If your one piece of mail or one packet of traffic were all that were travelling, you might have a point. But your mail courier and your internet provider have many package/packet origins headed to many different destinations. They will make a best effort to deliver each as they can, given that everybody else in the queue also wants their stuff delivered at least as much as you do. They have limited resources in which to do this. If traffic is congested, the mail courier cannot develop a new route/plane/vehicle in the timeframe of your delivery. The ISP cannot negotiate a new upstream provider in the timeframe of your packet's delivery. It is a best effort with the resource at hand. If there are insufficient resources, some of you will be disappointed.
If this is not good enough for you, you can pay for a guaranteed class of service.
If you fly and have checked baggage, the airline will make a best effort to see that your luggage arrives at your destination when you do. However, if you have a quick turnaround for a connecting flight and your checked baggage isn't sorted and loaded in time to make it out, the airline will shrug and say they've made a best effort. Clearly, according to you, they haven't. After all your carry-on made it just fine and they could have let you carry on all your baggage. This would entirely alter the situation by lowering max passenger counts and increasing aircraft groundtime (as passengers try to organize and haul 2-3 more bags off a plane). But to anybody else, the airline has made a best effort. If you wanted a better class of service, you could pay for it by reducing your baggage to a carry-on only (or.. I guess by paying for seats in which to put your otherwise-would've-been-checked baggage).
They're also comparing apps from an app store to games on disc, as if those two markets were directly competing. I got news for the author; they're not.
Second.. they're also basing their estimate of when apps will overtake game sales on the assumption that physical game sales are shrinking, because last year was down 5%. Although they conveniently don't mention that for roughly the same period, both song and app sales revenues also had declines. See those nice well-below-the-pretty-line data points in the graph?
Spectacular scholarship on display in the article, I must say.
If the state of California was honest with its residents, it would tell you that they want two bites at this delicious tax apple. Once on the "sale" of the phone (which isn't..) and then each month for taxes based on your invoiced service fees, which include Verizon's margin to pay for the "free" phone.
But thats no surprise to me. CA has some of the highest taxes at all levels, and they still can't fund a government.
Well.. firstly.. I didn't assume you suggested something to spend the money on. Nor did I assume, or state, that you had all the solutions.
You said "we do what we can"... which I am saying "costs money"..
If we spend money doing what we can and didn't need to.. what follows is what I said before. Spending more money than you need to on a problem causes a whole host of other problems that can and do degrade the quality and/or length of human lives. I am not unaware of the tradeoffs. You seem to have not even considered them.
I wouldn't have thought that I would need to explain the downsides of wasteful spending, or as you so eloquently called it spending "more money than we had to"..
Yeah.. I guess. If car insurance cost billions of dollars a day and there was a good chance that the insurance carrier wouldn't pay out in the event of an accident. (Oh wait, the second part is true)
Retooling the entire planet's infrastructure won't be cheap, isn't guaranteed to prevent a catastrophe (and a catastrophe isn't even guaranteed to occur), and while we only "spent more money that we had to" we're consuming funds and resources that could've been applied to other human endeavors. Like health care, so people don't die of disease. Or energy efficiency so that people who currently can't afford electrical infrastructure may be able to afford power so that they don't freeze to death in winter or heat stroke in summer. Or maybe we spend some money on cleaning up manufacturing processes (or just spending it on proper post-manufacture disposal of waste) so that they don't require so many nasty toxic chemicals which get dumped into waterways and seep into aquifers, poisoning people.
Not all that interesting.. each side kills the extreme, stupid ideas of the other (they're both full of 'em) and what we're left with is a least shitty, won't-make-anybody-happy medium. That's a republic at work.
Thats because a century or so ago it was very valuable to have currency that wasn't easy to fake, didn't grow on trees, and was easy to exchange in many different countries.
These days, those qualities aren't so much valuable. There are other ways to make currency that is difficult to fake, aren't easy to come by, and easily exchanged in other countries. Gold is still valuable because it has acquired new uses even as its old uses disappeared.
The presence of a government does not in itself limit the freedom of a market, especially if the market wouldn't exist without the government.
All governments limit the freedom of markets. Always. They need not limit all markets, and indeed the US government has done a wonderfully expensive job of not limiting the black market for drugs, but the very existence of a government limits some market.
A government has a monopoly on making laws. That is an extremely limited market. And there is no real competition. I can only change governments by uprooting my whole life, which is pretty much the opposite of changing soft drinks or PC vendors, and it is bloody expensive. Not to mention that your new government is only going to be marginally less shitty than the old one. The marginal cost required to obtain marginal benefits (pun intended) is insane.
Then, governments generally have a monopoly on enforcing those laws. If they can't enforce the laws they pass, they're don't really exist as a government. Enforcement of laws requires even more resources than creating laws. So.. governments must tax you in order to provide this service. I suppose they could collect an at-least-cost fee for doing their job, but that would create all kinds of incentive for corruption. So either they tax you to provide the monopoly service (market distortion x2) or they create a corrupted monopoly service (market distortion x2).
Say.. we don't develop an alternative energy source to provide baseload power. Or that can be effectively used in vehicles. Or, at least, we don't develop it in a timely fashion. In those situations not using sun shades could be a catastrophically bad choice that kills humankind.
Or say we do it, and the climate changes in such a way that even most of the deserts become breadbaskets. Not all unintended or unexpected consequences are bad.
Any time you face a decision of this complex and grand a scale, there will be unexpected, unintended consequences. Regardless of the choice you make. Arguing for not doing something because of those unintended consequences is self defeating. Anyone could argue right back that not doing has unintended consequences and thus we shouldn't go along with the not doers.
The AH is a MAJOR issue. Player-player exchanges are really important to facilitate in MMOs. FFXI had one of the better ones. Although, still distant second to the EVE market. But they had one, and it was pretty good. How the hell can they at all justify shipping without one now?
There could be great content waiting for you, but if you can't find the gear to help you get ready for it then what good is it? If you have to offload your junk to the NPC vendors at their depressed prices so you have to farm 3x the drops to afford the gear you need, what good is that great content just waiting out of reach? None.
At the very least there should be no retainers you interact with individually to buy. Just show up at the bazaar and interact with an object (or.. just have some in-town menu, preferably) that opens a window with all items available for sale. Filterable by categories, searchable. If you're selling, drop your stuff off with your retainer, and it shows up in that available list. It should also allow for putting out a purchase order, instead of just the sell orders.
And lastly.. bad UI is bad UI. It may not be literally unusable, but it can be ridiculously more painful than it needs to be which is almost the same thing. It is hardly like Square has no idea what good UI is. They have games with really sensible UI. But what they don't have is consistently good UI, and I can't figure that out. Its almost like they strive to discard the bits that work every time they develop a game.
Either of those issues (AH, needlessly terrible UI design) would be enough to kill my interest. I don't care how great the content may be.. without a worthwhile player economy, its just even more grind to get to that great content. Without a reasonable UI, it isn't fun to get to that great content.
No.. but law enforcement that claim they are law enforcement while they're wiring your vehicle aren't really effective. They've just told you to go have that shit ripped off and kicked into a water treatment plant's holding tank or something.
If you're looking at them through the sights of a firearm, you had better be justified in using lethal force. Because if you are not, you're already guilty of another crime.
Just because lethal force is legally justified does not mean that the defender must shoot. But if you present a firearm when it isn't justified, you got some splainin to do.
You may have a hard time with it, but there are relatively few jurisdictions (actually.. none that I'm aware of, although that doesn't mean there are none) that require verbal warnings when lethal force is justified. For much the same reason that they don't require "wounding shots" or other such nonsense that does nothing but make bad situations worse.
Its called living with reality, instead of say.. confusing it with the fiction that humans don't need sex. Or the fiction that all people with HIV/AIDS know they have it. Go ahead. Tell someone they just can never again have sex. Watch their face fill with joy. Wait for it.. Yeah. Thats why abstinence works so well..
As for what problems they solve.. well.. the same problems they solve in the industrialized world. Fewer unwanted pregnancies, lowered disease transmission. But yeah.. what good could that do for a populace more prone to starvation and STD.
No.. the guy's job is to represent the Queen of Canada.
There are just 15 other nations of which she is also Queen. Each of which nations has control over its territory without interference from the others, despite sharing a monarch. Thats whats sovereign about it.
You need the camera attachment ($40 new), the basic controller ($50 new), and if you're playing a game that needs a thumb stick for say movement, you need the other controller ($30). Thats before you buy any software at all.
There's a bundle with sports champs, but doesn't have the secondary controller, at $99. So.. you're pretty much at Wii prices for the Move. And you have all the downsides of bolted on accessories that have always plagued consoles. Required accessories further segment the market. Maybe the Move or Kinect will be so awesome that it'll be able to overcome that disadvantage. I doubt it. I'd guess that they're more like good practice for the engineers and some risk taking developers for the next generation of consoles.
This ignores all the passengers, seating, and baggage. None of which would be transparent. And which would be blocking most of your view.
Although.. transparent baggage. That would be nice. We could get rid of TSA. They wouldn't have to do security theatre anymore because you clearly can't see the horrible terrorizing instruments of terrifying terror. And thus you feel safe.
departing the US, I had to take my shoes off, seperate the liquids in my toiletries, and I could not take a drink through security. I spent an hour waiting to clear the checkpoint. And coming back I had clear security after transferring from international arrivals to domestic departures. That checkpoint took 90 minutes to clear. Ridiculous.
departing Japan, I didn't have to take my shoes off, I didn't have to dig out anything from my carry on to seperate it out, and I could take a drink through after I set it on a little scanner. I have no idea if that was a chemical sniffer or if it was just a little scale with a red and green led. But if it was security theatre, the Japanese are a lot better at it than the US. It was much faster clearing security in Japan, and less annoying. Took me about 10 minutes, maybe, to clear the checkpoint.
Sign me up for the Japanese version of airport security any day of the week.
Probably.. however.. I would laugh my ass off, if it opened the software house to lawsuits for crashing your computer, destroying your data, and whatnot despite the release from liability in the license.
After all, if I own the software and am licensing its use, its my property interfering with and damaging other property of mine. But now, I don't own the software. The development house does. And its property is damaging my property.
Jets flying in formation have their own organic computers that require offline maintanence roughly every 18 hours. Spacecraft don't have the luxury of landing to let their pilots off, or for hauling months of food, or the means to keep their pilots from going insane with the monotony. Not if they're going to be financially feasible anyway. Hence.. automated systems for maneuvering and analyzing sibling craft position, as well as getting physically discrete systems to interoperate as a single platform.
Rackspace, as an American company, should also be concerned with things like private property rights and the right to enter into contracts. Once there's widespread zealotry supporting one right over others, its only a matter of time before unfavored legal rights are eroded away.
The principle of free speech is important. But so is the right to own property and the right to contract. Right to own property is important. It is what lets you own yourself, rather than a limited class that can own you. Its what lets you own a home, a business, and the funds in your bank account. The right to contract is important too. It lets us make decisions today that depend on the behavior of others in the future.
Neither the legal free speech nor the principle of free speech for the church has been quashed. They're still able to burn their books, say what they (mostly) want, and if they really wanted, they could buy their own hardware and bandwidth. Or just find another host.
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If your one piece of mail or one packet of traffic were all that were travelling, you might have a point. But your mail courier and your internet provider have many package/packet origins headed to many different destinations. They will make a best effort to deliver each as they can, given that everybody else in the queue also wants their stuff delivered at least as much as you do. They have limited resources in which to do this. If traffic is congested, the mail courier cannot develop a new route/plane/vehicle in the timeframe of your delivery. The ISP cannot negotiate a new upstream provider in the timeframe of your packet's delivery. It is a best effort with the resource at hand. If there are insufficient resources, some of you will be disappointed.
If this is not good enough for you, you can pay for a guaranteed class of service.
If you fly and have checked baggage, the airline will make a best effort to see that your luggage arrives at your destination when you do. However, if you have a quick turnaround for a connecting flight and your checked baggage isn't sorted and loaded in time to make it out, the airline will shrug and say they've made a best effort. Clearly, according to you, they haven't. After all your carry-on made it just fine and they could have let you carry on all your baggage. This would entirely alter the situation by lowering max passenger counts and increasing aircraft groundtime (as passengers try to organize and haul 2-3 more bags off a plane). But to anybody else, the airline has made a best effort. If you wanted a better class of service, you could pay for it by reducing your baggage to a carry-on only (or.. I guess by paying for seats in which to put your otherwise-would've-been-checked baggage).
They're also comparing apps from an app store to games on disc, as if those two markets were directly competing. I got news for the author; they're not.
Second.. they're also basing their estimate of when apps will overtake game sales on the assumption that physical game sales are shrinking, because last year was down 5%. Although they conveniently don't mention that for roughly the same period, both song and app sales revenues also had declines. See those nice well-below-the-pretty-line data points in the graph?
Spectacular scholarship on display in the article, I must say.
If the state of California was honest with its residents, it would tell you that they want two bites at this delicious tax apple. Once on the "sale" of the phone (which isn't..) and then each month for taxes based on your invoiced service fees, which include Verizon's margin to pay for the "free" phone.
But thats no surprise to me. CA has some of the highest taxes at all levels, and they still can't fund a government.
Well.. firstly.. I didn't assume you suggested something to spend the money on. Nor did I assume, or state, that you had all the solutions.
You said "we do what we can" ... which I am saying "costs money" ..
If we spend money doing what we can and didn't need to .. what follows is what I said before. Spending more money than you need to on a problem causes a whole host of other problems that can and do degrade the quality and/or length of human lives. I am not unaware of the tradeoffs. You seem to have not even considered them.
I wouldn't have thought that I would need to explain the downsides of wasteful spending, or as you so eloquently called it spending "more money than we had to" ..
Yeah.. I guess. If car insurance cost billions of dollars a day and there was a good chance that the insurance carrier wouldn't pay out in the event of an accident. (Oh wait, the second part is true)
Retooling the entire planet's infrastructure won't be cheap, isn't guaranteed to prevent a catastrophe (and a catastrophe isn't even guaranteed to occur), and while we only "spent more money that we had to" we're consuming funds and resources that could've been applied to other human endeavors. Like health care, so people don't die of disease. Or energy efficiency so that people who currently can't afford electrical infrastructure may be able to afford power so that they don't freeze to death in winter or heat stroke in summer. Or maybe we spend some money on cleaning up manufacturing processes (or just spending it on proper post-manufacture disposal of waste) so that they don't require so many nasty toxic chemicals which get dumped into waterways and seep into aquifers, poisoning people.
But yeah, you're right. Its only money.
They're called Blackberries. And the job that pays for your car, home, and pizza will give you one.
Not all that interesting.. each side kills the extreme, stupid ideas of the other (they're both full of 'em) and what we're left with is a least shitty, won't-make-anybody-happy medium. That's a republic at work.
Thats because a century or so ago it was very valuable to have currency that wasn't easy to fake, didn't grow on trees, and was easy to exchange in many different countries.
These days, those qualities aren't so much valuable. There are other ways to make currency that is difficult to fake, aren't easy to come by, and easily exchanged in other countries. Gold is still valuable because it has acquired new uses even as its old uses disappeared.
All governments limit the freedom of markets. Always. They need not limit all markets, and indeed the US government has done a wonderfully expensive job of not limiting the black market for drugs, but the very existence of a government limits some market.
A government has a monopoly on making laws. That is an extremely limited market. And there is no real competition. I can only change governments by uprooting my whole life, which is pretty much the opposite of changing soft drinks or PC vendors, and it is bloody expensive. Not to mention that your new government is only going to be marginally less shitty than the old one. The marginal cost required to obtain marginal benefits (pun intended) is insane.
Then, governments generally have a monopoly on enforcing those laws. If they can't enforce the laws they pass, they're don't really exist as a government. Enforcement of laws requires even more resources than creating laws. So.. governments must tax you in order to provide this service. I suppose they could collect an at-least-cost fee for doing their job, but that would create all kinds of incentive for corruption. So either they tax you to provide the monopoly service (market distortion x2) or they create a corrupted monopoly service (market distortion x2).
We also don't know the costs of not doing it.
Say.. we don't develop an alternative energy source to provide baseload power. Or that can be effectively used in vehicles. Or, at least, we don't develop it in a timely fashion. In those situations not using sun shades could be a catastrophically bad choice that kills humankind.
Or say we do it, and the climate changes in such a way that even most of the deserts become breadbaskets. Not all unintended or unexpected consequences are bad.
Any time you face a decision of this complex and grand a scale, there will be unexpected, unintended consequences. Regardless of the choice you make. Arguing for not doing something because of those unintended consequences is self defeating. Anyone could argue right back that not doing has unintended consequences and thus we shouldn't go along with the not doers.
The AH is a MAJOR issue. Player-player exchanges are really important to facilitate in MMOs. FFXI had one of the better ones. Although, still distant second to the EVE market. But they had one, and it was pretty good. How the hell can they at all justify shipping without one now?
There could be great content waiting for you, but if you can't find the gear to help you get ready for it then what good is it? If you have to offload your junk to the NPC vendors at their depressed prices so you have to farm 3x the drops to afford the gear you need, what good is that great content just waiting out of reach? None.
At the very least there should be no retainers you interact with individually to buy. Just show up at the bazaar and interact with an object (or.. just have some in-town menu, preferably) that opens a window with all items available for sale. Filterable by categories, searchable. If you're selling, drop your stuff off with your retainer, and it shows up in that available list. It should also allow for putting out a purchase order, instead of just the sell orders.
And lastly.. bad UI is bad UI. It may not be literally unusable, but it can be ridiculously more painful than it needs to be which is almost the same thing. It is hardly like Square has no idea what good UI is. They have games with really sensible UI. But what they don't have is consistently good UI, and I can't figure that out. Its almost like they strive to discard the bits that work every time they develop a game.
Either of those issues (AH, needlessly terrible UI design) would be enough to kill my interest. I don't care how great the content may be.. without a worthwhile player economy, its just even more grind to get to that great content. Without a reasonable UI, it isn't fun to get to that great content.
No.. but law enforcement that claim they are law enforcement while they're wiring your vehicle aren't really effective. They've just told you to go have that shit ripped off and kicked into a water treatment plant's holding tank or something.
If you're looking at them through the sights of a firearm, you had better be justified in using lethal force. Because if you are not, you're already guilty of another crime.
Just because lethal force is legally justified does not mean that the defender must shoot. But if you present a firearm when it isn't justified, you got some splainin to do.
You may have a hard time with it, but there are relatively few jurisdictions (actually.. none that I'm aware of, although that doesn't mean there are none) that require verbal warnings when lethal force is justified. For much the same reason that they don't require "wounding shots" or other such nonsense that does nothing but make bad situations worse.
If I were a mutant, and the non-mutants were out for blood, I'd be hard pressed to side against Magneto..
On the other hand, Xavier has some seriously smoking mutants working for him.
Tough choice..
Its called living with reality, instead of say.. confusing it with the fiction that humans don't need sex. Or the fiction that all people with HIV/AIDS know they have it. Go ahead. Tell someone they just can never again have sex. Watch their face fill with joy. Wait for it.. Yeah. Thats why abstinence works so well..
As for what problems they solve.. well.. the same problems they solve in the industrialized world. Fewer unwanted pregnancies, lowered disease transmission. But yeah.. what good could that do for a populace more prone to starvation and STD.
40 grains of powder... 7.62? out of an evil black rifle?
No.. the guy's job is to represent the Queen of Canada.
There are just 15 other nations of which she is also Queen. Each of which nations has control over its territory without interference from the others, despite sharing a monarch. Thats whats sovereign about it.
You need the camera attachment ($40 new), the basic controller ($50 new), and if you're playing a game that needs a thumb stick for say movement, you need the other controller ($30). Thats before you buy any software at all.
There's a bundle with sports champs, but doesn't have the secondary controller, at $99. So.. you're pretty much at Wii prices for the Move. And you have all the downsides of bolted on accessories that have always plagued consoles. Required accessories further segment the market. Maybe the Move or Kinect will be so awesome that it'll be able to overcome that disadvantage. I doubt it. I'd guess that they're more like good practice for the engineers and some risk taking developers for the next generation of consoles.
This ignores all the passengers, seating, and baggage. None of which would be transparent. And which would be blocking most of your view.
Although.. transparent baggage. That would be nice. We could get rid of TSA. They wouldn't have to do security theatre anymore because you clearly can't see the horrible terrorizing instruments of terrifying terror. And thus you feel safe.
My trip to japan a couple years ago..
departing the US, I had to take my shoes off, seperate the liquids in my toiletries, and I could not take a drink through security. I spent an hour waiting to clear the checkpoint. And coming back I had clear security after transferring from international arrivals to domestic departures. That checkpoint took 90 minutes to clear. Ridiculous.
departing Japan, I didn't have to take my shoes off, I didn't have to dig out anything from my carry on to seperate it out, and I could take a drink through after I set it on a little scanner. I have no idea if that was a chemical sniffer or if it was just a little scale with a red and green led. But if it was security theatre, the Japanese are a lot better at it than the US. It was much faster clearing security in Japan, and less annoying. Took me about 10 minutes, maybe, to clear the checkpoint.
Sign me up for the Japanese version of airport security any day of the week.
For the pilots, yeah probably. For the crew chief hanging out the door, not at all. And they have radios.
Probably.. however.. I would laugh my ass off, if it opened the software house to lawsuits for crashing your computer, destroying your data, and whatnot despite the release from liability in the license.
After all, if I own the software and am licensing its use, its my property interfering with and damaging other property of mine. But now, I don't own the software. The development house does. And its property is damaging my property.
Jets flying in formation have their own organic computers that require offline maintanence roughly every 18 hours. Spacecraft don't have the luxury of landing to let their pilots off, or for hauling months of food, or the means to keep their pilots from going insane with the monotony. Not if they're going to be financially feasible anyway. Hence.. automated systems for maneuvering and analyzing sibling craft position, as well as getting physically discrete systems to interoperate as a single platform.
Rackspace, as an American company, should also be concerned with things like private property rights and the right to enter into contracts. Once there's widespread zealotry supporting one right over others, its only a matter of time before unfavored legal rights are eroded away.
The principle of free speech is important. But so is the right to own property and the right to contract. Right to own property is important. It is what lets you own yourself, rather than a limited class that can own you. Its what lets you own a home, a business, and the funds in your bank account. The right to contract is important too. It lets us make decisions today that depend on the behavior of others in the future.
Neither the legal free speech nor the principle of free speech for the church has been quashed. They're still able to burn their books, say what they (mostly) want, and if they really wanted, they could buy their own hardware and bandwidth. Or just find another host.