Yeah, because my overriding concern when I go to a concert is "will somebody attempt to assassinate me tonight?"
Unless your name is Abraham Lincoln, your odds of being "assassinated" at a concert are pretty much dead even with your odds of being struck by a meteorite while you stand there.
And all those financial companies were just caught "not being careful enough" with their investments and debt levels recently, too, which was technically their responsibility.
So why the double standard? We scream for blood from the CEOs of the banks & financial services firms, and give Google a "aw shucks, kid, we still love you... but try harder next time, okay?"
Google is kind of like that obnoxious friend or family member who does Amway or some other bullshit "MLM" scam, giving away some of their "awesome new products from Amway brand products!" in order to try to get you hooked and spending money on their stuff. They are not the plucky underdog. They are not your friend. They are a well-automated advertising company, and they exist to profit by selling your attention to the highest bidder. In this case, they broke the law, and much like any other company, they have paid a fine to make the problem go away.
I know, right? And for that matter, why does the getaway driver get in trouble for what the bank robber did? Why does the accountant who helped the CEO falsify financial and audit information get thrown in prison?
If you aid in the commission of a crime... you are liable for being an accomplice, or an accessory, or for aiding and abetting... there are numerous legal precedents for this, and this is nothing new. In this case, Google was helping pharmacies of dubious legality sell drugs of dubious quality and manufacture to American consumers, in conflict with FDA regulations and federal law.
Riiiiiiiight. "It doesn't prove they're unsafe or not the same drug." It also doesn't prove they ARE safe and ARE the same drug, because there are no quality controls, safety regulations, or adequate oversight of production and procurement of the drugs they're selling.
I'm frankly amazed, reading this thread, at the outcry against government oversight and regulation - almost enough to make me think that Slashdot is some sort of libertarian paradise, where regulation is bad, and laissez-faire / caveat emptor policies are the way things should be.
And of course the FDA isn't interested in performing their mission of overseeing quality, purity, and dosage standards for prescription medications. This is all just some sort of money grab by the big pharmaceutical companies, and poor little Google is just trying to help those benevolent, fraudulent, lying, illegal pharmacies engage in their mission of mercy - distributing low-cost sugar pills and poison to credulous or desperate dupes who don't realize that the wrong dosage, wrong drug, or wrong interaction could actually kill them.
When we look at it that way, it's hard to understand why Google would ever be criticized for this: Google, Mother Theresa, Florence Nightingale, Clara Barton... all just angels of mercy sent from above, truly doing god's work.
How is it unreasonable? Here's the complex decision making process they'd have to follow:
if ( Pharmacy is Registered with PharmacyChecker ) {
Accept Advertisement; } else {
Deny Advertisement; }
Nobody's asking them to inspect the operations of every individual pharmacy, they're simply being asked to check that the pharmacy is registered & legal via an existing online service. Stop making excuses for them, they screwed up, and got caught doing so, and now they pay the price for it. This is government regulation and oversight working as intended - even if you don't like the particular regulations in this case, it's clear that Google was in violation.
What you are suggesting is that Google - an *advertising* company, who makes 95+% of its revenues and profits from advertising - should be exempted from knowing the rules and regulations of the industries in which they operate because "they have computers."
I work in IT for a financial company - all of our revenues & profits are from financial services - funds, trading, planning, etc, but anybody who knows anything about the financial services industry knows that it's a very broad and diverse industry, and we have our fingers in many many pies. Should my company be allowed to claim an exemption from SEC and other financial regulations, and immunity from government penalties because we have lots of computer systems, making us an "IT company," by your bizarro-world defintion?
If you sell ads, it is incumbent upon you to do so in a legal fashion, especially when you have already previously agreed to abide by rules which you are demonstrably continuing to violate (see: http://yro.slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=2395960&cid=37193690).
And yet the Resident Evil franchise is... three? four movies deep, and the Matrix hit 3. Dystopian near-future + shadowy corporate / technocrat overlords vs plucky/sexy protagonists in black/gray/vaguely-military-ish clothing certainly seems to be a successful recipe at the box office.
They could easily expand on the game universe while keeping it true to the feel and premise of the game. Add some backstory to the characters, corporation, and GladOS, a few wisecracks and punchlines, some bouncy T&A, and the phrase, "Shia LeBoeuf stars in the latest action-packed thriller from Michael Bay," and you've got a perfectly acceptable summer movie that'll enjoy at least modestly profitable success.
Pretty sure that Duct tape (air conditioning ducts), velcro (invented in the early 40's) and plastics (first derived from petroleum in the late 1800's or early 1900's, iirc) all predated the space shuttle program. Allowing for GPS, and early warning weather systems doesn't require manned space exploration, it simply requires the ability to launch satellites into orbit - this can (and has) been done with unmanned missions. Your argument for medical advances is about the only thing that might hold some water, but that doesn't require much in the way of "space exploration," it's more of a "do experiments in low-gravity to see if things behave differently than they do here on earth," type of science.
I'm all for devoting our efforts and resources into building better unmanned launch, science, and even exploration capabilities, but barring significant advances and breakthroughs in fundamental physics, funding manned exploration and colonization efforts is a foolish and prohibitively expensive novelty.
What absolutely slays me about these arguments is that there's a lot of willfully ignorant nerds who will blithely assure us that "mining the moons of Jupiter is totally economically feasible, or will be someday" despite all of the points you've pointed out.
They KNOW the distances involved. They KNOW that you would literally need to have hundreds of cargo ships in transit at all times to establish any sort of economically viable supply line, with a supply line that was literally YEARS long, each carrying hundreds of tons of whatever material you hope to recover, and they KNOW that we would regularly have multiple-hundred-ton cargo ships needing to be offloaded, and the material shipped down to the surface here.
But none of those practical considerations matter one whit, because they read a science fiction book once in high school. It's like the brain just shuts down as soon as somebody says "space," and the solution to everything becomes some magic pixie dust that doesn't exist, but "totally will, soon."
They want to explore space? Great, get started building better, smarter, more independent robots, and find a cheap way to launch a million of them to other stars, then hope that some survive the tens or hundreds of thousands of years required to reach even our nearest stellar neighbors, then wait years for their communications to reach us back here on earth. Hopefully somebody's great-great-great-great-greatx10^10000 grandchildren will have the technology, and care enough to remember to listen for those broadcasts someday in 88,011.
Fair enough, and I agree - all of these programs should be reviewed, I'm not suggesting that we should only be looking at projects costing 500k-1mill, or anything like that. And it's entirely possible that there's a dozen medium-sized 50mill projects in the DoL and DoA that are pissing away money on less value than this study would provide, and are far more worthy of being cut. Absolute dollars spent is just about the worst metric to use to judge the worth of a project. Some 800 billion dollar expenditures are incredibly valuable. Some 8 dollar expenditures are useless.
My basic opinion on the matter is that we figure out what's a social priority for us and what's not before we spend the money. Then we continue funding the valuable ones, and cut the useless ones. My issue with this grant specifically is that I don't see how it'll produce much to justify its existence - 500k will not go very far to fund much actual scientific research.
If the research is useful and worthwhile, it should be defended on its own merits[...]
You responded:
Cheap transit to LEO. Orbital mining for metals and volatiles. Artificial intelligence and other computer science areas. New energy storage and generation technologies. Genetic engineering. Advanced hydroponics.
Thank you. That's *exactly* what I was asking for - not a handwaving "you'll never even notice the money's gone anyway, so just shut up with your complaints about spending." These are areas we could expect to make some breakthroughs in if we were to undertake a manned interstellar travel program. However, are these technologies (and by extension, is manned interstellar travel) something that is important to us, as a society? And should it take priority over other things that we consider more important?
My entire point is that the discussion about priorities needs to be had, and had about every program the government is funding. If it's not a priority for us as a society, why are we spending the money? If there are other, competing, under-funded priorities we consider more valuable, why isn't this money allocated to those higher-priority projects?
The simple fact of the matter is this: many of the things you listed are already actively funded & being researched today... so why the sudden need for a vague catch-all grant that won't seriously fund much research in any of these areas, other than to produce a paper saying "There's a raft of problems - including our current understanding of the fundamental laws of physics, which may simply not be flexible in ways which would allow us to travel to other stars with a reasonable cost or time frame - which we need to solve before we can go to another star. So we need billions more in funding to work on solving them."
If the research is useful and worthwhile, it should be defended on its own merits, not on the principle of, "our government spends way more than that anyway, so comparatively, it's like, free." If you piss away 50 cents a day, every day, at the end of the year you've pissed away about 180 bucks. Doesn't sound like much, but when you start pissing away 50 cents a day, every day, on 50 different things... it adds up quick.
Budgeting & spending needs to be prioritized - the government isn't exempt from this exercise, though it tries really hard to be. This may be "really interesting science," but is it as valuable as funding... cancer research? obesity research? AIDS research? Renewable energy research? Battery & fuel cell research? If it's not more valuable... why are we spending the money on studies of interstellar travel, instead of funding someone's cancer research for another 6 months? If it is more valuable, then someone certainly should be able to provide arguments for that value (including what sort of returns on the investment we expect) besides, "it's barely any money."
When you're running out of money and borrowing to finance your lifestyle, something's got to give. In this case, I don't see much potential return from "studying interstellar travel," so I'm not sure I'd consider this a good use of our limited resources at this time. By all means, feel free to present your arguments for the merits of this study - just make sure they don't include the phrase, "and that's barely any money at all."
It has nothing to do with Anti-Intellectualism as some others have suggested, and everything to do with prioritizing the allocation of our limited resources into the most pressing & urgent needs. It may be "interesting science," but is it "important to us, as a society," over all other competing needs? I'd say no.
Yeah, and I'm sympathetic to their argument that they "have to balance around max level" - that makes sense, the game isn't meant for a bunch of players to stay at level 39 forever... but the cc chains, and undispellable nature of some of the cc/snare/root/silences is just killing any sense of fun in pvp. I don't mind losing to a better player who gets the drop on me in the open and works me over, but it's incredibly UN-fun to sit there stunned, unable to do anything, while you get destroyed over the space of 3-4 GCDs.
Agreed. And I find that the RDF has actually killed guild community as well. Why wait for a guild group when I can just queue up now and get my run out of the way? And then, 5 minutes later, more guildies show up and are looking for a run... but suddenly it's 3 dps looking to run, and all 3 queued up at separate times, and they're 8 - 10 minutes into a 30 minute queue, and nobody wants to drop queue now because then they'll send themselves back to the beginning of the 30 minute queue... I see that happening all the time in my guild. About the ONLY way I can get a guild run together is if I log onto my pally tank, and say "Queueing in 5 mins for a random, let me know if you want to come with." Then the dps will drop queue for the faster queue I offer, and I can generally convince one of our healers to run with me. Otherwise, guilds are becoming ships in the night, too. Just like trade / general are now home only to trolls, guild chats are rapidly becoming "GRATS" spam points when somebody gets an achievement, and that's it.
Though I've actually had pretty good luck with the RDF in terms of people not being assholes though - the groups aren't often "friendly," but they are fairly business-like, and the jerks generally get vote-kicked pretty quickly.
The problem Blizzard had with PvP and especially Arenas which they put so much effort into is that it was all a burst affair. Those who could unload the fastest and most coordinated won. So what did Blizzard do? They jacked up the hit points of characters. When an average mage had 20k health at level 80 in the previous release they now have 100k health. This caused a new problem, healers would just make PvP (specifically Arenas) play drag on and on. So they eliminate the effects of burst attacks with immense health pools and in turn keep the games from going on forever by nerfing the healers so strongly they cannot afford to heal effectively for any period of time.
The sick thing is that, even with all these increased health pools, arenas are *still* mostly about burst. A well geared rogue coming out of stealth - smoke->kidneyshot->unload will drop an opponent to very close to death in seconds. Ferals, Mages, too; even spriests to an extent, if they can get a few lucky procs during their opener. Rets, Warriors, and DKs all have stupid amounts of uptime on any class except frost mages, and warlocks get ridiculous control, self-healing, and damage with dispel protection.
The amount of stuns, silences, fears, roots, disorients, etc. in the game are ridiculous as well - I've had matches where I *literally* manage to do no damage or healing because I'm stunned, trained, and dead from the first second of the match. Trinketing out of a kidney/bomb and trying to run away from the rogue's dk or warr partner is just a few seconds delaying the inevitable. It's entirely possible to have absolutely no control of your character for the entirety of the match, as well - your only contribution is to press your trinket button once, and end up cycloned or stunned or blinded or deep freezed again immediately.
And yeah, healing was made incredibly painful and punishing - they made my enjoyment of healing subject to the fact that half the bads in my group don't know what fire is, much less that you shouldn't stand in it. So yeah, "you stood in fire, you died, working as intended," is the official reason for the wipe, but everybody sits there going, "Is the healer sandbagging? Could he have saved us? Why didn't he save us? Maybe he's bad." And mana management is absolutely retarded for healers - if anybody in my group is a little slow, I have to burn all my resources keeping them alive, and once again, Blizz is punishing the healer for the bad connection and/or bad awareness of the other players.
The people have a choice and it is pretty obvious how they have spoken.
Yes, and that choice is, "buy a new Android phone to replace my existing Android phone, or buy a new WP7 phone to replace my existing Android phone?" Unless there's a compelling reason to switch, people will stick with what they know. This doesn't mean that consumers "demand Android," it means they already have Android phones - likely because the iPhone wasn't available on their carrier, or they absolutely hate Apple and refuse to buy Apple products (seriously: read about some of the attitudes here http://www.businessinsider.com/smartphone-survey-results-2011-4?op=1), and now that they have an Android model, they're sticking with it because it's easier than switching. "Not hating" something isn't the same as "demanding" something.
First mover advantage. iPhone sales started 3 years before the first WP7 phone went on sale; Android phones went on sale 2 years before the first WP7 phone went on sale. People tend to stick with what they know, and what they have an existing investment of time, energy and money in.
People aren't "demanding Android," they're saying "I really don't want to have to adjust to a whole new phone, buy a whole bunch of new apps, and set up a bunch of new stuff on my computer to manage things."
If your WP7 / Android phones are always lagging the Nokia / Motorola offerings, you won't sell many. Ask Nokia how the low-end, low-margin, high-volume commodity handset market worked out for them in terms of sustainable profits. (Not very well.)
I think you're looking - a couple years down the road - at a market full of hardware/software stacks, with a single company/pairing making the vast majority of "premiere" handsets for that software stack: Google+Motorola = Android; Microsoft+Nokia = WP7; Apple = iOS; HP = WebOS; RIM = BBOS; This means companies like HTC and Samsung may still exist as phone manufacturers, but they will not be major players in the space - they'll have a few "me too" knockoffs, and/or be focusing on the low-end feature phone market as a "hobby" alongside their other lines of business.
The fact of the matter is that there's consumer demand for Android
No, there really isn't, this is simply a myth reinforced by the "Google good, Android good, MSFT/AAPL BAD" mentality of slashdot. With the exception of a small minority of geeks, people buy Android because that's what the handset makers are using on the handsets, not because "The people demand their Android."
You're correct that the handset makers will go where the sales are - if Motorola suddenly has favored status with Android releases at the expense of Samsung & HTC's sales, you can bet that Samsung and HTC are going to start pushing WP7 or some other mobile OS.
Yes, now those other companies just have to start making insane amounts of cash off Android, then they won't need to drop it. Problem is, they're NOT making insane amounts of cash off it, and this move by Google just ensured that they're going to be even harder-pressed to make insane amounts of cash.
Google will likely have their phones always a step ahead of competitor phones in terms of features and capabilities. Google has, in a stroke, relegated HTC & Samsung to the low-end commodity phone market if they stay with Android. Shipping millions of low-margin phones may be GREAT for Google's advertising revenues, but it's not going to help HTC & Samsung produce a quality product that can make a sustainable profit.
Well, since it's so bad for scrappy startups and favors entrenched interests, I can only assume that Google is lobbying feverishly against this, given their preferences for openness, transparency, and eliminating bogus patents, unlike all those other big players who just abuse the patent system to secure their own business models?
With 1.2 MILLION DOLLARS spent on lobbying in Q1 of 2011 (source), Google must surely take this issue very seriously. Of course, they take buying bogus patents and perpetuating the existing system 2,616 times MORE seriously than lobbying for reform, as evidenced by their 3.14 Billion bid for a bunch of "bogus" patents, which they assured us they would ONLY use for self-defense, completely unlike all those other companies who are just big meany-head bullies.
Google: "Do No Evil. But if you MUST do evil, be sure to spend a little time and money to make it appear like you're not doing any evil, because those dumb rubes won't know the difference anyway."
If Google was such a fan of openness and anti-patent, they wouldn't file for patents, they'd produce defensive publications, showing that they developed the technique, but rather than patent it, they've opened it up and created prior art (in the form of the defensive publication) preventing anybody ELSE from patenting it.
They could nullify bullshit patents, and further the cause of openness and free-as-in-freedom in one fell swoop, protecting their products, and actually doing good. Instead they shout on one hand about how broken the patent system is, and on the other hand, file for patent after patent in order to protect their business just like everybody else is doing.
Google is happily trying to play both sides of the issue: - Poor besieged underdog when somebody else is alleging they infringe on something; - Really nice guys, and titans of innovation and industry whose ideas are just being jacked left and right by all their competitors, if they happen to hold a patent relevant to the domain;
Do you really think for a second that if Bing started really chipping away at Google's search business, that Google wouldn't find a half a dozen patents that Microsoft is infringing on? Problem is, Google doesn't hold a lot of patents in the areas where their competitors are making all their money, because they're releasing a host of "me too" responses to the products of their competitors, rather than in-house or home-grown innovations.
Slashdot Mirror
Yeah, because my overriding concern when I go to a concert is "will somebody attempt to assassinate me tonight?"
Unless your name is Abraham Lincoln, your odds of being "assassinated" at a concert are pretty much dead even with your odds of being struck by a meteorite while you stand there.
And all those financial companies were just caught "not being careful enough" with their investments and debt levels recently, too, which was technically their responsibility.
So why the double standard? We scream for blood from the CEOs of the banks & financial services firms, and give Google a "aw shucks, kid, we still love you... but try harder next time, okay?"
Google is kind of like that obnoxious friend or family member who does Amway or some other bullshit "MLM" scam, giving away some of their "awesome new products from Amway brand products!" in order to try to get you hooked and spending money on their stuff. They are not the plucky underdog. They are not your friend. They are a well-automated advertising company, and they exist to profit by selling your attention to the highest bidder. In this case, they broke the law, and much like any other company, they have paid a fine to make the problem go away.
I know, right? And for that matter, why does the getaway driver get in trouble for what the bank robber did? Why does the accountant who helped the CEO falsify financial and audit information get thrown in prison?
If you aid in the commission of a crime... you are liable for being an accomplice, or an accessory, or for aiding and abetting... there are numerous legal precedents for this, and this is nothing new. In this case, Google was helping pharmacies of dubious legality sell drugs of dubious quality and manufacture to American consumers, in conflict with FDA regulations and federal law.
Riiiiiiiight. "It doesn't prove they're unsafe or not the same drug." It also doesn't prove they ARE safe and ARE the same drug, because there are no quality controls, safety regulations, or adequate oversight of production and procurement of the drugs they're selling.
I'm frankly amazed, reading this thread, at the outcry against government oversight and regulation - almost enough to make me think that Slashdot is some sort of libertarian paradise, where regulation is bad, and laissez-faire / caveat emptor policies are the way things should be.
And of course the FDA isn't interested in performing their mission of overseeing quality, purity, and dosage standards for prescription medications. This is all just some sort of money grab by the big pharmaceutical companies, and poor little Google is just trying to help those benevolent, fraudulent, lying, illegal pharmacies engage in their mission of mercy - distributing low-cost sugar pills and poison to credulous or desperate dupes who don't realize that the wrong dosage, wrong drug, or wrong interaction could actually kill them.
When we look at it that way, it's hard to understand why Google would ever be criticized for this: Google, Mother Theresa, Florence Nightingale, Clara Barton... all just angels of mercy sent from above, truly doing god's work.
How is it unreasonable? Here's the complex decision making process they'd have to follow:
if ( Pharmacy is Registered with PharmacyChecker ) {
Accept Advertisement;
} else {
Deny Advertisement;
}
Nobody's asking them to inspect the operations of every individual pharmacy, they're simply being asked to check that the pharmacy is registered & legal via an existing online service. Stop making excuses for them, they screwed up, and got caught doing so, and now they pay the price for it. This is government regulation and oversight working as intended - even if you don't like the particular regulations in this case, it's clear that Google was in violation.
What you are suggesting is that Google - an *advertising* company, who makes 95+% of its revenues and profits from advertising - should be exempted from knowing the rules and regulations of the industries in which they operate because "they have computers."
I work in IT for a financial company - all of our revenues & profits are from financial services - funds, trading, planning, etc, but anybody who knows anything about the financial services industry knows that it's a very broad and diverse industry, and we have our fingers in many many pies. Should my company be allowed to claim an exemption from SEC and other financial regulations, and immunity from government penalties because we have lots of computer systems, making us an "IT company," by your bizarro-world defintion?
If you sell ads, it is incumbent upon you to do so in a legal fashion, especially when you have already previously agreed to abide by rules which you are demonstrably continuing to violate (see: http://yro.slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=2395960&cid=37193690).
Sure, it would be better if they did that. Problem is, they won't do that. :)
And yet the Resident Evil franchise is... three? four movies deep, and the Matrix hit 3. Dystopian near-future + shadowy corporate / technocrat overlords vs plucky/sexy protagonists in black/gray/vaguely-military-ish clothing certainly seems to be a successful recipe at the box office.
They could easily expand on the game universe while keeping it true to the feel and premise of the game. Add some backstory to the characters, corporation, and GladOS, a few wisecracks and punchlines, some bouncy T&A, and the phrase, "Shia LeBoeuf stars in the latest action-packed thriller from Michael Bay," and you've got a perfectly acceptable summer movie that'll enjoy at least modestly profitable success.
Pretty sure that Duct tape (air conditioning ducts), velcro (invented in the early 40's) and plastics (first derived from petroleum in the late 1800's or early 1900's, iirc) all predated the space shuttle program. Allowing for GPS, and early warning weather systems doesn't require manned space exploration, it simply requires the ability to launch satellites into orbit - this can (and has) been done with unmanned missions. Your argument for medical advances is about the only thing that might hold some water, but that doesn't require much in the way of "space exploration," it's more of a "do experiments in low-gravity to see if things behave differently than they do here on earth," type of science.
I'm all for devoting our efforts and resources into building better unmanned launch, science, and even exploration capabilities, but barring significant advances and breakthroughs in fundamental physics, funding manned exploration and colonization efforts is a foolish and prohibitively expensive novelty.
What absolutely slays me about these arguments is that there's a lot of willfully ignorant nerds who will blithely assure us that "mining the moons of Jupiter is totally economically feasible, or will be someday" despite all of the points you've pointed out.
They KNOW the distances involved. They KNOW that you would literally need to have hundreds of cargo ships in transit at all times to establish any sort of economically viable supply line, with a supply line that was literally YEARS long, each carrying hundreds of tons of whatever material you hope to recover, and they KNOW that we would regularly have multiple-hundred-ton cargo ships needing to be offloaded, and the material shipped down to the surface here.
But none of those practical considerations matter one whit, because they read a science fiction book once in high school. It's like the brain just shuts down as soon as somebody says "space," and the solution to everything becomes some magic pixie dust that doesn't exist, but "totally will, soon."
They want to explore space? Great, get started building better, smarter, more independent robots, and find a cheap way to launch a million of them to other stars, then hope that some survive the tens or hundreds of thousands of years required to reach even our nearest stellar neighbors, then wait years for their communications to reach us back here on earth. Hopefully somebody's great-great-great-great-greatx10^10000 grandchildren will have the technology, and care enough to remember to listen for those broadcasts someday in 88,011.
Fair enough, and I agree - all of these programs should be reviewed, I'm not suggesting that we should only be looking at projects costing 500k-1mill, or anything like that. And it's entirely possible that there's a dozen medium-sized 50mill projects in the DoL and DoA that are pissing away money on less value than this study would provide, and are far more worthy of being cut. Absolute dollars spent is just about the worst metric to use to judge the worth of a project. Some 800 billion dollar expenditures are incredibly valuable. Some 8 dollar expenditures are useless.
My basic opinion on the matter is that we figure out what's a social priority for us and what's not before we spend the money. Then we continue funding the valuable ones, and cut the useless ones. My issue with this grant specifically is that I don't see how it'll produce much to justify its existence - 500k will not go very far to fund much actual scientific research.
I said:
You responded:
Thank you. That's *exactly* what I was asking for - not a handwaving "you'll never even notice the money's gone anyway, so just shut up with your complaints about spending." These are areas we could expect to make some breakthroughs in if we were to undertake a manned interstellar travel program. However, are these technologies (and by extension, is manned interstellar travel) something that is important to us, as a society? And should it take priority over other things that we consider more important?
My entire point is that the discussion about priorities needs to be had, and had about every program the government is funding. If it's not a priority for us as a society, why are we spending the money? If there are other, competing, under-funded priorities we consider more valuable, why isn't this money allocated to those higher-priority projects?
The simple fact of the matter is this: many of the things you listed are already actively funded & being researched today... so why the sudden need for a vague catch-all grant that won't seriously fund much research in any of these areas, other than to produce a paper saying "There's a raft of problems - including our current understanding of the fundamental laws of physics, which may simply not be flexible in ways which would allow us to travel to other stars with a reasonable cost or time frame - which we need to solve before we can go to another star. So we need billions more in funding to work on solving them."
If the research is useful and worthwhile, it should be defended on its own merits, not on the principle of, "our government spends way more than that anyway, so comparatively, it's like, free." If you piss away 50 cents a day, every day, at the end of the year you've pissed away about 180 bucks. Doesn't sound like much, but when you start pissing away 50 cents a day, every day, on 50 different things... it adds up quick.
Budgeting & spending needs to be prioritized - the government isn't exempt from this exercise, though it tries really hard to be. This may be "really interesting science," but is it as valuable as funding... cancer research? obesity research? AIDS research? Renewable energy research? Battery & fuel cell research? If it's not more valuable... why are we spending the money on studies of interstellar travel, instead of funding someone's cancer research for another 6 months? If it is more valuable, then someone certainly should be able to provide arguments for that value (including what sort of returns on the investment we expect) besides, "it's barely any money."
When you're running out of money and borrowing to finance your lifestyle, something's got to give. In this case, I don't see much potential return from "studying interstellar travel," so I'm not sure I'd consider this a good use of our limited resources at this time. By all means, feel free to present your arguments for the merits of this study - just make sure they don't include the phrase, "and that's barely any money at all."
It has nothing to do with Anti-Intellectualism as some others have suggested, and everything to do with prioritizing the allocation of our limited resources into the most pressing & urgent needs. It may be "interesting science," but is it "important to us, as a society," over all other competing needs? I'd say no.
Yeah, and I'm sympathetic to their argument that they "have to balance around max level" - that makes sense, the game isn't meant for a bunch of players to stay at level 39 forever... but the cc chains, and undispellable nature of some of the cc/snare/root/silences is just killing any sense of fun in pvp. I don't mind losing to a better player who gets the drop on me in the open and works me over, but it's incredibly UN-fun to sit there stunned, unable to do anything, while you get destroyed over the space of 3-4 GCDs.
Agreed. And I find that the RDF has actually killed guild community as well. Why wait for a guild group when I can just queue up now and get my run out of the way? And then, 5 minutes later, more guildies show up and are looking for a run... but suddenly it's 3 dps looking to run, and all 3 queued up at separate times, and they're 8 - 10 minutes into a 30 minute queue, and nobody wants to drop queue now because then they'll send themselves back to the beginning of the 30 minute queue... I see that happening all the time in my guild. About the ONLY way I can get a guild run together is if I log onto my pally tank, and say "Queueing in 5 mins for a random, let me know if you want to come with." Then the dps will drop queue for the faster queue I offer, and I can generally convince one of our healers to run with me. Otherwise, guilds are becoming ships in the night, too. Just like trade / general are now home only to trolls, guild chats are rapidly becoming "GRATS" spam points when somebody gets an achievement, and that's it.
Though I've actually had pretty good luck with the RDF in terms of people not being assholes though - the groups aren't often "friendly," but they are fairly business-like, and the jerks generally get vote-kicked pretty quickly.
The sick thing is that, even with all these increased health pools, arenas are *still* mostly about burst. A well geared rogue coming out of stealth - smoke->kidneyshot->unload will drop an opponent to very close to death in seconds. Ferals, Mages, too; even spriests to an extent, if they can get a few lucky procs during their opener. Rets, Warriors, and DKs all have stupid amounts of uptime on any class except frost mages, and warlocks get ridiculous control, self-healing, and damage with dispel protection.
The amount of stuns, silences, fears, roots, disorients, etc. in the game are ridiculous as well - I've had matches where I *literally* manage to do no damage or healing because I'm stunned, trained, and dead from the first second of the match. Trinketing out of a kidney/bomb and trying to run away from the rogue's dk or warr partner is just a few seconds delaying the inevitable. It's entirely possible to have absolutely no control of your character for the entirety of the match, as well - your only contribution is to press your trinket button once, and end up cycloned or stunned or blinded or deep freezed again immediately.
And yeah, healing was made incredibly painful and punishing - they made my enjoyment of healing subject to the fact that half the bads in my group don't know what fire is, much less that you shouldn't stand in it. So yeah, "you stood in fire, you died, working as intended," is the official reason for the wipe, but everybody sits there going, "Is the healer sandbagging? Could he have saved us? Why didn't he save us? Maybe he's bad." And mana management is absolutely retarded for healers - if anybody in my group is a little slow, I have to burn all my resources keeping them alive, and once again, Blizz is punishing the healer for the bad connection and/or bad awareness of the other players.
Yes, and that choice is, "buy a new Android phone to replace my existing Android phone, or buy a new WP7 phone to replace my existing Android phone?" Unless there's a compelling reason to switch, people will stick with what they know. This doesn't mean that consumers "demand Android," it means they already have Android phones - likely because the iPhone wasn't available on their carrier, or they absolutely hate Apple and refuse to buy Apple products (seriously: read about some of the attitudes here http://www.businessinsider.com/smartphone-survey-results-2011-4?op=1), and now that they have an Android model, they're sticking with it because it's easier than switching. "Not hating" something isn't the same as "demanding" something.
First mover advantage. iPhone sales started 3 years before the first WP7 phone went on sale; Android phones went on sale 2 years before the first WP7 phone went on sale. People tend to stick with what they know, and what they have an existing investment of time, energy and money in.
People aren't "demanding Android," they're saying "I really don't want to have to adjust to a whole new phone, buy a whole bunch of new apps, and set up a bunch of new stuff on my computer to manage things."
Probably not in the long run.
If your WP7 / Android phones are always lagging the Nokia / Motorola offerings, you won't sell many. Ask Nokia how the low-end, low-margin, high-volume commodity handset market worked out for them in terms of sustainable profits. (Not very well.)
I think you're looking - a couple years down the road - at a market full of hardware/software stacks, with a single company/pairing making the vast majority of "premiere" handsets for that software stack: Google+Motorola = Android; Microsoft+Nokia = WP7; Apple = iOS; HP = WebOS; RIM = BBOS; This means companies like HTC and Samsung may still exist as phone manufacturers, but they will not be major players in the space - they'll have a few "me too" knockoffs, and/or be focusing on the low-end feature phone market as a "hobby" alongside their other lines of business.
So they spent 12 billion dollars to basically *shut down* a major Android handset manufacturer?
No, there really isn't, this is simply a myth reinforced by the "Google good, Android good, MSFT/AAPL BAD" mentality of slashdot. With the exception of a small minority of geeks, people buy Android because that's what the handset makers are using on the handsets, not because "The people demand their Android."
You're correct that the handset makers will go where the sales are - if Motorola suddenly has favored status with Android releases at the expense of Samsung & HTC's sales, you can bet that Samsung and HTC are going to start pushing WP7 or some other mobile OS.
Yes, now those other companies just have to start making insane amounts of cash off Android, then they won't need to drop it. Problem is, they're NOT making insane amounts of cash off it, and this move by Google just ensured that they're going to be even harder-pressed to make insane amounts of cash.
Google will likely have their phones always a step ahead of competitor phones in terms of features and capabilities. Google has, in a stroke, relegated HTC & Samsung to the low-end commodity phone market if they stay with Android. Shipping millions of low-margin phones may be GREAT for Google's advertising revenues, but it's not going to help HTC & Samsung produce a quality product that can make a sustainable profit.
See: Nokia, Rise and Fall of
Well, since it's so bad for scrappy startups and favors entrenched interests, I can only assume that Google is lobbying feverishly against this, given their preferences for openness, transparency, and eliminating bogus patents, unlike all those other big players who just abuse the patent system to secure their own business models?
With 1.2 MILLION DOLLARS spent on lobbying in Q1 of 2011 (source), Google must surely take this issue very seriously. Of course, they take buying bogus patents and perpetuating the existing system 2,616 times MORE seriously than lobbying for reform, as evidenced by their 3.14 Billion bid for a bunch of "bogus" patents, which they assured us they would ONLY use for self-defense, completely unlike all those other companies who are just big meany-head bullies.
Google: "Do No Evil. But if you MUST do evil, be sure to spend a little time and money to make it appear like you're not doing any evil, because those dumb rubes won't know the difference anyway."
And it's funny that you believe that.
If Google was such a fan of openness and anti-patent, they wouldn't file for patents, they'd produce defensive publications, showing that they developed the technique, but rather than patent it, they've opened it up and created prior art (in the form of the defensive publication) preventing anybody ELSE from patenting it.
They could nullify bullshit patents, and further the cause of openness and free-as-in-freedom in one fell swoop, protecting their products, and actually doing good. Instead they shout on one hand about how broken the patent system is, and on the other hand, file for patent after patent in order to protect their business just like everybody else is doing.
Really? Because I haven't wondered that at all.
Google is happily trying to play both sides of the issue:
- Poor besieged underdog when somebody else is alleging they infringe on something;
- Really nice guys, and titans of innovation and industry whose ideas are just being jacked left and right by all their competitors, if they happen to hold a patent relevant to the domain;
Do you really think for a second that if Bing started really chipping away at Google's search business, that Google wouldn't find a half a dozen patents that Microsoft is infringing on? Problem is, Google doesn't hold a lot of patents in the areas where their competitors are making all their money, because they're releasing a host of "me too" responses to the products of their competitors, rather than in-house or home-grown innovations.