> The funny thing is, elsewhere on this article will be people bitching about "Well I left Wikipedia, I got fed up of people coming in an making changes to articles, without discussing with people or following basic guidelines". I'm not saying you're in the wrong, I'm just saying there's no right answer here, and the fault is not with "Wikipedia" as an entity.
Well, yeah. Both cases will happen, and because the rules are enforced by individual people the enforcement will be spotty. I think some are arguing that there's a sort of "editor rot" filtering upwards in the hierarchy, though; that the good editors losses and bad editor gains are collectively outpacing the bad editor losses and good editor gains; and/or that good edit rejections and bad edit acceptances are collectively outpacing good edit acceptances and bad edit rejections.
In which case it doesn't matter that wiki is, or was, "good enough", because it's still a living site and capable of suffering from information entropy.
I noticed in the/. summary blurb, the rebuttal sounds weak; the accusation is that wiki's taking a net loss of editors, and the rebuttal is that wiki's getting a net gain of *readers*... but of course, not all readers are editors - this doesn't counter the accusation. Other accusations were that new articles and edits are being rejected, but the rebuttal only says that the number of people writing is stable - which doesn't really counter the accusation either.
> If the population grows, the flying car has to happen one day, because the roads just get too congested otherwise.
I'm not sure that's exactly the right solution, actually. (Mainly, I'm thinking that congestion in 3D is even more complex and dangerous than congestion in our current 1.5D. Both are easy when you're the only one on/in the road/sky, but there are more variables to manage in the sky crowd than on the road crowd). Flying cars are also impractical for energy reasons; if we're already using too much energy on cars and afraid that greater car ownership will make this worse, then *flying* car ownership will take this to new levels of energy extravagance. If we want to take to the air, we'd need to do it with something more like a flying bus that takes relative large loads of people between a relatively small number of stations. Then we have a crack at energy efficiency gains, space efficiency gains, and keeping the number of vehicles aloft (and the complexity of their routes) simple enough to be manageable.
But yes, we have a scaling problem as population density increases. We build on areas (scaling quadratically, then), and then as we start building up and down we're building in volumes (scaling kinda cubically). But roads area linear. People flow in toward the center, or need to go through the center, and it jams. The current solution is to try to channel people into highways that go around, to minimize time spent in the center, but that is a bandaid and requires everyone to use a lot more foresight in picking their route - and since it makes the trip longer, it's only enforced by negative feedback (try the middle first, only go around if it's already jammed... but by then it's too late, isn't it?). I think our mid-term solutions (until we can build a reliable flying bus) lie in implementations of some older ideas:
1) multi-level roads. Yeah, it's kind of the 1950s' vision of the future. In practical use, we already have elevated light rail, buried subways, and some new highway interchange hubs are stacked like 6 levels high. In a city, you'd probably want a stack like that at the center to manage the through-highways, and you'd want the ground-level roads to have a lot of clearance and width, because you'd want all the heavy vehicles to use the ground routes. Then you'd want the next tier(s) up to be for light city vehicles... private people commuting around in something like electric Smart cars and 4-6 passenger variants. The high tiers would be narrower and slower-traveling, of course, but less congested because all the delivery trucks and buses and dump trucks are below. You'd also be able to do different parking garage designs since you'd have multiple floors with road access.
Mostly, the extra tiers will only be in the densest city core, so that road area scales up more closely with population/traffic density. But the idea is that it'll work out better for both people living in the city and for people coming and going.
2) skyways for pedestrian travel. Some city cores also have already partly implemented this, such that a few big malls and hotels and convention centers and stadiums are all linked up and you can walk between them without getting rained/snowed on or hit by crazed taxi cabbies. It's equally effective to have these a few floors above ground or below ground, and it's also possible to have a few high traffic areas be powered conveyor belt type walkways like those we've already seen connecting airport terminals. Your routine can then be drive in ONCE, park ONCE, walk/conveyer around through your errands, get back in car and drive home ONCE. As opposed to the present day juggling act of cruise around for parking, park, do task, cruise more, park again, do task, and so on. Vastly less road use needed if implemented cleanly. It requires people to walk more, but we know from our European brethren that walking won't kill you, and IMO more Americans would walk if there was a clean, dry, non-dangerous route available, especially if it meant we could avoid a stressf
I'd only like to add that, for geographically larger services, there is less guarantee that things will scale as well as municipal services. (More people + area + money, and it becomes possible to shift money around while being less directly accountable...). But a hybrid of methods 1+2 should work well. Sliced one way, you'd end up with the public service establishing the baseline acceptable service and fees, which the private competition then has to meet or exceed in order to win business. They should be able to keep each other in check: unlike case 3, they can't really collude, because the public one is very directly accountable to the public (as opposed to a private company). So if the public service sucks, people shift to the private one and bitch loudly to the government. If the private service sucks, people shift to the public one and the private one then goes out of business and gets bought out by someone else who thinks they can do it better. In the interest of fair competition, you can also lock the tax:fee ratio on the public service, so that government can't (through corruption or collusion) stealthily rijigger the balance to unfairly help or hurt the private competitor.
Sliced a different way, if I recall correctly, many European nations decoupled ownership of the communications backbone from ownership of the services, and that worked out well too.
None of the Google deals are exclusives. ALL of the Microsoft deals that got them nailed in court are exclusives or near-exclusives.
You don't have to use adwords and adwords don't prevent anyone else from using their own ad service. You don't have to use android to get a phone. Google's licensing fee for out of print books is NOT exclusive: any other company can negotiate their own license.
Compare to things that got Microsoft in trouble: the big recent ones were having a 90%+ market share and then adding things into their OS that conflict with the products of competitors; and forcing contracts with PC vendors to not sell systems with other operating systems. Earlier legal problems involved wholesale stealing the products of their in-negotiation-to-be-business-partners.
To be equivalent, Google would have to... I don't know, they'd have to make using one of their most popular products lock you into their other products, or block you from using competitor's products, or using google product A means you're unable to use competitor product B that competes with google product B; or they'd have to cut deals with computer vendors and browser makers to the effect of "use ONLY google, or you won't be allowed to use google at all without a crippling high fee". Or be a monopoly in something and then continually intentionally break standards and APIs so that any competitor is in a constant losing race to try to maintain compatibility.
TL;DR CAR ANALOGY:
Google merely makes good gas and is using that to also make good gas stations; they are popular, but other companies also make good gas and run their own gas stations. Microsoft makes cars with special bolts that explosively eject non-Microsoft wheels when you drive over 50mph on a Tuesday.
I don't wear a watch at home, but I do when I go out, because the clocks out there can be off by +/- 15 minutes. This is true even at my college, and since that margin of error can mean being way too early for class (and bored) or horribly late for class (and missing things), the watch keeps me on time.
I was thinking about those Niven stories when I saw the blurb on the front page, and that's why I clicked to see comments.
In the Niven stories, basically, as more people got frozen, the number of their potential heirs increased, until eventually they got the corpsicles declared legally dead so they could get the money for themselves.
Later, it was possible to sometimes harvest organs from the frozen corpses, so this was also done. And later still, when it was possible to revive some of them, since they were legally dead they had no rights...
I'd like to add that patronage not only has a long history, but that it's also still being practiced right now, in nearly every community: every high school and college band is being paid for by some combination of the community, the students, and the students' parents.
I bring it up because it shows that we're already comfortable with the basics, and because I don't think purely anonymous internet patronage would work well enough on its own. But community patronage for rehearsal space and local performances, combined with internet patronage? That just might work. The college students in particular are already plenty talented and capable of playing gigs for cash, and internet donations, however sporadic and unreliable, might be just enough to bump a hobby-that-sometimes-breaks-even up to the level of an actual stable career for a LOT more musicians than are currently able to make a living from it.
For the music-loving public, compare the current model (most musicians 'starving', and a few make mega and get rich) to one where we have a LOT more musicians making music and getting merely 'normal' pay from it. The latter model works out better for both the public and the musicians - the public gets more and cheaper music, and the musicians get to pursue their calling full time.
Could this concept be pushed into other media? Certainly, though perhaps not as quickly as music could be right away. Theatre, movies, and even software could benefit from the hybrid model. Software's already touching on it with open source projects being sponsored by companies (they get the use of the software for themselves, and then a bunch of prestige for releasing it). TV shows once followed this model, too, Back In The Day.
After you have those random five minute paths, you can also change coordinates from absolute to relative - the path starts at (0,0) and proceeds onward. Then rotate the path a random number of degrees, around a random point along the path. If you also have z-coordinates (possible, if the GPS unit's map had altitude data), then pick another random point along the path and shift the entire path such that that point is at sea level.
My initial version was pretty anonymous already, but you now have the road map captcha from hell.
A guess: you start out with a long list of personal data - driver ID, car make and model and year, and a longass list of coordinates with timestamps (from which the speed and braking and all that can be derived).
Throw away all the names, so that you only have the car make/model and the path. Then throw away the first and last two minutes of driving of every trip. Cut all the trips into random five minute slices. Convert their timestamps from absolute time to relative time (the trip starts at 0 and each frame is one higher than the last).
You now have a long list of five minute trips associated with a make and model of car, and the most personal information you can hope to get from it is that you can map makes and models of cars to roads they travel, but you can't recover Who or When, you can't reconstruct the full body of a single trip (or even a single route), and you can't reconstruct where any individual car parks.
But you retain a lot of data about how people in general drive types of cars on types of roads.
Perhaps think of it this way instead: there are additional visual cues that become possible with additional graphical oomph, which might be employed for more creative user interface options. PC games have shied away from trying this because developers can't count on the players having the same hardware - most graphics chips sold are still the weak built-in intel ones, IIRC. MS and Sony have staked their reputation this generation on big budget eye candy, so they haven't really hit their peak of using the new power in interesting ways either.
But Nintendo? They just might do it. They played around with touchpads and dual screens and motion sensors when the other big players sneered in derision, and they made it work. Give them high resolution and a pile of pixel shaders and we'll see games where things like the presence/absence/color of lighting, or the physical textures of objects, or the faint ripple of heat radiation in the distance, might have actual gameplay significance. It could be a flop or it could be interesting, but I'd rather let Nintendo try it and see. We may actually get games out of it that are more immersive, instead of the current bunch that wash everything out with bloom.
"Some people would claim that adapting the game to you just rewards mediocrity (i.e. you don't get rewarded for playing well). Others would say that it restricts the freedom of expression for the game designer."
What, their freedom to guess wrong and alienate a large chunk of their playerbase? Player skill is going to be on a bell curve, and the best you can do without some dynamic adjustment is to hope to hell you've nailed the difficulty perfectly at the top of the curve; that way you're the least wrong for the fewest number of players... but even then, you're still going to be unplayably wrong for 10% and irritating to another 20%. And this will only reward skill for that narrow slice of players for which the game was initially slightly too hard (and then becomes pefect as the player improves).
The flaw in rubberbanding is only that it still can't read your mind. The developer's idea of "normal" may actually still be too easy or too hard, and then the game guarantees that it stays too easy or too hard throughout, no matter what you the player do. Really what we need is a hybrid between the old "easy/normal/hard" choice and dynamic adjustment. That puts enough wiggle room back in that the developer can be wrong yet the player can still fix it and have fun. And the holy grail here is to have it require minimal interaction - if you implement this right, it's correct by default for the largest reasonably attainable number of players, and for the rest it's correctable through the simple and well-understood easy/normal/hard mode choice.
Yes, risk vs impulse buy is probably the major issue here.
The thing is that, additionally, this game purchase decision is not made in isolation, but in context of our total gaming budgets.
In other words: what are prices X and Y, such that most people would buy one game at X, but would but two at Y, even though 2Y > X? Wouldn't the game industry like to know that! They'd want to price games at the highest Y that works.
IMO, the main logic was probably that since the 360 and PS3 cost more than the last generation, their owners have a higher game price threshhold too. In other words, they'd buy 2 games at $50 each but they'd still buy both at $60 each, so might as well charge $60; more expensive extra controllers were probably reasoned through in the same way. I leave it as an exercise to the reader as to whether this was correct, but, note the Wii pricing model and the Wii's success...
It would seem to follow from this that, as the consoles are older now and the console prices are dropping, the game prices will also slip, otherwise the game sales won't keep pace with the console sales. Or in other words, the lower console price will mean a larger market, but the new owners are the ones more sensitive to prices, and now all the $60 games are really competing with the previous year's games that the new owners haven't played and which have been discounted to $40 (or are easily found used)... the new owners might buy two games at $50, but only one at $60.
Here is the reason this is going to be annoying: consider TV in general. Commercials on TV are already targeted, as far as targeting is possible. They guess "this type of person watches this type of channel at this time slot" and choose the ads based on that.
And thus we see the same damn marketing campaign over and over and over and over, and this is annoying as hell, because even if the targeting was right, the commercials themselves are still the jarring attention-grabbing things they always were, because, hey, you might only ever see that one once so it has to get your attention! Except you end up seeing it 30 times and it started to grate after the third time.
What this sort of clumsily tells us is that once you break the commercials down into narrower categories, a few companies dominate each one. It's like there's not enough competition (either overall, or just in the ad-buying process) to fully populate each category. Or, alternately, the ad-men are over ten years behind adapting to the times. Better targeting is going to mean the same total pool of commercials gets sliced into even more, smaller categories.
And what *that* tells us is that, basically, if smartscreens are all over the place delivering targeted ads, we are each going to be followed around all day by *the same damn ad repeated over and over and over and over*. You won't be able to escape it! Maddening!
Because it might turn out that sitting around for 30 minutes a day at >1g is enough to spend the rest of the day at 0g? Which would mean you could get away with a smaller centrifuge that you put the astronauts through in shifts, which is a lot cheaper than spinning the whole station?
You'd only be able to test that kind of thing if you have the ability to put then through the other 23.5 hours/day in 0g for long enough to get useful muscle and bone mass checks after the test (to see if it was working).
Although I suppose the ground based test might still be useful for other things - like seeing if you can stimulate increased bone density. Then maybe you could spend a month "storing up" excess before going into space...
What comes to mind is that, as far as I know, we only use helium for three things... lighter-than-air stuff, as a neutral gas in very deep dive air tanks, and as a coolant for nifty medical and sciency devices. Part of the reason, IIRC, is that it's just that it's a relatively cheap byproduct of existing oil and natural gas mining. But we could just as easily use hydrogen for the lighter-than-air stuff and other gases or techniques for the coolants. I'm not so sure about the diving, but then, we use a hell of a lot less helium for that than we do for blimps or coolant, so it may be that diving will be fine, since using helium to fill gigantic balloons will price itself out of that market before it prices itself out of the diving air market...
If the wiki bans are on specific pages? Probably a lot of the literature classes in that school are required to certain books like 1984 and write an essay or report on them. The wiki ban would be a weak attempt at stopping them from trying to cheat.
> There were some great ideas back in the days when computers were in there infancy and a lot of them have been abandoned for the most part. Like trinary computing for instance. The building blocks of the computers that you see today were partially designed because of technological limitations at the time. The mechanical underpinnings of the first computers are still present today. I don't care if I'm really wrong about this point (I've been wrong before), but I think computing really needs to transcend a system based on 0s and 1s.
The short answer is that you're probably wrong on this point, but only due to lack of information. I probably won't do much better trying to respond. Trying to boil down a few semesters of higher level CS classes here: essentially, once you get to studying the fundamentals of computation, it turns out that all the really good methods are equally powerful. Powerful in terms of what kind of problems they can and can't solve.
So in practical terms, what happens is that the hardware that gets produced does its thing based on whatever was more efficient from the stuff the materials science and electrical engineering people figure out. If they figure out a way to get three states working cheaper than two, then yay, we get the benefit of the resulting lower prices or incremental linear speedup - but our algorithms will still be doing things the same way.
It could also be an interpretation thing. Like "there are 2 to 5 sites I ALWAYS have open, and a bunch of transient ones that come and go as needed, but those others don't really count...". Which is a pretty practical way to think about it for those who're already comfortable with tabs.
At least, that's one of the only two ways I ever see people browse anymore; there are the ones who never use tabs, vs the ones who're used to them and will automatically open a ton of them from time to time. It mirrors the fluency (and available compute power) change that happened with the desktop, IMO; remember when people used to only ever have ONE program open at a time, even five years after it was practical to have a bunch running at once? And now these days most people think nothing of having 4+ things minimized at a time while they do something in some other maximized window. And the power users moved on to having four programs minimized and six more up and tiled *just so*, one of which is firefox with ten essential sites already open...
There are three things that come to mind that a "legitimized" money trading feature would have to address - all related to the poor in-game effects of the current model.
1 - It would have to remove or negate the player behavior of farmers. The camping (and subsequent artificially increased rarity of gold/items), the spamming, the foreign language ninja looters, etc. IMO a certain amount of that is human nature, but the only "cure" is to make sure that in game behavior cannot translate into real-life profit. In other words, this money trade has to be one-way: you can spend real money to buy gold, but you can't trade in gold to get real money.
2 - It would have to address the effect on the game economy. If all normal players are still making the same in-game income, but inflation screws up the prices, that really screws around with the difficulty level of the game. And if that happens in the in-game auction house, it encourages the loot farming from #1.
3 - It would have to address the effect of twinking on the player-vs-player side of things, and the positive feedback loop of #3 into #2 and #1 - pay money up front, twink character, dominate the best loot areas to corner the auction house. Not only are the twinks, um, twinked... but everyone else is under-geared due to inflation limiting their ability to buy gear and mass farming limiting their ability to loot gear (and even under-leveled due to the same mass farming limiting their ability to get XP).
This requires more than just tacking on one more gui panel for confirming your credit card number for gold++. It requires a major rehaul of the game mechanics. I'd do it three ways; first, you'd need to quasi-instance *everywhere* in a load-balancing way instead of a per-group way, so everyone has equal access to resources. You'd need to have "matchmaking" code that takes gear into account, not just level, such that players are put into appropriate instances except for whatever free-for-all zones the game has. And you'd probably want the money->gold flow to feed only into the auction house; equal access to resources means that while this inflates prices in the auction house up to a new equilibrium, said equilibrium actually exists - normal players can get stuff to sell too, so normal players a) cap prices by undercutting and b) make more money, thus c) are still able to afford the stuff they're supposed to be able to afford on the auction house.
And even then I'm sure it'd probably take more new checks and balances, because that auction house equilibrium could still be *really high* and I'm not sure it's a good idea for the game mechanics to *force* every player in an MMO to choose to either fork over more dollars or spend excessive time playing the mandatory auction-house mini-game. And the improved matchmaking and instancing code would take a lot of work. And deciding how to manage the free-for-all PvP areas would be a lot of careful work too - too much, and twinking is mandatory, too little and you drive away twinks who were willing to hand you big bags of money.
I guess my point is: I'm not yet hearing about the big MMO companies actually trying to make this work; I'm just hearing them try to make a quick buck on it by bolting on a new moneysink without dealing with the issues that'll potentially ruin the game.
No. Copyright is explicitly *not* a "natural right". That's why it's a transferable thing that legislatures get to set the length and restrictiveness of, rather than being something in the US Bill of Rights or your nation of choice's equivalent. It could, entirely plausibly, be arbitrarily changed today by an act of law; lengthened, shortened, broadened, weakened, whatever - it's happened before and it'll happen again.
If it were a natural right, it would, logically, be non-transferable and last for exactly the artist's lifespan, since it'd considered inherently a part of the author. You can't part with your freedoms, and you don't get to keep them after you die; contracts that do the first are invalid and doing the second doesn't make any sense.
Note that the entities litigating this case aren't governments or artists or even human beings, but companies that own companies that own companies that bought copyright from artists. Under 95 year terms; so long that if you were an adult when the work was created, it won't be free until you're dead and buried, and probably your kids too.
Herd immunity is important because, no matter how hard (within reason) you try, the vaccine won't be 100% effective in 100% of the population. But if a high enough percentage of the population is immune, then the density of vulnerable people will be too low for the disease to spread.
Note from that link that the required percentage is pretty high for Measles and Pertussis (whooping cough), and still pretty high for the others listed. High enough that if the vaccines were optional, we'd probably be well under herd immunity.
You took a chip design class yet never covered CISC vs RISC, such that you currently insist the instruction set doesn't make a difference? This was only briefly covered in a CS class I took, but it was pretty clear when we looked at a trivially simple chip directly wired vs the same thing done in microcode.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Microcode#Microcode_versus_VLIW_and_RISC may help refresh your memory if your class DID cover that but you forgot. Or, to summarize in context: all that extra translation hardware for more complex instruction sets costs transistors and wiring and performance, vs simpler instruction sets that can be implemented without microcode. Higher clocks speeds and pipelining and multicore will, of course, widen the gap even more. All else being equal, this is part of where the huge difference in power requirements comes from.
And yet, I could entirely see people running private WoW servers for a playerbase of just 10... that's perfectly fine if you're not huge into PvP and have some kind of script to populate/simulate the auction house. That's enough for those ten players to each have two accounts (one alliance, one horde) with a few characters on each... basically exactly one guild on each side and that little group of friends explores the world together.
For many people, it's the huge persistent world full of things to do that serves as the foundation of the game, and your friends that play it cooperatively are what keeps drawing you back in. We could call it a... hmmm... Modestly Multiplayer Online Game, and keep the MMO acronym just as it is.
For a max of 10 concurrent users, it wouldn't require all that beefy a server or all that much bandwidth, and since cable/fiber connections are relatively common these days... hmm. Actually it might be possible to make a game explicitly designed for small persistent servers. I can see the market for a dual-mode game like that... the client comes with a server, you can pay monthly to play on the huge company servers, run your own miniserver for free. Maybe it'd even have a middle option of paying a small monthly licensing fee to run a mid-range userbase server (100ish concurrent users)? Anyway, the idea of a game that scales from single-player all the way up to many-thousand-player is kinda neat. It'd still make the company money at all levels, since the singletons still buy the box like a normal game and the hardcore still pay the monthly official server access fee...
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He was making reference to the West Side Story "When you're a Jet..." gang membership song. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=exGJsv6ZNlo
> The funny thing is, elsewhere on this article will be people bitching about "Well I left Wikipedia, I got fed up of people coming in an making changes to articles, without discussing with people or following basic guidelines". I'm not saying you're in the wrong, I'm just saying there's no right answer here, and the fault is not with "Wikipedia" as an entity.
Well, yeah. Both cases will happen, and because the rules are enforced by individual people the enforcement will be spotty. I think some are arguing that there's a sort of "editor rot" filtering upwards in the hierarchy, though; that the good editors losses and bad editor gains are collectively outpacing the bad editor losses and good editor gains; and/or that good edit rejections and bad edit acceptances are collectively outpacing good edit acceptances and bad edit rejections.
In which case it doesn't matter that wiki is, or was, "good enough", because it's still a living site and capable of suffering from information entropy.
I noticed in the /. summary blurb, the rebuttal sounds weak; the accusation is that wiki's taking a net loss of editors, and the rebuttal is that wiki's getting a net gain of *readers*... but of course, not all readers are editors - this doesn't counter the accusation. Other accusations were that new articles and edits are being rejected, but the rebuttal only says that the number of people writing is stable - which doesn't really counter the accusation either.
> If the population grows, the flying car has to happen one day, because the roads just get too congested otherwise.
I'm not sure that's exactly the right solution, actually. (Mainly, I'm thinking that congestion in 3D is even more complex and dangerous than congestion in our current 1.5D. Both are easy when you're the only one on/in the road/sky, but there are more variables to manage in the sky crowd than on the road crowd). Flying cars are also impractical for energy reasons; if we're already using too much energy on cars and afraid that greater car ownership will make this worse, then *flying* car ownership will take this to new levels of energy extravagance. If we want to take to the air, we'd need to do it with something more like a flying bus that takes relative large loads of people between a relatively small number of stations. Then we have a crack at energy efficiency gains, space efficiency gains, and keeping the number of vehicles aloft (and the complexity of their routes) simple enough to be manageable.
But yes, we have a scaling problem as population density increases. We build on areas (scaling quadratically, then), and then as we start building up and down we're building in volumes (scaling kinda cubically). But roads area linear. People flow in toward the center, or need to go through the center, and it jams. The current solution is to try to channel people into highways that go around, to minimize time spent in the center, but that is a bandaid and requires everyone to use a lot more foresight in picking their route - and since it makes the trip longer, it's only enforced by negative feedback (try the middle first, only go around if it's already jammed... but by then it's too late, isn't it?). I think our mid-term solutions (until we can build a reliable flying bus) lie in implementations of some older ideas:
1) multi-level roads. Yeah, it's kind of the 1950s' vision of the future. In practical use, we already have elevated light rail, buried subways, and some new highway interchange hubs are stacked like 6 levels high. In a city, you'd probably want a stack like that at the center to manage the through-highways, and you'd want the ground-level roads to have a lot of clearance and width, because you'd want all the heavy vehicles to use the ground routes. Then you'd want the next tier(s) up to be for light city vehicles... private people commuting around in something like electric Smart cars and 4-6 passenger variants. The high tiers would be narrower and slower-traveling, of course, but less congested because all the delivery trucks and buses and dump trucks are below. You'd also be able to do different parking garage designs since you'd have multiple floors with road access.
Mostly, the extra tiers will only be in the densest city core, so that road area scales up more closely with population/traffic density. But the idea is that it'll work out better for both people living in the city and for people coming and going.
2) skyways for pedestrian travel. Some city cores also have already partly implemented this, such that a few big malls and hotels and convention centers and stadiums are all linked up and you can walk between them without getting rained/snowed on or hit by crazed taxi cabbies. It's equally effective to have these a few floors above ground or below ground, and it's also possible to have a few high traffic areas be powered conveyor belt type walkways like those we've already seen connecting airport terminals. Your routine can then be drive in ONCE, park ONCE, walk/conveyer around through your errands, get back in car and drive home ONCE. As opposed to the present day juggling act of cruise around for parking, park, do task, cruise more, park again, do task, and so on. Vastly less road use needed if implemented cleanly. It requires people to walk more, but we know from our European brethren that walking won't kill you, and IMO more Americans would walk if there was a clean, dry, non-dangerous route available, especially if it meant we could avoid a stressf
That was really well written.
I'd only like to add that, for geographically larger services, there is less guarantee that things will scale as well as municipal services. (More people + area + money, and it becomes possible to shift money around while being less directly accountable...). But a hybrid of methods 1+2 should work well. Sliced one way, you'd end up with the public service establishing the baseline acceptable service and fees, which the private competition then has to meet or exceed in order to win business. They should be able to keep each other in check: unlike case 3, they can't really collude, because the public one is very directly accountable to the public (as opposed to a private company). So if the public service sucks, people shift to the private one and bitch loudly to the government. If the private service sucks, people shift to the public one and the private one then goes out of business and gets bought out by someone else who thinks they can do it better. In the interest of fair competition, you can also lock the tax:fee ratio on the public service, so that government can't (through corruption or collusion) stealthily rijigger the balance to unfairly help or hurt the private competitor.
Sliced a different way, if I recall correctly, many European nations decoupled ownership of the communications backbone from ownership of the services, and that worked out well too.
None of the Google deals are exclusives. ALL of the Microsoft deals that got them nailed in court are exclusives or near-exclusives.
You don't have to use adwords and adwords don't prevent anyone else from using their own ad service. You don't have to use android to get a phone. Google's licensing fee for out of print books is NOT exclusive: any other company can negotiate their own license.
Compare to things that got Microsoft in trouble: the big recent ones were having a 90%+ market share and then adding things into their OS that conflict with the products of competitors; and forcing contracts with PC vendors to not sell systems with other operating systems. Earlier legal problems involved wholesale stealing the products of their in-negotiation-to-be-business-partners.
To be equivalent, Google would have to... I don't know, they'd have to make using one of their most popular products lock you into their other products, or block you from using competitor's products, or using google product A means you're unable to use competitor product B that competes with google product B; or they'd have to cut deals with computer vendors and browser makers to the effect of "use ONLY google, or you won't be allowed to use google at all without a crippling high fee". Or be a monopoly in something and then continually intentionally break standards and APIs so that any competitor is in a constant losing race to try to maintain compatibility.
TL;DR CAR ANALOGY:
Google merely makes good gas and is using that to also make good gas stations; they are popular, but other companies also make good gas and run their own gas stations. Microsoft makes cars with special bolts that explosively eject non-Microsoft wheels when you drive over 50mph on a Tuesday.
I don't wear a watch at home, but I do when I go out, because the clocks out there can be off by +/- 15 minutes. This is true even at my college, and since that margin of error can mean being way too early for class (and bored) or horribly late for class (and missing things), the watch keeps me on time.
I was thinking about those Niven stories when I saw the blurb on the front page, and that's why I clicked to see comments.
In the Niven stories, basically, as more people got frozen, the number of their potential heirs increased, until eventually they got the corpsicles declared legally dead so they could get the money for themselves.
Later, it was possible to sometimes harvest organs from the frozen corpses, so this was also done. And later still, when it was possible to revive some of them, since they were legally dead they had no rights...
I'd like to add that patronage not only has a long history, but that it's also still being practiced right now, in nearly every community: every high school and college band is being paid for by some combination of the community, the students, and the students' parents.
I bring it up because it shows that we're already comfortable with the basics, and because I don't think purely anonymous internet patronage would work well enough on its own. But community patronage for rehearsal space and local performances, combined with internet patronage? That just might work. The college students in particular are already plenty talented and capable of playing gigs for cash, and internet donations, however sporadic and unreliable, might be just enough to bump a hobby-that-sometimes-breaks-even up to the level of an actual stable career for a LOT more musicians than are currently able to make a living from it.
For the music-loving public, compare the current model (most musicians 'starving', and a few make mega and get rich) to one where we have a LOT more musicians making music and getting merely 'normal' pay from it. The latter model works out better for both the public and the musicians - the public gets more and cheaper music, and the musicians get to pursue their calling full time.
Could this concept be pushed into other media? Certainly, though perhaps not as quickly as music could be right away. Theatre, movies, and even software could benefit from the hybrid model. Software's already touching on it with open source projects being sponsored by companies (they get the use of the software for themselves, and then a bunch of prestige for releasing it). TV shows once followed this model, too, Back In The Day.
On reflection, I realized I left part out:
After you have those random five minute paths, you can also change coordinates from absolute to relative - the path starts at (0,0) and proceeds onward. Then rotate the path a random number of degrees, around a random point along the path. If you also have z-coordinates (possible, if the GPS unit's map had altitude data), then pick another random point along the path and shift the entire path such that that point is at sea level.
My initial version was pretty anonymous already, but you now have the road map captcha from hell.
A guess: you start out with a long list of personal data - driver ID, car make and model and year, and a longass list of coordinates with timestamps (from which the speed and braking and all that can be derived).
Throw away all the names, so that you only have the car make/model and the path. Then throw away the first and last two minutes of driving of every trip. Cut all the trips into random five minute slices. Convert their timestamps from absolute time to relative time (the trip starts at 0 and each frame is one higher than the last).
You now have a long list of five minute trips associated with a make and model of car, and the most personal information you can hope to get from it is that you can map makes and models of cars to roads they travel, but you can't recover Who or When, you can't reconstruct the full body of a single trip (or even a single route), and you can't reconstruct where any individual car parks.
But you retain a lot of data about how people in general drive types of cars on types of roads.
Perhaps think of it this way instead: there are additional visual cues that become possible with additional graphical oomph, which might be employed for more creative user interface options. PC games have shied away from trying this because developers can't count on the players having the same hardware - most graphics chips sold are still the weak built-in intel ones, IIRC. MS and Sony have staked their reputation this generation on big budget eye candy, so they haven't really hit their peak of using the new power in interesting ways either.
But Nintendo? They just might do it. They played around with touchpads and dual screens and motion sensors when the other big players sneered in derision, and they made it work. Give them high resolution and a pile of pixel shaders and we'll see games where things like the presence/absence/color of lighting, or the physical textures of objects, or the faint ripple of heat radiation in the distance, might have actual gameplay significance. It could be a flop or it could be interesting, but I'd rather let Nintendo try it and see. We may actually get games out of it that are more immersive, instead of the current bunch that wash everything out with bloom.
"Some people would claim that adapting the game to you just rewards mediocrity (i.e. you don't get rewarded for playing well). Others would say that it restricts the freedom of expression for the game designer."
What, their freedom to guess wrong and alienate a large chunk of their playerbase? Player skill is going to be on a bell curve, and the best you can do without some dynamic adjustment is to hope to hell you've nailed the difficulty perfectly at the top of the curve; that way you're the least wrong for the fewest number of players... but even then, you're still going to be unplayably wrong for 10% and irritating to another 20%. And this will only reward skill for that narrow slice of players for which the game was initially slightly too hard (and then becomes pefect as the player improves).
The flaw in rubberbanding is only that it still can't read your mind. The developer's idea of "normal" may actually still be too easy or too hard, and then the game guarantees that it stays too easy or too hard throughout, no matter what you the player do. Really what we need is a hybrid between the old "easy/normal/hard" choice and dynamic adjustment. That puts enough wiggle room back in that the developer can be wrong yet the player can still fix it and have fun. And the holy grail here is to have it require minimal interaction - if you implement this right, it's correct by default for the largest reasonably attainable number of players, and for the rest it's correctable through the simple and well-understood easy/normal/hard mode choice.
Yes, risk vs impulse buy is probably the major issue here.
The thing is that, additionally, this game purchase decision is not made in isolation, but in context of our total gaming budgets.
In other words: what are prices X and Y, such that most people would buy one game at X, but would but two at Y, even though 2Y > X? Wouldn't the game industry like to know that! They'd want to price games at the highest Y that works.
IMO, the main logic was probably that since the 360 and PS3 cost more than the last generation, their owners have a higher game price threshhold too. In other words, they'd buy 2 games at $50 each but they'd still buy both at $60 each, so might as well charge $60; more expensive extra controllers were probably reasoned through in the same way. I leave it as an exercise to the reader as to whether this was correct, but, note the Wii pricing model and the Wii's success...
It would seem to follow from this that, as the consoles are older now and the console prices are dropping, the game prices will also slip, otherwise the game sales won't keep pace with the console sales. Or in other words, the lower console price will mean a larger market, but the new owners are the ones more sensitive to prices, and now all the $60 games are really competing with the previous year's games that the new owners haven't played and which have been discounted to $40 (or are easily found used)... the new owners might buy two games at $50, but only one at $60.
Here is the reason this is going to be annoying: consider TV in general. Commercials on TV are already targeted, as far as targeting is possible. They guess "this type of person watches this type of channel at this time slot" and choose the ads based on that.
And thus we see the same damn marketing campaign over and over and over and over, and this is annoying as hell, because even if the targeting was right, the commercials themselves are still the jarring attention-grabbing things they always were, because, hey, you might only ever see that one once so it has to get your attention! Except you end up seeing it 30 times and it started to grate after the third time.
What this sort of clumsily tells us is that once you break the commercials down into narrower categories, a few companies dominate each one. It's like there's not enough competition (either overall, or just in the ad-buying process) to fully populate each category. Or, alternately, the ad-men are over ten years behind adapting to the times. Better targeting is going to mean the same total pool of commercials gets sliced into even more, smaller categories.
And what *that* tells us is that, basically, if smartscreens are all over the place delivering targeted ads, we are each going to be followed around all day by *the same damn ad repeated over and over and over and over*. You won't be able to escape it! Maddening!
Because it might turn out that sitting around for 30 minutes a day at >1g is enough to spend the rest of the day at 0g? Which would mean you could get away with a smaller centrifuge that you put the astronauts through in shifts, which is a lot cheaper than spinning the whole station?
You'd only be able to test that kind of thing if you have the ability to put then through the other 23.5 hours/day in 0g for long enough to get useful muscle and bone mass checks after the test (to see if it was working).
Although I suppose the ground based test might still be useful for other things - like seeing if you can stimulate increased bone density. Then maybe you could spend a month "storing up" excess before going into space...
What comes to mind is that, as far as I know, we only use helium for three things... lighter-than-air stuff, as a neutral gas in very deep dive air tanks, and as a coolant for nifty medical and sciency devices. Part of the reason, IIRC, is that it's just that it's a relatively cheap byproduct of existing oil and natural gas mining. But we could just as easily use hydrogen for the lighter-than-air stuff and other gases or techniques for the coolants. I'm not so sure about the diving, but then, we use a hell of a lot less helium for that than we do for blimps or coolant, so it may be that diving will be fine, since using helium to fill gigantic balloons will price itself out of that market before it prices itself out of the diving air market...
If the wiki bans are on specific pages? Probably a lot of the literature classes in that school are required to certain books like 1984 and write an essay or report on them. The wiki ban would be a weak attempt at stopping them from trying to cheat.
> There were some great ideas back in the days when computers were in there infancy and a lot of them have been abandoned for the most part. Like trinary computing for instance. The building blocks of the computers that you see today were partially designed because of technological limitations at the time. The mechanical underpinnings of the first computers are still present today. I don't care if I'm really wrong about this point (I've been wrong before), but I think computing really needs to transcend a system based on 0s and 1s.
The short answer is that you're probably wrong on this point, but only due to lack of information. I probably won't do much better trying to respond. Trying to boil down a few semesters of higher level CS classes here: essentially, once you get to studying the fundamentals of computation, it turns out that all the really good methods are equally powerful. Powerful in terms of what kind of problems they can and can't solve.
So in practical terms, what happens is that the hardware that gets produced does its thing based on whatever was more efficient from the stuff the materials science and electrical engineering people figure out. If they figure out a way to get three states working cheaper than two, then yay, we get the benefit of the resulting lower prices or incremental linear speedup - but our algorithms will still be doing things the same way.
It could also be an interpretation thing. Like "there are 2 to 5 sites I ALWAYS have open, and a bunch of transient ones that come and go as needed, but those others don't really count...". Which is a pretty practical way to think about it for those who're already comfortable with tabs.
At least, that's one of the only two ways I ever see people browse anymore; there are the ones who never use tabs, vs the ones who're used to them and will automatically open a ton of them from time to time. It mirrors the fluency (and available compute power) change that happened with the desktop, IMO; remember when people used to only ever have ONE program open at a time, even five years after it was practical to have a bunch running at once? And now these days most people think nothing of having 4+ things minimized at a time while they do something in some other maximized window. And the power users moved on to having four programs minimized and six more up and tiled *just so*, one of which is firefox with ten essential sites already open...
There are three things that come to mind that a "legitimized" money trading feature would have to address - all related to the poor in-game effects of the current model.
1 - It would have to remove or negate the player behavior of farmers. The camping (and subsequent artificially increased rarity of gold/items), the spamming, the foreign language ninja looters, etc. IMO a certain amount of that is human nature, but the only "cure" is to make sure that in game behavior cannot translate into real-life profit. In other words, this money trade has to be one-way: you can spend real money to buy gold, but you can't trade in gold to get real money.
2 - It would have to address the effect on the game economy. If all normal players are still making the same in-game income, but inflation screws up the prices, that really screws around with the difficulty level of the game. And if that happens in the in-game auction house, it encourages the loot farming from #1.
3 - It would have to address the effect of twinking on the player-vs-player side of things, and the positive feedback loop of #3 into #2 and #1 - pay money up front, twink character, dominate the best loot areas to corner the auction house. Not only are the twinks, um, twinked... but everyone else is under-geared due to inflation limiting their ability to buy gear and mass farming limiting their ability to loot gear (and even under-leveled due to the same mass farming limiting their ability to get XP).
This requires more than just tacking on one more gui panel for confirming your credit card number for gold++. It requires a major rehaul of the game mechanics. I'd do it three ways; first, you'd need to quasi-instance *everywhere* in a load-balancing way instead of a per-group way, so everyone has equal access to resources. You'd need to have "matchmaking" code that takes gear into account, not just level, such that players are put into appropriate instances except for whatever free-for-all zones the game has. And you'd probably want the money->gold flow to feed only into the auction house; equal access to resources means that while this inflates prices in the auction house up to a new equilibrium, said equilibrium actually exists - normal players can get stuff to sell too, so normal players a) cap prices by undercutting and b) make more money, thus c) are still able to afford the stuff they're supposed to be able to afford on the auction house.
And even then I'm sure it'd probably take more new checks and balances, because that auction house equilibrium could still be *really high* and I'm not sure it's a good idea for the game mechanics to *force* every player in an MMO to choose to either fork over more dollars or spend excessive time playing the mandatory auction-house mini-game. And the improved matchmaking and instancing code would take a lot of work. And deciding how to manage the free-for-all PvP areas would be a lot of careful work too - too much, and twinking is mandatory, too little and you drive away twinks who were willing to hand you big bags of money.
I guess my point is: I'm not yet hearing about the big MMO companies actually trying to make this work; I'm just hearing them try to make a quick buck on it by bolting on a new moneysink without dealing with the issues that'll potentially ruin the game.
No. Copyright is explicitly *not* a "natural right". That's why it's a transferable thing that legislatures get to set the length and restrictiveness of, rather than being something in the US Bill of Rights or your nation of choice's equivalent. It could, entirely plausibly, be arbitrarily changed today by an act of law; lengthened, shortened, broadened, weakened, whatever - it's happened before and it'll happen again.
If it were a natural right, it would, logically, be non-transferable and last for exactly the artist's lifespan, since it'd considered inherently a part of the author. You can't part with your freedoms, and you don't get to keep them after you die; contracts that do the first are invalid and doing the second doesn't make any sense.
Note that the entities litigating this case aren't governments or artists or even human beings, but companies that own companies that own companies that bought copyright from artists. Under 95 year terms; so long that if you were an adult when the work was created, it won't be free until you're dead and buried, and probably your kids too.
It's because of http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Herd_immunity
Herd immunity is important because, no matter how hard (within reason) you try, the vaccine won't be 100% effective in 100% of the population. But if a high enough percentage of the population is immune, then the density of vulnerable people will be too low for the disease to spread.
Note from that link that the required percentage is pretty high for Measles and Pertussis (whooping cough), and still pretty high for the others listed. High enough that if the vaccines were optional, we'd probably be well under herd immunity.
You took a chip design class yet never covered CISC vs RISC, such that you currently insist the instruction set doesn't make a difference? This was only briefly covered in a CS class I took, but it was pretty clear when we looked at a trivially simple chip directly wired vs the same thing done in microcode.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Microcode#Microcode_versus_VLIW_and_RISC may help refresh your memory if your class DID cover that but you forgot. Or, to summarize in context: all that extra translation hardware for more complex instruction sets costs transistors and wiring and performance, vs simpler instruction sets that can be implemented without microcode. Higher clocks speeds and pipelining and multicore will, of course, widen the gap even more. All else being equal, this is part of where the huge difference in power requirements comes from.
Hmm. So use the engines for takeoff and climb, then do long glides with the engines idle or off...
Essentially, aerial hypermiling.
And yet, I could entirely see people running private WoW servers for a playerbase of just 10... that's perfectly fine if you're not huge into PvP and have some kind of script to populate/simulate the auction house. That's enough for those ten players to each have two accounts (one alliance, one horde) with a few characters on each... basically exactly one guild on each side and that little group of friends explores the world together.
For many people, it's the huge persistent world full of things to do that serves as the foundation of the game, and your friends that play it cooperatively are what keeps drawing you back in. We could call it a... hmmm... Modestly Multiplayer Online Game, and keep the MMO acronym just as it is.
For a max of 10 concurrent users, it wouldn't require all that beefy a server or all that much bandwidth, and since cable/fiber connections are relatively common these days... hmm. Actually it might be possible to make a game explicitly designed for small persistent servers. I can see the market for a dual-mode game like that... the client comes with a server, you can pay monthly to play on the huge company servers, run your own miniserver for free. Maybe it'd even have a middle option of paying a small monthly licensing fee to run a mid-range userbase server (100ish concurrent users)? Anyway, the idea of a game that scales from single-player all the way up to many-thousand-player is kinda neat. It'd still make the company money at all levels, since the singletons still buy the box like a normal game and the hardcore still pay the monthly official server access fee...