Industry funded pseudo-scientists
2) People who don't know jack about climatology
I just ask for one. One legitimate paper that really shows valid evidence to discredit the consensus. I assume said paper will be delivered by Godot.
A telling statistic about this is in Gore's movie. They did a random sample of scientific peer reviewed papers on global warming. Of 932 samples, ZERO disagreed with the conclusion that global warming was happening and was man made. On the other hand 56% of the articles on the subject they randomly surveyed said the jury was still out.
This is the long standing problem in the media of false equivalency. They take any issue and assume that there are two sides and that both sides have similar standing. So if 932 peer reviewed scientific papers say that global warming is happening and humans are causing it, and there's 932 articles written by crackpots and industry lobbyists saying the opposite, the media treat this as being two equivlanet sides of an issue. It makes good copy, but it's incredibly desceptive.
I always find it helpful to track the sources of information they are siteing. For example, there's Professor Bob Carter. This is a professor who claimed that global warming stopped in 1998 when it turns out that 2005 was the hottest year on record (since we began tracking such things).
I saw a similar article making similar claims yesterday and the "experts" they sited weren't even in the field of climatology, and had gone so far as to fake a letter from the National Academy of Sciences to give their position a supposed credence.
Show me one peer reviewed scientific paper that says anything other than global warming is happening and it's caused by human emissions of CO2. To my knowledge, this does not exist. I recognize that peer review is somewhat prone to group think, and in that you might expect a leaning one direction or another. But to have ZERO? That seems rather dramatic to just be a group think issue.
A lot of the "scientists" that I've seen taking a position on this are clearly hucksters working for the likes of Exxon Mobile, etc. I have little doubt that there are some scientists who are legitimate who don't buy into the common thinking, but that doesn't mean the common thinking is wrong. They need to back up their beliefs with sound evidence and method. But they don't.
The thing we keep hearing is that the PS3 is too expensive. Beyond that point, we've heard no criticism of the device itself. Everything you hear about the hardware is good. Yes it's pricier, but does it mean they won't sell millions of them? That's the big question.
I have little doubt that Sony would like to trim $100 off the price of the PS3 but I suspect they realize that for that extra $100 the won't sell enough consoles to make up for their losses. So yeah it'll initially cost more, but so long as Sony sells enough of them, they'll be in really good shape because it will lock in Blu-ray as the standard for high-def video.
If Blu-ray becomes the standard, Sony is in a very good position. Right now, a DVD player costs what, $50? Manufacturers aren't making much money on those, but if you're the company with the royalties, you don't have to fight for the crumbs, you get a cut of everybody's profits off the top. Furthermore, the existence of a HD video player has been a big hinderance to adoption of HDTV. Sony sells HDTV's, so if this pushes sales of those, it's yet another benefit especially if they can use some proprietary interface that makes Sony HDTV's more attractive to PS3 owners.
My dad was a commercial airline pilot. This meant that he was home for a few days a week and then would be gone for a few days at a time. Provided that it's a fairly predictable few days a week rather than a situation where you end up spending weeks away, it's not too bad. Besides, you'll have airline miles out the wazoo when you want to take the kids to Disney :)
Where you get into trouble is when you become a road warrior where you fly home on saturday and then fly out on sunday night or monday morning. If you live that kind of life, you're probably better off just filing for divorce in advance. I've known people who have tried to live that life where their home is an airline gate. It rarely works out.
The truth of the matter is that most people wouldn't buy that software if they couldn't get it for free. I'm sorry but the average home user doesn't have the cash for a copy of Photoshop, so yeah, they pirate it. If they couldn't pirate they wouldn't go out and buy photoshop, they'd download the Gimp.
"To them another high level dungeon is a complete new challenge with an AI that uses different spells and rewards that give different benefits. To you it is just another dump AI wich you can learn with a few tries and dumps yet more loot that gives a few stat boosts so you can do it all over again."
This is why I can't stand MMORPG's. They all seeme so much the same. Different environments and such but the basics are the same. In Everquest you cast magic spells. In City of Heroes, you cast spells or invoke technology, or whatever. You kill rats, or thugs, or whatever, but it's all pretty much the same crap.
Then you get the tedious and predictable AI's. All you have to do is either overwhelm them with sheer power, or use some trick.
I like games where I actually work against people. People think. They can be predicatble too, but sometimes they aren't. There's a challenge to it like Chess. Trying to figure out how they think and trying to change your patterns to throw them off.
There seems to be very little appreciation anymore for the notion of having a stable business. You must always be growing and raking in more and more money. There's little room for a company to just keep delivering what they've been delivering consistently.
So if you sell a million copies of a game this year you have to sell two next year. Then four, then eight, then you have to start having upgrades and expansions that have lower productions costs but cost nearly as much to improve your margins and increase your growth.
People will buy the PS3. In fact, a lot of people will buy the PS3. The price is high yes, but not so high that it's pricing people out of it. Yes, 425 pounds is $800, but then the dollar has been tanking.
Are people going to buy PS3 as a blu-ray player? No. But then that's not the point. The point is that when movie studios are looking to support HD-DVD or Blu-Ray, and there's already millions of Blu-Ray players out there because of all the PS3's, what are they going to choose.
Practically speaking very few people are out there are buying HD-DVD or Blu-Ray right now. Most people I know don't even have HDTV yet. Of those that do I can't imagine many of them shelling out $800-1000 for a HD movie player yet. However, of those people I can imagine many of them buying a PS3. They won't buy it to be a player, of course, but hey, if it will play those, why shell out the money for an HD-DVD player when you've got a Blu-ray player sitting in your living room already.
It's going to be probably 3-4 years before either HD format becomes vaguely mainstream. DVD players are dirt cheap right now and since most people don't have HD, it's not worth investing in the format (especially if all the HD players will be backward compatible with DVD's). However if you have a PS3, expect to upgrade to HD at some point, and have a choice between a Blu-ray and a DVD version of a movie, why not get the higher quality now? Then you won't feel a need to upgrade later.
The PS3 will be expensive relative to what's out there now, but people will buy it. And because it'll be in millions of living rooms unlike HD-DVD players. Sony's probably losing a fair bit on the PS3 but if it lays the ground work for winning the format war on HD video, they'll be rolling in the licensing fees for at least a decade.
It would be rather a strange thing for a company totally dependent on the sales of proprietary closed source software to go out and talk up how wonderful open source is. It would be similarly looney to expect say, RMS, to talk about the advantages of closed source software. News for Nerds: Stuff that's obvious.
As you point out, there's really not an obvious political benefit here. Maybe there's some under the table deal where a lobbyist from Dell is getting them to do this. But overall I can see at being a valid security concern. The US government has a long history of using our technical reach to subvert other governments. I remember during the first Gulf War a story that printers the Iraqis bought were installed with a trojan such that when the war began a number of their AA batteries were rendered useless.
So why would the Chinese be any different?
As for Halliburton, etc, yeah they may be defrauding the government, but that's par for the course in government contracting. They don't care about how much things cost, they just care about making sure their secrets stay secret. I mean can you imagine what would happen if the government was spying on american phone conversations and e-mail and knowledge of that got out? Oh.... nevermind.
Frankly I don't mind ads as long as they don't distract from the game environment. If I walk past an ad in the game and it starts making noises or the overall content doesn't really fit the game, it bugs me. I've been playing PlanetSide since it came out and they added the in-game ads a little while ago. I actually have them blocked because they annoyed me so much.
The basic problem with the ads was three things:
1) Some ads were intrusive, making loud noises, etc
2) Almost all the ads didn't fit into the context of the game
3) I was still paying $13/month for the game AND getting ads
To can't say I'd reject a game outright based on ads, but it's all a matter of context. The game will have to have that much more to offer or be cheaper because of them. Also, I'm really not cool with the notion of paying a monthly fee then having to see ads on top of that.
Oh really? Where was that written?
The truth is, health care costs less when the exact opposite is the case. If people can get maintenance care for little or no cost, they are far more likely to avoid the extreme costs of critical care. There are countless people, lacking insurance, that avoid going to the doctor for seemingly minor problems. Then they end up having to go to the emergency room when those minor problems turn out to be major.
Ummmm... okay see here's the thing. I'd rather that medicare was paying out too much than paying out not enough. I'd rather that when I needed a medical procedure that I didn't have to fight with my insurer to get the work done. I'd rather try to improve medicare's efficiency in such matters than to try to convince private insurers to make less profit.