If there is reason to suspect a low success rate, conducting an experiment with a high margin of error is a bad idea, the success will otherwise always be lost in the error noise.
What you REALLY need to do, is repeat the test multiple times, ideally with more people, so you can reduce the margin of error significantly and differentiate between error and small effects.
After all a low success rate isn't a bad thing... If you could wake up only 1% of a certain class of coma patients, even that would be a significant breakthrough.
It would. It's just not practical. Chips are too complicated.
Require them to use simple chips. Its a voting machine; we could probably model it with a finite-state-machine graph drawn by hand. A coffee maker is more complicated.;)
Does that not depend on the error of your expectation of 3 waking up? If the average(expected) is 3 but the SD of that value is 2 then 5 people waking up really is not statistically significant.
It -may- not be statistically significant. Its enough to make it worth repeating the experiment to ensure its not consistently one SD up.
After all, my if my batting average during a game is x +/- y, and something makes it x+y +/- y' I've just moved from the beer league to the major league.;)
How about the waiting list for maternity wards? Last I checked it was over 9 months...
That's a great headline, but in reality, it was in one city during a population explosion due to booming economy.
I've had 2 kids in the last couple years in Vancouver, we had no issue whatsoever getting access to a delivery room nor pre or post care in either case. The overloaded maternity wards was a temporary and localized problem due to a rash of babies being born at once, that could have just as easily happened in the states, and it has.
Indeed...
"The UC Davis Medical Center declared an internal state of emergency Wednesday morning and began turning away all but the most seriously ill and injured patients from the trauma center and emergency room because the hospital is completely full.
Elective surgeries are being postponed to free up operating rooms for patients with life-threatening conditions.
UC Davis -- and other local hospitals -- have been operating close to capacity for much of the year. The rapidly growing population in the Sacramento region, a growing number of uninsured patients who crowd emergency rooms because they cannot get care anywhere else, and a critical shortage of nursing staff are causing the strain. "
These headline grabbing anecdotes however aren't representative of either system.
I've never seen anyone die in the street because he didn't get his surgery. Get real.
Probably, because "didn't get his surgery" can't be listed as a cause of death on a coroners report.
But this comes pretty close:
"A paraplegic man wearing a soiled hospital gown and a broken colostomy bag was found crawling in a gutter in skid row in Los Angeles on Thursday after allegedly being dumped in the street by a Hollywood Presbyterian Medical Center van, police said."
In Baltimore, Maryland, on July 27, 1998, a 70-year-old man accompanied his daughter to the hospital with a sick child. When they arrived, the man told his daughter he didn't feel well and would wait outside the hospital. Passersby noticed something was wrong and called security. The security officer's log stated: "911 notified intoxicated male... ER notified (refused)" An emergency medical technician with a private ambulance leaving the hospital initiated CPR while the officer contacted the emergency department for assistance. The emergency department again refused assistance. Another ambulance arrived and transported the man to the ER. About one-half hour after the man was first seen lying in the grass, he was pronounced dead of cardiac arrhythmia.
"In Chicago, Illinois, a 19-year-old patient came to the ER of Provident Hospital of Cook County with symptoms of threatened miscarriage. The hospital sought HMO approval, which was denied. The young woman was not given an exam or treatment. Because of the delay, she began to deliver a nonviable fetus as she waited for a taxi to take her to another hospital."
"In 2006, criminal charges were filed against Kaiser Permanente after one of its hospitals was caught on tape dumping a 63 year old women on the street, wearing nothing but a hospital gown, and still very ill."
Well they only sold 21.7 million Gamecubes compared to XBox doing 24 million worldwide
Yeah... I'd hardly call pretty much tying for 2nd place being unsuccessful, especially since they sold those at a profit, while MS is in an ocean of red ink. Meanwhile the PS2 is pretty much a league of its own; and comparing anything to it for the purpose of defining 'success' is sort of silly; by that metric the DS is a fail, the Wii is a fail, the PS1 was a fail, the NES was a fail...
Seriously? They've had ups and downs. They've never actually failed at anything though.
That about sums it up, the cube wasn't their brightest moment, but it was hardly 'unsuccessful'.
Once I have developed and am ready to market a console-style game for the PC, how would I convince my customers to buy a VGA-to-SDTV scan converter and a set of gamepads so that they can play with their friends on a suitably large TV?
You have 2 choices:
If you want to grow organically develop a PC game or two for the PC first, establish yourself, and then move on to consoles.
Otherwise build your prototype, scrounge up some venture capital, mortgage your house, find a partner or 2, hire a secretary, rent an office and gamble on jumping headfirst into Wii development.
If you give TMS to a hundred patients, three of whom would be expected to wake up naturally, and 90 of them actually wake up, you've got something worth investigating further. If you give it to one patient who wakes up you've got nothing but an interesting story.
If three of them are expected to wake up and you get five you've got something worth investigating further. 90 is an unqualified success.
but as i understand it, they can prevent titles from launching if they're 'below par' or even contain questionable content..
Same is true of games for Microsoft Xbox, Sony Playstation, and Apple ipod/iphone products, not to mention most platforms of yesterday from the Nokia ngage to the Sega Dreamcast to the Atari and Intellivision. (Although 'legal ways around' the licensing system existed for some of the really old platforms, leading to piles of unauthorized shovelware.)
Its also true if you want your 'cellphone game' available on the Verizon / Sprint / Telus / Bell / AT&T / etc / application store.
Yeah getting Nintendo licensing is more "exclusive" than some of these but they ALL have final say on whether your title sees the light of day.
If you want freedom, develop for the PC. This has always been true.
getting a license isn't necessarily just a price, it's also entering into a contract with nintendo. perhaps part of the reason why nintendo had to go after different market segments with the wii to be successful with a console.
But seriously, you aren't going to qualify yet, they simply won't currently authorize an individual working from home.* You really need to be an 'established business'. I would suggest doing the game for the PC first, or Xbox XNA getting some work behind you, and establishing the business, before approaching Nintendo, if that's really what you want.
I presume this is primarily a filter to keep the kids and hackers out. After all 2k-3k isn't that hard to come up with.
Nobody has configured for IPv6 because there's been no forced set date to switch over so everyone is still just using IPv4 which is working just fine.
Sure my PCs can all switch without too much trouble; just configuration issues.
Will an xbox, xbox360, PS3, Wii, PSP or DS do ipv6? Will my ipod touch? What about my cell phone? Does my dlink nat/router do it? What about my dlink voip box? My network printer? My cable/adsl modem?
Seriously.
I can't abandon v4 at home (Wii doesn't do ipv6 afaik, nor does my router). Nor can I do it at work... the LaserJet 4050s don't do it unless I upgrade the jetdirect module (which is stupid expensive). I also doubt my cell phone supports ipv6. My parent's have a Wii and a usb-print server that don't d ipv6. My brother in-law has a PS3 and a Wii that doesn't appear to support ipv6. My parents in-law have an xbox and a wifi router that doesn't do ipv6... my cousin has a DS... she's stuck on WEP because it doesn't do WPA... I highly doubt its going to do ipv6.
Will they let me peel the packaging off the chips so I can put them in an electron microscope? Will they supply me with the electron microscope and a team of grad students?
I would be happy to require it on a random sampling of voting machines in key areas after each election if it would make you feel better.
What do you do when you want to play a game that isn't on the consoles? For example, a lot of indie games are PC exclusives because the developer isn't a big enough company for a WiiWare license.
WiiWare licenses apparently cost under ~3k. I can see that killing a solo-hobby-developer, but any entity big enough to call itself a small business can afford this.
That said, I have never played an indie game that needed beta drivers, had crazy drm, or was otherwise particularly difficult to install and get running, so if the OP wanted to play one, it would probably be a no-brainer to just buy it and play it.
It's a matter of degree. In Canada, the average waiting time for a necessary surgery is 18 weeks. Having your appointment happen an hour late isn't even close.
Necessary surgery != Surgery you need today.
In Canada, its a perpetual system of triage. People who need the surgery most get it first.
That combined with budget limitations means that there are a lot of people who 'need' surgery but have to wait a long time to get it. In some cases they are perfectly fine, other times they are in discomfort or pain until they get it but their lives aren't at risk, and the condition isn't likely to worsen while they wait. And so these people end up waiting an unfortunately long time creating the long average times.
But if you need surgery now, its an immediate threat, or they expect your condition is going to worsen, you are moved up to the front of the queue. If its serious people get surgery within hours of showing up at the doctor.
So yeah, the Canadian system is a bummer for people who 'need surgery soon', because they usually have to wait a few months.
But contrasted with the American system, and I'm not sure what you are so smug about. Millions of uninsured people can't get the surgery at all. Millions of insured people are 'under insured' and won't get the surgery, millions more have adequate insurance and their insurance company still elects not to approve the procedure... "18 weeks" vs "No".
By any metrics Canada is healthier than the US. Lower infant mortality, longer life expectancy, better overall health. The majority of americans would actually be better off under the Canadian system than the American system, yet the wealthy elite have convinced them otherwise. Suckers.
Doubly so, because the wealthy elite are never subject to the system anyway, they can ALWAYS fly to Cuba or wherever to get some procedure or other done tomorrow, so by keeping unified health care out they aren't even protecting themselves from 'long wait times' because they'd never be subject to them anyway. They'd just rather see millions of their fellow american's die in the street than pay more taxes.
I can choose to watch the votes from the time they get put into the boxes to the time they get counted and recounted. I can check that the counts from the voting place I watch match what the newspapers report the following days.
Ah, well, then you can do the same with the electronic system. You can choose to watch the machine from the moment its first used until after the fact to inspect the hardware and software on the machine. You can hang on to its printed logs the same way and use them to both validate the software and the count.
I can't watch the whole nationwide counting myself, but I know that others will watch other areas.
Same could apply to electronic voting, provided there are logs.
Absentee ballots are a problem.
One that electronic systems don't help nor hinder.
How about if I came as a guest, and you gave me a series of very strict rules I had to follow, then on a whim, and without warning, you changed them? I'd be pissed, wouldn't anyone?
And you wouldn't come back. But would you seriously sue?
What if as a part of the evening entertainment, you led a knitting class? The guests had to pay for the materials; you provided the instruction. At the end of the evening, we weren't allowed to take our projects home.
Or like going to a restaurant, and buying a bottle of wine... and then at the end of the evening not being allowed to take the 1/4 bottle that is left home? (Actually, to be fair, around here at least, I beleive you ARE allowed to have them cork it back up to take with you... but that's a relatively recent development.)
That said, if the rules for the course stated up front you couldn't keep your stuff, then what are you complaining about? You shouldn't have signed up for the course.
If you signed up, brought your stuff, and they changed the rules on you, that would be different. But can you name a virtual world where that's happened?
And that is your right and duty as a consumer. If something's too expensive or overvalued, you either wait until the price comes down or you replace it with an alternative good that is often inferior.
If something is too expensive or overvalued than replacing it with an alternative that is not inferior is easy. Its only usually inferior if the original good isn't overvalued.
Blizzard has a right to charge whatever they want for the product, us consumers have the right not to pay what they want, but please stop acting like Blizzard has committed some heinous crime against humanity.
Consumers also have the right to tell other consumers they are being ripped off, what their options are, what the real costs of products are, etc, etc, etc, so that they can make more informed buying decisions.
How will I scrutinize it? How can I prove that the software running the machines is the same that I got to inspect, and that the hardware hasn't been compromised?
The only way to do secure e-voting is to use it for quick results and always do a manual recount afterwards. This obviously requires printing the votes.
How will you scrutinze them? How can you prove that the manual records of the votes you have been provided are the same ones voters actually created? And that they haven't been substituted with forgeries? And that some aren't missing?
That's a surprisingly common mistake. its "a Triple-E" not "an Triple-E". You always alter the article (a or an) based on the sound of what you are actually saying.
a Liquid Crystal Display
an LCD ("ell-see-dee")
an AAA member (pronouncing each letter: ay-ay-ay)
a Triple "A" member
As for the eee, its pronounced as a regular long 'e', or 'eee' is to 'eee PC' what 'i' is to 'iPod'
That's largely my thought, if they have enough material to justify several games, I'd rather have several games rather than one mega sized mega priced game.
Historically additional content that uses the same engine is called an expansion. All they're doing is bundling the engine with the expansions and charging full price for them.
They develop the engine once, you pay for it 3 times. Sucker.
Me, I'll just wait until they release a 'box set' with all 3 for what a regular game costs; it probably won't take more than 6-12 months after release.
No, you're paying $50 for an engine and a campaign. Then you're paying $100 for 2 more campaigns.
Right... except normally you'd pay $50-60 for 2 more campaigns, in boxes called 'expansions' normally for between 19 and 29 bucks, instead of the price of a full game.
Remind me why I need 3 copies of the game engine? They only developed it once, why do I need to pay for it 3 times?
May I recommend Eve-online. A solid single universe game without the cushy penalties of WOW.(not that I have played WOW)
Oh yes... Eve online --- a game of studying spreadsheets for hours in painful light text on dark background style; with no ability adjust the small barely legible font.
When you've finished that, there are hours of joyous sitting around watching the game play itself after you plot a course. Of course you can't actually leave, because there is a small chance you'll get ganked, a chance which moves to 99% if you leave. Or maybe sitting in an asteroid belt clicking on rocks for a couple hours is your idea of fun? Eve has plenty of that too!
Then you get to participate in these giant space battles with hundreds of ships... of course you have to turn all the eyecandy off so it looks like shit, and it still lags around so badly that instead of 'frames per second' its 'seconds per frame'.
Oh, and its highly competitive, which is cool... but the game developers play (insider information)... and have even been caught blatantly cheating, which is much less cool. Coincidence that they were associated with the dominant 'alliance/corporation/guild' at the time? I think not.
Eve Online is a terrible game with a great meta-game played on top of it.
Requiring banks to give loans to people without SSNs or even proof of employment is essentially the same.
Legally maybe, but not practically. Its not like they had to loan money to EVERY one without an ssn or proof of employment, and I'm sure you could have found people without an SSN or a proper job who yet still were responsible and had reliable income.
(e.g. a mexican nanny who'd been getting paid under the table for 2+ years has neither ssn nor 'proof' of employment; but would have been a prime candidate for a loan she could afford.)
We know this, but do you honestly think it's okay to penalize responsible people so that bad risks can get loans?
No. I'm not arguing that it was a good law.
But seeing as it was the law, the banks should have been properly covering the risk they were being forced to take.
That said, I do think there are a lot of bank categorized 'bad risks' out there that aren't really 'bad risks'. Remember, they weren't merely lending money to poor people with steady jobs and a history of paying their rent to buy a home they could afford the mortgage on even after their 1-year promo-interest rate expired. That would have worked out mostly ok.
Instead they were irresponsibly loaning it out to who had no way of paying it back. They didn't verify their incomes at all, and they offered them interest only loans structured so that even if they could pay them now, they wouldn't be able to pay them when the interest rates reset, and because they were interest only the owner never had any equity, so if the price ever fell it would foreclose, etc, etc, and they KNEW they were doing this.
Slashdot Mirror
3 * 5 = 8
Holy shit that's some bad math!
That's nothing. You want bad math:
Its not just "8" its ie8... and e is around 2.7 and i is the square root of -1... so
ie8 =~ 21.6i
FF3*5 = 21.61i ... ok, hmmm.. that's not really better is it... lets keep trying
FF3 = ie8/5
FF3 = (8e/5)i
FF = (8e/15)i or
F^2= (8e/15e)i
F = sqrt((8e/15)i)
F = sqrt(8e/15)sqrt(i)
F = sqrt(8e/15) * (1/sqrt(2)+1/sqrt(2)i)
F = sqrt(8e/15)(1/sqrt(2) + sqrt(8e/15)((1/sqrt(2))i)
F =~ 0.516 + 0.516i
(assuming you only consider positive roots...)
who knew?
If there is reason to suspect a low success rate, conducting an experiment with a high margin of error is a bad idea, the success will otherwise always be lost in the error noise.
What you REALLY need to do, is repeat the test multiple times, ideally with more people, so you can reduce the margin of error significantly and differentiate between error and small effects.
After all a low success rate isn't a bad thing... If you could wake up only 1% of a certain class of coma patients, even that would be a significant breakthrough.
It would. It's just not practical. Chips are too complicated.
Require them to use simple chips. Its a voting machine; we could probably model it with a finite-state-machine graph drawn by hand. A coffee maker is more complicated. ;)
Does that not depend on the error of your expectation of 3 waking up?
If the average(expected) is 3 but the SD of that value is 2 then 5 people waking up really is not statistically significant.
It -may- not be statistically significant. Its enough to make it worth repeating the experiment to ensure its not consistently one SD up.
After all, my if my batting average during a game is x +/- y, and something makes it x+y +/- y' I've just moved from the beer league to the major league. ;)
How about the waiting list for maternity wards? Last I checked it was over 9 months...
That's a great headline, but in reality, it was in one city during a population explosion due to booming economy.
I've had 2 kids in the last couple years in Vancouver, we had no issue whatsoever getting access to a delivery room nor pre or post care in either case. The overloaded maternity wards was a temporary and localized problem due to a rash of babies being born at once, that could have just as easily happened in the states, and it has.
Indeed...
"The UC Davis Medical Center declared an internal state of emergency Wednesday morning and began turning away all but the most seriously ill and injured patients from the trauma center and emergency room because the hospital is completely full.
Elective surgeries are being postponed to free up operating rooms for patients with life-threatening conditions.
UC Davis -- and other local hospitals -- have been operating close to capacity for much of the year. The rapidly growing population in the Sacramento region, a growing number of uninsured patients who crowd emergency rooms because they cannot get care anywhere else, and a critical shortage of nursing staff are causing the strain. "
http://sacramento.bizjournals.com/sacramento/stories/2003/03/17/daily25.html
Sacramento? Where is that again? Oh... right.
These headline grabbing anecdotes however aren't representative of either system.
I've never seen anyone die in the street because he didn't get his surgery. Get real.
Probably, because "didn't get his surgery" can't be listed as a cause of death on a coroners report.
But this comes pretty close:
"A paraplegic man wearing a soiled hospital gown and a broken colostomy bag was found crawling in a gutter in skid row in Los Angeles on Thursday after allegedly being dumped in the street by a Hollywood Presbyterian Medical Center van, police said."
http://blogs.usatoday.com/ondeadline/2007/02/la_hospital_all.html
Or this:
In Baltimore, Maryland, on July 27, 1998, a 70-year-old man accompanied his daughter to the hospital with a sick child. When they arrived, the man told his daughter he didn't feel well and would wait outside the hospital. Passersby noticed something was wrong and called security. The security officer's log stated: "911 notified intoxicated male ... ER notified (refused)" An emergency medical technician with a private ambulance leaving the hospital initiated CPR while the officer contacted the emergency department for assistance. The emergency department again refused assistance. Another ambulance arrived and transported the man to the ER. About one-half hour after the man was first seen lying in the grass, he was pronounced dead of cardiac arrhythmia.
http://www.wsws.org/articles/2001/nov2001/dump-n07.shtml
or this:
"In Chicago, Illinois, a 19-year-old patient came to the ER of Provident Hospital of Cook County with symptoms of threatened miscarriage. The hospital sought HMO approval, which was denied. The young woman was not given an exam or treatment. Because of the delay, she began to deliver a nonviable fetus as she waited for a taxi to take her to another hospital."
again from:
http://www.wsws.org/articles/2001/nov2001/dump-n07.shtml
or:
"In 2006, criminal charges were filed against Kaiser Permanente after one of its hospitals was caught on tape dumping a 63 year old women on the street, wearing nothing but a hospital gown, and still very ill."
http://ezinearticles.com/?Crack-Down-on-Patient-Dumping&id=100321
Well they only sold 21.7 million Gamecubes compared to XBox doing 24 million worldwide
Yeah... I'd hardly call pretty much tying for 2nd place being unsuccessful, especially since they sold those at a profit, while MS is in an ocean of red ink. Meanwhile the PS2 is pretty much a league of its own; and comparing anything to it for the purpose of defining 'success' is sort of silly; by that metric the DS is a fail, the Wii is a fail, the PS1 was a fail, the NES was a fail...
Seriously? They've had ups and downs. They've never actually failed at anything though.
That about sums it up, the cube wasn't their brightest moment, but it was hardly 'unsuccessful'.
Once I have developed and am ready to market a console-style game for the PC, how would I convince my customers to buy a VGA-to-SDTV scan converter and a set of gamepads so that they can play with their friends on a suitably large TV?
You have 2 choices:
If you want to grow organically develop a PC game or two for the PC first, establish yourself, and then move on to consoles.
Otherwise build your prototype, scrounge up some venture capital, mortgage your house, find a partner or 2, hire a secretary, rent an office and gamble on jumping headfirst into Wii development.
If you give TMS to a hundred patients, three of whom would be expected to wake up naturally, and 90 of them actually wake up, you've got something worth investigating further. If you give it to one patient who wakes up you've got nothing but an interesting story.
If three of them are expected to wake up and you get five you've got something worth investigating further. 90 is an unqualified success.
but as i understand it, they can prevent titles from launching if they're 'below par' or even contain questionable content..
Same is true of games for Microsoft Xbox, Sony Playstation, and Apple ipod/iphone products, not to mention most platforms of yesterday from the Nokia ngage to the Sega Dreamcast to the Atari and Intellivision. (Although 'legal ways around' the licensing system existed for some of the really old platforms, leading to piles of unauthorized shovelware.)
Its also true if you want your 'cellphone game' available on the Verizon / Sprint / Telus / Bell / AT&T / etc / application store.
Yeah getting Nintendo licensing is more "exclusive" than some of these but they ALL have final say on whether your title sees the light of day.
If you want freedom, develop for the PC. This has always been true.
getting a license isn't necessarily just a price, it's also entering into a contract with nintendo. perhaps part of the reason why nintendo had to go after different market segments with the wii to be successful with a console.
Which console was unsuccessful for Nintendo?
Where do you suggest I turn next?
http://www.warioworld.com/
Click on developer applications.
But seriously, you aren't going to qualify yet, they simply won't currently authorize an individual working from home.* You really need to be an 'established business'. I would suggest doing the game for the PC first, or Xbox XNA getting some work behind you, and establishing the business, before approaching Nintendo, if that's really what you want.
I presume this is primarily a filter to keep the kids and hackers out. After all 2k-3k isn't that hard to come up with.
Nobody has configured for IPv6 because there's been no forced set date to switch over so everyone is still just using IPv4 which is working just fine.
Sure my PCs can all switch without too much trouble; just configuration issues.
Will an xbox, xbox360, PS3, Wii, PSP or DS do ipv6? Will my ipod touch? What about my cell phone? Does my dlink nat/router do it? What about my dlink voip box? My network printer? My cable/adsl modem?
Seriously.
I can't abandon v4 at home (Wii doesn't do ipv6 afaik, nor does my router). Nor can I do it at work... the LaserJet 4050s don't do it unless I upgrade the jetdirect module (which is stupid expensive). I also doubt my cell phone supports ipv6. My parent's have a Wii and a usb-print server that don't d ipv6. My brother in-law has a PS3 and a Wii that doesn't appear to support ipv6. My parents in-law have an xbox and a wifi router that doesn't do ipv6... my cousin has a DS... she's stuck on WEP because it doesn't do WPA... I highly doubt its going to do ipv6.
Will they let me peel the packaging off the chips so I can put them in an electron microscope? Will they supply me with the electron microscope and a team of grad students?
I would be happy to require it on a random sampling of voting machines in key areas after each election if it would make you feel better.
What do you do when you want to play a game that isn't on the consoles? For example, a lot of indie games are PC exclusives because the developer isn't a big enough company for a WiiWare license.
WiiWare licenses apparently cost under ~3k. I can see that killing a solo-hobby-developer, but any entity big enough to call itself a small business can afford this.
That said, I have never played an indie game that needed beta drivers, had crazy drm, or was otherwise particularly difficult to install and get running, so if the OP wanted to play one, it would probably be a no-brainer to just buy it and play it.
It's a matter of degree. In Canada, the average waiting time for a necessary surgery is 18 weeks. Having your appointment happen an hour late isn't even close.
Necessary surgery != Surgery you need today.
In Canada, its a perpetual system of triage. People who need the surgery most get it first.
That combined with budget limitations means that there are a lot of people who 'need' surgery but have to wait a long time to get it. In some cases they are perfectly fine, other times they are in discomfort or pain until they get it but their lives aren't at risk, and the condition isn't likely to worsen while they wait. And so these people end up waiting an unfortunately long time creating the long average times.
But if you need surgery now, its an immediate threat, or they expect your condition is going to worsen, you are moved up to the front of the queue. If its serious people get surgery within hours of showing up at the doctor.
So yeah, the Canadian system is a bummer for people who 'need surgery soon', because they usually have to wait a few months.
But contrasted with the American system, and I'm not sure what you are so smug about. Millions of uninsured people can't get the surgery at all. Millions of insured people are 'under insured' and won't get the surgery, millions more have adequate insurance and their insurance company still elects not to approve the procedure... "18 weeks" vs "No".
By any metrics Canada is healthier than the US. Lower infant mortality, longer life expectancy, better overall health. The majority of americans would actually be better off under the Canadian system than the American system, yet the wealthy elite have convinced them otherwise. Suckers.
Doubly so, because the wealthy elite are never subject to the system anyway, they can ALWAYS fly to Cuba or wherever to get some procedure or other done tomorrow, so by keeping unified health care out they aren't even protecting themselves from 'long wait times' because they'd never be subject to them anyway. They'd just rather see millions of their fellow american's die in the street than pay more taxes.
I can choose to watch the votes from the time they get put into the boxes to the time they get counted and recounted. I can check that the counts from the voting place I watch match what the newspapers report the following days.
Ah, well, then you can do the same with the electronic system. You can choose to watch the machine from the moment its first used until after the fact to inspect the hardware and software on the machine. You can hang on to its printed logs the same way and use them to both validate the software and the count.
I can't watch the whole nationwide counting myself, but I know that others will watch other areas.
Same could apply to electronic voting, provided there are logs.
Absentee ballots are a problem.
One that electronic systems don't help nor hinder.
How about if I came as a guest, and you gave me a series of very strict rules I had to follow, then on a whim, and without warning, you changed them? I'd be pissed, wouldn't anyone?
And you wouldn't come back. But would you seriously sue?
What if as a part of the evening entertainment, you led a knitting class? The guests had to pay for the materials; you provided the instruction. At the end of the evening, we weren't allowed to take our projects home.
Or like going to a restaurant, and buying a bottle of wine... and then at the end of the evening not being allowed to take the 1/4 bottle that is left home? (Actually, to be fair, around here at least, I beleive you ARE allowed to have them cork it back up to take with you... but that's a relatively recent development.)
That said, if the rules for the course stated up front you couldn't keep your stuff, then what are you complaining about? You shouldn't have signed up for the course.
If you signed up, brought your stuff, and they changed the rules on you, that would be different. But can you name a virtual world where that's happened?
And that is your right and duty as a consumer. If something's too expensive or overvalued, you either wait until the price comes down or you replace it with an alternative good that is often inferior.
If something is too expensive or overvalued than replacing it with an alternative that is not inferior is easy. Its only usually inferior if the original good isn't overvalued.
Blizzard has a right to charge whatever they want for the product, us consumers have the right not to pay what they want, but please stop acting like Blizzard has committed some heinous crime against humanity.
Consumers also have the right to tell other consumers they are being ripped off, what their options are, what the real costs of products are, etc, etc, etc, so that they can make more informed buying decisions.
How will I scrutinize it? How can I prove that the software running the machines is the same that I got to inspect, and that the hardware hasn't been compromised?
The only way to do secure e-voting is to use it for quick results and always do a manual recount afterwards. This obviously requires printing the votes.
How will you scrutinze them? How can you prove that the manual records of the votes you have been provided are the same ones voters actually created? And that they haven't been substituted with forgeries? And that some aren't missing?
That's a surprisingly common mistake. its "a Triple-E" not "an Triple-E". You always alter the article (a or an) based on the sound of what you are actually saying.
a Liquid Crystal Display
an LCD ("ell-see-dee")
an AAA member (pronouncing each letter: ay-ay-ay)
a Triple "A" member
As for the eee, its pronounced as a regular long 'e',
or 'eee' is to 'eee PC' what 'i' is to 'iPod'
The Doom, Quake, and Unreal engines were heavily reused for other things. Reusing a game engine for another game is hardly a new thing.
You are conflating graphics engine with game engine. They aren't remotely the same thing.
That's largely my thought, if they have enough material to justify several games, I'd rather have several games rather than one mega sized mega priced game.
Historically additional content that uses the same engine is called an expansion. All they're doing is bundling the engine with the expansions and charging full price for them.
They develop the engine once, you pay for it 3 times. Sucker.
Me, I'll just wait until they release a 'box set' with all 3 for what a regular game costs; it probably won't take more than 6-12 months after release.
No, you're paying $50 for an engine and a campaign. Then you're paying $100 for 2 more campaigns.
Right... except normally you'd pay $50-60 for 2 more campaigns, in boxes called 'expansions' normally for between 19 and 29 bucks, instead of the price of a full game.
Remind me why I need 3 copies of the game engine? They only developed it once, why do I need to pay for it 3 times?
May I recommend Eve-online. A solid single universe game without the cushy penalties of WOW.(not that I have played WOW)
Oh yes... Eve online --- a game of studying spreadsheets for hours in painful light text on dark background style; with no ability adjust the small barely legible font.
When you've finished that, there are hours of joyous sitting around watching the game play itself after you plot a course. Of course you can't actually leave, because there is a small chance you'll get ganked, a chance which moves to 99% if you leave. Or maybe sitting in an asteroid belt clicking on rocks for a couple hours is your idea of fun? Eve has plenty of that too!
Then you get to participate in these giant space battles with hundreds of ships... of course you have to turn all the eyecandy off so it looks like shit, and it still lags around so badly that instead of 'frames per second' its 'seconds per frame'.
Oh, and its highly competitive, which is cool... but the game developers play (insider information)... and have even been caught blatantly cheating, which is much less cool. Coincidence that they were associated with the dominant 'alliance/corporation/guild' at the time? I think not.
Eve Online is a terrible game with a great meta-game played on top of it.
Requiring banks to give loans to people without SSNs or even proof of employment is essentially the same.
Legally maybe, but not practically. Its not like they had to loan money to EVERY one without an ssn or proof of employment, and I'm sure you could have found people without an SSN or a proper job who yet still were responsible and had reliable income.
(e.g. a mexican nanny who'd been getting paid under the table for 2+ years has neither ssn nor 'proof' of employment; but would have been a prime candidate for a loan she could afford.)
We know this, but do you honestly think it's okay to penalize responsible people so that bad risks can get loans?
No. I'm not arguing that it was a good law.
But seeing as it was the law, the banks should have been properly covering the risk they were being forced to take.
That said, I do think there are a lot of bank categorized 'bad risks' out there that aren't really 'bad risks'. Remember, they weren't merely lending money to poor people with steady jobs and a history of paying their rent to buy a home they could afford the mortgage on even after their 1-year promo-interest rate expired. That would have worked out mostly ok.
Instead they were irresponsibly loaning it out to who had no way of paying it back. They didn't verify their incomes at all, and they offered them interest only loans structured so that even if they could pay them now, they wouldn't be able to pay them when the interest rates reset, and because they were interest only the owner never had any equity, so if the price ever fell it would foreclose, etc, etc, and they KNEW they were doing this.