Aircraft mechanics shouldn't need a Bachelor degree... You're a mechanic, not an aerospace engineer. Same for CAD designers or what not. These are jobs, good jobs, that don't require an university degree (and it should stay like that).
Erm.. how long has it been since you went to school? Or is that hearsay?
I've been through the public education in Quebec about 10 years ago, and had the same classes as you. Of course you also forget history, ethics, music/drama/arts, biology, physics, chemistry... I was even lucky and had Spanish. My sister graduated this past summer. Okay, true, now they removed économie familiale and that workshop class I forgot the name of, but overall? It's been mostly the same.
Yes, as time passes and society changes, some skills are lost. Just like we have less artisan woodworkers and metalworkers than a hundred years ago, maybe in a hundred years you will have less people that know how to put a computer together using off-the-shelf parts. Our world and society changes, and while I sometimes find myself in the "back in my days..." camp, saying the newer generation is going to shit is pretty inaccurate, and unfair to them.
Actually, no, the financial sector _was_ deregulated, and deregulation does cause monopolies.
You got the first part right. In some sectors, there is a very high cost to entry, for example telecom and utilities (in economics, a natural monopoly), due mainly to the initial outlay. The first movers get a big advantage, because once their network is setup, they can drive new entrants out by taking a loss on the service they provide until they get all of the market, and then jack up prices. New entrants can't match artificial low prices because they need to recoup the initial investment, and thus are pushed out in the absence of regulations.
Of course you can argue the first entrant was able to get into the market easily because of regulations, but deregulation won't help solve that problem. You'll _need_ regulations to break monopolies once they're in place, regardless of who you want to blame. There is just a right amount of regulations that's required for capitalism to work well, and it won't lead to socialism (not that there's anything wrong with socialism, but I think you'd beg to differ).
A nutjob remains a nutjob, correct, and he/she might have found another way to kill people... the question is, why do you want to make their life easier by giving them easy access to lethal weapons?
That's not what we mean by "liquidity". Liquidity is less about the speed at which a trade gets processed and more about the possibility of having that trade in the first place.
HFTs, by definition, trade often, at various price points very close to the current market price. The fact they put in so many trades means that for the stock exchange, it's easier to match Buy and Sell orders, and so trades have a higher chance of being executed at a price closer to the bid/offer price.
Of course, that's the theory. HFTs would usually trade on liquid investments anyway, so I'm not sure how much value would be gained by having your trade filled in 50ms instead of 5 seconds. They would help the rest of the investment world if they started trading thinly traded investments, but that's not their strategy.
You also can't automatically grade software projects.
Do you think a good programmer is just someone that is able to take an input and provide the required output, regardless of method, without checking what's inside his logic? In a complex project, do you not want to know how an engineer works with peers, approaches a problem? Is a mathematician someone that solves equations for you?
Higher education is about thought-process, be it in humanities or sciences. Measuring thought-process with a simple input-output grading is hard. At the post-graduate level when you're supposed to write a thesis and read and analyze other people's research, I'm not sure how well that's going to work...
Your post is probably the most rational, well-written piece I've seen from someone with faith on an Internet forum. Kudos on expressing your thoughts and opinion in a non-adversarial or emotionally-charged manner.
I can easily see that you will never accept evolution, because it goes against your faith. You've examined the facts presented to you, accept them as fact, but reject the conclusion. At this point, there is nothing else anyone can do to convince you, because your faith tells you to deny the scientific conclusion, and faith is irrational.
Now, this is, and is not, an attack on your religion. If the Bible didn't exist and you would have to form an opinion about the facts presented for evolution, I'd argue there's a fair chance you would say "oh okay evolution might be real". The scientific approach would tell you to look only at the facts presented, and if the Bible tells something different, examine whether or not the Bible is true. That's where the attack is. It attacks a fundamental tenet of the religion: whether or not the Bible says the truth. For someone with faith, there will be no reconsideration of the veracity of Bible, so it's a moot point and evolution cannot be real. It's also not really an attack, because religion is not considered in the thought-process. Evolution is a logical conclusion when presented with the facts and only looking at the facts without prior beliefs.
With that said, you're absolutely entitled to your beliefs. I do not believe in God, because I've seen no proof of his existence. If facts come up that indicate he does, I will have to change my opinion. However, this debate has no reason to be; an overwhelming amount of facts is on the side of evolution being true, and it would be the logical conclusion leaving religion aside. Therefore, believe what you will as you're entitled to, but I hope you accept that evolution is what is commonly taught and accepted in modern society.
You know, most of it is not because of your education system, but because of your parents/environment?
I also was doing algebra at age 8. How many schools, or school systems, teach that at that age? It's not an American problem at all. The fact that kid was taught calculus at age 6 only means he had great parents, and there is no way he was taught the math necessary for solving his problem in school.
Now granted your school experience might have sucked, and having to apply and write down a technique for multiplication that you can do in your head is annoying, but that is also the point of giving you an education. Sure, the school system wants to produce good workers... because good workers fit in the society. If you were able to understand it, why wouldn't you apply it? Because you had a better way? What's wrong with understand the "bad" techniques? If you are open to understanding _all_ possible methods, that means you're a bright and intelligent person that is a curious about the world, in other words, someone worth teaching to. If you go back to your shell because you think you're special... well, that failing is yours, not the school system's.
If you want your school system to cater to the top 5%, or the bottom 5%, consider attending special schools. If you don't have the money, consider learning on your own, like that Shouryya Ray kid. The public school system is there to make sure everyone is given a fair chance and a standard basic education, not for the geniuses to have special treatment.
Now, on the other hand, if you want to start a debate on how to improve on the education system, let me propose a starting point: use tiers for public schools, with admission exams. Top students get into the top tier, but all schools are funded publicly. Would that work for you?
The summary is misleading, there is no "VP of SAP", instead there are many, many VPs for different sections (stuff like "VP Mobile Dev Palo Alto"). They're not really "executive" level, as VP is the step up from "Development Manager". A VP at SAP Palo Alto would be paid decently, probably in the 175-250k range, but above VP is when you start getting into real executive level (and most probably pay).
I'd have to say this has nothing to do with SAP; it's just a dude that likes Legos and wanted to scam the system.
Disclaimer: info is 2 years old by now.
Unfortunately that's not really true. The cost of equity should be higher than the cost of debt (else you're clearly doing something wrong with your equity), so unless Facebook had trouble borrowing money to grow, the IPO had nothing to do with investments. On the other hand, it has everything to do with diversifying its founders' assets by letting them convert to cash and buy other stuff, and more importantly, is the best out possible from a VC perspective.
The whole point of investing in Facebook is to buy into the growth. Clearly, the IPO price and the trailing P/E does not reflect a "normal" P/E, because Facebook is considered to not be a mature company, which is why you must look at the forward P/E. If you want a comparison with stocks that are overvalued on a P/E basis, just take a look at Amazon or Salesforce.com (actually at negative EPS right now on Google), both of which have shown crazy valuations for quite some time. Also, the mandatory Google comparison would tell you that at IPO, Google was also overvalued on a trailing P/E basis (priced at $85, last 4Q earnings at $1.26 => P/E = 67.5).
That being said, I agree with you. Facebook looks like a poor investment to me even considering growth prospects, but my analysis is as bad as any other (arguably, worse). It's just that trailing or forward P/E should not discourage you from investigating the stock further (believe me, shorting CRM when its P/E was over 300 was a bad decision, as crazy as it sounds).
Y'know, when you build a network, you should take this into account. Out of your millions of customers, chances are, you will get a few (hundreds, thousands?) that will consume inordinate amounts of data. But as a whole? I can't believe that 100%, or even 50% of the "unlimited plan" customers use an insane amount, which means that on the scale of your entire network, it shouldn't be a problem. That's a common problem in engineering, isn't it? Your bridge has a max capacity, of course, but you plan for it to be much larger than the load it should be facing, and you estimate that load giving yourself enough buffer for the entire thing to be safe.
If you don't trust in your network to be able to handle customers with unlimited data plans, don't sell them. Sell 300GB caps if you must, but sell something you can actually provide, else it's just false advertising.
Is it impossible to get high-speed internet without subscribing to TV cable?
And even if where you live, cable automatically comes bundled with TV cable, are there no other options? ADSL for me is 7 Mbps down, which is sufficient to stream anything.
I was going to mod people but instead found this post, and it's... incensing, to say the least.
There's a good reason why autism or Asperger's are dissociated from being "slow", "retarded", etc. Let me clue you in: it's not the same fucking thing.
Have you actually talked to "highly-functioning" autistic people? It has nothing to do with being slow. It's not their brain power that's in question. It just happens that there are things that they can't do, and although there are common themes between them, autistic people are very different from each other as well.
Now, I will agree that some autistic people have trouble learning, and might never fit in a normal classroom or be able to work in a social environment, but that's not because they're stupid. It's not about their intelligence, even if from an external point of view it might look very similar. For that matter, how do you call lightly autistic (aka, Asperger's syndrome) people that can function in society, but just happen to not like fur, eat sandwiches by the corners, hate phones and can't catch a ball? They have "limitations", but they're not stupid. I call "being stupid" the person that says "sir, you moved the x from the left to the right side of the equation but you made a mistake, you copied the + into a - sign!" stupid.
I wish we would stop considering some fields "an education" and some "a vocation". A truly educated person should be balanced, and knowledgeable in many things. Remember how people like Descartes dabbled in both math and philosophy? That's because they had an education.
Providing an education to all, with or without skills valuable to the job market, is a noble goal. A basic education _is_ already provided to everyone in most Western countries (now you can argue your high school education sucked, but that's beside the point. It was still free.), so if you want people to specialize as well, why not just subsidize everyone's first university degree, regardless of field, and make them pay for the failed classes and subsequent degrees? If someone makes a "bad" choice of degree or doesn't study, that's their own problem. Society is providing its best already, and I surely refuse to pay taxes for people going to school just for fun, because I'd like to do so as well, but I have to work to pay for my living and for others to go to school.
... I do know I am sad that someone is
1. considering another country a "rival" (because that is how rivalries and wars are born)
2. wishing more human beings to be fooled into believing something that's false (you might consider a country's government as corrupt, but the population is not its government, as you should know if you're in the US).
"I'm oot and aboot", my gf likes to say mockingly (she's Scottish). As a Quebecer I can swear to you none of us would pronounce "aboot", we would say "abowtte" or something like that (pronounce it in your mind as you wish, I can't convey a Quebec accent through text).
I've left, know plenty that have left, and know plenty that are still there. Obviously take my comments with a grain of salt, since it's anecdotal.
The majority of people I met/know don't even talk about censorship or lack of rights. However, that's not indicative of fear, but rather of the fact it's just not something most people talk about in the first place. I have met guys that left China for the very purpose of escaping the regime to go to a place with more human rights; they're the Slashdot crowd-type of people, that proxy out to see all of the Internet. Most people though, including my family, don't care so much. Their quality of life has vastly improved in the past 50 years. They are no longer afraid of starving, have a roof on top of their head, and the country is not constantly attacked and/or screwed over by foreign superpowers or civil war.
I am not saying the government is perfect, and everyone knows there are plenty of people in disagreement. Usually, those people are the ones 1. getting screwed by the government 2. with enough money and free time to think about democracy. Number one is hard to avoid, because the Chinese government is very utilitarian. When you manage 1.3b+ people, there are choices that need to be made, and they won't please everyone. Number two will only go increasingly, as the population gets richer, but at this point I don't see it as being a major issue. Compare that to people just about anywhere? Not everyone cares about what the TSA does, because it doesn't really affect them, the issues are there, but people live with it as long as they can have a comfortable life.
The point is the electric grid is so much more stable than the Internet, for most people?
Having no offline mode in a game that I can play single player is like having your kitchen faucet stop working because the electricity is down. It sucks, and the user sees no practical reason for it.
Actually, if they made a handwritten version of a popular book with quality ink, great binding and cotton-like high-grade paper, I'm sure some people would pay thousands for it. It costs almost that much to produce, it's only fair.
Comparing royalties with a daily job is disingenuous. If your job is developing software, writing a book is spending 3 years of your life writing that software and then earning money on it until you die (or, rather, until you die + 70 years). The point the poster was making is not really that they _can't_ price it at their current price, but that he/she finds it too expensive, which is fine. It only means they will not buy it at that price and will either do without or find an alternative (I heard of this great "brick and mortar", old school creation called "libraries". They're amazing, it's like a video store for books and the best is it's free. Also a lot of them do have e-books now.)
You can't argue that the e-book is _worth_ 7.99, because it depends on how much the _buyer_ values it at. For some people it's worth that much, others not. The lowest price you can go to, however, is the production price, and that is not nearly as high as eight bucks for an e-book, considering a lot of money has been made (and the cost of production paid many many times over) through the paper version already. The case would be different if it was a new book released in both paper and e-book format, as in you would have to account for publishing, editing and all.
To me, this is more like... "look guys, remember Warcraft 2? Good shit right? How about we release it again, but like, as a download-only version with a new splash screen? I think we should make it cheaper than what we used to sell it at. Let's say $40, cheaper than the original 49.99!". You're allowed to, but I'm allowed to think you're trying to rip me off.
And many direct download links may or may not contain viruses, urls may or may not point to websites with malicious scripts. I say we block all of these as well, what do you think?
I use Messenger with my friends, people I know. I've seen some of them get their accounts hijacked and send out scam links, but I've yet to see a Pirate Bay scam operation.
That means, selling your product at 25% of your original price increases total sales 40 times over, or in other words you sell 160 times what you would have sold.
Indeed, if you earn a buck instead of 10 per book, your net profit is still up. Your profit margin, _per book "copy"_, is lower, but if you consider the fact that an eBook is zero marginal cost, it means that on a company-basis your entire profitability still goes up.
Many people like games, and games are demanding. This is why Intel is working on making their integrated video cards better. No, it's not as good as the AMD offering, but it is improving, and since Sandy Bridge they've been sufficient to run most games in low settings.
Lo and behold! Actual review instead of FUD! Starcraft 2 running in 1680x1050, Medium settings, 44.6 fps.
Slashdot Mirror
Aircraft mechanics shouldn't need a Bachelor degree... You're a mechanic, not an aerospace engineer. Same for CAD designers or what not. These are jobs, good jobs, that don't require an university degree (and it should stay like that).
Erm.. how long has it been since you went to school? Or is that hearsay?
I've been through the public education in Quebec about 10 years ago, and had the same classes as you. Of course you also forget history, ethics, music/drama/arts, biology, physics, chemistry... I was even lucky and had Spanish. My sister graduated this past summer. Okay, true, now they removed économie familiale and that workshop class I forgot the name of, but overall? It's been mostly the same.
Yes, as time passes and society changes, some skills are lost. Just like we have less artisan woodworkers and metalworkers than a hundred years ago, maybe in a hundred years you will have less people that know how to put a computer together using off-the-shelf parts. Our world and society changes, and while I sometimes find myself in the "back in my days..." camp, saying the newer generation is going to shit is pretty inaccurate, and unfair to them.
Actually, no, the financial sector _was_ deregulated, and deregulation does cause monopolies.
You got the first part right. In some sectors, there is a very high cost to entry, for example telecom and utilities (in economics, a natural monopoly), due mainly to the initial outlay. The first movers get a big advantage, because once their network is setup, they can drive new entrants out by taking a loss on the service they provide until they get all of the market, and then jack up prices. New entrants can't match artificial low prices because they need to recoup the initial investment, and thus are pushed out in the absence of regulations.
Of course you can argue the first entrant was able to get into the market easily because of regulations, but deregulation won't help solve that problem. You'll _need_ regulations to break monopolies once they're in place, regardless of who you want to blame. There is just a right amount of regulations that's required for capitalism to work well, and it won't lead to socialism (not that there's anything wrong with socialism, but I think you'd beg to differ).
A nutjob remains a nutjob, correct, and he/she might have found another way to kill people... the question is, why do you want to make their life easier by giving them easy access to lethal weapons?
That's not what we mean by "liquidity". Liquidity is less about the speed at which a trade gets processed and more about the possibility of having that trade in the first place.
HFTs, by definition, trade often, at various price points very close to the current market price. The fact they put in so many trades means that for the stock exchange, it's easier to match Buy and Sell orders, and so trades have a higher chance of being executed at a price closer to the bid/offer price.
Of course, that's the theory. HFTs would usually trade on liquid investments anyway, so I'm not sure how much value would be gained by having your trade filled in 50ms instead of 5 seconds. They would help the rest of the investment world if they started trading thinly traded investments, but that's not their strategy.
You also can't automatically grade software projects.
Do you think a good programmer is just someone that is able to take an input and provide the required output, regardless of method, without checking what's inside his logic? In a complex project, do you not want to know how an engineer works with peers, approaches a problem? Is a mathematician someone that solves equations for you?
Higher education is about thought-process, be it in humanities or sciences. Measuring thought-process with a simple input-output grading is hard. At the post-graduate level when you're supposed to write a thesis and read and analyze other people's research, I'm not sure how well that's going to work...
Your post is probably the most rational, well-written piece I've seen from someone with faith on an Internet forum. Kudos on expressing your thoughts and opinion in a non-adversarial or emotionally-charged manner.
I can easily see that you will never accept evolution, because it goes against your faith. You've examined the facts presented to you, accept them as fact, but reject the conclusion. At this point, there is nothing else anyone can do to convince you, because your faith tells you to deny the scientific conclusion, and faith is irrational.
Now, this is, and is not, an attack on your religion. If the Bible didn't exist and you would have to form an opinion about the facts presented for evolution, I'd argue there's a fair chance you would say "oh okay evolution might be real". The scientific approach would tell you to look only at the facts presented, and if the Bible tells something different, examine whether or not the Bible is true. That's where the attack is. It attacks a fundamental tenet of the religion: whether or not the Bible says the truth. For someone with faith, there will be no reconsideration of the veracity of Bible, so it's a moot point and evolution cannot be real. It's also not really an attack, because religion is not considered in the thought-process. Evolution is a logical conclusion when presented with the facts and only looking at the facts without prior beliefs.
With that said, you're absolutely entitled to your beliefs. I do not believe in God, because I've seen no proof of his existence. If facts come up that indicate he does, I will have to change my opinion. However, this debate has no reason to be; an overwhelming amount of facts is on the side of evolution being true, and it would be the logical conclusion leaving religion aside. Therefore, believe what you will as you're entitled to, but I hope you accept that evolution is what is commonly taught and accepted in modern society.
You know, most of it is not because of your education system, but because of your parents/environment?
I also was doing algebra at age 8. How many schools, or school systems, teach that at that age? It's not an American problem at all. The fact that kid was taught calculus at age 6 only means he had great parents, and there is no way he was taught the math necessary for solving his problem in school.
Now granted your school experience might have sucked, and having to apply and write down a technique for multiplication that you can do in your head is annoying, but that is also the point of giving you an education. Sure, the school system wants to produce good workers... because good workers fit in the society. If you were able to understand it, why wouldn't you apply it? Because you had a better way? What's wrong with understand the "bad" techniques? If you are open to understanding _all_ possible methods, that means you're a bright and intelligent person that is a curious about the world, in other words, someone worth teaching to. If you go back to your shell because you think you're special... well, that failing is yours, not the school system's.
If you want your school system to cater to the top 5%, or the bottom 5%, consider attending special schools. If you don't have the money, consider learning on your own, like that Shouryya Ray kid. The public school system is there to make sure everyone is given a fair chance and a standard basic education, not for the geniuses to have special treatment.
Now, on the other hand, if you want to start a debate on how to improve on the education system, let me propose a starting point: use tiers for public schools, with admission exams. Top students get into the top tier, but all schools are funded publicly. Would that work for you?
The summary is misleading, there is no "VP of SAP", instead there are many, many VPs for different sections (stuff like "VP Mobile Dev Palo Alto"). They're not really "executive" level, as VP is the step up from "Development Manager". A VP at SAP Palo Alto would be paid decently, probably in the 175-250k range, but above VP is when you start getting into real executive level (and most probably pay).
I'd have to say this has nothing to do with SAP; it's just a dude that likes Legos and wanted to scam the system.
Disclaimer: info is 2 years old by now.
Unfortunately that's not really true. The cost of equity should be higher than the cost of debt (else you're clearly doing something wrong with your equity), so unless Facebook had trouble borrowing money to grow, the IPO had nothing to do with investments. On the other hand, it has everything to do with diversifying its founders' assets by letting them convert to cash and buy other stuff, and more importantly, is the best out possible from a VC perspective.
See, that analysis is incorrect.
The whole point of investing in Facebook is to buy into the growth. Clearly, the IPO price and the trailing P/E does not reflect a "normal" P/E, because Facebook is considered to not be a mature company, which is why you must look at the forward P/E. If you want a comparison with stocks that are overvalued on a P/E basis, just take a look at Amazon or Salesforce.com (actually at negative EPS right now on Google), both of which have shown crazy valuations for quite some time. Also, the mandatory Google comparison would tell you that at IPO, Google was also overvalued on a trailing P/E basis (priced at $85, last 4Q earnings at $1.26 => P/E = 67.5).
That being said, I agree with you. Facebook looks like a poor investment to me even considering growth prospects, but my analysis is as bad as any other (arguably, worse). It's just that trailing or forward P/E should not discourage you from investigating the stock further (believe me, shorting CRM when its P/E was over 300 was a bad decision, as crazy as it sounds).
Y'know, when you build a network, you should take this into account. Out of your millions of customers, chances are, you will get a few (hundreds, thousands?) that will consume inordinate amounts of data. But as a whole? I can't believe that 100%, or even 50% of the "unlimited plan" customers use an insane amount, which means that on the scale of your entire network, it shouldn't be a problem. That's a common problem in engineering, isn't it? Your bridge has a max capacity, of course, but you plan for it to be much larger than the load it should be facing, and you estimate that load giving yourself enough buffer for the entire thing to be safe.
If you don't trust in your network to be able to handle customers with unlimited data plans, don't sell them. Sell 300GB caps if you must, but sell something you can actually provide, else it's just false advertising.
Is it impossible to get high-speed internet without subscribing to TV cable?
And even if where you live, cable automatically comes bundled with TV cable, are there no other options? ADSL for me is 7 Mbps down, which is sufficient to stream anything.
I was going to mod people but instead found this post, and it's... incensing, to say the least.
There's a good reason why autism or Asperger's are dissociated from being "slow", "retarded", etc. Let me clue you in: it's not the same fucking thing.
Have you actually talked to "highly-functioning" autistic people? It has nothing to do with being slow. It's not their brain power that's in question. It just happens that there are things that they can't do, and although there are common themes between them, autistic people are very different from each other as well.
Now, I will agree that some autistic people have trouble learning, and might never fit in a normal classroom or be able to work in a social environment, but that's not because they're stupid. It's not about their intelligence, even if from an external point of view it might look very similar. For that matter, how do you call lightly autistic (aka, Asperger's syndrome) people that can function in society, but just happen to not like fur, eat sandwiches by the corners, hate phones and can't catch a ball? They have "limitations", but they're not stupid. I call "being stupid" the person that says "sir, you moved the x from the left to the right side of the equation but you made a mistake, you copied the + into a - sign!" stupid.
And Oceania has always been at war with Eurasia.
I wish we would stop considering some fields "an education" and some "a vocation". A truly educated person should be balanced, and knowledgeable in many things. Remember how people like Descartes dabbled in both math and philosophy? That's because they had an education.
Providing an education to all, with or without skills valuable to the job market, is a noble goal. A basic education _is_ already provided to everyone in most Western countries (now you can argue your high school education sucked, but that's beside the point. It was still free.), so if you want people to specialize as well, why not just subsidize everyone's first university degree, regardless of field, and make them pay for the failed classes and subsequent degrees? If someone makes a "bad" choice of degree or doesn't study, that's their own problem. Society is providing its best already, and I surely refuse to pay taxes for people going to school just for fun, because I'd like to do so as well, but I have to work to pay for my living and for others to go to school.
... I do know I am sad that someone is
1. considering another country a "rival" (because that is how rivalries and wars are born)
2. wishing more human beings to be fooled into believing something that's false (you might consider a country's government as corrupt, but the population is not its government, as you should know if you're in the US).
Please mod this up.
"I'm oot and aboot", my gf likes to say mockingly (she's Scottish). As a Quebecer I can swear to you none of us would pronounce "aboot", we would say "abowtte" or something like that (pronounce it in your mind as you wish, I can't convey a Quebec accent through text).
I've left, know plenty that have left, and know plenty that are still there. Obviously take my comments with a grain of salt, since it's anecdotal.
The majority of people I met/know don't even talk about censorship or lack of rights. However, that's not indicative of fear, but rather of the fact it's just not something most people talk about in the first place. I have met guys that left China for the very purpose of escaping the regime to go to a place with more human rights; they're the Slashdot crowd-type of people, that proxy out to see all of the Internet. Most people though, including my family, don't care so much. Their quality of life has vastly improved in the past 50 years. They are no longer afraid of starving, have a roof on top of their head, and the country is not constantly attacked and/or screwed over by foreign superpowers or civil war.
I am not saying the government is perfect, and everyone knows there are plenty of people in disagreement. Usually, those people are the ones 1. getting screwed by the government 2. with enough money and free time to think about democracy. Number one is hard to avoid, because the Chinese government is very utilitarian. When you manage 1.3b+ people, there are choices that need to be made, and they won't please everyone. Number two will only go increasingly, as the population gets richer, but at this point I don't see it as being a major issue. Compare that to people just about anywhere? Not everyone cares about what the TSA does, because it doesn't really affect them, the issues are there, but people live with it as long as they can have a comfortable life.
The point is the electric grid is so much more stable than the Internet, for most people?
Having no offline mode in a game that I can play single player is like having your kitchen faucet stop working because the electricity is down. It sucks, and the user sees no practical reason for it.
Actually, if they made a handwritten version of a popular book with quality ink, great binding and cotton-like high-grade paper, I'm sure some people would pay thousands for it. It costs almost that much to produce, it's only fair.
Comparing royalties with a daily job is disingenuous. If your job is developing software, writing a book is spending 3 years of your life writing that software and then earning money on it until you die (or, rather, until you die + 70 years). The point the poster was making is not really that they _can't_ price it at their current price, but that he/she finds it too expensive, which is fine. It only means they will not buy it at that price and will either do without or find an alternative (I heard of this great "brick and mortar", old school creation called "libraries". They're amazing, it's like a video store for books and the best is it's free. Also a lot of them do have e-books now.)
You can't argue that the e-book is _worth_ 7.99, because it depends on how much the _buyer_ values it at. For some people it's worth that much, others not. The lowest price you can go to, however, is the production price, and that is not nearly as high as eight bucks for an e-book, considering a lot of money has been made (and the cost of production paid many many times over) through the paper version already. The case would be different if it was a new book released in both paper and e-book format, as in you would have to account for publishing, editing and all.
To me, this is more like... "look guys, remember Warcraft 2? Good shit right? How about we release it again, but like, as a download-only version with a new splash screen? I think we should make it cheaper than what we used to sell it at. Let's say $40, cheaper than the original 49.99!". You're allowed to, but I'm allowed to think you're trying to rip me off.
And many direct download links may or may not contain viruses, urls may or may not point to websites with malicious scripts. I say we block all of these as well, what do you think?
I use Messenger with my friends, people I know. I've seen some of them get their accounts hijacked and send out scam links, but I've yet to see a Pirate Bay scam operation.
And this is why DST sucks. You can't even argue convincingly on Slashdot because of it. :(
This is typical, and not even anecdotal. There's a certain price point at which people don't care Just look at Steam.
"We do a 75 percent price reduction, our Counter-Strike experience tells us that our gross revenue would remain constant. Instead what we saw was our gross revenue increased by a factor of 40. Not 40 percent, but a factor of 40."
http://www.rockpapershotgun.com/2011/10/24/less-is-more-gabe-newell-on-game-pricing/
That means, selling your product at 25% of your original price increases total sales 40 times over, or in other words you sell 160 times what you would have sold.
Indeed, if you earn a buck instead of 10 per book, your net profit is still up. Your profit margin, _per book "copy"_, is lower, but if you consider the fact that an eBook is zero marginal cost, it means that on a company-basis your entire profitability still goes up.
Many people like games, and games are demanding. This is why Intel is working on making their integrated video cards better. No, it's not as good as the AMD offering, but it is improving, and since Sandy Bridge they've been sufficient to run most games in low settings.
Lo and behold! Actual review instead of FUD! Starcraft 2 running in 1680x1050, Medium settings, 44.6 fps.