The fact that magic swords and gold pieces can be created at will by Blizzard doesn't mean that they couldn't be a legitimate currency, it just means that the inflation rate is potentially very high. The rise of paper currency, which isn't limited by the amount of gold available, faces the exact same issue: you can just print more of them off any time you want.
As for how good an investment magic rings or whatnot are, there are a lot of nations with really high inflation rates, and lots of stocks which are ridiculously overvalued and risky, so there are probably worse places to put your money than WoW gold, EVE Online ISK or whatnot.
And you don't just have to go long, you could also go short. If there was a way to borrow gold, you could borrow 40,000 gold, and then sell it for $6000. If the price goes down by 50% over the next few months, you can then buy back that 40,000 gold for just $3000, repay the loan of gold (presumably paying a certain number of gold in interest), and make a profit of $3000. That's if it goes down, of course, if it goes up you're screwed. Speculating in online currencies... bound to happen sooner or later.
I typed in Joseph Heller's _Catch-22_, and kept getting stuff like _The first and second Epistles to the Thessalonians_, _When I don't desire God : how to fight for joy_, _The gagging of God : Christianity confronts pluralism_... makes sense considering all the shots the book takes at religion. There's a great bit where the Chaplain sees Yossarian naked in a tree at a funeral, and thinks that it's some sort of sign from God, but can't figure out what it is.
Incidentally if you're looking for a good read, and _Six hours, one Friday : anchoring to the cross_ isn't your idea of a good read, I highly recommend Catch-22. One of the only comedies to be nominated as one the best 100 American novels by the ALA.
Right, why spend millions of dollars on satellites that are now able to directly benefit mankind when we can send over $100 million/year to the National Endowment for the Arts? Someone remind me what it is their mission is...
OK, I'll bite. I'm a scientist who does utterly useless, blue-sky type stuff that will never make anyone money, or save anyone's life. So why should anyone pay me to do things that don't have a clear payoff?
The answer I've come up with is that these things- pure research, art, music, philosophy, museums- may not make us live any longer, and they may not make us richer, but they make our lives richer. Sure, if we diverted all government funding from the arts, public TV, the Smithsonian, the National Parks Service and soforth, and used it to fund stuff that would directly benefit people, people might live longer, more comfortable lives. But a world with less art, music, museums, and pure research is a deader, duller, less interesting world. Who'd want to live in that world? I'm not saying that justifies any level of funding, you've got to figure out how many dollars you're willing to pay for each "Angels in America" (an incredible work funded by the NEA, incidentally), but it's worth something and I'm more than happy to have my tax dollars promote that kind of thing. It's a hell of a lot more productive than having my tax dollars kill my countrymen and foreigners in the Middle East. And a hundred million a year works out to what, 30 cents per American on the arts?
The other answer is that there is a payoff, but it's a long-term, indirect one. Look at a city like New York. It's a vibrant, changing, economic powerhouse. Part of that, I think, is that the city is so filled with the arts- writers, photographers, musicians, scholars and soforth- that it's just a damn interesting place to live. Many of the best and the brightest from across the nation are drawn to the city because they want to experience a place that's alive intellectually and artistically, and in the long term that helps the city to reap huge economic benefits. I think a vibrant culture will help foster a vibrant economy. If nothing else, millions of people visit cities like New York and San Francisco to take in that culture, spending a lot of money in the process. So I think that long term, a few dollars wisely invested in the arts and academia are a good move.
And I have never had a Wikipedia article about myself. But please tell me: what is the harm if I would put up an article about my (hypothetical) cat, filled with lies? As the cat does not exist, it would not really matter. And very few, if any, would find and read the article. And any outrageous claims that would surface to the general knowledge, could easily be corrected by other editors.
OK, how about we take a cat, and write a Wikipedia article on that cat, and THEN we put the cat in a steel box with a bit of radioactive material and a geiger counter...
No, it's not a good thing in disguise. Why? Because that music tax would only go to RIAA-owned artists. Every other musician would get entirely fucked over.
Well, if you read the fine print of the article you notice some interesting things. First, they say it's the #2 player in it's first four days of sales, not the first week. Since you'd expect sales to be highest on the first day the product is released and then to decrease from there as pent-up demand is met, I'd imagine that a full week's worth of sales data would show the Zune performing more poorly.
Also, that's just one company's data. The article goes on to say, "Another research agency, Current Analysis, reported a somewhat similar sales reading during the same week. For the same week ending November 18, 2006, the Zune took 7 percent of the MP3 player market, falling behind both Apple and Sandisk.". So other statistics suggest that the Zune may only have been able to hit the #3 spot in the first week of sales. Again, this is going up against models that have been out for some time.
But the really important thing to keep in mind is who we're dealing with and their original goal. These would be good sales for a new company, but for an established behemoth with the clout of Microsoft, and given their goal of producing an "iPod killer", this is a pretty lame showing. If anybody is being fanboyish here, it's people who are saying that not doing quite as horrifically awful as people predicted is some kind of victory for Microsoft. Not to say that you can count Microsoft out; they'll doubtless release improved versions. But first impressions count for a lot, as Apple learned that the hard way with Newton. Although Apple eventually produced a good PDA, the Newton never recovered from the bad press and bad reviews that the initial, not-ready-for-prime-time models received.
The problem with all these sedimentological studies is that the statistical period between large meteorite impacts and the systematic error in the dating of the sediments (using isotopic geochemistry) in addition to the ambiguity in the fossil record (and the dating errors in those sediments) means that it's guaranteed that you will find a correlation between any mass extinction and a large meteorite impact event.
This is really misleading- there may be other craters out there, but there is certainly nothing else out there like Chicxulub. The Chicxulub crater is one of the largest meteorite craters ever discovered; vastly larger than anything we've ever seen in human history or anything that's happened in the past 65 million years. The rock or comet responsible for it is thought to have been about 10km in diameter, travelling at tens of thousands of miles per hour; in terms of energy released by that blast, we're talking about something that would have made a full-scale nuclear exchange between the US and USSR look like a couple of kids playing with fireworks. It is estimated that a Chicxulub-scale impact occurs on the order of once every 100 million years, if that often.
The end-Cretaceous mass extinction, meanwhile is one of the five largest mass extinctions to occur in the past half-billion years. In other words, a 1-in-100 million year event. What are the odds of two such large scale, exceptionally rare events occurring simultaneously? Pretty much nil. True, there may be a few scientists out there who debate whether the K-T extinction was caused by the Chicxulub, and they try to poke holes in the Alvarez extinction hypothesis. But they haven't been able to present a compelling alternative to it.
Finally, ammonites go right up to the K-T boundary. In a paper in PNAS, Pope et al. show stratigraphic ranges of ammonites; the majority of ammonites extend to within a few tens of thousands of years of the K-T boundary and many go extinct right at the boundary.
It appears that Goodwin's law is not invoked for the first comment in a discussion. This come logically from the requirement that Goodwin's law apply to a discussion that involves the Nazi/Hitler example as a means to refute another comment.
So now you're trying to tell me how to interpret Godwin's Law? If you ask me, that sounds like just the type of thing that would have happened under the Hitler and the Third Reich.
Re:Reusable paper good idea but only in volume
on
Self-Recycling Paper
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· Score: 3, Insightful
The problem I see is that it's hard to know for certain how long you will need that printout for. Perhaps in the morning you figure you'll get to that printout in the next couple of hours, but it's a busy day and it sits on your desk all day long. The next morning you decide to take a look at it, but the paper has already recycled itself.
It would make more sense to allow the user to decide when the paper needs to be recycled. Create some sort of "de-printer" or "un-printer" that would zap the ink with UV and make it invisible, or something.
Also raises some corporate security issues. A lot of paper currently ends up in the shredder. If the recycled paper preserves minute but detectable traces of what was written before, it may be that it will have to end up in the shredder anyhow.
Microsoft rose to the top by illegal business practices, from per-processor pricing to the illegal leveraging of their monopoly in order to get the marketshare. Read the trial transcripts where Microsoft execs admitted that they had to bundle second rate products with Windows in order to grab the marketshare.
It's still marketing... it just happens to be a form of marketing that's illegal when you hold a monopoly.
Microsoft didn't become a 300 billion dollar company by playing nice and innovating. They did it by figuring out where they needed to be after the innovators had already gotten there and done it first. They did this with operating systems, office software, and the world wide web. They got there second with a tolerable product and then marketed the hell out of it. Microsoft was rarely first, rarely best, and never nice, but they got the market share, and that's what made them a success. The Microsoft of old could sell snow to Alaskans (as an integral part of the Windows operating system, of course).
As to whether Microsoft can get back in stride, hard to say. F. Scott Fitzgerald said that "There are no second acts in American lives", but as someone quipped, he was probably drunk when he said that. Steve Jobs managing to retake Apple and turn the company around shows that, but it also shows how important it is to have good leadership, and since Bill Gates has left, the company just hasn't been the ruthless, unstoppable, Borg-like entity it once was.
The whole Zune thing seems weird and sad. I mean, I don't think Microsoft is inherently bad or evil, I just wish they would live up to their own hype.
Man, how times change. Six or seven years ago, Microsoft was "He-who-must-not-be-named", where the very mention of the company brought a chill to the room. The question hanging over every startup's head was, "after we invent this, how long until Microsoft either buys us out or crushes us like a peanut under an elephant's foot?" They'd mopped the floor with Netscape, and Apple only seemed to exist because doing so made Microsoft's monopoly less transparently obvious. In terms of sheer, merciless, menacing authority, they were the Soviet Union, the Galactic Empire, and SkyNet all rolled into one. And now we look at Microsoft and we laugh, or worse, actually feel sorry for the guys...
Yes, but the positive side of all this is that it's never been a better time to be a Russian researching exotic poisons and poison delivery systems!
Seriously, it's pretty hard to believe that Russian intelligence didn't have a hand in the recent poisoning of Litvinenko. The KGB has a long history of tracking down and silencing dissenters. Plus the Russians have a fetish for James Bond-esque plots involving bizarre poisons. There was Georgi Markov, offed with a ricin-laced BB fired from an umbrella. There was the use of an opiate gas against the Chechen terrorists who seized the opera (most of the people who died during that incident were killed by the gas), Yuschenko's poisoning with dioxin (arguable whether this was the FSB or the Ukraine's own former KGB men), and now this... and likewise, given his strongman tendencies, and given that Putin was a long-time KGB member, and and given that he was formerly the head of the FSB (the new, friendlier name for KGB), I find it very hard to believe that he doesn't keep close tabs on the FSB. Old habits die hard, I guess.
I think what people are really torn about is that (1) people really, really loathe spammers and phishers, and want to see them lose(2) people really, really loathe Microsoft, and don't want to see them win... so who do we root for? It's like the tagline for Alien vs. Predator: "No matter who wins, we all lose". Is there an option 3, where both Microsoft and phishers lose?
It doesn't seem to me that the Egyptian Gov't went out of its way to nab this guy
Read between the lines. Of course the Egyptian government claimed it was random and a routine part of a security initiative. Seriously, what do you expect the Egyptian government to say? "In a targeted operation against political dissidents, we arrested members coming out of an opposition party's headquarters and took them away on bullshit charges, so that we wouldn't have to openly debate their ideas, and so we could discourage other people from speaking out".
It's exactly the same deal when the White House moves protesters to a "Free Speech Zone" (a name straight out of 1984) so nobody can hear them. They're never in a million years going to come out and admit they're trying to stifle dissent, they're going to claim it's for the safety of the public and the safety of the protestors themselves.
No violence? Yeah right. While I was waiting for a Wii someone actually jumped on my head. As if that wasn't enough, he then threw a turtle shell at me.
Every breath you take
Every move you make
Every bond you break
Every step you take
I'll be watching you
Every single day
Every word you say
Every game you play
Every night you stay
I'll be watching you
Oh, cant you see
You belong to me
How my poor heart aches
With every step you take
Every move you make
Every vow you break
Every smile you fake
Every claim you stake
I'll be watching you
Unfortunately, the Police's political commentary seems only to have become more timely over the past twenty years... the NSA already has data on something like 1.9 trillion phone conversations according to Wikipedia, and conducts wiretaps without a warrant, all in the name of protecting us from terror. Somehow it does't make me sleep all that much easier at night. It is hardly a stretch to imagine the NSA coming up with a database that tracks the movements of individuals using their cell phones.
I do think we have to ask tough questions about how much privacy we're willing to compromise for how much security, but the current trend is just to grant the government the authority to do anything it wants, even when there's little evidence that the wholesale surrender of our civil liberties has really foiled any terrorist plots. I suspect that we haven't even begun to see the half of it, the full extent of these programs and the abuses won't be known for years to come. Oh well. When the world is running down, you make the best of what's still around.
Yes I'm breaking the rules to reply to my own comment. Why was I modded flamebait? I'm a friggin ubuntu user (Xubuntu actually). I think I would know as well as anyone that Ubuntu, by default, may work beautifully but it looks like absolute shit.
Welcome to Slashdot. I've been a loyal Apple user since the days of the IIe, but if I say anything negative about Apple, odds are good I'll get modded into oblivion. Likewise, I despise Microsoft, but if I suggest that perhaps they are not always pure evil, I better watch my ass. Go against groupthink and fanboys at your peril.
Most people feel that security is a higher priority than political freedom. Given a choice between living in Singapore and not having completely free speech, versus living in Iraq and being able to say whatever you want, almost everybody will choose Singapore. In retrospect, we would have done a lot better to install a military government in Iraq and worry about free press and voting *after* we had electricity, running water, and a functional police force.
However, those intent on gaining power will usually try to persuade you of two things:
- it's a simple either/or choice: you can be secure, or have a lot of freedoms, but not both.
-You are much less secure than you think. They're coming after you! The gays are out to make little Billy one of them! A nuclear-armed Osama bin Laden has his spies scoping out your trailer park RIGHT NOW. This has been the Bush Administration's strategy for the past five years.
Slashdot Mirror
As for how good an investment magic rings or whatnot are, there are a lot of nations with really high inflation rates, and lots of stocks which are ridiculously overvalued and risky, so there are probably worse places to put your money than WoW gold, EVE Online ISK or whatnot.
And you don't just have to go long, you could also go short. If there was a way to borrow gold, you could borrow 40,000 gold, and then sell it for $6000. If the price goes down by 50% over the next few months, you can then buy back that 40,000 gold for just $3000, repay the loan of gold (presumably paying a certain number of gold in interest), and make a profit of $3000. That's if it goes down, of course, if it goes up you're screwed. Speculating in online currencies... bound to happen sooner or later.
Incidentally if you're looking for a good read, and _Six hours, one Friday : anchoring to the cross_ isn't your idea of a good read, I highly recommend Catch-22. One of the only comedies to be nominated as one the best 100 American novels by the ALA.
OK, I'll bite. I'm a scientist who does utterly useless, blue-sky type stuff that will never make anyone money, or save anyone's life. So why should anyone pay me to do things that don't have a clear payoff?
The answer I've come up with is that these things- pure research, art, music, philosophy, museums- may not make us live any longer, and they may not make us richer, but they make our lives richer. Sure, if we diverted all government funding from the arts, public TV, the Smithsonian, the National Parks Service and soforth, and used it to fund stuff that would directly benefit people, people might live longer, more comfortable lives. But a world with less art, music, museums, and pure research is a deader, duller, less interesting world. Who'd want to live in that world? I'm not saying that justifies any level of funding, you've got to figure out how many dollars you're willing to pay for each "Angels in America" (an incredible work funded by the NEA, incidentally), but it's worth something and I'm more than happy to have my tax dollars promote that kind of thing. It's a hell of a lot more productive than having my tax dollars kill my countrymen and foreigners in the Middle East. And a hundred million a year works out to what, 30 cents per American on the arts?
The other answer is that there is a payoff, but it's a long-term, indirect one. Look at a city like New York. It's a vibrant, changing, economic powerhouse. Part of that, I think, is that the city is so filled with the arts- writers, photographers, musicians, scholars and soforth- that it's just a damn interesting place to live. Many of the best and the brightest from across the nation are drawn to the city because they want to experience a place that's alive intellectually and artistically, and in the long term that helps the city to reap huge economic benefits. I think a vibrant culture will help foster a vibrant economy. If nothing else, millions of people visit cities like New York and San Francisco to take in that culture, spending a lot of money in the process. So I think that long term, a few dollars wisely invested in the arts and academia are a good move.
OK, how about we take a cat, and write a Wikipedia article on that cat, and THEN we put the cat in a steel box with a bit of radioactive material and a geiger counter...
In related news, a Supreme Court Justice is being sued for patent infringement by DoorCo, a manufacturer of garage doors and door sensors...
Speaking of f'ed over, the story reminded me of this article: http://uncyclopedia.org/wiki/UnNews:RIAA_CEO_disc
Also, that's just one company's data. The article goes on to say, "Another research agency, Current Analysis, reported a somewhat similar sales reading during the same week. For the same week ending November 18, 2006, the Zune took 7 percent of the MP3 player market, falling behind both Apple and Sandisk.". So other statistics suggest that the Zune may only have been able to hit the #3 spot in the first week of sales. Again, this is going up against models that have been out for some time.
But the really important thing to keep in mind is who we're dealing with and their original goal. These would be good sales for a new company, but for an established behemoth with the clout of Microsoft, and given their goal of producing an "iPod killer", this is a pretty lame showing. If anybody is being fanboyish here, it's people who are saying that not doing quite as horrifically awful as people predicted is some kind of victory for Microsoft. Not to say that you can count Microsoft out; they'll doubtless release improved versions. But first impressions count for a lot, as Apple learned that the hard way with Newton. Although Apple eventually produced a good PDA, the Newton never recovered from the bad press and bad reviews that the initial, not-ready-for-prime-time models received.
This is really misleading- there may be other craters out there, but there is certainly nothing else out there like Chicxulub. The Chicxulub crater is one of the largest meteorite craters ever discovered; vastly larger than anything we've ever seen in human history or anything that's happened in the past 65 million years. The rock or comet responsible for it is thought to have been about 10km in diameter, travelling at tens of thousands of miles per hour; in terms of energy released by that blast, we're talking about something that would have made a full-scale nuclear exchange between the US and USSR look like a couple of kids playing with fireworks. It is estimated that a Chicxulub-scale impact occurs on the order of once every 100 million years, if that often.
The end-Cretaceous mass extinction, meanwhile is one of the five largest mass extinctions to occur in the past half-billion years. In other words, a 1-in-100 million year event. What are the odds of two such large scale, exceptionally rare events occurring simultaneously? Pretty much nil. True, there may be a few scientists out there who debate whether the K-T extinction was caused by the Chicxulub, and they try to poke holes in the Alvarez extinction hypothesis. But they haven't been able to present a compelling alternative to it.
Finally, ammonites go right up to the K-T boundary. In a paper in PNAS, Pope et al. show stratigraphic ranges of ammonites; the majority of ammonites extend to within a few tens of thousands of years of the K-T boundary and many go extinct right at the boundary.
You know, you don't have to lie to try to impress us.
So now you're trying to tell me how to interpret Godwin's Law? If you ask me, that sounds like just the type of thing that would have happened under the Hitler and the Third Reich.
It would make more sense to allow the user to decide when the paper needs to be recycled. Create some sort of "de-printer" or "un-printer" that would zap the ink with UV and make it invisible, or something.
Also raises some corporate security issues. A lot of paper currently ends up in the shredder. If the recycled paper preserves minute but detectable traces of what was written before, it may be that it will have to end up in the shredder anyhow.
It's still marketing... it just happens to be a form of marketing that's illegal when you hold a monopoly.
How much is that in gold pieces?
As to whether Microsoft can get back in stride, hard to say. F. Scott Fitzgerald said that "There are no second acts in American lives", but as someone quipped, he was probably drunk when he said that. Steve Jobs managing to retake Apple and turn the company around shows that, but it also shows how important it is to have good leadership, and since Bill Gates has left, the company just hasn't been the ruthless, unstoppable, Borg-like entity it once was.
Man, how times change. Six or seven years ago, Microsoft was "He-who-must-not-be-named", where the very mention of the company brought a chill to the room. The question hanging over every startup's head was, "after we invent this, how long until Microsoft either buys us out or crushes us like a peanut under an elephant's foot?" They'd mopped the floor with Netscape, and Apple only seemed to exist because doing so made Microsoft's monopoly less transparently obvious. In terms of sheer, merciless, menacing authority, they were the Soviet Union, the Galactic Empire, and SkyNet all rolled into one. And now we look at Microsoft and we laugh, or worse, actually feel sorry for the guys...
Seriously, it's pretty hard to believe that Russian intelligence didn't have a hand in the recent poisoning of Litvinenko. The KGB has a long history of tracking down and silencing dissenters. Plus the Russians have a fetish for James Bond-esque plots involving bizarre poisons. There was Georgi Markov, offed with a ricin-laced BB fired from an umbrella. There was the use of an opiate gas against the Chechen terrorists who seized the opera (most of the people who died during that incident were killed by the gas), Yuschenko's poisoning with dioxin (arguable whether this was the FSB or the Ukraine's own former KGB men), and now this... and likewise, given his strongman tendencies, and given that Putin was a long-time KGB member, and and given that he was formerly the head of the FSB (the new, friendlier name for KGB), I find it very hard to believe that he doesn't keep close tabs on the FSB. Old habits die hard, I guess.
Now Michael Jackson can have a nose that morphs into different shapes to fit his mood and coordinate with his outfit!
I think what people are really torn about is that (1) people really, really loathe spammers and phishers, and want to see them lose(2) people really, really loathe Microsoft, and don't want to see them win... so who do we root for? It's like the tagline for Alien vs. Predator: "No matter who wins, we all lose". Is there an option 3, where both Microsoft and phishers lose?
Read between the lines. Of course the Egyptian government claimed it was random and a routine part of a security initiative. Seriously, what do you expect the Egyptian government to say? "In a targeted operation against political dissidents, we arrested members coming out of an opposition party's headquarters and took them away on bullshit charges, so that we wouldn't have to openly debate their ideas, and so we could discourage other people from speaking out".
It's exactly the same deal when the White House moves protesters to a "Free Speech Zone" (a name straight out of 1984) so nobody can hear them. They're never in a million years going to come out and admit they're trying to stifle dissent, they're going to claim it's for the safety of the public and the safety of the protestors themselves.
No violence? Yeah right. While I was waiting for a Wii someone actually jumped on my head. As if that wasn't enough, he then threw a turtle shell at me.
Every move you make
Every bond you break
Every step you take
I'll be watching you
Every single day
Every word you say
Every game you play
Every night you stay
I'll be watching you
Oh, cant you see
You belong to me
How my poor heart aches
With every step you take
Every move you make
Every vow you break
Every smile you fake
Every claim you stake
I'll be watching you
Unfortunately, the Police's political commentary seems only to have become more timely over the past twenty years... the NSA already has data on something like 1.9 trillion phone conversations according to Wikipedia, and conducts wiretaps without a warrant, all in the name of protecting us from terror. Somehow it does't make me sleep all that much easier at night. It is hardly a stretch to imagine the NSA coming up with a database that tracks the movements of individuals using their cell phones.
I do think we have to ask tough questions about how much privacy we're willing to compromise for how much security, but the current trend is just to grant the government the authority to do anything it wants, even when there's little evidence that the wholesale surrender of our civil liberties has really foiled any terrorist plots. I suspect that we haven't even begun to see the half of it, the full extent of these programs and the abuses won't be known for years to come. Oh well. When the world is running down, you make the best of what's still around.
Search your feelings... you know it to be true.
Welcome to Slashdot. I've been a loyal Apple user since the days of the IIe, but if I say anything negative about Apple, odds are good I'll get modded into oblivion. Likewise, I despise Microsoft, but if I suggest that perhaps they are not always pure evil, I better watch my ass. Go against groupthink and fanboys at your peril.
Also, should "www.firefox.com" and "www.mozilla.com" really be included in IE7's tally of phishing sites blocked?
However, those intent on gaining power will usually try to persuade you of two things:
- it's a simple either/or choice: you can be secure, or have a lot of freedoms, but not both. -You are much less secure than you think. They're coming after you! The gays are out to make little Billy one of them! A nuclear-armed Osama bin Laden has his spies scoping out your trailer park RIGHT NOW. This has been the Bush Administration's strategy for the past five years.