Since the first thing I did after (finally) getting my Wii and a couple major titles was to go out and buy (cheap!) a bunch of the old Gamecube games I missed out on since I haven't owned a console in more than 10 years, I'm skeptical of the notion that withholding Wii stock will increase sales of GC titles. Also, that would be the most radically shortsighted, stupid move they could make even if it worked, since a few extra dollars from old, mostly out-of-print GC games will not compensate for the potential lost sales from their new system that will drive revenue for years to come if people succeed in purchasing it.
It's actually quite likely that there will be increased supply in April, but not because Nintendo has been deliberately withholding them -- rather because they've been working on a ramp-up in production that will take effect in April. This has been public knowledge for quite a while, so "predicting" increased supply in April is a little disingenuous at this point.
Umm. I do understand inflation (I mean, I'm not a PhD in economics or anything, but I understand the principle). I don't know where you got the bizarre claim that inflation doesn't exist, I didn't say that at all. Nor did I say that becoming accustomed to a price negated inflation, or changed it in any way. I did say people are accustomed to paying the same price every generation, but you perversely misinterpreted this to mean the same price after adjusting for inflation, which is not what people usually mean in a casual discussion unless they add the qualifier "adjusting for inflation," which I didn't.
What I was actually saying was not (directly) about economics or inflation, but rather about consumer psychology. It doesn't matter that the price is the same after adjusting for inflation. Electronics prices do not keep up with inflation, since engineering is improving faster than prices can increase. People are aware that electronics prices do not keep up with inflation. They expect the price (in actual dollars, not inflation-adjusted dollars) to remain more or less stable, or even to drop. Since their expectations are met almost across the board, when they are not met it produces a negative reaction. Call it a market force or something if you like, but if someone is annoyed at how much your product costs then lecturing them about economics and how they're wrong is not going to improve the situation.
Telling me, today, "Well, you bought a NES the day it came out, and adjusting for inflation you paid $800 in today's money!" is not going to make me even a little bit more eager to pay $600 for a PS3. Times have changed, consoles do not cost that much anymore, and after adjusting for inflation I can get a top-of-the-line computer system for 1/10 the price of the 286 we got back in the 80s. If Dell used that as an excuse to raise its prices by a factor of 10, I would laugh at them and go somewhere else.
This is the problem with reasoning about economics completely numerically, and forgetting that at some point the interactions you are describing are made by actual human beings, with actual personalities and opinions...
Now, it's hard to tell what the real situation is, but the idea of doing interesting work for a presumably reasonable hourly rate, and having them actually tell you not to put in any extra hours (or, if you have to, being compensated well for it)... well, that could be pretty nice. The perpetual expectation of "going the extra mile" by putting in lots of hours to get projects done (obviously without the corresponding "going the extra mile" by the employer by sacrificing some of the resulting profits to supplement employee salaries) is the biggest thing that bothers me about tech jobs.
If I could have the benefits of an interesting tech job without the drawbacks of a culture where you're considered lazy for working 40 hours a week, that would be pretty cool.
the PS3 is not even close to as expensive as the Neo Geo once you adjust for inflation. The Neo Geo came out for $650 in 1990. That's about $1020 in modern dollars.
Except that this doesn't work, because the price of consumer electronics doesn't increase along with inflation. With consoles, people have become accustomed to paying pretty much the same price every generation regardless of inflation, and getting better and better hardware for that same price. (You may recall that the 360's $400 was initially considered an awful lot of money, though people seem to be getting accustomed to it now -- even though, correcting backwards for inflation, that's quite a cheap price for such a powerful console.) So, if you go back and correct for inflation, yes, the Neo Geo is far more than the PS3. If you look at its price relative to its competitors, though, the comparison becomes more reasonable again...
Why do we have to create mutant mosquitos when we can use good old DDT? All we have to do is get rich, white people to get off their high horses at cocktail parties so the rest of the world can be saved from this horrible disease.
Wow, you paint an impressive caricature of anyone who could possibly disagree with you. However, your suggested solution (and the accompanying ad hominem) is just as simplistic as the opposing view that DDT is an unmitigated evil.
For someone who is not rich, white and at a cocktail party and yet still disagrees with you, I'd point to my wife, who is Nigerian and, like most of her family, has actually had malaria. She still thinks unrestrained use of DDT is a bad idea -- partly because, though much of Silent Spring was discredited, it is still a toxin that builds up substantially over the very long term, and it's a good idea to avoid that if you don't know the effects over the course of a lifetime, but especially because of the point that other responses have made, that if we did that then soon DDT would become useless, even in cases where we really did need it.
It would clearly be a stupid idea to recommend that every human being continuously take antibiotics. It is a similarly bad idea to say that entire ecosystems should be covered with DDT. Right now, use of DDT in moderation can handle particularly bad infestations. Heavy DDT use would lower malaria rates for a few years, before bringing it back up above todays levels because there would be no easy fix at all.
Your caricature of rich white people on high horses perpetuating disease among the poor and powerless is only at all legitimate if you yourself are not also essentially an armchair philosopher on this issue. If you are insulting other people for having opinions on how to effectively protect people, because they have no personal stake and are somewhat removed from the issue, then you'd better have some personal stake or be close to the issue before going on about your own opinions on the issue. Obviously I don't know your personal stake, if any -- but a lot of people who seem to feel the way you do are no closer to the issue than your hypothetical rich white people.
It would also be good to accept that people who oppose heavy DDT use are genuinely trying to protect people's lives, and have reasons for their opinions (even if you disagree with them), and it's not just that all of them freaked out after reading Silent Spring.
And I love the perspective that says that an efficient, lightweight vehicle wouldn't survive a collision with an enormous Hummer, and therefore there is a problem with the smaller vehicle...
It seems a considerable oversight to me that Federal vehicle safety standards seem to consider almost exclusively the safety of the people in the vehicle, and not so much the people around it...
Some other comments already sort of addressed this, but to clarify: your claim that most business PCs are not Apples was the entire point. If 8% of all PCs are Macs, and more than half of all PCs are used in business, but very few business PCs are Macs (the article explicitly assumes this), then there must be a higher density of macs in the remaining, non-business segment of the market. His claim that 15% of consumer PCs are Macs is actually dependent on the assumption that most business (i.e. non-consumer) PCs are not.
Err... actually, it seems to me that those charts just rub in that with only four months of data, it's impossible to say how these consoles will do in the long run. If you chopped off the 360 chart at 4 months, it wouldn't look nearly as favorable compared to the Dreamcast, and only marginally above the PS3, yet it appears to be doing fine now. The PS3 may mature and stabilize and do quite well given another 6-8 months.
Damn. Now look, your unsupported extrapolation made me actually defend Sony... I need to keep my Wii from finding out about this...
Perhaps it's Nintendo that should have charged $5-600 for their console, and Sony who should have tried to sell their's for $250...
Except then instead of trying for more than three months to buy one (finally succeeded last week), I would have felt insulted and ignored the system entirely. I might buy a PS3 at $250, though...:-P
Well, there's the issue that they got the entire target of the statistic wrong, and there's the issue that they apparently think 37% is "almost a third"... *whimper*...
And shame on me for not proofreading carefully enough, obviously I meant PS2 is weaker technically than the XBox, not the 360 (though that's also true:-P)...
So, your comment ignores the fact that Sony is not the only console that will be improving over the next several months, but one thing in particular:
...showing off upcoming games in all their "impossible on Xbox 360" glory. Kids all over the US and Europe beg their parents for a PS3.
Now, that's a nice theory, and one that obviously certain company executives subscribe to, but with all the talk about how powerful these consoles are people keep ignoring the fact that for at least the last several generations, the "winner" has been the weaker one from a raw processing perspective. PS2 was weaker technically than both 360 and GameCube. PS1 was weaker technically than N64 (albeit with some compensation since it could hold a lot more data). Genesis was weaker than SNES.
And of course there are plenty of examples -- the Dreamcast the most prominent, at least among some circles I guess -- of a console that was clearly technically superior, but failed horribly.
After all that, we suddenly expect people to go for the more expensive, technically superior console, because of all the shiny pretty graphics it has that its competitors don't? What is so different about this time around that has not been true for the last 15+ years, when exactly the opposite happened?
Well, no, I don't care to spill the beans on other people's salaries on a public board without their permission, even if I don't give their names.
I got an offer from MS that was in the range you give (though they also have a number of non-salary benefits) -- that was a few years ago, though, so it may have changed. But the Google offers I've heard of have been higher.
I've heard over this line and over that Google doesn't pay as well as their competitors, relying instead on these intangible perks...
I've never heard this... rather the opposite. I know a few people who went to Google, and their pay is very good, even after factoring in the high cost of living out there. In the few cases where I do know approximate numbers, Google starting salaries are (or at least were) well over Microsoft's...
Whenever someone says "I'm telling you the truth of God because I care about your soul" I hear "I'm somewhat insecure in my own faith and I need you to believe with me"
That seems to presuppose that it's actually impossible for the people speaking to you to truly believe what they claim to believe. If they did truly believe it, and that belief led them to the conclusion that you would suffer for eternity if you didn't come to believe the same thing, and that belief further led them to genuinely care about the welfare of others, then "I'm telling you the truth of God because I care about your soul" is the correct and altruistic response.
Now, perhaps you're correct that not all of them really do believe it, or are at least somewhat insecure about it. But it's pretty presumptuous to start from that assumption on the mere basis that they're telling you about it.
Of course, how well various religious groups do at presenting themselves and actually caring for other people and so on is a whole other discussion. But to sum up: Some groups do very badly, some do very well, and some are in between.
I will agree with you, however, to the extent that in my personal opinion, the groups that are likely to appear at your front door or randomly harass you in the mall are not usually the ones that do the best at actually caring for other people. I'm not as convinced as you are, though, that this behavior is particularly linked to insecurity.
One of the things that tends to happen as you become, let us say, "popular" on Wikipedia is that you attract the attention of an unsavory element. There are a number of trolls, stalkers, and psychopaths who wander around Wikipedia and the other Wikimedia projects looking for people to harass, stalk, and otherwise ruin the lives of
...
Many people have tried many things to keep thier identities secret: They worry over every little detail they may have released, or refuse to answer anything about themselves, making it very difficult to form any personal ties. Quite unfortunately, it simply isn't possible to keep your details quiet: You will eventually say something that will lead back to you, and the stalkers will find it. My approach was different: I decided to be myself, to never hide my personality, to always be who I am, but to utilize disinformation with regard to what I consider unimportant details: age, location, occupation, etc. As a result, I've made many strong friendships here, because I've always been the person I am, but the stalkers have spent the last two years searching for middle-aged college professors with the initials "SJ" (which are, by the way, my initials) who live in the Northeast; I never had to worry that anything I said would lead back to me, because the areas they focused on, the unimportant statistical information, was a cover
I was actually under the impression that the stalkers and psychopaths were the only people who actually believed the story... [etc.]
(Emphasis mine, of course.) Sooo... yeah. An interesting excuse. The constant references to the stalkers and psychopaths sounds a little paranoid... are there really people who have been trying for two years to figure out who this guy is? I mean, come on...
It makes *perfect* sense to say, for example: In many hospitals there are strains of bacteria that have evolved antibiotics-resistance.
True, but less sense to say: antibiotics resistance is evolving in many hospitals. The resistance itself doesn't evolve, it emerges (like the quote said) as the underlying bacteria evolve.
It might be possible to use "evolve" in the way they suggest, but it would be less precise at best and incorrect at worst.
Whenever someone says something like this (which is pretty frequently) it occurs to me, it's sad to think that human beings languish among the world's millions of underprivileged children...
But I guess the one-in-a-million starving, uneducated supergeniuses would affect us more:-P
Isn't Nintendo's inability to keep it on the shelf a sign that the excitement is still there? If the excitement were gone, would stores still sell out within days of recieving a shipment?
Yeah. Well, except for the "days" thing, the stores in my area have been telling me minutes. I mean, inability to keep in stock is a bad thing in some ways -- I'm sure Nintendo would love to be able to meet supply right away if only to ramp up game sales faster, but according to the local places I've been asking, (1) they're getting 1-2 shipments a week, (2) these sell out within minutes, and (3) pretty much every person who comes in asks if they have any in stock.
That third one especially seems to dismiss the "Is the magic gone?" question -- or at the very least, if you're more objecting that people who have them aren't that happy with them anymore, it gets rid of the absurd argument that inability to produce sufficient stock is evidence that the magic is gone.
I mean, I'll certainly admit I'm getting frustrated, and would much prefer to actually buy a Wii right now. But I mean, even if there were none in stock for the next six months, worst-case scenario is I get bored of checking around every few days, and just forget about the whole thing until I can just get one on amazon. At the very worst, I'm a deferred happy console owner. So, what's the problem?
Basic probability also suggests that it is extremely unlikely that we are an isolated occurrence...You'd have to buy into Creationism to think that such as we could never have happened anywhere else.
Not necessarily. It might be that such as we could have happened somewhere else, but that in fact the probabilities required for intelligent life are so mind-bogglingly bad that it is only by an extremely small chance that it ever emerged anywhere for the entire life of the universe. It could be, for example, that for any given big bang there is only a 1/1,000,000 chance that intelligent life appears. It might then be that, even if we know that it exists (in the form of us), the chance of it having independently appeared elsewhere in the universe, ever, could still be on the order of 1/1,000,000.
Actually applying probability theory, we're in a very special situation: ordinarily, if you don't know the probability that something happens, and then you observe it to happen, this (roughly speaking) raises the "probable probability" of the event -- that is, if you didn't know if it was likely, and then it happens, you are now reasonable to suspect that it is at least somewhat likely.
The appearance of intelligent life is different: since this is a probabilistic "experiment" in which it is impossible to observe a negative result (i.e. the non-appearance of intelligent life anywhere in the universe), observing a positive result gives us no information, and we are right where we started, knowing nothing about the general probability of intelligent life except what we can infer from things that are very, very nearby (at least unless and until we can observe the rest of the galaxy/universe in more depth). It's like claiming a coin is likely to land heads-up because that's all you ever observe, when really you're just closing your eyes when it lands tails.
Now, on the other hand: if we were, ever, to encounter other intelligent life... then your statement holds, and probability theory kicks in to give us real information about the situation. As James P. Hogan wrote, "Two is an impossible number and cannot exist." Knowing intelligent life appeared once (that is, us) tells us nothing (except that the probability, whatever it is, is non-zero): but knowing it appeared twice tells us that it probably appeared uncountably many times. The probability works out differently because, in this case, it is possible to observe a negative result -- it is possible (though how probable, no one knows) that in all the history of humanity we will never encounter other intelligent life. Therefore, actually observing other intelligent life gives us quite a bit of information about how probable such life is...
I'm still not convinced by the Fermi "Paradox," however, since it seems to be extremely presumptuous about (1) how other intelligent life would behave, if it did exist, and (2) the fundamental engineering constraints imposed by the laws of physics. We know very little about either of these (though (2) isn't looking good in the short term... we'll see in a few thousand years, perhaps).
You missed my point. I wasn't trying to distinguish the "right" people from the "wrong" ones. I openly stated my suspicions that, legally, amazon is completely in the wrong here. Certainly they don't have a clear case, and should drop this entirely (the fact that they aren't makes me suspect that they lost an awful lot of money -- historically they've been extremely willing to trade cash for good will).
The only thing I was objecting to was that a lot of posts were going further than that, and saying that the customers were morally in the right. A lot of them are even sounding indignant that anyone is suggesting there was anything going on here beyond a clear, honest, open business agreement between consenting parties. This is not at all the real situation. Many people, though not breaking any laws (so there are no "illegal people" as you say), were still deliberately trying to take advantage of something they knew to be a mistake.
I mean, on the grand scale of ethical dilemmas I think that's a pretty minor one -- some posts go to the other extreme and talk about what a miserable society we live in and how they could never even be friends with anyone who would do something like this. That's silly. But even if it's kind of petty, it's still wrong, and when people do something that is wrong in a kind of petty way, and then get called on it, they should just get over it and move on, not defend the behavior like it was admirable and any wrong lies entirely with amazon...
Did 9/11 choke the Internet? I'd say that was a heck of a lot more of an immediate go-to-your-computer-for-news crisis...
Well, one of the other replies claims that the issue was physical, because some bandwidth went through the WTC. I guess that's possibly part of it, but that's not how I remember it... very early, just after the first plane hit, I could load CNN. 15-20 minutes later, no news site would load for me at all, and I couldn't even get through to my family on the phone on the first several tries (Neither end of the phone call was near New York). It seemed clear at the time that the issue was congestion, since essentially everybody was loading news sites and trying to get through on the phone -- I never heard it suggested that there was any substantial issue beyond that.
In any case, even if it was partly a physical issue, I think the answer to your question is an emphatic yes. That said, though, I'm not sure why someone would think that, say, a flu pandemic would have the same effect, since that's not the sort of thing that would have an entire country or more urgently hitting refresh on the news sites within minutes of each other. Even if things get bad, it's not like there's going to be the same sort of breaking news. Video is a more serious issue as far as global bandwidth use goes, but that's not a fundamental limitation in the technology, just a matter of continuing to improve the network, just like we have for the last few decades.
Meh. This potential crisis is overblown. The Internet is more susceptible to physical damage to part of the backbone, and to short-term urgent news issues like 9/11 (which are pretty rare:-P) than to any of this stuff. Even Google didn't seem to be saying "Oh no! Not enough bandwidth, the Internet is doomed!" -- just, don't expect that we can really deliver real-time video as effectively over the Internet right now as we can over broadcast and cable TV. Bandwidth is improving, but it's not quite that impressive yet.
But it seems like every attempt at improving the accuracy or consistency of ESRB ratings is met with derision and anger.
Not at all. Attempts by the Federal Government at improving ESRB ratings via legislation are met with derision and anger. As they should be. The fact that the particular methods proposed by the legislation are often (1) literally impossible to carry out with many games, and (2) wouldn't have prevented prior "incidents" like hot coffee anyway, only makes the problem worse, since it's not even clear that these changes would be improvements if they were taken up totally voluntarily.
Now, if there are realistic ways to improve the ESRB process, and consumer awareness of the ratings, great. But it should be done by people who have some idea what they're doing, and shouldn't be mandated by the federal government (it would be rather odd for the federal government to finally decide that this one form of media, after all of our country's history, is the only one threatening our children seriously enough to warrant this sort of response).
Actually, (approximate) majority voting is the problem. Giving all power to the individual with the most votes is a fundamentally flawed system with all kinds of pathologies. In the context of this system, the two-party system is actually the best compromise for the voters, that is, the electoral system we have now will always converge to behavior similar to two political parties, because that is the optimal strategy for actually electing people who share at least some of the voters' opinions.
Now, obviously this is broken in more ways than we could count. But we're pretty much stuck with political parties (and two of them, at that) until we do major election reform... let's get some proportionate representation and approval voting!
Hah. Of course, the system also works against the institution of those kinds of changes, because it is in the interests of the typical voter but counter to the interests of the typical politician -- so as soon as someone is elected, if they want to maintain / increase their power it is in their best interest to preserve the current system. *Sigh*...
You also mention the difficulties in getting people to think for themselves. Well, yeah, we're kind of stuck with that forever, I think... though the recent sharp increase in the polarization of US politics leads me to hope that it is at least theoretically possible to have a sharp decrease as well, even if partisanship can't be eliminated. I'm not sure how one would produce such a change, though...
Slashdot Mirror
Since the first thing I did after (finally) getting my Wii and a couple major titles was to go out and buy (cheap!) a bunch of the old Gamecube games I missed out on since I haven't owned a console in more than 10 years, I'm skeptical of the notion that withholding Wii stock will increase sales of GC titles. Also, that would be the most radically shortsighted, stupid move they could make even if it worked, since a few extra dollars from old, mostly out-of-print GC games will not compensate for the potential lost sales from their new system that will drive revenue for years to come if people succeed in purchasing it.
It's actually quite likely that there will be increased supply in April, but not because Nintendo has been deliberately withholding them -- rather because they've been working on a ramp-up in production that will take effect in April. This has been public knowledge for quite a while, so "predicting" increased supply in April is a little disingenuous at this point.
Umm. I do understand inflation (I mean, I'm not a PhD in economics or anything, but I understand the principle). I don't know where you got the bizarre claim that inflation doesn't exist, I didn't say that at all. Nor did I say that becoming accustomed to a price negated inflation, or changed it in any way. I did say people are accustomed to paying the same price every generation, but you perversely misinterpreted this to mean the same price after adjusting for inflation, which is not what people usually mean in a casual discussion unless they add the qualifier "adjusting for inflation," which I didn't.
What I was actually saying was not (directly) about economics or inflation, but rather about consumer psychology. It doesn't matter that the price is the same after adjusting for inflation. Electronics prices do not keep up with inflation, since engineering is improving faster than prices can increase. People are aware that electronics prices do not keep up with inflation. They expect the price (in actual dollars, not inflation-adjusted dollars) to remain more or less stable, or even to drop. Since their expectations are met almost across the board, when they are not met it produces a negative reaction. Call it a market force or something if you like, but if someone is annoyed at how much your product costs then lecturing them about economics and how they're wrong is not going to improve the situation.
Telling me, today, "Well, you bought a NES the day it came out, and adjusting for inflation you paid $800 in today's money!" is not going to make me even a little bit more eager to pay $600 for a PS3. Times have changed, consoles do not cost that much anymore, and after adjusting for inflation I can get a top-of-the-line computer system for 1/10 the price of the 286 we got back in the 80s. If Dell used that as an excuse to raise its prices by a factor of 10, I would laugh at them and go somewhere else.
This is the problem with reasoning about economics completely numerically, and forgetting that at some point the interactions you are describing are made by actual human beings, with actual personalities and opinions...
Now, it's hard to tell what the real situation is, but the idea of doing interesting work for a presumably reasonable hourly rate, and having them actually tell you not to put in any extra hours (or, if you have to, being compensated well for it)... well, that could be pretty nice. The perpetual expectation of "going the extra mile" by putting in lots of hours to get projects done (obviously without the corresponding "going the extra mile" by the employer by sacrificing some of the resulting profits to supplement employee salaries) is the biggest thing that bothers me about tech jobs.
If I could have the benefits of an interesting tech job without the drawbacks of a culture where you're considered lazy for working 40 hours a week, that would be pretty cool.
the PS3 is not even close to as expensive as the Neo Geo once you adjust for inflation. The Neo Geo came out for $650 in 1990. That's about $1020 in modern dollars.
Except that this doesn't work, because the price of consumer electronics doesn't increase along with inflation. With consoles, people have become accustomed to paying pretty much the same price every generation regardless of inflation, and getting better and better hardware for that same price. (You may recall that the 360's $400 was initially considered an awful lot of money, though people seem to be getting accustomed to it now -- even though, correcting backwards for inflation, that's quite a cheap price for such a powerful console.) So, if you go back and correct for inflation, yes, the Neo Geo is far more than the PS3. If you look at its price relative to its competitors, though, the comparison becomes more reasonable again...
Why do we have to create mutant mosquitos when we can use good old DDT? All we have to do is get rich, white people to get off their high horses at cocktail parties so the rest of the world can be saved from this horrible disease.
Wow, you paint an impressive caricature of anyone who could possibly disagree with you. However, your suggested solution (and the accompanying ad hominem) is just as simplistic as the opposing view that DDT is an unmitigated evil.
For someone who is not rich, white and at a cocktail party and yet still disagrees with you, I'd point to my wife, who is Nigerian and, like most of her family, has actually had malaria. She still thinks unrestrained use of DDT is a bad idea -- partly because, though much of Silent Spring was discredited, it is still a toxin that builds up substantially over the very long term, and it's a good idea to avoid that if you don't know the effects over the course of a lifetime, but especially because of the point that other responses have made, that if we did that then soon DDT would become useless, even in cases where we really did need it.
It would clearly be a stupid idea to recommend that every human being continuously take antibiotics. It is a similarly bad idea to say that entire ecosystems should be covered with DDT. Right now, use of DDT in moderation can handle particularly bad infestations. Heavy DDT use would lower malaria rates for a few years, before bringing it back up above todays levels because there would be no easy fix at all.
Your caricature of rich white people on high horses perpetuating disease among the poor and powerless is only at all legitimate if you yourself are not also essentially an armchair philosopher on this issue. If you are insulting other people for having opinions on how to effectively protect people, because they have no personal stake and are somewhat removed from the issue, then you'd better have some personal stake or be close to the issue before going on about your own opinions on the issue. Obviously I don't know your personal stake, if any -- but a lot of people who seem to feel the way you do are no closer to the issue than your hypothetical rich white people.
It would also be good to accept that people who oppose heavy DDT use are genuinely trying to protect people's lives, and have reasons for their opinions (even if you disagree with them), and it's not just that all of them freaked out after reading Silent Spring.
And I love the perspective that says that an efficient, lightweight vehicle wouldn't survive a collision with an enormous Hummer, and therefore there is a problem with the smaller vehicle...
It seems a considerable oversight to me that Federal vehicle safety standards seem to consider almost exclusively the safety of the people in the vehicle, and not so much the people around it...
Some other comments already sort of addressed this, but to clarify: your claim that most business PCs are not Apples was the entire point. If 8% of all PCs are Macs, and more than half of all PCs are used in business, but very few business PCs are Macs (the article explicitly assumes this), then there must be a higher density of macs in the remaining, non-business segment of the market. His claim that 15% of consumer PCs are Macs is actually dependent on the assumption that most business (i.e. non-consumer) PCs are not.
Err... actually, it seems to me that those charts just rub in that with only four months of data, it's impossible to say how these consoles will do in the long run. If you chopped off the 360 chart at 4 months, it wouldn't look nearly as favorable compared to the Dreamcast, and only marginally above the PS3, yet it appears to be doing fine now. The PS3 may mature and stabilize and do quite well given another 6-8 months.
Damn. Now look, your unsupported extrapolation made me actually defend Sony... I need to keep my Wii from finding out about this...
Hang in there, man. It's worth the wait.
(Just got mine a week ago :-P)
Perhaps it's Nintendo that should have charged $5-600 for their console, and Sony who should have tried to sell their's for $250...
Except then instead of trying for more than three months to buy one (finally succeeded last week), I would have felt insulted and ignored the system entirely. I might buy a PS3 at $250, though... :-P
Well, there's the issue that they got the entire target of the statistic wrong, and there's the issue that they apparently think 37% is "almost a third"... *whimper*...
And shame on me for not proofreading carefully enough, obviously I meant PS2 is weaker technically than the XBox, not the 360 (though that's also true :-P)...
So, your comment ignores the fact that Sony is not the only console that will be improving over the next several months, but one thing in particular:
Now, that's a nice theory, and one that obviously certain company executives subscribe to, but with all the talk about how powerful these consoles are people keep ignoring the fact that for at least the last several generations, the "winner" has been the weaker one from a raw processing perspective. PS2 was weaker technically than both 360 and GameCube. PS1 was weaker technically than N64 (albeit with some compensation since it could hold a lot more data). Genesis was weaker than SNES.
And of course there are plenty of examples -- the Dreamcast the most prominent, at least among some circles I guess -- of a console that was clearly technically superior, but failed horribly.
After all that, we suddenly expect people to go for the more expensive, technically superior console, because of all the shiny pretty graphics it has that its competitors don't? What is so different about this time around that has not been true for the last 15+ years, when exactly the opposite happened?
Well, no, I don't care to spill the beans on other people's salaries on a public board without their permission, even if I don't give their names.
I got an offer from MS that was in the range you give (though they also have a number of non-salary benefits) -- that was a few years ago, though, so it may have changed. But the Google offers I've heard of have been higher.
I've heard over this line and over that Google doesn't pay as well as their competitors, relying instead on these intangible perks...
I've never heard this... rather the opposite. I know a few people who went to Google, and their pay is very good, even after factoring in the high cost of living out there. In the few cases where I do know approximate numbers, Google starting salaries are (or at least were) well over Microsoft's...
Whenever someone says "I'm telling you the truth of God because I care about your soul" I hear "I'm somewhat insecure in my own faith and I need you to believe with me"
That seems to presuppose that it's actually impossible for the people speaking to you to truly believe what they claim to believe. If they did truly believe it, and that belief led them to the conclusion that you would suffer for eternity if you didn't come to believe the same thing, and that belief further led them to genuinely care about the welfare of others, then "I'm telling you the truth of God because I care about your soul" is the correct and altruistic response.
Now, perhaps you're correct that not all of them really do believe it, or are at least somewhat insecure about it. But it's pretty presumptuous to start from that assumption on the mere basis that they're telling you about it.
Of course, how well various religious groups do at presenting themselves and actually caring for other people and so on is a whole other discussion. But to sum up: Some groups do very badly, some do very well, and some are in between.
I will agree with you, however, to the extent that in my personal opinion, the groups that are likely to appear at your front door or randomly harass you in the mall are not usually the ones that do the best at actually caring for other people. I'm not as convinced as you are, though, that this behavior is particularly linked to insecurity.
Essjay's comments on why he did it (from here):
(Emphasis mine, of course.) Sooo... yeah. An interesting excuse. The constant references to the stalkers and psychopaths sounds a little paranoid... are there really people who have been trying for two years to figure out who this guy is? I mean, come on...
It makes *perfect* sense to say, for example: In many hospitals there are strains of bacteria that have evolved antibiotics-resistance.
True, but less sense to say: antibiotics resistance is evolving in many hospitals. The resistance itself doesn't evolve, it emerges (like the quote said) as the underlying bacteria evolve.
It might be possible to use "evolve" in the way they suggest, but it would be less precise at best and incorrect at worst.
Whenever someone says something like this (which is pretty frequently) it occurs to me, it's sad to think that human beings languish among the world's millions of underprivileged children...
But I guess the one-in-a-million starving, uneducated supergeniuses would affect us more :-P
Isn't Nintendo's inability to keep it on the shelf a sign that the excitement is still there? If the excitement were gone, would stores still sell out within days of recieving a shipment?
Yeah. Well, except for the "days" thing, the stores in my area have been telling me minutes. I mean, inability to keep in stock is a bad thing in some ways -- I'm sure Nintendo would love to be able to meet supply right away if only to ramp up game sales faster, but according to the local places I've been asking, (1) they're getting 1-2 shipments a week, (2) these sell out within minutes, and (3) pretty much every person who comes in asks if they have any in stock.
That third one especially seems to dismiss the "Is the magic gone?" question -- or at the very least, if you're more objecting that people who have them aren't that happy with them anymore, it gets rid of the absurd argument that inability to produce sufficient stock is evidence that the magic is gone.
I mean, I'll certainly admit I'm getting frustrated, and would much prefer to actually buy a Wii right now. But I mean, even if there were none in stock for the next six months, worst-case scenario is I get bored of checking around every few days, and just forget about the whole thing until I can just get one on amazon. At the very worst, I'm a deferred happy console owner. So, what's the problem?
Basic probability also suggests that it is extremely unlikely that we are an isolated occurrence...You'd have to buy into Creationism to think that such as we could never have happened anywhere else.
Not necessarily. It might be that such as we could have happened somewhere else, but that in fact the probabilities required for intelligent life are so mind-bogglingly bad that it is only by an extremely small chance that it ever emerged anywhere for the entire life of the universe. It could be, for example, that for any given big bang there is only a 1/1,000,000 chance that intelligent life appears. It might then be that, even if we know that it exists (in the form of us), the chance of it having independently appeared elsewhere in the universe, ever, could still be on the order of 1/1,000,000.
Actually applying probability theory, we're in a very special situation: ordinarily, if you don't know the probability that something happens, and then you observe it to happen, this (roughly speaking) raises the "probable probability" of the event -- that is, if you didn't know if it was likely, and then it happens, you are now reasonable to suspect that it is at least somewhat likely.
The appearance of intelligent life is different: since this is a probabilistic "experiment" in which it is impossible to observe a negative result (i.e. the non-appearance of intelligent life anywhere in the universe), observing a positive result gives us no information, and we are right where we started, knowing nothing about the general probability of intelligent life except what we can infer from things that are very, very nearby (at least unless and until we can observe the rest of the galaxy/universe in more depth). It's like claiming a coin is likely to land heads-up because that's all you ever observe, when really you're just closing your eyes when it lands tails.
Now, on the other hand: if we were, ever, to encounter other intelligent life... then your statement holds, and probability theory kicks in to give us real information about the situation. As James P. Hogan wrote, "Two is an impossible number and cannot exist." Knowing intelligent life appeared once (that is, us) tells us nothing (except that the probability, whatever it is, is non-zero): but knowing it appeared twice tells us that it probably appeared uncountably many times. The probability works out differently because, in this case, it is possible to observe a negative result -- it is possible (though how probable, no one knows) that in all the history of humanity we will never encounter other intelligent life. Therefore, actually observing other intelligent life gives us quite a bit of information about how probable such life is...
I'm still not convinced by the Fermi "Paradox," however, since it seems to be extremely presumptuous about (1) how other intelligent life would behave, if it did exist, and (2) the fundamental engineering constraints imposed by the laws of physics. We know very little about either of these (though (2) isn't looking good in the short term... we'll see in a few thousand years, perhaps).
You missed my point. I wasn't trying to distinguish the "right" people from the "wrong" ones. I openly stated my suspicions that, legally, amazon is completely in the wrong here. Certainly they don't have a clear case, and should drop this entirely (the fact that they aren't makes me suspect that they lost an awful lot of money -- historically they've been extremely willing to trade cash for good will).
The only thing I was objecting to was that a lot of posts were going further than that, and saying that the customers were morally in the right. A lot of them are even sounding indignant that anyone is suggesting there was anything going on here beyond a clear, honest, open business agreement between consenting parties. This is not at all the real situation. Many people, though not breaking any laws (so there are no "illegal people" as you say), were still deliberately trying to take advantage of something they knew to be a mistake.
I mean, on the grand scale of ethical dilemmas I think that's a pretty minor one -- some posts go to the other extreme and talk about what a miserable society we live in and how they could never even be friends with anyone who would do something like this. That's silly. But even if it's kind of petty, it's still wrong, and when people do something that is wrong in a kind of petty way, and then get called on it, they should just get over it and move on, not defend the behavior like it was admirable and any wrong lies entirely with amazon...
Did 9/11 choke the Internet? I'd say that was a heck of a lot more of an immediate go-to-your-computer-for-news crisis...
Well, one of the other replies claims that the issue was physical, because some bandwidth went through the WTC. I guess that's possibly part of it, but that's not how I remember it... very early, just after the first plane hit, I could load CNN. 15-20 minutes later, no news site would load for me at all, and I couldn't even get through to my family on the phone on the first several tries (Neither end of the phone call was near New York). It seemed clear at the time that the issue was congestion, since essentially everybody was loading news sites and trying to get through on the phone -- I never heard it suggested that there was any substantial issue beyond that.
In any case, even if it was partly a physical issue, I think the answer to your question is an emphatic yes. That said, though, I'm not sure why someone would think that, say, a flu pandemic would have the same effect, since that's not the sort of thing that would have an entire country or more urgently hitting refresh on the news sites within minutes of each other. Even if things get bad, it's not like there's going to be the same sort of breaking news. Video is a more serious issue as far as global bandwidth use goes, but that's not a fundamental limitation in the technology, just a matter of continuing to improve the network, just like we have for the last few decades.
Meh. This potential crisis is overblown. The Internet is more susceptible to physical damage to part of the backbone, and to short-term urgent news issues like 9/11 (which are pretty rare :-P) than to any of this stuff. Even Google didn't seem to be saying "Oh no! Not enough bandwidth, the Internet is doomed!" -- just, don't expect that we can really deliver real-time video as effectively over the Internet right now as we can over broadcast and cable TV. Bandwidth is improving, but it's not quite that impressive yet.
But it seems like every attempt at improving the accuracy or consistency of ESRB ratings is met with derision and anger.
Not at all. Attempts by the Federal Government at improving ESRB ratings via legislation are met with derision and anger. As they should be. The fact that the particular methods proposed by the legislation are often (1) literally impossible to carry out with many games, and (2) wouldn't have prevented prior "incidents" like hot coffee anyway, only makes the problem worse, since it's not even clear that these changes would be improvements if they were taken up totally voluntarily.
Now, if there are realistic ways to improve the ESRB process, and consumer awareness of the ratings, great. But it should be done by people who have some idea what they're doing, and shouldn't be mandated by the federal government (it would be rather odd for the federal government to finally decide that this one form of media, after all of our country's history, is the only one threatening our children seriously enough to warrant this sort of response).
Political parties are the problem.
Actually, (approximate) majority voting is the problem. Giving all power to the individual with the most votes is a fundamentally flawed system with all kinds of pathologies. In the context of this system, the two-party system is actually the best compromise for the voters, that is, the electoral system we have now will always converge to behavior similar to two political parties, because that is the optimal strategy for actually electing people who share at least some of the voters' opinions.
Now, obviously this is broken in more ways than we could count. But we're pretty much stuck with political parties (and two of them, at that) until we do major election reform... let's get some proportionate representation and approval voting!
Hah. Of course, the system also works against the institution of those kinds of changes, because it is in the interests of the typical voter but counter to the interests of the typical politician -- so as soon as someone is elected, if they want to maintain / increase their power it is in their best interest to preserve the current system. *Sigh*...
You also mention the difficulties in getting people to think for themselves. Well, yeah, we're kind of stuck with that forever, I think... though the recent sharp increase in the polarization of US politics leads me to hope that it is at least theoretically possible to have a sharp decrease as well, even if partisanship can't be eliminated. I'm not sure how one would produce such a change, though...