Cool. Good to see, since even trimming off b-side problems like this can attract less die-hard customers.
As I mentioned, designers (including a few friends) *know* they can improve stuff and are working on it. But, like with the local newspaper (which wants me to pay almost DOUBLE to get electronic access to a paper I already subscribe to), there are rough edges both at the business side and the game side.
Thanks to the 1001 people that took my comments personally. It's just priceless to have gotten zero mods and a dozen replies.
we did the market research to determine the project had demand, we put the sales force out on the road and invested in advertising, we even came up with the ideas in the first place
Um... Search engines. Which of your phrases describes Microsoft, again?
A balanced life to me at 15 yrs old was maximizing my access to computers. Nowadays, not-so-much. I work on 'em 10 hrs a day, so after-hours computer fun seems a bit less important than the other things. I agree with you both on your sense of 'balance' and people abusing the 'no-life' label.
But there *are* people who deserve the label. Just grab any old 'Do I have an addiction' questionaire and refactor for WoW or whatever. Even an 'obsession' isn't necessarily unhealthy. But an out-and-out addiction is, if you'll let me define addiction as an obsession strong enough to causefailing out of classes, skipping work, having difficulty holding a job or maintaining a relationship. Those are all harmful side-effects of someone with an addiction problem.
--
Yeah, $10 per month is chump change compared to almost anything... unless you imagine where the market needs to go. Compare gaming to TV:
I like 'The Daily Show'. A lot. It *Might* be worth $10 a month to me.
Everything else on TV isn't worth $10 by itself. No, I won't pay $2 apiece for the 4 or 5 Drew Carey reruns I watch each month. No, TV news isn't worth a buck. No, not even Battlestar Galactica... well, maybe.
In a gaming context, most people are curious enough that they'd willingly try things out at $10/month. Like me: I'd like to explore several games, or watch someone else's gaming, even. WoW, Second Life, Evercrack, etc. To casually opt *out* of some other activity and instead spend the freed 30 mins gaming, 1-5 times a month... not sure it's even worth $10, and utterly not worth $50 for the whole bunch.
And if I spend my summer outdoors, would I face $30 to keep an account alive despite not playing? Not so attractive. And that demographic hasn't yet been hooked by MMORPG's. Second Life, I'm told, has a free option, but you're restricted from a lot of deeper functionality unless you sign up. To build/own a place will cost you $10 a month, $120 a year. And $120 isn't chump change.
At $120, I start to think to myself: I've got a *lot* of other things I do. Seasonally, they shift. I could go *months* without playing, yet still be paying $10 per month. Not so cool. Anything that costs me $10 a month even when it is ignored... I'm not so eager to commit to.
Going back to my previous note, MMORPG's suffer a penetration gap: at $500 million a year (a quick stat I just googled up for MMORPG's), 4 million users chunk $120 a year to the hobby. That is less than 1% market penetration in the industrialized world. And that's beneath 0.1% worldwide. Compare that with the percentages for other entertainment, and you can imagine how wide-open the market is for a game site that draws everyday people in.
As for dedicated people outplaying diletantes like me... that is completely not what casual user gripes focus on. The problem is one of better players being so powerful and so focussed on THEIR goal, that they can deny me EVER getting to my goal (the first example of this was gangs paying their 'net bills by camping somewhere critical, then extorting REAL cash for access or for the item or whatever). At that point, it isn't at all about how well-adjusted I am. It's about balanced gameplay.
We'll get there, wherever THERE is w/r/t the future of gaming. And if I'm lucky, it'll be designed to draw my kids in.
(snark:) Damn pathetic. Everyone knows that SCA is the officially-approved healthy outlet for 18-40 year old role-playing addicts. That, or buying a Harley.(/snark)
Seriously? Whatever floats yer boat. If someone seems to lack the social skills and wants/needs help, I'll offer help. Some nerds really are 'trapped' in a life they don't know the first thing about changing. But, if they're really happiest that way and nobody's hurt, then ok by me.
1 - 'Serious' would be the key word and with adulthood come all those distractions (wife, kids, career, other interests). Also, remember realizing how sad/lame that 40-year-old guy was that'd still come down and play D&D with you 15-year-olds because he *had no life?* Don't be that guy.
2 - 'sactly. One counter-issue: infrequent users shouldn't get hammered for $10 per month.
3 - Too often, I hear exactly *this* complaint about MMORPG's. Solo casual players getting repeatedly mauled, being denied access to key goals by online guilds/gangs, and feeling perpetually disadvantaged because they're not click-slaving away n hours per day. The good news is that game designers are trying to solve this, since that is why MMORPG's are a niche.
This, mixed in with the Cylons looking like humans, feeling like humans, makes the entire of the show even more amigious
"Amigious?"
Obviously, TPA meant ambitious.
Ambiguous? Are you sure?!
Apologies to Drew Carey: Huh, you got crappy mods? Hey, there's a support group for that. It's called EVERYONE. They meet um (checks watch) right about NOW at The Bar.
(gawd, I hope *someone* gets my 2nd-level joke here. Think of the definition of the intended word, folks)
If you're seriously eager to break out of the rut, you can.
For one woman I worked with, it took 3 things: shifting from scripts to python*, *REALLY* figuring out and internalizing what objects were and how to use 'em, and applying that learning to the job. FWIW, good object-oriented code usually breaks big problems down into small, KISS-simple chunks.
Another guy like that realized his limitations and (sigh) became a pointy-haired boss. Unspeakably tragic for the geeks he herds, but profitable for him.
* - python, ruby, whatever. C++ has more pitfalls. For all three langs, the lang isn't the hard part: making a mental transition from scripter to object-oriented-coder is not easy.
Google's market cap has gone from $30 billion to $80 billion in the last year. Microsoft's is $280 billion, which is only a 3.5 multiplier over GOOG.
Now, I really don't have the slightest idea if that makes GOOG hitting $105 billion in 3-5 yrs. insanely low or insanely high. I just know the numbers are insane. Oh, and it shows me that NOTHING has changed in the last 5 yrs: Wall Street is still an idiot mob.
So, at 26 miles up, moving 17,000 miles per hour, if the RFID dies, is that due to gamma, vibration, tile failure, sudden temp changes, or what?
And how exactly is a communications tool (rfid) a solution for nondestructive testing needs (detecting tile failure)? Oh, you mean that'll be done by some other thing embedded into the tiles?
How will embedding devices in the tiles change their performance? Could the small imperfections introduced by the addition of an RFID component create pinholes paths, cavitation or other modes of failure?
Rocket Science is tough. So tough that I have this grim expectation that within a decade we'll have seen at least one cheap orbiter full of dead Chinese 'nauts.
Adding complexity is rarely the answer to a problem. Put another way, every new complexity becomes a new way to fail.
IANARS, but adding a mechanism to get close enough to ping every RFID tile, ruggedizing the rfid for extreme force/heat/cold/vibration/thermal-expansion survivability, adding redundant rfid systems to EVERY tile to avoid failure of an RFID being mistaken for tile failure, designing the fail threshold (does a tile trigger a failure if 30% breaks off and that part doesn't have the rfid circuitry? What happens if the tile merely cracks, or loses the top 95% (after all, I'd put the rfid at the bottom of the tile as a ruggedization measure). I'm sure there are other modes of failure that are well-understood that you'd have to re-examine, but let me repeat, IANARS. Gamma bombardment could kill RFID chips, or electrostatic buildup or whatever.
(and here's me, getting sucked into yet another naive slashdot suggestion about rocket-science. No disrespect, but slashdot users have no credibility on rocket science, based on prior rocket-sci comment modding/posting insanity)
As an ex-kid, I can't tell you how bad an idea this is.
My parents were pretty cool. Grade-A, top shelf. But there were kids whose parents would have spent their ed money on alcohol and shopping sprees. Heck, I just recently overheard someone that was talking about homeschooling because they had a misguided impression that it'd get them government money *and* a computer that they could sell off. No shit. Anyone that dumb or selfish shouldn't be in charge of a child's educational plan.
Ditto the above argument w/r/t 'Intelligent Design' and other zealotry-over-wisdom academic decision. Heck, kids are resilient and I don't care if horseshit like ID gets mention or discussion. But I pity any college-bound student who shows up thinking ID is credible science because the school/parents/church in charge had an anti-evolution agenda.
Ditto the above argument w/r/t anyone that likes to cut ed spending or thinks all we need is the 3 R's. Arts, science, history, engineering, logic, economics... ignoring them is a fast track to a life of 'would you like fries with that?'
All this arguing about superior systems notwithstanding, at least kids are protected from parents that wrong, stupid or insane. Standardization protects kids, who otherwise won't have a voice in the above discussion until it is way too late.
Oh, and we do have standards on food quality (for anyone and for food-stamp use), the building code enforces quality standards on housing. I honestly don't know on clothes, though (anyone else?). And there are several successful programs in each category: WIC, low-income mortgages, subsidized housing.
As for privatization, there are plenty of failure examples: NAFTA, energy (Enron, California brownouts, etc) and healthcare (spiralling rates, diminishing coverage, worse care than other industrialized nations) are three train-wrecks that come to mind.
The first rule to tinkering is to save all the parts. - Paul Erlich
Second argument, the easter Island scenario: a willful disregard for all them other critters might cause us to make things hard on ourselves at some point, through unintended consequences.
Hey, ten years of sippin' lattes on a beach in cancun, while lazily & secretly reverse-engineering an Army MRE heater-widget would cost 15 scientists about.... $25 million.
1> Round up a bunch of caffeine-junkie engineers 2> Spend 10 years in cancun, 'perfecting' this widget 3> profit!
In 2000?! No way. At the time, the endless september had already come and (never) gone. Think about it: that is how this suit got a footing: AOL turned on the idiot stream, Harlan noticed, Kersplat!
TO call USENET useful at this point, I suspect you've got the same definition as I do: Useful compared to it being gone, but a faint shadow of itself and only useful thanks to deja-news and massive killfiles.
I agree the apple/jobs commentary is off-topic, but you're nuts to think apple should relenquish hardware control. Controlling both hardware and software is what makes everyday users into Apple fanatics: their systems earn stellar satisfaction ratings from users largely because of deep control of hardware/software integration issues.
Apple's BSD underpinnings and rumblings of positive developer feedback on their platform for intel portability is icing on the cake, in my book. Their hardware and software single-source nature is a *feature* for me, not a bug.
Heck, save your money, buy something else. But after never having bought an Apple in my 28 years of being a computer nerd, I'm buying 2 for home use in the next year. My job'll still make me do PC stuff. But at home, I'm done with the wintel rat-race. My time is worth more...
Another 12-percenter... Firefox. That sudden rush of blood to your brain was you regaining some perspective. Oh, and I lied: the actual # is around 7%, depending on the source.
To be honest, I let the literary device get ahead of me here... I figured that, if I was mistaken, someone would point out corrections.
I'd agree that the political and economic mechanisms are decoupled. That was partly why I said 'in *practice*'. With that in mind, it'd be interesting to see how many decades your examples survive without getting mired by favoritism, self-indulgence, nepotism, or the likes.
That separation of market and politics is pretty profound: if the politicians don't meddle, there's no linkage. If they *do* meddle, any politically-forced flaws either cause the country to shift businesses to profitable ones or causes a black market (or both).
That said, it takes profound self-restraint for governing agencies to not bend economic rules to their own selfish interests. That would be a longterm risk for any single-controller governmental system. I'd argue that the risk is higher than for democracies and republics, since the latter allows an occasional nondestructive purging of the insiders.
Then again, we seem to have plenty of those flaws in our Republic (the US). Gilmore's law version 3: Rich and powerful people treat laws as damage, and route around them via whatever means they find. And the more money/power you have, the better your workaround will be.
A last thought: It's ironic that I believe politics and economics are decoupled, but that power and money are interchangable.
Not to quibble, but wikis offer several remedies to your concern:
Most wikis come with version tracking and user administration. You diss this with 'yes you can look at history, but who does?' I'd counter that people can forge citations, fake quotes, etc. Eventually, the evidence accumulates, and once it does, wikis provide capability to re-examine and undo everything a Troll submitted.
More advanced wikis (wikipedia) work to improve this with several frameworks: editors, reviewers, buttons to ask for audit/review, etc. This speeds up the detection of lying or BS'ing or inappropriate content or trolling or opinionated entries. Mechanisms to lockdown a contentious entry help, too.
Even in something as huge/auspicious as a major newspaper attempting to wikify an editorial page, it'd be trivial to pick a board of moderators or do some similar existing control technique to prevent abuse.
Economic growth: growing from zero (china) has a better percentage gain than growth from peak (US). No news here. On the other hand, things that grow quickly have a higher risk. Put another way, a startup grows faster than GE or Microsoft. But they can also overheat/crash/fail for a lot of reasons that won't kill a stable diversified giant corporation.
Your posting also interchanges economic and political concepts. They're not the same thing, and untangling them is necessary to talk effectively.
Bottom line: In theory, maximum political efficiency comes from despotic or dictatorial control. In practice, no economically optimized dictatorship has ever existed. To paraphrase Gilmore's law, that's why regulation inevitably creates a black market: capitalism treats control as damage and routes around it.
Also consider going with PICs, Basic Stamp, SitePlayer (a webserver on a chip), the BugBook books and hardware, 8085-based systems, or some other simplistic frameworks.
A year or so ago, I was lamenting how complicated (and unapproachable) systems had gotten, and a friend proved me wrong when he pointed toward some similar set of suggestions. There are a zillion interesting ways to learn practical/basic digital electronics now, rather than fewer. And the results can be delightfully cheap: simple atmel pic's sell for a buck or 2, can be programmed by some funny homebrew parallel/serial port interfaces that are equally cheap, etc.
And then there's USB, digital A/V, etc.
Depending on what aspect of pc design (memory, buffering, hardware I/O, signals/timing, computation, real-time circuits, homebrew SCADA, animatronic/smart toys, robotics, or whatever), you can either go retro using modern equivalents to old hardware or do enough to learn concepts and then fast-forward to the newer tools.
Oh, if you want them to sign an NDA, forget it. Almost never happens.
If your idea is such that if explaining it to an investor would "give away the secret," then you probably don't have something worth their time anyways.
Besides, that sort of idea is what Submarine Patents are for. </snark>
Slashdot Mirror
Cool. Good to see, since even trimming off b-side problems like this can attract less die-hard customers.
As I mentioned, designers (including a few friends) *know* they can improve stuff and are working on it. But, like with the local newspaper (which wants me to pay almost DOUBLE to get electronic access to a paper I already subscribe to), there are rough edges both at the business side and the game side.
Thanks to the 1001 people that took my comments personally. It's just priceless to have gotten zero mods and a dozen replies.
A balanced life to me at 15 yrs old was maximizing my access to computers. Nowadays, not-so-much. I work on 'em 10 hrs a day, so after-hours computer fun seems a bit less important than the other things. I agree with you both on your sense of 'balance' and people abusing the 'no-life' label.
But there *are* people who deserve the label. Just grab any old 'Do I have an addiction' questionaire and refactor for WoW or whatever. Even an 'obsession' isn't necessarily unhealthy. But an out-and-out addiction is, if you'll let me define addiction as an obsession strong enough to causefailing out of classes, skipping work, having difficulty holding a job or maintaining a relationship. Those are all harmful side-effects of someone with an addiction problem.
--
Yeah, $10 per month is chump change compared to almost anything... unless you imagine where the market needs to go. Compare gaming to TV:
I like 'The Daily Show'. A lot. It *Might* be worth $10 a month to me.
Everything else on TV isn't worth $10 by itself. No, I won't pay $2 apiece for the 4 or 5 Drew Carey reruns I watch each month. No, TV news isn't worth a buck. No, not even Battlestar Galactica... well, maybe.
In a gaming context, most people are curious enough that they'd willingly try things out at $10/month. Like me: I'd like to explore several games, or watch someone else's gaming, even. WoW, Second Life, Evercrack, etc. To casually opt *out* of some other activity and instead spend the freed 30 mins gaming, 1-5 times a month... not sure it's even worth $10, and utterly not worth $50 for the whole bunch.
And if I spend my summer outdoors, would I face $30 to keep an account alive despite not playing? Not so attractive. And that demographic hasn't yet been hooked by MMORPG's. Second Life, I'm told, has a free option, but you're restricted from a lot of deeper functionality unless you sign up. To build/own a place will cost you $10 a month, $120 a year. And $120 isn't chump change.
At $120, I start to think to myself: I've got a *lot* of other things I do. Seasonally, they shift. I could go *months* without playing, yet still be paying $10 per month. Not so cool. Anything that costs me $10 a month even when it is ignored... I'm not so eager to commit to.
Going back to my previous note, MMORPG's suffer a penetration gap: at $500 million a year (a quick stat I just googled up for MMORPG's), 4 million users chunk $120 a year to the hobby. That is less than 1% market penetration in the industrialized world. And that's beneath 0.1% worldwide. Compare that with the percentages for other entertainment, and you can imagine how wide-open the market is for a game site that draws everyday people in.
As for dedicated people outplaying diletantes like me... that is completely not what casual user gripes focus on. The problem is one of better players being so powerful and so focussed on THEIR goal, that they can deny me EVER getting to my goal (the first example of this was gangs paying their 'net bills by camping somewhere critical, then extorting REAL cash for access or for the item or whatever). At that point, it isn't at all about how well-adjusted I am. It's about balanced gameplay.
We'll get there, wherever THERE is w/r/t the future of gaming. And if I'm lucky, it'll be designed to draw my kids in.
(snark:) Damn pathetic. Everyone knows that SCA is the officially-approved healthy outlet for 18-40 year old role-playing addicts. That, or buying a Harley.(/snark)
Seriously? Whatever floats yer boat. If someone seems to lack the social skills and wants/needs help, I'll offer help. Some nerds really are 'trapped' in a life they don't know the first thing about changing. But, if they're really happiest that way and nobody's hurt, then ok by me.
In order:
1 - 'Serious' would be the key word and with adulthood come all those distractions (wife, kids, career, other interests). Also, remember realizing how sad/lame that 40-year-old guy was that'd still come down and play D&D with you 15-year-olds because he *had no life?* Don't be that guy.
2 - 'sactly. One counter-issue: infrequent users shouldn't get hammered for
$10 per month.
3 - Too often, I hear exactly *this* complaint about MMORPG's. Solo casual
players getting repeatedly mauled, being denied access to key goals by online guilds/gangs, and feeling perpetually disadvantaged because they're not click-slaving away n hours per day. The good news is that game designers are
trying to solve this, since that is why MMORPG's are a niche.
So, the editors *do* something after all...
Ambiguous? Are you sure?!
Apologies to Drew Carey: Huh, you got crappy mods? Hey, there's a support group for that. It's called EVERYONE. They meet um (checks watch) right about NOW at The Bar.
(gawd, I hope *someone* gets my 2nd-level joke here. Think of the definition of the intended word, folks)
If you're seriously eager to break out of the rut, you can.
For one woman I worked with, it took 3 things: shifting from scripts to python*, *REALLY* figuring out and internalizing what objects were and how to use 'em, and applying that learning to the job. FWIW, good object-oriented code usually breaks big problems down into small, KISS-simple chunks.
Another guy like that realized his limitations and (sigh) became a pointy-haired boss. Unspeakably tragic for the geeks he herds, but profitable for him.
* - python, ruby, whatever. C++ has more pitfalls. For all three langs, the lang isn't the hard part: making a mental transition from scripter to object-oriented-coder is not easy.
Google's market cap has gone from $30 billion to $80 billion in the last year. Microsoft's is $280 billion, which is only a 3.5 multiplier over GOOG.
Now, I really don't have the slightest idea if that makes GOOG hitting $105 billion in 3-5 yrs. insanely low or insanely high. I just know the numbers are insane. Oh, and it shows me that NOTHING has changed in the last 5 yrs: Wall Street is still an idiot mob.
[me, singing like Dolly Parton]: 'Workin... Nine to Five... '
9 to 5 would be, um, 3 hrs to noon, 5 more to 5pm == 8 hrs.
So, somebody seems to get away with it. I suspect the cliche banker's hours is also a sign.
That said, I've never seen hours like that...
So, at 26 miles up, moving 17,000 miles per hour, if the RFID dies, is that due to gamma, vibration, tile failure, sudden temp changes, or what?
And how exactly is a communications tool (rfid) a solution for nondestructive testing needs (detecting tile failure)? Oh, you mean that'll be done by some other thing embedded into the tiles?
How will embedding devices in the tiles change their performance? Could the small imperfections introduced by the addition of an RFID component create pinholes paths, cavitation or other modes of failure?
Rocket Science is tough. So tough that I have this grim expectation that within a decade we'll have seen at least one cheap orbiter full of dead Chinese 'nauts.
heh heh heh... oh, wait... you're serious.
Adding complexity is rarely the answer to a problem. Put another way, every new complexity becomes a new way to fail.
IANARS, but adding a mechanism to get close enough to ping every RFID tile, ruggedizing the rfid for extreme force/heat/cold/vibration/thermal-expansion survivability, adding redundant rfid systems to EVERY tile to avoid failure of an RFID being mistaken for tile failure, designing the fail threshold (does a tile trigger a failure if 30% breaks off and that part doesn't have the rfid circuitry? What happens if the tile merely cracks, or loses the top 95% (after all, I'd put the rfid at the bottom of the tile as a ruggedization measure). I'm sure there are other modes of failure that are well-understood that you'd have to re-examine, but let me repeat, IANARS. Gamma bombardment could kill RFID chips, or electrostatic buildup or whatever.
(and here's me, getting sucked into yet another naive slashdot suggestion about rocket-science. No disrespect, but slashdot users have no credibility on rocket science, based on prior rocket-sci comment modding/posting insanity)
As an ex-kid, I can't tell you how bad an idea this is.
My parents were pretty cool. Grade-A, top shelf. But there were kids whose parents would have spent their ed money on alcohol and shopping sprees. Heck, I just recently overheard someone that was talking about homeschooling because they had a misguided impression that it'd get them government money *and* a computer that they could sell off. No shit. Anyone that dumb or selfish shouldn't be in charge of a child's educational plan.
Ditto the above argument w/r/t 'Intelligent Design' and other zealotry-over-wisdom academic decision. Heck, kids are resilient and I don't care if horseshit like ID gets mention or discussion. But I pity any college-bound student who shows up thinking ID is credible science because the school/parents/church in charge had an anti-evolution agenda.
Ditto the above argument w/r/t anyone that likes to cut ed spending or thinks all we need is the 3 R's. Arts, science, history, engineering, logic, economics... ignoring them is a fast track to a life of 'would you like fries with that?'
All this arguing about superior systems notwithstanding, at least kids are protected from parents that wrong, stupid or insane. Standardization protects kids, who otherwise won't have a voice in the above discussion until it is way too late.
Oh, and we do have standards on food quality (for anyone and for food-stamp use), the building code enforces quality standards on housing. I honestly don't know on clothes, though (anyone else?). And there are several successful programs in each category: WIC, low-income mortgages, subsidized housing.
As for privatization, there are plenty of failure examples: NAFTA, energy (Enron, California brownouts, etc) and healthcare (spiralling rates, diminishing coverage, worse care than other industrialized nations) are three train-wrecks that come to mind.
The first rule to tinkering is to save all the parts.
- Paul Erlich
Second argument, the easter Island scenario: a willful disregard for
all them other critters might cause us to make things hard on
ourselves at some point, through unintended consequences.
Hey, ten years of sippin' lattes on a beach in cancun, while lazily & secretly reverse-engineering an Army MRE heater-widget would cost 15 scientists about.... $25 million.
1> Round up a bunch of caffeine-junkie engineers
2> Spend 10 years in cancun, 'perfecting' this widget
3> profit!
Is it too much to hope that these biscuit-headed nimrods will STFU forever if, erm, WHEN their predictions about Deep Impact are wrong?
Also, a swift kick to the 'nads for Taco for considering this news, nerdy, or something that mattered.
In 2000?! No way. At the time, the endless september had already come and (never) gone. Think about it: that is how this suit got a footing: AOL turned on the idiot stream, Harlan noticed, Kersplat!
TO call USENET useful at this point, I suspect you've got the same definition as I do: Useful compared to it being gone, but a faint shadow of itself and only useful thanks to deja-news and massive killfiles.
I agree the apple/jobs commentary is off-topic, but you're nuts to think apple should relenquish hardware control. Controlling both hardware and software is what makes everyday users into Apple fanatics: their systems earn stellar satisfaction ratings from users largely because of deep control of hardware/software integration issues.
Apple's BSD underpinnings and rumblings of positive developer feedback on their platform for intel portability is icing on the cake, in my book. Their hardware and software single-source nature is a *feature* for me, not a bug.
Heck, save your money, buy something else. But after never having bought an Apple in my 28 years of being a computer nerd, I'm buying 2 for home use in the next year. My job'll still make me do PC stuff. But at home, I'm done with the wintel rat-race. My time is worth more...
Another 12-percenter... Firefox. That sudden rush of blood to your brain was you regaining some perspective. Oh, and I lied: the actual # is around 7%, depending on the source.
To be honest, I let the literary device get ahead of me here... I figured that, if I was mistaken, someone would point out corrections.
I'd agree that the political and economic mechanisms are decoupled. That was partly why I said 'in *practice*'. With that in mind, it'd be interesting to see how many decades your examples survive without getting mired by favoritism, self-indulgence, nepotism, or the likes.
That separation of market and politics is pretty profound: if the politicians don't meddle, there's no linkage. If they *do* meddle, any politically-forced flaws either cause the country to shift businesses to profitable ones or causes a black market (or both).
That said, it takes profound self-restraint for governing agencies to not bend economic rules to their own selfish interests. That would be a longterm risk for any single-controller governmental system. I'd argue that the risk is higher than for democracies and republics, since the latter allows an occasional nondestructive purging of the insiders.
Then again, we seem to have plenty of those flaws in our Republic (the US). Gilmore's law version 3: Rich and powerful people treat laws as damage, and route around them via whatever means they find. And the more money/power you have, the better your workaround will be.
A last thought: It's ironic that I believe politics and economics are decoupled, but that power and money are interchangable.
Even in something as huge/auspicious as a major newspaper attempting to wikify an editorial page, it'd be trivial to pick a board of moderators or do some similar existing control technique to prevent abuse.
Followup on a subthread yesterday on Irony:
You, posting AC. That's irony.
In short, no.
Economic growth: growing from zero (china) has a better percentage gain than growth from peak (US). No news here. On the other hand, things that grow quickly have a higher risk. Put another way, a startup grows faster than GE or Microsoft. But they can also overheat/crash/fail for a lot of reasons that won't kill a stable diversified giant corporation.
Your posting also interchanges economic and political concepts. They're not the same thing, and untangling them is necessary to talk effectively.
Bottom line: In theory, maximum political efficiency comes from despotic or dictatorial control. In practice, no economically optimized dictatorship has ever existed. To paraphrase Gilmore's law, that's why regulation inevitably creates a black market: capitalism treats control as damage and routes around it.
Ebay is your friend.
Also consider going with PICs, Basic Stamp, SitePlayer (a webserver on a chip), the BugBook books and hardware, 8085-based systems, or some other simplistic frameworks.
A year or so ago, I was lamenting how complicated (and unapproachable) systems had gotten, and a friend proved me wrong when he pointed toward some similar set of suggestions. There are a zillion interesting ways to learn practical/basic digital electronics now, rather than fewer. And the results can be delightfully cheap: simple atmel pic's sell for a buck or 2, can be programmed by some funny homebrew parallel/serial port interfaces that are equally cheap, etc.
And then there's USB, digital A/V, etc.
Depending on what aspect of pc design (memory, buffering, hardware I/O, signals/timing, computation, real-time circuits, homebrew SCADA, animatronic/smart toys, robotics, or whatever), you can either go retro using modern equivalents to old hardware or do enough to learn concepts and then fast-forward to the newer tools.