A little while ago, I warned about companies trying to sell consoles below cost and recover the loss through games. See here.
I warned that they would interpret legal attempts to circumvent this as theft. I didn't give the example of suing people who rent/trade/sell games on this flimsy basis, but I guess that would have made me look even more prescient.:-(
I'm not sure there was potential to begin with, just a wild guess. But it's definitely analagous -- claiming the existence of cures in nature that we won't get if we don't go along with some environmentalist* program.
* By "environmentalist", I of course mean anti-technologists who use desire for non-pollution and wilderness preservation as a cloak for their real goals, not genuine environmentalists that actually care about the environment.
What makes you think that this is going to be cheap??
What makes you think I thought this was going to be cheap? Given any real number n, there exists a real number m greater than n. I was saying the prices would be inflated relative to what they would be without AMA's noble intervention. Of course it's going to be expensive. AMA will make it so that in America, it's much more expensive than it would be in other countries.
So how long until the AMA (American Medical Association, doctors' union) makes certain this is never used legally in America (except perhaps at wildly inflated prices), and justifies such a ban on their "noble" concern for patients?
What's important to note is why this particular patent, even more so than other software patents, is stupid. It's stupid because it doesn't patent *how* you accomplish something, just *that* you accomplish it. It would be like patenting "computing numbers quickly" rather than patenting "a specific chip that can compute numbers quickly".
Parent gives an important insight far too lacking today, not just in console hardware. As a general rule, an exponential increase in stimulus is perceived by humans as a linear increase. As it pertains to graphics, the difference between the NES and SNES, and then between SNES and N64/PS was huge. However, now we're at the point where better graphics wouldn't make much of a difference *as perceived by the user* unless the image could look almost indistinguishable from the real thing. So at this point, the additional cost really does not justify the better graphics. On the other hand, we are still on the low end in terms of sensor technology, so including controllers that integrate more body movement, and more accurately, add proportionally more value to the system.
I believe Second Life, a fee-based MMORPG, allowed lifetime membership accounts. You could pay $225 for access forever. Or at least they did when I started in Summer '03. And some people took this.
You know, I might be the only one to feel this way, but I am glad that Nintendo isn't planning on monthly payments to leech money out of its victim... er... consumer.
I definitely agree with your sentiments. When a company sells a product under cost, hoping to "get it back" through some gimmick down the line, I get very suspicious. It's the kind of strategy that could lead to them suing customers to "get back revenue" the customer stole, by, e.g., disabling ads or something. When their costs are covered up front, it's much less likely that they'll try something evil. (It's for the same reason that you should have been suspicious of cyber-rebate.com's overpriced items that it would, they promise, refund.) That's why I respect Nintendo's strategy of making money on the console itself, which it generally does for a while until third party support is reliably bringing in enough.
It becomes even clearer when you compare opportunity costs. For the price of a PS3 and one game (~$660), you could buy a Wii and 10 games! (Charitably favoring the PS3 by assuming the Wii starts at $250 and has $40 games.) And to even notice the HDTV difference, you have to buy such a TV, which will cost you $1000, which could have bought 25 Wii games. (!) Yes, this ignores sales tax, but since it's an opportunity cost comparison, the conclusions hold regardless.
So does that mean it effectively competes with the ".NET framework"? And what's an "internet platform" anyway? Is that just a term they invented to have something Google would be good at?
In Railroad Tycoon II, one of the scenarios is playing as Mao Zedong in 1949, and using the railroads to "revitalize China". Considering Mao knowingly killed more people than Hitler, that's at least as bad. Yet no outcry. Probably because the game sucked and glorified socialism to begin with.
I'm sick and tired of people complaining about those who live paycheck-to-paycheck so they can buy the latest toys. That's not a poverty issue. It's a prioritization issue. If you're having trouble finding money for food, you have my sympathy. If you're having trouble finding money for an HDTV, go fuck yourself.
Did you read his post? "its odd that a state secret can be known/shared by a non-state organization that has no special security clearance" Everyone with any significant knowledge about those airplanes at Lockheed had "a special security clearance". I work for a small(er) defense contractor, and I guarantee you, anyone above the new grads has a clearance. It's not just "a few people".
People on Gamefaqs.com, a popular gaming site, started a site called luelinks.net where you had to be a member of a locked part of gamefaqs.com (no new entrants) to join. They had a board there where people didn't trade credit card numbers, but they did share information about what "free gift offers" were fraudable.
It should be possible to write a program such that you can easily develop a game. Make it so it's modular and you can add objects and scripts to make it come to life. This would make it possible for even a small, unfunded team, or even one person, to make a game. It should be possible to make some kind of tool. Is anyone working on such a project, which would allow much more innovation in gaming?
Demand isn't saving construction. It's that construction is de facto non-union, whatever the official estimates say. Any contractor will (assuming you won't turn him in or something) admit that illegal immigrants or otherwise off-the-books labor fuels an astounding fraction of manual construction labor. And no -- they're not unionized. Just trust me on that one.
This doesn't eliminate another problem I thought of, which hasn't been explained elsewhere. Lets say you swing for their body and they block it. What then? In your living room, you still hit air. So your lightsaber keeps going. Now, it might vibrate to signify that you connected, but what then? Your saber is now sticking through your opponent's body. What then? Will it count that as a hit? Will it require you to pull back before doing anything else? What?
If you're going to liberate it after 10 broadcasts, you might as well never liberate it. It's like with Creative Commons licenses, that "sorta kinda" liberate the work, but add annoying restrictions (no derivative works, or "sample only" licenses [wtf?]). The GPL lays down what it means to liberate something. I means you let them use it *for anything they want*, no restrictions. *at all* BBC doesn't meet that. It totally violates the spirit of the open source movement.
Doesn't that infringe on Hyundai's trademark of "Driving is believing"? Or is that just legal low-class imitation? (No offense -- the Wii looks to be awesome, but copying is still lame.)
Kinda reminds me of (in Texas), Wendy's "It's better here" and HEB's "Here everything's better" (HEB is a grocery chain).
I don't remember using the term "extra work" in my post -- doesn't belong in quotes.
bottled water STILL ends up with more bacteria 2 weeks later than ordinary tap water, as well as more contaminants.
And for all the extra work repeating this claim, you STILL haven't sourced it.
here are a ton of regulations governing the purity of the water you drink from the tap - none of which apply after its bottled and sold to you.
The regulations essentially say "this stuff won't kill you", but they're allowed to have "acceptable" levels of chemicals they don't feel like removing. And of course, what are they worried about, that people will switch to another municipal water supply? Who do you believe, government promises, or your own taste buds? Why does it taste so gross?
s for the "pipes that haven't been clean in 50 years", I don't know where you live, but the pipes here are flushed on a regular basis. It's not a hard process - they just dump some extra chlorine into the system, open the fire hydrant at the end of the loop and let it run. This removes any "dead zones".
Oh, except for the one between the fire hydrant and your home. You've dug that pipe out and cleaned it once or twice, right? No? And I'm glad there's a low risk of the flushing chemicals remaining in the water when it's re-connected.
lso, if you've ever done any home plumbing, you'd know that even 50-year-old copper pipe is in decent shape inside, after decades of attack by chlorine, ozone, and good old H2O.
"Decent shape"? What did you think I was worried about, leaks? I'm worried about accumlation of deposits, and yes, they are there when you look at you pipes.
And if you're concerned about energy consumption,
Lest I thought you were finished adding words to my post...
Plus, last I heard, copper and cast-iron water pipes don't have issues with phthalates leeching from the plastic water bottles. You know, those plastics that contaminate the water in the bottle, your peanut butter, etc., 6 types of which have already been permanently banned in Europe
Oh, well, if Europe's convinced. (They're also convinced that all genetically modified food is dangerous.) Besides, I mainly buy drinking water in the gallon jugs that are used for milk. Oh, wait, Europe's banned those too, right? Please.
they help explain the huge decline in male fertility over the last 50 years
No, they help you believe a conclusion you've already decided to believe. The male fertility issue is debunked in The Skeptical Environmentalis, which you probably reject entirely because of some odd reason like that it's "so damnably reasonable" or something.
ummm... you do know that both Dasani (Coca-Cola) and Aquafina (PepsiCo) ARE tap water...???
*sigh*
Not this bullshit again.
Yes, most drinking water says on the label "Source: $CITY_NAME Municipal Water Supply". That doesn't mean it's the same stuff coming out of your tap! Look further. See that? What's that, it says? "Processed by: Carbon filtration, reverse osmosis, UV treatment, microfiltration, ozonation". In other words, a hell of a lot more than the city will do to the water they're pumping out to the proles. Plus, they do the favor of, you know, not sending it through pipes that haven't been cleaned in 50 years.
Slashdot Mirror
Why do people say "price point" instead of "price"? Just to sound smart? In virtually every context, it's completely unnecessary.
A little while ago, I warned about companies trying to sell consoles below cost and recover the loss through games. See here.
:-(
I warned that they would interpret legal attempts to circumvent this as theft. I didn't give the example of suing people who rent/trade/sell games on this flimsy basis, but I guess that would have made me look even more prescient.
I'm not sure there was potential to begin with, just a wild guess. But it's definitely analagous -- claiming the existence of cures in nature that we won't get if we don't go along with some environmentalist* program.
* By "environmentalist", I of course mean anti-technologists who use desire for non-pollution and wilderness preservation as a cloak for their real goals, not genuine environmentalists that actually care about the environment.
What makes you think that this is going to be cheap??
What makes you think I thought this was going to be cheap? Given any real number n, there exists a real number m greater than n. I was saying the prices would be inflated relative to what they would be without AMA's noble intervention. Of course it's going to be expensive. AMA will make it so that in America, it's much more expensive than it would be in other countries.
So how long until the AMA (American Medical Association, doctors' union) makes certain this is never used legally in America (except perhaps at wildly inflated prices), and justifies such a ban on their "noble" concern for patients?
I guess I'm not going to buy a Wii now, because they housed the hardware for the demo inside a GameCube.
Come on Sony, you can poison the well better than that.
What's important to note is why this particular patent, even more so than other software patents, is stupid. It's stupid because it doesn't patent *how* you accomplish something, just *that* you accomplish it. It would be like patenting "computing numbers quickly" rather than patenting "a specific chip that can compute numbers quickly".
Parent gives an important insight far too lacking today, not just in console hardware. As a general rule, an exponential increase in stimulus is perceived by humans as a linear increase. As it pertains to graphics, the difference between the NES and SNES, and then between SNES and N64/PS was huge. However, now we're at the point where better graphics wouldn't make much of a difference *as perceived by the user* unless the image could look almost indistinguishable from the real thing. So at this point, the additional cost really does not justify the better graphics. On the other hand, we are still on the low end in terms of sensor technology, so including controllers that integrate more body movement, and more accurately, add proportionally more value to the system.
I believe Second Life, a fee-based MMORPG, allowed lifetime membership accounts. You could pay $225 for access forever. Or at least they did when I started in Summer '03. And some people took this.
You know, I might be the only one to feel this way, but I am glad that Nintendo isn't planning on monthly payments to leech money out of its victim ... er ... consumer.
I definitely agree with your sentiments. When a company sells a product under cost, hoping to "get it back" through some gimmick down the line, I get very suspicious. It's the kind of strategy that could lead to them suing customers to "get back revenue" the customer stole, by, e.g., disabling ads or something. When their costs are covered up front, it's much less likely that they'll try something evil. (It's for the same reason that you should have been suspicious of cyber-rebate.com's overpriced items that it would, they promise, refund.) That's why I respect Nintendo's strategy of making money on the console itself, which it generally does for a while until third party support is reliably bringing in enough.
Ah, damn, you're right, an HDTV "only" (!) comes at the cost of getting 7 Wii games. That fucking changes everything.
It becomes even clearer when you compare opportunity costs. For the price of a PS3 and one game (~$660), you could buy a Wii and 10 games! (Charitably favoring the PS3 by assuming the Wii starts at $250 and has $40 games.) And to even notice the HDTV difference, you have to buy such a TV, which will cost you $1000, which could have bought 25 Wii games. (!) Yes, this ignores sales tax, but since it's an opportunity cost comparison, the conclusions hold regardless.
So does that mean it effectively competes with the ".NET framework"? And what's an "internet platform" anyway? Is that just a term they invented to have something Google would be good at?
In Railroad Tycoon II, one of the scenarios is playing as Mao Zedong in 1949, and using the railroads to "revitalize China". Considering Mao knowingly killed more people than Hitler, that's at least as bad. Yet no outcry. Probably because the game sucked and glorified socialism to begin with.
I'm sick and tired of people complaining about those who live paycheck-to-paycheck so they can buy the latest toys. That's not a poverty issue. It's a prioritization issue. If you're having trouble finding money for food, you have my sympathy. If you're having trouble finding money for an HDTV, go fuck yourself.
Did you read his post? "its odd that a state secret can be known/shared by a non-state organization that has no special security clearance" Everyone with any significant knowledge about those airplanes at Lockheed had "a special security clearance". I work for a small(er) defense contractor, and I guarantee you, anyone above the new grads has a clearance. It's not just "a few people".
People on Gamefaqs.com, a popular gaming site, started a site called luelinks.net where you had to be a member of a locked part of gamefaqs.com (no new entrants) to join. They had a board there where people didn't trade credit card numbers, but they did share information about what "free gift offers" were fraudable.
It should be possible to write a program such that you can easily develop a game. Make it so it's modular and you can add objects and scripts to make it come to life. This would make it possible for even a small, unfunded team, or even one person, to make a game. It should be possible to make some kind of tool. Is anyone working on such a project, which would allow much more innovation in gaming?
Demand isn't saving construction. It's that construction is de facto non-union, whatever the official estimates say. Any contractor will (assuming you won't turn him in or something) admit that illegal immigrants or otherwise off-the-books labor fuels an astounding fraction of manual construction labor. And no -- they're not unionized. Just trust me on that one.
This doesn't eliminate another problem I thought of, which hasn't been explained elsewhere. Lets say you swing for their body and they block it. What then? In your living room, you still hit air. So your lightsaber keeps going. Now, it might vibrate to signify that you connected, but what then? Your saber is now sticking through your opponent's body. What then? Will it count that as a hit? Will it require you to pull back before doing anything else? What?
If you're going to liberate it after 10 broadcasts, you might as well never liberate it. It's like with Creative Commons licenses, that "sorta kinda" liberate the work, but add annoying restrictions (no derivative works, or "sample only" licenses [wtf?]). The GPL lays down what it means to liberate something. I means you let them use it *for anything they want*, no restrictions. *at all* BBC doesn't meet that. It totally violates the spirit of the open source movement.
Right. Like the Japanese ever read the Bible. What soul are they trying to save?
Doesn't that infringe on Hyundai's trademark of "Driving is believing"? Or is that just legal low-class imitation? (No offense -- the Wii looks to be awesome, but copying is still lame.)
Kinda reminds me of (in Texas), Wendy's "It's better here" and HEB's "Here everything's better" (HEB is a grocery chain).
For all this "extra work"
I don't remember using the term "extra work" in my post -- doesn't belong in quotes.
bottled water STILL ends up with more bacteria 2 weeks later than ordinary tap water, as well as more contaminants.
And for all the extra work repeating this claim, you STILL haven't sourced it.
here are a ton of regulations governing the purity of the water you drink from the tap - none of which apply after its bottled and sold to you.
The regulations essentially say "this stuff won't kill you", but they're allowed to have "acceptable" levels of chemicals they don't feel like removing. And of course, what are they worried about, that people will switch to another municipal water supply? Who do you believe, government promises, or your own taste buds? Why does it taste so gross?
s for the "pipes that haven't been clean in 50 years", I don't know where you live, but the pipes here are flushed on a regular basis. It's not a hard process - they just dump some extra chlorine into the system, open the fire hydrant at the end of the loop and let it run. This removes any "dead zones".
Oh, except for the one between the fire hydrant and your home. You've dug that pipe out and cleaned it once or twice, right? No? And I'm glad there's a low risk of the flushing chemicals remaining in the water when it's re-connected.
lso, if you've ever done any home plumbing, you'd know that even 50-year-old copper pipe is in decent shape inside, after decades of attack by chlorine, ozone, and good old H2O.
"Decent shape"? What did you think I was worried about, leaks? I'm worried about accumlation of deposits, and yes, they are there when you look at you pipes.
And if you're concerned about energy consumption,
Lest I thought you were finished adding words to my post...
Plus, last I heard, copper and cast-iron water pipes don't have issues with phthalates leeching from the plastic water bottles. You know, those plastics that contaminate the water in the bottle, your peanut butter, etc., 6 types of which have already been permanently banned in Europe
Oh, well, if Europe's convinced. (They're also convinced that all genetically modified food is dangerous.) Besides, I mainly buy drinking water in the gallon jugs that are used for milk. Oh, wait, Europe's banned those too, right? Please.
they help explain the huge decline in male fertility over the last 50 years
No, they help you believe a conclusion you've already decided to believe. The male fertility issue is debunked in The Skeptical Environmentalis, which you probably reject entirely because of some odd reason like that it's "so damnably reasonable" or something.
ummm ... you do know that both Dasani (Coca-Cola) and Aquafina (PepsiCo) ARE tap water ...???
*sigh*
Not this bullshit again.
Yes, most drinking water says on the label "Source: $CITY_NAME Municipal Water Supply". That doesn't mean it's the same stuff coming out of your tap! Look further. See that? What's that, it says? "Processed by: Carbon filtration, reverse osmosis, UV treatment, microfiltration, ozonation". In other words, a hell of a lot more than the city will do to the water they're pumping out to the proles. Plus, they do the favor of, you know, not sending it through pipes that haven't been cleaned in 50 years.
Yeah.