It seems like a lot of the commenters here are missing the point. They say, "Well, I *murder* in games all the time, so what's the big deal about a Ponzi scheme?" but it's not true. You're not "murdering" in Quake when you shoot someone. The person on the other computer is still alive after you "kill" their in-game character. It's not murder because there is no real world effect from your actions, only an in-game effect.
On the other hand, if you run a Ponzi scheme in a game world, the other players really do lose their (in-game) money. The trade takes place in-game, but it has the real world effect of leaving the victim without in-game currency. Now, given that a lot of in-game currencies are tradable for real world money, this works out to look just like any other kind of taking something of value from another person. If I were to go into a game and say, "Send me some diamonds, and I'll send you something good," you're not going to say, "Oh, it's not fraud, because 'diamonds' aren't really money." No, diamonds aren't cash, but you can trade them for cash or anything else. Contrarily, imagine a person conducting a Ponzi scheme mostly in the real world, who says at the last minute, "Oh for this scheme, don't give me regular cash. Give me [in-game currency] worth the same amount instead." Does merely changing the item used as a proxy for cash make what would ordinarily be illegal, legal? That seems unlikely.
People also keep saying, "It's like stealing Monopoly money," but that doesn't even make sense as a support for their position, since stealing Monopoly money is a crime, depending on what's meant by "stealing" it. If during the game when I look away, you take my money and put it in your stack, that's not a crime; it's just cheating. But if when we finish the game, you sneakily take my Monopoly dollars back to your house and add them to your collect, that is stealing, because you've permanently taken something of mine without my permission. Obviously, it's only petty theft, since Monopoly money isn't worth much more than the paper it's printed on, but it's worth something.
Now, the issue on top of this is that when players agree to play a game, they agree to follow certain rules which are very different from the rules we follow in real life. If me and my buddies all agreed to it, we could say that when we see each other in the streets, we can challenge each other to a Paper-Rock-Scissors battle, and the loser pays the winner a dollar. That's fine; we're adults, and that's something we could agree to do. In game PvP is basically the same as that agreement. You agree that if your character loses a match to some other character, you'll let the host server give that person some virtual items. In fact, one of the conditions of using the host server at all is agreeing to abide by this rule. However, do you also agree that if someone commits an act that is indistinguishable from real world fraud, that you'll let that person keep what he takes from you? That's a much more difficult question, one that should preferably be set out ahead of time in the EULA. If the EULA doesn't specify whether fraud-like actions are OK or not, then the question is an open one for the courts to decide.
Do you think it theoretically can't be done? That's pretty much ridiculous. Sending images back and forth over the web isn't that hard, the only tricky parts are the bandwidth and CPU power required. Well, if YouTube can stay alive while burning barrels of cash to send videos to client for free, then AjaxAdobe2.0 can stay alive charging customers about the same price per year as Photoshop to send images back and forth to clients. Googling "buy photoshop" the first ad says, "Buy Photoshop - $288.85." At $250 per user, the AjaxAdobe2.0 can buy one $2,500 server for every ten users, and just hope they don't all try to log in at the same time (and if they serve the amateur market at all, they won't). Of course $2,500 is how much one pays to for mid to high end desktop computer with a monitor and other crap that won't be needed for web server. Image processing is typically embarassingly parallel, so they could easily just buy a huge farm of crap PCs to do the backend work, then add some AJAX magic so that when you squiggle on your screen it draws the line in real time by using the clients CPU before sending the results back to mothership. So, the CPU issue doesn't have to be a problem, especially if they can just get enough venture capital get the ball rolling and stay in business for a couple years to amortize hardware expenses.
As it is, Photoshop is already available for Mac as well as Windows, so you're probably a troll, but it's worth pointing out the huge flaw in your reasoning.
The age of the OS is almost over. Remember in the mid-90s, what you did when you wanted a computerized map of some place you'd never been? You went to the store, bought a CD-ROM, put it in your computer, ran the installer, and checked the map. The CD had to be for the right OS (meaning Windows most of the time) or the whole thing wouldn't work.
How do we check maps now? We go to googlemaps.com. It doesn't matter what OS you use for this.
The internet is making whole classes of applications that used to be OS-specific OS-independent. Yes, there will always be some programs that are better to do local, but a) there aren't that many of those. b) eventually, there will be good open source replacements for all such apps*.
*Except for maybe non-casual games.
The OS Wars are almost over. MS and Apple are both selling OSes that are competing with free, which is damned hard. Old versions of Linux were ugly as sin, but Ubuntu et al. aren't that hard on the eyes. Apple here has the advantage that its OS is subsidized by hardware sales, so it's not as hard for them to turn a profit, but MS is going to face serious challenges once OEMs start seeing how they can cut another couple dollars off the cost of their bottom end computers.
I dunno, it seems to me that we do philosophy in natural language, but that doesn't stop the majority of people from being really bad at it. I think that some things are just hard to describe, because they require more precision than a human is used to thinking with. Now, you could just say, "Oh, well then just let the computer decide for itself the best implementation method..." but at that point, you've gone beyond just semantically understanding a text to having the artificial intelligence to creatively decide what the best implementation of so inexact specification will be.
It's a bullshit suit though, since you don't have to sue Youtube to get a video pulled, you just have to click the links to inform about the infringement.
Hmm, if only there were some way to free up space. But as we all know the market demands that each of the items you listed be in all portable music listening devices, and any device without them would undoubtedly be called "lame" by an influential figure like Cmdr. Taco.
Slashdot has run a number of articles about analysts predicting this or that console manufacture will sell X or Y million machines in the next generation, so to help us sort through the archives more efficiently, I propose that we all use the same tag to mark these stories for quick searching.
For a light weight PHP-based (ugh, I know, but every hosting service supports it and it's really easy to whip up plug-ins) wiki, it's hard to beat PMWiki. Their default template is XHTML too, which is nice.
I would prefer to just SSH into granny's computer, start an X-windows session and do it myself, but hey, if you like telling your granny, "no gran, don't click the X button," over the phone while you try to guess what she's actually doing, more power to you, I guess.
Uh, you know the Mario character debuted in Donkey Kong, right? And again in DK Jr. And then yet again in Mario Brothers (the one with the crabs in tunnels and stuff). All of this way before before Super Mario Bros., let alone SMB2.
...yet MS continues to name programs idiotic and needlessly cryptic things like iexplore.exe, charmap.exe, etc., etc. It's really sad that 11 years later, Microsoft still isn't confident enough to name its Windows XP+ only applications using more than 8.3 characters.
2) As another poster said, the month name thing goes back to Latin, not English's history, per se.
3) What you said about Chinese was almost completely incorrect. Read pinyin.info for a more detailed explanation, but rest assured, Cantonese children have to learn to speak Beijing Mandarin as a part of their education process.
OS stands for "Operating System." It is a system in which one operates. I think that the conventional usage of the term OS to refer to one's desktop environment doesn't stray too far from that core meaning. True, CS heads frequently use the term to refer just to the central kernel and its associated components, but that doesn't mean that all other senses of OS are invalid.
Yeah, that camera sounds like crap. How did you buy a camera that doesn't have a rechargeable battery?
I wish iPhoto's date manipulation abilities were a little better though. I live in Japan now, and sometimes my friends from America come visit. When they're done with the trip, we swap all our photos. The only problem is their time stamp is 12-hours off because of the time zone lag. I eventually found a script somewhere to time shift the photos, but it took a while. I've also already forgotten the name of what I used, but I imagine it can be googled up.
If you user iPhoto for any length of time, you come to realize that pretty much the most important bit of metadata for a photo is when you take it. Say you want a photo from your wedding. As long as you can remember the date, it's trivial to glance through the hundred or so photos from that day and find the particular one you want.
I think the same is true of documents a lot of the time, though full text searchability is also nice.
Re:On running something just because someone told
on
TUAW Recommends Joke App
·
· Score: 2, Funny
The Nintendo GameCube uses a unique storage medium, the GameCube Optical Disc, a proprietary format based on Matsushita's optical-disc technology; the discs are approximately 8 centimeters (3 1/8 inches) in diameter (considerably smaller than the 12 cm CDs or DVDs used in competitors' consoles), and the discs have a capacity of approximately 1.5 gigabytes. Contrary to popular belief, GameCube discs are not physically read any differently from a standard DVD disc, but are encrypted and contain a 'bar code' unreadable by most DVD drives. This move was mainly intended to prevent piracy of GCN titles, but like most anti-piracy technology, it was eventually cracked. By exploiting a flaw in Phantasy Star Online Episode I & II, users were able to connect their GameCubes to their PCs and run homebrew programming on the console.
Speculation about the DVD player attachment follows:
Nintendo has said before the DVD player will be an attachment, which has made some people think it will be an entire external drive that plugs in. My theory is that there is a reason for this. Gamecube discs spin backwards from DVDs and CDs. This is one reason why almost no one has pirate Gamecube discs. Since the Wii is backwards compatible, it too will probably spin backwards for at least Gamecube discs and possible Wii ones as well. Accordingly, I think that the Wii's main drive will be entirely incapable of spinning in the usual direction as an anti-piracy measure, necessitating the external reader for DVDs.
It's a theory, that's all, but see if it doesn't turn out to be true.
Is there any evidence that children are working at the factory? Is there any evidence that people are being made to work there against their will? Were people lied to about the salary or working conditions before they took the job?
If not, then what's happening is adults are being told about a job, and they decide to take it. Presuming that they're rational human beings, this means that this is the best job they could find and they decided it was worth the drawbacks. Why are people clamoring to take away their choice about this? Do we think that we know better than these people do what kind of job they should take? That's paternalism, and it's highly misplaced. The Chinese aren't children. We have no right to tell them that should or shouldn't be willing to do a job.
It would be nice if Apple's subsidiaries could pay their workers more, but the reality of the situation is, the workers took the job knowing full well what they were getting into. If they thought the job sucked too much to take, they wouldn't sign up for it, and the price of labor would increase. As it is, presuming a free market, the workers consider the money the best they can get. This means that if the job weren't there, they would be taking even worse jobs. So, by all means, let's not pillory Apple into leaving China. Why? Because that's what would hurt the workers the most. They'd get stuck with even crappier jobs, but hey, we could all pretend global inequity doesn't exist and assuage the guilt of Western affluence.
I'm in Japan now, and my broadband options are DSL from YahooBB (secretly softbank, I think?), DSL from NTT, and cable from the local cable company. There might be other options that my semi-illiteracy is hiding from me though. Speeds are high, and service is reasonably priced.
Slashdot Mirror
It seems like a lot of the commenters here are missing the point. They say, "Well, I *murder* in games all the time, so what's the big deal about a Ponzi scheme?" but it's not true. You're not "murdering" in Quake when you shoot someone. The person on the other computer is still alive after you "kill" their in-game character. It's not murder because there is no real world effect from your actions, only an in-game effect.
On the other hand, if you run a Ponzi scheme in a game world, the other players really do lose their (in-game) money. The trade takes place in-game, but it has the real world effect of leaving the victim without in-game currency. Now, given that a lot of in-game currencies are tradable for real world money, this works out to look just like any other kind of taking something of value from another person. If I were to go into a game and say, "Send me some diamonds, and I'll send you something good," you're not going to say, "Oh, it's not fraud, because 'diamonds' aren't really money." No, diamonds aren't cash, but you can trade them for cash or anything else. Contrarily, imagine a person conducting a Ponzi scheme mostly in the real world, who says at the last minute, "Oh for this scheme, don't give me regular cash. Give me [in-game currency] worth the same amount instead." Does merely changing the item used as a proxy for cash make what would ordinarily be illegal, legal? That seems unlikely.
People also keep saying, "It's like stealing Monopoly money," but that doesn't even make sense as a support for their position, since stealing Monopoly money is a crime, depending on what's meant by "stealing" it. If during the game when I look away, you take my money and put it in your stack, that's not a crime; it's just cheating. But if when we finish the game, you sneakily take my Monopoly dollars back to your house and add them to your collect, that is stealing, because you've permanently taken something of mine without my permission. Obviously, it's only petty theft, since Monopoly money isn't worth much more than the paper it's printed on, but it's worth something.
Now, the issue on top of this is that when players agree to play a game, they agree to follow certain rules which are very different from the rules we follow in real life. If me and my buddies all agreed to it, we could say that when we see each other in the streets, we can challenge each other to a Paper-Rock-Scissors battle, and the loser pays the winner a dollar. That's fine; we're adults, and that's something we could agree to do. In game PvP is basically the same as that agreement. You agree that if your character loses a match to some other character, you'll let the host server give that person some virtual items. In fact, one of the conditions of using the host server at all is agreeing to abide by this rule. However, do you also agree that if someone commits an act that is indistinguishable from real world fraud, that you'll let that person keep what he takes from you? That's a much more difficult question, one that should preferably be set out ahead of time in the EULA. If the EULA doesn't specify whether fraud-like actions are OK or not, then the question is an open one for the courts to decide.
Why not?
Seriously.
Do you think it theoretically can't be done? That's pretty much ridiculous. Sending images back and forth over the web isn't that hard, the only tricky parts are the bandwidth and CPU power required. Well, if YouTube can stay alive while burning barrels of cash to send videos to client for free, then AjaxAdobe2.0 can stay alive charging customers about the same price per year as Photoshop to send images back and forth to clients. Googling "buy photoshop" the first ad says, "Buy Photoshop - $288.85." At $250 per user, the AjaxAdobe2.0 can buy one $2,500 server for every ten users, and just hope they don't all try to log in at the same time (and if they serve the amateur market at all, they won't). Of course $2,500 is how much one pays to for mid to high end desktop computer with a monitor and other crap that won't be needed for web server. Image processing is typically embarassingly parallel, so they could easily just buy a huge farm of crap PCs to do the backend work, then add some AJAX magic so that when you squiggle on your screen it draws the line in real time by using the clients CPU before sending the results back to mothership. So, the CPU issue doesn't have to be a problem, especially if they can just get enough venture capital get the ball rolling and stay in business for a couple years to amortize hardware expenses.
As it is, Photoshop is already available for Mac as well as Windows, so you're probably a troll, but it's worth pointing out the huge flaw in your reasoning.
"Generals always fight the last war."
The age of the OS is almost over. Remember in the mid-90s, what you did when you wanted a computerized map of some place you'd never been? You went to the store, bought a CD-ROM, put it in your computer, ran the installer, and checked the map. The CD had to be for the right OS (meaning Windows most of the time) or the whole thing wouldn't work.
How do we check maps now? We go to googlemaps.com. It doesn't matter what OS you use for this.
The internet is making whole classes of applications that used to be OS-specific OS-independent. Yes, there will always be some programs that are better to do local, but a) there aren't that many of those. b) eventually, there will be good open source replacements for all such apps*.
*Except for maybe non-casual games.
The OS Wars are almost over. MS and Apple are both selling OSes that are competing with free, which is damned hard. Old versions of Linux were ugly as sin, but Ubuntu et al. aren't that hard on the eyes. Apple here has the advantage that its OS is subsidized by hardware sales, so it's not as hard for them to turn a profit, but MS is going to face serious challenges once OEMs start seeing how they can cut another couple dollars off the cost of their bottom end computers.
I dunno, it seems to me that we do philosophy in natural language, but that doesn't stop the majority of people from being really bad at it. I think that some things are just hard to describe, because they require more precision than a human is used to thinking with. Now, you could just say, "Oh, well then just let the computer decide for itself the best implementation method..." but at that point, you've gone beyond just semantically understanding a text to having the artificial intelligence to creatively decide what the best implementation of so inexact specification will be.
It's a bullshit suit though, since you don't have to sue Youtube to get a video pulled, you just have to click the links to inform about the infringement.
Hmm, if only there were some way to free up space. But as we all know the market demands that each of the items you listed be in all portable music listening devices, and any device without them would undoubtedly be called "lame" by an influential figure like Cmdr. Taco.
Slashdot has run a number of articles about analysts predicting this or that console manufacture will sell X or Y million machines in the next generation, so to help us sort through the archives more efficiently, I propose that we all use the same tag to mark these stories for quick searching.
The tag?
"Bullshit".
Huh, I can't think of any reason why that could be...
(Sorry, I usually try not to be a fanboy, but this one I couldn't resist.)
For a light weight PHP-based (ugh, I know, but every hosting service supports it and it's really easy to whip up plug-ins) wiki, it's hard to beat PMWiki. Their default template is XHTML too, which is nice.
I would prefer to just SSH into granny's computer, start an X-windows session and do it myself, but hey, if you like telling your granny, "no gran, don't click the X button," over the phone while you try to guess what she's actually doing, more power to you, I guess.
Uh, you know the Mario character debuted in Donkey Kong, right? And again in DK Jr. And then yet again in Mario Brothers (the one with the crabs in tunnels and stuff). All of this way before before Super Mario Bros., let alone SMB2.
Yeah, your point doesn't hold up at all.
...yet MS continues to name programs idiotic and needlessly cryptic things like iexplore.exe, charmap.exe, etc., etc. It's really sad that 11 years later, Microsoft still isn't confident enough to name its Windows XP+ only applications using more than 8.3 characters.
What 128 Marios turned into is clearly Pikmin.
1) Bush isn't really a Texan.
2) As another poster said, the month name thing goes back to Latin, not English's history, per se.
3) What you said about Chinese was almost completely incorrect. Read pinyin.info for a more detailed explanation, but rest assured, Cantonese children have to learn to speak Beijing Mandarin as a part of their education process.
OS stands for "Operating System." It is a system in which one operates. I think that the conventional usage of the term OS to refer to one's desktop environment doesn't stray too far from that core meaning. True, CS heads frequently use the term to refer just to the central kernel and its associated components, but that doesn't mean that all other senses of OS are invalid.
Yeah, that camera sounds like crap. How did you buy a camera that doesn't have a rechargeable battery?
I wish iPhoto's date manipulation abilities were a little better though. I live in Japan now, and sometimes my friends from America come visit. When they're done with the trip, we swap all our photos. The only problem is their time stamp is 12-hours off because of the time zone lag. I eventually found a script somewhere to time shift the photos, but it took a while. I've also already forgotten the name of what I used, but I imagine it can be googled up.
If you user iPhoto for any length of time, you come to realize that pretty much the most important bit of metadata for a photo is when you take it. Say you want a photo from your wedding. As long as you can remember the date, it's trivial to glance through the hundred or so photos from that day and find the particular one you want.
I think the same is true of documents a lot of the time, though full text searchability is also nice.
Macs for Mac users!
"Did you watch the new episodes yet?"
"Yes, now stop asking me that!"
Try this tip: Listen to an old fashioned typwriter while typing.
From the Wikipedia,
Damn you, popular belief! *Shakes fist*
Speculation about the DVD player attachment follows:
Nintendo has said before the DVD player will be an attachment, which has made some people think it will be an entire external drive that plugs in. My theory is that there is a reason for this. Gamecube discs spin backwards from DVDs and CDs. This is one reason why almost no one has pirate Gamecube discs. Since the Wii is backwards compatible, it too will probably spin backwards for at least Gamecube discs and possible Wii ones as well. Accordingly, I think that the Wii's main drive will be entirely incapable of spinning in the usual direction as an anti-piracy measure, necessitating the external reader for DVDs.
It's a theory, that's all, but see if it doesn't turn out to be true.
Is there any evidence that children are working at the factory? Is there any evidence that people are being made to work there against their will? Were people lied to about the salary or working conditions before they took the job?
If not, then what's happening is adults are being told about a job, and they decide to take it. Presuming that they're rational human beings, this means that this is the best job they could find and they decided it was worth the drawbacks. Why are people clamoring to take away their choice about this? Do we think that we know better than these people do what kind of job they should take? That's paternalism, and it's highly misplaced. The Chinese aren't children. We have no right to tell them that should or shouldn't be willing to do a job.
It would be nice if Apple's subsidiaries could pay their workers more, but the reality of the situation is, the workers took the job knowing full well what they were getting into. If they thought the job sucked too much to take, they wouldn't sign up for it, and the price of labor would increase. As it is, presuming a free market, the workers consider the money the best they can get. This means that if the job weren't there, they would be taking even worse jobs. So, by all means, let's not pillory Apple into leaving China. Why? Because that's what would hurt the workers the most. They'd get stuck with even crappier jobs, but hey, we could all pretend global inequity doesn't exist and assuage the guilt of Western affluence.
The Triforce is already on gravestones in Japan. They predate Zelda though. Here's a picture of the triforce on some knick-knacks.
Cartels are illegal, at least in the States.
I'm in Japan now, and my broadband options are DSL from YahooBB (secretly softbank, I think?), DSL from NTT, and cable from the local cable company. There might be other options that my semi-illiteracy is hiding from me though. Speeds are high, and service is reasonably priced.