This is why you need an intelligent popup blocker... Ive been saying this for a while... For both spam and popups, you need a smart blocker, since the advertisers will get sneakier and sneakier. You can't stop them with legal action because they don't care.
From the article, it looks as if the only thing they had to restore from tape/disk was their customer database, so that they could send out the next month's bills. So, the 72 hours was basically putting in new hardware and turning it on. They probably lost all their user's web sites and other "expendible" data.
How about talking about disaster recovery for a REAL company with tens to hundreds of terabytes of data sitting on disk? The kind of data that you cannot lose and must have back on-line asap?
This article is like congratulating them for putting up detour signs when a road is destroyed, or rerouting power when a power line goes down.
Just about everything that was destroyed was not-unique, manufactured items that could be recreated and repurchased. The only exception was the user data, which was pulled off of a nearly destroyed drive by a data recovery company. (Lucky for them!)
I would like to hear more about companies that lose tons of difficult to replace, unique items, such as TBs of user data, prototype designs, business records, etc.
I would bet that if a company were to permenantly lose these types of things, they would nearly go out of business.
This is a good example of the lack of anonymity that we have as consumers on the internet. Had these people been able to purchase their products anonymously, this sort of abuse wouldn't be possible.
If the government were to try a stunt like this, it would be against the constitution's "ex post facto" rules. But instead, we are moving toward a society that's "laws" are defined by corporate entities.
Though we loathe the idea of the government installing cameras and watching us, bugging our phones, reading our e-mail, record our purchase transactions, and track our movements, we allow corporations to do it all the time. This is already bad enough, but if we allow the government to centralize these corporate databases, then by default, we will have allowed the frightening world of 1984 to exist.
Its probably too late to be moderated up so that more people see this information but, here goes anyway:
You don't need discriminatory pricing to cause life-saving operation to cost too much. They already do cost enough to bankrupt most people. Approximately 50% of all bankruptcies
The same goes for anything that is deemed "neccessary" by the public:
- Medical expenses - College - Housing
All of these things have been slowly becoming more expensive at a rate greater than inflation, because these are not discretionary spending items.
In particular, medical expenses and college are subsidized by insurance and scholarships/grants. This has the affect of artificially increasing demand, or at least, the affect of the demand, which in turn increases the prices.
I a near perfect market environment, everyone would pay everything they could afford for sustinence items, leaving them working every hour they could just to survive. This sounds like an extremist point of view, but during the 19th century in England(and some of Europe), those are the conditions that most of the population were living under. Read about it; it's amazing and offensive. Why WOULDN'T you want to move over to communism or socialism after living in a "perfect" market environment? That is why much of Europe still has pseudo-socialist democracies. In the United States, there has been a steady trend of overabundance of supply, keeping prices down, so socialism never took a strong hold.
Feeding yourself is more important than saving money. (for most people... There are those people that choose to die instead of impovrishing their families, and they are more common than you think. Older people that would have had 20 more years to live had they had they felt like living those 20 years in poverty.)
Because feeding yourself is more important than saving, in perfect market conditions, which would include descriminatory pricing, make it impossible for the consumer to save money. It is the size of the split between the cost of living and your income that allows people to save, and in turn, become investors/capitalists with their excess money. (or wasteful consumers)
Thats unreasonable since not everyone can afford a computer. Some person's only internet access is through terminals provided in public libraries and the like.
In fact, because of the higher speed access provided by many libraries, persons who live out of their RVs rely on them for internet access while they are on the road.
It is getting to the point now that you NEED internet access... some government web sites offer information and forms that would be difficult to get otherwise. It is slowly becoming a de-facto neccessity, like owning a car. Other than a few large northern cities, almost everyone needs to have a car in order to have a job and live on their own.
How much does a terminal or kiosk cost to maintain? If it costs $60/hour for a repairman to fix your kiosk, even if it breaks every two weeks, it is still going to be cheaper than paying a teller $8/hour for 40 hours a week for 52 weeks a year.
The cost of the automated checkout at Home Depot is going to be significantly cheaper than hiring someone. Even a low paid person at $15000-20000 a year (less benefits and taxes) is WAY WAY more expensive than a kiosk.
Who says we need to "allow" them to take our jobs? Did the check-out teller have a say when home depot installed those automated check out counters? Did you have a say when your company eliminated your department and re-opened it in India?
If it is cheaper or more convienent to those who make the decisions, it will happen.
In the case of home depot, the customer will decide if those robots take the jobs of the teller, not the teller. In the case of your company, the management will decide, not you.
Those older people who do not like kiosks are going to be long dead in 50 years, while the current younger ones, that were raised around automation and kiosks will be older people who are comfortable with using an automaton instead of face-to-face contact.
Robots more expensive than humans? Impossible. Literally.
About the cost vs. human work: - A human can either do the work that the robot does for X dollars/hour indefinitely, or he can build a robot that does the work for nothing for X dollars/hour for Y hours.. After the robot is built, it will be able to produce essentially free labor for an indefinite amount of time. As more humans lose jobs and the cost of labor drops, the cost to produce a new robot will decrease in conjunction.
About self repair: - Why would these "robots" be any different than robots and computers of today? If they break, throw them away and replace them with a new one. It is significantly cheaper to build another one (because other robots build them anyway) than to fix a broken one.
About vision: - You assume that most of these robot devices will need vision. Most will not, as in the examples that the article gives. As for those that will need some sort of vision, it will probably be very specialized. I do not doubt that this will possible eventually. Very likely within the next 50 years.
Though, I do not agree with the opinion that these robots will be humanoid. I believe that they will probably be kiosk or terminal-based. Tasks that previously were done by trained employees will now be done by kiosk-based computers/robots and guided by the untrained customer.
The pay-at-the-pump phenonmenon was not by choice. Yes, it probably DOES make them lose money. The problem is that as soon as the first pay at the pump gas station opened in an area, it attracted so much business that all of the others HAD to implement the same system to keep up.
I know that as soon as the first pay-at-the-pump station opened in my town, I stopped there even if it cost a little more per gallon.
A bigger problem is remembering to pay when you go to a gas station that is not pay at the pump! oops!
Great idea, but that will never happen in a capitalist society. The big businesses will build and buy these expensive robots and they will be the sole ones to profit from them.
As an employee, you get paid ONLY for the work you do.
As a business, you can replace yourself or your equipment with more efficient people or equipment. (read: forign workers and robots) and you get to profit from it.
If it were a perfectly fair society, you could hire a lower cost Indian that does better work to replace yourself and make the profit. Instead, only your company can do that now.
By that logic, you do not let anyone "sell" a virtual property to someone in the real world and that all the sales on ebay of everquest items are void.
So that if someone sells a Sword of +8 to someone else on ebay and then promptly shaft them by not delivering the sword, then they have no recourse, since the sword is entirely virtual.. It only exists on paper, or in this case in the computer.
So, if Michael Jackson decided not to pay for the rights to the beatles songs (which also only exist on paper) he wouldn't have any recourse.
Whether or not you agree with intellectual property rights, they do exist as property (for the length of the copyright or patent), and can be sold or traded.
Actually, the only reason that the value of gold fluctuates is because we are off the gold standard... Before we left the gold standard, the value of gold (or the dollar, depending on how you look at it) was $33 per ounce.
I see your point... How can you claim something as yours that is entirely under the control of someone else? Plus, its existence is entirely dependant on the maintenance by the operator.
So unless the operator were to be legally required to keep the system up, all virtual objects within the system are the property of the operator. I guess then, yes, much like the government, the rights of property are granted by the operator.
Makes sense. Its much like a government and real estate... We need to pay taxes on property... but how is that different than renting it from the government? Its not.
So: In theory, you can consider the virtual world an entirely separate nation. In fact, if Everquest wanted to, they could print physical money tied to the virtual money in the virtual world. You could trade it in for virtual money or sell it for US dollars... The dollar value would fluctuate just like any foriegn currency. You could even perform arbitrage and make money off of the fluctuations. All the game maker needs to do is create a free market, where the money in the system is valued by the market, not with fixed prices for objects.
Assuming that there are no licenses wrapped around the virtual world stating "you may not sell or buy items within this world", then the virtual items have value.
Note these facts: (at least, what I take to be facts) - The market places real monetary value on the "virtual" property. - I never see the money I make from work. It exists entirely within computers. It passes from my employers bank account to mine to some retail shop entirely "virtually". (Thank you checkcard!) If we were still on the gold standard, this point would be void. However, we are not, and therefore much of the money in the USA is "virtual" and propped up on nothing. In conjunction, the value of items in the 'real world' are not tied to the dollar. They also fluctuate depending on the market. (id est, inflation and deflation).
You might say that the money in my bank account has a fixed value, but it doesnt. Because we and most of the world is not on the gold standard, currency values fluctuate, and the value of currency in the united states may change from minute to minute depending on the market.
Similarly, the value of the items in Everquest fluctuate, even though they exist within computers. They are no less real than currency is in the real world.
It seems like that today, reasonable observations are so far away from the contrived reality that the media and the Bush administration is pushing that they start to sound "far out" and "left wing".
These crazy "left-wing" rantings are what pretty much what the rest of the rational world thinks.
Yea, I think you understood where I was coming from.
Not only do they attempt perfection, the miss badly.
Poor physics The characters don't always "contact" their environment. Incorrect lighting
It makes us realize that the actors in the scene with the CG characters are actually talking to nothing. Its difficult to suspend disbelief when it is obvious that the character that you are looking at is not actually there and just superimposed onto the scene. The puppets are actually there on the set when they are filming. The actors can touch them and they react as expected.
While competition is good fun when it comes to sport, it is about time the West, in particular the USA stopped believing that every time another entity tries to do something newer, bigger or better that such a step is looked upon as a threat.
It is because it IS a threat. Now, though we don't expect china or western Europe to attack the united states, as soon as they obtain enough economic and technological advantage over everyone else, they will use it to enrich themselves and maintain their advantage, much like the United States does now.
Everything comes down to economics. Until everyone on earth is extremely comfortable in their lives (much like middle and upper class America is now) there will always be a lot of conflict from people trying to improve their situation. Most people don't care if others get rich, as long as the others don't get rich off of their back, and as long as they are comfortable.
Then again, even if everyone were comfortable, they may not be satisfied.
Worse yet, the CG in most movies is not believeable. The quality is so low and the animation so obvious that it removes the credibility so that only children could possibly enjoy it.
In the 80's, most sci-fi and fantasy movies needed to use puppets and camera trics. The puppets were significantly more believable and enjoyable to watch than most current CG characters. I would take an old starwars puppet over a CG Jabba anyday.
One of the only movies to do it right was Jurrassic Park. It was also one of the first. It is a shame that production values have dropped so dramatically.
Think of all the great fantasy and scifi movies in the past that used puppets instead of graphics:
The neverending story Star wars trilogy (before profiteering by Lucas) Labrynth The Dark crystal Legend
All of the characters were more believable than the current crop... Even Gollum from the recent LOTR movies, which had some of the best acting by a CG character in a while, was difficult to believe because half the time he was on the screen, it we obvious that he was a CG character.
Their actions, intended to preserve their monopoly power and dying business model, instead actually hurt the artists by encouraging people to use alternative, illegal sources of distribution.
The recording industry has been "dying" since the start of their price fixing. However, it is important to note that the actual music nor the quality of the music has not been dieing, but only the actual value of the music. (the amount of money the market is willing to pay for the product)
The artifical inflation of price has maintained a high production value and a large number of well-produced and highly-advertised attempts at stardom. If the industry were to make only as much money as their product is now worth, the number and/or the quality of the product as a whole will necessarily decrease.
What would likely happen is that a lot of the "me-too" stars and the already low profit niche music would slough away until only the core of the most profitable music remained. (read: lowest common denominator) This might mean a lower produced Brittany Spears, but no Christina Aguiliera, no Mandy Moore, no Pink, or other me-too stars.
I can't imagine most people paying for something that allows only on-demand listening. There are far too many limitations to on-demand listening:
Must be on a Windows PC attached to a high-speed internet line in the United States. So that cuts out listening to your music on any sort of musical "appliance" like a radio or cd player... You can't listen in your car, or anywhere else.
Its much like watching re-runs of Friends on pay-per-view. Who would want that?
No, thats not what we are saying at all. My original message was in response to another message stating something to the effect of "This is why you roll your own PVR".
Basically, I was countering the statement "No one should use Tivo because the roll-your-own method is technically and ethically superior".
I shouldn't have to respond to that sort of lapse of logic... but alas, this is Slashdot... logic has nothing to do with it.
While 85% of the games out there might feature violence, I sincerely doubt that 85% of the *purchases* are of violence-oriented games.
I disagree. When you count the huge number of super-hit violent games out there, they outsell and greatly out-number nonviolent games.
Doom and Doom 2 Quake 1-3 and the games based off of it. Half-life Matrix CounterStrike Grand Theft Auto Halo
And another large number of semi-violent or less graphic games: Madden football Spiderman Warcraft 1-3 Everquest
In particular, when you take into account the large number of Games that are purchased for game systems like Playstation and Xbox. Non-violent games rarely translate well to the console market.
The non-violent games tend to be limited to a handful of extremely popular titles:
The Sim series Civilization 1,2,3 etc Myst Some Racing games, but the newest ones have turned violent also.
Not many more than that were big hits. Syberia and the others you mentioned might be great games, but not huge sellers.
US hegemony is the best way for the US to protect its interests, cultural, economic and strategic. To suggest otherwise is idealistic leftist folly.
And what interests would those be? List them out specifically, please, and show in detail how hegemony is going to be a good thing.
The United States already had a natural hegemony via its unequalled financial power. Everyone wanted to be like the USA in their unsurpassed financial, scientific, quality of life, and other successes. Therefore, hegemony in itself was not the goal of the second gulf war.
Let me play Bush's advocate for a minute.
The United States and the other nations in the first gulf war did not have the opportunity to pilliage Iraq for its black gold to the extent that they felt they deserved. But would simple greed alone drive the united states to abandon the rest of the world and attack a defenseless country? Probably not.
However, the growing strength of China and Western Europe are a threat to the United States hegemony. China's GNP has grown by an average of 7% a year for the past 10 years. Their economy is booming. Jobs are plentiful.
The United States is afraid that other countries or coallitions (but primarily China) is going to overpower it by an explosive economy driving a powerful military. The USA is able to keep its position on top of the world by coercing other countries with its financial and milatary might. The economists in the administration know that we are in for a long lull in our economy as it "resets" from the bubble of the late 90's. Without a massive influx of money from resources like oil, it is going to be difficult or impossible to keep on top of other up-and-comers like China.
Capitalists know that a socialist or communist country can industrialize very quickly by focusing all of its resources to the task. Russia did this in the early 20th century and brought millions of serfs and peasants into an industrialized superpower.
Now, the Bush Administration is attempting to strengthen our power and hegemony to prevent that from happening.
Every day I see the creeping evangelism of Orwellian doublespeak advancing through the ranks, where you only want privacy if you have something criminal to hide, where safety can be bought at the expense of rights, and where Big Brother *really does* know what's good for you.
Big Brother does think it knows what's good for you, and further, Big Brother thinks his job is to tell you what is good for you. The (theoretical) job of Government isn't to do whats best for the people. It is to do the will of the people, whether or not that will is in the best interest of the people or not. Currently in Florida, Jeb Bush and others in the state legislature are trying to suspend and re-vote on a law that was passed by referendum in the last election. Basically, they are saying "the people did not know what they were voting for"... and they want the people to revote until the law is removed. The law basically states that no classroom should have more than X number of students per teacher (that number fluctuates depending on the grade level of the class).
The legislators and Jeb Bush are all worried that when people see how much their taxes are raised, (or other services lowered) that the people will vote them out of office. It just shows the contempt that they have for democracy.
I'm sure many RTV owners will agree with me that having the ability to send shows over the internet is pretty pointless (it can take hours to days to send one).
Though it might be somewhat useless now, in the future, when broadband becomes faster, it will be a great feature.
It is along the lines of MP3s, which when you had dial-up, took forever to download and send, but now can be obtained in only a few seconds.
Of course, the most obvious use of that feature would be illegal distribution, but there are some very compelling uses for that feature:
- Watching shows from your ReplayTV from another house, television, computer, handheld device (like a video phone) (or from work!) - Storing your videos on a central server (Imagine a website like a videos.yahoo.com, where you can store all your videos and watch them from anywhere). - Renting videos via your ReplayTV... downloading them and electronically "returning them". The bill can go straight to your Replay TV bill. The smart thing for them to do would be to allow the user to keep the video for extra days and return it late for a fee (if they so wanted). The replay machine could also have an option for "automatic return" at the end of the rental period.
All the feature would need is some sort of legitimacy. Sort of like how Apple gave digital music (mp3s or AACs, as the case may be) legitimacy.
Slashdot Mirror
This is why you need an intelligent popup blocker... Ive been saying this for a while... For both spam and popups, you need a smart blocker, since the advertisers will get sneakier and sneakier. You can't stop them with legal action because they don't care.
From the article, it looks as if the only thing they had to restore from tape/disk was their customer database, so that they could send out the next month's bills. So, the 72 hours was basically putting in new hardware and turning it on. They probably lost all their user's web sites and other "expendible" data.
How about talking about disaster recovery for a REAL company with tens to hundreds of terabytes of data sitting on disk? The kind of data that you cannot lose and must have back on-line asap?
This article is like congratulating them for putting up detour signs when a road is destroyed, or rerouting power when a power line goes down.
Just about everything that was destroyed was not-unique, manufactured items that could be recreated and repurchased. The only exception was the user data, which was pulled off of a nearly destroyed drive by a data recovery company. (Lucky for them!)
I would like to hear more about companies that lose tons of difficult to replace, unique items, such as TBs of user data, prototype designs, business records, etc.
I would bet that if a company were to permenantly lose these types of things, they would nearly go out of business.
This is a good example of the lack of anonymity that we have as consumers on the internet. Had these people been able to purchase their products anonymously, this sort of abuse wouldn't be possible.
If the government were to try a stunt like this, it would be against the constitution's "ex post facto" rules. But instead, we are moving toward a society that's "laws" are defined by corporate entities.
Though we loathe the idea of the government installing cameras and watching us, bugging our phones, reading our e-mail, record our purchase transactions, and track our movements, we allow corporations to do it all the time. This is already bad enough, but if we allow the government to centralize these corporate databases, then by default, we will have allowed the frightening world of 1984 to exist.
Its probably too late to be moderated up so that more people see this information but, here goes anyway:
You don't need discriminatory pricing to cause life-saving operation to cost too much. They already do cost enough to bankrupt most people. Approximately 50% of all bankruptcies
The same goes for anything that is deemed "neccessary" by the public:
- Medical expenses
- College
- Housing
All of these things have been slowly becoming more expensive at a rate greater than inflation, because these are not discretionary spending items.
In particular, medical expenses and college are subsidized by insurance and scholarships/grants. This has the affect of artificially increasing demand, or at least, the affect of the demand, which in turn increases the prices.
I a near perfect market environment, everyone would pay everything they could afford for sustinence items, leaving them working every hour they could just to survive. This sounds like an extremist point of view, but during the 19th century in England(and some of Europe), those are the conditions that most of the population were living under. Read about it; it's amazing and offensive. Why WOULDN'T you want to move over to communism or socialism after living in a "perfect" market environment? That is why much of Europe still has pseudo-socialist democracies. In the United States, there has been a steady trend of overabundance of supply, keeping prices down, so socialism never took a strong hold.
Feeding yourself is more important than saving money. (for most people... There are those people that choose to die instead of impovrishing their families, and they are more common than you think. Older people that would have had 20 more years to live had they had they felt like living those 20 years in poverty.)
Because feeding yourself is more important than saving, in perfect market conditions, which would include descriminatory pricing, make it impossible for the consumer to save money. It is the size of the split between the cost of living and your income that allows people to save, and in turn, become investors/capitalists with their excess money. (or wasteful consumers)
Thats unreasonable since not everyone can afford a computer. Some person's only internet access is through terminals provided in public libraries and the like.
In fact, because of the higher speed access provided by many libraries, persons who live out of their RVs rely on them for internet access while they are on the road.
It is getting to the point now that you NEED internet access... some government web sites offer information and forms that would be difficult to get otherwise. It is slowly becoming a de-facto neccessity, like owning a car. Other than a few large northern cities, almost everyone needs to have a car in order to have a job and live on their own.
Yes, but notice I said "essentially".
How much does a terminal or kiosk cost to maintain? If it costs $60/hour for a repairman to fix your kiosk, even if it breaks every two weeks, it is still going to be cheaper than paying a teller $8/hour for 40 hours a week for 52 weeks a year.
The cost of the automated checkout at Home Depot is going to be significantly cheaper than hiring someone. Even a low paid person at $15000-20000 a year (less benefits and taxes) is WAY WAY more expensive than a kiosk.
Who says we need to "allow" them to take our jobs? Did the check-out teller have a say when home depot installed those automated check out counters? Did you have a say when your company eliminated your department and re-opened it in India?
If it is cheaper or more convienent to those who make the decisions, it will happen.
In the case of home depot, the customer will decide if those robots take the jobs of the teller, not the teller. In the case of your company, the management will decide, not you.
Those older people who do not like kiosks are going to be long dead in 50 years, while the current younger ones, that were raised around automation and kiosks will be older people who are comfortable with using an automaton instead of face-to-face contact.
Robots more expensive than humans? Impossible. Literally.
About the cost vs. human work:
- A human can either do the work that the robot does for X dollars/hour indefinitely, or he can build a robot that does the work for nothing for X dollars/hour for Y hours.. After the robot is built, it will be able to produce essentially free labor for an indefinite amount of time. As more humans lose jobs and the cost of labor drops, the cost to produce a new robot will decrease in conjunction.
About self repair:
- Why would these "robots" be any different than robots and computers of today? If they break, throw them away and replace them with a new one. It is significantly cheaper to build another one (because other robots build them anyway) than to fix a broken one.
About vision:
- You assume that most of these robot devices will need vision. Most will not, as in the examples that the article gives. As for those that will need some sort of vision, it will probably be very specialized. I do not doubt that this will possible eventually. Very likely within the next 50 years.
Though, I do not agree with the opinion that these robots will be humanoid. I believe that they will probably be kiosk or terminal-based. Tasks that previously were done by trained employees will now be done by kiosk-based computers/robots and guided by the untrained customer.
The pay-at-the-pump phenonmenon was not by choice. Yes, it probably DOES make them lose money. The problem is that as soon as the first pay at the pump gas station opened in an area, it attracted so much business that all of the others HAD to implement the same system to keep up.
I know that as soon as the first pay-at-the-pump station opened in my town, I stopped there even if it cost a little more per gallon.
A bigger problem is remembering to pay when you go to a gas station that is not pay at the pump! oops!
Great idea, but that will never happen in a capitalist society. The big businesses will build and buy these expensive robots and they will be the sole ones to profit from them.
As an employee, you get paid ONLY for the work you do.
As a business, you can replace yourself or your equipment with more efficient people or equipment. (read: forign workers and robots) and you get to profit from it.
If it were a perfectly fair society, you could hire a lower cost Indian that does better work to replace yourself and make the profit. Instead, only your company can do that now.
By that logic, you do not let anyone "sell" a virtual property to someone in the real world and that all the sales on ebay of everquest items are void.
So that if someone sells a Sword of +8 to someone else on ebay and then promptly shaft them by not delivering the sword, then they have no recourse, since the sword is entirely virtual.. It only exists on paper, or in this case in the computer.
So, if Michael Jackson decided not to pay for the rights to the beatles songs (which also only exist on paper) he wouldn't have any recourse.
Whether or not you agree with intellectual property rights, they do exist as property (for the length of the copyright or patent), and can be sold or traded.
Actually, the only reason that the value of gold fluctuates is because we are off the gold standard... Before we left the gold standard, the value of gold (or the dollar, depending on how you look at it) was $33 per ounce.
I see your point... How can you claim something as yours that is entirely under the control of someone else? Plus, its existence is entirely dependant on the maintenance by the operator.
So unless the operator were to be legally required to keep the system up, all virtual objects within the system are the property of the operator. I guess then, yes, much like the government, the rights of property are granted by the operator.
Makes sense. Its much like a government and real estate... We need to pay taxes on property... but how is that different than renting it from the government? Its not.
So: In theory, you can consider the virtual world an entirely separate nation. In fact, if Everquest wanted to, they could print physical money tied to the virtual money in the virtual world. You could trade it in for virtual money or sell it for US dollars... The dollar value would fluctuate just like any foriegn currency. You could even perform arbitrage and make money off of the fluctuations. All the game maker needs to do is create a free market, where the money in the system is valued by the market, not with fixed prices for objects.
Gary
Assuming that there are no licenses wrapped around the virtual world stating "you may not sell or buy items within this world", then the virtual items have value.
Note these facts: (at least, what I take to be facts)
- The market places real monetary value on the "virtual" property.
- I never see the money I make from work. It exists entirely within computers. It passes from my employers bank account to mine to some retail shop entirely "virtually". (Thank you checkcard!) If we were still on the gold standard, this point would be void. However, we are not, and therefore much of the money in the USA is "virtual" and propped up on nothing. In conjunction, the value of items in the 'real world' are not tied to the dollar. They also fluctuate depending on the market. (id est, inflation and deflation).
You might say that the money in my bank account has a fixed value, but it doesnt. Because we and most of the world is not on the gold standard, currency values fluctuate, and the value of currency in the united states may change from minute to minute depending on the market.
Similarly, the value of the items in Everquest fluctuate, even though they exist within computers. They are no less real than currency is in the real world.
Why was that message rated (0: Troll)??
It seems like that today, reasonable observations are so far away from the contrived reality that the media and the Bush administration is pushing that they start to sound "far out" and "left wing".
These crazy "left-wing" rantings are what pretty much what the rest of the rational world thinks.
Yea, I think you understood where I was coming from.
Not only do they attempt perfection, the miss badly.
Poor physics
The characters don't always "contact" their environment.
Incorrect lighting
It makes us realize that the actors in the scene with the CG characters are actually talking to nothing. Its difficult to suspend disbelief when it is obvious that the character that you are looking at is not actually there and just superimposed onto the scene. The puppets are actually there on the set when they are filming. The actors can touch them and they react as expected.
While competition is good fun when it comes to sport, it is about time the West, in particular the USA stopped believing that every time another entity tries to do something newer, bigger or better that such a step is looked upon as a threat.
It is because it IS a threat. Now, though we don't expect china or western Europe to attack the united states, as soon as they obtain enough economic and technological advantage over everyone else, they will use it to enrich themselves and maintain their advantage, much like the United States does now.
Everything comes down to economics.
Until everyone on earth is extremely comfortable in their lives (much like middle and upper class America is now) there will always be a lot of conflict from people trying to improve their situation. Most people don't care if others get rich, as long as the others don't get rich off of their back, and as long as they are comfortable.
Then again, even if everyone were comfortable, they may not be satisfied.
Worse yet, the CG in most movies is not believeable. The quality is so low and the animation so obvious that it removes the credibility so that only children could possibly enjoy it.
In the 80's, most sci-fi and fantasy movies needed to use puppets and camera trics. The puppets were significantly more believable and enjoyable to watch than most current CG characters. I would take an old starwars puppet over a CG Jabba anyday.
One of the only movies to do it right was Jurrassic Park. It was also one of the first. It is a shame that production values have dropped so dramatically.
Think of all the great fantasy and scifi movies in the past that used puppets instead of graphics:
The neverending story
Star wars trilogy (before profiteering by Lucas)
Labrynth
The Dark crystal
Legend
All of the characters were more believable than the current crop... Even Gollum from the recent LOTR movies, which had some of the best acting by a CG character in a while, was difficult to believe because half the time he was on the screen, it we obvious that he was a CG character.
Their actions, intended to preserve their monopoly power and dying business model, instead actually hurt the artists by encouraging people to use alternative, illegal sources of distribution.
The recording industry has been "dying" since the start of their price fixing. However, it is important to note that the actual music nor the quality of the music has not been dieing, but only the actual value of the music. (the amount of money the market is willing to pay for the product)
The artifical inflation of price has maintained a high production value and a large number of well-produced and highly-advertised attempts at stardom. If the industry were to make only as much money as their product is now worth, the number and/or the quality of the product as a whole will necessarily decrease.
What would likely happen is that a lot of the "me-too" stars and the already low profit niche music would slough away until only the core of the most profitable music remained. (read: lowest common denominator) This might mean a lower produced Brittany Spears, but no Christina Aguiliera, no Mandy Moore, no Pink, or other me-too stars.
I can't imagine most people paying for something that allows only on-demand listening. There are far too many limitations to on-demand listening:
Must be on a Windows PC attached to a high-speed internet line in the United States. So that cuts out listening to your music on any sort of musical "appliance" like a radio or cd player... You can't listen in your car, or anywhere else.
Its much like watching re-runs of Friends on pay-per-view. Who would want that?
No, thats not what we are saying at all. My original message was in response to another message stating something to the effect of "This is why you roll your own PVR".
Basically, I was countering the statement "No one should use Tivo because the roll-your-own method is technically and ethically superior".
I shouldn't have to respond to that sort of lapse of logic... but alas, this is Slashdot... logic has nothing to do with it.
While 85% of the games out there might feature violence, I sincerely doubt that 85% of the *purchases* are of violence-oriented games.
I disagree. When you count the huge number of super-hit violent games out there, they outsell and greatly out-number nonviolent games.
Doom and Doom 2
Quake 1-3 and the games based off of it.
Half-life
Matrix
CounterStrike
Grand Theft Auto
Halo
And another large number of semi-violent or less graphic games:
Madden football
Spiderman
Warcraft 1-3
Everquest
In particular, when you take into account the large number of Games that are purchased for game systems like Playstation and Xbox. Non-violent games rarely translate well to the console market.
The non-violent games tend to be limited to a handful of extremely popular titles:
The Sim series
Civilization 1,2,3 etc
Myst
Some Racing games, but the newest ones have turned violent also.
Not many more than that were big hits. Syberia and the others you mentioned might be great games, but not huge sellers.
US hegemony is the best way for the US to protect its interests, cultural, economic and strategic. To suggest otherwise is idealistic leftist folly.
And what interests would those be? List them out specifically, please, and show in detail how hegemony is going to be a good thing.
The United States already had a natural hegemony via its unequalled financial power. Everyone wanted to be like the USA in their unsurpassed financial, scientific, quality of life, and other successes. Therefore, hegemony in itself was not the goal of the second gulf war.
Let me play Bush's advocate for a minute.
The United States and the other nations in the first gulf war did not have the opportunity to pilliage Iraq for its black gold to the extent that they felt they deserved. But would simple greed alone drive the united states to abandon the rest of the world and attack a defenseless country? Probably not.
However, the growing strength of China and Western Europe are a threat to the United States hegemony. China's GNP has grown by an average of 7% a year for the past 10 years. Their economy is booming. Jobs are plentiful.
The United States is afraid that other countries or coallitions (but primarily China) is going to overpower it by an explosive economy driving a powerful military. The USA is able to keep its position on top of the world by coercing other countries with its financial and milatary might. The economists in the administration know that we are in for a long lull in our economy as it "resets" from the bubble of the late 90's. Without a massive influx of money from resources like oil, it is going to be difficult or impossible to keep on top of other up-and-comers like China.
Capitalists know that a socialist or communist country can industrialize very quickly by focusing all of its resources to the task. Russia did this in the early 20th century and brought millions of serfs and peasants into an industrialized superpower.
Now, the Bush Administration is attempting to strengthen our power and hegemony to prevent that from happening.
Every day I see the creeping evangelism of Orwellian doublespeak advancing through the ranks, where you only want privacy if you have something criminal to hide, where safety can be bought at the expense of rights, and where Big Brother *really does* know what's good for you.
Big Brother does think it knows what's good for you, and further, Big Brother thinks his job is to tell you what is good for you. The (theoretical) job of Government isn't to do whats best for the people. It is to do the will of the people, whether or not that will is in the best interest of the people or not. Currently in Florida, Jeb Bush and others in the state legislature are trying to suspend and re-vote on a law that was passed by referendum in the last election. Basically, they are saying "the people did not know what they were voting for"... and they want the people to revote until the law is removed. The law basically states that no classroom should have more than X number of students per teacher (that number fluctuates depending on the grade level of the class).
The legislators and Jeb Bush are all worried that when people see how much their taxes are raised, (or other services lowered) that the people will vote them out of office. It just shows the contempt that they have for democracy.
I'm sure many RTV owners will agree with me that having the ability to send shows over the internet is pretty pointless (it can take hours to days to send one).
Though it might be somewhat useless now, in the future, when broadband becomes faster, it will be a great feature.
It is along the lines of MP3s, which when you had dial-up, took forever to download and send, but now can be obtained in only a few seconds.
Of course, the most obvious use of that feature would be illegal distribution, but there are some very compelling uses for that feature:
- Watching shows from your ReplayTV from another house, television, computer, handheld device (like a video phone) (or from work!)
- Storing your videos on a central server (Imagine a website like a videos.yahoo.com, where you can store all your videos and watch them from anywhere).
- Renting videos via your ReplayTV... downloading them and electronically "returning them". The bill can go straight to your Replay TV bill. The smart thing for them to do would be to allow the user to keep the video for extra days and return it late for a fee (if they so wanted). The replay machine could also have an option for "automatic return" at the end of the rental period.
All the feature would need is some sort of legitimacy. Sort of like how Apple gave digital music (mp3s or AACs, as the case may be) legitimacy.