And here's a news-flash for whoever wrote that summary: Terms like "Culturally congruent risk perception" have no obvious meaning for the general reader. Field-specific jargon is just annoying to everyone who doesn't happen to be in your field (i.e., almost everyone else on the planet).
Culture, congruent, risk and perception are standard English words. Culturally is a standard adverb for culture. The meaning of the phrase is easily understood by just putting together the meaning of the individual words. None of the words in the grouping rely on field-specific meanings.
I'm sorry that your grasp of the English language is so poor that a few 25 cent words strung together scare you. Now go read a dictionary and stop living up to the stereotype of the proud-to-be-ignorant American.
Yea, that's great, we're getting better at understanding evolution. Okay. Nice. Why use that to try to tear down someone's beliefs?
Because a lot of the principles that are used to prop up beliefs are used to tear down scientific achievements. I wager that if the religious types would be a little more polite in their discussions about science, the scientific types would be a bit more polite about what science has to say about faith. That said, there's a significant problem for religion here: there is no question that science cannot ask. As the scientific method provides more and more answers to those questions, religions, especially of the organized type, will find themselves responsible for ever smaller pieces of our culture. This guarantees conflict, and it guarantees that neither science nor religion will ever be totally at peace with each other.
Paranoia is also a result of difficult economic times. If everything's hunky-dory, there's a lot less space for paranoia to thrive in. But with the 2008 financial crisis, the major threat of a European break-up on the horizon and a Chinese juggernaut that just isn't showing many signs of slowing down, and it's kinda understandable that a lot of politics is based on an us-vs-them, apocalyptic them. Not good, not right, but certainly understandable.
Actually, it is much more internally consistent than a lot of other labels. After all, ecology is basic the story of anarchy and the systems that emerge from it. As a result, eco-anarchism should be fairly compelling, strictly from an ideological consistency perspective.
Holy crap dude - can you understand the difference between understanding what your opponents are up to, and technical details and specs of your gadgetry? One is something that is crucial towards formulating an effective strategy, the other is crucial to formulating battlefield tactics. I'm sure you can figure out which is which.
In other news, voters clamor for an efficient government, but then are shocked when the government sources contracts to the lowest bidder.
*facepalm* Either pay for an expensive, inefficient government that props up corporations solely so that it has a national source for everything military, or shut the fuck up and pay China for its cheap crap.
Not to mention that there already is a Facebook phone. Information about it is right now buried underneath articles for the current story, but I saw it advertised a while ago by either HTC, LG or one of the other Asian smartphone makers. It basically was an Android with a UI designed to make updating and reading Facebook very easy.
Not sure what Facebook could add to that effort, outside of more space for ads.
What about keeping the general population informed about what the world is up to? You know, so that the electorate can make electoral decisions based on actual information rather than fear-mongering? Or is this just an outdated concept, and we should let our politicians just tell us what we should worry about?
And absolutely nothing in your entire wall of text supports your idea that used games hurt your industry. It's all conjecture that requires some basic economics to be 100% false, as well as some very real history to be utterly non-existent.
Tell you what: show me some data how many people who bought used games would have bought games new in the complete absence of new games. Note that it requires you to show that these would be the same people who would have otherwise paid full price. Furthermore, show me that people who sold new games would have bought more games even if there was no used game market.
If you can't, you're making crap up that flies in the face of history and economic theory. I know it feels good to blame your money problems on others stealing from you, but it doesn't change the fact that it is nothing but a delusion.
Oh, and for your information: the industry is actually created by the consumers. Without them, games would be nothing but a hobby.
Bull-fucking-shit. You know who made money on games? iD Software. You know when some of their biggest money makers came about? When they GAVE their software away. I don't know if you remember, but used games used to be the norm, and people made money hand over fist. If anything, used game sales have never been lower than they have been now. And yet, you think it is somehow bad? It's only because you have no idea of history, or even economic theory.
Here's why used games cannot influence your sales: 1) Used games are a different product. Manuals are torn, CDs are scratched, and sometimes fun stuff like maps is missing. 2) You ALREADY got your sale. A used game can never be put into circulation without a first sale having occurred. 3) People who buy a game used are unlikely to have bought the game new. That's just basic economic principle. As a result, a used game sale cannot possibly equate a new game sale. 4) People who sell a game get more money for more games. A used game means that someone got money back to reinvest into a new game. 5) If your game is so shit that people play it once, then put it up for sale within 2 weeks, the problem is your game, not the economic model.
In short: fuck off and die. We are not renters. We are buyers. And a bit of a warning, coming from someone who has probably been gaming for longer than you have been alive: I already have a hard time accepting the always-on principle for games. I'm willing to make an exception for certain exceptional titles, but don't fool yourself for a second that all people will put up with buying a license for $60 or more.
Or, alternatively, it means you're a moron and your posts are a waste of screen space. Na, couldn't be. It's all a giant conspiracy to keep you from speaking the truth to power. What the hell is "power" in a Slashdot discussion anyway?
Yes, of course. At the same time, what would have them do? Not ever mention anything about potential security holes, because it could be construed as a conflict interest?
Here's the real question you need to ask yourself before putting anything in the cloud: do you trust them to be more competent than yourself at backing things up, providing uptime and securing the data? If you answer no to any of these questions, you have a reason to keep stuff in-house. Note: beware of Dunning-Kruger effect. If you answer yes to all three, you have no reason to keep things in-house.
What IBM has done is to say that they can do a better job securing their data than Dropbox and iCloud. Considering the rather significant breaches that have occurred at Dropbox, and the completely unknown state of data security in iCloud, IBM is spot on with their assessment. I would only put encrypted stuff on either, or stuff where I have no problem if people are snooping through it. Want to take a gander at my weekend pictures? Knock yourself out. Want to find out what my truecrypt file is about? Good luck with that.
If 90% of published articles are wrong, the current model is already failing. What you're absolutely missing, is that there is nothing in the journal model that can't be replicated online. ABSOLUTELY NOTHING. And since the heavy lifting - the writing of the paper and the review - is already done for free for the papers, it's trivial to put that process on the internet.
Looks like your other accounts managed to get some modpoints. Nice going.
Have you ever heard of a search engine? It's this fancy tool that uses an algorithm to determine the most relevant webpage for your query. Somehow, I think there's space here to use that technology to build a search engine that will return you the most relevant article for your query. For example, beyond keywords, it could leverage highest number of citations, most blue-ribbon reviewers, best ratings, etc. You could even build reputation graphs for papers and reviewers.
All of that is old hat. And, if it is really critical to brand papers, you could have researchers create review pools, where random members rate a paper, and where the only thing you know is that "Badass Astronomers from Hell" said a paper is good. Once you figure out that these people are generally spot on with their review, you'll trust them more, search more for their reviews, and suddenly, you have Nature reborn online, but without all the overhead that doesn't go to scientists.
Oh, and someone should maintain a list of the sockpuppets. I'd hate to see them actually get modpoints.
Whoever didn't see this coming.... can I have your job?
That said... "clear goal of violating copyrights and destroying the fundamental underpinnings of the broadcast television ecosystem." *facepalm* The Internet is SUPPOSED to destroy ecosystems built on artificial scarcity. Free markets and black swans are a bitch, aren't they?
Quick question: how many people are selling entertainment? It seems to me that there's a glut of entertainment, which means that supply completely overwhelms demand. The result: very low prices for a product, with only a select few making lots of money in it.
That's the free market for you. If there would be only a few hundred musicians in the world, I can guarantee you they would make out like bandits. Put since there are a few millions, most live hand-to-mouth.
I think what happened with the new bosses is not so much that they are worse than the old bosses, but that there are now far, far more musicians around chasing that same entertainment dollar. Before, supply was artificially constrained. Now, it's not, and people find out that it is even harder to make a living - because suddenly, the competition got that much fiercer.
I'm starting to think that Slashdot should go the NEOGAF route when it comes to new posters: no creating topics until you have at least somewhat participated in the community. The amount of astro-turfing in Google, MS and FB stories is starting to get ridiculous.
For what it's worth: you're completely wrong. This is the only way that the patent system can be made to work and can be fixed: MAD. Once there are smoldering craters everywhere, and the entire tech landscape is a glass parking lot, maybe the powers that be (both governmental and corporate) will revisit the notion that more patent law is always better than some patent law.
Not sure if it's the same AC, but it's a good discussion starter.
Here's the thing: yes, by your definition, bad elements outnumber good elements about 1000:1. However, what exactly is the solution to this problem? What you're saying is that past a certain size, group decision-making via majority vote doesn't work anymore. That leaves group decision-making via a restricted minority of a larger group, or single-user decision-making on behalf of a group. Slice and dice all you want, but that is what all government systems boil down to. Representative democracies deal with the scale issue by delegating voting to an elected minority, decided by majority vote. The minority group then decides on issues via majority vote. But at the core, it's majority votes all the way down. As alternatives, you can have the system of the early US, where you restrict decision-making to a subset of the population (white landowners), with the assumption that they have the required skills, capacity and education to keep the connection between group welfare and individual welfare in mind. What we found though is that that assumption isn't really true, and that we might as well just get everyone involved. And the last one is just autocracy: great for getting things done, bad for smooth regime change.
The advantage of democracy is fairly subtle: it's the only system where every single member of a society is able to influence its direction, and therefore responsible for influencing it. All others reduce ability and responsibility in varying degrees.
Or, more accurately, it is about 9999 average people and one serial rapists deciding what to do for the evening. If you assume that bad elements outnumber good elements 3:1, democracy - and yes, your precious republic as well - is guaranteed to fail as hard as any other government. But since that isn't true, we found that democracy works on average a lot better than the feudal regimes of the past.
The online voting part is especially troubling. With paper votes, anybody can see a paper ballot, understand who the vote was for, and tally up the votes. They can even be clever and just weight the ballots, if they can't count very high.
But with online voting? Whoever controls the servers, controls the voting. And there is absolutely NOTHING that can be done to fix that issue. Not only will electoral fraud be trivial, it will be impossible to prove that no electoral fraud took place. Secure the servers? The communication trail gets intercepted at the ISP level. SSH tunnel, SSL connection? MITM attack. Secure the ISPs? Poison the DNS to have the request be routed to a server you control. DNS servers are secure? Malware on the machine that shows you one page, but actually sends out an entirely different post message.
It is absolutely ridiculous to think that online voting in its current state is feasible. And even if we assume fully secured voting terminals, with independent hardlines and fully audited voting servers, you can't show anyone what the paper trail looks like. For most of the population, voting will be indistinguishable from any religious ritual: you see the motions, but you have no idea if anything is actually going on.
Too bad I used my mod points yesterday. The responses to your post are all very good summaries of why your example misses the huge differences between the government and Google. 1) License plates are mandatory accessories on a car. There is no way for me to legally avoid this type of monitoring, unless I decide to walk. Compare that with Google: I can easily encrypt the signal, and carry on just as before. 2) It is the government. I am forced to do business with the government. I can choose to ignore Google. Yay Noscript! 3) The government enforces its terms at gun point. A dispute with Google involves at worst some fines. 4) Government is full of people who love to tell me what I should do. Google is merely interested in finding out what I'm doing.
So yes, Google=Fine, Government = Bad. Let me know if you still don't understand the differences between what the Government is and can do, and what Google is and can do.
Hello, dear Astroturfer (brand new account, immediate posting, anti-Google bent, false information about Google practices). I see that you at least are changing tack. No longer is Google evil because it is abusing its search monopoly, it is now evil because they are abusing their ad monopoly.
Here's one area where you have a point, and I'll leave it up to the courts to ferret out the details: if they are going into exclusive agreements with sites that leverage their position in one market (say, email) to argue for better prices in another market, then they would indeed be guilty of monopoly abuse. Go get em, EU.
In the meantime, here are your actual lies: * your hotel and restaurant example is actual complete nonsense. Either Google is promoting competing reviews, or they are burying them. They can't do both. * there is no exclusivity agreement baked into AdWords. You might be able to enter one, but that is not in the default TOS. You are flat out lying.
Don't know about 99%, but certainly the majority. Roads and bridges are built for max loads, and those are tied to trucks. Running big trucks means that streets and bridges are closer to their max loads, which means they wear out faster.
Besides, have you ever seen the right lane on any type of road? It is always in a worse shape than other roads, sometimes to the point where it is basically undriveable by anything but a truck.
Slashdot Mirror
And here's a news-flash for whoever wrote that summary: Terms like "Culturally congruent risk perception" have no obvious meaning for the general reader. Field-specific jargon is just annoying to everyone who doesn't happen to be in your field (i.e., almost everyone else on the planet).
Culture, congruent, risk and perception are standard English words. Culturally is a standard adverb for culture. The meaning of the phrase is easily understood by just putting together the meaning of the individual words. None of the words in the grouping rely on field-specific meanings.
I'm sorry that your grasp of the English language is so poor that a few 25 cent words strung together scare you. Now go read a dictionary and stop living up to the stereotype of the proud-to-be-ignorant American.
Yea, that's great, we're getting better at understanding evolution. Okay. Nice. Why use that to try to tear down someone's beliefs?
Because a lot of the principles that are used to prop up beliefs are used to tear down scientific achievements. I wager that if the religious types would be a little more polite in their discussions about science, the scientific types would be a bit more polite about what science has to say about faith. That said, there's a significant problem for religion here: there is no question that science cannot ask. As the scientific method provides more and more answers to those questions, religions, especially of the organized type, will find themselves responsible for ever smaller pieces of our culture. This guarantees conflict, and it guarantees that neither science nor religion will ever be totally at peace with each other.
Paranoia is also a result of difficult economic times. If everything's hunky-dory, there's a lot less space for paranoia to thrive in. But with the 2008 financial crisis, the major threat of a European break-up on the horizon and a Chinese juggernaut that just isn't showing many signs of slowing down, and it's kinda understandable that a lot of politics is based on an us-vs-them, apocalyptic them. Not good, not right, but certainly understandable.
Actually, it is much more internally consistent than a lot of other labels. After all, ecology is basic the story of anarchy and the systems that emerge from it. As a result, eco-anarchism should be fairly compelling, strictly from an ideological consistency perspective.
Holy crap dude - can you understand the difference between understanding what your opponents are up to, and technical details and specs of your gadgetry? One is something that is crucial towards formulating an effective strategy, the other is crucial to formulating battlefield tactics. I'm sure you can figure out which is which.
In other news, voters clamor for an efficient government, but then are shocked when the government sources contracts to the lowest bidder.
*facepalm* Either pay for an expensive, inefficient government that props up corporations solely so that it has a national source for everything military, or shut the fuck up and pay China for its cheap crap.
Not to mention that there already is a Facebook phone. Information about it is right now buried underneath articles for the current story, but I saw it advertised a while ago by either HTC, LG or one of the other Asian smartphone makers. It basically was an Android with a UI designed to make updating and reading Facebook very easy.
Not sure what Facebook could add to that effort, outside of more space for ads.
What about keeping the general population informed about what the world is up to? You know, so that the electorate can make electoral decisions based on actual information rather than fear-mongering? Or is this just an outdated concept, and we should let our politicians just tell us what we should worry about?
Dolphin is a very nice browser. No adblock though.
And absolutely nothing in your entire wall of text supports your idea that used games hurt your industry. It's all conjecture that requires some basic economics to be 100% false, as well as some very real history to be utterly non-existent.
Tell you what: show me some data how many people who bought used games would have bought games new in the complete absence of new games. Note that it requires you to show that these would be the same people who would have otherwise paid full price. Furthermore, show me that people who sold new games would have bought more games even if there was no used game market.
If you can't, you're making crap up that flies in the face of history and economic theory. I know it feels good to blame your money problems on others stealing from you, but it doesn't change the fact that it is nothing but a delusion.
Oh, and for your information: the industry is actually created by the consumers. Without them, games would be nothing but a hobby.
Bull-fucking-shit. You know who made money on games? iD Software. You know when some of their biggest money makers came about? When they GAVE their software away. I don't know if you remember, but used games used to be the norm, and people made money hand over fist. If anything, used game sales have never been lower than they have been now. And yet, you think it is somehow bad? It's only because you have no idea of history, or even economic theory.
Here's why used games cannot influence your sales:
1) Used games are a different product. Manuals are torn, CDs are scratched, and sometimes fun stuff like maps is missing.
2) You ALREADY got your sale. A used game can never be put into circulation without a first sale having occurred.
3) People who buy a game used are unlikely to have bought the game new. That's just basic economic principle. As a result, a used game sale cannot possibly equate a new game sale.
4) People who sell a game get more money for more games. A used game means that someone got money back to reinvest into a new game.
5) If your game is so shit that people play it once, then put it up for sale within 2 weeks, the problem is your game, not the economic model.
In short: fuck off and die. We are not renters. We are buyers. And a bit of a warning, coming from someone who has probably been gaming for longer than you have been alive: I already have a hard time accepting the always-on principle for games. I'm willing to make an exception for certain exceptional titles, but don't fool yourself for a second that all people will put up with buying a license for $60 or more.
Hi Bonch. Your OCD is showing again.
Or, alternatively, it means you're a moron and your posts are a waste of screen space. Na, couldn't be. It's all a giant conspiracy to keep you from speaking the truth to power. What the hell is "power" in a Slashdot discussion anyway?
Yes, of course. At the same time, what would have them do? Not ever mention anything about potential security holes, because it could be construed as a conflict interest?
Here's the real question you need to ask yourself before putting anything in the cloud: do you trust them to be more competent than yourself at backing things up, providing uptime and securing the data? If you answer no to any of these questions, you have a reason to keep stuff in-house. Note: beware of Dunning-Kruger effect. If you answer yes to all three, you have no reason to keep things in-house.
What IBM has done is to say that they can do a better job securing their data than Dropbox and iCloud. Considering the rather significant breaches that have occurred at Dropbox, and the completely unknown state of data security in iCloud, IBM is spot on with their assessment. I would only put encrypted stuff on either, or stuff where I have no problem if people are snooping through it. Want to take a gander at my weekend pictures? Knock yourself out. Want to find out what my truecrypt file is about? Good luck with that.
If 90% of published articles are wrong, the current model is already failing. What you're absolutely missing, is that there is nothing in the journal model that can't be replicated online. ABSOLUTELY NOTHING. And since the heavy lifting - the writing of the paper and the review - is already done for free for the papers, it's trivial to put that process on the internet.
Looks like your other accounts managed to get some modpoints. Nice going.
Have you ever heard of a search engine? It's this fancy tool that uses an algorithm to determine the most relevant webpage for your query. Somehow, I think there's space here to use that technology to build a search engine that will return you the most relevant article for your query. For example, beyond keywords, it could leverage highest number of citations, most blue-ribbon reviewers, best ratings, etc. You could even build reputation graphs for papers and reviewers.
All of that is old hat. And, if it is really critical to brand papers, you could have researchers create review pools, where random members rate a paper, and where the only thing you know is that "Badass Astronomers from Hell" said a paper is good. Once you figure out that these people are generally spot on with their review, you'll trust them more, search more for their reviews, and suddenly, you have Nature reborn online, but without all the overhead that doesn't go to scientists.
Oh, and someone should maintain a list of the sockpuppets. I'd hate to see them actually get modpoints.
Whoever didn't see this coming.... can I have your job?
That said... "clear goal of violating copyrights and destroying the fundamental underpinnings of the broadcast television ecosystem." *facepalm* The Internet is SUPPOSED to destroy ecosystems built on artificial scarcity. Free markets and black swans are a bitch, aren't they?
Quick question: how many people are selling entertainment? It seems to me that there's a glut of entertainment, which means that supply completely overwhelms demand. The result: very low prices for a product, with only a select few making lots of money in it.
That's the free market for you. If there would be only a few hundred musicians in the world, I can guarantee you they would make out like bandits. Put since there are a few millions, most live hand-to-mouth.
I think what happened with the new bosses is not so much that they are worse than the old bosses, but that there are now far, far more musicians around chasing that same entertainment dollar. Before, supply was artificially constrained. Now, it's not, and people find out that it is even harder to make a living - because suddenly, the competition got that much fiercer.
I'm starting to think that Slashdot should go the NEOGAF route when it comes to new posters: no creating topics until you have at least somewhat participated in the community. The amount of astro-turfing in Google, MS and FB stories is starting to get ridiculous.
For what it's worth: you're completely wrong. This is the only way that the patent system can be made to work and can be fixed: MAD. Once there are smoldering craters everywhere, and the entire tech landscape is a glass parking lot, maybe the powers that be (both governmental and corporate) will revisit the notion that more patent law is always better than some patent law.
Not sure if it's the same AC, but it's a good discussion starter.
Here's the thing: yes, by your definition, bad elements outnumber good elements about 1000:1. However, what exactly is the solution to this problem? What you're saying is that past a certain size, group decision-making via majority vote doesn't work anymore. That leaves group decision-making via a restricted minority of a larger group, or single-user decision-making on behalf of a group. Slice and dice all you want, but that is what all government systems boil down to. Representative democracies deal with the scale issue by delegating voting to an elected minority, decided by majority vote. The minority group then decides on issues via majority vote. But at the core, it's majority votes all the way down. As alternatives, you can have the system of the early US, where you restrict decision-making to a subset of the population (white landowners), with the assumption that they have the required skills, capacity and education to keep the connection between group welfare and individual welfare in mind. What we found though is that that assumption isn't really true, and that we might as well just get everyone involved. And the last one is just autocracy: great for getting things done, bad for smooth regime change.
The advantage of democracy is fairly subtle: it's the only system where every single member of a society is able to influence its direction, and therefore responsible for influencing it. All others reduce ability and responsibility in varying degrees.
Or, more accurately, it is about 9999 average people and one serial rapists deciding what to do for the evening. If you assume that bad elements outnumber good elements 3:1, democracy - and yes, your precious republic as well - is guaranteed to fail as hard as any other government. But since that isn't true, we found that democracy works on average a lot better than the feudal regimes of the past.
The online voting part is especially troubling. With paper votes, anybody can see a paper ballot, understand who the vote was for, and tally up the votes. They can even be clever and just weight the ballots, if they can't count very high.
But with online voting? Whoever controls the servers, controls the voting. And there is absolutely NOTHING that can be done to fix that issue. Not only will electoral fraud be trivial, it will be impossible to prove that no electoral fraud took place. Secure the servers? The communication trail gets intercepted at the ISP level. SSH tunnel, SSL connection? MITM attack. Secure the ISPs? Poison the DNS to have the request be routed to a server you control. DNS servers are secure? Malware on the machine that shows you one page, but actually sends out an entirely different post message.
It is absolutely ridiculous to think that online voting in its current state is feasible. And even if we assume fully secured voting terminals, with independent hardlines and fully audited voting servers, you can't show anyone what the paper trail looks like. For most of the population, voting will be indistinguishable from any religious ritual: you see the motions, but you have no idea if anything is actually going on.
Too bad I used my mod points yesterday. The responses to your post are all very good summaries of why your example misses the huge differences between the government and Google.
1) License plates are mandatory accessories on a car. There is no way for me to legally avoid this type of monitoring, unless I decide to walk. Compare that with Google: I can easily encrypt the signal, and carry on just as before.
2) It is the government. I am forced to do business with the government. I can choose to ignore Google. Yay Noscript!
3) The government enforces its terms at gun point. A dispute with Google involves at worst some fines.
4) Government is full of people who love to tell me what I should do. Google is merely interested in finding out what I'm doing.
So yes, Google=Fine, Government = Bad. Let me know if you still don't understand the differences between what the Government is and can do, and what Google is and can do.
Hello, dear Astroturfer (brand new account, immediate posting, anti-Google bent, false information about Google practices). I see that you at least are changing tack. No longer is Google evil because it is abusing its search monopoly, it is now evil because they are abusing their ad monopoly.
Here's one area where you have a point, and I'll leave it up to the courts to ferret out the details: if they are going into exclusive agreements with sites that leverage their position in one market (say, email) to argue for better prices in another market, then they would indeed be guilty of monopoly abuse. Go get em, EU.
In the meantime, here are your actual lies:
* your hotel and restaurant example is actual complete nonsense. Either Google is promoting competing reviews, or they are burying them. They can't do both.
* there is no exclusivity agreement baked into AdWords. You might be able to enter one, but that is not in the default TOS. You are flat out lying.
Don't know about 99%, but certainly the majority. Roads and bridges are built for max loads, and those are tied to trucks. Running big trucks means that streets and bridges are closer to their max loads, which means they wear out faster.
Besides, have you ever seen the right lane on any type of road? It is always in a worse shape than other roads, sometimes to the point where it is basically undriveable by anything but a truck.