Surely there was some kind of trigger in the software that would detect these kind of errors! Windows asks if im sure when I try to delete a file and even then it only sends to to the recyle bin!
As much as I hate Sony you don't think they are absorbing the cost as well? Just because they get to "write it off" doesn't mean they magically get the money back. A write off or a charge off is just an accounting term. They will probably get to report that write off when they file their income taxes -- it will reduce the amount of taxable income they had -- but they still have to absorb the cost.
IANAA (I am not an accountant) but here is the run down with that tax loophole. If you earn Earn $20. With the standard made up tax rate of say 50% you would pay $10 and only have $10 left, but because you are a corporation that is considered profit and you are taxed twice you pay another 50% of that profit.
Now you have $5 left over for your shareholders. Not much of a profit, but anyhoos...
Lets say you earn $20 but get to write off $10 due to theoretical losses. You are only now taxed on the original $20 and get $10 back, but now if your company lost $10 from a write off now you have $0 to tax for the profits.
Your company now has $10 left over for your shareholders.*
Now which one would you like to have? The $5 or $10? You see tax write offs can earn you money that you would not have had as a corporation.
*Yes all above is rather abstracted and figured are all made up and doesn't really go over tax law, but didn't I say I wasn't an accountant!
An important part of marketing is understanding your audience and applying that information to the product to, well, make sure that it's a product that people will buy.
Regardless if you know your audience, if you make a bad, buggy, rushed out the door, hard to use game that isn't fun then it doens't matter how well your marketing team is.
But... a weakened field for a few decades will not send us all to early graves. The biggest impact of a changing magnetic field would be to:
I wish I could find the source this, but it was an episode on Nova I saw a while ago about the magnetic fields and pole reversal, but it has been known that when the poles flip it tends to last longer than just a few decades. One is known to last over 3,000 years.
But in general, it won't be too bad because obviously life survived through that. Increased cancer rates will most likely be noticiable.
Our electronics industry might have some issues though.
So how does giving someone a "noise blast" make you a more violent person? This type of study seems so flawed that its humorous.
I'm not sure. That may be more competitive in nature. The gamers get the options to punish his opponent much like they would punish people online (like killing someone in hand to hand in Counter Strike or DoD... it is just embarassing to die like that).
But would playing video make you immune emmotionally to gun fire, burning flesh, blood, guts, people screaming and crying. The only way to tell would be have them compete while flashing violent images (i'm mean faces of death) while the smell of burning meat is being pumped into their rooms with screams of the dying.
Many hardend war veterns don't even truly get over what they have seen in real life. I doubt video games would fix that either.
If people don't want to wade through hundreds of boring hours of leveling up before they are allowed to do anything interesting, the logical solution is to fix the game so that they wouldn't have to. When will MMOG writers figure out that nobody wants to kill rats for a living?
My thoughts were to copy what Ultima Online had going for its test servers for a while back in 2000. Players go through a gate and it allocates points for a template. No worrying about trying to gain stats... You just grabbed a weapon and starting killing people... Errr...I mean things.
But if I were to make an MMORPG, I'd give out all the stat and skill points at the start and let people create the player they want and then play the game. Gold would be important, but not so much that it is a task. There would be no superitems in which just by having it would make you 10x better than other players, but there would be unique items (mostly cosmetic).
Of course this would be more like original UO with PvP and the gold farmers would have problems dealing with the resident PK's;)
They wreck the in-game economy and then charge you real money to be able to play the game like you should. Do you want to know why that sword hasn't dropped after 100 kills? It's because some jerk item farmer kills 10,000 every single week, and the developers have had to drastically reduce the droprate to prevent the item from being common. You know why you can't afford to buy that pair of boots? Because gold farmers have driven the price of all items way up past what a normal player can afford.
The game economy is a closed system. Unless they are duping items, they aren't magically inflating prices and introducing things that wouldn't be there there in the first place. Sure you can trade real money for WoW gold, but that gold is still in the game nor does it add any extra gold other than what the players farmed off the mobs (sure they might farm less, but it isn't like people wouldn't do that anyones without being paid).
Secondly, I thought WoW instancing prevents this or at least makes everything accessible to everyone rather than camping out for unique items.
The only way you can remove gold farming is to remove the treadmill. Apparently if people are paying real money so that others do tedious tasks over and over again, then maybe they should remove some of those tedious tasks.
The parent was spouting forth stuff on how capitalism wasn't the fundamental driver of freedom.
For some reason I recall the American revolution happened because the Colonists didn't want to be taxed without represenation. There were of course qualms with many American businessmen who wanted the British East India's monopoly removed, but I don't think that would good if we said our founding fathers killed British soldiers for the sake of money.
They wanted to be able to govern and regulate themselves as they see fit with proper representation. Capitalism was just a system already in place of how things are done ("mine is mine but if you want we can trade") and taxes were levied in order to finance government instituions.
Capitalism in a sense is a method of freely doing this without government interference, but the founding fathers were also very aware that corporate entities also could limit freedoms and were very aware of the problem that the East India Company brought about. (remember what you say is capitialism is actually not true capitalism)
The founding fathers of the US were an interesting bunch; some of them were into some strange things. Many were members of secret societies, with hidden knowledge and rituals. You think the eye in the pyramid on the back of the dollar bill doesn't have some hidden meaning? Right. These people knew of the evil arcane power of the vampire-corporation; the British controlled the colonies with a few huge and powerful corporations. After the Revolution, they let corporations exist, but they reserved the right to plunge a stake into their hearts at any time. For the first 100 years of the US, corporations were highly limited. But they were plotting and planning their release. They got their big break during the Civil War. At the same time that black folks were getting freed from slavery, the vampires of Wall Street were slipping their bonds, setting up a slave system for all of us. In 1872, they convinced the Supreme Court that corporations had all the rights of a person. And that's what we have today; America Inc., a wholly owned subsidiary of GlobalCapitalists'R'Us.
I don't object to anyone owning personal property or capitalism in itself, but we me must get over the fact that what we have today in the United States is not capitalism (perhaps Corporate Socialism) and we must stop considering corporations as human beings... because they are not. They are being used as sheilds that can be used to circumvent your rights and commit opression where as the government cannot.
Just because you didn't vote for them, doesn't mean they would take power if given the chance.
but if you believe in capitalism as a fundamental driver of freedom, then markets must be opened, and MS should be allowed to set up shop and do business where they please
MS is not sentietn being. It has no freedoms or human rights to be given or taken away.
(BTW in India's constitution, they have removed most references of personal property rights in order to acheive better socialism ideals. Look it up on wiki or something)
Secondly...
Totalitarianism is not exclusive to controlled economies. Capitalism is not exclusive to freedom.
They can be interchanged fairly easily. My question to you would be, do we want freedom for individuals to do business or do we superceede them with anthromorphized organizations desires for stock price gains?
What's even goofier is that in OS X, as far as I can figure, "show file extension" is a file-specific flag, not a user-specific flag. Unless I'm missing something, it's impossible to get OS X to show file extensions on all files all the time.
When you download and run a program (that doesn't require admin password to install) OS X will let you know that you are about to run a program for the first time and ask if you want to do this.
Either we educate AOLusers - in English rather than in computer science - so that they use more complex language that machines can't readily mimic, or we shut down file transfers over IM.
On the flip side, if someone messaged me in aim with proper english spellings and correct grammar, I'd be more suspect that they are a bot rather than a real person.
No one spends time spell checking aim messages and common mistakes constantly occur. If the conversation was perfect, flags would start to raised. That is why AI needs to have programmed imperfections to pass as a human.
However this situation is mearly a canned text response.
Is that our whole aim as a species? To manufacture more and more goods?
I'd hope our end goal as a species would be trying to reverse the 2nd law of thermodynamics. Barring that... Everything we do will be pointless in the grand scheme of things.
Of course your suggestion of higher education and technological improvement will lead the road towards that goal. However, the human race might not survive long enough to even have to consider this problem, but I tend to be an optimist.
However, don't discount technological progress through entertainment and mass production. The singularity might happen because we spent all our time trying to develop high end cpus and AI's for the PS5 or Xbox720.
Actually, the "best" (i.e. most efficient) solution for society would be to execute the unproductive members.* We don't actually do that, of course, because as a society we're more concerned with being humane than being efficient.
Actually, a better solution would be to offer vasectomies with a $1,000 bonus upfront for volunteering to be sterilized.
Maybe $10,000 to women because of the medical complications involved.
Anyone could volunteer regardless of race and wealth status. Those who were hard up for money (or of lower caliber who wanted money for drugs etc) would tend to gravitate towards this as an easy way to get money.
Therefore they would not be producing unwanted children or children they could not support. Since the program was totally voluntary, anyone who really wanted children could just opt to not go through the process or perhaps reverse it with a more exspensive procedure down the road.
The problem with this way of thinking, though, is that most ordinary people believe that terrorism is not an act of God, and that it is, in some way, a preventable issue.
I've always told people that terrorism is unpreventable. Anyone who randomly decides to give up his life to take others can and will do it. Anyone could spontaneously convert to Radical Islam, Fundie Christian, or heck even radical Hinduism and then go out and fill up a can of gasoline and set it off on the closest public gathering of people they deem to be unbelievers.
The reason why we don't see this is on a daily basis (at least in the states) is that most people (even deaply religious people) tend to not have desires to go out of their way to do this. Only when you piss someone off or put them in a situation favorable to finding salvation through self termination (ie they have nothing else to loose and everything to gain) will they go and do this.
I'm not saying you shouldn't punish people for wrong doings and not take preventive measures, but it is just silly to think that you can stop people from going over the edge at all times during the day. The only way to defeat terrorism is to downplay it and almost ignore it. If terrorism doesn't get headlines and everyone accepts that it is just another way to die but is highly unlikley in terms of ways to die and moves on with the life, the sooner people will stop using terror as a means of political agenda tool.
After all, that is the whole point of terror.
Besides you are more likley to be shot and murdered for your money than for your religion.
Brains look for order. We've known that for ages. Finding order is how a brain learns, it's how the brain separates relevant details from the background noise. The ability to identify order is the whole basis of intelligence. Every sense, every stimulus, every aspect of the brain has order-seeking overtones. This feature of brains is so absolutely universal that it must be deeply ingrained into the neurons themselves.
Would you speculate that brains are the universes counter balance to Entropy?
That the universe had to make humans in order to reverse chaos and put things into order. Only intelligent life can do this so I'm not sure what else humans are good for. (As by order I mean just reversing entropy... not monolithic justice systems)
I don't like where this disrespect for life is going.
Without sacrifices of sentient life, all life is doomed anyways. I for one wouldn't mind donating parts to science if it means the a step closer in technological advancement. Especially, if I might end up in some computer. You may object now, but you won't in 1,000 years.
"Opfer müssen gebracht werden!" (Sacrifices must be made) -Otto Lilienthal
Also (about the icky disecting rats part) are you aware people have been disecting human corpses for science for quite some time now? (and still do!) And lastly, an organic brain would be the best opponent in the battle field. If the enemy cannot predict your next move they will have a hard time fighting you. A predictible AI will be analyzed and defeated by an unpredictible AI.
Hrm... You've given me an idea for an expiriment. I'll put a keyboard in a mouse cage with a full view of my monitor:
If he jumps on the delete key and deletes a spam message, he'll get a peice of cheese. If he deletes a legitimate peice of email, he will get an electric shock. If he hits ctrl+alt+del, I'll be using him as tech support.
I mean Microsoft already has their system out; Sony will have their system out soon. And Nintendo doesn't even have a launch date.
Do you remember the SNES, N64, and Game Cube? They all came to the table after the competition. Nintendo has a wait and see and do things right attitude rather than the first to market.
Slashdot Mirror
Surely there was some kind of trigger in the software that would detect these kind of errors! Windows asks if im sure when I try to delete a file and even then it only sends to to the recyle bin!
He was holding down the shift key.
As much as I hate Sony you don't think they are absorbing the cost as well? Just because they get to "write it off" doesn't mean they magically get the money back. A write off or a charge off is just an accounting term. They will probably get to report that write off when they file their income taxes -- it will reduce the amount of taxable income they had -- but they still have to absorb the cost.
IANAA (I am not an accountant) but here is the run down with that tax loophole. If you earn Earn $20. With the standard made up tax rate of say 50% you would pay $10 and only have $10 left, but because you are a corporation that is considered profit and you are taxed twice you pay another 50% of that profit.
Now you have $5 left over for your shareholders. Not much of a profit, but anyhoos...
Lets say you earn $20 but get to write off $10 due to theoretical losses. You are only now taxed on the original $20 and get $10 back, but now if your company lost $10 from a write off now you have $0 to tax for the profits.
Your company now has $10 left over for your shareholders.*
Now which one would you like to have? The $5 or $10? You see tax write offs can earn you money that you would not have had as a corporation.
*Yes all above is rather abstracted and figured are all made up and doesn't really go over tax law, but didn't I say I wasn't an accountant!
An important part of marketing is understanding your audience and applying that information to the product to, well, make sure that it's a product that people will buy.
Regardless if you know your audience, if you make a bad, buggy, rushed out the door, hard to use game that isn't fun then it doens't matter how well your marketing team is.
Once we fuck it up, we're extinct.
Waddya mean we, human!
-Signed Cockroaches of the World
But... a weakened field for a few decades will not send us all to early graves. The biggest impact of a changing magnetic field would be to:
I wish I could find the source this, but it was an episode on Nova I saw a while ago about the magnetic fields and pole reversal, but it has been known that when the poles flip it tends to last longer than just a few decades. One is known to last over 3,000 years.
But in general, it won't be too bad because obviously life survived through that. Increased cancer rates will most likely be noticiable.
Our electronics industry might have some issues though.
I found the link on the show on PBS:
http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/nova/magnetic/
Better marketing does not make a better game.
So how does giving someone a "noise blast" make you a more violent person? This type of study seems so flawed that its humorous.
I'm not sure. That may be more competitive in nature. The gamers get the options to punish his opponent much like they would punish people online (like killing someone in hand to hand in Counter Strike or DoD... it is just embarassing to die like that).
But would playing video make you immune emmotionally to gun fire, burning flesh, blood, guts, people screaming and crying. The only way to tell would be have them compete while flashing violent images (i'm mean faces of death) while the smell of burning meat is being pumped into their rooms with screams of the dying.
Many hardend war veterns don't even truly get over what they have seen in real life. I doubt video games would fix that either.
If people don't want to wade through hundreds of boring hours of leveling up before they are allowed to do anything interesting, the logical solution is to fix the game so that they wouldn't have to. When will MMOG writers figure out that nobody wants to kill rats for a living?
;)
My thoughts were to copy what Ultima Online had going for its test servers for a while back in 2000. Players go through a gate and it allocates points for a template. No worrying about trying to gain stats... You just grabbed a weapon and starting killing people... Errr...I mean things.
But if I were to make an MMORPG, I'd give out all the stat and skill points at the start and let people create the player they want and then play the game. Gold would be important, but not so much that it is a task. There would be no superitems in which just by having it would make you 10x better than other players, but there would be unique items (mostly cosmetic).
Of course this would be more like original UO with PvP and the gold farmers would have problems dealing with the resident PK's
They wreck the in-game economy and then charge you real money to be able to play the game like you should. Do you want to know why that sword hasn't dropped after 100 kills? It's because some jerk item farmer kills 10,000 every single week, and the developers have had to drastically reduce the droprate to prevent the item from being common. You know why you can't afford to buy that pair of boots? Because gold farmers have driven the price of all items way up past what a normal player can afford.
The game economy is a closed system. Unless they are duping items, they aren't magically inflating prices and introducing things that wouldn't be there there in the first place. Sure you can trade real money for WoW gold, but that gold is still in the game nor does it add any extra gold other than what the players farmed off the mobs (sure they might farm less, but it isn't like people wouldn't do that anyones without being paid).
Secondly, I thought WoW instancing prevents this or at least makes everything accessible to everyone rather than camping out for unique items.
The only way you can remove gold farming is to remove the treadmill. Apparently if people are paying real money so that others do tedious tasks over and over again, then maybe they should remove some of those tedious tasks.
Make the game a game, not a job.
But he hasn't had anything relevant to say about computers in a very long, long time.
Neither has Dvorak, Jobs, Gates, or Balmer, but that doesn't stop them.
For some reason I recall the American revolution happened because the Colonists didn't want to be taxed without represenation. There were of course qualms with many American businessmen who wanted the British East India's monopoly removed, but I don't think that would good if we said our founding fathers killed British soldiers for the sake of money.
They wanted to be able to govern and regulate themselves as they see fit with proper representation. Capitalism was just a system already in place of how things are done ("mine is mine but if you want we can trade") and taxes were levied in order to finance government instituions.
Capitalism in a sense is a method of freely doing this without government interference, but the founding fathers were also very aware that corporate entities also could limit freedoms and were very aware of the problem that the East India Company brought about. (remember what you say is capitialism is actually not true capitalism)
Now for an read:
Benjamin Franklin The Vampire Slayer
I don't object to anyone owning personal property or capitalism in itself, but we me must get over the fact that what we have today in the United States is not capitalism (perhaps Corporate Socialism) and we must stop considering corporations as human beings... because they are not. They are being used as sheilds that can be used to circumvent your rights and commit opression where as the government cannot.
Just because you didn't vote for them, doesn't mean they would take power if given the chance.
but if you believe in capitalism as a fundamental driver of freedom, then markets must be opened, and MS should be allowed to set up shop and do business where they please
MS is not sentietn being. It has no freedoms or human rights to be given or taken away.
(BTW in India's constitution, they have removed most references of personal property rights in order to acheive better socialism ideals. Look it up on wiki or something)
Secondly...
Totalitarianism is not exclusive to controlled economies.
Capitalism is not exclusive to freedom.
They can be interchanged fairly easily. My question to you would be, do we want freedom for individuals to do business or do we superceede them with anthromorphized organizations desires for stock price gains?
What's even goofier is that in OS X, as far as I can figure, "show file extension" is a file-specific flag, not a user-specific flag. Unless I'm missing something, it's impossible to get OS X to show file extensions on all files all the time.
When you download and run a program (that doesn't require admin password to install) OS X will let you know that you are about to run a program for the first time and ask if you want to do this.
Either we educate AOLusers - in English rather than in computer science - so that they use more complex language that machines can't readily mimic, or we shut down file transfers over IM.
On the flip side, if someone messaged me in aim with proper english spellings and correct grammar, I'd be more suspect that they are a bot rather than a real person.
No one spends time spell checking aim messages and common mistakes constantly occur. If the conversation was perfect, flags would start to raised. That is why AI needs to have programmed imperfections to pass as a human.
However this situation is mearly a canned text response.
my God, this one will be unstoppable.
I dunno... It is one thing to get a virus via aim, but I'd be more concerned if it gave me a link and said:
"lol no this is not goatse man"
Is that our whole aim as a species? To manufacture more and more goods?
I'd hope our end goal as a species would be trying to reverse the 2nd law of thermodynamics. Barring that... Everything we do will be pointless in the grand scheme of things.
Of course your suggestion of higher education and technological improvement will lead the road towards that goal. However, the human race might not survive long enough to even have to consider this problem, but I tend to be an optimist.
However, don't discount technological progress through entertainment and mass production. The singularity might happen because we spent all our time trying to develop high end cpus and AI's for the PS5 or Xbox720.
Actually, the "best" (i.e. most efficient) solution for society would be to execute the unproductive members.* We don't actually do that, of course, because as a society we're more concerned with being humane than being efficient.
Actually, a better solution would be to offer vasectomies with a $1,000 bonus upfront for volunteering to be sterilized.
Maybe $10,000 to women because of the medical complications involved.
Anyone could volunteer regardless of race and wealth status. Those who were hard up for money (or of lower caliber who wanted money for drugs etc) would tend to gravitate towards this as an easy way to get money.
Therefore they would not be producing unwanted children or children they could not support. Since the program was totally voluntary, anyone who really wanted children could just opt to not go through the process or perhaps reverse it with a more exspensive procedure down the road.
That's what Stalin did. And we all know how well that went.
No. No. No.
You got Stalinism all wrong...
Everyone was productive. Just a lot of people died in that process of being productive.
The problem with this way of thinking, though, is that most ordinary people believe that terrorism is not an act of God, and that it is, in some way, a preventable issue.
I've always told people that terrorism is unpreventable. Anyone who randomly decides to give up his life to take others can and will do it. Anyone could spontaneously convert to Radical Islam, Fundie Christian, or heck even radical Hinduism and then go out and fill up a can of gasoline and set it off on the closest public gathering of people they deem to be unbelievers.
The reason why we don't see this is on a daily basis (at least in the states) is that most people (even deaply religious people) tend to not have desires to go out of their way to do this. Only when you piss someone off or put them in a situation favorable to finding salvation through self termination (ie they have nothing else to loose and everything to gain) will they go and do this.
I'm not saying you shouldn't punish people for wrong doings and not take preventive measures, but it is just silly to think that you can stop people from going over the edge at all times during the day. The only way to defeat terrorism is to downplay it and almost ignore it. If terrorism doesn't get headlines and everyone accepts that it is just another way to die but is highly unlikley in terms of ways to die and moves on with the life, the sooner people will stop using terror as a means of political agenda tool.
After all, that is the whole point of terror.
Besides you are more likley to be shot and murdered for your money than for your religion.
Brains look for order. We've known that for ages. Finding order is how a brain learns, it's how the brain separates relevant details from the background noise. The ability to identify order is the whole basis of intelligence. Every sense, every stimulus, every aspect of the brain has order-seeking overtones. This feature of brains is so absolutely universal that it must be deeply ingrained into the neurons themselves.
Would you speculate that brains are the universes counter balance to Entropy?
That the universe had to make humans in order to reverse chaos and put things into order. Only intelligent life can do this so I'm not sure what else humans are good for. (As by order I mean just reversing entropy... not monolithic justice systems)
I don't like where this disrespect for life is going.
Without sacrifices of sentient life, all life is doomed anyways. I for one wouldn't mind donating parts to science if it means the a step closer in technological advancement. Especially, if I might end up in some computer. You may object now, but you won't in 1,000 years.
"Opfer müssen gebracht werden!" (Sacrifices must be made) -Otto Lilienthal
Also (about the icky disecting rats part) are you aware people have been disecting human corpses for science for quite some time now? (and still do!) And lastly, an organic brain would be the best opponent in the battle field. If the enemy cannot predict your next move they will have a hard time fighting you. A predictible AI will be analyzed and defeated by an unpredictible AI.
Ultra-intelligent spam filters. //yay!
Hrm... You've given me an idea for an expiriment. I'll put a keyboard in a mouse cage with a full view of my monitor:
If he jumps on the delete key and deletes a spam message, he'll get a peice of cheese.
If he deletes a legitimate peice of email, he will get an electric shock.
If he hits ctrl+alt+del, I'll be using him as tech support.
You could have a speculative market!
Kind of like selling EQ or WoW money.
I mean Microsoft already has their system out; Sony will have their system out soon. And Nintendo doesn't even have a launch date.
Do you remember the SNES, N64, and Game Cube? They all came to the table after the competition. Nintendo has a wait and see and do things right attitude rather than the first to market.
it's free
you get what you pay for
Then why was it better in the 1990's? It was free than as much as it is free now.