So that means no guns in games unless I can shoot out every window in the game world and be able to kill people vital to the storyline? No rocket launchers that can take down tanks but can't destroy walls/floors and let me roam where I want? It's always been a trade off between making the game fun and playable, being able to tell a specific story and the constraints of the hardware, it's just that most of the mechanisms that have these unrealistic limitations are so ingrained that we don't question that a grenade launcher could kill five guys in a confined space but not damage the cardboard boxes right beside them. Should that be a reason to not try and introduce a new game mechanic to play around with tired old formulas?
The important thing is not how you're constrained, but how constraining it feels in the game - there's no logical reason that the portal gun in Portal only works on certain surfaces, or why a portal has to be attached to a surface at all, but the game flows so well that we don't question this or see it as a limitation, indeed it's the very mechanism that makes the game challenging and fun. By the yardstick you set, that game would never have been made.
No, that would just have the effect of outlawing buying milk, it wouldn't negate the law against murder. Of course, in practice sufficient people would complain that the law would be changed.
I don't know what the state of the law is like in the US on this, but here in the UK goods have to be fit for purpose, and if I buy a related service on the basis of goods that turn out to be faulty then I have the right to return both (well, actually the company can offer a replacement rather than a return, but since they could only offer me a handset with the same fault, they'd be forced to give me my money back and negate the contract). Is there no similar consumer protection in the US?
Better results, I would have thought. If they had to give out some iTunes vouchers, they've still made a huge profit on the phone and contract, and they sell iTunes content at a further profit anyway, so you're getting nowhere near $5 (or whatever it is) value from the company, and on top of that if you go buy someone else's phone you won't be spending at the App store. If you take the vouchers, you're demonstrating they can sell you an inferior product without any real consequence - assuming enough people returned them, I think that would be a much clearer statement for the future.
I don't see why, plenty of married men get caught out in the reverse scenario, I don't think they lose their tax benefits (well, not until after the divorce, anyway).
It seems from your argument that kids in marriages already have the breaks of a stable home life, and that the tax breaks should therefore go to unmarried people with kids - they're likely to have a harsher upbringing so they need all the help they can get, no?
It does seem counter-intuitive that marriage is seen as important by the devoutly religious, and the way politicians win their votes is by offering tax breaks for married people. Reducing the status of marriage to a financial incentive doesn't really re-inforce its importance, not when it's trivial to then get divorced and find someone else when you're both sick of each other. Nor is making divorce more difficult the answer - nobody should be trapped in an unhappy relationship. It seems to me the way to make marriage more important is to make it more difficult to get married in the first place, make sure the couple really understand the implications and are happy with the commitment and are even suited to live together. Assigning an arbitrary cash value isn't the way to give something real value.
Well that leaves them with discriminating against socially awkward people who can't find a partner of either sex. Fortunately Google employs a lot of developers who aren't noted for scoring high in that particular demographic. Oh, wait...
Yeah, you see I don't buy that. If it were purely a social debate, you'd see countries with population issues encouraging homosexual behaviour to reduce childbirth. The UK is pretty much at peak population, but I didn't see any of the major political parties offering tax cutting incentives to homosexuals. Furthermore, it's inherently wrong to assume a homosexual can somehow stop being gay so that he can go live a fulfilling life with a wife and children (that's not to say many don't try, for whatever reason, they just tend to come up short on the fulfilling part), and patently ridiculous to think a slight tax break would be sufficient to sway them to even try - look at it from the other perspective, if you're a straight man would you enter into a homosexual relationship in order to pay less tax? No, whichever way you paint it this boils down to people A don't like people B and have a big enough majority to enact laws to punish them. That's how democracy works, but people A could at least have the decency to be honest about it and not try to pretend it's part of some grand scheme to embiggen us all.
I honestly don't know how they reconcile their belief and their failure to follow the strict rule of their god. I don't have any firm religious beliefs (I'm not atheist, I don't disbelieve and I'd like to believe I'm open to the idea of a god, I just lack the blind faith requirement) but it seems to me that if I knew in my heart that there was an all powerful being who could send me to burn for eternity, I'd do whatever that bastard told me to. A few years of self privation in this life to negate an eternity of pain seems like a pretty good payout, and yet I see many Christians who blatantly ignore or give very wide interpretation to what the Bible tells them, almost always in favour of how they want to live their lives. Either these people don't really believe, or they believe but they think their god is lying about the whole eternity bit, or their own ego is so great that they just think god'll forgive them all their transgressions, but somewhere along the way something just doesn't add up, here.
It seems like Sony's usual mis-step of creating nice hardware but completing misjudging the mood of the market. They released a be-all-end-all console that could play games from the current and last two generations, contained a Blu-Ray player and was a Linux computer, but they charged an astronomical price at launch. It then transpired that there market wanted a cheap, dedicated game console and didn't care about the bells and whistles. The world economy starting to collapse a year later probably didn't help, but disregarding even this it was badly judged - if they'd stuck to their guns and produced a cheap, solid gaming console they'd have likely hit profit much sooner and wouldn't now have a bunch of angry customers who've seen the feature set of their purchase pared down. The flip side of the coin is that the PS3 helped them win the BD/HDD war, and taking a long term view maybe they're going to reap back far more than they'd have lost with a cheap console and HDD being the market standard - time will tell on that score.
Some sites suggested that the 360 made it into profit less than a year after launch (based on estimates of shaving 40% off the cost to produce as component prices fell), however that doesn't take the red ring o' death debacle into account, which I'm sure kept the company in the red (no pun intended) on the hardware front for a few more years.
Not only that, but the fact that you don't "win" at the stock market by following the herd. By the time the herd has latched onto something in significant numbers, the opportunity to make money from it has likely already passed, so you have people specifically bidding in ways that don't reflect the crowd's initial choices and then hoping the crowd will make the same conclusion at some point.
Maybe it's funny that anyone would continue to pay money to a site with such an incredibly fraudulent business model (if this is true, I've never heard of it but I've never had much to do with Fark other than inadvertently clicking through from the occasional link).
The fact that the majority of people are there for that type of humour (otherwise surely they'd leave, I skimmed it for two days and gave up) shows that the crowd is successfully producing exactly what the crowd wants to hear. If Curtis thinks he's going to find deep philosophical or scientific insight, he's wrong, but if the goal of the site is to encourage exactly the kind of atmosphere that the people using the site seem to enjoy then it's doing okay.
Or maybe the wisdom of the crowd tells them that giving the 6'4 guy in the bar the impression that they think he's overweight is not a smart move, so they adjust down on purpose:)
If anything, this is an example of one of the reasons Surowiecki gives for why the wisdom of crowds can fail - conformity and imitation. If the crowd is ignoring the busker (and past experience tells us this is usually a wise decision), then new members entering the crowd will mirror that behaviour as there is a strong herd instinct. As you point out, the violin is such a niche instrument to most people, it would be unusual to find sufficient numbers of people in a given crowd who could appreciate that his playing is better than average. If, by some oddity, the first crowd that came upon him were avid violin fans, the whole dynamic of the crowd might change - all it takes is a small gathering around him and suddenly the crowd, instead of ignoring him, will become attracted to the spectacle. Nothing in that disproves the theory of the wisdom of crowds, it just demonstrates that you need the right conditions before you can tap into that wisdom.
Exactly, the crowd can go either way, the interesting part is studying what causes the crowd to go either way so that we can better leverage crowd wisdom. There are many examples of intelligence in crowds that we see every single day and just take for granted - anyone who drives probably thinks most other road users are idiots, but collectively the fact that there are literally millions of vehicles on our roads and yet accidents are relatively isolated incidents (and even the fact that some people do drive like idiots and yet the crowd takes their behaviour into account and compensates) couple with the fact that driving is a pretty complex task to be doing as part of a crowd in the first place, and it's only that the crowd adjusts and makes allowances that allows this all to work, is a prime example. It's all too easy to point to crowds doing something stupid and argue that crowds are therefore stupid while ignoring the clever things crowds accomplish or the reasons for that stupidity.
This is accounted for in the Wisdom of Crowds hypothesis - the two are not mutually exclusive but are two sides of the same coin, that under the right conditions a crowd can become more intelligent than any of its constituent parts, while under the wrong conditions it can become an ugly mob with pitchforks and flaming torches and a penchant for burning down the towers of respectable men of science. The key is providing the right conditions to reap the benefits.
Exactly, even Surowiecki recognised that there were many points where the benefits of the crowd could break down (what he identified as systemic flaws in the decision making process, which generally manifest as an environment of conformity). His suggestion wasn't that all crowds are automatically smarter than their constituent parts, just that all crowds have the ability to be in the right conditions. The fact that 99% of Fark comments are people trying to be funny or posting established memes to try and fit in demonstrates this quite accurately, maybe Curtis didn't appreciate that there was more to the theory than a blanket statement that crowds are smart.
Slashdot Mirror
So that means no guns in games unless I can shoot out every window in the game world and be able to kill people vital to the storyline? No rocket launchers that can take down tanks but can't destroy walls/floors and let me roam where I want? It's always been a trade off between making the game fun and playable, being able to tell a specific story and the constraints of the hardware, it's just that most of the mechanisms that have these unrealistic limitations are so ingrained that we don't question that a grenade launcher could kill five guys in a confined space but not damage the cardboard boxes right beside them. Should that be a reason to not try and introduce a new game mechanic to play around with tired old formulas?
The important thing is not how you're constrained, but how constraining it feels in the game - there's no logical reason that the portal gun in Portal only works on certain surfaces, or why a portal has to be attached to a surface at all, but the game flows so well that we don't question this or see it as a limitation, indeed it's the very mechanism that makes the game challenging and fun. By the yardstick you set, that game would never have been made.
It's Chuck Norris I feel sorry for, his entire body is a destructive device. Expect the feds to turn up and perform a controlled detonation any time.
No, that would just have the effect of outlawing buying milk, it wouldn't negate the law against murder. Of course, in practice sufficient people would complain that the law would be changed.
I don't know what the state of the law is like in the US on this, but here in the UK goods have to be fit for purpose, and if I buy a related service on the basis of goods that turn out to be faulty then I have the right to return both (well, actually the company can offer a replacement rather than a return, but since they could only offer me a handset with the same fault, they'd be forced to give me my money back and negate the contract). Is there no similar consumer protection in the US?
Better results, I would have thought. If they had to give out some iTunes vouchers, they've still made a huge profit on the phone and contract, and they sell iTunes content at a further profit anyway, so you're getting nowhere near $5 (or whatever it is) value from the company, and on top of that if you go buy someone else's phone you won't be spending at the App store. If you take the vouchers, you're demonstrating they can sell you an inferior product without any real consequence - assuming enough people returned them, I think that would be a much clearer statement for the future.
Yeah, it might be this guy.
Maybe its quid-pro-quo payment for James Cameron consulting them on border control issues?
They've been pulling the piracy == terrorism crap for a good few years now. It seems like it finally got government backing, that's all.
I don't see why, plenty of married men get caught out in the reverse scenario, I don't think they lose their tax benefits (well, not until after the divorce, anyway).
It seems from your argument that kids in marriages already have the breaks of a stable home life, and that the tax breaks should therefore go to unmarried people with kids - they're likely to have a harsher upbringing so they need all the help they can get, no?
It does seem counter-intuitive that marriage is seen as important by the devoutly religious, and the way politicians win their votes is by offering tax breaks for married people. Reducing the status of marriage to a financial incentive doesn't really re-inforce its importance, not when it's trivial to then get divorced and find someone else when you're both sick of each other. Nor is making divorce more difficult the answer - nobody should be trapped in an unhappy relationship. It seems to me the way to make marriage more important is to make it more difficult to get married in the first place, make sure the couple really understand the implications and are happy with the commitment and are even suited to live together. Assigning an arbitrary cash value isn't the way to give something real value.
Well that leaves them with discriminating against socially awkward people who can't find a partner of either sex. Fortunately Google employs a lot of developers who aren't noted for scoring high in that particular demographic. Oh, wait...
Yeah, you see I don't buy that. If it were purely a social debate, you'd see countries with population issues encouraging homosexual behaviour to reduce childbirth. The UK is pretty much at peak population, but I didn't see any of the major political parties offering tax cutting incentives to homosexuals. Furthermore, it's inherently wrong to assume a homosexual can somehow stop being gay so that he can go live a fulfilling life with a wife and children (that's not to say many don't try, for whatever reason, they just tend to come up short on the fulfilling part), and patently ridiculous to think a slight tax break would be sufficient to sway them to even try - look at it from the other perspective, if you're a straight man would you enter into a homosexual relationship in order to pay less tax? No, whichever way you paint it this boils down to people A don't like people B and have a big enough majority to enact laws to punish them. That's how democracy works, but people A could at least have the decency to be honest about it and not try to pretend it's part of some grand scheme to embiggen us all.
I honestly don't know how they reconcile their belief and their failure to follow the strict rule of their god. I don't have any firm religious beliefs (I'm not atheist, I don't disbelieve and I'd like to believe I'm open to the idea of a god, I just lack the blind faith requirement) but it seems to me that if I knew in my heart that there was an all powerful being who could send me to burn for eternity, I'd do whatever that bastard told me to. A few years of self privation in this life to negate an eternity of pain seems like a pretty good payout, and yet I see many Christians who blatantly ignore or give very wide interpretation to what the Bible tells them, almost always in favour of how they want to live their lives. Either these people don't really believe, or they believe but they think their god is lying about the whole eternity bit, or their own ego is so great that they just think god'll forgive them all their transgressions, but somewhere along the way something just doesn't add up, here.
It seems like Sony's usual mis-step of creating nice hardware but completing misjudging the mood of the market. They released a be-all-end-all console that could play games from the current and last two generations, contained a Blu-Ray player and was a Linux computer, but they charged an astronomical price at launch. It then transpired that there market wanted a cheap, dedicated game console and didn't care about the bells and whistles. The world economy starting to collapse a year later probably didn't help, but disregarding even this it was badly judged - if they'd stuck to their guns and produced a cheap, solid gaming console they'd have likely hit profit much sooner and wouldn't now have a bunch of angry customers who've seen the feature set of their purchase pared down. The flip side of the coin is that the PS3 helped them win the BD/HDD war, and taking a long term view maybe they're going to reap back far more than they'd have lost with a cheap console and HDD being the market standard - time will tell on that score.
Some sites suggested that the 360 made it into profit less than a year after launch (based on estimates of shaving 40% off the cost to produce as component prices fell), however that doesn't take the red ring o' death debacle into account, which I'm sure kept the company in the red (no pun intended) on the hardware front for a few more years.
And ruled by cats.
Not only that, but the fact that you don't "win" at the stock market by following the herd. By the time the herd has latched onto something in significant numbers, the opportunity to make money from it has likely already passed, so you have people specifically bidding in ways that don't reflect the crowd's initial choices and then hoping the crowd will make the same conclusion at some point.
Maybe it's funny that anyone would continue to pay money to a site with such an incredibly fraudulent business model (if this is true, I've never heard of it but I've never had much to do with Fark other than inadvertently clicking through from the occasional link).
The fact that the majority of people are there for that type of humour (otherwise surely they'd leave, I skimmed it for two days and gave up) shows that the crowd is successfully producing exactly what the crowd wants to hear. If Curtis thinks he's going to find deep philosophical or scientific insight, he's wrong, but if the goal of the site is to encourage exactly the kind of atmosphere that the people using the site seem to enjoy then it's doing okay.
Or maybe the wisdom of the crowd tells them that giving the 6'4 guy in the bar the impression that they think he's overweight is not a smart move, so they adjust down on purpose :)
If anything, this is an example of one of the reasons Surowiecki gives for why the wisdom of crowds can fail - conformity and imitation. If the crowd is ignoring the busker (and past experience tells us this is usually a wise decision), then new members entering the crowd will mirror that behaviour as there is a strong herd instinct. As you point out, the violin is such a niche instrument to most people, it would be unusual to find sufficient numbers of people in a given crowd who could appreciate that his playing is better than average. If, by some oddity, the first crowd that came upon him were avid violin fans, the whole dynamic of the crowd might change - all it takes is a small gathering around him and suddenly the crowd, instead of ignoring him, will become attracted to the spectacle. Nothing in that disproves the theory of the wisdom of crowds, it just demonstrates that you need the right conditions before you can tap into that wisdom.
Exactly, the crowd can go either way, the interesting part is studying what causes the crowd to go either way so that we can better leverage crowd wisdom. There are many examples of intelligence in crowds that we see every single day and just take for granted - anyone who drives probably thinks most other road users are idiots, but collectively the fact that there are literally millions of vehicles on our roads and yet accidents are relatively isolated incidents (and even the fact that some people do drive like idiots and yet the crowd takes their behaviour into account and compensates) couple with the fact that driving is a pretty complex task to be doing as part of a crowd in the first place, and it's only that the crowd adjusts and makes allowances that allows this all to work, is a prime example. It's all too easy to point to crowds doing something stupid and argue that crowds are therefore stupid while ignoring the clever things crowds accomplish or the reasons for that stupidity.
This is accounted for in the Wisdom of Crowds hypothesis - the two are not mutually exclusive but are two sides of the same coin, that under the right conditions a crowd can become more intelligent than any of its constituent parts, while under the wrong conditions it can become an ugly mob with pitchforks and flaming torches and a penchant for burning down the towers of respectable men of science. The key is providing the right conditions to reap the benefits.
Exactly, even Surowiecki recognised that there were many points where the benefits of the crowd could break down (what he identified as systemic flaws in the decision making process, which generally manifest as an environment of conformity). His suggestion wasn't that all crowds are automatically smarter than their constituent parts, just that all crowds have the ability to be in the right conditions. The fact that 99% of Fark comments are people trying to be funny or posting established memes to try and fit in demonstrates this quite accurately, maybe Curtis didn't appreciate that there was more to the theory than a blanket statement that crowds are smart.