Heat pipes are nifty from a modder perspective. As the TFA states however, this thing is never to be sold, and the pipes just a quick way to get something working.
As far as I can see, her company is NOT in direct competition- the OLPC folks seem to be treating selling to the developed world to be something to be avoided; even this buy two get one program was set to end at the end of last year so they could focus their efforts on the undeveloped places. She however wants to sell to people with money. I'd think the two companies would get along rather well with each other, and be relatively happy information, and even where possible coordinate on components to drive down costs, to the benefit of both.
A coworker with a Palm Vx loves it- he uses it for reading on trans-pacific flights & such. It does have a serial interface- he has to use a serial-USB adaptor with it. He is on his second, which he got about 3 years ago.
I've had a Tungsten and currently have a Tungsten E2. They both do the job- I read books with it frequently, but don't have the long battery life the old black&white models have.
Get an older cheap Palm before they put in too many bells and whistles (or a newer one and turn them off, but your battery life won't be as good as if you get a black&white). It's got the touchscreen, but you can scroll with the buttons instead.
The FCC is a part of the government. The government has a monopoly on force. If it says you have to pay to do something, and it has a reasonable way to detect that you are doing it, then they usually get the money, either through official means like this auction, or unofficial means like officials being bribed to look the other way.
The government thinks it owns the air you breathe too. You might not have noticed, but there are all sorts of regulations regarding vehicle and industrial emissions. Most people think most of these are a good thing- but it does amount to the govt having a certain control over the air you breathe.
Pragmatic stuff like the above aside, the general argument for the FCC controlling access to the airwaves is that it is a scarce resource, so someone needs to apportion it fairly- and in this case "fairly" is defined as giving the govt as much money as possible for the govt to spend for the general welfare (i.e. to bribe constituents to vote in again the people in charge of spending the money, or special interests to contribute to campaigns to the same end).
More importantly in the case of Puerto Rico, the majority there considers it a fair trade. They had the chance to vote on whether they wanted to keep their current status, become independent, or go for statehood. Three times they chose to continue to keep their current status. I suspect they will have further votes in the future until statehood or independence wins, because the US govt would really like to get the tax money.
.. that your logic is flawed insofar as you ignore the difference between someone starting to smoke and someone continuing to smoke, when considering judgement. What percentage of those >18 smoking started smoking below 18? Smoking is highly addictive, and I suspect therefore that whether one starts smoking early in life is an excellent predictor of whether one will continue to smoke later. If one starts smoking below 18 due to bad judgement, but would have not started after 18 due to an improvement in judgement, one might still CONTINUE smoking after 18 due to the extra difficulties in dealing with an addiction.
Of course, the other reason is that people below 18 are less likely to be able to vote the politicos banning the tobacco sales out of office, than the addicts above 18 who may be driven to become single-issue voters from such a ban.
I always use two monitors at home now, it would drive me crazy to go back to one. Of course, I play things like Eve, where there are so many external things you want to run at various times (industrial tools, jump-planners, mapping tools, TS) that you don't want to cover the screen with that there really isn't much of a choice.
For example, my favorite color is green. That's a fact. I don't want some one to look me up in wikipedia and find out my sexual preferences or my favorite color or anything else that I consider private information. Well, since you didn't post as AC it's a bit late for that, eh? Now we all know your favorite color.
IANAL, but while in the USA the truth is an absolute defense against charges of libel and such, that is not true everywhere. Indeed there are plenty of places in the world where the truth will get you in a heck of a lot more trouble than pretty much anything you can make up.
Absent a way to get around DRM, art in digital form (games, music, video) is irreplaceable information as soon as the publisher decides to stop selling it. One of the purposes of copyright expiration was to keep such information from being lost forever when the purely commercial interest was gone and existing copies degraded. If an irreplacable piece of art you have is destroyed, your homeowner's insurance won't magically make it reappear.
True. In Eve on the other hand, while it is a fairly risk-free way to make ISK, you can make money MUCH faster with even a small amount of creativity. Heck, it doesn't even need to be your creativity- the people with the ideas will pay you more than the miners get to implement their plans.
Of course, I've never been that obsessed by "progress" relative to whether what I'm actually doing is fun. Case in point, I also play LOTRO some, and I'm still exploring different bits of the relatively low level content a month in- rather than rushing a character up to lvl50 just to achieve "progress". I take my time, actually read the flavor text on the quests, roleplay a bit, help out new players, hang out with my guild. I'll reach 50 eventually, but I'll have had fun getting there, which is supposed to be the point. It's a game after all. Mileage may vary with addiction to level dings.
This "mining" you speak of- in the three years I've been playing the game, I've spent maybe 10 hours total doing it. Most of that in the first week on a corp op. Perhaps you should look at what else there is to do in the game, instead of finding the most boring possible way to spend your time and wallowing in it?
I've played plenty of games that were much less fun with much more controversy. Not for as long though.:)
This particular one is not a big deal. Someone figured out a way to hack the database to get items. The safeguards to notice if something happened worked, they took down the game a little while, and they fixed it. Compare to games that leave major economic loopholes bascially forever. There's really only one big (and very important) black mark against CCP, and that's that employee cheating scandal and the naivete in how it was (mis)handled. And I've seen enough abusive GMs in certain other games that that's not even unique, just something where we had expected better of them.
There's plenty I wish that did better, but which they already do better than the other games so there's nowhere to go anyway for putting a good economy and PVP into the same game. It's not the only game I play, but it's the only MMO that scratches certain itches so it's going to keep on prospering.
Re:Not so hard to stop
on
eBay The Vote
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· Score: 1
This is indeed why it's very important when designing a voting system to make it impossible for someone to prove who they voted for. It protects somewhat against vote selling as well as intimidation and blackmail. This necessary feature, combined with the requirement of preventing the counters from (easily) changing people's votes, are what makes designing a good voting setup where recounts an interesting problem. And why so many systems coming into use now are so screwed up.
Well, there are two attitudes toward the game (and this is a simplification, but probably useful here). One is that the cool thing in the game is the PVP with real consequences ingame. The other is the cool economy. The PVP focused people gripe a bit about the economy, but the pain of economic loss is one of the things that gives the PVP spice, so when they are not so drunk they realize it's importance, but still look down on the second group. For them, the economy is only the means to an end, whether the end being killboard stats, control of space, diplomatic manuvring, etc. I am a member of an alliance of predominantly this philosophy, though the second was what hooked me in the game initially. The second group are those for whom the economy is really cool- doing well economically is the game, and the PVP stuff is just one means of economic competition for resources. I have had some good fun making ISK on mineral arbitrage and blueprints, but don't have the stamina for thinks like mining that suck up a lot of RL time.
Both groups seem by my observation to have both people who are only addicted and those who are still having fun. The percentage that are still having fun seems higher than I have observed with high level play in other MMO.
Myself, I've achieved enough economically to keep me in Battleship and smaller class ships for a long time. I've got a capital ship. I burned out on the game for a while, but still log in enough to keep some of my basic economic gears turning. Interest in now picking back up again, and so when I finish the content in LOTRO I'll probably be pretty active over in Eve again.
Measuring "fun" is hard- they can measure retention (which for those who make it through the first few weeks is extremely high for Eve), but as you point out, that doesn't tell us how much of that is addiction, and how much is fun. Eve is certainly different than the grind games like Everquest or WoW, but whether it's different in being more fun or more addictive is something you really need a psychologist rather than an economist to look into.
Hope this all helps, despite that it's all just my subjective viewpoint rather than measured data of happyness:).
Many of the issues you are talking about are not mentioned in the article because they were solved in Eve well before the person interviewed came on board. Which was pretty recently. As a player who has been around longer, I will address some of your Examples:
Not a closed system on minerals. Asteroid belts respawn, so with player time and effort, more minerals are created. When ships are destroyed, resources are destroyed, so there is a sink as well. I could go into more detail, but it would be at great length, and anyway his first Blog was about the initial steps of looking at mineral pricing.
NPC trade- There is a limited amount of NPC arbitrage available. NPC prices adjust with buys and sells however, and over time (generally at downtime) go back toward where they started. Thus, there is some money to be made there, but the more people who try to do it, and the more frequently, the less to be made, leading to a relatively harmless PVE sideline.
Gold farmers: They are annoying. People blow them up when possible. They are unnecessary for effective play. CCP's most effective step against them was the controversial decision to allow people to buy game time with ingame money and provide a secure system for these transactions- this undercut the gold farmer prices, and the gold farmers have more trouble nowadays converting resources. This is actually a matter which will be interesting for him to explore in the future, but again he's done one blog so far.
Basically, what your objections boil down to appears to be "An online economy can't work. Why isn't he talking about why it isn't working?". Yet it is working, unlike in most other games that use a lot more central management of the economy. So he's intersted in talking about what is happening in the economy, not why other games don't work.
Slashdot Mirror
Heat pipes are nifty from a modder perspective. As the TFA states however, this thing is never to be sold, and the pipes just a quick way to get something working.
Let's try another thought experiement- switch some other words:
A GNU project duplicates a Microsoft product feature for feature, even down to the animation effects, and gives it away for free.
Aside from the flying chairs, noone would be complaining.
If you legalize something and tax it to hell, you don't remove the profit margin of those who sell it illegally.
Presumably, one would only need to send one from the entangled pair, not both.
Until the duct tape becomes illegal in some future legislation that is the love child of DMCA & PATRIOT.
.. if I create villians in City of Villians based on these designs, whether Microsoft will clone the Marvel lawsuit.
As far as I can see, her company is NOT in direct competition- the OLPC folks seem to be treating selling to the developed world to be something to be avoided; even this buy two get one program was set to end at the end of last year so they could focus their efforts on the undeveloped places. She however wants to sell to people with money. I'd think the two companies would get along rather well with each other, and be relatively happy information, and even where possible coordinate on components to drive down costs, to the benefit of both.
A coworker with a Palm Vx loves it- he uses it for reading on trans-pacific flights & such. It does have a serial interface- he has to use a serial-USB adaptor with it. He is on his second, which he got about 3 years ago.
I've had a Tungsten and currently have a Tungsten E2. They both do the job- I read books with it frequently, but don't have the long battery life the old black&white models have.
Get an older cheap Palm before they put in too many bells and whistles (or a newer one and turn them off, but your battery life won't be as good as if you get a black&white). It's got the touchscreen, but you can scroll with the buttons instead.
The FCC is a part of the government. The government has a monopoly on force. If it says you have to pay to do something, and it has a reasonable way to detect that you are doing it, then they usually get the money, either through official means like this auction, or unofficial means like officials being bribed to look the other way.
The government thinks it owns the air you breathe too. You might not have noticed, but there are all sorts of regulations regarding vehicle and industrial emissions. Most people think most of these are a good thing- but it does amount to the govt having a certain control over the air you breathe.
Pragmatic stuff like the above aside, the general argument for the FCC controlling access to the airwaves is that it is a scarce resource, so someone needs to apportion it fairly- and in this case "fairly" is defined as giving the govt as much money as possible for the govt to spend for the general welfare (i.e. to bribe constituents to vote in again the people in charge of spending the money, or special interests to contribute to campaigns to the same end).
The problem with the PS3 WAS the price tag. Considering that they are now cheaper than the going ebay cost of a Wii the verb tense is important there.
Option 3: You know enough about networking to examine their source, and gain some appreciation as to whether it does what they say it does.
More importantly in the case of Puerto Rico, the majority there considers it a fair trade. They had the chance to vote on whether they wanted to keep their current status, become independent, or go for statehood. Three times they chose to continue to keep their current status. I suspect they will have further votes in the future until statehood or independence wins, because the US govt would really like to get the tax money.
Given the actual choice for this year, giving the Nobel Prize to the iPhone would have been an improvement.
.. that your logic is flawed insofar as you ignore the difference between someone starting to smoke and someone continuing to smoke, when considering judgement. What percentage of those >18 smoking started smoking below 18? Smoking is highly addictive, and I suspect therefore that whether one starts smoking early in life is an excellent predictor of whether one will continue to smoke later. If one starts smoking below 18 due to bad judgement, but would have not started after 18 due to an improvement in judgement, one might still CONTINUE smoking after 18 due to the extra difficulties in dealing with an addiction.
Of course, the other reason is that people below 18 are less likely to be able to vote the politicos banning the tobacco sales out of office, than the addicts above 18 who may be driven to become single-issue voters from such a ban.
I always use two monitors at home now, it would drive me crazy to go back to one. Of course, I play things like Eve, where there are so many external things you want to run at various times (industrial tools, jump-planners, mapping tools, TS) that you don't want to cover the screen with that there really isn't much of a choice.
IANAL, but while in the USA the truth is an absolute defense against charges of libel and such, that is not true everywhere. Indeed there are plenty of places in the world where the truth will get you in a heck of a lot more trouble than pretty much anything you can make up.
Absent a way to get around DRM, art in digital form (games, music, video) is irreplaceable information as soon as the publisher decides to stop selling it. One of the purposes of copyright expiration was to keep such information from being lost forever when the purely commercial interest was gone and existing copies degraded. If an irreplacable piece of art you have is destroyed, your homeowner's insurance won't magically make it reappear.
True. In Eve on the other hand, while it is a fairly risk-free way to make ISK, you can make money MUCH faster with even a small amount of creativity. Heck, it doesn't even need to be your creativity- the people with the ideas will pay you more than the miners get to implement their plans.
Of course, I've never been that obsessed by "progress" relative to whether what I'm actually doing is fun. Case in point, I also play LOTRO some, and I'm still exploring different bits of the relatively low level content a month in- rather than rushing a character up to lvl50 just to achieve "progress". I take my time, actually read the flavor text on the quests, roleplay a bit, help out new players, hang out with my guild. I'll reach 50 eventually, but I'll have had fun getting there, which is supposed to be the point. It's a game after all. Mileage may vary with addiction to level dings.
This "mining" you speak of- in the three years I've been playing the game, I've spent maybe 10 hours total doing it. Most of that in the first week on a corp op. Perhaps you should look at what else there is to do in the game, instead of finding the most boring possible way to spend your time and wallowing in it?
I've played plenty of games that were much less fun with much more controversy. Not for as long though. :)
This particular one is not a big deal. Someone figured out a way to hack the database to get items. The safeguards to notice if something happened worked, they took down the game a little while, and they fixed it. Compare to games that leave major economic loopholes bascially forever. There's really only one big (and very important) black mark against CCP, and that's that employee cheating scandal and the naivete in how it was (mis)handled. And I've seen enough abusive GMs in certain other games that that's not even unique, just something where we had expected better of them.
There's plenty I wish that did better, but which they already do better than the other games so there's nowhere to go anyway for putting a good economy and PVP into the same game. It's not the only game I play, but it's the only MMO that scratches certain itches so it's going to keep on prospering.
This is indeed why it's very important when designing a voting system to make it impossible for someone to prove who they voted for. It protects somewhat against vote selling as well as intimidation and blackmail.
This necessary feature, combined with the requirement of preventing the counters from (easily) changing people's votes, are what makes designing a good voting setup where recounts an interesting problem. And why so many systems coming into use now are so screwed up.
Well, there are two attitudes toward the game (and this is a simplification, but probably useful here). One is that the cool thing in the game is the PVP with real consequences ingame. The other is the cool economy. The PVP focused people gripe a bit about the economy, but the pain of economic loss is one of the things that gives the PVP spice, so when they are not so drunk they realize it's importance, but still look down on the second group. For them, the economy is only the means to an end, whether the end being killboard stats, control of space, diplomatic manuvring, etc. I am a member of an alliance of predominantly this philosophy, though the second was what hooked me in the game initially.
The second group are those for whom the economy is really cool- doing well economically is the game, and the PVP stuff is just one means of economic competition for resources. I have had some good fun making ISK on mineral arbitrage and blueprints, but don't have the stamina for thinks like mining that suck up a lot of RL time.
Both groups seem by my observation to have both people who are only addicted and those who are still having fun. The percentage that are still having fun seems higher than I have observed with high level play in other MMO.
Myself, I've achieved enough economically to keep me in Battleship and smaller class ships for a long time. I've got a capital ship. I burned out on the game for a while, but still log in enough to keep some of my basic economic gears turning. Interest in now picking back up again, and so when I finish the content in LOTRO I'll probably be pretty active over in Eve again.
Measuring "fun" is hard- they can measure retention (which for those who make it through the first few weeks is extremely high for Eve), but as you point out, that doesn't tell us how much of that is addiction, and how much is fun. Eve is certainly different than the grind games like Everquest or WoW, but whether it's different in being more fun or more addictive is something you really need a psychologist rather than an economist to look into.
Hope this all helps, despite that it's all just my subjective viewpoint rather than measured data of happyness:).
Many of the issues you are talking about are not mentioned in the article because they were solved in Eve well before the person interviewed came on board. Which was pretty recently. As a player who has been around longer, I will address some of your Examples:
Not a closed system on minerals. Asteroid belts respawn, so with player time and effort, more minerals are created. When ships are destroyed, resources are destroyed, so there is a sink as well. I could go into more detail, but it would be at great length, and anyway his first Blog was about the initial steps of looking at mineral pricing.
NPC trade- There is a limited amount of NPC arbitrage available. NPC prices adjust with buys and sells however, and over time (generally at downtime) go back toward where they started. Thus, there is some money to be made there, but the more people who try to do it, and the more frequently, the less to be made, leading to a relatively harmless PVE sideline.
Gold farmers: They are annoying. People blow them up when possible. They are unnecessary for effective play. CCP's most effective step against them was the controversial decision to allow people to buy game time with ingame money and provide a secure system for these transactions- this undercut the gold farmer prices, and the gold farmers have more trouble nowadays converting resources. This is actually a matter which will be interesting for him to explore in the future, but again he's done one blog so far.
Basically, what your objections boil down to appears to be "An online economy can't work. Why isn't he talking about why it isn't working?". Yet it is working, unlike in most other games that use a lot more central management of the economy. So he's intersted in talking about what is happening in the economy, not why other games don't work.