gender-imbalanced offices/teams/companies have a higher probability of disfunction
FTFY. Having too many women is not likely to be an issue for a tech company, but it's still worth noting. (Though I suppose you could argue that the problems in that case arose more from the fact that it was intentionally all-woman, which probably wouldn't attract the most healthy applicants...)
African-American culture is a subset or even a distinct American culture on its own. What may very well prove successful with one group of low income people may not work as well with another.
Yes, for black students to succeed they very much need courses that are separate from, but equal to the courses that white students take.
The ROB and the Virtual Boy were abject failures, while the Zapper wasn't at all fragile. I'm not sure you're making the point you think you're making here.
Indeed we have--the fact that Nintendo thought that, after decades of marketing its consoles to kids and having the reputation of making family-friendly toys, it could get away with selling a console where a giant, fragile $150 controller is the primary component.
Actually, even GamerGhazi is celebrating this decision. Gawker is that bad. The only people defending them are their corrupt buddies in the media (Polygon in particular) who see themselves on the gallows next.
This was posted right after an article about 191M voters having their information exposed on a single database. But no, I'm sure requiring everyone to have their identifying information on a national database won't lead to any problems...
The pharmaceutical companies aren't interested in developing inexpensive drugs you take a few times and then are done with. They want to develop something you have to take for the rest of your life to treat a chronic condition and charge as much as they can get away with.
Bzzt. This is a very common misconception about the motives behind pharmaceutical companies not going into antibiotic or vaccine research without government funding. It doesn't hold up to scrutiny.
Any competent pharmaceutical company is constantly looking for cures to both acute and chronic conditions. Why? Because not only would it be a very expensive drug that you take a few times while the patent is active, but when one company discovers the cure, all of the other companies are left holding their dicks in the wind. No company wants to be in that position, so they all want to be the first to a cure even if they technically would make more money with a non-curative treatment in the long run. It's the Prisoner's Dilemma writ large.
Funding for antibiotics isn't low because Big Pharma doesn't want to cure people. It's low because there's a lot more money in a cure for type II diabetes than there is in a cure for carbapenem-resistant enterobacteria.
Incorrect. If brand-name manufacturers had this sort of power over generic drug approval, then there would be no generic drugs. The people who are saying that they can withhold consent to having their drugs used in bioequivalency trials are doing so based on a court case that never went to trial, about a company (mis)using REMS (a restriction placed by the FDA on certain dangerous drugs) to keep other companies from having their product. Daraprim is not a REMS drug AFAICT.
The real reason why there are no generic versions of Daraprim is because creating one and getting one approved costs a lot of money. When Glaxo was still selling the drug at a relatively low price, there was no incentive to make a generic because said generic couldn't be competitive. Now that Turing has marked the price up, a generic is far more feasible, but it will still take a considerable amount of time before one gets on the market. And even then, it might not be worth the risk that Turing will just lower the price and undercut any would-be competitors.
The article does not at all say that there aren't gamers who are fans of specific genres. What it says is that the giant categories of people who play video games (which should be differentiated from "gamer" in the same way that "people who watch movies" is differentiated from "movie buff") that small developers tend to go after in order to do well in the marketplace, like "MOBA gamers," "core gamers," or "female gamers," aren't cohesive blocs that all buy and play a variety of games within their interests. Indeed, the vast majority of people who play video games tend to stick to a handful of games for various reasons. The point of the article is that while genre gamers and hardcore gamers who will buy your game even if it isn't mainstream exist, there are a lot fewer of them than indie developers tend to assume that there are, and those developers should keep their sales expectations appropriately low.
it appears to violate conventional physics and the law of conservation of momentum; No, it does not, otherwise it would not work.
A theoretical physicist, an applied physicist, and an engineer walk into a bar. The engineer says, "Thanks barkeep, may I have another?" The bartender bets the three that he can serve them beer at FTL speeds. The theoretical physicist says, "Preposterous! That would violate all sorts of fundamental laws including causality!" The applied physicist says, "If it works, it doesn't matter what your theory says!"
There should definitely be systems in place to protect developing minds from porn. We could even give them a snappy name like "Pornographic Age-Restriction Enforcing Network Tool." Really a shame that nothing like this exists in the 21st century.
I agree with your whole post except for the last paragraph. Guys who play Madden or Cawadoody all day are just as casual as women who play Candy Crush Saga or Farmville all day, they just have penises.
My wife has a desktop with Debian 6 installed and it's nothing but trouble, crashes, dropped Internet connection, etc. What really sucks about it is that she likes to stay up late playing Tux Racer and whenever something goes wrong she wakes me up out of a good rest to fix it!
.
.
tl; dr: Momma's got a Squeeze box, Daddy never sleeps at night
A better comparison is not with the Hollywood model of today, but with the model that existed in the early days of cinema--studios "owned" actors, directors, etc. under contract so that they could only make pictures for that studio. This made a lot of money for the studios but everyone else got peanuts and had their creativity stifled, a natural oligopoly arose, and mediocrity ruled the day. The system eventually was broken up by the Supreme Court under antitrust law and the studios felt extreme competitive pressure from television, leading to the freelance system we have now where studios compete to get the best stars by sharing profit, granting creative ownership, and so forth. We wouldn't necessarily need another Supreme Court ruling or another entertainment medium to fix the video-game industry, but doing so would probably still require some sort of collective action (e.g. a general strike by top game designers and writers).
No, the very nature of the PC ecosystem keeps you from reselling what you paid for. Bootlegging PC games has been trivial for well over a decade even if you're only looking at optical-disc-based games. There's also the fact that you could never trust any used game with both a multiplayer component and a CD key (because how do you know the original owner isn't still using the key?) Those trust issues (not to mention the ease of piracy) made the PC used-game market essentially nonviable for years before Steam came out, and would continue to do so if Steam didn't exist. Especially since the publishers that are currently using Steam to lock down their games would continue to do so through similar methods.
Hell, the medical community puts mercury into injections, and expect you to inject it directly into your blood steam.
You couldn't have shown less of an understanding of basic chemistry even if you had instead posted that the copious amounts of hydrogen we ingest every day puts us all in danger of spontaneously combusting.
Slashdot Mirror
FTFY. Having too many women is not likely to be an issue for a tech company, but it's still worth noting. (Though I suppose you could argue that the problems in that case arose more from the fact that it was intentionally all-woman, which probably wouldn't attract the most healthy applicants...)
Rob
If you don't like the Snapchat filter, use the next one. Why take offense?
Rob
Yes, for black students to succeed they very much need courses that are separate from, but equal to the courses that white students take.
Rob
The ROB and the Virtual Boy were abject failures, while the Zapper wasn't at all fragile. I'm not sure you're making the point you think you're making here.
Rob
Indeed we have--the fact that Nintendo thought that, after decades of marketing its consoles to kids and having the reputation of making family-friendly toys, it could get away with selling a console where a giant, fragile $150 controller is the primary component.
Rob
Actually, even GamerGhazi is celebrating this decision. Gawker is that bad. The only people defending them are their corrupt buddies in the media (Polygon in particular) who see themselves on the gallows next.
Rob
"All things are poison and nothing is without poison; only the dose makes a thing not a poison." --Paracelsus
Rob
This was posted right after an article about 191M voters having their information exposed on a single database. But no, I'm sure requiring everyone to have their identifying information on a national database won't lead to any problems...
Rob
Can't wait to "play" Marsbase Alpha!
Rob
The pharmaceutical companies aren't interested in developing inexpensive drugs you take a few times and then are done with. They want to develop something you have to take for the rest of your life to treat a chronic condition and charge as much as they can get away with.
Bzzt. This is a very common misconception about the motives behind pharmaceutical companies not going into antibiotic or vaccine research without government funding. It doesn't hold up to scrutiny.
Any competent pharmaceutical company is constantly looking for cures to both acute and chronic conditions. Why? Because not only would it be a very expensive drug that you take a few times while the patent is active, but when one company discovers the cure, all of the other companies are left holding their dicks in the wind. No company wants to be in that position, so they all want to be the first to a cure even if they technically would make more money with a non-curative treatment in the long run. It's the Prisoner's Dilemma writ large.
Funding for antibiotics isn't low because Big Pharma doesn't want to cure people. It's low because there's a lot more money in a cure for type II diabetes than there is in a cure for carbapenem-resistant enterobacteria.
Rob
Incorrect. If brand-name manufacturers had this sort of power over generic drug approval, then there would be no generic drugs. The people who are saying that they can withhold consent to having their drugs used in bioequivalency trials are doing so based on a court case that never went to trial, about a company (mis)using REMS (a restriction placed by the FDA on certain dangerous drugs) to keep other companies from having their product. Daraprim is not a REMS drug AFAICT.
The real reason why there are no generic versions of Daraprim is because creating one and getting one approved costs a lot of money. When Glaxo was still selling the drug at a relatively low price, there was no incentive to make a generic because said generic couldn't be competitive. Now that Turing has marked the price up, a generic is far more feasible, but it will still take a considerable amount of time before one gets on the market. And even then, it might not be worth the risk that Turing will just lower the price and undercut any would-be competitors.
Rob
The article does not at all say that there aren't gamers who are fans of specific genres. What it says is that the giant categories of people who play video games (which should be differentiated from "gamer" in the same way that "people who watch movies" is differentiated from "movie buff") that small developers tend to go after in order to do well in the marketplace, like "MOBA gamers," "core gamers," or "female gamers," aren't cohesive blocs that all buy and play a variety of games within their interests. Indeed, the vast majority of people who play video games tend to stick to a handful of games for various reasons. The point of the article is that while genre gamers and hardcore gamers who will buy your game even if it isn't mainstream exist, there are a lot fewer of them than indie developers tend to assume that there are, and those developers should keep their sales expectations appropriately low.
Rob
A theoretical physicist, an applied physicist, and an engineer walk into a bar.
The engineer says, "Thanks barkeep, may I have another?"
The bartender bets the three that he can serve them beer at FTL speeds.
The theoretical physicist says, "Preposterous! That would violate all sorts of fundamental laws including causality!"
The applied physicist says, "If it works, it doesn't matter what your theory says!"
There should definitely be systems in place to protect developing minds from porn. We could even give them a snappy name like "Pornographic Age-Restriction Enforcing Network Tool." Really a shame that nothing like this exists in the 21st century.
Rob
...and Verizon chose to be salty.
Rob
I agree with your whole post except for the last paragraph. Guys who play Madden or Cawadoody all day are just as casual as women who play Candy Crush Saga or Farmville all day, they just have penises.
Rob
My wife has a desktop with Debian 6 installed and it's nothing but trouble, crashes, dropped Internet connection, etc. What really sucks about it is that she likes to stay up late playing Tux Racer and whenever something goes wrong she wakes me up out of a good rest to fix it!
.
.
tl; dr: Momma's got a Squeeze box, Daddy never sleeps at night
A better comparison is not with the Hollywood model of today, but with the model that existed in the early days of cinema--studios "owned" actors, directors, etc. under contract so that they could only make pictures for that studio. This made a lot of money for the studios but everyone else got peanuts and had their creativity stifled, a natural oligopoly arose, and mediocrity ruled the day. The system eventually was broken up by the Supreme Court under antitrust law and the studios felt extreme competitive pressure from television, leading to the freelance system we have now where studios compete to get the best stars by sharing profit, granting creative ownership, and so forth. We wouldn't necessarily need another Supreme Court ruling or another entertainment medium to fix the video-game industry, but doing so would probably still require some sort of collective action (e.g. a general strike by top game designers and writers).
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Studio_system
Rob
PC gamers aren't interested, they still need help from keyboard+mouse combinations to aid them in games that actually require precision to play well .
FTFY
Rob
No, the very nature of the PC ecosystem keeps you from reselling what you paid for. Bootlegging PC games has been trivial for well over a decade even if you're only looking at optical-disc-based games. There's also the fact that you could never trust any used game with both a multiplayer component and a CD key (because how do you know the original owner isn't still using the key?) Those trust issues (not to mention the ease of piracy) made the PC used-game market essentially nonviable for years before Steam came out, and would continue to do so if Steam didn't exist. Especially since the publishers that are currently using Steam to lock down their games would continue to do so through similar methods.
Rob
You couldn't have shown less of an understanding of basic chemistry even if you had instead posted that the copious amounts of hydrogen we ingest every day puts us all in danger of spontaneously combusting.
Rob
Though not quite as interesting as when the article was posted yesterday.
Rob
Guess who's MS's closest partner on the Xbone?
Rob
Also the former.
Rob
Stop it with the Bitcoin articles. We're not interested in your Ponzi scheme.
Rob