I'm never going to forgive them for that stupid fucking name change, but they actually seem to have gotten their act together recently. Season one of "The Expanse" was great, (going by the post-analysis it probably would have been nominated for a Hugo if the fans could just have agreed on which episode to vote for) and I've heard mostly good stuff about their other new shows too.
It's too bad they never made a third game in that series. Oh wait! They just announced one last month! Hopefully making a third game won't turn out to be a horrible mistake! *crosses fingers*
#1 You stated something that was factually incorrect. "Their profits are always high". I used as much data as was necessary to show that you were incorrect.
#2 I started at 2012 because I stated "Not anymore they aren't," implicitly accepting that earlier in time they were making money and arguing that a change had occurred. And 2012 was when that change occurred. Namely, the release of the Wii U. I never claimed that they never made money, only that they sometimes lose money.
#3 I then said "Yes, they made a lot of money before the Wii U and still have a lot in reserve, but if the Switch follows in the Wii U's footsteps and performs poorly Nintendo can't afford to keep losing money forever."
Thus explicitly acknowledging that they made a lot of money before 2012, but arguing that if they continue the trend of 2012 and on then they will continue to lose money.
Countering an argument of "recently they've been losing money or only making a small profit" with "but at times in the past they made large profits!" proves nothing other than that it's _possible_ for them to make money, which no one here was disputing. But if they're going to do that they're going to have to address some problems, and the question is whether or not the Switch will do that. Since it hasn't actually been released yet it's all just speculation.
"Nintendo will have no problem "surviving". Their profits are always high."
Not anymore they aren't. They lost $548 million in 2012 and $232 million in 2014, and their profits in 2013 and 2015-2016 only totals to $604 million. (Source)
"They have plenty of cash reserves if they bomb, but I doubt they'll bomb."
The Wii was obviously a huge success, but i doubt they'll be able to capture that kind of lighting again. Meanwhile the Wii U has been a failure from a sales and marketing perspective and is probably the biggest contributor to the huge losses above. I believe the New 3DS is doing okay now, but it had a very rocky start. So i don't have unbounded confidence that this time they'll get it right.
Yes, they made a lot of money before the Wii U and still have a lot in reserve, but if the Switch follows in the Wii U's footsteps and performs poorly Nintendo can't afford to keep losing money forever.
I didn't think the Wii was that bad, but i never did really like the motion controls and always opted for classic controller whenever possible. I never did get around to upgrading to the Wii U (though there are some games on it that i really want to play) but i have been enjoying my 3DS quite a bit.
So i'm pretty glad that motion controls don't seem to be a big feature of the Switch. However i am worried about the graphical quality. If their "unspecified custom Nvidia Tegra processor" can't easily handle ports from the PS4 and XBone (for the base models at the very least) Nintendo may end up in a tough spot.
They're trying to go for a "best of both worlds" approach, but with phone and tablet games eating into their market at one end and the PS4 and XBone capping it on the other end i'm not sure if we still live in an era where Nintendo can continue to survive on console exclusives alone.
But it _does_ look like a more interesting concept to me than the Wii and Wii U, so i'll try to keep my hopes up.
No, you are not reading what I am saying. My problem is plagiarism and fraud. When someone lifts an author's work wholesale and either relabels it as their own (plagiarism) or claims that they have the right to sell it (as designated by the author or their representative) when they don't (fraud.)
That is entirely different from copying the whole work without altering it or making false claims ("pirating") or altering the work or making use of a subset of it in an open manner to accomplish some other purpose (free use or parody.)
In my opinion the items in the first paragraph are morally wrong while those in the second paragraph inhabit an area ranging through all the possible values of grey. You are certainly free to disagree with that, but please don't misrepresent what i'm saying.
Clearly you've thought a lot about this, but please reference my original post. I was referring to people and groups that sell works online that they did not create themselves and do not have permission from the creator to sell. In some cases it's an "author" relabeling an ebook as having been written by them (plagiarism) and in other cases it's a store that claims to be an authorized distributor but is actually selling pirated copies (fraud.)
So yes, very definitely stealing. In both cases they are diverting sales _directly_ from the original author under false pretenses. This is in no ways similar to Burger King opening a store across the street from McDonald's and engaging in legitimate competition.
Since i argued that the police should be focusing on people who are actually committing plagiarism and fraud rather than people distributing properly attributed electronic copies for free i believe you may by responding to the wrong half of the discussion.
I have complicated feelings about the subject of digital piracy. But i'd like to hope we could both agree that people who make a profit by stealing others' works and selling them as their own are the scum of the earth.
I feel like that's who the police should really be focused on, since they are undeniably causing harm by siphoning money away from those who are actually willing to pay for the product.
The police put a lot of effort making sure this guy goes to jail for making information available for free. Meanwhile there are tons of fake authors and stores online (some of them even represented on big sites like Amazon) who are selling the works of others for a profit. And no matter how often they get reported the police either don't care or are incapable of tracking them down (despite the presence of a clear money trail.)
I know it's cool to hate on the editors, but i like how you didn't even read the blurb to see three other companies that were listed:
"Likewise, Google, Amazon, and Microsoft routinely file trademarks for their most important products in locales far flung from Silicon Valley and Seattle."
As others have said, selection bias. You hear about the rich people who are delusional, you don't hear about the non-rich people who are delusional.
I had a close friend who suffered from delusions of some kind. (I would guess paranoid schizophrenia, but i'm not a doctor.) At the start it was just that she thought people were spying on her (or at least that was all she would admit to at the time.) Eventually this developed into a belief that the government was bouncing signals off of tesla coils on the moon to put thoughts in her head. She tried telling people about this on the web and calling people she thought might listen to her, and tried to get me to help her in those endeavors. But she wasn't rich or powerful so no one except her close friends listened to what she had to say so her voice wasn't amplified so you never heard about it.
The only differences i expect that being wealthy makes is:
1: You're not likely to end up homeless on the street shouting at passers-by
2: If you want you can pay to have your voice amplified.
3: Even if you don't pay people will gossip about what you say, probably snickering about it the whole time
4: You're probably a little less likely to believe in a grand conspiracy about the rich and powerful secretly being in control of everything. (Cause if you think you're rich and powerful it probably makes it harder to believe in a conspiracy about your peers being in charge of everything.)
I agree with your cautionary side! Just within the last week or two we've had stories about new or upcoming Facebook services that will be competing directly with ebay, Craigslist, Slack, LinkedIn, and probably others. And i'm sure they've got other services planned that haven't been well publicized yet.
If Facebook gets it set up so everyone has free access to all their cloned services while having to pay for the originals that's going to give them a huge advantage and could easily lead to a monopoly situation.
Giving Facebook an economically reinforced status as the gateway to the internet seems like a bad idea to me.
"Emphasis mine. I'm going to go ahead and assume that the rest of your links are either not direct quotes or severely misrepresenting his positions like just about any outrageous claim about Trump."
You mean you checked the first sentence of the first article, and assumed that that first sentence represented the whole of the first article, and continued on to assume that it also represented the whole of all the other articles?
Because the second paragraph agrees with you, acknowledging: "Scarborough's claim was thinly sourced. He didn't reveal the identity of the expert advising Trump or even where he learned the information. Information attributed to anonymous sources is inherently suspect."
But then it _continues_ by saying: "But one need not rely on anonymous sources to glean Trump's views on nuclear weapons. He has broached the subject repeatedly on the campaign trail. Several of his public comments are similar to Scarborough's account while others are terrifying in their own way."
And then proceeds with the numerous direct, sourced quotes of the kind that you just assumed wouldn't be present.
It's mind boggling that you would make such a huge assumption when it can so easily be proven just be reading another couple sentences that you're in direct contradiction of reality.
As i said, not only, just first. If rich people would be affected negatively and _none_ of them are doing anything to stop it, you can be pretty sure it's not real. Just because rich people do believe in something does not make it real, it just makes it non-trivial to disprove. As you say, for most issues that are actually real there are rich people on both sides, proving that it's an issue that is potentially real for which there is either no trivial proof and no trivial solution, or that there is a non-trivial financial incentive on at least one of the sides.
TL;DW, a good first test (not only, just first) for whether a conspiracy theory might be true is "if true would this theory have a negative effect on rich people?"
You don't see rich people campaigning against chemtrails even though they breath the same air we do, so you can be pretty sure chemtrails aren't real.
Here is a theory that if true would have a negative impact on rich people (at least to the extent that you regard being alive in a simulation as a negative) and a non-trivial number of them are willing to throw money at the problem to "fix" it.
Which is definitely not proof that the simulation theory is true, but is pretty damning for a lot of other conspiracy theories.
Uh, the definition you just pointed me at, in addition to saying "to break up a camp", also says "to leave a place suddenly and secretly", and "to depart suddenly".
You can argue about the original meaning i suppose, but it's had those other meanings for a long time. I think you're going to have a tough time un-debarning that horse.
And furthermore, fitness, in fact health in general, is one of those things that's hard to get and stay motivated for. Humans have very little incentive to go out of their way to stay in shape for most of their evolutionary history, so there's no one weird trick to the psychology for motivating yourself to stay healthy. Different tactics work for different people. If fitness trackers help 10% of the people stay motivated that's a success for those 10%, and the other 90% just need to try some other method until they hit on something that works for them.
Slashdot Mirror
I'm never going to forgive them for that stupid fucking name change, but they actually seem to have gotten their act together recently. Season one of "The Expanse" was great, (going by the post-analysis it probably would have been nominated for a Hugo if the fans could just have agreed on which episode to vote for) and I've heard mostly good stuff about their other new shows too.
I hate it when there are Problems Issues with things. Like the grammar in unedited Slashdot article summaries.
It's too bad they never made a third game in that series. Oh wait! They just announced one last month! Hopefully making a third game won't turn out to be a horrible mistake! *crosses fingers*
I've seen a number of cute Vines of cats. I'll miss those, but that about it?
If the AI's are created in any kind of evolutionary manner, then almost certainly yes. It's happened with hardware design before.
But did it turn inside-out first?
#1 You stated something that was factually incorrect. "Their profits are always high". I used as much data as was necessary to show that you were incorrect.
#2 I started at 2012 because I stated "Not anymore they aren't," implicitly accepting that earlier in time they were making money and arguing that a change had occurred. And 2012 was when that change occurred. Namely, the release of the Wii U. I never claimed that they never made money, only that they sometimes lose money.
#3 I then said "Yes, they made a lot of money before the Wii U and still have a lot in reserve, but if the Switch follows in the Wii U's footsteps and performs poorly Nintendo can't afford to keep losing money forever."
Thus explicitly acknowledging that they made a lot of money before 2012, but arguing that if they continue the trend of 2012 and on then they will continue to lose money.
Countering an argument of "recently they've been losing money or only making a small profit" with "but at times in the past they made large profits!" proves nothing other than that it's _possible_ for them to make money, which no one here was disputing. But if they're going to do that they're going to have to address some problems, and the question is whether or not the Switch will do that. Since it hasn't actually been released yet it's all just speculation.
"Nintendo will have no problem "surviving". Their profits are always high."
Not anymore they aren't. They lost $548 million in 2012 and $232 million in 2014, and their profits in 2013 and 2015-2016 only totals to $604 million. (Source)
"They have plenty of cash reserves if they bomb, but I doubt they'll bomb."
The Wii was obviously a huge success, but i doubt they'll be able to capture that kind of lighting again. Meanwhile the Wii U has been a failure from a sales and marketing perspective and is probably the biggest contributor to the huge losses above. I believe the New 3DS is doing okay now, but it had a very rocky start. So i don't have unbounded confidence that this time they'll get it right.
Yes, they made a lot of money before the Wii U and still have a lot in reserve, but if the Switch follows in the Wii U's footsteps and performs poorly Nintendo can't afford to keep losing money forever.
I didn't think the Wii was that bad, but i never did really like the motion controls and always opted for classic controller whenever possible. I never did get around to upgrading to the Wii U (though there are some games on it that i really want to play) but i have been enjoying my 3DS quite a bit.
So i'm pretty glad that motion controls don't seem to be a big feature of the Switch. However i am worried about the graphical quality. If their "unspecified custom Nvidia Tegra processor" can't easily handle ports from the PS4 and XBone (for the base models at the very least) Nintendo may end up in a tough spot.
They're trying to go for a "best of both worlds" approach, but with phone and tablet games eating into their market at one end and the PS4 and XBone capping it on the other end i'm not sure if we still live in an era where Nintendo can continue to survive on console exclusives alone.
But it _does_ look like a more interesting concept to me than the Wii and Wii U, so i'll try to keep my hopes up.
No, you are not reading what I am saying. My problem is plagiarism and fraud. When someone lifts an author's work wholesale and either relabels it as their own (plagiarism) or claims that they have the right to sell it (as designated by the author or their representative) when they don't (fraud.)
That is entirely different from copying the whole work without altering it or making false claims ("pirating") or altering the work or making use of a subset of it in an open manner to accomplish some other purpose (free use or parody.)
In my opinion the items in the first paragraph are morally wrong while those in the second paragraph inhabit an area ranging through all the possible values of grey. You are certainly free to disagree with that, but please don't misrepresent what i'm saying.
Clearly you've thought a lot about this, but please reference my original post. I was referring to people and groups that sell works online that they did not create themselves and do not have permission from the creator to sell. In some cases it's an "author" relabeling an ebook as having been written by them (plagiarism) and in other cases it's a store that claims to be an authorized distributor but is actually selling pirated copies (fraud.)
So yes, very definitely stealing. In both cases they are diverting sales _directly_ from the original author under false pretenses. This is in no ways similar to Burger King opening a store across the street from McDonald's and engaging in legitimate competition.
Since i argued that the police should be focusing on people who are actually committing plagiarism and fraud rather than people distributing properly attributed electronic copies for free i believe you may by responding to the wrong half of the discussion.
...yes, i agree.
https://slashdot.org/comments....
(This is the comment thread that never ends, it just goes on and on my friends...)
I have complicated feelings about the subject of digital piracy. But i'd like to hope we could both agree that people who make a profit by stealing others' works and selling them as their own are the scum of the earth.
I feel like that's who the police should really be focused on, since they are undeniably causing harm by siphoning money away from those who are actually willing to pay for the product.
The police put a lot of effort making sure this guy goes to jail for making information available for free. Meanwhile there are tons of fake authors and stores online (some of them even represented on big sites like Amazon) who are selling the works of others for a profit. And no matter how often they get reported the police either don't care or are incapable of tracking them down (despite the presence of a clear money trail.)
The single most popular in use? It must not be .xyz, because that is apparently the dual most popular in use.
I know it's cool to hate on the editors, but i like how you didn't even read the blurb to see three other companies that were listed:
"Likewise, Google, Amazon, and Microsoft routinely file trademarks for their most important products in locales far flung from Silicon Valley and Seattle."
Et tu, Equador?
As others have said, selection bias. You hear about the rich people who are delusional, you don't hear about the non-rich people who are delusional.
I had a close friend who suffered from delusions of some kind. (I would guess paranoid schizophrenia, but i'm not a doctor.) At the start it was just that she thought people were spying on her (or at least that was all she would admit to at the time.) Eventually this developed into a belief that the government was bouncing signals off of tesla coils on the moon to put thoughts in her head. She tried telling people about this on the web and calling people she thought might listen to her, and tried to get me to help her in those endeavors. But she wasn't rich or powerful so no one except her close friends listened to what she had to say so her voice wasn't amplified so you never heard about it.
The only differences i expect that being wealthy makes is:
1: You're not likely to end up homeless on the street shouting at passers-by
2: If you want you can pay to have your voice amplified.
3: Even if you don't pay people will gossip about what you say, probably snickering about it the whole time
4: You're probably a little less likely to believe in a grand conspiracy about the rich and powerful secretly being in control of everything. (Cause if you think you're rich and powerful it probably makes it harder to believe in a conspiracy about your peers being in charge of everything.)
I agree with your cautionary side! Just within the last week or two we've had stories about new or upcoming Facebook services that will be competing directly with ebay, Craigslist, Slack, LinkedIn, and probably others. And i'm sure they've got other services planned that haven't been well publicized yet.
If Facebook gets it set up so everyone has free access to all their cloned services while having to pay for the originals that's going to give them a huge advantage and could easily lead to a monopoly situation.
Giving Facebook an economically reinforced status as the gateway to the internet seems like a bad idea to me.
"Emphasis mine. I'm going to go ahead and assume that the rest of your links are either not direct quotes or severely misrepresenting his positions like just about any outrageous claim about Trump."
You mean you checked the first sentence of the first article, and assumed that that first sentence represented the whole of the first article, and continued on to assume that it also represented the whole of all the other articles?
Because the second paragraph agrees with you, acknowledging: "Scarborough's claim was thinly sourced. He didn't reveal the identity of the expert advising Trump or even where he learned the information. Information attributed to anonymous sources is inherently suspect."
But then it _continues_ by saying: "But one need not rely on anonymous sources to glean Trump's views on nuclear weapons. He has broached the subject repeatedly on the campaign trail. Several of his public comments are similar to Scarborough's account while others are terrifying in their own way."
And then proceeds with the numerous direct, sourced quotes of the kind that you just assumed wouldn't be present.
It's mind boggling that you would make such a huge assumption when it can so easily be proven just be reading another couple sentences that you're in direct contradiction of reality.
As i said, not only, just first. If rich people would be affected negatively and _none_ of them are doing anything to stop it, you can be pretty sure it's not real. Just because rich people do believe in something does not make it real, it just makes it non-trivial to disprove. As you say, for most issues that are actually real there are rich people on both sides, proving that it's an issue that is potentially real for which there is either no trivial proof and no trivial solution, or that there is a non-trivial financial incentive on at least one of the sides.
The Ultimate Conspiracy Debunker
TL;DW, a good first test (not only, just first) for whether a conspiracy theory might be true is "if true would this theory have a negative effect on rich people?"
You don't see rich people campaigning against chemtrails even though they breath the same air we do, so you can be pretty sure chemtrails aren't real.
Here is a theory that if true would have a negative impact on rich people (at least to the extent that you regard being alive in a simulation as a negative) and a non-trivial number of them are willing to throw money at the problem to "fix" it.
Which is definitely not proof that the simulation theory is true, but is pretty damning for a lot of other conspiracy theories.
Uh, the definition you just pointed me at, in addition to saying "to break up a camp", also says "to leave a place suddenly and secretly", and "to depart suddenly".
You can argue about the original meaning i suppose, but it's had those other meanings for a long time. I think you're going to have a tough time un-debarning that horse.
" 3. departure from: decamp"
I've definitely heard that one used quite a lot, including in periods from long before there were any planes around.
And furthermore, fitness, in fact health in general, is one of those things that's hard to get and stay motivated for. Humans have very little incentive to go out of their way to stay in shape for most of their evolutionary history, so there's no one weird trick to the psychology for motivating yourself to stay healthy. Different tactics work for different people. If fitness trackers help 10% of the people stay motivated that's a success for those 10%, and the other 90% just need to try some other method until they hit on something that works for them.