"Boole's system (detailed in his 'An Investigation of the Laws of Thought, on Which Are Founded the Mathematical Theories of Logic and Probabilities', 1854) was based on a binary approach, processing only two objects - the yes-no, true-false, on-off, zero-one approach.
Surprisingly, given his standing in the academic community, Boole's idea was either criticized or completely ignored by the majority of his peers. Luckily, American logician Charles Sanders Peirce was more open-minded."
So yes there is plenty of people ignored and criticized by the math community. Mr Boole's ideas were absolutely critical for the development of electronic computers when Claude Shannon picked them up.
Giving up hope is a function of learning from your mistakes, there are situations where it is perfectly rational to give up hope.
They don't address the complexity of 'learning from your mistakes', one man's mistake is another man's genius idea. History is filled with critics that thought someone was mistaken when they ultimately turned out to be right, especially in mathematics.
... I know I make these all the time, when I send commands to the motor centers some of them never get there and some of my posts are truncated or the wrong message was sent, so I might say their instead of there, etc.
Many errors are really the result of neurological issues and I wish more teachers would understand that.
I still make unconscious errors, so I'd have to agree with the article.
"But how would the game developers be compensated?"
It's not the job of society to ensure some businesses are profitable, there are many unprofitable ventures that wouldn't make 'economic sense' but we don't go around trying to make sure they are 'compensated'.
Tis goes to show you economics is all about politics, and has nothing to do with neoclassical principles of supply and demand.
"It doesn't change the essential nature of the problem to just use a different kind of token."
No it doesn't but in any system that is going to interact with outside systems you can't completely be secure, by adding many layers what you want is deterence. Think of nuclear weapons, no one really want's to use them unless forced to do so.
Whenever you have legitmate users who are going to use your system you're going to have security holes somewhere, because someone needs access to the resource unobscured.
"Of course, now this makes processing logins expensive, as each attempt requires consulting with a retry-blacklist. One might try making a single, global blacklist and then dealing with the support calls from people with infected machines who were blacklisted for testing other accounts without their knowledge.
Tough game to win, really..."
Well this is why banks could keep a record of IP's you login from and only block permanently those that according to the logs are rarest in successful login attempts.
""Supply and demand" is an illusion, a fairytale they tell you in school. There is hardly a single item traded anymore, where supply isn't manipulated to such an extent that it's meaningless."
You are correct but we are dealing with people that aren't very smart and they need a system they perceive to be in their interests.
Most people simply do not have the cognitive level, nor maturity to deal well with discussing such complex issues. In short, most people don't know how ignorant they really are.
"Ok so I've saved time by not clicking on links, but what if there's something I want at the bottom of the screen, but there are all these mouse-over links between my cursor and it. The screen is suddenly a minefield."
But if you read the site it was experimental, i.e. the design issues using gesturing would still have to be worked out. IMHO it's not a BAD idea, it's not a replacement for buttons, but it is another way of thinking about things. I think the big problem was merely a problem of implementation, not the fact that it didn't work.
"Our society has given up all of its responsibility and demand that someone else (government) take care of them in all aspects of their life"
This is nonsense, the modern world is a complex place, people no longer own their own means of subsistence and existence. The majority of people are landless workers that float from job to job, their only security being the money they make. If real hardship were to occur (i.e. energy becoming prohibitively expensive before effective solutions were found) entire cities would be fucked.
Maybe you weren't there for the great depression but I've read a tonne and talked to people that lived through it. There is a reason government is there, it is because no man is completely self-sufficient.
The whole individual responsibility thing includes realizing that no man is an island, and has a responsibility towards his community has to be balanced against private interests.
A quote from John adams:
John Adams often pondered the issue of civic virtue. Writing Mercy Otis Warren in 1776, he agreed with the Greeks and the Romans, that,
"Public Virtue cannot exist without private, and public Virtue is the only Foundation of Republics." Adams insisted, "There must be a positive Passion for the public good, the public Interest, Honour, Power, and Glory, established in the Minds of the People, or there can be no Republican Government, nor any real Liberty. And this public Passion must be Superior to all private Passions. Men must be ready, they must pride themselves, and be happy to sacrifice their private Pleasures, Passions, and Interests, nay their private Friendships and dearest connections, when they Stand in Competition with the Rights of society."
In today's modern world, there is less and less of that. Most people check out into entertainment and whats left for their social life and are so engrossed in their work theirs scarce time for anything else.
Passwords can still play a role, the problem has always been user stupidity and convenience vs security. We always love to save time and anything that requires less effort = good for us, but at the expense of being less secure. Moving security to invisible layers is just asking for abuse by authorities, as if they didn't have enough power already via MAC address + ip binding in being able to track down and identify users by merely tooling around with the equipment right at the ISP end.
My bank uses multiple authentication using personal questions which I would only know the answer to and if you get the question wrong just once, it flags the account. The big problem is the amount of retries, you can't guess or brute force passwords on accounts that will lock after the first few failed attempts.
In my opinion it's probably best if we moved to gesturing, I find an interesting site here - http://www.dontclick.it/
It could serve as an interesting basis for security, i.e. gesturing and opening the correct doors in a maze.
"Are you saying that since costs of reproduction are so low, the price should be lower? Entertainment and manufacturing are completely separate things."
You're missing the point of course, the manufacturing cost is distributed. Game developers are not the only ones that have the means of production. Once a game is made I can copy-manufacture a copy of it.
It could take millions of dollars to produce a Lamborghini, but if I had a matter copying machine that allowed me to copy it at negligible cost, it doesn't matter how much it cost someone else to produce the original model. All that matters is MY cost to produce the good out of my own matter and energy via copying technique that allows me to copy the good at negligible value.
"If the games are "so poor", why are people paying for them?"
Because people are not rational, also consider the demographics. I have a gaming history going back into the 8 bit era, millions of children do not have this experience to see that the "new" games they are playing are old rehashes, so what in actuality an old game rehashed, to someone who's very new to the world, it's brand new (no prior gaming experiences).
People are not rational, just because people voluntarily buy shit doesn't mean it's good for us. There are plenty of stupid people out there. This doesn't in any way effect the argument I made.
"You assume, erroneously, that everyone who relies on copyright to make a living is part of some filthy rich megacorp."
That's not it at all, the fact is games, once produced, are NOT SCARCE. According to supply and demand, such industries should be unprofitable, but yet are some of the most profitable. As supply goes up cost should come down, regardless of what the labour costs to produce said item.
Just because gaming is a white collar profession doesn't mean squat, according to economics games should be uneconomical to produce because they have infinite supply (they can always meet demand) there is not a case where you cannot meet demand given modern technology.
Like I said before, if we invented replicators, entire industries would disappear over night. You're still stuck in the old way of economic thinking.
The fact is many indies want money for games that aren't worth that much to consumers, you have to consider the actual value to the consumer of a luxury item, it has marginal utility and should be treated as such. It's not an indispensable product.
"He's not wrong, and the pirates know that. There are a few excuses that are legitimate (lost/broken CDs) and some that are semilegitimate (abandonware), but most pirating is just people wanting something for free."
Unfortunately, I think we should turn it around. Instead of "Why do people pirate games?"
What we should be asking is? "Why should your industry making record profits despite non-scarcity?"
People are so stuck in the old model of thinking. The whole intellectual property model combined with non-scarcity should mean game dev's shouldnt be making anything at all, in market economies we use them because of scarcity. Imagine if we invented a startrek replicator tomorrow and all you needed was some matter out of our backyard, entire industries would go bankrupt over night. The economic idealogy is at odds with some of the technology we develop, that has to be realized instead of fought. IMHO developers need to start treating their customers like customers instead of just objects with wallets to be abused willy nilly. I like the stardock approach myself.
I think the argument should be viewed in the reverse, considering non-scarcity of said product once it is produced, why haven't prices of games come down? Many hit selling games keep their priceses maximized to extract the maximum amount of profit because they can and becaue most games are so poor to begin with.
The supply of digital goods is infinite and yet game devs still make record profits, exactly why should they be complaining?
Next is the issue of the game industry being unable to control it's costs effectively, that's the real issue. IT's no longer the 8 and 16-bit era where you could spend less on developing a game and didn't have to sell so many units just to break even, also you could slowly grow a franchise instead of having to develop an 'instant hit'. Many games in the old era slowly grew their fanbases through rentals, etc, that became increasingly difficult to do, to make money but also still be creative and not release sequel after sequal.
They've boxed themselves into a corner with driving dev costs up through the roof, their are still a lot of problems with the game industry not being able to effectively cut it's costs on producing games. I imagine this will take a while until new middleware / software emerges that makes games easier to produce, thereby reducing the cost.
Actually you bring up a very good point in your humor, with the advent of the internet and google people are becoming increasingly addicted to data. Now, considering opportunity vs time cost which is ever present in our short lives so we end up giving up more and more of our data to the websites/cloud. Privacy in the coming age will be either a product for big companies, etc, or increasingly irrelevant as the web has shown (myspace/facebook generation). It seems in order to do anything and gain peoples trust to some extent, some amount of disclosure is necessary. There are many people with websites, blogs, etc with their real names on it. The web is becoming more and more integral into how we do business and how we interact across large distances (telepresence, etc).
"Every web property owner will, at the end of the day, protect their own turf--at the possible expense of the user. So, for example, I can't expect facebook to play nice with say a competitor like Plaxo"
This is exactly where competition and the free market hurts us and causes a lot of inefficiency, I wish there were ways to 'de-marketize' certain area's so that standards can emerge. It would save us lots of money and lots of headaches if we could develop a framework for this to occur. IMHO, markets begin to break down when certain features of our world have to start obeying the laws of geometry vs some idealized form of socio-economic system.
The idea that one is worth more then the other is a bit nonsensical, it's not an either-or proposition since whenever you're doing something you're executing ideas! This whole false dichotomy between execution and ideas is nonsensical. Take for instance all the ideas that go into making a modern CPU, or GPU for that matter. IDEA's MATTER, bigtime. Someone had the ideas public education was a good idea!
What is mathematics if not one big mass of ideas? Don't think ideas matter? Someone somewhere along the line had the IDEA of inventing money as a medium of exchange. Someone along the line had the IDEA of markets (Adam smith). Idea's matter, and anyone who says they don't isn'y really be aware of history. The whole of human history is driven by ideas usually tempered by pragmatism.
Idea's are equally as important as being able to implement then, since if you get right down to it since everything within a business usually encompasses information in some form (i.e. ideas).
"I don't care how good it looks if the game sucks, and if it is a good game then stellar graphics are hardly my concern."
The big problem is with consumers though, what people buy vs what people rent makes a huge difference and many people buy games on hype and graphics more then gameplay, because most people are simple minded.
"Also worth remembering: the reason that WoW is more successful than every other MMO put together is precisely because Blizzard ignored the conventional wisdom"
Sorry, the reason WOW is more successful is because it uses warcraft property. If it was not based in the warcraft universe and had all the same play mechanics with a different set of graphics, then you could bet your ass it wouldn't have sold what it did.
WoW is not god's gift to gaming. All it did was copied the best elements of prior MMO's and put them into one game (mostly), and gave it the warcraft themed graphics and universe.
I couldn't stand wow's insane travel times and no town portal, etc, etc. It's something I've hated for a long time in MMO's, they make you waste an enormous amount of of time traveling around.
WoW for me was nowhere near as fun as Diablo was, the fact that it sold so much is because they dumbed down the gameplay (as most MMO's do) so that any drooling idiot can play it.
That's the real reason: i.e. doesn't require any kind of serious twitch skills.
" they even know the difference between "they're" and "their". Something most college grads seem to not know. Too bad you can't fire people (lovely government interventions) for having been too stupid to get value for their money when they shopped for "education"."
The difference between "they're and their", when people MAKE the mistake. Is often a unconscious memory error. I know because I make these all the time and it has to do with the way each person's neurology stores information in memory. I will also type the wrong word for words that sound phonetically near, or exactly the same. It has nothing to do with being 'ill educated', I think everyone needs some basic courses in neurology as to why these mistakes keep creeping up in people's writing: Hint, it's not (always) because they are simply stupid, it has to do with the way information in memory is stored and organized in the brain.
The so called "fruedian slip" is more like the "storage" slip, networks of associated content are activated, boob job becomes blow job, they both begin with be, and end with job, so the mind while looking up boob, misfires and gives the man "blow". There was an excellent segment on this at orwell coming to america conference (I believe it is in, video 2)
"Who they really are or who they wish they could be?"
If you're being it, then you are it. You are what you do.
I'm not saying people can't lie, as I pointed out: It allows us to be hot-headed and stupid (i.e. jokes, trolling, lying, etc). But like I said, we do it because that's a part of us that goes unexpressed in the "real" face-to-face world.
We can engage in behaviors that we wish at any time, with no filters.
"the dehumanizing effect of anonymity. It is twofold: first it is easy to dehumanize the person you are hating-on because they are obscured in a metal box, second it is easy to let go of your social common sense because you are obscured by your metal box"
I really doubt this personally, online people can be who they REALLY ARE and say what they what they REALLY feel, certainly this allows for more hot-headedness and stupidity as well that we regret later, but more or less people get to be another side of themselves who they really are and is really a part of them.
All internet does is bring down the barriers on human nature and the immature asshole inside everyone. The truth is 1000's of years ago we would kill and enslave people who disagree'd with us, just look at human history! It's filled with people getting killed over arguments over what they believed in and their personal values and view of the world, and not just religion either.
If you doubt this: Just look at the cold war, and how many americans can't have a conversation about helping others without being labelled 'socialist' or 'commie' or 'pinko'. It's ridiculous, people think they know more then they actually do, and they prefer to defer to themselves because you can't convince someone who thinks they know everything.
The average person does not have the heart of a philosopher or scientist, below is one of my favorite quotes from Ibn al-Haytham (11th century islam scientist).
Ibn al-Haytham articulated some remarkably sophisticated statements on the practice of science and the growth of scientific knowledge. In a critical treatise, Aporias against Ptolemy, he asserts that "Truth is sought for itself"--but "the truths," he warns, "are immersed in uncertainties" and the scientific authorities (such as Ptolemy, whom he greatly respected) are "not immune from error...." Nor, he said, is human nature itself: "Therefore, the seeker after the truth is not one who studies the writings of the ancients and, following his natural disposition, puts his trust in them, but rather the one who suspects his faith in them and questions what he gathers from them, the one who submits to argument and demonstration, and not to the sayings of a human being whose nature is fraught with all kinds of imperfection and deficiency. Thus the duty of the man who investigates the writings of scientists, if learning the truth is his goal, is to make himself an enemy of all that he reads, and, applying his mind to the core and margins of its content, attack it from every side. He should also suspect himself as he performs his critical examination of it, so that he may avoid falling into either prejudice or leniency.
"I think that any college educated person has the same amount of information in their brain as someone who recored a hundred hours of oral history and song."
Much of the information we intake is recorded subconsciously, until we know exactly how and why memories are stored and what triggers memory storage, human memory varies vastly differently between people. They remember vastly different things, and if you don't use the information frequently it will be harder to retrieve, if at all. It's a "use it or lose it" proposition, there has to be some binding function (natural interest, emotional component, reptition, etc)
I remember more theme songs from TV shows and commercials over math equations, IMHO I've wondered if we should let certain advertisers figure out ways to drill stuff into our head so we don't forget it.
"It's really easy to talk like that, but look at CB verses Ham Radio. The Internet we have today is like CB radio...anyone can transmit and receive. CB radio has its advantages and disadvantages"
While I agree with you in theory, in practice we know corporations are going to do their damnest to lock it down and be able to block and censor and "black out" websites they don't like. They HATE the fact that information is free, they want to enclose the last commons which is infinite (information, ideas, etc), we can't let these pieces of capitalist shit have it. (no offense to other capitalists who genuinely believe in freedom of information)
Slashdot Mirror
"Boole's system (detailed in his 'An Investigation of the Laws of Thought, on Which Are Founded the Mathematical Theories of Logic and Probabilities', 1854) was based on a binary approach, processing only two objects - the yes-no, true-false, on-off, zero-one approach.
Surprisingly, given his standing in the academic community, Boole's idea was either criticized or completely ignored by the majority of his peers. Luckily, American logician Charles Sanders Peirce was more open-minded."
So yes there is plenty of people ignored and criticized by the math community. Mr Boole's ideas were absolutely critical for the development of electronic computers when Claude Shannon picked them up.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Claude_Shannon
"That's giving up hope. "
Giving up hope is a function of learning from your mistakes, there are situations where it is perfectly rational to give up hope.
They don't address the complexity of 'learning from your mistakes', one man's mistake is another man's genius idea. History is filled with critics that thought someone was mistaken when they ultimately turned out to be right, especially in mathematics.
... I know I make these all the time, when I send commands to the motor centers some of them never get there and some of my posts are truncated or the wrong message was sent, so I might say their instead of there, etc.
Many errors are really the result of neurological issues and I wish more teachers would understand that.
I still make unconscious errors, so I'd have to agree with the article.
"If a tree falls in the woods and no one is there to hear it, did it make any noise?"
Actually there is an answer to that riddle: What the question is asking is WAS THERE A MAN TO HEAR IT, and quite clearly, no there wasn't.
"But how would the game developers be compensated?"
It's not the job of society to ensure some businesses are profitable, there are many unprofitable ventures that wouldn't make 'economic sense' but we don't go around trying to make sure they are 'compensated'.
Tis goes to show you economics is all about politics, and has nothing to do with neoclassical principles of supply and demand.
"It doesn't change the essential nature of the problem to just use a different kind of token."
No it doesn't but in any system that is going to interact with outside systems you can't completely be secure, by adding many layers what you want is deterence. Think of nuclear weapons, no one really want's to use them unless forced to do so.
Whenever you have legitmate users who are going to use your system you're going to have security holes somewhere, because someone needs access to the resource unobscured.
"Of course, now this makes processing logins expensive, as each attempt requires consulting with a retry-blacklist. One might try making a single, global blacklist and then dealing with the support calls from people with infected machines who were blacklisted for testing other accounts without their knowledge.
Tough game to win, really..."
Well this is why banks could keep a record of IP's you login from and only block permanently those that according to the logs are rarest in successful login attempts.
""Supply and demand" is an illusion, a fairytale they tell you in school. There is hardly a single item traded anymore, where supply isn't manipulated to such an extent that it's meaningless."
You are correct but we are dealing with people that aren't very smart and they need a system they perceive to be in their interests.
Most people simply do not have the cognitive level, nor maturity to deal well with discussing such complex issues. In short, most people don't know how ignorant they really are.
"Ok so I've saved time by not clicking on links, but what if there's something I want at the bottom of the screen, but there are all these mouse-over links between my cursor and it. The screen is suddenly a minefield."
But if you read the site it was experimental, i.e. the design issues using gesturing would still have to be worked out. IMHO it's not a BAD idea, it's not a replacement for buttons, but it is another way of thinking about things. I think the big problem was merely a problem of implementation, not the fact that it didn't work.
"Our society has given up all of its responsibility and demand that someone else (government) take care of them in all aspects of their life"
This is nonsense, the modern world is a complex place, people no longer own their own means of subsistence and existence. The majority of people are landless workers that float from job to job, their only security being the money they make. If real hardship were to occur (i.e. energy becoming prohibitively expensive before effective solutions were found) entire cities would be fucked.
Maybe you weren't there for the great depression but I've read a tonne and talked to people that lived through it. There is a reason government is there, it is because no man is completely self-sufficient.
The whole individual responsibility thing includes realizing that no man is an island, and has a responsibility towards his community has to be balanced against private interests.
A quote from John adams:
John Adams often pondered the issue of civic virtue. Writing Mercy Otis Warren in 1776, he agreed with the Greeks and the Romans, that,
"Public Virtue cannot exist without private, and public Virtue is the only Foundation of Republics." Adams insisted, "There must be a positive Passion for the public good, the public Interest, Honour, Power, and Glory, established in the Minds of the People, or there can be no Republican Government, nor any real Liberty. And this public Passion must be Superior to all private Passions. Men must be ready, they must pride themselves, and be happy to sacrifice their private Pleasures, Passions, and Interests, nay their private Friendships and dearest connections, when they Stand in Competition with the Rights of society."
In today's modern world, there is less and less of that. Most people check out into entertainment and whats left for their social life and are so engrossed in their work theirs scarce time for anything else.
Passwords can still play a role, the problem has always been user stupidity and convenience vs security. We always love to save time and anything that requires less effort = good for us, but at the expense of being less secure. Moving security to invisible layers is just asking for abuse by authorities, as if they didn't have enough power already via MAC address + ip binding in being able to track down and identify users by merely tooling around with the equipment right at the ISP end.
My bank uses multiple authentication using personal questions which I would only know the answer to and if you get the question wrong just once, it flags the account. The big problem is the amount of retries, you can't guess or brute force passwords on accounts that will lock after the first few failed attempts.
In my opinion it's probably best if we moved to gesturing, I find an interesting site here -
http://www.dontclick.it/
It could serve as an interesting basis for security, i.e. gesturing and opening the correct doors in a maze.
"Are you saying that since costs of reproduction are so low, the price should be lower? Entertainment and manufacturing are completely separate things."
You're missing the point of course, the manufacturing cost is distributed. Game developers are not the only ones that have the means of production. Once a game is made I can copy-manufacture a copy of it.
It could take millions of dollars to produce a Lamborghini, but if I had a matter copying machine that allowed me to copy it at negligible cost, it doesn't matter how much it cost someone else to produce the original model. All that matters is MY cost to produce the good out of my own matter and energy via copying technique that allows me to copy the good at negligible value.
"If the games are "so poor", why are people paying for them?"
Because people are not rational, also consider the demographics. I have a gaming history going back into the 8 bit era, millions of children do not have this experience to see that the "new" games they are playing are old rehashes, so what in actuality an old game rehashed, to someone who's very new to the world, it's brand new (no prior gaming experiences).
People are not rational, just because people voluntarily buy shit doesn't mean it's good for us. There are plenty of stupid people out there. This doesn't in any way effect the argument I made.
"You assume, erroneously, that everyone who relies on copyright to make a living is part of some filthy rich megacorp."
That's not it at all, the fact is games, once produced, are NOT SCARCE. According to supply and demand, such industries should be unprofitable, but yet are some of the most profitable. As supply goes up cost should come down, regardless of what the labour costs to produce said item.
Just because gaming is a white collar profession doesn't mean squat, according to economics games should be uneconomical to produce because they have infinite supply (they can always meet demand) there is not a case where you cannot meet demand given modern technology.
Like I said before, if we invented replicators, entire industries would disappear over night. You're still stuck in the old way of economic thinking.
Indies already make decent cash, check out.
http://www.dragonfable.com/
The fact is many indies want money for games that aren't worth that much to consumers, you have to consider the actual value to the consumer of a luxury item, it has marginal utility and should be treated as such. It's not an indispensable product.
"He's not wrong, and the pirates know that. There are a few excuses that are legitimate (lost/broken CDs) and some that are semilegitimate (abandonware), but most pirating is just people wanting something for free."
Unfortunately, I think we should turn it around. Instead of "Why do people pirate games?"
What we should be asking is? "Why should your industry making record profits despite non-scarcity?"
People are so stuck in the old model of thinking. The whole intellectual property model combined with non-scarcity should mean game dev's shouldnt be making anything at all, in market economies we use them because of scarcity. Imagine if we invented a startrek replicator tomorrow and all you needed was some matter out of our backyard, entire industries would go bankrupt over night. The economic idealogy is at odds with some of the technology we develop, that has to be realized instead of fought. IMHO developers need to start treating their customers like customers instead of just objects with wallets to be abused willy nilly. I like the stardock approach myself.
I think the argument should be viewed in the reverse, considering non-scarcity of said product once it is produced, why haven't prices of games come down? Many hit selling games keep their priceses maximized to extract the maximum amount of profit because they can and becaue most games are so poor to begin with.
The supply of digital goods is infinite and yet game devs still make record profits, exactly why should they be complaining?
Next is the issue of the game industry being unable to control it's costs effectively, that's the real issue. IT's no longer the 8 and 16-bit era where you could spend less on developing a game and didn't have to sell so many units just to break even, also you could slowly grow a franchise instead of having to develop an 'instant hit'. Many games in the old era slowly grew their fanbases through rentals, etc, that became increasingly difficult to do, to make money but also still be creative and not release sequel after sequal.
They've boxed themselves into a corner with driving dev costs up through the roof, their are still a lot of problems with the game industry not being able to effectively cut it's costs on producing games. I imagine this will take a while until new middleware / software emerges that makes games easier to produce, thereby reducing the cost.
Actually you bring up a very good point in your humor, with the advent of the internet and google people are becoming increasingly addicted to data. Now, considering opportunity vs time cost which is ever present in our short lives so we end up giving up more and more of our data to the websites/cloud. Privacy in the coming age will be either a product for big companies, etc, or increasingly irrelevant as the web has shown (myspace/facebook generation). It seems in order to do anything and gain peoples trust to some extent, some amount of disclosure is necessary. There are many people with websites, blogs, etc with their real names on it. The web is becoming more and more integral into how we do business and how we interact across large distances (telepresence, etc).
"Every web property owner will, at the end of the day, protect their own turf--at the possible expense of the user. So, for example, I can't expect facebook to play nice with say a competitor like Plaxo"
This is exactly where competition and the free market hurts us and causes a lot of inefficiency, I wish there were ways to 'de-marketize' certain area's so that standards can emerge. It would save us lots of money and lots of headaches if we could develop a framework for this to occur. IMHO, markets begin to break down when certain features of our world have to start obeying the laws of geometry vs some idealized form of socio-economic system.
"Execution is IMHO worth more than a good idea"
The idea that one is worth more then the other is a bit nonsensical, it's not an either-or proposition since whenever you're doing something you're executing ideas! This whole false dichotomy between execution and ideas is nonsensical. Take for instance all the ideas that go into making a modern CPU, or GPU for that matter. IDEA's MATTER, bigtime. Someone had the ideas public education was a good idea!
What is mathematics if not one big mass of ideas? Don't think ideas matter? Someone somewhere along the line had the IDEA of inventing money as a medium of exchange. Someone along the line had the IDEA of markets (Adam smith). Idea's matter, and anyone who says they don't isn'y really be aware of history. The whole of human history is driven by ideas usually tempered by pragmatism.
Idea's are equally as important as being able to implement then, since if you get right down to it since everything within a business usually encompasses information in some form (i.e. ideas).
"I don't care how good it looks if the game sucks, and if it is a good game then stellar graphics are hardly my concern."
The big problem is with consumers though, what people buy vs what people rent makes a huge difference and many people buy games on hype and graphics more then gameplay, because most people are simple minded.
"Also worth remembering: the reason that WoW is more successful than every other MMO put together is precisely because Blizzard ignored the conventional wisdom"
Sorry, the reason WOW is more successful is because it uses warcraft property. If it was not based in the warcraft universe and had all the same play mechanics with a different set of graphics, then you could bet your ass it wouldn't have sold what it did.
WoW is not god's gift to gaming. All it did was copied the best elements of prior MMO's and put them into one game (mostly), and gave it the warcraft themed graphics and universe.
I couldn't stand wow's insane travel times and no town portal, etc, etc. It's something I've hated for a long time in MMO's, they make you waste an enormous amount of of time traveling around.
WoW for me was nowhere near as fun as Diablo was, the fact that it sold so much is because they dumbed down the gameplay (as most MMO's do) so that any drooling idiot can play it.
That's the real reason: i.e. doesn't require any kind of serious twitch skills.
" they even know the difference between "they're" and "their". Something most college grads seem to not know. Too bad you can't fire people (lovely government interventions) for having been too stupid to get value for their money when they shopped for "education"."
The difference between "they're and their", when people MAKE the mistake. Is often a unconscious memory error. I know because I make these all the time and it has to do with the way each person's neurology stores information in memory. I will also type the wrong word for words that sound phonetically near, or exactly the same. It has nothing to do with being 'ill educated', I think everyone needs some basic courses in neurology as to why these mistakes keep creeping up in people's writing: Hint, it's not (always) because they are simply stupid, it has to do with the way information in memory is stored and organized in the brain.
The so called "fruedian slip" is more like the "storage" slip, networks of associated content are activated, boob job becomes blow job, they both begin with be, and end with job, so the mind while looking up boob, misfires and gives the man "blow". There was an excellent segment on this at orwell coming to america conference (I believe it is in, video 2)
http://www.linktv.org/video/2142
See items by: George lakoff
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/George_Lakoff
Hist postings at the (now closed) rockridge institute
http://www.rockridgeinstitute.org/people/lakoff
"Who they really are or who they wish they could be?"
If you're being it, then you are it. You are what you do.
I'm not saying people can't lie, as I pointed out: It allows us to be hot-headed and stupid (i.e. jokes, trolling, lying, etc). But like I said, we do it because that's a part of us that goes unexpressed in the "real" face-to-face world.
We can engage in behaviors that we wish at any time, with no filters.
"the dehumanizing effect of anonymity. It is twofold: first it is easy to dehumanize the person you are hating-on because they are obscured in a metal box, second it is easy to let go of your social common sense because you are obscured by your metal box"
I really doubt this personally, online people can be who they REALLY ARE and say what they what they REALLY feel, certainly this allows for more hot-headedness and stupidity as well that we regret later, but more or less people get to be another side of themselves who they really are and is really a part of them.
All internet does is bring down the barriers on human nature and the immature asshole inside everyone. The truth is 1000's of years ago we would kill and enslave people who disagree'd with us, just look at human history! It's filled with people getting killed over arguments over what they believed in and their personal values and view of the world, and not just religion either.
If you doubt this: Just look at the cold war, and how many americans can't have a conversation about helping others without being labelled 'socialist' or 'commie' or 'pinko'. It's ridiculous, people think they know more then they actually do, and they prefer to defer to themselves because you can't convince someone who thinks they know everything.
The average person does not have the heart of a philosopher or scientist, below is one of my favorite quotes from Ibn al-Haytham (11th century islam scientist).
http://harvardmagazine.com/2003/09/ibn-al-haytham.html
(quote from above article below)
Ibn al-Haytham articulated some remarkably sophisticated statements on the practice of science and the growth of scientific knowledge. In a critical treatise, Aporias against Ptolemy, he asserts that "Truth is sought for itself"--but "the truths," he warns, "are immersed in uncertainties" and the scientific authorities (such as Ptolemy, whom he greatly respected) are "not immune from error...." Nor, he said, is human nature itself: "Therefore, the seeker after the truth is not one who studies the writings of the ancients and, following his natural disposition, puts his trust in them, but rather the one who suspects his faith in them and questions what he gathers from them, the one who submits to argument and demonstration, and not to the sayings of a human being whose nature is fraught with all kinds of imperfection and deficiency. Thus the duty of the man who investigates the writings of scientists, if learning the truth is his goal, is to make himself an enemy of all that he reads, and, applying his mind to the core and margins of its content, attack it from every side. He should also suspect himself as he performs his critical examination of it, so that he may avoid falling into either prejudice or leniency.
"I think that any college educated person has the same amount of information in their brain as someone who recored a hundred hours of oral history and song."
Much of the information we intake is recorded subconsciously, until we know exactly how and why memories are stored and what triggers memory storage, human memory varies vastly differently between people. They remember vastly different things, and if you don't use the information frequently it will be harder to retrieve, if at all. It's a "use it or lose it" proposition, there has to be some binding function (natural interest, emotional component, reptition, etc)
I remember more theme songs from TV shows and commercials over math equations, IMHO I've wondered if we should let certain advertisers figure out ways to drill stuff into our head so we don't forget it.
"It's really easy to talk like that, but look at CB verses Ham Radio. The Internet we have today is like CB radio...anyone can transmit and receive. CB radio has its advantages and disadvantages"
While I agree with you in theory, in practice we know corporations are going to do their damnest to lock it down and be able to block and censor and "black out" websites they don't like. They HATE the fact that information is free, they want to enclose the last commons which is infinite (information, ideas, etc), we can't let these pieces of capitalist shit have it. (no offense to other capitalists who genuinely believe in freedom of information)