No, they don't. How do you compete over customers who are locked into contracts? Cell phone carriers collude, and it doesn't matter if it's complicit or implicit collusion. Each carrier has its own brands of phones, which are built to be incompatible with each others' networks, so that means the cell phone manufacturers are in on the deal as well. Because of the contract-subsidized discounts (it's really usury in disguise) on the locked-in phones, they can and do overcharge for the phones. Computers are dirt cheap because of competition -- why aren't cell phones?
The current prices are what they are because people pay them.
People pay them because they have no other choice.
Well, causality could be thrown out the window if the universe were deterministic. Which puts us in a pickle: if we have free will, we can't go faster than light. But if the future is set in stone then we have the, er, freedom to posit a universe without causality and also without paradox.
They built this whole neighborhood out of wood, out of wood
I guess I'll still be around when they burn, burn it down
I will be standing around when they burn it down
Here in the Museum of Idiots
...
If you and I had any brains, we wouldn't be in this place
Chop me up into pieces, if it pleases, if it pleases
And when the chopping is through, every piece will say "I love you"
Every piece of me will say "I love you"
Here in the Museum of Idiots
Can a parallel universe which is missing a black hole here and there, and therefore missing all of the information which ever dumped into them, really be said to be parallel?
I've got it! The mass from the missing black holes can be found in the goatees on all the evil parallel twins.
whereby black holes were seemingly able to 'swallow up' information and completely destroy it (whereas no other process in the universe appeared able to do so).
What about photons travelling in an uninterrupted path towards the edge of the observable universe? I assume they would be irretrievably lost in ever-expanding space, with anything they could possibly interact with receding from them faster than they move.
Parallel universes that only exist on paper or in the minds of quantum physicists are such a copout. You can't detect them, measure them, interact with them, or otherwise find any way to prove they exist, yet some people believe in them anyway. Kinda like God.
If I understand correctly, light travels more slowly through translucent substances because the photons are being absorbed and re-emitted by the electrons in them. The photons travel at c until they hit an atom's electron shell. The electron absorbs the photon, quantum leaps to a higher energy state, then immediately releases the absorbed energy as another photon and returns to its rest state. That whole process takes time, effectively slowing down a pulse of light. The light is still travelling at c between atoms.
In the experiment being discussed in the article, it sounds like they are stopping the process at the point where the photons have been absorbed by matter, and delaying their being re-emitted for quite a long time (relatively speaking). The light is being stopped, but not by causing photons to travel more slowly than c. It's being stopped by keeping the photons' energy bottled up inside the Bose-Einstein condensate.
we've often seen them apparently asleep, but if you can move to see their other eye, you find it open and alert
I've got four of the little bastards and I've never noticed them doing that. Now I'm gonna have to watch 'em for a while and try see it happen.
Are they doing this when they sleep on one foot with the other one tucked away?
Why is this article calling them "independents" when they are apparently thieves? If I sell other people's music without their permission, that doens't make me an indie record label. It makes me a criminal.
Actually, I would recommend using Access's visual query designer as a stepping stone to learning SQL, not the other way around. I know people who went to school to learn SQL and still get confused about the difference between inner and outer joins. The little arrow on the line connecting two tables (or lack of an arrow) in the query builder makes the type of join you're making quite plain.
I think I understand this now -- maybe this explanation will help.
First, let's suppose we can pick out a particular point in space and put a permanent mark on it so we can always find it again. Now, let's mark two points exactly 1 meter apart. If we come back in a year, the distance between those two points will be slightly more than 1 meter, because all space everywhere is expanding. Every point is moving away from every other point.
To use nice small round numbers, let's suppose that one year later, the distance between the two original points is 1.001 meters. So, you now know that space is expanding at 0.1% every year. You can use that to extrapolate larger measurements. Say you had marked two points 1000 meters apart. The distance between those two points a year later would be 1001 meters. The two points were 1000 times farther apart, and they grew 1000 times more distance between them.
Now, let's take it to extremes. Two points 2,000 light-years apart would gain two light-years of distance between them in that first year. That means a photon leaving one point heading directly towards the other point would never make it, because the space between them would be expanding faster than the photon moves.
This would also be a compound-interest function. If a distance of 2000 light-years grew to 2002 light-years in a year, then in two years it would grow to 2004.002.
Because all space is expanding equally in every direction, beyond the 1000 light-year barrier using these example numbers there might as well be no universe. You'll never be able to interact with it. If you were a photon travelling from one point to the other, it would be as if you were just heading in a straight path out into an endless void. If you aren't on a collision path with anything between your origin and destination, you would end up irrelevant to the entire universe -- just a packet of energy lost in the middle of new space coalescing in the middle of nowhere.
the universe is instead about 15.8 billion years old and about 180 billion light-years wide
Wouldn't that mean that the universe has been expanding at several times c since the big bang? How does the universe come to be 180 billion light-years across in only 15.8 billion years, if nothing travels faster than light?
People always like to bring up QM, especially entanglement, when talking about magical things like FTL travel or communication, super-duper-duper-computers, and time travel. Now it's telepathy too? Nice.
Quantum Mechanics is not magic. It's also not dimly understood. It is counterintuitive, but that doesn't mean that it somehow turns black into white.
The big problem with QM is how people write about it. With the double-slit experiment, for example, you'll read a phrase like "when you observe which slit each photon goes through, the interference patterns disappear". The problem is, most people think of observation as something completely passive. But in the realm of QM, observation is very active and very destructive. In QM-speak, it goes without saying that to observe something is to change it. If the above phrase were written "when you jigger with each photon to try to get an idea of which slit it goes through, the interference pattern vanishes", it would be equally accurate and sound a lot less magical. A pretty pattern of waves on the surface of a pond will vanish if you jump into the pond to get a look at the waves up close.
Entanglement is described with equal misguidance. Usually you get a phrase like "when you measure measure one photon of the entangled pair, the other one's spin changes instantly across any distance to match". Sounds magical, right? But it ain't. The spin "changes" from a state where it has all possible values with equal probability of each into a state where you know what the value of that spin is. QM is all about probabilities and information and not so much about the actual particles. Instead of saying "the particle's spin changes", it would be more correct to say "what we know about the particle's spin changes". But instead we get shorthand that is clear to anyone who groks QM but is counterintuitive to the layman. By observing your electron (and remember, observing means you've destroyed information in it by getting the spin information out), you've gained some information about it. Because of the entanglement, you've also gained information about the other memeber of the pair, without disturbing it, at that very moment, no matter where the other member of that pair is. That's it.
Yours was a very good reply and I thank you for it; it's nice to see that Slashdotters can still be civil and engage in meaningful discussion.
For example a college degree.
The degree is just a piece of paper that says you're educated; it's different from the education itself. With top-tier equipment in an MMO, though, you aren't buying a lie. You're buying the real thing. If I buy a fake PhD and call myself "doctor", that doesn't mean I can do a job that only a PhD can do. But if I buy elite gear in WoW, then it buffs up my stats exactly how a fake diploma won't.:)
Now, I think you've hit the nail on the head with this statement:
if it's unofficial, then you're stuck with a lot of the shady circumstances that pop up. Like in WoW, you've got those gold farmers that ruin game experience for others simply because they're trying to earn a living
What the real deal here is, is that gold buying in an MMO becomes almost exactly like real-world vice crime. When something victimless like pot smoking or prostitution is legal and is reasonably regulated like any "legitimate" business would be, then it doesn't cause a stir. Brothels are peaceful, secure places where money changes hands, people enjoy themselves in privacy, and disease is not spread. Herb dens are like pubs except full of happy stoners instead of rowdy drunks.
But, when those things become illegal, that doesn't stop the basic human desires that lead to the demand that creates the market; people want to enjoy themselves, get laid, or whatever else without being bothered and without hurting anyone. So, they do these things anyway. But, without the protection of law, they have lots of negative ancilliary effects and secondary crime, all of which reinforces the negative perception of the original vice and clouds peoples' judgement over what the real solution is.
On the gold farming thing, I think the best way to handle it is to sanction it and not try to stop it. You'll waste a lot of time and effort trying to stop it, ruining the game experiences of the "cheaters" who just wanted to skip over some of the boring parts along the way, and you won't really stop it. By "criminalizing" it, you're exacerbating the problem that you created in the first place. It's better to noturinate into the wind, right?
I think creating a real no-grind MMORPG will require creating a whole new kind of beast. These games must have huge subscription revenues to be profitable, because they cost boatloads of money to make and maintain. You can't put content into the game cheaply enough and in enough volume to keep your playerbase engaged and still make a profit. So, you have to put in the level grind and the loot grind to give players more hurdles than just the quests and instances you build into the game. Otherwise, they power through all your content in no time, and you might as well have sold them a single-player game, because they won't subscribe and will move on to the next RPG. Since the grind is required for an MMO to be sustainable long-term, then you have to embrace the "seedier" side of people just engaging in capitalist economics vis-a-vis gold farming and gold buying.
It's interesting watching things like Second Life emerge and evolve. SL is all about being a virtual world and not about being a game; there's no grind to it and there's an officially sanctioned currency market for it. But, it's not a game. However, I do bet that eventually we'll see an MMO that is somewhere between Wow and Second Life, where player-generated content provides enough playability to eliminate the ridiculous grind.
I don't think there are any games yet that have a fixed amount of commodities in the gaming world, but I'd appreciate seeing it.
Ultima Online did early on. People hoarded. The system broke. It sounds good in theory, but there are too many variables you can't easily account for in practice. What about the guy who has a nice collection of some commodity, then doesn't log in for six months? Do you release his supply back into the system? What about when he returns to the game -- is he screwed out of his stuff, or is his supply allowed to go over the limit?
I think this is exactly what the game needs to prove that the money situation is broken.
The situation needs deeper analysis. MMORPGs are a new layer on top of the RPG. Classically, the "economy" in an RPG is a combination of game world flavor, a way to inflate the game's play time, a flow controller (i.e. to prevent you from buying powerful high-level equipment too early), and a sub-game of decision-making about things like exactly how important it is to have the Uber Sword of Donkeylizard Slaying or if the Elite Sword of Donkeylizard Slaying is good enough.
Single-player RPGs contain things look like economics but really aren't -- it's just part of the game.
Early MMORPG designers built the game systems the same way, without giving much thought to how real economics were going to come into play. It's just a game, one that happens to be multiplayer, right? It's obvious to add in trading of stuff between players. But, as soon as you do that, a real economy emerges. The real one interacts strangely with the fake one built into the game world. The classical RPG economy has the hero being uber-rich by the end of the game, because accumulated money is just another scorecard. But when that useless stuff can be traded between players and the game is designed for all players to get steadily richer over time, then you end up with this huge disconnect between the value of money in terms of the game rules and the value of money between two players. A friend signs on, you give him a small fraction of all the excess money you've piled up, and that little gift allows him to never have to worry about gaining money in the game on his own.
Money is a store of time, nothing more.
In an MMO, currency has the dual role of being a scorecard in a sub-game, and being real currency for player-to-player transactions. On the game engine side, the system is immutable. On the human side, the value of the currency fluctuates constantly in response to uncountable things. It just doesn't work right. No matter how much you bandaid it.
The key is to fix it so that the game engine "economics" adjust themselves dynamically in response to the real economics that happen as a result of player action. Ultima Online took a small step in that direction a few years back, when they made it so that NPCs would adjust their prices in response to player purchases and sellbacks. It was shown to be a successful experiment when, later, an NPC shopkeeper was placed in a dangerous and hard to access are of the game world. Players found it preferable to spend the gold they gained in that dungeon locally with that shopkeeper, because it was literally not worth their time to truck the loot back out for deposit into their bank accounts. Prices on that vendor skyrocketed to more than ten times the price for the same item in an easily accessible part of the world. They eventually stabilized when players began finding it worth their time to truck goods into that area specifically to sell to that vendor. That simple little change in game mechanics allowed actual economics to emerge in that game.
On the whole, MMO developers aren't generally interested in playing with economic theories. They are much more interested in providing a fun play experience that is visually stunning. Experimentation with the basic game design is a Bad Thing because the results might be unknown and if you f
Slashdot Mirror
Entanglement can't be used to communicate useful information.
Well, causality could be thrown out the window if the universe were deterministic. Which puts us in a pickle: if we have free will, we can't go faster than light. But if the future is set in stone then we have the, er, freedom to posit a universe without causality and also without paradox.
Ain't philosophy fun?
Rampant credit card fraud, you say? Money laundering? Huh? Are you just making stuff up, or repeating xenophobic FUD?
These are aboveboard businesses, not underground mafia crime rings.
They built this whole neighborhood out of wood, out of wood
I guess I'll still be around when they burn, burn it down
I will be standing around when they burn it down
Here in the Museum of Idiots
...
If you and I had any brains, we wouldn't be in this place
Chop me up into pieces, if it pleases, if it pleases
And when the chopping is through, every piece will say "I love you"
Every piece of me will say "I love you"
Here in the Museum of Idiots
Any word from E3 on a ship date for Duke Nukem Forever?
And that's the best they can come up with as a way to prove Many-Worlds? Russian Roulette with a quantum trigger?
I was only half joking when comparing MWIs to religion; now I am starting to believe it is a cult, right down to the suicide pact.
Or maybe the whole thing is just an elaborate joke.
Parallel universes that only exist on paper or in the minds of quantum physicists are such a copout. You can't detect them, measure them, interact with them, or otherwise find any way to prove they exist, yet some people believe in them anyway. Kinda like God.
The link in the article points to a review of "Cooking Mama". What's up?
If I understand correctly, light travels more slowly through translucent substances because the photons are being absorbed and re-emitted by the electrons in them. The photons travel at c until they hit an atom's electron shell. The electron absorbs the photon, quantum leaps to a higher energy state, then immediately releases the absorbed energy as another photon and returns to its rest state. That whole process takes time, effectively slowing down a pulse of light. The light is still travelling at c between atoms.
In the experiment being discussed in the article, it sounds like they are stopping the process at the point where the photons have been absorbed by matter, and delaying their being re-emitted for quite a long time (relatively speaking). The light is being stopped, but not by causing photons to travel more slowly than c. It's being stopped by keeping the photons' energy bottled up inside the Bose-Einstein condensate.
If a photon is absorbed by an electron and re-emitted, is it really the same photon?
If you say yes, then what about when one photon is absorbed and two are subsequently emitted?
we've often seen them apparently asleep, but if you can move to see their other eye, you find it open and alert I've got four of the little bastards and I've never noticed them doing that. Now I'm gonna have to watch 'em for a while and try see it happen.
Are they doing this when they sleep on one foot with the other one tucked away?
Why is this article calling them "independents" when they are apparently thieves? If I sell other people's music without their permission, that doens't make me an indie record label. It makes me a criminal.
I'll pass.
Actually, I would recommend using Access's visual query designer as a stepping stone to learning SQL, not the other way around. I know people who went to school to learn SQL and still get confused about the difference between inner and outer joins. The little arrow on the line connecting two tables (or lack of an arrow) in the query builder makes the type of join you're making quite plain.
I think I understand this now -- maybe this explanation will help.
First, let's suppose we can pick out a particular point in space and put a permanent mark on it so we can always find it again. Now, let's mark two points exactly 1 meter apart. If we come back in a year, the distance between those two points will be slightly more than 1 meter, because all space everywhere is expanding. Every point is moving away from every other point.
To use nice small round numbers, let's suppose that one year later, the distance between the two original points is 1.001 meters. So, you now know that space is expanding at 0.1% every year. You can use that to extrapolate larger measurements. Say you had marked two points 1000 meters apart. The distance between those two points a year later would be 1001 meters. The two points were 1000 times farther apart, and they grew 1000 times more distance between them.
Now, let's take it to extremes. Two points 2,000 light-years apart would gain two light-years of distance between them in that first year. That means a photon leaving one point heading directly towards the other point would never make it, because the space between them would be expanding faster than the photon moves.
This would also be a compound-interest function. If a distance of 2000 light-years grew to 2002 light-years in a year, then in two years it would grow to 2004.002.
Because all space is expanding equally in every direction, beyond the 1000 light-year barrier using these example numbers there might as well be no universe. You'll never be able to interact with it. If you were a photon travelling from one point to the other, it would be as if you were just heading in a straight path out into an endless void. If you aren't on a collision path with anything between your origin and destination, you would end up irrelevant to the entire universe -- just a packet of energy lost in the middle of new space coalescing in the middle of nowhere.
People always like to bring up QM, especially entanglement, when talking about magical things like FTL travel or communication, super-duper-duper-computers, and time travel. Now it's telepathy too? Nice.
Quantum Mechanics is not magic. It's also not dimly understood. It is counterintuitive, but that doesn't mean that it somehow turns black into white.
The big problem with QM is how people write about it. With the double-slit experiment, for example, you'll read a phrase like "when you observe which slit each photon goes through, the interference patterns disappear". The problem is, most people think of observation as something completely passive. But in the realm of QM, observation is very active and very destructive. In QM-speak, it goes without saying that to observe something is to change it. If the above phrase were written "when you jigger with each photon to try to get an idea of which slit it goes through, the interference pattern vanishes", it would be equally accurate and sound a lot less magical. A pretty pattern of waves on the surface of a pond will vanish if you jump into the pond to get a look at the waves up close.
Entanglement is described with equal misguidance. Usually you get a phrase like "when you measure measure one photon of the entangled pair, the other one's spin changes instantly across any distance to match". Sounds magical, right? But it ain't. The spin "changes" from a state where it has all possible values with equal probability of each into a state where you know what the value of that spin is. QM is all about probabilities and information and not so much about the actual particles. Instead of saying "the particle's spin changes", it would be more correct to say "what we know about the particle's spin changes". But instead we get shorthand that is clear to anyone who groks QM but is counterintuitive to the layman. By observing your electron (and remember, observing means you've destroyed information in it by getting the spin information out), you've gained some information about it. Because of the entanglement, you've also gained information about the other memeber of the pair, without disturbing it, at that very moment, no matter where the other member of that pair is. That's it.
No, not really. Given identical graphics cards, I'll take the one in the machine with the AMD CPU in it over one in an Intel box any day.
Now, I think you've hit the nail on the head with this statement: What the real deal here is, is that gold buying in an MMO becomes almost exactly like real-world vice crime. When something victimless like pot smoking or prostitution is legal and is reasonably regulated like any "legitimate" business would be, then it doesn't cause a stir. Brothels are peaceful, secure places where money changes hands, people enjoy themselves in privacy, and disease is not spread. Herb dens are like pubs except full of happy stoners instead of rowdy drunks.
But, when those things become illegal, that doesn't stop the basic human desires that lead to the demand that creates the market; people want to enjoy themselves, get laid, or whatever else without being bothered and without hurting anyone. So, they do these things anyway. But, without the protection of law, they have lots of negative ancilliary effects and secondary crime, all of which reinforces the negative perception of the original vice and clouds peoples' judgement over what the real solution is.
On the gold farming thing, I think the best way to handle it is to sanction it and not try to stop it. You'll waste a lot of time and effort trying to stop it, ruining the game experiences of the "cheaters" who just wanted to skip over some of the boring parts along the way, and you won't really stop it. By "criminalizing" it, you're exacerbating the problem that you created in the first place. It's better to noturinate into the wind, right?
I think creating a real no-grind MMORPG will require creating a whole new kind of beast. These games must have huge subscription revenues to be profitable, because they cost boatloads of money to make and maintain. You can't put content into the game cheaply enough and in enough volume to keep your playerbase engaged and still make a profit. So, you have to put in the level grind and the loot grind to give players more hurdles than just the quests and instances you build into the game. Otherwise, they power through all your content in no time, and you might as well have sold them a single-player game, because they won't subscribe and will move on to the next RPG. Since the grind is required for an MMO to be sustainable long-term, then you have to embrace the "seedier" side of people just engaging in capitalist economics vis-a-vis gold farming and gold buying.
It's interesting watching things like Second Life emerge and evolve. SL is all about being a virtual world and not about being a game; there's no grind to it and there's an officially sanctioned currency market for it. But, it's not a game. However, I do bet that eventually we'll see an MMO that is somewhere between Wow and Second Life, where player-generated content provides enough playability to eliminate the ridiculous grind.
Ultima Online did early on. People hoarded. The system broke. It sounds good in theory, but there are too many variables you can't easily account for in practice. What about the guy who has a nice collection of some commodity, then doesn't log in for six months? Do you release his supply back into the system? What about when he returns to the game -- is he screwed out of his stuff, or is his supply allowed to go over the limit? I think this is exactly what the game needs to prove that the money situation is broken. The situation needs deeper analysis. MMORPGs are a new layer on top of the RPG. Classically, the "economy" in an RPG is a combination of game world flavor, a way to inflate the game's play time, a flow controller (i.e. to prevent you from buying powerful high-level equipment too early), and a sub-game of decision-making about things like exactly how important it is to have the Uber Sword of Donkeylizard Slaying or if the Elite Sword of Donkeylizard Slaying is good enough.
Single-player RPGs contain things look like economics but really aren't -- it's just part of the game.
Early MMORPG designers built the game systems the same way, without giving much thought to how real economics were going to come into play. It's just a game, one that happens to be multiplayer, right? It's obvious to add in trading of stuff between players. But, as soon as you do that, a real economy emerges. The real one interacts strangely with the fake one built into the game world. The classical RPG economy has the hero being uber-rich by the end of the game, because accumulated money is just another scorecard. But when that useless stuff can be traded between players and the game is designed for all players to get steadily richer over time, then you end up with this huge disconnect between the value of money in terms of the game rules and the value of money between two players. A friend signs on, you give him a small fraction of all the excess money you've piled up, and that little gift allows him to never have to worry about gaining money in the game on his own.
In an MMO, currency has the dual role of being a scorecard in a sub-game, and being real currency for player-to-player transactions. On the game engine side, the system is immutable. On the human side, the value of the currency fluctuates constantly in response to uncountable things. It just doesn't work right. No matter how much you bandaid it.
The key is to fix it so that the game engine "economics" adjust themselves dynamically in response to the real economics that happen as a result of player action. Ultima Online took a small step in that direction a few years back, when they made it so that NPCs would adjust their prices in response to player purchases and sellbacks. It was shown to be a successful experiment when, later, an NPC shopkeeper was placed in a dangerous and hard to access are of the game world. Players found it preferable to spend the gold they gained in that dungeon locally with that shopkeeper, because it was literally not worth their time to truck the loot back out for deposit into their bank accounts. Prices on that vendor skyrocketed to more than ten times the price for the same item in an easily accessible part of the world. They eventually stabilized when players began finding it worth their time to truck goods into that area specifically to sell to that vendor. That simple little change in game mechanics allowed actual economics to emerge in that game.
On the whole, MMO developers aren't generally interested in playing with economic theories. They are much more interested in providing a fun play experience that is visually stunning. Experimentation with the basic game design is a Bad Thing because the results might be unknown and if you f