Giving developers a percentage of the profits would just encourage the same accounting methods Hollywood uses to stiff writers, or labels use on bands.
The real problem is not used stores, it is that there were a lot of good games released that I didn't have the time or money for when they were new that I'm now picking up for cheap because they have more value than current games.
Or not so cheap, I did pay $25 for a unopened box of UFO/X-com about 10 years after it came out. If they still were selling it, they could have got some cash.
On the other hand, with Fallout I bought a jewelcase rerelease of it, which hopefully netted them some money, but saved me 40 bucks.
For me(to bring in a car analogy), it's as if car makers suddenly started making worse cars and wondered why the value of used cars skyrocketed.
At a place I worked at, our rate table for anything up to 40 pounds or around... I think 9 linear feet to anywhere in north america fit on a single piece of paper, front and half of the back. The remaining half sheet had the rules for everything larger or denser than that.
I'm suprised I don't still remember the # of feet, there was a poster of it outside my office for years. Well, it was replaced every 6 months or so, but everything but the dollars stayed the same.
Re:That's what you get... for not using FedEx
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USPS Server Meltdown
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You have a point.
I used to work for a company that shipped $40 million/year to residences and charged flat rate shipping for almost half of it. Every month we hit within.5% of the actual cost to ship. Whenever the disparity exceeded a certain dollar value in a given week, we added or subtracted 5 cents from the shipping charge for the next week.
It wobbled back and forth like that for years, until one week when we had a sale on 40 pound ferrite cores.
Then we added 10 cents.
The larger your shipping is, the more you can absorb discrepancies if you know already know how much your inventory costs to ship and know where your customers are.
You can buy 1:4 scale radio operated airplanes. Load em up with *boom* and a camera, put the GPS unit in the camera's field of view. Should easily within a terrorist budget, although range will be very dependant on the wireless you use. If you get spiffy and follow that netgear-router remote truck guide plus slap a cantenna on it, you could get several miles.
Hell, if you can find a cell phone with a serial port to control the servos and streams video, you can hit any city with phone service.
Back in 1990 there was a survey on the relative addictiveness of substances(John Hastings, Relative Addictiveness of Various Substances). All the more recent stuff usually leaves off hallucinogens as they are usually less addictive than corn syrup.
This is more frequently used to highlight the addictiveness of nicotine than support drug use.
I think 1 was unsweetened tea or something, but as you can see, the usual hallucinogens all fall at the bottom and some suprising things are near the top(although I think caffeine should be a bit higher *pop-fizz-ahh*).
Huh, why don't they just add an "Abuse of Analogues" provision to make whole classes of similar drugs illegal?
Oh, it could be because they were smarter and didn't want to make chemicals commonly found in normal body chemistry illegal. Hit an all-time highscore or meet an interesting girl(as if, on/.), you just generated enough endorphins to qualify for possesion.
(you can't sue in federal court for matters of less than $20 per the Constitution, and you can't sue over copyrights anywhere else, though the statutory damages could easily push it over the cap if there's precedent to that effect and I have no idea if they've ever argued that the $20 was in 1776 dollars, and should be adjusted for inflation).
As somebody else mentioned, I think the $20 is a requirement for jury trials. However, that's not what I'm being pedantic about.
Since you asked, $20 bucks from 1776 would be somewhere between $500 and $10,000 in today's dollars, depending on if you use GDP per capita(for the latter, data goes back to 1790) or the cost of various consumer goods(former, only have data back to 1900, so it's a W.A.G., plus they didn't have ipods back then).
I'm suprised this is news. Wasn't there just recently an article about the set of nerves that fire the same when seeing someone else perform an action as doing it yourself?
Heck, I imagine anyone who has worked with waldos/tele-operated robotics has felt a sense of transference to the mechanical portion. After using a waldo for several hours a day for a few weeks, I swear I developed a sense of touch in a device with no force feedback, but it was most likely just my sympathetic reaction to seeing the waldo come into contact.
Whoever came up with this idea should have bothered to put a minimum time limit. Even if someone is super-speedy, it should take at least a half second to click the "bid" button, load the bidding page, and hit submit.
I would have at least set up a new random bid URL for each items so people couldn't just hitting the URL for regular bidding and would need to take the time to download the item page before finding the URL for that item. Plus, after they caught on, that'd reduce the # of false bids on other $1 items.
But then I've done similar myself, although not so scummy, just auto-buying a Wii(at the regular price) from Amazon so I didn't have to stay awake all night for the 5 minute window that it was in stock.
I still feel OK with it, since I didn't check Amazon more frequently than I would have hitting F5 and scalpers are still selling it for a $100 mark up this long after release.
Blockbuster currently is providing its VOD STB (made by 2Wire) free with an advance rental of 25 on-demand movies for $99. Thereafter, VOD titles are available for $1.99 each.
so for a limited time, it is $99 for 25 movies+free box or, equivalently, a $99 box with 25 free movies.
Since that works out to $4/each for the first 25 when they are normally $1.99, it is hardly a special. More like paying double for the first 25 to defray the cost of the box.
See, that's why I specified we handfed. The ducks they use to make commercial foie-gras are fed by pneumatic pump and it inflates them like little feathery basketballs, leading to your "occasional stomach-bursting". Similarly, if you are just ramming a tube down their throat, it leads to esophageal tearing and infection.
But a funnel and a bucket of warm mash isn't any more torture than a beer bong to a college student. It just lets the goose eat as much as possible before their stomach registers "full". They can eat a whole fish without chewing, so you needn't be cruel like the commercial places are with ducks.
Wild geese by themselves will eat until they weigh 2 or 3 times normal in preparation for winter migration and by providing domestic geese with high-calorie food, their liver approaches the traditional size of foie gras. The French insist that what some call "humane" foie gras isn't "true" foie gras(see here), but it looks the same to me and, despite what your ignorance in comparing my geese to those pictures of factory ducks, it doesn't require any cruelty beyond that of raising free range birds for food.
Of course, if you are a rabid PETA vegan, you'll say any use of animals is cruelty, but otherwise those geese were better treated than any other meat product in your fridge. Unhappy geese are skinny geese. My geese didn't need to be caged to keep them from escaping, they came when I rang and wandered around the rest of the time.
Re:Stephenson actually sucks. There. I've said it.
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Anathem
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Color of Magic is the best example of this! The Light Fantastic is his most direct sequel and they really should have been published as one book. As his works have gotten thicker, he's been better about keeping one complete tale in a book, although his Postal/Making Money pair are headed back that way.
I actually like his books, I'm being snarky since he really needs to kick out a dozen more before his Alzheimer's affects his writing.
I've raised geese for foie gras before. The little gals actually like it. After the second or third time they figure out "damn, I don't even have to chew?" and come running up at feeding time and try to swallow the feed tube and your hand with it.
Sure, if you didn't eat them, they'd die of liver failure shortly thereafter, but that's why you kill them before they get sick:)
Re:Stephenson actually sucks. There. I've said it.
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Anathem
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· Score: 1
Pratchett has always been as bad, he just publishes every 200-300 pages because he needs the money. Haven't you noticed he tends to stick with a character for a few books? Instead of paying for one mammoth book like the others, he's got you paying for 4 or 5!
I'm sorry, but if a novel has 200-300 pages of introduction, the author has failed. I got through about 50 pages of Anathem before throwing in the towel. There are millions of books out there which I'd rather spend 300 pages with.
But some of us don't need ADD meds to make it through the heating instructions on packet of ramen.
My kid is in the 2nd grade and already doing powerpoint. WTF?!?!?! The focus is on presentation, not content. The kids know how to make things 'look nice' but they dont have anything worth saying.
Shit, they're teaching my kids how to write? Why, they'll only be able to copy nicely, they don't have anything worth saying.
Call me technophobic, but I see the use of computers in the classroom as a crutch more than as a tool that extends the students knowledge.
Preach it! Unless you can recite Ovid and do derivations and quad roots in your head, writing is a crutch.
My car has a terabyte drive in the center console. I suppose if I had all FLAC, I could've filled it by now, but I'm fine with lesser standards in my car. Once I'm in the possession of 3-6 years of non-repeating audio, perhaps I'll have to worry about such complexities as choosing what to put on my player.
Or say(and demonstrate) that they are using it as an interest generating investment sufficient to fund their operation without diminishing the capital, just like any endowment or scholarship foundation.
Slashdot Mirror
Giving developers a percentage of the profits would just encourage the same accounting methods Hollywood uses to stiff writers, or labels use on bands.
The real problem is not used stores, it is that there were a lot of good games released that I didn't have the time or money for when they were new that I'm now picking up for cheap because they have more value than current games.
Or not so cheap, I did pay $25 for a unopened box of UFO/X-com about 10 years after it came out. If they still were selling it, they could have got some cash.
On the other hand, with Fallout I bought a jewelcase rerelease of it, which hopefully netted them some money, but saved me 40 bucks.
For me(to bring in a car analogy), it's as if car makers suddenly started making worse cars and wondered why the value of used cars skyrocketed.
Some say this has already happened:)
At a place I worked at, our rate table for anything up to 40 pounds or around ... I think 9 linear feet to anywhere in north america fit on a single piece of paper, front and half of the back. The remaining half sheet had the rules for everything larger or denser than that.
I'm suprised I don't still remember the # of feet, there was a poster of it outside my office for years. Well, it was replaced every 6 months or so, but everything but the dollars stayed the same.
You have a point.
I used to work for a company that shipped $40 million/year to residences and charged flat rate shipping for almost half of it. Every month we hit within .5% of the actual cost to ship. Whenever the disparity exceeded a certain dollar value in a given week, we added or subtracted 5 cents from the shipping charge for the next week.
It wobbled back and forth like that for years, until one week when we had a sale on 40 pound ferrite cores.
Then we added 10 cents.
The larger your shipping is, the more you can absorb discrepancies if you know already know how much your inventory costs to ship and know where your customers are.
You can buy 1:4 scale radio operated airplanes. Load em up with *boom* and a camera, put the GPS unit in the camera's field of view. Should easily within a terrorist budget, although range will be very dependant on the wireless you use. If you get spiffy and follow that netgear-router remote truck guide plus slap a cantenna on it, you could get several miles.
Hell, if you can find a cell phone with a serial port to control the servos and streams video, you can hit any city with phone service.
PS, a more recent(2007) if more fuzzy representation of relative addictiveness:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Image:Rational_scale_to_assess_the_harm_of_drugs_(mean_physical_harm_and_mean_dependence).svg
Back in 1990 there was a survey on the relative addictiveness of substances(John Hastings, Relative Addictiveness of Various Substances). All the more recent stuff usually leaves off hallucinogens as they are usually less addictive than corn syrup.
This is more frequently used to highlight the addictiveness of nicotine than support drug use.
100 Nicotine
99 Methamphetamine smoked
98 Crack
93 Methamphetamine injected
85 Valium (Diazepam)
83 Quaalude (Methaqualone)
82 Seconal (Secobarbital)
81 Alcohol
80 Heroin
78 Amphetamine taken nasally
72 Cocaine
68 Caffeine
57 Phencyclidine
21 Marijuana
20 MDMA
18 Psilocybin Mushrooms
18 LSD
18 Mescaline
I think 1 was unsweetened tea or something, but as you can see, the usual hallucinogens all fall at the bottom and some suprising things are near the top(although I think caffeine should be a bit higher *pop-fizz-ahh*).
Huh, why don't they just add an "Abuse of Analogues" provision to make whole classes of similar drugs illegal?
Oh, it could be because they were smarter and didn't want to make chemicals commonly found in normal body chemistry illegal. Hit an all-time highscore or meet an interesting girl(as if, on /.), you just generated enough endorphins to qualify for possesion.
God, my country is stupid...
As somebody else mentioned, I think the $20 is a requirement for jury trials. However, that's not what I'm being pedantic about.
Since you asked, $20 bucks from 1776 would be somewhere between $500 and $10,000 in today's dollars, depending on if you use GDP per capita(for the latter, data goes back to 1790) or the cost of various consumer goods(former, only have data back to 1900, so it's a W.A.G., plus they didn't have ipods back then).
I'm suprised this is news. Wasn't there just recently an article about the set of nerves that fire the same when seeing someone else perform an action as doing it yourself?
Heck, I imagine anyone who has worked with waldos/tele-operated robotics has felt a sense of transference to the mechanical portion. After using a waldo for several hours a day for a few weeks, I swear I developed a sense of touch in a device with no force feedback, but it was most likely just my sympathetic reaction to seeing the waldo come into contact.
Whoever came up with this idea should have bothered to put a minimum time limit. Even if someone is super-speedy, it should take at least a half second to click the "bid" button, load the bidding page, and hit submit.
I would have at least set up a new random bid URL for each items so people couldn't just hitting the URL for regular bidding and would need to take the time to download the item page before finding the URL for that item. Plus, after they caught on, that'd reduce the # of false bids on other $1 items.
But then I've done similar myself, although not so scummy, just auto-buying a Wii(at the regular price) from Amazon so I didn't have to stay awake all night for the 5 minute window that it was in stock.
I still feel OK with it, since I didn't check Amazon more frequently than I would have hitting F5 and scalpers are still selling it for a $100 mark up this long after release.
He bought an Apple notebook?
You misspelled Planck, but Wikipedia covered for you.
It is in the article, the box is $99 or:
so for a limited time, it is $99 for 25 movies+free box or, equivalently, a $99 box with 25 free movies.
Since that works out to $4/each for the first 25 when they are normally $1.99, it is hardly a special. More like paying double for the first 25 to defray the cost of the box.
See, that's why I specified we handfed. The ducks they use to make commercial foie-gras are fed by pneumatic pump and it inflates them like little feathery basketballs, leading to your "occasional stomach-bursting". Similarly, if you are just ramming a tube down their throat, it leads to esophageal tearing and infection.
But a funnel and a bucket of warm mash isn't any more torture than a beer bong to a college student. It just lets the goose eat as much as possible before their stomach registers "full". They can eat a whole fish without chewing, so you needn't be cruel like the commercial places are with ducks.
Wild geese by themselves will eat until they weigh 2 or 3 times normal in preparation for winter migration and by providing domestic geese with high-calorie food, their liver approaches the traditional size of foie gras. The French insist that what some call "humane" foie gras isn't "true" foie gras(see here), but it looks the same to me and, despite what your ignorance in comparing my geese to those pictures of factory ducks, it doesn't require any cruelty beyond that of raising free range birds for food.
Of course, if you are a rabid PETA vegan, you'll say any use of animals is cruelty, but otherwise those geese were better treated than any other meat product in your fridge. Unhappy geese are skinny geese. My geese didn't need to be caged to keep them from escaping, they came when I rang and wandered around the rest of the time.
Color of Magic is the best example of this! The Light Fantastic is his most direct sequel and they really should have been published as one book. As his works have gotten thicker, he's been better about keeping one complete tale in a book, although his Postal/Making Money pair are headed back that way.
I actually like his books, I'm being snarky since he really needs to kick out a dozen more before his Alzheimer's affects his writing.
Then again, some say it always has:)
I've raised geese for foie gras before. The little gals actually like it. After the second or third time they figure out "damn, I don't even have to chew?" and come running up at feeding time and try to swallow the feed tube and your hand with it.
Sure, if you didn't eat them, they'd die of liver failure shortly thereafter, but that's why you kill them before they get sick:)
Pratchett has always been as bad, he just publishes every 200-300 pages because he needs the money. Haven't you noticed he tends to stick with a character for a few books? Instead of paying for one mammoth book like the others, he's got you paying for 4 or 5!
Clever, innit.
But some of us don't need ADD meds to make it through the heating instructions on packet of ramen.
That's it, turn in your geek card and be outta town by sundown.
Considering the area, you have to mentally s/apple juice/hard cider
Shit, they're teaching my kids how to write? Why, they'll only be able to copy nicely, they don't have anything worth saying.
Preach it! Unless you can recite Ovid and do derivations and quad roots in your head, writing is a crutch.
My car has a terabyte drive in the center console. I suppose if I had all FLAC, I could've filled it by now, but I'm fine with lesser standards in my car. Once I'm in the possession of 3-6 years of non-repeating audio, perhaps I'll have to worry about such complexities as choosing what to put on my player.
Or say(and demonstrate) that they are using it as an interest generating investment sufficient to fund their operation without diminishing the capital, just like any endowment or scholarship foundation.