My wife is an author, and for a while there a lot of authors were boycotting Amazon for the same reason. If you did a search for a book, they would pull up used books in the same search. The authors objected, because they only wanted used books to come up if there were no new copies in stock.
This boycott made just about 0 difference, of course.
Maybe. Depends on how things are managed. Most of the big costs in this thing are probably fixed costs, which means with a greater production run, you have more units to spread the costs over, and so the cost per unit goes down.
For shipping and things, if all they do is send stores 6 copies instead of 4, theres probably not really any big cost increases there either. (And that shipping might get charged to the retailer; that's how it works in some idustries.)
In fact the more I think about it, a total breakeven price cut probably benefits the manufacturer (because the whole key in commocity manufacturing is volume, to absorb your overhead) and hurts the retailer (who is going to be the one to have their per unit costs go up).
Actually my wife (who is a pastry chef) always says that cooking is an art, and baking is a science.
The difference is that in cooking, if you make a mistake adding ingredients, you can usually compensate by adding a different ingredient to counteract it.
In baking if you screw up, you usually have completely destroyed the chemical reactions you need to have happen, and so you have to throw it all away and start over.
(There is, of course, art in baking, too, but that usually comes into play in the finishing of the item, *after* the baking is done.)
Actually, you missed his (somewhat arrogantly stated) point.
For Apple users, setting this all up isn't this big ordeal, it's easy. It took me all of 10 min to set mine up last weekend.
Saying that it's hard to set up a WiFi network securely with multiple comps and OSes and sources of cards is not a counter to the statement that setting up an Airport network securely is a piece of cake.
The thing is, the cost for the original game, and the monthly fees are for two different things. The upfront cost is going to the developer/publisher, to pay for writing the game in the first place. The monthly fee is going to the 'hosting' company, which is running the servers and providing customer service, and running events and such. Since these are (potentially) different companies, they have to have different revenue streams. (Yes, I know, in practice both these functions are usually done by the same company. That just makes everything more confusing.)
But, you, the consumer doesn't care about all that, and there's no reason you should. I'm just explaining how it got that way. If you really are interested in MMORPGs that have no upfront cost, but does have a monthly fee, there should be plenty of those out there. Once the initial costs get paid off, this is a strategy that the games can take. I know that Shadowbane (the only one I actually play) does that now--you can download the game and get a 15 day trial for free.
3) It used to be that bands would play little gigs and amuse people in a bar. What do people want now? They want bars with DJ's, dancing girls in skimpy outfits and glowing sticks. How can a band compete? A band cannot compete because bars can make more money by amusing people in other ways that does not require a band. Bands cost money, and cause people to drink or eat slower.
A very interesting article in this week's Stranger (a Seattle alternative newsweekly, quality can be hit or miss, but this particular article was very good) touched on this subject in a different way. They were comparing cover bands (and one local one in particular, the Beatniks) to original bands, and basically realizing that cover bands tend to last longer, make more money, and have more manageable lives.
To oversimplify their conclusions, you could say this: with a cover band, the audience actually knows what they're getting into, and they can dance and enjoy the music without having to 'figure it out'. With an original band, you will by definition have a narrower audience, and the audience has to think more during the show, and thereby have less 'fun'. TO piggyback this onto your point, I would suggest that a cover band is something of a hybrid--mixing the familiarity of a DJ with the energy of a live band.
This is true of any medium though. Genre fiction (romance, or mystery, say) always sells better than mainstream. Formulaic blockbusters do better at the movies. Or just look at TV. (Or video games.) It's not really an indictment of quality (people want to watch crap), because you can do an excellent job at any of those things. It's because people want something predictable, that they already understand. So for innovation to sell, you have to package it into a package of predicatablity.
No, that's not how everybody's tastes run (mine don't, for instance), but that's how it is for most people, most of the time.
Anyway, the article I mentioned is here if anyone is interested.
Would be my choice of a game for teaching history.
It focuses more on trade, diplomacy, and research than on combat (there is plenty of combat, but it's relatively abstract). Also, it's focus on a particular time period (~1300 till 1800, if I remember correctly) means that it can be incredibly detailed and accurate. Many of the 'random' events are historical in nature, and tied to particular countries. Also the fact that you can play any of the more than 100 countries in the game (though many are doomed without lots of luck and skill) is pretty neat too.
Far and away the best game of its genre I've ever played. Difficult as hell, too.
Yeah, but the one who was playing the game was a kid. (Which is bad parenting right there, but...). Judging by the things I have to explain to my nine year-old when he's playing video games, I don't doubt that he could have said that at all.
Kids (well at least mine) tend to not read the instructions, or the on-screen help cause they're boring, and then just push every button to see what they do. Drives me crazy during RPGs...he'll just quickly page through the NPC conversations without reading them, and then get upset cause he can't figure out what to do next. (Ummm, the quest that guy just gave you. What quest? How was I supposed to know that was important?)
Or, his income is fairly low, and he spends more than he earns, so that his consumption based taxes end up taking a very high percentage of his income.
Sales tax, Property tax, vehicle registration, etc can take a pretty high percentage of income, if you're only making $20k a year.
From what I can tell, it is almost a given that they were smugglers and that they were heavily armed as a matter of course. Both of these things being almost universal for the people who lived in that area. What has yet to be proven is whether or not they were smuggling *weapons for the insurgents* or running a *safehouse*. I have no opinion on either of those things.
And regardless of whether or not they were doing that, I find it very believable that they *also* hosted a wedding.
Granted all that is true. IANAL. To my simple brain, this is how things break down:
When the army goes to another country to fight somebody, and captures them, they are prisoners of war.
When law enforcement officials take somebody into custody, they are in the criminal justice system.
What I don't understand is why we thought we had to come up with another paradigm for dealing with these "detainees".
Honestly, I would have given the administration the benefit of the doubt if they had said they just needed some time (like six months) to sort through the prisoners and figure out what to do. But holding people indefinitely without due process just doesn't pass the sniff test.
I also had always been under the impression that military bases were like embassies and considered sovereign territory. From the way this has played out, I guess that's not true legally, but pretending that the US doesn't have authority in Gitmo is just weak.
(Or does that mean that Cuba could try and prosecute us for kidnapping these people? I mean, if we're saying Gitmo is under Cuban law, isn't that the corrolary?)
(That's why, incidentally, the United States could not have ratified the Rome Treaty if it had wanted to. The International Criminal Court would have completely violated the Constitution's protection of our rights of due process, equal protection, and freedom from self-incrimination.)
This doesn't prevent ratification. If the treaties were then later ruled to be unconstitutional, then those parts of the treaties would be declared void, but the test of unconstitutionality is decided by the courts well after ratification. Just like Congress can clearly pass an unconstitutional law, and until the courts throw it out it is still fully in force. (Not that it's a good idea to do so.)
Now, let's talk about law for a second. Law is legitimate only to the extent that it arises from the collective will of the people. The rules of war, such as the Geneva Conventions, are agreements made between governments without the involvement of the people. Therefore the rules of war do not comprise a body of law. They're legally equivalent to a handshake.
No, in our representative democracy, we have given legitimacy to our government to pass laws and ratify treaties. They have our collective will to do these things because we voted for them. Legally, they are in full force. Now, if you mean that there's no higher authority that can *enforce* these treaties, if the US government will not enforce them themselves, you are correct. But you could say that about any law.
You are absolutely right, there are no studies showing a link between eating food cooked with aluminum and Alzheimers, but this isn't something that was made up by loony people either. There was a time when the best available science suggested that there might be a link.
As they studied the brains of people who had Alzheimers, they discovered that they had a lot of placques (sp?) in their brains, and that there was a lot of aluminum in these placques. The discoverers theorized that these might have formed from an excess of aluminium in the body and that this might have come about from a dietary source. They probably suggested many other possibilities, too, since at this point they still didn't know if these placques were a cause of brain damage or an effect of brain damage, or hae any notion of how they might have formed. But the dietary aluminum link is what the press picked up and ran with. And once you get a meme like that out into the public, you start getting all the anecdotal evidence you could want.
As an aside, it always annoys me that here in America we are so obsessed with food that we always want everything to have a dietary cause. For example, cholesterol. When they discovered cholesterol pockets clogging areteries, the first conclusion jumped to was that they came from eating too much cholesterol. However, as the long-term studies roll in, they're finding that that's not really the case. There is a week linkage between dietary cholesterol and blood cvholesterol levels, but there are many other factors that are more important. But since we Americans like to feel guilty about our food, we don't like to hear that.
I understand what you're saying, but I think you're making mistaking the form for the function.
All a grade is, is a form of communication. Your final class grade is communication with the outside world (the registrar, your parents, anyone who reads your transcript) to tell them what your mastery of the subject matter of the class is. For this grade I absolutely agree with you, grades need to be equal for equal results. Anything else would be completely unfair.
But a grade on a paper is communication between the instructor and the student, and in a lot of ways is just another form of comment. (Really, I always found the comments to be more valuable than the grade, anyway.) It doesn't have anything to do with any other paper that was turned. (Most people aren't going to be directly comparable anyway.) It should give a general indication of how I'm doing overall, but my final grade should not just be a blind average of all my papers. And for some people there is a big motivational difference between, say, a C+ and a B-, even if the "objective" difference between them is slight. So if you've got it, use it.
IF you want to put it in a real world context, thing of management. A manager's job is to get the best results out of their employees. The way of *managing* the employees is going to be different for each, depending on what motivates each person individually. But the actual *reward* (ie pay, final grade)that they get should depend entirely on what they actually produce. (Another similarity is that you probably only have the freedom to use this approach in classes/departments of a dozen or less. Once you get larger than that, you probably don't have enough knowledge about the individuals involved to use it effectively.)
You are confusing two different kinds of grades. A final grade in a class should be used to show how well you know a subject. A grade on an individual paper can mean anything the instructor wants it to. The instructor's job is to get you to learn *as much as you can* in a class. If they think they can motivate you by grading you down on a paper for arbitrary reasons, then they should. If they think they can do that by grading you up on a paper for arbitrary reasons, then they should.
In the interim stages people need feedback on different things, and for different reasons. These grades are instructive and motivational. Only the final grade needs to be in any way comparative from student to student.
Or maybe I'm weird--I thought the purpose of classes was to learn stuff, not to reward behavior of one kind or another.
I'm bummed. I used the hotspot at a plaza where I worked to play my MMORPG on my lunch-hour. I figure I saved more than $12/mo by brown-bagging instead of going out to lunch every day.
Ah well, the new downtown Seattle library is opening this week, and they're supposed to have a free hotspot...maybe that will work.
What do you mean? Shareholders get together all the time. What do you think a board of directors is?
All unions are trying to do is balance the power of management (ie shareholders) within a company. Speaking as a manager, I have never yet seen a company where a union had as much power over things as management did. (Now, *government unions*, I'll acknowledge, are a different story.)
It is definitely immoral, except in situations where it's morally imperative. And it's actually a very good way to get information, which is why we do it. And by "we" I don't just mean Americans. I mean human beings in general. We learned thousands of years ago that torture is a great way to get to the truth, so when we need to get to the truth, that's the method we use.
Here's the problem. The kind of torture that actually works to get information is slow. The kind of situations that might actually justify torture are situations where you need the information quickly. If you have the time it takes to properly torture someone in such a way that you have enough confidence that you can actually *trust* the information, there was almost certainly a more morally defensible way to get that information.
Another big problem is when you *don't know* whether or not someone has any information at all. Torture is not a good way to do your sorting, either morally, or from a resource allocation standpoint.
I have one particular world that I have been working on for about 10 years.(yikes!) I keep going back and forth, trying to decide whether I'm going to write the book, or run the game. This article gives me some insights into what my debate has been.
My main impetus was to take a lot of very disparate elements, put them together, and then see what happened. I didn't have a plot, I had an initial state, and I wanted to see what players reacted to, which factions were interesting and which wouldn't even show up on their radar, and what the end result of all that was.
By the time I got all my background stuff together, the group had broken up because we all had families and lives and no time. The novel(s) will get written eventually, but that will mean that *I* have to put the final structure on it. Which means that even if I do sometime run the game, I'll never know how it would have turned out spontaneously. Which has been bumming me out. But until reading this article, I wasn't completely sure *why* that was bothering me.
I didn't want to tell a story; I wanted to see how people would play on my playground.
Slashdot Mirror
My wife is an author, and for a while there a lot of authors were boycotting Amazon for the same reason. If you did a search for a book, they would pull up used books in the same search. The authors objected, because they only wanted used books to come up if there were no new copies in stock.
This boycott made just about 0 difference, of course.
For shipping and things, if all they do is send stores 6 copies instead of 4, theres probably not really any big cost increases there either. (And that shipping might get charged to the retailer; that's how it works in some idustries.)
In fact the more I think about it, a total breakeven price cut probably benefits the manufacturer (because the whole key in commocity manufacturing is volume, to absorb your overhead) and hurts the retailer (who is going to be the one to have their per unit costs go up).
The difference is that in cooking, if you make a mistake adding ingredients, you can usually compensate by adding a different ingredient to counteract it.
In baking if you screw up, you usually have completely destroyed the chemical reactions you need to have happen, and so you have to throw it all away and start over.
(There is, of course, art in baking, too, but that usually comes into play in the finishing of the item, *after* the baking is done.)
For Apple users, setting this all up isn't this big ordeal, it's easy. It took me all of 10 min to set mine up last weekend.
Saying that it's hard to set up a WiFi network securely with multiple comps and OSes and sources of cards is not a counter to the statement that setting up an Airport network securely is a piece of cake.
But, you, the consumer doesn't care about all that, and there's no reason you should. I'm just explaining how it got that way. If you really are interested in MMORPGs that have no upfront cost, but does have a monthly fee, there should be plenty of those out there. Once the initial costs get paid off, this is a strategy that the games can take. I know that Shadowbane (the only one I actually play) does that now--you can download the game and get a 15 day trial for free.
A very interesting article in this week's Stranger (a Seattle alternative newsweekly, quality can be hit or miss, but this particular article was very good) touched on this subject in a different way. They were comparing cover bands (and one local one in particular, the Beatniks) to original bands, and basically realizing that cover bands tend to last longer, make more money, and have more manageable lives.
To oversimplify their conclusions, you could say this: with a cover band, the audience actually knows what they're getting into, and they can dance and enjoy the music without having to 'figure it out'. With an original band, you will by definition have a narrower audience, and the audience has to think more during the show, and thereby have less 'fun'. TO piggyback this onto your point, I would suggest that a cover band is something of a hybrid--mixing the familiarity of a DJ with the energy of a live band.
This is true of any medium though. Genre fiction (romance, or mystery, say) always sells better than mainstream. Formulaic blockbusters do better at the movies. Or just look at TV. (Or video games.) It's not really an indictment of quality (people want to watch crap), because you can do an excellent job at any of those things. It's because people want something predictable, that they already understand. So for innovation to sell, you have to package it into a package of predicatablity.
No, that's not how everybody's tastes run (mine don't, for instance), but that's how it is for most people, most of the time.
Anyway, the article I mentioned is here if anyone is interested.
http://www.thestranger.com/current/feature.html
It focuses more on trade, diplomacy, and research than on combat (there is plenty of combat, but it's relatively abstract). Also, it's focus on a particular time period (~1300 till 1800, if I remember correctly) means that it can be incredibly detailed and accurate. Many of the 'random' events are historical in nature, and tied to particular countries. Also the fact that you can play any of the more than 100 countries in the game (though many are doomed without lots of luck and skill) is pretty neat too.
Far and away the best game of its genre I've ever played. Difficult as hell, too.
Kids (well at least mine) tend to not read the instructions, or the on-screen help cause they're boring, and then just push every button to see what they do. Drives me crazy during RPGs...he'll just quickly page through the NPC conversations without reading them, and then get upset cause he can't figure out what to do next. (Ummm, the quest that guy just gave you. What quest? How was I supposed to know that was important?)
Sales tax, Property tax, vehicle registration, etc can take a pretty high percentage of income, if you're only making $20k a year.
And regardless of whether or not they were doing that, I find it very believable that they *also* hosted a wedding.
When the army goes to another country to fight somebody, and captures them, they are prisoners of war.
When law enforcement officials take somebody into custody, they are in the criminal justice system.
What I don't understand is why we thought we had to come up with another paradigm for dealing with these "detainees".
Honestly, I would have given the administration the benefit of the doubt if they had said they just needed some time (like six months) to sort through the prisoners and figure out what to do. But holding people indefinitely without due process just doesn't pass the sniff test.
I also had always been under the impression that military bases were like embassies and considered sovereign territory. From the way this has played out, I guess that's not true legally, but pretending that the US doesn't have authority in Gitmo is just weak.
(Or does that mean that Cuba could try and prosecute us for kidnapping these people? I mean, if we're saying Gitmo is under Cuban law, isn't that the corrolary?)
This doesn't prevent ratification. If the treaties were then later ruled to be unconstitutional, then those parts of the treaties would be declared void, but the test of unconstitutionality is decided by the courts well after ratification. Just like Congress can clearly pass an unconstitutional law, and until the courts throw it out it is still fully in force. (Not that it's a good idea to do so.)
Now, let's talk about law for a second. Law is legitimate only to the extent that it arises from the collective will of the people. The rules of war, such as the Geneva Conventions, are agreements made between governments without the involvement of the people. Therefore the rules of war do not comprise a body of law. They're legally equivalent to a handshake.
No, in our representative democracy, we have given legitimacy to our government to pass laws and ratify treaties. They have our collective will to do these things because we voted for them. Legally, they are in full force. Now, if you mean that there's no higher authority that can *enforce* these treaties, if the US government will not enforce them themselves, you are correct. But you could say that about any law.
As they studied the brains of people who had Alzheimers, they discovered that they had a lot of placques (sp?) in their brains, and that there was a lot of aluminum in these placques. The discoverers theorized that these might have formed from an excess of aluminium in the body and that this might have come about from a dietary source. They probably suggested many other possibilities, too, since at this point they still didn't know if these placques were a cause of brain damage or an effect of brain damage, or hae any notion of how they might have formed. But the dietary aluminum link is what the press picked up and ran with. And once you get a meme like that out into the public, you start getting all the anecdotal evidence you could want.
As an aside, it always annoys me that here in America we are so obsessed with food that we always want everything to have a dietary cause. For example, cholesterol. When they discovered cholesterol pockets clogging areteries, the first conclusion jumped to was that they came from eating too much cholesterol. However, as the long-term studies roll in, they're finding that that's not really the case. There is a week linkage between dietary cholesterol and blood cvholesterol levels, but there are many other factors that are more important. But since we Americans like to feel guilty about our food, we don't like to hear that.
All a grade is, is a form of communication. Your final class grade is communication with the outside world (the registrar, your parents, anyone who reads your transcript) to tell them what your mastery of the subject matter of the class is. For this grade I absolutely agree with you, grades need to be equal for equal results. Anything else would be completely unfair.
But a grade on a paper is communication between the instructor and the student, and in a lot of ways is just another form of comment. (Really, I always found the comments to be more valuable than the grade, anyway.) It doesn't have anything to do with any other paper that was turned. (Most people aren't going to be directly comparable anyway.) It should give a general indication of how I'm doing overall, but my final grade should not just be a blind average of all my papers. And for some people there is a big motivational difference between, say, a C+ and a B-, even if the "objective" difference between them is slight. So if you've got it, use it.
IF you want to put it in a real world context, thing of management. A manager's job is to get the best results out of their employees. The way of *managing* the employees is going to be different for each, depending on what motivates each person individually. But the actual *reward* (ie pay, final grade)that they get should depend entirely on what they actually produce. (Another similarity is that you probably only have the freedom to use this approach in classes/departments of a dozen or less. Once you get larger than that, you probably don't have enough knowledge about the individuals involved to use it effectively.)
In the interim stages people need feedback on different things, and for different reasons. These grades are instructive and motivational. Only the final grade needs to be in any way comparative from student to student.
Or maybe I'm weird--I thought the purpose of classes was to learn stuff, not to reward behavior of one kind or another.
Of course, you'd probably have to be a company the size of ABC to be able to afford to do that.
Ah well, the new downtown Seattle library is opening this week, and they're supposed to have a free hotspot...maybe that will work.
All unions are trying to do is balance the power of management (ie shareholders) within a company. Speaking as a manager, I have never yet seen a company where a union had as much power over things as management did. (Now, *government unions*, I'll acknowledge, are a different story.)
so CWA must be something like the Caffeine Workers of America
Working conditions for barristas must be heinous.
Here's the problem. The kind of torture that actually works to get information is slow. The kind of situations that might actually justify torture are situations where you need the information quickly. If you have the time it takes to properly torture someone in such a way that you have enough confidence that you can actually *trust* the information, there was almost certainly a more morally defensible way to get that information.
Another big problem is when you *don't know* whether or not someone has any information at all. Torture is not a good way to do your sorting, either morally, or from a resource allocation standpoint.
I have one particular world that I have been working on for about 10 years.(yikes!) I keep going back and forth, trying to decide whether I'm going to write the book, or run the game. This article gives me some insights into what my debate has been.
My main impetus was to take a lot of very disparate elements, put them together, and then see what happened. I didn't have a plot, I had an initial state, and I wanted to see what players reacted to, which factions were interesting and which wouldn't even show up on their radar, and what the end result of all that was.
By the time I got all my background stuff together, the group had broken up because we all had families and lives and no time. The novel(s) will get written eventually, but that will mean that *I* have to put the final structure on it. Which means that even if I do sometime run the game, I'll never know how it would have turned out spontaneously. Which has been bumming me out. But until reading this article, I wasn't completely sure *why* that was bothering me.
I didn't want to tell a story; I wanted to see how people would play on my playground.