20 megapixels times 4 channels ( R, G, B, A ) is 80 megabytes, times the number of layers you put into the image, and you're easily talking several hundred megabytes, if not a gigabyte, just to hold the entirety of the image-data for a single picture in RAM.
That's assuming you only ever have one picture open at a time, and even then you need to add whatever the programs themselves use.
You don't typically *need* 8, but you don't need to be a very heavy user of photoshop on large pictures before it starts being noticeably superior to 4.
I don't think the comparison is fair. Because subsidies for behaviour seen as useful, is common all trough life, including as an adult. The thing with "first hit is free" for drugs is that's it's subsidising *bad* behaviour.
The government has multiple ways of making wanted behaviour cheaper, and/or making unwanted behaviour more expensive. Thus if I buy a book as an adult, it's VAT-free, whereas if I buy alcohol as an adult it's 25%VAT and carries an additional alcohol-tax.
These, and other strategies, change the price, in the hope that it'll influence our spending-habits.
I as a parent do the same thing, and see nothing wrong with it. That is, if my kids by sweets for their allowance, then that's fine but I don't support it further, while if they buy books or something else I consider useful, I often volunteer to pay half the price for them.
It's almost as if religious folks -know- that they're wrong. Thus to preserve their wrongheadedness, it's requires to not even learn about the alternatives. (presumably, learning would risk realising that the alternative theories are correct.)
Learning about something, doesn't require *agreeing* with it. I've read both the Koran and the Bible, and spend hundreds of hours learning about both. I don't *agree* with it,but it's still useful to understand it and know about it.
But religious folks are frequently panicked about the idea that they might have to learn about something they themselves don't agree with. In my opinion, they're scared. And rightfully so. The thing about reality is that it does not go away, even if you don't believe in it.
What typically happens is the monopolist raises prices significantly, extracting what economists call "monopoly rent". At the same time, the fact that the monopolist *could* lower prices, acts as a barrier to entry. Absent government-regulation, he'll do so selectively to bankrupt any new competition.
If McDonald sells $10 burgers from 1000 locations, but *could* sell $5 burgers if they wanted to, what will happen is that the day you open a $5 burgershop next to one of their restaurants, McDonalds will lower the price at that particular restaurant to $4 until you're bankrupt or give up, at which point they'll put it back to $10. They've got 999 other restaurants to fund the $1/burger temporary loss, while you've got only this one restaurant, thus they'll tend to win this by virtue of having deeper pockets.
This is illegal, offcourse. But that particular law is one example of government-regulation. My point was that *absent* government-intervention, competition will tend to disappear.
Yeah, but the article tries much too hard. For example, quoting the fact that hydropower needs concrete for dams, and some metal for the pipes and turbines.
We're not in any immediate danger of running out of concrete and a dam, once built has a very long lifetime with fairly low maintenance needed. The metal for the pipes and turbines is not consumed - you can easily melt-down a old broken turbine and re-use the metal in it.
We produce 90%+ of our electricity this way, and there's no reason hinted at in the article why we cannot do that for the next 1000 or the next 10000 years. The sun will go out one day, so technically nothing is *truly* renewable.
But in practice, if something is sustainable for the next several millenia, it's probably not worth worrying about it now.
The problem with non-renewables such as oil, is that our current consumption is not even sustainable over the next century.
This is the "help me choose" page when configuring a optiplex. None of those even come with VGA, and all of them (including the "standard graphics card") come with HDMI.
Yeah, but factoring in all that, and using the numbers from the article, all of that adds to £9 for a dozen cupcakes. Which then normally sells for £26.
No matter how you twist and turn it, that's a very healthy margin.
Yes. And the theoretical free market with perfect competition would also allow near-zero profits. Afterall if goods are perfectly substitutable and all buyers are perfectly informed, they'll all buy from the cheapest vendor, and thus the price will be just *slightly* above the production-cost of the second-cheapest producer.
Furthermore, in step 2, every company except the cheapest producer will go bankrupt, which eliminates the competition.
Free markets thus, by definition, cannot exist over time.
Yeah. And then they get a bazillion as a bonus as CEOs of a oil-company, because the price of oil (and thus the value of the company) has doubled in the last 5 years -- something which has *nothing* to do with their performance on the job.
At a -minimum- such bonuses should be tied to their firms performance, relative to other companies in the same bussiness. Otherwise you get mega-bonuses of the "rising tides lift all boats" variety.
Year one, Bank-manager takes a huge risk, which pays off, and he gets a nice fat bonus.
Year two, he does the same thing, but it goes wrong and the bank blows up. The bill for this, is picked up by the shareholders, and the banks creditors.
From the POV of the bank-manager (i.e. the one making the choice) taking the risk, is perfectly rational.
Indeed, one could say that about *anything* that's been shown to create problems in the real world: "but it wasn't implemented -properly-"
We've had several attempts at implementing communism, it's never worked very well in practice, and often the results have been disastrous. Arguing that the *next* implementation is going to be different, is an uphill battle.
In the real world, all free markets and capitalist systems, have also shown significant problems (less so than communism, but still significant) - arguing that this is only because those markets where never truly free, is similarily a uphill battle.
Going to an extreme, is seldom a good idea in practice, despite how nice it looks to the puritan ideologists. Reality is a mess. Compromise is needed. There's good and bad in all ideologies. Pick and mix, is the right policy.
There is such a thing as a over-regulated market. There is also such a thing as a under-regulated market.
Indeed, your democratic system is designed in such a way that you're pretty much guaranteed a two-party-system.
Proportional representation, or ranked choice is needed for a plurality of parties to thrive (and be *real* alternatives). (ranked choice is best for choice of president, proprtional representation is best when you're voting for a congress or similar group of politician)
We've got proportional elections, and consequently 7 parties in our storting. (roughly equivalent to congress) The political spectrum is *much* larger than the comparatively tiny Rep/Dem difference, ranging from socialist left, to conservative right. (the center of mass is more left than in USA though, to the point where even the democrats looks like right-wingers to most norwegians)
The odd thing here in Norway, is that the poor actually vote against their own interests. That's right, the ones who are poor, vote for political parties that would make them poorer, while those who are better off, more frequently vote for parties that do show concern for distribution.
My household is upper-middle-class with a pre-tax income of around $200K/year, after taxes we take home around $140K/year, we vote for parties that'd likely *increase* our tax-burden, and use that money to increase quality of public schools and make benefits more generous. You could think we're odd in this, but actually we're pretty average, that is, lots of people like us are concerned about the tendency for wealth to defy gravity and gravitate up, rather than tricle down.
It's fine to offer me a 10% stake in profits arising from my department, with a maximum of $10000 - if I'm *also* willing to accept a 10% stake in any losses arising from my department, with a maximum of $10000.
Practically, you do this by offering a 10% paycut, in exchange for a chance of a 20% bonus. (with average performance giving a 10% bonus, that is the same pay you had before)
Instead of $100K/year, you offer $90K/year, but with a bonus that's zero if the department underperforms the budget by 10% or more, growing to 20% if the department overperforms the budget by 10% or more.
Certainly people accept risk. The perverse insentive of bonuses though, is that the risk is taken by someone else than the person rewarded.
If someone offers you 5-fold return on your bets of tossing a 6 with fair dice, the bet is bad, and you'd be better off not taking it.
However if you're a hedge-fund-manager, and the money in the fund aren't yours, and if (say) 10% of the gains fall on you as a bonus, yet 0% of the potential losses, then the bet looks attractive. You've got a 1/6th chance of gaining 10% of 4 times someone elses money, and a 5/6th chance of gaining nothing. A huge win, from your perspective.
Sure. And the simple and well-tested way of getting lower birthrates, is by upping living-standard.
Europe as a whole is already basically reproducing at replacement-levels, USA is a little above, but much of that is due to first-generation immigrants outbreeding the average, and due to an overabundance of teenage pregnancies. (something that's fixable by reducing shame and increasing knowledge about contraception)
That'd work, if wealth was mostly the result of being a fool versus being smart. In the real world, being wealthy is mostly an accident of where you're born, and to which parents. Your own performance can push you up or down somewhat, but in the overwhelming majority of cases, people end up near where they started in social class and income.
Wealth-distribution is getting more and more unbalanced too, thus vote-with-your-wallet gives the upper 1% a much larger fraction of the total influence today, than it did 10, 20 or 50 years ago -- yet there is zero reason to believe that the smartness-gap between the top 1% and the rest, is any larger today than it was earlier.
Vote with your wallet, means my influence is 20 to 50 times larger than the average human, and I guess it'd be flattering to say that it's "deserved" because I'm so freaking smart. The truth of the matter though is that *most* of this discrepancy is attributable to where I was born and who my parents where. (Norway, 2 university-educated upper-middle-class parents)
But that's equivalent to -not- believing it. Because there's an infinite number of possible gods, and they've got an infinite variety of mutually contradictory wishes.
Thus, the answer translates to living your life, including all ethical and moral decisions, exactly as you would if no God existed. And expect the same results from all experiments you perform, as you would expect in a world with no God.
In what sense does such a god 'exist' ?
There's no practical difference between: "he don't exist" and "I'm going to act, in every manner, as if he don't exist"
In fairness, thermostats are typically braindead, so it's no wonder people have been conditioned to do this. Ancient termostats work with a metal-thingie that bends based on temperature. So you put it at say 70F, and what happens is that it keeps the heating up full-load until ~73F has been reached, then it completely turns off until ~65F is reached, repeat.
Even worse with heaters with significant termal mass, such as heated floors where the termal mass means that the room keeps raising in temperature for a significant time after the power has been cut. For a heated floor that is an inch of concrete, the time is on the order of 1-2 hours.
Set it for 70F, and it'll keep the power on full until the air is 73F, (the floor may be 85F), then it'll cut power, but the warm floor continues to heat the air until perhaps 80F. As time goes by, the temperature falls, and eventually the air is down to 68F, floor may be 65F and though you turn on the power, the air-temperature will continue to drop until the floor is warm enough to compensate heat-loss trough walls, which may take half an hour, and allow the air to drop to 60F.
Swinging between 60F and 80F is *sucky* when I said I wanted 70. You can put the termostat in the floor instead, this improves the situation slightly, in that the floor-temperature is then more constant, but this too means you must micro-manage it, because higher floor-temperature is required to compensate heat-loss when there's a lower outside temperature. (=larger heat-loss)
Electronic termostats are more accurate, but overwhelmingly equally stupid. There's no excuse for them not throttling the heating so as to slow heating when required temperature is nearing, and similarily, to turn the heat -somewhat- higher when the temperature is still-near-desired-but-falling.
They can use pulse-width-modulation with wide pulses. A 1000W heater-element that is turned on for 30 seconds out of every minute, is equivalent to 500W of constant heat, afterall.
To add insult to injury, each termostat in a house is typically an island, with no idea what goes on in the rest of the house. Yes, I'm aware there's solutions - they're immature and overpriced. (A central controller, for ELKO which is basically a fanless embedded PC with very modest specs (700Mhz ARM, 128MB ram, 1GB flash) for mounting in the fuse-box retails for $4200 which is just plain nuts - it's $50 worth of hardware. And even a fucking expensive system such as this, doesn't manage to control heating more fine-grained than "on" and "off".
From time to time maybe - but a lot of it simply haven't kept up. Most of the recent RPGs from Japan feel as if they're a decade old - they're childish, noisy, shallow and repetitive.
It's 2011, can we -not- have random wandering on a map until a encounter happens out of the blue ?
Can we have heroes who are firmly out of their diapers ? Even ones that have kissed a girl before and thus aren't more mortified by this prospect than by the idea of facing Lucifer himself ?
Can we -not- smash random boxes in random locations and have loot fall out of them ? It's boring by now. (okay, so the Japanese are not alone about this)
Yeah, I suppose there's still some gems, but it's been a while since I was impressed. I was with Valkyria Chronicles though - and I agree with you it had potential to appeal to a much wider audience.
Yeah - what *did* they do with Valkyria Chronicles ? It's splendid, but was marketed like crap. And there's been essentially nothing happening with it since it was released in april 2008.
One nessecary consequence, would be a lowering of real (as in inflation-adjusted) interest-rates. (including rates of return on stock)
Long-term is everything in investment - and with that long a lifespan, it becomes *much* easier to reach a point where you can live from interest alone, while still having many decades ahead of you. But that means a smaller fraction of the population actually contributing, which is only possible if productivity grows to match.
You currently need on the order of a million dollars to be able to live from interest alone (2-3 if you want to live comfortably), at 5% interest, you get a million by saving $100 a month for 75 years. Leaving you to spend the other half of your life doing nothing productive.
By using statistics. If a message is significantly longer than you'd expect, compared to how far you've calculated pi, then it's statistically odd.
Calulating pi to 1000 digits and somewhere finding 12 would be expected. finding 1234 would be odd, finding 12345 would be highly unlikely. Finding 12345678901234567890 in the first 1000 digits of pi, would be *extremely* odd.
At some point, believing that something that a message is a message, rather than random noise, becomes more rational than the alternative. Though I suppose you could always debate at *which* point that happens.
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20 megapixels times 4 channels ( R, G, B, A ) is 80 megabytes, times the number of layers you put into the image, and you're easily talking several hundred megabytes, if not a gigabyte, just to hold the entirety of the image-data for a single picture in RAM.
That's assuming you only ever have one picture open at a time, and even then you need to add whatever the programs themselves use.
You don't typically *need* 8, but you don't need to be a very heavy user of photoshop on large pictures before it starts being noticeably superior to 4.
axes suck for splitting firewood too. One guy with a hydraulic splitter does more splitting in an hour than a pro with an axe does in a day.
There's uses for an axe, sure. But for 90% of the situation where an axe *used* to be the right tool, it no longer is.
Same for paper-letters. There's uses for it, but 90% of the messages you get are better sent electronically.
I don't think the comparison is fair. Because subsidies for behaviour seen as useful, is common all trough life, including as an adult. The thing with "first hit is free" for drugs is that's it's subsidising *bad* behaviour.
The government has multiple ways of making wanted behaviour cheaper, and/or making unwanted behaviour more expensive. Thus if I buy a book as an adult, it's VAT-free, whereas if I buy alcohol as an adult it's 25%VAT and carries an additional alcohol-tax.
These, and other strategies, change the price, in the hope that it'll influence our spending-habits.
I as a parent do the same thing, and see nothing wrong with it. That is, if my kids by sweets for their allowance, then that's fine but I don't support it further, while if they buy books or something else I consider useful, I often volunteer to pay half the price for them.
It's almost as if religious folks -know- that they're wrong. Thus to preserve their wrongheadedness, it's requires to not even learn about the alternatives. (presumably, learning would risk realising that the alternative theories are correct.)
Learning about something, doesn't require *agreeing* with it. I've read both the Koran and the Bible, and spend hundreds of hours learning about both. I don't *agree* with it,but it's still useful to understand it and know about it.
But religious folks are frequently panicked about the idea that they might have to learn about something they themselves don't agree with. In my opinion, they're scared. And rightfully so. The thing about reality is that it does not go away, even if you don't believe in it.
Sadly, it doesn't work like that.
What typically happens is the monopolist raises prices significantly, extracting what economists call "monopoly rent". At the same time, the fact that the monopolist *could* lower prices, acts as a barrier to entry. Absent government-regulation, he'll do so selectively to bankrupt any new competition.
If McDonald sells $10 burgers from 1000 locations, but *could* sell $5 burgers if they wanted to, what will happen is that the day you open a $5 burgershop next to one of their restaurants, McDonalds will lower the price at that particular restaurant to $4 until you're bankrupt or give up, at which point they'll put it back to $10. They've got 999 other restaurants to fund the $1/burger temporary loss, while you've got only this one restaurant, thus they'll tend to win this by virtue of having deeper pockets.
This is illegal, offcourse. But that particular law is one example of government-regulation. My point was that *absent* government-intervention, competition will tend to disappear.
Yeah, but the article tries much too hard. For example, quoting the fact that hydropower needs concrete for dams, and some metal for the pipes and turbines.
We're not in any immediate danger of running out of concrete and a dam, once built has a very long lifetime with fairly low maintenance needed. The metal for the pipes and turbines is not consumed - you can easily melt-down a old broken turbine and re-use the metal in it.
We produce 90%+ of our electricity this way, and there's no reason hinted at in the article why we cannot do that for the next 1000 or the next 10000 years. The sun will go out one day, so technically nothing is *truly* renewable.
But in practice, if something is sustainable for the next several millenia, it's probably not worth worrying about it now.
The problem with non-renewables such as oil, is that our current consumption is not even sustainable over the next century.
This is the "help me choose" page when configuring a optiplex. None of those even come with VGA, and all of them (including the "standard graphics card") come with HDMI.
Yeah, but factoring in all that, and using the numbers from the article, all of that adds to £9 for a dozen cupcakes. Which then normally sells for £26.
No matter how you twist and turn it, that's a very healthy margin.
Yes. And the theoretical free market with perfect competition would also allow near-zero profits. Afterall if goods are perfectly substitutable and all buyers are perfectly informed, they'll all buy from the cheapest vendor, and thus the price will be just *slightly* above the production-cost of the second-cheapest producer.
Furthermore, in step 2, every company except the cheapest producer will go bankrupt, which eliminates the competition.
Free markets thus, by definition, cannot exist over time.
Yeah. And then they get a bazillion as a bonus as CEOs of a oil-company, because the price of oil (and thus the value of the company) has doubled in the last 5 years -- something which has *nothing* to do with their performance on the job.
At a -minimum- such bonuses should be tied to their firms performance, relative to other companies in the same bussiness. Otherwise you get mega-bonuses of the "rising tides lift all boats" variety.
That doesn't help.
Year one, Bank-manager takes a huge risk, which pays off, and he gets a nice fat bonus.
Year two, he does the same thing, but it goes wrong and the bank blows up. The bill for this, is picked up by the shareholders, and the banks creditors.
From the POV of the bank-manager (i.e. the one making the choice) taking the risk, is perfectly rational.
Indeed, one could say that about *anything* that's been shown to create problems in the real world: "but it wasn't implemented -properly-"
We've had several attempts at implementing communism, it's never worked very well in practice, and often the results have been disastrous. Arguing that the *next* implementation is going to be different, is an uphill battle.
In the real world, all free markets and capitalist systems, have also shown significant problems (less so than communism, but still significant) - arguing that this is only because those markets where never truly free, is similarily a uphill battle.
Going to an extreme, is seldom a good idea in practice, despite how nice it looks to the puritan ideologists. Reality is a mess. Compromise is needed. There's good and bad in all ideologies. Pick and mix, is the right policy.
There is such a thing as a over-regulated market. There is also such a thing as a under-regulated market.
Indeed, your democratic system is designed in such a way that you're pretty much guaranteed a two-party-system.
Proportional representation, or ranked choice is needed for a plurality of parties to thrive (and be *real* alternatives). (ranked choice is best for choice of president, proprtional representation is best when you're voting for a congress or similar group of politician)
We've got proportional elections, and consequently 7 parties in our storting. (roughly equivalent to congress) The political spectrum is *much* larger than the comparatively tiny Rep/Dem difference, ranging from socialist left, to conservative right. (the center of mass is more left than in USA though, to the point where even the democrats looks like right-wingers to most norwegians)
The odd thing here in Norway, is that the poor actually vote against their own interests. That's right, the ones who are poor, vote for political parties that would make them poorer, while those who are better off, more frequently vote for parties that do show concern for distribution.
My household is upper-middle-class with a pre-tax income of around $200K/year, after taxes we take home around $140K/year, we vote for parties that'd likely *increase* our tax-burden, and use that money to increase quality of public schools and make benefits more generous. You could think we're odd in this, but actually we're pretty average, that is, lots of people like us are concerned about the tendency for wealth to defy gravity and gravitate up, rather than tricle down.
Or balance the bonus by a malus:
It's fine to offer me a 10% stake in profits arising from my department, with a maximum of $10000 - if I'm *also* willing to accept a 10% stake in any losses arising from my department, with a maximum of $10000.
Practically, you do this by offering a 10% paycut, in exchange for a chance of a 20% bonus. (with average performance giving a 10% bonus, that is the same pay you had before)
Instead of $100K/year, you offer $90K/year, but with a bonus that's zero if the department underperforms the budget by 10% or more, growing to 20% if the department overperforms the budget by 10% or more.
Certainly people accept risk. The perverse insentive of bonuses though, is that the risk is taken by someone else than the person rewarded.
If someone offers you 5-fold return on your bets of tossing a 6 with fair dice, the bet is bad, and you'd be better off not taking it.
However if you're a hedge-fund-manager, and the money in the fund aren't yours, and if (say) 10% of the gains fall on you as a bonus, yet 0% of the potential losses, then the bet looks attractive. You've got a 1/6th chance of gaining 10% of 4 times someone elses money, and a 5/6th chance of gaining nothing. A huge win, from your perspective.
Sure. And the simple and well-tested way of getting lower birthrates, is by upping living-standard.
Europe as a whole is already basically reproducing at replacement-levels, USA is a little above, but much of that is due to first-generation immigrants outbreeding the average, and due to an overabundance of teenage pregnancies. (something that's fixable by reducing shame and increasing knowledge about contraception)
That'd work, if wealth was mostly the result of being a fool versus being smart. In the real world, being wealthy is mostly an accident of where you're born, and to which parents. Your own performance can push you up or down somewhat, but in the overwhelming majority of cases, people end up near where they started in social class and income.
Wealth-distribution is getting more and more unbalanced too, thus vote-with-your-wallet gives the upper 1% a much larger fraction of the total influence today, than it did 10, 20 or 50 years ago -- yet there is zero reason to believe that the smartness-gap between the top 1% and the rest, is any larger today than it was earlier.
Vote with your wallet, means my influence is 20 to 50 times larger than the average human, and I guess it'd be flattering to say that it's "deserved" because I'm so freaking smart. The truth of the matter though is that *most* of this discrepancy is attributable to where I was born and who my parents where. (Norway, 2 university-educated upper-middle-class parents)
Even in jurisdictions where that's the case, you can generally hire someone for a single project.
Thus you hire them for some 3-month project, and use their performance on that as the basis for whether to hire them permanently, or not.
But that's equivalent to -not- believing it. Because there's an infinite number of possible gods, and they've got an infinite variety of mutually contradictory wishes.
Thus, the answer translates to living your life, including all ethical and moral decisions, exactly as you would if no God existed. And expect the same results from all experiments you perform, as you would expect in a world with no God.
In what sense does such a god 'exist' ?
There's no practical difference between: "he don't exist" and "I'm going to act, in every manner, as if he don't exist"
In fairness, thermostats are typically braindead, so it's no wonder people have been conditioned to do this. Ancient termostats work with a metal-thingie that bends based on temperature. So you put it at say 70F, and what happens is that it keeps the heating up full-load until ~73F has been reached, then it completely turns off until ~65F is reached, repeat.
Even worse with heaters with significant termal mass, such as heated floors where the termal mass means that the room keeps raising in temperature for a significant time after the power has been cut. For a heated floor that is an inch of concrete, the time is on the order of 1-2 hours.
Set it for 70F, and it'll keep the power on full until the air is 73F, (the floor may be 85F), then it'll cut power, but the warm floor continues to heat the air until perhaps 80F. As time goes by, the temperature falls, and eventually the air is down to 68F, floor may be 65F and though you turn on the power, the air-temperature will continue to drop until the floor is warm enough to compensate heat-loss trough walls, which may take half an hour, and allow the air to drop to 60F.
Swinging between 60F and 80F is *sucky* when I said I wanted 70. You can put the termostat in the floor instead, this improves the situation slightly, in that the floor-temperature is then more constant, but this too means you must micro-manage it, because higher floor-temperature is required to compensate heat-loss when there's a lower outside temperature. (=larger heat-loss)
Electronic termostats are more accurate, but overwhelmingly equally stupid. There's no excuse for them not throttling the heating so as to slow heating when required temperature is nearing, and similarily, to turn the heat -somewhat- higher when the temperature is still-near-desired-but-falling.
They can use pulse-width-modulation with wide pulses. A 1000W heater-element that is turned on for 30 seconds out of every minute, is equivalent to 500W of constant heat, afterall.
To add insult to injury, each termostat in a house is typically an island, with no idea what goes on in the rest of the house. Yes, I'm aware there's solutions - they're immature and overpriced. (A central controller, for ELKO which is basically a fanless embedded PC with very modest specs (700Mhz ARM, 128MB ram, 1GB flash) for mounting in the fuse-box retails for $4200 which is just plain nuts - it's $50 worth of hardware. And even a fucking expensive system such as this, doesn't manage to control heating more fine-grained than "on" and "off".
From time to time maybe - but a lot of it simply haven't kept up. Most of the recent RPGs from Japan feel as if they're a decade old - they're childish, noisy, shallow and repetitive.
It's 2011, can we -not- have random wandering on a map until a encounter happens out of the blue ?
Can we have heroes who are firmly out of their diapers ? Even ones that have kissed a girl before and thus aren't more mortified by this prospect than by the idea of facing Lucifer himself ?
Can we -not- smash random boxes in random locations and have loot fall out of them ? It's boring by now. (okay, so the Japanese are not alone about this)
Yeah, I suppose there's still some gems, but it's been a while since I was impressed. I was with Valkyria Chronicles though - and I agree with you it had potential to appeal to a much wider audience.
Yeah - what *did* they do with Valkyria Chronicles ? It's splendid, but was marketed like crap. And there's been essentially nothing happening with it since it was released in april 2008.
One nessecary consequence, would be a lowering of real (as in inflation-adjusted) interest-rates. (including rates of return on stock)
Long-term is everything in investment - and with that long a lifespan, it becomes *much* easier to reach a point where you can live from interest alone, while still having many decades ahead of you. But that means a smaller fraction of the population actually contributing, which is only possible if productivity grows to match.
You currently need on the order of a million dollars to be able to live from interest alone (2-3 if you want to live comfortably), at 5% interest, you get a million by saving $100 a month for 75 years. Leaving you to spend the other half of your life doing nothing productive.
By using statistics. If a message is significantly longer than you'd expect, compared to how far you've calculated pi, then it's statistically odd.
Calulating pi to 1000 digits and somewhere finding 12 would be expected. finding 1234 would be odd, finding 12345 would be highly unlikely. Finding 12345678901234567890 in the first 1000 digits of pi, would be *extremely* odd.
At some point, believing that something that a message is a message, rather than random noise, becomes more rational than the alternative. Though I suppose you could always debate at *which* point that happens.