"In any event, this sounds like a lawsuit waiting to happen. And the bad publicity is likely to cost Valve/Steam far more than any additional revenue they make from selling the game twice."
I know what I'm about to say is not popular on sites like this, but I think it stands to reason. Double selling is not the point from their perspective. This is a form of arbitrage, which they consider wrong. I know people disagree, but I can see the frustration on their end.
They basically have two choices - sell games for cheaper in poorer countries, or not sell them at all in these countries. I commend them for choosing the first option; people in less wealthy countries deserve entertainment too (without the Windows 3rd world crippling mentality). Arbitrage threatens to cut their main sense of revenue: American gamers who can afford American prices. Obviously they could choose the latter option I mentioned above, but this is lose-lose. The Thai can't play Valve games, and Valve loses a legitimate source of revenue.
At least believing in God answers questions science can't and probably never will answer, like who created the Universe. Believing in ghosts is just pointless superstition.
"Yes, and generally that means that an optimist has more reasons not to be happy, because something is always wrong (i.e. not perfect). In contrast, a pessimist can relax, because they feel happy by preserving their state of "things are OK as they are" [I won't bother thinking about imporoving them, so I will never fail]."
I'm pretty sure you got those two definitions exactly backwards.
Free bonus on being an optimist; if you're right, you didn't waste effort worrying about it. If you're wrong, then you can claim the situation was beyond your control.
They may lack direction, but that does not matter one bit to them. Nor their shareholders. Nor their users. Remember, they just announced a 1 billion dollar profit for the last quarter. They are still growing...
Their search/advertising is like Microsoft's OS and Office - it is guaranteed to make them *a lot* of money for the foreseeable future - enough to dwarf the cost of these side projects. To the shareholder, the side projects make sense because 1% of them turn into a gmail. To the typical user, these beta projects remain hidden deep in the site, so it doesn't clutter stuff up.
Sure, it's not optimal, but a behemoth like Google is bound to use the shotgun approach to increase revenue. If they don't, they risk atrophying, which is the worst thing that could happen to them. It makes intuitive sense that they will run into diminishing returns as they have previously tried out obvious ideas, so I think from a business perspective we should excuse their more "creative" ideas.
America takes a lot of pride in its constitution and the attached bill of rights (the first ten amendments), including the 8th amendment which forbids "excessive fines." The US constitution is truly a revolutionary document (something that is easy to forget 230 years later), and I honestly think it has directly led to the stability of the nation. Although there are periodic periods of abuse of the constitution (like the last seven years), the nation has consistently prevailed and proven itself to be relatively stable. The USA was founded on protecting its citizens from the government, something Americans should rightfully never forget, especially in cases like this.
In parts of Europe, Wolfenstein 3D was banned because, even though it was critical of Nazis, it dared to portray them at all. In the USA, we take pride that this sort of censorship was explicitly forbidden when our nation was founded. I'm not trying to troll, but Europe chose not to do this.
"Sadly, interactive entertainment is the name of the game, and it always comes first. That's why gamers play these things. So rather than assume every player wants to watch your story-telling chops, allow them to bypass cut scenes, tutorials, and even speed up the showing of logos when a game boots up."
A compromise, like in half-life, is to have an interactive cut scene. In these, you can still control your character, but the exterior action is playing the role of a cut-scene. I personally am not a fan of these (I'm on the extreme end of hating cut scenes), but I admit they are better than cut-scenes if the story HAS to be explained.
I've been waiting five years for a decent e-mail application, which is a lot of time in the tech world. Maybe somebody will come out with something better, but it's irrelvant to me - I stopped waiting and moved everything to gmail.
that pretty much every study about viruses or computer security are paid for by the virus and computer security companies, and their conclusion is always more people need to buy their software?
I'm tired of those companies and their products. They overcharge for their products, force you to upgrade when the upgrade barely offers any additional coverage, and their products slow down computers (my biggest pet peeve).
A few preventive measures can make virus checking useless. Use firefox, not IE. Don't use outlook. Never open VBS files. And run something like this: http://www.mlin.net/StartupMonitor.shtml Not only does startup monitor catch most viruses (who always place something in your startup registry), it keeps your computer lean from bloated software.
A few 1000 observers will offer very little resolution, considering the fact that light pollution is very localized. I live in the middle of an urban area, but can drive a few miles to see 10x as many stars.
Good explanation. Here's a cost analysis for an American engineering student:
Typical starting salary if you have a computer engineering BS: 65K a year Getting a masters: (-65000*2 years) - 40000 in tuition = 170,000 net loss Extra salary with masters: 5-10K Years to recoup losses: 15-35 years
This is why many Americans do not consider grad school. Especially those who have college loans to pay off from undergrad, or who have worked a few years and have gotten used to having money.
There are plenty of reasons why foreigners want to go to grad school. Foreigners have to jump through more hoops to get a good job in the USA; they have to be smarter than an American to get the same job for various reasons, including: tougher communication, more red tape with the government, implicit racism, etc. A grad degree helps a lot. Being in school is less risky than a job, because if they get fired or laid off their green card may get taken away. American grad schools are generally very strong, which attracts a lot of foreigners. Remember that the combined population of India, China and Europe is several times that of the USA - there are a lot of foreigners who *want* to be in American grad schools. The best and brightest make it here, and often perform very well.
Everyone I have asked uses a small handful of passwords because they physically cannot (or do not want to) remember dozens of passwords. There is a fair expectation that when you use a service, especially a for-profit one like ebay and Paypal, that your password will remain secure.
Off the internet there are legal safeguards when security breaches happen - why do we lower our standards when the internet is involved? In fact, the real world is inherently less secure; waiters can steal your credit card information, someone can look over your back at an ATM, people can rob you in the subway, etc. The internet SHOULD be safer.
The number of videos is irrelevant. It's the number of people who watch those videos, especially the % of viewers who are watching pirated material. I have frequently seen links on popular blogs and link sites (reddit, digg, etc) to full movies hosted on google video. I have even personally watched a few movies on it. Google Video is specifically susceptible because their maximum video length allows full movies to sneak in.
Google should themselves check the most popular videos for piracy. I don't know if they have ads (I use adblock), but if so they may be profiting off pirated material.
I agree - algorithms are underrated by traditional programmers, who have an attitude that they can build any algorithm when they need it. Problem is, most "naive" algorithms, which is what an untrained person would develop, far under-perform state of the art algorithms. It's critical to know algorithms if you want to be anything less than a code monkey.
I am in the machine learning field, and am patiently waiting for more useful applications to pop up. I know plenty of things out there could use machine learning, which indicates to me that the algorithms are still not good enough for the real world. The only useful applications that I have seen so far are in finance and money (predicting the value of something, detecting fraud, etc) and search (I'm pretty sure Google is using machine learning in their search already). If you count optimization as machine learning, a lot of industrial applications have popped up.
I highly recommend this book - it's really well written. It was actually written by an excellent machine learning professor too (Dasgupta), so it's sort of on topic:)
Woah, that's actually a really cool website. Looks like they have a decent privacy policy too. If someone wants to know how much money I spent on beer and gas, that's their problem.
At this point, it is obvious Apple is making massive profits off each iPod. A lot of development costs have been done in previous models, e.g. software.
From a simple economic theory stand point, competitors should have reduced their pure profits (after paying salaries and advertising, etc) to almost 0 - this is what would happen in an entirely competitive capitalist model. The fact that Apple can still sell millions of these at at such a large return indicates not that Apple is greedy, but that their competitors are utterly incompetent. If there was at least one other competent competitor, these iPods would be going for 70-100 dollars (more in line with what portable music players cost before the iPod.)
It has nothing to do with Apple being "cool," I know plenty of people who would rather not buy an iPod, but grudgingly do so because it's the only player they find comfortable to use.
I believe they used to define it by the most dense state of water at 1 atm. Of course this gets tricky, because pressure is defined using mass, which is currently ill-defined.
Regardless, IMO all SI definitions should be reproducible in a lab. Reference objects serve no real purpose other than producing a museum piece. A kilogram could be defined as some fixed number of some molecule - at that point, a lab could find a way to collect that number of molecules.
Slashdot Mirror
"In any event, this sounds like a lawsuit waiting to happen. And the bad publicity is likely to cost Valve/Steam far more than any additional revenue they make from selling the game twice."
I know what I'm about to say is not popular on sites like this, but I think it stands to reason. Double selling is not the point from their perspective. This is a form of arbitrage, which they consider wrong. I know people disagree, but I can see the frustration on their end.
They basically have two choices - sell games for cheaper in poorer countries, or not sell them at all in these countries. I commend them for choosing the first option; people in less wealthy countries deserve entertainment too (without the Windows 3rd world crippling mentality). Arbitrage threatens to cut their main sense of revenue: American gamers who can afford American prices. Obviously they could choose the latter option I mentioned above, but this is lose-lose. The Thai can't play Valve games, and Valve loses a legitimate source of revenue.
At least believing in God answers questions science can't and probably never will answer, like who created the Universe. Believing in ghosts is just pointless superstition.
"Yes, and generally that means that an optimist has more reasons not to be happy, because something is always wrong (i.e. not perfect). In contrast, a pessimist can relax, because they feel happy by preserving their state of "things are OK as they are" [I won't bother thinking about imporoving them, so I will never fail]."
I'm pretty sure you got those two definitions exactly backwards.
Free bonus on being an optimist; if you're right, you didn't waste effort worrying about it. If you're wrong, then you can claim the situation was beyond your control.
:)
I love being an optimist
"The surcharge would help compensate artists for piracy"
So now we are taxing law-abiding citizens to make up for those who break the law? Is it just me, or does this *promote* piracy?
They may lack direction, but that does not matter one bit to them. Nor their shareholders. Nor their users. Remember, they just announced a 1 billion dollar profit for the last quarter. They are still growing...
Their search/advertising is like Microsoft's OS and Office - it is guaranteed to make them *a lot* of money for the foreseeable future - enough to dwarf the cost of these side projects. To the shareholder, the side projects make sense because 1% of them turn into a gmail. To the typical user, these beta projects remain hidden deep in the site, so it doesn't clutter stuff up.
Sure, it's not optimal, but a behemoth like Google is bound to use the shotgun approach to increase revenue. If they don't, they risk atrophying, which is the worst thing that could happen to them. It makes intuitive sense that they will run into diminishing returns as they have previously tried out obvious ideas, so I think from a business perspective we should excuse their more "creative" ideas.
America takes a lot of pride in its constitution and the attached bill of rights (the first ten amendments), including the 8th amendment which forbids "excessive fines." The US constitution is truly a revolutionary document (something that is easy to forget 230 years later), and I honestly think it has directly led to the stability of the nation. Although there are periodic periods of abuse of the constitution (like the last seven years), the nation has consistently prevailed and proven itself to be relatively stable. The USA was founded on protecting its citizens from the government, something Americans should rightfully never forget, especially in cases like this.
In parts of Europe, Wolfenstein 3D was banned because, even though it was critical of Nazis, it dared to portray them at all. In the USA, we take pride that this sort of censorship was explicitly forbidden when our nation was founded. I'm not trying to troll, but Europe chose not to do this.
"Sadly, interactive entertainment is the name of the game, and it always comes first. That's why gamers play these things. So rather than assume every player wants to watch your story-telling chops, allow them to bypass cut scenes, tutorials, and even speed up the showing of logos when a game boots up."
A compromise, like in half-life, is to have an interactive cut scene. In these, you can still control your character, but the exterior action is playing the role of a cut-scene. I personally am not a fan of these (I'm on the extreme end of hating cut scenes), but I admit they are better than cut-scenes if the story HAS to be explained.
She could have started an independent music store and given CDs out for free for less than 200,000 dollars.
I've been waiting five years for a decent e-mail application, which is a lot of time in the tech world. Maybe somebody will come out with something better, but it's irrelvant to me - I stopped waiting and moved everything to gmail.
I would guess its even older than that, based on the summary:
"In a series of studies conducted over the past several decades..."
that pretty much every study about viruses or computer security are paid for by the virus and computer security companies, and their conclusion is always more people need to buy their software?
I'm tired of those companies and their products. They overcharge for their products, force you to upgrade when the upgrade barely offers any additional coverage, and their products slow down computers (my biggest pet peeve).
A few preventive measures can make virus checking useless. Use firefox, not IE. Don't use outlook. Never open VBS files. And run something like this: http://www.mlin.net/StartupMonitor.shtml
Not only does startup monitor catch most viruses (who always place something in your startup registry), it keeps your computer lean from bloated software.
But can't we just view how much light there is in space from satellite photos and guess what the light pollution would be (like in http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/archive/8/86/20040921144929!Usa_night.gif)?
A few 1000 observers will offer very little resolution, considering the fact that light pollution is very localized. I live in the middle of an urban area, but can drive a few miles to see 10x as many stars.
Good explanation. Here's a cost analysis for an American engineering student:
Typical starting salary if you have a computer engineering BS: 65K a year
Getting a masters: (-65000*2 years) - 40000 in tuition = 170,000 net loss
Extra salary with masters: 5-10K
Years to recoup losses: 15-35 years
This is why many Americans do not consider grad school. Especially those who have college loans to pay off from undergrad, or who have worked a few years and have gotten used to having money.
There are plenty of reasons why foreigners want to go to grad school. Foreigners have to jump through more hoops to get a good job in the USA; they have to be smarter than an American to get the same job for various reasons, including: tougher communication, more red tape with the government, implicit racism, etc. A grad degree helps a lot. Being in school is less risky than a job, because if they get fired or laid off their green card may get taken away. American grad schools are generally very strong, which attracts a lot of foreigners. Remember that the combined population of India, China and Europe is several times that of the USA - there are a lot of foreigners who *want* to be in American grad schools. The best and brightest make it here, and often perform very well.
"Why not just put them on airplanes then? "
;)
Reread what you quoted
Blame the victim - real nice.
Everyone I have asked uses a small handful of passwords because they physically cannot (or do not want to) remember dozens of passwords. There is a fair expectation that when you use a service, especially a for-profit one like ebay and Paypal, that your password will remain secure.
Off the internet there are legal safeguards when security breaches happen - why do we lower our standards when the internet is involved? In fact, the real world is inherently less secure; waiters can steal your credit card information, someone can look over your back at an ATM, people can rob you in the subway, etc. The internet SHOULD be safer.
The number of videos is irrelevant. It's the number of people who watch those videos, especially the % of viewers who are watching pirated material. I have frequently seen links on popular blogs and link sites (reddit, digg, etc) to full movies hosted on google video. I have even personally watched a few movies on it. Google Video is specifically susceptible because their maximum video length allows full movies to sneak in.
Google should themselves check the most popular videos for piracy. I don't know if they have ads (I use adblock), but if so they may be profiting off pirated material.
I agree - algorithms are underrated by traditional programmers, who have an attitude that they can build any algorithm when they need it. Problem is, most "naive" algorithms, which is what an untrained person would develop, far under-perform state of the art algorithms. It's critical to know algorithms if you want to be anything less than a code monkey.
I am in the machine learning field, and am patiently waiting for more useful applications to pop up. I know plenty of things out there could use machine learning, which indicates to me that the algorithms are still not good enough for the real world. The only useful applications that I have seen so far are in finance and money (predicting the value of something, detecting fraud, etc) and search (I'm pretty sure Google is using machine learning in their search already). If you count optimization as machine learning, a lot of industrial applications have popped up.
I highly recommend this book - it's really well written. It was actually written by an excellent machine learning professor too (Dasgupta), so it's sort of on topic :)
"how is the slogan 'virgin to virgin' derogatory to a faithful churchgoing 16 year old? aren't girls like that supposed to be proud to be virgins?"
One of the ads says: "Dump your pen friend."
I think that's the one that mostly offended her. Given that tone, it's obvious they meant for the virgin to virgin one to be offensive.
SAN = Storage area network
Woah, that's actually a really cool website. Looks like they have a decent privacy policy too. If someone wants to know how much money I spent on beer and gas, that's their problem.
:)
Thanks for the link
At this point, it is obvious Apple is making massive profits off each iPod. A lot of development costs have been done in previous models, e.g. software.
From a simple economic theory stand point, competitors should have reduced their pure profits (after paying salaries and advertising, etc) to almost 0 - this is what would happen in an entirely competitive capitalist model. The fact that Apple can still sell millions of these at at such a large return indicates not that Apple is greedy, but that their competitors are utterly incompetent. If there was at least one other competent competitor, these iPods would be going for 70-100 dollars (more in line with what portable music players cost before the iPod.)
It has nothing to do with Apple being "cool," I know plenty of people who would rather not buy an iPod, but grudgingly do so because it's the only player they find comfortable to use.
Very few of my friends own ipods. At some point we realized that for 100 dollars less, we could get all the same features with less restrictions.
It is NOT a monopoly; in contrast, it is in a highly competitive market with more than enough companies trying to take them down.
I believe they used to define it by the most dense state of water at 1 atm. Of course this gets tricky, because pressure is defined using mass, which is currently ill-defined.
Regardless, IMO all SI definitions should be reproducible in a lab. Reference objects serve no real purpose other than producing a museum piece. A kilogram could be defined as some fixed number of some molecule - at that point, a lab could find a way to collect that number of molecules.