So they can push for more Steam style activation based games to kill the second hand market and ensure everyone has to buy new whilst milking money episodic content and other DLC which is flawed as demonstrated perfectly by SiN episodes - i.e. studio goes bust and you're left with having paid for half a game or even by Valve with the HL2 episodes whereby it took them far longer between episodes than they originally told everyone it would when they all bought the first episode.
The article here from yesterday or Monday or whenever is relevant- that of games with no endings and cliffhangers leaving you stuck waiting for the next game. DLC is like that, but a million times worse.
I'd like to believe the ESA was pushing for broadband so we can have more immersive and better online games, but I'm not convinced we don't have the bandwidth for that already (i.e. WoW) but I think the reality truly is that they're just out to try and screw and milk the customer more and more.
The push towards horrificially bad DRM, activation, episodic content and so on has pushed me away from PC gaming to console gaming, where there is still DLC and episodic content but at least for the most part the games you buy are complete games. Even here things are annoying though- look at Mercenairies 2, you have to connect to EA's servers to play coop even though the coop game is P2P and yet EA's servers regularly go down so you can't actually play coop sometimes, if they go down in the middle of your coop session it fucks you too. Presumably when EA can't be arsed to run the servers anymore as they eventually do with games the "Coop 2" sign on the back of the box becomes false advertising? Then of course there's the question of games that have to be activated - what happens if you want to install it once the activation servers have gone and there's no patch because once a company has file for bankruptcy they have bigger things to worry about than making sure people can still play their old games?
It's a shame because I really liked Spore, Dawn of War II, Mercenairies 2, SiN episodes, HL2 episodes, they were all pretty good but my god the DRM/Episodic idea spoils them completely.
Seriously, whatever happened to buying a game and just being able to play it without having to give away your soul like back in the Quake 1 days and prior where CDs were DRM free and the worst thing you might come across is a CD key type thing? Oh wait, they still exist, only, to get those superior quality, hassle free versions you have to break the law and pirate them.
Greater availability of broadband for the ESA's goals is sadly a bad thing for the consumer, even if it's a good thing in general. The only upside of it all is that at least there is an increasing market for self-publishing indie developers who don't have to suffer publishers imposing draconian DRM on their games and can pick up the customers that ESA member companies have fucked off.
I don't expect we could deal with this but I already covered that in my closing paragraph. The people already living in rural areas could be supported, additional people from the cities could be supported, but not everyone. Hence we'd almost certainly see fighting as we do elsewhere in the world but when enough humans would died and resources were no longer scarce, as mentioned, we'd still end up with the equivalent numbers of the rural population and then some more on top because that's what could be supported by the available resources.
Populations always tend to follow a model where you get peaks and troughs from different factors but where they ultimately end up in equilibrium positions when they have settled at a point that can be sustained unless something additional comes along to change that such as a further disaster.
Regarding survival, the thing there is it only takes one person in every 50 or a 100 or 1000 that knows how to survive for the others to learn too. Humans are amazingly adept at survival which is why we're so succesful as a species, sure modern life has nullified that somewhat, but not totally. I'd bet most people (apart from those who, without a better way to put it, would be selected against via natural selection - i.e. the morbidly unhealthy, the severely disabled) could survive better than you might imagine if they were dumped into this kind of disaster scenario.
Whilst AI has produced some fantastic techniques for solving countless problems through the years pretty much everyone in the field accepts that on current computer architecture it's scope is limited. For us to make any advance towards strong AI we'd need much greater computing power and some see biological computing, others see quantum computing as key here.
Perhaps you might just call it a branch of biological computing, but I've thought for a while now and said here a few times that I think realistically what we'll see is that instead of trying to re-create the brain we'll simply start working out how to control the brain and effectively end up programming it. It seems possible that in a few decades we'll be able to grow or harness brain matter for processing at will and this new science of neuroengineering coupled with advanced in biology are I'm sure steps towards that. We will also almost certainly see experts in artificial intelligence from computer science backgrounds involved as well of course and the end result will be convergence between neuroscience, computer science and biology when they realise they all effectively are seeking the same goal in this particular scenario - understanding and perhaps creation of true and customized intelligence.
It's something that sounds like it's from the realm of sci-fi for the most part certainly, but the fact we already are at the stage where we can interface electronics with nervous systems and I don't think it's an unrealistic future.
Of course we'd have a new round of arguments about ethics- if it's intelligent should we be controlling it? countering that, if it's entirely man made then is it really any different to controlling a computer? This is a particularly interesting question should we find out that the brain really isn't much more than an extremely complex computer in the first place, an argument for which there is already a ton of evidence. At that point if there are ethical considerations to be taken into account where do you draw the line in computer complexity before treating it differently? Presumably much of Asimov's ideas can be applied here but is there a difference between organic and electronic ultra intelligent systems?
"Brute force and work animals, of course. Hand operated machines. Even people dragging small plows by hand. But.... Say tonight is the end, and tomorrow we wake up to by previously described scenario. Where would you find a mule, a horse, a hand powered water pump."
Well you don't need a mule and a horse because again we're talking about farming for ourselves, not a number of people, one person can do the work required to feed themselves and a few others without the need for additional equipment. A water pump is largely irrelevant too, you can work on that or just digging a well later, immediate water requirements are satisified by rain, plans, collected water and so on until you get to that point.
"Would you drink from the Hudson river? I happen to be in a rather wet area. The largest nearby river is not safe to drink or swim in due to bacteria. Many retention ponds (natural and man made) exist in the area, but those are questionably safe to drink."
So sterilise it, most people could produce fire to boil water if need be and if they want to be really sure could rig up something such as a cloth to collect the steam and filter it off. Simply boiling it is fine though for the most part.
"Waste water is a bigger concern. It may not be in the first few days, but how long would it be without having running water and working sewage systems, that human waste contamination rendered those local supplies contaminated?"
That's only an issue effecting urbanites which as mentioned I accept would run into these problems and die. In rural areas there is enough room to deal with waste. If you're worried about living beings crapping in your water supply then again, you can still just sterilise it.
"I like that idea. "Given a choice." You know on day #1, given an empty piece of land, a fistful of seeds, and a hoe, all you have is that. It takes months for crops to grow. I don't know about you, but us humans will die if we don't eat in months."
Who said anything about an empty piece of land? What about the millions of acres of farmland that already had food on but could no longer be collected due to lack of tractors etc.? I'm just talking about using existing farmland which already exists to feed far more than just local rural populations which would be fine to provide for quite a while.
"When you go to the grocery store again, look carefully at the boxes or labels in the fresh produce area. You'll find many or most are imported. Then start checking the frozen produce. The more you look, the more you'll find that most of your food doesn't come from anywhere near you."
It depends what you're talking about, things like milk, meat, wheat and so on certainly tend to. If you're after some Belgian chocolate or Jamaican bananas or something then yeah, you're going to be shit out of luck.
Back to my original question though was anything you said including any of the figures based on fact? Not knowing about sterilising water or pulling food and water from plants and so forth suggests at very least you don't have much knowledge of basic survival which most people do.
The problem is over the top sensationalist stuff like that generally doesn't wake people up, it leaves them thinking they're the ramblings of a madman that should be ignored.
He's not made proper investigative reporting difficult, he's just brought accountability to investigative reporting which only harms publications like The Daily Mail that post opinion and not fact.
As long as papers don't invade entirely private space and actions and get their facts straight there's no problem.
Dacre hates Eady because he has enforced the already written laws that exist to protect people against both publishing false information (the claim it was a Nazi orgy- it wasn't) and their entirely private parts of their lives. Dacre's problem is that this goes entirely against how his paper operates - posting at best opinion, and at worst lies, to try and sell his papers. Again, this is in contrast to say the BBC and The Guardian who generally try to stick to the facts.
I do understand there's an argument that the Mail's liberties have been infringed by limiting what they report, but personal liberty should come ahead of corporate liberty if the people are to be truly free. In this case we had a conflict also whereby Dacre was suggesting his right to report on anything no matter how private is more important than personal liberty such that if people decided to do something that he personally felt was wrong he should be able to expose it to act as a deterrent to others. Effectively he is stating that he has the right to use his freedoms to act against other people having theirs. Even worse is the argument that Mosley is an influence and so must be stopped from this, because had it not been plastered over the papers to start with and exposed then no one could've been influenced by his actions anyway. It was only the very exposing of it that could have that effect.
Do you really believe corporate freedom (because that's what it is, in The Daily Mail's case it certainly can't be called press freedom because they do not post only the facts) comes ahead of personal freedom?
All Eady has done is enforced the laws that exist to protect personal freedom. This has no effect whatsoever on proper investigative journalism, only on bad investigative journalism or mere speculation (i.e. the nazi claim). If journalists can be sure of their facts before the story is published there is nothing to worry about, if they can't then they should almost certainly not be publishing it anyway. The ruling has no effect on The Daily Mail investigating the Max Mosley case once they received the video/pictures for example, it only has an effect on them publishing it if a) the claims are false and/or b) it is of a strictly private nature.
Whilst your post is rather sensationalist and outright false on some issues, I do have to agree that as a British citizen one of the things that makes me appalled by the current situation is remembering the stories my grandfather, a D-Day veteran told me. Him and millions like him did not fight and die for our freedoms only for them to be taken away by our own government.
As more people of that era pass away less and less people realise how important and how hard fought for our freedoms were. I still have two SS daggers that my grandfather took from captured German SS soldiers during the war locked away safely that I and hopefully future generations of my family can keep as a reminder of what was fought for. Perhaps ironically, if Labour and the police have their way, these knives will be confiscated as dangerous weapons when the only threat they pose kept safely as they are is a threat to Labour's totalitarian ambitions as I and my family and friends use them to keep in our memories what is important - our freedom.
You have to realise the BBC are on difficult ground. If they actively oppose Labour's ideas they risk change of management to one more favourable to the government.
Look at what happened around the Iraq war when the BBC reported the government had exagerated claims about WMDs- heads rolled in the BBC even though we know now the BBC was dead right.
I don't know what versions of the Guardian you've been reading but they certainly do report the issues with CCTV cameras although by the sounds of it what you're asking for is opinion pieces that come out against cameras. It's pretty dangerous to confuse the two and this is why The Daily Mail and The Telegraph are awful publications because they merge opinion and fact and sell the combination as fact even when it's only partially so. In the face of this one could argue this is the problem with more balanced and liberal media outlets such as the BBC and The Guardian- they don't use the same dirty tactics of twisting British opinion in response.
Most people in Britain are simply unaware of this issue, that much of what the read isn't factual but is simply opinion but think because it's in a paper "it must be true". If the BBC or The Guardian seem less pressing on issues it's because they're doing what news outlets are supposed to do- reporting the news, rather than reporting opinion and passing it off as fact.
Only the elections can tell what the British people want but near the end of Bush's first term I heard the same things yet he was voted in again, near the end of the second term we heard the same and yet McCain with his very similar policies still got a disturbingly high proportion of the overall votes. I think it comes down to this, those who wont vote for who they currently see as the bad party, in this case, Labour are vocal in their opposition and it is those we hear about and because of this people like yourself assume this is the voice of the British people. That's not the case, the voice of the British people are the silent ones who vote Labour because they've always voted Labour and whose opinion wont change unless Labour does something that directly effects them - i.e. raises taxes. An example of this was seen in the recent local elections last year shortly after Labour raised taxes by eliminating the lowest tax band and was getting blamed for high fuel costs exagerated by the taxes on it- the two things the man on the street only really gives a damn about.
The BBC and The Guardian do what they can in the bounds of being responsible, sticking to their job and allowing people to make up their minds based on fact, rather than force feeding people personal opinion like The Daily Mail and The Telegraph. You have to realise even a hint of political bias from the BBC is enough to get them in trouble, but where they do call the government out for what it is they should be commended for having the balls to do so- it's a lot harder, and a lot riskier for the BBC to do this than it is The Daily Mail who builds it's business model around shouting the odds.
But one final point about The Daily Mail as I'm concerned that you believe it actually cares about liberty rather than say, just slagging off an unpopular government at every chance it gets to sell papers. Read this:
"I am referring, of course, to Justice David Eady who has, again and again, under the privacy clause of the Human Rights Act, found against newspapers and their age-old freedom to expose the moral shortcomings of those in high places."
"Now most people would consider such activities to be perverted, depraved, the very abrogation of civilised behaviour of which the law is supposed to be the safeguard. Not Eady. To him such behaviour was merely 'unconventional',"
Does that sound like someone who cares about the right to privacy? about liberty? This guy thinks him and his
Facebook groups aren't created with the hope of people in power looking at the amount of people in the group and thinking "Oh, let's do something about that". They're created to spread the word- the point is that Facebook groups are viral, each time someone you know joins it you will see about it on your profile page or whatever. If you join, your friends will see about it too. This spreads and spreads so that more people are aware of the issue than otherwise would be.
That's why people use Facebook groups- to spread the word, not to directly try and achieve change. It's a quick and free way to spread the word to a lot of people you don't otherwise know.
When our company took over a company worth £43mill it cost us £1mill in legal fees etc. etc. to get everything looked over and sorted out.
I think for something of Yahoo's worth, $79 million isn't massively unrealistic. I'd say it's not unreasonable either, it is to most people including me, but in the world of business I'd say it's probably not.
Still Yahoo, perhaps the most business plan challenged IT company in the last few years, turning down Micrososft, going for Google, getting told to f off by Google because of the potential for monopoly problems and then running back to Microsoft and being told to f off by Micrososft too.
Ballmer is probably laughing his arse off, they offered over the odds to pay for the company but if they had paid that much and then seen the resulting decline of it's worth due to a number of factors from Google to the financial crisis then they'd have wasted literally billions.
Even the most Apple biased browser stats I've looked through top it out at 8.3%, the more objective sites put it at around 4%. The thing is, even most Mac users I know use Firefox rather than Safari.
I don't even think Apple has 10% of computer market share which makes the claim even more unlikely unless there is some specific reason Mac users are more likely to be internet users than Linux or Windows users are. See here:
But to the person asking the question, if you want a full answer then you need to get your site built and make use of stress testing tools such as JMeter for Apache or Microsoft's WAS tool for IIS.
It's not something anyone here can give you a definite answer for without knowing how well your site is implemented and what it actually does.
Look into Transaction Cost Analysis, that's ultimately what you need here, a good start is this article:
Don't worry that these are MS articles on MS technologies they both still cover the ideas that are applicable elsewhere.
Even though no one here can give you a full answer for the above mentioned reasons, we can at least give you our best guesses and this is where I think the parent poster is spot on, 6 servers is absolute overkill for this kind of load requirements and indeed, unless your application does some pretty intensive processing I see little reason why a single server couldn't do the trick or at least a web/application server and a database server at most.
For ensuring high availability you may indeed need more servers of course and as you mention a requirement for FTP is bandwidth likely to be an issue?
The fact you're only expecting 1000 a day suggest you're not running the biggest of operations and although it's nice to do these things in house it may just be worth you using a hosting provider with an acceptable SLA, at the end of the day they have more experience, more hardware, more bandwidth and can probably even do things a fair bit cheaper than you can. Do you have a generator to allow continued provision of the service should your power fail for an extended period for example? If you receive an unexpected spike in traffic or a DDOS do you have the facility to cope with and resolve that like a big hosting company could?
There are many things I wouldn't ever use an external hosting provider for, but this doesn't sound like one of them.
"MS on the other hand have saddled themselves with a multi-core PowerPC architecture, that even Apple was moving aware from in their competition with MS. Which it may have worked for this generation of console, I wonder how expandable the design would be for the NEXT generation."
It doesn't really matter. Operating systems and development tools are core to Microsoft's business, a massive portion of the company is devoted to creating software that works in different hardware architectures and development tools to go with it.
Microsoft is better placed than either Nintendo or Sony to switch to whatever platform they feel is best for their console, there is no reason they're stuck with what they used this time. Microsoft have been quite close to Toshiba through the whole HD-DVD thing and IBM built their last processor. IBM and Toshiba are also heavily invested in Cell, more so than even Sony I believe, so it's not unrealistic to think Microsoft may go Cell anyway and similarly leverage the points you mention that you believe are exclusive to Sony. Of course, there's also the point that the XBox 360's Xenon processor is based on elements of Cell anyway.
I'd say Microsoft's only real worry for their next generation console is their media format- do they swallow their pride and go Bluray or go for a custom format? DVD isn't going to cut it next time round.
Is any of this based on fact or research or is it simply just guesswork?
One thing that stood out to me was this:
"Less than 25% of the 21% rural dwellers will have the necessities on hand for continued survival without our modern infrastructures. i.e., how do you plow a field without a tractor (no fuel)."
How do you think fields were plowed and trade carried out before we'd invented motor vehicles?
We only need tractors because we're farming to provide food for millions, most of which are those urbanites. If you no longer need to farm on the scale required to feed the now irrelevant urbanites, then why do you even need a tractor? Any urbanites that came along could be given the choice of working the land you can no longer work to produce their own food.
You also don't need a direct supply of water to survive although how many people wouldn't have a stream or river within a decent distance? but even without that kind of water supply, in the America's plants like cacti provide a good supply of water to keep you hydrated. Having butchered many myself I can assure you that sucking the liquids out of them is fairly easy, much like any fruit such as a kiwi only they're much more efficient at storing it than most other plants. Saguaro (Carnegia gigantea) in Arizona/California for example at their hydrated peak consist of around 90% water and can soak up 200 gallons. The other 10% consists of woody stems, the skin and spines. Many cacti can survive over 2 years without a drop of additional water than that already stored in them and if you chop them they'll callous over quickly. Effectively what this means is if you chopped down a large cactus, you could suck or extract a lot of liquid from it, let it callous over and it would effectively act as a self-sealing water storage device. Many desert areas that are human inhabited in the rest of the world where cacti don't grow (at least natively) have similar plants, commonly Euphorbia. Areas that aren't desert like wont have much of an issue with water supply anyway!
I see little reason why rural populations couldn't survive in almost their entirety. The biggest issue would be the urbanites that did escape and if they overwhelmed the rural populations, but in general they wouldn't necessarily lead to a decline in the rural population, if anything an increase unless they started getting reckless and killing each other for resources. It'd almost certainly be more likely the cause of human actions that would lead to mass deaths in the rural areas if anything than it would people unable to find what they need to survive there.
Taking into account humans killing each other due to scarcity of resources this happens all the time and has since man figured out how to kill each other wouldn't have much effect on long term rural populations as when they'd killed enough of each other, resources would no longer be so scarce they'd be worth fighting over.
I'm not really sure why you make the assumption that if people's water pumps failed that they'd be wholly unable to gather water themselves from a stream, from rainfall, from plants, from a well?
I think realistically what you'd see is a quick increase in rural population as people left the cities, followed by a decline as people fought for resources followed by it reaching an equilibrium that was somewhat above that of the initial rural population as rural areas can provide for far more people than currently live there - mostly because as mentioned, they feed the cities in the first place.
The problem is the record industry aren't claiming copyright infringement anymore, they dropped that charge.
They're claiming assisting copyright infringement and monetary loss as a result. The point of this testimony is that even if they're found guilty of assisting copyright infringement there was no monetary loss.
That should at very least reduce any punishment significantly.
I don't know what the fuck 99% of that site says, but the following near the bottom seems pretty clear! -
"Thanks to all of you who have sent flowers to the Wallis. But enough is enough. With flowers, vases, teddybears and chocolate for over $5000 they allready got more than they can handle."
Of course I'm sure dropping a message or something may be a nice gesture to show your support, that or a cheque for a small amount to not buy an RIAA affiliated music CD with or something;)
I keep hearing this but again it seems to be an argument not applicable outside the US at least. People in Europe from the age of 1 to 100 have been happily using mobile phones since they were more god awful to use than every phone on the market today in both Japan and Europe.
Usability has never been a problem for phone users here because they're so widespread it's like a TV remote or a microwave, people just know how to use them. Ironically though the lack of a proper keypad is actually a usability issue for a lot of Japanese/European users where texting is far more prominent than it is in the US too. People can text much faster and much more mindlessly with standard number pads than they can with the iPhones touch screen interface.
I know where you're coming from don't get me wrong, it is easier to use, but for many outside the US we've not been so hard done by that the difference in usability is positive enough to make it worth losing features or form over (the iPhone is quite big compared to some on the market, small phones are a big thing to a lot of Europeans/Japanese too).
Apple's brought some cool stuff to the interface for sure and many other companies are producing models that have similar features, but I think you'll struggle to ever do away with full keypad based phones, they'll always have a place for many people over the touch screen interface. It'll be interesting to see how Apple pursues mobile technology in this manner- whether they just stick to their niche market as they effectively do with their computing hardware or if they start producing multiple models like they have with the iPod nano, touch and classic. An Apple phone with a keypad could be quite interesting and certainly open them up to a much larger marketshare but I get the impression that a device like that would be hard to maintain a "wow" factor with in the way Apple tends to achieve with most of it's products.
That would be a good theory were it true, but the fact is the US cell phone market has always been even further behind than just skipping the beta phase. Every time I'd visit and go into a shop selling mobiles I'd have to chuckle to myself at the stuff they were selling which was years behind what we had even in Europe, let alone Japan.
This is why the original iPhone was a flop everywhere but the US (yes it was even a flop in Europe), people were looking at it and thinking what's the big deal when it's camera, it's memory, it's lack of custom apps, lack of MMS, lack of 3G, lack of GPS and so on made it a laughably poor device, whilst in the US it was pretty state of the art.
Move forward to the iPhone 3G and Apple have realise their mistakes and have moved forward a bit, but as stated in the summary, the iPhone still lacks features that many in Europe and Japan have come to expect.
The US is a world leader on most things, but cell phones are one of the few products the US was simply years behind on, often never even getting some of the high end Nokia models we enjoyed in Europe For example, did the US ever even get the Nokia 7650 in the end? a phone that in 2001 had a camera, could play Doom, browse the web, run Java apps- in fact, everything the original iPhone had minus touch screen but plus a whole bunch of other features (MMS, custom apps).
Apple realised the mobile gap was in the US and took advantage of that, they couldn't compete immediately with the companies like Nokia that had been doing it years and the US gave them a place to get started without ever needing to do so. Once their foot was in the door they could fairly quickly move on with their technology to produce a phone that was a little more attractive in Europe/Japan, if they keep it up and keep going they'll do well.
At the end of the day though, the summary comes as no suprise as it really is quite similar to the story here in Europe. It's not to slag Apple off, because if the US was as uptodate on mobile technology as Europe it's questionable whether Apple could've got it's foot in the door as easily as it did and more fool Nokia et. al. for not taking the opportunity to exploit the rather backwards US cell phone market themselves. I think this is also why the iPhone has the following it does, not necessarily because it's any better than other phones outside North America- it still lacks a lot of features European and Japanese phones have, but because it's a decent mid-range phone in Europe/Japan and more importantly, because it is light years ahead of much of what the US ever really had before it.
I agree with you completely, my point was that Mario Kart doesn't come out top with any other metric or combination of metrics either though which is why the list is rather questionable.
Even taking out statistical methods of deciding though (i.e. units sold, review ratings etc.) it's still hard to figure how Mario Kart could be classed as more influential than something such as Space Invaders or say Doom or Wolfenstein.
The only way of getting it to the top of the most influential list is if it's done defying any sensible and objective measure of influence be it numeric or not which is why I still can't help but feel the list is just a list of top 50 games for person x which makes the list worthless due to it being entirely subjective. If they're going to state it as a top 50 list of influential games of all time then it would be nice if they could justify their decisions, else they may as well just file it with all the other millions of worthless "My top 50 favourite whatever" lists on the internet.
If the 8 million units figure for Super Mario Kart is true then there are tens of games that outsold it and possibly for a longer period. Halo 2 is oddly a possibility but more importantly, GTA: San Andreas, Gran Turismo, FFVII.
About the only way Mario Kart could be top is if you bundled all Mario Kart versions together, but then if you apply the same method to say, Grand Theft Auto or the Halo franchise then it starts to slip right back down again.
So in other words, I don't think that list is even correct by any reasonable metric at all.
I don't really know how they compiled the list, it's certainly not on lasting legacy - I can barely even remember the original super mario kart, but everyone remembers space invaders for example. It's not on sales figures because super mario kart comes way, way down the list again, possibly as far down as past number 50. It can't be influence because really, how many SMK clones are there vs. say, Doom clones?
As stated earlier in the thread it seems like it's basically just one persons list of their top 50 favourite games. It certainly doesn't seem to be based on any objective measure that's for sure as I can't find any objective measure that fits their results, on the contrary, all objective measures seem to contradict their results completely even when combined in different combinations.
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So they can push for more Steam style activation based games to kill the second hand market and ensure everyone has to buy new whilst milking money episodic content and other DLC which is flawed as demonstrated perfectly by SiN episodes - i.e. studio goes bust and you're left with having paid for half a game or even by Valve with the HL2 episodes whereby it took them far longer between episodes than they originally told everyone it would when they all bought the first episode.
The article here from yesterday or Monday or whenever is relevant- that of games with no endings and cliffhangers leaving you stuck waiting for the next game. DLC is like that, but a million times worse.
I'd like to believe the ESA was pushing for broadband so we can have more immersive and better online games, but I'm not convinced we don't have the bandwidth for that already (i.e. WoW) but I think the reality truly is that they're just out to try and screw and milk the customer more and more.
The push towards horrificially bad DRM, activation, episodic content and so on has pushed me away from PC gaming to console gaming, where there is still DLC and episodic content but at least for the most part the games you buy are complete games. Even here things are annoying though- look at Mercenairies 2, you have to connect to EA's servers to play coop even though the coop game is P2P and yet EA's servers regularly go down so you can't actually play coop sometimes, if they go down in the middle of your coop session it fucks you too. Presumably when EA can't be arsed to run the servers anymore as they eventually do with games the "Coop 2" sign on the back of the box becomes false advertising? Then of course there's the question of games that have to be activated - what happens if you want to install it once the activation servers have gone and there's no patch because once a company has file for bankruptcy they have bigger things to worry about than making sure people can still play their old games?
It's a shame because I really liked Spore, Dawn of War II, Mercenairies 2, SiN episodes, HL2 episodes, they were all pretty good but my god the DRM/Episodic idea spoils them completely.
Seriously, whatever happened to buying a game and just being able to play it without having to give away your soul like back in the Quake 1 days and prior where CDs were DRM free and the worst thing you might come across is a CD key type thing? Oh wait, they still exist, only, to get those superior quality, hassle free versions you have to break the law and pirate them.
Greater availability of broadband for the ESA's goals is sadly a bad thing for the consumer, even if it's a good thing in general. The only upside of it all is that at least there is an increasing market for self-publishing indie developers who don't have to suffer publishers imposing draconian DRM on their games and can pick up the customers that ESA member companies have fucked off.
I don't expect we could deal with this but I already covered that in my closing paragraph. The people already living in rural areas could be supported, additional people from the cities could be supported, but not everyone. Hence we'd almost certainly see fighting as we do elsewhere in the world but when enough humans would died and resources were no longer scarce, as mentioned, we'd still end up with the equivalent numbers of the rural population and then some more on top because that's what could be supported by the available resources.
Populations always tend to follow a model where you get peaks and troughs from different factors but where they ultimately end up in equilibrium positions when they have settled at a point that can be sustained unless something additional comes along to change that such as a further disaster.
Regarding survival, the thing there is it only takes one person in every 50 or a 100 or 1000 that knows how to survive for the others to learn too. Humans are amazingly adept at survival which is why we're so succesful as a species, sure modern life has nullified that somewhat, but not totally. I'd bet most people (apart from those who, without a better way to put it, would be selected against via natural selection - i.e. the morbidly unhealthy, the severely disabled) could survive better than you might imagine if they were dumped into this kind of disaster scenario.
Well yeah exactly, which is surely why it's better to stay calm and reasoned when arguing a point so that doesn't happen no?
Whilst AI has produced some fantastic techniques for solving countless problems through the years pretty much everyone in the field accepts that on current computer architecture it's scope is limited. For us to make any advance towards strong AI we'd need much greater computing power and some see biological computing, others see quantum computing as key here.
Perhaps you might just call it a branch of biological computing, but I've thought for a while now and said here a few times that I think realistically what we'll see is that instead of trying to re-create the brain we'll simply start working out how to control the brain and effectively end up programming it. It seems possible that in a few decades we'll be able to grow or harness brain matter for processing at will and this new science of neuroengineering coupled with advanced in biology are I'm sure steps towards that. We will also almost certainly see experts in artificial intelligence from computer science backgrounds involved as well of course and the end result will be convergence between neuroscience, computer science and biology when they realise they all effectively are seeking the same goal in this particular scenario - understanding and perhaps creation of true and customized intelligence.
It's something that sounds like it's from the realm of sci-fi for the most part certainly, but the fact we already are at the stage where we can interface electronics with nervous systems and I don't think it's an unrealistic future.
Of course we'd have a new round of arguments about ethics- if it's intelligent should we be controlling it? countering that, if it's entirely man made then is it really any different to controlling a computer? This is a particularly interesting question should we find out that the brain really isn't much more than an extremely complex computer in the first place, an argument for which there is already a ton of evidence. At that point if there are ethical considerations to be taken into account where do you draw the line in computer complexity before treating it differently? Presumably much of Asimov's ideas can be applied here but is there a difference between organic and electronic ultra intelligent systems?
"Brute force and work animals, of course. Hand operated machines. Even people dragging small plows by hand. But.... Say tonight is the end, and tomorrow we wake up to by previously described scenario. Where would you find a mule, a horse, a hand powered water pump."
Well you don't need a mule and a horse because again we're talking about farming for ourselves, not a number of people, one person can do the work required to feed themselves and a few others without the need for additional equipment. A water pump is largely irrelevant too, you can work on that or just digging a well later, immediate water requirements are satisified by rain, plans, collected water and so on until you get to that point.
"Would you drink from the Hudson river? I happen to be in a rather wet area. The largest nearby river is not safe to drink or swim in due to bacteria. Many retention ponds (natural and man made) exist in the area, but those are questionably safe to drink."
So sterilise it, most people could produce fire to boil water if need be and if they want to be really sure could rig up something such as a cloth to collect the steam and filter it off. Simply boiling it is fine though for the most part.
"Waste water is a bigger concern. It may not be in the first few days, but how long would it be without having running water and working sewage systems, that human waste contamination rendered those local supplies contaminated?"
That's only an issue effecting urbanites which as mentioned I accept would run into these problems and die. In rural areas there is enough room to deal with waste. If you're worried about living beings crapping in your water supply then again, you can still just sterilise it.
"I like that idea. "Given a choice." You know on day #1, given an empty piece of land, a fistful of seeds, and a hoe, all you have is that. It takes months for crops to grow. I don't know about you, but us humans will die if we don't eat in months."
Who said anything about an empty piece of land? What about the millions of acres of farmland that already had food on but could no longer be collected due to lack of tractors etc.? I'm just talking about using existing farmland which already exists to feed far more than just local rural populations which would be fine to provide for quite a while.
"When you go to the grocery store again, look carefully at the boxes or labels in the fresh produce area. You'll find many or most are imported. Then start checking the frozen produce. The more you look, the more you'll find that most of your food doesn't come from anywhere near you."
It depends what you're talking about, things like milk, meat, wheat and so on certainly tend to. If you're after some Belgian chocolate or Jamaican bananas or something then yeah, you're going to be shit out of luck.
Back to my original question though was anything you said including any of the figures based on fact? Not knowing about sterilising water or pulling food and water from plants and so forth suggests at very least you don't have much knowledge of basic survival which most people do.
The problem is over the top sensationalist stuff like that generally doesn't wake people up, it leaves them thinking they're the ramblings of a madman that should be ignored.
He's not made proper investigative reporting difficult, he's just brought accountability to investigative reporting which only harms publications like The Daily Mail that post opinion and not fact.
As long as papers don't invade entirely private space and actions and get their facts straight there's no problem.
Dacre hates Eady because he has enforced the already written laws that exist to protect people against both publishing false information (the claim it was a Nazi orgy- it wasn't) and their entirely private parts of their lives. Dacre's problem is that this goes entirely against how his paper operates - posting at best opinion, and at worst lies, to try and sell his papers. Again, this is in contrast to say the BBC and The Guardian who generally try to stick to the facts.
I do understand there's an argument that the Mail's liberties have been infringed by limiting what they report, but personal liberty should come ahead of corporate liberty if the people are to be truly free. In this case we had a conflict also whereby Dacre was suggesting his right to report on anything no matter how private is more important than personal liberty such that if people decided to do something that he personally felt was wrong he should be able to expose it to act as a deterrent to others. Effectively he is stating that he has the right to use his freedoms to act against other people having theirs. Even worse is the argument that Mosley is an influence and so must be stopped from this, because had it not been plastered over the papers to start with and exposed then no one could've been influenced by his actions anyway. It was only the very exposing of it that could have that effect.
Do you really believe corporate freedom (because that's what it is, in The Daily Mail's case it certainly can't be called press freedom because they do not post only the facts) comes ahead of personal freedom?
All Eady has done is enforced the laws that exist to protect personal freedom. This has no effect whatsoever on proper investigative journalism, only on bad investigative journalism or mere speculation (i.e. the nazi claim). If journalists can be sure of their facts before the story is published there is nothing to worry about, if they can't then they should almost certainly not be publishing it anyway. The ruling has no effect on The Daily Mail investigating the Max Mosley case once they received the video/pictures for example, it only has an effect on them publishing it if a) the claims are false and/or b) it is of a strictly private nature.
Whilst your post is rather sensationalist and outright false on some issues, I do have to agree that as a British citizen one of the things that makes me appalled by the current situation is remembering the stories my grandfather, a D-Day veteran told me. Him and millions like him did not fight and die for our freedoms only for them to be taken away by our own government.
As more people of that era pass away less and less people realise how important and how hard fought for our freedoms were. I still have two SS daggers that my grandfather took from captured German SS soldiers during the war locked away safely that I and hopefully future generations of my family can keep as a reminder of what was fought for. Perhaps ironically, if Labour and the police have their way, these knives will be confiscated as dangerous weapons when the only threat they pose kept safely as they are is a threat to Labour's totalitarian ambitions as I and my family and friends use them to keep in our memories what is important - our freedom.
You have to realise the BBC are on difficult ground. If they actively oppose Labour's ideas they risk change of management to one more favourable to the government.
Look at what happened around the Iraq war when the BBC reported the government had exagerated claims about WMDs- heads rolled in the BBC even though we know now the BBC was dead right.
I don't know what versions of the Guardian you've been reading but they certainly do report the issues with CCTV cameras although by the sounds of it what you're asking for is opinion pieces that come out against cameras. It's pretty dangerous to confuse the two and this is why The Daily Mail and The Telegraph are awful publications because they merge opinion and fact and sell the combination as fact even when it's only partially so. In the face of this one could argue this is the problem with more balanced and liberal media outlets such as the BBC and The Guardian- they don't use the same dirty tactics of twisting British opinion in response.
Most people in Britain are simply unaware of this issue, that much of what the read isn't factual but is simply opinion but think because it's in a paper "it must be true". If the BBC or The Guardian seem less pressing on issues it's because they're doing what news outlets are supposed to do- reporting the news, rather than reporting opinion and passing it off as fact.
Only the elections can tell what the British people want but near the end of Bush's first term I heard the same things yet he was voted in again, near the end of the second term we heard the same and yet McCain with his very similar policies still got a disturbingly high proportion of the overall votes. I think it comes down to this, those who wont vote for who they currently see as the bad party, in this case, Labour are vocal in their opposition and it is those we hear about and because of this people like yourself assume this is the voice of the British people. That's not the case, the voice of the British people are the silent ones who vote Labour because they've always voted Labour and whose opinion wont change unless Labour does something that directly effects them - i.e. raises taxes. An example of this was seen in the recent local elections last year shortly after Labour raised taxes by eliminating the lowest tax band and was getting blamed for high fuel costs exagerated by the taxes on it- the two things the man on the street only really gives a damn about.
The BBC and The Guardian do what they can in the bounds of being responsible, sticking to their job and allowing people to make up their minds based on fact, rather than force feeding people personal opinion like The Daily Mail and The Telegraph. You have to realise even a hint of political bias from the BBC is enough to get them in trouble, but where they do call the government out for what it is they should be commended for having the balls to do so- it's a lot harder, and a lot riskier for the BBC to do this than it is The Daily Mail who builds it's business model around shouting the odds.
But one final point about The Daily Mail as I'm concerned that you believe it actually cares about liberty rather than say, just slagging off an unpopular government at every chance it gets to sell papers. Read this:
http://www.guardian.co.uk/media/2008/nov/10/pauldacre-dailymail
Some quotes from the Mail's chief:
"I am referring, of course, to Justice David Eady who has, again and again, under the privacy clause of the Human Rights Act, found against newspapers and their age-old freedom to expose the moral shortcomings of those in high places."
"Now most people would consider such activities to be perverted, depraved, the very abrogation of civilised behaviour of which the law is supposed to be the safeguard. Not Eady. To him such behaviour was merely 'unconventional',"
Does that sound like someone who cares about the right to privacy? about liberty? This guy thinks him and his
I think that was his point. The British public support it because they've been told to by the papers and that's all that matters to them.
What you're saying is "If they were enlightened then they wouldn't support it", but they're not and make no effort to be, hence they support it.
Facebook groups aren't created with the hope of people in power looking at the amount of people in the group and thinking "Oh, let's do something about that". They're created to spread the word- the point is that Facebook groups are viral, each time someone you know joins it you will see about it on your profile page or whatever. If you join, your friends will see about it too. This spreads and spreads so that more people are aware of the issue than otherwise would be.
That's why people use Facebook groups- to spread the word, not to directly try and achieve change. It's a quick and free way to spread the word to a lot of people you don't otherwise know.
When our company took over a company worth £43mill it cost us £1mill in legal fees etc. etc. to get everything looked over and sorted out.
I think for something of Yahoo's worth, $79 million isn't massively unrealistic. I'd say it's not unreasonable either, it is to most people including me, but in the world of business I'd say it's probably not.
Still Yahoo, perhaps the most business plan challenged IT company in the last few years, turning down Micrososft, going for Google, getting told to f off by Google because of the potential for monopoly problems and then running back to Microsoft and being told to f off by Micrososft too.
Ballmer is probably laughing his arse off, they offered over the odds to pay for the company but if they had paid that much and then seen the resulting decline of it's worth due to a number of factors from Google to the financial crisis then they'd have wasted literally billions.
10% is indeed BS.
Even the most Apple biased browser stats I've looked through top it out at 8.3%, the more objective sites put it at around 4%. The thing is, even most Mac users I know use Firefox rather than Safari.
I don't even think Apple has 10% of computer market share which makes the claim even more unlikely unless there is some specific reason Mac users are more likely to be internet users than Linux or Windows users are. See here:
http://www.slashgear.com/apple-os-x-market-share-drops-in-feb-as-vista-use-rises-0236001/
I was thinking along the same lines.
But to the person asking the question, if you want a full answer then you need to get your site built and make use of stress testing tools such as JMeter for Apache or Microsoft's WAS tool for IIS.
It's not something anyone here can give you a definite answer for without knowing how well your site is implemented and what it actually does.
Look into Transaction Cost Analysis, that's ultimately what you need here, a good start is this article:
http://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/commerceserver/bb608757.aspx
or this one:
http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/cc261632.aspx
Don't worry that these are MS articles on MS technologies they both still cover the ideas that are applicable elsewhere.
Even though no one here can give you a full answer for the above mentioned reasons, we can at least give you our best guesses and this is where I think the parent poster is spot on, 6 servers is absolute overkill for this kind of load requirements and indeed, unless your application does some pretty intensive processing I see little reason why a single server couldn't do the trick or at least a web/application server and a database server at most.
For ensuring high availability you may indeed need more servers of course and as you mention a requirement for FTP is bandwidth likely to be an issue?
The fact you're only expecting 1000 a day suggest you're not running the biggest of operations and although it's nice to do these things in house it may just be worth you using a hosting provider with an acceptable SLA, at the end of the day they have more experience, more hardware, more bandwidth and can probably even do things a fair bit cheaper than you can. Do you have a generator to allow continued provision of the service should your power fail for an extended period for example? If you receive an unexpected spike in traffic or a DDOS do you have the facility to cope with and resolve that like a big hosting company could?
There are many things I wouldn't ever use an external hosting provider for, but this doesn't sound like one of them.
"MS on the other hand have saddled themselves with a multi-core PowerPC architecture, that even Apple was moving aware from in their competition with MS. Which it may have worked for this generation of console, I wonder how expandable the design would be for the NEXT generation."
It doesn't really matter. Operating systems and development tools are core to Microsoft's business, a massive portion of the company is devoted to creating software that works in different hardware architectures and development tools to go with it.
Microsoft is better placed than either Nintendo or Sony to switch to whatever platform they feel is best for their console, there is no reason they're stuck with what they used this time. Microsoft have been quite close to Toshiba through the whole HD-DVD thing and IBM built their last processor. IBM and Toshiba are also heavily invested in Cell, more so than even Sony I believe, so it's not unrealistic to think Microsoft may go Cell anyway and similarly leverage the points you mention that you believe are exclusive to Sony. Of course, there's also the point that the XBox 360's Xenon processor is based on elements of Cell anyway.
I'd say Microsoft's only real worry for their next generation console is their media format- do they swallow their pride and go Bluray or go for a custom format? DVD isn't going to cut it next time round.
Is any of this based on fact or research or is it simply just guesswork?
One thing that stood out to me was this:
"Less than 25% of the 21% rural dwellers will have the necessities on hand for continued survival without our modern infrastructures. i.e., how do you plow a field without a tractor (no fuel)."
How do you think fields were plowed and trade carried out before we'd invented motor vehicles?
We only need tractors because we're farming to provide food for millions, most of which are those urbanites. If you no longer need to farm on the scale required to feed the now irrelevant urbanites, then why do you even need a tractor? Any urbanites that came along could be given the choice of working the land you can no longer work to produce their own food.
You also don't need a direct supply of water to survive although how many people wouldn't have a stream or river within a decent distance? but even without that kind of water supply, in the America's plants like cacti provide a good supply of water to keep you hydrated. Having butchered many myself I can assure you that sucking the liquids out of them is fairly easy, much like any fruit such as a kiwi only they're much more efficient at storing it than most other plants. Saguaro (Carnegia gigantea) in Arizona/California for example at their hydrated peak consist of around 90% water and can soak up 200 gallons. The other 10% consists of woody stems, the skin and spines. Many cacti can survive over 2 years without a drop of additional water than that already stored in them and if you chop them they'll callous over quickly. Effectively what this means is if you chopped down a large cactus, you could suck or extract a lot of liquid from it, let it callous over and it would effectively act as a self-sealing water storage device. Many desert areas that are human inhabited in the rest of the world where cacti don't grow (at least natively) have similar plants, commonly Euphorbia. Areas that aren't desert like wont have much of an issue with water supply anyway!
I see little reason why rural populations couldn't survive in almost their entirety. The biggest issue would be the urbanites that did escape and if they overwhelmed the rural populations, but in general they wouldn't necessarily lead to a decline in the rural population, if anything an increase unless they started getting reckless and killing each other for resources. It'd almost certainly be more likely the cause of human actions that would lead to mass deaths in the rural areas if anything than it would people unable to find what they need to survive there.
Taking into account humans killing each other due to scarcity of resources this happens all the time and has since man figured out how to kill each other wouldn't have much effect on long term rural populations as when they'd killed enough of each other, resources would no longer be so scarce they'd be worth fighting over.
I'm not really sure why you make the assumption that if people's water pumps failed that they'd be wholly unable to gather water themselves from a stream, from rainfall, from plants, from a well?
I think realistically what you'd see is a quick increase in rural population as people left the cities, followed by a decline as people fought for resources followed by it reaching an equilibrium that was somewhat above that of the initial rural population as rural areas can provide for far more people than currently live there - mostly because as mentioned, they feed the cities in the first place.
"Business is a brutal and if you are not willing to do something like Valve's Steam that gives something for giving up something"
Are you referring to Steam giving DRM for giving up your rights? :p
The problem is the record industry aren't claiming copyright infringement anymore, they dropped that charge.
They're claiming assisting copyright infringement and monetary loss as a result. The point of this testimony is that even if they're found guilty of assisting copyright infringement there was no monetary loss.
That should at very least reduce any punishment significantly.
See here:
http://yodo.se/wallis/
I don't know what the fuck 99% of that site says, but the following near the bottom seems pretty clear! -
"Thanks to all of you who have sent flowers to the Wallis. But enough is enough. With flowers, vases, teddybears and chocolate for over $5000 they allready got more than they can handle."
Of course I'm sure dropping a message or something may be a nice gesture to show your support, that or a cheque for a small amount to not buy an RIAA affiliated music CD with or something ;)
I keep hearing this but again it seems to be an argument not applicable outside the US at least. People in Europe from the age of 1 to 100 have been happily using mobile phones since they were more god awful to use than every phone on the market today in both Japan and Europe.
Usability has never been a problem for phone users here because they're so widespread it's like a TV remote or a microwave, people just know how to use them. Ironically though the lack of a proper keypad is actually a usability issue for a lot of Japanese/European users where texting is far more prominent than it is in the US too. People can text much faster and much more mindlessly with standard number pads than they can with the iPhones touch screen interface.
I know where you're coming from don't get me wrong, it is easier to use, but for many outside the US we've not been so hard done by that the difference in usability is positive enough to make it worth losing features or form over (the iPhone is quite big compared to some on the market, small phones are a big thing to a lot of Europeans/Japanese too).
Apple's brought some cool stuff to the interface for sure and many other companies are producing models that have similar features, but I think you'll struggle to ever do away with full keypad based phones, they'll always have a place for many people over the touch screen interface. It'll be interesting to see how Apple pursues mobile technology in this manner- whether they just stick to their niche market as they effectively do with their computing hardware or if they start producing multiple models like they have with the iPod nano, touch and classic. An Apple phone with a keypad could be quite interesting and certainly open them up to a much larger marketshare but I get the impression that a device like that would be hard to maintain a "wow" factor with in the way Apple tends to achieve with most of it's products.
Really? I guess O2, Orange and so on just stole the handsets they were selling and hacked the Apple store to allow Europeans to activate then?
Here, it's always nice to have evidence to backup a claim:
http://apple20.blogs.fortune.cnn.com/2008/04/19/iphone-european-fire-sales-spreading-to-france/
"Do you have numbers that indicate the orginal iPhone was actually a "flop" in Europe (the ONLY placed outside the US it was sold)?"
Sure have a look here:
http://www.pcadvisor.co.uk/blogs/index.cfm?entryid=1433&blogid=4
http://www.electronista.com/articles/08/04/18/europe.low.iphone.sales/
http://apple20.blogs.fortune.cnn.com/2008/04/19/iphone-european-fire-sales-spreading-to-france/
http://lifestyle.hexus.net/content/item.php?item=11303
http://arstechnica.com/apple/news/2008/04/lackluster-iphone-sales-in-europe.ars
http://techwag.com/index.php/2007/11/11/apples-european-iphone-debut-a-royal-flop/
That would be a good theory were it true, but the fact is the US cell phone market has always been even further behind than just skipping the beta phase. Every time I'd visit and go into a shop selling mobiles I'd have to chuckle to myself at the stuff they were selling which was years behind what we had even in Europe, let alone Japan.
This is why the original iPhone was a flop everywhere but the US (yes it was even a flop in Europe), people were looking at it and thinking what's the big deal when it's camera, it's memory, it's lack of custom apps, lack of MMS, lack of 3G, lack of GPS and so on made it a laughably poor device, whilst in the US it was pretty state of the art.
Move forward to the iPhone 3G and Apple have realise their mistakes and have moved forward a bit, but as stated in the summary, the iPhone still lacks features that many in Europe and Japan have come to expect.
The US is a world leader on most things, but cell phones are one of the few products the US was simply years behind on, often never even getting some of the high end Nokia models we enjoyed in Europe For example, did the US ever even get the Nokia 7650 in the end? a phone that in 2001 had a camera, could play Doom, browse the web, run Java apps- in fact, everything the original iPhone had minus touch screen but plus a whole bunch of other features (MMS, custom apps).
Apple realised the mobile gap was in the US and took advantage of that, they couldn't compete immediately with the companies like Nokia that had been doing it years and the US gave them a place to get started without ever needing to do so. Once their foot was in the door they could fairly quickly move on with their technology to produce a phone that was a little more attractive in Europe/Japan, if they keep it up and keep going they'll do well.
At the end of the day though, the summary comes as no suprise as it really is quite similar to the story here in Europe. It's not to slag Apple off, because if the US was as uptodate on mobile technology as Europe it's questionable whether Apple could've got it's foot in the door as easily as it did and more fool Nokia et. al. for not taking the opportunity to exploit the rather backwards US cell phone market themselves. I think this is also why the iPhone has the following it does, not necessarily because it's any better than other phones outside North America- it still lacks a lot of features European and Japanese phones have, but because it's a decent mid-range phone in Europe/Japan and more importantly, because it is light years ahead of much of what the US ever really had before it.
I agree with you completely, my point was that Mario Kart doesn't come out top with any other metric or combination of metrics either though which is why the list is rather questionable.
Even taking out statistical methods of deciding though (i.e. units sold, review ratings etc.) it's still hard to figure how Mario Kart could be classed as more influential than something such as Space Invaders or say Doom or Wolfenstein.
The only way of getting it to the top of the most influential list is if it's done defying any sensible and objective measure of influence be it numeric or not which is why I still can't help but feel the list is just a list of top 50 games for person x which makes the list worthless due to it being entirely subjective. If they're going to state it as a top 50 list of influential games of all time then it would be nice if they could justify their decisions, else they may as well just file it with all the other millions of worthless "My top 50 favourite whatever" lists on the internet.
If that's true about their definition of importance then the list is even more incorrect. Have a look here:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_best-selling_video_games
If the 8 million units figure for Super Mario Kart is true then there are tens of games that outsold it and possibly for a longer period. Halo 2 is oddly a possibility but more importantly, GTA: San Andreas, Gran Turismo, FFVII.
About the only way Mario Kart could be top is if you bundled all Mario Kart versions together, but then if you apply the same method to say, Grand Theft Auto or the Halo franchise then it starts to slip right back down again.
So in other words, I don't think that list is even correct by any reasonable metric at all.
I don't really know how they compiled the list, it's certainly not on lasting legacy - I can barely even remember the original super mario kart, but everyone remembers space invaders for example. It's not on sales figures because super mario kart comes way, way down the list again, possibly as far down as past number 50. It can't be influence because really, how many SMK clones are there vs. say, Doom clones?
As stated earlier in the thread it seems like it's basically just one persons list of their top 50 favourite games. It certainly doesn't seem to be based on any objective measure that's for sure as I can't find any objective measure that fits their results, on the contrary, all objective measures seem to contradict their results completely even when combined in different combinations.