Not the, but a, yes. We now have more than 50% of the world population living in cities. That's 3.5 billion or so. Logistics of 3.5 billion people is a non-trivial and important thing. And getting people around short distances efficiently reduces their desire to take the fucking car for a trip of two blocks.
It seems pretty hard to just stop and smell the roses when you're whizzing by them at thirty miles per hour.
I don't think you want to smell the roses in the inner city of any of the major 20 or so cities.
But yeah, the internet or something like it will be with us for the remainder of humanity's run on this planet
No, it won't. Like other technology, it will evolve, and then be replaced by something better. There's a bit of good SciFi out there that outlines various scenarios. For example, in Cory Doctorow's stories, being interconnected has become so ubiquitous that you don't go on the Internet anymore, the Internet comes to you - like a global Wolfram Alpha for everyone. You ask your computer something, and it'll find out or do it for you, that it's over a network is totally hidden from you. There's no notion of "websites" or even anything like it. I'm pretty sure reality will be stranger still.
I actually kinda get his point. It's been a long time since anything really interesting happened on the Internet, via the Internet, or Thanks to the Internet.
That's not true. What happened is that the fact that it happened on the Internet is not newsworthy anymore.
When we get messages out of otherwise news-dead zones like Iraq or some broken-down-in-civil-war country, we don't explicitly mention anymore that the Internet was the transport medium. 10 years ago, that part would have been the big news.
It's simple market economics. You price a good at a level the market will bear. If you sell tickets for $100 apiece and the show sells out in 6 minutes, you price the next show at $120. If it also sells out in under 10 minutes you know your good is priced below market value and you make future pricing decisions accordingly.
The problem is that it isn't really the hypothetical free market at work here.
Remember, a real market requires a theoretically unlimited number of both suppliers and buyers. If there is only one supplied (and with limited supply!) then free market theory simply does not apply. You can not argue from a theory that isn't applicable. Well, you can, like you can try to explain gravity with electro-magnetism, but it doesn't make any sense, even if you put in enough confusing words that it appears to, at first glance.
In this particular case, there is a vast amount of factors that can easily distort everything. The most common is that the show does not actually sell out. A lot of those tickets are bought by brokers. Exactly because they buy them all up so that the show sells out, they can then turn around and sell them on for higher prices, because - once again - there is not actual market. Supply is close to non-existent, which means they can ask almost as much as they want. Buyers have the option to buy at inflated prices, or not buy at all. There is no alternative, no other supplier and most importantly, buyers must act on very limited information (perfect information of all participants is another small detail of free market theory that everyone conveniently forgets about). They don't know if the show is really sold out and they have a rare opportunity in front of them, or if they're talking with a broker sitting on a few hundred tickets who is equally desperate in getting them sold.
I believe that where we screwed up big-time was when we ever allowed the government to have any input whatsoever into how we educate our children.
Actually, I have to disagree on that part. Probably because my girlfriend is a teacher, just starting, and I've seen the incredible amount of effort that goes into showing teachers how to teach right. There's a whole science behind that, and not with the best instincts can you be as good as a good teacher.
That said, public schools in the US are probably the mess I keep hearing about. That does not mean the entire concept of a public school is bullshit, just because one specific implementation of it is. Have you ever seen public schools outside the US? Say, in countries that are famous for good schools, such as the scandinavian countries?
Unless you want to give that game to a friend, sell it 2nd hand, or do any other of a long list of perfectly legal things. Except that you can't.
Sure, pirates don't like it, because it means they have to wait for a cracking group to clear the DRM before they can steal it.
I'm sorry to destroy your fantasy world, but DRM has in no way whatsoever changed the warez scene. To a cracker, DRM is just a new term for copy protection, and they've been cracking that in 1% the time it took to create since the 80s. DRM or not, you can get any game out there on the day of sale as a free download. Not always as a torrent, sometimes it takes a while before it leaves the closed circles, but DRM has nothing whatsoever to do with the availability or lack of of a pirate copy.
You're saying that game developers need offer you an "honest option," what the fuck does that mean? It really sounds like "don't use DRM so I can easily pirate your goods."
Funny how I already answered your question further up in my OP. Among other things (like not fucking with the kernel in a way a freaking game isn't supposed to, I'm looking at you, SecuROM) an "honest option" means that I can sell the game to someone else when I'm done playing it.
And your argument is don't buy PC games because you need to buy two copies and it has DRM.... instead buy console games? WTF?
I didn't say "buy console games". Please respond to things I actually write and not to things that exist only in your imagination.
Maybe you're too young, but there were times when you could buy a game once and then play it with your friends. As in, for example, only the original copy could host a game, but copies of it could join that session. Sometimes a limited amount of copies, say 2-4, so that for a larger LAN session you'd need two copies. But playing a game on a LAN session and having to buy two copies of it for a total of 80 is a totally different story than having to buy 8 copies of it for a total of 400. Nobody who is quite right in their mind can expect that anyone is going to part with that kind of money for a cool evening. Heck, hiring a few whores would probably be cheaper.
I usually don't get out of an entire market because one vendor fucking sucks
If it's just one vendor, then that's a good decision. If it's just a few, it is still probably a good decision. If it's a whole freaking lot, it's stupid.
I didn't stop buying PC games, either. But almost all my money now goes to indie developers with an honest business model. Of course, to the big players, I'm probably included somewhere in their made-up-bullshit "losses due to piracy" statistics. Because they're like the RIAA or MPAA in that regard - "everyone who ever got a glimpse of our stuff without paying us is a lost sale".
DRM is always bad for the customer. Because it is never your rights that get "managed", it is always someone elses, and always to your disadvantage.
Some DRM is worse than others, yes. Some is almost tolerable. I do enjoy that Steam on Mac is bringing more games to the Mac. But frankly, that is not thanks to Steam, but thanks to Valve porting their engines and picking up a bunch of mostly indie games that were already available for the Mac and bundling it all up into a distribution channel that is too big to ignore.
It is rarely a choice between "content with DRM / content without DRM" but usually "content with DRM / no content at all".
And that is where the free market fails because it assumes choice. If you don't have choice, you can't vote with your dollars. Which is another freedom taken away from you.
The real reason that people don't buy PC games anymore - at least for the class of people I've talked about - is DRM. And I'm serious. Actually, the combination of DRM + "no demo".
Most of us have been burned once too often buying a game that sucks, doesn't run on your machine even if you satisfy the minimum requirements (and more), and so on.
10 years ago, if a game was awfully short, or sucked, or didn't work, you'd put it on the 2nd hand market and it wasn't so bad. You'd not get your original investment back, but about half of it, a bit more if you did it right. That put the cost of picking a bad apple at maybe 20, often less. Today, with all those options killed thanks to DRM, the price for an error is 50 (prices have also gone up). That's 250% the old value. And then people wonder why less games are bought.
It gets multiplied by a good factor if you figure in that many gamers are now adults, with family. A large part of the "available income marked for gaming" is in a demographic that wants to play with their spouse or kids. Which means the game has to run on at least two PCs, and the network part has to work. You'd think that's a solved problem, but it isn't. For one, almost all games today require you to buy two copies for that - bringing the price of error up to 100. Two, it increases the chance that some part of the equation fails, so the chance for error increases(*). Both cost and chance of error go up. If that happens, you very, very quickly reach the point where it just isn't a rational decision anymore.
Today, even though I enjoy coop gaming a ton, I would not recommend buying any windos game to anyone. Well, maybe my enemies on/.;-) Seriously. You want to play a game? Find a torrent.
Yes, I feel sorry for the developers. There's nothing I can do for you guys. Go indie and offer an honest option for me to buy (I've bought a lot of indie stuff, and so far haven't had one regret) or tell your distributors to stop fucking the customer. Because even in that business, "money up front" only works for a short time, and if you want them to come back, the product better feels like worth paying for afterwards.
(*) you'd not believe the amount of total bullshit I've seen with windos network gaming. Like XP and Win7 not being able to communicate via TCP/IP when they're not in the same workgroup. Err... yeah, makes sense. Random failures left and right. Some machines on the network being able to see another machine, but not vice versa (because, you know, your ping reply gets through just fine, but your ping request doesn't???). Network games working just fine if machine A hosts, but not if machine B hosts. And so on.
The only bullshit part of it is that the fact you were arrested shows up on any criminal background check.
Uh, an unlawful arrest doesn't get deleted from your record? Wow. Just wow. I already had a low opinion of the USA, but I think it just dropped a few floors.
Only to those who read shortcut comments and believe they reflect the true opinion of someone.
Of course there's a difference. Vital, important, huge even. Try to explain that difference to a lay person that is not a geek. That's what I meant by "visible". The vast majority of people don't see it, at least until it is pointed out to them.
Apparently, if you didn't need Tarp money, the government look at your bank as though you MUST have been doing something "wrong".
Absolutely. You see, if you weren't "in" on this largest scam in history, then you are not part of the elite capitalist clan, and thus you are obviously a communist. A communist! Oh, wait, wrong century. A terrorist! You're with the terrorists!
I thought the point of the stock market was that people with money can buy shares into companies they think will be profitable.
That was 50 years ago. Today, actual investment is about 1% of the trading activity, the rest is speculation. While speculation does have its place at the stock market (it provides for liquidity), the fact that it has drowned out actual investment is doing damage that can't be measured. Among other things, it is the speculators who lobbied against the transaction tax that would've a) made the stock market pay their fair share in the financial crisis and b) done at least a bit to prevent it from repeating. If you buy or sell in a month or year cycle, you don't really care much about a 0.01% or so tax. If you buy and sell in minute or second (or even shorter - margin trading) cycles, it quickly adds up.
Yes, obviously. A stupid person will try to read the embossed symbols. A smart person remembers which way the empty batteries she just removed were oriented.
If you can't apply your aw-shucks logic to these problems, then why do you think climate science is any different?
Because you can see the climate. Well, actually not, only the weather, but that's not a visible difference.
People like to argue about things that they have an intuition about. That they can see, touch and grasp with their senses. We are biologically evolved that way, to have an opinion on our environment.
The Higgs boson and mathematical theories don't fall into that category, and as such they are left alone. A discussion about climate change on Venus would not yield 1% of the opposition.
Always good to see people who are intolerant of Christians.
Your welcome. We may be a bit out of line with our choice of words at times, but after 1500 years or so of being killed, tortured, driven to the edge of society, forced to hide and being subjected to pretty much every other physical or mental mistreatment by them, that is a very moderate and tame reaction. Theirs after just a few hundred years of oppression by the romans was a lot less civilized.
If you can be tolerant of gays, and tolerant of people speaking ideas you disagree with, why can't you be tolerant of Muslims, Jews, and Christians too?
I've yet to meet a gay who wants to kill me because I'm not gay. If gays would be walking around burning non-gay literature, stoning heterosexuals to death and telling everyone to convert "or else", I'd be just as much opposed to them.
Yeah, right. Because we give cattle photo ID cards, right? Uh, wait...
They are talking about a friggin' ID card, not a tattoo, not an RFID implant. It's a damn passport. I've had one all my life and I feel just fine. They're not poisonous, and they don't suck out your soul at night. Oh yeah, the evil government now has you by a unique ID number. Instead of by your name, birthdate, place of living or what else they've used so far. As if their databases would not have a primary key already, you know. They just didn't print it on a card so far.
And yes, Office is making MS quite a bit of money, but once word gets out about Google Docs and OOo, the case to use Office keeps on becoming less and less for most users.
Unfortunately not. Their main game - lock in - is still working splendid. So much that my girlfriend is thinking about buying a windos netbook. She'll have Ubuntu on it for (her words!) when she wants to get some real work done, but the main reason is that she needs MS Office. None of the alternatives work well enough with their proprietary, fucked-up, pushed-through-ISO-and-then-implemented-differently formats and her new job requires her to be able to work with those documents.
But on the bright side, one of their employees has come to the conclusion that, in principle anyway, it would be good if their software worked. And was easy to use. [...] So maybe they'll give that a shot soon.
I heard the board is discussing putting that on the business plan. For 2030.
Maybe they're learning. Learning that almost everything they make is pure crap. Unfortunately, their solution is to make different crap, not making something that isn't crap.
This is incorrect, or to be more fair, is correct only for certain cases. It is trivial to create situations in which the average person, and crowd as a whole, performs horribly, while a 10th grader with a smidgen of knowledge can figure out an exact answer. When human intuition is not just random, but *skewed*, large samples screw up badly and predictably.
That is correct, but as you said: For carefully selected examples. Fortunately for the survival of the species, a lot of day-to-day stuff is pretty intuitive, or rather: Our intuition has adapted to be at least useably close to the truth.
Maybe one could some up that if a crowd is to judge something that was in any way vital for survival 10,000 years ago, it will largely be either right, or make a non-fatal error. In most other cases, all bets are off.
somebody spends 20 minutes sprinkling obscenities into a wiki article and somebody else spends 20 seconds reverting it, those sorts of attacks are survivable enough.
As long as your "idiot-to-someone-who-cares" ratio is 60:1 or better. And maintaining a good ratio is a hard struggle, because almost always the people who care give up long before the idiots and assholes do. Yes, that explains a lot about politics, but that wasn't the point.
We know for a fact that when crowds have significant enough motivation (like money), they do an excellent job of predicting things, for example.
Actually, no. We need more research in this area. What we do know is that groups judge better than individuals. Large groups, if there is some selection involves, appear to share that. Don't forget that almost all of the prediction markets used so far have a strong self-selection involved.
If you want to study large-scale crowd predictions, take horse racing or other sports bets.
What crowds are excellent at is predicting the obvious and filtering out the personal bias we all have - you one way, I the other, in a crowd that cancels out and we all together arrive at a pretty good mean estimate. But as soon as the judgement requires any expert knowledge whatsoever, you have strong selection at work (most people don't "bet" on things they don't understand), which kind of violates your core assumption of having a crowd, not just a group of experts.
Slashdot Mirror
Seriously? THAT'S the real problem nowadays?
Not the, but a, yes. We now have more than 50% of the world population living in cities. That's 3.5 billion or so. Logistics of 3.5 billion people is a non-trivial and important thing. And getting people around short distances efficiently reduces their desire to take the fucking car for a trip of two blocks.
It seems pretty hard to just stop and smell the roses when you're whizzing by them at thirty miles per hour.
I don't think you want to smell the roses in the inner city of any of the major 20 or so cities.
But yeah, the internet or something like it will be with us for the remainder of humanity's run on this planet
No, it won't. Like other technology, it will evolve, and then be replaced by something better. There's a bit of good SciFi out there that outlines various scenarios. For example, in Cory Doctorow's stories, being interconnected has become so ubiquitous that you don't go on the Internet anymore, the Internet comes to you - like a global Wolfram Alpha for everyone. You ask your computer something, and it'll find out or do it for you, that it's over a network is totally hidden from you. There's no notion of "websites" or even anything like it. I'm pretty sure reality will be stranger still.
I actually kinda get his point. It's been a long time since anything really interesting happened on the Internet, via the Internet, or Thanks to the Internet.
That's not true. What happened is that the fact that it happened on the Internet is not newsworthy anymore.
When we get messages out of otherwise news-dead zones like Iraq or some broken-down-in-civil-war country, we don't explicitly mention anymore that the Internet was the transport medium. 10 years ago, that part would have been the big news.
You must be using a different Internet than I am. There's a ton of amazing stuff out there.
Fact is that the number of users really hasn't changed. I mean, real actual users as in people who contribute something to the discussion.
Formerly, all the twits were collected by AOL. Today, all the twits are collected by Twitter and Facebook.
It's a great service, really. Keeps the rest of the Internet clean for actual use. And it's free because the twits pay for it!
It's simple market economics. You price a good at a level the market will bear. If you sell tickets for $100 apiece and the show sells out in 6 minutes, you price the next show at $120. If it also sells out in under 10 minutes you know your good is priced below market value and you make future pricing decisions accordingly.
The problem is that it isn't really the hypothetical free market at work here.
Remember, a real market requires a theoretically unlimited number of both suppliers and buyers. If there is only one supplied (and with limited supply!) then free market theory simply does not apply. You can not argue from a theory that isn't applicable. Well, you can, like you can try to explain gravity with electro-magnetism, but it doesn't make any sense, even if you put in enough confusing words that it appears to, at first glance.
In this particular case, there is a vast amount of factors that can easily distort everything. The most common is that the show does not actually sell out. A lot of those tickets are bought by brokers. Exactly because they buy them all up so that the show sells out, they can then turn around and sell them on for higher prices, because - once again - there is not actual market. Supply is close to non-existent, which means they can ask almost as much as they want. Buyers have the option to buy at inflated prices, or not buy at all. There is no alternative, no other supplier and most importantly, buyers must act on very limited information (perfect information of all participants is another small detail of free market theory that everyone conveniently forgets about). They don't know if the show is really sold out and they have a rare opportunity in front of them, or if they're talking with a broker sitting on a few hundred tickets who is equally desperate in getting them sold.
I believe that where we screwed up big-time was when we ever allowed the government to have any input whatsoever into how we educate our children.
Actually, I have to disagree on that part. Probably because my girlfriend is a teacher, just starting, and I've seen the incredible amount of effort that goes into showing teachers how to teach right. There's a whole science behind that, and not with the best instincts can you be as good as a good teacher.
That said, public schools in the US are probably the mess I keep hearing about. That does not mean the entire concept of a public school is bullshit, just because one specific implementation of it is. Have you ever seen public schools outside the US? Say, in countries that are famous for good schools, such as the scandinavian countries?
"Good" DRM isn't noticeable in anyway.
Unless you want to give that game to a friend, sell it 2nd hand, or do any other of a long list of perfectly legal things. Except that you can't.
Sure, pirates don't like it, because it means they have to wait for a cracking group to clear the DRM before they can steal it.
I'm sorry to destroy your fantasy world, but DRM has in no way whatsoever changed the warez scene. To a cracker, DRM is just a new term for copy protection, and they've been cracking that in 1% the time it took to create since the 80s. DRM or not, you can get any game out there on the day of sale as a free download. Not always as a torrent, sometimes it takes a while before it leaves the closed circles, but DRM has nothing whatsoever to do with the availability or lack of of a pirate copy.
You're saying that game developers need offer you an "honest option," what the fuck does that mean? It really sounds like "don't use DRM so I can easily pirate your goods."
Funny how I already answered your question further up in my OP. Among other things (like not fucking with the kernel in a way a freaking game isn't supposed to, I'm looking at you, SecuROM) an "honest option" means that I can sell the game to someone else when I'm done playing it.
And your argument is don't buy PC games because you need to buy two copies and it has DRM.... instead buy console games? WTF?
I didn't say "buy console games". Please respond to things I actually write and not to things that exist only in your imagination.
Maybe you're too young, but there were times when you could buy a game once and then play it with your friends. As in, for example, only the original copy could host a game, but copies of it could join that session. Sometimes a limited amount of copies, say 2-4, so that for a larger LAN session you'd need two copies. But playing a game on a LAN session and having to buy two copies of it for a total of 80 is a totally different story than having to buy 8 copies of it for a total of 400. Nobody who is quite right in their mind can expect that anyone is going to part with that kind of money for a cool evening. Heck, hiring a few whores would probably be cheaper.
I usually don't get out of an entire market because one vendor fucking sucks
If it's just one vendor, then that's a good decision. If it's just a few, it is still probably a good decision. If it's a whole freaking lot, it's stupid.
I didn't stop buying PC games, either. But almost all my money now goes to indie developers with an honest business model. Of course, to the big players, I'm probably included somewhere in their made-up-bullshit "losses due to piracy" statistics. Because they're like the RIAA or MPAA in that regard - "everyone who ever got a glimpse of our stuff without paying us is a lost sale".
Some DRM is bad, some is great.
DRM is always bad for the customer. Because it is never your rights that get "managed", it is always someone elses, and always to your disadvantage.
Some DRM is worse than others, yes. Some is almost tolerable. I do enjoy that Steam on Mac is bringing more games to the Mac. But frankly, that is not thanks to Steam, but thanks to Valve porting their engines and picking up a bunch of mostly indie games that were already available for the Mac and bundling it all up into a distribution channel that is too big to ignore.
It is rarely a choice between "content with DRM / content without DRM" but usually "content with DRM / no content at all".
And that is where the free market fails because it assumes choice. If you don't have choice, you can't vote with your dollars. Which is another freedom taken away from you.
The real reason that people don't buy PC games anymore - at least for the class of people I've talked about - is DRM. And I'm serious. Actually, the combination of DRM + "no demo".
Most of us have been burned once too often buying a game that sucks, doesn't run on your machine even if you satisfy the minimum requirements (and more), and so on.
10 years ago, if a game was awfully short, or sucked, or didn't work, you'd put it on the 2nd hand market and it wasn't so bad. You'd not get your original investment back, but about half of it, a bit more if you did it right. That put the cost of picking a bad apple at maybe 20, often less. Today, with all those options killed thanks to DRM, the price for an error is 50 (prices have also gone up). That's 250% the old value. And then people wonder why less games are bought.
It gets multiplied by a good factor if you figure in that many gamers are now adults, with family. A large part of the "available income marked for gaming" is in a demographic that wants to play with their spouse or kids. Which means the game has to run on at least two PCs, and the network part has to work. You'd think that's a solved problem, but it isn't. For one, almost all games today require you to buy two copies for that - bringing the price of error up to 100. Two, it increases the chance that some part of the equation fails, so the chance for error increases(*). Both cost and chance of error go up. If that happens, you very, very quickly reach the point where it just isn't a rational decision anymore.
Today, even though I enjoy coop gaming a ton, I would not recommend buying any windos game to anyone. Well, maybe my enemies on /. ;-)
Seriously. You want to play a game? Find a torrent.
Yes, I feel sorry for the developers. There's nothing I can do for you guys. Go indie and offer an honest option for me to buy (I've bought a lot of indie stuff, and so far haven't had one regret) or tell your distributors to stop fucking the customer. Because even in that business, "money up front" only works for a short time, and if you want them to come back, the product better feels like worth paying for afterwards.
(*) you'd not believe the amount of total bullshit I've seen with windos network gaming. Like XP and Win7 not being able to communicate via TCP/IP when they're not in the same workgroup. Err... yeah, makes sense. Random failures left and right. Some machines on the network being able to see another machine, but not vice versa (because, you know, your ping reply gets through just fine, but your ping request doesn't???). Network games working just fine if machine A hosts, but not if machine B hosts. And so on.
The only bullshit part of it is that the fact you were arrested shows up on any criminal background check.
Uh, an unlawful arrest doesn't get deleted from your record? Wow. Just wow. I already had a low opinion of the USA, but I think it just dropped a few floors.
Only to those who read shortcut comments and believe they reflect the true opinion of someone.
Of course there's a difference. Vital, important, huge even. Try to explain that difference to a lay person that is not a geek. That's what I meant by "visible". The vast majority of people don't see it, at least until it is pointed out to them.
Apparently, if you didn't need Tarp money, the government look at your bank as though you MUST have been doing something "wrong".
Absolutely. You see, if you weren't "in" on this largest scam in history, then you are not part of the elite capitalist clan, and thus you are obviously a communist. A communist! Oh, wait, wrong century. A terrorist! You're with the terrorists!
I thought the point of the stock market was that people with money can buy shares into companies they think will be profitable.
That was 50 years ago. Today, actual investment is about 1% of the trading activity, the rest is speculation. While speculation does have its place at the stock market (it provides for liquidity), the fact that it has drowned out actual investment is doing damage that can't be measured. Among other things, it is the speculators who lobbied against the transaction tax that would've a) made the stock market pay their fair share in the financial crisis and b) done at least a bit to prevent it from repeating. If you buy or sell in a month or year cycle, you don't really care much about a 0.01% or so tax. If you buy and sell in minute or second (or even shorter - margin trading) cycles, it quickly adds up.
Yes, obviously. A stupid person will try to read the embossed symbols. A smart person remembers which way the empty batteries she just removed were oriented.
If you can't apply your aw-shucks logic to these problems, then why do you think climate science is any different?
Because you can see the climate. Well, actually not, only the weather, but that's not a visible difference.
People like to argue about things that they have an intuition about. That they can see, touch and grasp with their senses. We are biologically evolved that way, to have an opinion on our environment.
The Higgs boson and mathematical theories don't fall into that category, and as such they are left alone. A discussion about climate change on Venus would not yield 1% of the opposition.
Did you think I'm using the royal "we" for fun?
Always good to see people who are intolerant of Christians.
Your welcome. We may be a bit out of line with our choice of words at times, but after 1500 years or so of being killed, tortured, driven to the edge of society, forced to hide and being subjected to pretty much every other physical or mental mistreatment by them, that is a very moderate and tame reaction. Theirs after just a few hundred years of oppression by the romans was a lot less civilized.
If you can be tolerant of gays, and tolerant of people speaking ideas you disagree with, why can't you be tolerant of Muslims, Jews, and Christians too?
I've yet to meet a gay who wants to kill me because I'm not gay. If gays would be walking around burning non-gay literature, stoning heterosexuals to death and telling everyone to convert "or else", I'd be just as much opposed to them.
tagged like cattle
Yeah, right. Because we give cattle photo ID cards, right? Uh, wait...
They are talking about a friggin' ID card, not a tattoo, not an RFID implant. It's a damn passport. I've had one all my life and I feel just fine. They're not poisonous, and they don't suck out your soul at night. Oh yeah, the evil government now has you by a unique ID number. Instead of by your name, birthdate, place of living or what else they've used so far. As if their databases would not have a primary key already, you know. They just didn't print it on a card so far.
He's probably missing one bomb conviction for the "all culprit types captures" achievement.
And they talk about us computer games players losing contact with reality. They wouldn't know reality if it came knocking.
And yes, Office is making MS quite a bit of money, but once word gets out about Google Docs and OOo, the case to use Office keeps on becoming less and less for most users.
Unfortunately not. Their main game - lock in - is still working splendid. So much that my girlfriend is thinking about buying a windos netbook. She'll have Ubuntu on it for (her words!) when she wants to get some real work done, but the main reason is that she needs MS Office. None of the alternatives work well enough with their proprietary, fucked-up, pushed-through-ISO-and-then-implemented-differently formats and her new job requires her to be able to work with those documents.
But on the bright side, one of their employees has come to the conclusion that, in principle anyway, it would be good if their software worked. And was easy to use. [...] So maybe they'll give that a shot soon.
I heard the board is discussing putting that on the business plan. For 2030.
Maybe they're learning. Learning that almost everything they make is pure crap. Unfortunately, their solution is to make different crap, not making something that isn't crap.
This is incorrect, or to be more fair, is correct only for certain cases. It is trivial to create situations in which the average person, and crowd as a whole, performs horribly, while a 10th grader with a smidgen of knowledge can figure out an exact answer. When human intuition is not just random, but *skewed*, large samples screw up badly and predictably.
That is correct, but as you said: For carefully selected examples. Fortunately for the survival of the species, a lot of day-to-day stuff is pretty intuitive, or rather: Our intuition has adapted to be at least useably close to the truth.
Maybe one could some up that if a crowd is to judge something that was in any way vital for survival 10,000 years ago, it will largely be either right, or make a non-fatal error. In most other cases, all bets are off.
somebody spends 20 minutes sprinkling obscenities into a wiki article and somebody else spends 20 seconds reverting it, those sorts of attacks are survivable enough.
As long as your "idiot-to-someone-who-cares" ratio is 60:1 or better. And maintaining a good ratio is a hard struggle, because almost always the people who care give up long before the idiots and assholes do. Yes, that explains a lot about politics, but that wasn't the point.
We know for a fact that when crowds have significant enough motivation (like money), they do an excellent job of predicting things, for example.
Actually, no. We need more research in this area. What we do know is that groups judge better than individuals. Large groups, if there is some selection involves, appear to share that. Don't forget that almost all of the prediction markets used so far have a strong self-selection involved.
If you want to study large-scale crowd predictions, take horse racing or other sports bets.
What crowds are excellent at is predicting the obvious and filtering out the personal bias we all have - you one way, I the other, in a crowd that cancels out and we all together arrive at a pretty good mean estimate. But as soon as the judgement requires any expert knowledge whatsoever, you have strong selection at work (most people don't "bet" on things they don't understand), which kind of violates your core assumption of having a crowd, not just a group of experts.