The reason console prices haven't dropped is in part because of the 'vibrant' secondary market. Steam proves that publishers are happy to drop prices with a captive audience.
The used games market on the consoles is bad for everyone. It artificially inflates retail prices and it denies publishers revenue and instead hands it to useless organizations like Gamestop.
I'm mostly met with arguments about how I'm trying to weaken the strength of marriage or something.
This is the greatest (hillarious) irony of the homophobic movement. The greatest threat to state sanctioned marriage is going to come from people asking why the government is even involved in the institution of marriage in the first place.
If they had just let homosexuals marry then this whole non-issue would be gone by now and we wouldn't have given it a second thought. But since they've forced the debate and the evaluation they've actually encouraged a number of people who would have just taken Marriage as a given to contemplate the role of government in mating.
I know a lot of people (myself included) who wouldn't have given a moment's pause to the role of government in relation to marriage if gay marriage was allowed. Now that I've been confronted with the debate and been forced to think about it I've decided the government has no role for straight or gay couples to "marry" someone.
Gay Marriage isn't weakening marriage, anti-gay-marriage is weakening marriage.
I think it should remain that we don't pay sales tax on out-of-state purchases. I don't live in Ohio and I don't expect to pay Ohio state sales tax on a purchase I made over the Internet, nor do I expect the state of Michigan to tax my purchase from a company outside of Michigan.
Except that you're missing the entire point of the law. You *already have to pay sales tax* on out of state purchases in pretty much every state with a sales tax.
The only change is that California in this instance wants to put the collection process in Amazon's hands.
This isn't requiring Amazon to pay California taxes for all of their sales. This is requiring Californian citizens, who already are required to pay taxes an easier and more straight forward system of paying at the point of purchase as if it was a physical store instead of filling out a form and keeping receipts.
If I'm an inventor why should I have to build a factory? Not everyone wants to be an end-to-end mega-corporation. Maybe even a mega-corporation invests a lot of time and money into something and discovers it's not a product they want to sell but is still valuable and could be offered by someone else?
I have an application that I wrote that we aren't using at the company any more. That doesn't mean I can just take that application and start selling it. My employer spent a lot of money on development. We have no interest in commercializing it since we aren't a software company. But if someone wanted to license it and support/resell it we would be happy to profit from it.
If I were to write a book the person who prints the book should have to pay me for the IP. The writing is what has value. A book printed full of jibberish is mostly useless. The "R&D" that went into writing the manuscript is what is valuable.
If you used a bulb for 750 hours (about 3 months of 8 hours a day or 6 months of 4 hours a day) you would pay for the fluorescent with the default above metrics. That's actually pretty cheap electricity, I would wager the pay-off on the eastern US would be abut 30% sooner.
I already had my Hotmail account somehow compromised this year. It sent an email to everyone in my contact list alphabetically. I wish I could set a pin for emails with more than 5 recipients in less than 30 minutes. And that watched for unusual volumes of outgoing mail to alert another email address.
Obviously these settings would be pin accessible to ensure the compromised account didn't go crazy.
I wouldn't even mind a separate highly irregular password for IMAP or POP3 access.
This *shouldn't* be a problem with some very basic options for account holders. Hell, I wouldn't mind changing my old Hotmail so that it's incapable of sending emails at all for instance.
Wasn't calling you a hater. Nor am I calling HTC a leech or Apple a patent troll. I was just trying to answer the question at hand.;)
Apple owns tech that they want license fees for. HTC wants to pay as few licensing fees as possible so they'll challenge as many patent disputes as possible and the quickest way to get someone to settle is to cut off their revenue.
So to answer your question "does this ever actually happen?" No, because the offending party always folds and settles before it actually affects them.
Without the *threat* of import bans the carrot wouldn't be so sweet.
It's great if you don't have to invest in an R&D department and just use all of the innovation from other companies! Sure you'll get sued every now and then, but then you just pay a licensing fee and can use the best research from all the other companies who refuse on principle to use tech developed by their competitors.
HTC is in a great place, pretty much everybody is willing to license their IP out but as an organization they can pick and choose whose IP is superior without feeling obligated to hold desparately onto their own R&D departments successes and failures.
These companies have payed millions of dollars to buy patents. HTC didn't buy the IP therefore it has to pay a licensing fee.
The goal isn't to actually stop the selling of products, the goal is to extract licensing fees to cover the costs of patent purchases in the past and internal R&D.
The sales block just expedites the process by hitting the company much harder than insubstantial penalties (see Microsoft's fines in the 90s). It's one thing to fine them a few million a year, it's another to cut their revenue stream so that they can't afford the fines.
It's almost as if DRM free games aren't profitable enough to produce...
I'm very pro consumer-rights. But used games are just bad for the industry all around. It's better to pirate a game and buy another than to buy two at half price used. At least one developer actually got 100% of the money instead of two developers getting nothing.
The only group which benefits from used game sales is the used games retailer. They make more off of each sale than the actual developer.
I would also argue that unlike movies or music games can't recoup the benefits of a rental structure from volume. Where someone might buy dozens of albums they usually only buy a handful of games per year.
Biases: Atheist, Ex-Christian, 12 years of denominational school, PhD philosopher father, many friends who are psychologists...
- Santa and Supernatural Jesus are both ridiculous since they make extraordinary claims without any evidence. The claim that I am a wizard would have equally ridiculous basis. - Santa and God are not. There is equal empirical evidence that there was a creator of the universe as that there wasn't, which is to say 0 evidence. But in this case we know the universe exists and we know it came into being somehow so dividing it up into either "Random" or "Divinely Crafted" isn't a terribly ridiculous way to divide the two theories. - It could, however, be logically and philosophically argued though that if there is a God that created our universe he's been proven to be an asshole and not a loving or caring all powerful entity. - Mental Illness though is recognizing as abnormal human thought processes that are outside of normal reason and logic. It's not outside of normal reason and logic to find causation where none exists (Belief in the Supernatural). It's not mental illness to attribute meaning or purpose to actions which have none--in fact, quite the contrary, we're hardwired to find patterns in noise. If you find an abnormal number of patterns in noise to the degree that you ability to find real patterns in data through the noise of false-positives then you have a mental illness. The centuries of philosophical tradition prove that the notion of a divine being is within the normal threshold of an average 'healthy' human mind.
Now that's not to say that it's rational. You could also use the exact same argument to say that Racism is also not a mental illness (I would agree with that statement) based on the fact that it's a seemingly 'normal' part of the human condition. That's not to say it's a belief system that should be encouraged but it's also not a "disease" since it's within the design-spec of the experience.
Yes, I believe that supernatural beliefs are the product of irrational thought. But there is plenty of irrational thought in the average, well functioning individual. Similarly while it would be great if we all had 150+ IQs it doesn't lead to follow that everyone with a 100 IQ is mentally ill.
Also from my experience most Christians think they're using sound logic to found their beliefs. It's like solving a physics question with the wrong equation. You might be great at math, but if you think gravity is -8m/s^2 you're always going to come up with the wrong answer.
Religion isn't a defect of the mind, it's a defect of education. Proof being that your upbringing is by far the largest predictor of your religiosity. That goes to show it isn't mental illness, it's just bad parenting.
You don't even have to use your "feelings", he says it in the next sentence:
Second, who is to say that it is the code used in the phones? That's the point of software â" it's easy to change.
"Please give us all your source code! And proof that it's exactly the source code on my phone! And that you didn't push an OTA update! And that you are verifying the MD5 checksum of the source code to the build on my phone! And a UN panel to supervise the foundry in which the hardware md5 check was being performed! And a background check on all the people supervising the foundry to make sure nobody changes the hardware to mis-report the checksum! And...."
There is no way to please them. At least they were up front about it.
Yeah I'll probably keep the weeky NewEgg one. But with daily deals I've discovered that unless I'm shopping for a HDD there probably isn't anything I actually want, it's the same deals day after day after day. And there is *always* a HDD on sale.
Underestimating how much something costs seems to be the only way to actually get it funded in the first place. We just need to tell Congress that going to Mars will take $10B and 3 years.
Maybe, just maybe, then in 20 years and 10x cost over runs we'll actually go.
Junk filtering has all but eliminated my spam. What it hasn't eliminated is the plethora of mailing lists and newsletters and daily deals I've accumulated. Most of them are weekly or monthly. But just the volume of companies I've interacted with over the last couple of years finally reached a breaking point this last week.
Just yesterday I started the exact same process (sans spam folder). I've started going through and actually unsubscribing from all the shit I receive. Already with the weekly and daily crap unsubscribed I for the first time in a long time have returned to what I consider an acceptable mail volume.
Alternately Microsoft (like Google) derives value from users of their products through Bing ad revenue.
Google charges $0 but it still costs money to develop Android.
Microsoft charges $15 but it probably costs significantly more money to develop WP7.
Also Microsoft can 'cut itself a deal' with some of its patents since the R&D expenses aren't wrapped up into the phone division. If I spend $10m developing a new codec for instance I might include it in the Mobile OS even though the desktop division spent all of the R&D money. However if someone else wanted to use the codec I would charge them a fee to recoup some of my Desktop development expenses.
Collaboration: You can have multiple people easily editing the same document Portability: Your documents are both at the office and on your sales person's laptop in China. Ease of Setup: You just start spending the monthly fee and everything is setup and running. You don't have to shop for a server, configure your sharepoint server, setup a VPN etc. ?Security?: In the case of our business we have no good way to remotely access data. That's because we don't want to risk our network being compromised. So we have firewalls on top of firewalls on top of firewalls. If our documents were in the cloud we wouldn't need to let any remote access to our file servers and none of the confidential "important" data is ever in a word document.
We don't have a cloud based document system but we do use a web based project management suite which we really like. It offers all of the above and it's easy to scale up and down etc.
The problem is that it's destructive to society. There is a halo to the Film and Game Industries. They seem like they're super exciting and people invest a lot of time and money on training to be able to get a job doing it--and then a year in discover that the reality of 10 100 hour weeks back to back is very different than the idea of it.
So yes, they do eventually quit. And a whole new batch of young and naive fools fall into the meat grinder. The normal market forces where you run out of talent just don't exist.
Another problem is expectation. As it said in TFA most of these people were told it was a 12 month job and that they would get bonuses/overtime if they stuck around to the finish. You get into the Gambler's fallacy pretty quick. "I've already put in 6 months. I can tough out another 6 for a huge fat bonus." And then 12 months promised turns into 5 years so they quit having put in longer than they had hoped but gotten less than promised.
The real tragedy is that it doesn't need to be that way. As was pointed out in multiple interviews with ex-staff you have huge waste. You don't have to run a 24/7 crunch for 8 years. That's just poor management excusing their incompetence. I've seen it before many times. The leadership treats the people as dispensable. The people quit. They fall behind. They treat the next people like shit. They quit. They fall further behind. If they had paced themselves at the beginning and been honest that they couldn't match their deadlines then ultimately they would be more productive and finish sooner. But they also have the publisher breathing down their neck and they know that admitting to needing a 100% larger budget will end the project. Asking for 10 10% extensions to not "let the work done so far go to waste so far" keeps their death spiral alive.
Eventually the game gets released. Eventually if it's halfway decent it'll probably make its money back. The whole fucking fiasco looks like it was the right decision and they do it all over again.
What's wrong with simply saying "online"? They're putting the patient records online. Medical staff will be able to access them through the internet.
Personally I think in a lot of these cases "the cloud" is a better descriptor than "internet". For me at least the "internet" is a bunch of websites. So if you say my settings are stored "on the internet" the mental picture I have is opening a web browser. If you say "in the cloud" then I picture a data service like Dropbox or LiveMesh.
Slashdot Mirror
Egg meet Chicken.
The reason console prices haven't dropped is in part because of the 'vibrant' secondary market. Steam proves that publishers are happy to drop prices with a captive audience.
The used games market on the consoles is bad for everyone. It artificially inflates retail prices and it denies publishers revenue and instead hands it to useless organizations like Gamestop.
Because there is now way 'they' can track your CC purchases every couple of hours.
I'm mostly met with arguments about how I'm trying to weaken the strength of marriage or something.
This is the greatest (hillarious) irony of the homophobic movement. The greatest threat to state sanctioned marriage is going to come from people asking why the government is even involved in the institution of marriage in the first place.
If they had just let homosexuals marry then this whole non-issue would be gone by now and we wouldn't have given it a second thought. But since they've forced the debate and the evaluation they've actually encouraged a number of people who would have just taken Marriage as a given to contemplate the role of government in mating.
I know a lot of people (myself included) who wouldn't have given a moment's pause to the role of government in relation to marriage if gay marriage was allowed. Now that I've been confronted with the debate and been forced to think about it I've decided the government has no role for straight or gay couples to "marry" someone.
Gay Marriage isn't weakening marriage, anti-gay-marriage is weakening marriage.
Are you one of those people who thinks the median households in the US are still middle class?
Middle class enough to afford internet and a computer.
The median household income in these areas is between $40,100 and $50,900.
First of all they're dirt poor and not going to pay for broadband or own a computer.
The 2003 Median Income of US households was $45,018 per annum. [1]
[1]http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Household_income_in_the_United_States
So the average American is dirt poor and can't afford internet or a computer?
I think it should remain that we don't pay sales tax on out-of-state purchases. I don't live in Ohio and I don't expect to pay Ohio state sales tax on a purchase I made over the Internet, nor do I expect the state of Michigan to tax my purchase from a company outside of Michigan.
Except that you're missing the entire point of the law. You *already have to pay sales tax* on out of state purchases in pretty much every state with a sales tax.
The only change is that California in this instance wants to put the collection process in Amazon's hands.
This isn't requiring Amazon to pay California taxes for all of their sales. This is requiring Californian citizens, who already are required to pay taxes an easier and more straight forward system of paying at the point of purchase as if it was a physical store instead of filling out a form and keeping receipts.
If I'm an inventor why should I have to build a factory? Not everyone wants to be an end-to-end mega-corporation. Maybe even a mega-corporation invests a lot of time and money into something and discovers it's not a product they want to sell but is still valuable and could be offered by someone else?
I have an application that I wrote that we aren't using at the company any more. That doesn't mean I can just take that application and start selling it. My employer spent a lot of money on development. We have no interest in commercializing it since we aren't a software company. But if someone wanted to license it and support/resell it we would be happy to profit from it.
If I were to write a book the person who prints the book should have to pay me for the IP. The writing is what has value. A book printed full of jibberish is mostly useless. The "R&D" that went into writing the manuscript is what is valuable.
Keep in mind that electricity is usually where you save the most money, not bulb replacement.
http://www.ajdesigner.com/fl_light_bulb/light_bulb.php
If you used a bulb for 750 hours (about 3 months of 8 hours a day or 6 months of 4 hours a day) you would pay for the fluorescent with the default above metrics. That's actually pretty cheap electricity, I would wager the pay-off on the eastern US would be abut 30% sooner.
Well seeing as you seem to wait until an OS is obsolete before upgrading this just means you can wait another 3 years before upgrading to 8!
Thankfully nobody is holding a gun to your head or depriving you of security updates to force you to upgrade.
I already had my Hotmail account somehow compromised this year. It sent an email to everyone in my contact list alphabetically. I wish I could set a pin for emails with more than 5 recipients in less than 30 minutes. And that watched for unusual volumes of outgoing mail to alert another email address.
Obviously these settings would be pin accessible to ensure the compromised account didn't go crazy.
I wouldn't even mind a separate highly irregular password for IMAP or POP3 access.
This *shouldn't* be a problem with some very basic options for account holders. Hell, I wouldn't mind changing my old Hotmail so that it's incapable of sending emails at all for instance.
Wasn't calling you a hater. Nor am I calling HTC a leech or Apple a patent troll. I was just trying to answer the question at hand. ;)
Apple owns tech that they want license fees for. HTC wants to pay as few licensing fees as possible so they'll challenge as many patent disputes as possible and the quickest way to get someone to settle is to cut off their revenue.
So to answer your question "does this ever actually happen?" No, because the offending party always folds and settles before it actually affects them.
Without the *threat* of import bans the carrot wouldn't be so sweet.
It's great if you don't have to invest in an R&D department and just use all of the innovation from other companies! Sure you'll get sued every now and then, but then you just pay a licensing fee and can use the best research from all the other companies who refuse on principle to use tech developed by their competitors.
HTC is in a great place, pretty much everybody is willing to license their IP out but as an organization they can pick and choose whose IP is superior without feeling obligated to hold desparately onto their own R&D departments successes and failures.
These companies have payed millions of dollars to buy patents. HTC didn't buy the IP therefore it has to pay a licensing fee.
The goal isn't to actually stop the selling of products, the goal is to extract licensing fees to cover the costs of patent purchases in the past and internal R&D.
The sales block just expedites the process by hitting the company much harder than insubstantial penalties (see Microsoft's fines in the 90s). It's one thing to fine them a few million a year, it's another to cut their revenue stream so that they can't afford the fines.
It's almost as if DRM free games aren't profitable enough to produce...
I'm very pro consumer-rights. But used games are just bad for the industry all around. It's better to pirate a game and buy another than to buy two at half price used. At least one developer actually got 100% of the money instead of two developers getting nothing.
The only group which benefits from used game sales is the used games retailer. They make more off of each sale than the actual developer.
I would also argue that unlike movies or music games can't recoup the benefits of a rental structure from volume. Where someone might buy dozens of albums they usually only buy a handful of games per year.
Biases: Atheist, Ex-Christian, 12 years of denominational school, PhD philosopher father, many friends who are psychologists...
- Santa and Supernatural Jesus are both ridiculous since they make extraordinary claims without any evidence. The claim that I am a wizard would have equally ridiculous basis.
- Santa and God are not. There is equal empirical evidence that there was a creator of the universe as that there wasn't, which is to say 0 evidence. But in this case we know the universe exists and we know it came into being somehow so dividing it up into either "Random" or "Divinely Crafted" isn't a terribly ridiculous way to divide the two theories.
- It could, however, be logically and philosophically argued though that if there is a God that created our universe he's been proven to be an asshole and not a loving or caring all powerful entity.
- Mental Illness though is recognizing as abnormal human thought processes that are outside of normal reason and logic. It's not outside of normal reason and logic to find causation where none exists (Belief in the Supernatural). It's not mental illness to attribute meaning or purpose to actions which have none--in fact, quite the contrary, we're hardwired to find patterns in noise. If you find an abnormal number of patterns in noise to the degree that you ability to find real patterns in data through the noise of false-positives then you have a mental illness. The centuries of philosophical tradition prove that the notion of a divine being is within the normal threshold of an average 'healthy' human mind.
Now that's not to say that it's rational. You could also use the exact same argument to say that Racism is also not a mental illness (I would agree with that statement) based on the fact that it's a seemingly 'normal' part of the human condition. That's not to say it's a belief system that should be encouraged but it's also not a "disease" since it's within the design-spec of the experience.
Yes, I believe that supernatural beliefs are the product of irrational thought. But there is plenty of irrational thought in the average, well functioning individual. Similarly while it would be great if we all had 150+ IQs it doesn't lead to follow that everyone with a 100 IQ is mentally ill.
Also from my experience most Christians think they're using sound logic to found their beliefs. It's like solving a physics question with the wrong equation. You might be great at math, but if you think gravity is -8m/s^2 you're always going to come up with the wrong answer.
Religion isn't a defect of the mind, it's a defect of education. Proof being that your upbringing is by far the largest predictor of your religiosity. That goes to show it isn't mental illness, it's just bad parenting.
Believe me, that suitcase will have tons of security.
Think again:
http://patterico.com/2007/10/29/firearms-disappearing-from-airport-luggage/
You don't even have to use your "feelings", he says it in the next sentence:
Second, who is to say that it is the code used in the phones? That's the point of software â" it's easy to change.
"Please give us all your source code! And proof that it's exactly the source code on my phone! And that you didn't push an OTA update! And that you are verifying the MD5 checksum of the source code to the build on my phone! And a UN panel to supervise the foundry in which the hardware md5 check was being performed! And a background check on all the people supervising the foundry to make sure nobody changes the hardware to mis-report the checksum! And...."
There is no way to please them. At least they were up front about it.
Yeah I'll probably keep the weeky NewEgg one. But with daily deals I've discovered that unless I'm shopping for a HDD there probably isn't anything I actually want, it's the same deals day after day after day. And there is *always* a HDD on sale.
Underestimating how much something costs seems to be the only way to actually get it funded in the first place. We just need to tell Congress that going to Mars will take $10B and 3 years.
Maybe, just maybe, then in 20 years and 10x cost over runs we'll actually go.
Junk filtering has all but eliminated my spam. What it hasn't eliminated is the plethora of mailing lists and newsletters and daily deals I've accumulated. Most of them are weekly or monthly. But just the volume of companies I've interacted with over the last couple of years finally reached a breaking point this last week.
Just yesterday I started the exact same process (sans spam folder). I've started going through and actually unsubscribing from all the shit I receive. Already with the weekly and daily crap unsubscribed I for the first time in a long time have returned to what I consider an acceptable mail volume.
Alternately Microsoft (like Google) derives value from users of their products through Bing ad revenue.
Google charges $0 but it still costs money to develop Android.
Microsoft charges $15 but it probably costs significantly more money to develop WP7.
Also Microsoft can 'cut itself a deal' with some of its patents since the R&D expenses aren't wrapped up into the phone division. If I spend $10m developing a new codec for instance I might include it in the Mobile OS even though the desktop division spent all of the R&D money. However if someone else wanted to use the codec I would charge them a fee to recoup some of my Desktop development expenses.
Collaboration: You can have multiple people easily editing the same document
Portability: Your documents are both at the office and on your sales person's laptop in China.
Ease of Setup: You just start spending the monthly fee and everything is setup and running. You don't have to shop for a server, configure your sharepoint server, setup a VPN etc.
?Security?: In the case of our business we have no good way to remotely access data. That's because we don't want to risk our network being compromised. So we have firewalls on top of firewalls on top of firewalls. If our documents were in the cloud we wouldn't need to let any remote access to our file servers and none of the confidential "important" data is ever in a word document.
We don't have a cloud based document system but we do use a web based project management suite which we really like. It offers all of the above and it's easy to scale up and down etc.
I loved this website:
http://www.trypython.org/
It's an interactive class on Python and sounds a lot like Learning Python the Hard Way.
The problem is that it's destructive to society. There is a halo to the Film and Game Industries. They seem like they're super exciting and people invest a lot of time and money on training to be able to get a job doing it--and then a year in discover that the reality of 10 100 hour weeks back to back is very different than the idea of it.
So yes, they do eventually quit. And a whole new batch of young and naive fools fall into the meat grinder. The normal market forces where you run out of talent just don't exist.
Another problem is expectation. As it said in TFA most of these people were told it was a 12 month job and that they would get bonuses/overtime if they stuck around to the finish. You get into the Gambler's fallacy pretty quick. "I've already put in 6 months. I can tough out another 6 for a huge fat bonus." And then 12 months promised turns into 5 years so they quit having put in longer than they had hoped but gotten less than promised.
The real tragedy is that it doesn't need to be that way. As was pointed out in multiple interviews with ex-staff you have huge waste. You don't have to run a 24/7 crunch for 8 years. That's just poor management excusing their incompetence. I've seen it before many times. The leadership treats the people as dispensable. The people quit. They fall behind. They treat the next people like shit. They quit. They fall further behind. If they had paced themselves at the beginning and been honest that they couldn't match their deadlines then ultimately they would be more productive and finish sooner. But they also have the publisher breathing down their neck and they know that admitting to needing a 100% larger budget will end the project. Asking for 10 10% extensions to not "let the work done so far go to waste so far" keeps their death spiral alive.
Eventually the game gets released. Eventually if it's halfway decent it'll probably make its money back. The whole fucking fiasco looks like it was the right decision and they do it all over again.
What's wrong with simply saying "online"? They're putting the patient records online. Medical staff will be able to access them through the internet.
Personally I think in a lot of these cases "the cloud" is a better descriptor than "internet". For me at least the "internet" is a bunch of websites. So if you say my settings are stored "on the internet" the mental picture I have is opening a web browser. If you say "in the cloud" then I picture a data service like Dropbox or LiveMesh.