Do you recall Clinton's government never prosecuting anyone for pornography? I wonder why you don't recall him "pushing" school prayer. In many places it's not "pushing" it's making sure prayer is not prohibited.
So that's exactly what we're going to do! Instead of getting mostly science with a bit of creationism thrown it, now it's no science at all. Good job denying the young people a science education and punishing the people not responsible.
So that's exactly what we're going to do! Instead of getting mostly science with a bit of misinformation and confused anti-science thrown it, now it's no science at all. Good job denying the young people a science education and punishing the people not responsible.
You can't add stuff to the ciriculum that undermines the basic principals of the subject and expect it not to affect the quality. It's like teachin medicine and randomly changing the dosages int he texts. The doctors may know they have to look up other sources to find the true dosage but they now have to do this with all of the information. Throwing in creationism into biology undermines the principals being taught. Not teaching it in high school and make them learn it un adultered in universty would almost be better. Hard call though.
Unlike the spin Sony usually puts out on press conferences;)
Sony rarely out right lies. They instead stretch the truth. Instead of saying, "it can do 2 mil shaded polygons under normal circumstances", they say "it can push 77 million polygons". Which is true but only under optimal conditions with not other load and all polugons are unshaded with no AA. There is a difference between "technically true" and "outright lie".
When you say something is "not profitable" what you really mean is "consumers don't want it." PLEASE READ THE FOLLOWING ANALAYSIS BEFORE YOU IMITATE MOST SLASDHOT READERS WHO RESPOND TO ME BY IGNORING IMPORTANT CONTENT IN MY POST To be sure, consumers prefer "improvements in technology" to "no improvements in technology" - you can never beat "something" with "nothing". But that's not the choice here: you have to count the costs, not just the benefits. If you spend $100 billion dollars now to get a benefit of $160 billion fifty years from now that was a loss because the ROR was ~1%/year. You could have benefitted more people by sticking the money in a bank. In other words, the research cost you much better opportunities.
(And please don't say "well you can't just count monetary savings, you have to count improvement in product quality" - because I am. Any benefit can be expressed equivalently, for purposes of comparison, in dollars via indifference curve analysis.)
I'd estimate that when you tabulate the ROR on current long-term research, it's well below 1%, maybe even negative. Remember, you have to count all research costs, not just the costs of research that actually leads to something. Nor can you count research whose results are "force-fitted" into applications we can already do better and cheaper, like memory metal being used to check if fish were defrosted when a 50-cent memory thermometer can do the same thing (which I keep griping about).
If all current long-term research funds were redirected into the private sector, corporations would "flush out" any significant gains from incremental improvements, at which point the ROR on more long-term activities would look more attractive and then they would invest in it.
(Btw, this is kind of tangential - I was just questioning where the thread starter got his conclusion that government funding is corrupting.)
The return is imaterial, how do you calculate the return on the Lasers? How about gene sequencers? Restriction enzymes? Nanotech? ect..
None of those fields were initially funded by corporations. They were essoteric research projects by small scale academic labs. Gov funding is essential. Revolutionary science like lasers/internet ect.. are too long term for corps. Corps excel at refinement but suck at pioneering.
Something i've never quite understood is why reverse compatability is such a big issue...I used to think it was when I bought PS2, then I realized i never once played a PS1 game on it. Hopefully if you are dishing $400 out for a system it has enough games to keep you happy, and if not you still have the old system to play the old games on right? Just don't trade in that old system until you're sure you won't play the games anymore.
I have a vast libarary of PS2/Ps1 games. I occasionally fire up an old Ps1 game like FF:tactics. My Ps1 is now dead. Backwards compatability means that my vast libarary of games can be played withuot resorting to emulation on my PC. I dislike fidling with emulation to get my fix of a game. For SNES and older the emulation is smooth, almost flawless ect.. but for anything newer it reuqires configuration, graphic glitches are frequent. So that is why backwards compatability is important to people. So they feel good about their current library of games. They dont' feel like the hundreds of dollars in games they have with be meaningless when their current machine breaks.
A friend of mine works for a popular game company as a graphic artists. I asked him, "are you goign to get a 360" he replied "not any time soon". He was thouroughly undewhelmed by the 360. The company has received several Dev kits. He'll get it for Halo 3 but has few other reasons to get one, explaining it's like a 6 month video card upgrade on a xbox and very little more.
Before the PS2 was released, there was talk coming out of Sony about how the EE + GS could power billions and billions of polygons, how it would take over high-performance workstations and potentially displace the x86 architecture, and how its DVD player would be more advanced than any standalone player out there. If the PS3 is really as powerful as Sony is claiming, I imagine developers won't ever need to worry about optimizing their code or taking advantage of multi-threading -- the unlimited power of the console will compensate for it (at 120fps, at that). I'm eagerly awaiting the PS3, but this really sounds like Sony Marketing Talk (TM) at work once again. But...maybe I'll just have to get a 6-HDTV array...you know, just in case...
Sony promised graphics like MGS3 for the PS2. They delivered but 5 years after launch. Now Sony is promising similiar things. Expect to see them in the 5th generation of games.
Sure. So, why did the quote turn up years before the Xbox was in development? Just search usenet for discussions about this in the period of 1998-1999. It was a preposterous and stupid thing to claim, but Toy Story was hip at the time and Sony wanted in on the hype.
Look for the direct quote, you wont' find it. It was journalistic spin on what Sony has said at a press conference.
Funny thing about that Toy Story quote is how it's been misrepresented. Turns out it was originally a quote from the xbox team about xbox (Seamus Blackley if I remember correctly. In videogame forums it's taken a life of its own and now Sony is blamed.
Not to say Kutaragi hasn't made outlandish claims for the PS, though. I seem to remember how much the Emotion Engine was going to change my life....
Kutaragi never out right lies, he spins. Makes claims that are technically true but under optimal conditiosn (ie. unshaded with no anti aliasing).
I'm just suggesting that their review of scientific material by such creationists is beneficial to all scientists. Their attempts to prove science wrong will weed out the results and data that may be falsified. That in turn will bolster the quality of scientific material.
Indeed, we ideally would see a case where the intelligent design people completely prove themselves wrong, all due to their attempts to prove science wrong (but at the same time strengthening science by helping to eliminate bad data).
The problem with this is Creationists often wouldn't understand the data. Just like a person with out a biological science degree wouldn't proteonics, a person with out a physics degree couldn't interpret linear collider data, ect... So the benifit would be 0. The information is already there to scrutinize but the Creationists wave their hand at it and say it's all fake/lies/the devil/clever trick by god to test faith/work of aliens ect...
And if you got rid of government funding, you wouldn't have much left (or so the conventional knowlege goes). I'd actually agree that gov. funding should be eliminated, but I don't see how it "distorts the intellectual environment". If you're claiming that "money" in general is corrupting, I don't know what to say. People who reserach for the hell of it do it either way; money convinces the greedy bastards to start contributing. It seems you're more blaming shortsightedness than money itself.
Most great leaps in science have been governments funded/nobility patronaged. Most incremental improvement of exsisting technlogoies come from corprate enviroments. Corprate research goes to where the money soon will be, this leads to near sighted research into only a few fields. We get better cars, but we won't derive new energy sources. This is where academic government funded research is for. They research the things that aren't profitable but are interesting to science. Gov. funding should never be eliminated unless you want science to degenerate into nothing more then incremental improvements of consumer products.
Their doing pre-release damage control for the fact that the first generation 360 games will suck. They explain it away as being "single threaded" when the real reason is that the software companies have only had real machines for a short period of time and that first wave of games for a system almost universally suck.
There were a lot of VERY good games for Xbox with VERY good gameplay (Halo, Jet Grind Radio, MechWarrior, etc), not to mention they often had the best ports of multiplatform games, so I'm pretty sure you have no idea what you're talking about.
Thats not often true, often multi platform games would be made for the PS2 (more cash potential) ported over to the Xbox and GC resulting in some games performing worse on the box (rarely the gc). Of games optimized for each platform, then the Xbox was often slightly better then the GC while drastically better then the PS2, this all hlding more true with games displayed in HD.
Another thing: I am charged with providing for my family. This totally justifies me busting my ass every day, working hard and earning all the goods and services my family needs. It does not justify stealing, negotiating in bad faith, or casting such shenanigans as a moral choice. I still think it looks like the Taiwanese government put themselves in a situation where they had no morally good solution to their problem. They could either let their responsibility to their people slide completely, or they could find a way to behave badly that would also fulfill their responsibility. It's also possible that they could've simply paid Roche's price, which would've been the honorable thing to do, in my opinion.
Roche is evil. the very definition. They are convicted price fixers and play hardball with all their contracts. Taiwan made a choice to risk infringing on roche's patents to make somethign for their people. Roche isn't exactly simply askign for "a fair price" their opportunistic jackals.
As for WWII, the rocket technology wasn't jewish scientists, it was the V2 rocket program that was the basis of the space program.
That $40Cn eighth is $60Us down here in Seattle. Being from the east cost, I can tell you that BC weed is "the best mother-f'ing shit" I have ever experienced. It only takes a pinner to get the highest that I've EVER been (except for that night in NYC where I thought I was interviewing David Bowie, but it turned out to be a walnut tree that "looked" like David Bowie).... Yeah.
BBH
I can tell you, I've had it for as little as $10CND/eigth for as little as buying 1 ounce($80). But I know growers so I guess it's not retail. If yoru a stoner, Canada is the place for you.
Technology in World Civilization: A Thousand-Year History by Arnold Pacey is a good book about the trends of technology.
As for my stance on Taiwan, your statement saying it is evil is really really misguided. Evil implies that it the act in itself as well as the motives behind it are malevolent. The acts of IP theivery that America/Europe/Arabia ect.. practice are just natural movements of technology. The American industrial machine was built upon technologies like Jacquard loom for which Jacquard did not see a dime. At worst these acts are selfish but evil is stretching it. As for Taiwan it is their mandate to look out for their people. Not for the profits of Roche and if for some reason they had to steal from another country to do so they will. America still does this, espionage and the spoils of war have also help built America. For instance America's golden age (1945-1960) was due to stolen technologies from the germans. The space program was a natural exstention of germanies rocketry projects, medical advances owed thigns to mengala, There was an adoption of the education paradigm used byt he germans, ect... All basically acts of IP theivery. I would say it is all morally ambigious. Selfish but nto evil per se and it's basically the stealing of ideas.
In this particular case Taiwan has made a choice to try to make the drugs themselves. This is an anologue of the drug Roche makes since Taiwan doesn't have Roche research notes or production methodology. They are aware that it is very similiar but it is still not exactly the same thing. Taiwan had two choices, negotiate a deal with Roche, problbly taking some time as well as having to compete with many other countries for supplies or make it themselves. Roche's patents aren't legally valid in any other country except the one they were registered in. However international agreements on IP exstend them to a large number of countries. Taiwan has therefore not broken any law but may have violated a international agreement (if they had signed one with the swiss.
I'm not sure why your PC costs 200+ dollars each year to stay viable. I spend much less than that and I have never encountered a game I could not play. It costs 200-500 a year AT LEAST if you want to stay on or near the cutting edge, but if all you want to do is play your games at a reasonable frame rate and resolution (especially compared to consoles) then a PC is very cost effective, once you factor in the fact that you need one anyways.
To get a midrange card every year to keep the PC current it will cost $200 at least, often more and more often. Anything less and your getting an economy card which has a dismal performance return for the money. It costs 500-900 to stay cuttign edge (especially with the SLI stuff). Most hardcore PC gamers I know spend ~$300 for a mid range card every 6 months. Casual gamers shell out ~$200 every year or so. Frame rate and resolution don't make the game any more fun, The games I'm addicted to for the PC are WOW and War III. Neither could be for the console but the things that graphics are importan for (DOOM 3, Half life 2, Far Cry) aren't fun for long.
I am also addicted to a dozen Console games(MGS 3, Damacy Katamary, ect..). These games are fine despite the aged graphics. I'm not playing for eye candy, I'm playing for fun.
I have a Radeon 9600. It is approximately 5 years old and can run Half-Life 2, Quake IV, Battlefield 2, Age of Empires III, and similar games. Can it run them on high? No. Can it run them on a higher resolution, with better graphics, than a console? Yes. The Playstation 2 came out in 2000, the same year as my 9600. It is not going to run Quake IV at the same level of quality no matter how much you prod it. A console is almost always inferior to a similar PC in terms of power; the only advantages it has, technologically, are price and stability. Price is a silly comparison because a personal computer will do all sorts of things a console won't, and has a longer shelf life because people don't stop making games for it when a new round of videocards come out, wherears a console forces you to upgrade eventually. Stability is a whole category unto itself, but suffice to say the games that crash do so because they're pushing things to the limit.
Or ATi makes shoddy graphics drivers. That causes lots of crashes too.
A good game is pretty independant of the graphics. They help but there are a lot of pretty games that aren't funt o play. A game like starcraft/warcraft III look alright even years after they came out but a game like Quake II or Unreal look pretty bad even a year after. A lot of the time it's not important how much antiscopic filtering and Antialiasing the iamges it, it onyl matters that it's fun.
Yep! No arguments there. It's just going to look worse, is all. And 3 years from now, your PC will not only play Call of Duty 2 at ultra high, but whatever other games you want which look even better. 360 will be stuck with whatever it could play when it came out.
The Pc will cost at least an extra $200+ every year to do that. Whiel the 360/PS3/revolution will be 399 up front and that would be about it. As well for 80% of us, we can't really tell the difference, have just as much fun. Seriously graphics aren't that important. It's nice to have a good looking game but it is as much about the art direction as it is about the technology. Castlevania: SOTN could be for any platform, looks amazing, and doesn't need that much graphics power to do it. While Games of the same era (like Quake 2) look horribly dated and ungly.
Let's pretend that I agree with everything you have to say about patent law and how it is currently a bad thing. How does this make Taiwan's actions morally righteous, as the/. editor implies?
I would say it's morally ambigious. I only pointed out that you can't be an american and look down upon this as your country is built upon it.
It's only hypocritical if I say that America was right to get on top in this way, or if I say that I appreciate America being on top and I don't care how it got there (but I do care about how Taiwan secures its position).
Since I haven't said either of those things, no hypocrisy is in effect. You're welcome to assume that I believe America was also wrong to get on top in this way, or that I appreciate America's position but do not approve of some of the methods it used.
And I'm still not clear on your point: are you arguing that activities like this one are good for us, because they put countries like America on top?
Or are you saying that the greatest good Taiwan can offer its citizens and the rest of the world is to safeguard its citizens regardless of the expense to outsiders?
The/. editor who posted the article frames Taiwan's choice as a morally righteous choice. I disagree with this view.
I think the morally righteous choice would've been for the the Taiwanese government to either invest in their own bird flu treatments, or pay Roche the asking price for Roche's treatments.
What they've done instead is the expedient and corrupt choice: ignore their responsibility to their own citizens, and flout international law and custom to cover their ignorance.
In school, we call this "cheating". In academia, we call it "plagiarism". In property law, we call it "theft". In the Slashdot editorial offices, it's called "moral". What do you call it?
Many great innovations have been partially plagerism. I'm saying as a world wide race this reduced the rate of technological advancement. Patients make some thing that would be impossible to fund acdemically possible, but generally they retard scientific/technological advancement and in the logn run this is bad. A system liek the universities can come up with similiar things, but are more open and allow for better use of the resources. What large corporations do is simply making variations on the same idea. Refinement as opposed to true innovation. There really isn't an upside to patents on medicines, it's all abtou greed, and it doesn't give us anything extra. Same with many other patents. The original goal of patents was to let the technique be shared but give the originator a temparary monopoly, patents as they exsist now are mroe often used to stifle all others from creating an analogue to your invention. In the long run this hurts the human race.
How does it make me a hypocrite? Have I said anywhere that America's behavior was excusable but Taiwan's was not?
Anyway, what's your point? Do you agree with me, that Taiwan is behaving badly? Are you arguing that America's behavior was also righteous, just as Taiwan's behavior is righteous now?
Or are you just one of those annoying little factoid-goblins, physically allergic to actually thinking seriously about an interesting issue?
I had a few courses on the history of technology when I went to university. The current model of propriatery IP and legal limits on innovation stifles true innovation. Great leaps in technology happen when one country/culture takes technology (gunpowder) and puts it's own cultural spin on it (guns). This type of advancement is harder these days because the owners of the original invention attempt to prevent all others from building off their technology. In the end we are advancing slower due to this. So America was doign what was best for it. As taiwan is doign now. There might be peripheral improvements to it as they research it because they may bring something to the production that roche didn't.
Sometimes it's not even direct derivative work that brings leaps in technology, the touchstone for the industrial revolution was mechanical technology from asia (the printing press) combined with the drive to create texstiles as good as the east indians. These two factors as well as the lack of skilled labour lead to the industiral revolutuion. Today that would be impossible because the two seperate inventors would sue.
America is currently on top, Or "appears" to be so. It uses Patents and legalist methods to try to maintain it's position. But many countries will ignore this in order to advance. China does this, taiwan as well. It's hypicritical to point to this and say it's wrong because the US got on top by stealing in the same way. It does suck for Roche. But taiwan is in the business of looking out for it's people, not Roche.
No doubt using that enormous, highly modernized Chinese navy the world is so in awe of.
they could instruct every 15 year old high school girl to swim in the ocean between china and taiwan, the resulting tidal wave from all that displaced water would sink all our carriers.
You bring up an interesting point. Look at it this way: The Taiwanese government, charged with the protection of their citizens, and taxing them for that very purpose, never saw fit to invest in their own safeguards against plagues like the bird flu. Nor does the Taiwanese government see fit to pay now the cost of such an investment, which Roche made for its own reasons.
So the Taiwanese government won't save its own citizens, and won't pay someone else to save its own citizens, but will gladly steal the results of someone else's work to save its own citizens. Doesn't it seem like Taiwan is behaving badly?
You do know that if you life in America and make this arguement you are an immense hypocrite. America was built on patented european invetions that Americans used without renumerations to the appropriate patent holder.
Slashdot Mirror
Do you recall Clinton's government never prosecuting anyone for pornography? I wonder why you don't recall him "pushing" school prayer. In many places it's not "pushing" it's making sure prayer is not prohibited.
And this related because????
So that's exactly what we're going to do! Instead of getting mostly science with a bit of creationism thrown it, now it's no science at all. Good job denying the young people a science education and punishing the people not responsible.
So that's exactly what we're going to do! Instead of getting mostly science with a bit of misinformation and confused anti-science thrown it, now it's no science at all. Good job denying the young people a science education and punishing the people not responsible.
You can't add stuff to the ciriculum that undermines the basic principals of the subject and expect it not to affect the quality. It's like teachin medicine and randomly changing the dosages int he texts. The doctors may know they have to look up other sources to find the true dosage but they now have to do this with all of the information. Throwing in creationism into biology undermines the principals being taught. Not teaching it in high school and make them learn it un adultered in universty would almost be better. Hard call though.
Unlike the spin Sony usually puts out on press conferences ;)
Sony rarely out right lies. They instead stretch the truth. Instead of saying, "it can do 2 mil shaded polygons under normal circumstances", they say "it can push 77 million polygons". Which is true but only under optimal conditions with not other load and all polugons are unshaded with no AA. There is a difference between "technically true" and "outright lie".
When you say something is "not profitable" what you really mean is "consumers don't want it." PLEASE READ THE FOLLOWING ANALAYSIS BEFORE YOU IMITATE MOST SLASDHOT READERS WHO RESPOND TO ME BY IGNORING IMPORTANT CONTENT IN MY POST To be sure, consumers prefer "improvements in technology" to "no improvements in technology" - you can never beat "something" with "nothing". But that's not the choice here: you have to count the costs, not just the benefits. If you spend $100 billion dollars now to get a benefit of $160 billion fifty years from now that was a loss because the ROR was ~1%/year. You could have benefitted more people by sticking the money in a bank. In other words, the research cost you much better opportunities.
(And please don't say "well you can't just count monetary savings, you have to count improvement in product quality" - because I am. Any benefit can be expressed equivalently, for purposes of comparison, in dollars via indifference curve analysis.)
I'd estimate that when you tabulate the ROR on current long-term research, it's well below 1%, maybe even negative. Remember, you have to count all research costs, not just the costs of research that actually leads to something. Nor can you count research whose results are "force-fitted" into applications we can already do better and cheaper, like memory metal being used to check if fish were defrosted when a 50-cent memory thermometer can do the same thing (which I keep griping about).
If all current long-term research funds were redirected into the private sector, corporations would "flush out" any significant gains from incremental improvements, at which point the ROR on more long-term activities would look more attractive and then they would invest in it.
(Btw, this is kind of tangential - I was just questioning where the thread starter got his conclusion that government funding is corrupting.)
The return is imaterial, how do you calculate the return on the Lasers? How about gene sequencers? Restriction enzymes? Nanotech? ect..
None of those fields were initially funded by corporations. They were essoteric research projects by small scale academic labs. Gov funding is essential. Revolutionary science like lasers/internet ect.. are too long term for corps. Corps excel at refinement but suck at pioneering.
Something i've never quite understood is why reverse compatability is such a big issue...I used to think it was when I bought PS2, then I realized i never once played a PS1 game on it. Hopefully if you are dishing $400 out for a system it has enough games to keep you happy, and if not you still have the old system to play the old games on right? Just don't trade in that old system until you're sure you won't play the games anymore.
I have a vast libarary of PS2/Ps1 games. I occasionally fire up an old Ps1 game like FF:tactics. My Ps1 is now dead. Backwards compatability means that my vast libarary of games can be played withuot resorting to emulation on my PC. I dislike fidling with emulation to get my fix of a game. For SNES and older the emulation is smooth, almost flawless ect.. but for anything newer it reuqires configuration, graphic glitches are frequent. So that is why backwards compatability is important to people. So they feel good about their current library of games. They dont' feel like the hundreds of dollars in games they have with be meaningless when their current machine breaks.
A friend of mine works for a popular game company as a graphic artists. I asked him, "are you goign to get a 360" he replied "not any time soon". He was thouroughly undewhelmed by the 360. The company has received several Dev kits. He'll get it for Halo 3 but has few other reasons to get one, explaining it's like a 6 month video card upgrade on a xbox and very little more.
Before the PS2 was released, there was talk coming out of Sony about how the EE + GS could power billions and billions of polygons, how it would take over high-performance workstations and potentially displace the x86 architecture, and how its DVD player would be more advanced than any standalone player out there. If the PS3 is really as powerful as Sony is claiming, I imagine developers won't ever need to worry about optimizing their code or taking advantage of multi-threading -- the unlimited power of the console will compensate for it (at 120fps, at that). I'm eagerly awaiting the PS3, but this really sounds like Sony Marketing Talk (TM) at work once again. But...maybe I'll just have to get a 6-HDTV array...you know, just in case...
Sony promised graphics like MGS3 for the PS2. They delivered but 5 years after launch. Now Sony is promising similiar things. Expect to see them in the 5th generation of games.
Sure. So, why did the quote turn up years before the Xbox was in development? Just search usenet for discussions about this in the period of 1998-1999. It was a preposterous and stupid thing to claim, but Toy Story was hip at the time and Sony wanted in on the hype.
Look for the direct quote, you wont' find it. It was journalistic spin on what Sony has said at a press conference.
Funny thing about that Toy Story quote is how it's been misrepresented. Turns out it was originally a quote from the xbox team about xbox (Seamus Blackley if I remember correctly. In videogame forums it's taken a life of its own and now Sony is blamed.
Not to say Kutaragi hasn't made outlandish claims for the PS, though. I seem to remember how much the Emotion Engine was going to change my life....
Kutaragi never out right lies, he spins. Makes claims that are technically true but under optimal conditiosn (ie. unshaded with no anti aliasing).
I know the creationist system is without merit.
I'm just suggesting that their review of scientific material by such creationists is beneficial to all scientists. Their attempts to prove science wrong will weed out the results and data that may be falsified. That in turn will bolster the quality of scientific material.
Indeed, we ideally would see a case where the intelligent design people completely prove themselves wrong, all due to their attempts to prove science wrong (but at the same time strengthening science by helping to eliminate bad data).
The problem with this is Creationists often wouldn't understand the data. Just like a person with out a biological science degree wouldn't proteonics, a person with out a physics degree couldn't interpret linear collider data, ect... So the benifit would be 0. The information is already there to scrutinize but the Creationists wave their hand at it and say it's all fake/lies/the devil/clever trick by god to test faith/work of aliens ect...
And if you got rid of government funding, you wouldn't have much left (or so the conventional knowlege goes). I'd actually agree that gov. funding should be eliminated, but I don't see how it "distorts the intellectual environment". If you're claiming that "money" in general is corrupting, I don't know what to say. People who reserach for the hell of it do it either way; money convinces the greedy bastards to start contributing. It seems you're more blaming shortsightedness than money itself.
Most great leaps in science have been governments funded/nobility patronaged. Most incremental improvement of exsisting technlogoies come from corprate enviroments. Corprate research goes to where the money soon will be, this leads to near sighted research into only a few fields. We get better cars, but we won't derive new energy sources. This is where academic government funded research is for. They research the things that aren't profitable but are interesting to science. Gov. funding should never be eliminated unless you want science to degenerate into nothing more then incremental improvements of consumer products.
Their doing pre-release damage control for the fact that the first generation 360 games will suck. They explain it away as being "single threaded" when the real reason is that the software companies have only had real machines for a short period of time and that first wave of games for a system almost universally suck.
There were a lot of VERY good games for Xbox with VERY good gameplay (Halo, Jet Grind Radio, MechWarrior, etc), not to mention they often had the best ports of multiplatform games, so I'm pretty sure you have no idea what you're talking about.
Thats not often true, often multi platform games would be made for the PS2 (more cash potential) ported over to the Xbox and GC resulting in some games performing worse on the box (rarely the gc). Of games optimized for each platform, then the Xbox was often slightly better then the GC while drastically better then the PS2, this all hlding more true with games displayed in HD.
Another thing: I am charged with providing for my family. This totally justifies me busting my ass every day, working hard and earning all the goods and services my family needs. It does not justify stealing, negotiating in bad faith, or casting such shenanigans as a moral choice. I still think it looks like the Taiwanese government put themselves in a situation where they had no morally good solution to their problem. They could either let their responsibility to their people slide completely, or they could find a way to behave badly that would also fulfill their responsibility. It's also possible that they could've simply paid Roche's price, which would've been the honorable thing to do, in my opinion.
Roche is evil. the very definition. They are convicted price fixers and play hardball with all their contracts. Taiwan made a choice to risk infringing on roche's patents to make somethign for their people. Roche isn't exactly simply askign for "a fair price" their opportunistic jackals.
As for WWII, the rocket technology wasn't jewish scientists, it was the V2 rocket program that was the basis of the space program.
At the risk of adding too much info...
That $40Cn eighth is $60Us down here in Seattle. Being from the east cost, I can tell you that BC weed is "the best mother-f'ing shit" I have ever experienced. It only takes a pinner to get the highest that I've EVER been (except for that night in NYC where I thought I was interviewing David Bowie, but it turned out to be a walnut tree that "looked" like David Bowie).... Yeah.
BBH
I can tell you, I've had it for as little as $10CND/eigth for as little as buying 1 ounce($80). But I know growers so I guess it's not retail. If yoru a stoner, Canada is the place for you.
And I thought $160 was too much to be paying for an ounce...
Quality BC weed costs about $40 for 1/8 ounce here in Alberta. Discounts for larger volume available.
Technology in World Civilization: A Thousand-Year History by Arnold Pacey is a good book about the trends of technology.
As for my stance on Taiwan, your statement saying it is evil is really really misguided. Evil implies that it the act in itself as well as the motives behind it are malevolent. The acts of IP theivery that America/Europe/Arabia ect.. practice are just natural movements of technology. The American industrial machine was built upon technologies like Jacquard loom for which Jacquard did not see a dime. At worst these acts are selfish but evil is stretching it. As for Taiwan it is their mandate to look out for their people. Not for the profits of Roche and if for some reason they had to steal from another country to do so they will. America still does this, espionage and the spoils of war have also help built America. For instance America's golden age (1945-1960) was due to stolen technologies from the germans. The space program was a natural exstention of germanies rocketry projects, medical advances owed thigns to mengala, There was an adoption of the education paradigm used byt he germans, ect... All basically acts of IP theivery. I would say it is all morally ambigious. Selfish but nto evil per se and it's basically the stealing of ideas.
In this particular case Taiwan has made a choice to try to make the drugs themselves. This is an anologue of the drug Roche makes since Taiwan doesn't have Roche research notes or production methodology. They are aware that it is very similiar but it is still not exactly the same thing. Taiwan had two choices, negotiate a deal with Roche, problbly taking some time as well as having to compete with many other countries for supplies or make it themselves. Roche's patents aren't legally valid in any other country except the one they were registered in. However international agreements on IP exstend them to a large number of countries. Taiwan has therefore not broken any law but may have violated a international agreement (if they had signed one with the swiss.
I'm not sure why your PC costs 200+ dollars each year to stay viable. I spend much less than that and I have never encountered a game I could not play. It costs 200-500 a year AT LEAST if you want to stay on or near the cutting edge, but if all you want to do is play your games at a reasonable frame rate and resolution (especially compared to consoles) then a PC is very cost effective, once you factor in the fact that you need one anyways.
To get a midrange card every year to keep the PC current it will cost $200 at least, often more and more often. Anything less and your getting an economy card which has a dismal performance return for the money. It costs 500-900 to stay cuttign edge (especially with the SLI stuff). Most hardcore PC gamers I know spend ~$300 for a mid range card every 6 months. Casual gamers shell out ~$200 every year or so. Frame rate and resolution don't make the game any more fun, The games I'm addicted to for the PC are WOW and War III. Neither could be for the console but the things that graphics are importan for (DOOM 3, Half life 2, Far Cry) aren't fun for long.
I am also addicted to a dozen Console games(MGS 3, Damacy Katamary, ect..). These games are fine despite the aged graphics. I'm not playing for eye candy, I'm playing for fun.
I have a Radeon 9600. It is approximately 5 years old and can run Half-Life 2, Quake IV, Battlefield 2, Age of Empires III, and similar games. Can it run them on high? No. Can it run them on a higher resolution, with better graphics, than a console? Yes. The Playstation 2 came out in 2000, the same year as my 9600. It is not going to run Quake IV at the same level of quality no matter how much you prod it. A console is almost always inferior to a similar PC in terms of power; the only advantages it has, technologically, are price and stability. Price is a silly comparison because a personal computer will do all sorts of things a console won't, and has a longer shelf life because people don't stop making games for it when a new round of videocards come out, wherears a console forces you to upgrade eventually. Stability is a whole category unto itself, but suffice to say the games that crash do so because they're pushing things to the limit.
Or ATi makes shoddy graphics drivers. That causes lots of crashes too.
A good game is pretty independant of the graphics. They help but there are a lot of pretty games that aren't funt o play. A game like starcraft/warcraft III look alright even years after they came out but a game like Quake II or Unreal look pretty bad even a year after. A lot of the time it's not important how much antiscopic filtering and Antialiasing the iamges it, it onyl matters that it's fun.
Yep! No arguments there. It's just going to look worse, is all. And 3 years from now, your PC will not only play Call of Duty 2 at ultra high, but whatever other games you want which look even better. 360 will be stuck with whatever it could play when it came out.
The Pc will cost at least an extra $200+ every year to do that. Whiel the 360/PS3/revolution will be 399 up front and that would be about it. As well for 80% of us, we can't really tell the difference, have just as much fun. Seriously graphics aren't that important. It's nice to have a good looking game but it is as much about the art direction as it is about the technology. Castlevania: SOTN could be for any platform, looks amazing, and doesn't need that much graphics power to do it. While Games of the same era (like Quake 2) look horribly dated and ungly.
Let's pretend that I agree with everything you have to say about patent law and how it is currently a bad thing. How does this make Taiwan's actions morally righteous, as the /. editor implies?
I would say it's morally ambigious. I only pointed out that you can't be an american and look down upon this as your country is built upon it.
It's only hypocritical if I say that America was right to get on top in this way, or if I say that I appreciate America being on top and I don't care how it got there (but I do care about how Taiwan secures its position).
/. editor who posted the article frames Taiwan's choice as a morally righteous choice. I disagree with this view.
Since I haven't said either of those things, no hypocrisy is in effect. You're welcome to assume that I believe America was also wrong to get on top in this way, or that I appreciate America's position but do not approve of some of the methods it used.
And I'm still not clear on your point: are you arguing that activities like this one are good for us, because they put countries like America on top?
Or are you saying that the greatest good Taiwan can offer its citizens and the rest of the world is to safeguard its citizens regardless of the expense to outsiders?
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I think the morally righteous choice would've been for the the Taiwanese government to either invest in their own bird flu treatments, or pay Roche the asking price for Roche's treatments.
What they've done instead is the expedient and corrupt choice: ignore their responsibility to their own citizens, and flout international law and custom to cover their ignorance.
In school, we call this "cheating". In academia, we call it "plagiarism". In property law, we call it "theft". In the Slashdot editorial offices, it's called "moral". What do you call it?
Many great innovations have been partially plagerism. I'm saying as a world wide race this reduced the rate of technological advancement. Patients make some thing that would be impossible to fund acdemically possible, but generally they retard scientific/technological advancement and in the logn run this is bad. A system liek the universities can come up with similiar things, but are more open and allow for better use of the resources. What large corporations do is simply making variations on the same idea. Refinement as opposed to true innovation. There really isn't an upside to patents on medicines, it's all abtou greed, and it doesn't give us anything extra. Same with many other patents. The original goal of patents was to let the technique be shared but give the originator a temparary monopoly, patents as they exsist now are mroe often used to stifle all others from creating an analogue to your invention. In the long run this hurts the human race.
How does it make me a hypocrite? Have I said anywhere that America's behavior was excusable but Taiwan's was not?
Anyway, what's your point? Do you agree with me, that Taiwan is behaving badly? Are you arguing that America's behavior was also righteous, just as Taiwan's behavior is righteous now?
Or are you just one of those annoying little factoid-goblins, physically allergic to actually thinking seriously about an interesting issue?
I had a few courses on the history of technology when I went to university. The current model of propriatery IP and legal limits on innovation stifles true innovation. Great leaps in technology happen when one country/culture takes technology (gunpowder) and puts it's own cultural spin on it (guns). This type of advancement is harder these days because the owners of the original invention attempt to prevent all others from building off their technology. In the end we are advancing slower due to this. So America was doign what was best for it. As taiwan is doign now. There might be peripheral improvements to it as they research it because they may bring something to the production that roche didn't.
Sometimes it's not even direct derivative work that brings leaps in technology, the touchstone for the industrial revolution was mechanical technology from asia (the printing press) combined with the drive to create texstiles as good as the east indians. These two factors as well as the lack of skilled labour lead to the industiral revolutuion. Today that would be impossible because the two seperate inventors would sue.
America is currently on top, Or "appears" to be so. It uses Patents and legalist methods to try to maintain it's position. But many countries will ignore this in order to advance. China does this, taiwan as well. It's hypicritical to point to this and say it's wrong because the US got on top by stealing in the same way. It does suck for Roche. But taiwan is in the business of looking out for it's people, not Roche.
No doubt using that enormous, highly modernized Chinese navy the world is so in awe of.
they could instruct every 15 year old high school girl to swim in the ocean between china and taiwan, the resulting tidal wave from all that displaced water would sink all our carriers.
You bring up an interesting point. Look at it this way: The Taiwanese government, charged with the protection of their citizens, and taxing them for that very purpose, never saw fit to invest in their own safeguards against plagues like the bird flu. Nor does the Taiwanese government see fit to pay now the cost of such an investment, which Roche made for its own reasons.
So the Taiwanese government won't save its own citizens, and won't pay someone else to save its own citizens, but will gladly steal the results of someone else's work to save its own citizens. Doesn't it seem like Taiwan is behaving badly?
You do know that if you life in America and make this arguement you are an immense hypocrite. America was built on patented european invetions that Americans used without renumerations to the appropriate patent holder.