By my doctrine if you're not contradicting people who know way more than you it's ok to speak out in support, whereas if you are contradicting them then you need some sort of qualification. It's one of them crazy meritocratic concepts.
Don't need any particular qualification, since I'm not trying to deny the leading theory proposed for the phenomenon by a large number of qualified scientists. Well, ok, maybe I do have a qualification. I can, after all, read, which doesn't seem to be some folks' strong point.
An even better example is that we've been wandering around the pool while it's half full and then we discovered a water pump connected to a huge reservoir and immediately threw the throttle open and now we're drowning but some assholes have decided that it's not the pump's fault and hey, maybe it just rained really hard and if that's the case we're going to drown anyways.
See, here's the thing. UnrealEngine isn't a single game. When those developers speak, they're speaking for literally thousands of projects. So while you can cite a single Myst series game as an example of a bad DRM scheme, the guys at Epic dealt with almost every UnrealEngine game (barring the tiny set of games which are platform exclusives) that sold poorly or just plain didn't make it to the PC as a counterexample. They can discuss this issue at a level shared by maybe 3 or 4 other teams in the world. It's not endemic to a single situation or game or even genre, it's pandemic across the entirety of the industry. We know from the figures given by indie and pro developers alike, that the overwhelming, nearly-10-to-1 champion of the game space on PCs is illegal copies. That's not the kind of problem that you can deal with on a reasonable basis. All you can do is lock the doors and throw away the key.
Don't try to justify it. It demeans the entire set of gamers who are passionate for the platform to do so. There is no justification for the massive levels of piracy occurring. Those of us who pay for our games can tell you that the service around those games has gotten much better in the past couple of years, with a variety of choices as to how to get a copy of a game, much more mature update and expansion mechanisms, free and paid content with meaning, and a general level of quality that is hard to argue with. And there'd probably be more games, and in particular more blockbuster, huge epic insane feasts for the eye and mind if 90% of all PC gamers weren't thieving assoholes.
Your dad didn't have ownership of the building, he didn't commission its construction, he didn't build it "on spec". Artists do build on spec or commission, and the owner of that work, for taking the financial risk, reaps the benefit. The owner of the building your dad helped make sure as shit reaped the benefit of a large portion of the people who enjoyed its comforts. In today's world, most of the people working on a movie don't get to enjoy its long term successes, but the artists primarily charged with creating success for it and those who financially backed it receive long term dividends. It's a business, and making stupid simplistic analogies to things that don't behave at all the same way doesn't help anyone.
The evidence is pretty simple: PCs became a second string game console, something to port to if it was easy (Gears of War 2 didn't even get that treatment). The sales numbers for PC Games were not there, and you can make up all the castles in the air you want, the accountants at game studios aren't going to say don't bother if there's a reasonable amount of money to be made. The money isn't there, and it's at least partly piracy related. See also: Sega Dreamcast.
Cliff Bleszinski seems to think PC Games in general died as a result of piracy. Working for the creators of one of the top game engines in the world, he might just know what he's talking about.
A scientist will be happy with a simple and beautiful solution, but will then work to determine whether that is or is not the deepest expression of truth about reality all the same. F=ma and e=mc^2 will always be beautiful scientific notions, regardless of their exact domains and fit to the actual data.
I grew up in rural Newfoundland, and I've seen three separate resources (minerals, fish, and forests) getting devastated in waves. Corrupt governments can only go so far - they are mostly parasitic to the corporations which work their resources. Resource extraction companies are directly fueled by the misery they cause and as such are the cause of poverty and environmental devastation that boggles the mind. There's a little town called Tilt Cove in Newfoundland, go there sometime. Better yet, don't even leave the mainland - visit Sydney Mines in Cape Breton. These are places that were absolutely destroyed both financially and environmentally by corporations whose only motivation was a better bottom line, and the level to which they sank in achieving that aim is horrifying to consider.
Black hole rotating in reverse relative to its accretion disk has the highest energy of particle interactions at the hole-disk boundary just as two particles travelling towards each other have a higher energy collision than two traveling in parallel. One would, naively, assume that that was the highest energy configuration, although how it gets to be that way in the first place is still an interesting question. I assume objects must have been captured and are now revolving about the hole in a direction opposite to its spin.
Proved is the only quantity that matters - it is the only one that has a legitimate engineering and science basis. When the claim is orders of magnitude larger than any single country's total proved reserves, it's beyond wrong. If the argument was about ultimately recoverable resource for the field, you could maybe justify several times the proved resource - that's the general trend - but even then it would be in the billions. Any number in the trillions simply has no place in the discussion.
It's not interesting that you can't find offshore reserves in the rows, given the rows are all combined resources for individual countries, which each have their own offshore resource - Newfoundland's several oil fields contribute a significant part of the 2007 Canadian total, for example.
Claiming trillions of barrels from a single reserve makes this guy a total idiot. Here's why: When was the last time you heard about this particular reserve? Economists, analysts, and oil industry spokesmen talk about individual Saudi fields (Ghawar in particular) by name constantly, and those have "merely" several billions of barrels each, which turns out to be almost unimaginably rich for single resources. If the Gulf resource was anywhere near trillions of barrels of oil it would show up every time someone said the word "oil" on tv. For comparison, the Tiber well, another Gulf well they're really interested in drilling despite having to go 35000 feet deep to get at it, has maybe 3 billion barrels. Every oilhound would be slavering over a trillion-barrel resource at every available opportunity. But they're not, because no such creature is known to exist, and the fact that the guy wrote it that way makes him a total idiot who who clearly isn't paying nearly enough attention to what he's doing and has nowhere near the needed level of informedness to discuss the matter.
You don't have to believe me. Wikipedia delivers the relevant quote:
It is pretty clear that there is not much chance of finding any significant quantity of new cheap oil. Any new or unconventional oil is going to be expensive.
— Lord Ron Oxburgh, a former chairman of Shell, October 2008
When the guy from Shell is saying it's over, it's probably over and done with.
No, I think I'll continue to blame Apple. Modern tools like Flash have increased the quality and ease of software development because they provide common functionality support at a very high level. While there are a few holes in the Flash provider itself, those are not comparable to the damage done by developers who have to reinvent the wheel every time. Consumers don't give a damn what something was written in, and Flash has been one of those technologies consumers have glommed onto en masse. Apple shutting down Flash and comparable frameworks is Apple's fault and nobody else's, and it's bad for everyone.
The rate of discovery is one of the metrics I was talking about - leaving aside dubious inflation by providers and monstrously large outliers in recent discoveries, the trend is that we're not even close to keeping up anymore, and it's only getting worse.
If Apple is outselling the entire netbook-ish end of the market, it's a problem. Apple sells well because of their hardware, but their lockdown on software is bad for everyone else, and if they continue to grow and take over device markets it's going to be a long, hard road for developers.
Even in that situation one could argue that the work of making the copy (say it's one of those painting making shops in China) is the one deserving of a reward.
Fun Historical Fact: People making and selling copies of original artwork nearly bankrupted working artists in the 17 and 1800s, which is part of the reason we have copyright laws. If you want art in your society, you don't want to encourage copying of that art in a way that bankrupts your artists. Of course, most people really are too ignorant to understand that art is a desirable quantity for reasons other than simple entertainment.
Time is running out because either peak supply or peak demand means terrible things for the market. And by several metrics, peak supply, at least, is not that far away.
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By my doctrine if you're not contradicting people who know way more than you it's ok to speak out in support, whereas if you are contradicting them then you need some sort of qualification. It's one of them crazy meritocratic concepts.
And I bet you pointed out the lack of evidence to the scientists, too, you clever scientist.
Don't need any particular qualification, since I'm not trying to deny the leading theory proposed for the phenomenon by a large number of qualified scientists. Well, ok, maybe I do have a qualification. I can, after all, read, which doesn't seem to be some folks' strong point.
The truth is a shitload of science indicates it is us, and unless you're somehow qualified to comment maybe STFU.
An even better example is that we've been wandering around the pool while it's half full and then we discovered a water pump connected to a huge reservoir and immediately threw the throttle open and now we're drowning but some assholes have decided that it's not the pump's fault and hey, maybe it just rained really hard and if that's the case we're going to drown anyways.
See, here's the thing. UnrealEngine isn't a single game. When those developers speak, they're speaking for literally thousands of projects. So while you can cite a single Myst series game as an example of a bad DRM scheme, the guys at Epic dealt with almost every UnrealEngine game (barring the tiny set of games which are platform exclusives) that sold poorly or just plain didn't make it to the PC as a counterexample. They can discuss this issue at a level shared by maybe 3 or 4 other teams in the world. It's not endemic to a single situation or game or even genre, it's pandemic across the entirety of the industry. We know from the figures given by indie and pro developers alike, that the overwhelming, nearly-10-to-1 champion of the game space on PCs is illegal copies. That's not the kind of problem that you can deal with on a reasonable basis. All you can do is lock the doors and throw away the key.
Don't try to justify it. It demeans the entire set of gamers who are passionate for the platform to do so. There is no justification for the massive levels of piracy occurring. Those of us who pay for our games can tell you that the service around those games has gotten much better in the past couple of years, with a variety of choices as to how to get a copy of a game, much more mature update and expansion mechanisms, free and paid content with meaning, and a general level of quality that is hard to argue with. And there'd probably be more games, and in particular more blockbuster, huge epic insane feasts for the eye and mind if 90% of all PC gamers weren't thieving assoholes.
Your dad didn't have ownership of the building, he didn't commission its construction, he didn't build it "on spec". Artists do build on spec or commission, and the owner of that work, for taking the financial risk, reaps the benefit. The owner of the building your dad helped make sure as shit reaped the benefit of a large portion of the people who enjoyed its comforts. In today's world, most of the people working on a movie don't get to enjoy its long term successes, but the artists primarily charged with creating success for it and those who financially backed it receive long term dividends. It's a business, and making stupid simplistic analogies to things that don't behave at all the same way doesn't help anyone.
The evidence is pretty simple: PCs became a second string game console, something to port to if it was easy (Gears of War 2 didn't even get that treatment). The sales numbers for PC Games were not there, and you can make up all the castles in the air you want, the accountants at game studios aren't going to say don't bother if there's a reasonable amount of money to be made. The money isn't there, and it's at least partly piracy related. See also: Sega Dreamcast.
Cliff Bleszinski seems to think PC Games in general died as a result of piracy. Working for the creators of one of the top game engines in the world, he might just know what he's talking about.
GAH! Why do I never have mod points when I need them!!!
A scientist will be happy with a simple and beautiful solution, but will then work to determine whether that is or is not the deepest expression of truth about reality all the same. F=ma and e=mc^2 will always be beautiful scientific notions, regardless of their exact domains and fit to the actual data.
Wasn't Nevada also proclaimed as the dumping ground for nuclear and toxic waste?
And in related news, it is now the Saudi Arabia of geothermal energy. Turns out toxins and nuclear waste are really, really exothermic!
I grew up in rural Newfoundland, and I've seen three separate resources (minerals, fish, and forests) getting devastated in waves. Corrupt governments can only go so far - they are mostly parasitic to the corporations which work their resources. Resource extraction companies are directly fueled by the misery they cause and as such are the cause of poverty and environmental devastation that boggles the mind. There's a little town called Tilt Cove in Newfoundland, go there sometime. Better yet, don't even leave the mainland - visit Sydney Mines in Cape Breton. These are places that were absolutely destroyed both financially and environmentally by corporations whose only motivation was a better bottom line, and the level to which they sank in achieving that aim is horrifying to consider.
Black hole rotating in reverse relative to its accretion disk has the highest energy of particle interactions at the hole-disk boundary just as two particles travelling towards each other have a higher energy collision than two traveling in parallel. One would, naively, assume that that was the highest energy configuration, although how it gets to be that way in the first place is still an interesting question. I assume objects must have been captured and are now revolving about the hole in a direction opposite to its spin.
I bought donuts for Spirit's overtaking of the record, I guess I did so prematurely.
Proved is the only quantity that matters - it is the only one that has a legitimate engineering and science basis. When the claim is orders of magnitude larger than any single country's total proved reserves, it's beyond wrong. If the argument was about ultimately recoverable resource for the field, you could maybe justify several times the proved resource - that's the general trend - but even then it would be in the billions. Any number in the trillions simply has no place in the discussion.
It's not interesting that you can't find offshore reserves in the rows, given the rows are all combined resources for individual countries, which each have their own offshore resource - Newfoundland's several oil fields contribute a significant part of the 2007 Canadian total, for example.
Claiming trillions of barrels from a single reserve makes this guy a total idiot. Here's why: When was the last time you heard about this particular reserve? Economists, analysts, and oil industry spokesmen talk about individual Saudi fields (Ghawar in particular) by name constantly, and those have "merely" several billions of barrels each, which turns out to be almost unimaginably rich for single resources. If the Gulf resource was anywhere near trillions of barrels of oil it would show up every time someone said the word "oil" on tv. For comparison, the Tiber well, another Gulf well they're really interested in drilling despite having to go 35000 feet deep to get at it, has maybe 3 billion barrels. Every oilhound would be slavering over a trillion-barrel resource at every available opportunity. But they're not, because no such creature is known to exist, and the fact that the guy wrote it that way makes him a total idiot who who clearly isn't paying nearly enough attention to what he's doing and has nowhere near the needed level of informedness to discuss the matter.
Is the DOE good enough? Probably not, but whatever:
http://www.eia.doe.gov/emeu/international/reserves.html
The current estimate for total world reserves is just over 1 trillion, so this guy is just a total idiot.
It is pretty clear that there is not much chance of finding any significant quantity of new cheap oil. Any new or unconventional oil is going to be expensive. — Lord Ron Oxburgh, a former chairman of Shell, October 2008
When the guy from Shell is saying it's over, it's probably over and done with.
No, I think I'll continue to blame Apple. Modern tools like Flash have increased the quality and ease of software development because they provide common functionality support at a very high level. While there are a few holes in the Flash provider itself, those are not comparable to the damage done by developers who have to reinvent the wheel every time. Consumers don't give a damn what something was written in, and Flash has been one of those technologies consumers have glommed onto en masse. Apple shutting down Flash and comparable frameworks is Apple's fault and nobody else's, and it's bad for everyone.
The rate of discovery is one of the metrics I was talking about - leaving aside dubious inflation by providers and monstrously large outliers in recent discoveries, the trend is that we're not even close to keeping up anymore, and it's only getting worse.
If Apple is outselling the entire netbook-ish end of the market, it's a problem. Apple sells well because of their hardware, but their lockdown on software is bad for everyone else, and if they continue to grow and take over device markets it's going to be a long, hard road for developers.
Even in that situation one could argue that the work of making the copy (say it's one of those painting making shops in China) is the one deserving of a reward.
Fun Historical Fact: People making and selling copies of original artwork nearly bankrupted working artists in the 17 and 1800s, which is part of the reason we have copyright laws. If you want art in your society, you don't want to encourage copying of that art in a way that bankrupts your artists. Of course, most people really are too ignorant to understand that art is a desirable quantity for reasons other than simple entertainment.
I believe it was only pants that went out of fashion.
Time is running out because either peak supply or peak demand means terrible things for the market. And by several metrics, peak supply, at least, is not that far away.