You are close to the mark, but this is potentially worse than fascism as we have known it. It opens the possibility of an entirely new form of tyranny that the human race has not yet experienced.
If you study the history of fascism, the various ideas that "fascists" have become confusing, until you realize that fascism isn't an ideology. Fascism isn't about ideas, but achieving a specific effect: maximizing the power of an individual or group of people who have control of the government. Where it serves that purpose, fascism will embrace extremes of spiritualism or materialism, or even mix the two. Consistency doesn't matter. Authority does.
What is different about this is that we aren't talking about putting the power of the State in the hands of an individual or group of individuals. We are talking about putting it at the disposal of artificial entities; immortal profit making machines with a capacity for accumulating wealth beyond that of any individual. This is like *Colossus: The Forbin Project*, only with machines we've already built and operated.
It's not that making a profit is evil. It's that the very definition of evil (see Saint Augustine, or even Kant) is making one sided decisions. Human concerns like ethics are not part of the design of the institution of the corporation. Ethics are forced on corporations by two things: the individuals working for the corporations, and by law.
But the ethics of the individual are always under pressure in a corporation. We've all seen that. There's always the question of whether we can push the limit just a bit, and if we try it and get away with it, we suddenly have a new conception of what "normal behavior" is. We know that "everybody does it" doesn't excuse something, but we don't act that way. The law is what makes it possible for people to remain ethical. They can always say, "we will go to jail if we try that," or "we'll be fined," or even "we'll get bad publicity," which of course depends on individuals having rights that are respected under the law.
Corporations have inappropriate influence now on government, but that doesn't make a dystopia. Life is still good for most of us. But we can't extrapolate that to giving them unchecked power to make laws for their own benefit. If we do that, the safety net provided by individual ethics won't matter. Once corporations are above the law, any corporation that fails to take the profit maximizing step regardless of the other consequences won't survive.
Allow the power of corporations to grow without any check, and for the first time in human history human affairs will be governed with absolutely no regard to human welfare.
You actually *can* learn something useful in a way from considering the Jurassic Park story. Consider this: the T. rex was awesome, *cool* even. The raptors were terrifying. The little venom spitting dinosaur was the worst.
If you think about it, that's actually a fairly reasonable reaction. Which of the animals would be a potential problem for people if they were reconstructed? The T. rex is huge, easy to spot, and probably needs an enormous geographic range to itself to survive. If a breeding pair escaped, they'd have almost no chance of establishing a stable population, even if people left them alone.
The raptors on the other hand might have a chance. The range for a single T. rex probably would support a good sized band of them. But they probably wouldn't be hard to hunt down. They're still pretty big and would be easy to track down. As formidable as they are, they wouldn't be a match for a squad of human commandos.
It's that little spitting dinosaur that you'd have to look out for. If a breeding pair escaped, they'd be all over the place and you'd never be able to eradicate them.
The smaller an individual organism is and the less resources it requires to maintain itself in breeding condition, the harder it is to eradicate. Insects the the fire ant, the japanese beetle, or the asian tiger mosquito pretty much can't be stopped once they start breeding in a hospitable environment. Microorganisms are the very hardest. Unless they have a very narrow habitat (e.g. pathogens that infect humans only), you can't even begin to contain their geographic spread; even then it's hard.
In any case, if you read the book, the real screwups werent't he scientists. They were the systems engineers who relied too much on the resumptions in the requirements spec.
So you're saying this is kind of like BSD and Linux. There should have been only *one* effort to resurrect Unix, a commercially extinct operating system.
So what happens if you start finding yourself believing astrologers?
Really, if you want to distrust what scientists say, your best option is to *become* one. Here's an actual quote from a recent issue of Science News
Lovejoy's hypothesis is an interesting 'just so' story. He's rapidly becoming the Rudyard Kipling of paleoanthropology.
Meow! Take that! And look at those *shoes* he's wearing.
And consider: that was a scientist talking to a science journalist with a notebook and pencil in hand. This kind of mean-girl talk is a lot more common when they don't think the public is talking. Ever see the actual comments scientists submit during peer review?
Well, yes I understand what you are saying. But if you are going to go in that direction, you might as well go with something a little better organized.
I should be clear that I have no beef with simulation per se. Simulation on some level is necessary to make the system comprehensible. I just look at modern editions of D&D and my first impression is that it's conceptually messy. It always was, and I don't think it matters that much except that improving something that is already conceptually messy makes it harder for newcomers. I'm sure it's a fine system for people who've had campaigns up and running for years.
In an ideal world there would be a clean, well-documented system whose complexity telescopes with the needs of the players. I haven't seen that yet, although clearly the companies behind these products are trying. I look at GURPS and it I *get* what the designers are trying to do, but I have to laugh when I go on the Steven Jackson web site. Oh, it's chock full of useful information, but that's not the same as having good documentation. Try to figure out exactly what you need to get to get a simple dungeon crawl adventure off the ground and your poor eyes will start watering.
I was a DM during the heyday of AD&D 2nd Ed. I ran successful AD&D and Traveler campaigns for several years, until work commitments and the old gang moving away put and end to that. After ten years of my old roleplaying stuff gathering dust I put it in the library book sale.
When I was running campaigns, I quickly realized that the rules were not really workable from a DM's perspective. The roleplaying aspect of the game was too open ended to be practical for this set of rules. That's why the ridiculous "dungeon crawl" campaigns were so popular, because they paid back *all* of the DM's work. If you filled a hundred rooms with treasure and monsters, the players would methodically clean out each level.
In a sense this recaptured the old strategic simulation games from which this kind of thing evolved. If you set up Napolean vs. Wellington at Waterloo, you didn't have to worry about players saying, "I think I'll take my army and move back over Belgian fronteir, then negotiate a treaty which will apparently give Britain what it is looking for, under the cover of which I can build other geopolitical alliances that will undercut her." After you did all the work of researching and setting up the initial conditions for an elaborate battle simulation, the players were jolly well going to play out *your* scenario. But the freedom to do something unexpected is the essence of roleplaying.
That the rules were really not very adequate didn't hurt, because short of simulating the whole world, they couldn't possibly be. The DM makes up rules governing outcomes as he goes along, and if he does it skillfully the players don't even notice. In fact once I got very experienced at this *most* of the campaign, and usually the best parts of the campaign, were improvised on the spot. Instead of spending five hours preparing for a five hour session, I could spend one hour on something that would make a really big difference.
The key insight I got was this: roleplaying games aren't simulation. They're "cops and robbers" or "cowboys and indians" with just enough structure to make them interesting and challenging. It's group story telling, not for the end product but for the experience of being in the story.
Now recently my teenaged daughter expressed interest in learning D&D, so I picked up the latest books. Now before I start yelling at all you kids with your newfangled systems to get off my lawn, let me say that the new rules are impressive. Clearly a lot of thought has gone into them, and they cover contingencies a lot more clearly, and tweak some of the things that were illogical. These are much better *simulation* rules. But they aren't necessarily better roleplaying rules.
Perfect, even *reasonably good* simulation rules for roleplaying are impractical, in my opinion, because such rules would have to be a reasonably good ontology of some world. Well before you'd get to "reasonably good" you'd reach the point where the rules are cumbersome. What rules ought to do (in my opinion) is provide a framework in which players are forced to make decisions that are meaningful to them (e.g., "Am I up to fighting this guy, or should I run away and heal up?"; "If I want to steal the jewel from the idol, how should I prepare my escape?").
It seems to me that roleplaying rules should focus on (a) forcing player decisions, (b) being convenient to use and (c) being easy to learn for both gamemaster and player.
It seems to me the new D&D rules are no better at A, not significantly better at B, and a lot worse at C.
It used to be that you could bring up a new player with about fifteen minutes of explanation and another fifteen minutes of walking him through his character generation. That coincided with the phase of the evening's entertainment that featured pizza and chatting for the other players. If you wanted to bring a whole group up, you took them all through the half hour orientation then treated them to a one evening dungeon crawl, after which they'd know everything th
You are correct, but only in a sense that has no practical value.
This is a case of metonymy (sorry, language isn't logical). When the poster was talking about "the government", he was obviously talking about that portion of the government that is concerned with setting policies with the aim to maximizing the revenue of the national government. It makes no sense to ascribe policy motivations to judicial decisions, unless one is criticizing the judicial system for operating outside its proper sphere.
I ran into a similar issue recently in a medical ontology, which had a concept for "adverse reactions to insulin and anti-diabetic medications". Technically that is redundant since insulin *is* an anti-diabetic medication. Insulin is by far the most important medication, so reactions to it go in this category, but reactions to *other* medications go in categories *underneath* this. This is not logical; it makes it impossible for the system to be sure that a patient has had an adverse reaction to insulin if this category is used. But that's the way people speak and understand each other. Humans *know* that unless otherwise specified we're talking insulin.
It's just synecdoche -- the part standing for the whole in speech. That's the way people talk, even though it is inconsistent with kind of language philosopher-kings would prefer.
If by "real" you mean "non-tangible", that's been the case for centuries, and was finally recognized when we went off the gold standard. The Fed alters the money supply, not by printing money, but by altering the amount of money people agree exists.
If you're a big bank and the Fed loans you a million dollars, nothing tangible changes. Everyone just agrees you have a million dollars at your disposal because the Fed says there is. If they alter their interest rates to make borrowing attractive, suddenly there's lot more money floating around in the economy. If the raise interest rates so you (as a big bank) don't want to have so much debt to them on your books, suddenly you start demanding people you've lent money pay you back so you can pay your bills. That sucks money out of the economy, even though nothing tangible has happened (like zapping a pile of gold with a disintegration ray).
It's really simple in a completely non-intuitive way.
But that's not the sense I mean when I say "real money". "Real money" is something anybody with any sense would agree is money. In-game money has many of the characteristics of "real money"; it is liquid, and you can exchange it for some things of value. It lacks the property that anybody of any sense would treat it as "just as good as money", which means you can't trade it for just about anything the way you can real money. You've got to barter it for something else people agree is money before it has that all important universal buying power.
There's an obvious reason for this. The company that operates the game would literally have system that could generate unlimited amounts of money. Banks can be a *little bit* like that. They can create travelers checks and other documents that say "pay to the bearer such and so", but they have to carry those as liabilities on their books. They can't print as much of this money as they like without altering their ability to pay their obligations to people who demand something "as good as" what the Fed provides. The game company has no incentive to limit the amount of money it creates, other than its impact on game play. If the government gave me the power to make *real* virtual money without any kind of downside, I wouldn't care about what it did to my game.
In books printed around 1900. The language was startlingly familiar. You were supposedly allowed to use the book for private, personal use only. You weren't allowed to sell it or rent it out.
The first sale doctrine meant that the copyright holders couldn't impose such uses on third parties without entering into a contract. That wasn't feasible in the era when publishers sold to bookstores who had no interest in becoming license brokers. Things are different for ebooks, where it's easy to sell licenses rather than copies. In fact, that's what's behind one of the niftier features of Amazon's Kindle: you can copy your book to your iPhone or Kindle as you like, you just can't resell or lend it.
There's no question that eliminating this nonsense was *good* for book publishing as a whole, because this was a deal which left the public hungry for more of their product. Some individual publishers could have made more money on certain individual works. In the transition to electronic formats, the book publishing industry could easily become the next music industry.
It's not the *government* saying that. It's the courts.
I have serious doubts about the article summary and title here. Reading the article behind the article, it seems that the courts haven't ruled that in game money is "real", otherwise they'd be taxing in-game transactions. It's just saying that in-game money can be sold.
It seems reasonable that they should treat the sale of in game things (currency or objects) like any other kind of sale of any other kind of property. Why should you be able to earn in-game money and sell it without tax, while somebody selling the fruits of his labor in something else has to pay tax? Or vice versa?
For years Microsoft used BSD licensed code in Windows' networking. It never caused a problem for their customers. I wouldn't be surprised if removing it were a political decision.
For practical purposes "no open source software" means they customer wants a 100% Microsoft development and deployment stack. It means no Apache, no perl, php, and for practical purposes no Java either. The only entity in the world who has a rational reason to avoid BSD licensed software is Microsoft, and purely for the purpose of preventing its customers from buying competitor's software. There's no rational reason to avoid BSD licensed software as a customer, because it's just a minimal subset of what's in just about every proprietary license that isn't written by an idiot.
You see this situation all the time with miliary/government surplus.
For a hundred bucks or even less, you can pick up all kinds of neat surplus gizmos that Uncle Sam paid thousands and thousands of dollars for. The reason is that the gizmo is sure to perform some highly demanding task that nobody has any use for except in the exact original application. That's why you don't see cheap surplus trucks or aircraft -- lots of people have a use for that kind of stuff. The "bargain" stuff is more likely to be an assembly used to collimate the target sights for a huge and obsolete field artillery piece, or an oddball large format camera (sans lens) designed fit in the nose of a 1960s era fighter plane.
If you buy this kind of stuff, you are almost certainly doing it for one of two reasons. Either it's as a conversation piece, or you're taking it apart for things like lenses, mirrors and such. You don't need any of the things that made the gizmo expensive. Neither does anyone else.
That's the situation for the SSME. IIRC, it's an outstanding engine, but it's most important characteristic is that it is reusable. It has a remarkable track record of success at that, but you'd have to be building a reusable launch vehicle to want that. In other words the only people who'd have a use for this thing would be people building their own shuttle.
Maybe if you wanted to build *one* disposable rocket, you might find this thing a bargain. But who in their mind would want to do that? You achieve economy on a disposable rocket by building lots of nearly identical copies. For that you don't give a damn about getting the first engine cheap. You want an engine that is cheap to build over and over again, which of course the SSME wasn't designed to be. Even *we* have no use for these things, even though we intend to build a shuttle replacement.
What is at issue is whether a private entity has a right to control information about itself, aside from what it must disclose to meet its legal obligations (e.g. in SEC filings).
To a first approximation, the way the law in the US works with respect to private secrets is once you let them out of the bag, they aren't secrets any longer. That embarrassing purchase you made on Amazon? They can tell the world all about it. In fact, you have to assume to *do*, they just do it in a way that's hard for you to find out. They have to, because if they want to continue selling rubber solace for the lonely gentlemen, they have to be discreet about being indiscreet. As long as you're the last to know everyone is happy. (note ironic tone)
Now when a company creates a product like this, there's no way to keep information from leaking. They can sign all their employees and suppliers to an NDA, but information leaks, and once somebody is in possession of information that he received without doing anything illegal to get it, it's his to do whatever he wants.
If you overhear two Apple employees discussing the new secret device at the next restaurant booth, you're free to tell the world. If you're working for the caterer for a party at Apple HQ and see an exec showing of a strange new device, you're free to tell the world.
Even if you receive information by illegitimate channels, for *trade secrets* the situation is not so clear. If you entice an Apple employee to break his NDA, that's bad for you, but if a disgruntled Apple employee throws the specs of the device over your transom, it's a different kettle of fish. Of course consult your lawyer if this ever happens.
It's interesting that the article is claiming that *copyright* suit threats are being made, because there is strong common law copyright protection for unpublished works. Basically, an unpublished work is *yours* in a much more fundamental way than a published work is. The public copyright deal, fair use and all that doesn't come into it.
Now many aspects of successful Apple products could plausibly be claimed as different kinds of intellectual property. Some might be trademarked, some might be patented, others might be copyrighted. But the mere *fact* that Apple is working on a product of a certain type could only be considered a trade secret, and such information is legally a secret only so long as they manage to keep that knowledge away from anyone who hasn't signed an NDA.
If the article is accurate (don't count on it) this would be one of those nasty situations where lawyers try to conjure whole new classes of rights for their clients out of existing rights of a completely different nature. Sometimes they can obtain greater *de facto* rights for their client by sending nasty sounding C&D letters that play fast and loose with the law. That's good for their clients, but bad for society, and bad for the law if it values voluntary cooperation by citizens.
exactly. they've only just come out with a black wii. then they will have a blue wii, yellow wii, green wii,
Exactly, indeed. It worked for Apple, didn't it?
This, my friends, is how you make profit in business. Figure out what a large group of people really want at a price they'll pay and give them the cheapest to manufacture product that meets that criterion. It's all about profit, not gross. The best way to increase your market share is to stay profitable and avoid changes that disturb the cheap product that gives your customers something they want to pay for.
If you've done this, you'd be surprised how bizarre people's buying behavior is. If you interviewed them, they'll tell you all kinds of things that they want, but if you put them into your product, they won't pay any more. So you cater to the customer's slightest whim, so long as its cheap. Then the customer gets all kinds of neat things, and the thing he really needs, but not luxury features unless the unit cost of that feature is low (attractive design has the cheapest unit cost).
That's why tech enthusiasts are usually bad product designers. They mistake the expensive features they're excited for something customers will pay for. You have to engineer a product, not just to perform its ostenisble job, not just to *sell*, but to sell profitably. That aspect of the product has tradeoffs, just like its physical parameters. You can't make a widget arbitrarily strong and arbitrarily light at the same time. You can't expand a product's appeal to arbitrary breadth and produce it cheap enough to make a profit.
Nintendo can't keep this up forever, but stretching out the tech cycle has a huge number of benefits for them. Developers know how to target the platform and can concentrate on game design rather than learning to use new features. If somebody moves in on Nintendo's profitable casual gamer market, they can simply cut their costs and starve the competition for profit. If they need to pull a tech rabbit out of the hat, they can produce better controllers and more specialized ones -- in fact they're doing both. They can't keep this up forever, but they can make a lot of money for a long time.
Warm ups. I'm visiting my sister next week, and my brother-in-law is a professor of Cultural Studies at an ivy league university. My Academese is a little rusty, but the Pimsleur tapes are too damned expensive.
The ways this is supposed to work is that you explain something hard to understand at the cost of assuming something that is hard to swallow. It's all about faultless logic proceeding from readily manufactured premises.
Although there is no evidence that the NSA is monkeying with Chinese search engine traffic, if we look at it as a hypothetical scenario, it doesn't contradict anything we know about the world. That makes this a weak conspiracy theory premise. You're supposed to start from a premise that is implausible ("organized labor is conspiring with the bankers"). What's the point of a conspiracy theory that is based on plausible premises? One might as well form a plain old theory.
On the other hand, your theory fails to explain China's actions. Why would they need to break into the email accounts of their political critics *in order to address the problem of NSA spying*? It doesn't follow. What we're supposed to get by believing your theory's crazy premise is a slam-dunk conclusion to some mystery. Not only is the thing we want explained no mystery, if we buy into your theory we don't get any explanation at all. It's a dead end, because there's no logical connection.
I just did. Of course, it's sloppy to say that "'Sys Rq' signifies nothing", since one might well confuse "nothing" with "'nothing'". It might be better to say that for all x, x is not in the set of things signified by the key labeled "Sys Rq".
The only way to more concretely define the Sys Rq key is by enumeration, e.g.:
* It does not signify the letter "Q". * It does not signiffy the name of the Egyptian
Pharaoh "Ramses", the deciphering of which left
Champollion bed-ridden for five days in 1822. * It does not signify those black carbon
granules that collect in the bottom of
your toaster and that you can never manage
to clean out with getting them all over
the place. * It does not signify the set of things
signified by the the "Sys Rq" key. *...
In fact, to *urgently* tell the OS that the SysRq. It's not supposed to be buffered or anything, it supposed to grab the OS by the collar and scream "THE USER JUST PRESSED THE DAMMNED SYSRQ KEY!!!!" at it.
But what is that supposed to mean?
It doesn't mean anything.
That's the whole point.
When they were designing the keyboard, they thought of all the things that you might want a keyboard to say ("STOP SCROLLING", "Show me that last page", "Get me the hell out of this input mode"). And after they'd mandated keys for everything anybody could think of, they had a stroke of genius. They mandated a key that did nothing anybody wanted to do.
Why is that a stroke of genius?
It is something rare in engineering, which thrives on bravado and feverishly inflated self-confidence. It is an admission of the limitation of human foresight, an acknowledgement that there are more things under Heaven and Earth than are dreamt of in our philosophies; a semiotic *memento mori*.
This key is mandated to mean nothing, therefore it can mean anything, or indeed, everything.
What if the deep seated beliefs of the population aren't implementable as policy? Or simply nonsense?
Being ashamed of nakedness is certainly not a fundamental human instinct. We evolved to live naked. Culture taught us to clothe ourselves. You might claim its a bedrock cultural value. But those values change, as we've seen in the erosion of control over personal information. The attitude of many people today toward that would shock people from fifty years ago.
When the Model T was introduced, it cost the equivalent of around 20K$, about half what this car is going to go for. But competing cars were more in the $50K to $70K range, so $40K is not too bad, and somewhat less than that (as the article says might happen) would be quite practical for many working people *given that there are operational savings*. It could well be a modest success at a price like $35K.
The cost of the Model T drop from $20,000 in current dollars to $12000 and then to under $10000, making it practical for the workers who assembled it to buy one. That's economies of manufacturing scale. The Volt has potentials for such economies of scale as the purchase expensive new parts like large batteries attracts investment and initial development costs are recouped. A modest hit with new technology is hard to achieve, but it will drive down cost and drive up profits more quickly than throwing a new skin on the same old platform would, where economies of scale have already been accounted for.
I'm not so sure. If "Dignity" is defined as anything somebody takes offense at, then we're all offenders. People who write things about my race that I find offensive offend my dignity. The proper response to the vast majority of such offenses is to ignore them.
I'd say that people have a right to self determination, which means at a minimum they must know what they are going to be subjected to and what the consequences of their choices may be. After that, the consequences they are subjected to ought to be the minimum necessary to achieve to achieve some reasonable, well documented public purpose. Finally the net benefit of such purposes for the vast majority of people should exceed the personal cost.
So in this case I'd ask (1) are people really aware of what these machines can do and *might* do? (2) Do these machines serve a legitimate purpose, and do they work? (3) Are they the minimum possible intrusion needed to do the job? (4) Are they a net benefit to most people, and what are the other choices of people who have reason to avoid them?
That gives me a pretty good sense for whether these machines are good policy. It seems to me that the biggest questions with them are (1) what exactly *could* they do and (4) are the really a net benefit to most people? As far as the minimum intrusion standard is concern, I suspect that no equally effective method will be much less intrusive. The question is whether obtaining that much information is of net use to most people involved.
That's not such a "clear bright line" standard as "dignity is an essential human right"; it's just more workable. I don't disagree with your sentiment about dignity, but it's a better guide of private conduct than public policy.
Slashdot Mirror
You are close to the mark, but this is potentially worse than fascism as we have known it. It opens the possibility of an entirely new form of tyranny that the human race has not yet experienced.
If you study the history of fascism, the various ideas that "fascists" have become confusing, until you realize that fascism isn't an ideology. Fascism isn't about ideas, but achieving a specific effect: maximizing the power of an individual or group of people who have control of the government. Where it serves that purpose, fascism will embrace extremes of spiritualism or materialism, or even mix the two. Consistency doesn't matter. Authority does.
What is different about this is that we aren't talking about putting the power of the State in the hands of an individual or group of individuals. We are talking about putting it at the disposal of artificial entities; immortal profit making machines with a capacity for accumulating wealth beyond that of any individual. This is like *Colossus: The Forbin Project*, only with machines we've already built and operated.
It's not that making a profit is evil. It's that the very definition of evil (see Saint Augustine, or even Kant) is making one sided decisions. Human concerns like ethics are not part of the design of the institution of the corporation. Ethics are forced on corporations by two things: the individuals working for the corporations, and by law.
But the ethics of the individual are always under pressure in a corporation. We've all seen that. There's always the question of whether we can push the limit just a bit, and if we try it and get away with it, we suddenly have a new conception of what "normal behavior" is. We know that "everybody does it" doesn't excuse something, but we don't act that way. The law is what makes it possible for people to remain ethical. They can always say, "we will go to jail if we try that," or "we'll be fined," or even "we'll get bad publicity," which of course depends on individuals having rights that are respected under the law.
Corporations have inappropriate influence now on government, but that doesn't make a dystopia. Life is still good for most of us. But we can't extrapolate that to giving them unchecked power to make laws for their own benefit. If we do that, the safety net provided by individual ethics won't matter. Once corporations are above the law, any corporation that fails to take the profit maximizing step regardless of the other consequences won't survive.
Allow the power of corporations to grow without any check, and for the first time in human history human affairs will be governed with absolutely no regard to human welfare.
Details matter.
You actually *can* learn something useful in a way from considering the Jurassic Park story. Consider this: the T. rex was awesome, *cool* even. The raptors were terrifying. The little venom spitting dinosaur was the worst.
If you think about it, that's actually a fairly reasonable reaction. Which of the animals would be a potential problem for people if they were reconstructed? The T. rex is huge, easy to spot, and probably needs an enormous geographic range to itself to survive. If a breeding pair escaped, they'd have almost no chance of establishing a stable population, even if people left them alone.
The raptors on the other hand might have a chance. The range for a single T. rex probably would support a good sized band of them. But they probably wouldn't be hard to hunt down. They're still pretty big and would be easy to track down. As formidable as they are, they wouldn't be a match for a squad of human commandos.
It's that little spitting dinosaur that you'd have to look out for. If a breeding pair escaped, they'd be all over the place and you'd never be able to eradicate them.
The smaller an individual organism is and the less resources it requires to maintain itself in breeding condition, the harder it is to eradicate. Insects the the fire ant, the japanese beetle, or the asian tiger mosquito pretty much can't be stopped once they start breeding in a hospitable environment. Microorganisms are the very hardest. Unless they have a very narrow habitat (e.g. pathogens that infect humans only), you can't even begin to contain their geographic spread; even then it's hard.
In any case, if you read the book, the real screwups werent't he scientists. They were the systems engineers who relied too much on the resumptions in the requirements spec.
So you're saying this is kind of like BSD and Linux. There should have been only *one* effort to resurrect Unix, a commercially extinct operating system.
So what happens if you start finding yourself believing astrologers?
Really, if you want to distrust what scientists say, your best option is to *become* one. Here's an actual quote from a recent issue of Science News
Lovejoy's hypothesis is an interesting 'just so' story. He's rapidly becoming the Rudyard Kipling of paleoanthropology.
Meow! Take that! And look at those *shoes* he's wearing.
And consider: that was a scientist talking to a science journalist with a notebook and pencil in hand. This kind of mean-girl talk is a lot more common when they don't think the public is talking. Ever see the actual comments scientists submit during peer review?
'Toying with life' is one valuable definition of 'life'.
Well, yes I understand what you are saying. But if you are going to go in that direction, you might as well go with something a little better organized.
I should be clear that I have no beef with simulation per se. Simulation on some level is necessary to make the system comprehensible. I just look at modern editions of D&D and my first impression is that it's conceptually messy. It always was, and I don't think it matters that much except that improving something that is already conceptually messy makes it harder for newcomers. I'm sure it's a fine system for people who've had campaigns up and running for years.
In an ideal world there would be a clean, well-documented system whose complexity telescopes with the needs of the players. I haven't seen that yet, although clearly the companies behind these products are trying. I look at GURPS and it I *get* what the designers are trying to do, but I have to laugh when I go on the Steven Jackson web site. Oh, it's chock full of useful information, but that's not the same as having good documentation. Try to figure out exactly what you need to get to get a simple dungeon crawl adventure off the ground and your poor eyes will start watering.
Thanks for the pointers, by the way.
I was a DM during the heyday of AD&D 2nd Ed. I ran successful AD&D and Traveler campaigns for several years, until work commitments and the old gang moving away put and end to that. After ten years of my old roleplaying stuff gathering dust I put it in the library book sale.
When I was running campaigns, I quickly realized that the rules were not really workable from a DM's perspective. The roleplaying aspect of the game was too open ended to be practical for this set of rules. That's why the ridiculous "dungeon crawl" campaigns were so popular, because they paid back *all* of the DM's work. If you filled a hundred rooms with treasure and monsters, the players would methodically clean out each level.
In a sense this recaptured the old strategic simulation games from which this kind of thing evolved. If you set up Napolean vs. Wellington at Waterloo, you didn't have to worry about players saying, "I think I'll take my army and move back over Belgian fronteir, then negotiate a treaty which will apparently give Britain what it is looking for, under the cover of which I can build other geopolitical alliances that will undercut her." After you did all the work of researching and setting up the initial conditions for an elaborate battle simulation, the players were jolly well going to play out *your* scenario. But the freedom to do something unexpected is the essence of roleplaying.
That the rules were really not very adequate didn't hurt, because short of simulating the whole world, they couldn't possibly be. The DM makes up rules governing outcomes as he goes along, and if he does it skillfully the players don't even notice. In fact once I got very experienced at this *most* of the campaign, and usually the best parts of the campaign, were improvised on the spot. Instead of spending five hours preparing for a five hour session, I could spend one hour on something that would make a really big difference.
The key insight I got was this: roleplaying games aren't simulation. They're "cops and robbers" or "cowboys and indians" with just enough structure to make them interesting and challenging. It's group story telling, not for the end product but for the experience of being in the story.
Now recently my teenaged daughter expressed interest in learning D&D, so I picked up the latest books. Now before I start yelling at all you kids with your newfangled systems to get off my lawn, let me say that the new rules are impressive. Clearly a lot of thought has gone into them, and they cover contingencies a lot more clearly, and tweak some of the things that were illogical. These are much better *simulation* rules. But they aren't necessarily better roleplaying rules.
Perfect, even *reasonably good* simulation rules for roleplaying are impractical, in my opinion, because such rules would have to be a reasonably good ontology of some world. Well before you'd get to "reasonably good" you'd reach the point where the rules are cumbersome. What rules ought to do (in my opinion) is provide a framework in which players are forced to make decisions that are meaningful to them (e.g., "Am I up to fighting this guy, or should I run away and heal up?"; "If I want to steal the jewel from the idol, how should I prepare my escape?").
It seems to me that roleplaying rules should focus on (a) forcing player decisions, (b) being convenient to use and (c) being easy to learn for both gamemaster and player.
It seems to me the new D&D rules are no better at A, not significantly better at B, and a lot worse at C.
It used to be that you could bring up a new player with about fifteen minutes of explanation and another fifteen minutes of walking him through his character generation. That coincided with the phase of the evening's entertainment that featured pizza and chatting for the other players. If you wanted to bring a whole group up, you took them all through the half hour orientation then treated them to a one evening dungeon crawl, after which they'd know everything th
You are correct, but only in a sense that has no practical value.
This is a case of metonymy (sorry, language isn't logical). When the poster was talking about "the government", he was obviously talking about that portion of the government that is concerned with setting policies with the aim to maximizing the revenue of the national government. It makes no sense to ascribe policy motivations to judicial decisions, unless one is criticizing the judicial system for operating outside its proper sphere.
I ran into a similar issue recently in a medical ontology, which had a concept for "adverse reactions to insulin and anti-diabetic medications". Technically that is redundant since insulin *is* an anti-diabetic medication. Insulin is by far the most important medication, so reactions to it go in this category, but reactions to *other* medications go in categories *underneath* this. This is not logical; it makes it impossible for the system to be sure that a patient has had an adverse reaction to insulin if this category is used. But that's the way people speak and understand each other. Humans *know* that unless otherwise specified we're talking insulin.
It's just synecdoche -- the part standing for the whole in speech. That's the way people talk, even though it is inconsistent with kind of language philosopher-kings would prefer.
If by "real" you mean "non-tangible", that's been the case for centuries, and was finally recognized when we went off the gold standard. The Fed alters the money supply, not by printing money, but by altering the amount of money people agree exists.
If you're a big bank and the Fed loans you a million dollars, nothing tangible changes. Everyone just agrees you have a million dollars at your disposal because the Fed says there is. If they alter their interest rates to make borrowing attractive, suddenly there's lot more money floating around in the economy. If the raise interest rates so you (as a big bank) don't want to have so much debt to them on your books, suddenly you start demanding people you've lent money pay you back so you can pay your bills. That sucks money out of the economy, even though nothing tangible has happened (like zapping a pile of gold with a disintegration ray).
It's really simple in a completely non-intuitive way.
But that's not the sense I mean when I say "real money". "Real money" is something anybody with any sense would agree is money. In-game money has many of the characteristics of "real money"; it is liquid, and you can exchange it for some things of value. It lacks the property that anybody of any sense would treat it as "just as good as money", which means you can't trade it for just about anything the way you can real money. You've got to barter it for something else people agree is money before it has that all important universal buying power.
There's an obvious reason for this. The company that operates the game would literally have system that could generate unlimited amounts of money. Banks can be a *little bit* like that. They can create travelers checks and other documents that say "pay to the bearer such and so", but they have to carry those as liabilities on their books. They can't print as much of this money as they like without altering their ability to pay their obligations to people who demand something "as good as" what the Fed provides. The game company has no incentive to limit the amount of money it creates, other than its impact on game play. If the government gave me the power to make *real* virtual money without any kind of downside, I wouldn't care about what it did to my game.
In books printed around 1900. The language was startlingly familiar. You were supposedly allowed to use the book for private, personal use only. You weren't allowed to sell it or rent it out.
The first sale doctrine meant that the copyright holders couldn't impose such uses on third parties without entering into a contract. That wasn't feasible in the era when publishers sold to bookstores who had no interest in becoming license brokers. Things are different for ebooks, where it's easy to sell licenses rather than copies. In fact, that's what's behind one of the niftier features of Amazon's Kindle: you can copy your book to your iPhone or Kindle as you like, you just can't resell or lend it.
There's no question that eliminating this nonsense was *good* for book publishing as a whole, because this was a deal which left the public hungry for more of their product. Some individual publishers could have made more money on certain individual works. In the transition to electronic formats, the book publishing industry could easily become the next music industry.
It's not the *government* saying that. It's the courts.
I have serious doubts about the article summary and title here. Reading the article behind the article, it seems that the courts haven't ruled that in game money is "real", otherwise they'd be taxing in-game transactions. It's just saying that in-game money can be sold.
It seems reasonable that they should treat the sale of in game things (currency or objects) like any other kind of sale of any other kind of property. Why should you be able to earn in-game money and sell it without tax, while somebody selling the fruits of his labor in something else has to pay tax? Or vice versa?
Bingo.
For years Microsoft used BSD licensed code in Windows' networking. It never caused a problem for their customers. I wouldn't be surprised if removing it were a political decision.
For practical purposes "no open source software" means they customer wants a 100% Microsoft development and deployment stack. It means no Apache, no perl, php, and for practical purposes no Java either. The only entity in the world who has a rational reason to avoid BSD licensed software is Microsoft, and purely for the purpose of preventing its customers from buying competitor's software. There's no rational reason to avoid BSD licensed software as a customer, because it's just a minimal subset of what's in just about every proprietary license that isn't written by an idiot.
You see this situation all the time with miliary/government surplus.
For a hundred bucks or even less, you can pick up all kinds of neat surplus gizmos that Uncle Sam paid thousands and thousands of dollars for. The reason is that the gizmo is sure to perform some highly demanding task that nobody has any use for except in the exact original application. That's why you don't see cheap surplus trucks or aircraft -- lots of people have a use for that kind of stuff. The "bargain" stuff is more likely to be an assembly used to collimate the target sights for a huge and obsolete field artillery piece, or an oddball large format camera (sans lens) designed fit in the nose of a 1960s era fighter plane.
If you buy this kind of stuff, you are almost certainly doing it for one of two reasons. Either it's as a conversation piece, or you're taking it apart for things like lenses, mirrors and such. You don't need any of the things that made the gizmo expensive. Neither does anyone else.
That's the situation for the SSME. IIRC, it's an outstanding engine, but it's most important characteristic is that it is reusable. It has a remarkable track record of success at that, but you'd have to be building a reusable launch vehicle to want that. In other words the only people who'd have a use for this thing would be people building their own shuttle.
Maybe if you wanted to build *one* disposable rocket, you might find this thing a bargain. But who in their mind would want to do that? You achieve economy on a disposable rocket by building lots of nearly identical copies. For that you don't give a damn about getting the first engine cheap. You want an engine that is cheap to build over and over again, which of course the SSME wasn't designed to be. Even *we* have no use for these things, even though we intend to build a shuttle replacement.
But that's not what is at issue here.
What is at issue is whether a private entity has a right to control information about itself, aside from what it must disclose to meet its legal obligations (e.g. in SEC filings).
To a first approximation, the way the law in the US works with respect to private secrets is once you let them out of the bag, they aren't secrets any longer. That embarrassing purchase you made on Amazon? They can tell the world all about it. In fact, you have to assume to *do*, they just do it in a way that's hard for you to find out. They have to, because if they want to continue selling rubber solace for the lonely gentlemen, they have to be discreet about being indiscreet. As long as you're the last to know everyone is happy. (note ironic tone)
Now when a company creates a product like this, there's no way to keep information from leaking. They can sign all their employees and suppliers to an NDA, but information leaks, and once somebody is in possession of information that he received without doing anything illegal to get it, it's his to do whatever he wants.
If you overhear two Apple employees discussing the new secret device at the next restaurant booth, you're free to tell the world. If you're working for the caterer for a party at Apple HQ and see an exec showing of a strange new device, you're free to tell the world.
Even if you receive information by illegitimate channels, for *trade secrets* the situation is not so clear. If you entice an Apple employee to break his NDA, that's bad for you, but if a disgruntled Apple employee throws the specs of the device over your transom, it's a different kettle of fish. Of course consult your lawyer if this ever happens.
It's interesting that the article is claiming that *copyright* suit threats are being made, because there is strong common law copyright protection for unpublished works. Basically, an unpublished work is *yours* in a much more fundamental way than a published work is. The public copyright deal, fair use and all that doesn't come into it.
Now many aspects of successful Apple products could plausibly be claimed as different kinds of intellectual property. Some might be trademarked, some might be patented, others might be copyrighted. But the mere *fact* that Apple is working on a product of a certain type could only be considered a trade secret, and such information is legally a secret only so long as they manage to keep that knowledge away from anyone who hasn't signed an NDA.
If the article is accurate (don't count on it) this would be one of those nasty situations where lawyers try to conjure whole new classes of rights for their clients out of existing rights of a completely different nature. Sometimes they can obtain greater *de facto* rights for their client by sending nasty sounding C&D letters that play fast and loose with the law. That's good for their clients, but bad for society, and bad for the law if it values voluntary cooperation by citizens.
exactly. they've only just come out with a black wii. then they will have a blue wii, yellow wii, green wii,
Exactly, indeed. It worked for Apple, didn't it?
This, my friends, is how you make profit in business. Figure out what a large group of people really want at a price they'll pay and give them the cheapest to manufacture product that meets that criterion. It's all about profit, not gross. The best way to increase your market share is to stay profitable and avoid changes that disturb the cheap product that gives your customers something they want to pay for.
If you've done this, you'd be surprised how bizarre people's buying behavior is. If you interviewed them, they'll tell you all kinds of things that they want, but if you put them into your product, they won't pay any more. So you cater to the customer's slightest whim, so long as its cheap. Then the customer gets all kinds of neat things, and the thing he really needs, but not luxury features unless the unit cost of that feature is low (attractive design has the cheapest unit cost).
That's why tech enthusiasts are usually bad product designers. They mistake the expensive features they're excited for something customers will pay for. You have to engineer a product, not just to perform its ostenisble job, not just to *sell*, but to sell profitably. That aspect of the product has tradeoffs, just like its physical parameters. You can't make a widget arbitrarily strong and arbitrarily light at the same time. You can't expand a product's appeal to arbitrary breadth and produce it cheap enough to make a profit.
Nintendo can't keep this up forever, but stretching out the tech cycle has a huge number of benefits for them. Developers know how to target the platform and can concentrate on game design rather than learning to use new features. If somebody moves in on Nintendo's profitable casual gamer market, they can simply cut their costs and starve the competition for profit. If they need to pull a tech rabbit out of the hat, they can produce better controllers and more specialized ones -- in fact they're doing both. They can't keep this up forever, but they can make a lot of money for a long time.
Warm ups. I'm visiting my sister next week, and my brother-in-law is a professor of Cultural Studies at an ivy league university. My Academese is a little rusty, but the Pimsleur tapes are too damned expensive.
Your conspiracy theory is inside-out.
The ways this is supposed to work is that you explain something hard to understand at the cost of assuming something that is hard to swallow. It's all about faultless logic proceeding from readily manufactured premises.
Although there is no evidence that the NSA is monkeying with Chinese search engine traffic, if we look at it as a hypothetical scenario, it doesn't contradict anything we know about the world. That makes this a weak conspiracy theory premise. You're supposed to start from a premise that is implausible ("organized labor is conspiring with the bankers"). What's the point of a conspiracy theory that is based on plausible premises? One might as well form a plain old theory.
On the other hand, your theory fails to explain China's actions. Why would they need to break into the email accounts of their political critics *in order to address the problem of NSA spying*? It doesn't follow. What we're supposed to get by believing your theory's crazy premise is a slam-dunk conclusion to some mystery. Not only is the thing we want explained no mystery, if we buy into your theory we don't get any explanation at all. It's a dead end, because there's no logical connection.
I just did. Of course, it's sloppy to say that "'Sys Rq' signifies nothing", since one might well confuse "nothing" with "'nothing'". It might be better to say that for all x, x is not in the set of things signified by the key labeled "Sys Rq".
The only way to more concretely define the Sys Rq key is by enumeration, e.g.:
* It does not signify the letter "Q". ...
* It does not signiffy the name of the Egyptian
Pharaoh "Ramses", the deciphering of which left
Champollion bed-ridden for five days in 1822.
* It does not signify those black carbon
granules that collect in the bottom of
your toaster and that you can never manage
to clean out with getting them all over
the place.
* It does not signify the set of things
signified by the the "Sys Rq" key.
*
that the user is pressing the SysRq key.
In fact, to *urgently* tell the OS that the SysRq. It's not supposed to be buffered or anything, it supposed to grab the OS by the collar and scream "THE USER JUST PRESSED THE DAMMNED SYSRQ KEY!!!!" at it.
But what is that supposed to mean?
It doesn't mean anything.
That's the whole point.
When they were designing the keyboard, they thought of all the things that you might want a keyboard to say ("STOP SCROLLING", "Show me that last page", "Get me the hell out of this input mode"). And after they'd mandated keys for everything anybody could think of, they had a stroke of genius. They mandated a key that did nothing anybody wanted to do.
Why is that a stroke of genius?
It is something rare in engineering, which thrives on bravado and feverishly inflated self-confidence. It is an admission of the limitation of human foresight, an acknowledgement that there are more things under Heaven and Earth than are dreamt of in our philosophies; a semiotic *memento mori*.
This key is mandated to mean nothing, therefore it can mean anything, or indeed, everything.
Maybe he's just misunderstood.
Guy: Hey, would you like to be my "GF"?
Girl 1: NO. (to herself: Why does he want me to be his goldfish?)
Girl 2: UR hot. Are you "SWM"?
Guy: NO. (to himself: What is she talking about? Southwest Michigan isn't hot in January.)
Has FOX News' target audience never heard of any English city besides London?
Well, I had heard of "Manchester", but I thought it was some English boarding school/Royal Navy thing.
I know. What a wuss.
If debugging your code is *easy* you aren't trying hard enough.
What if the deep seated beliefs of the population aren't implementable as policy? Or simply nonsense?
Being ashamed of nakedness is certainly not a fundamental human instinct. We evolved to live naked. Culture taught us to clothe ourselves. You might claim its a bedrock cultural value. But those values change, as we've seen in the erosion of control over personal information. The attitude of many people today toward that would shock people from fifty years ago.
I dunno.
When the Model T was introduced, it cost the equivalent of around 20K$, about half what this car is going to go for. But competing cars were more in the $50K to $70K range, so $40K is not too bad, and somewhat less than that (as the article says might happen) would be quite practical for many working people *given that there are operational savings*. It could well be a modest success at a price like $35K.
The cost of the Model T drop from $20,000 in current dollars to $12000 and then to under $10000, making it practical for the workers who assembled it to buy one. That's economies of manufacturing scale. The Volt has potentials for such economies of scale as the purchase expensive new parts like large batteries attracts investment and initial development costs are recouped. A modest hit with new technology is hard to achieve, but it will drive down cost and drive up profits more quickly than throwing a new skin on the same old platform would, where economies of scale have already been accounted for.
Dignity an essential human right?
I'm not so sure. If "Dignity" is defined as anything somebody takes offense at, then we're all offenders. People who write things about my race that I find offensive offend my dignity. The proper response to the vast majority of such offenses is to ignore them.
I'd say that people have a right to self determination, which means at a minimum they must know what they are going to be subjected to and what the consequences of their choices may be. After that, the consequences they are subjected to ought to be the minimum necessary to achieve to achieve some reasonable, well documented public purpose. Finally the net benefit of such purposes for the vast majority of people should exceed the personal cost.
So in this case I'd ask (1) are people really aware of what these machines can do and *might* do? (2) Do these machines serve a legitimate purpose, and do they work? (3) Are they the minimum possible intrusion needed to do the job? (4) Are they a net benefit to most people, and what are the other choices of people who have reason to avoid them?
That gives me a pretty good sense for whether these machines are good policy. It seems to me that the biggest questions with them are (1) what exactly *could* they do and (4) are the really a net benefit to most people? As far as the minimum intrusion standard is concern, I suspect that no equally effective method will be much less intrusive. The question is whether obtaining that much information is of net use to most people involved.
That's not such a "clear bright line" standard as "dignity is an essential human right"; it's just more workable. I don't disagree with your sentiment about dignity, but it's a better guide of private conduct than public policy.