Why a cost plus percentage formula, though? If someone comes up with something that cost little to invent but that's worth a fortune to society, the current system would reward them greatly, while this proposal would give more to a guy who invented a slightly better toothbrush but spent a lot of money doing it. I've heard traditional aerospace companies (the kind SpaceX is gunning for) criticized for getting "cost-plus" payments that encourage wasteful management, and the same criticism would apply here.
On the other hand, something like what you proposed is being used a little, with some success. The Ansari X Prize offered a flat fee for a demonstration of a particular technology, NASA's doing something with its "MoonROx" prize, etc..
For those who want to offer an unsecured wireless connection, yet punish piggybackers in a harmless way, I repost a trick someone offered: the Upside-Down-Ternet.
Although I like the idea of having different patent terms for different industries (which we kind of have already in the distinction between patent and copyright), I disagree with the business plan approach. That model would involve a substantially increased degree of government control over industry, with many opportunities for trollish lobbying. Once you have the IRS and SEC reviewing a plan from year to year to decide how much profit is "enough," others will want a seat on the review board. Just imagine Jack Thomson demanding that the latest patent be invalidated because it's being used to make ultra-realistic violent video games!
Don't you see a qualitative difference between a policeman happening to spot you while you're walking down the street, and a policeman stalking you everywhere you go outside your house? Sure, you're being "seen by the police" either way, but ubiquitous surveillance leads toward the second situation.
If we really trusted the will of the majority, there would be no need for a Bill of Rights. We would just assume that the majority would always elect politicians who could be trusted to respect our rights, or that the majority would remove any politicians who didn't, or rely on referenda.
Or we would assume that if you're outvoted, you have no rights.
Nope, and so I would look forward to Intel (or anyone else) offering a super-cheap laptop like this on the open market, regardless of the effect on OLPC. You'd think that a group of engineers who get tired of hearing people say "Let me buy your product" would, you know, sell it to them.
It's true that XM's actions aren't justified just because the company has a legal right to do them; we just don't have a legal method of forcing that judgment on them. Instead what people are doing is exercising their own right to cancel their subscription, which will influence the company's decision in turn. I see the backlash as normal and healthy.
*nod* I can't speak fairly for games 8-12 in the series, not having played much of them, but the trend seems the same.
Square seems to be locked into a niche that's worked very well for them, so that innovation comes slowly to them in that series, even though they try different things in off-series games like Chrono Trigger and Dirge of Cerberus. Minor tweaks plus top-of-the-line graphics keep a certain group of gamers happy with the main series.
As I try to learn game design, a lot of my thinking goes back to Final Fantasy I and the other early console RPGs, so the series is a good starting point for coming up with new ideas. "What if the game world was really open-ended? What if the battle system didn't use hit points?" New gameplay mechanics like those are where independent developers should focus their efforts.
I wonder why it is that I like the characters but not the plots in Final Fantasy. It might have something to do with them being "reactive," with the characters always trying to Save the World from a lunatic villain, but that doesn't explain why I liked Chrono Trigger's plot too. Or maybe it's the limited way you interact with the world and NPCs, but that doesn't explain games like Disgaea.
I don't care to get into a discussion of the details of campaign finance here, in a thread about the Florida primary. Just saying that government control over who can say what, when and how* is a problematic "solution" to allegedly excessive influence of some power bloc over politics, and that opposing it does not mean one is in favor of Evil Corporate Interests, or of corruption. In fact the burden of proof for the effectiveness and legitimacy of such control should be on the people who advocate it, because unlike the free-market system it involves the use of force and centralized control, wielded by the same politicians who are said to be corrupted now. That's all I've got to say on the topic here.
Straw man, or fallacy of excluded alternatives. The fact that I don't support legal controls on who is allowed to speak doesn't mean I "like the existing system" and "prefer corruption." I could also point out that mass censorship doesn't have a history of eliminating corruption or supporting the interests of the public.
The first Final Fantasy was one of the first console games I played, so the series has nostalgia appeal for me. What I enjoyed about it (in hindsight) was exploring a big game world on an epic quest, being able to wander around instead of being stuck in the linear levels of most games. In reality the series is nearly linear because the geography just happens to force you to do X to get a ship, then Y to get an airship, etc., but there's still a sense of there being some freedom of exploration and a "living" game world outside of the dungeons. For comparison, I also liked Morrowind.
I enjoyed FFIV and VI (aka. FF2 and FF3), FFV when I got to play it, and eventually FFVII. These consistently had memorable music and interesting characters. By this point I was starting to think that the plots were repetitive, weak or nonsensical ("Mwahaha, I'm gonna blow up the world because I'm just that evil and crazy!") and that the battle sytem was dull. I also thought that Square had become obsessed with improving its graphics at the expense of other innovation. For instance your typical RPG villager still mostly stands there waiting to spout a line of dialogue just as in FF1, and magic still mostly consists of elemental blast spells. I ended up migrating to games with more interesting battle systems (Grandia 1&2, FF Tactics, Star Ocean 2, Disgaea 1&2) and have ever since then expected more from an RPG than the FF series tended to deliver.
So, for me the appeal was in the characters, the music, and the novelty of a console role-playing game.
There's precedent. I had heard about the dating site True.com lobbying Congressmen for "reform" of online dating, as a way to attract attention to the supposed virtues of their service.
As I understand it, the bridge is currently still slated to be built with federal taxpayers' money, because the specific allocation was quietly deleted from the budget without actually reducing the amount of funding for Alaska.
On campaign finance "reform," I trust those "monied interests" of private citizens more than I trust politicians. Better to have big corporations buying expensive ads and other private citizens buying cheap ones, than a government agency unconstitutionally censoring political speech by dictating who can use what media when.
I notice that there's a man going by "Captain Gatso" who's still active in certain protest activities in the UK. Looks like there's now suspicion on him as a letter-bomb terrorist, which he's denied outright and which doesn't make sense. The UK's universal surveillance plan for the nation's roadways (eg. here) was once marketed as something to fight crime, but is now all about "road pricing." Considering the amazing claim that the average Briton is now spotted on camera 300 times a day, that the cameras bark orders at you, and that the software will actively scan for signs of trouble, I'd like to avoid England until things change. No offense to you, much to the politicians and other officials building this network. Unfortunately we in the US are following along, with both parties involved.
The problem with that position is it might be imposed on us by the state. If health care is considered the government's responsibility, then at some point it may make that sort of decision ("Logan's Run, Lite?") on behalf of people who would rather continue living, and who in a free market would have the resources to continue to fight.
Thank you. That's a more civil response than the other. My attitude towards that one is: how do you expect to attract new users to Linux who have many years' experience with Windows and only casual interest in switching, and hence a low patience level with it? Part of the "monoculture" problem is that regardless of a product's actual quality, people can get locked in by their familiarity with it.
Seems to me that it would not promote innovation to legally demand equal packet treatment, in a case where someone wanted to try implementing (say) a game with guaranteed low lag. What if Google were to use the "dark" fiber-optic lines they've been rumored to be buying, to create a true GoogleNet using resources that no one is currently using? Or better yet, what if they built a whole new physical network? (As a thought experiment.) Would you say they should be forbidden to discriminate in what packets arrive when, because the structures they built and paid for are automatically treated as public property? I ought to read up more on this issue.
Hopefully this issue will become moot, with increasing availability of wireless networking and peer-to-peer services like the mesh networks of the OLPC project. Maybe the physical fibers and wireless networks will come to have different uses and different rules.
Elsewhere in this discussion someone mentioned Tesla, and I thought of the "war of the electric currents" between his AC systems and Edison's DC. I can imagine Congress deciding that DC would be the national standard, to save the American people from the dangers of cheap, deadly AC power, "the executioner's current."
(And though I'm skeptical of regulating the free market, I'm not in league with the Conservapedia types. That's largely why I don't have a party anymore.)
I would be happy to give Linux a serious chance, if it were even nearly as easy to use as Windows. While I'm far from 1337, I'm savvy enough to know what Linux is and to do programming for fun. So, if a piece of software annoys me into not using it, it's too hard for the average user.
I tried out Ubuntu Linux, marketed as the CD distribution that finally makes Linux usable. I installed Firefox and Thunderbird and OpenOffice partly thanks to that CD, and that's great -- for Windows. When I tried out the actual OS, I got a slowly-booting desktop with no tutorial and no obvious way to get started using Python (which is included) or use the file system, or install anything. I was running the "Live CD," which might explain the slowness, but as a new Linux user, how was I supposed to figure out how to do basic things like find where stuff is in the file system or install programs? So I ask around and am told, go on IRC for advice. It's great that there's a community of users to help with problems, but things shouldn't get to that point for a new user. The advice I got online was to start invoking absolutely non-intuitive text commands like "apt-get sudo" just to start doing basic installation tasks for things like getting a firewall and support for a thumb drive (so I could actually transfer files to/from Linux). So I had a system I didn't know how to do anything useful with, and gave up before trying to plug the machine into a network cable to go online to download software to run my wireless card. And then when I later tried the latest distribution, it just wouldn't start up at all.
Upshot: If you build it, they will come. Linux will only be suitable for me and others' tolerance for frustration -- remember, it's competing against something that we already know how to use -- when it's got a little hand-holding and some easy ways to do standard tasks. Dumb it down beyond what you think we need.
That's if we're to use Linux at all. Isn't it possible these days to build something new and easy to use, not dependent on the essentially decades-old Linux?
Actually, Tesla and Edison were involved in a "war of the electric currents" over whether alternating or direct current would become the standard, with a lot of propaganda being flung around. (I suggest the book "Empires of Light" about this.) What if Congress had stepped in and demanded that DC be the national standard, instead of letting the engineers and businessmen figure things out in an atmosphere of free competition?
Those early electric networks were haphazard and dangerous, but they worked well enough to help build the modern world.
Well, you can set up your own infrastructure, even your own software protocol, and encourage others to use it. But doesn't this demand for "net neutrality" actually limit the potential for innovation in some cases? It strikes me that if your idea involves offering different levels of service for any reason, you get branded as an evil corporate overlord. There might be legitimate uses for "tiering," which is why we shouldn't be forcing it on the Net through the means of law.
When you no longer feel compelled to assign a gender and race to a person for anything about that person, you also might find yourself not assuming things about this person. For anything about a specific person that you do not know, would you subconsciously start to fill the knowledge gap by drawing what you don't know from a stereotype?
I think we should take the idea even further. Why do we feel compelled to distinguish between people and cars? I mean, we make this set of assumptions based on things we've seen and heard that aren't necessarily accurate. And then whenever we see a new person or car, we subconsciously fill in the knowledge gap by drawing from a stereotype about all people, or all cars. If we could just get past that stereotyping, we might learn that some people don't mind being ridden and that some cars are good conversationalists.
I can't find a reference offhand, but months ago there were reports (and videos) showing a Korean automated turret, capable of using motion tracking to identify something human-sized and moving. A quick YouTube search shows the possibility of sonar-based targeting as well. This experiment shows some ability to identify people and cars in a street scene. So, the technology seems to be just about ready for automatic targeting of humans, if anyone's willing to use it.
Of course the things should have a shutdown code, but we need to use them against human opponents. For political reasons we've become appalled by the thought of human soldiers dying in war, so if we're to fight at all, we need proxies.
Slashdot Mirror
Have a look at this, a custom gaming setup someone built for D&D. Not practical for the average user, but cool.
Why a cost plus percentage formula, though? If someone comes up with something that cost little to invent but that's worth a fortune to society, the current system would reward them greatly, while this proposal would give more to a guy who invented a slightly better toothbrush but spent a lot of money doing it. I've heard traditional aerospace companies (the kind SpaceX is gunning for) criticized for getting "cost-plus" payments that encourage wasteful management, and the same criticism would apply here.
On the other hand, something like what you proposed is being used a little, with some success. The Ansari X Prize offered a flat fee for a demonstration of a particular technology, NASA's doing something with its "MoonROx" prize, etc..
For those who want to offer an unsecured wireless connection, yet punish piggybackers in a harmless way, I repost a trick someone offered: the Upside-Down-Ternet.
Although I like the idea of having different patent terms for different industries (which we kind of have already in the distinction between patent and copyright), I disagree with the business plan approach. That model would involve a substantially increased degree of government control over industry, with many opportunities for trollish lobbying. Once you have the IRS and SEC reviewing a plan from year to year to decide how much profit is "enough," others will want a seat on the review board. Just imagine Jack Thomson demanding that the latest patent be invalidated because it's being used to make ultra-realistic violent video games!
Don't you see a qualitative difference between a policeman happening to spot you while you're walking down the street, and a policeman stalking you everywhere you go outside your house? Sure, you're being "seen by the police" either way, but ubiquitous surveillance leads toward the second situation.
If we really trusted the will of the majority, there would be no need for a Bill of Rights. We would just assume that the majority would always elect politicians who could be trusted to respect our rights, or that the majority would remove any politicians who didn't, or rely on referenda.
Or we would assume that if you're outvoted, you have no rights.
Nope, and so I would look forward to Intel (or anyone else) offering a super-cheap laptop like this on the open market, regardless of the effect on OLPC. You'd think that a group of engineers who get tired of hearing people say "Let me buy your product" would, you know, sell it to them.
It's true that XM's actions aren't justified just because the company has a legal right to do them; we just don't have a legal method of forcing that judgment on them. Instead what people are doing is exercising their own right to cancel their subscription, which will influence the company's decision in turn. I see the backlash as normal and healthy.
*nod* I can't speak fairly for games 8-12 in the series, not having played much of them, but the trend seems the same.
Square seems to be locked into a niche that's worked very well for them, so that innovation comes slowly to them in that series, even though they try different things in off-series games like Chrono Trigger and Dirge of Cerberus. Minor tweaks plus top-of-the-line graphics keep a certain group of gamers happy with the main series.
As I try to learn game design, a lot of my thinking goes back to Final Fantasy I and the other early console RPGs, so the series is a good starting point for coming up with new ideas. "What if the game world was really open-ended? What if the battle system didn't use hit points?" New gameplay mechanics like those are where independent developers should focus their efforts.
I wonder why it is that I like the characters but not the plots in Final Fantasy. It might have something to do with them being "reactive," with the characters always trying to Save the World from a lunatic villain, but that doesn't explain why I liked Chrono Trigger's plot too. Or maybe it's the limited way you interact with the world and NPCs, but that doesn't explain games like Disgaea.
Oh, and it's worth pointing out the Grand List Of Console Role Playing Game Clichés.
I don't care to get into a discussion of the details of campaign finance here, in a thread about the Florida primary. Just saying that government control over who can say what, when and how* is a problematic "solution" to allegedly excessive influence of some power bloc over politics, and that opposing it does not mean one is in favor of Evil Corporate Interests, or of corruption. In fact the burden of proof for the effectiveness and legitimacy of such control should be on the people who advocate it, because unlike the free-market system it involves the use of force and centralized control, wielded by the same politicians who are said to be corrupted now. That's all I've got to say on the topic here.
*(And if that isn't censorship, what is?)
Straw man, or fallacy of excluded alternatives. The fact that I don't support legal controls on who is allowed to speak doesn't mean I "like the existing system" and "prefer corruption." I could also point out that mass censorship doesn't have a history of eliminating corruption or supporting the interests of the public.
The first Final Fantasy was one of the first console games I played, so the series has nostalgia appeal for me. What I enjoyed about it (in hindsight) was exploring a big game world on an epic quest, being able to wander around instead of being stuck in the linear levels of most games. In reality the series is nearly linear because the geography just happens to force you to do X to get a ship, then Y to get an airship, etc., but there's still a sense of there being some freedom of exploration and a "living" game world outside of the dungeons. For comparison, I also liked Morrowind.
I enjoyed FFIV and VI (aka. FF2 and FF3), FFV when I got to play it, and eventually FFVII. These consistently had memorable music and interesting characters. By this point I was starting to think that the plots were repetitive, weak or nonsensical ("Mwahaha, I'm gonna blow up the world because I'm just that evil and crazy!") and that the battle sytem was dull. I also thought that Square had become obsessed with improving its graphics at the expense of other innovation. For instance your typical RPG villager still mostly stands there waiting to spout a line of dialogue just as in FF1, and magic still mostly consists of elemental blast spells. I ended up migrating to games with more interesting battle systems (Grandia 1&2, FF Tactics, Star Ocean 2, Disgaea 1&2) and have ever since then expected more from an RPG than the FF series tended to deliver.
So, for me the appeal was in the characters, the music, and the novelty of a console role-playing game.
There's precedent. I had heard about the dating site True.com lobbying Congressmen for "reform" of online dating, as a way to attract attention to the supposed virtues of their service.
As I understand it, the bridge is currently still slated to be built with federal taxpayers' money, because the specific allocation was quietly deleted from the budget without actually reducing the amount of funding for Alaska.
On campaign finance "reform," I trust those "monied interests" of private citizens more than I trust politicians. Better to have big corporations buying expensive ads and other private citizens buying cheap ones, than a government agency unconstitutionally censoring political speech by dictating who can use what media when.
I notice that there's a man going by "Captain Gatso" who's still active in certain protest activities in the UK. Looks like there's now suspicion on him as a letter-bomb terrorist, which he's denied outright and which doesn't make sense. The UK's universal surveillance plan for the nation's roadways (eg. here) was once marketed as something to fight crime, but is now all about "road pricing." Considering the amazing claim that the average Briton is now spotted on camera 300 times a day, that the cameras bark orders at you, and that the software will actively scan for signs of trouble, I'd like to avoid England until things change. No offense to you, much to the politicians and other officials building this network. Unfortunately we in the US are following along, with both parties involved.
The problem with that position is it might be imposed on us by the state. If health care is considered the government's responsibility, then at some point it may make that sort of decision ("Logan's Run, Lite?") on behalf of people who would rather continue living, and who in a free market would have the resources to continue to fight.
See, there is a good reason why the Institute decided to keep all freshmen on campus. What would they have done without Net access that evening?
Thank you. That's a more civil response than the other. My attitude towards that one is: how do you expect to attract new users to Linux who have many years' experience with Windows and only casual interest in switching, and hence a low patience level with it? Part of the "monoculture" problem is that regardless of a product's actual quality, people can get locked in by their familiarity with it.
Seems to me that it would not promote innovation to legally demand equal packet treatment, in a case where someone wanted to try implementing (say) a game with guaranteed low lag. What if Google were to use the "dark" fiber-optic lines they've been rumored to be buying, to create a true GoogleNet using resources that no one is currently using? Or better yet, what if they built a whole new physical network? (As a thought experiment.) Would you say they should be forbidden to discriminate in what packets arrive when, because the structures they built and paid for are automatically treated as public property? I ought to read up more on this issue.
Hopefully this issue will become moot, with increasing availability of wireless networking and peer-to-peer services like the mesh networks of the OLPC project. Maybe the physical fibers and wireless networks will come to have different uses and different rules.
Elsewhere in this discussion someone mentioned Tesla, and I thought of the "war of the electric currents" between his AC systems and Edison's DC. I can imagine Congress deciding that DC would be the national standard, to save the American people from the dangers of cheap, deadly AC power, "the executioner's current."
(And though I'm skeptical of regulating the free market, I'm not in league with the Conservapedia types. That's largely why I don't have a party anymore.)
I would be happy to give Linux a serious chance, if it were even nearly as easy to use as Windows. While I'm far from 1337, I'm savvy enough to know what Linux is and to do programming for fun. So, if a piece of software annoys me into not using it, it's too hard for the average user.
I tried out Ubuntu Linux, marketed as the CD distribution that finally makes Linux usable. I installed Firefox and Thunderbird and OpenOffice partly thanks to that CD, and that's great -- for Windows. When I tried out the actual OS, I got a slowly-booting desktop with no tutorial and no obvious way to get started using Python (which is included) or use the file system, or install anything. I was running the "Live CD," which might explain the slowness, but as a new Linux user, how was I supposed to figure out how to do basic things like find where stuff is in the file system or install programs? So I ask around and am told, go on IRC for advice. It's great that there's a community of users to help with problems, but things shouldn't get to that point for a new user. The advice I got online was to start invoking absolutely non-intuitive text commands like "apt-get sudo" just to start doing basic installation tasks for things like getting a firewall and support for a thumb drive (so I could actually transfer files to/from Linux). So I had a system I didn't know how to do anything useful with, and gave up before trying to plug the machine into a network cable to go online to download software to run my wireless card. And then when I later tried the latest distribution, it just wouldn't start up at all.
Upshot: If you build it, they will come. Linux will only be suitable for me and others' tolerance for frustration -- remember, it's competing against something that we already know how to use -- when it's got a little hand-holding and some easy ways to do standard tasks. Dumb it down beyond what you think we need.
That's if we're to use Linux at all. Isn't it possible these days to build something new and easy to use, not dependent on the essentially decades-old Linux?
Actually, Tesla and Edison were involved in a "war of the electric currents" over whether alternating or direct current would become the standard, with a lot of propaganda being flung around. (I suggest the book "Empires of Light" about this.) What if Congress had stepped in and demanded that DC be the national standard, instead of letting the engineers and businessmen figure things out in an atmosphere of free competition?
Those early electric networks were haphazard and dangerous, but they worked well enough to help build the modern world.
Well, you can set up your own infrastructure, even your own software protocol, and encourage others to use it. But doesn't this demand for "net neutrality" actually limit the potential for innovation in some cases? It strikes me that if your idea involves offering different levels of service for any reason, you get branded as an evil corporate overlord. There might be legitimate uses for "tiering," which is why we shouldn't be forcing it on the Net through the means of law.
When you no longer feel compelled to assign a gender and race to a person for anything about that person, you also might find yourself not assuming things about this person. For anything about a specific person that you do not know, would you subconsciously start to fill the knowledge gap by drawing what you don't know from a stereotype?
I think we should take the idea even further. Why do we feel compelled to distinguish between people and cars? I mean, we make this set of assumptions based on things we've seen and heard that aren't necessarily accurate. And then whenever we see a new person or car, we subconsciously fill in the knowledge gap by drawing from a stereotype about all people, or all cars. If we could just get past that stereotyping, we might learn that some people don't mind being ridden and that some cars are good conversationalists.
I can't find a reference offhand, but months ago there were reports (and videos) showing a Korean automated turret, capable of using motion tracking to identify something human-sized and moving. A quick YouTube search shows the possibility of sonar-based targeting as well. This experiment shows some ability to identify people and cars in a street scene. So, the technology seems to be just about ready for automatic targeting of humans, if anyone's willing to use it.
Of course the things should have a shutdown code, but we need to use them against human opponents. For political reasons we've become appalled by the thought of human soldiers dying in war, so if we're to fight at all, we need proxies.