I thought Pete Wilson signed the power deregulation bill into law, and Davis was unlucky enough to be the one in office when the power companies sold off all their electrical plants.
Too bad we can't recall former CA governor Pete Wilson, too, since he was the one who signed the power deregulation bill into law, which led directly to the recent electricity crisis. Davis got the fun task of cleaning up the situation, as well as the blame for it happening while he was in office.
My first internet account in 1993 charged a sign-up fee, and then when I switched to high-speed in 1997, there was an other sign-up fee.
There hasn't been a sign-up fee for the overwhelming majority of dialup accounts since around 1994 or 95. The "sign-up fee" for the high-speed access in 1997 sounds more like it was paying for the service of setting it up. My DSL had a $200 setup fee when I got it in 1999, and a $150 DSL modem. (They waived the setup fee; I got to keep the DSL modem.) But even had I paid the setup fee, it would have paid for the time of the technician who came out and installed the wiring in my apartment.
Sign-up fees for simple access (e.g. dialup) to internet service, when the ISP doesn't actually have to do anything but give you a phone number and create dialup and email accounts, have been unheard of for nearly ten years.
You're wrong here too, it may not be the exact same service, but it fills the same market. These games are in direct competition with each other. If someone signs up with Sims Online, it drastically decreases their chances of signing up with EverQuest. People only have so many hours a week to play the games, and only want to incur so many of the monthly fees. If EQ offers a better deal, they will steal business from SWG, even if the player would prefer SWG.
This is false. Content is mostly not interchangeable; if this were true, then the cheap $2 second-run movie theaters would always be full, and the mainstream, first-run theaters would stand empty, because even though the moviegoers would prefer to see new movies, they'd settle for old ones because it's a better deal (one-fourth the price of a first-run movie). However, this is not true, because content is not interchangable. EQ IS going to be a better deal than SWG, in terms of cost per month at least, but there are a lot of people who have no interest in EQ but will gladly pay through the nose for SWG. Why? Because it has exclusive content.
You're right in that people only have a limited amount of time to spend on these games; but a lot of people (a LOT of people) are quite willing to have multiple MMO accounts, even if they only play each game a little each week. Since you refuse to buy any MMOs, you don't seem to think these people exist.:)
If someone has to pay $50 for the MMO, they are taking a big risk that they might hate the game. If they just have to pay the $10 fee for the first month, a lot of people who would never consider risking the $50 will try the game, and a lot will decide they like it and keep playing (and paying).
You're right in that this is a superior option for the consumer, but you've yet to prove that it's superior for the game companies. Would they actually sell more units if the game cost $10 to buy and that paid for the first month free? Your suggestion is, after all, to ditch the box, manual, and everything except the jewel box and CD, and cut the price by 80%. And yeah, it seems reasonably likely that more people would try the game out... but how do you know? Maybe people see $10 games as being worthless bargain bin crap, and won't even bother. Maybe people are drawn in by the flashy box graphics and the cool screenshots on the back. Maybe not... but do you have any evidence that shows one way or the other? Until you do, it may be a significant financial gamble for a company to make on an MMO that it's spent $15 million producing for the past four years.
Surely the book publishers must realize that a lof of people enjoy reading on their PDAs, and that is a great opportunity.
Surely the RIAA must realize that people like having their entire music library on their computer so they don't have to deal with swapping discs, so copy protection is a bad thing and electronic distribution is good.
Apples and oranges. There's (so far) no continuing service
Then why don't I have to pay AOL a huge upfront fee to buy their disc since they put so much dev work into all their new versions?
Basic internet service is a different sector of the market. Historically, there's been no signup fee, only monthly fees. Part of the reason is that internet service is basically a commodity -- totally interchangeable. MMOs are not a commodity; EQ is not interchangeable with DAOC, Star Wars Galaxies, or The Sims Online.
AOL's monthly fee is only double the cost of most of the online games, and they have to pay for phonelines to provide a dial up connection plus the backend connection, and they offer a lot of their own content that has to be paid for.
Well, it doesn't seem to be working out for them. AOL charges more for basic internet service than almost any other ISP... and they've been losing subscribers the last few months! Maybe they should cut back on the content and lower their prices a bit.
These companies and most others understand that their main revenue stream is from the service. Initial costs such as activation fees or hardware and software costs are barriers to people becoming customers and that is a bad thing.
I'll reiterate: mobile phone service and internet service are functionally interchangeable. It doesn't matter if I have SBC Yahoo! DSL, AOL for Broadband, or a cable modem from my local cable company -- the things I can do are all identical (barring minor ISP-specific content, but then little of that is really unique anyway; SBC Yahoo!'s custom news site is going to have the same news as AOL's). But if I want to go and kill Lord Nagafen in his fiery mountain lair, I can't play any game except EverQuest. MMOs are not interchangeable in this way. A lot of people have accounts on multiple MMOs -- a far higher percentage than have accounts with multiple cellular services, or multiple ISPs -- because the content is game-specific. It doesn't matter what ISP I use, I can still get to Slashdot.
There are other reasons, as well. People aren't used to the idea that the game is free and the service costs money, so there's a huge inertia problem to overcome -- they will quite probably shun a game that looks like it might have come from the bargain bin. Free products are often seen as having no value, and games are seen by most customers as products, not services.
What is better for the software company: if 100,000 people buy the software for $30 and 50% decide to keep the account for a year at $10/month, or 2 million people sign up for free and just 10% keep their accounts for a year? That's exactly why barriers are bad; even if you have a lower turnover rate, you still have less total customers
If the game was free, how do the customers get it? Maybe they download it. Well, that excludes anyone on dial-up, which is still half the country. So the people on broadband get to download a 2-3 gigabyte game -- costing the game company around $4-5 in bandwidth per download, depending on what their ISP charges. The dial-up people will presumably need to get a CD, which won't be given away for free (at best it might come included in a magazine, but magazines aren't free).
Those CDs cost money to print and distribute. Maybe stores charge $5 for it. Well, that's a barrier. So if 500,000 people download the game (costing about $2 million), and 500,000 people buy the game (and the CDs at $5 are probably a loss, what with printing and distributing them), now the company's just spent maybe $2-3 million to distribute the game -- instead of having an income of around $3 million (300,000 copies at a more realistic $50, 20% of which might go to the developer).
Maybe you should talk to some MMO developers about this. Surely they must have thought of this model as well; perhaps there's some good reasons why they don't use it.
What you're paying for when you buy the game in the box is not the box or the manual (or at least, not very much). Mostly you're paying for (in the case of MMOs) the $10-20 MILLION of development that the game cost before it made a single cent. The initial box purchase offsets the cost of development; the monthly fee offsets the cost of continuing service.
And what if you can't tell who sent the spam? Look at it this way: Let's say I run a dry cleaning business. Then someone starts posting flyer ads for my business, stapling them to utility poles. Well, that happens to be illegal without a permit in the county I live in. If they can go after me because of the ads, that's totally unfair, because I did nothing wrong. That's the issue at hand, that you can't fairly go after someone because of illegal advertising unless you can prove they are directly responsible for the advertising. If you could, then all I would have to do is send out some untraceable spam advertising your company (which isn't that hard if you know what you're doing), and watch your company get obliterated by the government... and yet you did nothing wrong.
Yeah, it seems obvious that an ad for a website was sent on behalf of the website, or with their consent, but if you could go after someone for an ad posted for their product, without actually proving that they sent the ad, then I (or anyone) could post fake ads that would get businesses in trouble.
Yeah, it sucks because a business can send out fake or misleading ads, and then claim they didn't do it ("I swear, I don't know why someone would send out ads for me"), but if it were the other way around, any business could be destroyed by anyone.
Just for those who aren't aware, Thomas Jefferson was a Deist.
I don't know if it's that simple. Whenever I've looked into it, I've found that Jefferson's later years are marked by significant skepticism and dislike of Christianity, but his earlier years are filled with what seems to be honest eagerness toward the religion. Maybe I'm wrong, but that's what seems to be the case. And just for reference, I'm an atheist.:)
To me, it seems like something that might infringe on somebody's trademark.
This article has a definition for trademark infringement.
Answer: Although different courts have different tests, the central concept is confusion in the marketplace. The law protects against consumer confusion by ensuring that the marks on the same or similar products or services are sufficiently different. A plaintiff in a trademark infringement case generally must prove 1) it possesses a valid mark; 2) that the defendant used the mark; 3) that the defendant used the mark in commerce, "in connection with the sale, offering for sale, distribution or advertising "of goods and services; and 4) that the defendant used the mark in a manner likely to confuse consumers.
The first three pass: 1) Strawberry Shortcake is (presumably) a valid mark; 2) Penny Arcade did indeed use the mark; the Penny Arcade website sells merchandise, so 3) is probably true; but 4) is not true, at least not in my humble estimation, as no reasonable person would conclude that the PA comic is going to confuse consumers.
As a result, no trademark infringement occurred. I'm not a lawyer (or, more importantly, a judge), but it seems pretty clear-cut.
If we ignore the possibility of a lip, then the answer is no. Of course, then the answer is no for any shape without a lip, even a circle... so I'm not sure why we need to drop the lip issue.
have you considered the fact that the top of the trajectory on moon will be higher
Yes. Without taking the atmosphere into account, the highest particle trajectory would be six times higher on the Moon than it is on Earth, and it would take six times longer for the Moon ejecta to land than it would for the Earth ejecta to land. With an initial velocity of 50 m/s straight up, the moon ejecta would all have landed after 61.8 seconds. The earth ejecta would all have landed after 10.2 seconds, one-sixth of the time. (Remember, this is without atmospheric effects.)
Now add the atmosphere. Well, the Moon has none, so all its ejecta still land after 61.8 seconds. On Earth, however, large volume of air is now full of dust, which will take, as an absolute minimum, several minutes to settle (and more likely, some of the dust will remain airborne for hours -- not because it's falling slowly, but because it's so light that even tiny air currents will keep it aloft).
NerveGas claimed that equilateral triangles also have this property, that if there is any lip whatsoever, it cannot pass through its hole.
No, he didn't. Here's the entirety of his post:
A triangular manhole cover (well, an equilateral triangle anyway) is also immune to being dropped in the hole.
However, a ROUND hole is much, much more amenable to having an overweight public works employee climb through it than is a triangular hole.
He didn't say anything about a lip, and neither did the parent to his post. Certainly his omission didn't help, but you're ascribing things to him that he didn't say. Also, earlier in this thread, you said:
The parent post of this thread put forth the notion that an equilateral triangle has the same "not-able-to-go-through-a-hole-of-the-same-size (with a trivial lip)"
The parent post said nothing about "(with a trivial lip)", but I didn't catch it at the time. Nobody mentioned a lip in this thread until you did, in this post.
Specifically, the point of the discussion is whether a manhole cover shaped like an equilateral triangle can pass through its own hole.
Only if the lip is small enough. Since you claim this is "obvious," then NerveGas must have known it as well, so why did you need to point it out to him?
Okay, imagine two bomb blasts, one on the surface of the Moon, and one on the surface of the Earth.
The Moon blast ejects enough dust, dirt, and other matter so that the most energetic particles reach the top of their trajectory in (say) one minute. Exactly one minute after that, every particle from the explosion has landed on the lunar surface.
The Earth blast produces the same amount of energy. The large ejecta from the explosion (e.g. chunks of earth) fly through the air but land within, maybe 10-15 seconds. The smaller ejecta -- the dust -- spread out massively and encounter tremendous air resistance, relative to the mass of the dust. The entire dust cloud is stationary, relative to the center of the explosion, within a couple of seconds. However, instead of settling back down to earth immediately, minor currents in the air are able to carry the dust around, keeping it from hitting the ground, for a few hours. The larger pieces of dust fall to earth faster, but the smaller pieces stay aloft indefinitely. (Ever watched the air in a beam of sunlight? Those little motes dancing about, and often moving UP, are dust.)
The upshot is that 100% of the Moon blast ejecta land within a short period. 99% of the Earth blast ejecta land even faster, but the remaining 1% stays aloft, and widely distributed, for hours.
Slashdot Mirror
I thought Pete Wilson signed the power deregulation bill into law, and Davis was unlucky enough to be the one in office when the power companies sold off all their electrical plants.
Too bad we can't recall former CA governor Pete Wilson, too, since he was the one who signed the power deregulation bill into law, which led directly to the recent electricity crisis. Davis got the fun task of cleaning up the situation, as well as the blame for it happening while he was in office.
There hasn't been a sign-up fee for the overwhelming majority of dialup accounts since around 1994 or 95. The "sign-up fee" for the high-speed access in 1997 sounds more like it was paying for the service of setting it up. My DSL had a $200 setup fee when I got it in 1999, and a $150 DSL modem. (They waived the setup fee; I got to keep the DSL modem.) But even had I paid the setup fee, it would have paid for the time of the technician who came out and installed the wiring in my apartment.
Sign-up fees for simple access (e.g. dialup) to internet service, when the ISP doesn't actually have to do anything but give you a phone number and create dialup and email accounts, have been unheard of for nearly ten years.
This is false. Content is mostly not interchangeable; if this were true, then the cheap $2 second-run movie theaters would always be full, and the mainstream, first-run theaters would stand empty, because even though the moviegoers would prefer to see new movies, they'd settle for old ones because it's a better deal (one-fourth the price of a first-run movie). However, this is not true, because content is not interchangable. EQ IS going to be a better deal than SWG, in terms of cost per month at least, but there are a lot of people who have no interest in EQ but will gladly pay through the nose for SWG. Why? Because it has exclusive content.
You're right in that people only have a limited amount of time to spend on these games; but a lot of people (a LOT of people) are quite willing to have multiple MMO accounts, even if they only play each game a little each week. Since you refuse to buy any MMOs, you don't seem to think these people exist. :)
You're right in that this is a superior option for the consumer, but you've yet to prove that it's superior for the game companies. Would they actually sell more units if the game cost $10 to buy and that paid for the first month free? Your suggestion is, after all, to ditch the box, manual, and everything except the jewel box and CD, and cut the price by 80%. And yeah, it seems reasonably likely that more people would try the game out... but how do you know? Maybe people see $10 games as being worthless bargain bin crap, and won't even bother. Maybe people are drawn in by the flashy box graphics and the cool screenshots on the back. Maybe not... but do you have any evidence that shows one way or the other? Until you do, it may be a significant financial gamble for a company to make on an MMO that it's spent $15 million producing for the past four years.
Apples and oranges. There's (so far) no continuing service
Whoops, pasted the wrong link in there.
I meant, on THIS page, at the bottom it says $1.50 per additional gig of transfer. Heh.
On this page, at the very bottom, it says each additional gig of transfer is $1.50. Where do you get the $0.25 figure?
There are other reasons, as well. People aren't used to the idea that the game is free and the service costs money, so there's a huge inertia problem to overcome -- they will quite probably shun a game that looks like it might have come from the bargain bin. Free products are often seen as having no value, and games are seen by most customers as products, not services.
If the game was free, how do the customers get it? Maybe they download it. Well, that excludes anyone on dial-up, which is still half the country. So the people on broadband get to download a 2-3 gigabyte game -- costing the game company around $4-5 in bandwidth per download, depending on what their ISP charges. The dial-up people will presumably need to get a CD, which won't be given away for free (at best it might come included in a magazine, but magazines aren't free).Those CDs cost money to print and distribute. Maybe stores charge $5 for it. Well, that's a barrier. So if 500,000 people download the game (costing about $2 million), and 500,000 people buy the game (and the CDs at $5 are probably a loss, what with printing and distributing them), now the company's just spent maybe $2-3 million to distribute the game -- instead of having an income of around $3 million (300,000 copies at a more realistic $50, 20% of which might go to the developer).
Maybe you should talk to some MMO developers about this. Surely they must have thought of this model as well; perhaps there's some good reasons why they don't use it.
What you're paying for when you buy the game in the box is not the box or the manual (or at least, not very much). Mostly you're paying for (in the case of MMOs) the $10-20 MILLION of development that the game cost before it made a single cent. The initial box purchase offsets the cost of development; the monthly fee offsets the cost of continuing service.
When contemplating the worth of the name "Dot ComBack," I think it's important to remember this quote from bash.org.
I've got a better fix.
And what if you can't tell who sent the spam? Look at it this way: Let's say I run a dry cleaning business. Then someone starts posting flyer ads for my business, stapling them to utility poles. Well, that happens to be illegal without a permit in the county I live in. If they can go after me because of the ads, that's totally unfair, because I did nothing wrong. That's the issue at hand, that you can't fairly go after someone because of illegal advertising unless you can prove they are directly responsible for the advertising. If you could, then all I would have to do is send out some untraceable spam advertising your company (which isn't that hard if you know what you're doing), and watch your company get obliterated by the government... and yet you did nothing wrong.
Yeah, it seems obvious that an ad for a website was sent on behalf of the website, or with their consent, but if you could go after someone for an ad posted for their product, without actually proving that they sent the ad, then I (or anyone) could post fake ads that would get businesses in trouble.
Yeah, it sucks because a business can send out fake or misleading ads, and then claim they didn't do it ("I swear, I don't know why someone would send out ads for me"), but if it were the other way around, any business could be destroyed by anyone.
That is, about him *mentioning* lipless covers.
As a result, no trademark infringement occurred. I'm not a lawyer (or, more importantly, a judge), but it seems pretty clear-cut.
Actually, the /. editors didn't say that at all -- that was written by the guy who submitted the article.
/. needs to be (or can be) held to professional journalistic standards.
The grandparent is a fucking clown if he thinks
If we ignore the possibility of a lip, then the answer is no. Of course, then the answer is no for any shape without a lip, even a circle... so I'm not sure why we need to drop the lip issue.
Now add the atmosphere. Well, the Moon has none, so all its ejecta still land after 61.8 seconds. On Earth, however, large volume of air is now full of dust, which will take, as an absolute minimum, several minutes to settle (and more likely, some of the dust will remain airborne for hours -- not because it's falling slowly, but because it's so light that even tiny air currents will keep it aloft).
They should make a movie out of all those Star Wars games I keep seeing. It seems like a strong franchise; there must be something to it.
Okay, imagine two bomb blasts, one on the surface of the Moon, and one on the surface of the Earth.
The Moon blast ejects enough dust, dirt, and other matter so that the most energetic particles reach the top of their trajectory in (say) one minute. Exactly one minute after that, every particle from the explosion has landed on the lunar surface.
The Earth blast produces the same amount of energy. The large ejecta from the explosion (e.g. chunks of earth) fly through the air but land within, maybe 10-15 seconds. The smaller ejecta -- the dust -- spread out massively and encounter tremendous air resistance, relative to the mass of the dust. The entire dust cloud is stationary, relative to the center of the explosion, within a couple of seconds. However, instead of settling back down to earth immediately, minor currents in the air are able to carry the dust around, keeping it from hitting the ground, for a few hours. The larger pieces of dust fall to earth faster, but the smaller pieces stay aloft indefinitely. (Ever watched the air in a beam of sunlight? Those little motes dancing about, and often moving UP, are dust.)
The upshot is that 100% of the Moon blast ejecta land within a short period. 99% of the Earth blast ejecta land even faster, but the remaining 1% stays aloft, and widely distributed, for hours.
That's no moon! It's a space station!