The religious narrative itself gives the moral code a history of about 3500 years. Modern scholars reckon the writings are more like 2500-3000 years old. Tops. And much of the developments in modern societal code can be attributed to secular classical Greek and enlightenment-era philosophy. Christianity has historically been a very conservative force.
To be a really effective medium of exchange people also need to have faith in it as a store of value. And this doesn't come naturally from being a favored medium of exchange for certain types of goods. And purely as a payment medium, the "low" 0.99% rates that bitpay advertises only look good if you've never looked any further than your credit card.
You've missed the paragraph entirely, but let's look at some definitions:
(2) Attempting to aid the enemy.
(a) That the accused did a certain overt act; (b) That the act was done with the intent to aid the enemy with certain arms, ammunition, supplies, money, or other things; (c) That the act amounted to more than mere preparation; and (d) That the act apparently tended to bring about the offense of aiding the enemy with certain arms, ammunition, supplies, money, or other things.
So for a guilty verdict you need need to prove intention.
Even Bluray only uses 30 Mbps. Transferring files faster is nice, but you should really be using ethernet or powerline adapters rather than crowd the spectrum with your junk.
High speed is definitely worth it for cameras. I went for the "small" 8GB version in favor of speed. Space is so abundant these days that it isn't a priority for most people.
Think about it: When you use the SD card in the camera you're either taking snaps, or copying existing images or videos from or to the card. You want all this to happen as fast as possible. Once you've copied the files over you can delete everything. The rest of the time it does nothing.
On a tablet you're using it as computer storage, so you want bulk. OTOH the applications rarely require the same bandwidth as photography and class 4 is usually enough.
Huh? All those services are operated by the respective companies. There are no "XBOX Netflix servers", it's just your device decoding the stream that it sends to everyone else. Or do you have evidence otherwise? In-game chat is obviously a different issue, and the quality of the apps may vary (you're probably best sticking with a PC if you want the best UI).
Difficult call. Certainly on a microeconomical scale (that is for the individual publisher) it wouldn't strike me as being a smart move to dig deeper in the wallets of your legitimate customers because you think there'll be more piracy. Conversely, when piracy isn't a huge problem there might be no immediate gains of reducing your price. But on a macroeconomical scale more industry revenue spread across more companies will push more studios and projects into profitability. This increased competition is what leads to the downward push on prices (or upward push on quality).
But anyway, this wasn't about piracy, it was about used games. If people really do stop buying games because they can't resell them, then they will need to reduce their prices. If however all developers start ending up with bags and bags of money, then there will be more competition.
My point being that if you care about the producer, then you should care about how used games affect the market (whether or not you support or oppose them).
Revenue *is* affected by piracy, I don't think anyone's reasonably been able to debunk that. When you change the balance there's always going to winners and losers. In the case of piracy, it's the legitimate customers who have only to lose.
5 Dollars a Month is a Netflix subscription. Or a new downloadable game every 1-2 Months, many of which are excellent. Or a PS3 after 5 Years. Basically, 5 Dollars a Month is a whole lot of Money for nothing much. I appreciate that there exists a certain class of gamer who will think of it as negligible for the amount of features unlocked. But I'm the kind of customer who when he buys something takes into account not just whether or not I want it, but whether I think it's reasonable. I *know* that the Live subscription doesn't go to help indie developers, subsidize Netflix or pay Youtube channels. I also know that other vendors such as Apple, Sony, Nintendo *don't* charge to have the services unlocked, and that the other platforms offer online gaming for free. So in that context, yes, 5 Dollars a month is a rip-off.
Copying digital content is ludicrously easy, so there is very little inherent value in a game disc. It has "fake" value, because people respect copyrights. We do this to reward producers so that they can do business.
When you start to think about how many copies are "needed" it turns out that these are very few indeed. If a game takes a week to complete, then only one copy is needed to satisfy 52 people within one year. Of course there are factors limiting this: Many people are impatient and won't wait that long, they will want more than a week, or they're just too lazy to go to the store to trade it in. But say you are willing to drive everyone to their maximum level of inconvenience, then you will indeed arrive at a minimum number of needed copies.
Think of these two options: 1)You make only the minimum number of "needed" copies and sell them at a high price. But people split the cost by reselling, so their individual contribution is relatively small.
2)You sell everyone the game right away but for a much cheaper price. Because you make money on every sale the total revenue stays the same though.
In terms of results option 2 is preferable, because no-one has to wait around and everyone still gets to keep a copy if they ever fancy going back to the game.
So, instead of selling one full price game the publisher get's to sell a full priced game and bargain-bin game? Sounds like a sweet deal to me.
What you describe is price discrimination and does indeed increase sales and profits. The thing is that this new restriction *always* works out better for the publisher because they can fine-tune to the optimal situation. It's like a concert organizer limiting the number of cheap seats, even though they know that people in the pricey seats would have bought the cheap ones had they been available. What's best for the customer isn't necessarily what's best for the publisher.
The copyright holder is not allowed to oppose such a seal, and technical means to render a resold copy unusable will probably be seen as an opposition of the copyright holder to a sale -- thus making them illegal.
Replace "probably" with "definitely won't". Oracle sued a company who was selling licenses it bought from Oracle customers. All the court said is that this company had done nothing wrong and that Oracle has no legal case against them. Nowhere does it require them to have an officially sanctioned used-licence scheme for their product activation. And believe me, this wouldn't have slipped the court's - or the software industy's - eye.
But not so good for the producer. If no-one cares about the producer making money why do we even bother pretending that a physical or digital copy is even worth anything? The truth is of course that the whole point of copyright is to make creative production economically viable. If publishers can't make enough money selling regular copies they need to change their business model.
To be honest I can't believe we're all having this discussion again. It's exactly what happened with physical media and that's what brought us into this "games as a service" mess in the first place.
Valve set the conditions. They could easily make it a requirement that all games need to be priced the same everywhere. It's them who have the leverage. Obviously they just don't feel very strongly about it or want the price discrimination themselves.
That's a question of semantics. Copy protection is certainly a much older term and more easily understandable. Traditional copy protection is user-indiscriminate. DRM on the other hand uses information on the user (location / Identity) to decide whether to grant access or not and will actively revoke access.
Not really. Games used to require the CD to be in the drive the whole time. And they also had serial numbers. You couldn't play the same copy in a LAN and playing online with the same serial could lead to you getting banned. Of course you could bypass these restrictions by using various hacks and cracks, but that probably violates the T&Cs like everything else.
I guess what's different this time is that they can deny access to your old games. Does stuff like that happen often or easily?
It actually is - on a personal level. After having consumed a game or a book it's "spent" for me and I have little or no interest in playing or reading it again. Of course the physical data is still there, which is why someone else would happily buy it for almost the same as you paid. It's this discrepancy that causes traditional market principles to break down.
Physical media still has some decay: Books get dirty, discs get scratched. But with digital media there is no degradation and no scarcity. There is absolutely no motivation to keep your copy and no motivation to buy from the producers.
If it's only the gun nuts who won't want to blow up their own buildings how is this an advantage for them? Also, it needn't be as extreme as blowing up the building. The military has a wide selection of toys somewhere between "assault rifle" and "blow up a building" at their disposal, not to mention a ton of other gadgets unavailable to individuals.
You misread. He didn't state that tanks were good in cities, but that the Coalition forces were doing well in cities.
While you correctly pointed out some weaknesses of tanks the overall theme was small arms vs. an arm with heavy arms, i.e. artillery and missiles. Of course they'll need defense, but let's take that for granted. Snipers may be able to kill a few people and stay hidden. But even then you're assuming the enemy will hold restraint. When it come down to it they won't be averse to bombshelling the whole building before they send their infantry in.
1) Acute radiation sickness is something that is very well understood in terms of necessary doses. 2) No-one disputes that ionizing radiation is harmful and increases the risk of developing cancer. 3) Background radiation is a perfectly reasonable comparison and there is certainly no reason to believe in some kind of crazy non-linear relation. It doesn't mean we're completely ignorant, just that it's impossible to separate statistical differences from background noise and fluctuations.
BTW I looked up Helen Caldicott and it appears she is an anti-nuclear advocate with no major scientific publications to her name. Not wanting to discredit the woman, but I couldn't find any noteworthy contribution on her part to the biological effects of radiation.
The amount of thermal emission depends on the temperature and surface area. A civilization would presumably require a minimum temperature and have a small (in stellar terms) amount of material available. Using known characteristics of stellar radiation and plugging in some sensible values you could work out the peak wavelength. The far limit would be the CMBR wavelength, as you can't cool off any more than your surroundings.
Without patents there's little incentive to develop inventions into technologies
A propositional fallacy. There's a whole load of reasons to develop new technologies: A competitive edge, a high reputation or simply not waiting around for others to develop it. Those are just a few selfish motivators, but the real economy works in non-selfish ways too: Engineers simply enjoy what they do and are very passionate about their work. If monetary compensation were then none of the smart guys would put up with low-paying academic research positions or R&D jobs which make you hand over your invention to the company.
The way patents work now is that they're seen as a by-product of regular development, intended to accumulate a portfolio to enable strategic lawsuits. So before we start talking about the strengths of the patent system, I'd like to see evidence that they can actually be better incentives than the natural incentives which are already there. Then we can start talking about whether the advantages outweigh the drawbacks.
Re:Great Summary. But where does this go from here
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Sexism In Science
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The religious narrative itself gives the moral code a history of about 3500 years. Modern scholars reckon the writings are more like 2500-3000 years old. Tops.
And much of the developments in modern societal code can be attributed to secular classical Greek and enlightenment-era philosophy. Christianity has historically been a very conservative force.
To be a really effective medium of exchange people also need to have faith in it as a store of value. And this doesn't come naturally from being a favored medium of exchange for certain types of goods.
And purely as a payment medium, the "low" 0.99% rates that bitpay advertises only look good if you've never looked any further than your credit card.
You've missed the paragraph entirely, but let's look at some definitions:
(2) Attempting to aid the enemy.
(a) That the accused did a certain overt act;
(b) That the act was done with the intent to aid the enemy with certain arms, ammunition, supplies, money, or other things;
(c) That the act amounted to more than mere preparation; and
(d) That the act apparently tended to bring about the offense of aiding the enemy with certain arms, ammunition, supplies, money, or other things.
So for a guilty verdict you need need to prove intention.
Even Bluray only uses 30 Mbps. Transferring files faster is nice, but you should really be using ethernet or powerline adapters rather than crowd the spectrum with your junk.
High speed is definitely worth it for cameras. I went for the "small" 8GB version in favor of speed. Space is so abundant these days that it isn't a priority for most people.
Think about it: When you use the SD card in the camera you're either taking snaps, or copying existing images or videos from or to the card. You want all this to happen as fast as possible. Once you've copied the files over you can delete everything. The rest of the time it does nothing.
On a tablet you're using it as computer storage, so you want bulk. OTOH the applications rarely require the same bandwidth as photography and class 4 is usually enough.
Huh? All those services are operated by the respective companies. There are no "XBOX Netflix servers", it's just your device decoding the stream that it sends to everyone else. Or do you have evidence otherwise?
In-game chat is obviously a different issue, and the quality of the apps may vary (you're probably best sticking with a PC if you want the best UI).
Difficult call. Certainly on a microeconomical scale (that is for the individual publisher) it wouldn't strike me as being a smart move to dig deeper in the wallets of your legitimate customers because you think there'll be more piracy. Conversely, when piracy isn't a huge problem there might be no immediate gains of reducing your price.
But on a macroeconomical scale more industry revenue spread across more companies will push more studios and projects into profitability. This increased competition is what leads to the downward push on prices (or upward push on quality).
But anyway, this wasn't about piracy, it was about used games. If people really do stop buying games because they can't resell them, then they will need to reduce their prices. If however all developers start ending up with bags and bags of money, then there will be more competition.
My point being that if you care about the producer, then you should care about how used games affect the market (whether or not you support or oppose them).
Revenue *is* affected by piracy, I don't think anyone's reasonably been able to debunk that. When you change the balance there's always going to winners and losers. In the case of piracy, it's the legitimate customers who have only to lose.
5 Dollars a Month is a Netflix subscription. Or a new downloadable game every 1-2 Months, many of which are excellent. Or a PS3 after 5 Years. Basically, 5 Dollars a Month is a whole lot of Money for nothing much. I appreciate that there exists a certain class of gamer who will think of it as negligible for the amount of features unlocked.
But I'm the kind of customer who when he buys something takes into account not just whether or not I want it, but whether I think it's reasonable. I *know* that the Live subscription doesn't go to help indie developers, subsidize Netflix or pay Youtube channels. I also know that other vendors such as Apple, Sony, Nintendo *don't* charge to have the services unlocked, and that the other platforms offer online gaming for free. So in that context, yes, 5 Dollars a month is a rip-off.
That's after Philips in turn was ditched by Nintendo who decided to abandon the CD add-on completely.
Copying digital content is ludicrously easy, so there is very little inherent value in a game disc. It has "fake" value, because people respect copyrights. We do this to reward producers so that they can do business.
When you start to think about how many copies are "needed" it turns out that these are very few indeed. If a game takes a week to complete, then only one copy is needed to satisfy 52 people within one year.
Of course there are factors limiting this: Many people are impatient and won't wait that long, they will want more than a week, or they're just too lazy to go to the store to trade it in. But say you are willing to drive everyone to their maximum level of inconvenience, then you will indeed arrive at a minimum number of needed copies.
Think of these two options:
1)You make only the minimum number of "needed" copies and sell them at a high price. But people split the cost by reselling, so their individual contribution is relatively small.
2)You sell everyone the game right away but for a much cheaper price. Because you make money on every sale the total revenue stays the same though.
In terms of results option 2 is preferable, because no-one has to wait around and everyone still gets to keep a copy if they ever fancy going back to the game.
So, instead of selling one full price game the publisher get's to sell a full priced game and bargain-bin game? Sounds like a sweet deal to me.
What you describe is price discrimination and does indeed increase sales and profits. The thing is that this new restriction *always* works out better for the publisher because they can fine-tune to the optimal situation. It's like a concert organizer limiting the number of cheap seats, even though they know that people in the pricey seats would have bought the cheap ones had they been available.
What's best for the customer isn't necessarily what's best for the publisher.
The copyright holder is not allowed to oppose such a seal, and technical means to render a resold copy unusable will probably be seen as an opposition of the copyright holder to a sale -- thus making them illegal.
Replace "probably" with "definitely won't". Oracle sued a company who was selling licenses it bought from Oracle customers. All the court said is that this company had done nothing wrong and that Oracle has no legal case against them. Nowhere does it require them to have an officially sanctioned used-licence scheme for their product activation. And believe me, this wouldn't have slipped the court's - or the software industy's - eye.
But not so good for the producer. If no-one cares about the producer making money why do we even bother pretending that a physical or digital copy is even worth anything?
The truth is of course that the whole point of copyright is to make creative production economically viable. If publishers can't make enough money selling regular copies they need to change their business model.
To be honest I can't believe we're all having this discussion again. It's exactly what happened with physical media and that's what brought us into this "games as a service" mess in the first place.
Valve set the conditions. They could easily make it a requirement that all games need to be priced the same everywhere. It's them who have the leverage. Obviously they just don't feel very strongly about it or want the price discrimination themselves.
That's a question of semantics. Copy protection is certainly a much older term and more easily understandable. Traditional copy protection is user-indiscriminate.
DRM on the other hand uses information on the user (location / Identity) to decide whether to grant access or not and will actively revoke access.
Not really. Games used to require the CD to be in the drive the whole time. And they also had serial numbers. You couldn't play the same copy in a LAN and playing online with the same serial could lead to you getting banned. Of course you could bypass these restrictions by using various hacks and cracks, but that probably violates the T&Cs like everything else.
I guess what's different this time is that they can deny access to your old games. Does stuff like that happen often or easily?
It actually is - on a personal level. After having consumed a game or a book it's "spent" for me and I have little or no interest in playing or reading it again. Of course the physical data is still there, which is why someone else would happily buy it for almost the same as you paid. It's this discrepancy that causes traditional market principles to break down.
Physical media still has some decay: Books get dirty, discs get scratched. But with digital media there is no degradation and no scarcity. There is absolutely no motivation to keep your copy and no motivation to buy from the producers.
If it's only the gun nuts who won't want to blow up their own buildings how is this an advantage for them? Also, it needn't be as extreme as blowing up the building. The military has a wide selection of toys somewhere between "assault rifle" and "blow up a building" at their disposal, not to mention a ton of other gadgets unavailable to individuals.
You misread. He didn't state that tanks were good in cities, but that the Coalition forces were doing well in cities.
While you correctly pointed out some weaknesses of tanks the overall theme was small arms vs. an arm with heavy arms, i.e. artillery and missiles. Of course they'll need defense, but let's take that for granted. Snipers may be able to kill a few people and stay hidden. But even then you're assuming the enemy will hold restraint. When it come down to it they won't be averse to bombshelling the whole building before they send their infantry in.
1) Acute radiation sickness is something that is very well understood in terms of necessary doses.
2) No-one disputes that ionizing radiation is harmful and increases the risk of developing cancer.
3) Background radiation is a perfectly reasonable comparison and there is certainly no reason to believe in some kind of crazy non-linear relation. It doesn't mean we're completely ignorant, just that it's impossible to separate statistical differences from background noise and fluctuations.
BTW I looked up Helen Caldicott and it appears she is an anti-nuclear advocate with no major scientific publications to her name. Not wanting to discredit the woman, but I couldn't find any noteworthy contribution on her part to the biological effects of radiation.
The amount of thermal emission depends on the temperature and surface area.
A civilization would presumably require a minimum temperature and have a small (in stellar terms) amount of material available. Using known characteristics of stellar radiation and plugging in some sensible values you could work out the peak wavelength. The far limit would be the CMBR wavelength, as you can't cool off any more than your surroundings.
Right now the trend is towards outsourcing email services to the likes of Google and Microsoft, simply because of the ease-of-use and low maintenance.
Without patents there's little incentive to develop inventions into technologies
A propositional fallacy. There's a whole load of reasons to develop new technologies: A competitive edge, a high reputation or simply not waiting around for others to develop it.
Those are just a few selfish motivators, but the real economy works in non-selfish ways too: Engineers simply enjoy what they do and are very passionate about their work. If monetary compensation were then none of the smart guys would put up with low-paying academic research positions or R&D jobs which make you hand over your invention to the company.
The way patents work now is that they're seen as a by-product of regular development, intended to accumulate a portfolio to enable strategic lawsuits. So before we start talking about the strengths of the patent system, I'd like to see evidence that they can actually be better incentives than the natural incentives which are already there. Then we can start talking about whether the advantages outweigh the drawbacks.
The two names they used in the study were John and Jennifer, which are apparently equally likeable, where they cite this study here: http://pss.sagepub.com/content/19/3/268.short