You missed the GP's point. It is not humans who are predisposed to disobeyal, it's kids. Adolescents are quite disposed towards being completely at odds with older generations, and this is quite healthy for a society because it allows quicker evolution. Sorta like not being asexual. Sure, budding will reproduce one's own kind more efficiently, but sexual (i.e., two sources) reproduction leads to more evolution.
...which is something we would care about if he didn't consistently submit interesting articles. Some of them are rather on the fringes of science, certainly, but isn't that the kind of stuff we want to know about perhaps before it's truly viable? He's started linking to the original article in all his submissions, and if he has more information he's put together himself on his site, I'm more than glad to give him some clicks for this service, if I'm interested enough to want to see said extras.
Seriously, more often than not, he submits really interesting stuff. I wish more people would emulate that, not less.
There do still exist some non-advertising based media--NPR, BBC and CBC to name a few. For more in depth coverage, places like http://votesmart.org/index.htm do quite a good job of being above the fray.
I do agree with most of what you're saying (you're right on with the current filtering effectiveness bit), but I think there are some sources of media that manage not to want to be profitable still.
So large of a percentage of medical equipment is disposable (for hygine, of course, but man do they make a whole lot of waste), that I wouldn't be surprised at all if this was the same--at least in mostly developed nations. If you make them disposable you also needn't make them big enough to be recharged (or dissasembled for battery replacement, etc.) or carry any more charge than necessary for one trip.
Combine that with its makers being able to sell more & it still being a cheaper prospect for many HMO's than the invasive surgery--no way these things won't be disposable.
The biggest hurdle I see is that (of course) individuall countries can only tax people residing there or making sales there. And the game companies have no business (and certainly needn't) find out where people are playing from. (Ignoring for the moment region-centric consoles.) If servers in some said country are being taxed internally through the system, then such transactions will move to international servers--really, what big games have only servers in one country?
The problem boils down to this: Game companies are not enforcing anything about their players' locations. Therefore, their location cannot be proved taxable. (Unless somehow you give all your real contact information to them, which I find unlikely, as they don't want to require citizenship to any one country to be a player.)
The Post (and most newspapers) make a very small percentage of their revenue on subscription. Far more comes from advertisements; which is of course why most larger cities have free papers of some sort.
There's a lot of resourses to go around in this world. A very small amount of human productivity goes into providing basic needs (food, shelter, clean water, internet, Zelda sequals, etc.). Even the U.S., by far mostly a service industry country, still exports more food than we import. So we can afford to have some lofty goals. Yes, helping less luckily born humans shrould certainly be one of those priorities, , but even after that there's a bit more left over. I think science and space exploration (and yes, colonization) is one of the better uses of that money.
Getting resources diverted to other issues is a completely different question though. If you want a better target,everyone in the world could have been given the access to clean drinking water for the price the U.S. government is paying to have ousted a really rather small-time megalomaniac who was harming far less of his people than the resulting, foreseeable mess.
I apologise for feeding this troll of an article, but nevertheless.
Certainly there was some base of people who wanted (some later to be usefull) wi-fi plus an FM receiver plus video at that price point. Microsoft advertized enough that these people knew about it, so they got it when they first had their chance. That group of people, however, is not particularly related to digital music player buyers as a whole, as it is only continuous purchases over its life span that will be untimately meaningful. Furthermore, this week was singled out from the Zune being the only new thing on the market. That they only got second when they were the only new thing around--for over a month or something?--is actually rather sad.
A more representative week would be, say, the week after Thanksgiving, which shows a lot about retail buying habits (and is a significant percentage of such).
So the article is saying that there is an easy and pleasurable way to increase my emotional arousal (or, let's say, passion) about things in my life, that is coupled with making me more daring and courageous?
Certainly things need to come in moderation, but I see both of those as positive to my life. Am I missing something?
The laser keyboards, while cool, are actually very annoyingly inaccurate. You can sorta set them up to give them an optimal read pattern, but you still get mistaken entries unless your fingers move in a very very rigid way. Because of mistakes they tend to be considerably slower than even thumpads used one-handed (and I'm not even that good with them).
Yeah, cost for the most part. Wood is easy to make, easy to ship, and mostly, really simple to install (& install other stuff to it). Metal is a pain to attatch securely, & bigger pieces are a pain to transport. Brick's used in abundance around areas where it's mined (like North Carolina), but it gets expensive to transport far. And tile, of course is not a particularly strong material. Stronger than regular shingles? Yes. Cheaper than replacing shingles a few times? No.
I think you misinterpret Google's interest. They don't care what you do. They just don't want to be sued under breach of contract. Their C&D removes their liability, and thus allows you to keep using their data via Gaia (or whatever) if you're a user who cares not about such laws.
The situation is far more complicated than that. The ruling government, Fatah, had been so incredibly corrupt that a plurality of voters just wanted something else. You don't have to agree with all of a party's goals to find them slightly less bad of a choice than another party.
THe thing is , the US Department of Defence is putting those 100's of millions into said research, because of course they would love this tech too. Go to just about any decent sized engineering school and there's a bunch of money coming right from DoD into making robotic insects. It got to the point where it's not easy to to graduate work in robotics without taking DoD's money.
You argument would contain some relevance if not for the fact that many (if not most) of the beta projects are considerably ahead of competing aplications. When maps came out, for example, yahoo's & mapquest were sad little engines, that I was glad to get past. Certainly the gmail beta kick-started some decent webmail from others as well. Now I'm not saying that google's releasing stuff 'early' to help their competition, but certainly it helps end users immensely.
And as far as paying testers? Well, in those previous examples you spoke of, I imagine that software wasn't so much being given out free. I for one am quite happy when some new stuff comes out from a company that can improve my life in some way and they let me use it for free as soon as possible. If you don't like 'testing' it... (gasp..) um, just don't use it. D'uh.
The problem is, knowing much at all about how politics plays out can have a very demoralizing effect. Once you get down to the nitty-gritty, most politicians compromise here and there (which is good, it does make stuff happen), and so without a lot of information about the big picture of compromises, investigations into politics is quite likely to get people turned off to it.
Of course, that hypothetical big picture might not help either, but that's a different problem.
Yes, yes it would. If you did have to report computer-made virtual income to the irs, everything you purchased to allow you to get said income should be deducted from how much you made. I'm not sure how people who work from an office in their home are taxed, but I suspect that you could get some discount for paying the rent or morgage on that room as well.
And as opposed to some others in this discussion, I do think that an income tax on virtual transactions does make sense. As in many cases in tax law, any small amount should be ignored (net earnings under, say, $2000, per year). I think once games come out where gold farming is allowed (and there can be no doubt that this will happen sooner or later), said game software can keep track of appropriate sums for appropriate countries' servers. (Or many other possible methods.) Now will users be able to get around this, easily? Yes. But just because waiters don't disclose their cash tips doesn't mean they shouldn't. Certainly I don't want goldfarmers to get an effective tax break on income compared to other professions.
When steps get taken to preserve the integrity of the commonly traded stock--like holding those accountable who abuse it--the stock is worth more. I believe the market had already adjusted for the fact that there had been some cooking in McAfee's books.
Even though I'm not much of a gamer anymore, I totally see what Jackson is saying here. I could maybe invest 9 hours of my life into a typical 90 minute movie (though there are only a handful of these), while I imagine FF VI alone has lasted me 90 hours in its replaying over the years. One of these things is just not like the other.
I can sort of understand that 6% number, talking about revenue for the brick & mortar stores. They don't see the subscription fees that WoW & some other PC games are now taking in, or he Pop Cap casual downloaded games. Nor the games Yahoo Games buys & pays off with ads.
That said, PC also doesn't have all those crap games that line the shelves of EB & GameStop--all those ones for 8 year olds and weak movie spin offs. Which is to say, I think PC gamers are a bit more selective in their B&M purchases.
Exactly. And besides that, Google's IPO was a strange one, in that the publicly traded stock does not grant voting rights for within the company. That privledge is left to the people with the preferred stock--the employees--who are less than likely to change the nice working conditions.
Slashdot Mirror
You missed the GP's point. It is not humans who are predisposed to disobeyal, it's kids. Adolescents are quite disposed towards being completely at odds with older generations, and this is quite healthy for a society because it allows quicker evolution. Sorta like not being asexual. Sure, budding will reproduce one's own kind more efficiently, but sexual (i.e., two sources) reproduction leads to more evolution.
Seriously, more often than not, he submits really interesting stuff. I wish more people would emulate that, not less.
Waste heat energy, like pretty much all inefficiencies. Now if you're using this at an antarctic research lab, voila! it's not wasted at all!
I do agree with most of what you're saying (you're right on with the current filtering effectiveness bit), but I think there are some sources of media that manage not to want to be profitable still.
I suppose you just forgot to mention that you were plagerizing that text from the AP article?
Combine that with its makers being able to sell more & it still being a cheaper prospect for many HMO's than the invasive surgery--no way these things won't be disposable.
The problem boils down to this: Game companies are not enforcing anything about their players' locations. Therefore, their location cannot be proved taxable. (Unless somehow you give all your real contact information to them, which I find unlikely, as they don't want to require citizenship to any one country to be a player.)
The Post (and most newspapers) make a very small percentage of their revenue on subscription. Far more comes from advertisements; which is of course why most larger cities have free papers of some sort.
Perhaps you think we are being too well informed about programs like these?
Getting resources diverted to other issues is a completely different question though. If you want a better target,everyone in the world could have been given the access to clean drinking water for the price the U.S. government is paying to have ousted a really rather small-time megalomaniac who was harming far less of his people than the resulting, foreseeable mess.
Certainly there was some base of people who wanted (some later to be usefull) wi-fi plus an FM receiver plus video at that price point. Microsoft advertized enough that these people knew about it, so they got it when they first had their chance. That group of people, however, is not particularly related to digital music player buyers as a whole, as it is only continuous purchases over its life span that will be untimately meaningful. Furthermore, this week was singled out from the Zune being the only new thing on the market. That they only got second when they were the only new thing around--for over a month or something?--is actually rather sad.
A more representative week would be, say, the week after Thanksgiving, which shows a lot about retail buying habits (and is a significant percentage of such).
Certainly things need to come in moderation, but I see both of those as positive to my life. Am I missing something?
The laser keyboards, while cool, are actually very annoyingly inaccurate. You can sorta set them up to give them an optimal read pattern, but you still get mistaken entries unless your fingers move in a very very rigid way. Because of mistakes they tend to be considerably slower than even thumpads used one-handed (and I'm not even that good with them).
Yeah, cost for the most part. Wood is easy to make, easy to ship, and mostly, really simple to install (& install other stuff to it). Metal is a pain to attatch securely, & bigger pieces are a pain to transport. Brick's used in abundance around areas where it's mined (like North Carolina), but it gets expensive to transport far. And tile, of course is not a particularly strong material. Stronger than regular shingles? Yes. Cheaper than replacing shingles a few times? No.
I think you misinterpret Google's interest. They don't care what you do. They just don't want to be sued under breach of contract. Their C&D removes their liability, and thus allows you to keep using their data via Gaia (or whatever) if you're a user who cares not about such laws.
The situation is far more complicated than that. The ruling government, Fatah, had been so incredibly corrupt that a plurality of voters just wanted something else. You don't have to agree with all of a party's goals to find them slightly less bad of a choice than another party.
THe thing is , the US Department of Defence is putting those 100's of millions into said research, because of course they would love this tech too. Go to just about any decent sized engineering school and there's a bunch of money coming right from DoD into making robotic insects. It got to the point where it's not easy to to graduate work in robotics without taking DoD's money.
And as far as paying testers? Well, in those previous examples you spoke of, I imagine that software wasn't so much being given out free. I for one am quite happy when some new stuff comes out from a company that can improve my life in some way and they let me use it for free as soon as possible. If you don't like 'testing' it... (gasp..) um, just don't use it. D'uh.
Of course, that hypothetical big picture might not help either, but that's a different problem.
And as opposed to some others in this discussion, I do think that an income tax on virtual transactions does make sense. As in many cases in tax law, any small amount should be ignored (net earnings under, say, $2000, per year). I think once games come out where gold farming is allowed (and there can be no doubt that this will happen sooner or later), said game software can keep track of appropriate sums for appropriate countries' servers. (Or many other possible methods.) Now will users be able to get around this, easily? Yes. But just because waiters don't disclose their cash tips doesn't mean they shouldn't. Certainly I don't want goldfarmers to get an effective tax break on income compared to other professions.
When steps get taken to preserve the integrity of the commonly traded stock--like holding those accountable who abuse it--the stock is worth more. I believe the market had already adjusted for the fact that there had been some cooking in McAfee's books.
Even though I'm not much of a gamer anymore, I totally see what Jackson is saying here. I could maybe invest 9 hours of my life into a typical 90 minute movie (though there are only a handful of these), while I imagine FF VI alone has lasted me 90 hours in its replaying over the years. One of these things is just not like the other.
That said, PC also doesn't have all those crap games that line the shelves of EB & GameStop--all those ones for 8 year olds and weak movie spin offs. Which is to say, I think PC gamers are a bit more selective in their B&M purchases.
Exactly. And besides that, Google's IPO was a strange one, in that the publicly traded stock does not grant voting rights for within the company. That privledge is left to the people with the preferred stock--the employees--who are less than likely to change the nice working conditions.
What does some Oil Company profits vs Oil taxes ratio have to do with anything?