You apparently haven't played Lord of the Rings Online since they went F2P, or possibly even DDO. Neither of these, in my experience suffer the problems you describe, and both are doing quite well as fun and friendly F2P enterprises.
Oh man, I can't wait for the "bits are free" arguments to start flying.
Look, bits aren't like electricity. Me using more bits doesn't mean there are less for you to use. Bandwidth is limited instantaneously, but *practically* infinite over time. And creating bits doesn't cost anything either. Of course there are infrastructure costs, but really most limits are just designed to do two things: discourage heavy use that negatively affects other users and to make them more money. The pricing is as artificial as the cost of texting, which IIRC started out as a free service until it caught on and the telecoms realized they could monetize it.
IMO "overage" charges shouldn't exist. You make tiers for max total use and if someone goes over you bump them into the next tier and charge them for that. At the same time, you increase their speed to match the new tier for the rest of the month, just to be fair. People can then decide what tier they really belong in, or let it float month to month and pay for what they use. But the greed-heads would rather use a model like the banks, where they charge you $25 for spending three pennies more than you have in your account. Maybe it makes them more money. You can't really blame them for wanting more money, right? I sure would like some.
This is a straw man. Most people don't use the "full capacity" of their connection 90% of the time. Some people do, sure, and as streaming video gets more popular it will increase, but you can watch HD video on Netflix at 3Mbps. So the second cheapest plan listed here you could watch 15 hours of HD movies per month (that's 10 90 minute movies) and still have plenty of bandwidth for general web surfing. If you're watching regular TV shows and don't mind a slightly less than HD image, that doubles.
I'm not saying these plans are generous. I have Comcast and for US$75/month I have a 250Gb cap and speeds "up to" 20Gbps. We watch a TON of tv and Netflix, as well as downloading videos, ISOs, and playing online games, and rarely come anywhere near that cap.
However, trying to portray the top plan listed here as paying $74/month for 11.4 hours of usage is purposefully misleading. Unless you're downloading a LOT of distros every month and watching all your entertainment online instead of OTA or Cable TV, then you're not going to run into overages in the first week like these numbers seem to suggest.
I hope someday things are better, but using rhetoric like this doesn't help your case, it just makes you look like a charlatan.
My post was mostly rhetorical, intended to highlight the absurdity (IMO) of asking why scientists would be interested in having a living mammoth to study when we have some fossils and frozen carcasses already.
I don't know much about Coelacanths, but considering that they've been found now living off of South Africa, Madagascar, Kenya, Mozambique and Tanzania, I suspect we're learning far more about them now than we could even from a plethora of Latimeria fossils, were they available.
Well, have we learned anything from living Coelacanths that we didn't already know from their fossils? Other than that they weren't actually extinct, I mean.
Maybe they are putting it off until Congress can pass a law indemnifying the TSA against the lawsuits that will crop up as soon as they reveal that they knew cancer was a risk but deployed them anyway.
Windows 7 is pretty great. I've used Macs off and on over the years and both platforms have their strengths and weaknesses. But the vast selection of software available as well as the lower cost hardware keep me on Windows / PCs. Oh, and the versatility of the platform. So I guess a lot of things keep me in this universe.
You must have missed the part where they said this is the first "intelligent" absorbent. Apparently they have developed a radiation filter with the capacity for learning, reasoning, and understanding. Pretty impressive!:D
The most generic relevant definition could indicate anything that can be "emitted". I suppose for a traditional tractor beam it would have to be something you could emit in a straight line, so radio waves may not be ideal, but I'm not a scientist.
You make a good point. But I'm not sure what any of that has to do with bubbles or flipping. Maybe I'm just being pedantic, but the very real problems of the current student loan situation in the US doesn't seem to me to be caused by either of those terms. I think the original title is just trying to use a buzzword as a scare tactic.
Doesn't "flipping" and a "bubble" require a continual increase in the perceived value of the good? I don't see employers rushing to increase starting wages for graduates. In fact in the current job market you've got college educated people taking jobs that used to be 'reserved' for those without a degree.
If it's anything like the anti-glare coating on my glasses it will be very sturdy indeed. Of course that coating adds a pretty good chunk of change to the cost of the lenses, but it works like a charm and stands up to repeated cleaning with rubbing alcohol.
I'm not sure where you're getting your words, but the article doesn't say anything about the O2 workers contacting Nokia. It just says "The catering manager sought help from medical experts and communications chiefs at Nokia to build the special prosthethic." It doesn't say that he actually received any assistance from Nokia directly, so we can't really tell.
But my original point still holds. Nothing from Nokia was "customized" from what I can tell. It sounded to me like they basically made a cast from a phone that they could use to size the hole in the prosthetic. You can't blame Apple for not wanting to ship some random dude a blank iPhone shell just because he asked nicely. I'm pretty sure that if he had called Nokia and asked the same question, and they said yes, it would have been in the article.
Hey, I hate Apple as much as the next/. reader, but this is just a baseless attack. OP writes "Apple refused to have an iPhone suitably customized for the job."
From TFA: "Trevor contacted Apple to try and get hold of a blank iPhone casing to test it out, but he said the communications giant refused to co-operate."
So some guy calls Apple and says "Hey can I get an empty iPhone shell to test out in my fake arm?" and they said no. The guy couldn't just go BUY an iPhone? Or borrow one?
It's not like Nokia custom-built a phone for him. It doesn't even sound like Nokia knew about this. The guy went to his local O2 store to upgrade his old phone and the workers there agreed to help him.
This reminds me of how flight attendants in the US always say to take with you anything you *might* have brought on board when disembarking. Really? I might have brought my dog, but I didn't. How shall I now take him with me?
Luddites continue to sing the same old song
on
The Real Job Threat
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· Score: 2
on a related topic - maybe the author needs to read Bertrand Russell's "In Praise of Idleness" and relax a bit: http://www.zpub.com/notes/idle.html
My engineer friend points out that if this saves fuel for large shippers, that should decrease global warming, resulting in a future closing of the passage to these largest ships, right?:)
Forgive me, but I'm more inclined to believe famous authors, like Orson Scott Card, who attributes "Trilogy Creep" to publishing executives that pressure authors into producing sequel after sequel to take advantage of the preexisting fan-base rather than wrapping up their stories as originally intended. I'm sure that sometimes an author decides to stretch out a work, to follow his vision, and to take things in a new direction, or add new subtlety. But sometimes that's a tendency that a good editor should temper in the interest of a good story. Editors aren't just spell checkers.
See also "Executive Meddling" and "Franchise Zombie" for details. It happens in movies, TV, and yes, novels.
Publishing house editors removing cruft? What dimension do you live in? Have you read any book series by a popular author lately? Game of Thrones, Wheel of Time, Harry Potter, Left Behind? As soon as an author shows promising sales and decides to write a story longer than one volume, the publisher starts encouraging them to stretch it out into as many books as they can.
I'm a fan of many such series, but honestly any story that takes more than 4000 pages to tell probably could be told in half as much space. But the publishers are as bad as Hollywood when it comes to sequels. They just work it from a different angle.
Or how about any Stephen King novel? I like many of his stories, but seriously. That man needs someone brave enough to tell him to cut his descriptive narration by about 30%.
"psychopathic murderers make identifiable word choices – beyond their conscious control – when talking about their crimes."
So we aren't talking about all psychos, just the murdering ones. And apparently only about how they refer to their crimes. But they immediately make the jump to using it as a predictive tool on social media, making it sound like you could scan peoples' Facebook postings and play "spot the killer".
Seems like a troll to me. Shame on you Cornell University Press Relations.
In California, community colleges are funded primarily from 2 sources. 1 the states general fund and 2 a portion of the states lottery. Outside of that it is up to the school to try and get grants and community outreach programs in order to get additional funds.
The saddest thing about this truth is that when the lottery was first proposed in California many years ago, it was sold as a way to give schools MORE money than they were already getting. Then of course, slowly over the years, politicians kept stealing the original funds the schools had because the lottery income would cover the difference. Eventually much of the original funding was redirected to other things and now we couldn't get rid of the lottery without decimating school budgets. So much for the "extra" benefit to our schools.
Slashdot Mirror
You apparently haven't played Lord of the Rings Online since they went F2P, or possibly even DDO. Neither of these, in my experience suffer the problems you describe, and both are doing quite well as fun and friendly F2P enterprises.
Oh man, I can't wait for the "bits are free" arguments to start flying.
Look, bits aren't like electricity. Me using more bits doesn't mean there are less for you to use. Bandwidth is limited instantaneously, but *practically* infinite over time. And creating bits doesn't cost anything either. Of course there are infrastructure costs, but really most limits are just designed to do two things: discourage heavy use that negatively affects other users and to make them more money. The pricing is as artificial as the cost of texting, which IIRC started out as a free service until it caught on and the telecoms realized they could monetize it.
IMO "overage" charges shouldn't exist. You make tiers for max total use and if someone goes over you bump them into the next tier and charge them for that. At the same time, you increase their speed to match the new tier for the rest of the month, just to be fair. People can then decide what tier they really belong in, or let it float month to month and pay for what they use. But the greed-heads would rather use a model like the banks, where they charge you $25 for spending three pennies more than you have in your account. Maybe it makes them more money. You can't really blame them for wanting more money, right? I sure would like some.
This is a straw man. Most people don't use the "full capacity" of their connection 90% of the time. Some people do, sure, and as streaming video gets more popular it will increase, but you can watch HD video on Netflix at 3Mbps. So the second cheapest plan listed here you could watch 15 hours of HD movies per month (that's 10 90 minute movies) and still have plenty of bandwidth for general web surfing. If you're watching regular TV shows and don't mind a slightly less than HD image, that doubles.
I'm not saying these plans are generous. I have Comcast and for US$75/month I have a 250Gb cap and speeds "up to" 20Gbps. We watch a TON of tv and Netflix, as well as downloading videos, ISOs, and playing online games, and rarely come anywhere near that cap.
However, trying to portray the top plan listed here as paying $74/month for 11.4 hours of usage is purposefully misleading. Unless you're downloading a LOT of distros every month and watching all your entertainment online instead of OTA or Cable TV, then you're not going to run into overages in the first week like these numbers seem to suggest.
I hope someday things are better, but using rhetoric like this doesn't help your case, it just makes you look like a charlatan.
My post was mostly rhetorical, intended to highlight the absurdity (IMO) of asking why scientists would be interested in having a living mammoth to study when we have some fossils and frozen carcasses already.
I don't know much about Coelacanths, but considering that they've been found now living off of South Africa, Madagascar, Kenya, Mozambique and Tanzania, I suspect we're learning far more about them now than we could even from a plethora of Latimeria fossils, were they available.
Well, have we learned anything from living Coelacanths that we didn't already know from their fossils? Other than that they weren't actually extinct, I mean.
Maybe they are putting it off until Congress can pass a law indemnifying the TSA against the lawsuits that will crop up as soon as they reveal that they knew cancer was a risk but deployed them anyway.
Windows 7 is pretty great. I've used Macs off and on over the years and both platforms have their strengths and weaknesses. But the vast selection of software available as well as the lower cost hardware keep me on Windows / PCs. Oh, and the versatility of the platform. So I guess a lot of things keep me in this universe.
You must have missed the part where they said this is the first "intelligent" absorbent. Apparently they have developed a radiation filter with the capacity for learning, reasoning, and understanding. Pretty impressive! :D
The most generic relevant definition could indicate anything that can be "emitted". I suppose for a traditional tractor beam it would have to be something you could emit in a straight line, so radio waves may not be ideal, but I'm not a scientist.
You make a good point. But I'm not sure what any of that has to do with bubbles or flipping. Maybe I'm just being pedantic, but the very real problems of the current student loan situation in the US doesn't seem to me to be caused by either of those terms. I think the original title is just trying to use a buzzword as a scare tactic.
Which is the opposite of a bubble, right? When everyone has one, the perceived value goes down.
Doesn't "flipping" and a "bubble" require a continual increase in the perceived value of the good? I don't see employers rushing to increase starting wages for graduates. In fact in the current job market you've got college educated people taking jobs that used to be 'reserved' for those without a degree.
The TSA should take the extra money and pay their workers more so they won't be so apathetic about their jobs and also maybe train them better.
If it's anything like the anti-glare coating on my glasses it will be very sturdy indeed. Of course that coating adds a pretty good chunk of change to the cost of the lenses, but it works like a charm and stands up to repeated cleaning with rubbing alcohol.
AFAIK redbox doesn't take cash. You have to use a credit or debit card so they can charge you automatically if you don't return the DVD.
I'm not sure where you're getting your words, but the article doesn't say anything about the O2 workers contacting Nokia. It just says "The catering manager sought help from medical experts and communications chiefs at Nokia to build the special prosthethic." It doesn't say that he actually received any assistance from Nokia directly, so we can't really tell.
But my original point still holds. Nothing from Nokia was "customized" from what I can tell. It sounded to me like they basically made a cast from a phone that they could use to size the hole in the prosthetic. You can't blame Apple for not wanting to ship some random dude a blank iPhone shell just because he asked nicely. I'm pretty sure that if he had called Nokia and asked the same question, and they said yes, it would have been in the article.
Hey, I hate Apple as much as the next /. reader, but this is just a baseless attack. OP writes "Apple refused to have an iPhone suitably customized for the job."
From TFA: "Trevor contacted Apple to try and get hold of a blank iPhone casing to test it out, but he said the communications giant refused to co-operate."
So some guy calls Apple and says "Hey can I get an empty iPhone shell to test out in my fake arm?" and they said no. The guy couldn't just go BUY an iPhone? Or borrow one?
It's not like Nokia custom-built a phone for him. It doesn't even sound like Nokia knew about this. The guy went to his local O2 store to upgrade his old phone and the workers there agreed to help him.
This reminds me of how flight attendants in the US always say to take with you anything you *might* have brought on board when disembarking. Really? I might have brought my dog, but I didn't. How shall I now take him with me?
on a related topic - maybe the author needs to read Bertrand Russell's "In Praise of Idleness" and relax a bit: http://www.zpub.com/notes/idle.html
My engineer friend points out that if this saves fuel for large shippers, that should decrease global warming, resulting in a future closing of the passage to these largest ships, right? :)
"Could this be the beginning of dismounting the legacy system of exclusive distribution rights awarded to one company in one state?"
I would hope it would be the beginning of the legacy system dismounting the fans so they can have a break from being on the bottom in this situation.
Or did the OP mean to say "dismantling" ?
Forgive me, but I'm more inclined to believe famous authors, like Orson Scott Card, who attributes "Trilogy Creep" to publishing executives that pressure authors into producing sequel after sequel to take advantage of the preexisting fan-base rather than wrapping up their stories as originally intended. I'm sure that sometimes an author decides to stretch out a work, to follow his vision, and to take things in a new direction, or add new subtlety. But sometimes that's a tendency that a good editor should temper in the interest of a good story. Editors aren't just spell checkers.
See also "Executive Meddling" and "Franchise Zombie" for details. It happens in movies, TV, and yes, novels.
Publishing house editors removing cruft? What dimension do you live in? Have you read any book series by a popular author lately? Game of Thrones, Wheel of Time, Harry Potter, Left Behind? As soon as an author shows promising sales and decides to write a story longer than one volume, the publisher starts encouraging them to stretch it out into as many books as they can.
I'm a fan of many such series, but honestly any story that takes more than 4000 pages to tell probably could be told in half as much space. But the publishers are as bad as Hollywood when it comes to sequels. They just work it from a different angle.
Or how about any Stephen King novel? I like many of his stories, but seriously. That man needs someone brave enough to tell him to cut his descriptive narration by about 30%.
From TFA:
"psychopathic murderers make identifiable word choices – beyond their conscious control – when talking about their crimes."
So we aren't talking about all psychos, just the murdering ones. And apparently only about how they refer to their crimes. But they immediately make the jump to using it as a predictive tool on social media, making it sound like you could scan peoples' Facebook postings and play "spot the killer".
Seems like a troll to me. Shame on you Cornell University Press Relations.
In California, community colleges are funded primarily from 2 sources. 1 the states general fund and 2 a portion of the states lottery. Outside of that it is up to the school to try and get grants and community outreach programs in order to get additional funds.
The saddest thing about this truth is that when the lottery was first proposed in California many years ago, it was sold as a way to give schools MORE money than they were already getting. Then of course, slowly over the years, politicians kept stealing the original funds the schools had because the lottery income would cover the difference. Eventually much of the original funding was redirected to other things and now we couldn't get rid of the lottery without decimating school budgets. So much for the "extra" benefit to our schools.