The camera connector kit that enables most of these things is $30, which is cheaper than expected, coming from Apple. $30 is about 6 to 9 cups of reasonable coffee. That is hardly expensive these days.
So Ebenezer Scrooge would rather buy a netbook than an iPad. He isn't most people.
Many griefers want to be the famous badass, so I just don't buy it.
And past experience is not much of a guide, since there hasn't been a decently designed MMO yet. They tend to be designed by the socially inept, or by people with libertarian beliefs (in other words, mainly Americans). Too much thought is put into combat mechanics and not enough into social mechanics.
You don't have to cater to one or the other. It is possible to design a game that appeals to both. The obvious solution is to turn griefing behaviour from a liability into a boon.
Allowing griefers to play as outlaw characters at a certain cost (that cost being whatever it takes to make sure that it remains a minority activity, and ought to vary according to supply and demand) and providing incentives for law abiding players to hunt them down gives both parties what they want. The griefer gets to annoy people and gain a reputation as a badass. Everyone else gets to hunt him down for fun and money.
After all what's a fantasy setting without brigands and sadists to provide some colour? The game designer's only thought should be making sure that brigandage serves the world and does not ruin it.
My way of putting it is that some people are dumb enough to want an MMO to be a war simulation, overlooking the facts that: (1) War is generally anything but fun; and (2) any game has to have sufficient motivation for the losers to keep playing, or it will eventually end.
"Seriously, how the heck can you first note that democracy results in more efficient cooperation than dictatorship, and then suggest that democracy should be "suspended" when cooperation is required?"
Because it doesn't always result in greater efficiency, as I made plain in the original post.
Your threats are risible. You'll do as you're told, just like everyone else.
Rich countries refusing to do anything about climate change is effectively deciding without obtaining the consent of people in poorer countries that the latter will pay the cost.
Once you acknowledge the externalities inherent in carbon emissions, the only way you could preserve democracy is by having a democratically elected world parliament decide the issue, and if Lovelock is right, even that might not work.
The fact that people in rich countries would not consent to a world vote on reducing emissions shows how hollow talk of democracy among the rich is.
This isn't true. Democratic government is preferable under most circumstances. It is much easier to secure co-operation and deal with dissent if people have a genuine stake in society and the government exists by consent. Democracy has been successful for reasons of efficiency more than any other reason. It would very likely be much easier to restore democracy than you think.
But Lovelock is right. There are certain sorts of problems that democracies can't really deal with. That's why democracy and democratic freedoms are sometimes curtailed during war. In particular, democracies are poor at dealing with slowly developing, complex, and eventually catastrophic problems. WWII is a good example.
All I see is people crying like bitches about Lovelock's argument, or indulging in climate change denialism. None of this is addressing his argument. If democracy can't fix it and climate change is that big of a problem, it follows that we have to dispense with democracy (perhaps only in certain respects) until the problem is fixed. Crying like a bitch because you don't like the situation isn't solving anything.
In fact, all that needs to be done is for the political class to agree to fix the carbon problem no matter what the voters think. Such solutions are not unprecedented in democracies.
That seems reasonable. What's unreasonable is saying that you personally can live with the effects of climate change. I'm sure that the millions of people who would suffer terribly because of climate change would have a problem with your "choice". It's a global problem. If you just choose for yourself and screw everyone else, then you are justifying the use of force against yourself.
If rich countries think that they can ignore climate change and not suffer Al Qaeda x 100, then they are sadly mistaken. The world's poor aren't going to go quietly just so you can have "democracy".
Because, although you wouldn't know it from the way people talk, in some contexts freedom is a bad thing. Sometimes everyone benefits from imposed regulation.
But, even if you think that state regulation is wrong, we are talking about a private company choosing to regulate its own products. What some people are asking is for Apple to be compelled to open up their platform. That doesn't sound like promoting freedom, but forcing Apple to bow to the will of a minority of users.
If Apple is wrong, then the device will fail in the market. If Apple is right, then less freedom is something that a sufficient number of users will be willing to trade off to use their products. Most users are not power users. Why shouldn't they be able to buy the computer they want? It's like saying that only hi fi equipment should be manufactured and that everyone who wants to play music has to buy it. Some people don't need or want that.
In the end this boils down to the same argument regarding Apple's refusal to sanction installation of OS X on non-Apple hardware.
If you want to prevent companies that aren't monopolies from choosing their own business models, then that would probably be the end of capitalism.
Why should it? These folks have a warped understanding of privacy. How bad does it have to get? What if someone produced an accurate mind reading device? Then thoughtcrime would become a reality. I imagine people would have a problem with that. Well, I have the same problem with government spooks being able to access my private telephone calls.
Nobody ever asks us if we are willing to give up our privacy in exchange for security.
Both Android and the iPhone OS are ultraportable computing platforms. The iPhone isn't really a phone per se, but a mobile computing device with phone functionality. Apple will even sell you one sans phone if you want it.
Successful competitors to the iPhone will be those that understand that the point is to make a better ultraportable computing platform, not necessarily a better phone. I think Google may be able to do that, but I don't think RIM can, and Microsoft's development team appears to be a circular firing squad.
As usual, competition is only good for end users, so I hope Android does well.
"Having met a large number of history and philosophy majors, I can tell you that they are no more politically and/or civically informed or capable than the average engineering or physics major."
Having taught both, I can confidently assure you that this is bollocks. Take a couple of A grade students. One in engineering and one in philosophy. Watch the engineer rip the philosopher to shreds in discussions about engineering, and then watch the philosophy student humiliate the engineer in an ethical argument.
That's just the way specialization works.
Now if we're talking about "C" students, it will be a different story, due to the decline of pass standards in the humanities (something which is deplorable).
I don't think you get what I am saying because you have a narrow view of what counts as a burden on society. Sure, someone who spends their life drinking away welfare checks when they could be working is a drain, but so is someone who can't or won't subject the decisions of our political masters to rational evaluation. By voting, such people lead to suboptimal political outcomes. That's one reason that compulsory civics education is so important. We also need a significant number of people with degrees like philosophy and history spread throughout society. It's like seeding our society with a bunch of people like Socrates.
To be fair, we also need to reform education in the humanities. It has become rather soft and lax for cultural reasons and needs to be returned to the hardass standards of yore. It is still like this in some places (Classics departments for example).
I take it that you didn't notice you were living in a democracy. Degrees like history or philosophy that have no direct application to employment (although the skills developed in doing such a degree have a general application) are exactly the sort of degrees that engender an informed and capable citizenry capable of properly holding its representatives to account. A citizenry incapable of evaluating arguments and ignorant of history is more easily duped.
It has long been a dream of fascists to eliminate such forms of education for precisely that reason.
And before anyone starts, you should already have noticed that the same phenomenon occurs with science degrees. Some of those who think science degrees are great as long as science graduates are making useful widgets tend to get very agitated when science graduates start using their education to hold policy makers to account (climate change is an obvious example, as is teaching evolution in schools).
Beware those who say that all education must be "useful". They often have a hidden agenda.
Your argument doesn't follow. Free will might well be an illusion, but that doesn't mean we should stop locking up criminals or cracking down on fraud or that the actions of such people would stop making the lives of others worse.
It depends what you mean by "the rules". If you want to be a really successful criminal, it almost always means joining or founding some form of organized crime (and before people start, I'm including being elected to political office). Organized crime is simply a replacement trust network for society at large, and while they break society's rules, they don't break their own very often, since the penalty for doing so is usually far worse than anything society metes out.
In order to live almost any kind of life that could be called a "success" you have to form and sustain trust networks with others. It's just unavoidable.
Sometimes you can get away with breaking the rules, but this is quite uncommon. The only reason we don't think this is so is that we are so used to following the rules that we don't tend to notice when we're doing it.
There's also an unexamined assumption here (yet another example of Christianity's baleful influence on our culture) that people can actually choose to be good or bad. I'm not sure that this is the case for most people. Good people tend to be pained, shamed and distressed if they do bad things, so for such people there really isn't much of a sense in which they'd be "better off" breaking moral rules. Bad folks don't seem to care, so that's not a problem for them. Given that by the time most of us are old enough to ponder it, our moral characters are already formed, the idea of a "choice" is somewhat senseless. Ask yourself how many people you know who have radically altered their moral character. All such cases I know have involved some traumatic event, like going to jail, being the victim of a terrible crime, or some sort of head injury.
WoW also has a fairly large black market in the presence of illegal gold sellers.
If anything, the economics of MMOs are far less interesting than the socio-political aspects of the game. WoW is more or less set up to maximize character freedom. The police (GMs) are relatively ineffective, and apart from a few obvious things you aren't allowed to do, like call other players faggots in public chat, most anti-social behaviour is in practice insufficiently policed or not policed at all. I'm talking about things all the way from ninja looting and node stealing up to the use of illegal hacks (like the underground mining hack, for example). The small percentage of outright asshats on any server seem to be sufficient to prevent a general climate of trust from forming (even though most people are nice, and helpful).
The guild system is the only way where people can build decent trust networks, and these of course require human leadership. Even then, a good guild (meaning a guild with reasonable leadership and adequate policing) is hard to find and it can't get too large before it's too big to serve that function. But Azeroth as a whole suffers from severe social dysfunction.
I guess it just shows to go that any social environment would work just fine if only a way could be found to get rid of the 10% who are hell bent on exploitation, cheating, griefing and bending the rules to suit themselves (and these are the people who howl loudest at any attempt to fix things). WoW's economy suffers from many honest players having a disincentive to enter the market, because people who hack and cheat have an illegal competitive advantage. It's really no different from the real free market or the real world in that respect (a friend of mine who is a cop pointed out that the people who barely stay within the letter of the law are often as much of a social nuisance as genuine criminals - knowing some people I've seen in business, I am not surprised).
I think WoW stands as a living counterexample to all those who desire a lightly policed social system based entirely on consent.
Whatever one thinks of Chavez, your post is seriously misleading.
1. "OK for the dictatorial head of a murderous socialist regimes to name himself president for life."
(a) It's a strange dictator who wins by free and fair elections, multiple times.
(b) Who has he had killed?
(c) I know he calls himself a socialist, but he's more of a New Dealer.
(d) In what universe is changing the law so that you can run for election any number of times the same as making yourself president for life? Not everyone thinks term limits are a good idea. The US did not used to have them.
2. "shut down not-propogandizing-for-him media, "disappear" elected officials that disagree with him"
(a) If a major US television station had (i) collaborated in the (unconstitutional) attempted military overthrow of the United States government, and (ii) consistently referred to Obama as "the nigger" on air, do you think that such a station would be allowed to continue to broadcast? I have a bridge for sale if you think so.
(b) What credible reports are there of Chavez having people offed? I haven't seen any.
If you don't like the guy, then fine. There's no need to make shit up.
If the F22 didn't appear to have all the hallmarks of a lemon, there would be no problem.
The US had it right in the 50s and 60s by not putting all its eggs in one basket, so if some of the aircraft turn out to suck, at least you have something else to fall back on. The F22 is a monumental gamble, and all we get from Lockheed is talk and more talk.
Slashdot Mirror
The camera connector kit that enables most of these things is $30, which is cheaper than expected, coming from Apple. $30 is about 6 to 9 cups of reasonable coffee. That is hardly expensive these days.
So Ebenezer Scrooge would rather buy a netbook than an iPad. He isn't most people.
Many griefers want to be the famous badass, so I just don't buy it.
And past experience is not much of a guide, since there hasn't been a decently designed MMO yet. They tend to be designed by the socially inept, or by people with libertarian beliefs (in other words, mainly Americans). Too much thought is put into combat mechanics and not enough into social mechanics.
You don't have to cater to one or the other. It is possible to design a game that appeals to both. The obvious solution is to turn griefing behaviour from a liability into a boon.
Allowing griefers to play as outlaw characters at a certain cost (that cost being whatever it takes to make sure that it remains a minority activity, and ought to vary according to supply and demand) and providing incentives for law abiding players to hunt them down gives both parties what they want. The griefer gets to annoy people and gain a reputation as a badass. Everyone else gets to hunt him down for fun and money.
After all what's a fantasy setting without brigands and sadists to provide some colour? The game designer's only thought should be making sure that brigandage serves the world and does not ruin it.
My way of putting it is that some people are dumb enough to want an MMO to be a war simulation, overlooking the facts that: (1) War is generally anything but fun; and (2) any game has to have sufficient motivation for the losers to keep playing, or it will eventually end.
Um... whose homeland was being destroyed in that video?
People like you make me want to send Osama bin Laden ten bucks.
"Seriously, how the heck can you first note that democracy results in more efficient cooperation than dictatorship, and then suggest that democracy should be "suspended" when cooperation is required?"
Because it doesn't always result in greater efficiency, as I made plain in the original post.
Your threats are risible. You'll do as you're told, just like everyone else.
You're missing Plato's point.
http://www.kiwipolitico.com/2009/12/climate-change-denial-a-lesson-from-plato/
Rich countries refusing to do anything about climate change is effectively deciding without obtaining the consent of people in poorer countries that the latter will pay the cost.
Once you acknowledge the externalities inherent in carbon emissions, the only way you could preserve democracy is by having a democratically elected world parliament decide the issue, and if Lovelock is right, even that might not work.
The fact that people in rich countries would not consent to a world vote on reducing emissions shows how hollow talk of democracy among the rich is.
This isn't true. Democratic government is preferable under most circumstances. It is much easier to secure co-operation and deal with dissent if people have a genuine stake in society and the government exists by consent. Democracy has been successful for reasons of efficiency more than any other reason. It would very likely be much easier to restore democracy than you think.
But Lovelock is right. There are certain sorts of problems that democracies can't really deal with. That's why democracy and democratic freedoms are sometimes curtailed during war. In particular, democracies are poor at dealing with slowly developing, complex, and eventually catastrophic problems. WWII is a good example.
All I see is people crying like bitches about Lovelock's argument, or indulging in climate change denialism. None of this is addressing his argument. If democracy can't fix it and climate change is that big of a problem, it follows that we have to dispense with democracy (perhaps only in certain respects) until the problem is fixed. Crying like a bitch because you don't like the situation isn't solving anything.
In fact, all that needs to be done is for the political class to agree to fix the carbon problem no matter what the voters think. Such solutions are not unprecedented in democracies.
That seems reasonable. What's unreasonable is saying that you personally can live with the effects of climate change. I'm sure that the millions of people who would suffer terribly because of climate change would have a problem with your "choice". It's a global problem. If you just choose for yourself and screw everyone else, then you are justifying the use of force against yourself.
If rich countries think that they can ignore climate change and not suffer Al Qaeda x 100, then they are sadly mistaken. The world's poor aren't going to go quietly just so you can have "democracy".
Because, although you wouldn't know it from the way people talk, in some contexts freedom is a bad thing. Sometimes everyone benefits from imposed regulation.
But, even if you think that state regulation is wrong, we are talking about a private company choosing to regulate its own products. What some people are asking is for Apple to be compelled to open up their platform. That doesn't sound like promoting freedom, but forcing Apple to bow to the will of a minority of users.
If Apple is wrong, then the device will fail in the market. If Apple is right, then less freedom is something that a sufficient number of users will be willing to trade off to use their products. Most users are not power users. Why shouldn't they be able to buy the computer they want? It's like saying that only hi fi equipment should be manufactured and that everyone who wants to play music has to buy it. Some people don't need or want that.
In the end this boils down to the same argument regarding Apple's refusal to sanction installation of OS X on non-Apple hardware.
If you want to prevent companies that aren't monopolies from choosing their own business models, then that would probably be the end of capitalism.
Why should it? These folks have a warped understanding of privacy. How bad does it have to get? What if someone produced an accurate mind reading device? Then thoughtcrime would become a reality. I imagine people would have a problem with that. Well, I have the same problem with government spooks being able to access my private telephone calls.
Nobody ever asks us if we are willing to give up our privacy in exchange for security.
More proof that God synchronizes mental and physical events. Substance dualists rejoice! ;)
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Occasionalism
I disagree.
Both Android and the iPhone OS are ultraportable computing platforms. The iPhone isn't really a phone per se, but a mobile computing device with phone functionality. Apple will even sell you one sans phone if you want it.
Successful competitors to the iPhone will be those that understand that the point is to make a better ultraportable computing platform, not necessarily a better phone. I think Google may be able to do that, but I don't think RIM can, and Microsoft's development team appears to be a circular firing squad.
As usual, competition is only good for end users, so I hope Android does well.
Dude, Italian scientists helped design this. You can be sure it's grope ready.
I regularly ask myself the same question.
One answer is that moves are already afoot in many countries to bring critical reasoning into the secondary curriculum.
"Having met a large number of history and philosophy majors, I can tell you that they are no more politically and/or civically informed or capable than the average engineering or physics major."
Having taught both, I can confidently assure you that this is bollocks. Take a couple of A grade students. One in engineering and one in philosophy. Watch the engineer rip the philosopher to shreds in discussions about engineering, and then watch the philosophy student humiliate the engineer in an ethical argument.
That's just the way specialization works.
Now if we're talking about "C" students, it will be a different story, due to the decline of pass standards in the humanities (something which is deplorable).
I don't think you get what I am saying because you have a narrow view of what counts as a burden on society. Sure, someone who spends their life drinking away welfare checks when they could be working is a drain, but so is someone who can't or won't subject the decisions of our political masters to rational evaluation. By voting, such people lead to suboptimal political outcomes. That's one reason that compulsory civics education is so important. We also need a significant number of people with degrees like philosophy and history spread throughout society. It's like seeding our society with a bunch of people like Socrates.
To be fair, we also need to reform education in the humanities. It has become rather soft and lax for cultural reasons and needs to be returned to the hardass standards of yore. It is still like this in some places (Classics departments for example).
"We've elevated the office job and made skilled trades a thing of contempt."
I agree absolutely. I think it is disgraceful that people hold trades in contempt. There is nothing degrading about being a plumber or an electrician.
I take it that you didn't notice you were living in a democracy. Degrees like history or philosophy that have no direct application to employment (although the skills developed in doing such a degree have a general application) are exactly the sort of degrees that engender an informed and capable citizenry capable of properly holding its representatives to account. A citizenry incapable of evaluating arguments and ignorant of history is more easily duped.
It has long been a dream of fascists to eliminate such forms of education for precisely that reason.
And before anyone starts, you should already have noticed that the same phenomenon occurs with science degrees. Some of those who think science degrees are great as long as science graduates are making useful widgets tend to get very agitated when science graduates start using their education to hold policy makers to account (climate change is an obvious example, as is teaching evolution in schools).
Beware those who say that all education must be "useful". They often have a hidden agenda.
Your argument doesn't follow. Free will might well be an illusion, but that doesn't mean we should stop locking up criminals or cracking down on fraud or that the actions of such people would stop making the lives of others worse.
It depends what you mean by "the rules". If you want to be a really successful criminal, it almost always means joining or founding some form of organized crime (and before people start, I'm including being elected to political office). Organized crime is simply a replacement trust network for society at large, and while they break society's rules, they don't break their own very often, since the penalty for doing so is usually far worse than anything society metes out.
In order to live almost any kind of life that could be called a "success" you have to form and sustain trust networks with others. It's just unavoidable.
Sometimes you can get away with breaking the rules, but this is quite uncommon. The only reason we don't think this is so is that we are so used to following the rules that we don't tend to notice when we're doing it.
There's also an unexamined assumption here (yet another example of Christianity's baleful influence on our culture) that people can actually choose to be good or bad. I'm not sure that this is the case for most people. Good people tend to be pained, shamed and distressed if they do bad things, so for such people there really isn't much of a sense in which they'd be "better off" breaking moral rules. Bad folks don't seem to care, so that's not a problem for them. Given that by the time most of us are old enough to ponder it, our moral characters are already formed, the idea of a "choice" is somewhat senseless. Ask yourself how many people you know who have radically altered their moral character. All such cases I know have involved some traumatic event, like going to jail, being the victim of a terrible crime, or some sort of head injury.
WoW also has a fairly large black market in the presence of illegal gold sellers.
If anything, the economics of MMOs are far less interesting than the socio-political aspects of the game. WoW is more or less set up to maximize character freedom. The police (GMs) are relatively ineffective, and apart from a few obvious things you aren't allowed to do, like call other players faggots in public chat, most anti-social behaviour is in practice insufficiently policed or not policed at all. I'm talking about things all the way from ninja looting and node stealing up to the use of illegal hacks (like the underground mining hack, for example). The small percentage of outright asshats on any server seem to be sufficient to prevent a general climate of trust from forming (even though most people are nice, and helpful).
The guild system is the only way where people can build decent trust networks, and these of course require human leadership. Even then, a good guild (meaning a guild with reasonable leadership and adequate policing) is hard to find and it can't get too large before it's too big to serve that function. But Azeroth as a whole suffers from severe social dysfunction.
I guess it just shows to go that any social environment would work just fine if only a way could be found to get rid of the 10% who are hell bent on exploitation, cheating, griefing and bending the rules to suit themselves (and these are the people who howl loudest at any attempt to fix things). WoW's economy suffers from many honest players having a disincentive to enter the market, because people who hack and cheat have an illegal competitive advantage. It's really no different from the real free market or the real world in that respect (a friend of mine who is a cop pointed out that the people who barely stay within the letter of the law are often as much of a social nuisance as genuine criminals - knowing some people I've seen in business, I am not surprised).
I think WoW stands as a living counterexample to all those who desire a lightly policed social system based entirely on consent.
Whatever one thinks of Chavez, your post is seriously misleading.
1. "OK for the dictatorial head of a murderous socialist regimes to name himself president for life."
(a) It's a strange dictator who wins by free and fair elections, multiple times.
(b) Who has he had killed?
(c) I know he calls himself a socialist, but he's more of a New Dealer.
(d) In what universe is changing the law so that you can run for election any number of times the same as making yourself president for life? Not everyone thinks term limits are a good idea. The US did not used to have them.
2. "shut down not-propogandizing-for-him media, "disappear" elected officials that disagree with him"
(a) If a major US television station had (i) collaborated in the (unconstitutional) attempted military overthrow of the United States government, and (ii) consistently referred to Obama as "the nigger" on air, do you think that such a station would be allowed to continue to broadcast? I have a bridge for sale if you think so.
(b) What credible reports are there of Chavez having people offed? I haven't seen any.
If you don't like the guy, then fine. There's no need to make shit up.
"When was the last time you saw two armies face each other across a field in two long lines and start firing at each other?"
The Democratic caucus factions have been doing that for the last 30 years.
If the F22 didn't appear to have all the hallmarks of a lemon, there would be no problem.
The US had it right in the 50s and 60s by not putting all its eggs in one basket, so if some of the aircraft turn out to suck, at least you have something else to fall back on. The F22 is a monumental gamble, and all we get from Lockheed is talk and more talk.