Some people like to work. My step-grandpa is over 90 years old and he till does yard work in yard with covered in trees, takes care of chickens, and plants a garden. Up until a few years ago, he had a lot that he farmed corn on with his tractor. He doesn't do it because he has to. He does it because he likes to.
If I was him, I would take all that saved money and spend it traveling the world.
I am more worried about traditional computers following this trend as the average Joe finds all his non-productive computer usage can be done on a tablet and gaming console. Power users, productive users, and PC gamers would left spending even more money on equipment than they already do.
The world is not divided neatly into "the straight edge public" and "junkies who will do anything for drugs".
Perhaps not, but I would argue the decrease in violent crime, being able to zero out cost of "The War on Drugs", being able to make drug use as safe as possible, and the ability to regulate the industry is worth the possibility that there are a few more drug users or the current drug users do more drugs.
We best off making drug use as open and safe as possible now and spendinf more time and resources on educating and encouraging people to stay away from drugs from the start. It is a cultural issue not a criminal one.
If it is priced right, there are non-streaming alternatives, offline sycing, and several streaming vendors, I have no problem paying for streaming music. I have an issue when I am expected to pay retail/purchased prices for streaming/renting. Rdio's and Spotify's $10 per month price point is fine by me. I can easily and legally move for artist to artist without having to worry about buying crap. If I don't like a artist/song, I move to the next one. Now is only Rdio would allow local playback within their app.
At the end of the day you have to have more interceptors than I have missiles.
Not if my interceptors are laser or other energy weapon based. Think Missile Command (loved that game at the time...) Sure we may be a ways away from that now, or I should say as far as the *public* knows we may be a ways away from that, but we'll get there...
Energy generation is still limited and high-capacity capacitors only recharge so quickly.
Getting taxing drug sales is just a way of getting more people to consider the argument. Here are the better arguments.
The fact of the matter is that people who want to do drugs, do drugs. They will find a way to get access to them. Because it can only be sold by shady individuals, it is easy for these dealers to push harder drugs or spike their drugs with more dangerous elements. In other words, you are making the health risks even worse than they were already by banning drugs. If drugs were legal, they could be make by reputable companies that have something to loose if they make bad products.
Black markets form around banned products that are in demand. Since drug dealers cannot go to the police with their problems, they take matters into their own hands. This causes a lot of violence between the various dealers. By removing the ban, you can potentially decrease the violence (and collateral damage) associated with drugs.
Because their is a high risk associated with dealing/making drugs, drugs can be priced at a premium. This is why gangs and cartels use drugs to fund their enterprises. By making drugs legal, you lower the cost of drugs such that gangs and cartels can no longer justify taking the risk. You essentially defund the gangs and cartels. Without funds, they become significantly smaller threat to society.
All in all, if individuals are going to do drugs anyway, wouldn't you rather it be out in the open instead of a dark hole? In the open, the government has some level of control over it, it can be made as safe as possible, and bring in some level of income. In a dark hole, it will fund violent crime, be extremely costly and futile to stop, and be increasingly unsafe.
Societies best way to stop drug use it not to ban it but to educate in order to change cultural norms. Look at smoking. At no point did we ban it but a significantly lower percentage of people use it today than they use to. Of course, banning is easier and it makes people feel good. People don't usually like to take the hard (but effective) route. They want a easy solution right now.
I have heard of similar hacking sites that using Onion sites to host their stores within the Tor network anonymously. I would assume they do something similar. The same protocols are used to protect online political activists and speech in repressed countries. Anonymity brings out both the best and worst of society.
I guess that is a intelligent way of disarming most while staying armed. They will NEVER collect all the guns even if they tried. Pandora's box has already been opened. The most they can hope to do is collect and destroy all legally owned guns. That means all respectable, law-abiding, gun-owning citizens will be stripped of their guns while many criminals will still have them. All in all, if the president is armed until all other guns are destroyed, the president will always be armed. The fact of the matter is the biggest deterrent to adversarial gun use is a more-power, more-effective gun. Why do you think that the US keeps nuclear weapons while actively making sure countries like Iran cannot create or get them? They want to make sure they always have the upper hand if they get in a fight. I am sure they would love to disarm China, Russia, and other nuclear toting countries but that is pretty much impossible. Instead they focus on keeping out new players.
And really, you can't sell phones at a loss and make up the difference in games, like you can with consoles.
Microsoft has its own market on its phones and I believe are you locked into their market if you have one of their phones. If they can get traction, they could indeed sell phones at a loss and make up the difference in apps/games.
Didn't Google do something pretty close to that with the Nexus 7? They made extremely low profit on Nexus 7 hardware. Of course, they knew that almost no one uses anything but the default app market. They were trying to compete with the Kindle Fire's price because it doesn't use Google's market. They wanted people to prefer their market over all others. After all, if nothing is wrong with the old market app, why would you switch when your app purchases are already registered with your current market. You would have to use the new one side-by-side just to be sure that you can continue to download and update previously purchased apps.
The problem is an Apple Mac truck would be really small, thin, and made of aluminum. I don't know who would want to drive that death trap. At least all the corners would be rounded.
Another reason I like the idea of local governments managing their own local network is that it increases the number of customers interested in networking equipment and technology. If everything was controlled by one entity, there would only be one customer for network technology. This would likely lead to only one or two companies getting contracts for equipment. They could charge whatever they wanted because eventually everyone else will be so far behind them in research that it wouldn't make sense to go with another company. If every town controlled their own network, the customer based is much larger. This allows for a market that would encourage a greater number of companies to exist and leaves the possibility for new players to get into the market.
I think it would probably be best if the local governments owned a high bandwidth infrastructure in town and then simply rented off the bandwidth to ISPs via auction. The town could decide the appropriate number of ISPs and auction accordingly. The town can have a plan for how often they want to update the infrastructure and budget accordingly. The ISPs would be responsible for the street to house wiring, being a point of contact for problems, and management of their virtual bandwidth segment. The city would be responsible for infrastructure upgrades and maintenance. Of course, if they wanted they could contract out those responsibilities as well. ISPs could also build and own the long-distance, backbone lines between towns.
The $100 pricing is for home use not business use. I haven't checked but I am sure the business price is more. By the way, 21 * $10 = $210, 1 * $100 = $100, $210 > $100. Based on your numbers, it is more lucrative to sell at $10. If you are going to use made-up numbers at least use numbers that make sense with your argument.
You're looking at it the wrong way. The device works, but like most things man made, it has shortcomings. Imagine the learning experience the kids will have in overcoming these limitations.
What if the next version of the R-Pi contains a fix to these problems developed by a bunch of kids in one of those schools? Wouldn't that be cool?
If I am understanding it right, they are doing a controlled disconnection. A given node handles multiple solar systems. When battle started, the network moved the non-battle solar systems to other nodes. This required the users be disconnected from the node and connected to the new node. In other words, the only people being disconnected were the people not part of the battle. Not sure if they were automatically connected to the new node or if they actually had to log in again.
As far as the time slowdown goes, it is more acceptable than 3,000 players all getting knocked off in the middle of an active battlefield. The last thing you want is to have to log back into the center of a battle blind. This is especially true when there are several thousand US dollars worth of in-game equipment involved. If you read the article, the combined losses by the end of the battle were $24,000 based on the conversion of in-game money to US dollars.
$100 a year is way too much for the average home user. I bought a copy of Microsoft Office 2007 for around $70 at the student pricing when I was in college. I have been using the same copy since. So far the price per year has been $70 / 6 years = $11.67/year. That assumes I will buy a new copy sometime this year which I most likely will not. $5 to $10 a year would be more reasonable. Since graduating, my average usage of Microsoft Office at home is probably under 10 hours per year.
Windows XP still runs my entire business. It doesn't wear out.
Not in the normal sense anyway. You still have to worry about security vulnerabilities. All commercials software reaches a point where it is no longer supported and doesn't get any new security patches. You only got 427 more days (April 1, 2014) of updates before you are going to have to move off Windows XP.
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Some people like to work. My step-grandpa is over 90 years old and he till does yard work in yard with covered in trees, takes care of chickens, and plants a garden. Up until a few years ago, he had a lot that he farmed corn on with his tractor. He doesn't do it because he has to. He does it because he likes to.
If I was him, I would take all that saved money and spend it traveling the world.
I am more worried about traditional computers following this trend as the average Joe finds all his non-productive computer usage can be done on a tablet and gaming console. Power users, productive users, and PC gamers would left spending even more money on equipment than they already do.
You can drive a Godzilla?!
Actually that was the best part the worst part was the drugs and criminal hacking.
The world is not divided neatly into "the straight edge public" and "junkies who will do anything for drugs".
Perhaps not, but I would argue the decrease in violent crime, being able to zero out cost of "The War on Drugs", being able to make drug use as safe as possible, and the ability to regulate the industry is worth the possibility that there are a few more drug users or the current drug users do more drugs.
We best off making drug use as open and safe as possible now and spendinf more time and resources on educating and encouraging people to stay away from drugs from the start. It is a cultural issue not a criminal one.
That is why people start bands.
If it is priced right, there are non-streaming alternatives, offline sycing, and several streaming vendors, I have no problem paying for streaming music. I have an issue when I am expected to pay retail/purchased prices for streaming/renting. Rdio's and Spotify's $10 per month price point is fine by me. I can easily and legally move for artist to artist without having to worry about buying crap. If I don't like a artist/song, I move to the next one. Now is only Rdio would allow local playback within their app.
At the end of the day you have to have more interceptors than I have missiles.
Not if my interceptors are laser or other energy weapon based. Think Missile Command (loved that game at the time...) Sure we may be a ways away from that now, or I should say as far as the *public* knows we may be a ways away from that, but we'll get there...
Energy generation is still limited and high-capacity capacitors only recharge so quickly.
Getting taxing drug sales is just a way of getting more people to consider the argument. Here are the better arguments.
The fact of the matter is that people who want to do drugs, do drugs. They will find a way to get access to them. Because it can only be sold by shady individuals, it is easy for these dealers to push harder drugs or spike their drugs with more dangerous elements. In other words, you are making the health risks even worse than they were already by banning drugs. If drugs were legal, they could be make by reputable companies that have something to loose if they make bad products.
Black markets form around banned products that are in demand. Since drug dealers cannot go to the police with their problems, they take matters into their own hands. This causes a lot of violence between the various dealers. By removing the ban, you can potentially decrease the violence (and collateral damage) associated with drugs.
Because their is a high risk associated with dealing/making drugs, drugs can be priced at a premium. This is why gangs and cartels use drugs to fund their enterprises. By making drugs legal, you lower the cost of drugs such that gangs and cartels can no longer justify taking the risk. You essentially defund the gangs and cartels. Without funds, they become significantly smaller threat to society.
All in all, if individuals are going to do drugs anyway, wouldn't you rather it be out in the open instead of a dark hole? In the open, the government has some level of control over it, it can be made as safe as possible, and bring in some level of income. In a dark hole, it will fund violent crime, be extremely costly and futile to stop, and be increasingly unsafe.
Societies best way to stop drug use it not to ban it but to educate in order to change cultural norms. Look at smoking. At no point did we ban it but a significantly lower percentage of people use it today than they use to. Of course, banning is easier and it makes people feel good. People don't usually like to take the hard (but effective) route. They want a easy solution right now.
I have heard of similar hacking sites that using Onion sites to host their stores within the Tor network anonymously. I would assume they do something similar. The same protocols are used to protect online political activists and speech in repressed countries. Anonymity brings out both the best and worst of society.
I guess that is a intelligent way of disarming most while staying armed. They will NEVER collect all the guns even if they tried. Pandora's box has already been opened. The most they can hope to do is collect and destroy all legally owned guns. That means all respectable, law-abiding, gun-owning citizens will be stripped of their guns while many criminals will still have them. All in all, if the president is armed until all other guns are destroyed, the president will always be armed. The fact of the matter is the biggest deterrent to adversarial gun use is a more-power, more-effective gun. Why do you think that the US keeps nuclear weapons while actively making sure countries like Iran cannot create or get them? They want to make sure they always have the upper hand if they get in a fight. I am sure they would love to disarm China, Russia, and other nuclear toting countries but that is pretty much impossible. Instead they focus on keeping out new players.
They would just claim it is a square with rounded corners.
And really, you can't sell phones at a loss and make up the difference in games, like you can with consoles.
Microsoft has its own market on its phones and I believe are you locked into their market if you have one of their phones. If they can get traction, they could indeed sell phones at a loss and make up the difference in apps/games.
Didn't Google do something pretty close to that with the Nexus 7? They made extremely low profit on Nexus 7 hardware. Of course, they knew that almost no one uses anything but the default app market. They were trying to compete with the Kindle Fire's price because it doesn't use Google's market. They wanted people to prefer their market over all others. After all, if nothing is wrong with the old market app, why would you switch when your app purchases are already registered with your current market. You would have to use the new one side-by-side just to be sure that you can continue to download and update previously purchased apps.
The problem is an Apple Mac truck would be really small, thin, and made of aluminum. I don't know who would want to drive that death trap. At least all the corners would be rounded.
Another reason I like the idea of local governments managing their own local network is that it increases the number of customers interested in networking equipment and technology. If everything was controlled by one entity, there would only be one customer for network technology. This would likely lead to only one or two companies getting contracts for equipment. They could charge whatever they wanted because eventually everyone else will be so far behind them in research that it wouldn't make sense to go with another company. If every town controlled their own network, the customer based is much larger. This allows for a market that would encourage a greater number of companies to exist and leaves the possibility for new players to get into the market.
I think it would probably be best if the local governments owned a high bandwidth infrastructure in town and then simply rented off the bandwidth to ISPs via auction. The town could decide the appropriate number of ISPs and auction accordingly. The town can have a plan for how often they want to update the infrastructure and budget accordingly. The ISPs would be responsible for the street to house wiring, being a point of contact for problems, and management of their virtual bandwidth segment. The city would be responsible for infrastructure upgrades and maintenance. Of course, if they wanted they could contract out those responsibilities as well. ISPs could also build and own the long-distance, backbone lines between towns.
The $100 pricing is for home use not business use. I haven't checked but I am sure the business price is more. By the way, 21 * $10 = $210, 1 * $100 = $100, $210 > $100. Based on your numbers, it is more lucrative to sell at $10. If you are going to use made-up numbers at least use numbers that make sense with your argument.
You're looking at it the wrong way. The device works, but like most things man made, it has shortcomings. Imagine the learning experience the kids will have in overcoming these limitations.
What if the next version of the R-Pi contains a fix to these problems developed by a bunch of kids in one of those schools? Wouldn't that be cool?
It's not a bug. It's a feature!
You are in marketing, aren't you?
If I am understanding it right, they are doing a controlled disconnection. A given node handles multiple solar systems. When battle started, the network moved the non-battle solar systems to other nodes. This required the users be disconnected from the node and connected to the new node. In other words, the only people being disconnected were the people not part of the battle. Not sure if they were automatically connected to the new node or if they actually had to log in again.
As far as the time slowdown goes, it is more acceptable than 3,000 players all getting knocked off in the middle of an active battlefield. The last thing you want is to have to log back into the center of a battle blind. This is especially true when there are several thousand US dollars worth of in-game equipment involved. If you read the article, the combined losses by the end of the battle were $24,000 based on the conversion of in-game money to US dollars.
All in all, an impressive feat.
Most likely.
$100 a year is way too much for the average home user. I bought a copy of Microsoft Office 2007 for around $70 at the student pricing when I was in college. I have been using the same copy since. So far the price per year has been $70 / 6 years = $11.67/year. That assumes I will buy a new copy sometime this year which I most likely will not. $5 to $10 a year would be more reasonable. Since graduating, my average usage of Microsoft Office at home is probably under 10 hours per year.
I meant to type that I was in Brazil a few weeks ago. Happy?
I was a Brazil a few weeks ago. From what I saw, it looks like everyone over there is starting to move to Facebook as their dominate social network.
Windows XP still runs my entire business. It doesn't wear out.
Not in the normal sense anyway. You still have to worry about security vulnerabilities. All commercials software reaches a point where it is no longer supported and doesn't get any new security patches. You only got 427 more days (April 1, 2014) of updates before you are going to have to move off Windows XP.
Interesting. Has anyone written software to do this?