What we're really saying here (and for the record, I don't think anyone has been trolling) is that the economy isn't about money at all, but confidence. If I could somehow convince people that maple leaves were valuable, I'd be rich come Fall. Of course, so would the rest of you, and so nothing much would change.
I don't think it's a particular problem that we're not on the gold standard any more. The dollar is now a barter-chip, not an instrument of credit or debt. Instead of having to find a shovel to trade someone for a hammer, I can give him a handful of bartering chips, which he can then barter for whatever he wants to acquire. It shortens the chain that would be required if we had to trade for everything we wanted.
The trouble comes when the government spends a whole lot of virtual bartering chips (borrows) without collecting bartering chips to make up for it (taxes). And so cutting taxes while spending billions on a war is a monumentally poor idea, because now we have to choose between asking China to give us more bartering chips in order for us to stay afloat (and thereby turning some measure of control of our destiny to a foreign country), or issuing more dollars ourselves and thereby driving the value of the rest of them down.
Whether we backed our currency with gold or with the illusion of worth (one and the same, really) we'd still be in debt thanks to fiscally irresponsible politicians who have managed to convince the public that taxes are evil (they're not - they're a group-buy to pay for things that we can't obtain easily or at all individually) while also convincing the public that we need massive military spending in order to remain "safe."
Did he also read the stuff Spolsky said about paying fantastic above-industry-standard salaries and having a fantastic office with excellent workspace and expensive, comfortable chairs, and catered staff lunches daily? Oh, and a lounge with a theater system and a ridiculously expensive coffee machine that costs more than the GDP of some countries?
How about the stuff Spolsky says about retaining old customers by squashing bugs and not just adding new features specifically so you can run around claiming you have a new shiny, even though it's useless and buggy?
Tell your boss to stop cherrypicking from what Spolsky says when he has no idea what his actual management philosophy is.
If you want to be technical, you can still get new Atari 2600 games. So the idea that the PS2 is still selling games isn't quite as impressive as it sounds at first blush. And just because something is still being sold doesn't mean it wasn't overhyped. Such would fit just about every movie released to theaters in the last 15 years.
If there's a manufacturing defect or they screw up in the assembly of your eyeglasses, you get a different pair of eyeglasses. Generally for free.
If there's a manufacturing defect or they screw up the crystalens implant surgery, you're blind. Also for free, but the results are nonetheless undesirable.
A fairly powerful graphics card is roughly 300 bucks. I'm not talking about the insane bleeding edge ones, but just one that can hold its own and play pretty much anything out there (except flight simulator) with all the sliders up full. Add wireless to that, and the "Ohh, wireless video card new shiny!" aspect to that and I figure you'll jack the price by at least $100.
So now I can either spend $400 not to hear my fans, or I can spend $150-250 for a high quality case with quiet fans in the first place that's easy to work with and has plenty of room for anything I want to throw in there, leaving me with $150-250 to put toward something else (like a bleeding edge vidcard maybe?).
OK. I'll say what others are thinking. You're a moron. You know what we're talking about. We know what we're talking about. Your introductions of irrelevancies are either a cry for attention or an utterly failed attempt to appear smart or savvy. Either way, I'm done feeding this troll.
So are you a law student who hasn't quite managed to pass the bar yet or something?
It's very obvious to everyone here, except apparently you, that Gizzmonic was talking about XM/Sirius Satellite Radio, and commercial satellite television services like Dish and DirecTV, which you cannot tune in for free unless you fall into one of the groups I mentioned.
I'm not even going to dignify your piracy definitions crap with a correction. This is Slashdot. We all know what a pirate is, and we all know it doesn't have to have a peg leg and a parrot.
Unless you work for a media company, or have some other legitimate deal set up, you're pirating it, and I don't think Gizzmonic was referring to criminals or employees of the broadcasters.
Don't try to twist out of it now that you know you're wrong. You said you "guess" the high rollers are *paying for* the free crap. Not "paying for losing at gambling and then getting stuff given to them." The money they spend is for gambling. The blackjack table doesn't say "$100 gets you a hand of cards and a martini."
I'd be nice if you were brave enough to post snark without hiding behind Anonymous, hm?
"The car handled pretty much like it does when the ground is dry."
Thanks for proving my point for me. If you think that, you tend to drive like you do when the ground is dry. ESC is not magic. You can still lose control even with ESC. And if you go around thinking the car handles like it does when the ground is dry (no, actually, it doesn't, ESC or not), you're going to be one of the ones who loses control.
Everyone else on the road is not an idiot. . But by your post, you are.
It's interesting you should bring up the cutting down on car accidents thing. Statistics don't bear that out. We're still having roughly the same number of wrecks as we always did, and roughly the same number of fatalities. There's an interesting book, "Traffic," by Tom Vanderbilt that explains the psychology behind that. As cars and highways become "safer," they feel safer as well. You feel safe enshrouded in a big car with airbags and driving on a wide highway that doesn't have buildings with nooks and crannies that a kid could pop out of, and so what do you do? You drive more recklessly. You speed up, you eat, you talk on the phone, etc. Conversely, if you're driving on a steep slippery mountain road in a raging snowstorm, both hands are on the wheel and you're concentrating 100% on the business of driving, because you don't feel as safe.
The book talks about how when ABS became standard, everyone thought rear-end collisions would plummet in frequency because people would be able to stop easier. They didn't, because people assume that ABS means "I can stop, so I don't have to drive as smart as I used to."
The same holds true for all the other safety systems. They work fine, but their effects are counteracted by people driving more recklessly than they did before they felt as safe in their cars.
I remember Mercury Cougars in the late 80's/early 90's had autodim headlights. They had this huge bulky photosensor between the rearview mirror and the windshield.
All that fancy stuff is great until it fails or you rent/borrow/buy a car that doesn't have it. We shouldn't need radar assisted cruise or collision avoidance because we should be paying attention. We shouldn't need blind spot systems because if you're not too lazy to turn your head you don't have blind spots (and that's not even going into the "mirrors out" technique which eliminates blindspots with just the mirrors). Backup cameras I'll give you - They're great for parking when there's a pole or a wall behind your spot, because the ass end of modern cars is so freaking high that you can't see properly.
Traction control/ stability assist is great, until you're expecting the car to behave a certain way and stability assist decides to mess with your head. Those of us who take driving more seriously than most know what cars do in the snow. We set up our turns to compensate for the extra understeer we get in the slick. And then the damned nannymachine pops on and suddenly we're oversteering, swearing, and cursing the cow-like public who's shitty driving skills necessitate such things. And that's in a car with good TCS/ESC like my 07 TL. The '11 Escape I drive for work just slams on the brakes for its ESC. I've almost been rearended several times thanks to its shenanigans. And no, it's not just that car, because we've got 8 of them and they all do it.
I do like voice control for the reason you listed (and because it's cool) and I like GPS because I'm otherwise very good at getting lost. But those aren't driving-interference systems. ECS/TCS/ABS/etc are. It's nice to bring a shitty driver up to some semblance of competence with machinery, but the machinery can't match a good driver, so it brings those who are down in competence.
The payouts on slot machines and even games of "skill" (which are still weighted in favor of the casino) are calculated and expected. Payouts on slot machines that are programmed wrong and paying out too often are not. That's why this casino got pissy.
The high rollers don't win any more than anyone else. They just bet a hell of a lot more money. If you've got a guy coming in dropping 10 grand per roll at the craps table, you're gonna give him a free drink. And probably a free suite. And if you can get away with it, a hooker.
And on the statistically rare occasion that the high roller actually wins something that, too, is good for business. Sure, it costs the casino some money (money which they make up in literally minutes thanks to everyone else in the casino who's losing) but it generates excitement and "That could be me!" attitudes from the other gamblers.
Do you have any idea how much a casino makes? One opened in north Iowa a few years ago. Iowa. Their only clients were farmers and people on Social Security. Cost 20 million to build. They had the loan paid off 2 months after opening. That's 10 million per month only for the loan. Plus the salaries of all the workers, and the profit the owners took off the top. And that was *only* from slot machines. They had a poker room but replaced it with more slot machines because no one in Iowa wanted to play.
If you own a casino you make money faster than you could if you printed it. You don't give a damn if someone wins big - it's a drop in the bucket compared to *your* winnings, and all it does is get the other gamblers to gamble even more.
Damn right. Or at least, if it IS illegal to distract someone from the fact that they're losing their shorts, I expect a lot of casino orders to either get rid of the flashy lights and the whirring and beeping sounds and the complimentary cocktails and the dancing girls, or do jailtime. There's a reason every casino has all that crap in it - to keep you from realizing that all you're doing is pouring money into a vending machine that doesn't actually vend anything.
Well, the Anon Coward was talking about Top Gear, which used a stock vehicle with the normal keyfob, so the transmitting strength of the sending unit was not enhanced as you propose.
Additionally, at least in my car, there are several antenna receivers. Some are on the outside, some are on the inside, and one is in the trunk (in case I close the trunk with the key inside, it will automatically open it up again).
Plus, the signal strength of the transmitter is irrelevant for actually starting the car. The transmitter strength only determines how far away you can be and still unlock the doors. The key itself is chipped with an RFID, and the car scans for it when you try to start it. It's pretty unlikely that the RFID detector can detect one when the car's in the parking lot and the key is in the pocket of someone inside a restaurant.
At any rate, if the thief has the spoof key/RFID identifier, range doesn't matter. He just gets in the car, fires up the spoofer, and goes on his way.
50wpm is less than 100wpm, which means something when you're paid by how much text you can output. You'd be asking transcriptionists and typists to cut their wages in half for the privilege of using a touch screen. (actually you'd be asking them to cut their wages by more than 50%, because back in high school when I worked at a publishing house, at 115wpm I was the slowest typer there.)
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What we're really saying here (and for the record, I don't think anyone has been trolling) is that the economy isn't about money at all, but confidence. If I could somehow convince people that maple leaves were valuable, I'd be rich come Fall. Of course, so would the rest of you, and so nothing much would change.
I don't think it's a particular problem that we're not on the gold standard any more. The dollar is now a barter-chip, not an instrument of credit or debt. Instead of having to find a shovel to trade someone for a hammer, I can give him a handful of bartering chips, which he can then barter for whatever he wants to acquire. It shortens the chain that would be required if we had to trade for everything we wanted.
The trouble comes when the government spends a whole lot of virtual bartering chips (borrows) without collecting bartering chips to make up for it (taxes). And so cutting taxes while spending billions on a war is a monumentally poor idea, because now we have to choose between asking China to give us more bartering chips in order for us to stay afloat (and thereby turning some measure of control of our destiny to a foreign country), or issuing more dollars ourselves and thereby driving the value of the rest of them down.
Whether we backed our currency with gold or with the illusion of worth (one and the same, really) we'd still be in debt thanks to fiscally irresponsible politicians who have managed to convince the public that taxes are evil (they're not - they're a group-buy to pay for things that we can't obtain easily or at all individually) while also convincing the public that we need massive military spending in order to remain "safe."
Did he also read the stuff Spolsky said about paying fantastic above-industry-standard salaries and having a fantastic office with excellent workspace and expensive, comfortable chairs, and catered staff lunches daily? Oh, and a lounge with a theater system and a ridiculously expensive coffee machine that costs more than the GDP of some countries?
How about the stuff Spolsky says about retaining old customers by squashing bugs and not just adding new features specifically so you can run around claiming you have a new shiny, even though it's useless and buggy?
Tell your boss to stop cherrypicking from what Spolsky says when he has no idea what his actual management philosophy is.
If you want to be technical, you can still get new Atari 2600 games. So the idea that the PS2 is still selling games isn't quite as impressive as it sounds at first blush. And just because something is still being sold doesn't mean it wasn't overhyped. Such would fit just about every movie released to theaters in the last 15 years.
Trending toward fitting quite well, actually:
http://www.wired.com/gadgetlab/2010/09/android-market-share/
And just for giggles:
http://www.wired.com/gadgetlab/2010/04/windows-mobile-android/
If there's a manufacturing defect or they screw up in the assembly of your eyeglasses, you get a different pair of eyeglasses. Generally for free.
If there's a manufacturing defect or they screw up the crystalens implant surgery, you're blind. Also for free, but the results are nonetheless undesirable.
Valid point. Next nitpick:
A fairly powerful graphics card is roughly 300 bucks. I'm not talking about the insane bleeding edge ones, but just one that can hold its own and play pretty much anything out there (except flight simulator) with all the sliders up full. Add wireless to that, and the "Ohh, wireless video card new shiny!" aspect to that and I figure you'll jack the price by at least $100.
So now I can either spend $400 not to hear my fans, or I can spend $150-250 for a high quality case with quiet fans in the first place that's easy to work with and has plenty of room for anything I want to throw in there, leaving me with $150-250 to put toward something else (like a bleeding edge vidcard maybe?).
What's the incentive to buy the wireless vidcard?
OK. I'll say what others are thinking. You're a moron. You know what we're talking about. We know what we're talking about. Your introductions of irrelevancies are either a cry for attention or an utterly failed attempt to appear smart or savvy. Either way, I'm done feeding this troll.
So are you a law student who hasn't quite managed to pass the bar yet or something?
It's very obvious to everyone here, except apparently you, that Gizzmonic was talking about XM/Sirius Satellite Radio, and commercial satellite television services like Dish and DirecTV, which you cannot tune in for free unless you fall into one of the groups I mentioned.
I'm not even going to dignify your piracy definitions crap with a correction. This is Slashdot. We all know what a pirate is, and we all know it doesn't have to have a peg leg and a parrot.
Unless you work for a media company, or have some other legitimate deal set up, you're pirating it, and I don't think Gizzmonic was referring to criminals or employees of the broadcasters.
Yes.
Don't try to twist out of it now that you know you're wrong. You said you "guess" the high rollers are *paying for* the free crap. Not "paying for losing at gambling and then getting stuff given to them." The money they spend is for gambling. The blackjack table doesn't say "$100 gets you a hand of cards and a martini."
I'd be nice if you were brave enough to post snark without hiding behind Anonymous, hm?
"The car handled pretty much like it does when the ground is dry."
Thanks for proving my point for me. If you think that, you tend to drive like you do when the ground is dry. ESC is not magic. You can still lose control even with ESC. And if you go around thinking the car handles like it does when the ground is dry (no, actually, it doesn't, ESC or not), you're going to be one of the ones who loses control.
Everyone else on the road is not an idiot. . But by your post, you are.
It's interesting you should bring up the cutting down on car accidents thing. Statistics don't bear that out. We're still having roughly the same number of wrecks as we always did, and roughly the same number of fatalities. There's an interesting book, "Traffic," by Tom Vanderbilt that explains the psychology behind that. As cars and highways become "safer," they feel safer as well. You feel safe enshrouded in a big car with airbags and driving on a wide highway that doesn't have buildings with nooks and crannies that a kid could pop out of, and so what do you do? You drive more recklessly. You speed up, you eat, you talk on the phone, etc. Conversely, if you're driving on a steep slippery mountain road in a raging snowstorm, both hands are on the wheel and you're concentrating 100% on the business of driving, because you don't feel as safe.
The book talks about how when ABS became standard, everyone thought rear-end collisions would plummet in frequency because people would be able to stop easier. They didn't, because people assume that ABS means "I can stop, so I don't have to drive as smart as I used to."
The same holds true for all the other safety systems. They work fine, but their effects are counteracted by people driving more recklessly than they did before they felt as safe in their cars.
I remember Mercury Cougars in the late 80's/early 90's had autodim headlights. They had this huge bulky photosensor between the rearview mirror and the windshield.
All that fancy stuff is great until it fails or you rent/borrow/buy a car that doesn't have it. We shouldn't need radar assisted cruise or collision avoidance because we should be paying attention. We shouldn't need blind spot systems because if you're not too lazy to turn your head you don't have blind spots (and that's not even going into the "mirrors out" technique which eliminates blindspots with just the mirrors). Backup cameras I'll give you - They're great for parking when there's a pole or a wall behind your spot, because the ass end of modern cars is so freaking high that you can't see properly.
Traction control/ stability assist is great, until you're expecting the car to behave a certain way and stability assist decides to mess with your head. Those of us who take driving more seriously than most know what cars do in the snow. We set up our turns to compensate for the extra understeer we get in the slick. And then the damned nannymachine pops on and suddenly we're oversteering, swearing, and cursing the cow-like public who's shitty driving skills necessitate such things. And that's in a car with good TCS/ESC like my 07 TL. The '11 Escape I drive for work just slams on the brakes for its ESC. I've almost been rearended several times thanks to its shenanigans. And no, it's not just that car, because we've got 8 of them and they all do it.
I do like voice control for the reason you listed (and because it's cool) and I like GPS because I'm otherwise very good at getting lost. But those aren't driving-interference systems. ECS/TCS/ABS/etc are. It's nice to bring a shitty driver up to some semblance of competence with machinery, but the machinery can't match a good driver, so it brings those who are down in competence.
As a guy who's owned 3 CRX's and still has 1 of them, I can say they should'a named the new one CRY. What an underpowered dog.
Well that explains why Acuras suddenly became so damned ugly.
The payouts on slot machines and even games of "skill" (which are still weighted in favor of the casino) are calculated and expected. Payouts on slot machines that are programmed wrong and paying out too often are not. That's why this casino got pissy.
They're still wrong to bring charges, though.
Your guess is wrong. As is the rest of your post.
The high rollers don't win any more than anyone else. They just bet a hell of a lot more money. If you've got a guy coming in dropping 10 grand per roll at the craps table, you're gonna give him a free drink. And probably a free suite. And if you can get away with it, a hooker.
And on the statistically rare occasion that the high roller actually wins something that, too, is good for business. Sure, it costs the casino some money (money which they make up in literally minutes thanks to everyone else in the casino who's losing) but it generates excitement and "That could be me!" attitudes from the other gamblers.
Do you have any idea how much a casino makes? One opened in north Iowa a few years ago. Iowa. Their only clients were farmers and people on Social Security. Cost 20 million to build. They had the loan paid off 2 months after opening. That's 10 million per month only for the loan. Plus the salaries of all the workers, and the profit the owners took off the top. And that was *only* from slot machines. They had a poker room but replaced it with more slot machines because no one in Iowa wanted to play.
If you own a casino you make money faster than you could if you printed it. You don't give a damn if someone wins big - it's a drop in the bucket compared to *your* winnings, and all it does is get the other gamblers to gamble even more.
Well, yeah, I'll agree there. That's why I mentioned Swype in my starter post in this thread.
Sure, if you're on the nickel slots.
The high rollers still get all sorts of free crap.
Damn right. Or at least, if it IS illegal to distract someone from the fact that they're losing their shorts, I expect a lot of casino orders to either get rid of the flashy lights and the whirring and beeping sounds and the complimentary cocktails and the dancing girls, or do jailtime. There's a reason every casino has all that crap in it - to keep you from realizing that all you're doing is pouring money into a vending machine that doesn't actually vend anything.
Well, the Anon Coward was talking about Top Gear, which used a stock vehicle with the normal keyfob, so the transmitting strength of the sending unit was not enhanced as you propose.
Additionally, at least in my car, there are several antenna receivers. Some are on the outside, some are on the inside, and one is in the trunk (in case I close the trunk with the key inside, it will automatically open it up again).
Plus, the signal strength of the transmitter is irrelevant for actually starting the car. The transmitter strength only determines how far away you can be and still unlock the doors. The key itself is chipped with an RFID, and the car scans for it when you try to start it. It's pretty unlikely that the RFID detector can detect one when the car's in the parking lot and the key is in the pocket of someone inside a restaurant.
At any rate, if the thief has the spoof key/RFID identifier, range doesn't matter. He just gets in the car, fires up the spoofer, and goes on his way.
50wpm is less than 100wpm, which means something when you're paid by how much text you can output. You'd be asking transcriptionists and typists to cut their wages in half for the privilege of using a touch screen. (actually you'd be asking them to cut their wages by more than 50%, because back in high school when I worked at a publishing house, at 115wpm I was the slowest typer there.)
Hehe. Yes, but how are you going to convince a bunch of people who's keyboards already work perfectly fine to learn morse code?