Is there a matching law, then, that prevents people from opting out of health insurance unless a genetic test makes them think it's a good idea?
Yes, I know, some politicians want that law too. We're better off, though, without both of them.
And to answer your rhetorical question: no. That is not necessarily the purpose of insurance. It is to spread risk, but where did you get the "evenly" idea? Insurance allows you to have a flat cost related to the level of risk, instead of a sudden unexpected cost. That's why we charge bad drivers more for auto insurance, and smokers and old people more for life insurance, and people without deadbolts and modern electrical systems more for home insurance, and people in the flood plane more for flood insurance, and.... You get the idea by now, I'm sure.
The problem with the Blackberry phones is that they cost $30+/month for the same features you can get on other phones. Sure, maybe some of the Blackberry models are superior to the other phones on the market, but they're not $360/year better. Not anywhere near close.
I'd love to have one if somebody else is paying for it... But instead I'll stick with my Treo, and deal with the extra thickness and UI annoyances, and all that cash in my wallet.
Why shouldn't we? Is that too much to expect? It seems perfectly reasonable to me to assume that a "news" organization can have a uniform policy of reasonable standards that they could hold their editors to.
When you play back the high-speed camera footage taken through a microscope on a 100" screen...
Oh, nevermind... Even then it's probably not a very impressive explosion.
It bothers me that the editors here simultaneously push the "we don't invest enough in space research" platform, and fall into the "journalistic" trap of sensationalizing NASA's failures to make their readers feel "smarter than those rocket scientist guys".
I have every expectation that the readers and comment writers on Slashdot have vastly differing opinions on the subject, but you'd think that the clearly biased editorial staff here could get their story straight.
Given that people like to invent things just for fun, and that there was plenty of innovation before patents were invented, I suspect that that second category is close to empty. And I suspect that you're wrong.
Is an invention still an invention if it is never produced? The knowledge that somebody else is going to produce a copy of your invention when they see it, combined with the knowledge that the competition will make your idea unprofitable means that many innovative things have been brought to market, or brought to market sooner (with fairer distribution of the profits) because of patent.
The fact that many, many bad patents are issued does not mean that patents are bad.
In this particular case, you have a market for laptops, none of which have hand shaped impressions on them. If it turns out that this is something everyday people actually want in their laptops and just didn't know it yet, this patent has contributed to the greater good. Without it, there is a good chance that nobody would have bothered to try producing such a device.
It's in "Your Rights Online", so clearly kdawson wants us to be outraged... Is it because he thinks the idea is dumb, or that the patent is dumb? It's hard to tell in this case, since it seems to be a reasonable idea, and a reasonable patent...
I only picked that number because I heard once that Blizzard said only about 5% of the players make it to the end-game raiding content. Maybe more of them PvP, but my impression is that most people never even make it to level 70.
I know that I know plenty of people who have played for six months or more, and are still below level 60.
I think the pre-existing fan-base explains the initial uptake, but I don't think it explains the insane, continued, and even accelerating growth. Especially compared to the other games on the list, some of which I would consider to be "better" games.
I think that if they had written their game with higher end hardware in mind, the growth would have slowed after that initial fan-base got their fix. I think there are two reasons behind it. First, it would have taken them less time to saturate the market of people with that type of gaming rig. And second, the types of people who are into those types of gaming rigs are also likely to move on to the next big thing when it comes out. Those gamers already left WoW for LotR, and that's where I would bet most of Conan's players come from too.
WoW fills an enormous niche. A game like Conan, no matter how great, will likely find it isn't even competing in the same market.
WoW runs on crap hardware. When something like 95% of your customer base is a "casual" player, that's an important (of not the important) feature. The shitty $400 Laptop or $300 PC you bought from WalMart will probably give you a satisfactory experience playing WoW, and it's likely that the vast, vast majority of WoW's customer's are running on low-end machines. Conan doesn't even have a shot at those customers. They can't even run the game if they wanted to.
If you want to de-throne WoW, you've got to build a well marketed, feature and content rich MMO that runs on today's low-end machines. Otherwise you are selling to a much smaller market than Blizzard.
This is nothing new for Blizzard, either. All their games have always been targeted at low-end (mainstream) machines. And they always sell like crazy. This isn't a coincidence.
Half completed, unpolished commercial software usually stays unreleased and safe from this sort of scrutiny. However many of the same types of projects get left out in the open and easily visible to everybody when developed as open source. The low code quality of these projects would drag down the average for open source projects as a whole.
On the lighter side, you could say that you'd only consider software that was "out of beta" or version 1.0 or greater, but that would leave out most open source projects and commercial "Web 2.0" products....
It didn't deteriorate. It started that way. Plenty of us pointed out Negroponte's ego and the impossibility of success without compromising on almost every one of the stated goals. When we said these things in forums such as this one, we were modded down, and told we hated children, or that we were linux haters, or were asked what we were doing to improve the world...
Now, it becomes clear. The cost is higher than was originally planned. The devices are going to run Windows instead of Linux. Negroponte has admitted he's more interested in proliferating his brain-child than maintaining the commitment to learning about and through computers that he originally claimed. They used those things for publicity, and now that they got the publicity they're dishing out the reality.
Thanks for the link. I'm glad something like this will finally be available.
Digital would be nice, but this is better than nothing. Aren't cable boxes supposed to down-res the analog output if the broadcast flag is set though? Could be a problem...
I timeshift everything. I don't watch any live TV. Even sporting events. Pause 'em for 20 minutes first, so I can skip the commercials and commentators (more annoying than the commercials).
Set the broadcast flag? Ok. I can't and won't watch your show. I'm not going to go watch it on your website, either. I have a big 47" HDTV for a reason. I don't want to watch a 320x240 version of a show in a tiny window on my computer.
The days of planting your ass on the couch and being a captive audience to one of the big networks is over. They'll either need to learn to cope, or lose their audience entirely.
If you only care about SD, and broadcast networks, sure. It's really easy.
I used to run MythTV for years, and loved it. But as soon as my signal provider moved to encrypted QAM, it became useless. I'm still patiently waiting for somebody to sell decryption device (PCI-E cableCARD slot?) so I can start using it again... But until then I went to an HD TiVo. The hardware is cheaper anyway, and the updates are automatic...
Of course, now that I've R'd the FA, I understand that it's the first entry in the block (of which a directory with a sufficient number of files would have multiple), and not the first entry in the directory. Kindly ignore my previous response... Nothing to see here...
I don't know whether you were swayed in your opinion at all by the irresponsibly biased headline, but it seems to me that this was (yet again) a choice between:
A) Censor parts of Google in China. B) Censor all of Google in China.
Fair enough. Still, you say you didn't have success with your proposed actions.
The only reason there was success in my community was that a second company was interested in building out a network in my town. Before that, it didn't matter how often you showed up at the meetings, or how much facetime you had with the committee members. The majority of vocal residents were interested in reducing their costs at the expense of people who weren't showing up at the meetings. They weren't interested in technological progress at all. Just cheap TV.
Both my power and water rates have *lower* rates for the "over"usage compared to the rates for the initial consumption (I can see this being different in areas with water shortages, but around here there's plenty of water, and the local utility likes you to use more to boost their revenues). The price per cubic foot is less the more cubic feet I use. With the electricity, any power I use over a certain amount is sold to me at a discount (I never cross the line, though). It's like that so people who use electric heating in their home pay a lower rate for their power.
Slashdot Mirror
Is there a matching law, then, that prevents people from opting out of health insurance unless a genetic test makes them think it's a good idea?
Yes, I know, some politicians want that law too. We're better off, though, without both of them.
And to answer your rhetorical question: no. That is not necessarily the purpose of insurance. It is to spread risk, but where did you get the "evenly" idea? Insurance allows you to have a flat cost related to the level of risk, instead of a sudden unexpected cost. That's why we charge bad drivers more for auto insurance, and smokers and old people more for life insurance, and people without deadbolts and modern electrical systems more for home insurance, and people in the flood plane more for flood insurance, and.... You get the idea by now, I'm sure.
That's a shitty argument. It essentially boils down to "10,000 wrongs make a right".
The problem with the Blackberry phones is that they cost $30+/month for the same features you can get on other phones. Sure, maybe some of the Blackberry models are superior to the other phones on the market, but they're not $360/year better. Not anywhere near close.
I'd love to have one if somebody else is paying for it... But instead I'll stick with my Treo, and deal with the extra thickness and UI annoyances, and all that cash in my wallet.
Why shouldn't we? Is that too much to expect? It seems perfectly reasonable to me to assume that a "news" organization can have a uniform policy of reasonable standards that they could hold their editors to.
When you play back the high-speed camera footage taken through a microscope on a 100" screen...
Oh, nevermind... Even then it's probably not a very impressive explosion.
It bothers me that the editors here simultaneously push the "we don't invest enough in space research" platform, and fall into the "journalistic" trap of sensationalizing NASA's failures to make their readers feel "smarter than those rocket scientist guys".
I have every expectation that the readers and comment writers on Slashdot have vastly differing opinions on the subject, but you'd think that the clearly biased editorial staff here could get their story straight.
Is an invention still an invention if it is never produced? The knowledge that somebody else is going to produce a copy of your invention when they see it, combined with the knowledge that the competition will make your idea unprofitable means that many innovative things have been brought to market, or brought to market sooner (with fairer distribution of the profits) because of patent.
The fact that many, many bad patents are issued does not mean that patents are bad.
In this particular case, you have a market for laptops, none of which have hand shaped impressions on them. If it turns out that this is something everyday people actually want in their laptops and just didn't know it yet, this patent has contributed to the greater good. Without it, there is a good chance that nobody would have bothered to try producing such a device.
Most of the outrage around here (and in the world in general) seems to fall into the "Too busy being outraged to pay attention" category.
It's in "Your Rights Online", so clearly kdawson wants us to be outraged... Is it because he thinks the idea is dumb, or that the patent is dumb? It's hard to tell in this case, since it seems to be a reasonable idea, and a reasonable patent...
It means exactly what I think it means. What do you think it means?
I only picked that number because I heard once that Blizzard said only about 5% of the players make it to the end-game raiding content. Maybe more of them PvP, but my impression is that most people never even make it to level 70.
I know that I know plenty of people who have played for six months or more, and are still below level 60.
I think the pre-existing fan-base explains the initial uptake, but I don't think it explains the insane, continued, and even accelerating growth. Especially compared to the other games on the list, some of which I would consider to be "better" games.
I think that if they had written their game with higher end hardware in mind, the growth would have slowed after that initial fan-base got their fix. I think there are two reasons behind it. First, it would have taken them less time to saturate the market of people with that type of gaming rig. And second, the types of people who are into those types of gaming rigs are also likely to move on to the next big thing when it comes out. Those gamers already left WoW for LotR, and that's where I would bet most of Conan's players come from too.
WoW fills an enormous niche. A game like Conan, no matter how great, will likely find it isn't even competing in the same market.
WoW runs on crap hardware. When something like 95% of your customer base is a "casual" player, that's an important (of not the important) feature. The shitty $400 Laptop or $300 PC you bought from WalMart will probably give you a satisfactory experience playing WoW, and it's likely that the vast, vast majority of WoW's customer's are running on low-end machines. Conan doesn't even have a shot at those customers. They can't even run the game if they wanted to.
If you want to de-throne WoW, you've got to build a well marketed, feature and content rich MMO that runs on today's low-end machines. Otherwise you are selling to a much smaller market than Blizzard.
This is nothing new for Blizzard, either. All their games have always been targeted at low-end (mainstream) machines. And they always sell like crazy. This isn't a coincidence.
Perception is more important than reality.
It doesn't matter how safe you make nuclear power. You lose the argument against people who think it's dangerous.
It's obvious what the results would be.
Half completed, unpolished commercial software usually stays unreleased and safe from this sort of scrutiny. However many of the same types of projects get left out in the open and easily visible to everybody when developed as open source. The low code quality of these projects would drag down the average for open source projects as a whole.
On the lighter side, you could say that you'd only consider software that was "out of beta" or version 1.0 or greater, but that would leave out most open source projects and commercial "Web 2.0" products....
It didn't deteriorate. It started that way. Plenty of us pointed out Negroponte's ego and the impossibility of success without compromising on almost every one of the stated goals. When we said these things in forums such as this one, we were modded down, and told we hated children, or that we were linux haters, or were asked what we were doing to improve the world...
Now, it becomes clear. The cost is higher than was originally planned. The devices are going to run Windows instead of Linux. Negroponte has admitted he's more interested in proliferating his brain-child than maintaining the commitment to learning about and through computers that he originally claimed. They used those things for publicity, and now that they got the publicity they're dishing out the reality.
We told you so.
Thanks for the link. I'm glad something like this will finally be available.
Digital would be nice, but this is better than nothing. Aren't cable boxes supposed to down-res the analog output if the broadcast flag is set though? Could be a problem...
Vocal? Meh.
I timeshift everything. I don't watch any live TV. Even sporting events. Pause 'em for 20 minutes first, so I can skip the commercials and commentators (more annoying than the commercials).
Set the broadcast flag? Ok. I can't and won't watch your show. I'm not going to go watch it on your website, either. I have a big 47" HDTV for a reason. I don't want to watch a 320x240 version of a show in a tiny window on my computer.
The days of planting your ass on the couch and being a captive audience to one of the big networks is over. They'll either need to learn to cope, or lose their audience entirely.
...if you want to record encrypted digital HD...
If you only care about SD, and broadcast networks, sure. It's really easy.
I used to run MythTV for years, and loved it. But as soon as my signal provider moved to encrypted QAM, it became useless. I'm still patiently waiting for somebody to sell decryption device (PCI-E cableCARD slot?) so I can start using it again... But until then I went to an HD TiVo. The hardware is cheaper anyway, and the updates are automatic...
Also, unlike some other mussels, they don't taste very good. They have stinky greenish yellow insides.
Of course, now that I've R'd the FA, I understand that it's the first entry in the block (of which a directory with a sufficient number of files would have multiple), and not the first entry in the directory. Kindly ignore my previous response... Nothing to see here...
Isn't the first entry usually '.'? How often would that be deleted?
I don't know whether you were swayed in your opinion at all by the irresponsibly biased headline, but it seems to me that this was (yet again) a choice between:
A) Censor parts of Google in China.
B) Censor all of Google in China.
Which one of those is more evil?
Fair enough. Still, you say you didn't have success with your proposed actions.
The only reason there was success in my community was that a second company was interested in building out a network in my town. Before that, it didn't matter how often you showed up at the meetings, or how much facetime you had with the committee members. The majority of vocal residents were interested in reducing their costs at the expense of people who weren't showing up at the meetings. They weren't interested in technological progress at all. Just cheap TV.
And you don't cook or have a refrigerator, or a washing machine? (Much less a dryer....)
If you go to a laundromat, do you count the electricity you consume (and pay for ) there? Or do you wash your clothes by hand and hang them on a line?
Both my power and water rates have *lower* rates for the "over"usage compared to the rates for the initial consumption (I can see this being different in areas with water shortages, but around here there's plenty of water, and the local utility likes you to use more to boost their revenues). The price per cubic foot is less the more cubic feet I use. With the electricity, any power I use over a certain amount is sold to me at a discount (I never cross the line, though). It's like that so people who use electric heating in their home pay a lower rate for their power.