The game is a mix of strategy, speed, and knowledge.
It isn't as much speed as it is timing. You have to hit the buzzer right after Alex finishes his question. If you mistime, you are penalized a fraction of a second before you can ring in again. It just isn't very interesting.
I guess they did it that way because they didn't want people mashing the buttons as soon as the question appeared (which would be the correct strategy if you usually knew the answer), but the end result still sucks.
When Ken Jennings was winning all those games were people complaining that it was unfair because he had better reaction times?
No, but it's still a stupid part of the game. The computer just highlighted that part.
Oh and I watch hulu.com too. Why not? ABC, NBC, CBS, etc are using the People's airwaves free-of-charge, so might as well enjoy the product they produce on OUR property.
Wow, you're such a rebel. Hulu licenses their content and displays ads. It's just an extension of broadcast. It's owned by the broadcasters.
What I *don't* want is the shitty, noisy, tacky plastic cases that come with most PCs.
Oh get off it. You can get a quiet PC with a metal case, and it won't cost you Apple prices, either. I assembled my own from cheapo parts from Newegg, and was very happy with the quality and final results. If you pay a bit more you'll get something decent from the major vendors.
The price premium (about 20% over an equivalent machine at the time I bought it, over 4 years ago) was well worth it.
Usually the "equivalent" machine is completely over-spec'd, high-end extras that you don't need. If all you want and need is a commodity PC, which for most people is just fine, then Apple is just a waste of money.
I am seriously thinking about getting a tiny laptop with no Windows tax
Good luck with that. When I went shopping for such a device a year or so ago, the cheapest option available was a netbook with Windows. It was near impossible to get anything comparable without it.
Because you are MSFT fanboy and can't take criticism of your bellowed company. That is only explanation when someone disparage people for saying M$.
You're wrong. I dislike Microsoft. But when I see childish name calling as part of the argument, it turns me off. It doesn't matter if it's "libtard" or "tea bagger" or whatever.
It's also meaningless name calling. Yes, Microsoft is out to make money. So is every for-profit corporation out there, and most of them act no better than Microsoft, though few have as much power.
You're just acting in your own self-interest, not on any principles. Why is privacy limited to your photos, but not to your work? It's a much simpler principle to state that somebody is not allowed to hack into your computer and copy information.
You can debate whether or not a privately-held monopoly is "right" or "wrong", but not whether or not it's capitalist. There are monopolies that were not government granted---what's known as natural monopolies. They use their monopolies to put an end to any competition that might creep up. In such a case, the market is not free either, but it's certainly capitalist.
Your specific example was for a government-granted and enforced monopoly, which is what I was debating. The existence of a natural monopoly doesn't mean the market isn't free. You are again introducing disputable examples into the argument. The point of the free market is that the government isn't regulating the price. A free market doesn't mean a perfect market.
Look back at where this started: "For being so staunchly capitalist, big corporations sure hate the free market." Which is bad for a Free Market system as a whole, but of course is exactly what you would expect of the individual capitalists.
Any individual actor in a system that they purport to believe in will often find cause to complain when the chips don't fall their way.
Rather than continue this discussion, I'm just going to note that while I understand your viewpoint, and even agree that it is right depending on how narrow you want to restrict your definitions to, on the whole I don't agree with it. I have found several references that support my point of view (including dictionaries and an old Encyclopedia Britannica) . You have your Oxford dictionary.
Wikipedia also supports the free market view as part of the definition, though it raises several warnings about debates over the precise meaning, and you can follow a debate in the Discussion tab, too. It also includes sections on etymology and history.
As I stated in answer to someone else, guns are prohibited from being sold in Japan. Are you going to claim Japan's not a Free Market economy?
With respect to guns, no. There probably is no truly free market system any where in the world. Every regulation you place on buying and selling makes the market less free. Overall, though, the system is based on a free market.
There is a tendency for Capitalism and Free Markets to go hand-in-hand.
Which was pretty much my point. They're so tightly bound, in fact, that when people talk about capitalism they usually mean a free market, too.
It's quite debatable that a company that was granted an exclusive monopoly by-law is an example of capitalism, because that means that other owners of capital do not have the same rights. It's not full ownership if all owners are not treated equally.
I don't know what dictionary you have, but here's what the Concise Oxford says:
I said I checked multiple and that many mentioned a free market. Quoting one that doesn't doesn't invalidate the overall point. References:
American Heritage: "An economic system in which the means of production and distribution are privately or corporately owned and development is proportionate to the accumulation and reinvestment of profits gained in a free market."
Merriam-Webster: "an economic system characterized by private or corporate ownership of capital goods, by investments that are determined by private decision, and by prices, production, and the distribution of goods that are determined mainly by competition in a free market"
Not that you should be learning about economic or political systems from dictionaries.
Oh please. If you want some basic definitions, they are fine.
Your local library should have an entire section on these subjects.
You enjoy going to the library. I'll use whatever references are online. Speaking of which, here's a quote from a classic version of the Encyclopaedia Britannica: "Thus capitalism is essentially based on freedom - the freedom of the subscriber in risking his money, and the freedom of the consumer in giving or withholding his custom and the profit that it makes possible."
Competition is the key idea, not whether or not a company is free to sell their goods.
This is just bizarre. How can you have unfettered competition if a company isn't allowed to freely sell their goods?
You can have free market capitalism, but you can still have capitalism without a free market---capitalism tells us that private owners control the means of production, but doesn't tell us how they get their products to consumers.
Technically you can, in a very strict definition of capitalism, but in common usage, and also based on the theory of capitalism, and the common sense of what it means to own something, it is closely associated with being able to sell your goods in a free market. The references I found didn't associate them by accident.
People manage to find new jobs while working an existing job all the time. Some people work full time and pay their way for secondary education.
Some people spend countless hours goofing off while collecting unemployment and "looking" for another job. The sense of entitlement people have is just amazing.
I'm saying that, believing the police report, they don't have enough income to have real profit.
Which is why I think the police report just scratched the surface. They get far too much traffic to make so little in advertising. The Swedish newspaper estimate, where they quote sales numbers from a sales manager purportedly handling ads for the Pirate Bay, seem much more believable.
Nor did I say that. I just said I doubt they're making much profit, not that they don't try to.
It goes hand-in-hand. What does private ownership of capital mean if you can't sell your product freely? It's like "owning" a hammer and being told you can't pound screws with it. In fact, I checked multiple dictionaries and many of them explicitly mention free market as part of the definition of capitalism.
They'd much rather have the lazy security of a monopoly.
Existence of a monopoly doesn't mean there isn't a free market. Besides that, there is no monopoly in the games industry, and while the exec in question might be lamenting about the free market in action, it's a fairly innocuous complaint, and no different than makers of quality items often say in regards to Wal-Mart.
No, but we have numbers from a police investigation (who I regard as less biased than anti-piracy orgs), which say their income is around $170,000/year.
The police investigation number could be missing lots of income. They can only report what they found. If these guys are smart, they'd make sure any income they showed was near operating expenses, and keep the rest in secret accounts.
Considering it's on of the top-100 websites in terms of traffic, doesn't seem like profit to me.
Are you seriously claiming that a top-100 website can't make money off of advertising, and likely isn't? It's extremely naive.
The court also found them guilty of commercially profiting off of piracy, which is why the Wikipedia article infobox shows them as "commercial".
These guys never claimed to be operating as a non-profit. They just claimed that they weren't making a lot of money or were operating at a loss. Do you really think if they were generating a ton of money in ads they'd just donate the money to charity? Whatever profit they earned, they were going to keep for themselves. It's foolish to think otherwise.
That's entirely the point. The fact is they are getting revenue from ads. Bandwidth and servers have been cheap for a very long time, and many sites make money via advertising.
It's rather naive to assume they aren't making a decent amount of profit out of it, or even if they aren't, that they aren't trying. Do you think if they were making a lot of money they would just give it all back? It's the whole reason why non-profits and open books are put in place.
Slashdot Mirror
Let's continue the irony with your post:
I can understand attacking PayPal or Visa websites over the Wikileaks thing [..] not really getting the underlying point of freedoms.
PayPal or Visa have the freedom to not do business with Wikileaks. Criminal interference with their websites is not an appropriate response.
The game is a mix of strategy, speed, and knowledge.
It isn't as much speed as it is timing. You have to hit the buzzer right after Alex finishes his question. If you mistime, you are penalized a fraction of a second before you can ring in again. It just isn't very interesting.
I guess they did it that way because they didn't want people mashing the buttons as soon as the question appeared (which would be the correct strategy if you usually knew the answer), but the end result still sucks.
When Ken Jennings was winning all those games were people complaining that it was unfair because he had better reaction times?
No, but it's still a stupid part of the game. The computer just highlighted that part.
But [buzzer timing] is a stupid part of the game
I agree. I'd prefer it if they let all contestants ring in during the question, and then rotated who got to go first.
overload
I'm sorry, that's not the correct answer. We were looking for "overlords".
Oh and I watch hulu.com too. Why not? ABC, NBC, CBS, etc are using the People's airwaves free-of-charge, so might as well enjoy the product they produce on OUR property.
Wow, you're such a rebel. Hulu licenses their content and displays ads. It's just an extension of broadcast. It's owned by the broadcasters.
So basically organizations that do business with consumers would be allowed to scan the consumer PC. Great idea...
What's pathetic is that this is already occurring. If you play Blizzard games like StarCraft or World of Warcraft, you're running Warden.
What I *don't* want is the shitty, noisy, tacky plastic cases that come with most PCs.
Oh get off it. You can get a quiet PC with a metal case, and it won't cost you Apple prices, either. I assembled my own from cheapo parts from Newegg, and was very happy with the quality and final results. If you pay a bit more you'll get something decent from the major vendors.
The price premium (about 20% over an equivalent machine at the time I bought it, over 4 years ago) was well worth it.
Usually the "equivalent" machine is completely over-spec'd, high-end extras that you don't need. If all you want and need is a commodity PC, which for most people is just fine, then Apple is just a waste of money.
I am seriously thinking about getting a tiny laptop with no Windows tax
Good luck with that. When I went shopping for such a device a year or so ago, the cheapest option available was a netbook with Windows. It was near impossible to get anything comparable without it.
What's the *major* error?
and microsoft-beware-stephen-elop-is-a-flight-risk
That's an awesome article (with hilarious comments to boot).
Because you are MSFT fanboy and can't take criticism of your bellowed company. That is only explanation when someone disparage people for saying M$.
You're wrong. I dislike Microsoft. But when I see childish name calling as part of the argument, it turns me off. It doesn't matter if it's "libtard" or "tea bagger" or whatever.
It's also meaningless name calling. Yes, Microsoft is out to make money. So is every for-profit corporation out there, and most of them act no better than Microsoft, though few have as much power.
Do you have a point, or do you just like to ramble incoherently?
You're just acting in your own self-interest, not on any principles. Why is privacy limited to your photos, but not to your work? It's a much simpler principle to state that somebody is not allowed to hack into your computer and copy information.
M$
I stop reading here.
You can debate whether or not a privately-held monopoly is "right" or "wrong", but not whether or not it's capitalist. There are monopolies that were not government granted---what's known as natural monopolies. They use their monopolies to put an end to any competition that might creep up. In such a case, the market is not free either, but it's certainly capitalist.
Your specific example was for a government-granted and enforced monopoly, which is what I was debating. The existence of a natural monopoly doesn't mean the market isn't free. You are again introducing disputable examples into the argument. The point of the free market is that the government isn't regulating the price. A free market doesn't mean a perfect market.
Look back at where this started: "For being so staunchly capitalist, big corporations sure hate the free market." Which is bad for a Free Market system as a whole, but of course is exactly what you would expect of the individual capitalists.
Any individual actor in a system that they purport to believe in will often find cause to complain when the chips don't fall their way.
Rather than continue this discussion, I'm just going to note that while I understand your viewpoint, and even agree that it is right depending on how narrow you want to restrict your definitions to, on the whole I don't agree with it. I have found several references that support my point of view (including dictionaries and an old Encyclopedia Britannica) . You have your Oxford dictionary.
Wikipedia also supports the free market view as part of the definition, though it raises several warnings about debates over the precise meaning, and you can follow a debate in the Discussion tab, too. It also includes sections on etymology and history.
On that note, I'll take my leave.
we can save you (just pay us)!
And pay us now! There's no time to wait!
As I stated in answer to someone else, guns are prohibited from being sold in Japan. Are you going to claim Japan's not a Free Market economy?
With respect to guns, no. There probably is no truly free market system any where in the world. Every regulation you place on buying and selling makes the market less free. Overall, though, the system is based on a free market.
There is a tendency for Capitalism and Free Markets to go hand-in-hand.
Which was pretty much my point. They're so tightly bound, in fact, that when people talk about capitalism they usually mean a free market, too.
It's quite debatable that a company that was granted an exclusive monopoly by-law is an example of capitalism, because that means that other owners of capital do not have the same rights. It's not full ownership if all owners are not treated equally.
I don't think I've met two people who say it the same way.
Classic. The first two replies each offer two different ways of saying it, with all four being different from each other. "Postgres" is my favorite.
I don't know what dictionary you have, but here's what the Concise Oxford says:
I said I checked multiple and that many mentioned a free market. Quoting one that doesn't doesn't invalidate the overall point. References:
American Heritage: "An economic system in which the means of production and distribution are privately or corporately owned and development is proportionate to the accumulation and reinvestment of profits gained in a free market."
Merriam-Webster: "an economic system characterized by private or corporate ownership of capital goods, by investments that are determined by private decision, and by prices, production, and the distribution of goods that are determined mainly by competition in a free market"
Not that you should be learning about economic or political systems from dictionaries.
Oh please. If you want some basic definitions, they are fine.
Your local library should have an entire section on these subjects.
You enjoy going to the library. I'll use whatever references are online. Speaking of which, here's a quote from a classic version of the Encyclopaedia Britannica: "Thus capitalism is essentially based on freedom - the freedom of the subscriber in risking his money, and the freedom of the consumer in giving or withholding his custom and the profit that it makes possible."
Competition is the key idea, not whether or not a company is free to sell their goods.
This is just bizarre. How can you have unfettered competition if a company isn't allowed to freely sell their goods?
You can have free market capitalism, but you can still have capitalism without a free market---capitalism tells us that private owners control the means of production, but doesn't tell us how they get their products to consumers.
Technically you can, in a very strict definition of capitalism, but in common usage, and also based on the theory of capitalism, and the common sense of what it means to own something, it is closely associated with being able to sell your goods in a free market. The references I found didn't associate them by accident.
People manage to find new jobs while working an existing job all the time. Some people work full time and pay their way for secondary education.
Some people spend countless hours goofing off while collecting unemployment and "looking" for another job. The sense of entitlement people have is just amazing.
Please, please use quotes
In the same vein, please use proper paragraphs.
I'm saying that, believing the police report, they don't have enough income to have real profit.
Which is why I think the police report just scratched the surface. They get far too much traffic to make so little in advertising. The Swedish newspaper estimate, where they quote sales numbers from a sales manager purportedly handling ads for the Pirate Bay, seem much more believable.
Nor did I say that. I just said I doubt they're making much profit, not that they don't try to.
Fair enough.
Capitalism != Free Market
It goes hand-in-hand. What does private ownership of capital mean if you can't sell your product freely? It's like "owning" a hammer and being told you can't pound screws with it. In fact, I checked multiple dictionaries and many of them explicitly mention free market as part of the definition of capitalism.
They'd much rather have the lazy security of a monopoly.
Existence of a monopoly doesn't mean there isn't a free market. Besides that, there is no monopoly in the games industry, and while the exec in question might be lamenting about the free market in action, it's a fairly innocuous complaint, and no different than makers of quality items often say in regards to Wal-Mart.
No, but we have numbers from a police investigation (who I regard as less biased than anti-piracy orgs), which say their income is around $170,000/year.
The police investigation number could be missing lots of income. They can only report what they found. If these guys are smart, they'd make sure any income they showed was near operating expenses, and keep the rest in secret accounts.
Considering it's on of the top-100 websites in terms of traffic, doesn't seem like profit to me.
Are you seriously claiming that a top-100 website can't make money off of advertising, and likely isn't? It's extremely naive.
The court also found them guilty of commercially profiting off of piracy, which is why the Wikipedia article infobox shows them as "commercial".
These guys never claimed to be operating as a non-profit. They just claimed that they weren't making a lot of money or were operating at a loss. Do you really think if they were generating a ton of money in ads they'd just donate the money to charity? Whatever profit they earned, they were going to keep for themselves. It's foolish to think otherwise.
Sure, it's all speculation
That's entirely the point. The fact is they are getting revenue from ads. Bandwidth and servers have been cheap for a very long time, and many sites make money via advertising.
It's rather naive to assume they aren't making a decent amount of profit out of it, or even if they aren't, that they aren't trying. Do you think if they were making a lot of money they would just give it all back? It's the whole reason why non-profits and open books are put in place.