I don't know anything about Australian employment law, but in American many (most?) states are "employment at will" -- the boss can fire you for any reason except the few proscribed ones (illegal to discriminate based on short enumerated set of attributes, illegal to fire in retaliation for whistleblowing, etc). They can fire you for your taste in music (I can't tolerate anyone who listens to Brittney Spears in this company), your failure to address them as Your Imperial Majesty, your involvement with Boy Scouts, whatever.
I could go into all the reasons why, but this guy does a much better job of it. In a nutshell, micropayments impose huge transaction costs on the user for not a lot of benefit to them. The successful microcredit businesses, which are mostly classical utilities (phones, electricity, gas), are moving away from the microcredit model. Why should Internet anything start moving towards it?
Note that the most successful micropayment system right now is probably Google adWords. Laugh if you want, they allow users to contribute a trivial amount of real world currency to the author of a website and provide value added to both users and authors without unduly inconviniencing most users. And they do a couple million dollars in business every week.
And after you get a lawyer in the loop, game over. Two words: "class action". If your company enables a micro-fraud against, say, 1% of your million users, thats a certified class of 10,000 (or more -- anyone who answers their ad in the paper will be certified, because no one will bother using the money to check -- see the CD price-fixing settlement), and if you even inflicted a few pennies per user worth of damages the punitive component of the award will wreck you. (With, naturally, the first third going to the lawyers and the harmed users collecting nigh-valueless coupons.)
Hideho, Marvel. I'm the world's biggest fan of Ant Man. Granted, until I read this Slashdot article I have never heard of him -- but, now that I have and actually had a positive reaction I think this qualifies me for the job. Here is my proposal. You give me $50 million to make a movie. I will spend $2000 on a video camera and $10 on an ant farm, and I will make a movie of Ant Man's early days. I will put the other $49,997,990 in a 5% interest bearing CD for six months. At the end of six months, I will give you your $50 million back, skim off the interest as my "director's cut", and post my interpretation of Ant Man on the Internet for all to see and download for free. Maybe they'll share in my Ant Man fandom, maybe not. But you'll have $50 million dollars. This is the only one of the ten movies which will get you your money back, take this offer while you still can!
The fact that MMORPGs are a whole new revenue model for developers is one of the major reasons everyone and their dog tried to build one after the success of UO and Everquest. a) You're effectively immune to piracy of the monthly fee, even in markets where piracy *is* the market (hello, China) and b) you don't have to share 95% of the $15 a month with the publisher and Wal-Mart.
Ditto, WoW has murdered my spending on computer games. I've been playing it since launch, which means I've made about three quarterly payments now, right? I haven't bought another real computer game since HL2 came out. I did resubscribe to Puzzle Pirates though, mainly to play Hearts. Haven't bought a new console game in months, either (although I did buy a DS for train rides and have half beaten Kirby and DS Wars). WoW isn't really a huge monetary commitment (I mean, the monthly subscription is cheaper than a night's entertainment doing almost anything -- heck, where I live I can scarcely get dinner and a soda for $13), but it has a way of sucking up your prime gaming hours. I see new RPGs at the shop as I'm biking by and do the mental calculation "Nope, I don't have 60 hours to spend on that, I only have about 6 hours a week of gaming nowadays and WoW gets at least 4 of those".
I work for a technology incubator in the boonies of Japan. My salary is a matter of the public record, so why not -- after taxes its precisely 3 million yen (current exchange rate about 110 to the dollar). That includes medical and social security (which, not being Japanese, I'll get partially refunded in a lump sum when/if I leave the country -- about 80% of one month's salary for every year vested in the system). Living in Japan is expensive (~$600 a month for food for one person, and I weigh about 130 lbs), but I get my housing for very, very close to free. That deal probably saves me close to 10k a year.
Nintendo should release a cell shaded game where the main character is a persecuted homosexual who has to solve puzzles which refer to classical literature in order to avoid being lynched and attacked by a suspicious homophobic public. The goal is to be able to adopt a child in Missouri. Then, we can see what style is more grown up.
I see THAT game soaring to the top of the Japanese sales charts...
If you know, when you start development, that you will be making a game designed for digital distribution, then you can engineer around the problem of low bandwidth. Produce a minimal demo installation with the typical 30-45 minutes of play time for an 80mb download or whatever. And include a "buy it now" button which will give them an ordering interface directly inside of the application (or open up an external webbrowser if you really feel like it). The SECOND the game starts running you start streaming content down off the Internet with a background thread and you don't stop until they exit or you're done (actually, you may want to give the player the option of continuing the streaming in the background). Keep going even after they buy the game, too -- no reason you can't grab all the textures/models you need for level one before you grab the ones needed for level two, etc.
This sort of model also cries for Bittorrent, too. The bittorrent protocol is fire-and-forget for almost all users -- just build it into your game behind the scenes, and then other people end up paying for your bandwidth expense. You'd probably want to tweak the implementation a bit so that clients prioritize collecting the pieces in order, but its something thats quite doable. And, of course, not all games are multi-gig monstrosities.
If you use the sort of game-community/portal model that TFA advocates, you can share one common bittorrent network and preload content on your gamers machines ala Steam both as a way to maximize your torrenting efficiency and to also give seamless response when they buy a new product. Just make sure to add in some sort of DRM (doesn't have to be terribly invasive -- I think the "encrypt it all" thing was likely the biggest problem with Steam).
Its the industry standard in the US to waive the $50 of liability. Its a dirt-cheap bullet point you can put on your credit card solicitations ("You have NO FRAUD LIABILITY!"), and enough of the banks decided to do it that the others basically have no choice but to comply. (There is also a legal angle -- if your cardholder agreement says that you'll always be responsible for every cent of the fraud then, if fraud happens, the customer has no cause of action against you even if some portion of the fraud was theoretically your fault, say for negligence in disclosing customer information or what have you.)
In defense of the Deep Blue team, they spent a couple hundred million dollars, if I remember correctly, developing the heuristics that let the machine search the *important* parts of the problem space, because it just didn't have the power to brute-force the thing. And "What is the important part of the board? What are the important responses to consider?" are very, very difficult problems, which are classical AI.
To throw out two other examples of empirical AI advances, systems which could detect if a credit card transaction was fradulent or whether a communication was useful ("Ooh, an intelligent agent!") would once have been called AI. Now people turn up their nose and say "Hey, thats just applied statistics". When the algorithm is something more concrete than Black Magic, and generally pretty easy to grasp (e.g. Bayesian filters), people say "Hey, thats not what I thought you were going to come up with, so its not AI".
Then again, my career is basically focused on taking things out of the realm of AI and moving them into the algorithmically solved column, so what do I know.:)
"100 times" is what they have printed on their website (disclaimer: I'm reading it by way of Japanese -- yay for borrowing half the language from China -- and that character can mark degrees in Japanese as well as times). They also have an official explanation of where their name comes from which is written in English for the benefit of their investors. Apparently its from a classical Chinese poem about seeing something beautiful one hundred times.
Google's performance is generally pretty bad for Asian languages, at least compared to the way they dominate English language searches. Remember back in 1996 when you were using Hotbot and had to go through pages and pages of irrelevant results trying to find the one link that would have an answer to a simple question? Thats like what using Google to find Japanese is at the moment. I got asked last week to find some details for the boss on a new "digital paper" product that got debuted at the Aichi Expo. After fifteen minutes of fruitless banging away at Google with the obvious Japanese search terms (including the exact name of the product!), I found the company's press release in English on the first I'm Feeling Lucky, and then clicked the "Japanese" button at the top of their interface. Leading me to a page which was literally covered in the terms I had been searching for.
AAAAAAAAAAAAARGH. For the love of little apples, people, things like this DO NOT make people want to switch to OSS! Don't tell the user he is insufficiently intelligent to roll his own replacement to a feature which should a) work right, out of the box and b) which the competitor has!
And not even a real statistics geek would re-roll score normalization, standard deviation coding, or what have you. Whats the point? Thats like saying a real computer programmer should install their IDE of choice and then immediately start writing a regexp parsing library. Sure, you could do it, but why? Its a solved problem with great utility! That screams "Build me in!".
Not to ruin a perfectly good gag, but in the Soviet Union, the State owned the DVD player. Or would have, if the Soviet Union had ever put any money into basic consumer electronics ("Bah, opiates of the masses"). Central planning wasn't really a consumer-friendly move in any case -- they had an entire year without a toothbrush because the bureacrats forgot to put it on the production schedule.
Because your system takes significantly more work than "Turn on and it works", which is what all consumer electronics need to have to be accessible to the mass market. Early adopters are different. I was the first kid in school with a web page back in the day where anyone could write a daily journal, provided they knew how to format HTML properly and understood an FTP interface -- now even my mother has a blog, but she never has to deal with anymore more complicated than "type out my thoughts and hit 'post'".
Oh, yeah. Thats the ticket. Fix all those problems with volcanoes and hurricanes by flying all of humanity to a place where a 1/8th of an inch scratch in our hull means we all die. Sweet deal. Maybe we can put our webservers into low orbit where their status will be Up, Down, or Barbecued By Solar Flares.
Exactly. Why couldn't he have made a five minute phone call? "Hiya, glad you like my flash game. I was wondering if you'd be interested in purchasing a special Fuddruckers branded version? Given that I already have the game mostly ready, this could be done for very, very cheaply next to your website budget -- you feel free to make an offer, but I'm thinking mid four figures would do nicely. Of course, if you don't take me up on this offer, I'm going to have to ask that you not link directly to my game. It costs me bandwidth, you realize, and you're the only one who benefits."
Heck, given that you get someone different from the HTML peon they might be happy to send you money just to eliminate the threat of you suing them.
In Soviet Russia, someone pours Natalie Portman down Hot Grit's pants. (Asked for comment, Hot Grit said "If I wasn't a strict Marxist-Leninist who thought religion was the opiate of the masses I would say 'Thank God for Communism!', but as it is I'll have to content myself with having Natalie Portman being poured down my pants." Natalie Portman could not be reached for comment.)
The first thing they'll be passing is a relief bill. Granted, it will be porked-out (disaster relief is ALWAYS porked-out), but the folks down in New Orleans and the surrounding areas need it at the moment. I share the same general distrust of the Congresscritters but they've got their uses, and this is one of those times.
Wasn't Londo the fake French guy? Ahh, my favorite part of that show. He also gets all the good lines in the novelizations -- the introduction to the first one, which is framed around Londo telling a story to two human children, is a classic. Eons better than most mass-market sci-fi, to say nothing of mass-market sci-fi series.
Disclaimer: I'm not a lawyer, I'm the tech guy who occasionally consults with them to make sure they don't file a lawsuit alleging someone "downloaded a virus into a database" (smart guy, but he really meant SQL injection attack). The RIAA is going to get p0wned on this one, because they're fighting this case on autopilot (makes sense -- no way they can justify the resources to fight it) and are getting beaten up on both the facts (they can't find a specific infringing act) and the law (see the Memorandum of Law for the lady, its really actually readable even to a layman). And the guys working for her are sharp -- after they realized there was a wee little hole in the case against her they've driven a wedge through it and are starting to close the door (holy metaphor mixing Batman). The other side has, through basically laziness and failure to brief correctly, already conceded that they are losing the relevant arguments, and that loss of the relevant arguments should cost them the case, AND that they can't refile the case at a later date due to a procedural error.
Its over except for the actual order of dismissal.
I don't think this is necessarily the just result (after all, we all know that those files didn't come from a CD and that while they were in her share folder they in all probability got downloaded) but its the Proper Interpretation of the Law that my legal beagles are always blathering about.
Slashdot Mirror
I don't know anything about Australian employment law, but in American many (most?) states are "employment at will" -- the boss can fire you for any reason except the few proscribed ones (illegal to discriminate based on short enumerated set of attributes, illegal to fire in retaliation for whistleblowing, etc). They can fire you for your taste in music (I can't tolerate anyone who listens to Brittney Spears in this company), your failure to address them as Your Imperial Majesty, your involvement with Boy Scouts, whatever.
Don't you mean FRD? OWND, BTCH. (Curse you lameness filter!)
Note that the most successful micropayment system right now is probably Google adWords. Laugh if you want, they allow users to contribute a trivial amount of real world currency to the author of a website and provide value added to both users and authors without unduly inconviniencing most users. And they do a couple million dollars in business every week.
And after you get a lawyer in the loop, game over. Two words: "class action". If your company enables a micro-fraud against, say, 1% of your million users, thats a certified class of 10,000 (or more -- anyone who answers their ad in the paper will be certified, because no one will bother using the money to check -- see the CD price-fixing settlement), and if you even inflicted a few pennies per user worth of damages the punitive component of the award will wreck you. (With, naturally, the first third going to the lawyers and the harmed users collecting nigh-valueless coupons.)
They'd be lucky if they could even convince swarms to pirate it by hosting a .torrent themselves.
Hideho, Marvel. I'm the world's biggest fan of Ant Man. Granted, until I read this Slashdot article I have never heard of him -- but, now that I have and actually had a positive reaction I think this qualifies me for the job. Here is my proposal. You give me $50 million to make a movie. I will spend $2000 on a video camera and $10 on an ant farm, and I will make a movie of Ant Man's early days. I will put the other $49,997,990 in a 5% interest bearing CD for six months. At the end of six months, I will give you your $50 million back, skim off the interest as my "director's cut", and post my interpretation of Ant Man on the Internet for all to see and download for free. Maybe they'll share in my Ant Man fandom, maybe not. But you'll have $50 million dollars. This is the only one of the ten movies which will get you your money back, take this offer while you still can!
The fact that MMORPGs are a whole new revenue model for developers is one of the major reasons everyone and their dog tried to build one after the success of UO and Everquest. a) You're effectively immune to piracy of the monthly fee, even in markets where piracy *is* the market (hello, China) and b) you don't have to share 95% of the $15 a month with the publisher and Wal-Mart.
Ditto, WoW has murdered my spending on computer games. I've been playing it since launch, which means I've made about three quarterly payments now, right? I haven't bought another real computer game since HL2 came out. I did resubscribe to Puzzle Pirates though, mainly to play Hearts. Haven't bought a new console game in months, either (although I did buy a DS for train rides and have half beaten Kirby and DS Wars). WoW isn't really a huge monetary commitment (I mean, the monthly subscription is cheaper than a night's entertainment doing almost anything -- heck, where I live I can scarcely get dinner and a soda for $13), but it has a way of sucking up your prime gaming hours. I see new RPGs at the shop as I'm biking by and do the mental calculation "Nope, I don't have 60 hours to spend on that, I only have about 6 hours a week of gaming nowadays and WoW gets at least 4 of those".
I work for a technology incubator in the boonies of Japan. My salary is a matter of the public record, so why not -- after taxes its precisely 3 million yen (current exchange rate about 110 to the dollar). That includes medical and social security (which, not being Japanese, I'll get partially refunded in a lump sum when/if I leave the country -- about 80% of one month's salary for every year vested in the system). Living in Japan is expensive (~$600 a month for food for one person, and I weigh about 130 lbs), but I get my housing for very, very close to free. That deal probably saves me close to 10k a year.
Hah, hah, hah. Thats a good one. You had me going there for a minute.
I see THAT game soaring to the top of the Japanese sales charts...
This sort of model also cries for Bittorrent, too. The bittorrent protocol is fire-and-forget for almost all users -- just build it into your game behind the scenes, and then other people end up paying for your bandwidth expense. You'd probably want to tweak the implementation a bit so that clients prioritize collecting the pieces in order, but its something thats quite doable. And, of course, not all games are multi-gig monstrosities.
If you use the sort of game-community/portal model that TFA advocates, you can share one common bittorrent network and preload content on your gamers machines ala Steam both as a way to maximize your torrenting efficiency and to also give seamless response when they buy a new product. Just make sure to add in some sort of DRM (doesn't have to be terribly invasive -- I think the "encrypt it all" thing was likely the biggest problem with Steam).
Its the industry standard in the US to waive the $50 of liability. Its a dirt-cheap bullet point you can put on your credit card solicitations ("You have NO FRAUD LIABILITY!"), and enough of the banks decided to do it that the others basically have no choice but to comply. (There is also a legal angle -- if your cardholder agreement says that you'll always be responsible for every cent of the fraud then, if fraud happens, the customer has no cause of action against you even if some portion of the fraud was theoretically your fault, say for negligence in disclosing customer information or what have you.)
To throw out two other examples of empirical AI advances, systems which could detect if a credit card transaction was fradulent or whether a communication was useful ("Ooh, an intelligent agent!") would once have been called AI. Now people turn up their nose and say "Hey, thats just applied statistics". When the algorithm is something more concrete than Black Magic, and generally pretty easy to grasp (e.g. Bayesian filters), people say "Hey, thats not what I thought you were going to come up with, so its not AI".
Then again, my career is basically focused on taking things out of the realm of AI and moving them into the algorithmically solved column, so what do I know. :)
"100 times" is what they have printed on their website (disclaimer: I'm reading it by way of Japanese -- yay for borrowing half the language from China -- and that character can mark degrees in Japanese as well as times). They also have an official explanation of where their name comes from which is written in English for the benefit of their investors. Apparently its from a classical Chinese poem about seeing something beautiful one hundred times.
Google's performance is generally pretty bad for Asian languages, at least compared to the way they dominate English language searches. Remember back in 1996 when you were using Hotbot and had to go through pages and pages of irrelevant results trying to find the one link that would have an answer to a simple question? Thats like what using Google to find Japanese is at the moment. I got asked last week to find some details for the boss on a new "digital paper" product that got debuted at the Aichi Expo. After fifteen minutes of fruitless banging away at Google with the obvious Japanese search terms (including the exact name of the product!), I found the company's press release in English on the first I'm Feeling Lucky, and then clicked the "Japanese" button at the top of their interface. Leading me to a page which was literally covered in the terms I had been searching for.
And not even a real statistics geek would re-roll score normalization, standard deviation coding, or what have you. Whats the point? Thats like saying a real computer programmer should install their IDE of choice and then immediately start writing a regexp parsing library. Sure, you could do it, but why? Its a solved problem with great utility! That screams "Build me in!".
Not to ruin a perfectly good gag, but in the Soviet Union, the State owned the DVD player. Or would have, if the Soviet Union had ever put any money into basic consumer electronics ("Bah, opiates of the masses"). Central planning wasn't really a consumer-friendly move in any case -- they had an entire year without a toothbrush because the bureacrats forgot to put it on the production schedule.
Because your system takes significantly more work than "Turn on and it works", which is what all consumer electronics need to have to be accessible to the mass market. Early adopters are different. I was the first kid in school with a web page back in the day where anyone could write a daily journal, provided they knew how to format HTML properly and understood an FTP interface -- now even my mother has a blog, but she never has to deal with anymore more complicated than "type out my thoughts and hit 'post'".
Oh, yeah. Thats the ticket. Fix all those problems with volcanoes and hurricanes by flying all of humanity to a place where a 1/8th of an inch scratch in our hull means we all die. Sweet deal. Maybe we can put our webservers into low orbit where their status will be Up, Down, or Barbecued By Solar Flares.
Exactly. Why couldn't he have made a five minute phone call? "Hiya, glad you like my flash game. I was wondering if you'd be interested in purchasing a special Fuddruckers branded version? Given that I already have the game mostly ready, this could be done for very, very cheaply next to your website budget -- you feel free to make an offer, but I'm thinking mid four figures would do nicely. Of course, if you don't take me up on this offer, I'm going to have to ask that you not link directly to my game. It costs me bandwidth, you realize, and you're the only one who benefits." Heck, given that you get someone different from the HTML peon they might be happy to send you money just to eliminate the threat of you suing them.
In Soviet Russia, someone pours Natalie Portman down Hot Grit's pants. (Asked for comment, Hot Grit said "If I wasn't a strict Marxist-Leninist who thought religion was the opiate of the masses I would say 'Thank God for Communism!', but as it is I'll have to content myself with having Natalie Portman being poured down my pants." Natalie Portman could not be reached for comment.)
The first thing they'll be passing is a relief bill. Granted, it will be porked-out (disaster relief is ALWAYS porked-out), but the folks down in New Orleans and the surrounding areas need it at the moment. I share the same general distrust of the Congresscritters but they've got their uses, and this is one of those times.
Wasn't Londo the fake French guy? Ahh, my favorite part of that show. He also gets all the good lines in the novelizations -- the introduction to the first one, which is framed around Londo telling a story to two human children, is a classic. Eons better than most mass-market sci-fi, to say nothing of mass-market sci-fi series.
Its over except for the actual order of dismissal.
I don't think this is necessarily the just result (after all, we all know that those files didn't come from a CD and that while they were in her share folder they in all probability got downloaded) but its the Proper Interpretation of the Law that my legal beagles are always blathering about.