Well, that's certainly true if you apply a specific scale to the map, but another method would be to attach geo-coordinates to landmarks on the map and then use interpolation to determine location otherwise.
In this way, if you were "moving on the map" between two locations that are a different distance apart on the map than reality, your "dot" would just move faster. Positional accuracy would be a continuum that increases in accuracy the nearer one is to a particular point of interest.
I'm under the impression that projects like this are generally taken on by cross-disciplinary teams, scientists is a general term that works nicely for a term that includes geneticists, biologists, experimental/rigorous breeders, etc.
I mean, it's clear that the people undertaking this project are "doing science", it's hard to say for sure (especially as an uninformed reporter) exactly what kind of scientists are doing the work.
The custom video codec accelerator board pricing was covered, it turns out to be about $25 a chip. Additionally, they only need high-end GPUs when people choose to play games that require them. They've had good success on less video intensive games just running them in software, without the GPUs. Additionally, as he mentioned, they lease the hardware, rather than purchasing the hardware, and have a venture capital arrangement for providing the initial start up funds.
As it turns out, it's extremely economically sensible (if there's adoption from customers, of course) because they have a substantial revenue sharing agreement for the sale/rent of the games, plus a monthly fee. Simply put, they'll make more money per game sale than any single entity currently makes on any sale. That puts them at a position of greater economic viability than the game developers themselves... and they seem to do fine.
You obviously didn't watch the video at all. While you're being an asshole about the idea, the guy presenting during the presentation covered all of your strawmen.
1) "fill instance of the most powerful PC you can throw at it" - Uh, no. When you move from workstation class hardware to server hardware, the "ceilings" change. But, for games like Crysis, they do, indeed, use a big GPU per instance.
2) "720p video in realtime that no codec today can deliver" - Too bad you didn't watch the video. Turns out, this is the same team that brought us QuickTime before video codecs were even discussed. He also describes exactly how they pulled it off, started with scrapping the stream-based design paradigm, using a feedback loop based design paradigm, and creating a new encoder that looks great in motion encoded and decoded in real time (as one of the weaknesses, you can't pause it or it looks like shit).
3) "Presumably happen on the same computing hardware..." - Actually, no. As the presenter describes, the codec taxed even the dual quad core xeons that it was developed on. Then they fabbed custom chips that do nothing but implement the encoding algorithm. It's entirely hardware accelerated encoding, two chips per user on custom boards.
I also thought the entire process sounded like a big stupid scam, but before I declared the mighty victory of common sense, talking out of my ass, I went ahead and watched the video.
Is the incorrect idiom in your signature ("For all intensive purposes" instead of "For all intents and purposes") intentional? Perhaps it's a reference to an internet meme or something? I've seen that typed wrong pretty often lately, and I was curious if perhaps there was a joke that I missed out on?
(I'm not being sardonic or anything, just curious)
Your sense of entitlement to enforce the law on others is exactly what's getting the laws changed. In my state of Kansas, we've just passed a law (went into effect July 1) that makes your exact behavior illegal. You must move to the right hand lane for faster moving traffic (regardless of speed) or you get a ticket for obstructing the flow of traffic.
By the way, how do you know that the person behind you doesn't have a legitimate reason to be going faster than the speed limit when you're in the left lane blocking traffic? They could be a doctor traveling to an emergency, a family member trying to make it to an unexpected birth, or any number of time sensitive things that are completely out of control of the driver. There are things more important than trivial laws.
While you're busy being "holier than thou", you're really just the problem. It's not up to you to enforce the law, it is up to you, as a driver, to make every attempt to avoid an accident. This includes sometimes increasing or decreasing your speed in response to changing driving conditions. Rain, sleet, snow, and even other traffic and other drivers.
I propose that we don't use for-profit corporations that have proven multiple times that they are willing to literally break the internet in order to make a buck.
The problem with the current system isn't that it requires a web of trust in order to work, the problem is that when a corporation has participated in untrustworthy behavior, they don't get removed from the positions of trust. If participating in behaviors that are openly hostile to the proper function of the internet can't get your CA status revoked, then it's useless to me.
And while insulting me by claiming I live in my mother's basement might make the claim that manually verified certificates won't scale seem more emphatic, it's still invalid. Sure, actually verifying the identity of certificate owners won't scale to the level of profitability that Verisign currently enjoys. So what? Scalability is not a requirement of a trust system. TRUSTWORTHINESS is. If you scale to the point that the certs are no longer verified, then you've already failed. Then it's not about trust, it's just about the racket. I'm not responsible for insuring that the CA is a profitable business case.
But I can confidently state that security certificate warnings don't work, because they are just fear mongering for a system that's broken.
Verisign is untrustworthy, so why should I care if a certificate is signed or not?
Signed certificates are a complete racket: If you don't pay us then when your users show up they will get a giant warning shown in their face, telling them not to trust you. You wouldn't want that would you? Nope, don't care who you are, what you do, or why. $100 bucks please.
You're very in-line in the conventional wisdom. Here's a starter article that shows the scholastic work being done to try and bring that conventional wisdom around to reality:
It's certainly not an end-all, be-all resource. But it's a nice starting point to broadening your discourse on intellectual property.
It's not all just "common sense", and some things are certainly prerequisites to others. It's notable that in repeating some of your core points, you chose to still consider IP law a foundational element while trivializing my notion that quality of life and general wealth are the actual foundation of career artists. But it is logically certain. IP law doesn't pay anyone, it merely provides limited time monopolies on creatives works. However, *most notably*, all creatives works were *extremely difficult to duplicate* until very recent times. The natural monopoly of of physical existence, in combination with additional wealth allocated by society to the arts, makes IP law irrelevant until very recent times. However, career artists have not existed only in very recent times...
I'll stop hammering the same conceptual points, but just because one can settle on conventional wisdom doesn't make it correct... it just makes it easy.
Art historians do not. Art as a career did not proliferate as a result of IP law. Art as a career proliferated as a response to rising quality of life allowing for disposable income to facilitate the social surplus necessary to afford artistry. Not only do a lion share of great works pre-date IP law, the explosion of artists directly correlates with the advent of printing technology making cheap study material available worldwide for would-be painters.
No, absolutely not, IP law was not a significant prerequisite for the proliferation of career artists in human history. That analysis is hopelessly out of sync with the actual historical order of events.
"I'm just trying to make it clear that IP law is what allowed for the proliferation of art we have seen in our modern times."
This is the common assumption, but there is no evidence for this! It's just as empirically supported to say that the proliferation of art in modern times is what got us stuck with the IP law, not the other way around.
No, I don't disagree that there is a great role for public libraries to fill. I was just disagreeing with the generalization that all private endeavors are necessarily driven by the profit motive, as your example alluded to. Non-profits and charities thrive and provide an important role in free societies and often suffer disproportionately from the economic "crowding out" effect of public spending. So while public libraries are essential, it's important not to forget the non-profits are a superior method whenever possible. (Public spending, no one gets to choose what to support, private spending offers more choice, more freedom.)
I guess I just responded the way I did to try and raise emphasis/awareness that it's not just a profit or public dichotomy. A lot of people forget about how important non-profits are. As I started last time, I agree with you, just thought I'd comment on some of the finer points.:)
Other than provide the safety regulations to minimize the risk the product harms you, the advertising regulations to minimize the chance you are scammed, etc, etc. Your commercial transaction occurs in a complicated environment, much of which is government funded, much of which serves to protect you (nominally, obviously you can debate the efficacy).
So, I agree with your post, but I'd like to give you some better reasons than the two you decided to lead with. Those both have pretty compelling free market alternatives, including private safety certifications (like the American Dental Association seal on toothpaste, don't be toothpaste without it! seriously.) and advertising regulations could potentially just be covered under fraud laws.
The biggest is the rule of law that allows people to actually have ownership. Without the government, your trip to the store would 1) have your car stolen while you're shopping (or you must personally defend it), 2) sharply decrease the quantity and variety of goods at your store (due to less safe infrastructure), 3) increase the price of goods at your store due to increased transportation costs, etc, etc.
I mention these reasons, not because you don't understand them (I'm sure you do), but because these are reasons that every person with a vision of correct government (short of anarchists, which are generally either very rare, or just dumb) can agree, too. In a free society, we socialize self defense because it drastically lowers the cost and efficiency of everything we do. The most free societies still leave the individual with an option of self defense, but societies that require every individual to provide for their own self defense at all times are significantly less free.
Also, there are a lot of really fantastic private libraries out there. While those things with a natural monopoly (like Fire Departments and power generation) work well as government services, non-profits are very much alive and important in the private sector. From libraries and museums to charities to churches.
Wolfenstein! It was called "Barneystein" and changed the final boss of the first episode into Barney (who "shot" musical notes at you while playing the "I Love You" song). It also changed the default soldiers into Butt-Head and the machine gun soldiers into Beavis, (from the Beavis and Butt-Head cartoon on MTV)
I'm a little late, but I thought I would pitch in.
I'm "Ash", the "Director of BYOC" of the largest Bring Your Own Computer event in North America: QuakeCon. (http://www.quakecon.org)
1) A waiver. You'll want to provide it in advance of the event, not just on site. Not only is it ethically sound to allow attendees to read the terms they will be agreeing to in order to attend in advance, minors can't sign legally binding documents and they will need to have their parent/guardian sign it. You could use a variation of the waiver on www.quakecon.org (or if it's down now, you can email me and I'll send it to you). It was put together by id Software's legal team, and is probably a fine example.
2) Check-in, Check-out. Standard operating procedure for a LAN party dictates that you take record (however you prefer: text, image, video) of the "big ticket" items that an attendee brings into the event such that no one but the original person can leave with those items. Emphasis is on "big ticket", don't bother tracking mice, keyboards, Nintendo DSes, etc. Let people bring a backpack or whatever to bring those items in and out with them if they so choose.
3) Bag check. Gotta check the contents of bags coming in and out, every time, see (2).
4) Establish a single entry/exit. It's just too costly (in money or, more likely, volunteer hours) to maintain multiple entry/exit bag check points. You should only use a single egress/ingress. Of course, there will be fire doors all over the place that you may not lock. That's fine, there are two solutions. Sit a volunteer at the door to watch it, or (best ever) buy a cheap "door alarm" from an electronics store and fasten it to the door. You can't block fire exits, but you can most certainly have alarms on fire exits. We cut our security budget by a ton using these things, (the idea actually came from Sgt. Mike Bradshaw, our outstanding law enforcement partner.)
5) Do you have sponsored network hardware? If so, then don't allow anyone to bring network hardware into the event. Do you provide patch cables? Then don't allow anyone to bring patch cables into the event. Anything else requires some sort of tagging/identification system and it's likely not worth your time.
6) Prizes. If enough prizes/freebies get given out at your LAN party that it's an issue, give the sponsors a certificate to hand out with the prize to certify ownership for the bag check guys.
Of course, it would be easy to talk for pages and pages about the challenges of LAN party logistics, but those are probably the enough to get you through.
The success in the real world (money) is used to model the behavior of people. The success of the system as a whole is measured (among other things) in economic profit. Then those that manipulate the economy examine the difference and try to move the incentives for individuals such that the goals align.
To be full disclosure, I'm not in that category of economist. There's a bunch of bullshit in economics, mountains of it, but it's not in the fundamentals that you learned in your coursework. Terms like economic profit are very useful, they just have a confusing name (at least until you're familiar with the modeling used).
The core problem with economics as a field of study is the entrenchment it has with politics. Often, the most correct theory/model is tossed aside because it's not politically expedient. After/during the great depression, the government was looking for an explanation for why the economy "broke" and what they could do to "fix it". Keynesian economics is the result. Generally speaking, economics is *powerful*, because world leaders want information to help them meddle with the markets of their respective countries. But also because of this bias, economic models that conclude with "stop messing with things" rarely get professionally respected.
Also, it's painful to come from a rigorous scientific discipline and then study economics. It's so obvious when theorems and formulas are intentionally muddied with greek letters and unnecessary exposition. ("Pi is inflation? Pi is a number... like a real number... why would you use that for inflation?") They also have a long standing professional/academic understanding that empirical modeling is definitive. Ala: if you have a model that you make up while showering one morning, and it accurately explains a portion of data, then it is *valid*. Nevermind that it includes variables for sunspot generation and number of paint chips eaten in New Jersey during the previous month (recursive), if it appears to work it is valid! (Then they wonder why the forecasts don't work for all cases)
So, don't think that I'm not "with you" in thinking that economist are often full of shit. But it's not the fundamentals that you learned in early econ classes that are messed up (especially just because you confused two complete different terms that end in "profit"). And many people are very influential and very very rich from their use of current economic theory.
Economics is a very real field and there are a lot of economists that do real work with genuine scientific rigor. It just happens to be in the same pile with a bunch of politically loaded dog shit.
This is because in your economics class, you might have slept through the part where "economic profit" and "monetary profit" were defined and differentiated.
Normal profit, of the cash-money variety, is *subtracted as a cost* when calculating economic profit. Sam Walton had zero economic profit because in his very competitive market *after subtracting monetary profit*, he was (approximately) break even. This is a measure of economic systems in a more holistic view, rather than a "money in the bank view".
So yes, Sam Walton had a negligible economic profit while (at the same time) making a fortune in monetary profit.
(Also, financial speculators are economists... and they are often the majority of Forbes "Richest" lists.)
While it might not be your cup of tea, the game you just described is Supreme Commander. I'm sure that it has it's faults (I'm not skilled enough at RTS games to spot these things), but the queuing capabilities are absolutely amazing. I can queue a "tech upgrade" on a factory, queue two of the "tech 2" units, queue the "tech 3 upgrade", queue 2 engineers, 50 tech 1 tanks, and 20 tech 2 tanks, and go away. Later I can come back and remove one of the "tech 2" units, cut the order for 50 tanks down to 20 tanks, and continue.
I can also queue a guy to go build a thingie, patrol a bit, build another thingie, reclaim something, and patrol some more. Every way point will tell me how many minutes:seconds until it is reached and I can edit the visual chain of activities in place.
I think you should check it out, I think you'd be stoked. I'm not really that good at RTSes, but I definitely never felt that the interface was in my way in Supreme Commander. The real limitation was myself... oh... and the pathing for naval ships. The admirals of supreme commander apparently ate wall candy while they were kids.
Capitalism in the ideological sense bars the use of force from interaction. That same ideology defines government action as force. (Indeed, government has a traditional monopoly on force.) So it's ethical for a individual/business/corporation to do any voluntary negotiation, the use of force is never voluntary.
On the other hand, lobbying government is requesting the single monopoly of force to act on their behalf for something other than personal self defense. (A corporation can't claim self defense, that's a right for individuals, not fictitious legal entities.)
A person that doesn't personally believe that the capitalist system is the most ethical method to run a society benefits from at least understanding the difference between capitalism as it is defined and capitalism as it is practiced. While I am a fan of capitalism, I can recognize and identify a ton of real problems with capitalism (like income inequality) without needing the bullshit problems of "capitalism" (as it is wrongly defined) that comes with "crapitalism" (crony+capitalism) as it is practiced in the USA.
So perhaps it's futile, but I have to mention that this isn't capitalism. It's corporatism or "crony capitalism". Capitalism doesn't involve lobbying for government assistance. Lobbying could be seen as a "short cut" to avoid having to deal with the market pressures of capitalism.
Slashdot Mirror
Well, that's certainly true if you apply a specific scale to the map, but another method would be to attach geo-coordinates to landmarks on the map and then use interpolation to determine location otherwise.
In this way, if you were "moving on the map" between two locations that are a different distance apart on the map than reality, your "dot" would just move faster. Positional accuracy would be a continuum that increases in accuracy the nearer one is to a particular point of interest.
I'm under the impression that projects like this are generally taken on by cross-disciplinary teams, scientists is a general term that works nicely for a term that includes geneticists, biologists, experimental/rigorous breeders, etc.
I mean, it's clear that the people undertaking this project are "doing science", it's hard to say for sure (especially as an uninformed reporter) exactly what kind of scientists are doing the work.
Once again, you didn't pay enough attention...
The custom video codec accelerator board pricing was covered, it turns out to be about $25 a chip. Additionally, they only need high-end GPUs when people choose to play games that require them. They've had good success on less video intensive games just running them in software, without the GPUs. Additionally, as he mentioned, they lease the hardware, rather than purchasing the hardware, and have a venture capital arrangement for providing the initial start up funds.
As it turns out, it's extremely economically sensible (if there's adoption from customers, of course) because they have a substantial revenue sharing agreement for the sale/rent of the games, plus a monthly fee. Simply put, they'll make more money per game sale than any single entity currently makes on any sale. That puts them at a position of greater economic viability than the game developers themselves... and they seem to do fine.
You obviously didn't watch the video at all. While you're being an asshole about the idea, the guy presenting during the presentation covered all of your strawmen.
1) "fill instance of the most powerful PC you can throw at it" - Uh, no. When you move from workstation class hardware to server hardware, the "ceilings" change. But, for games like Crysis, they do, indeed, use a big GPU per instance.
2) "720p video in realtime that no codec today can deliver" - Too bad you didn't watch the video. Turns out, this is the same team that brought us QuickTime before video codecs were even discussed. He also describes exactly how they pulled it off, started with scrapping the stream-based design paradigm, using a feedback loop based design paradigm, and creating a new encoder that looks great in motion encoded and decoded in real time (as one of the weaknesses, you can't pause it or it looks like shit).
3) "Presumably happen on the same computing hardware..." - Actually, no. As the presenter describes, the codec taxed even the dual quad core xeons that it was developed on. Then they fabbed custom chips that do nothing but implement the encoding algorithm. It's entirely hardware accelerated encoding, two chips per user on custom boards.
I also thought the entire process sounded like a big stupid scam, but before I declared the mighty victory of common sense, talking out of my ass, I went ahead and watched the video.
Only holding the assumption that a portable gaming system is less valuable than a home system. This assumption turns out to not be universally true...
Is the incorrect idiom in your signature ("For all intensive purposes" instead of "For all intents and purposes") intentional? Perhaps it's a reference to an internet meme or something? I've seen that typed wrong pretty often lately, and I was curious if perhaps there was a joke that I missed out on? (I'm not being sardonic or anything, just curious)
Your sense of entitlement to enforce the law on others is exactly what's getting the laws changed. In my state of Kansas, we've just passed a law (went into effect July 1) that makes your exact behavior illegal. You must move to the right hand lane for faster moving traffic (regardless of speed) or you get a ticket for obstructing the flow of traffic.
By the way, how do you know that the person behind you doesn't have a legitimate reason to be going faster than the speed limit when you're in the left lane blocking traffic? They could be a doctor traveling to an emergency, a family member trying to make it to an unexpected birth, or any number of time sensitive things that are completely out of control of the driver. There are things more important than trivial laws.
While you're busy being "holier than thou", you're really just the problem. It's not up to you to enforce the law, it is up to you, as a driver, to make every attempt to avoid an accident. This includes sometimes increasing or decreasing your speed in response to changing driving conditions. Rain, sleet, snow, and even other traffic and other drivers.
I propose that we don't use for-profit corporations that have proven multiple times that they are willing to literally break the internet in order to make a buck.
http://www.icann.org/en/topics/wildcard-history.html
The problem with the current system isn't that it requires a web of trust in order to work, the problem is that when a corporation has participated in untrustworthy behavior, they don't get removed from the positions of trust. If participating in behaviors that are openly hostile to the proper function of the internet can't get your CA status revoked, then it's useless to me.
And while insulting me by claiming I live in my mother's basement might make the claim that manually verified certificates won't scale seem more emphatic, it's still invalid. Sure, actually verifying the identity of certificate owners won't scale to the level of profitability that Verisign currently enjoys. So what? Scalability is not a requirement of a trust system. TRUSTWORTHINESS is. If you scale to the point that the certs are no longer verified, then you've already failed. Then it's not about trust, it's just about the racket. I'm not responsible for insuring that the CA is a profitable business case.
But I can confidently state that security certificate warnings don't work, because they are just fear mongering for a system that's broken.
No, I'm not being disingenuous. I'm being literal and honest, Verisign is untrustworthy.
http://www.icann.org/en/topics/wildcard-history.html
Verisign is untrustworthy, so why should I care if a certificate is signed or not?
Signed certificates are a complete racket: If you don't pay us then when your users show up they will get a giant warning shown in their face, telling them not to trust you. You wouldn't want that would you? Nope, don't care who you are, what you do, or why. $100 bucks please.
You're very in-line in the conventional wisdom. Here's a starter article that shows the scholastic work being done to try and bring that conventional wisdom around to reality:
http://www.reason.com/news/show/28703.html
It's certainly not an end-all, be-all resource. But it's a nice starting point to broadening your discourse on intellectual property.
It's not all just "common sense", and some things are certainly prerequisites to others. It's notable that in repeating some of your core points, you chose to still consider IP law a foundational element while trivializing my notion that quality of life and general wealth are the actual foundation of career artists. But it is logically certain. IP law doesn't pay anyone, it merely provides limited time monopolies on creatives works. However, *most notably*, all creatives works were *extremely difficult to duplicate* until very recent times. The natural monopoly of of physical existence, in combination with additional wealth allocated by society to the arts, makes IP law irrelevant until very recent times. However, career artists have not existed only in very recent times...
I'll stop hammering the same conceptual points, but just because one can settle on conventional wisdom doesn't make it correct... it just makes it easy.
Art historians do not. Art as a career did not proliferate as a result of IP law. Art as a career proliferated as a response to rising quality of life allowing for disposable income to facilitate the social surplus necessary to afford artistry. Not only do a lion share of great works pre-date IP law, the explosion of artists directly correlates with the advent of printing technology making cheap study material available worldwide for would-be painters. No, absolutely not, IP law was not a significant prerequisite for the proliferation of career artists in human history. That analysis is hopelessly out of sync with the actual historical order of events.
"I'm just trying to make it clear that IP law is what allowed for the proliferation of art we have seen in our modern times."
This is the common assumption, but there is no evidence for this! It's just as empirically supported to say that the proliferation of art in modern times is what got us stuck with the IP law, not the other way around.
No, I don't disagree that there is a great role for public libraries to fill. I was just disagreeing with the generalization that all private endeavors are necessarily driven by the profit motive, as your example alluded to. Non-profits and charities thrive and provide an important role in free societies and often suffer disproportionately from the economic "crowding out" effect of public spending. So while public libraries are essential, it's important not to forget the non-profits are a superior method whenever possible. (Public spending, no one gets to choose what to support, private spending offers more choice, more freedom.)
I guess I just responded the way I did to try and raise emphasis/awareness that it's not just a profit or public dichotomy. A lot of people forget about how important non-profits are. As I started last time, I agree with you, just thought I'd comment on some of the finer points. :)
Other than provide the safety regulations to minimize the risk the product harms you, the advertising regulations to minimize the chance you are scammed, etc, etc. Your commercial transaction occurs in a complicated environment, much of which is government funded, much of which serves to protect you (nominally, obviously you can debate the efficacy).
So, I agree with your post, but I'd like to give you some better reasons than the two you decided to lead with. Those both have pretty compelling free market alternatives, including private safety certifications (like the American Dental Association seal on toothpaste, don't be toothpaste without it! seriously.) and advertising regulations could potentially just be covered under fraud laws.
The biggest is the rule of law that allows people to actually have ownership. Without the government, your trip to the store would 1) have your car stolen while you're shopping (or you must personally defend it), 2) sharply decrease the quantity and variety of goods at your store (due to less safe infrastructure), 3) increase the price of goods at your store due to increased transportation costs, etc, etc.
I mention these reasons, not because you don't understand them (I'm sure you do), but because these are reasons that every person with a vision of correct government (short of anarchists, which are generally either very rare, or just dumb) can agree, too. In a free society, we socialize self defense because it drastically lowers the cost and efficiency of everything we do. The most free societies still leave the individual with an option of self defense, but societies that require every individual to provide for their own self defense at all times are significantly less free.
Also, there are a lot of really fantastic private libraries out there. While those things with a natural monopoly (like Fire Departments and power generation) work well as government services, non-profits are very much alive and important in the private sector. From libraries and museums to charities to churches.
Wolfenstein! It was called "Barneystein" and changed the final boss of the first episode into Barney (who "shot" musical notes at you while playing the "I Love You" song). It also changed the default soldiers into Butt-Head and the machine gun soldiers into Beavis, (from the Beavis and Butt-Head cartoon on MTV)
Might want to read the comment a little closer... particularly the part that mentions "fire exits everywhere".
I'm a little late, but I thought I would pitch in.
I'm "Ash", the "Director of BYOC" of the largest Bring Your Own Computer event in North America: QuakeCon. (http://www.quakecon.org)
1) A waiver. You'll want to provide it in advance of the event, not just on site. Not only is it ethically sound to allow attendees to read the terms they will be agreeing to in order to attend in advance, minors can't sign legally binding documents and they will need to have their parent/guardian sign it. You could use a variation of the waiver on www.quakecon.org (or if it's down now, you can email me and I'll send it to you). It was put together by id Software's legal team, and is probably a fine example.
2) Check-in, Check-out. Standard operating procedure for a LAN party dictates that you take record (however you prefer: text, image, video) of the "big ticket" items that an attendee brings into the event such that no one but the original person can leave with those items. Emphasis is on "big ticket", don't bother tracking mice, keyboards, Nintendo DSes, etc. Let people bring a backpack or whatever to bring those items in and out with them if they so choose.
3) Bag check. Gotta check the contents of bags coming in and out, every time, see (2).
4) Establish a single entry/exit. It's just too costly (in money or, more likely, volunteer hours) to maintain multiple entry/exit bag check points. You should only use a single egress/ingress. Of course, there will be fire doors all over the place that you may not lock. That's fine, there are two solutions. Sit a volunteer at the door to watch it, or (best ever) buy a cheap "door alarm" from an electronics store and fasten it to the door. You can't block fire exits, but you can most certainly have alarms on fire exits. We cut our security budget by a ton using these things, (the idea actually came from Sgt. Mike Bradshaw, our outstanding law enforcement partner.)
5) Do you have sponsored network hardware? If so, then don't allow anyone to bring network hardware into the event. Do you provide patch cables? Then don't allow anyone to bring patch cables into the event. Anything else requires some sort of tagging/identification system and it's likely not worth your time.
6) Prizes. If enough prizes/freebies get given out at your LAN party that it's an issue, give the sponsors a certificate to hand out with the prize to certify ownership for the bag check guys.
Of course, it would be easy to talk for pages and pages about the challenges of LAN party logistics, but those are probably the enough to get you through.
Good luck, have fun!
-- Travis "Ash" Bradshaw
Um, no. Wrong again.
The success in the real world (money) is used to model the behavior of people. The success of the system as a whole is measured (among other things) in economic profit. Then those that manipulate the economy examine the difference and try to move the incentives for individuals such that the goals align.
To be full disclosure, I'm not in that category of economist. There's a bunch of bullshit in economics, mountains of it, but it's not in the fundamentals that you learned in your coursework. Terms like economic profit are very useful, they just have a confusing name (at least until you're familiar with the modeling used).
The core problem with economics as a field of study is the entrenchment it has with politics. Often, the most correct theory/model is tossed aside because it's not politically expedient. After/during the great depression, the government was looking for an explanation for why the economy "broke" and what they could do to "fix it". Keynesian economics is the result. Generally speaking, economics is *powerful*, because world leaders want information to help them meddle with the markets of their respective countries. But also because of this bias, economic models that conclude with "stop messing with things" rarely get professionally respected.
Also, it's painful to come from a rigorous scientific discipline and then study economics. It's so obvious when theorems and formulas are intentionally muddied with greek letters and unnecessary exposition. ("Pi is inflation? Pi is a number... like a real number... why would you use that for inflation?") They also have a long standing professional/academic understanding that empirical modeling is definitive. Ala: if you have a model that you make up while showering one morning, and it accurately explains a portion of data, then it is *valid*. Nevermind that it includes variables for sunspot generation and number of paint chips eaten in New Jersey during the previous month (recursive), if it appears to work it is valid! (Then they wonder why the forecasts don't work for all cases)
So, don't think that I'm not "with you" in thinking that economist are often full of shit. But it's not the fundamentals that you learned in early econ classes that are messed up (especially just because you confused two complete different terms that end in "profit"). And many people are very influential and very very rich from their use of current economic theory.
Economics is a very real field and there are a lot of economists that do real work with genuine scientific rigor. It just happens to be in the same pile with a bunch of politically loaded dog shit.
George Soros
This is because in your economics class, you might have slept through the part where "economic profit" and "monetary profit" were defined and differentiated.
Normal profit, of the cash-money variety, is *subtracted as a cost* when calculating economic profit. Sam Walton had zero economic profit because in his very competitive market *after subtracting monetary profit*, he was (approximately) break even. This is a measure of economic systems in a more holistic view, rather than a "money in the bank view".
So yes, Sam Walton had a negligible economic profit while (at the same time) making a fortune in monetary profit.
(Also, financial speculators are economists... and they are often the majority of Forbes "Richest" lists.)
I think it's a point release. But the "honest" Microsoft releases have been too:
Windows 2000: NT 5.0
Windows XP: NT 5.1
Only with Vista did the marketing team get a hold of the version numbers: NT 6.0
A major version number is supposed to indicate a break with backwards compatibility. Why would someone be in a rush for something like that?
While it might not be your cup of tea, the game you just described is Supreme Commander. I'm sure that it has it's faults (I'm not skilled enough at RTS games to spot these things), but the queuing capabilities are absolutely amazing. I can queue a "tech upgrade" on a factory, queue two of the "tech 2" units, queue the "tech 3 upgrade", queue 2 engineers, 50 tech 1 tanks, and 20 tech 2 tanks, and go away. Later I can come back and remove one of the "tech 2" units, cut the order for 50 tanks down to 20 tanks, and continue.
I can also queue a guy to go build a thingie, patrol a bit, build another thingie, reclaim something, and patrol some more. Every way point will tell me how many minutes:seconds until it is reached and I can edit the visual chain of activities in place.
I think you should check it out, I think you'd be stoked. I'm not really that good at RTSes, but I definitely never felt that the interface was in my way in Supreme Commander. The real limitation was myself... oh... and the pathing for naval ships. The admirals of supreme commander apparently ate wall candy while they were kids.
No, not because it's personally disagreeable.
Capitalism in the ideological sense bars the use of force from interaction. That same ideology defines government action as force. (Indeed, government has a traditional monopoly on force.) So it's ethical for a individual/business/corporation to do any voluntary negotiation, the use of force is never voluntary.
On the other hand, lobbying government is requesting the single monopoly of force to act on their behalf for something other than personal self defense. (A corporation can't claim self defense, that's a right for individuals, not fictitious legal entities.)
A person that doesn't personally believe that the capitalist system is the most ethical method to run a society benefits from at least understanding the difference between capitalism as it is defined and capitalism as it is practiced. While I am a fan of capitalism, I can recognize and identify a ton of real problems with capitalism (like income inequality) without needing the bullshit problems of "capitalism" (as it is wrongly defined) that comes with "crapitalism" (crony+capitalism) as it is practiced in the USA.
So perhaps it's futile, but I have to mention that this isn't capitalism. It's corporatism or "crony capitalism". Capitalism doesn't involve lobbying for government assistance. Lobbying could be seen as a "short cut" to avoid having to deal with the market pressures of capitalism.