No, the difference is that there is a WIDE gulf between what you can do as a normal company and what you can do as a monopoly.
Apple controls roughly 10% of the personal computer market. They hold a monopoly only on computers that they make... which is what ever company holds, and is no monopoly at all.
Intel, on the other hand, took in 80% of the worldwide microprocessor revenue last year. This (arguably- this is part of what the court will have to decide) makes them a monopoly, which would make them subject to an entire different set of laws. These laws have been on the books for about 100 years, by the way, and are well known to all companies involved.
By the way, these laws exist entirely to protect the ability of the free market to function efficiently. When one player has enough power to not just out-compete all comers, but to actively sabotage them, there is very little that consumer choice can do about it.
This is why, for example, there have been rumors of lawsuits against Apple on antitrust grounds in the mp3 player market, but even there they only hold a 42% marketshare - hardly a monopoly.
So here's a question - why are people in third world countries working in sweatshops? For the most part, they aren't being forced to. Why are they doing that instead of subsistence farming, as their forefathers did for generations?
Because it pays better. Because it is an improvement on their life. Living conditions for the average person in China have skyrocketed since they started allowing relatively free market companies to start operating there. You've seen the same thing in Japan, in Taiwan, in Korea. Labor is cheap in these markets because there weren't any better options for them before.
Now, you can argue that they aren't having as fulfilling lives or whatever as they did breaking their backs on a farm as opposed to over a Nike sewing machine... but that's their decision to make.
So yes, it is benefitting the poor, in a relative sense even more than it does us rich folk in developed countries.
Of course, there's also the fact that free markets have brought more people out of poverty than all of the social programs in the world. A libertarian would argue that the best thing you can do for a poor person is hire them, not give them charity.
Here's a fun little thought experiment - who has done more good in the world? A priest and social worker who feeds and clothes 100 people for no benefit to himself, or a man who founds a company with the express purpose of becoming obscenely wealthy and employs 1,000. The society that gives us leisure time to sit and argue this is built entirely on such greedy men. The libertarian goal is not to screw the people who are left out of the economy, but to allow the economy to grow until there is space for them.
There are two situations with chronic health problems - one where a person has been on a health insurance plan and paying it, and one where they haven't.
In the first case, their payments to the insurer were the expected value of their health, essentially - if they had a 1% chance of getting cancer that cost $100,000 to treat, they would be paying roughly $1,000 for the insurance - simplified of course, but it's the basic premise. So when they happen to be in the 1%, it doesn't matter, because that's what they paid for, and yes, it fits the insurance model.
When someone hasn't had insurance and has a chronic condition, though, it's more like asking someone to insurance a house that has already been washed away by a flood, and is built three feet from the water. There is a 100% chance that the insurer will have to pay more than they take in from the customer. If the insurer is forced to take these people in, the affected person must be subsidized by the rest of the insured. They are not paying the expected value of the cost of their care, because the probability is such that they *cannot* pay the expected value of their care. This is no longer insurance, it is charity. The closest working model that still looks like insurance would be, essentially, "insurance insurance" that everyone has to start buying to pay for the ability to continue buying insurance after you would stop being eligible for it. But again, that doesn't work for the people who haven't been paying that fee to begin with.
My point being, trying to buy insurance *after* you get an expensive disease is the same as buying car insurance after you crash, house insurance after it burns down, or life insurance after you die. Insurance is about balancing possible future payments, not certain ones.
Oh, I completely agree we can do better, and that civilized debate is unfortunately nowhere to be found. A large part of that is defining the problem in a reasonable fashion, and being honest about solutions.
We don't have a free market. We haven't since congress established our employer based health insurance system. We have a highly regulated industry where laws create essentially only 2-3 providers in each state. These providers sell primarily to businesses because of various tax laws. So most consumers of healthcare never see the real bill, and have no incentive to shop around or minimize the cost of procedures. When getting an x-ray or an MRI have the same deductible, which are you going to choose? People make decisions that they would not if they were paying the bills themselves, driving up the overall cost of insurance.
Adding to this, because most insurance is obtained with employment, increasing required benefits is seen as benefitting workers and normal people. This means in many states, insurance is required to pay for birth control, medications, and other procedures - this makes it more expensive (generally to the employer, so the cost is again hidden), but it also drives up costs for individuals who don't have employer-funded insurance. Most healthy young adults (the largest group who lacks insurance) can't buy a high-deductible, low-benefit plan that would only pay for catastrophic damage (similar to the minimum coverage car insurance many of them are also buying) because state law prevents it.
Finally, because voters are concerned about insurance companies bypassing the laws they have made about minimum insurance (which, again, make some sense when you see insurance as part of a benefits package from employers, not as something bought by the individual) they don't want insurance companies to be able to cross state lines. This preserves state's individual mandates for extended coverage, but reduces competition and overall increases prices.
The proposed solution for a public "option" attempts to solve the problem of availability and price for those without employer insurance without solving any of the other major issues contributing to the rising costs of medical care. Ignoring any argument about the proper role of government, there is a very hard problem here of how to run a government backed system that is simultaneously more efficient than private efforts (who have a very good reason to be efficient, as they lose money if they aren't) while not undercutting private industry to the point of driving it out of business. It is very hard for a private industry to compete with a government corporation who can mandate that people buy its product, or what prices its clients can charge. Two very likely (or at least very concerning) outcomes of this are that the public option fails to be more effective and becomes a bloated, inefficient arm of government that requires ever higher taxes and fees to administer, or that it succeeds and in doing so drives private industry out of business. Any government-backed company is not playing on a level field with its opposition. It is either operating under legislative mandates which hamstring it as a successful business, or with a government windfall that removes impetus for better management and hides the real costs of poor decisions.
Given all that, we have three groups of people who need to be served by healthcare: Those who have or can pay for "normal" insurance. Those who can't pay for normal insurance. Those who have an existing issue that prevents them from getting normal insurance.
The first group aren't really the problem at all - they pay for a good that they can afford, get some use out of, and are generally happy with. Few people are arguing that US healthcare is actively (or at least significantly) worse for those who do have insurance.
The second people can be fixed at least partially by lowering the cost of insurance, but many of them will still never carry it. Short of actively charging or imprisoning people
And the only reason that the primary method of providing healthcare is insurance is because of government tax laws for businesses.
If it weren't for that, everyone would still pay for medical expenses out of pocket, with some people choosing to have disaster-level insurance for major procedures, just like they do for car wrecks, unexpected death, and home fires.
There is a problem with people who have chronic, recurring problems. The thing is, at that point that person is essentially a charity case - whether it's charity through higher premiums everyone else pays or through a government mandate, they are someone who costs more to keep alive than they will produce with their life. The insurance model breaks down. That is still not a particularly good reason for trying to still ram them into an insurance model of any sort, government or otherwise.
Personally I'd love a purely free market approach, untied from employment, for the vast majority of people to cover unexpected horrible events, and possibly a government funded program that yes, rations funds, to pay for the charity cases.
Really depends on where you're doing it. I worked for a while with a lumberjack from the Minnesota/Wisconsin area. He said most of the cutting they did around there was selective cutting by individuals.
A fair amount of timber still comes out of private woodlots where owners have trees cut in stages every few years so that they have a steadier cash flow than if they just clear cut it.
They also practiced the same slash and burn agriculture that is now devastating the rainforest, their populations were just never high enough for it to catch up to them in the same way.
I'm still waiting for someone to explain to me why a relatively free market works so well for food, water, shelter, clothing, and heat (all basic human needs that are a much higher priority to one's continued existence) but fails for healthcare. Healthcare is not inherently a magical good that is not subject to market forces. No, using our ridiculous government-enforced, highly-regulated current model as an example of failure does not count. Our current system has some benefits (relatively good overall care if you can pay) and a ton of problems. No one who doesn't have their hand in the medical industry's pocket disagrees with that, it's just that people have decided that "reform" mean "have the government take it over completely."
I love this theory of constitutional protection. Please let me know when legislators start following it.
If you are wrongfully accused of murdering (insert ethnic group), and the FBI goes onto slashdot and sees you posting some rant about how much you hate (ethnic group)s, or even some jokes that could be misconstrued as your hating (ethnic group), that's going to appear in your trial.
No, I'm saying that they are not equivalent products.
I'm the sort of person who would choose a cheap but fun to drive car like a miata over a lexus any day. That's a value judgement on my part. That doesn't mean that the Lexus shouldn't cost more, because it's a nicer car.
The polish and production values in a modern game like MW2 far exceed that of small independent releases or a military sim. That is a factual statement that is completely independent of how fun the games are.
Also, if you say the MW2's gameplay is exactly the same as all FPS's for the last 12 years, you either don't like FPS or haven't been paying attention. The overall idea hasn't changed - the details have massively. Personally I'm not a huge fan of the CoD series because of some of these changes, but you're taking a very high-altitude view to say nothing's changed.
I never claimed that better graphics make a better game. I claimed that better graphics make a game with better graphics and better production. All other things being equal, better graphics improve a game. The fact that graphics are not a substitute for gameplay is irrelevant.
I thought that by now it was a fairly heavily modified Unreal engine. I knew it was based on the tech, wasn't sure how close to its roots they stayed. In any case, they're still paying however many millions of dollars in licensing fees on it and not really using it.
There are plenty of general-purpose mil-sim engines, but they're built by private defense contractors and generally sold along with that contractor's expertise in setting up a more complete sim. There's a fair amount of overlap sometimes between more air and ground oriented ones. Meta-VR is the gorilla in the room most of the time. I used to work on a startup one called Vision, but it didn't sell too many copies outside of our own contracts. There are a few others. Many of them are just a wrapper on open scene graph with handling for DIS and other mil-sim protocols built in.
Had a bit of experience with Delta3D. I don't think too many people are actually using it - it's an academic project to cobble together a bunch of open-source gaming libraries - take OSG, add cal3d for character animation, etc. We were talking with them for a while about working on improving cal3d and adding a better character-scripting interface on top of it at some point - the sort of thing that is obvious in most gaming libraries, but sadly lacking from most mil-sims - but I don't think it ever went anywhere.
There just isn't money in it. Most of these sims are maintained by 2-3 guys who sort of do whatever the next government contract needs out of it, rather than building something that is a whole product. They then sell the engine, internally or externally, to the contractor whose job it is to build and maintain the PCs or simulators or whatever the troops are actually going to use. Those guys take some map data and probably 1-2 artists total (as compared to the dozens to hundreds of artists working on a commercial game) to cludge it together into something that vaguely resembles fort benning enough that they can use it for simulation.
But there's nowhere close to as much money in it as the game industry, and it isn't as glamorous, so instead you have something with 90's level tech and horrible artwork that costs $10,000 a seat. Ah, niche markets.
The fact that people regularly breaks the law means that everyone is a criminal under some law. You apparently missed the point of my post as well - it's not about sticking it to the man. It's about the physical impossibilities of a) never being guilty of some crime as a citizen and b) enforcing all crime consistently as a law enforcement system.
When you have such a byzantine legal structure that can change whenever a new party is put into power, many laws become not the consistent framework that citizens and police dutifully follow. Yes, there are still parts of the law that are that way - murder, for example, is something everyone knows is bad and that police will generally prosecute you for only if you actually committed it.
But leaving aside, just for the moment, the separate problem of false positives ("oh, you were searching for 'how do I murder my wife and get away with it' because you were just have an intellectual interest in serial killers") you have the basic fact that in a legal system such as ours, one only needs to go digging to find something illegal a person has done that they can be prosecuted for.
My point is that we are all already guilty of some crime that we either didn't know about, or thought that was on the books but no one ever enforces it. Therefore, if we piss off the wrong person, run into a random official on a holy crusade against X, or just happen to be in the wrong place at the wrong time, we can be punished under the full weight of the law. EVERYONE has something to hide, because EVERYONE is guilty of something, and they just aren't being prosecuted for it. You never know what a blind search can turn up. Saying that "if you break the law, you should expect the consequences" is a beautiful thought in an ideal world and legal system. This is not the legal system we live in.
If you prosecuted every person who is a criminal under pornography, sex, and copyright laws you would have to imprison almost the entire country. That is what I mean by "capricious and inconsistent." *some* people do go to trial for those crimes. Which people those are is (at best) entirely random or (at worst) politically or personally motivated.
Someone obviously hasn't looked at the games side by side.
Most of the manpower cost of a video game is artist time. DoD games and military sim stuff looks like crap comparatively because they don't put millions of dollars into artists. When I played America's Army the visual quality was about the same as most fan mods to commercial games.
Although what amazes me is that the army spends millions building their own game and engine, then still turns around and spends $10k/seat on meta-VR for all of their sim training. I mean, I get it for large scale sims - as someone who worked in this area, there is a big difference between building a military sim engine that can span hundreds or thousands of miles and a video game engine that will span two - but for a lot of the small-scale infantry work like the fort benning training, I really don't see the point.
Supposedly they were looking at finally correcting that issue - I was at one point going to be the guy doing some of the work to make the game read mil-sim protocols, actually, before that part of the contract fell through. I wonder if they've made any progress since then.
Nearly everyone in here broke the speed limit on their way to work, has pornography that is considered illegal in some states, software that is being used outside of its licensing terms, used drugs that are illegal somewhere in the world, music or movies that violate copyright law, and probably had sex in a way that is illegal in many states and cities. Not to mention the fact that you will be hard-pressed to find someone who does not have opinions they have expressed that could be used to incriminate them of something in the wrong context, or that some people who want to be political power consider to be illegal.
Laws are arbitrary rules written by those in charge. Rules that can change, rules that can be enforced capriciously and inconsistently. YOU PERSONALLY have done something illegal in that last year, and probably several things that a large number of people would like to make illegal. Lawyers and judges study the law for years, and even they only know a small subset of what actually is legal and illegal in any given area.
It's a trite maxim, but it's true. Here's a great video from a lawyer and a cop about why the right against to self-incrimination and privacy is so important even to people who don't think they have anything to hide. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=i8z7NC5sgik
Any job is going to be completely dependent on the company. Remember that you are interviewing the company as much as they are interviewing you. If you are actually good - that is, you are one of the developers who gets it, who can write good code, who is self-driven and learns quickly and does their job, even if you don't have any experience you are still worth your weight in gold to a good company. At my internship, the first thing my boss did was tell me that she would kick the ass of anyone who asked me to make coffee. It was interesting and I learned a ton. I try to provide the same experience for any interns we have at my current job - writing real code (or at least solid qa work) where they can actually get their feet wet.
If your company isn't doing that. find another one, because they're wasting your time.
Did that article seriously try to argue that a new spaceplane was going to be an ecological breakthrough? No, no, no! SS2 is cool because it's a spaceship, not because it's engines are fricking low-carbon.
Pollution control isn't about spending five cents more on your Happy Meal toy, it's about getting to enjoy a middle class living instead of farming shit for a living.
Whatever feel-good economy-crippling regulations you enforce on developed countries, it won't mean jack for the planet until someone makes it cheaper for China use solar panels than coal. Because when you're just trying to make a decent life for yourself, whether the world might be 1 degree hotter in fifty years or not isn't something you worry about.
It's still a cleaner system than anything else I've seen, because it keeps it all within the game's normal economy. Cheap players can keep playing for essentially free, and rich dudes can get the stuff that they would have paid someone to gold farm anyway. It at least *feels* like much less of a money grab.
If you live pretty much anywhere urban you can get along fine without a car. Only about 50-60% of people actually drive a car every day. That's a HUGE difference. As important as they are to many Americans, cars are not a requirement for life.
It's typical because American unions are pretty pathetic.
There's a balancing act. Unions definitely brought us out of child labor, into safer working conditions and a reasonable workweek in many semi-skilled professions.
But they have also produced people who cannot be laid off, even when a job no longer exists for them to do. You cannot run a company on that.
Once a labor becomes big enough it starts having the problem of all organizations - it exists for the organization, not for the membership. The head of my mom's teacher's union makes 10x what any teacher makes, and most bargaining they've done has only protected the bad teachers and lowered salaries. In the US, most union shops end up with promotion by seniority, not production, and that's failure waiting to happen.
The difference is that in rural America, wal-mart may be the only vendor for many items within a 40 minute drive.
Growing up, I bought my jeans at wal-mart, because Old Navy etc were 45 minutes away. Same for appliances, toys, sports supplies. A town of 10,000 will usually have a wal-mart, but it doesn't have much else to go to any more. Going to the mall was a relatively special occasion, not your regular shopping run.
Oh, I should add - connecting down the road shouldn't be particularly more expensive aside from adjusting to inflation. It's essentially the same work you do when a new house is put in. The only difference would be how the entity paying for the infrastructure amortizes costs over total users. I would assume that whoever is running lines is amortizing over all the work they do, not that specific project, so while my neighbor's costs might have paid for their line my future costs would pay for someone else's line.
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No, the difference is that there is a WIDE gulf between what you can do as a normal company and what you can do as a monopoly.
Apple controls roughly 10% of the personal computer market. They hold a monopoly only on computers that they make... which is what ever company holds, and is no monopoly at all.
Intel, on the other hand, took in 80% of the worldwide microprocessor revenue last year. This (arguably- this is part of what the court will have to decide) makes them a monopoly, which would make them subject to an entire different set of laws. These laws have been on the books for about 100 years, by the way, and are well known to all companies involved.
By the way, these laws exist entirely to protect the ability of the free market to function efficiently. When one player has enough power to not just out-compete all comers, but to actively sabotage them, there is very little that consumer choice can do about it.
This is why, for example, there have been rumors of lawsuits against Apple on antitrust grounds in the mp3 player market, but even there they only hold a 42% marketshare - hardly a monopoly.
So here's a question - why are people in third world countries working in sweatshops? For the most part, they aren't being forced to. Why are they doing that instead of subsistence farming, as their forefathers did for generations?
Because it pays better. Because it is an improvement on their life. Living conditions for the average person in China have skyrocketed since they started allowing relatively free market companies to start operating there. You've seen the same thing in Japan, in Taiwan, in Korea. Labor is cheap in these markets because there weren't any better options for them before.
Now, you can argue that they aren't having as fulfilling lives or whatever as they did breaking their backs on a farm as opposed to over a Nike sewing machine... but that's their decision to make.
So yes, it is benefitting the poor, in a relative sense even more than it does us rich folk in developed countries.
Of course, there's also the fact that free markets have brought more people out of poverty than all of the social programs in the world. A libertarian would argue that the best thing you can do for a poor person is hire them, not give them charity.
Here's a fun little thought experiment - who has done more good in the world? A priest and social worker who feeds and clothes 100 people for no benefit to himself, or a man who founds a company with the express purpose of becoming obscenely wealthy and employs 1,000. The society that gives us leisure time to sit and argue this is built entirely on such greedy men. The libertarian goal is not to screw the people who are left out of the economy, but to allow the economy to grow until there is space for them.
There are two situations with chronic health problems - one where a person has been on a health insurance plan and paying it, and one where they haven't.
In the first case, their payments to the insurer were the expected value of their health, essentially - if they had a 1% chance of getting cancer that cost $100,000 to treat, they would be paying roughly $1,000 for the insurance - simplified of course, but it's the basic premise. So when they happen to be in the 1%, it doesn't matter, because that's what they paid for, and yes, it fits the insurance model.
When someone hasn't had insurance and has a chronic condition, though, it's more like asking someone to insurance a house that has already been washed away by a flood, and is built three feet from the water. There is a 100% chance that the insurer will have to pay more than they take in from the customer. If the insurer is forced to take these people in, the affected person must be subsidized by the rest of the insured. They are not paying the expected value of the cost of their care, because the probability is such that they *cannot* pay the expected value of their care. This is no longer insurance, it is charity. The closest working model that still looks like insurance would be, essentially, "insurance insurance" that everyone has to start buying to pay for the ability to continue buying insurance after you would stop being eligible for it. But again, that doesn't work for the people who haven't been paying that fee to begin with.
My point being, trying to buy insurance *after* you get an expensive disease is the same as buying car insurance after you crash, house insurance after it burns down, or life insurance after you die. Insurance is about balancing possible future payments, not certain ones.
Oh, I completely agree we can do better, and that civilized debate is unfortunately nowhere to be found. A large part of that is defining the problem in a reasonable fashion, and being honest about solutions.
We don't have a free market. We haven't since congress established our employer based health insurance system. We have a highly regulated industry where laws create essentially only 2-3 providers in each state. These providers sell primarily to businesses because of various tax laws. So most consumers of healthcare never see the real bill, and have no incentive to shop around or minimize the cost of procedures. When getting an x-ray or an MRI have the same deductible, which are you going to choose? People make decisions that they would not if they were paying the bills themselves, driving up the overall cost of insurance.
Adding to this, because most insurance is obtained with employment, increasing required benefits is seen as benefitting workers and normal people. This means in many states, insurance is required to pay for birth control, medications, and other procedures - this makes it more expensive (generally to the employer, so the cost is again hidden), but it also drives up costs for individuals who don't have employer-funded insurance. Most healthy young adults (the largest group who lacks insurance) can't buy a high-deductible, low-benefit plan that would only pay for catastrophic damage (similar to the minimum coverage car insurance many of them are also buying) because state law prevents it.
Finally, because voters are concerned about insurance companies bypassing the laws they have made about minimum insurance (which, again, make some sense when you see insurance as part of a benefits package from employers, not as something bought by the individual) they don't want insurance companies to be able to cross state lines. This preserves state's individual mandates for extended coverage, but reduces competition and overall increases prices.
The proposed solution for a public "option" attempts to solve the problem of availability and price for those without employer insurance without solving any of the other major issues contributing to the rising costs of medical care. Ignoring any argument about the proper role of government, there is a very hard problem here of how to run a government backed system that is simultaneously more efficient than private efforts (who have a very good reason to be efficient, as they lose money if they aren't) while not undercutting private industry to the point of driving it out of business. It is very hard for a private industry to compete with a government corporation who can mandate that people buy its product, or what prices its clients can charge. Two very likely (or at least very concerning) outcomes of this are that the public option fails to be more effective and becomes a bloated, inefficient arm of government that requires ever higher taxes and fees to administer, or that it succeeds and in doing so drives private industry out of business. Any government-backed company is not playing on a level field with its opposition. It is either operating under legislative mandates which hamstring it as a successful business, or with a government windfall that removes impetus for better management and hides the real costs of poor decisions.
Given all that, we have three groups of people who need to be served by healthcare:
Those who have or can pay for "normal" insurance.
Those who can't pay for normal insurance.
Those who have an existing issue that prevents them from getting normal insurance.
The first group aren't really the problem at all - they pay for a good that they can afford, get some use out of, and are generally happy with. Few people are arguing that US healthcare is actively (or at least significantly) worse for those who do have insurance.
The second people can be fixed at least partially by lowering the cost of insurance, but many of them will still never carry it. Short of actively charging or imprisoning people
And the only reason that the primary method of providing healthcare is insurance is because of government tax laws for businesses.
If it weren't for that, everyone would still pay for medical expenses out of pocket, with some people choosing to have disaster-level insurance for major procedures, just like they do for car wrecks, unexpected death, and home fires.
There is a problem with people who have chronic, recurring problems. The thing is, at that point that person is essentially a charity case - whether it's charity through higher premiums everyone else pays or through a government mandate, they are someone who costs more to keep alive than they will produce with their life. The insurance model breaks down. That is still not a particularly good reason for trying to still ram them into an insurance model of any sort, government or otherwise.
Personally I'd love a purely free market approach, untied from employment, for the vast majority of people to cover unexpected horrible events, and possibly a government funded program that yes, rations funds, to pay for the charity cases.
Really depends on where you're doing it. I worked for a while with a lumberjack from the Minnesota/Wisconsin area. He said most of the cutting they did around there was selective cutting by individuals.
A fair amount of timber still comes out of private woodlots where owners have trees cut in stages every few years so that they have a steadier cash flow than if they just clear cut it.
They also practiced the same slash and burn agriculture that is now devastating the rainforest, their populations were just never high enough for it to catch up to them in the same way.
I'm still waiting for someone to explain to me why a relatively free market works so well for food, water, shelter, clothing, and heat (all basic human needs that are a much higher priority to one's continued existence) but fails for healthcare. Healthcare is not inherently a magical good that is not subject to market forces. No, using our ridiculous government-enforced, highly-regulated current model as an example of failure does not count. Our current system has some benefits (relatively good overall care if you can pay) and a ton of problems. No one who doesn't have their hand in the medical industry's pocket disagrees with that, it's just that people have decided that "reform" mean "have the government take it over completely."
Really?
http://www.religioustolerance.org/hom_hat3.htm
I love this theory of constitutional protection. Please let me know when legislators start following it.
If you are wrongfully accused of murdering (insert ethnic group), and the FBI goes onto slashdot and sees you posting some rant about how much you hate (ethnic group)s, or even some jokes that could be misconstrued as your hating (ethnic group), that's going to appear in your trial.
No, I'm saying that they are not equivalent products.
I'm the sort of person who would choose a cheap but fun to drive car like a miata over a lexus any day. That's a value judgement on my part. That doesn't mean that the Lexus shouldn't cost more, because it's a nicer car.
The polish and production values in a modern game like MW2 far exceed that of small independent releases or a military sim. That is a factual statement that is completely independent of how fun the games are.
Also, if you say the MW2's gameplay is exactly the same as all FPS's for the last 12 years, you either don't like FPS or haven't been paying attention. The overall idea hasn't changed - the details have massively. Personally I'm not a huge fan of the CoD series because of some of these changes, but you're taking a very high-altitude view to say nothing's changed.
I never claimed that better graphics make a better game. I claimed that better graphics make a game with better graphics and better production. All other things being equal, better graphics improve a game. The fact that graphics are not a substitute for gameplay is irrelevant.
Yes, I know. They paid the millions in licensing fees for it, though, and did enough modification to make it into a game.
I thought that by now it was a fairly heavily modified Unreal engine. I knew it was based on the tech, wasn't sure how close to its roots they stayed. In any case, they're still paying however many millions of dollars in licensing fees on it and not really using it.
There are plenty of general-purpose mil-sim engines, but they're built by private defense contractors and generally sold along with that contractor's expertise in setting up a more complete sim. There's a fair amount of overlap sometimes between more air and ground oriented ones. Meta-VR is the gorilla in the room most of the time. I used to work on a startup one called Vision, but it didn't sell too many copies outside of our own contracts. There are a few others. Many of them are just a wrapper on open scene graph with handling for DIS and other mil-sim protocols built in.
Had a bit of experience with Delta3D. I don't think too many people are actually using it - it's an academic project to cobble together a bunch of open-source gaming libraries - take OSG, add cal3d for character animation, etc. We were talking with them for a while about working on improving cal3d and adding a better character-scripting interface on top of it at some point - the sort of thing that is obvious in most gaming libraries, but sadly lacking from most mil-sims - but I don't think it ever went anywhere.
There just isn't money in it. Most of these sims are maintained by 2-3 guys who sort of do whatever the next government contract needs out of it, rather than building something that is a whole product. They then sell the engine, internally or externally, to the contractor whose job it is to build and maintain the PCs or simulators or whatever the troops are actually going to use. Those guys take some map data and probably 1-2 artists total (as compared to the dozens to hundreds of artists working on a commercial game) to cludge it together into something that vaguely resembles fort benning enough that they can use it for simulation.
But there's nowhere close to as much money in it as the game industry, and it isn't as glamorous, so instead you have something with 90's level tech and horrible artwork that costs $10,000 a seat. Ah, niche markets.
The fact that people regularly breaks the law means that everyone is a criminal under some law. You apparently missed the point of my post as well - it's not about sticking it to the man. It's about the physical impossibilities of a) never being guilty of some crime as a citizen and b) enforcing all crime consistently as a law enforcement system.
When you have such a byzantine legal structure that can change whenever a new party is put into power, many laws become not the consistent framework that citizens and police dutifully follow. Yes, there are still parts of the law that are that way - murder, for example, is something everyone knows is bad and that police will generally prosecute you for only if you actually committed it.
But leaving aside, just for the moment, the separate problem of false positives ("oh, you were searching for 'how do I murder my wife and get away with it' because you were just have an intellectual interest in serial killers") you have the basic fact that in a legal system such as ours, one only needs to go digging to find something illegal a person has done that they can be prosecuted for.
My point is that we are all already guilty of some crime that we either didn't know about, or thought that was on the books but no one ever enforces it. Therefore, if we piss off the wrong person, run into a random official on a holy crusade against X, or just happen to be in the wrong place at the wrong time, we can be punished under the full weight of the law. EVERYONE has something to hide, because EVERYONE is guilty of something, and they just aren't being prosecuted for it. You never know what a blind search can turn up. Saying that "if you break the law, you should expect the consequences" is a beautiful thought in an ideal world and legal system. This is not the legal system we live in.
If you prosecuted every person who is a criminal under pornography, sex, and copyright laws you would have to imprison almost the entire country. That is what I mean by "capricious and inconsistent." *some* people do go to trial for those crimes. Which people those are is (at best) entirely random or (at worst) politically or personally motivated.
Someone obviously hasn't looked at the games side by side.
Most of the manpower cost of a video game is artist time. DoD games and military sim stuff looks like crap comparatively because they don't put millions of dollars into artists. When I played America's Army the visual quality was about the same as most fan mods to commercial games.
Although what amazes me is that the army spends millions building their own game and engine, then still turns around and spends $10k/seat on meta-VR for all of their sim training. I mean, I get it for large scale sims - as someone who worked in this area, there is a big difference between building a military sim engine that can span hundreds or thousands of miles and a video game engine that will span two - but for a lot of the small-scale infantry work like the fort benning training, I really don't see the point.
Supposedly they were looking at finally correcting that issue - I was at one point going to be the guy doing some of the work to make the game read mil-sim protocols, actually, before that part of the contract fell through. I wonder if they've made any progress since then.
Please stop spewing ridiculous idealism.
Nearly everyone in here broke the speed limit on their way to work, has pornography that is considered illegal in some states, software that is being used outside of its licensing terms, used drugs that are illegal somewhere in the world, music or movies that violate copyright law, and probably had sex in a way that is illegal in many states and cities. Not to mention the fact that you will be hard-pressed to find someone who does not have opinions they have expressed that could be used to incriminate them of something in the wrong context, or that some people who want to be political power consider to be illegal.
Laws are arbitrary rules written by those in charge. Rules that can change, rules that can be enforced capriciously and inconsistently. YOU PERSONALLY have done something illegal in that last year, and probably several things that a large number of people would like to make illegal. Lawyers and judges study the law for years, and even they only know a small subset of what actually is legal and illegal in any given area.
It's a trite maxim, but it's true. Here's a great video from a lawyer and a cop about why the right against to self-incrimination and privacy is so important even to people who don't think they have anything to hide. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=i8z7NC5sgik
Any job is going to be completely dependent on the company. Remember that you are interviewing the company as much as they are interviewing you. If you are actually good - that is, you are one of the developers who gets it, who can write good code, who is self-driven and learns quickly and does their job, even if you don't have any experience you are still worth your weight in gold to a good company. At my internship, the first thing my boss did was tell me that she would kick the ass of anyone who asked me to make coffee. It was interesting and I learned a ton. I try to provide the same experience for any interns we have at my current job - writing real code (or at least solid qa work) where they can actually get their feet wet.
If your company isn't doing that. find another one, because they're wasting your time.
The problem is that everyone is a wrongdoer by someone's definition.
Did that article seriously try to argue that a new spaceplane was going to be an ecological breakthrough? No, no, no! SS2 is cool because it's a spaceship, not because it's engines are fricking low-carbon.
Pollution control isn't about spending five cents more on your Happy Meal toy, it's about getting to enjoy a middle class living instead of farming shit for a living.
Whatever feel-good economy-crippling regulations you enforce on developed countries, it won't mean jack for the planet until someone makes it cheaper for China use solar panels than coal. Because when you're just trying to make a decent life for yourself, whether the world might be 1 degree hotter in fifty years or not isn't something you worry about.
It's still a cleaner system than anything else I've seen, because it keeps it all within the game's normal economy. Cheap players can keep playing for essentially free, and rich dudes can get the stuff that they would have paid someone to gold farm anyway. It at least *feels* like much less of a money grab.
If you live pretty much anywhere urban you can get along fine without a car. Only about 50-60% of people actually drive a car every day. That's a HUGE difference. As important as they are to many Americans, cars are not a requirement for life.
It's typical because American unions are pretty pathetic.
There's a balancing act. Unions definitely brought us out of child labor, into safer working conditions and a reasonable workweek in many semi-skilled professions.
But they have also produced people who cannot be laid off, even when a job no longer exists for them to do. You cannot run a company on that.
Once a labor becomes big enough it starts having the problem of all organizations - it exists for the organization, not for the membership. The head of my mom's teacher's union makes 10x what any teacher makes, and most bargaining they've done has only protected the bad teachers and lowered salaries. In the US, most union shops end up with promotion by seniority, not production, and that's failure waiting to happen.
The difference is that in rural America, wal-mart may be the only vendor for many items within a 40 minute drive.
Growing up, I bought my jeans at wal-mart, because Old Navy etc were 45 minutes away. Same for appliances, toys, sports supplies. A town of 10,000 will usually have a wal-mart, but it doesn't have much else to go to any more. Going to the mall was a relatively special occasion, not your regular shopping run.
Oh, I should add - connecting down the road shouldn't be particularly more expensive aside from adjusting to inflation. It's essentially the same work you do when a new house is put in. The only difference would be how the entity paying for the infrastructure amortizes costs over total users. I would assume that whoever is running lines is amortizing over all the work they do, not that specific project, so while my neighbor's costs might have paid for their line my future costs would pay for someone else's line.