Yes, you could, buy doing that would almost be logistically impossible. Let's assume you went into a store and tried to buy every single copy on release day. The store has every single right to refuse sale to you and most stores probably would. Many stores have "1 per customer" rules to prevent this problem. I even see grocery stores do this all the time on sale items to so that customers don't get annoyed when all the sale items are gone. The other option is to go to Amazon.com and try to order all 100,000 copies they will ship in the next 2 days. However, if you try to place that all in 1 order, their system would probably flag it, or they would hold off shipping to you until a later date, when all the individual sales have been fulfilled. There's very few things where it's possible to buy up such a large percentage of something and also purchase something that won't be available later. Once all the tickets are sold, they are gone. You can't just wait a few days or weeks like you can with books and more will be produced. It's like saying you're going to buy all the iPads. You could, but then Apple will just keep on producing more. Most sane people would probably wait an extra couple of weeks for something than pay twice as much. You might be able to get some people on this, but most people who wanted iPad/Twilight/whatever, already pre-ordered 6 months before it came out and will get it delivered a couple days after it comes out.
Seriously, when I started reading I thought the "Grandma Problem" was going to be, "My grandma died and I can't go to the concert". I think that what really has to change here is to make it so that scalpers can't get a large number of tickets. I'm not sure of the exact mechanism which could accomplish this, but it would solve most of the problems. Since all sales are made online, they could track things such as IP address, credit card numbers, shipping address, captchas and many other things to figure out if somebody is buying too many tickets, or using a computer to buy a lot of tickets. Probably not fool proof, but if they make it hard enough, it could really cut down on scalpers.
The main question here is, are you actually buying anything, or are you just paying for a reservation, for you personally to sit in a specific seat. If airplane tickets have gone this long being non-transferable, then I'm sure that concert tickets could do the same. I'm not saying it doesn't suck, but if you don't like the terms and conditions, don't get the tickets.
Making it illegal still won't make it not happen. It's too easy for a ticket and the money to change hands, without anybody knowing it happened. The same reason you can't control scalpers is the same reason you can't control drugs. People are willing to pay high prices, and the product is too hard to track. I think most places have laws against scalping. It still happens.
You could always just not go to the show. When concert tickets already cost $100 or even much more, and then Ticket Master adds a $12 "convenience fee", which is mandatory, because there is no other way to get tickets, then I stop going to concerts. When I was in university, and I went to a lot of concerts, they were usually small shows at local bars. We never paid more than $20 for a concert ticket, sometimes as little as $5. And there's a lot of free tickets to interesting bands if you keep your eyes open. Why would I want to pay $100 to go to a venue with terrible sound, and sit 200 ft. from the band and the crowd is just filled with a bunch of people who happen to have a lot of money, but aren't all that interested in the music, when I can go to a smaller venue, pay $10, be 10 ft. from the band, the sound isn't any worse, and the crowd is really into it. I guess there's just too many people with too much money, and that's the reason they can demand outrageous prices, and even stoop to things like paperless tickets that you can't resell. Granted there are more people without money, but that's not important, because as long as there are enough people in each city on the tour to buy the tickets, it doesn't matter how much the real fans can afford.
Maybe the people who are trying to stop the information from going public are some of the same people who are exploiting the flaws. The more public the flaws, and the more people exploiting it, the more likely it is that the flaw will be fixed. If you were making lots of money from an existing flaw, wouldn't you want that flaw to remain open?
While I'm not sure if they are legally responsible, I would have to say that they do bear the cost. I have had my bank card duped twice in the last 4 years, and both times the bank fixed the problem before I even realized the money was gone. I'm not sure which banks you deal with, but of all the times I have had this happen to me, or any body I personally know, the bank has put the money back in the account very quickly. Granted it would be better if it didn't happen in the first place. However, depending on how severely the system is flawed, it may not be possible to fix the problem at all, without changing out all the current machines, and settling on a new standard, which may again have its own list of faults.
And yet 2D Boy was still able to release World of Goo for the Wii. Even though their office is "whichever free wi-fi coffee shop they wander into on a given day".
I agree. I think that the reader should be required to different read works of similar length and difficulty on each device. The reader should also have a break in between each reading. The order that the devices are being used in, and the piece being read on each device could be randomized. They should also be required to answer questions about the work to determine how well they understood what they read.
Only so long as console makers make it difficult/expensive to develop to their systems. Things have turned around in the last generation, with XNA and WiiWare (and probably something similar for PS3). A lot of small shops who would have never been able to make it in the old console world, because they lacked the ability to make it into the large retail chains, and buy extremely expensive dev kits, can now produce games for the consoles. If things continue in this fashion, then small shops will be able to start off on the Console, and the only thing left on PCs will be niche games for high end systems or small audiences, like flight simulators.
Fewer Viruses - While this is technically true, most viruses I've seen installed on users machines are the result of users actively clicking and running an executable on their machine. While not running in root mode by default on Linux helps to prevent some of the damage, I think a virus running as a regular unprivileged user could still cause a lot of damage. This is also ignoring the fact that if the same incompetent users if presented with a message asking them to perform administrator actions for no reason at all would still click on "Yes", even if there should be no reason for them to do so, as long it promises smiley icons.
Lower cost of Ownership - Last time I went shoppping for a computer, I didn't see any discounts for not having Windows installed from the get go. Either you go with Dell/HP/Lenovo, and they only offer windows, or when the offer Linux, it's the same price, or only a little cheaper, but you get a lot less selection of machines you can get. The other option is to build your own machine from off the shelf components. This is my favourite option, as you can get exactly what you want, but you will end up spending more.
CLI/Scripting system - Almost nobody except tech geeks cares about this. Also, Powershell on Windows isn't all that bad. It has its pluses and its minuses.
Most open source software runs on it - Most all of open source that is worth running will run on Windows. Maybe not all of it, but most of the more important stuff. Conversely, almost no closed source software runs on Linux. Which might not matter to you, but if you're trying to get work done, having things like Photoshop, Outlook (hate it but necessary for business), and many other closed source programs, makes a big difference.
Drivers - Sure you get drivers for all the old stuff. But are you sure that shiny new piece of hardware that just came out last week will run to its full potential. Probably not. And there's also plenty of older hardware that I had that I couldn't run on Linux.
No Blue Screen - I haven't seen a blue screen on a Windows machine in many years. And when I do, it's usually because of bad RAM, causing something to get corrupted. Blue screens still exist, but they don't happen quite as often as they used to. I imagine most Linux systems would also crash pretty badly when they have bad memory.
I'm not some Windows Zealot. I use Windows when it makes sense, and I use Linux where it makes sense. But I don't really think that that any of the reasons you mentioned are valid. Especially if you're talking about home desktop use. Which in the case of Compiz, is exactly the kind of people we are talking about.
Not only is it great for developing countries. It's great for those of us in countries like the USA, Canada, Easter Europe, and many other places. Health care costs are increasing. It's about time we came up with some ways to make health care cheaper. My province spends half of it's revenue on health care. I would love for them to start using ideas like this to make it possible for lower skilled people who demand less money to give medical care in simple cases such as prescribing glasses, so that doctor's have more time for real important stuff and also so that health care costs would go down. With all the advancements in science it seems that health care is just getting more and more expensive. Really, we should be using those advancements to make it cheap and accessible to all.
I think it's more to do with the fact that there aren't that many doctors around, and therefore their time is valuable. If instead, you could visit a nurse, or some other less skilled person for common ailments, and get the proper drugs, then it would probably be a lot cheaper. Think about if casts for broken bones were done the same way as fixing a car or a computer. Go into "bone fixing services", they get some person to take an X-ray (low skilled), and get somebody who is trained to put on casts to put on a cast (also low skilled). If the X-Ray shows you need pins in your arm, or special treatment, they send you to a more qualified person. You don't reach the software engineers at Microsoft when you call Dell to have your problems with windows fixed. You don't talk to the engineer who designed your car when you need your wheels aligned. Why should you need to talk to high payed doctors every time you have a simple ailment?
I don't know if anybody remembers TwinVQ, aka.VFQ, but it was a pretty good format. However, required quite a big more processing than MP3, which in the early days, when many computers couldn't even handle MP3, was a big problem.
But humans can reproduce. So a individual humans don't need to live 10,000 years for us to reach the stars. All we need is a ship that can sustain life for that amount of time. The people on the ship can create more people. And their predecessors will be the ones that get to the stars.
No different than with most people I know who travel anywhere. Most people I know who go on regular vacations to other countries end up going to the Caribbean twice a year, and sitting on a beach. There are so many more interesting places to see in the world. Go to Europe, Japan, Africa. Visit the cities, see the people, visit the villages too. Maybe it costs more. Maybe you can only make a trip every 5 years because of the cost. But you will have a much richer experience. If all you want to do is sit on a beach and drink, you might as well just sit on your couch at home. At least you won't get skin cancer.
We only need health insurance for "little things" because "little things" cost so much. Do you really want to pay $200 (it's probably more) out of pocket every time you need to get the doctor to give you a prescription for your kids ear ache? The reason we insure for everything is because even the most basic things cost large amounts of money.
Always makes you wonder though. Whenever they come up with a cheap way of treating something, they say "just think of the third world implications". I think we should really be looking at stuff like this for first world applications. Think of countries with government health care like Britain and Canada (also everyone except US it seems). I know that the province of Ontario spends 50% of their revenue on health care. If the government took a more cost savings approach, trying to use off the shelf consumer goods where possible, then they could probably save quite a bit. I'm not saying they should do away with all the specialized equipment, but they should start to look for cheaper alternatives and use it if one exists.
Not really much different from animal crossing. You basically just fish, look for fossils, plant trees and such, and all within your own little world. You can visit other towns, but it's not something that's necessary, or even advantageous in the game. Sure you can visit other towns to get other fruits, but if you wait long enough, you'll get one from another resident of your town anyway, so there's almost no incentive to visit other towns. Also, if you don't play daily, you get roaches in your house and the grass starts to get lots of weeds, plus the other residents of the town start asking where you have been.
Exactly. It's completely common in this type of logic puzzle to directly try and fool a person through clever use of English, that doesn't mean what people really think it means. I see no reason, at least from the way the problem is stated in the summary, that the answer shouldn't be 50%. Just because one child is a boy and born on Tuesday, that does not mean that the second child could not also be a boy born on Tuesday. The only correct answer is to assume that the second child could be a boy born on Tuesday, because the way the problem is written, it doesn't specifically not allow for the second child to also be a boy born on tuesday.
I don't know, kind of creapy, but cheaper than a therapist (I'm assuming didn't look at pricing). And probably better for your social life than complaining to your actual friends all the time. I wonder how many people just use this thing as a sounding board to talk out their problems. I don't think anybody really needs to pay for friends on the internet. There's tons of forums and chat channels on just about any topic you can think of. However, most of these places, as in real life, people will start to ignore you if you complain too much. But I wonder if having a person who is paid to sit there and listen to your ranting would be helpful to people, and would accomplish a large amount of what therapists are paid to do.
But who cares about speed of browsing web pages. Most web pages perform pretty well at.5 mbps, or even less. For the most part, on any cable or DSL connection, you should get the entire (HTML) page in less than a second. For most people the only reason they really want high speed connections is for downloading torrents, music, movies, and other rich media. In those cases, raw speed matters.
Sounds a little odd. How do you know the users aren't downloading multiple things at the same time? I live in Canada, and I am on the 3 mbit plan with Rogers. When I'm downloading, I almost always max it out. Others I know on faster plans are also able to max out their 5 mbit and 10 mbit connections all the tims. Maybe things are different in the US, but I really hope things are this bad.
Even with transparency, what stops one from using a fake name. Actually, this type of transparency just has that many more reasons for people to put fake names. If someone asks you to sign a petition you support, but don't want others to know you support, then you just sign a fake name (like "John McCarthy"), and you don't have to worry about others knowing you support the cause. The name is sufficiently popular (In America) that it couldn't be linked to a specific person, and sufficiently real enough that most people wouldn't ask you if it's your real name. I never really understood signing petitions anyway. It would be trivially easy to pad the petition with extra signatures, and nobody really knows if people put their proper name, or if they were even told what they were really signing a petition for. I would say it's almost as bad, if not worse, than counting support based on number of people joining a facebook group.
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Yes, you could, buy doing that would almost be logistically impossible. Let's assume you went into a store and tried to buy every single copy on release day. The store has every single right to refuse sale to you and most stores probably would. Many stores have "1 per customer" rules to prevent this problem. I even see grocery stores do this all the time on sale items to so that customers don't get annoyed when all the sale items are gone. The other option is to go to Amazon.com and try to order all 100,000 copies they will ship in the next 2 days. However, if you try to place that all in 1 order, their system would probably flag it, or they would hold off shipping to you until a later date, when all the individual sales have been fulfilled. There's very few things where it's possible to buy up such a large percentage of something and also purchase something that won't be available later. Once all the tickets are sold, they are gone. You can't just wait a few days or weeks like you can with books and more will be produced. It's like saying you're going to buy all the iPads. You could, but then Apple will just keep on producing more. Most sane people would probably wait an extra couple of weeks for something than pay twice as much. You might be able to get some people on this, but most people who wanted iPad/Twilight/whatever, already pre-ordered 6 months before it came out and will get it delivered a couple days after it comes out.
Seriously, when I started reading I thought the "Grandma Problem" was going to be, "My grandma died and I can't go to the concert". I think that what really has to change here is to make it so that scalpers can't get a large number of tickets. I'm not sure of the exact mechanism which could accomplish this, but it would solve most of the problems. Since all sales are made online, they could track things such as IP address, credit card numbers, shipping address, captchas and many other things to figure out if somebody is buying too many tickets, or using a computer to buy a lot of tickets. Probably not fool proof, but if they make it hard enough, it could really cut down on scalpers.
The main question here is, are you actually buying anything, or are you just paying for a reservation, for you personally to sit in a specific seat. If airplane tickets have gone this long being non-transferable, then I'm sure that concert tickets could do the same. I'm not saying it doesn't suck, but if you don't like the terms and conditions, don't get the tickets.
Making it illegal still won't make it not happen. It's too easy for a ticket and the money to change hands, without anybody knowing it happened. The same reason you can't control scalpers is the same reason you can't control drugs. People are willing to pay high prices, and the product is too hard to track. I think most places have laws against scalping. It still happens.
You could always just not go to the show. When concert tickets already cost $100 or even much more, and then Ticket Master adds a $12 "convenience fee", which is mandatory, because there is no other way to get tickets, then I stop going to concerts. When I was in university, and I went to a lot of concerts, they were usually small shows at local bars. We never paid more than $20 for a concert ticket, sometimes as little as $5. And there's a lot of free tickets to interesting bands if you keep your eyes open. Why would I want to pay $100 to go to a venue with terrible sound, and sit 200 ft. from the band and the crowd is just filled with a bunch of people who happen to have a lot of money, but aren't all that interested in the music, when I can go to a smaller venue, pay $10, be 10 ft. from the band, the sound isn't any worse, and the crowd is really into it. I guess there's just too many people with too much money, and that's the reason they can demand outrageous prices, and even stoop to things like paperless tickets that you can't resell. Granted there are more people without money, but that's not important, because as long as there are enough people in each city on the tour to buy the tickets, it doesn't matter how much the real fans can afford.
Maybe the people who are trying to stop the information from going public are some of the same people who are exploiting the flaws. The more public the flaws, and the more people exploiting it, the more likely it is that the flaw will be fixed. If you were making lots of money from an existing flaw, wouldn't you want that flaw to remain open?
While I'm not sure if they are legally responsible, I would have to say that they do bear the cost. I have had my bank card duped twice in the last 4 years, and both times the bank fixed the problem before I even realized the money was gone. I'm not sure which banks you deal with, but of all the times I have had this happen to me, or any body I personally know, the bank has put the money back in the account very quickly. Granted it would be better if it didn't happen in the first place. However, depending on how severely the system is flawed, it may not be possible to fix the problem at all, without changing out all the current machines, and settling on a new standard, which may again have its own list of faults.
And yet 2D Boy was still able to release World of Goo for the Wii. Even though their office is "whichever free wi-fi coffee shop they wander into on a given day".
I agree. I think that the reader should be required to different read works of similar length and difficulty on each device. The reader should also have a break in between each reading. The order that the devices are being used in, and the piece being read on each device could be randomized. They should also be required to answer questions about the work to determine how well they understood what they read.
Only so long as console makers make it difficult/expensive to develop to their systems. Things have turned around in the last generation, with XNA and WiiWare (and probably something similar for PS3). A lot of small shops who would have never been able to make it in the old console world, because they lacked the ability to make it into the large retail chains, and buy extremely expensive dev kits, can now produce games for the consoles. If things continue in this fashion, then small shops will be able to start off on the Console, and the only thing left on PCs will be niche games for high end systems or small audiences, like flight simulators.
Fewer Viruses - While this is technically true, most viruses I've seen installed on users machines are the result of users actively clicking and running an executable on their machine. While not running in root mode by default on Linux helps to prevent some of the damage, I think a virus running as a regular unprivileged user could still cause a lot of damage. This is also ignoring the fact that if the same incompetent users if presented with a message asking them to perform administrator actions for no reason at all would still click on "Yes", even if there should be no reason for them to do so, as long it promises smiley icons.
Lower cost of Ownership - Last time I went shoppping for a computer, I didn't see any discounts for not having Windows installed from the get go. Either you go with Dell/HP/Lenovo, and they only offer windows, or when the offer Linux, it's the same price, or only a little cheaper, but you get a lot less selection of machines you can get. The other option is to build your own machine from off the shelf components. This is my favourite option, as you can get exactly what you want, but you will end up spending more.
CLI/Scripting system - Almost nobody except tech geeks cares about this. Also, Powershell on Windows isn't all that bad. It has its pluses and its minuses.
Most open source software runs on it - Most all of open source that is worth running will run on Windows. Maybe not all of it, but most of the more important stuff. Conversely, almost no closed source software runs on Linux. Which might not matter to you, but if you're trying to get work done, having things like Photoshop, Outlook (hate it but necessary for business), and many other closed source programs, makes a big difference.
Drivers - Sure you get drivers for all the old stuff. But are you sure that shiny new piece of hardware that just came out last week will run to its full potential. Probably not. And there's also plenty of older hardware that I had that I couldn't run on Linux.
No Blue Screen - I haven't seen a blue screen on a Windows machine in many years. And when I do, it's usually because of bad RAM, causing something to get corrupted. Blue screens still exist, but they don't happen quite as often as they used to. I imagine most Linux systems would also crash pretty badly when they have bad memory.
I'm not some Windows Zealot. I use Windows when it makes sense, and I use Linux where it makes sense. But I don't really think that that any of the reasons you mentioned are valid. Especially if you're talking about home desktop use. Which in the case of Compiz, is exactly the kind of people we are talking about.
Not only is it great for developing countries. It's great for those of us in countries like the USA, Canada, Easter Europe, and many other places. Health care costs are increasing. It's about time we came up with some ways to make health care cheaper. My province spends half of it's revenue on health care. I would love for them to start using ideas like this to make it possible for lower skilled people who demand less money to give medical care in simple cases such as prescribing glasses, so that doctor's have more time for real important stuff and also so that health care costs would go down. With all the advancements in science it seems that health care is just getting more and more expensive. Really, we should be using those advancements to make it cheap and accessible to all.
I think it's more to do with the fact that there aren't that many doctors around, and therefore their time is valuable. If instead, you could visit a nurse, or some other less skilled person for common ailments, and get the proper drugs, then it would probably be a lot cheaper. Think about if casts for broken bones were done the same way as fixing a car or a computer. Go into "bone fixing services", they get some person to take an X-ray (low skilled), and get somebody who is trained to put on casts to put on a cast (also low skilled). If the X-Ray shows you need pins in your arm, or special treatment, they send you to a more qualified person. You don't reach the software engineers at Microsoft when you call Dell to have your problems with windows fixed. You don't talk to the engineer who designed your car when you need your wheels aligned. Why should you need to talk to high payed doctors every time you have a simple ailment?
I don't know if anybody remembers TwinVQ, aka .VFQ, but it was a pretty good format. However, required quite a big more processing than MP3, which in the early days, when many computers couldn't even handle MP3, was a big problem.
But humans can reproduce. So a individual humans don't need to live 10,000 years for us to reach the stars. All we need is a ship that can sustain life for that amount of time. The people on the ship can create more people. And their predecessors will be the ones that get to the stars.
No different than with most people I know who travel anywhere. Most people I know who go on regular vacations to other countries end up going to the Caribbean twice a year, and sitting on a beach. There are so many more interesting places to see in the world. Go to Europe, Japan, Africa. Visit the cities, see the people, visit the villages too. Maybe it costs more. Maybe you can only make a trip every 5 years because of the cost. But you will have a much richer experience. If all you want to do is sit on a beach and drink, you might as well just sit on your couch at home. At least you won't get skin cancer.
We only need health insurance for "little things" because "little things" cost so much. Do you really want to pay $200 (it's probably more) out of pocket every time you need to get the doctor to give you a prescription for your kids ear ache? The reason we insure for everything is because even the most basic things cost large amounts of money.
Always makes you wonder though. Whenever they come up with a cheap way of treating something, they say "just think of the third world implications". I think we should really be looking at stuff like this for first world applications. Think of countries with government health care like Britain and Canada (also everyone except US it seems). I know that the province of Ontario spends 50% of their revenue on health care. If the government took a more cost savings approach, trying to use off the shelf consumer goods where possible, then they could probably save quite a bit. I'm not saying they should do away with all the specialized equipment, but they should start to look for cheaper alternatives and use it if one exists.
Not really much different from animal crossing. You basically just fish, look for fossils, plant trees and such, and all within your own little world. You can visit other towns, but it's not something that's necessary, or even advantageous in the game. Sure you can visit other towns to get other fruits, but if you wait long enough, you'll get one from another resident of your town anyway, so there's almost no incentive to visit other towns. Also, if you don't play daily, you get roaches in your house and the grass starts to get lots of weeds, plus the other residents of the town start asking where you have been.
Exactly. It's completely common in this type of logic puzzle to directly try and fool a person through clever use of English, that doesn't mean what people really think it means. I see no reason, at least from the way the problem is stated in the summary, that the answer shouldn't be 50%. Just because one child is a boy and born on Tuesday, that does not mean that the second child could not also be a boy born on Tuesday. The only correct answer is to assume that the second child could be a boy born on Tuesday, because the way the problem is written, it doesn't specifically not allow for the second child to also be a boy born on tuesday.
I don't know, kind of creapy, but cheaper than a therapist (I'm assuming didn't look at pricing). And probably better for your social life than complaining to your actual friends all the time. I wonder how many people just use this thing as a sounding board to talk out their problems. I don't think anybody really needs to pay for friends on the internet. There's tons of forums and chat channels on just about any topic you can think of. However, most of these places, as in real life, people will start to ignore you if you complain too much. But I wonder if having a person who is paid to sit there and listen to your ranting would be helpful to people, and would accomplish a large amount of what therapists are paid to do.
But who cares about speed of browsing web pages. Most web pages perform pretty well at .5 mbps, or even less. For the most part, on any cable or DSL connection, you should get the entire (HTML) page in less than a second. For most people the only reason they really want high speed connections is for downloading torrents, music, movies, and other rich media. In those cases, raw speed matters.
And even if it does, sex is not porn.
Sounds a little odd. How do you know the users aren't downloading multiple things at the same time? I live in Canada, and I am on the 3 mbit plan with Rogers. When I'm downloading, I almost always max it out. Others I know on faster plans are also able to max out their 5 mbit and 10 mbit connections all the tims. Maybe things are different in the US, but I really hope things are this bad.
Even with transparency, what stops one from using a fake name. Actually, this type of transparency just has that many more reasons for people to put fake names. If someone asks you to sign a petition you support, but don't want others to know you support, then you just sign a fake name (like "John McCarthy"), and you don't have to worry about others knowing you support the cause. The name is sufficiently popular (In America) that it couldn't be linked to a specific person, and sufficiently real enough that most people wouldn't ask you if it's your real name. I never really understood signing petitions anyway. It would be trivially easy to pad the petition with extra signatures, and nobody really knows if people put their proper name, or if they were even told what they were really signing a petition for. I would say it's almost as bad, if not worse, than counting support based on number of people joining a facebook group.