Puerto Rico is a notable exception. Even at the tournament level, most players of the game use a nearly random strategy.
I'm glad that you pointed that out, because my friend just bought that. When you say that it is a notable exception, do you mean that it literally took only 5 minutes to read the instructions & start playing the 1st time?
There is a Canadian game called, Poleconomy. It has 2 variations. 1 is economics based. The other is politics based. Unfortunately, the latter can be hard to play because of the complexities of politics, plus feelings might get personal.
Also, there are 2 tracks in this game. Just like your game, the inner track gets rarely used.
There would have to be some kind of special bonus in there to lure people into inner tracks.
You need to be able to sit down, read the rules, and understand the game in under 5 minutes.
Actually German board games never take 5 minutes to understand, yet you can blindly pull a random game off of the shelf, & it'll be good. Obviously, certain games gel better with certain temperments, but you can still rest assured that they are good.
As the other fellow said, your pitfalls are correct. My brother tried making a card game which had too many of those pitfalls.
Getting an education will not get you a job. Take it from me...and from countless others. Employers always look for particular skills and experience. Just because you have an education won't get you a job...
Well, yes & no. I think that you do need something to be a doctor. I do agree with you, though, that skills & experience are more important. @ some institutions, they are focusing of being practical & getting experience so that you have the best chance of getting a job.
Also, bear in mind that I only gave examples. Perhaps the company could offer some kind of work experience instead of educational training.
So what is the middle class supposed to do for a living in 20 years. I have never heard a good answer for this from any of the 'free traders', just the same old babble about productivity, innovation, blah, blah, blah. The sad fact is that economic activity just can't grow fast enough to offset job losses like we've seen in the U.S. in manufacturing--Best Buy only needs so many washing machine salesmen.
When companies offshore jobs, or import labour, then they should make a commitment to re-educating the workers. An example implementation might be: all workers to be laid off due to exporting of jobs will be given up to $XX,XXX towards education, which must be spent in the next 4 years. The "up to" part forces them to spend it on education, instead of $10 on education & $XX,XXX-$10 on beer & "other necessities". In other words, it sends clear message that there still is a budget & it must be directed to education. The price limit forces them to choose the best education that they can find [biggest bang for the buck]. The time limit prevents them from mucking around & waiting till things seem "convenient". Obviously, there are things that must be considered such as costs of food, shelter & water during that time, but I gave only an example. The company can always give special deals to people as a whole. For example: to provide food, the company can give credits towards for meals @ a local restaurant @ certain times of the day. The general idea is that the company tries to spend the least during the transition period, while the laid off workers try to live as cheaply as possible & get the best education.
When I say "best", I'm referring to the greatest opportunity, not the highest paid or prestigious. If a man gets laid off 4 years before his retirement, then he should be able to use the credits towards almost any education.
This sounds very protectionist in flavour, but it's the exact opposite. When workers put their heart & soul into making a company great, then they should have some ownership in it. Because of their labour, the company now has the option of starting a new factory overseas. There is a lot of momentum in the company which was generated by the workers. Investors should be forced to factor this concept in their investment decisions.
Corporations shouldn't be allowed to exist. Their existence alone makes it too easy to do what they do. But then again, I don't understand corporate law. So, I can't really say that.
You paint such a dark future. I am almost inclined to agree with you. You are very insightful.
I've kind of speculated that we'll need to really hit rock bottom for a generation before we come up with new things to do.
1 way out of this is to get them to buy from us as well. I don't know how buisness minded they are, but I get the distinct impression that in the civilized countries, we tend to have better a mind set towards starting businesses. Maybe we could start businesses overseas, hire them to manufacture, & then sell it to them. If everyone of us did that, we'd certainly solve our financial problems.
Unfortunately, it all doesn't work that way. Perhaps there are other areas. Don't we have better health care & health care technology? Then why don't we send health care workers overseas to teach them & service them?
The middle poster (inode_buddah) was correct in pointing out that while some products are now made overseas, when can you remember a company lowering the price on any of their goods and NOT call it a sale or special purchase or whatever.
"Since you all are such good customers, and we are saving a shitload by making our product in [insert country here], we're going to knock 10% off the suggested retail price."
Well, computers are getting dirt cheap. Clothes are dirt cheap @ Walmart, etc. That being said, I do agree with you all. They'll never lower the price until someone competes with them. I like the tax idea of not subsidizing R&D unless the jobs are in the native country. I don't understand the 90% thing, though.
Also, another thing that countries can do is tax the workers overseas. The idea being that the workers reap some of the benefits of being employed by consumers from Canada [or US or UK, etc.]. A significant portion of the taxes could be spent on ensuring better working conditions & education. Of course the teachers would be hired from the taxing country [Canada, US, UK, etc.].
...games like this give street violence & insanity a bad name. This can only be a bad influence on our children.;^)
Seriously, though, I really do agree. I had to do a double take when I saw how built these game characters were. The only way that this could be any good is with the game's story line, otherwise it'll be yet another fighting game.
As for Austin having developers modify the code - what makes you think that's possible? You assume they have a bunch of people just sitting around with nothing important to do. My guess is that if they have full time programmers, they're busy, and if they just give development contracts to private bidders, it would cost money they may not want to spend.
Is that what I assume? I said, "If I understand this situation correctly, then I believe that Austin should get the software developers to modify the code to work with OOo.", meaning that they should pay the people who develop the software that works with MS software. That's why I said, "If I understand correctly". I got the impression that they are using software developed by some other company, & the software only works with MS Office. In short, I'm hoping that the other company develops compatibility for OOo.
For example, I can't fully switch because I need the chart/graph capabilities that Excel has, but OOo doesn't.
Just out of curiosity, what is that capability that you need? I don't ask to be argumentative. I ask out of curiosity, knowing that there are some chart/graph capabilities buried in there somewhere.
For Austin, it's a specific application.
If I understand this situation correctly, then I believe that Austin should get the software developers to modify the code to work with OOo. In exchange, Austin could pay them some money, plus Austin could make mention of them and/or give a testimonial. This should help to increase sales of that software, which means that it is much less risky to embark on such a venture.
Thanks for the explanation. I must say, though, that although that scenario could happen, I'm not sure that I would call it "being used against them". With GPL software, you still don't get a whole lot of money for your software. In the above scenario, the customers win because they get better software. The proprietary software wouldn't have been added in the GPL software, so that means low quality or less featured software. In the above scenario, the free software developers don't loose, because they are supposed to check ahead of time to see whether or not it is profitable to release their software. In some cases it is, because you get to be that company gets to be the 1 that sets the standard. There are very few hard & fast rules. It's mostly determined by market conditions & risk [or lack thereof].
With either licensing, if the free software guys want more features, then they have to add them with free software. I look @ it this way: you have X number of people who wish to create software; some of them want to create free software; the remainder want to create proprietary software; the BSD license allows all of them to create & compete, whereas the GPL only allows the "some" to create with no competition. I see you seeing it as this way: the GPL requires the "remainder" to either do it the GPL way or start from scratch. I say that in that situation, the consumer is the looser, because the costs are passed down to the consumer if they start from scratch or there is no money to be made if they open their source.
I think that the best mix is to have open standards for all protocols & APIs, etc., & the ability to link to libraries.
The risk is that someone could take UserBSD, and for a small fortune, make something better but closed source and patented. Then the work that everyone else put into it would be used against them.
How could it be used against them? They still have their copies, & they can continue to develop it. Maybe I misunderstand the lincensing?
Note: I'm not entirely sure about which is the best place to reply, so I thought that I would just reply where the dicussion is, as opposed to where you got my attention.
From the message with which you got my attention, it seems that they need hands on experience more than text books. Perhaps I misunderstand you. From here, it seems that they need more power to do the things that they already want to do.
I suppose that the people creating the power grid need to be sold on solar power, because of all countries, the African countries would probably get the best use of it, year round.
The users of the power need to be sold on it as well. I get the impression that they are much like westerners in that they are used to getting their power out of the wall. The folks need to realize that the bottle neck isn't their understanding of computers, but their understanding of electricity & generating it. By bringing in power, they will help way more people than they will by teaching computers.
I agree with you. I think that this idea that the fellow has is not as easy as it looks. He admits to not knowing much about networking. I don't understand how he even hopes to get the computer(s) set up. Instead of us teaching him from scratch, why doesn't he gather up some of his own money & send it to a professional. Of course, once that's done, he can deal with the electricity problems.
Not only that; he has to bear in mind that free hand outs are the exact opposite of what these people need. Think about that for a moment. Everybody should try to imagine what the black friend [he was black wasn't he? I'm not trying to be racist; I'm trying to keep tabs on the people involved] will do once he can afford his own computer(s). I doubt that the friend will want to donate them to a university. Besides, who said that the friend really wanted to have a computer? There is the "Wow! Can I have that for free?" type of desire, & then there's the "Cool! I'll buy 1." type of desire. In the case of the former, when the person is asked to pay, he'll often sing a different song: "Uh, not now. Maybe later."; or "A foobar for that price? It's not worth it.". I think that there needs to be a lot of changing in the mind sets of the recepients.
Before we start sending computers over there, we really need to ask ourselves how much benefit people will get out the devices. It's not as if dead tree texts are going to hinder their learning of reading, writing, arithmatic, other pressing subjects.
Please don't interpret my question as argumentative. I'm asking because I'm not as technically inclined in the area of relays & mail servers.
Why don't people publish fake email address lists? This reminds me of that plum killer spam thing, where it would allow spambots to harvest fake email addresses. Isn't it possible to distribute fake lists?
Basically, the problem with mass transit is getting a mass of people all going from the same place to a the same destination. For most commutes, e.g. to and from the office, this simply is not the case. Unless you want to force everybody who works in a certain office building to all live in a certain suburb.
An interesting point about the transit system in the GVRD [Greater Vancouver Regional District], which I use, is that it has a few long lines of travel. In other words, because it is long, & because it travels in a variety of areas, people end up using it quite a bit. A bunch will get on @ the start, & then get off along the way, as people get on along the way. I think the key is having a variety for stablity. I guess that I'm speaking about a bus route or 2, whereas you seem to be speaking about an overall system. I guess my point is that it would be nice if the people running the system would try to bear that in mind, & make more routes profitable.
Just to emphasize the variety idea: in my city, there is a route that runs through some fairly run down neighbourhoods, & yet there is a high frequency. The neighbourhoods aren't slums by any measure, but you can tell that nobody seems to be doing well, & it appears to be ugly overall.
I think that another way to promote transit is to promote it by marketing to specific customers. With infrequent routes, you probably want to know about alternate routings that will get you from point A to B, & would prefer to have everything mixed into 1 schedule. Perhaps the marketers should try to send out some promotional brochures just while the route is new or has been upgraded in frequency. With frequent routes, you probably want to know what other frequent routes connect to them, so that you can move about without having worry about schedule timings. You might also want to have a listing of what kinds of businesses are along those routes. It could be like a yellow pages.
I'm in the process of making some of these brochures & schedules. I'm hoping to start a project on the Internet where people can customized information. The information would be given by volunteers for the areas that interest them personally. I would call these brochures, TIPs [Transit Information Packages], because they are more than schedules & maps, & because everybody likes a good acronym.:^)
If anybody is interested in what I got, then let me know.
At each step, you have individualized transportation
The problem with individualized transportation is that the vehicle that you ride in takes up a proportionately large amount of room. In this case, it would make the sky look very messy to see tons of vehicles flying over your home. There are some planes now, but I can tolerate that.
When mass transit is implemented without the politics [almost impossible, unfortunately], then you can have an extremely efficient system. We had a lot of politics go into ours, but it's not too bad.
According to the bug reports, I don't know.:^) Seriously, I think that is a K6-3, but it is so poorly documented by AMD. You have to look in/proc/cpuinfo [or whatever it is called], & compare the flags to the bug reports. Even then, it still may not work. I know that for a fact because I tried all of the K6 alternatives & it would fail during the gcc compile as well. I had to end up using i586. It was kind of sad, but @ least I finished installing it.
It just happens that I finished installing the kernel & KDE yesterday.
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There is a Canadian game called, Poleconomy. It has 2 variations. 1 is economics based. The other is politics based. Unfortunately, the latter can be hard to play because of the complexities of politics, plus feelings might get personal.
Also, there are 2 tracks in this game. Just like your game, the inner track gets rarely used.
There would have to be some kind of special bonus in there to lure people into inner tracks.
As the other fellow said, your pitfalls are correct. My brother tried making a card game which had too many of those pitfalls.
Also, bear in mind that I only gave examples. Perhaps the company could offer some kind of work experience instead of educational training.
When I say "best", I'm referring to the greatest opportunity, not the highest paid or prestigious. If a man gets laid off 4 years before his retirement, then he should be able to use the credits towards almost any education.
This sounds very protectionist in flavour, but it's the exact opposite. When workers put their heart & soul into making a company great, then they should have some ownership in it. Because of their labour, the company now has the option of starting a new factory overseas. There is a lot of momentum in the company which was generated by the workers. Investors should be forced to factor this concept in their investment decisions.
Corporations shouldn't be allowed to exist. Their existence alone makes it too easy to do what they do. But then again, I don't understand corporate law. So, I can't really say that.
You paint such a dark future. I am almost inclined to agree with you. You are very insightful.
I've kind of speculated that we'll need to really hit rock bottom for a generation before we come up with new things to do.
1 way out of this is to get them to buy from us as well. I don't know how buisness minded they are, but I get the distinct impression that in the civilized countries, we tend to have better a mind set towards starting businesses. Maybe we could start businesses overseas, hire them to manufacture, & then sell it to them. If everyone of us did that, we'd certainly solve our financial problems.
Unfortunately, it all doesn't work that way. Perhaps there are other areas. Don't we have better health care & health care technology? Then why don't we send health care workers overseas to teach them & service them?
There's also teaching ESL.
Also, another thing that countries can do is tax the workers overseas. The idea being that the workers reap some of the benefits of being employed by consumers from Canada [or US or UK, etc.]. A significant portion of the taxes could be spent on ensuring better working conditions & education. Of course the teachers would be hired from the taxing country [Canada, US, UK, etc.].
...games like this give street violence & insanity a bad name. This can only be a bad influence on our children. ;^)
Seriously, though, I really do agree. I had to do a double take when I saw how built these game characters were. The only way that this could be any good is with the game's story line, otherwise it'll be yet another fighting game.
Take care.
Thanks for the explanation. I must say, though, that although that scenario could happen, I'm not sure that I would call it "being used against them". With GPL software, you still don't get a whole lot of money for your software. In the above scenario, the customers win because they get better software. The proprietary software wouldn't have been added in the GPL software, so that means low quality or less featured software. In the above scenario, the free software developers don't loose, because they are supposed to check ahead of time to see whether or not it is profitable to release their software. In some cases it is, because you get to be that company gets to be the 1 that sets the standard. There are very few hard & fast rules. It's mostly determined by market conditions & risk [or lack thereof].
With either licensing, if the free software guys want more features, then they have to add them with free software. I look @ it this way: you have X number of people who wish to create software; some of them want to create free software; the remainder want to create proprietary software; the BSD license allows all of them to create & compete, whereas the GPL only allows the "some" to create with no competition. I see you seeing it as this way: the GPL requires the "remainder" to either do it the GPL way or start from scratch. I say that in that situation, the consumer is the looser, because the costs are passed down to the consumer if they start from scratch or there is no money to be made if they open their source.
I think that the best mix is to have open standards for all protocols & APIs, etc., & the ability to link to libraries.
I read through all that, expecting humour to be mixed in. As it drew on & on without anything funny, I then expected a punch line.
Maybe the moderators were making fun of you.
Thanks. I appreciate that a lot.
What happened with this staging of the taking down of the statue? I never heard about it. Was the statue not taken down?
Note: I'm not entirely sure about which is the best place to reply, so I thought that I would just reply where the dicussion is, as opposed to where you got my attention.
From the message with which you got my attention, it seems that they need hands on experience more than text books. Perhaps I misunderstand you. From here, it seems that they need more power to do the things that they already want to do.
I suppose that the people creating the power grid need to be sold on solar power, because of all countries, the African countries would probably get the best use of it, year round.
The users of the power need to be sold on it as well. I get the impression that they are much like westerners in that they are used to getting their power out of the wall. The folks need to realize that the bottle neck isn't their understanding of computers, but their understanding of electricity & generating it. By bringing in power, they will help way more people than they will by teaching computers.
It's kind of sad really.
Did I misunderstand you?
I agree with you. I think that this idea that the fellow has is not as easy as it looks. He admits to not knowing much about networking. I don't understand how he even hopes to get the computer(s) set up. Instead of us teaching him from scratch, why doesn't he gather up some of his own money & send it to a professional. Of course, once that's done, he can deal with the electricity problems.
Not only that; he has to bear in mind that free hand outs are the exact opposite of what these people need. Think about that for a moment. Everybody should try to imagine what the black friend [he was black wasn't he? I'm not trying to be racist; I'm trying to keep tabs on the people involved] will do once he can afford his own computer(s). I doubt that the friend will want to donate them to a university. Besides, who said that the friend really wanted to have a computer? There is the "Wow! Can I have that for free?" type of desire, & then there's the "Cool! I'll buy 1." type of desire. In the case of the former, when the person is asked to pay, he'll often sing a different song: "Uh, not now. Maybe later."; or "A foobar for that price? It's not worth it.". I think that there needs to be a lot of changing in the mind sets of the recepients.
Before we start sending computers over there, we really need to ask ourselves how much benefit people will get out the devices. It's not as if dead tree texts are going to hinder their learning of reading, writing, arithmatic, other pressing subjects.
Please don't interpret my question as argumentative. I'm asking because I'm not as technically inclined in the area of relays & mail servers.
Why don't people publish fake email address lists? This reminds me of that plum killer spam thing, where it would allow spambots to harvest fake email addresses. Isn't it possible to distribute fake lists?
Just to emphasize the variety idea: in my city, there is a route that runs through some fairly run down neighbourhoods, & yet there is a high frequency. The neighbourhoods aren't slums by any measure, but you can tell that nobody seems to be doing well, & it appears to be ugly overall.
I think that another way to promote transit is to promote it by marketing to specific customers. With infrequent routes, you probably want to know about alternate routings that will get you from point A to B, & would prefer to have everything mixed into 1 schedule. Perhaps the marketers should try to send out some promotional brochures just while the route is new or has been upgraded in frequency. With frequent routes, you probably want to know what other frequent routes connect to them, so that you can move about without having worry about schedule timings. You might also want to have a listing of what kinds of businesses are along those routes. It could be like a yellow pages.
I'm in the process of making some of these brochures & schedules. I'm hoping to start a project on the Internet where people can customized information. The information would be given by volunteers for the areas that interest them personally. I would call these brochures, TIPs [Transit Information Packages], because they are more than schedules & maps, & because everybody likes a good acronym.
If anybody is interested in what I got, then let me know.
When mass transit is implemented without the politics [almost impossible, unfortunately], then you can have an extremely efficient system. We had a lot of politics go into ours, but it's not too bad.
The least that they could do is add AM-FM radio. Good grief!
It just happens that I finished installing the kernel & KDE yesterday.