Instead of making sure only the people who bought the machines can control corruption, now everyone can buy your vote. Capitalism finally meets Democracy at a grass roots level:)
I think a better arguement might be this : The probability of new technologies (biowarfare, nuclear weaponry, nanobots) being developed by *someone* is very high (given human nature as observed throughout history). In most instances where an activity is banned by some authority, that activity merely goes underground.
Therefore, banning research altogether (or guns or alcohol, for that matter) just puts it into the hands of the unethical, or the criminal, and removes it from the supervision of ethical bodies (and governments- ethical or otherwise).
What scenario would you rather have ? Mad Scientist with Nano-disassemblers, or the Diamond Age ? There are no utopias, and the genie is no longer in the bottle no matter how much you call for "banning" nanotechnology. The best you can hope for is a reasoned and ethical approach being taken by researchers in the area.
Hmm, so you know you're elite when a bunch of other people refer to you as elite in their (elite) writings ?
I guess those non-westerners are shit outta luck getting their own elite leaders, but fortunately 97% of significant elitists are westerners, so we've got enough for everyone. They can have some of our elite to govern them. I'm sure they'll appreciate that.
You still haven't proved your yardstick for elitism is of any use when governing others, (Why does a Nobel physicist automatically qualify as a philosopher king ? ) or even is anything other than one self-professed genius patting his own back while scratching his friends'.
I thought 9/11 was a special effect the first time I saw it.
We're so used to the medias ability to lie with ease, I expect we'd probably need to be hit by the Heat-Ray before we'd accept such a thing these days. Some people still believe we've never landed on the Moon, after all.
Thats true, but democracy is always based on the lowest common denominator. Capitalism will always reflect the worst of man, not the best.
First point. Democracy != Capitalism.
Secondly, you seem to believe there is some "higher" standard, that there is some perfection a society can strive toward. How do you know this, or what it is ? What is the benchmark for your ethical elitism ?
To take a less emotionally loaded example : artistic merit. One might suggest that ornate baroque architecture is more aesthetically "perfect" than "modern" functional office buildings. How does one make this judgement ? If it is relative to the society, then how is this any different than a mob decision? If there is someone who makes that decision for the society, how does one qualify to be that person ? If there are arbitrary (or culturally-relative) standards for aesthetics, surely there must similarly culturally-relative benchmarks for leader-selection. If that is the case, then each society is best served by selecting their own leaders on their own terms - perhaps democratically:)
It's trivial to allow a person to get a new ballot sheet by presenting the old (invalid because they made a mistake) one to the vote staff. In Australia, where paper ballots were pretty much perfected, you sign off on a registration sheet to say that you're voting, and get the paperwork. You fill it out and put it in the ballot box. If you make a mistake you can go back and turn in your error sheet and get a new one.
You tally the votes in the box with the number of people who signed the sheet to ensure there aren't people stuffing the ballot box.
While I agree that a completely electronic solution is hard to have faith in, the addition of a voter-verifiable audit trail should be viable.
For example - I go to my electonic booth and hit the VOTE button. I get a print out of my selection and I put that in the ballot box by hand after I verify that it says what I think it should.
This gives us redundancy (electronic and hard-copy), initial counting-speed (votes registered immediately), and voter verification. It also gives us an audit trail in the form of the hard copy for manual recounts.
For all of that, it's probably more expensive than the current systems, and less open to abuse. So it'll never happen:)
Hmm - I thought it was supposed to be the other way around. I mean - didn't Gore concede well before the booths closed because the media declared for Bush, and then have to recant the concession because it suddenly became "too close to call" ? That certainly cost him votes because he suddenly looked like a "sore loser" when really he might have been just a media dupe:)
Well not all of us have the capacity or desire to work on creating wonderful new things. Sure, everyone in Star Trek seems to, but really... how many people do you know who are actually capable of developing that new killer-application, or whatever. Not everyone, I'm sure.
Which still brings us back to the point - if you're simply not capable of contributing at the bleeding edge, and replicators can make anything you could ever want, and there is no cash, *why* would you do a shitty job? You don't need the money... So yes - I agree with your assessment. I suspect there might be quite a bit of self-delusion in the Star Trek universe.
This is too funny. I laughed when I read the original poster said "discount money from genetics because it's most often inherited." I mean - come on, was that in intential double entendre ?
Nonetheless, I have to say, wealth isn't a trait that can be effectively passed on in ones genes. For that reason alone, you have to discount it as a factor of evolution. You don't evolve into wealth, even if you do inherit it.
In most instances, a less than perfectly fit individual will survive to procreate due to wealth (and health-care) - just look at the royal families of Europe and their prediliction for the haemophilia. However, the actual wealth itself can be won or lost without any genetic disposition either way. Furthermore, suggesting that the correlation between rich people and low birth rates implies wealth is a negative trait is also missing the point.
So on the main philips Portable Audio page, I see a little photo of a girl reclining on a bed with a Philips MP3 player in her hand...
It's the exact same shot from the DELL animation, but with the dell DJ overlayed with the philips player. You can tell its Philips who did the "appropriating" here, because the girls fingers are blurred out in their shot, and not in the Dell one.
If I had a mod point, you'd get an Insightful right there. Of course, the fun is where you're still learning. Whether it's about the "game play" (ie the skills it takes to make your character do stuff) or whether it's the game world (where do I go to kill rats around here? How do I complete this quest? etc) or whatever, you _THE PLAYER_ are learning about the game.
I guess the problem with most of the games is, once you've learned how to level, and how to get around and how to find the monsters, these games just make it more of the same to progress.
Your solution is to make the player continue to learn new things - I think that's possible without making them rely on reflexes (which seems anathema to most MMOGs, Planetside excepted), but it *does* seem to be the key.
Hmm. I wonder if there's an abusive patent in here somewhere:)
No. I'm saying people generally don't think things through properly. (including me, many times) There's an *emotional* feeling that things that are free tend to be of lower quality. Marketing people capitalize on that. If something looks good, but is "free", people might actually spend the 10 minutes it takes them to think things through and realize that they will be paying for this for the duration of their usage, rather than merely upfront. That's why my two statements aren't contradictory.
I don't suggest that the upfront cost is a direct cause of the game sucking. However, a company factors in the high turn-over of players into their margins and a high-upfront cost is a good way of recouping for a game with a high turn over. In general, better games should have a lower turn over and companies should be able to charge less up front. In practice, this doesn't happen because no matter how good or bad the game is, the publishers will still stick with the model that gives them the most cash.
P.S. AOL *was* a huge success because it marketed to less net-savvy "average" people. How many geeks use AOL? By making the internet easy for normal people to get used to, they made a lot of money. However, as the average user becomes more netsavvy, AOL is becoming less necessary, and consequently they're not doing as well as they used to be. (Of course, now Time-Warner acquired them, we'll never know the exact bottom line).
Speaking of Morrowinds pointless walks...
There's an ability to make spells in that game. If you're bored of walking, try creating a spell that gives you +100 (or more) Jump skill, and some acrobatics to soften the fall. Or some Slowfall if you like (although I prefer the acrobatics).
Then you can jump around the map instead.
Of course, to truly experience the fun of Morrowind after it's lost it's lustre, you should go load up some 3rd party mods. The true fun starts when you can add entire areas to the game world, and tweak all sorts of internal settings using the TES construction set. Sure it can take some of the challenge out of the game, but who cares about that ? It wasn't that much of a challenge in the first place, and jumping for miles at a stride is too much fun. It's a pity they didn't allow spells to be created with a delay in them (like Jump+1000, delay 3 seconds, SlowFall 20 seconds, delay 20 seconds, Acrobatics+100 5 seconds -> that would be a fun spell)
It's not the power gamers who suffer the most. Sure they bitch and moan that they don't have their Sword of Ultimate PKing yet, and they've only camped the Monster of Incredible Drops for three days straight. Yes, this kind of bitching is annoying.
But it's the fact that there is often *nothing else to do* in these games which pisses the average player off. The average player wants something new and interesting, or at least wants a near constant set of rewards, to keep them playing. As the writer of the article suggests...
Nope. People generally believe free things are of lower quality than things they pay for. 90% of people will believe that the slick box they paid $50 for is worth that $50.
If it were free, then they might also start to wonder about how much they're really paying for it through that monthly fee.
Furthermore, the games are generally of low enough actual quality that the company has to cover their costs up front as much as possible, in order to cover those who drop out after the first month - a large percentage of their inital player-base due to the aforementioned low quality.
The Big Brother implications of all this might unleash a massive public backlash. But just as plausibly, people may decide to put up with technology's double-edged sword to regain a measure of the security they have lost.
In what way does this technology restore a measure of lost security?
The US lost nothing but the illusion of security on 9/11. If a psycho wants you dead, and doesn't care if he dies achieving that goal, there's very little you can do to stop him. This has always been the case. It always will be. There is no such thing as perfect fore-knowledge, or unbreachable security.
All this technology does is give anyone (including the terrorists) a cheap way of tracking other people using near-ubiquitous devices. Gee - that makes me feel safe, how about you ?
Which is why I often begin such a conversation with "sorry if I sound distracted - I'm driving". The person on the other end just has to live with being low on my list of priorities. If it's important, I'll pull over, or if it can wait, I'll call back later. If it's the usual "I just called to say Hi!" bullshit I get, then half the time they don't even know I'm not paying attention to their conversation. After all, if they don't notice I'm not listening when I'm sitting right next to them, they're not going to notice when I'm in a different part of the city.
Well CID doesn't show me international numbers (at least, it doesn't with my phone). Since my family lives overseas, I have no way of telling if its someone who is CID-blocked, or my loving parents.
Believe me - it's more prudent for me to field the occaisional call from an unknown 3rd party than it is to piss off my parents:)
Of course they mentioned it. But they're down-playing it now, since it's patently obvious that the code isn't really there. There's so little support and balance for the existing character options, that slapping in the Jedi code would be premature to say the least. Probably be better to get Bounty Hunters and MasterCarbiners working correctly - not to mention content for the rest of their players to muck around with, before they start letting wanna-be-darths wander around unchecked and unbalanced.
I don't know about the US, but there's something we like to call "evidence" and "onus of proof".
If she doesn't use the card, immediately sues the CC company and there is no signature, then the onus of proof is on the CC company to prove that she did, in fact, wish to enter into the legally binding contract. They can assert that she failed to sign, through whatever reason, but that her intent remained clear. But they have to prove it on the balance of probabilities in a court. Since there is no signature, the onus is on them. That's why people always say "get it in writing". They mean the signature as much as the conditions.
On the other hand - I can't say that invalidating the contract will automatically get her damages for the selling of her information... that's a different thing, and if the CC company can argue that it was acting on good faith, they might get only limited damages.
Slashdot Mirror
Instead of making sure only the people who bought the machines can control corruption, now everyone can buy your vote. :)
Capitalism finally meets Democracy at a grass roots level
I think a better arguement might be this : The probability of new technologies (biowarfare, nuclear weaponry, nanobots) being developed by *someone* is very high (given human nature as observed throughout history).
In most instances where an activity is banned by some authority, that activity merely goes underground.
Therefore, banning research altogether (or guns or alcohol, for that matter) just puts it into the hands of the unethical, or the criminal, and removes it from the supervision of ethical bodies (and governments- ethical or otherwise).
What scenario would you rather have ? Mad Scientist with Nano-disassemblers, or the Diamond Age ? There are no utopias, and the genie is no longer in the bottle no matter how much you call for "banning" nanotechnology. The best you can hope for is a reasoned and ethical approach being taken by researchers in the area.
Actually - just scratch the grandparent poster off your list of "people who know wtf they're talking about."
Blue Gene -look out world you know I've got mine
But Remember they always let you down when you need 'em...
Hmm, so you know you're elite when a bunch of other people refer to you as elite in their (elite) writings ?
I guess those non-westerners are shit outta luck getting their own elite leaders, but fortunately 97% of significant elitists are westerners, so we've got enough for everyone. They can have some of our elite to govern them. I'm sure they'll appreciate that.
You still haven't proved your yardstick for elitism is of any use when governing others, (Why does a Nobel physicist automatically qualify as a philosopher king ? ) or even is anything other than one self-professed genius patting his own back while scratching his friends'.
I thought 9/11 was a special effect the first time I saw it.
We're so used to the medias ability to lie with ease, I expect we'd probably need to be hit by the Heat-Ray before we'd accept such a thing these days.
Some people still believe we've never landed on the Moon, after all.
Thats true, but democracy is always based on the lowest common denominator. Capitalism will always reflect the worst of man, not the best.
:)
First point. Democracy != Capitalism.
Secondly, you seem to believe there is some "higher" standard, that there is some perfection a society can strive toward. How do you know this, or what it is ? What is the benchmark for your ethical elitism ?
To take a less emotionally loaded example : artistic merit. One might suggest that ornate baroque architecture is more aesthetically "perfect" than "modern" functional office buildings. How does one make this judgement ? If it is relative to the society, then how is this any different than a mob decision? If there is someone who makes that decision for the society, how does one qualify to be that person ? If there are arbitrary (or culturally-relative) standards for aesthetics, surely there must similarly culturally-relative benchmarks for leader-selection. If that is the case, then each society is best served by selecting their own leaders on their own terms - perhaps democratically
It's trivial to allow a person to get a new ballot sheet by presenting the old (invalid because they made a mistake) one to the vote staff.
In Australia, where paper ballots were pretty much perfected, you sign off on a registration sheet to say that you're voting, and get the paperwork. You fill it out and put it in the ballot box. If you make a mistake you can go back and turn in your error sheet and get a new one.
You tally the votes in the box with the number of people who signed the sheet to ensure there aren't people stuffing the ballot box.
It's not hard, really.
While I agree that a completely electronic solution is hard to have faith in, the addition of a voter-verifiable audit trail should be viable.
:)
For example - I go to my electonic booth and hit the VOTE button. I get a print out of my selection and I put that in the ballot box by hand after I verify that it says what I think it should.
This gives us redundancy (electronic and hard-copy), initial counting-speed (votes registered immediately), and voter verification. It also gives us an audit trail in the form of the hard copy for manual recounts.
For all of that, it's probably more expensive than the current systems, and less open to abuse. So it'll never happen
Hmm - I thought it was supposed to be the other way around. :)
I mean - didn't Gore concede well before the booths closed because the media declared for Bush, and then have to recant the concession because it suddenly became "too close to call" ?
That certainly cost him votes because he suddenly looked like a "sore loser" when really he might have been just a media dupe
Well not all of us have the capacity or desire to work on creating wonderful new things. Sure, everyone in Star Trek seems to, but really ... how many people do you know who are actually capable of developing that new killer-application, or whatever. Not everyone, I'm sure.
Which still brings us back to the point - if you're simply not capable of contributing at the bleeding edge, and replicators can make anything you could ever want, and there is no cash, *why* would you do a shitty job? You don't need the money... So yes - I agree with your assessment. I suspect there might be quite a bit of self-delusion in the Star Trek universe.
"It's a dirty job, but somebody has to do it".
This is too funny.
I laughed when I read the original poster said "discount money from genetics because it's most often inherited." I mean - come on, was that in intential double entendre ?
Nonetheless, I have to say, wealth isn't a trait that can be effectively passed on in ones genes. For that reason alone, you have to discount it as a factor of evolution. You don't evolve into wealth, even if you do inherit it.
In most instances, a less than perfectly fit individual will survive to procreate due to wealth (and health-care) - just look at the royal families of Europe and their prediliction for the haemophilia. However, the actual wealth itself can be won or lost without any genetic disposition either way. Furthermore, suggesting that the correlation between rich people and low birth rates implies wealth is a negative trait is also missing the point.
So on the main philips Portable Audio page, I see a little photo of a girl reclining on a bed with a Philips MP3 player in her hand...
It's the exact same shot from the DELL animation, but with the dell DJ overlayed with the philips player. You can tell its Philips who did the "appropriating" here, because the girls fingers are blurred out in their shot, and not in the Dell one.
For Shame Philips !
If I had a mod point, you'd get an Insightful right there.
:)
Of course, the fun is where you're still learning. Whether it's about the "game play" (ie the skills it takes to make your character do stuff) or whether it's the game world (where do I go to kill rats around here? How do I complete this quest? etc) or whatever, you _THE PLAYER_ are learning about the game.
I guess the problem with most of the games is, once you've learned how to level, and how to get around and how to find the monsters, these games just make it more of the same to progress.
Your solution is to make the player continue to learn new things - I think that's possible without making them rely on reflexes (which seems anathema to most MMOGs, Planetside excepted), but it *does* seem to be the key.
Hmm. I wonder if there's an abusive patent in here somewhere
No. I'm saying people generally don't think things through properly. (including me, many times) There's an *emotional* feeling that things that are free tend to be of lower quality. Marketing people capitalize on that.
If something looks good, but is "free", people might actually spend the 10 minutes it takes them to think things through and realize that they will be paying for this for the duration of their usage, rather than merely upfront. That's why my two statements aren't contradictory.
I don't suggest that the upfront cost is a direct cause of the game sucking. However, a company factors in the high turn-over of players into their margins and a high-upfront cost is a good way of recouping for a game with a high turn over. In general, better games should have a lower turn over and companies should be able to charge less up front. In practice, this doesn't happen because no matter how good or bad the game is, the publishers will still stick with the model that gives them the most cash.
P.S. AOL *was* a huge success because it marketed to less net-savvy "average" people. How many geeks use AOL? By making the internet easy for normal people to get used to, they made a lot of money. However, as the average user becomes more netsavvy, AOL is becoming less necessary, and consequently they're not doing as well as they used to be. (Of course, now Time-Warner acquired them, we'll never know the exact bottom line).
Speaking of Morrowinds pointless walks...
There's an ability to make spells in that game. If you're bored of walking, try creating a spell that gives you +100 (or more) Jump skill, and some acrobatics to soften the fall. Or some Slowfall if you like (although I prefer the acrobatics).
Then you can jump around the map instead.
Of course, to truly experience the fun of Morrowind after it's lost it's lustre, you should go load up some 3rd party mods. The true fun starts when you can add entire areas to the game world, and tweak all sorts of internal settings using the TES construction set. Sure it can take some of the challenge out of the game, but who cares about that ? It wasn't that much of a challenge in the first place, and jumping for miles at a stride is too much fun. It's a pity they didn't allow spells to be created with a delay in them (like Jump+1000, delay 3 seconds, SlowFall 20 seconds, delay 20 seconds, Acrobatics+100 5 seconds -> that would be a fun spell)
It's not the power gamers who suffer the most. Sure they bitch and moan that they don't have their Sword of Ultimate PKing yet, and they've only camped the Monster of Incredible Drops for three days straight.
...
Yes, this kind of bitching is annoying.
But it's the fact that there is often *nothing else to do* in these games which pisses the average player off. The average player wants something new and interesting, or at least wants a near constant set of rewards, to keep them playing.
As the writer of the article suggests
Nope.
People generally believe free things are of lower quality than things they pay for. 90% of people will believe that the slick box they paid $50 for is worth that $50.
If it were free, then they might also start to wonder about how much they're really paying for it through that monthly fee.
Furthermore, the games are generally of low enough actual quality that the company has to cover their costs up front as much as possible, in order to cover those who drop out after the first month - a large percentage of their inital player-base due to the aforementioned low quality.
The Big Brother implications of all this might unleash a massive public backlash. But just as plausibly, people may decide to put up with technology's double-edged sword to regain a measure of the security they have lost.
In what way does this technology restore a measure of lost security?
The US lost nothing but the illusion of security on 9/11. If a psycho wants you dead, and doesn't care if he dies achieving that goal, there's very little you can do to stop him. This has always been the case. It always will be. There is no such thing as perfect fore-knowledge, or unbreachable security.
All this technology does is give anyone (including the terrorists) a cheap way of tracking other people using near-ubiquitous devices. Gee - that makes me feel safe, how about you ?
Which is why I often begin such a conversation with "sorry if I sound distracted - I'm driving". The person on the other end just has to live with being low on my list of priorities. If it's important, I'll pull over, or if it can wait, I'll call back later.
If it's the usual "I just called to say Hi!" bullshit I get, then half the time they don't even know I'm not paying attention to their conversation. After all, if they don't notice I'm not listening when I'm sitting right next to them, they're not going to notice when I'm in a different part of the city.
Well CID doesn't show me international numbers (at least, it doesn't with my phone). Since my family lives overseas, I have no way of telling if its someone who is CID-blocked, or my loving parents.
:)
Believe me - it's more prudent for me to field the occaisional call from an unknown 3rd party than it is to piss off my parents
1 Full tank of gas
It's dark outside and we're wearing sunglasses.
Hit it!
Exactly - what some people don't realize is that businesses usually need to see a reason to spend money.
Only Geeks buy new gear just because it's new.
Of course they mentioned it. But they're down-playing it now, since it's patently obvious that the code isn't really there.
There's so little support and balance for the existing character options, that slapping in the Jedi code would be premature to say the least.
Probably be better to get Bounty Hunters and MasterCarbiners working correctly - not to mention content for the rest of their players to muck around with, before they start letting wanna-be-darths wander around unchecked and unbalanced.
I don't know about the US, but there's something we like to call "evidence" and "onus of proof".
If she doesn't use the card, immediately sues the CC company and there is no signature, then the onus of proof is on the CC company to prove that she did, in fact, wish to enter into the legally binding contract.
They can assert that she failed to sign, through whatever reason, but that her intent remained clear. But they have to prove it on the balance of probabilities in a court.
Since there is no signature, the onus is on them. That's why people always say "get it in writing". They mean the signature as much as the conditions.
On the other hand - I can't say that invalidating the contract will automatically get her damages for the selling of her information... that's a different thing, and if the CC company can argue that it was acting on good faith, they might get only limited damages.