...so, how about removing ALL digital rights management from the materials, and putting them up on the web? Suddenly, *someone* will have a copy of every movie, every nuance, every little clipped edit (there are fanbois for everything) FOREVER. Cost? Nothing.
(And yes, I know that some catastrophe could happen to our civilization, in which the internet would indeed go dark, like, say, a giant jet of relativistic particles from a nearby black hole. But in this case, all of humanity would be extinguished thus the loss of "Ice Pirates" and "The Muppet Movie" would perhaps not be such a big deal.)
Part of the problem, of course, is that the marketplace utterly ignores the need.
As an early adopter of HDTV, I have a toshiba set that doesn't have a built-in receiver. For well over the last year, I've been looking for an HD set-top receiver with no luck. Best Buy, Circuit City, and none of the usual electronics outlets carry or know anything about them, and until now I've been reluctant to buy an HD receiver until I've seen the signal quality for myself, thus making internet purchase less interesting.
Kucinich: - sees UFOs - he wants to give reparations to American blacks
Lots of sanity there.
He's an entertaining idealist, but has essentially no concept of how to PRACTICALLY get anything done; witness his bankrupting of Cleveland - he wanted to help everyone, with no real reference to what was in fact possible.
I'm less concerned about a single city, which would be devastating but survivable. What scares me more was the (2004?) near-miss of an asteroid that could have hit somewhere in Pakistan or India precisely when they were in the middle of a very tense standoff. With immature command/control systems, what are the odds that would escalate into a nuclear shooting war, which would kill not the 10's or 100's of thousands of a single strike, but the 10's or 100's of MILLIONS of the resulting conflict.
First, it's imminent, not immanent. Rather Freudian slip.
And again, this doesn't appear to me to be synthetic life any more than putting an artificial heart into a person and starting it up is giving them "artificial life". We're taking pieces (important ones), creating them synthetically, and sticking them into a living creature.
And this is a non-trivial distinction. The real question about life is a more metaphysical one: if we come to the point where we can move molecules on large scales like Legos, putting them all exactly where they should be compared to a model single-celled creature (for example), and when we can simultaneously 'insert' all the necessary electrochemical charges in the right places in the right proportions....will that creature 'pop' into living? I guess it goes to one's deep beliefs about whether "life" is something unique and non-physical, something essentially tangential to the chemistry and physics. In a sense it's a question fundamentally about God and the soul.
Not sure, but how much of this 'shortage' was deliberate by a subset of consumers that bought Wiis simply for speculative reasons?
I can find tons (right now I see 9000+) of Wiis on ebay at joke prices. Presumeably almost all of these will go back to the store within a week or two of Christmas.
"There is no conclusive evidence that playing violent videogames leads to violent acts."
I understand the motivation by gamers to press this argument. I've been playing FPS's since Doom1, loved most of them, and as far as I can tell I'm not a homocidal maniac. I've never shot a human, nor do I ever hope/intend to. The 'anti-game' community is simplistic and generally ignorant, so I can understand trying to undermine their every argument.
But (re the above statement) - really? I mean, if one claims that repeatedly watching (in this case, violent) imagery *doesn't* in any way change behavior and values, doesn't that ipso facto perjure the ENTIRE concept of our $multi-billion$ (trillion?) advertising industries?
IMO, actually no. Considering the pollution consequences (not to mention political consequences) of our fossil-fuel economy, I would say anything that accelerates our move away from them is good...including scarcity.
Track testing & engine design have MANY more goals than simple fuel economy. There's emissions, noise, wear & durability, a whole HOST of subjects.
I agree with your point about top speeds, but part of that is a red herring. Cars ARE safer to drive when they have better acceleration (to a point), and if they are geared lower and lower at the top end to allow maximum efficiency, well, then you get very high top speeds.
Finally, you DO understand that the price you pay for fuel in the UK includes an utterly ridiculous ~70% in taxes? I love when Euros imply that Americans somehow pay an unfairly subsidized price on gas when in fact ALL governments subsidize oil exploration, it's just that some then in turn rape the consumer to pay for huge social commitments.
If you insist that the increase of tax bills to further your particular moral ends is justified, then you really can't objectively claim that someone else pursuing their own moral agenda (or refusing to do so) is 'wrong'.
The FACT is that oil is still damned cheap in a relative sense. Even with our absurd gas taxes, a gallon of milk at the store is cheaper than a gallon of gasoline. Eventually, if the whole Scientology of 'peak oil' actually does come about (this time), the price of oil WILL RISE and you will see a consumer demand for high-mileage vehicles. To anticipate this and insist that everyone drive uncomfortable little economy cars TODAY simply because 'eventually' we'll need to actually delays the point when we will HAVE to abandon the petro system.
Maybe someone can enlighten me: are the CAFE standards based on the PRODUCT LINE of the car company, or on the average of all cars sold?
I mean, if it's an average of the product LINES, that's almost meaningless; a manufacturer could still offer the same slate of guzzling SUVs but then instead of offering 1 hybrid microcar they could offer 15 *slight* variations on that same design, pulling the average MPG for the product line over 35.
If it's based on total sales, I don't really see how that's fair. I don't sympathize much with giant automakers who (for example) insisted that airbags were going to cost $10,000 more per car, but to require that the market be interested in something it isn't willing to buy seems unreasonable.
"One of the most interesting things for future military historians will be how the US, and to a lesser extent the UK, have believed in the effecitveness of action at a distance warfare."
Actually, it's not some strange, illogical 'love' for distance warfare.
Certainly, in one sense it's a manpower issue - technology is indeed a force-multiplier, and historically for the west it's been about smaller cadres of soldiers facing much greater numbers of lower-tech opponents, consistently, for nearly the last 2000 years. If one sees a coming conflict with China, that would certainly be consistent.
Moreover, I'd suspect that future historians are more likely to point out that rich & indolent Western Societies, as the collective memory faded of what real oppression was like and as cynical politicians continued to cry "wolf" over threats that were actually insignificant, became less and less willing to bestir themselves from their couches to sacrifice anything (particularly lives) in their own defense.
In point of fact, for all the furor over the America's Army game, it's popularity in terms of online gaming is rather trivial.
Compared to WoW's 9+ million accounts, and the other data from http://www.mmogchart.com/ (granted, that's accounts, not current-online) AA is small-fry.
...we have far more to fear that our games are teaching kids to be Gordon Freeman than some Uncle-Sam-programmed killing machine. I actually don't understand why AA is so limited in popularity. I thought it was actually a fairly decent shooter, and the price is certainly right. But then again, I haven't been a l33t FPS player for probably a dozen years.
...millions of personal-injury lawyers cried out in pleasure at the idea of the galaxy's largest class-action damages lawsuit, and were suddenly silenced - by realizing that simply serving the summons on that bastard Fomalhaut (we know it was him, he's always been a troublemaker) would take longer than their lifespans.
Nevertheless, I'm sure a few are planning to file anyway this morning, "just in case".
"You don't need to know the exact capillary constriction/dilation response curve under all types of trauma to know that it's probably best not to whack yourself in the head with an axe handle."
True, but SOME level of comprehension of the cause and the specific effect is useful if you purport to TREAT the consequences of the problem. If you just got whacked in the head with an axe handle, no amount of foot-cream is going to help you.
It's even more important if you intend to prevent the problem happening again; in the abovementioned example, founding a company to profit from trading on axe-handle futures would be pointless to prevent being whacked again, no matter how many Grammy or Nobel prizes you've won.
- Cats playing piano - fart videos - stuff crashing & people hurting themselves - a study in the limitless narcissism of humanity....yeah, clearly, that's where I'm going to find the best medical advice! And it's FREE!
It seems pointless to build an economic game that nobody will play, or that (in the best possible world) will: - be played by a bunch of self-selected participants who are conscious of the testing and metrics, and thus will actively seek to 'game' them if possible. - be played by too small a group to draw reasonable statistical inferences (seriously, in their wildest dreams, do they expect more than 25,000 players?)
I would argue that it would make much more sense to approach Blizzard, sign NDA's out the wazoo, and get their buy-in to do economic research with their data. Granted, you don't have a complete tabula rasa, but the value of hundreds of millions of transactions should be enough to outweigh the capability to 'set up' experiments as in a lab.* I think that with this many actions going on, you could really draw some subtle data out of the world based on very small changes to how certain things are priced. IIRC Eve's doing this with an economics professor already.
* besides, as a WoW player, I'd love to have an economist speak to them at length about how some of their decisions occasionally really fark up their economics.
....she should get an award or something. That's a fantastic synthesis of practical, proven tech to make something even MORE high tech (and expensive).
Slashdot Mirror
...so, how about removing ALL digital rights management from the materials, and putting them up on the web? Suddenly, *someone* will have a copy of every movie, every nuance, every little clipped edit (there are fanbois for everything) FOREVER. Cost? Nothing.
(And yes, I know that some catastrophe could happen to our civilization, in which the internet would indeed go dark, like, say, a giant jet of relativistic particles from a nearby black hole. But in this case, all of humanity would be extinguished thus the loss of "Ice Pirates" and "The Muppet Movie" would perhaps not be such a big deal.)
Part of the problem, of course, is that the marketplace utterly ignores the need.
As an early adopter of HDTV, I have a toshiba set that doesn't have a built-in receiver. For well over the last year, I've been looking for an HD set-top receiver with no luck. Best Buy, Circuit City, and none of the usual electronics outlets carry or know anything about them, and until now I've been reluctant to buy an HD receiver until I've seen the signal quality for myself, thus making internet purchase less interesting.
That's where Phobos and Deimos came from as well.
Maybe they get a baby brother for Christmas!
Sodomsky?
Are you serious?
That's like....occuponymous.
You knew eventually these bastards would get so greedy that they'd start devouring their own tail.
Sad that we couldn't have had clear-thinking political leadership that weren't whores to special interests, to kill it as it should have been killed.
But as long as they end up attacking themselves out of existence, I guess I shouldn't complain too much.
Yeah, keep telling yourself that.
Kucinich:
- sees UFOs
- he wants to give reparations to American blacks
Lots of sanity there.
He's an entertaining idealist, but has essentially no concept of how to PRACTICALLY get anything done; witness his bankrupting of Cleveland - he wanted to help everyone, with no real reference to what was in fact possible.
....isn't that far off then?
4568 million years vs. somewhere around 6000 yrs. That's only 6 orders of magnitude, I mean, really they're just ZEROES.
I'm less concerned about a single city, which would be devastating but survivable.
What scares me more was the (2004?) near-miss of an asteroid that could have hit somewhere in Pakistan or India precisely when they were in the middle of a very tense standoff. With immature command/control systems, what are the odds that would escalate into a nuclear shooting war, which would kill not the 10's or 100's of thousands of a single strike, but the 10's or 100's of MILLIONS of the resulting conflict.
THAT'S terrifying.
First, it's imminent, not immanent. Rather Freudian slip.
And again, this doesn't appear to me to be synthetic life any more than putting an artificial heart into a person and starting it up is giving them "artificial life". We're taking pieces (important ones), creating them synthetically, and sticking them into a living creature.
And this is a non-trivial distinction. The real question about life is a more metaphysical one: if we come to the point where we can move molecules on large scales like Legos, putting them all exactly where they should be compared to a model single-celled creature (for example), and when we can simultaneously 'insert' all the necessary electrochemical charges in the right places in the right proportions....will that creature 'pop' into living? I guess it goes to one's deep beliefs about whether "life" is something unique and non-physical, something essentially tangential to the chemistry and physics. In a sense it's a question fundamentally about God and the soul.
Not sure, but how much of this 'shortage' was deliberate by a subset of consumers that bought Wiis simply for speculative reasons?
I can find tons (right now I see 9000+) of Wiis on ebay at joke prices. Presumeably almost all of these will go back to the store within a week or two of Christmas.
Not Nintendo's fault, really.
"There is no conclusive evidence that playing violent videogames leads to violent acts."
I understand the motivation by gamers to press this argument. I've been playing FPS's since Doom1, loved most of them, and as far as I can tell I'm not a homocidal maniac. I've never shot a human, nor do I ever hope/intend to. The 'anti-game' community is simplistic and generally ignorant, so I can understand trying to undermine their every argument.
But (re the above statement) - really? I mean, if one claims that repeatedly watching (in this case, violent) imagery *doesn't* in any way change behavior and values, doesn't that ipso facto perjure the ENTIRE concept of our $multi-billion$ (trillion?) advertising industries?
...I mean, there's only so much space in those tubes. If we don't want to run out, we have to limit what we put up there.
IMO, actually no. Considering the pollution consequences (not to mention political consequences) of our fossil-fuel economy, I would say anything that accelerates our move away from them is good...including scarcity.
Track testing & engine design have MANY more goals than simple fuel economy. There's emissions, noise, wear & durability, a whole HOST of subjects.
I agree with your point about top speeds, but part of that is a red herring. Cars ARE safer to drive when they have better acceleration (to a point), and if they are geared lower and lower at the top end to allow maximum efficiency, well, then you get very high top speeds.
Finally, you DO understand that the price you pay for fuel in the UK includes an utterly ridiculous ~70% in taxes? I love when Euros imply that Americans somehow pay an unfairly subsidized price on gas when in fact ALL governments subsidize oil exploration, it's just that some then in turn rape the consumer to pay for huge social commitments.
If you insist that the increase of tax bills to further your particular moral ends is justified, then you really can't objectively claim that someone else pursuing their own moral agenda (or refusing to do so) is 'wrong'.
The FACT is that oil is still damned cheap in a relative sense. Even with our absurd gas taxes, a gallon of milk at the store is cheaper than a gallon of gasoline. Eventually, if the whole Scientology of 'peak oil' actually does come about (this time), the price of oil WILL RISE and you will see a consumer demand for high-mileage vehicles. To anticipate this and insist that everyone drive uncomfortable little economy cars TODAY simply because 'eventually' we'll need to actually delays the point when we will HAVE to abandon the petro system.
Maybe someone can enlighten me: are the CAFE standards based on the PRODUCT LINE of the car company, or on the average of all cars sold?
I mean, if it's an average of the product LINES, that's almost meaningless; a manufacturer could still offer the same slate of guzzling SUVs but then instead of offering 1 hybrid microcar they could offer 15 *slight* variations on that same design, pulling the average MPG for the product line over 35.
If it's based on total sales, I don't really see how that's fair. I don't sympathize much with giant automakers who (for example) insisted that airbags were going to cost $10,000 more per car, but to require that the market be interested in something it isn't willing to buy seems unreasonable.
I dunno, WW2OL (ok, now it's Battleground Europe) has had a diehard cadre of roughly 10-15,000 paying subscribers for precisely this.
Maybe you're right, I'd suspect that 10k subscribers doesn't equate to much over 2k online at any time.
"One of the most interesting things for future military historians will be how the US, and to a lesser extent the UK, have believed in the effecitveness of action at a distance warfare."
Actually, it's not some strange, illogical 'love' for distance warfare.
Certainly, in one sense it's a manpower issue - technology is indeed a force-multiplier, and historically for the west it's been about smaller cadres of soldiers facing much greater numbers of lower-tech opponents, consistently, for nearly the last 2000 years. If one sees a coming conflict with China, that would certainly be consistent.
Moreover, I'd suspect that future historians are more likely to point out that rich & indolent Western Societies, as the collective memory faded of what real oppression was like and as cynical politicians continued to cry "wolf" over threats that were actually insignificant, became less and less willing to bestir themselves from their couches to sacrifice anything (particularly lives) in their own defense.
Compared to WoW's 9+ million accounts, and the other data from http://www.mmogchart.com/ (granted, that's accounts, not current-online) AA is small-fry.
According to Gamespy's stats at this moment:
"...Granted, it hasn't happened yet..."
It hasn't?
http://www.americasarmy.com/
?
...millions of personal-injury lawyers cried out in pleasure at the idea of the galaxy's largest class-action damages lawsuit, and were suddenly silenced - by realizing that simply serving the summons on that bastard Fomalhaut (we know it was him, he's always been a troublemaker) would take longer than their lifespans.
Nevertheless, I'm sure a few are planning to file anyway this morning, "just in case".
"You don't need to know the exact capillary constriction/dilation response curve under all types of trauma to know that it's probably best not to whack yourself in the head with an axe handle."
True, but SOME level of comprehension of the cause and the specific effect is useful if you purport to TREAT the consequences of the problem. If you just got whacked in the head with an axe handle, no amount of foot-cream is going to help you.
It's even more important if you intend to prevent the problem happening again; in the abovementioned example, founding a company to profit from trading on axe-handle futures would be pointless to prevent being whacked again, no matter how many Grammy or Nobel prizes you've won.
"No, uh, I just spilled paint on my lap. Although yes, I *am* quite happy to see you, Ms. Kidman."
- Cats playing piano ....yeah, clearly, that's where I'm going to find the best medical advice! And it's FREE!
- fart videos
- stuff crashing & people hurting themselves
- a study in the limitless narcissism of humanity
It seems pointless to build an economic game that nobody will play, or that (in the best possible world) will:
- be played by a bunch of self-selected participants who are conscious of the testing and metrics, and thus will actively seek to 'game' them if possible.
- be played by too small a group to draw reasonable statistical inferences (seriously, in their wildest dreams, do they expect more than 25,000 players?)
I would argue that it would make much more sense to approach Blizzard, sign NDA's out the wazoo, and get their buy-in to do economic research with their data. Granted, you don't have a complete tabula rasa, but the value of hundreds of millions of transactions should be enough to outweigh the capability to 'set up' experiments as in a lab.* I think that with this many actions going on, you could really draw some subtle data out of the world based on very small changes to how certain things are priced.
IIRC Eve's doing this with an economics professor already.
* besides, as a WoW player, I'd love to have an economist speak to them at length about how some of their decisions occasionally really fark up their economics.
....she should get an award or something. That's a fantastic synthesis of practical, proven tech to make something even MORE high tech (and expensive).