This site does summaries of public opinion polls -- though I don't know if they have internal biases.
From the most recent poll on their abortion page, only 10% of people believe it should be illegal in all circumstances, and the rest believe it should be available under certain restraints.
From their guns page (Quinnipac poll): 54% support increased controls on guns -- though the overwhelming majority oppose gun control at the constitutional amendment level
The death penalty thing I screwed up on -- most people support it but there are problems depending on how you word the question.
Of course, the big issue with ALL polls is how you ask the question -- you can get almost any result you want with the right wording...
The issue is that if you look at public opinion polling, the majority of the population:
Is opposed to capital punishment
Is in support of a federal single-payer health plan
Is for a woman's right to choose (the question is usually worded 'with reasonable restrictions' but if you saw any of Obama's speeches or position papers on the topic, he agrees with reasonable restrictions as well)
Is for increased control of guns.
Sorry to burst YOUR bubble, but it seems as if the american people are "leftist."
Very interesting -- wish his reviews were in a slightly more readable (to me) language; while I speak many dialects of Computer, my dialects of Human are quite limited.:-P
Let's say that you make your living writing internet articles. Advertisements on your website provide you with the entirety of your income. Now let's say that someone wrote a bot that captured all of the articles that you ever wrote and posted them on another website. And subsequently, you lost your entire audience and therefore your entire income.
You'd be forced to get another job, and therefore the byte stream would dry up. Everyone loses.
Yeah -- I was mostly simplifying to try and point out some problems with the $6 billion number.
But the big deal on Pareto-optimality is you make everyone better off without making anyone worse off. So if you have a system where the record companies are legally entitled to a certain amount for their work, and you give it a way, you DO make the end-user better off, but you make the record companies worse off because of the "lost" income.
Of course there's the whole argument--how much worse off are the record companies?
The real point here is that Pareto optimality, unfortunately, is not a very good tool for analyzing markets, since there are many many Parteo-optimal outcomes to any market.
I do, in fact, understand the price elasticity of demand.
I said "as soon as you raise the price a little bit, the number of people willing to buy the good drops substantially. This is called the price elasticity of demand."
You said "f the number is less than -1, price is said to be elastic. That is, an x% increase in price will effect a greater than x% decrease in demand. e.g. if the elasticity is -9, a 10% increase in price will decrease demand by 90%."
Please understand that I'm simplifying concepts for the vast majority of/. readers who may know a ton about technology, but not much about economics. Perhaps a better wording would have been "this is represented by a number called the price elasticity of demand"
Doesn't the safe harbor clause of the DMCA basically say that they are?
As in, as long as they don't filter content, they can't be held responsible for what their users do, but as soon as they start filtering anything, they DO become responsible, according to the DMCA.
IANAL.
While we've had controversy in the past with fake movie reviews, there's never really been a question about bribed movie reviews.
Why is this? I think it's because movie reviews are advertised by the reviewer, not the paper. You don't open up the Chicago Sun-Times to read the Sun-Times movie reviews, you open up the Chicago Sun-Times to read Roger Ebert's movie reviews. For games, however, with the exception of people like Yahtzee and his "Zero Punctuation" reviews, write-ups are advertised by the site as a whole. Read the Gamespot review! Read the IGN review! Compare the Metacritic pages for a film and a game and you'll see what I'm talking about.
So how can we fix this? We need higher-profile game reviewers and for that to occur we need more games to be viewed as art -- or at least as a viable form of expression/story-telling. Just as Hollywood legitimized the movie industry by telling compelling stories and setting up a system of internal rewards for good products (Oscars), we need something legitimate for video-games.
Is that ever going to happen? Who knows.
Of course the whole thing might just be pointless because with demos and such people can get a much better sense of the game than anyone can get with a movie trailer.
See the problem here is that the MPAA is calculating this $6 billion/year number by saying multiplying the number of pirated copies (a number they can only estimate and they probably highball it) times the retail cost of a legitimate copy.
The problem with this is that it completely bypasses all microeconomic theory.
In simple terms, there are a huge number of people that will consume your good if it doesn't cost them anything (or next to nothing), but as soon as you raise the price a little bit, the number of people willing to buy the good drops substantially. This is called the price elasticity of demand.
While there is some limited evidence that the market for piracy has shrank the overall market, it's difficult to tell how much of an effect piracy really has. There are so many other factors (dilution of purchase points, ease of access to new/unsigned bands, etc) that there's some evidence that the total market for media has actually increased substantially, but the record labels are being left out of the equation.
Piracy isn't good, but it is a result of a free society and the deadweight loss (basically: if you tax someone or restrict prices via regulation, the decrease in income from the economy is greater than the income from the tax, so there's 'lost' production that never occurs) incurred by preventing it is astronomical.
IANAE, BIAAEM (I am not an economist, but I am an economist major and I hope to get a PhD in economics down the road)
Tuesday mornings (US time) are when Blizzard does weekly maintenance on its servers.
As for the logging in, the authentication server occasionally crashes meaning that while players who are already logged in can continue playing, no one else can start.
Just as federal money for roads is dependent upon a state having a certain drinking age, the feds can impose quite a lot of rules on public universities.
But what happens when those two servers are no longer redundant backups but are both used and expected and taken for granted? One pops, the other might not cut it any more?
For some players, such as myself, having the pieces actually out on the board in 3D space is much more satisfying than flat pictures in books. Also, I find it easier to spot combinations and certain lines of play when I have a sense of "sides" that I can't always get in a book.
Don't get me wrong, I'd be a worthless player without the books, I'm just saying I prefer a "real" (by which I mean 3D) game to a 2D overhead view shown on a computer screen.
This is probably a stupid question, but why wouldn't inertia rip it apart? The way I see it happening is as follows: The bottom of the elevator is firmly anchored to Earth and the top is floating in space. The bottom is anchored so its movements match Earth's. The top, however, is so high up that it lags behind a bit and bends the whole elevator. Eventually, the material weakens and bends enough that the Earth pulls it down gravitationally and breaks it in two.
Also, could this possible create drag in the solar wind and slow the Earth's rotation? (most likely another stupid question)
There is a very good book out there written by the man that developed the codes that Skinnarland used. While the focus is on wartime codes and the internal struggles in the British War Department, it still contains good information about Skinnarland, and is a very good read
It is called Between Silk and Cyanide by Leo Marks.
I would be willing to bet the quality won't be so great. I speak from some experience. First, some background: My DVD player refuses to play CD-Rs, which I think is understandable because most of them are ripped songs from KaZaA or something.
My band at school just released a CD of music this month. They had it professionally made, although I am not quite sure of the process they used.
My DVD player refuses to play it.
If the "professionals" spent at least a month (the band was recording in December) making the CDs, and my DVD player sees it as a CD-R, how can these guys do any better in a few minutes?
[humor="bad"]
Of course they did! Why do you think XP is *ahem* so stable?
They couldn't have done that if they didn't have the right code all along!
[/humor]
Slashdot Mirror
This has been a hilarious thread to follow. Next up, somersault will be expounding unto all of us his LOVE FOR PORTAL!
This site does summaries of public opinion polls -- though I don't know if they have internal biases.
From the most recent poll on their abortion page, only 10% of people believe it should be illegal in all circumstances, and the rest believe it should be available under certain restraints.
From their guns page (Quinnipac poll): 54% support increased controls on guns -- though the overwhelming majority oppose gun control at the constitutional amendment level
The death penalty thing I screwed up on -- most people support it but there are problems depending on how you word the question.
Of course, the big issue with ALL polls is how you ask the question -- you can get almost any result you want with the right wording...
Only way to break the cartel of (D) and (R) is to ELECT someone who isn't (D) or (R).
And the best way to do that is to elect people who support instant runoff voting.
The issue is that if you look at public opinion polling, the majority of the population:
Is opposed to capital punishment
Is in support of a federal single-payer health plan
Is for a woman's right to choose (the question is usually worded 'with reasonable restrictions' but if you saw any of Obama's speeches or position papers on the topic, he agrees with reasonable restrictions as well)
Is for increased control of guns.
Sorry to burst YOUR bubble, but it seems as if the american people are "leftist."
That's an interesting point --- oddly enough, the car reviews that I read are in Consumer's Reports, a magazine that does not identify its reviewers.
Very interesting -- wish his reviews were in a slightly more readable (to me) language; while I speak many dialects of Computer, my dialects of Human are quite limited. :-P
Except the creators of the bytes.
Let's say that you make your living writing internet articles. Advertisements on your website provide you with the entirety of your income. Now let's say that someone wrote a bot that captured all of the articles that you ever wrote and posted them on another website. And subsequently, you lost your entire audience and therefore your entire income.
You'd be forced to get another job, and therefore the byte stream would dry up. Everyone loses.
Yeah -- I was mostly simplifying to try and point out some problems with the $6 billion number.
But the big deal on Pareto-optimality is you make everyone better off without making anyone worse off. So if you have a system where the record companies are legally entitled to a certain amount for their work, and you give it a way, you DO make the end-user better off, but you make the record companies worse off because of the "lost" income.
Of course there's the whole argument--how much worse off are the record companies?
The real point here is that Pareto optimality, unfortunately, is not a very good tool for analyzing markets, since there are many many Parteo-optimal outcomes to any market.
There's been some discussion of it in one of my textbooks -- I'll see if I can dig out the right one and source it for you.
I do, in fact, understand the price elasticity of demand. I said "as soon as you raise the price a little bit, the number of people willing to buy the good drops substantially. This is called the price elasticity of demand." You said "f the number is less than -1, price is said to be elastic. That is, an x% increase in price will effect a greater than x% decrease in demand. e.g. if the elasticity is -9, a 10% increase in price will decrease demand by 90%." Please understand that I'm simplifying concepts for the vast majority of /. readers who may know a ton about technology, but not much about economics. Perhaps a better wording would have been "this is represented by a number called the price elasticity of demand"
Doesn't the safe harbor clause of the DMCA basically say that they are? As in, as long as they don't filter content, they can't be held responsible for what their users do, but as soon as they start filtering anything, they DO become responsible, according to the DMCA. IANAL.
While we've had controversy in the past with fake movie reviews, there's never really been a question about bribed movie reviews.
Why is this? I think it's because movie reviews are advertised by the reviewer, not the paper. You don't open up the Chicago Sun-Times to read the Sun-Times movie reviews, you open up the Chicago Sun-Times to read Roger Ebert's movie reviews. For games, however, with the exception of people like Yahtzee and his "Zero Punctuation" reviews, write-ups are advertised by the site as a whole. Read the Gamespot review! Read the IGN review! Compare the Metacritic pages for a film and a game and you'll see what I'm talking about.
So how can we fix this? We need higher-profile game reviewers and for that to occur we need more games to be viewed as art -- or at least as a viable form of expression/story-telling. Just as Hollywood legitimized the movie industry by telling compelling stories and setting up a system of internal rewards for good products (Oscars), we need something legitimate for video-games.
Is that ever going to happen? Who knows.
Of course the whole thing might just be pointless because with demos and such people can get a much better sense of the game than anyone can get with a movie trailer.
See the problem here is that the MPAA is calculating this $6 billion/year number by saying multiplying the number of pirated copies (a number they can only estimate and they probably highball it) times the retail cost of a legitimate copy.
The problem with this is that it completely bypasses all microeconomic theory.
In simple terms, there are a huge number of people that will consume your good if it doesn't cost them anything (or next to nothing), but as soon as you raise the price a little bit, the number of people willing to buy the good drops substantially. This is called the price elasticity of demand.
While there is some limited evidence that the market for piracy has shrank the overall market, it's difficult to tell how much of an effect piracy really has. There are so many other factors (dilution of purchase points, ease of access to new/unsigned bands, etc) that there's some evidence that the total market for media has actually increased substantially, but the record labels are being left out of the equation.
Piracy isn't good, but it is a result of a free society and the deadweight loss (basically: if you tax someone or restrict prices via regulation, the decrease in income from the economy is greater than the income from the tax, so there's 'lost' production that never occurs) incurred by preventing it is astronomical.
IANAE, BIAAEM (I am not an economist, but I am an economist major and I hope to get a PhD in economics down the road)
Tuesday mornings (US time) are when Blizzard does weekly maintenance on its servers. As for the logging in, the authentication server occasionally crashes meaning that while players who are already logged in can continue playing, no one else can start.
Just as federal money for roads is dependent upon a state having a certain drinking age, the feds can impose quite a lot of rules on public universities.
I think the original poster said that the CDs were unreadable...
That was definitely the first thing that I thought of... Ah, the good ole' days of the SNES and 16-bit RPGs.
However, consider the instances when people USE the cache: when the original site is no longer available.
But what happens when those two servers are no longer redundant backups but are both used and expected and taken for granted? One pops, the other might not cut it any more?
Don't get me wrong, I'd be a worthless player without the books, I'm just saying I prefer a "real" (by which I mean 3D) game to a 2D overhead view shown on a computer screen.
Also, could this possible create drag in the solar wind and slow the Earth's rotation? (most likely another stupid question)
There is a very good book out there written by the man that developed the codes that Skinnarland used. While the focus is on wartime codes and the internal struggles in the British War Department, it still contains good information about Skinnarland, and is a very good read It is called Between Silk and Cyanide by Leo Marks.
I think it means: "Who is going to actually have paper (or metal, plastic, whatever) bills/coins in the future?"
I would be willing to bet the quality won't be so great. I speak from some experience. First, some background: My DVD player refuses to play CD-Rs, which I think is understandable because most of them are ripped songs from KaZaA or something. My band at school just released a CD of music this month. They had it professionally made, although I am not quite sure of the process they used. My DVD player refuses to play it. If the "professionals" spent at least a month (the band was recording in December) making the CDs, and my DVD player sees it as a CD-R, how can these guys do any better in a few minutes?
[humor="bad"] Of course they did! Why do you think XP is *ahem* so stable? They couldn't have done that if they didn't have the right code all along! [/humor]