Sports are not as accessible as gaming. I can hop on my computer, jump into a game and enjoy it, not all that much more involved than turning on a feed to watch someone else play. If I wanted to go out and play baseball at 1am, I'd need a field, and 2 teams. Watching this sport is my next best thing unless I want to get myself into local baseball league(probably between local businesses).
Watching gaming might be nice, but actually gaming is better.
And WOW, I just had a mental of image of someone watching someone else pretend to play a sport. Will we someday have a game where you play as someone watching someone else pretend to play a sport?
GP, I recommend a reduction in the use of caps. While I would assume that you're simply using it to provide emphasis, the translation to the reader is yelling. Italics would probably convey your tone better, or underlining. I understand that typing out the brackets for this can be time-consuming, but this limitation also increases the power of emphasis since emphasis spread too broadly dilutes the effect. (I use// to show italics personally)
For both the GP and parent post, this is what you are looking for:
Economic phenomenon. It leads to "monopolistic competition", not a monopoly, and not perfect competition. The entry should explain what that means more efficiently than I can.
Parent understands the concept of what's going on here, except that the term monopoly here isn't entirely accurate and does not properly communicate parent's explanation. GP is correct in contesting what has been said. To put it simply, it's "in-between".
Madonna songs are a differentiated product and are granted market power which in this case means that Madonna's distributor can affect pricing for that product. It does not dictate pricing like a monopoly can. In perfect competition, there is zero market power, no single body can affect the price of the market for a product.
These claims may be true, I care little enough to give them the benefit of the doubt.
But the real advantage of playing Oblivion on a PC is the plethora of modifications. The marginal difference of graphical performance between xbox360, PS3, and high-end PC Oblivion is not really that important.
So this article leaves me asking..."So what?"
And the PS3 isn't a terrible piece of equipment, it's just an expensive one. I wouldn't be suprised to see nice graphics on it, I would demand it.
Parent has a good point. Companies don't care. However, the employees, who are people, they might care. They're the humanizing part.
The farther the employee from the customer, the less human the customer appears and less sympathy is used, and the farther away employees are the management who hand policy down to the employees who are now bound by this policy in their handling of the customer.
So yeah, companies will be pretty dick to you. However, the employees might be nicer when they can.
So for companies, I only trust them to do what they think will get them the most money, beyond that, they will have to provide proof.
I can buy that visual processing improves. The actual usefulness in application outside of videogames?
I don't know...the only thing I can come up with is the internet and filtering out the massive amount of useless information for what I'm actually looking for. My poor dad takes minutes to find what he needs because he doesn't recognize the arrangement patterns of webpages. He actually goes left to right, line by line, starting from the top, and working to the bottom.
Dreamfall: The Longest Journey a 2006 game got "Best story" from IGN, Gamespy, and Gametrailers I believe.
It was a 3d adventure game, with a rare combat event sprinkled in here and there(horrible), and the puzzles were incredibly simple.
The story and voice acting were great though. And so I enjoyed the hell out of the game.
I used to love final fantasy games, until I realized I HATED RANDOM ENCOUNTERS! It's a dull grind when I'm only playing to get plot and background. So I was delighted to play Dreamfall where I only get the entertainment and not the time-sinks. I also enjoyed FF8 which seems to be an unpopular opinion. However, I played on PC where cheats and a no-encounter item at level 8 allowed me to skip collecting random crap and wading through random fights, so that I could skip straight to story elements.
They plant the hammer of dawn right where you need to use it, you never have to carry it with you in single player since they'll provide one within the zone of movement around the spot it needs to be used. In that second beserker encounter I believe it was in that hanging garden area. Just keep going forward and get the hammer at the end. You don't need to use the aim-to-walk slowly method either, just strafe around at normal speed. The beserker is pretty harmless.
After you get your hammer, you might not realize what to do, took me a few minutes. Gamefaqs probably has your answer(I don't want to put a spoiler here).
Lost Planet only has unavoidable damage at the end boss. The rest of the game focuses around preventable damage. When a threat arrives, you're too slow to dodge. But all the threats give warnings or use patterns. It's only impossible to dodge when you wait until it's too late to dodge. There are unavoidable stumble attacks in more than one place in the game, but the bosses that do it also follow it up with a pause allowing you to recover and dodge. (For example, the snow worm featured in the trailers).
If you're looking for unfair, try Dead or Alive 4 against CPU. Skill is involved, but arbitrary countering by the CPU is also involved. So if the CPU decides to go on a counter-streak, there's nothing you can do but accept defeat and hope it won't do it again next round. That's why the key is to make the longest and most varied combos you can to limit the CPU's ability to fight back. Arbitrariness is incredibly lame in gaming. Theoretically you can memorize every possible attack for each character so you can predict the next step in a CPU combo, but that's more like work than playing a game.
Unreal 3's advantage over previous engine seems to be primarily graphical. I'm going to venture that the reason that it won't be applicable to the Wii is that cutting effects enough to run on the Wii makes the advances of the Unreal engine largely irrelevant. I'm sure some form of it will be usable, but will it really be Unreal 3 at that point?
I'd have to agree. If math being "too hard" is causing a high wash-out rate, I don't think reducing expectations is an appropriate response. As the parent noted, there's a minimum level of competency required to be successful in this field that can't be filtered away. The school should grade accordingly or else students will just stay and finish a CS degree only to find themselves noncompetitive in that field. This way a student can evaluate their grade; they can work harder to become competitive, or switch out to another major.
I'll admit it, I'm among the washouts. I changed majors into Economics because I'm not good enough to be a programmer. I packed in the Economics degree requirements into 2 years and graduated on time. My college would have done me a disservice by coddling me until I had made it into a programming job only to find out I wasn't up to snuff.
Alternative methods to create quality graduates would be welcome though. The assumption that I'm making here is that aptitude for math is indeed a necessary requirement to perform well. If it is possible to implement an integrated approach to the math requirements, I think that'd be fine too. Teach the math concepts with a specific bent towards programming. Of course this would require a sufficient supply of qualified teachers, which is another problem as well. Not just people who are proficient in the field, but true teachers who are also proficient at education and communication.
Not all Slashdotters are geeks, though you may see more of them here. There's a certain amount of crossover between Digg and Slashdot, though I'd expect a demographic difference. (I'd like to see some surveys regarding this, it'd be interesting).
But Slashdot has quite a few average joes like myself. Middle income, B.A education. Not employed in tech industries.
Staying with the topic, I would have figured on Microsoft being able to at least hire a marketing company to do something similarly likeable. All I can remember is that annoying butterfly that shooes spam from a doorstep, or that stupid random old guy who intentionally no sense then drops a URL on the screen hoping that for some reason us lazy tv viewers will make the effort to leave the TV and go to the computer, just to hit that URL to make sense of that commercial.
MS marketing better come up with something funny for the Superbowl commercials!
Few want originality and creativity. The majority want a game to be...
Fun.
That's the overarching goal here. It doesn't need to be dramatically different, it can be just like everyone else's product so long as you do it better than everyone else. If it's so mired in "Been-done-before" then change it until it's fun. That's the primary goal. Changing things for the sake of changing things is throwing yourself out on a limb unnecessarily. Graphics is commonly referenced, while overall quality is easily recognized, though not always noticed. How well does everything in the game fit together to create a fun experience?
Just tightening up all the failings of a genre together to release another game without such failing is often enough to satisfy the fans of that genre.
Originality is only 1 path towards the ultimate goal of a game, fun.
I actually clicked in hopes of a descriptive tutorial explaining the merits of alternative OSes, as well as a getting started faq in getting the system to fulfill all the functions being fulfilled by the incumbent Windows setup.
I'm not trolling, I'm actually curious. And I think that my situation is not uncommon. Few have heard of non-MS solutions, and fewer still know/how/ to switch. Easing the transitional phase, and making it less scary would increase that market share against Windows and undermine its power.
I'm not opposed to switching, but I am intensely reluctant to give up existing functionality, and "For Dummies" approach to showing me that I have nothing to lose would help tremendously.
It's not so much the idea of damage to gaming, but that she would sink so far to propagate fear, uncertainty, and deception in order to garner public favor. That heavily damages my perception of her character. To manipulate fears by portraying games as training kids to kill people is trying to play off ignorance and capitalize on it to the detriment of the responsible people who are aware that it is not a threat. It makes me wonder what else she'd be willing to do or trade away. By itself it's a minor thing, but it captures an extremely disturbing picture of the person.
If she were to have disagreed with me on similarly minor topics that would have been fine so long as I feel that her position on major issues justify my vote. But now I can't trust anything she says or does, I'll just have to look for a different candidate.
"That's the factor of risk. It weights the cost depending on the consumer being risk-neutral(multiply by 1), riskophobe(multiply by 1). This effectively increases the cost of piracy as applicable to the decision-maker."
Should read as: "That's the factor of risk. It weights the cost depending on the consumer being risk-neutral(multiply by 1), riskophobe(multiply by less than one), or a riskophile(multiply by more than 1). This effectively modifies the cost of piracy as applicable to the decision-maker, in your example, the consumer is a riskophobe. This is actually the most common category, which is why I figured that a conservative estimate of 50 cents would be better).
You were probably joking, but just in case we have an actual misunderstanding(it's hard to tell tone with text):
www.dictionary.com defines "qualified" as: 1. having the qualities, accomplishments, etc., that fit a person for some function, office, or the like. 2. having the qualities, accomplishments, etc., required by law or custom for getting, having, or exercising a right, holding an office, or the like. 3. modified, limited, or restricted in some way: a qualified endorsement.
I'm using definition 3 rather than definition 1. I'm in agreement to the extent outlined by the rest of my post.
"Adjust this probability of being caught by the consumer's ability to accurately predict what their actual odds are, because that's how they're making this judgement, a perceived probability influences this cost"
That's the factor of risk. It weights the cost depending on the consumer being risk-neutral(multiply by 1), riskophobe(multiply by 1). This effectively increases the cost of piracy as applicable to the decision-maker.
If we assume the actual(not expected) cost of piracy is 2 cents and the legitimate cost of piracy is 99 cents, you would be irrational to buy it. (I should have mentioned this in the first post, but the moral cost is a premium added onto the cost of piracy, in general, this falls under the value of the song and the personal price of that consumer). What is happening is that the perceived cost of piracy is now outweighing that of the legitimate purchase, and as mentioned earlier, it's the perceived cost of piracy that people base their decision upon.
So in the example of the small guy not accepting the $20,000 fine x.0000001 cost, he's not using.0000001, because he perceives the odds of having to pay the $20,000 to be higher, around 1/20000 or more. With perceived odds of 1/20000, that gets him a final cost of 100 cents, which is more than the cost of buying it legitimately, and so they just buy the song instead.
People always do what they think is the best for them. Even someone who procrastinates himself into a dead end does what they think is best, because they value the short-term relaxation over the long-term benefit, and their ability to accurately gauge the pay-off is off also.
There is demand for the media. However, this reference to demand may need a bit of explanation to clearly define to the reader of the post.
The demand for the media indicates a maximum price a consumer is willing to pay for the product. When this coincides with the price the supplier charges, a sale is made. When the price is above that consumer's demand, the demand is still there at their personal price, it just doesn't result in a sale since the two parties are not in agreement.
Piracy should be looked at as an alternative vendor of the media.
The price of piracy is how much the punishment will cost the consumer if they are caught, and this is multiplied by the probability of the consumer of being caught. So let's pick a number out of the air for the lawsuit resulting from being caught. RIAA likes to settle out of court for a lower price than they filed for so the person will accept rather than fight the case, so let's say $20,000. $20,000 x.000001, If it's a 1 in a million chance of being caught for piracy with a penalty of $20,000 means that the price of piracy is 2 cents.
Adjust this probability of being caught by the consumer's ability to accurately predict what their actual odds are, because that's how they're making this judgement, a perceived probability influences this cost. This is also why the RIAA wants to publicize how many people they hit and how heavily they're hit. The perception of a piracy crackdown prevents piracy just as well as an actual piracy crackdown as long as the consumer believes it to be real.
So compare the cost of a song to the cost of a pirated song. It's about 99 cents vs. 2 cents. This is just an example, so a conservative estimate of a 50 cent cost for piracy is safer while still making the point.
The 50 cent price of a pirated song is cheaper than the 99 cent legitimate alternative, and is within the personal price range of the pirate, and thus they pirate.
The RIAA can prevent this in two ways. Price below the 50 cent cost of piracy and sell at 49 cents. Or, increase piracy difficulty and penalty until it's risker than the 99 cent cost(this is the course of action they're taking now). Or, they can pursue both a cost reduction and an attack on piracy at the same time to get sales at a price somewhere between 50 and 99 cents. If any of these 3 possibilities are achieved, the consumer will not choose piracy (Though the piracy cost for each consumer will vary of course).
Rutgers University teachers haven't mentioned any department-wide ban, but every teacher states from the outset that Wikipedia will not be accepted as a source. You can't be sure that your quote will be there when it gets checked, it lacks the accountability.
If the wiki is on a significant issue there should be citations for the information in that wiki. Wikipedia is still useful in this regard since you can follow those references and hopefully you'll find an acceptable source for use in backing up your paper instead.
What measures should be taken to prevent the 15-30 dead school children and whose fault is it that the kid took a black market AK-47 to school?
I don't think the schools should replace the ATF. Sometimes a fucking crazy lunatic will snap and go on a rampage. An incredibly small amount of bullied kids turn into homicidal lunatics, while majority do not. Let's skip the arguments about slippery slopes in security vs. freedom.
15-30 kids is a very small amount of people. An unfortunate tragedy that is the price of living the way we do. There are a vast number of ways we can reduce the number of deaths in the world, and they all bear their costs. Thus, a reasonable accounting of return on investment must be made. A human life has a price and we make that decision constantly.
For example, the computers we're posting on slashdot with could have saved an african kid from death. But we don't care. We like our computers. It takes about $200 bucks to fix a cleft palate so that a kid can live a normal life instead of being ostracized, maybe murdered for not having a minor surgery that would leave them looking completely normal except for a small scar on their lip.
That's the cost of a human life. Some human lives cost more than others, proximity is a huge factor in the value of a life. 15-30 dead kids vs. inconveniecing many many millions of kids.
Same deal with speed limits. More die the higher the speed limit is. Perhaps we have 1 person dying at a nation-wide speed limit of 10mph. How much is that life worth? This isn't a "slippery slope" example to ask "where does it end?" This is a specific example that is identifying the end-point, the value of a human life. Should we drop the speed limit to 5mph? We have to recognize that even inconveniences are too high a price to pay for saving a human life when the inconvenience is spread across a sufficiently large number of people. And just as an aside, let's weigh the inconvenience of the millions hit by spam, and the life of the spammer. I'm not saying he should be punished with death(not saying he shouldn't either), it's just something to think about.
Buying our way out of inconveniences with human lives isn't a new decision to be made, it's one that we've already made by living our lifestyle. Even living as a hermit in the woods has an economic cost of the lives that could have been saved by volunteer work.
Slashdot Mirror
Or perhaps no calculations are made and things just happen.
Rather than adding 1 and 1 together and getting 2. Maybe reality just has 1 and has 1 and has 2.
Math is just a descriptive framework we use to help understand reality. Reality doesn't necessarily have to have math, it's just reality.
I'm more worried about the turtle going to sleep and the universe slipping off its back.
Sports are not as accessible as gaming. I can hop on my computer, jump into a game and enjoy it, not all that much more involved than turning on a feed to watch someone else play. If I wanted to go out and play baseball at 1am, I'd need a field, and 2 teams. Watching this sport is my next best thing unless I want to get myself into local baseball league(probably between local businesses).
Watching gaming might be nice, but actually gaming is better.
And WOW, I just had a mental of image of someone watching someone else pretend to play a sport. Will we someday have a game where you play as someone watching someone else pretend to play a sport?
GP, I recommend a reduction in the use of caps. While I would assume that you're simply using it to provide emphasis, the translation to the reader is yelling. Italics would probably convey your tone better, or underlining. I understand that typing out the brackets for this can be time-consuming, but this limitation also increases the power of emphasis since emphasis spread too broadly dilutes the effect. (I use // to show italics personally)
i on
For both the GP and parent post, this is what you are looking for:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Product_differentiat
Economic phenomenon. It leads to "monopolistic competition", not a monopoly, and not perfect competition. The entry should explain what that means more efficiently than I can.
Parent understands the concept of what's going on here, except that the term monopoly here isn't entirely accurate and does not properly communicate parent's explanation. GP is correct in contesting what has been said. To put it simply, it's "in-between".
Madonna songs are a differentiated product and are granted market power which in this case means that Madonna's distributor can affect pricing for that product. It does not dictate pricing like a monopoly can. In perfect competition, there is zero market power, no single body can affect the price of the market for a product.
These claims may be true, I care little enough to give them the benefit of the doubt.
But the real advantage of playing Oblivion on a PC is the plethora of modifications. The marginal difference of graphical performance between xbox360, PS3, and high-end PC Oblivion is not really that important.
So this article leaves me asking..."So what?"
And the PS3 isn't a terrible piece of equipment, it's just an expensive one. I wouldn't be suprised to see nice graphics on it, I would demand it.
Parent has a good point. Companies don't care. However, the employees, who are people, they might care. They're the humanizing part.
The farther the employee from the customer, the less human the customer appears and less sympathy is used, and the farther away employees are the management who hand policy down to the employees who are now bound by this policy in their handling of the customer.
So yeah, companies will be pretty dick to you. However, the employees might be nicer when they can.
So for companies, I only trust them to do what they think will get them the most money, beyond that, they will have to provide proof.
I can buy that visual processing improves. The actual usefulness in application outside of videogames?
I don't know...the only thing I can come up with is the internet and filtering out the massive amount of useless information for what I'm actually looking for. My poor dad takes minutes to find what he needs because he doesn't recognize the arrangement patterns of webpages. He actually goes left to right, line by line, starting from the top, and working to the bottom.
Dreamfall: The Longest Journey a 2006 game got "Best story" from IGN, Gamespy, and Gametrailers I believe.
It was a 3d adventure game, with a rare combat event sprinkled in here and there(horrible), and the puzzles were incredibly simple.
The story and voice acting were great though. And so I enjoyed the hell out of the game.
I used to love final fantasy games, until I realized I HATED RANDOM ENCOUNTERS! It's a dull grind when I'm only playing to get plot and background. So I was delighted to play Dreamfall where I only get the entertainment and not the time-sinks. I also enjoyed FF8 which seems to be an unpopular opinion. However, I played on PC where cheats and a no-encounter item at level 8 allowed me to skip collecting random crap and wading through random fights, so that I could skip straight to story elements.
They plant the hammer of dawn right where you need to use it, you never have to carry it with you in single player since they'll provide one within the zone of movement around the spot it needs to be used. In that second beserker encounter I believe it was in that hanging garden area. Just keep going forward and get the hammer at the end. You don't need to use the aim-to-walk slowly method either, just strafe around at normal speed. The beserker is pretty harmless.
After you get your hammer, you might not realize what to do, took me a few minutes. Gamefaqs probably has your answer(I don't want to put a spoiler here).
Lost Planet only has unavoidable damage at the end boss. The rest of the game focuses around preventable damage. When a threat arrives, you're too slow to dodge. But all the threats give warnings or use patterns. It's only impossible to dodge when you wait until it's too late to dodge. There are unavoidable stumble attacks in more than one place in the game, but the bosses that do it also follow it up with a pause allowing you to recover and dodge. (For example, the snow worm featured in the trailers).
If you're looking for unfair, try Dead or Alive 4 against CPU. Skill is involved, but arbitrary countering by the CPU is also involved. So if the CPU decides to go on a counter-streak, there's nothing you can do but accept defeat and hope it won't do it again next round. That's why the key is to make the longest and most varied combos you can to limit the CPU's ability to fight back. Arbitrariness is incredibly lame in gaming. Theoretically you can memorize every possible attack for each character so you can predict the next step in a CPU combo, but that's more like work than playing a game.
Unreal 3's advantage over previous engine seems to be primarily graphical. I'm going to venture that the reason that it won't be applicable to the Wii is that cutting effects enough to run on the Wii makes the advances of the Unreal engine largely irrelevant. I'm sure some form of it will be usable, but will it really be Unreal 3 at that point?
I'd have to agree. If math being "too hard" is causing a high wash-out rate, I don't think reducing expectations is an appropriate response. As the parent noted, there's a minimum level of competency required to be successful in this field that can't be filtered away. The school should grade accordingly or else students will just stay and finish a CS degree only to find themselves noncompetitive in that field. This way a student can evaluate their grade; they can work harder to become competitive, or switch out to another major.
I'll admit it, I'm among the washouts. I changed majors into Economics because I'm not good enough to be a programmer. I packed in the Economics degree requirements into 2 years and graduated on time. My college would have done me a disservice by coddling me until I had made it into a programming job only to find out I wasn't up to snuff.
Alternative methods to create quality graduates would be welcome though. The assumption that I'm making here is that aptitude for math is indeed a necessary requirement to perform well. If it is possible to implement an integrated approach to the math requirements, I think that'd be fine too. Teach the math concepts with a specific bent towards programming. Of course this would require a sufficient supply of qualified teachers, which is another problem as well. Not just people who are proficient in the field, but true teachers who are also proficient at education and communication.
Won't somebody think of the Thetans?!
This IS comedy central y'know. I don't think Futurama is intent on surpassing South Park in vulgarity. Entirely different approaches.
Not all Slashdotters are geeks, though you may see more of them here. There's a certain amount of crossover between Digg and Slashdot, though I'd expect a demographic difference. (I'd like to see some surveys regarding this, it'd be interesting).
But Slashdot has quite a few average joes like myself. Middle income, B.A education. Not employed in tech industries.
Staying with the topic, I would have figured on Microsoft being able to at least hire a marketing company to do something similarly likeable. All I can remember is that annoying butterfly that shooes spam from a doorstep, or that stupid random old guy who intentionally no sense then drops a URL on the screen hoping that for some reason us lazy tv viewers will make the effort to leave the TV and go to the computer, just to hit that URL to make sense of that commercial.
MS marketing better come up with something funny for the Superbowl commercials!
Yes, when placed on the side, the slot's edge has a cradle to hold the DVD upright and in place.
Few want originality and creativity. The majority want a game to be...
Fun.
That's the overarching goal here. It doesn't need to be dramatically different, it can be just like everyone else's product so long as you do it better than everyone else. If it's so mired in "Been-done-before" then change it until it's fun. That's the primary goal. Changing things for the sake of changing things is throwing yourself out on a limb unnecessarily. Graphics is commonly referenced, while overall quality is easily recognized, though not always noticed. How well does everything in the game fit together to create a fun experience?
Just tightening up all the failings of a genre together to release another game without such failing is often enough to satisfy the fans of that genre.
Originality is only 1 path towards the ultimate goal of a game, fun.
I would heartily welcome competition in the gaming soundcard market.
Do you have a more informative link?
/how/ to switch. Easing the transitional phase, and making it less scary would increase that market share against Windows and undermine its power.
I actually clicked in hopes of a descriptive tutorial explaining the merits of alternative OSes, as well as a getting started faq in getting the system to fulfill all the functions being fulfilled by the incumbent Windows setup.
I'm not trolling, I'm actually curious. And I think that my situation is not uncommon. Few have heard of non-MS solutions, and fewer still know
I'm not opposed to switching, but I am intensely reluctant to give up existing functionality, and "For Dummies" approach to showing me that I have nothing to lose would help tremendously.
She had joined up with Jack Thompson.
It's not so much the idea of damage to gaming, but that she would sink so far to propagate fear, uncertainty, and deception in order to garner public favor. That heavily damages my perception of her character. To manipulate fears by portraying games as training kids to kill people is trying to play off ignorance and capitalize on it to the detriment of the responsible people who are aware that it is not a threat. It makes me wonder what else she'd be willing to do or trade away. By itself it's a minor thing, but it captures an extremely disturbing picture of the person.
If she were to have disagreed with me on similarly minor topics that would have been fine so long as I feel that her position on major issues justify my vote. But now I can't trust anything she says or does, I'll just have to look for a different candidate.
Bleh, should've proofread:
"That's the factor of risk. It weights the cost depending on the consumer being risk-neutral(multiply by 1), riskophobe(multiply by 1). This effectively increases the cost of piracy as applicable to the decision-maker."
Should read as: "That's the factor of risk. It weights the cost depending on the consumer being risk-neutral(multiply by 1), riskophobe(multiply by less than one), or a riskophile(multiply by more than 1). This effectively modifies the cost of piracy as applicable to the decision-maker, in your example, the consumer is a riskophobe. This is actually the most common category, which is why I figured that a conservative estimate of 50 cents would be better).
You were probably joking, but just in case we have an actual misunderstanding(it's hard to tell tone with text):
www.dictionary.com defines "qualified" as:
1. having the qualities, accomplishments, etc., that fit a person for some function, office, or the like.
2. having the qualities, accomplishments, etc., required by law or custom for getting, having, or exercising a right, holding an office, or the like.
3. modified, limited, or restricted in some way: a qualified endorsement.
I'm using definition 3 rather than definition 1. I'm in agreement to the extent outlined by the rest of my post.
"Adjust this probability of being caught by the consumer's ability to accurately predict what their actual odds are, because that's how they're making this judgement, a perceived probability influences this cost"
.0000001 cost, he's not using .0000001, because he perceives the odds of having to pay the $20,000 to be higher, around 1/20000 or more. With perceived odds of 1/20000, that gets him a final cost of 100 cents, which is more than the cost of buying it legitimately, and so they just buy the song instead.
That's the factor of risk. It weights the cost depending on the consumer being risk-neutral(multiply by 1), riskophobe(multiply by 1). This effectively increases the cost of piracy as applicable to the decision-maker.
If we assume the actual(not expected) cost of piracy is 2 cents and the legitimate cost of piracy is 99 cents, you would be irrational to buy it. (I should have mentioned this in the first post, but the moral cost is a premium added onto the cost of piracy, in general, this falls under the value of the song and the personal price of that consumer). What is happening is that the perceived cost of piracy is now outweighing that of the legitimate purchase, and as mentioned earlier, it's the perceived cost of piracy that people base their decision upon.
So in the example of the small guy not accepting the $20,000 fine x
People always do what they think is the best for them. Even someone who procrastinates himself into a dead end does what they think is best, because they value the short-term relaxation over the long-term benefit, and their ability to accurately gauge the pay-off is off also.
I'm in qualified agreement with the parent post.
.000001, If it's a 1 in a million chance of being caught for piracy with a penalty of $20,000 means that the price of piracy is 2 cents.
There is demand for the media. However, this reference to demand may need a bit of explanation to clearly define to the reader of the post.
The demand for the media indicates a maximum price a consumer is willing to pay for the product. When this coincides with the price the supplier charges, a sale is made. When the price is above that consumer's demand, the demand is still there at their personal price, it just doesn't result in a sale since the two parties are not in agreement.
Piracy should be looked at as an alternative vendor of the media.
The price of piracy is how much the punishment will cost the consumer if they are caught, and this is multiplied by the probability of the consumer of being caught. So let's pick a number out of the air for the lawsuit resulting from being caught. RIAA likes to settle out of court for a lower price than they filed for so the person will accept rather than fight the case, so let's say $20,000. $20,000 x
Adjust this probability of being caught by the consumer's ability to accurately predict what their actual odds are, because that's how they're making this judgement, a perceived probability influences this cost. This is also why the RIAA wants to publicize how many people they hit and how heavily they're hit. The perception of a piracy crackdown prevents piracy just as well as an actual piracy crackdown as long as the consumer believes it to be real.
So compare the cost of a song to the cost of a pirated song. It's about 99 cents vs. 2 cents. This is just an example, so a conservative estimate of a 50 cent cost for piracy is safer while still making the point.
The 50 cent price of a pirated song is cheaper than the 99 cent legitimate alternative, and is within the personal price range of the pirate, and thus they pirate.
The RIAA can prevent this in two ways. Price below the 50 cent cost of piracy and sell at 49 cents. Or, increase piracy difficulty and penalty until it's risker than the 99 cent cost(this is the course of action they're taking now). Or, they can pursue both a cost reduction and an attack on piracy at the same time to get sales at a price somewhere between 50 and 99 cents. If any of these 3 possibilities are achieved, the consumer will not choose piracy (Though the piracy cost for each consumer will vary of course).
That's the economics of the situation.
Rutgers University teachers haven't mentioned any department-wide ban, but every teacher states from the outset that Wikipedia will not be accepted as a source. You can't be sure that your quote will be there when it gets checked, it lacks the accountability.
If the wiki is on a significant issue there should be citations for the information in that wiki. Wikipedia is still useful in this regard since you can follow those references and hopefully you'll find an acceptable source for use in backing up your paper instead.
What measures should be taken to prevent the 15-30 dead school children and whose fault is it that the kid took a black market AK-47 to school?
I don't think the schools should replace the ATF. Sometimes a fucking crazy lunatic will snap and go on a rampage. An incredibly small amount of bullied kids turn into homicidal lunatics, while majority do not. Let's skip the arguments about slippery slopes in security vs. freedom.
15-30 kids is a very small amount of people. An unfortunate tragedy that is the price of living the way we do. There are a vast number of ways we can reduce the number of deaths in the world, and they all bear their costs. Thus, a reasonable accounting of return on investment must be made. A human life has a price and we make that decision constantly.
For example, the computers we're posting on slashdot with could have saved an african kid from death. But we don't care. We like our computers. It takes about $200 bucks to fix a cleft palate so that a kid can live a normal life instead of being ostracized, maybe murdered for not having a minor surgery that would leave them looking completely normal except for a small scar on their lip.
That's the cost of a human life. Some human lives cost more than others, proximity is a huge factor in the value of a life. 15-30 dead kids vs. inconveniecing many many millions of kids.
Same deal with speed limits. More die the higher the speed limit is. Perhaps we have 1 person dying at a nation-wide speed limit of 10mph. How much is that life worth? This isn't a "slippery slope" example to ask "where does it end?" This is a specific example that is identifying the end-point, the value of a human life. Should we drop the speed limit to 5mph? We have to recognize that even inconveniences are too high a price to pay for saving a human life when the inconvenience is spread across a sufficiently large number of people. And just as an aside, let's weigh the inconvenience of the millions hit by spam, and the life of the spammer. I'm not saying he should be punished with death(not saying he shouldn't either), it's just something to think about.
Buying our way out of inconveniences with human lives isn't a new decision to be made, it's one that we've already made by living our lifestyle. Even living as a hermit in the woods has an economic cost of the lives that could have been saved by volunteer work.