What -- has Steven Hawking retired, or died? First off, physicist John A. Wheeler is dead. I am sorry that the community and most importantly his family has lost an icon. I'm glad he was able to live such a full life and I hope that he was able to die happy of everything he has contributed to the human race.
Secondly while Hawking has made several important discoveries, he was cited by my college physics professor to be a 'pop' physicist. Hawking is a genius but mostly in theoretical physics. My professor also degraded Brian Greene to a much further point by saying he was nothing more than someone relaying physics to the general public. I also got into an argument about Sagan but I had an even harder time defending Sagan than Hawking.
While I've read books about the nature of space-time by Hawking, I noticed they were often co-written with Roger Penrose. In fact, if I were to ask you the most famous work of Hawking, what would you say? Probably A Brief History of Time.
What might follow is arguments of who is more important, the man who discovers this science or the man who makes it easily accessible and digestible by a vast majority of the five billion simpletons living on the earth?
Perhaps it can be said that Hawking is more than a pop-physicist but I'm aware of criticisms that he's mostly a public figure with a very romantic story behind him--condemned to a chair he took to books and became a brilliant scientist! I read his works and love him but I'm not a physicist so maybe that's why?
At any rate, whenever anyone dies a lot more respect is delivered unto them. Although I don't remember people saying much about Paul Erdos, I was shocked when people recognized Stanislaw Lem's death on such a large scale. It's a sad fact of our society, your work is commonly overlooked until you're dead.
I don't think that the "crowding out" phenomenon is really going to happen. There will still be technical journals and medical textbooks. No one has a medical degree from Wikipedia. It's not designed as that solution. Nobody consults Wikipedia when their life is on the line. Nobody purely learns from only Wikipedia.
From the start of this article (which was a bad analogy) to the mention of Google Knoll, I'm not impressed with this weird suggestion that Wikipedia is supposed to be the de facto source of knowledge for anyone and anything. It's great to start there or to 'get an understanding' as the article mentions but it's the sources and subsequent sources you find that have the real information. It's at least second hand information from the masses designed to be more second hand information for the masses. Not for doctors or academia.
I judged a state science fair recently and came upon a bridge project which hand one reference listed--Wikipedia. I asked the kid why he had only used these five different types of bridges and he said because that's what was listed on Wikipedia. I pretty much gave him a horrible score based on that and pointed out that the Army Corp of Engineers provides all its publications free and recommended he check that out if he wanted better information.
If you're a parent or a teacher, take the time to explain this to your children. If you're a medical doctor or expert in your field, stop fighting new technology that increases general knowledge and relax.
I don't know about your parents but mine were rife with "I didn't have it, why do you need it?" mentality. Luckily I convinced them to get a computer but it wasn't until I moved out that they had the internet...
It's about breaking down barriers and proving that games can be more useful than just leisure and entertainment. Collaboration, teamwork, and problem solving are just a few things that come from games without the edutainment factor predesigned into them.
Looks like you need a robots.txt......for your driveway. Nah, just a sign making it illegal for Google vans to Austin Powers it in your driveway. While they are great at coding, they can at best execute a 68 point U-turn.
Or merely a government that genuinely cares about your privacy, they should be going after Google for the infraction of... oh, wait a minute, this happened in The United States. Good luck with that!
I'm not saying that the complexity of the immune system implies a cost to the organism, I am saying that this adaptation is so ridiculously advantagious that there must be some cost or it would be much more common (Of course, this conjecture falls apart if the adaptation is more common than the article implies). And yet, here you and I are with opposable thumbs and an increased Broca's Region of our brain... why don't other animals have these ridiculously obvious advantages? Evolution is random and only reacts to the environment of the organism.
Don't believe that this adaptation is that advantagious? Infections deseases are responsible for 20% of human deaths, second only to heart disease; and that is even with modern antibiotics. A death rate of 20% is inflated because we know how to circumvent so many other forms of death. I'm sure prior to civilized humans, we were killed by many many other things. Not to mention that low death rates can lead to famine and ecosystem failure. How do you know we're not dooming the earth by ensuring everyone lives to age 70 and has 2.4 children? The human population is not kept in check the same way it used to be because of modern antibiotics.
There was very recent research that was quite extensive that showed this cost of complexity in evolution is a myth. I don't know why you think it has to come at a cost, it just so happens that alligators needed it to live in their conditions and with their temperaments.
You can sit here all day and question why we don't have some of the obvious advantage traits that any other animal has and the answer is simple: we didn't require it. If humans needed it and didn't have it, we wouldn't be around.
Explain your logic on why this must come at a price? The random evolution happened in alligators and may be present in other animals (or extinct relatives).
It's amazing what can be discovered when you're looking for something else. I have an excerpt from the researcher's journal that I found on their site:
"Johnson was busy cutting lines and snorting dolphin brains while playing Brain Age to see if that was increasing his mental capabilities. Heinz was freebasing hawk feathers and taking eye exams to check for increased vision. Me? I was mainlining alligator blood and hoping for some sort of super jaw strength and scales. As we were taking Williams to the hospital (he had grafted a mongoose tail to his ass and entered a pit of asps and vipers) I noticed that all my ulcers and sinuses had cleared up within the hour..."
Meanwhile in the enemy camp of Microsoft (maybe not so enemy now that HD-DVD is dea), they claim they were concentrating on HD downloads (digital distribution) the whole time!
"The horse that we're fundamentally backing is the one that says the future of entertainment content is online digital distribution. I would argue that we backed the right horse," Xbox UK chief Neil Thompson told The Guardian.
"If we're sitting here in 12 or 18 months time, we'll be saying, 'Why were people even thinking about a disc format when it's really about digital distribution?' Our strategy's been developed for the last six or seven years, and ever since we launched the platform this has been our big, big, big bet." So I guess you still have two camps here--Sony who thinks Blu-Ray is the future and Microsoft who is now betting on downloads of HD.
Convenience and you being at the mercy of whether or not your ISP deems that traffic taxable or expensive bulky disc boxes with insane prices? Good luck, consumer, you're bound to be screwed one way or the other!
-He lured critcs out to a charity fight [wired.com] and then beat the snot out of them, sending one to the hospital It's a bit worse than that, from the trivia page of Postal, he had also planned on capitalizing off of that by using it as footage in the movie:
In June of 2006, Uwe Boll publicly announced a challenge to his numerous critics to "put up or shut up." Based on certain criteria, Boll will select five of his harshest critics to fight in a series of multi-round boxing matches to be held in Vancouver, British Columbia that will be broadcast over the Internet. He planned to use footage from these fights in this movie, but it was soon discovered that they don't fit into the plot of the movie, so the idea was dropped. Itâ(TM)s claimed that they might be part of the DVD when itâ(TM)s released. Is it a "charity" fight when you are planning on making money off of it?
Also as further proof, I offer up another bit of trivia from Postal:
Uwe Boll only shot 3 to 5 takes of every scene in the movie. He thought that the biggest strength in comedy is the emotion behind the acting, which cannot be kept when trying the scenes too often. That little snippet may remind you of Ed Wood.
I assure you, I watch a lot of movies. He is up there in the worst director/writer category. Thank god Germany got its laws straightened out!
Where do I sign? Do you need blood? Money? A donation? How many times can I sign? Fucking I'LL SIGN! I reacted slightly differently. At first, yes I was eager to sign this... but then I paused... what about the Mystery Science Theater 3000s and Cinematic Titanics of the future? Where will they buy the rights to destroy movies for a couple thousand dollars?
Shouldn't be too hard... On the contrary, that's precisely why I think this will be difficult. I think bands like Linkin Park rely directly on their delivery method and cosmetic appeal instead of the chord structures. Just because a song is simple doesn't make it inferior to a complex song. Often times, it makes it more accessible to a larger audience.
The user of this software can put in the great lyrics and vocals but this is going to fail on delivery of someone who is thinking Tool but receives straight forward mediocre rock.
That said, I have listened to their comparison with Band in a Box and I must agree that their system is much much better. I don't know if they've selected only the ones that work or not but I think for these melodies that I've heard it's quite useful.
I don't think musicians will hate this without trying it and I think it would be a valuable tool for musicians stuck on how to smooth over some chord changes. I admit I am interested in plugging in the vocals from tunes I've written to see what it comes up with.
I have read a book by... Schumann I think? Where the intro claims that any songs conceived chords and melody separately (one before the other) is destined to be sub par and that truly great works will come from those that can conceive them at the same time. An orchestral snob maybe but something to think about. This tool implies you know the melody which would disrupt his process and encourage inherently deficient songs.
There's a device I wanted my roommates to start using called an e-Cigarette and I tried looking for it here in the states but ended up having to order it from China either due to the fact that they have th patent or that someone here (conspiracy!) has it and choses not to manufacture it.
I'm shocked I hadn't heard of this before but I am really concerned for my roommates' lungs as they smoke almost a pack a day and they get very very upset when they don't have it. Plus they could probably smoke these in the house or in bars as they're just water vapor.
A great gadget that I haven't found here. Actually, I think this could save a lot of people money (cheaper) and improve their health and duration of life.
This just in...leisure reduces stress! While this is true, there have been many criticisms of World of Warcraft. Even on Slashdot, we have seen people writing purple prose about the game destroying their lives worse than a heroin addiction. This study may present evidence that stories like the above are inherent problems with that person's ability to prioritize what is most important to them in their lives. They're free to pick Warcraft as #1 but I question why they wrote that piece if they did.
My friends have often commented that Warcraft is their second job and jokingly hate it for its 'grind.' Why do they play? Because it's still stress reduction, in my opinion.
So while you may find it obvious, there are caveats that make this interesting to some readers. I found it interesting and wonder now if people will compare it to cigarettes even though there's no chemical exchange (people love terrible analogies). You know, my parents and grandparents that live in the middle of nowhere used to waste hours playing cards with each other. Why? Because it reduced stress, I'm sure. I don't think Warcraft is any different.
Writers Find Blogging To Be a Stressful Method of Reporting Readers Find Blogging To Be Most Ridiculous Form of Reporting News Yet
Seriously, does anyone get their 'news' from blogs? Granted they can be interesting and helpful, they are often written with no editing and read more like "On the Road" than The New York Times.
Congratulations on developing income through traffic but it pains me to see people use this as a way to stay informed.
If you never leave your basement you're not reporting, you're aggregating or spinning.
Though I have to admit removing my rfid tag out and gluing it to a cockroach and letting it go in the ceiling could be amusing. User A: "Goddamnit, he's in the vents again!" User B: "But the system just showed the system administrator crawling in between the rafters!" User A: "I know, but maybe if we left some Jack Daniels in a dish, he would smell it and come out?" User B: "Ok, we better hurry though, my own personal internets keep getting slower and the Vista is asking me if I should accept or deny some application named MSBlastWorm32.exe that hasn't signed the proper forms yet... what do I do?"
You want people to come into the can and strike up a conversation with you about an inane obvious problem? Either you're joking or you're a masochist...
I always wondered what evaporating karma sounded like.... Right so remember kids, it's only funny when it's not you. Oh no, I'm going to be modded troll and then funny and then troll and then... I don't really care that much about this site anymore or my karma. If you need proof, I'll just go on a bitchy little rant about how I've never once gotten mod points despite the number of posts I've made, my karma, my many meta-moderations or the fact that I'm number four or five on the list of top contributors.
But if I hurt Cmdr Taco's feelings, I'll make it up to him:
eldavojohn
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Christ, if you can't laugh about everything what's the point of living?
Of course, it can be practical to know if a colleague is available for a cup of coffee but this kind of system (if in widespread use) has some serious implications. As the lead researcher said, 'what we want to understand is what makes it useful, what makes it threatening and how to balance the two. Um, I kind of view this technology as being inherently double edged. You give someone the power to find you at any time. This can be used for convenience often. This can be used for your boss to track you down on Saturday. This can be used to set you up or murder you. There's a whole rainbow of possibilities, the latter listed are probably less probable but quite scary.
Me, I hate it when people call me on my cell phone. Oftentimes I don't answer, my phone has never been off vibrate. I wouldn't opt for this technology at any point in my life for any reason. Other people may feel differently and more power to them. I don't understand why research is needed to see that, perhaps there are more caveats I don't see. But if you're thinking about making this mandatory under the guise of security or comfort, you're going to be tracking my RFID tag in a garbage can.
Most of them are kinda cheesy and obvious- I wonder if you can do better. CmdrTaco
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I don't think this article was talking about viruses that merely hose your hard drive. Granted, that's what most of those did, I think they are dreaming up something that writes your MBR to another piece of the hard drive and gains root access right when you start your computer. If virus writers are sophisticated enough, maybe the write something like an extended firmware interface that loads your operating system normally and you don't even know about it running in the background. Again, that's a high level of sophistication but I was blown away by what the virtual machines have been able to do.
There's also evidence that I am skeptical of like:
The problem with boot viruses is that their attack vector is fairly well-guarded. Any antivirus program worth beans will detect a suspicious attempt to modify the MBR and will alert the end user accordingly. Running as a user rather than an administrator should also prevent such modification even if you don't have an antivirus scanner installed. Panda implies that this kind of exploit could be an issue in Linux, and I suppose that's theoretically possible, but Linux always creates a user account without root access by default. If Panda's report really did imply that, they just lost a whole shitload of credibility in my book. I'm not stupid enough to think that Linux is impenetrable but I know that the Unix-like security scheme with users in userland and superusers in kerneland is always observed.
It's sad that has taken this long for "insight" like that to surface in the industry. Sometimes I wonder how another industry would react if a magical technology dropped in their lap that made duplicating their product instantaneous and nearly free (people already pay their ISPs) to nearly instantly deliver it to customers. What would an automaker think of something like that? They would probably rejoice and drop their pricing to pennies on the dollar.
Unfortunately, this was not how the music industry reacted to this same method of magical delivery. I realize the analogy has flaws but one would think that this would be a gift to marketing and profits. Instead, they've reacted in possibly the poorest way possible. Ignore its existence and sue the hell out of anyone doing it.
be cool to play civ4 on one of these yokes Um, while that's true, there's several more things I could think of that would be fun to do with this 'surface' technology. I just fear that Microsoft is going to make it expensive so that only the big boys can play with it.
A lowly developer that wants build a hobby project where anyone with a surface can play chess virtually against someone? Tough. Exorbitant license fees or no surface for you!
I remember in eighth grade trying to fathom how I would come up with $240 for a student license of Visual Studio! I can't imagine what these costs are going to be. And that's the sad thing, really, the neat stuff would all come from the hobbyists who still have an imagination that's not twisted towards profits.
Think what kind of senior project a graphical artist could make with one of these things! I'd go to an art show where you get to interact with the art any day.
To reiterate, I doubt your civilization 4 dreams will come true unless its creators decide the demand is big enough for them to drop megabucks developing another interface to the engine hoping that fans will splurge for the 'surface.'
'For the music industry, there is a dark side to Apple's ascension to the top of the charts. Buying patterns for digital downloads are different, as customers are far more likely to cherry pick a favorite track or two from an album than purchase the whole thing. In contrast, brick-and-mortar sales are predominantly high-margin CDs.' Don't forget that the $1 per song pricing scheme just seems to be something that Steve Jobs decreed from his high perch. I'm not saying I want this but I'll bet the music industry would favor a variable pricing per song to alleviate the cherry picking phenomenon. Frankly, I could care less about the top 40 or flavor of the week singles as that is not something I'd ever want to listen to. But I could see how someone like Britney Spears would feel the punch of fans just getting "Oops, I Did It Again" and not being forced to pay for the filler crap that barely passes as music on the rest of the album.
Furthermore, Wal-Mart has also done the same thing by basically dictating that it will start selling CDs at $9-$10 or it won't sell them at all. I'm kind of shocked the music industry just sat back and let that happen (even though it joys me to see people able to buy Beatles albums at a decent price). I mean, why should Wal-Mart be able to dictate MSRP? Oh, that's right, they are the all-encompassing Wal-Mart... they probably dictate how much I pay for milk at the local grocery store some how.
Either way, I find it humorous that what seems to be a 'dark side' for the RIAA is actually beautiful for the end consumer. I wish the RIAA would step back and look at how they could maximize profits now that distribution could be digital. Would I still be spending ~$20 a month on music if each song were ten cents? No, I'd probably go nuts and be spending $50 a month and I bet people that spend no money on music would start to slowly $5 or $10 for some popular albums. Just a though, I really wish they would look more at maximizing profits by lowering cost on something that can be copied for free and distributed cheaply.
Slashdot Mirror
Secondly while Hawking has made several important discoveries, he was cited by my college physics professor to be a 'pop' physicist. Hawking is a genius but mostly in theoretical physics. My professor also degraded Brian Greene to a much further point by saying he was nothing more than someone relaying physics to the general public. I also got into an argument about Sagan but I had an even harder time defending Sagan than Hawking.
While I've read books about the nature of space-time by Hawking, I noticed they were often co-written with Roger Penrose. In fact, if I were to ask you the most famous work of Hawking, what would you say? Probably A Brief History of Time.
What might follow is arguments of who is more important, the man who discovers this science or the man who makes it easily accessible and digestible by a vast majority of the five billion simpletons living on the earth?
Perhaps it can be said that Hawking is more than a pop-physicist but I'm aware of criticisms that he's mostly a public figure with a very romantic story behind him--condemned to a chair he took to books and became a brilliant scientist! I read his works and love him but I'm not a physicist so maybe that's why?
At any rate, whenever anyone dies a lot more respect is delivered unto them. Although I don't remember people saying much about Paul Erdos, I was shocked when people recognized Stanislaw Lem's death on such a large scale. It's a sad fact of our society, your work is commonly overlooked until you're dead.
I don't think that the "crowding out" phenomenon is really going to happen. There will still be technical journals and medical textbooks. No one has a medical degree from Wikipedia. It's not designed as that solution. Nobody consults Wikipedia when their life is on the line. Nobody purely learns from only Wikipedia.
From the start of this article (which was a bad analogy) to the mention of Google Knoll, I'm not impressed with this weird suggestion that Wikipedia is supposed to be the de facto source of knowledge for anyone and anything. It's great to start there or to 'get an understanding' as the article mentions but it's the sources and subsequent sources you find that have the real information. It's at least second hand information from the masses designed to be more second hand information for the masses. Not for doctors or academia.
I judged a state science fair recently and came upon a bridge project which hand one reference listed--Wikipedia. I asked the kid why he had only used these five different types of bridges and he said because that's what was listed on Wikipedia. I pretty much gave him a horrible score based on that and pointed out that the Army Corp of Engineers provides all its publications free and recommended he check that out if he wanted better information.
If you're a parent or a teacher, take the time to explain this to your children. If you're a medical doctor or expert in your field, stop fighting new technology that increases general knowledge and relax.
I don't know about your parents but mine were rife with "I didn't have it, why do you need it?" mentality. Luckily I convinced them to get a computer but it wasn't until I moved out that they had the internet ...
It's about breaking down barriers and proving that games can be more useful than just leisure and entertainment. Collaboration, teamwork, and problem solving are just a few things that come from games without the edutainment factor predesigned into them.
Or merely a government that genuinely cares about your privacy, they should be going after Google for the infraction of
There was very recent research that was quite extensive that showed this cost of complexity in evolution is a myth. I don't know why you think it has to come at a cost, it just so happens that alligators needed it to live in their conditions and with their temperaments.
You can sit here all day and question why we don't have some of the obvious advantage traits that any other animal has and the answer is simple: we didn't require it. If humans needed it and didn't have it, we wouldn't be around.
Explain your logic on why this must come at a price? The random evolution happened in alligators and may be present in other animals (or extinct relatives).
"If we're sitting here in 12 or 18 months time, we'll be saying, 'Why were people even thinking about a disc format when it's really about digital distribution?' Our strategy's been developed for the last six or seven years, and ever since we launched the platform this has been our big, big, big bet." So I guess you still have two camps here--Sony who thinks Blu-Ray is the future and Microsoft who is now betting on downloads of HD.
Convenience and you being at the mercy of whether or not your ISP deems that traffic taxable or expensive bulky disc boxes with insane prices? Good luck, consumer, you're bound to be screwed one way or the other!
Also as further proof, I offer up another bit of trivia from Postal: Uwe Boll only shot 3 to 5 takes of every scene in the movie. He thought that the biggest strength in comedy is the emotion behind the acting, which cannot be kept when trying the scenes too often. That little snippet may remind you of Ed Wood.
I assure you, I watch a lot of movies. He is up there in the worst director/writer category. Thank god Germany got its laws straightened out!
The user of this software can put in the great lyrics and vocals but this is going to fail on delivery of someone who is thinking Tool but receives straight forward mediocre rock.
That said, I have listened to their comparison with Band in a Box and I must agree that their system is much much better. I don't know if they've selected only the ones that work or not but I think for these melodies that I've heard it's quite useful.
I don't think musicians will hate this without trying it and I think it would be a valuable tool for musicians stuck on how to smooth over some chord changes. I admit I am interested in plugging in the vocals from tunes I've written to see what it comes up with.
I have read a book by
There's a device I wanted my roommates to start using called an e-Cigarette and I tried looking for it here in the states but ended up having to order it from China either due to the fact that they have th patent or that someone here (conspiracy!) has it and choses not to manufacture it.
I'm shocked I hadn't heard of this before but I am really concerned for my roommates' lungs as they smoke almost a pack a day and they get very very upset when they don't have it. Plus they could probably smoke these in the house or in bars as they're just water vapor.
A great gadget that I haven't found here. Actually, I think this could save a lot of people money (cheaper) and improve their health and duration of life.
My friends have often commented that Warcraft is their second job and jokingly hate it for its 'grind.' Why do they play? Because it's still stress reduction, in my opinion.
So while you may find it obvious, there are caveats that make this interesting to some readers. I found it interesting and wonder now if people will compare it to cigarettes even though there's no chemical exchange (people love terrible analogies). You know, my parents and grandparents that live in the middle of nowhere used to waste hours playing cards with each other. Why? Because it reduced stress, I'm sure. I don't think Warcraft is any different.
We discussed something similar to this here where they found organic molecules in a Canadian meteor.
Seriously, does anyone get their 'news' from blogs? Granted they can be interesting and helpful, they are often written with no editing and read more like "On the Road" than The New York Times.
Congratulations on developing income through traffic but it pains me to see people use this as a way to stay informed.
If you never leave your basement you're not reporting, you're aggregating or spinning.
User B: "But the system just showed the system administrator crawling in between the rafters!"
User A: "I know, but maybe if we left some Jack Daniels in a dish, he would smell it and come out?"
User B: "Ok, we better hurry though, my own personal internets keep getting slower and the Vista is asking me if I should accept or deny some application named MSBlastWorm32.exe that hasn't signed the proper forms yet
You want people to come into the can and strike up a conversation with you about an inane obvious problem? Either you're joking or you're a masochist
But if I hurt Cmdr Taco's feelings, I'll make it up to him:
eldavojohn
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Christ, if you can't laugh about everything what's the point of living?
Me, I hate it when people call me on my cell phone. Oftentimes I don't answer, my phone has never been off vibrate. I wouldn't opt for this technology at any point in my life for any reason. Other people may feel differently and more power to them. I don't understand why research is needed to see that, perhaps there are more caveats I don't see. But if you're thinking about making this mandatory under the guise of security or comfort, you're going to be tracking my RFID tag in a garbage can.
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I would like to point out the icon in the upper right of the page. It reads "Powered by Sci-Fi" and has the Sci-Fi channel logo.
...
Something gives me good reason to believe this is a graphical artist's concept and nothing more.
I'm reminded of Sci-Fi's viral marketing videos of a woman in an airplane seeing a UFO
There's also evidence that I am skeptical of like: The problem with boot viruses is that their attack vector is fairly well-guarded. Any antivirus program worth beans will detect a suspicious attempt to modify the MBR and will alert the end user accordingly. Running as a user rather than an administrator should also prevent such modification even if you don't have an antivirus scanner installed. Panda implies that this kind of exploit could be an issue in Linux, and I suppose that's theoretically possible, but Linux always creates a user account without root access by default. If Panda's report really did imply that, they just lost a whole shitload of credibility in my book. I'm not stupid enough to think that Linux is impenetrable but I know that the Unix-like security scheme with users in userland and superusers in kerneland is always observed.
Unfortunately, this was not how the music industry reacted to this same method of magical delivery. I realize the analogy has flaws but one would think that this would be a gift to marketing and profits. Instead, they've reacted in possibly the poorest way possible. Ignore its existence and sue the hell out of anyone doing it.
A lowly developer that wants build a hobby project where anyone with a surface can play chess virtually against someone? Tough. Exorbitant license fees or no surface for you!
I remember in eighth grade trying to fathom how I would come up with $240 for a student license of Visual Studio! I can't imagine what these costs are going to be. And that's the sad thing, really, the neat stuff would all come from the hobbyists who still have an imagination that's not twisted towards profits.
Think what kind of senior project a graphical artist could make with one of these things! I'd go to an art show where you get to interact with the art any day.
To reiterate, I doubt your civilization 4 dreams will come true unless its creators decide the demand is big enough for them to drop megabucks developing another interface to the engine hoping that fans will splurge for the 'surface.'
Furthermore, Wal-Mart has also done the same thing by basically dictating that it will start selling CDs at $9-$10 or it won't sell them at all. I'm kind of shocked the music industry just sat back and let that happen (even though it joys me to see people able to buy Beatles albums at a decent price). I mean, why should Wal-Mart be able to dictate MSRP? Oh, that's right, they are the all-encompassing Wal-Mart
Either way, I find it humorous that what seems to be a 'dark side' for the RIAA is actually beautiful for the end consumer. I wish the RIAA would step back and look at how they could maximize profits now that distribution could be digital. Would I still be spending ~$20 a month on music if each song were ten cents? No, I'd probably go nuts and be spending $50 a month and I bet people that spend no money on music would start to slowly $5 or $10 for some popular albums. Just a though, I really wish they would look more at maximizing profits by lowering cost on something that can be copied for free and distributed cheaply.