"two years ago Richard Dawkins and Lawrence Krauss set off on a barnstorming tour to save the world from religion and promote science."
That is exactly the wrong way to do things. I'm not going to argue whether it is reasonable or not to believe in both science or religion, because regardless of that if you frame an argument as A is wrong and B is right then everyone who already believes in A is going to get defensive and angry and be even _less_ likely to accept B.
If that's not actually a misrepresentation and he's actually approaching the perceived problem by trying to bludgeon the opposing side into adopting his beliefs then he's doomed to failure, and the whole things is really just a "feel good" tour for atheists to feel superior about their "enlightened" beliefs.
Every time there's a story about the trend of automating everything people worry that all the jobs are going to go away and there will be nothing left for anyone who isn't a brilliant scientist or talented artist. Well it actually makes sense to outlaw the automation of C&D letters by bots like the media industry is currently doing. One can make an entirely reasonable argument that this kind of legal activity needs to be performed by a human, not a machine. (At least up up until the point where we get true AI at least, and then everything goes out the window anyways.)
All we have to do is get a law passed saying that each C&D claim has to be reviewed by a real human who is employed by the company whose content is supposedly being infringed, plus specify a minimum amount of time necessary for the review. Huzah! At a minimum of one minute per C&D review (which could certainly be increased to five or even ten minutes if necessary,) 6.5 million C&Ds per week is at least 2,700 new jobs, and if the number keeps doubling every year... In less than two decades we could have an entire economy based around C&D letters!
I learned about a number of Black Friday and Cyber Monday sales through my Android phone. And in each case i then went and looked it up again on my PC for review before deciding whether or not to make a purchase.
"I liked the fact that the active playlist was held completely separate from the library (as opposed to say...struggling with itunes)."
And perhaps even more importantly, both of them aren't intimately tied to the file system! I still remember the first (and only) time i accidentally added a file to iTunes and then immediately deleted it from iTunes only to find out that the actual file had been deleted in windows! It was also the last time i ever used iTunes for anything other than downloading podcasts.
And i still use the winamp. And as other people have mentioned elsewhere, i've had others comment on the fact. Twice in the past month or two coworkers have wandered by my desk and exclaimed "wow, you still use winamp?!" Everyone else seems to have moved on to streaming music players, but i've already got most of my music locally and don't see any reason to waste bandwidth downloading it over and over again.
I believe, given what's said in the comic, that what Munroe was objecting to was not quotations in general, but quoting, fur humorous purposes, material whose foundation for humor was its surreality. And _personally_ i would say that although some xkcd comics are certainly surreal, that is not actually the founding principle of xkcd. I'm sure opinions vary however. The comic in question here certainly has some surreal elements, but the comic itself is about a non-surreal topic, which is why it was referenced in the first place.
So hopefully they'll give us some new spontaneous material to drive into the ground with endless repetition for decades to come? (And i admit, i'm as guilty of that as the next geek.)
I actually went to see Gravity twice. Once in 2D, and then again in 3D because my company organized a trip. If i'd actually had to pay for the 3D version i would have been sorry. I stopped noticing the 3D effect about 5 minutes in. Then during the ISS scene a couple things flew directly at my face and made me flinch (which i do not count as a positive experience) and then i stopped noticing it again for the entire rest of the movie.
To be fair i've said the same thing about every other 3D movie i've seen (with the possible exception of How to Train Your Dragon, where at least the "let's show off the 3D in the middle" scene made me go "ooohh" rather than flinch) but Gravity isn't necessarily going to cure everyone of a preexisting case of 3D apathy.
Any value the movie has as social commentary is overshadowed by its total misuse of the source material. The claims by Verhoeven and other critics that the novel supports fascism are shallow at best. The characters in the novel engage in a number moral debates about the values of their system of government, which you can certainly disagree with but can't just wave away with a simple accusation of fascism. In fact there's evidence that Heinlein got the idea of universal service in the novel from Switzerland, which as we all know is a hotbed of fascism. [/sarcasm]
I'm afraid that might be the problem, exactly - you can't fit the same specs with a decent battery life in a smaller package easily.
Or you might, but at a premium, and the larger devices are already pushing the maximum the market will bear (there are not enough people willing to buy a smartphone at higher prices to justify large-scale production).
I'm pretty sure the first half of that isn't true, though you may be right on the second half. The lion's share of space taken up internally is by the battery. However the thing that uses the most power is generally the screen, so if you reduce the screen size you don't need as much battery.
The Droid Mini came very close to matching its larger cousin's specs. The only shortcoming, and it's a pretty large one, is that it only has 16 GB of storage. I don't know what the form factor is for internal flash memory but i doubt there's a significant difference in size between 16 GB and 32 GB, or even 64 GB. If they'd just included a decent amount of storage, and it wasn't exclusive to Verizon, i would have bought one instantly. But going by what seems to be the standard cell phone pricing scheme, the extra 16 GB of storage would have cost $50 more, and i guess they didn't think enough people would have been willing to pay that to make it worthwhile.
After all those weeks of rumors, how did they manage to still get the wrong specs _after_ the device was announced? According to the order page the CPU is 2.3 GHz, not 2.2.
It looks like a really nice phone, i just wish it wasn't so large. I know it's only "slightly" larger than the Nexus 4 due to the reduced bevel, but the Nexus 4 was already too large. I really want a nice phone with a 4.0" or 4.3" screen. (And no, the "Mini" versions of the HTC One, Galaxy S4 and Droid don't count. They reduced the CPU and/or RAM and/or Storage for all of those when they made them "Mini".)
"If you pushed someone into a black hole, could you beat the murder rap by pointing out that he still hadn't finished falling in, from the jury's reference frame?"
Possibly. But in that case they'd just convict you of a lesser charge and instead of giving you the death penalty they'd throw you into the black hole as well.
This. Too many times i've tried to look up something on wikipedia, either because it's a subject i care about or a subject i want to find out about, and discover there _was_ a page on it, but it was deleted for lack of notability. In the second case it's annoying because it's entirely defeating the purpose of a reference work, trying to look up things i don't already know about. If it was more notable i probably would have heard of whatever it was before and wouldn't need to look it up. In the first case, it just feels like a snub.
Then there's the bit where they keep deleting lists of things inside articles, particularly lists of trivia. Trivia lists are one of the quickest and most rewarding things to skim through. (This is why every site on the internet these days frequently posts articles in the form of lists. They get a lot of hits.)
Which is why for any kind of fictional thing i often head to TVTropes before checking out Wikipedia. It's sometimes less informative but it's usually more fun, and i don't get the feeling there's a band of people running around deleting the stuff i'm interested in.
"(with a tip of the hat to another state, whose stupidity created similarily named labels). And now, moderators who live in those two states... fire up the 'overrated' and 'troll' buttons, and I apologize I kept you waiting so long."
Wait, do you honestly think you're going to find anyone from California who's eager to defend the Prop 65 signs? At least i presume that's what you're talking about. I started saying a long time ago that they should just start posting signs at every border crossing, airport and port: "This State contains chemicals known to the State of California to cause cancer, birth defects, and other reproductive harm." It would cover all the bases and save us a lot of trouble.
I sometimes wonder if the creation of that proposition was actually a very clever black op by the people most liable to lawsuits from _actual_ contamination. Now they can put up signs to get out from the legal liability without anyone paying any attention to them because everyone else has the same sign out front.
Well as someone who already owned those things because he had a GameCube that seems backwards compatible to me. Admittedly it's a slightly fuzzy area, but you wouldn't have to buy anything to play the game on the Wii that you wouldn't already have had to buy to play on the GameCube.
I don't use the screen controls on my Nexus 7. I've got a PS3 controller synched to it via the Sixaxis Controller app. I have no idea what a Kazzo or a Retrode are, and i seem able to play the games on my PC and tablet just fine, though i'm not sure why you're making a big deal out of that. It's not like i was claiming they were somehow backwards compatible with consoles in the first place =P
Community developed code is insecure! Community developed code is inferior! Open source must be exterminated! Exterminate! Exterminate!
Of course in the show the Daleks are supposed to be a huge threat, but they're also kind of laughable. Slow, clumsy, thrown together using whatever crap happened to by lying around at the time.
So i guess that kind of fits Oracle and its software as well.
I didn't know that about the Atari 7800. We went from the 2600 to the ColecoVision, which could actually play 2600 games with the use of a special adapter, but having to buy an extra piece of hardware doesn't really count as real backwards comaptibility in my book. I had a Sega Master system but never got any other Sega systems until the Dreamcast, so i wasn't aware of that backwards compatibiltiy either, though as previously mentioned i wouldn't personally count them as being truly backwards compatible because of the required adapter. Maybe i'm just easily impressed that they included all the "adapter" bits inside the PS2, but i felt like it was a big deal at the time.
There are definitely genres that work better on consoles, or at least are designed with that in mind. However i don't play a lot of sports or fighting or party games, so that's not a huge appeal to me. Most of what i play these days is JRPGs, tactics, strategy, tower defense, roguelikes, and Minecraft, all of which are well covered by the PC. Oh yeah, and replaying old NES and SNES games. Also well handled by both the PC and my Nexus 7:)
So? I never said it wasn't going to sell. I just said i'm not inclined to buy one right away. I was eager to get an SNES right away because A: i'd already played all my NES games (being a kid at the time i had a lot more free time for games) and B: the SNES offered a dramatic improvement over the NES. The PS4 just doesn't offer those advantages over the PS3.
And note that we expect new generations of consoles to do more than the previous generations. The PS2 playing PSX games was an incredibly awesome new feature. The fact that no other console had ever done that before was one of the selling points and part of why i got a PS2 on day one.
When the PS3 came out it had PS2 backwards compatibility but the price was extremely high. By the time the price got down to something i was starting to consider they dropped the backwards compatibility, which reduced the value to me and made the new lower price still not worth it, so i waited still longer. Meanwhile i was busy playing all the old PS2 games i still hadn't gotten around to and kept discovering i didn't really _need_ the PS3. Eventually there was a good enough deal on a PS3 that it was worth it even without the backwards compatibility, and i really don't feel like i suffered from waiting.
So now the PS4 seems to offer even less advantage over the PS3 than the PS3 offered over the PS2. The graphical leap isn't nearly as large and there's absolutely no backwards compatibility. The price is a bit more reasonable so i'll probably have a shorter wait until it gets down to something i consider worthwhile. I _just_ picked up Kingdom Hearts HD for the PS3 so i've got to finish that before i even think of getting a new console. And maybe by the time i'm done with that the Wii U will have gotten another price drop and i'll pick up one of those first. It could easily be over a year before i get around to getting a PS4. I might not get a PS4 until FF15 or Disgaea 5 come out. Or maybe those will suck (that's certainly the way FF15 looks to be heading) and i'll wait even longer.
And of course a confounding factor in all of this is the resurgence in PC games, mainly due to availability via Steam, which reduces the relative utility of all the consoles.
"Until now Sony has done a pretty good job of keeping future Playstation 4 owners happy."
Except for that little bit where there's zero backwards compatibility with PS3 games, beside which the lack of backwards compatibility for headsets is a pretty minor thing. It's certainly the #1 reason i'm not going to be getting a PS4 at launch. #2 of course being the wait until any initial hardware issues are resolved and #3 being that if i wait long enough there will be a price cut. I've got too many PS3 games i need to finish up and having to keep both the PS3 and PS4 hooked up at the same time seems like an annoyance.
He's right that, on average, the people in poor countries aren't the immediate problem. He's also right that we should be doing something about the immediate problem.
However focusing _solely_ on quick fixes to the immediate problem is exactly how we got into this problem in the first place. If we focus only on reducing the carbon output of the rich, then by the time we've got that under control we'll find that those poorer nations have developed the same kind of ecologically unfriendly economies that the rich nations have now, and we'll have to go through the whole fight against the same entrenched interests all over again.
Unless of course he's proposing that the poor nations should not or can not become economically developed, which i just don't believe to be the case. (If we want any kind of long term peace and stability on this planet we're going to have to bring everyone up to about the same economic level, but that's an argument for another post.)
He's making the same mistake that many a slashdotter does when a story comes up about someone spending time and money on the "wrong" thing. (Most frequently "on space" rather than "fixing stuff here on Earth.") We are not in some giant 4x game where we have to focus all our research and all our industry on a single project at a time. We can invest on improving the efficiency of developed nations while at the same time improving the capacity of poor nations in an ecologically friendly way.
After reading the wikipedia article, it's apparent that your example does not really demonstrate comparative advantage. "In economics, comparative advantage refers to the ability of a party to produce a particular good or service at a lower marginal and opportunity cost over another. Even if one country is more efficient in the production of all goods (absolute advantage in all goods) than the other, both countries will still gain by trading with each other, as long as they have different relative efficiencies."
From a bit further down in the article, " In Portugal it is possible to produce both wine and cloth with less labor than it would take to produce the same quantities in England. However the relative costs of producing those two goods are different in the two countries. In England it is very hard to produce wine, and only moderately difficult to produce cloth. In Portugal both are easy to produce. Therefore while it is cheaper to produce cloth in Portugal than England, it is cheaper still for Portugal to produce excess wine, and trade that for English cloth. Conversely England benefits from this trade because its cost for producing cloth has not changed but it can now get wine at a lower price, closer to the cost of cloth. The conclusion drawn is that each country can gain by specializing in the good where it has comparative advantage, and trading that good for the other."
Which is true, but it does mean that most of the wine producers in England and most of the cloth producers in Portugal are going to be out of a job and will have to learn how to do something else.
In your example the factory has an absolute advantage over both the basket weaver and the cobbler, but neither of them has a comparative advantage over the factory. Thus they have no incentive to trade with the factory whatsoever. The cobbler and basket weaver can ignore the output of the factory and keep trading their goods back and forth. However if the factory drives down the price of baskets and shoes in relation to food and housing then they'll have a hard time paying their rent and feeding themselves.
If _everything_ is automated, well you just argued that in order to keep their relative advantage the cobbler and basket weaver need to trade with each other rather than the factory. Which means they need to do all their trading with other people who are not taking advantage of the automation. Instead of buying food from the automated food factory they need to trade their non-automated shoes and baskets to the non-automated farmer for non-automated food. So now there's an entire second class of people doing everything by hand and ignoring the automation.
Unless you're saying that the cobbler will be selling their shoes for 49.9% of the original, to undercut the price of the factory, while the basket weaver is selling their baskets for 49.9% of the original price, and the farmer is selling their food for 49.9% of the original price, etc. But that works out to pretty much the same thing, there's a large class of people selling stuff for 49.9% of the original price and buying stuff for 49.9% or 50% of the original price, and none of them are getting any advantage from the factory.
Either the factories drive down the prices of some things disproportionately, and the people who originally make those goods suffer unless they can find a new job, or they drive down the price of everything equally, in which case you end up with two classes of people, those who can get new, more valuable jobs, and those who keep trading the same old goods around at a fraction of the original cost.
"We recently posted a contrary analysis arguing that the Luddites are wrong."
No, you said "The Luddites Are Almost Always Wrong", and then in the blurb you said, "Mike Masnick of Techdirt argues that we can all put down our wooden shoes and take a chill pill: technology 'rarely destroys jobs.'"
"This has never happened in the past, therefore it won't happen in the future" is a poor argument to begin with. (After all, i've never died in the past, therefore i shall live forever!) However saying "this rarely happened in the past, therefore we don't need to worry about it in the future" is an even worse argument.
Just to throw in a random car analogy, there are certainly intersections on smaller roads where you could say "crossing the road without looking both ways first is almost always safe." The fact that 99 out of 100 times it's perfectly safe won't help you much the 100th time you cross the street without looking and get creamed by an oncoming car.
Slashdot Mirror
"two years ago Richard Dawkins and Lawrence Krauss set off on a barnstorming tour to save the world from religion and promote science."
That is exactly the wrong way to do things. I'm not going to argue whether it is reasonable or not to believe in both science or religion, because regardless of that if you frame an argument as A is wrong and B is right then everyone who already believes in A is going to get defensive and angry and be even _less_ likely to accept B.
If that's not actually a misrepresentation and he's actually approaching the perceived problem by trying to bludgeon the opposing side into adopting his beliefs then he's doomed to failure, and the whole things is really just a "feel good" tour for atheists to feel superior about their "enlightened" beliefs.
This is all an overreaction. Everyone knows that a single isolated incident of a car bursting into flames after some kind of impact is no big deal. We shouldn't be concerned until at least three reports surface in the news. At which point it instantly becomes SERIOUS BUSINESS and must be investigated!
Every time there's a story about the trend of automating everything people worry that all the jobs are going to go away and there will be nothing left for anyone who isn't a brilliant scientist or talented artist. Well it actually makes sense to outlaw the automation of C&D letters by bots like the media industry is currently doing. One can make an entirely reasonable argument that this kind of legal activity needs to be performed by a human, not a machine. (At least up up until the point where we get true AI at least, and then everything goes out the window anyways.)
All we have to do is get a law passed saying that each C&D claim has to be reviewed by a real human who is employed by the company whose content is supposedly being infringed, plus specify a minimum amount of time necessary for the review. Huzah! At a minimum of one minute per C&D review (which could certainly be increased to five or even ten minutes if necessary,) 6.5 million C&Ds per week is at least 2,700 new jobs, and if the number keeps doubling every year... In less than two decades we could have an entire economy based around C&D letters!
I learned about a number of Black Friday and Cyber Monday sales through my Android phone. And in each case i then went and looked it up again on my PC for review before deciding whether or not to make a purchase.
Yet another thing, along with self-driving cars, Google Books, and Google Glass, that Vernor Vinge's 2006 novel seems to be on track for.
"I liked the fact that the active playlist was held completely separate from the library (as opposed to say...struggling with itunes)."
And perhaps even more importantly, both of them aren't intimately tied to the file system! I still remember the first (and only) time i accidentally added a file to iTunes and then immediately deleted it from iTunes only to find out that the actual file had been deleted in windows! It was also the last time i ever used iTunes for anything other than downloading podcasts.
And i still use the winamp. And as other people have mentioned elsewhere, i've had others comment on the fact. Twice in the past month or two coworkers have wandered by my desk and exclaimed "wow, you still use winamp?!" Everyone else seems to have moved on to streaming music players, but i've already got most of my music locally and don't see any reason to waste bandwidth downloading it over and over again.
I believe, given what's said in the comic, that what Munroe was objecting to was not quotations in general, but quoting, fur humorous purposes, material whose foundation for humor was its surreality. And _personally_ i would say that although some xkcd comics are certainly surreal, that is not actually the founding principle of xkcd. I'm sure opinions vary however. The comic in question here certainly has some surreal elements, but the comic itself is about a non-surreal topic, which is why it was referenced in the first place.
http://xkcd.com/16/
So hopefully they'll give us some new spontaneous material to drive into the ground with endless repetition for decades to come? (And i admit, i'm as guilty of that as the next geek.)
I actually went to see Gravity twice. Once in 2D, and then again in 3D because my company organized a trip. If i'd actually had to pay for the 3D version i would have been sorry. I stopped noticing the 3D effect about 5 minutes in. Then during the ISS scene a couple things flew directly at my face and made me flinch (which i do not count as a positive experience) and then i stopped noticing it again for the entire rest of the movie.
To be fair i've said the same thing about every other 3D movie i've seen (with the possible exception of How to Train Your Dragon, where at least the "let's show off the 3D in the middle" scene made me go "ooohh" rather than flinch) but Gravity isn't necessarily going to cure everyone of a preexisting case of 3D apathy.
Any value the movie has as social commentary is overshadowed by its total misuse of the source material. The claims by Verhoeven and other critics that the novel supports fascism are shallow at best. The characters in the novel engage in a number moral debates about the values of their system of government, which you can certainly disagree with but can't just wave away with a simple accusation of fascism. In fact there's evidence that Heinlein got the idea of universal service in the novel from Switzerland, which as we all know is a hotbed of fascism. [/sarcasm]
I'm afraid that might be the problem, exactly - you can't fit the same specs with a decent battery life in a smaller package easily.
Or you might, but at a premium, and the larger devices are already pushing the maximum the market will bear (there are not enough people willing to buy a smartphone at higher prices to justify large-scale production).
I'm pretty sure the first half of that isn't true, though you may be right on the second half. The lion's share of space taken up internally is by the battery. However the thing that uses the most power is generally the screen, so if you reduce the screen size you don't need as much battery.
The Droid Mini came very close to matching its larger cousin's specs. The only shortcoming, and it's a pretty large one, is that it only has 16 GB of storage. I don't know what the form factor is for internal flash memory but i doubt there's a significant difference in size between 16 GB and 32 GB, or even 64 GB. If they'd just included a decent amount of storage, and it wasn't exclusive to Verizon, i would have bought one instantly. But going by what seems to be the standard cell phone pricing scheme, the extra 16 GB of storage would have cost $50 more, and i guess they didn't think enough people would have been willing to pay that to make it worthwhile.
After all those weeks of rumors, how did they manage to still get the wrong specs _after_ the device was announced? According to the order page the CPU is 2.3 GHz, not 2.2.
It looks like a really nice phone, i just wish it wasn't so large. I know it's only "slightly" larger than the Nexus 4 due to the reduced bevel, but the Nexus 4 was already too large. I really want a nice phone with a 4.0" or 4.3" screen. (And no, the "Mini" versions of the HTC One, Galaxy S4 and Droid don't count. They reduced the CPU and/or RAM and/or Storage for all of those when they made them "Mini".)
"If you pushed someone into a black hole, could you beat the murder rap by pointing out that he still hadn't finished falling in, from the jury's reference frame?"
Possibly. But in that case they'd just convict you of a lesser charge and instead of giving you the death penalty they'd throw you into the black hole as well.
This. Too many times i've tried to look up something on wikipedia, either because it's a subject i care about or a subject i want to find out about, and discover there _was_ a page on it, but it was deleted for lack of notability. In the second case it's annoying because it's entirely defeating the purpose of a reference work, trying to look up things i don't already know about. If it was more notable i probably would have heard of whatever it was before and wouldn't need to look it up. In the first case, it just feels like a snub.
Then there's the bit where they keep deleting lists of things inside articles, particularly lists of trivia. Trivia lists are one of the quickest and most rewarding things to skim through. (This is why every site on the internet these days frequently posts articles in the form of lists. They get a lot of hits.)
Which is why for any kind of fictional thing i often head to TVTropes before checking out Wikipedia. It's sometimes less informative but it's usually more fun, and i don't get the feeling there's a band of people running around deleting the stuff i'm interested in.
"(with a tip of the hat to another state, whose stupidity created similarily named labels). And now, moderators who live in those two states... fire up the 'overrated' and 'troll' buttons, and I apologize I kept you waiting so long."
Wait, do you honestly think you're going to find anyone from California who's eager to defend the Prop 65 signs? At least i presume that's what you're talking about. I started saying a long time ago that they should just start posting signs at every border crossing, airport and port: "This State contains chemicals known to the State of California to cause cancer, birth defects, and other reproductive harm." It would cover all the bases and save us a lot of trouble.
I sometimes wonder if the creation of that proposition was actually a very clever black op by the people most liable to lawsuits from _actual_ contamination. Now they can put up signs to get out from the legal liability without anyone paying any attention to them because everyone else has the same sign out front.
Will this allow them to predict what compounds will make the best super-high-temperature superconductors, like Leland Hobart's periodic table of superconducting compounds?
Well as someone who already owned those things because he had a GameCube that seems backwards compatible to me. Admittedly it's a slightly fuzzy area, but you wouldn't have to buy anything to play the game on the Wii that you wouldn't already have had to buy to play on the GameCube.
I don't use the screen controls on my Nexus 7. I've got a PS3 controller synched to it via the Sixaxis Controller app. I have no idea what a Kazzo or a Retrode are, and i seem able to play the games on my PC and tablet just fine, though i'm not sure why you're making a big deal out of that. It's not like i was claiming they were somehow backwards compatible with consoles in the first place =P
Community developed code is insecure! Community developed code is inferior! Open source must be exterminated! Exterminate! Exterminate!
Of course in the show the Daleks are supposed to be a huge threat, but they're also kind of laughable. Slow, clumsy, thrown together using whatever crap happened to by lying around at the time.
So i guess that kind of fits Oracle and its software as well.
I didn't know that about the Atari 7800. We went from the 2600 to the ColecoVision, which could actually play 2600 games with the use of a special adapter, but having to buy an extra piece of hardware doesn't really count as real backwards comaptibility in my book. I had a Sega Master system but never got any other Sega systems until the Dreamcast, so i wasn't aware of that backwards compatibiltiy either, though as previously mentioned i wouldn't personally count them as being truly backwards compatible because of the required adapter. Maybe i'm just easily impressed that they included all the "adapter" bits inside the PS2, but i felt like it was a big deal at the time.
:)
There are definitely genres that work better on consoles, or at least are designed with that in mind. However i don't play a lot of sports or fighting or party games, so that's not a huge appeal to me. Most of what i play these days is JRPGs, tactics, strategy, tower defense, roguelikes, and Minecraft, all of which are well covered by the PC. Oh yeah, and replaying old NES and SNES games. Also well handled by both the PC and my Nexus 7
So? I never said it wasn't going to sell. I just said i'm not inclined to buy one right away. I was eager to get an SNES right away because A: i'd already played all my NES games (being a kid at the time i had a lot more free time for games) and B: the SNES offered a dramatic improvement over the NES. The PS4 just doesn't offer those advantages over the PS3.
And note that we expect new generations of consoles to do more than the previous generations. The PS2 playing PSX games was an incredibly awesome new feature. The fact that no other console had ever done that before was one of the selling points and part of why i got a PS2 on day one.
When the PS3 came out it had PS2 backwards compatibility but the price was extremely high. By the time the price got down to something i was starting to consider they dropped the backwards compatibility, which reduced the value to me and made the new lower price still not worth it, so i waited still longer. Meanwhile i was busy playing all the old PS2 games i still hadn't gotten around to and kept discovering i didn't really _need_ the PS3. Eventually there was a good enough deal on a PS3 that it was worth it even without the backwards compatibility, and i really don't feel like i suffered from waiting.
So now the PS4 seems to offer even less advantage over the PS3 than the PS3 offered over the PS2. The graphical leap isn't nearly as large and there's absolutely no backwards compatibility. The price is a bit more reasonable so i'll probably have a shorter wait until it gets down to something i consider worthwhile. I _just_ picked up Kingdom Hearts HD for the PS3 so i've got to finish that before i even think of getting a new console. And maybe by the time i'm done with that the Wii U will have gotten another price drop and i'll pick up one of those first. It could easily be over a year before i get around to getting a PS4. I might not get a PS4 until FF15 or Disgaea 5 come out. Or maybe those will suck (that's certainly the way FF15 looks to be heading) and i'll wait even longer.
And of course a confounding factor in all of this is the resurgence in PC games, mainly due to availability via Steam, which reduces the relative utility of all the consoles.
"Until now Sony has done a pretty good job of keeping future Playstation 4 owners happy."
Except for that little bit where there's zero backwards compatibility with PS3 games, beside which the lack of backwards compatibility for headsets is a pretty minor thing. It's certainly the #1 reason i'm not going to be getting a PS4 at launch. #2 of course being the wait until any initial hardware issues are resolved and #3 being that if i wait long enough there will be a price cut. I've got too many PS3 games i need to finish up and having to keep both the PS3 and PS4 hooked up at the same time seems like an annoyance.
He's right that, on average, the people in poor countries aren't the immediate problem. He's also right that we should be doing something about the immediate problem.
However focusing _solely_ on quick fixes to the immediate problem is exactly how we got into this problem in the first place. If we focus only on reducing the carbon output of the rich, then by the time we've got that under control we'll find that those poorer nations have developed the same kind of ecologically unfriendly economies that the rich nations have now, and we'll have to go through the whole fight against the same entrenched interests all over again.
Unless of course he's proposing that the poor nations should not or can not become economically developed, which i just don't believe to be the case. (If we want any kind of long term peace and stability on this planet we're going to have to bring everyone up to about the same economic level, but that's an argument for another post.)
He's making the same mistake that many a slashdotter does when a story comes up about someone spending time and money on the "wrong" thing. (Most frequently "on space" rather than "fixing stuff here on Earth.") We are not in some giant 4x game where we have to focus all our research and all our industry on a single project at a time. We can invest on improving the efficiency of developed nations while at the same time improving the capacity of poor nations in an ecologically friendly way.
After reading the wikipedia article, it's apparent that your example does not really demonstrate comparative advantage. "In economics, comparative advantage refers to the ability of a party to produce a particular good or service at a lower marginal and opportunity cost over another. Even if one country is more efficient in the production of all goods (absolute advantage in all goods) than the other, both countries will still gain by trading with each other, as long as they have different relative efficiencies."
From a bit further down in the article, " In Portugal it is possible to produce both wine and cloth with less labor than it would take to produce the same quantities in England. However the relative costs of producing those two goods are different in the two countries. In England it is very hard to produce wine, and only moderately difficult to produce cloth. In Portugal both are easy to produce. Therefore while it is cheaper to produce cloth in Portugal than England, it is cheaper still for Portugal to produce excess wine, and trade that for English cloth. Conversely England benefits from this trade because its cost for producing cloth has not changed but it can now get wine at a lower price, closer to the cost of cloth. The conclusion drawn is that each country can gain by specializing in the good where it has comparative advantage, and trading that good for the other."
Which is true, but it does mean that most of the wine producers in England and most of the cloth producers in Portugal are going to be out of a job and will have to learn how to do something else.
In your example the factory has an absolute advantage over both the basket weaver and the cobbler, but neither of them has a comparative advantage over the factory. Thus they have no incentive to trade with the factory whatsoever. The cobbler and basket weaver can ignore the output of the factory and keep trading their goods back and forth. However if the factory drives down the price of baskets and shoes in relation to food and housing then they'll have a hard time paying their rent and feeding themselves.
If _everything_ is automated, well you just argued that in order to keep their relative advantage the cobbler and basket weaver need to trade with each other rather than the factory. Which means they need to do all their trading with other people who are not taking advantage of the automation. Instead of buying food from the automated food factory they need to trade their non-automated shoes and baskets to the non-automated farmer for non-automated food. So now there's an entire second class of people doing everything by hand and ignoring the automation.
Unless you're saying that the cobbler will be selling their shoes for 49.9% of the original, to undercut the price of the factory, while the basket weaver is selling their baskets for 49.9% of the original price, and the farmer is selling their food for 49.9% of the original price, etc. But that works out to pretty much the same thing, there's a large class of people selling stuff for 49.9% of the original price and buying stuff for 49.9% or 50% of the original price, and none of them are getting any advantage from the factory.
Either the factories drive down the prices of some things disproportionately, and the people who originally make those goods suffer unless they can find a new job, or they drive down the price of everything equally, in which case you end up with two classes of people, those who can get new, more valuable jobs, and those who keep trading the same old goods around at a fraction of the original cost.
"We recently posted a contrary analysis arguing that the Luddites are wrong."
No, you said "The Luddites Are Almost Always Wrong", and then in the blurb you said, "Mike Masnick of Techdirt argues that we can all put down our wooden shoes and take a chill pill: technology 'rarely destroys jobs.'"
"This has never happened in the past, therefore it won't happen in the future" is a poor argument to begin with. (After all, i've never died in the past, therefore i shall live forever!) However saying "this rarely happened in the past, therefore we don't need to worry about it in the future" is an even worse argument.
Just to throw in a random car analogy, there are certainly intersections on smaller roads where you could say "crossing the road without looking both ways first is almost always safe." The fact that 99 out of 100 times it's perfectly safe won't help you much the 100th time you cross the street without looking and get creamed by an oncoming car.
I'm sure it won't last, nothing this good ever does, but let's enjoy it while we can.