And why invest emotionally when you know that it won't work out?
Compounding this even more are social rules about how alpha males are supposed to be all aloof and so neck-deep in women that one more is unimpressive. Gushing about how much you actually like a girl? What are you, some sort of stunted, desperate, game/porn playing beta male? What a turn-off (apparently). ^I'll grant the above line is exactly the sort of nuance-stunted non-mastery of flirtation that 20,000 hours of gaming/porn has earned me.
I'd make an off-the-cuff guess that most people could extend their effective lifespans by 24% if they just got +20 minutes of moderate (heart rate up, light sweat) exercise each day. Cost? $0 and 20 minutes of time. Available to everyone, ready for mass implementation today. Compared to gene therapy, anyone could do the exercise today for nothing. And most won't even then.
America has 300 million+ people.... and he's estimating a change that MIGHT increase fatalities by 149 per year.
Sorry, but that's background noise. We lose more people to random lightning strikes. We lose 400,000 to heart disease each year. He didn't say how many lives would be saved or improved my reduced air pollution either.
I'm with Notch on the idea that Elder Scrolls really doesn't have a lot of scroll-based IP in it nor the right to own single words, but more importantly:
Of all the company names Notch could pick to epitomize what he and Minecraft are about, why "Scrolls"? That doesn't add any brand value. Honestly, he himself has ten times the brand recognition of any company name he could make. He could make his company "NotchCo" or "Notch's Minecraft Company" and get 100x the name recognition.
"Scrolls Studios, LLC? The hell is that?" "It's the company Notch founded, that made Minecraft." "Oh! Why didn't you just SAY so?"
I wonder just how "similar" they really expect things can be and still be counted as infringement?
"Well, ours is sort of generically tablet-shaped, smooth and pleasing to the touch. Sooo... we're gonna need you to make yours have lots of jagged rusted metal bits on it, to be different."
The analogy is closer to, you are in a desert. You have $1000 on you. Do you give the other guy the $1000 for his canteen, or do you spend it on a solar-powered moisture condenser from local Jawas?
This would also undercut the whole "property values" argument by making all houses look the same. Hard to say solar panels are an eyesore when people grow used to seeing them on every civilized house.
It might not be "creation" of wealth, but prevention of wealth destruction is real. How much would it cost for the nation's banks or stock markets to go down for even one day? Then factor in the overall lost deals and reputation over the future. That's what preventing it is worth.
Spending some of our gold to hire guards to guard our giant pile of gold isn't a complete waste of gold. The guards may not make the pile bigger, but they help prevent it from getting massively smaller. And you're naive if you think there's no one would like to make the pile a lot smaller.
These kamikaze birds are SO angry that they think NOTHING of plowing themselves into buildings, skyscrapers if you will, and exploding, as long as it will kill a few of the hated pigs in the process.
But you make a good point on rate, it can take 30 to 60 seconds to set up just ONE brutal pig murder/suicide sometimes, which isn't a very good murder per minute rate.
If neurons can form fields larger than one neuron, just how big can these fields get? If they can go between some neurons in the same brain, could they send a weak signal to NEARBY brains? If humans had some wireless connection with nearby humans that would have interesting consequences for concepts like intimacy and social dynamics.
I think a point that has been undermentioned is this: all the games in these bundles are at the end of their life cycle. Aquaria, World of Goo, etc have all been around for years. Everyone who cares enough to know what they are and shell out cash has already done so. Aquaria already had plenty of sales, World of Goo already had a Pay What You Think is Fair sale. Their usual mini-markets have been tapped out.
So, along comes Humble Bundle. With absolutely nothing left to lose, each penny they bring in after that is a miracle penny from heaven, and every piece of publicity they bring in is someone they didn't reach before. New Players get to try the games "they'd been meaning to get around to" or had never heard of, now at a price they pick so will find fair. It's kind of like roasting up some BBQ beast, eating off all the meat you can carve, and then burying the scraps- only to find that you can get extra mushrooms to grow and eat even more off your feast.
Would you take a new game and bury it directly hoping to get mushrooms? That's doubtful. You'd want to tap your primary market first. Is the mushrooms phase likely to detract from the BBQ phase? Not too likely. People with a hankering for fresh BBQ game content probably don't want to wait around through the life cycle of the game to eat the older mushrooms. Everyone hungry to pay for delicious bacon still will- those willing to settle for mushrooms didn't really crave the BBQ experience enough to pay for it anyway.
Maybe PETA could give you a queasy feeling about meat by making a game where disgusting meat, blood and gore splatters everywhere every time you fail. And you can easily fail every few seconds, splattering horror all around the world....
What if I don't care about The Witcher 2 enough to download it even for free? I bought (bargain bin) and played Witcher 1- for about 30 minutes.
Right now I am not over the activation energy of playing Witcher 2 even for free, let alone paying for it. If I were over that, via free demo or torrent, I'd be one step closer to thinking "Hmmm... maybe I WILL pay for it." I've grown to love and then paid for a dozen games this way. Then they face the money activation energy hurdle. $49.95? Eh, probably not. $9.95? I could be persuaded.
But hearing that they think their not-that-amazing game is so precious that they want to take money-wasting punitive actions makes me more likely to file the entire experience on the "Nah" Category, case closed. This has happened for other games I was fully willing to pay for, due to DRM, (which at least they are skipping): Spore, Command and Conquer 4, Assassin's Creed 2
Their threats of punitive letters might prevent an unknown number of piracies, but it also prevents an unknown number of legitimate sales, including mine.
Probably the best bet is to copy it from visiting aliens, if any ever bother to visit.
I was thinking about this and: we're not ready. To this day, we have people who use what little technology they do have (chemistry etc) to make bomb vests and blow themselves up. We're still an absolutely greedy, violent species who regularly wars all the time.
The mass and energy involved in interstellar travel is sufficient to destroy planets. (I always wondered why they needed the Death Star when they could just accelerate a smallish frigate into a planet at lightspeed and accomplish the same thing. Planetary shields maybe.)
Any aliens moving amongst the stars must have a code of social justice and cooperation sufficient not to destroy themselves with their own technology. That code almost certainly includes rules for not giving technology to belligerent pre-stellar species. Would YOU start handing out laser pistols to a room of tantrumy 2-year olds?
This topic gets so overheated that I think we can miss a subtler point- having a short unit on the the fact that some people believed Intelligent Design in history, and then discussing how to analyze claims like that scientifically. You can approach the topic as an observer rather than necessarily as an authority.
For example:
"In 1997, 39 people committed suicide via drinking poisoned Kool Aid, because they believed that would free their souls from their bodies to teleport to a hidden alien spacecraft hidden in the tail of Comet Hale-Bopp. Let's use this example to discuss social psychology, peer pressure, and cult-like thinking in human behavior..." This could prove to be an interesting topic that makes kids think about just how far people can go. Teaching it does NOT mean teaching the children that alien comet-craft are real or that poisoned Kool Aid is a good, although hysterical claims to that effect could be made.
Similarly, at least rationally discussing the historical fact that some people believed in Intelligent Design and concepts like scientific provability, experiment replication, hypothesis and how to support them with evidence could be a fine topic, worth discussing. I know this sounds a little like capitulating to the whole "Teach the Controversy" approach, but I think there is potential in valuing how people came to believe "controversies" that absolutely no longer are. Examples: Sun revolves around earth, earth is flat, etc etc.
That original social "contract" assumes that the government actually enforces the protections of copyright. Millions of copies of Blizzard games have been copied and played through by people who had no intention of, and didn't, pay Blizzard for the honest effort that went into the games. So the government didn't actually offer them any copy protection for their side of your "bargain."
This is where Blizzard, in order to collect enough money to develop the next fun games we all enjoy, needed to put in slight speed bumps to people stealing their way around the no actual protection afforded from the government to their product.
"Welp, we didn't stop anyone from stealing your product, now you owe it to the public domain forever and ever" doesn't sound like a very fair bargain. Hence the (light) DRM.
Blizzard folks know they won't stop everyone, they just want to catch a large chunk of people who want their games in the initial rush to actually compensate them with some cash, before the crack comes out and they are too lazy to pay.
Technically speaking, isn't there a sphere of locations that would all be the same light-distance from the message sender? (I'm picturing an equilateral triangle here.) I don't know how you'd read the qubits to know the distance, but if you could, maybe you could position yourself at one of those equal points and thus be the right distance (and time) away.
You want to make it even less likely that I have ever herad of, or will ever play your game?
Let's not mince words. You're trying to convince me that your game is worth $50+, or more than six movies. Your game probably has a learning curve. That learning curve intimidates me from plopping down money on it. If I play your demo, I am now over your game's learning curve, for free. You have removed an obstacle of risk and fear that was holding me back from buying your game. That is good for YOU.
Believe me, if you won't help me over the learning curve before I risk $59.95 on your game, I'm happy to go find much lower-risk, lower learning curve alternatives. I can watch movies, buy CDs, iTunes up some MP3s, or download little $4.95 casual games, all of which have a much smaller learning curve, and all of which risk less than 1/6th the monetary investment in your game if I don't like it. In a world jam-packed with alternatives, taking your free demo removes one of the few hooks you had left for me caring about your game or even knowing it exists.
Slashdot Mirror
I hope the plans and values of his 2nd term really do help grow the country and the world.
And why invest emotionally when you know that it won't work out?
Compounding this even more are social rules about how alpha males are supposed to be all aloof and so neck-deep in women that one more is unimpressive.
Gushing about how much you actually like a girl? What are you, some sort of stunted, desperate, game/porn playing beta male? What a turn-off (apparently).
^I'll grant the above line is exactly the sort of nuance-stunted non-mastery of flirtation that 20,000 hours of gaming/porn has earned me.
I'd make an off-the-cuff guess that most people could extend their effective lifespans by 24% if they just got +20 minutes of moderate (heart rate up, light sweat) exercise each day. Cost? $0 and 20 minutes of time. Available to everyone, ready for mass implementation today. Compared to gene therapy, anyone could do the exercise today for nothing. And most won't even then.
You want my password? Ok, it is kind of long, here it is. Be sure to type it exactly!
"I,LewisCassRepresentativeDoHerebyConfessThatI amInfringingPrivacyRightsAndDoPromiseToPayFullDamagesForThis."
Let me know when you have typed that in!
Beuaraucratic greed meets Beuaraucratic fear.
It is cynical doublespeak, or cynically truncated.
Right to Work (Yourself to Death as a Slave.)
Exactly. "A single zergling is unskilled! My elite base can easily stop one!!"
America has 300 million+ people.... and he's estimating a change that MIGHT increase fatalities by 149 per year.
Sorry, but that's background noise. We lose more people to random lightning strikes. We lose 400,000 to heart disease each year. He didn't say how many lives would be saved or improved my reduced air pollution either.
I'm with Notch on the idea that Elder Scrolls really doesn't have a lot of scroll-based IP in it nor the right to own single words, but more importantly:
Of all the company names Notch could pick to epitomize what he and Minecraft are about, why "Scrolls"? That doesn't add any brand value. Honestly, he himself has ten times the brand recognition of any company name he could make. He could make his company "NotchCo" or "Notch's Minecraft Company" and get 100x the name recognition.
"Scrolls Studios, LLC? The hell is that?"
"It's the company Notch founded, that made Minecraft."
"Oh! Why didn't you just SAY so?"
Soon we will have nothing to fear but sphere itself.
I wonder just how "similar" they really expect things can be and still be counted as infringement?
"Well, ours is sort of generically tablet-shaped, smooth and pleasing to the touch. Sooo... we're gonna need you to make yours have lots of jagged rusted metal bits on it, to be different."
The analogy is closer to, you are in a desert. You have $1000 on you. Do you give the other guy the $1000 for his canteen, or do you spend it on a solar-powered moisture condenser from local Jawas?
This would also undercut the whole "property values" argument by making all houses look the same. Hard to say solar panels are an eyesore when people grow used to seeing them on every civilized house.
As a sailor in the Navy, this made me think of the Explosive Ordinance Disposal rating.
For them, their boss wants to see them "sweeping mines" on the job!
It might not be "creation" of wealth, but prevention of wealth destruction is real. How much would it cost for the nation's banks or stock markets to go down for even one day? Then factor in the overall lost deals and reputation over the future. That's what preventing it is worth.
Spending some of our gold to hire guards to guard our giant pile of gold isn't a complete waste of gold. The guards may not make the pile bigger, but they help prevent it from getting massively smaller. And you're naive if you think there's no one would like to make the pile a lot smaller.
These kamikaze birds are SO angry that they think NOTHING of plowing themselves into buildings, skyscrapers if you will, and exploding, as long as it will kill a few of the hated pigs in the process.
But you make a good point on rate, it can take 30 to 60 seconds to set up just ONE brutal pig murder/suicide sometimes, which isn't a very good murder per minute rate.
If neurons can form fields larger than one neuron, just how big can these fields get? If they can go between some neurons in the same brain, could they send a weak signal to NEARBY brains? If humans had some wireless connection with nearby humans that would have interesting consequences for concepts like intimacy and social dynamics.
I think a point that has been undermentioned is this: all the games in these bundles are at the end of their life cycle. Aquaria, World of Goo, etc have all been around for years. Everyone who cares enough to know what they are and shell out cash has already done so. Aquaria already had plenty of sales, World of Goo already had a Pay What You Think is Fair sale. Their usual mini-markets have been tapped out.
So, along comes Humble Bundle. With absolutely nothing left to lose, each penny they bring in after that is a miracle penny from heaven, and every piece of publicity they bring in is someone they didn't reach before. New Players get to try the games "they'd been meaning to get around to" or had never heard of, now at a price they pick so will find fair. It's kind of like roasting up some BBQ beast, eating off all the meat you can carve, and then burying the scraps- only to find that you can get extra mushrooms to grow and eat even more off your feast.
Would you take a new game and bury it directly hoping to get mushrooms? That's doubtful. You'd want to tap your primary market first. Is the mushrooms phase likely to detract from the BBQ phase? Not too likely. People with a hankering for fresh BBQ game content probably don't want to wait around through the life cycle of the game to eat the older mushrooms. Everyone hungry to pay for delicious bacon still will- those willing to settle for mushrooms didn't really crave the BBQ experience enough to pay for it anyway.
Maybe PETA could give you a queasy feeling about meat by making a game where disgusting meat, blood and gore splatters everywhere every time you fail. And you can easily fail every few seconds, splattering horror all around the world....
OH WAIT THAT'S WHAT SUPER MEAT BOY ALREADY IS!
What if I don't care about The Witcher 2 enough to download it even for free? I bought (bargain bin) and played Witcher 1- for about 30 minutes.
Right now I am not over the activation energy of playing Witcher 2 even for free, let alone paying for it. If I were over that, via free demo or torrent, I'd be one step closer to thinking "Hmmm... maybe I WILL pay for it." I've grown to love and then paid for a dozen games this way. Then they face the money activation energy hurdle. $49.95? Eh, probably not. $9.95? I could be persuaded.
But hearing that they think their not-that-amazing game is so precious that they want to take money-wasting punitive actions makes me more likely to file the entire experience on the "Nah" Category, case closed. This has happened for other games I was fully willing to pay for, due to DRM, (which at least they are skipping): Spore, Command and Conquer 4, Assassin's Creed 2
Their threats of punitive letters might prevent an unknown number of piracies, but it also prevents an unknown number of legitimate sales, including mine.
Probably the best bet is to copy it from visiting aliens, if any ever bother to visit.
I was thinking about this and: we're not ready. To this day, we have people who use what little technology they do have (chemistry etc) to make bomb vests and blow themselves up. We're still an absolutely greedy, violent species who regularly wars all the time.
The mass and energy involved in interstellar travel is sufficient to destroy planets. (I always wondered why they needed the Death Star when they could just accelerate a smallish frigate into a planet at lightspeed and accomplish the same thing. Planetary shields maybe.)
Any aliens moving amongst the stars must have a code of social justice and cooperation sufficient not to destroy themselves with their own technology. That code almost certainly includes rules for not giving technology to belligerent pre-stellar species. Would YOU start handing out laser pistols to a room of tantrumy 2-year olds?
What do words like "orgy" morph into?
This topic gets so overheated that I think we can miss a subtler point- having a short unit on the the fact that some people believed Intelligent Design in history, and then discussing how to analyze claims like that scientifically. You can approach the topic as an observer rather than necessarily as an authority.
For example:
"In 1997, 39 people committed suicide via drinking poisoned Kool Aid, because they believed that would free their souls from their bodies to teleport to a hidden alien spacecraft hidden in the tail of Comet Hale-Bopp. Let's use this example to discuss social psychology, peer pressure, and cult-like thinking in human behavior..." This could prove to be an interesting topic that makes kids think about just how far people can go. Teaching it does NOT mean teaching the children that alien comet-craft are real or that poisoned Kool Aid is a good, although hysterical claims to that effect could be made.
Similarly, at least rationally discussing the historical fact that some people believed in Intelligent Design and concepts like scientific provability, experiment replication, hypothesis and how to support them with evidence could be a fine topic, worth discussing. I know this sounds a little like capitulating to the whole "Teach the Controversy" approach, but I think there is potential in valuing how people came to believe "controversies" that absolutely no longer are. Examples: Sun revolves around earth, earth is flat, etc etc.
That original social "contract" assumes that the government actually enforces the protections of copyright. Millions of copies of Blizzard games have been copied and played through by people who had no intention of, and didn't, pay Blizzard for the honest effort that went into the games. So the government didn't actually offer them any copy protection for their side of your "bargain."
This is where Blizzard, in order to collect enough money to develop the next fun games we all enjoy, needed to put in slight speed bumps to people stealing their way around the no actual protection afforded from the government to their product.
"Welp, we didn't stop anyone from stealing your product, now you owe it to the public domain forever and ever" doesn't sound like a very fair bargain. Hence the (light) DRM.
Blizzard folks know they won't stop everyone, they just want to catch a large chunk of people who want their games in the initial rush to actually compensate them with some cash, before the crack comes out and they are too lazy to pay.
Technically speaking, isn't there a sphere of locations that would all be the same light-distance from the message sender? (I'm picturing an equilateral triangle here.) I don't know how you'd read the qubits to know the distance, but if you could, maybe you could position yourself at one of those equal points and thus be the right distance (and time) away.
You want to make it even less likely that I have ever herad of, or will ever play your game?
Let's not mince words. You're trying to convince me that your game is worth $50+, or more than six movies. Your game probably has a learning curve. That learning curve intimidates me from plopping down money on it. If I play your demo, I am now over your game's learning curve, for free. You have removed an obstacle of risk and fear that was holding me back from buying your game. That is good for YOU.
Believe me, if you won't help me over the learning curve before I risk $59.95 on your game, I'm happy to go find much lower-risk, lower learning curve alternatives. I can watch movies, buy CDs, iTunes up some MP3s, or download little $4.95 casual games, all of which have a much smaller learning curve, and all of which risk less than 1/6th the monetary investment in your game if I don't like it. In a world jam-packed with alternatives, taking your free demo removes one of the few hooks you had left for me caring about your game or even knowing it exists.