This is a great initiative to implement when facing massive, crippling budget deficits.
I think it's supposed to be classic Keynesian economics, that a government should run a deficit by cutting taxes and spending more when the economy is slow, then cut back on spending and raise taxes once the economy improves.
The only problem is that when the economy is doing well a "Less Government and Higher Taxes" platform is a pretty hard sell for a politician.
Here's a chart showing a very strong correlation between health care costs and wages. For a period in the 90s health care costs grew very slowly and wages shot up, and when health care costs started rising more sharply during the 00s wages became stagnant. It makes sense that an employer would spend less on an employees wages as the cost of their benefits go up.
The catch is, while manufacturing is actually increasing in America, employment in manufacturing has fallen because of increased productivity per worker.
Actually that's a good question because the first day Portal came out there was a bug where the voice giving you instructions wasn't audible (for a few people). That happened to me, I played the first few levels and I never heard the voice, then the next day Valve patched the game and the game worked for me.
It was a subtle bug because all the other sounds were there, I never realized the best part of the game is missing. Luckily I hadn't gotten too far into the game.
That's the way it is - it's profitable for the company with no downside.
The only option is for employees to show that it will cost them in the long run through turnover and training new employees.
Alternately, unionization or government regulation are the only other options.
The problem isn't capitalism, it's just bad management at that specific develooper. Here's part of interview with someone from one of the most successful developers right, Infinity Ward (who did Call of Duty 4 and Modern Warfare 2).
we schedule our projects well so there is never a feeling of "oh crap, this whole project is going to hell"; we reward our employees for their hard work with significant royalties; we usually make games on a relatively fast (but not rushed) two-year dev cycle; we almost never have forced crunch - in fact I've worked one full Saturday plus a few scattered weekend hours in the entire six years I've been at Infinity Ward.
I'm not a executive, but I would think Rockstar would be better off by hiring the best, paying them well and not overworking them so they can have a low turnover. I keep reading the same articles about "crunch time" and underpayed employees then later I read about the same companies having financial problems (EA in particular but also Rockstar).
Frankly an 80% piracy rate seems a little difficult to believe given how most iPhone users I know use their phones (most use stock firmware, since they're still on warranty, and people have spent up to £800 and don't want to 'brick' it).
An 80% piracy rate doesn't mean 80% of iPhone users are pirates.
Now my math might be little shakey, but let's say, hypothetically, for every 1000 iPhone users there are only 50 who pirate games. If only 5 out of 1000 buys a game, but 20 out of 50 pirates download the game... you would have an 80% piracy rate even though only less than 5% of users are pirates.
Wouldn't that suck? Spending 8 months in transit to Mars only to find a crowd waiting for you once you land: "yeah, we actually invented this really cool new engine like the week after you guys took off."
In case that sounds familiar, it's similar to the plot of a memorable short story from the 1940s, A.E. van Vogt's ‘Far Centaurus’.
As I vaguely remember it , Astronauts get frozen and go off for hundreds of years and find out that faster than light travel has been invented and the Alpha Centauri system had already been colonized.
I have to say that now I regret that the syntax is so clumsy. I would like http://www.example.com/foo/bar/baz to be just written http:com/example/foo/bar/baz where the client would figure out that www.example.com existed and was the server to contact. But it is too late now. It turned out the shorthand "//www.example.com/foo/bar/baz" is rarely used and so we could dispense with the "//".
The Internet facilitates easy plagiarism. I assume papers for sale on the 'net generally have good grammar. Is it possible an increase in Internet plagiarism caused the increase in literary quality?
The Internet makes it a lot easier to "detect" plagiarism, all you have to do is quote a few words from an essay and Google it, or use services like Turnitin.
Personally I think plagiarism in schools may be declining, it just appears to be increasing because a higher proportion are getting caught.
And what about the growing issue of ISPs capping bandwidth-per-month usage?
Wouldn't the best solution be to allow ISPs to cache the bulk of game data? I'd imagine it would work like this, you dowload a few megabytes from Steam or whatever and that initiates the download of a multi-gigabyte signed and encrypted file from you ISP. Everyone wins, less bandwidth for the game company, the ISP isn't using bandwidth outside their network, and the enduser gets the fastest download possible.
"That's the problem with conservatives, they can't approach things without an intensely partisan mindset"
Uh, some can, some can't. Are you actually going to claim liberals are any different?
Actually I think you could make the general criticism that conservatives tend to be too partisan and liberals not partisan enough, in that there is a lot more bickering and infighting among the left. As Lyndon Johnson said "You know the difference between cannibals and liberals? Cannibals only eat their enemies."
I sincerely hope that this doesn't become too commonplace, and that.com,.net, and.org don't just get thrown out the window. Call me lazy, but I love being able to ctrl+enter, shift+enter, and ctrl+shift+enter to auto-complete.com/.net/.org respectively. Typing "www.search.google" is just more tedious than typing, "google [ctrl][enter]" There are already quite a few popular sites that use "unusual" TLDs like last.fm, del.icio.us and blip.tv and it never struck me as a problem.
Plus, it really only deals with the Gnutella network, whereas most of the traffic nowadays would probably be using Bittorrent.
I think we're also seeing a shift away from P2P and towards file hosting sites like Megaupload/Badongo/Zshare/Rapidshare etc, especially for newer albums.
Just wait till marketing decides to call these memory cards 550GB instead of 512GB... then other competing companies others will follow suit and call people who complain whiners and that it's an industry standard way of labeling capacity.
It looks like you sent that track into the top 100, it's at #79 as of 2 a.m. est on Thursday. I'm chuckling at the thought of people buying it just because it's a "good deal" getting an hour of music for 89 cents, without caring what it sounds like.
Personally I never understood the appeal of DVDs. I bought a DVD player maybe six years or so ago and used it to watch rented movies but I didn't see the appeal of buying DVDs with high definition discs just a few years around corner. Sure it took a few years longer than I expected but I'm sure there must be a lot of people like me who avoided starting a movie collection because DVDs seemed like a low-res stop-gap technology until HDTVs and those blue-violet lasers (which both Blu-ray and HD DVD use) became affordable.
While there'll be future technologies I think 1080p will be high enough since we're getting into film grain territory, and while downloading movies is the future they'll likely be of lower quality (like MP3s vs CDs), so I hope one of these formats wins soon so I can start buying discs.
That Dell might not the best comparison, it's a lot bigger (208 cubic inches vs 120 cubic inches for the macbook) and almost a pound heavier, no wonder it's cheaper.
That distrubing picture shown is the one where she looked anorexic (and it was probably just bad makeup and lighting). Linked below are the photos from the Time magazine party where she looked "gorgeous". They ran the wrong picture with the story.
Slashdot Mirror
I'd consider that statement as justifying a firing.
This is a great initiative to implement when facing massive, crippling budget deficits.
I think it's supposed to be classic Keynesian economics, that a government should run a deficit by cutting taxes and spending more when the economy is slow, then cut back on spending and raise taxes once the economy improves.
The only problem is that when the economy is doing well a "Less Government and Higher Taxes" platform is a pretty hard sell for a politician.
Here's a chart showing a very strong correlation between health care costs and wages. For a period in the 90s health care costs grew very slowly and wages shot up, and when health care costs started rising more sharply during the 00s wages became stagnant. It makes sense that an employer would spend less on an employees wages as the cost of their benefits go up.
"Would you want to see a ban on the fan traditions in your country?"
Like a ban on thundersticks? Yes, yes I would. Those things are horrible.
Looks like an excellent bubble to take advantage of. Sell (or short) Apple, buy Microsoft.
The thing is, with near 10% unemployment and having just come out of the worst financial crisis since the great depression, Apple is doing well.
If a company that specializes in expensive, high-end computer products is doing well in a weak economy... what happens when the economy improves?
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_exports
We are #3 behind China and Germany, who both produce 20% more than we do for exports.
As far as raw manufacturing goes, USA is far ahead in the #1 position.
http://investing.curiouscatblog.net/2008/09/23/top-manufacturing-countries-in-2007/
The catch is, while manufacturing is actually increasing in America, employment in manufacturing has fallen because of increased productivity per worker.
http://www.fivethirtyeight.com/2010/02/us-manufacturing-is-not-dead.html
So while it's not true that the USA doesn't make stuff, it can seem like it because there are fewer jobs in manufacturing.
Did you play with sound enabled?
Actually that's a good question because the first day Portal came out there was a bug where the voice giving you instructions wasn't audible (for a few people). That happened to me, I played the first few levels and I never heard the voice, then the next day Valve patched the game and the game worked for me.
It was a subtle bug because all the other sounds were there, I never realized the best part of the game is missing. Luckily I hadn't gotten too far into the game.
You know, a lot of what you're proposing, (aside malpractice reform), sounds an awful lot like Obamacare (if the Senate bill passes).
That's the way it is - it's profitable for the company with no downside. The only option is for employees to show that it will cost them in the long run through turnover and training new employees. Alternately, unionization or government regulation are the only other options.
The problem isn't capitalism, it's just bad management at that specific develooper. Here's part of interview with someone from one of the most successful developers right, Infinity Ward (who did Call of Duty 4 and Modern Warfare 2).
we schedule our projects well so there is never a feeling of "oh crap, this whole project is going to hell"; we reward our employees for their hard work with significant royalties; we usually make games on a relatively fast (but not rushed) two-year dev cycle; we almost never have forced crunch - in fact I've worked one full Saturday plus a few scattered weekend hours in the entire six years I've been at Infinity Ward.
I'm not a executive, but I would think Rockstar would be better off by hiring the best, paying them well and not overworking them so they can have a low turnover. I keep reading the same articles about "crunch time" and underpayed employees then later I read about the same companies having financial problems (EA in particular but also Rockstar).
It so reminded me of that quote "So this is how liberty dies, with thunderous applause."
I googled that quote, expecting it came from someone like Solzhenitsyn or Orwell, only to find out you're quoting "Revenge of the Sith"... ugh.
Frankly an 80% piracy rate seems a little difficult to believe given how most iPhone users I know use their phones (most use stock firmware, since they're still on warranty, and people have spent up to £800 and don't want to 'brick' it).
An 80% piracy rate doesn't mean 80% of iPhone users are pirates.
Now my math might be little shakey, but let's say, hypothetically, for every 1000 iPhone users there are only 50 who pirate games. If only 5 out of 1000 buys a game, but 20 out of 50 pirates download the game... you would have an 80% piracy rate even though only less than 5% of users are pirates.
Wouldn't that suck? Spending 8 months in transit to Mars only to find a crowd waiting for you once you land: "yeah, we actually invented this really cool new engine like the week after you guys took off."
In case that sounds familiar, it's similar to the plot of a memorable short story from the 1940s, A.E. van Vogt's ‘Far Centaurus’.
As I vaguely remember it , Astronauts get frozen and go off for hundreds of years and find out that faster than light travel has been invented and the Alpha Centauri system had already been colonized.
Berners-Lee regrets that as well, from back in 2000...
The Internet facilitates easy plagiarism. I assume papers for sale on the 'net generally have good grammar. Is it possible an increase in Internet plagiarism caused the increase in literary quality?
The Internet makes it a lot easier to "detect" plagiarism, all you have to do is quote a few words from an essay and Google it, or use services like Turnitin.
Personally I think plagiarism in schools may be declining, it just appears to be increasing because a higher proportion are getting caught.
Before long children will be asking to transfer to the schools that pay the best.
Or that have the dumbest students (easier competition).
I always thought that they were knock-offs of Iain M Banks' Larry Niven knock-offs...
...of Freeman Dyson. That sounds about right.
Wouldn't the best solution be to allow ISPs to cache the bulk of game data? I'd imagine it would work like this, you dowload a few megabytes from Steam or whatever and that initiates the download of a multi-gigabyte signed and encrypted file from you ISP. Everyone wins, less bandwidth for the game company, the ISP isn't using bandwidth outside their network, and the enduser gets the fastest download possible.
"That's the problem with conservatives, they can't approach things without an intensely partisan mindset"
Uh, some can, some can't. Are you actually going to claim liberals are any different?
Actually I think you could make the general criticism that conservatives tend to be too partisan and liberals not partisan enough, in that there is a lot more bickering and infighting among the left. As Lyndon Johnson said "You know the difference between cannibals and liberals? Cannibals only eat their enemies."
Just wait till marketing decides to call these memory cards 550GB instead of 512GB... then other competing companies others will follow suit and call people who complain whiners and that it's an industry standard way of labeling capacity.
It looks like you sent that track into the top 100, it's at #79 as of 2 a.m. est on Thursday. I'm chuckling at the thought of people buying it just because it's a "good deal" getting an hour of music for 89 cents, without caring what it sounds like.
While there'll be future technologies I think 1080p will be high enough since we're getting into film grain territory, and while downloading movies is the future they'll likely be of lower quality (like MP3s vs CDs), so I hope one of these formats wins soon so I can start buying discs.
That Dell might not the best comparison, it's a lot bigger (208 cubic inches vs 120 cubic inches for the macbook) and almost a pound heavier, no wonder it's cheaper.
http://justjared.buzznet.com/2007/05/09/cate-blanc hett-skinny/