"AI Director" is just a fancy way of saying "weighted random number generator". The whole damn thing is probably a couple of hundred lines of code if you exclude the map hints required to make it work. Yawn.
The cash shop came out what, 3 years after release? Valve had already gotten all of the money the needed to get out of boxed copies to make the game a success. It isn't taking a chance when "failure" on your gamble amounts to a massively successful game.
Also, there was already a modernized version of the classic. It was called (wait for it) Team Fortress Classic. And that's a semantics game, anyway. Neither a sequel or a remake would have been risky.
What's sad is that I think there are some great examples of Valve taking more risks than publicly traded companies would in their position (I think the fact that they never went public with their stock is one of the biggest factors working in favor of the company). They aren't necessarily huge risks, but things like bringing the Narbacular Drop team in to make Portal were not nearly as boring and predictable as putting out yearly Half-life installments would have been. Team Fortress 2 just isn't a good example of what you are trying to give Valve credit for.
To add, Counterstrike and other mods were mostly Valve retroactively insofar as Valve hired the independent developers that created them after the mods were largely completed. Jess Cliffe and Minh Le did all of the heavy lifting for CS specifically before Valve employed them. I think it is a net positive for the industry probably that Steam picks up indie developers and gives them creative liberty like an EA or Activision never would, but for the purposes of what they released in-house before they produced Steam, most of what you listed does not count.
TF2 is thinking outside the box? Really? You do see that little number sitting out there to the right of the "Team Fortress" part of the title, right? The one that indicates that it is a sequel to a game that had the same gameplay format and the same class list that it has? Or are you talking about copying the cash shop from every free to play MMO that's come out in the last decade? Is that what passes for taking a chance these days?
Lack of competition affects more than just the current price of a product, so yes, dominating a particular market is inherently bad. For instance, if I can keep competitors from entering my market, I don't need a whole lot of R&D to keep ahead of competitors, because there aren't any. So right now consumers get better prices than they could get from a small competitor, but 10 years down the line they might be a whole lot worse off because technology hasn't advanced like it should have.
Additionally, there is a tendency to let limit pricing slide and then re-enact it regionally when competitors pop up, which turns it from limit pricing into predatory pricing. In an industry with otherwise low barriers to entry and loose regional ties, predatory pricing isn't a big deal because even a large firm can go out of business if it has to take losses whenever it needs to put some random guy working from his garage out of business, but again, in an industry with higher startup costs, you don't have to prove you are willing to engage in predatory pricing very many times before people aren't willing to make the investment to try to enter the market.
You can't eliminate the advantages of campaign financing without campaign finance reform. Money wins elections. If a politician does not pander to the interests who paid their way to office, they won't get money next time, and the other guy will, and the system goes right back to where it was. It's like if you have a baseball league where the umpires are selected primarily based on how many bribes they take in from team owners, and they get to write all of the rules for the game. Your suggestion amounts to asking the umpires to pretty please reform the rules they use to draw the most bribes oh and to also please call the game fairly 3 3:3. It's pretty talk, but it amounts to make believe.
That's nice, but the Twin Paradox put in terms of three moving bodies as I described above avoids any acceleration at all in the course of the thought experiment, so general relativity and acceleration dilation are a non-issue.
Using uniform background radiation as a privileged inertial frame is cheating. Who is to say that the source of that radiation wasn't just moving fast enough to cause a blue shift equal to what I see while I am walking to keep pace with the rest frame, and the uniform color you see isn't the result of matching your velocity to that of the cosmic background radiation's moving inertial frame?
Actually, acceleration has nothing at all to do with the twin paradox, insofar as it is explained by special relativity, which does not address acceleration. It would work the same way if, for instance, an object passed by earth at relativistic speeds, moved out a distance x, passed its clock measurement on to a second moving objecting moving in the exact opposite direction, which then compares its clock to one sitting on Earth and finds that less time has gone by.
My confusion, of course, comes from what happens when you assume that the object moving towards earth is the rest frame instead of earth itself.
If you make such an edit that follows those guidelines and it gets reverted, there are policies in place to resolve the dispute.
Except that there will be a discussion to come to consensus where you will argue with the same Wikipedia clique, have your replies marked with an indicator that states you have few or no edits on Wikipedia and therefore anything you say can be ignored, and then "consensus" will be arbitrated by another douchebag from the same pool that reverted your edits in the first place.
In reality, most of us realize that this does not happen in a majority of cases. But if you even hit a few percentage points, by the time a newcomer has hit a couple of dozen edits, there is a significant chance that at least one has been stomped over with little to no explanation and they are treated like idiots when they ask questions about it, given 23 citations of WP:Notability, WP:NPOV, and WP:llamas rather than a concise description of what they need to do to make their otherwise worthwhile edit stick, and sent on their way. Some people edit long enough to get the experience required to correctly navigate wikipedia editing guidelines without running into this problem, but a significant portion get nailed by the wikipedia posse before they ever make it that far and get left with such a bad taste in their mouths about how they are treated that they never contribute again.
Paperwork. Tracking how you handle any of those limits is an additional hurdle for every company, but is generally a smaller piece of the budget for big ones. Mandating that you share equipment you install is a cost, which requires an internal layer of bureaucracy to handle. Not allowing you to put in your own equipment at all is a major barrier to starting up your own company.
That doesn't even make sense in the context of the regulations I listed. What additionally paperwork is generated for an up and coming MVNO by requiring that AT&T let them lease usage of tower equipment? What paperwork is added to a bandwidth provider at a DSLAM selling their services through AT&T lines to my house? Sure, there is extra paperwork for the major provider in these instances, but that has nothing to do with barriers to entry. The sparsity of available spectrum and the natural monopoly inherent in wire easements mean that there is already such a high barrier to entry on the last mile that we're not likely to ever see real competition come to the market in the foreseeable future, but we can artificially lower barriers to entry for the bandwidth/phone service portions of those services by decoupling them from the portions of the service that cause the natural monopoly, and thus do the exact opposite of what you are complaining that regulation does.
Anti-monopoly regulation is only necessary as a corrective for other regulations. Non-abusive monopolies aren't problems, abusive monopolies create an incentive to compete.
This is where the voodoo mysticism shows up in your typical free-marketeer's ideology. The first thing any corporation does when it gets market dominance is to try to close the door behind it. Yes, sometimes this is done (especially in systems like ours where campaign contributions are key to getting elected) by getting their market advantage institutionalized, although I would note that the same people who like to prattle incessantly about the magic powers of a market are frequently the ones advocating against campaign finance reform and are thus the underlying cause for that problem. But there are plenty of other tactics available to a company with enough resources to prevent fair competition, especially in markets with natural monopolies like the aforementioned telecoms. For instance, (the again above mentioned) limit pricing in a region where a potential competitor is gaining steam does wonders for putting them out of business, and if there is a substantial front end investment to creating a new firm in your industry, it is unlikely that you'll have to take the hit on at- or below-cost sales very many times before people will give up on trying to break in. After that point, the only new competition that you'll see is if some other mega-conglomerate moves into your market for which barriers to entry as a startup aren't really relevant.
The problem with the belief that the market will take care of everything, in other words, is that it has it has no nuance. There are some industries that we could get away with regulating very little (like some sectors of software development), but a free-marketeer pretends that all markets can work that way, which is patently false. A free market takes care of monopolies on its own when the industry in question fulfills a specific set of criteria, but a large portion of industries do not meet the requirements. And that's not even looking at cross-industry anti-competitive behavior.
Generally, any regulation increases the cost of entry into the market, regardless of it's nominal purposes and even if you think a particular regulation is worthwhile.
Bullshit. Explain to me how regulating the last mile gear to my house into a common carrier raises the barrier of entry to the bandwidth provider market. Or how preventing Limit Pricing increases cost of entry. Or any number of other regulations that only preclude anti-competitive behavior from monopolistic or near-monopolistic entities.
Also, increasing cost of entry to a market isn't even a bad thing. Is there anyone that regrets the increased costs associated with additional regulation on say the meat packing industry? Did we really want what the free market gave us there?
Yes, clearly the meritocracy is in good working order. Every CEO makes 100x what their entry level employees do because they work 100x as hard as those lazy whiners.
There is a huge difference between needing to pull someplace and stop to recharge and randomly running out of battery and having to push your car to a garage, though. There was an additional implication that your battery is going to run out unexpectedly, and that's the real killer.
People love to bandy about those terms, but please take a minute to determine what respective percentages of the nation's income those groups take in. I think you'll find that they pay that outrageously large amount of taxes because they make that outrageously large a portion of the nation's income. Let me know when you've finished so I can begin playing the world's smallest violin for the poor rich people.
No. It has been demonstrated repeatedly that having a technique or idea in the public domain or implemented in a product or service for decades has no bearing on whether the USPTO will grant a patent to somebody else for it.
Actually, the jobs come from businesses. The pool of money a business uses to pay new employees is completely unrelated to personal income taxes of the owners.
You would store 100,000 different copies because storage is cheap, and you might not be able to get away with feeding me back Bubba's tiny bitrate rip of the song's chorus played over and over when I ask for the version I uploaded. Excepting, of course, copies that match checksum, file size, and meta data with the version sold by Amazon, maybe (even that sounds like a lot of work when storage is so cheap).
The other responses have made some points about possible additional information embedded in the spacing of the message, etc, but that seems a lot less important than the fact that some portions of the code are unclear and open to interpretation as to which letter is being represented. Is the second to last character on the first page an 'L', 'C', or '('? Can you say definitively enough for the FBI to rule out other options?
Either you wouldn't need to because the algorithm would be obvious given the plain text, or you would have to in order for anybody to verify your claim.
Slashdot Mirror
258 and 7 bonus points for Opera here, for those of you keeping score.
"AI Director" is just a fancy way of saying "weighted random number generator". The whole damn thing is probably a couple of hundred lines of code if you exclude the map hints required to make it work. Yawn.
The cash shop came out what, 3 years after release? Valve had already gotten all of the money the needed to get out of boxed copies to make the game a success. It isn't taking a chance when "failure" on your gamble amounts to a massively successful game.
Also, there was already a modernized version of the classic. It was called (wait for it) Team Fortress Classic. And that's a semantics game, anyway. Neither a sequel or a remake would have been risky.
What's sad is that I think there are some great examples of Valve taking more risks than publicly traded companies would in their position (I think the fact that they never went public with their stock is one of the biggest factors working in favor of the company). They aren't necessarily huge risks, but things like bringing the Narbacular Drop team in to make Portal were not nearly as boring and predictable as putting out yearly Half-life installments would have been. Team Fortress 2 just isn't a good example of what you are trying to give Valve credit for.
To add, Counterstrike and other mods were mostly Valve retroactively insofar as Valve hired the independent developers that created them after the mods were largely completed. Jess Cliffe and Minh Le did all of the heavy lifting for CS specifically before Valve employed them. I think it is a net positive for the industry probably that Steam picks up indie developers and gives them creative liberty like an EA or Activision never would, but for the purposes of what they released in-house before they produced Steam, most of what you listed does not count.
TF2 is thinking outside the box? Really? You do see that little number sitting out there to the right of the "Team Fortress" part of the title, right? The one that indicates that it is a sequel to a game that had the same gameplay format and the same class list that it has? Or are you talking about copying the cash shop from every free to play MMO that's come out in the last decade? Is that what passes for taking a chance these days?
I pick either L4D and/or L4D2. They can't both be important. They came out a year apart from each other and are barely different games.
Lack of competition affects more than just the current price of a product, so yes, dominating a particular market is inherently bad. For instance, if I can keep competitors from entering my market, I don't need a whole lot of R&D to keep ahead of competitors, because there aren't any. So right now consumers get better prices than they could get from a small competitor, but 10 years down the line they might be a whole lot worse off because technology hasn't advanced like it should have.
:3. It's pretty talk, but it amounts to make believe.
Additionally, there is a tendency to let limit pricing slide and then re-enact it regionally when competitors pop up, which turns it from limit pricing into predatory pricing. In an industry with otherwise low barriers to entry and loose regional ties, predatory pricing isn't a big deal because even a large firm can go out of business if it has to take losses whenever it needs to put some random guy working from his garage out of business, but again, in an industry with higher startup costs, you don't have to prove you are willing to engage in predatory pricing very many times before people aren't willing to make the investment to try to enter the market.
You can't eliminate the advantages of campaign financing without campaign finance reform. Money wins elections. If a politician does not pander to the interests who paid their way to office, they won't get money next time, and the other guy will, and the system goes right back to where it was. It's like if you have a baseball league where the umpires are selected primarily based on how many bribes they take in from team owners, and they get to write all of the rules for the game. Your suggestion amounts to asking the umpires to pretty please reform the rules they use to draw the most bribes oh and to also please call the game fairly 3 3
That's nice, but the Twin Paradox put in terms of three moving bodies as I described above avoids any acceleration at all in the course of the thought experiment, so general relativity and acceleration dilation are a non-issue.
Using uniform background radiation as a privileged inertial frame is cheating. Who is to say that the source of that radiation wasn't just moving fast enough to cause a blue shift equal to what I see while I am walking to keep pace with the rest frame, and the uniform color you see isn't the result of matching your velocity to that of the cosmic background radiation's moving inertial frame?
Actually, acceleration has nothing at all to do with the twin paradox, insofar as it is explained by special relativity, which does not address acceleration. It would work the same way if, for instance, an object passed by earth at relativistic speeds, moved out a distance x, passed its clock measurement on to a second moving objecting moving in the exact opposite direction, which then compares its clock to one sitting on Earth and finds that less time has gone by.
My confusion, of course, comes from what happens when you assume that the object moving towards earth is the rest frame instead of earth itself.
If you make such an edit that follows those guidelines and it gets reverted, there are policies in place to resolve the dispute.
Except that there will be a discussion to come to consensus where you will argue with the same Wikipedia clique, have your replies marked with an indicator that states you have few or no edits on Wikipedia and therefore anything you say can be ignored, and then "consensus" will be arbitrated by another douchebag from the same pool that reverted your edits in the first place.
In reality, most of us realize that this does not happen in a majority of cases. But if you even hit a few percentage points, by the time a newcomer has hit a couple of dozen edits, there is a significant chance that at least one has been stomped over with little to no explanation and they are treated like idiots when they ask questions about it, given 23 citations of WP:Notability, WP:NPOV, and WP:llamas rather than a concise description of what they need to do to make their otherwise worthwhile edit stick, and sent on their way. Some people edit long enough to get the experience required to correctly navigate wikipedia editing guidelines without running into this problem, but a significant portion get nailed by the wikipedia posse before they ever make it that far and get left with such a bad taste in their mouths about how they are treated that they never contribute again.
Paperwork. Tracking how you handle any of those limits is an additional hurdle for every company, but is generally a smaller piece of the budget for big ones. Mandating that you share equipment you install is a cost, which requires an internal layer of bureaucracy to handle. Not allowing you to put in your own equipment at all is a major barrier to starting up your own company.
That doesn't even make sense in the context of the regulations I listed. What additionally paperwork is generated for an up and coming MVNO by requiring that AT&T let them lease usage of tower equipment? What paperwork is added to a bandwidth provider at a DSLAM selling their services through AT&T lines to my house? Sure, there is extra paperwork for the major provider in these instances, but that has nothing to do with barriers to entry. The sparsity of available spectrum and the natural monopoly inherent in wire easements mean that there is already such a high barrier to entry on the last mile that we're not likely to ever see real competition come to the market in the foreseeable future, but we can artificially lower barriers to entry for the bandwidth/phone service portions of those services by decoupling them from the portions of the service that cause the natural monopoly, and thus do the exact opposite of what you are complaining that regulation does.
Anti-monopoly regulation is only necessary as a corrective for other regulations. Non-abusive monopolies aren't problems, abusive monopolies create an incentive to compete.
This is where the voodoo mysticism shows up in your typical free-marketeer's ideology. The first thing any corporation does when it gets market dominance is to try to close the door behind it. Yes, sometimes this is done (especially in systems like ours where campaign contributions are key to getting elected) by getting their market advantage institutionalized, although I would note that the same people who like to prattle incessantly about the magic powers of a market are frequently the ones advocating against campaign finance reform and are thus the underlying cause for that problem. But there are plenty of other tactics available to a company with enough resources to prevent fair competition, especially in markets with natural monopolies like the aforementioned telecoms. For instance, (the again above mentioned) limit pricing in a region where a potential competitor is gaining steam does wonders for putting them out of business, and if there is a substantial front end investment to creating a new firm in your industry, it is unlikely that you'll have to take the hit on at- or below-cost sales very many times before people will give up on trying to break in. After that point, the only new competition that you'll see is if some other mega-conglomerate moves into your market for which barriers to entry as a startup aren't really relevant.
The problem with the belief that the market will take care of everything, in other words, is that it has it has no nuance. There are some industries that we could get away with regulating very little (like some sectors of software development), but a free-marketeer pretends that all markets can work that way, which is patently false. A free market takes care of monopolies on its own when the industry in question fulfills a specific set of criteria, but a large portion of industries do not meet the requirements. And that's not even looking at cross-industry anti-competitive behavior.
Generally, any regulation increases the cost of entry into the market, regardless of it's nominal purposes and even if you think a particular regulation is worthwhile.
Bullshit. Explain to me how regulating the last mile gear to my house into a common carrier raises the barrier of entry to the bandwidth provider market. Or how preventing Limit Pricing increases cost of entry. Or any number of other regulations that only preclude anti-competitive behavior from monopolistic or near-monopolistic entities. Also, increasing cost of entry to a market isn't even a bad thing. Is there anyone that regrets the increased costs associated with additional regulation on say the meat packing industry? Did we really want what the free market gave us there?
Really? I can't think of a worse system for keeping sectors from becoming monopolized.
Yes, clearly the meritocracy is in good working order. Every CEO makes 100x what their entry level employees do because they work 100x as hard as those lazy whiners.
There is a huge difference between needing to pull someplace and stop to recharge and randomly running out of battery and having to push your car to a garage, though. There was an additional implication that your battery is going to run out unexpectedly, and that's the real killer.
People love to bandy about those terms, but please take a minute to determine what respective percentages of the nation's income those groups take in. I think you'll find that they pay that outrageously large amount of taxes because they make that outrageously large a portion of the nation's income. Let me know when you've finished so I can begin playing the world's smallest violin for the poor rich people.
No. It has been demonstrated repeatedly that having a technique or idea in the public domain or implemented in a product or service for decades has no bearing on whether the USPTO will grant a patent to somebody else for it.
Actually, the jobs come from businesses. The pool of money a business uses to pay new employees is completely unrelated to personal income taxes of the owners.
Why didn't he just set up a fixed wireless point to point to his house and get another broadband connection there?
You would store 100,000 different copies because storage is cheap, and you might not be able to get away with feeding me back Bubba's tiny bitrate rip of the song's chorus played over and over when I ask for the version I uploaded. Excepting, of course, copies that match checksum, file size, and meta data with the version sold by Amazon, maybe (even that sounds like a lot of work when storage is so cheap).
The other responses have made some points about possible additional information embedded in the spacing of the message, etc, but that seems a lot less important than the fact that some portions of the code are unclear and open to interpretation as to which letter is being represented. Is the second to last character on the first page an 'L', 'C', or '('? Can you say definitively enough for the FBI to rule out other options?
Given that the murder happened in 1999, my guess is that they have exhausted those other avenues.
Given that there are repeated segments of symbols, it is almost definitively not a one time pad.
Either you wouldn't need to because the algorithm would be obvious given the plain text, or you would have to in order for anybody to verify your claim.