When you're talking about a country of 1.3 billion people, remember that 15% disagreeing means you've got 195 million people who are unhappy with the situation.
Are you simply calling on people to limit themselves, completely absent any laws or FCC enforcement? If so, my apologies, I misunderstood. I strongly support your right to call for people to limit their own language.
However, this article is about FCC enforcement. And you call not being exposed to these words a "right," which presumably should be protected by law. If you think the FCC should be restricting what private companies broadcast and enforcing those restrictions through fines, you are absolutely pro-censorship. censorship: the institution, system, or practice of censoring.. censor(ing): to suppress or delete as objectionable.
I'm asking for civility, which is the right to not be assaulted by obscene images, and the morass of profanity on a public medium.
You have no such right. Freedom of speech is a right, protected by the first amendment to our constitution. That freedom includes freedom for those who assault us with garbage. It sucks, but the trade off is that you know the government won't decide that your political or religious beliefs are obscene and silence you.
Your vandalism of the language is less important than the sensibilities of others that would prefer to hear tracts of communications that aren't littered by detritus, poop-language, banal references to sex, and other excreta.
What you are advocating is censorship. Your standard for what to censor? "Common convention defines it. So does common sense." Common convention and common sense once dictated that "nigger" was an appropriate word to describe people with discernibly dark skin. That same convention and common sense lead people to prefer to not see people of distinguishable ancestry mingling. Common convention and common sense once defined "Jap" as an appropriate label for someone from Japan. Conventional wisdom and the resulting common sense changes over time. An appeal to the past is not a argument for how we should behave in the future. If you want to censor a particular list of words, you need more than an appeal to tradition to justify it.
Some people would "prefer" not to hear these things? Life's tough, get over it. As former Canadian Prime Minster Avril Campbell said, "...if you never encounter anything in your community that offends you, you are not living in a free society." I'd prefer to not hear politicians and media personalities that tell outright lies to support their views. I'd prefer to not have politicians try to use fear and dishonest appeals patriotism to scare us into compliance. I'd prefer to limit discussion to honest, logical debate supported by the best available knowledge. I'd prefer companies to issue honest statements about the quality and nature of their products, instead of trying to skirt the line of legal disclosure. I would prefer to not have the public airwaves dominated by a small number of companies who have incentive limit coverage of important public matters. These are the things that really "sully the common good," not the word "fuck."
Regulating lists of words is rearranging deck chairs on the Titanic. Maybe the ship is going down, but by God you're going to make sure you go down elegantly. You're not improving the level of discourse in this country, you're putting lipstick on a pig.
We're all offended by things we see or hear every day. But because you've got convention on your side you think it appropriate to try and silence the thing that offends you. You are wrong. The rest of us somehow manage to tough it out. We expect you to do the same.
Unless you are operating the only business in town, you should abso-fucking-lutely have the right to expose your employees to asbestos. Anybody who doesn't like it can work somewhere else.
Re:Comics as real literature
on
Reading Comics
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· Score: 2, Informative
What other graphic novels might you recommend that validate the format?
Validate it? To what standard? Does art ever really need validation?
But I'll take a shot in the dark. In particular, it's hard to know what works will help give a medium respectibility until a great deal of time has passed so that people can reflect upon them. The really important works are the ones that will still be read decades down the road. Graphic novels are still relatively young, so it's harder to guess what will matter in the future. Still, here are a few works that I think will likely make the cut:
Maus is the obvious one. A sort of biography, it covers the author's relationship with his father and his father's experiences as a Jew in Poland during World War II.
Barefoot Gen is a the story of a boy living in Hiroshima during World War II. While fictional, it was written by a survivor. It shows the nationalism of the period and the horror of the aftermath.
These are also quite good, but I'm not sure they'll prove to be timeless. However, they're good enough I think they're worth checking out:
New York: Life in the Big City is an interesting work, filled with the sort of slices of life that a skilled columnist or short story writer can capture.
Mom's Cancer, a relatively recent autobiographical work about the title, originally published online.
1) a gaming PC is substantially more expensive than a console
Assuming you mean "a roughly equivalent" gaming PC, sure, you're right.
2) you frequently have driver and other compatibility problems
You'd have to define "frequently," but yes, as a developer supporting PCs is definately harder.
3) a number of PC games are launched in a rather buggy state
And this is a fault of the platform how? If anything, the ability to ship buggy software, making initial money, then ship the fixes later should lower costs. PC games don't need to be buggy, it's just what the market tolerates. And we're slowly seeing patches become more and more common for consoles.
4) the overall performance level of consoles has improved a lot in the latest generation
That's just silly. Sure, consoles get more and more powerful, but so do PCs. Sure, Rainbox Six: Vegas looks great on the Xbox 360 at 720p, but it looks even better at 1920x1024 out of my gaming PC.
There's just not a lot left that PC games can claim superiority on.
And here is where I really disagree. PC gaming can claim superiority in one key area: truly independent development. You can develop a PC game on a $600 desktop. You can ship it from a $30 per month web hosting account. No one needs to approve your game. The more unique, more experimental stuff starts on the PC. The best the console people can hope for is that the PC version does well enough to attract investment for a port. Developing for a console is much more expensive. The console's manufacturer is free to reject your game, locking you out. If PC gaming largely dies out, this will be the biggest loss. The cost and filtering will encourage the already cautious publishers to err even more on the side of sequels and knock-offs.
(On that note, if you're looking for interesting new stuff, I recommend Play This Thing!. It's a mixed bag, but it's almost always interesting. The Independent Games Festival used to be a really good place, but it's increasingly dominated by games that haven't even shipped a demo yet, let alone an actual game, which seems like cheating to me.)
It's not a foolproof way to keep terrorists from assembling a liquid bomb on board. It just means you need a larger number of suicide bombers at a go.
You need more agents, yes. And you need more money for plane tickets, yes. But you don't need more people willing to die for their cause. By separating security from boarding, then letting people mill around in a large area, you could easily walk onto a plane with a gallon of liquid. Simply have a bunch of agents booked for different flights leaving within the same window. If you're feeling really paranoid, arrange to meet at a busy hub like Chicago and arrive from different airports with layovers that happen to overlap. Each brings in the fraction of a quart of precursor chemicals in their carryon. Once inside they bump into each other. Two might use adjacent bathrooms stalls, and assuming no one busts them for signalling for gay sex, they just pass the chemicals between them. They could meet in one of the restaurants, passing things under the table. The suicide bomber collects the liquid in some sort of expanding container that he brought through empty.
Sure, after the fact review of security video may reveal the connections, but at that point it's too late. A hub like Chicago is too large and too full of people to catch amazingly brief interactions between perhaps 20 people among the 190,000 passing through in a single day. Your agents don't even need to be dedicated members of your movement; since the risk to them is low you simply need to find someone psychopathic enough to take money for other people's lives.
The current liquid restrictions are stupid. They only protects us from terrorists with enough money, knowledge, and connections to acquire to buy unusual liquid explosives, but not enough money, knowledge, and connections to buy 20 people plane tickets.
You're a geek. You've got above average intelligence and a deep desire to make things, everything, better. You've done some great things so far. You've got more ideas that you're pretty sure will help. You want to share these ideas with the world. Trust me, we all know how you feel. However, the rest of us have little ego blogs and post our ideas there. That way, if they're bad ideas, as they frequently are when one dabbles in fields one only has a shallow knowledge of, they can be quietly ignored. If they're good ideas, someone else can submit it to Slashdot where it will be reported. There are two levels filtering the good from the bad: readers who do submissions and the Slashdot editors. It's imperfect, but seems to work.
You, however, are buddy-buddy with Slashdot's editors, so you skip those important filters. Random Slashdot readers aren't acting as a filter. Furthermore, at last some of the editors are chummy with you, eliminating them as reliable filters. The result: you get an artificial level of visibility and respect that you simply haven't earned.
Please, go post your ideas on a blog like the rest of us. If your ideas are really all that, they'll be back on the Slashdot's front page in no time. If not, you'll just have to learn to live with only being famous for your security and freedom of speech work.
So in answer to my question, "For what definition of fair?" what is your answer? My best guess is, "A fair tax would be one that every single citizen agreed was less than or equal the amount they would be willing to pay." There are people who believe that government services are always worthless, even emergency services, police, and the military. So by that definition the only fair tax is no taxes, and by extension, no government. Not, "just enough to protect the country from invasion and me from violence." Absolutely zero. You might get people willing to buy services, but at that point your "government" is just another business in competition with the rest. There might be laws, but lacking government enforcement they're meaningless. If you want police protection or emergency services, you pay for them. If the factory next door is poisoning you, you move. I disagree with but can respect this viewpoint in hard-core anarchists and libertarians, but it's extreme, and I suspect it's not your point of view. If not, please clarify.
(Cost of Government) / (Number of Citizens) = the fair tax per citizen.
For what definition of fair?
By this definition, people who make heavier use of government services are subsidized by those who less use, but that's somehow fair.
Also, by this definition, it's fair that someone who makes $27,000 a year (minimum wage, working two full time jobs) would give up 37% of it and be just scraping by, while someone making $200,000 a year would be losing a mere 5% and a negligibly impact on their life.
So, we're in Iraq because we really, really though they had, or were about to have, nukes and threatened nearby countries? Okay. Why aren't we in North Korea? They have nukes, and they sure as hell pose a threat to South Korea. Why can we deal with North Korea through diplomacy, but we had to invade Iraq?
We're in Iraq today because the Middle East is ruled by a bunch of fucktards who use a 7th-century religion to justify barbarity and evil, towards each other just as much as towards the "dar al-harb" they profess to hate.
Excepting that Iraq was one of the few places in the Middle East with a largely secular government and peace between different religious groups. Saddam Hussein was a terrible, brutal dictator, but he wasn't a religious zealot, he was a powermonger. He paid lip service to religion because it gave him some political benefit.
Anyone who thought Hussein and Iraq presented a credible threat that was imminent enough to warrant an unilateral invasion was deluding themselves.
"I think this problem is indeed about the few people trying to max out their "unlimited" connections, and the rest of us paying for it."
If they don't want people to think the connection is unlimited, maybe they should tell people about it up front. If they think that killing P2P connections during peak usage is a good idea for most people, maybe they should boldly tell their customers about this great feature instead of lying about it until confronted with evidence. They have shown themselves to be unworthy of trust. They deserve no sympathy.
Wow, a smug and lazy attack on Starbucks is somehow "insightful." How unsurprising.
Maybe you don't like Starbucks. That's fine. I don't care for them either. But don't project unfounded assumptions as to why everyone else goes there. Shocking though this may be, people genuinely enjoy Starbucks. I find the automatic espresso machine a bit soulless, and it never pulls a great shot of espresso, but it also never pulls a terrible shot of espresso. It pulls a consistently good shot. I prefer my local places, and I accept that I'll occasionally get some terrible drinks, but in exchange I also sometimes get exceptional drinks. As for the attitude, the Starbucks baristas never struck me as being quite a competent as someone who actually knows their way around an espresso machine, they have been consistently friendly and helpful.
(I won't defend the prices. When you're a name brand you get to charge a premium. Such is life.)
Barnes & Noble is trying this crazy idea of providing lots of chairs and tables throughout the store. This is obviously a bad idea. Have you been there? I have, and the chairs and tables are full of people reading, but not buying books. The little attached cafe is full of kids doing their homework! I hate it. Clearly they're losing piles of money, and I expect them to go out of business any day. After all, I've been buying books for years, so I'm clearly a qualified expert to tell other people how to run their business.
Back in reality, have you actually chatted with the staff and owners of the places offering free wifi? I'm on reasonably good terms with the manager of the campus coffee shop I frequent, and they're doing well. They're doing so well that they opened their first branch a year ago, and it's doing just fine. While it is frequently busy, I've never failed to find a seat and have always enjoyed the atmosphere. Meanwhile, the suburban local coffee shops I frequent are the ones I'll actually occasionally camp out in for several hours. I know I'll buy several drinks over that time period. Watching my fellow customers, they generally don't stay more than an hour or so.
Free wi-fi draws customers in who otherwise would go elsewhere. It builds goodwill. Indeed, I avoid a more convenient Starbucks and go to a less convenient local shop that offers free wifi, even if I'm not using my laptop. The local place has offered me a little nicety, so I prefer them.
Fretting about someone quietly loitering around and potentially not making you money is short sighted. It took Barnes & Noble's realization that reaching out to customers with tables and chairs indirectly increased sales.
1. WotC has not responded to the "Ask the developers questions" that have been posted for over a month.... Not a single question.
Lots of Slashdot interviews take over a month to get a reply. It sucks, but it's hardly fatal.
2. WotC claims to still be playtesting and running into some major issues (War-Forged Palidins are nigh invincable). However, they are preparing to mass produce the books in order to ready for launch in June.
Will Warforged be part of the initial release? No? Then chill out. There is a hell of a lot of expansion material to be converted and it will take time.
....a. After the 3edition vs. 3.5 edition issues, I will wait for the "Service Pack 2" (read 4.5) update... ; )
3. WotC wants ~$14.00 subsciption fee to continue to get online updates and erratas.
You're paying for online tools and the new online Dungeon and Dragon magazines. I'm quite confident that the errata will still be available for free.
...a. It will also allow for "virtual tabletop" but from what I have seen, there are open source "virtual tabletop" systems that CURRENTLY offer more flexability... and are FREE!!!
Soooo, don't pay for it? I can get free adventures and free role-playing games online too...
4. 4e will introduce "level specific" items. The playtesting reports indicate that at 11th level, a NON-combative character (wizard) is ASSUMED to have +5 bonus to thier armour class....
So?
5. You have to be 11th level BEFORE you can use a ring!!!! You need to be level 21 before you can use a second ring
So?
6. WotC seems to be creating a "digital devide".... The virtual tabletop will contain/replace miniatures... But they want us to buy miniatures as well. To my knowledge, these are mutually exclusive in the 4e gaming environment.
Might I suggest that the physical miniatures are for people playing at physical tables, while the virtual miniatures are intended for people playing online?
7. Supposedly, WotC will be releasing a NEW Dungeon Master Guide and Players Handbook ONCE A YEAR!!! (however, maybe these will elminiate the need for online errata's???? Not a good deal either way, IMHO)
This one worries the heck out of me as well. Mind you, they were already releasing new PHBs and DMGs. They just had funny names like, Wizards Handbook, Complete Book of Rogues or Complete Adventurer and somesuch. This is partially a branding issue based on the success of the PHB II and DMG II for 3.5e. I am worried, however, because the goal is to mark these expansion as "core", which I'm uncomfortable with. Currently if you run a "core book only" game, you're talking three and only three books. Such a definition will be fluid in 4e.
8. If this is a preview, why do we have to pay for it??? And, to the author, how is that "valuable"?
You have to pay for it because some people will pay for it. *shrug* I think they're overpriced, but such is life.
The default assumption of D&D is that I'm a fantasy hero, going forth to stop the forces of darkness, mostly by killing them. I want to role-play such a hero, fending back hordes of monsters. When I stand with my fellow party members, I want to be one of equals, not the spearcarrier. Paladins are supposed to be powerful holy warriors, different, but equal to warriors and clerics. If the game doesn't support that premise you've got a problem.
Races and Classes was originally called Player's Manual back when I was a kid.
No. No it wasn't. You are completely wrong.
The 4th edition Player's Handbook is due out in a few months, and exactly replaces your old Player's Handbook. This is a preview book. It has no rules. It discusses what you can expect, includes some color about the default world assumptions, and discusses the decisions they're making in the 4e design.
This is just the latest round of "buy this update we need another injection of cash" from WotC. I'll pass.
How about instead of passing judgement in advance, you actually check out the new game when it's available and see if they improved things? By all accounts D&D is getting a pretty significant overhaul, far more significant than 3rd edition. Role-playing game design has continued to advance in the last ten years; wouldn't it be nice for D&D to take advantage of it?
Then the market has failed and it's time for regulation.
If the free market is functioning correctly, or efficently as economists like to say, the price of a good or service will be just a bit above the cost or produce or provide it. If the price is higher, competition should drive the price down. That prices are well above the cost to provide the service and has been for a long time suggests that the US cell phone market is malfunctioning. Of course, this should be obvious to anyone who deals with US cell phone companies.
Should his premiums go up simply because of some number in a database that makes him look like a heavy drinker?
Your auto premiums are already strongly impacted by your gender, your age, your marital status, the neighborhood you live in, and the neighborhood you work in. Insurance companies make money by being good at taking imperfect and indirect data and making more accurate estimates of risk. An insurance company that is better at making the estimate will be more profitable than one that isn't. They'll take any data they can get, balanced by how annoyed their customers will be by the intrusion. If the numbers reveal that someone who regularly buys cases of beer tend to be in more accidents, his rate would go up. Mind you, the insurance company doesn't even care why the buying the beer makes him a bigger risk. Perhaps it means he drinks and drives. Perhaps it puts him at higher risk of being hit by one of the people he serves the beer to. Perhaps that his social group drinks that way is strongly correlated with people who are careful to drink and drive, but are just crappy, high risk drivers.
I'm not saying this is good, just that this is how it is.
The problem with downloading is it completely distorts the market.
Quite the opposite. Downloading clears up existing distortions in the market created by government regulation. Copyright is an artificial government granted monopoly. Absent copyright law, competition should quickly get the price of a single unit down to just above the cost of production of a single unit. Given the internet, the cost of production of one more copy is essentially zero, so the price can be and is zero.
It appears that the various religious groups are convincing their members to stay away from it due to the anti-religious message in the books.
While that may be true, it may not be the reason for the low revenue. It's possible that it just isn't a very good movie. It's currently running 43% at Rotten Tomatoes, which is pretty bad. I've seen the movie, and while it's not that bad, it's seriously flawed.
Bandwidth costs money - Gold subscribers at $50 a year pay for that. If you have a free account, why shouldn't it be considered a gift that you're able to download these things at all?
I'm going to go out on a limb here and suggest that it should be free because these are demos. They're advertisements for the full game. Demos manage to be free to download for PC games, and PC demos are frequently much larger.
The most obvious way to solve the problem like PC demos did: make it advertising supported. You might as well start charging movie goers a $0.25 surcharge to cover the cost of screening the trailers before the movie; after all, someone needs to set things up, and you have wear and tear on the projector and electricity.
Of course, this really has nothing to do with recovering bandwidth costs. The reality is that game publishers discovered that they can hand off downloads to profiteering, deadweight, no-value middlemen like FilePlanet and actually get paid for it. The better solution would be peer-to-peer technology like BitTorrent that means that popular downloads would cost almost nothing to distribute, and unpopular ones will be cheap since they're unpopular.
Demos should be freely available. If it's too expensive to ship them yourself, publish an MD5 (so people can validate their downloads) and let people host them themselves. Something equivalent could easily be set up for Xbox Live.
...but nobody has come up with a better way to create incentives to put R&D into ventures which pay only IP rewards...
Sure there is, contract law, especially the subset related to trade secrets. Require anyone buying your drug, or buying a ticket to your movie, sign a contract in which you promise to not reverse engineer or otherwise analyze the drug, or to record the movie. Standard contracts will soon appear, as will more global contracts. You'll sign a stock contract with GlaxoSmithKline and Paramont and be able to buy their drugs and watch their movies simply by presenting your ID. A quick database check and you'll be allowed to buy your drug or tickets.
You can also use something like the street performer protocol. "We'll put a team of 10 scientists on AIDS treatment research for a year if someone or group coughs up 10 million dollars. Everyone who contributes will get a copy of all the resulting research." Or "I've got a great idea for a movie. Here's my previous movies to show that I have the skills. Here's the general premise. If I'm given 50 million dollars, I'll make it. Everyone who contributes will get a copy for the cost of production and shipping."
Have a bit a of faith in the free market. I want medicine that will extend my life, and I want to watch entertaining movies. I have money I can spend on those things. Producers can make drugs and movies and want my money. We'll work something out!
With absolutely NO IP protection then movies just won't get made.
I find your lack of faith in the free market disturbing. But even if you're right and we can't find some way to connect people with money who want movies to people who want money and can make movies, it's silly to suggest that movies won't get made. It will just change the cost of movies that get made. Blogs have made anyone who wants a journalist. (Not necessarily a good journalist, but a journalist none-the-less.) Bandwidth, audio compression, computerize mixing, and cheap recording equipment mean that people who never expect to make money are recording talk shows as podcasts. We've got very free music under a variety of Creative Commons licenses. As costs keep dropping, it's just a matter of time before free movies become common. Short form films are already common (you may have heard of a little site called YouTube). They may not be Hollywood blockbusters, but movies will be made. It turns out that people like creating content, but the barrier was the cost of entry. That cost continues to drop. Sure, most of the resulting content will suck, but some of it will be really good.
You're adding nothing to the conversation. Epidemic obesity costs our society in lost productivity and higher medical coverage costs.
If telling people to "Stop being lazy pigs and get some discipline" was an effective treatment, we'd have had this licked years ago. Obviously it doesn't work. The people trying to stop obesity, figuring out what leads people to make the wrong decisions, helps people make better decisions, they're making the the world a better place. You're not; you're just being a smug ass.
Slashdot Mirror
When you're talking about a country of 1.3 billion people, remember that 15% disagreeing means you've got 195 million people who are unhappy with the situation.
Are you simply calling on people to limit themselves, completely absent any laws or FCC enforcement? If so, my apologies, I misunderstood. I strongly support your right to call for people to limit their own language.
However, this article is about FCC enforcement. And you call not being exposed to these words a "right," which presumably should be protected by law. If you think the FCC should be restricting what private companies broadcast and enforcing those restrictions through fines, you are absolutely pro-censorship. censorship: the institution, system, or practice of censoring.. censor(ing): to suppress or delete as objectionable.
You have no such right. Freedom of speech is a right, protected by the first amendment to our constitution. That freedom includes freedom for those who assault us with garbage. It sucks, but the trade off is that you know the government won't decide that your political or religious beliefs are obscene and silence you.
What you are advocating is censorship. Your standard for what to censor? "Common convention defines it. So does common sense." Common convention and common sense once dictated that "nigger" was an appropriate word to describe people with discernibly dark skin. That same convention and common sense lead people to prefer to not see people of distinguishable ancestry mingling. Common convention and common sense once defined "Jap" as an appropriate label for someone from Japan. Conventional wisdom and the resulting common sense changes over time. An appeal to the past is not a argument for how we should behave in the future. If you want to censor a particular list of words, you need more than an appeal to tradition to justify it.
Some people would "prefer" not to hear these things? Life's tough, get over it. As former Canadian Prime Minster Avril Campbell said, "...if you never encounter anything in your community that offends you, you are not living in a free society." I'd prefer to not hear politicians and media personalities that tell outright lies to support their views. I'd prefer to not have politicians try to use fear and dishonest appeals patriotism to scare us into compliance. I'd prefer to limit discussion to honest, logical debate supported by the best available knowledge. I'd prefer companies to issue honest statements about the quality and nature of their products, instead of trying to skirt the line of legal disclosure. I would prefer to not have the public airwaves dominated by a small number of companies who have incentive limit coverage of important public matters. These are the things that really "sully the common good," not the word "fuck."
Regulating lists of words is rearranging deck chairs on the Titanic. Maybe the ship is going down, but by God you're going to make sure you go down elegantly. You're not improving the level of discourse in this country, you're putting lipstick on a pig.
We're all offended by things we see or hear every day. But because you've got convention on your side you think it appropriate to try and silence the thing that offends you. You are wrong. The rest of us somehow manage to tough it out. We expect you to do the same.
Unless you are operating the only business in town, you should abso-fucking-lutely have the right to expose your employees to asbestos. Anybody who doesn't like it can work somewhere else.
Validate it? To what standard? Does art ever really need validation?
But I'll take a shot in the dark. In particular, it's hard to know what works will help give a medium respectibility until a great deal of time has passed so that people can reflect upon them. The really important works are the ones that will still be read decades down the road. Graphic novels are still relatively young, so it's harder to guess what will matter in the future. Still, here are a few works that I think will likely make the cut:
Maus is the obvious one. A sort of biography, it covers the author's relationship with his father and his father's experiences as a Jew in Poland during World War II.
Barefoot Gen is a the story of a boy living in Hiroshima during World War II. While fictional, it was written by a survivor. It shows the nationalism of the period and the horror of the aftermath.
These are also quite good, but I'm not sure they'll prove to be timeless. However, they're good enough I think they're worth checking out:
New York: Life in the Big City is an interesting work, filled with the sort of slices of life that a skilled columnist or short story writer can capture.
Mom's Cancer , a relatively recent autobiographical work about the title, originally published online.
Assuming you mean "a roughly equivalent" gaming PC, sure, you're right.
You'd have to define "frequently," but yes, as a developer supporting PCs is definately harder.
And this is a fault of the platform how? If anything, the ability to ship buggy software, making initial money, then ship the fixes later should lower costs. PC games don't need to be buggy, it's just what the market tolerates. And we're slowly seeing patches become more and more common for consoles.
That's just silly. Sure, consoles get more and more powerful, but so do PCs. Sure, Rainbox Six: Vegas looks great on the Xbox 360 at 720p, but it looks even better at 1920x1024 out of my gaming PC.
And here is where I really disagree. PC gaming can claim superiority in one key area: truly independent development. You can develop a PC game on a $600 desktop. You can ship it from a $30 per month web hosting account. No one needs to approve your game. The more unique, more experimental stuff starts on the PC. The best the console people can hope for is that the PC version does well enough to attract investment for a port. Developing for a console is much more expensive. The console's manufacturer is free to reject your game, locking you out. If PC gaming largely dies out, this will be the biggest loss. The cost and filtering will encourage the already cautious publishers to err even more on the side of sequels and knock-offs.
(On that note, if you're looking for interesting new stuff, I recommend Play This Thing!. It's a mixed bag, but it's almost always interesting. The Independent Games Festival used to be a really good place, but it's increasingly dominated by games that haven't even shipped a demo yet, let alone an actual game, which seems like cheating to me.)
You need more agents, yes. And you need more money for plane tickets, yes. But you don't need more people willing to die for their cause. By separating security from boarding, then letting people mill around in a large area, you could easily walk onto a plane with a gallon of liquid. Simply have a bunch of agents booked for different flights leaving within the same window. If you're feeling really paranoid, arrange to meet at a busy hub like Chicago and arrive from different airports with layovers that happen to overlap. Each brings in the fraction of a quart of precursor chemicals in their carryon. Once inside they bump into each other. Two might use adjacent bathrooms stalls, and assuming no one busts them for signalling for gay sex, they just pass the chemicals between them. They could meet in one of the restaurants, passing things under the table. The suicide bomber collects the liquid in some sort of expanding container that he brought through empty.
Sure, after the fact review of security video may reveal the connections, but at that point it's too late. A hub like Chicago is too large and too full of people to catch amazingly brief interactions between perhaps 20 people among the 190,000 passing through in a single day. Your agents don't even need to be dedicated members of your movement; since the risk to them is low you simply need to find someone psychopathic enough to take money for other people's lives.
The current liquid restrictions are stupid. They only protects us from terrorists with enough money, knowledge, and connections to acquire to buy unusual liquid explosives, but not enough money, knowledge, and connections to buy 20 people plane tickets.
Charter did it for a few weeks in the Madison, Wisconsin area over a year ago. Then sometime around the end of last year they turned it back on. The deal breaker was spending over an hour dealing with tech support to try and fix it, and never reaching anyone who understood my problem. So I bailed on Charter. My new provider (TDS) has far more clueful tech support who understand how their network is configured and can work off-script.
Bennett,
You're a geek. You've got above average intelligence and a deep desire to make things, everything, better. You've done some great things so far. You've got more ideas that you're pretty sure will help. You want to share these ideas with the world. Trust me, we all know how you feel. However, the rest of us have little ego blogs and post our ideas there. That way, if they're bad ideas, as they frequently are when one dabbles in fields one only has a shallow knowledge of, they can be quietly ignored. If they're good ideas, someone else can submit it to Slashdot where it will be reported. There are two levels filtering the good from the bad: readers who do submissions and the Slashdot editors. It's imperfect, but seems to work.
You, however, are buddy-buddy with Slashdot's editors, so you skip those important filters. Random Slashdot readers aren't acting as a filter. Furthermore, at last some of the editors are chummy with you, eliminating them as reliable filters. The result: you get an artificial level of visibility and respect that you simply haven't earned.
Please, go post your ideas on a blog like the rest of us. If your ideas are really all that, they'll be back on the Slashdot's front page in no time. If not, you'll just have to learn to live with only being famous for your security and freedom of speech work.
So in answer to my question, "For what definition of fair?" what is your answer? My best guess is, "A fair tax would be one that every single citizen agreed was less than or equal the amount they would be willing to pay." There are people who believe that government services are always worthless, even emergency services, police, and the military. So by that definition the only fair tax is no taxes, and by extension, no government. Not, "just enough to protect the country from invasion and me from violence." Absolutely zero. You might get people willing to buy services, but at that point your "government" is just another business in competition with the rest. There might be laws, but lacking government enforcement they're meaningless. If you want police protection or emergency services, you pay for them. If the factory next door is poisoning you, you move. I disagree with but can respect this viewpoint in hard-core anarchists and libertarians, but it's extreme, and I suspect it's not your point of view. If not, please clarify.
For what definition of fair?
By this definition, people who make heavier use of government services are subsidized by those who less use, but that's somehow fair.
Also, by this definition, it's fair that someone who makes $27,000 a year (minimum wage, working two full time jobs) would give up 37% of it and be just scraping by, while someone making $200,000 a year would be losing a mere 5% and a negligibly impact on their life.
Fair isn't a universal standard.
So, we're in Iraq because we really, really though they had, or were about to have, nukes and threatened nearby countries? Okay. Why aren't we in North Korea? They have nukes, and they sure as hell pose a threat to South Korea. Why can we deal with North Korea through diplomacy, but we had to invade Iraq?
Excepting that Iraq was one of the few places in the Middle East with a largely secular government and peace between different religious groups. Saddam Hussein was a terrible, brutal dictator, but he wasn't a religious zealot, he was a powermonger. He paid lip service to religion because it gave him some political benefit.
Anyone who thought Hussein and Iraq presented a credible threat that was imminent enough to warrant an unilateral invasion was deluding themselves.
"I think this problem is indeed about the few people trying to max out their "unlimited" connections, and the rest of us paying for it."
If they don't want people to think the connection is unlimited, maybe they should tell people about it up front. If they think that killing P2P connections during peak usage is a good idea for most people, maybe they should boldly tell their customers about this great feature instead of lying about it until confronted with evidence. They have shown themselves to be unworthy of trust. They deserve no sympathy.
Wow, a smug and lazy attack on Starbucks is somehow "insightful." How unsurprising.
Maybe you don't like Starbucks. That's fine. I don't care for them either. But don't project unfounded assumptions as to why everyone else goes there. Shocking though this may be, people genuinely enjoy Starbucks. I find the automatic espresso machine a bit soulless, and it never pulls a great shot of espresso, but it also never pulls a terrible shot of espresso. It pulls a consistently good shot. I prefer my local places, and I accept that I'll occasionally get some terrible drinks, but in exchange I also sometimes get exceptional drinks. As for the attitude, the Starbucks baristas never struck me as being quite a competent as someone who actually knows their way around an espresso machine, they have been consistently friendly and helpful.
(I won't defend the prices. When you're a name brand you get to charge a premium. Such is life.)
Barnes & Noble is trying this crazy idea of providing lots of chairs and tables throughout the store. This is obviously a bad idea. Have you been there? I have, and the chairs and tables are full of people reading, but not buying books. The little attached cafe is full of kids doing their homework! I hate it. Clearly they're losing piles of money, and I expect them to go out of business any day. After all, I've been buying books for years, so I'm clearly a qualified expert to tell other people how to run their business.
Back in reality, have you actually chatted with the staff and owners of the places offering free wifi? I'm on reasonably good terms with the manager of the campus coffee shop I frequent, and they're doing well. They're doing so well that they opened their first branch a year ago, and it's doing just fine. While it is frequently busy, I've never failed to find a seat and have always enjoyed the atmosphere. Meanwhile, the suburban local coffee shops I frequent are the ones I'll actually occasionally camp out in for several hours. I know I'll buy several drinks over that time period. Watching my fellow customers, they generally don't stay more than an hour or so.
Free wi-fi draws customers in who otherwise would go elsewhere. It builds goodwill. Indeed, I avoid a more convenient Starbucks and go to a less convenient local shop that offers free wifi, even if I'm not using my laptop. The local place has offered me a little nicety, so I prefer them.
Fretting about someone quietly loitering around and potentially not making you money is short sighted. It took Barnes & Noble's realization that reaching out to customers with tables and chairs indirectly increased sales.
Lots of Slashdot interviews take over a month to get a reply. It sucks, but it's hardly fatal.
Will Warforged be part of the initial release? No? Then chill out. There is a hell of a lot of expansion material to be converted and it will take time.
3. WotC wants ~$14.00 subsciption fee to continue to get online updates and erratas.You're paying for online tools and the new online Dungeon and Dragon magazines. I'm quite confident that the errata will still be available for free.
Soooo, don't pay for it? I can get free adventures and free role-playing games online too...
So?
So?
Might I suggest that the physical miniatures are for people playing at physical tables, while the virtual miniatures are intended for people playing online?
This one worries the heck out of me as well. Mind you, they were already releasing new PHBs and DMGs. They just had funny names like, Wizards Handbook, Complete Book of Rogues or Complete Adventurer and somesuch. This is partially a branding issue based on the success of the PHB II and DMG II for 3.5e. I am worried, however, because the goal is to mark these expansion as "core", which I'm uncomfortable with. Currently if you run a "core book only" game, you're talking three and only three books. Such a definition will be fluid in 4e.
You have to pay for it because some people will pay for it. *shrug* I think they're overpriced, but such is life.
The default assumption of D&D is that I'm a fantasy hero, going forth to stop the forces of darkness, mostly by killing them. I want to role-play such a hero, fending back hordes of monsters. When I stand with my fellow party members, I want to be one of equals, not the spearcarrier. Paladins are supposed to be powerful holy warriors, different, but equal to warriors and clerics. If the game doesn't support that premise you've got a problem.
No. No it wasn't. You are completely wrong.
The 4th edition Player's Handbook is due out in a few months, and exactly replaces your old Player's Handbook. This is a preview book. It has no rules. It discusses what you can expect, includes some color about the default world assumptions, and discusses the decisions they're making in the 4e design.
How about instead of passing judgement in advance, you actually check out the new game when it's available and see if they improved things? By all accounts D&D is getting a pretty significant overhaul, far more significant than 3rd edition. Role-playing game design has continued to advance in the last ten years; wouldn't it be nice for D&D to take advantage of it?
Then the market has failed and it's time for regulation.
If the free market is functioning correctly, or efficently as economists like to say, the price of a good or service will be just a bit above the cost or produce or provide it. If the price is higher, competition should drive the price down. That prices are well above the cost to provide the service and has been for a long time suggests that the US cell phone market is malfunctioning. Of course, this should be obvious to anyone who deals with US cell phone companies.
Your auto premiums are already strongly impacted by your gender, your age, your marital status, the neighborhood you live in, and the neighborhood you work in. Insurance companies make money by being good at taking imperfect and indirect data and making more accurate estimates of risk. An insurance company that is better at making the estimate will be more profitable than one that isn't. They'll take any data they can get, balanced by how annoyed their customers will be by the intrusion. If the numbers reveal that someone who regularly buys cases of beer tend to be in more accidents, his rate would go up. Mind you, the insurance company doesn't even care why the buying the beer makes him a bigger risk. Perhaps it means he drinks and drives. Perhaps it puts him at higher risk of being hit by one of the people he serves the beer to. Perhaps that his social group drinks that way is strongly correlated with people who are careful to drink and drive, but are just crappy, high risk drivers.
I'm not saying this is good, just that this is how it is.
Quite the opposite. Downloading clears up existing distortions in the market created by government regulation. Copyright is an artificial government granted monopoly. Absent copyright law, competition should quickly get the price of a single unit down to just above the cost of production of a single unit. Given the internet, the cost of production of one more copy is essentially zero, so the price can be and is zero.
I'm not saying this is good, simply that it is.
While that may be true, it may not be the reason for the low revenue. It's possible that it just isn't a very good movie. It's currently running 43% at Rotten Tomatoes, which is pretty bad. I've seen the movie, and while it's not that bad, it's seriously flawed.
I'm going to go out on a limb here and suggest that it should be free because these are demos. They're advertisements for the full game. Demos manage to be free to download for PC games, and PC demos are frequently much larger.
The most obvious way to solve the problem like PC demos did: make it advertising supported. You might as well start charging movie goers a $0.25 surcharge to cover the cost of screening the trailers before the movie; after all, someone needs to set things up, and you have wear and tear on the projector and electricity.
Of course, this really has nothing to do with recovering bandwidth costs. The reality is that game publishers discovered that they can hand off downloads to profiteering, deadweight, no-value middlemen like FilePlanet and actually get paid for it. The better solution would be peer-to-peer technology like BitTorrent that means that popular downloads would cost almost nothing to distribute, and unpopular ones will be cheap since they're unpopular.
Demos should be freely available. If it's too expensive to ship them yourself, publish an MD5 (so people can validate their downloads) and let people host them themselves. Something equivalent could easily be set up for Xbox Live.
Sure there is, contract law, especially the subset related to trade secrets. Require anyone buying your drug, or buying a ticket to your movie, sign a contract in which you promise to not reverse engineer or otherwise analyze the drug, or to record the movie. Standard contracts will soon appear, as will more global contracts. You'll sign a stock contract with GlaxoSmithKline and Paramont and be able to buy their drugs and watch their movies simply by presenting your ID. A quick database check and you'll be allowed to buy your drug or tickets.
You can also use something like the street performer protocol. "We'll put a team of 10 scientists on AIDS treatment research for a year if someone or group coughs up 10 million dollars. Everyone who contributes will get a copy of all the resulting research." Or "I've got a great idea for a movie. Here's my previous movies to show that I have the skills. Here's the general premise. If I'm given 50 million dollars, I'll make it. Everyone who contributes will get a copy for the cost of production and shipping."
Have a bit a of faith in the free market. I want medicine that will extend my life, and I want to watch entertaining movies. I have money I can spend on those things. Producers can make drugs and movies and want my money. We'll work something out!
I find your lack of faith in the free market disturbing. But even if you're right and we can't find some way to connect people with money who want movies to people who want money and can make movies, it's silly to suggest that movies won't get made. It will just change the cost of movies that get made. Blogs have made anyone who wants a journalist. (Not necessarily a good journalist, but a journalist none-the-less.) Bandwidth, audio compression, computerize mixing, and cheap recording equipment mean that people who never expect to make money are recording talk shows as podcasts. We've got very free music under a variety of Creative Commons licenses. As costs keep dropping, it's just a matter of time before free movies become common. Short form films are already common (you may have heard of a little site called YouTube). They may not be Hollywood blockbusters, but movies will be made. It turns out that people like creating content, but the barrier was the cost of entry. That cost continues to drop. Sure, most of the resulting content will suck, but some of it will be really good.
epidemic ... adj. ... 2. Widely prevalent ... n. ... A rapid spread, growth, or development: an unemployment epidemic. It need not be contagious. The use as an adjective is clearly correct. The noun use is correct if you believe that the increase in obesity has been rapid.
disease ... n. ... 2. A condition or tendency, as of society, regarded as abnormal and harmful.
You're adding nothing to the conversation. Epidemic obesity costs our society in lost productivity and higher medical coverage costs. If telling people to "Stop being lazy pigs and get some discipline" was an effective treatment, we'd have had this licked years ago. Obviously it doesn't work. The people trying to stop obesity, figuring out what leads people to make the wrong decisions, helps people make better decisions, they're making the the world a better place. You're not; you're just being a smug ass.