Normally, I'd roll my eyes along with you. Until I read a recent story about someone's automobile black box (installed to help monitor the engine and determine the cause of crashes) used to book him for speeding.
If we provide the technology, it always expands beyond its initial use.
Given that Spamcop's website was successfully taken down, it seems that describing spammers operations as "desperate" is a lot like President Bush saying how the terrorists are getting desperate given our success (16 killed in the most recent attack).
Economic theory is supposed to operate under the assumption of scarcity. That is what gives resources monetary value and makes the efficient use of them worthwhile. However, I don't think technology is at fault for the mirage of abundance. That's the damn greedy corporate executive, who can only make more money if people are always convinced that bigger, faster, and more are what they need. If he/she successfully creates the illusion that the environment is limitless, that just one more Oreo is okay, and that one more porn movie is what you need, then he makes a buck.
Technology might facilitate the illusion of abundance by allowing us to mitigate local shortages, but there's no actual abundance (see: Third World).
Exactly. I'm surprised to see so much complaining about this as a waste of time from people who try to install Linux on everything. Would this have been okay if the Enterprise main computer was running Linux Kernal c? Or if the wind tunnel software was Linux?
While I agree that beach can prime you to think bleach, answering bleach indicates that you did not read the directions to identify a popular laundry detergent.
...child molester gets himself a radio transmitter and tracker so he can easily find isolated prey...
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Re:No one took your time in the first place.
on
Take Back Your Time!
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· Score: 4, Insightful
There's a great book on the issue of the American tradeoff of time for disposable income called The Overspent American. Basically, we spend so much time trying to keep our incomes up, we end up having less and less time to enjoy the things we buy (that we arguably don't need anyway).
I've always felt that MMORGs suffer from a lack of individualized questing and have too great a focus on providing an equal opportunity gameplaying experience. Let me explain. First of all, there need to be interesting and personal quests. Perhaps your character arrives in a town just before a battle or when a roving dragon is attacking the fields. That one character should be able to perform the quest and decisively slay the dragon and collect the reward. Future comers to the town should find it clear of dragons, but with a new legend of a great hero.
As for equal opportunity, I think games should be different for everyone. Someone who plays from the beginning should be so much more powerful than latercomers as a result of their longevity. They should have unique items and powers that make them uniquely suited to certain quests/tasks. The opportunity to become one of these greats would serve as a mini-American dream. Obviously, most people don't become that powerful, which is what makes being so powerful so worthwhile.
What is really needed is the ability for senior players to create quests for newbies and others. For example, Lord Thistlewhick decides that a neighboring lord has become too overbearing. He puts out a request for a group of questors to go ravage the fields of his opponent and rewards them generously. Or perhaps he doesn't reward them, and so the rally the townspeople and slay the lord. The creators of the game should continue to affect the environment by adding dragons and such (a la Smaug), but the task of creating quests and such should be set up in a way that allows people to do more than just be a questor. After all, that's why D&D is so damn fun.
Don't ask me how this would be accomplished in terms of programming, I haven't a clue.
I have no idea why there is so much fantasizing over touchscreen voting. I've seen studies suggesting that its accuracy is actually worse than other existing technologies (optical scan) and is no better than the infamous punch card ballots. To top it off, optical scan machines are cheaper and leave a lovely paper trail (called a ballot) stored right inside the machine.
Actually, it is the lack of tax barriers (free trade) that has retarded the development of Third World agricultural self-sufficiency. Americans dump subsidized food on the world market at ridiculously low prices, destroying the capability of poorer nations to develop native industry.
While they might then have an abundance of imported grain, the destruction of the domestic industry means fewer jobs and paychecks to buy that food. Thus, the ridiculousness of American overproduction and Third World scarcity.
"After overrunning these countries Germany turned against France, entering the country through the Ardennes on May 13 - the French had made the fatal mistake of leaving this area almost totally undefended, believing its terrain to be impassible for tanks. Most Allied forces were in Flanders, anticipating a re-run of the World War I Schlieffen Plan, and were cut off from the French heartland. As a result of this, and also the superior German communications, the Battle of France was shorter than virtually all prewar Allied thought could have conceived. It lasted six weeks, after which France surrendered."
should prove the point that music piracy and falling CD sales were indicative of consumer demand for a more flexible model. I'd bet that revenues for iTunes and other online services will continue to rise and CD sales will continue to fall.
It's a good point. Take the deli counter for example. I would imagine that part of the job satisfaction is being able to interact with people and help fulfill their consumer needs. Same for checkers as opposed to floor-sweepers. Human interaction is natural for us and I think that dehumanizing jobs will have unfortunate side effects.
That being said, I love new technology and think that this kind of wireless shopping can be convenient and more fun.
By allowing people to scan their own stuff, I would guess that they are risking more theft. The article says that, "Stop & Shop is counting on random spot checks and video surveillance cameras to deter shoplifting." However, there's no equal efficiency replacement for the checker seeing that your cart is empty.
Another thing, I don't know if I would want to be reminded what I bought the last time I passed this section of the aisle. Rarely am I shopping for the same thing two weeks in a row or even two months in a row. Do I really want it to beep every time I pass an item I have purchased once?
Finally, please note that they have issued a challenge to you Linux folk: "The custom-built devices can't run ordinary computer software; they're good for shopping and nothing else." Wanna bet?
...the upset was of course the fault of the "vast right wing conspiracy" that brought all those allegations of sexual misconduct about Clinton to the airwaves...wait, those were true?
It is fascinating, though, that while the "secret" update to the machines has been exposed, we still can't figure out what "senior administration official" is disclosing the names of covert officials...
Yeah, I know, I'm (Offtopic, -1), but only because this story is (Redundant, -2).
Actually, most scientists are fairly careful to control for all of the circumstances you mentioned. I've seen this information in several other places before, and they do control for those variables. I'm kind of surprised that everyone thinks this is crackpot science, given how height is as obviously a part of a "good-looks" package as attractiveness, and we all know that good looks gets all sorts of advantages.
For those doubting Thomases:
A BBC story on the issue about a study tracking people born March 1958.
1. Full details of this research will appear in Harper, B. 'Beauty, Statute and the Labour Market: A British Cohort Study', Oxford Bulletin of Economics and Statistics, 62, December 2000, pp773-802.
2. The study sample of 11,000 people are members of the National Child Development Study. The NCDS cohort study tracks the lives of 17,733 people born in Britain in the first week of March 1958. They are now 42. They were last interviewed in 1991 when the sample had fallen to 11,407.
Further information
For further information, a copy of the full research article or to arrange an interview please contact Barry Harper (details below).
London Guildhall University does not have an abbreviation. To avoid confusion with other organisations, please use only our full name. Thank you.
Yes. But the professor's quote of Henry Ford sums up why the RIAA is pursuing this strategy anyway:
lawsuits against new technologies provide "opportunities for little minds... to usurp the gains of genuine inventors... and under the smug protest of righteousness, work a hold-up game in the most approved fashion."
I think that for some sick segments of society, games like POSTAL fulfill a want/need to indulge in violence that could reinforce a predisposition to do it in the real world. For most well-balanced people, it's easy to turn off the game and realize the difference. For some people, though, the game is an indulgence of a violent fantasy.
I know Slashdot is a libertarian stomping ground, but at what stage does a community think about what the use is for certain things and decide that we might be better off without them? Can community have some responsibility? We excoriate parents for failing to look over their kids, but perhaps parents feel like society is too hell-bent on making them go it alone all the time. Wouldn't it be easier to be a good parent if there weren't so many porn sites, violent games, etc...if those were restricted more effectively the same way that society has chosen to restrict supply of porn magazines, cigarettes, and alcohol?
I have no knowledge of programming, so I have a question. Is it a given that a program designed to sniff out and restrict P2P access cuts off LAN gaming? I'd have to agree with the Quake-playing student in the article, blasting holes in your college friends is fun!
Slashdot Mirror
If we provide the technology, it always expands beyond its initial use.
Given that Spamcop's website was successfully taken down, it seems that describing spammers operations as "desperate" is a lot like President Bush saying how the terrorists are getting desperate given our success (16 killed in the most recent attack).
But did you hear that M$ is buying Google?
*smack*
Technology might facilitate the illusion of abundance by allowing us to mitigate local shortages, but there's no actual abundance (see: Third World).
Exactly. I'm surprised to see so much complaining about this as a waste of time from people who try to install Linux on everything. Would this have been okay if the Enterprise main computer was running Linux Kernal c? Or if the wind tunnel software was Linux?
Sheesh. It's for fun!
I'm so sorry.
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As for equal opportunity, I think games should be different for everyone. Someone who plays from the beginning should be so much more powerful than latercomers as a result of their longevity. They should have unique items and powers that make them uniquely suited to certain quests/tasks. The opportunity to become one of these greats would serve as a mini-American dream. Obviously, most people don't become that powerful, which is what makes being so powerful so worthwhile.
What is really needed is the ability for senior players to create quests for newbies and others. For example, Lord Thistlewhick decides that a neighboring lord has become too overbearing. He puts out a request for a group of questors to go ravage the fields of his opponent and rewards them generously. Or perhaps he doesn't reward them, and so the rally the townspeople and slay the lord. The creators of the game should continue to affect the environment by adding dragons and such (a la Smaug), but the task of creating quests and such should be set up in a way that allows people to do more than just be a questor. After all, that's why D&D is so damn fun.
Don't ask me how this would be accomplished in terms of programming, I haven't a clue.
While they might then have an abundance of imported grain, the destruction of the domestic industry means fewer jobs and paychecks to buy that food. Thus, the ridiculousness of American overproduction and Third World scarcity.
From Internet Encyclopedia, however:
"After overrunning these countries Germany turned against France, entering the country through the Ardennes on May 13 - the French had made the fatal mistake of leaving this area almost totally undefended, believing its terrain to be impassible for tanks. Most Allied forces were in Flanders, anticipating a re-run of the World War I Schlieffen Plan, and were cut off from the French heartland. As a result of this, and also the superior German communications, the Battle of France was shorter than virtually all prewar Allied thought could have conceived. It lasted six weeks, after which France surrendered."
That being said, I love new technology and think that this kind of wireless shopping can be convenient and more fun.
*sigh*...so many factors to consider
Another thing, I don't know if I would want to be reminded what I bought the last time I passed this section of the aisle. Rarely am I shopping for the same thing two weeks in a row or even two months in a row. Do I really want it to beep every time I pass an item I have purchased once?
Finally, please note that they have issued a challenge to you Linux folk: "The custom-built devices can't run ordinary computer software; they're good for shopping and nothing else." Wanna bet?
It is fascinating, though, that while the "secret" update to the machines has been exposed, we still can't figure out what "senior administration official" is disclosing the names of covert officials...
Yeah, I know, I'm (Offtopic, -1), but only because this story is (Redundant, -2).
For those doubting Thomases:
2. The study sample of 11,000 people are members of the National Child Development Study. The NCDS cohort study tracks the lives of 17,733 people born in Britain in the first week of March 1958. They are now 42. They were last interviewed in 1991 when the sample had fallen to 11,407.
Further information For further information, a copy of the full research article or to arrange an interview please contact Barry Harper (details below). London Guildhall University does not have an abbreviation. To avoid confusion with other organisations, please use only our full name. Thank you.
-Bill
I think that for some sick segments of society, games like POSTAL fulfill a want/need to indulge in violence that could reinforce a predisposition to do it in the real world. For most well-balanced people, it's easy to turn off the game and realize the difference. For some people, though, the game is an indulgence of a violent fantasy.
I know Slashdot is a libertarian stomping ground, but at what stage does a community think about what the use is for certain things and decide that we might be better off without them? Can community have some responsibility? We excoriate parents for failing to look over their kids, but perhaps parents feel like society is too hell-bent on making them go it alone all the time. Wouldn't it be easier to be a good parent if there weren't so many porn sites, violent games, etc...if those were restricted more effectively the same way that society has chosen to restrict supply of porn magazines, cigarettes, and alcohol?
Virtually, of course...