While in a strict sense, it's still currency, the fact that the "real" (psychology, remember) money is already spent makes the points, once acquired, of less perceived value than money.
Not only that, they're of less actual value since their use is restricted.
If there was an aftermarket for points, or a way to cash them out, perhaps this wouldn't be the case - but as it is, I stand by my assertion that, in the minds of most people, points are money already spent.
I tried Just Cause and it was an interesting game however the controls completely sucked, and the game wasn't that great, I'm waiting on reviews for that one.
The controls completely sucked, the game wasn't that great, and you still might buy it depending on the reviews? You must be a game publisher's wet dream. And/or why the game industry is in decline.
I realized a way to put this that might be more clear, or maybe just more correct. After you've spent the money to get the points, you still have something of value that you can choose to spend: points. Where the sunk costs come into effect is that you've already bought the points, so you should choose to spend them based on whether you want to spend them or not, not based on whether you already paid for them. However, there's nothing in economic theory (AFAIK) that distinguishes between one carrier of value (money) and another (points). So you still have a purchase decision to make: whether to buy this game or not. That decision is similar to the decision to buy with cash. The only difference is that you can only use this value carrier (points) to buy a game (or whatever else they sell on Live), so your decision is limited to 1) whether to buy a game and 2) which game to buy. However, in all other respects the decision is the same as buying with cash. In fact, if you can buy an arbitrary number of points and use them immediately, and don't have to have a minimum points balance, it IS the same as cash. Spend $10 on points, immediately spend the 1625 points on a game. This might as well be cash. Any obstacles such as a delay between purchasing and using points, or holding a minimum point balance, is there simply to obscure the relationship between the points and the money.
Points are, as the article suggests, easier to spend. But not primarily because people are somehow "tricked" into not thinking of 1200 points as $15 - it's primarily because people see 1200 points as money they've already spent.
I'm sure both play a role. If MS didn't want to take advantage of the masking effect of substituting points for dollars, they would have made one point equal one dollar. By decoupling the value of a point from the value of a dollar, and not in any obvious way (1200 pts = $8.75?) they make it harder for the customer to assign a real cost to their purchase.
People tend to have a reasonably good grasp of the concept of sunk costs.
I think people generally understand sunk costs very poorly. This example is not a sunk cost. Having an all-you-can-play season pass for XBox Live would be a sunk cost. It wouldn't matter how much or how little you play, you have already spent the same amount of money. What people don't understand is that this doesn't mean you should play as much as you possibly can. It means you should play exactly as much as you want to. By playing an extra two hours longer than you would really enjoy just to get your money's worth, you're actually getting less value out of your season pass than you would by turning off the XBox and doing something you would enjoy more for those two hours. That is how people often misunderstand sunk costs.
This example is not a sunk cost, because you haven't actually spent the currency yet, you've just converted it into a different form. It's true that you cannot convert it back, so that makes it *seem* like you've already spent it, but it isn't actually spent - you've just comitted to spending it on XBox Live at some time in the future. If it were a sunk cost, you would buy the points, and then you could choose to download the game or not, without incurring any additional cost. This is not so - you still have to spend the points, which are equivalent to money because you can only get more by spending more money. You did hit on the effect they're going for, though. By converting from dollars to points, with no way back out, it seems like you've already spent the money, so it's easier to spend it as points. I hope I've made sense.
From wikipedia, which seems to have a pretty good article on sunk costs: "In economics and in business decision-making, sunk costs are costs that have already been incurred and which cannot be recovered to any significant degree. Sunk costs are sometimes contrasted with variable costs, which are the costs that will change due to the proposed course of action. In microeconomic theory, only variable costs are relevant to a decision. Economics proposes that one should not let sunk costs influence one's decisions, because doing so would not be assessing a decision exclusively on its own." Whether you buy a game with points or cash doesn't affect whether it's a sunk or variable cost.
They just need to store these things until they're allowed to throw them away. They don't need quick or easy access, so that's probably overkill. Cool product, though.
If the system is broken after the source code leaks, it's broken anyway. The system should be secure even if the source code is plastered all over the net. I don't expect any government officials or contractors to understand that principle, though.
However loving your family is, they're simply not the same as an enthusiastic sold-out crowd.
True, my family doesn't mind if I pause the movie to go to the bathroom.
don't fool yourself into thinking what you have at home even approaches the experience a real theater can offer.
Movie theater: at least as expensive per movie not counting initial investment, driving time, parking, crowds, commercials, people talking, no control over volume, can't pause to leave, need a babysitter... you're right, the home theater experience doesn't approach that. Thank goodness.
It's all profit motive. If the company can hire more or better hardware engineers to make the calls on their phones 10% better, or they can spend the same money to hire software engineers to give their phones 250% more features (pulling numbers from rear end), which would attract more customers to their phones and thus be a more profitable move? I can't imagine it's the former. So basically what it comes down to is, it sucks to want something from a product that's out of synch with what most of the market wants. This is true of movies, cars, food, clothes, everything.
1. The actual function of the phone call is still shit poor. I live in a HUGE metropolitan area, and there's still random and inexplicable dead zones. If they can't deliver an audio stream, how are they going to deliver a video stream?
What does that have to do with the phone? I live in a suburban area, and I can think of one place where I have problems. One. Work, home, roads, the windowless bathroom in the middle of my brick church, no problem. The fact that you get bad coverage does not mean phone manufacturers should stop putting MP3 players in phones.
2. More features means more to break.
But who cares if the feature that you don't use anyway breaks? I've never seen anybody present evidence that more features leads to less reliability in the phone function. I have a smartphone, and it's at least as reliable as the phones of other people I know.
There's more than raw processing power required- each feature can add significant ancillary hardware requirements.
Then don't use them. They aren't doing you any harm by sitting there on your phone.
3. Lots of workplaces simply ban pnones with cameras or any sort of recording ability, so it becomes a moot issue anyway.
Definitely an issue. Doesn't affect me, but I know that there are some phones with a yes-camera and no-camera version for just such users. There should probably be more, though.
The only features you list I can see as practical are email (or text messaging), and the calendar/notes (PDA-level functions).
Fine. But there are lots of features that OTHER people find practical. For example, I don't care about email (or at least not enough to pay for a data plan), but I do use spreadsheets on my phone.
I have a basic Motorola no-frills phone built to MIL-SPEC standards. It may not take pictures and has a pedestrian ring sound, but I can bounce it off a concrete wall and it still works fine.
That's so stupid, I have no need at all to bounce my phone off a concrete wall. Why would anybody ever make a phone like that? OK, end parody.
As this shock travelled through the clouds, maybe the gas condensed into stars or proto-stars. These stars might not be completely formed yet nor strongly clustered and might be invisible to us.
I am not an astronomer, but it seems to me that newly-formed stars that are invisible would be an even stranger result than dark matter. Do you have some mechanism in mind by which these stars would be invisible? Because if you're going to come up with an alternative explanation, it should fit the observations at least as well as the competing theory. New stars, AFAIK, tend to be on the hot and bright side, whereas the dark brown dwarfs that are hard to see are old burned-out stars.
And this would make it very difficult to get companies to do government contracts in the future.
I think it would be more likely to lead to realistic bids and a commitment to do the job right. And the bids would be coming from more qualified contractors. JMO.
I think the sad part of this story is that the ALCU are the ones standing up for our rights.
I don't understand why you find that sad, or even surprising. All the ACLU does is stand up for our rights. As the Democratic President said in the movie "The American President" after being attacked by a Republican challenger for being an ACLU member, "Why would a Senator... not be a member of an organization whose sole purpose is to protect the Constitution of the United States?" That may not be an exact quote. At any rate, I've never understood why conservatives continue to attack the ACLU when all they want to do is defend everyone's rights. Are conservatives opposed to the Bill of Rights? Are they opposed to the ACLU's tactics or strategies in defending it? If anybody can clue me in, please do - I'm lost.
That's possible, but when somebody says something online (no tone of voice to judge by) that could be funny or not, and then says "seriously", I'm inclined to take them seriously.
And because oil is expensive, agriculture is going to be a growth industry? If you want a field not related to what you're doing now that will assure maximum future employability, go with healthcare.
I think I'm not too far off in summing this up by saying you assume that the scientists are doing their jobs correctly by repeating (or failing to repeat) each other's work, correctly following the scientific method, etc. I'm not criticising, I assume that too. I don't know it directly. And I'm also not suggesting that this is the same thing as religious faith, because I think it's not. But it also isn't the same thing as knowing for myself that [insert theory here] is well-supported by evidence from the natural world. I'm basically taking someone else's word for it, or more typically a lot of people's words for it.
I personally put religious people on the same intellectual level as the guy on the street corner who is speaking to Elvis.
Forgot to address this part. This is of course your right, but you might think about how close-minded you are. You may want to consider what effect marginalizing people you don't know could have on you. You could also keep in mind that it's possible for you to be wrong about things. I'm not trying to convince you that this is one of them, but remember that skepticism, not arrogant surety, is the hallmark of science. Consider whether you are concluding something about these people based on evidence, or based on something you would like to believe.
By definition, any person who understands science cannot also believe in religion
Have you never heard of the concept that science and religion operate in different areas? Science has nothing to say about the existence of god(s). There is no scientific experiment you can conduct to prove or disprove their existence, therefore it is not a scientific question - by definition. I'm wondering if you're the one who doesn't understand science. But maybe you can explain yourself. You would have to provide scientific evidence that all religions are false, or demonstrate that all possible religions doctrinally reject science. Otherwise, you have not shown that the two are incompatible.
Java is still only good for simple embedded web applications, or server-side applications.
ONLY server-side applications? That's huge! I don't have any numbers, but it should be extremely clear that "server-side" is a significant percentage of all the software that gets written in the world in any given year. Therefore, the fact that Java is good for this means that Java is good.
Have you considered that perhaps it's not so much as a mental illness, but perhaps we're seeing an evolutionary split between homo sapiens that do have brains powerful enough to understand basic scientific principles, and cause/effect relationships, and homo sapiens that can't think any further than primitive "gods"?
You believe there are few or no religious people capable of understanding science? I assure you that is not true, and I suspect you're generalizing because you don't happen to know any.
Sure, religions can certainly be defined by mental illness (talking to non-existent people/"gods"/saints/whatever, having firm beliefs in completely illogical and bizarre things, etc.).
Only in the sense that any word "can be" defined to mean anything. I doubt you could find any reference from a scientific or medical organization that defines religion as a mental illness.
Except that for many of us, there's a HUGE difference between believing the findings of rigorous, peer-reviewed scientific exploration, and believing the (highly interpreted) word of some guys who lived 2000 years ago.
More devil's advocate. Why do you believe those rigorous, peer-reviewed scientific explorations? Have you read the peer-reviewed papers yourself? Have you examined the careers of the people doing the reviewing? If no to both, then who are you putting your confidence (faith?) in, and on what basis? If yes to either, what percentage of Americans do you think have this in common with?.1%, or less than that?;-)
The sooner our executive agents throw the book at these asshats, the better.
That's great, as long as it's the right book. It should be a city or state book, not a federal one. Nobody is saying the people should be allowed to burn police cars, we're saying the federal government has no jurisdiction in this case, and their reasoning for why they do would indicate that there's almost nothing outside federal jurisdiction.
I agree! I was responding to something which apparently you aren't espousing. It's this attitude among some Linux supporters that the lack of software for Linux isn't a Linux problem, because it's not actually the OS(es) that's at fault. Therefore we don't need to do anything about it, because Linux is fine. It IS a Linux problem, but as you point out, the solution is not to make the OS better.
I don't know if this attitude is prevalent or a vocal minority or I've just happened to run into the six people who think that way, but it's out there. There are many, I think, who say "fine, I don't care. Linux is great for me and if it only ever gets 1% market share (or whatever) I'm OK with that." Personally I have no problem with that view and I think it's very much in line with the OSS philosophy, if it can be said that there is such a thing. I would like to see it become more popular though, so I hope the things you're talking about start to happen more.
Slashdot Mirror
I realized a way to put this that might be more clear, or maybe just more correct. After you've spent the money to get the points, you still have something of value that you can choose to spend: points. Where the sunk costs come into effect is that you've already bought the points, so you should choose to spend them based on whether you want to spend them or not, not based on whether you already paid for them. However, there's nothing in economic theory (AFAIK) that distinguishes between one carrier of value (money) and another (points). So you still have a purchase decision to make: whether to buy this game or not. That decision is similar to the decision to buy with cash. The only difference is that you can only use this value carrier (points) to buy a game (or whatever else they sell on Live), so your decision is limited to 1) whether to buy a game and 2) which game to buy. However, in all other respects the decision is the same as buying with cash. In fact, if you can buy an arbitrary number of points and use them immediately, and don't have to have a minimum points balance, it IS the same as cash. Spend $10 on points, immediately spend the 1625 points on a game. This might as well be cash. Any obstacles such as a delay between purchasing and using points, or holding a minimum point balance, is there simply to obscure the relationship between the points and the money.
This example is not a sunk cost, because you haven't actually spent the currency yet, you've just converted it into a different form. It's true that you cannot convert it back, so that makes it *seem* like you've already spent it, but it isn't actually spent - you've just comitted to spending it on XBox Live at some time in the future. If it were a sunk cost, you would buy the points, and then you could choose to download the game or not, without incurring any additional cost. This is not so - you still have to spend the points, which are equivalent to money because you can only get more by spending more money. You did hit on the effect they're going for, though. By converting from dollars to points, with no way back out, it seems like you've already spent the money, so it's easier to spend it as points. I hope I've made sense.
From wikipedia, which seems to have a pretty good article on sunk costs: "In economics and in business decision-making, sunk costs are costs that have already been incurred and which cannot be recovered to any significant degree. Sunk costs are sometimes contrasted with variable costs, which are the costs that will change due to the proposed course of action. In microeconomic theory, only variable costs are relevant to a decision. Economics proposes that one should not let sunk costs influence one's decisions, because doing so would not be assessing a decision exclusively on its own." Whether you buy a game with points or cash doesn't affect whether it's a sunk or variable cost.
Sunk cost
They just need to store these things until they're allowed to throw them away. They don't need quick or easy access, so that's probably overkill. Cool product, though.
If the system is broken after the source code leaks, it's broken anyway. The system should be secure even if the source code is plastered all over the net. I don't expect any government officials or contractors to understand that principle, though.
It's all profit motive. If the company can hire more or better hardware engineers to make the calls on their phones 10% better, or they can spend the same money to hire software engineers to give their phones 250% more features (pulling numbers from rear end), which would attract more customers to their phones and thus be a more profitable move? I can't imagine it's the former. So basically what it comes down to is, it sucks to want something from a product that's out of synch with what most of the market wants. This is true of movies, cars, food, clothes, everything.
There's not always agreement on these terms. What do you mean by "democracy" and "republic"? I can't make sense of it.
That's possible, but when somebody says something online (no tone of voice to judge by) that could be funny or not, and then says "seriously", I'm inclined to take them seriously.
And because oil is expensive, agriculture is going to be a growth industry? If you want a field not related to what you're doing now that will assure maximum future employability, go with healthcare.
I think I'm not too far off in summing this up by saying you assume that the scientists are doing their jobs correctly by repeating (or failing to repeat) each other's work, correctly following the scientific method, etc. I'm not criticising, I assume that too. I don't know it directly. And I'm also not suggesting that this is the same thing as religious faith, because I think it's not. But it also isn't the same thing as knowing for myself that [insert theory here] is well-supported by evidence from the natural world. I'm basically taking someone else's word for it, or more typically a lot of people's words for it.
I agree! I was responding to something which apparently you aren't espousing. It's this attitude among some Linux supporters that the lack of software for Linux isn't a Linux problem, because it's not actually the OS(es) that's at fault. Therefore we don't need to do anything about it, because Linux is fine. It IS a Linux problem, but as you point out, the solution is not to make the OS better.
I don't know if this attitude is prevalent or a vocal minority or I've just happened to run into the six people who think that way, but it's out there. There are many, I think, who say "fine, I don't care. Linux is great for me and if it only ever gets 1% market share (or whatever) I'm OK with that." Personally I have no problem with that view and I think it's very much in line with the OSS philosophy, if it can be said that there is such a thing. I would like to see it become more popular though, so I hope the things you're talking about start to happen more.