sorry, I should have said "only the mature know: Ideals and principles are guidelines only, and if there were better ways we'd choose them in a heartbeat over the endless bloodshed, stupidity, ignorance and strife that is our world and is constrained and enforced on us by nature itself."
Not to exclude anyone who's realized such things regardless of age.
"Is the right to not be experimented on so unimportant that you guess when people get this right?"
You ignore the fact that any woman who has a her period and has not had sex with a man is killing someone without their consent, if my or your mother had been impregnated the month after *our embryo* came up to be fertilized we would not exist.
I agree with your concern and respect your sentiment and that you value human life but nature is passively cruel and doesn't care about us, you have an immune system for a reason yet nature devises ways and methods to try to overcome those defenses.
As much as we would hate to admit it, nature is not nice to us... the whole reason we have to use capitalism in the first place is because of scarcity and our own stupidity in being unable to manipulate reality to prevent our own deaths, diseases, and suffering.
I'm sure any of us given the power of god would not create a universe such as this in which we are weak and powerless that we have to create justifications for exluding people from resources and the benefits of our mutual hard work and co-operation, only the old know: Ideals and principles are guidelines only, and if there were better ways we'd choose them in a heartbeat over the endless bloodshed, stupidity, ignorance and strife that is our world and is constrained and enforced on us by nature itself.
They key word for the true nerd is truth and honesty, thats why the good nerds do so well with the ladies, because they ladies know they won't have to put up with bullshit.
Please hand in your nerd card! RTFM is what we do best ffs, we actually attempt to understand wtf it is we're doing and hence why we get labelled "nerds", the world is *nerd powered* without the nerds there'd be no f'n internet.
Thank god they:
-They read their fucking textbooks -Taught themselveson their own time using the net/other means -Gasp.. found learning shit they were passionate about fun.
I was referring to this comment in his post as well in the last paragaraph:
"My kid plays Runescape and anytime he as a quest (or whatever the hell it's called) to complete he pulls up walk-throughs on the web and follows them to get past it. Besides fighting other players or the standard NPC's he doesn't figure out anything on his own. It's very frustrating for me. I can't even watch him play. Hate to get all geezer here but when I was a kid playing Ultima IV for countless hours on my IBM PCjr I had to figure out all that stuff on my own. For me that was where all the fun was."
Notice how he was annoyed that his son went online and read faq's and didn't try for 'figure out the game for himself'. But he didn't try to do that with smash brothers, that's why games come with manuals, even in "ye old days" we still used the manual to figure out what button did which and for a few more complex aspects of the game it was there for reference. I was just pointing out that he was being a bit hypocritical of his son when he didn't take the time to understand smash and it gave me a bit of a chuckle.
" Except, get this, wait for it...., you don't die at 100%. In fact there's no set limit you die at. The game just decides it's your time to die. Sometimes their damage is at 150% or higher"
The problem is you haven't played smash brothers, smash brothers is in fact a skill based game. The more damage you take the easier it is to ring you out, the idea is to take the least damage as possible because the more damage you take using special moves at higher damage percentages will ring you out instantly for a win.
You just have to learn which moves will ring out and smash people out of the screen at high percentages.
The damage system is actually innovative in that you *do* increase your risk of dying by people who actually attempted to understand the game.
Ironically your complaint that your son didn't try to figure it out himself, when you didn't try to figure out smash brothers system is itself a bit humorous.:)
Media player classic + codec packs VLC
on
VLC 1.0.0 Released
·
· Score: 1
VLC has shitty subtitle support, why VLC gets accolades is beyond me when there are so many bugs compared to just downloading one of the many great community made codec packs and media player classic.
VLC is jack of all trades master of none, with weird bugs when you want to play subtitled files.
"One reason the stock market isn't a Ponzi scheme is that sometimes companies really do use the money invested in them to set up factories which make stuff. Then when that stuff is sold, the investors get a share of the profits. Difficult to believe, I know."
Except this ignores the flagrant evidence to the contrary of the largest rally in stock market history from this past Jan to around now that I participated in the dead-bank sector, all the financials rallied over %100 off their lows in march off of nothing more then speculation there certainly were no profits here or nothing produced, thereby cementing my point entirely.
Yes by and large the stock market is a legalize ponzi scheme under the euphamism of investment, since the way and manner in which the "profits are shared" and the way shares are bought and sold are proof positive of it's ponzi like nature, if one bought shares in a company at a fixed price which you couldn't then resell to other buyers, except back to the company like the current model that paid dividends you'd have a point.
" It wasn't so I could live in a society, but so I could have super powers, choose a side, and then run around kicking the asses of people on the opposing side with said super powers. "
The problem is when the other side are human players what happens to their avatar directly effects tehir psychology. Rage quitting and people getting mad at losing or dying is very common in video games. Mature sportsen make up a minority of any game playing population, but most people get enraged when they lose.
Even top playeers who are working on subdueing their anger when they lose because they recognize it is a flaw in themselves.
This is why PvE is so popular, killing ememies who don't have humans behind them to get angry and offended makes the fantasy of killing the villains much more palatable.
You have to remember psychologically people are emotionally / mentally invested in their avatars. Most people are not nerdy enough or intelligent enough to seperate their psyche from what happens to them in game.
"When I was a kid, I pirated hundreds of computer games from friends, so I'm certainly not arguing that sort of thing has always happened. (That sort of thing is exactly what I mean by a "scene".) However, as an adult, I don't have anyone I can call up and say "yo, hook me up with the warez". But I could PirateBay pretty much anything I wanted to."
You're missing the point entirely, PC games STILL SELL WELL if they are good, when starcraft 2 and diablo 3 hits you don't think the aren't going to sell DESPITE piracy? I mean come on, the truth is game developers have much more competition now and many of them have lost their mojo, they don't want to admit it. Piracy *IS DAMN WELL* an excuse, Piracy on the PS1 and PS2 was rampant. And console piracy is just as easy on the PC, anyone can buy pre-modded console boxes today as well, making the dl and burn very easy. Yet games like Halo 3 and call of duty 4 sell millions of copies on both console nad PC (Cod 4 sold over a million copies on PC) the piracy argument is and HAS ALWAYS BEEN utter bullshit, what you lose in lost pirated sales you can make up with by making a better game people want to buy. Call of duty 4 and 5 are no slouches they are all recent released, the real issue is game development costs corporate/developer greed.
Supreme commander sold over a million fucking units, how much more successful does a game developer want to be ffs? At some point they need to get their costs under control because their business model is the thing that they themselves are fucking up by being the clueless dipshits they really are.
I'm going to call utter bullshit on your protecting these greedy fucktards. The entire world lately is obsessed by their own greed and it's getting tiring. The level of entitlement amongst everbody from corporations, to game devs, to average people in the street is disturbing enough, but it is really bad amongst corps and game devs.
But you're missing the point of downside risk, dividends are likely not going to be more then your investment and you're totally eliminated the amount of risk that you're exposing yourself to when *other people sell* the fact that when other people sell and you lose money if it never reaches that high again is proof positive that my original observations are correct.
I know, I have investments I know what dividends are and I know almost all companies don't pay enough in dividends that would ever make up the average persons investment they made in them, dividends become irrelevant if you can't get your original amount back without a loss.
"It's more like multi-level marketing than a ponzi. "
The truth is they are both very similar, both metaphors are apt.
When someone buys a stock at say 3 bucks, and another one at 3.50, the person who bought at 3 bucks can cash out and sell his stock to the ones buying at 3.50, it's still very ponzi ish when you get down to it and basically suspect to begin with the idea that when you invest money in shares you make good gains by other people buying the stock after you and selling before the other people do is playing a game.
In ponzi scheme you have pyrmaid of taking someones money and using it to pay profits on the next persons money, etc, etc, ala bernie madoff, the stock market functions in similar way except using 'shares' as an abstraction for people. Multi level marketing bears many resemblences to ponzi schemes the same way - you build pyramids
... this is exactly why nerds and academic types get ousted from politics so quickly, STYLE and rhetoric is a must.
People who have people skills and enough intelligence like Mr Obama (not that I agree with everything the man does or says being the poltical stooge that he is), at least knows this.
This partly why academnics get wrtiten off, GOOD WRITING and expressing yourself so other people can understand wtf it is your saying DOES MATTER as well is the emotional tone and way you say it.
It all matters and there is a *mathematical* reason why this is the case, that has to do with symmetry of communication styles and how most people communicate in the real world(tm).
Style mattes as much as substance, the old idea that style does not matter is one of the enlightenments fallacies that many academics and nerds out of the loop of what science has discovered still cling to, since it has been shown to be scientifically false a long time ago.
A convincing bullshitter can often times bamboozle the traditional enlightenment rationalist that has not taken a couse in marketing or ever have had to market something to a general audience.
Most human beings are sloppy thinkers, and even careful thinkers have a tough time with academic companions whose prose is disturbingly obtuse.
I know tonnes of high IQ types who use the most obtuse arcance language known to man and they don't realize how *stupid* they look to people when the don't communicate in a language anyone can understand.
When it comes to argument I now focus both on STYLE and SUBSTANCE, because you want your stuff to be read and digested as widely as possible, coming off as a social slob as many nerds and academics do in writing is not good for propogating their insights and wisdom.
Sometimes we nerdy people need to take a step back and not be so serious about "form over substance" when we know both matters, how many nerds drool over hot girls, esp hot intelligent girls who have an intellectual side? Practically every intelligent man with a pulse.
"While in the good old days the banking business was simply a place to store and borrow money, it has now become a mess so complicated that nobody really understands it anymore."
The real problem is that stocks are a legalized ponzi sceheme and should be done away with entirely, it's basically a ponzi scheme through abstraction using machiens so you don't see the other people trying to fuck one another over for personal gain.
Securities themselves are the problem they allow the wealthy to suck wealth out of society on unprecedented scales in a legal way that is entirely suspect to begin with. If we could get rid of things like securities and credit default swaps, savings would probably pay pay a hell of a lot better. Trading is just too enticing for those that have the mega bucks and quite rankly it's a drag on the real economy.
"Commie" is a bit inappropriate, considering the immense environmental damage caused by communist regimes"
Not all communist regimes are equal, Cuba certainly has a better environmental record then most capitalist nations, since western nations usually export their garbage to the third world when possible. So keep the FUD to yourself please.
I alarmingly disagree, I've found countless books via google search via google books, try doing THAT in a library, really fucking time consuming. Anyone who thinks e-books are not a godsend in many ways (easier to copy, edit, update, etc) over dead-tree have not thought about it hard enough.
Wikibooks is a great example of the limitations of traditional books. Try mass collaboration on deadtree, going to be a lot less efficient.
Yes things have changed but not in the way you think, piracy has always been rampant in 3rd world countries like china and whatnot with people selling bootleg copies on the street. The idea that piracy was not widespread amongst millions and anonymous P2P "changes everything" ingores the continuous growth of the games and movies industries year over year with record box office takings.
The problem is with out-dated business models in an age abundance, according to traditional economic theory - supply exceeds demand so games and movie costs should be pushed lower because of competition from the internet, this by and large has not yet happened because most people are still clueless and love over-paying for crappy products.
People implicitly understand that if they don't pay for something people won't continue making it.
The idea that piracy is going to shut down these industries is a load of hogwash, people understand that it costs money to make these things most adults have jobs in which they produce said things, so they know.
The real problem is the internet now allows socialist economics and that has traditional capitalist scared, you have to remember your point of view is a very western capitalistic point of view, there are others who have good arguments that free distribution is great and the advent of non scarcity, means businesses can no longer control the flow of infromation to the public as they used to.
Fact is copyright as it stands right now is ludicrous for many things, software that ends up being abandonware, game companies that release games and then don't release the source (which should be released so fans of the game can fix and patch the stuff developers didn't bother with, etc).
We need more John Carmacks in the world that realize that releasing the source doesn't harm you. He's released the source to nearly all of his game engines so I give him major thanks.
"Nah, for my money, it is lack of sales that is killing the PC platform --- possibly due to rampant copying."
This ignores games that have sold into the millions of copies, they were easily piratable as well.
-Supreme commander -Crysis -The Witcher -Guid wars (5 million copies)
All games which sold more then a million on PC, in an age of bit-torrent and piracy as the piracy bleeters keep saying. The sales are there so you're argument is bullshit. The truth is game developers are clueless and just want to fall back on the easy tried and true and milk console gamers.
Other companies will come in to fill the void.
"Nah, those games just sucked in a major way. Descent was interesting for 5 minutes what with the full 3D and so on, but ugly as sin and quite repetitive. Freespace tried to be Elite with a terrible story --- and that mix just wasn't very fun. "
Descent's single player I can agree was somewhat shitty but try arguing with the sales #'s of D1 and D2 (millions of copies), lots of people ended up buyin that "repetitive shit" as you so call it, D3 didn't technically bomb it sold alright just not in the same numbers earlier Descent games did due to 3D acceleration requirement.
Also Multiplayer Descent was always blast you just never got into it. And freespace is a critically acclaimed game, I beg to differ it in that it sucked, Freespace is probably one of the best space sim games around. Freespace 1 was kind of lackluster but for the time was good, FS2 was damn great.
"Of course there has always been a ton of piracy, but the major change in recent years is that one can easily download warez without being a member of a "scene"."
I'm going to call BS on that one, games were simple to copy back then and you could always find a nerdy friend to hook you up with a copy. Civ 1 for instance had no copy protection, and I remember getting a copy of it from my cousins, you forget back in ye old days, DRM was not as widespread. Shareware were how Duke 3D and Doom were distributed, the idea that warez somehow has effected sales while it has been there all along is an excuse to cover up what the game industry did to themselves: Instead of focusing on their customers, the focused on themselves, creating expensive technology and ballooning their development costs into the sky while the gaming market for each different kind of game could not expand to keep up.
The gaming market is *always there* and always willing to buy games, Sins of a Solar empire sold 500,000 copies, for an "indie" game that doesn't have all the flash that is damn god, which proves the MARKET is there if you are willing to serve them by getting your development development costs down. Selling more then 200K units used to be consider successful, now game developers are targetting unreal expectations as their development costs of increased, those markets still exist they just could not be served by devs who were unwilling to go the other way and control their costs and focus the game itself ala stardock + ironclad with sins.
The issue is not about piracy, it's about game developers love fest with themseles and expensive production values. Gamers didn't go away, they just haven't found anything worth buying. Starcraft for instance was released when broadband was widespread by that time (hence battle.net) and yet it still sold a shit tonne, this idea that you need to be part of the "Scene" to pirate a game is BS. Kids have always known the people to see to get games in schools and universities around the world.
The fact is the market did not expand in the numbers needed in sales as development costs began to be pushed higher and higher. The gaming market was still there to be served but companies just wanted to keep pushing the envelope with their dev costs.
"Symantec provided a removal tool because their idiot programmers couldn't be assed to write a proper uninstaller for their shite product."
Symantec products used to be good in the DOS early windows 95 days, now they are just garbage and add no real value, I could never defrag my hard drive in XP using later versions of norton defrag, etc, because of hard disk locking issues because the way their clueless programmers could not figure out NTFS.
I also hate what they did to partition magic when they bought out powerquest. It seems to me anything that gets aquired by symantec turns to shit.
They used to be a good company, now one only uses their products "at arms length" I hate installing their anti virus software and usually only run it from CD/DVD.
They had a few good programs: Their old dos norton utilities and the DOS versions of Ghost - quick, clean simple utilities, what I wouldn't give for someone to make good utilities again.
"Freespace had a software renderer, so how did that one bomb?"
Descent 3 and Fs2 both had lower then expected sales, D3 and FS2 were both 3D accelerator only.
Descent 3 didn't technically bomb but it was nowhere near the sales of D1 and D2 according to interplay it sold "respectable numbers" in contrast to Freesapce 2.
Descent 1 and 2 by contrast could run on any system. Back then (around 1996/7/8), 3D accelerators did not have enough market penetration outside of certain genre's, Mainly FPS (quake, etc) and this did a lot to deter PC game developers because they didn't understand the dynamics of what hardware was out there. If there was something like Steam back then giving hardware surveys the could have made a lot more intelligent decisions in terms of making games.
Freespace 2 bombed, the first one didn't obviously (they had an expansion, silent threat). But Freespace 2 was 3D accelerators only, also note a game like Starcraft's popularity in korea was partly due to the fact that it does not *require* 3d acceleration and can run on most any system.
"There's a lot of factors. Piracy -> DRM -> problems -> Piracy."
This is a scapegoat I'm sorry, many games were released during the age of broadband and the internet and were easily downloadable then (pre 2000, 1998/1997). Warez scene has been around since ye old shareware days and before that. Copies of Dos / Win 3.1 were shared rampantly via sneakernet.
What really happened is this:
Game graphics tech got more and more complex with the advent of 3D acelleration, which upped development costs for creating assets by an enormous amount. The game industry did this to themselves, their belief that in order to expand the market they had to keep pushing the graphics envelope, etc, etc. From a business standpoint they pushed their development costs higher and higher but the gaming market for each game could not grow in tandem with their development costs.
The advent of 3D acelleration was a blessing but also a major burden for PC game development. The original games (duke 3d, Doom, Doom 2, diablo, starcraft, etc) were *ALL* games that could be rendered by a traditional 2D graphics card. This changed with the advent of 3D accelerators, the like of nvidia and 3dfx so a "Race to the death" in terms of PC graphics performance, new cards every year and then every 6-8 months from nvidia really did a lot to fragment and skew the PC game market for people that didn't even know what a 3D card was.
It took a while until every system had 3D acceleration like today, but even today your onboard 3D acceleration still sucks ass and it's better to go with an add in card.
Descent 3 and Freespace 1 + 2, part of the reason they bombed was because a large segment of Descent and other game players did not have 3D acceleration or could not afford it. This was lost on a lot of PC game developers and they ended up folding or going consoles (volition of freespace and freespace 2 fame comes to mind).
"I also don't want to live in a country with big government. Or big corporations, which can harness enough economic power to be their own big governments."
Welcome to the real world, throughout history those who governed had the most military/economic power in society. You can't get away from institutions of power that try to protect themselves and 'their interests'.
Slashdot Mirror
sorry, I should have said "only the mature know: Ideals and principles are guidelines only, and if there were better ways we'd choose them in a heartbeat over the endless bloodshed, stupidity, ignorance and strife that is our world and is constrained and enforced on us by nature itself."
Not to exclude anyone who's realized such things regardless of age.
"Is the right to not be experimented on so unimportant that you guess when people get this right?"
You ignore the fact that any woman who has a her period and has not had sex with a man is killing someone without their consent, if my or your mother had been impregnated the month after *our embryo* came up to be fertilized we would not exist.
I agree with your concern and respect your sentiment and that you value human life but nature is passively cruel and doesn't care about us, you have an immune system for a reason yet nature devises ways and methods to try to overcome those defenses.
As much as we would hate to admit it, nature is not nice to us... the whole reason we have to use capitalism in the first place is because of scarcity and our own stupidity in being unable to manipulate reality to prevent our own deaths, diseases, and suffering.
I'm sure any of us given the power of god would not create a universe such as this in which we are weak and powerless that we have to create justifications for exluding people from resources and the benefits of our mutual hard work and co-operation, only the old know: Ideals and principles are guidelines only, and if there were better ways we'd choose them in a heartbeat over the endless bloodshed, stupidity, ignorance and strife that is our world and is constrained and enforced on us by nature itself.
"Key word was "admitting""
They key word for the true nerd is truth and honesty, thats why the good nerds do so well with the ladies, because they ladies know they won't have to put up with bullshit.
Please hand in your nerd card! RTFM is what we do best ffs, we actually attempt to understand wtf it is we're doing and hence why we get labelled "nerds", the world is *nerd powered* without the nerds there'd be no f'n internet.
Thank god they:
-They read their fucking textbooks
-Taught themselveson their own time using the net/other means
-Gasp.. found learning shit they were passionate about fun.
I was referring to this comment in his post as well in the last paragaraph:
"My kid plays Runescape and anytime he as a quest (or whatever the hell it's called) to complete he pulls up walk-throughs on the web and follows them to get past it. Besides fighting other players or the standard NPC's he doesn't figure out anything on his own. It's very frustrating for me. I can't even watch him play. Hate to get all geezer here but when I was a kid playing Ultima IV for countless hours on my IBM PCjr I had to figure out all that stuff on my own. For me that was where all the fun was."
Notice how he was annoyed that his son went online and read faq's and didn't try for 'figure out the game for himself'. But he didn't try to do that with smash brothers, that's why games come with manuals, even in "ye old days" we still used the manual to figure out what button did which and for a few more complex aspects of the game it was there for reference. I was just pointing out that he was being a bit hypocritical of his son when he didn't take the time to understand smash and it gave me a bit of a chuckle.
" Except, get this, wait for it...., you don't die at 100%. In fact there's no set limit you die at. The game just decides it's your time to die. Sometimes their damage is at 150% or higher"
The problem is you haven't played smash brothers, smash brothers is in fact a skill based game. The more damage you take the easier it is to ring you out, the idea is to take the least damage as possible because the more damage you take using special moves at higher damage percentages will ring you out instantly for a win.
You just have to learn which moves will ring out and smash people out of the screen at high percentages.
The damage system is actually innovative in that you *do* increase your risk of dying by people who actually attempted to understand the game.
Ironically your complaint that your son didn't try to figure it out himself, when you didn't try to figure out smash brothers system is itself a bit humorous. :)
VLC has shitty subtitle support, why VLC gets accolades is beyond me when there are so many bugs compared to just downloading one of the many great community made codec packs and media player classic.
VLC is jack of all trades master of none, with weird bugs when you want to play subtitled files.
"One reason the stock market isn't a Ponzi scheme is that sometimes companies really do use the money invested in them to set up factories which make stuff. Then when that stuff is sold, the investors get a share of the profits. Difficult to believe, I know."
Except this ignores the flagrant evidence to the contrary of the largest rally in stock market history from this past Jan to around now that I participated in the dead-bank sector, all the financials rallied over %100 off their lows in march off of nothing more then speculation there certainly were no profits here or nothing produced, thereby cementing my point entirely.
Yes by and large the stock market is a legalize ponzi scheme under the euphamism of investment, since the way and manner in which the "profits are shared" and the way shares are bought and sold are proof positive of it's ponzi like nature, if one bought shares in a company at a fixed price which you couldn't then resell to other buyers, except back to the company like the current model that paid dividends you'd have a point.
" It wasn't so I could live in a society, but so I could have super powers, choose a side, and then run around kicking the asses of people on the opposing side with said super powers. "
The problem is when the other side are human players what happens to their avatar directly effects tehir psychology. Rage quitting and people getting mad at losing or dying is very common in video games. Mature sportsen make up a minority of any game playing population, but most people get enraged when they lose.
Even top playeers who are working on subdueing their anger when they lose because they recognize it is a flaw in themselves.
This is why PvE is so popular, killing ememies who don't have humans behind them to get angry and offended makes the fantasy of killing the villains much more palatable.
You have to remember psychologically people are emotionally / mentally invested in their avatars. Most people are not nerdy enough or intelligent enough to seperate their psyche from what happens to them in game.
"When I was a kid, I pirated hundreds of computer games from friends, so I'm certainly not arguing that sort of thing has always happened. (That sort of thing is exactly what I mean by a "scene".) However, as an adult, I don't have anyone I can call up and say "yo, hook me up with the warez". But I could PirateBay pretty much anything I wanted to."
You're missing the point entirely, PC games STILL SELL WELL if they are good, when starcraft 2 and diablo 3 hits you don't think the aren't going to sell DESPITE piracy? I mean come on, the truth is game developers have much more competition now and many of them have lost their mojo, they don't want to admit it. Piracy *IS DAMN WELL* an excuse, Piracy on the PS1 and PS2 was rampant. And console piracy is just as easy on the PC, anyone can buy pre-modded console boxes today as well, making the dl and burn very easy. Yet games like Halo 3 and call of duty 4 sell millions of copies on both console nad PC (Cod 4 sold over a million copies on PC) the piracy argument is and HAS ALWAYS BEEN utter bullshit, what you lose in lost pirated sales you can make up with by making a better game people want to buy. Call of duty 4 and 5 are no slouches they are all recent released, the real issue is game development costs corporate/developer greed.
Supreme commander sold over a million fucking units, how much more successful does a game developer want to be ffs? At some point they need to get their costs under control because their business model is the thing that they themselves are fucking up by being the clueless dipshits they really are.
I'm going to call utter bullshit on your protecting these greedy fucktards. The entire world lately is obsessed by their own greed and it's getting tiring. The level of entitlement amongst everbody from corporations, to game devs, to average people in the street is disturbing enough, but it is really bad amongst corps and game devs.
But you're missing the point of downside risk, dividends are likely not going to be more then your investment and you're totally eliminated the amount of risk that you're exposing yourself to when *other people sell* the fact that when other people sell and you lose money if it never reaches that high again is proof positive that my original observations are correct.
I know, I have investments I know what dividends are and I know almost all companies don't pay enough in dividends that would ever make up the average persons investment they made in them, dividends become irrelevant if you can't get your original amount back without a loss.
"It's more like multi-level marketing than a ponzi. "
The truth is they are both very similar, both metaphors are apt.
When someone buys a stock at say 3 bucks, and another one at 3.50, the person who bought at 3 bucks can cash out and sell his stock to the ones buying at 3.50, it's still very ponzi ish when you get down to it and basically suspect to begin with the idea that when you invest money in shares you make good gains by other people buying the stock after you and selling before the other people do is playing a game.
In ponzi scheme you have pyrmaid of taking someones money and using it to pay profits on the next persons money, etc, etc, ala bernie madoff, the stock market functions in similar way except using 'shares' as an abstraction for people. Multi level marketing bears many resemblences to ponzi schemes the same way - you build pyramids
... this is exactly why nerds and academic types get ousted from politics so quickly, STYLE and rhetoric is a must.
People who have people skills and enough intelligence like Mr Obama (not that I agree with everything the man does or says being the poltical stooge that he is), at least knows this.
This partly why academnics get wrtiten off, GOOD WRITING and expressing yourself so other people can understand wtf it is your saying DOES MATTER as well is the emotional tone and way you say it.
It all matters and there is a *mathematical* reason why this is the case, that has to do with symmetry of communication styles and how most people communicate in the real world(tm).
Style mattes as much as substance, the old idea that style does not matter is one of the enlightenments fallacies that many academics and nerds out of the loop of what science has discovered still cling to, since it has been shown to be scientifically false a long time ago.
A convincing bullshitter can often times bamboozle the traditional enlightenment rationalist that has not taken a couse in marketing or ever have had to market something to a general audience.
Most human beings are sloppy thinkers, and even careful thinkers have a tough time with academic companions whose prose is disturbingly obtuse.
I know tonnes of high IQ types who use the most obtuse arcance language known to man and they don't realize how *stupid* they look to people when the don't communicate in a language anyone can understand.
When it comes to argument I now focus both on STYLE and SUBSTANCE, because you want your stuff to be read and digested as widely as possible, coming off as a social slob as many nerds and academics do in writing is not good for propogating their insights and wisdom.
Sometimes we nerdy people need to take a step back and not be so serious about "form over substance" when we know both matters, how many nerds drool over hot girls, esp hot intelligent girls who have an intellectual side? Practically every intelligent man with a pulse.
One of the more intelligent posts on slashdot, can't believe you didn't get modded insightful yet.
"While in the good old days the banking business was simply a place to store and borrow money, it has now become a mess so complicated that nobody really understands it anymore."
The real problem is that stocks are a legalized ponzi sceheme and should be done away with entirely, it's basically a ponzi scheme through abstraction using machiens so you don't see the other people trying to fuck one another over for personal gain.
Securities themselves are the problem they allow the wealthy to suck wealth out of society on unprecedented scales in a legal way that is entirely suspect to begin with. If we could get rid of things like securities and credit default swaps, savings would probably pay pay a hell of a lot better. Trading is just too enticing for those that have the mega bucks and quite rankly it's a drag on the real economy.
"Commie" is a bit inappropriate, considering the immense environmental damage caused by communist regimes"
Not all communist regimes are equal, Cuba certainly has a better environmental record then most capitalist nations, since western nations usually export their garbage to the third world when possible. So keep the FUD to yourself please.
"search capability, much overrated "
I alarmingly disagree, I've found countless books via google search via google books, try doing THAT in a library, really fucking time consuming. Anyone who thinks e-books are not a godsend in many ways (easier to copy, edit, update, etc) over dead-tree have not thought about it hard enough.
Wikibooks is a great example of the limitations of traditional books. Try mass collaboration on deadtree, going to be a lot less efficient.
"But things have changed with the internet."
Yes things have changed but not in the way you think, piracy has always been rampant in 3rd world countries like china and whatnot with people selling bootleg copies on the street. The idea that piracy was not widespread amongst millions and anonymous P2P "changes everything" ingores the continuous growth of the games and movies industries year over year with record box office takings.
The problem is with out-dated business models in an age abundance, according to traditional economic theory - supply exceeds demand so games and movie costs should be pushed lower because of competition from the internet, this by and large has not yet happened because most people are still clueless and love over-paying for crappy products.
People implicitly understand that if they don't pay for something people won't continue making it.
The idea that piracy is going to shut down these industries is a load of hogwash, people understand that it costs money to make these things most adults have jobs in which they produce said things, so they know.
The real problem is the internet now allows socialist economics and that has traditional capitalist scared, you have to remember your point of view is a very western capitalistic point of view, there are others who have good arguments that free distribution is great and the advent of non scarcity, means businesses can no longer control the flow of infromation to the public as they used to.
... on at various places like The Globe and mail which have not gotten that much media attention.
Globes Public policy wiki:
http://policywiki.theglobeandmail.com/tiki-forums.php
Copyright Chat:
http://www.theglobeandmail.com/news/technology/download-decade/law-professor-takes-questions-on-copyright/article1141598/
Fact is copyright as it stands right now is ludicrous for many things, software that ends up being abandonware, game companies that release games and then don't release the source (which should be released so fans of the game can fix and patch the stuff developers didn't bother with, etc).
We need more John Carmacks in the world that realize that releasing the source doesn't harm you. He's released the source to nearly all of his game engines so I give him major thanks.
"Nah, for my money, it is lack of sales that is killing the PC platform --- possibly due to rampant copying."
This ignores games that have sold into the millions of copies, they were easily piratable as well.
-Supreme commander
-Crysis
-The Witcher
-Guid wars (5 million copies)
All games which sold more then a million on PC, in an age of bit-torrent and piracy as the piracy bleeters keep saying. The sales are there so you're argument is bullshit. The truth is game developers are clueless and just want to fall back on the easy tried and true and milk console gamers.
Other companies will come in to fill the void.
"Nah, those games just sucked in a major way. Descent was interesting for 5 minutes what with the full 3D and so on, but ugly as sin and quite repetitive. Freespace tried to be Elite with a terrible story --- and that mix just wasn't very fun. "
Descent's single player I can agree was somewhat shitty but try arguing with the sales #'s of D1 and D2 (millions of copies), lots of people ended up buyin that "repetitive shit" as you so call it, D3 didn't technically bomb it sold alright just not in the same numbers earlier Descent games did due to 3D acceleration requirement.
Also Multiplayer Descent was always blast you just never got into it. And freespace is a critically acclaimed game, I beg to differ it in that it sucked, Freespace is probably one of the best space sim games around. Freespace 1 was kind of lackluster but for the time was good, FS2 was damn great.
"Of course there has always been a ton of piracy, but the major change in recent years is that one can easily download warez without being a member of a "scene"."
I'm going to call BS on that one, games were simple to copy back then and you could always find a nerdy friend to hook you up with a copy. Civ 1 for instance had no copy protection, and I remember getting a copy of it from my cousins, you forget back in ye old days, DRM was not as widespread. Shareware were how Duke 3D and Doom were distributed, the idea that warez somehow has effected sales while it has been there all along is an excuse to cover up what the game industry did to themselves: Instead of focusing on their customers, the focused on themselves, creating expensive technology and ballooning their development costs into the sky while the gaming market for each different kind of game could not expand to keep up.
The gaming market is *always there* and always willing to buy games, Sins of a Solar empire sold 500,000 copies, for an "indie" game that doesn't have all the flash that is damn god, which proves the MARKET is there if you are willing to serve them by getting your development development costs down. Selling more then 200K units used to be consider successful, now game developers are targetting unreal expectations as their development costs of increased, those markets still exist they just could not be served by devs who were unwilling to go the other way and control their costs and focus the game itself ala stardock + ironclad with sins.
The issue is not about piracy, it's about game developers love fest with themseles and expensive production values. Gamers didn't go away, they just haven't found anything worth buying. Starcraft for instance was released when broadband was widespread by that time (hence battle.net) and yet it still sold a shit tonne, this idea that you need to be part of the "Scene" to pirate a game is BS. Kids have always known the people to see to get games in schools and universities around the world.
The fact is the market did not expand in the numbers needed in sales as development costs began to be pushed higher and higher. The gaming market was still there to be served but companies just wanted to keep pushing the envelope with their dev costs.
"Symantec provided a removal tool because their idiot programmers couldn't be assed to write a proper uninstaller for their shite product."
Symantec products used to be good in the DOS early windows 95 days, now they are just garbage and add no real value, I could never defrag my hard drive in XP using later versions of norton defrag, etc, because of hard disk locking issues because the way their clueless programmers could not figure out NTFS.
I also hate what they did to partition magic when they bought out powerquest. It seems to me anything that gets aquired by symantec turns to shit.
They used to be a good company, now one only uses their products "at arms length" I hate installing their anti virus software and usually only run it from CD/DVD.
They had a few good programs: Their old dos norton utilities and the DOS versions of Ghost - quick, clean simple utilities, what I wouldn't give for someone to make good utilities again.
"Freespace had a software renderer, so how did that one bomb?"
Descent 3 and Fs2 both had lower then expected sales, D3 and FS2 were both 3D accelerator only.
Descent 3 didn't technically bomb but it was nowhere near the sales of D1 and D2 according to interplay it sold "respectable numbers" in contrast to Freesapce 2.
Descent 1 and 2 by contrast could run on any system. Back then (around 1996/7/8), 3D accelerators did not have enough market penetration outside of certain genre's, Mainly FPS (quake, etc) and this did a lot to deter PC game developers because they didn't understand the dynamics of what hardware was out there. If there was something like Steam back then giving hardware surveys the could have made a lot more intelligent decisions in terms of making games.
Freespace 2 bombed, the first one didn't obviously (they had an expansion, silent threat). But Freespace 2 was 3D accelerators only, also note a game like Starcraft's popularity in korea was partly due to the fact that it does not *require* 3d acceleration and can run on most any system.
"There's a lot of factors. Piracy -> DRM -> problems -> Piracy."
This is a scapegoat I'm sorry, many games were released during the age of broadband and the internet and were easily downloadable then (pre 2000, 1998/1997). Warez scene has been around since ye old shareware days and before that. Copies of Dos / Win 3.1 were shared rampantly via sneakernet.
What really happened is this:
Game graphics tech got more and more complex with the advent of 3D acelleration, which upped development costs for creating assets by an enormous amount. The game industry did this to themselves, their belief that in order to expand the market they had to keep pushing the graphics envelope, etc, etc. From a business standpoint they pushed their development costs higher and higher but the gaming market for each game could not grow in tandem with their development costs.
The advent of 3D acelleration was a blessing but also a major burden for PC game development. The original games (duke 3d, Doom, Doom 2, diablo, starcraft, etc) were *ALL* games that could be rendered by a traditional 2D graphics card. This changed with the advent of 3D accelerators, the like of nvidia and 3dfx so a "Race to the death" in terms of PC graphics performance, new cards every year and then every 6-8 months from nvidia really did a lot to fragment and skew the PC game market for people that didn't even know what a 3D card was.
It took a while until every system had 3D acceleration like today, but even today your onboard 3D acceleration still sucks ass and it's better to go with an add in card.
Descent 3 and Freespace 1 + 2, part of the reason they bombed was because a large segment of Descent and other game players did not have 3D acceleration or could not afford it. This was lost on a lot of PC game developers and they ended up folding or going consoles (volition of freespace and freespace 2 fame comes to mind).
"I also don't want to live in a country with big government. Or big corporations, which can harness enough economic power to be their own big governments."
Welcome to the real world, throughout history those who governed had the most military/economic power in society. You can't get away from institutions of power that try to protect themselves and 'their interests'.