Well, you usually don't get XP for PvP. I think that's what they call "grading on a curve."
I might suggest sapping the teacher and pickpocketing his test answers while he's stunned, but the teacher is less like an NPC and more like a moderator...
You know, of course there's only going to be a few people who really hit it big in indie games. Just like there's only going to be a few people who really hit it big in indie movies. Just like there's only going to be a few people who really hit it big in indie music. Just like there are rarely television shows on off-brand cable networks that get the same kind of viewership that sitcoms get on network channels.
And yet, despite all of that, the FX Network picked up a pilot for a low-budget sitcom called It's Always Sunny in Philadelphia, and while it'll never get the viewers that Seinfeld had, it's gotten a cult audience. And occasionally a small-budget movie will win an Oscar for acting or something, and that'll drive enough people to see it to earn a profit on it. And if a local band sells 10,000 copies of their album, they're considered a success, even though big artists go platinum at 100 times that.
And so you're going to have an indie games network that's going to have a lot of trash on it that doesn't make a lot of money, but buried in there are going to be several simple games that sell 10K copies and earn their creators some spending money. That's how indie media usually works. Nothing wrong with that. (And nothing wrong with I Maed a Game With Zombies, either. That friggin' song gets stuck in my head a lot.)
If I've got a fourth grader, I give him a math test on memorization of the multiplication tables. He turns it in with a quarter of the problems wrong, he gets a D. Then a month later, I give him a test on multiplying double-digit numbers. He gets a quarter of the problems wrong, he gets a D. Then I give him a test on division, three-digit numbers divided by one digit. He gets a D.
This kid leaves the fourth grade, and he pretty much forgets the little that he did learn in my class. He spends most of the next year playing catch-up.
Let me suggest the curriculum for a fourth grader's math assignments. I'm going to give this kid a test on the multiplication tables, but I'm going to give it a week earlier than the other teacher did. If this kid gets a quarter of the problems wrong, then he has to respawn and go fight the boss aga-- er, he has to take another multiplication tables test a week later. He keeps taking one of those tests once a week until he gets at least a 90% on it, even if the other kids have moved on to start taking other tests.
If this kid can't get ever get a 90% on these tables, he gets an F in math for the semester. If he passes the tables test, his grade levels up to a D.
Then I give this kid a test on double-digit multiplication. He has to take it again and again until he gets a 90% on the test. When he does, he levels up to a C in math for the semester. This might take him so long that he doesn't ever really get to the long division test, although I'll still give him some assignments to pick up on the basics of it.
The kid in the first example never really got a strong handle on any of the subjects I taught. The second kid knows his expletive'ing multiplication tables and has a good handle on multiplying numbers, even if he never got a good shot at the later stuff. The first kid got a D in math, the second kid got a C. Which kid do you think knows more about math?
Alternatively, I give one student that tables test, and he gets an A on the first try, a week earlier than the others. I tell this kid, okay, you can beta test the new dungeon that the devs are working on-- er, you can start looking ahead at some of the new material. Or maybe you can actually only get to a B in this class by doing the three main quests, so if you want to get to an A, you'll have to do at least a few side quests. Here, why don't you solve the puzzles in this beginner's programming book, since it's tangentially related to math? Or you could grind the goblins in this basic accounting sheet, teaching you to balance a checkbook?
I'm sure the actual logistics of this method would require a bit of work, but I'd like to see it tried out in practice once.
It'll be amusing to see how the "rule of law" crowd justifies foreign assassinations of people currently sitting in private homes (read: not on a battlefield) in countries that we are not currently at war with (read: Pakistan) as being somehow in line with our code of military law.
Oddly enough, I would imagine that people who believe that captured enemies should be treated responsibly as due the Geneva Convention would also believe that there should be a line of accountability and transparency when the government decides to remotely kill someone not currently engaged in battle.
A government big enough to give you everything you want is a government big enough to take from you everything you have.
You fear a government that provides additional social services, but you think a government that can kill anyone they want to as long as its on foreign soil and not have to tell anyone about it should just be given the benefit of the doubt?
The FBI to paradrop into Afghanistan, slap the cuffs on them and read them their Miranda rights?
Many of these people are being killed in Pakistan. Y'know, a country we are not currently at war with. How about if we follow Pakistani law in those situations? Would it be okay if we sent predator drones over the Mexican border to kill drug lords without telling anyone about it? Are there other countries we can secretly send robotic assassins into?
Why should government be inherently scorned for its domestic policies and inherently trustworthy when dealing with the situation of assassinations?
Considering the install base of the 360 versus the PS3 in America, and the dull support for DLC songs on the Wii, are you seriously saying that only 1/3 of the Rock Band fanbase plays it on the 360? I would imagine it's a much greater proportion than that, and that they served the most of their fans by getting it to the 360 first.
And along that point, it's worth reminding people that the Rock Band Network just launched, making it even easier for those bands to get on there. The downside being that you'll have to rely on community rating to show up among the crowd of other bands on there - there were a 100 tracks released on launch of the network, with supposedly another 300 in the pipe. And while there's a glut of unknown indie bands on the network who are desperate for the publicity, there's also a number of... maybe you'd call them "third tier" bands, groups that have a strong following but don't get much radio airplay. I picked up tracks by Flogging Molly, Steve Vai, and KMFDM on launch day.
When they say that they're going to be more "selective" with the music they pick up, I'm guessing that's the direction they'll go in. It doesn't necessarily mean they'll be using worse bands or less good music - it more likely means that you'll be seeing less of Metallica in favor of more Mastodon, things along that line. And I wouldn't have a huge issue with that.
And now, I will tear apart the analysis that tears apart the Harvard analysis!
Economists with extensive practical experience of telecommunications regulation have already rebutted the Berkman Center report that harshly assessed Canadian broadband performance, but it is also worth pointing out how much room for interpretation there is in broadband comparisons.
Let me back up this point by just letting you know the research was refuted and not bother pointing out anyone who's refuted it.
Residential broadband subscriptions, however, are taken at the household level, not at the individual level. And big businesses often connect several hundred employees with one “line.” The United States and Canada have 2.6 individuals per household, compared with 2.2 in Germany and some other European countries. Thus, if North American household sizes fell to German levels, and all households subscribed to broadband, the United Statse and Canada would have an additional seven lines per 100 persons... Thus there could well be more employees “connected” in North America, although there might be fewer connections.
So, wait, you're saying that there's more internet penetration in North America because in NA there are more people able to check their e-mail from work?
And North Americans use the Internet somewhat more intensively than do Europeans, according to Cisco Systems data on Internet traffic. Further, business Internet traffic in North America appears to be at levels substantially higher than elsewhere in the world. Sadly, there is little systematic effort by international agencies to measure the intensity of Internet usage.
In fact, there's so little effort to measure internet usage that I can just spout this line and pretend it's true without anyone having to refute it!
Real-world speed testing efforts, while not perfect, tell a dramatically different story from comparisons of advertised speeds. Using real-world data on the amount of time taken to deliver files to end users from its global network of servers, Akamai Technologies reports that the average download speed for Canada was 4.2 megabits a second, against 3.2 Mbps for France, whereas the OECD finds that the average advertised speed from French ISPs was a staggering 51 Mbps.
Ah, but were they testing from home servers, or from work, which is where most people check their email in Canada?
Fifty-Mbps speeds (and their prices) are representative of user experience only where advanced fibre and cable networks are widely on offer. Although parts of France have developed impressively in this regard, such networks are accessible to at most 25 per cent of households, and the take-up of high-speed services is very low.
As opposed to the, what, 2% of North American households that get that kind of speed?
Canada is likely soon to have a proportion substantially higher than France's of homes served by advanced fibre and cable networks that can deliver such speeds, thanks in part to the ubiquity of cable networks that are less costly to upgrade.
Also, next year the Cubs will win the pennant. It's gonna be the year! They've been building such a strong team!
Robert Crandall from the Brookings Institution has shown that in recent years, the capital intensity of the wireline operations of the incumbent North American phone companies has significantly exceeded that of their European counterparts. In 2008, Telus's wireline capital expenditures were about 25 per cent of its corresponding revenue, nearly double the ratio for many European incumbents. Likewise, the Wireless Intelligence database shows that between 2004 and 2009, the capital intensity of wireless operators has been 50 per cent higher in North America than in Western Europe.
How do we know that North Americans get better internet? Because they spend more money on it! Or do they?
These aren't words that write themselves for you - this is a cleverly disguised level seven wizard spell, Runes of Inducing Headache. I honestly tried to RTFA - it is one of the most deliberately complex things I've ever waded into.
However, the retort from Globe and Mail that tries to refute the study basically needs one big [citation needed] tag written under the whole thing.
Which is not to say that I disagree with you at all, but now that the stadiums are built, I can't quite get them torn down again and scrapped for cash.
Y'know, I'm sorry to say this, but I'll vastly prefer a system that forces me to show up with the people I bought tickets for, where I can't buy gift tickets, and I have to show ID at the door to a system where I can't afford the ticket. I would submit this is not a process greatly different process from getting on an airplane. Tell me, would you pay $300 more per airline ticket if it meant you could buy your tickets on eBay and bypass security?
I'm really getting tired of this argument that scalpers don't cause any harm, as if driving up prices simply to create profit for a middleman never had any externalities.
Excuse me, but a piece of my tax money went to funding the creation of this stadium in our city. The point to building that stadium was to attract large acts and attractions to the city, making it a more enjoyable place to live. Now you're going to tell me that when those acts come to town, only the upper third of the city is going to be able to afford that concert. I guess it's great for them, but it's a raw deal for the rest of us.
There is a cultural concern for people. Ask an artist how he feels when his concert only goes 60% full because of unsold scalper tickets, and what effect that word of mouth about low-event concerts where the only audience members are the ones with the largest wallets. Does that have an effect on album sales, merchandise sales in the future? Ask your son what kind of cultural connection he has the local sports team - much worse the Yankees, or the Lakers - when he's never seen them play live, and likely never will since the ticket prices are so high. What effect does that have on the future sales of jerseys, on the number of people in the city that ignore the team altogether? No, really, honest question - what is the actual effect of inflated prices that don't go to benefit the team itself? Maybe the team did an economic study that showed that they make more money in the long run if prices are held to a certain level, provided scalping externalities don't come into play.
I'm gonna say something here that's going to get me modded -1 socialist, but what good does that extra ticket price do? It isn't going to benefit the artist or team directly. It won't provide upkeep for the stadium. It's paying someone else just for the privilege of saying that they'll put the tickets up on eBay for you. What do you think would happen if a city - instead of trying to outlaw scalping - enacted a scalping tax? When you sell a ticket, you owe 50% of your profit over the original resale price of the ticket. For the individual seller, this means that if you have tickets that you just want to get rid of, then you can sell them at original price without penalty. For the big name scalpers, it means that those sales at least go back into helping the city that helped to provide space for the attraction in the first place. Just a thought.
Has Google participated in any actions that deliberately force their rivals out of the market? Or have they acted in any manner that abuses their position as a majority holder, such as configuring their systems to deliberately work more slowly with competing products? I mean, I certainly appreciate the concerns being raised as to what happens when one company has that much market saturation, but I think that a company has to conspire to do something illegally before they can be busted up. I don't think that just being the major player makes you eligible for antitrust regulation. (For example, I would think we would've busted up Ticketmaster for much worse by now.)
Yeah, I wasn't disagreeing with you. I was in fact acknowledging that simplicity and simple rewards processes draws in a much bigger audience that the joys of sneaking up behind people, stabbing them, and taking all of their stuff. If the popularity of WoW was annoying to hunter-killer-types, the popularity of Castle Age must be driving them to drink.
If you thought the user-friendliness and simplicity is what drove people to WoW, you should see how many more people are suddenly being driven into Mafia Wars, Castle Age, and Farmville on Facebook. No, my friends, I do not want to friggin' click your button to help you kill Sylvanus.
Thanks for posting this. I'm getting really tired of all of the people getting modded +5 for saying, "I fought back, and the bullying stopped!" Yeah, pure genius. As if bullies had no idea how to adapt to that.
Do the bullies have friends? Then fighting back only goes so far. You'll be held down by the others. Actually, no, you won't. You'll starting fighting one guy, and the others will go tattle on you to a teacher. You'll both be punished, but the bully will be laughing at you for getting you in trouble, and he'll start it again to see if you'll risk getting in trouble again. Maybe punching a guy works when the bully doesn't have friends, when he's an outcast himself that no one likes, but those are somewhat few and far between. Good-looking kids with rich, happy parents are just as likely to become bullies as kids from messed up families.
Not all bullies are physical bullies. Some... sorry, MOST are psychological bullies. They'll never throw a punch at you. Instead, they'll drive you crazy until you throw a punch at them. And then they'll go tell a teacher, and you'll be the bad guy, or at least on equal footing with them, and so they know you'll never try to fight back again because you'll just end up in trouble again. And you'll just be the idiot who tried to punch the popular kid.
If you were naturally strong enough to end a fight in a single punch, sure, maybe you could deal with bullying problems yourself, but bullies don't tend to target those kinds of people in the first place. If you could go back in time and tell my pre-adolescent, low-self-esteem self that I could just break a guy's nose and everything would be okay... Well, no, I did start a few fights when I couldn't take it anymore, and the school's reaction was to punish everyone involved. This collection of +5 insightful anecdotes is not adding up to data.
But it IS a part of the formula, which is why some game magazines list "Replay Value" alongside their metrics for "Graphics/Sound" and "Gameplay." Pull up the Gamespot review for Torchlight, and you'll see a little dollar sign on their "awards" for the game on the side, notifying the game as having a lot of value for the price you pay. It's certainly not the single most important attribute of a game, but it's well worth taking note of.
I propose The EVE Maxim: As a discussion about the shortcoming about videogames increases in length, the probability that someone will propose that EVE does not fall to those shortcomings and is modded insightful for it approaches 1.
When I first decided to start working out again, I just went to the gym, just did the usual stuff. Did one chest exercise, one back exercise, etc., kept doing the same stuff twice a week or so. Then after about a year of that, I started reading weightlifting forums a bit, learning about "split routines" where you only do one muscle group a day, spent a bunch of time trying to decide which individual exercises I could do in my little gym at the apartment complex, how to space them apart and when to do them, how to watch my time, when to have a couple of protein shakes, things like that. I told friends that my compulsion toward planning out talent specs in WoW had spilled over into a compulsion to plan out my workout.
But man, it's worked. When I pull out my workout log... and believe me, you want a log. It's great to just be able to see that you did 6 reps of an exercise last week but you're doing 7 reps this week. It's feedback that what you're doing actually works. When I pull out my log, when I started about three months ago, I was doing 115 lbs. on the incline bench press machine, 4 sets, 6 reps each. Last Saturday, I did 175 lbs., 4 sets, 6 reps each. The improvement shows.
Seriously, take half the energy that you put into designing your last D&D character and put that into putting together a workout plan. You might be amazed to see that skill cross over a little into a skillset that geeks supposedly have no ability to take part in.
I wasn't so much arguing with the article as I was with the 80% of comments to the article that seem to act like any gain for Bing must be a loss for Google. You know, not like I expect slashdotters to RTFA or anything.
Slashdot Mirror
Well, you usually don't get XP for PvP. I think that's what they call "grading on a curve."
I might suggest sapping the teacher and pickpocketing his test answers while he's stunned, but the teacher is less like an NPC and more like a moderator...
You know, of course there's only going to be a few people who really hit it big in indie games. Just like there's only going to be a few people who really hit it big in indie movies. Just like there's only going to be a few people who really hit it big in indie music. Just like there are rarely television shows on off-brand cable networks that get the same kind of viewership that sitcoms get on network channels.
And yet, despite all of that, the FX Network picked up a pilot for a low-budget sitcom called It's Always Sunny in Philadelphia, and while it'll never get the viewers that Seinfeld had, it's gotten a cult audience. And occasionally a small-budget movie will win an Oscar for acting or something, and that'll drive enough people to see it to earn a profit on it. And if a local band sells 10,000 copies of their album, they're considered a success, even though big artists go platinum at 100 times that.
And so you're going to have an indie games network that's going to have a lot of trash on it that doesn't make a lot of money, but buried in there are going to be several simple games that sell 10K copies and earn their creators some spending money. That's how indie media usually works. Nothing wrong with that. (And nothing wrong with I Maed a Game With Zombies, either. That friggin' song gets stuck in my head a lot.)
If I've got a fourth grader, I give him a math test on memorization of the multiplication tables. He turns it in with a quarter of the problems wrong, he gets a D. Then a month later, I give him a test on multiplying double-digit numbers. He gets a quarter of the problems wrong, he gets a D. Then I give him a test on division, three-digit numbers divided by one digit. He gets a D.
This kid leaves the fourth grade, and he pretty much forgets the little that he did learn in my class. He spends most of the next year playing catch-up.
Let me suggest the curriculum for a fourth grader's math assignments. I'm going to give this kid a test on the multiplication tables, but I'm going to give it a week earlier than the other teacher did. If this kid gets a quarter of the problems wrong, then he has to respawn and go fight the boss aga-- er, he has to take another multiplication tables test a week later. He keeps taking one of those tests once a week until he gets at least a 90% on it, even if the other kids have moved on to start taking other tests.
If this kid can't get ever get a 90% on these tables, he gets an F in math for the semester. If he passes the tables test, his grade levels up to a D.
Then I give this kid a test on double-digit multiplication. He has to take it again and again until he gets a 90% on the test. When he does, he levels up to a C in math for the semester. This might take him so long that he doesn't ever really get to the long division test, although I'll still give him some assignments to pick up on the basics of it.
The kid in the first example never really got a strong handle on any of the subjects I taught. The second kid knows his expletive'ing multiplication tables and has a good handle on multiplying numbers, even if he never got a good shot at the later stuff. The first kid got a D in math, the second kid got a C. Which kid do you think knows more about math?
Alternatively, I give one student that tables test, and he gets an A on the first try, a week earlier than the others. I tell this kid, okay, you can beta test the new dungeon that the devs are working on-- er, you can start looking ahead at some of the new material. Or maybe you can actually only get to a B in this class by doing the three main quests, so if you want to get to an A, you'll have to do at least a few side quests. Here, why don't you solve the puzzles in this beginner's programming book, since it's tangentially related to math? Or you could grind the goblins in this basic accounting sheet, teaching you to balance a checkbook?
I'm sure the actual logistics of this method would require a bit of work, but I'd like to see it tried out in practice once.
This is war! So we have to do everything we can! But it's not a war! So we can do anything we want to! ...What?
It'll be amusing to see how the "rule of law" crowd justifies foreign assassinations of people currently sitting in private homes (read: not on a battlefield) in countries that we are not currently at war with (read: Pakistan) as being somehow in line with our code of military law.
Oddly enough, I would imagine that people who believe that captured enemies should be treated responsibly as due the Geneva Convention would also believe that there should be a line of accountability and transparency when the government decides to remotely kill someone not currently engaged in battle.
A government big enough to give you everything you want is a government big enough to take from you everything you have.
You fear a government that provides additional social services, but you think a government that can kill anyone they want to as long as its on foreign soil and not have to tell anyone about it should just be given the benefit of the doubt?
The FBI to paradrop into Afghanistan, slap the cuffs on them and read them their Miranda rights?
Many of these people are being killed in Pakistan. Y'know, a country we are not currently at war with. How about if we follow Pakistani law in those situations? Would it be okay if we sent predator drones over the Mexican border to kill drug lords without telling anyone about it? Are there other countries we can secretly send robotic assassins into?
Why should government be inherently scorned for its domestic policies and inherently trustworthy when dealing with the situation of assassinations?
Considering the install base of the 360 versus the PS3 in America, and the dull support for DLC songs on the Wii, are you seriously saying that only 1/3 of the Rock Band fanbase plays it on the 360? I would imagine it's a much greater proportion than that, and that they served the most of their fans by getting it to the 360 first.
And along that point, it's worth reminding people that the Rock Band Network just launched, making it even easier for those bands to get on there. The downside being that you'll have to rely on community rating to show up among the crowd of other bands on there - there were a 100 tracks released on launch of the network, with supposedly another 300 in the pipe. And while there's a glut of unknown indie bands on the network who are desperate for the publicity, there's also a number of... maybe you'd call them "third tier" bands, groups that have a strong following but don't get much radio airplay. I picked up tracks by Flogging Molly, Steve Vai, and KMFDM on launch day.
When they say that they're going to be more "selective" with the music they pick up, I'm guessing that's the direction they'll go in. It doesn't necessarily mean they'll be using worse bands or less good music - it more likely means that you'll be seeing less of Metallica in favor of more Mastodon, things along that line. And I wouldn't have a huge issue with that.
And now, I will tear apart the analysis that tears apart the Harvard analysis!
Economists with extensive practical experience of telecommunications regulation have already rebutted the Berkman Center report that harshly assessed Canadian broadband performance, but it is also worth pointing out how much room for interpretation there is in broadband comparisons.
Let me back up this point by just letting you know the research was refuted and not bother pointing out anyone who's refuted it.
Residential broadband subscriptions, however, are taken at the household level, not at the individual level. And big businesses often connect several hundred employees with one “line.” The United States and Canada have 2.6 individuals per household, compared with 2.2 in Germany and some other European countries. Thus, if North American household sizes fell to German levels, and all households subscribed to broadband, the United Statse and Canada would have an additional seven lines per 100 persons... Thus there could well be more employees “connected” in North America, although there might be fewer connections.
So, wait, you're saying that there's more internet penetration in North America because in NA there are more people able to check their e-mail from work?
And North Americans use the Internet somewhat more intensively than do Europeans, according to Cisco Systems data on Internet traffic. Further, business Internet traffic in North America appears to be at levels substantially higher than elsewhere in the world. Sadly, there is little systematic effort by international agencies to measure the intensity of Internet usage.
In fact, there's so little effort to measure internet usage that I can just spout this line and pretend it's true without anyone having to refute it!
Real-world speed testing efforts, while not perfect, tell a dramatically different story from comparisons of advertised speeds. Using real-world data on the amount of time taken to deliver files to end users from its global network of servers, Akamai Technologies reports that the average download speed for Canada was 4.2 megabits a second, against 3.2 Mbps for France, whereas the OECD finds that the average advertised speed from French ISPs was a staggering 51 Mbps.
Ah, but were they testing from home servers, or from work, which is where most people check their email in Canada?
Fifty-Mbps speeds (and their prices) are representative of user experience only where advanced fibre and cable networks are widely on offer. Although parts of France have developed impressively in this regard, such networks are accessible to at most 25 per cent of households, and the take-up of high-speed services is very low.
As opposed to the, what, 2% of North American households that get that kind of speed?
Canada is likely soon to have a proportion substantially higher than France's of homes served by advanced fibre and cable networks that can deliver such speeds, thanks in part to the ubiquity of cable networks that are less costly to upgrade.
Also, next year the Cubs will win the pennant. It's gonna be the year! They've been building such a strong team!
Robert Crandall from the Brookings Institution has shown that in recent years, the capital intensity of the wireline operations of the incumbent North American phone companies has significantly exceeded that of their European counterparts. In 2008, Telus's wireline capital expenditures were about 25 per cent of its corresponding revenue, nearly double the ratio for many European incumbents. Likewise, the Wireless Intelligence database shows that between 2004 and 2009, the capital intensity of wireless operators has been 50 per cent higher in North America than in Western Europe.
How do we know that North Americans get better internet? Because they spend more money on it! Or do they?
So it is that in Ca
These aren't words that write themselves for you - this is a cleverly disguised level seven wizard spell, Runes of Inducing Headache. I honestly tried to RTFA - it is one of the most deliberately complex things I've ever waded into.
However, the retort from Globe and Mail that tries to refute the study basically needs one big [citation needed] tag written under the whole thing.
Which is not to say that I disagree with you at all, but now that the stadiums are built, I can't quite get them torn down again and scrapped for cash.
You really don't think these guys had 5,000 credit cards to buy 20,000 tickets at a time, do you?
Well, if they just fill out every "You're pre-approved!" request that comes in the mail...
Y'know, I'm sorry to say this, but I'll vastly prefer a system that forces me to show up with the people I bought tickets for, where I can't buy gift tickets, and I have to show ID at the door to a system where I can't afford the ticket. I would submit this is not a process greatly different process from getting on an airplane. Tell me, would you pay $300 more per airline ticket if it meant you could buy your tickets on eBay and bypass security?
I'm really getting tired of this argument that scalpers don't cause any harm, as if driving up prices simply to create profit for a middleman never had any externalities.
Excuse me, but a piece of my tax money went to funding the creation of this stadium in our city. The point to building that stadium was to attract large acts and attractions to the city, making it a more enjoyable place to live. Now you're going to tell me that when those acts come to town, only the upper third of the city is going to be able to afford that concert. I guess it's great for them, but it's a raw deal for the rest of us.
There is a cultural concern for people. Ask an artist how he feels when his concert only goes 60% full because of unsold scalper tickets, and what effect that word of mouth about low-event concerts where the only audience members are the ones with the largest wallets. Does that have an effect on album sales, merchandise sales in the future? Ask your son what kind of cultural connection he has the local sports team - much worse the Yankees, or the Lakers - when he's never seen them play live, and likely never will since the ticket prices are so high. What effect does that have on the future sales of jerseys, on the number of people in the city that ignore the team altogether? No, really, honest question - what is the actual effect of inflated prices that don't go to benefit the team itself? Maybe the team did an economic study that showed that they make more money in the long run if prices are held to a certain level, provided scalping externalities don't come into play.
I'm gonna say something here that's going to get me modded -1 socialist, but what good does that extra ticket price do? It isn't going to benefit the artist or team directly. It won't provide upkeep for the stadium. It's paying someone else just for the privilege of saying that they'll put the tickets up on eBay for you. What do you think would happen if a city - instead of trying to outlaw scalping - enacted a scalping tax? When you sell a ticket, you owe 50% of your profit over the original resale price of the ticket. For the individual seller, this means that if you have tickets that you just want to get rid of, then you can sell them at original price without penalty. For the big name scalpers, it means that those sales at least go back into helping the city that helped to provide space for the attraction in the first place. Just a thought.
Has Google participated in any actions that deliberately force their rivals out of the market? Or have they acted in any manner that abuses their position as a majority holder, such as configuring their systems to deliberately work more slowly with competing products? I mean, I certainly appreciate the concerns being raised as to what happens when one company has that much market saturation, but I think that a company has to conspire to do something illegally before they can be busted up. I don't think that just being the major player makes you eligible for antitrust regulation. (For example, I would think we would've busted up Ticketmaster for much worse by now.)
Yeah, I wasn't disagreeing with you. I was in fact acknowledging that simplicity and simple rewards processes draws in a much bigger audience that the joys of sneaking up behind people, stabbing them, and taking all of their stuff. If the popularity of WoW was annoying to hunter-killer-types, the popularity of Castle Age must be driving them to drink.
If you thought the user-friendliness and simplicity is what drove people to WoW, you should see how many more people are suddenly being driven into Mafia Wars, Castle Age, and Farmville on Facebook. No, my friends, I do not want to friggin' click your button to help you kill Sylvanus.
If they were being attacked by spammers and DDOSers, they might have been getting coverage from GNAA.
Thanks for posting this. I'm getting really tired of all of the people getting modded +5 for saying, "I fought back, and the bullying stopped!" Yeah, pure genius. As if bullies had no idea how to adapt to that.
Do the bullies have friends? Then fighting back only goes so far. You'll be held down by the others. Actually, no, you won't. You'll starting fighting one guy, and the others will go tattle on you to a teacher. You'll both be punished, but the bully will be laughing at you for getting you in trouble, and he'll start it again to see if you'll risk getting in trouble again. Maybe punching a guy works when the bully doesn't have friends, when he's an outcast himself that no one likes, but those are somewhat few and far between. Good-looking kids with rich, happy parents are just as likely to become bullies as kids from messed up families.
Not all bullies are physical bullies. Some... sorry, MOST are psychological bullies. They'll never throw a punch at you. Instead, they'll drive you crazy until you throw a punch at them. And then they'll go tell a teacher, and you'll be the bad guy, or at least on equal footing with them, and so they know you'll never try to fight back again because you'll just end up in trouble again. And you'll just be the idiot who tried to punch the popular kid.
If you were naturally strong enough to end a fight in a single punch, sure, maybe you could deal with bullying problems yourself, but bullies don't tend to target those kinds of people in the first place. If you could go back in time and tell my pre-adolescent, low-self-esteem self that I could just break a guy's nose and everything would be okay... Well, no, I did start a few fights when I couldn't take it anymore, and the school's reaction was to punish everyone involved. This collection of +5 insightful anecdotes is not adding up to data.
But it IS a part of the formula, which is why some game magazines list "Replay Value" alongside their metrics for "Graphics/Sound" and "Gameplay." Pull up the Gamespot review for Torchlight, and you'll see a little dollar sign on their "awards" for the game on the side, notifying the game as having a lot of value for the price you pay. It's certainly not the single most important attribute of a game, but it's well worth taking note of.
Nope, but they will cut off your access to anti-socialism conspiracy theory forums on the internet.
I propose The EVE Maxim: As a discussion about the shortcoming about videogames increases in length, the probability that someone will propose that EVE does not fall to those shortcomings and is modded insightful for it approaches 1.
When I first decided to start working out again, I just went to the gym, just did the usual stuff. Did one chest exercise, one back exercise, etc., kept doing the same stuff twice a week or so. Then after about a year of that, I started reading weightlifting forums a bit, learning about "split routines" where you only do one muscle group a day, spent a bunch of time trying to decide which individual exercises I could do in my little gym at the apartment complex, how to space them apart and when to do them, how to watch my time, when to have a couple of protein shakes, things like that. I told friends that my compulsion toward planning out talent specs in WoW had spilled over into a compulsion to plan out my workout.
But man, it's worked. When I pull out my workout log... and believe me, you want a log. It's great to just be able to see that you did 6 reps of an exercise last week but you're doing 7 reps this week. It's feedback that what you're doing actually works. When I pull out my log, when I started about three months ago, I was doing 115 lbs. on the incline bench press machine, 4 sets, 6 reps each. Last Saturday, I did 175 lbs., 4 sets, 6 reps each. The improvement shows.
Seriously, take half the energy that you put into designing your last D&D character and put that into putting together a workout plan. You might be amazed to see that skill cross over a little into a skillset that geeks supposedly have no ability to take part in.
I wasn't so much arguing with the article as I was with the 80% of comments to the article that seem to act like any gain for Bing must be a loss for Google. You know, not like I expect slashdotters to RTFA or anything.
Sir, your logic and information is cramping my attempts at satirical humor. You know that such things have no place on /.