I have enough physical crap. I don't want to fill up landfills needlessly. I don't want to waste gas and time driving down to fry's to 'save' $10.
The download only should probably be cheaper than the physical version, but if they did that their retail partners probably wouldn't carry the physical version. Game theoretic economic constraints suck, but they exist so you do the best you can.
In fact by buying the physical box the store, you are telling game companies that you value the retail part of the supply chain. That makes them less likely to lower their online price out of fear of angering retail. By buying a physical copy at retail, you are supporting a middle man, keeping prices high, and helping to pollute our tiny planet.
I have enough physical crap in my living space. I don't need a box or a CD or a manual or little metal figures.
It did take me about 50 tries to remember my password to steam.
I have steam installed on a desktop that I've turned on once in the past 3 years. Last night I installed steam on my laptop, eventually got access to my account, and found Half-Life 2 -- which I purchsed at the store -- available to install. Not that I have any interest in installing it at the moment, but I could play it again if I wanted to. Where is the CD that I got with my physical copy? I have no idea. Probably in a box in storage somewhere.
This isn't really a rational argument, but it is a different viewpoint.
The universe exists and it came from somewhere. There is a base case to the recursive question of "where did I come from" and that is God. In actuality, God is all there is. This is kind of "by definition". There is a root node to creation that I call God and since everything came out of that, everything is a part of God.
I believe that God doesn't have the same constraints of time and the speed of light that we seem to. Maybe he is sort of like a computer that doesn't have time, space, entropy or Turing computation constraints. In that case, literally, all things are possible in God.
Though the magic of this infinite computation, our universe is simulated -- although simulated might not be the right word in the context of this types of computation. The multiple universe theory of quantum mechanics suggests that maybe there isn't a single reality being simulated. Maybe there are multiple truths. And maybe these areas of different truths can interact as long as there are not constraints that prevent them from interacting.
The Christian catechism has a question that is something like "Why did God create the world?" to which the official answer is "For his own glory." I never liked that answer and prefer to interpret its meaning more as "To explore the phase space of what is possible." Imagine you are a solitary intelligence with no constraints. What are you going to do? Maybe you start playing with what is possible with systems of constraints. So you put constaints on part of yourself and see what happens.
One of the things that happens is us. Our job is to see what happens when we do stuff. But we are still made out of God-stuff and are only constrained by the rules that we created for ourself. With infinite memory, there is no reason to throw anything away so we can be remembered for eternity and with infinite computation there is no reason to just archive stuff so we can keep running in some other system after we stop running in this constraint system. Since we are God, maybe we get to choose how we want to continue operating after we leave this world. Maybe to maintain a sense of "you" in the after life, the system in which you run is patterened after your beliefs. Or maybe not.
Based on the assumption that we have free will, and that free will gives us choice about how to spend our after life, what about people who find existence so terrible that they don't want to exist? Is oblivion an option? What about people who reject God (although they are really rejecting themselves)? What happens there? Disbelief in God is different from rejection of God. I've know athiests who fall into both camps (i.e. "I don't believe in God, but if he did exist I wouldn't like him" vs "I don't believe in God so whatever.")
I do believe there is right and wrong. I can think about things in my past that I regret. Those are parts of myself that I don't like. In other words, I reject those parts of myself. Since I am God-stuff, I believe that God tends to "reject" the same sort of things that I reject. This goes back to the knowledge of good and evil described in the Old Testament book of Genesis. When I die and get to view my entire life through the persepective of a larger consciousness, I don't want to reject who I am (I believe the message of forgiveness in the New Testament is intended to prevert this rejection).
But none of this is a rational argument other than (I think) the base case definition as God. The idea that the base case is an unconstrained intelligence and everything that follows from that might as well be fiction, but it is a fiction that meshes well with the Christian programming I received as a child.
By the way, since the purpose of us is the explore the phase space of what is possible, by being an athiest, your are exploring an important area of that phase space. I would like to thank you for your contribution. Also since you are God-stuff, your choice to explore that area means you won't be seeing any evidence of God during your time here. From your perspective, people who believe in God are actually following a belief system based on fairy tales. But from their perspective, those belief systems are true.
The entire economy is made up of supply chains. A produces something that B uses to produce something that C uses to produce something that is consumed by an end user. There is some amount of economic surplus that is necessary for a supply chain to be econmically viable. Free market theory says that competition will drive that surplus to the end consumer. But that takes time. In the short term, the surplus gets distributed across the supply chain. I theorize that negotiation power results in most of the surplus going to one entity in that supply chain. The rest become zombies or go out of business depending on market dynamics (and if they go out of business there often seems to be an unending supply of business people will make a go of it anyway).
Movie theater chains seem to be in the "go out of business" category. If movie studios are smart, they will give the theater chains just enough money to operate and keep them as zombies.
Most people don't even have a good idea what Net Neutrality means. It doesn't help that it means different things to different people.
What it means to me is this: If I pay for a pipe of a certain size from A to B, the ISP cannot differentiate pricing based on what I send down that pipe. They can't charge me more for video chat than email just because video chat competes with their phone system. They can't charge me more to watch Netflix online just because Netflix competes with their on-demand movie product. They can't make me pay more to access Google just because Google is making lots of money.
They can provide "first class" service by offering service at higher speed or lower latency or higher reliability. They can even sell bandwidth to Netflix so that Netflix can stream video containing ads to me at no cost on my part. But Netflix would be allowed to do whatever they want with that bandwidth.
I will be the first to admit that this will cut down on potential profits that can be earned by the ISP's. But they only reason they would be able to do that pricing transfer in the first place is because they have a government granted monopoly based on the right of way to lay cables. If they want a non-neutral net then we should take away that monopoly and watch their margins drop below zero as stupid competition saturates the market with supply.
I remember reading newsnet before DOOM came out. There was incredible buzz about the game. So much so that nearly every single post started with "DOOM:". People began to get tired of the prefix. Some suggested that the next game they get excited about have some super long name that couldn't be simply prefixed to a message title. Another person suggested the name "Smashing pumpkins into small piles of putrid debris." Yet another person countered that they would simply acronym it and all of the messages titles would be "SPISPOPD".
When DOOM was finally released, SPISPOPD was one of the cheat codes.
I work at a company that sells products purchased with money that has been taxed.
My salary is still taxed.
If I hire someone, their income is taxed even though I paid taxes on the money I am using the pay them.
If it is income, then the IRS taxes it. If you have a virtual economy and there is any way to convert virtual goods back to real money, then the IRS is going to want to tax those virtual goods as if they are real money.
(I don't know if the EVE products meet that description).
Maybe you should tell your neighbor down the hall that he has two options:
1) Sell DVD's 2) Rent movies
If he is going to sell DVD's, then people are going to buy them and rent them out under first sale doctrine. The goal here is that revenue from purchases is more than you can extract from rentals.
Or he could end sales. Plan on all revenue coming from revenue sharing on rentals. Give copies to the rental companies. Charge a super-high purchase rate if people don't return them. Dictate the rental price and take a healthy share. Doing it this way would also allow transfer pricing on companies like Netflix. Columbia could have transfer pricing on the Netflix's digital business if it were not for the escape hatch the physical mailing business provides.
Unfortunately (for him), if the other studio's don't follow his lead, the end result will be fewer movies from Columbia being watched as consumers choose the competition. He could arrange collusion with his competition, but that would be illegal and probably more financially damaging in the long run.
If he wants to discuss real long term solutions to this problem, I am available for consulting.
Right. The people who use the software get to make as much money as they can. The people who write the software get to make as much as they can providing support (and since there is a larger pool of support than authors the supply/demand price curve says that isn't very much).
I think he means the open source software that Google used to develop their lucrative search and ad business. If they ever distribute those binaries outside of the company they will be required to release the source code as well.
In the novelization, it was explained that Skynet had sent agents back in time to begin takeover of our industrial complex. Most machines had been designed for remote control and the factors would switch over to churning out Hunter Killers on Judgement Day. The terminator was able to take over those cars because they had been designed to be taken over.
Although, in the book, most of the cars on the planet started driving themselves and killing humans on that day.
Back in the 90's Microsoft was dominating the OS industry. There wasn't really a choice. The Linux kernal joined forces with GNU to provide an alternative out of necessity. Today there is a lot more choice (largely due to Linux) and the driving necessity just isn't there any more. Young developers don't see a crusade they can join and wave their flag. They see just another career option (and one that seems to not pay as well as other options).
More likely: Microsoft identified areas they thought were important. They then made plans to implement and test those areas. Once the implementation was done and the tests passed (thereby 'validating' the tests) they were submitted to the working group. Tests can be tricky to write and it is a good idea to make sure they work as expected before putting them into production. It shouldn't be a surprise that tests submitted by Microsoft work on IE9.
SVG is still under development. The IE9 preview is going to fail on a lot of the full test suite because there is a still a lot of work to do on it.
A single photon took a single path through multiple local parallel worlds. If no information is gathered on which path it took, those worlds collapse back into a single world because the resulting states are indistinguishable. If you observe which path was taken, then you become entangled in one of the worlds. The part of your brain that remembers that observation is now spread across multiple worlds and as that memory affects more of the world that divergence continues. However, if you forget that fact and the fact affects nothing else, then the worlds will collapse back together.
If you observe multiple photons, you get a statistical effect where the combination of all possible paths of all possile photons are indistinguishable from each other. The end result is the same and the billions of multiple worlds collapsing into a single world observable as an interference pattern.
Worlds diverge and merge on a quantum scale but as information travels between bubbles the bits that remain distinct can grow. People often think of multiple worlds as entire parallel universes in bubbles next to each other, but it is more like a foam of lots of tiny interacting bubbles. When two parallel bubbles are similar enough, they can collapse back together.
This is why you will often get conflicting reports from witnesses about some event. Sometimes different events are actually observed, but the imperfect information processing ability of our brains allows the different events to collapse back together as long as the final outcome it the same. Similarly, if you can forget your past, you open the future to new possiblities. There is a reason Merlin lived time backwards.
What if you could create a quantum bubble the size of the Earth? What if you could then force its collapse? I think this is what the TV show Fringe is about. Walter did an experiment a long time ago to create a massive quantum super-position. He diverged the two worlds in an artifical way and now the superpositions are colliding in a very destructive way.
By the way, I made everything up here and I highly doubt it has any basis in scientific fact.
We can construct a parse tree for a sentence by recursively grouping two groups into a single group. I believe the following is the correct parse tree for your original sentence.
You want verbs to be the operators. "believe" and "be" are the verbs. "can't" and "would" are auxillery verbs. Those would be unary operators that act on a simple verb. But since a verb is acting as an operator, it is tough to enter a verb and then an auxillery. I'll treat the entire verb as a single unit (if I had a 'operate' button instead of requiring a symbol to operate then we could break apart the verb phrases). How does "that" fit in? I'm going to make "that" a unary operator to complete the predicate target. While I'm at it, "so" is an operator on a noun.
I -> (literal) they -> (literal) shortsighted (literal) so -> ("so" + "shortsighted") would be -> "they" + "would be" + "so shortsighted" that -> "that" + "they would be so shortsighted" can't believe -> "I" + "can't believe" + "that they would be so shortsighted"
I they shortsighted so would be that can't believe! vs I that they so shortsighted would be can't believe!
Pretty close, but I'm going to have to take points off for not considering grouping operations other than S-V-O.
Slashdot Mirror
My version crashes frequently. One of its favorite places to crash is when I try to save my game. Thank goodness it has the autosave files.
Yeah, that really cut into my own online sales of real Buckminsterfullerines that I collect from my fireplace.
You're missing my point.
I have enough physical crap.
I don't want to fill up landfills needlessly.
I don't want to waste gas and time driving down to fry's to 'save' $10.
The download only should probably be cheaper than the physical version, but if they did that their retail partners probably wouldn't carry the physical version. Game theoretic economic constraints suck, but they exist so you do the best you can.
In fact by buying the physical box the store, you are telling game companies that you value the retail part of the supply chain. That makes them less likely to lower their online price out of fear of angering retail. By buying a physical copy at retail, you are supporting a middle man, keeping prices high, and helping to pollute our tiny planet.
I have enough physical crap in my living space. I don't need a box or a CD or a manual or little metal figures.
It did take me about 50 tries to remember my password to steam.
I have steam installed on a desktop that I've turned on once in the past 3 years. Last night I installed steam on my laptop, eventually got access to my account, and found Half-Life 2 -- which I purchsed at the store -- available to install. Not that I have any interest in installing it at the moment, but I could play it again if I wanted to. Where is the CD that I got with my physical copy? I have no idea. Probably in a box in storage somewhere.
If you own nothing then you have nothing to lose.
A man with nothing to lose is capable of anything.
The things you own end up owning you.
This isn't really a rational argument, but it is a different viewpoint.
The universe exists and it came from somewhere. There is a base case to the recursive question of "where did I come from" and that is God. In actuality, God is all there is. This is kind of "by definition". There is a root node to creation that I call God and since everything came out of that, everything is a part of God.
I believe that God doesn't have the same constraints of time and the speed of light that we seem to. Maybe he is sort of like a computer that doesn't have time, space, entropy or Turing computation constraints. In that case, literally, all things are possible in God.
Though the magic of this infinite computation, our universe is simulated -- although simulated might not be the right word in the context of this types of computation. The multiple universe theory of quantum mechanics suggests that maybe there isn't a single reality being simulated. Maybe there are multiple truths. And maybe these areas of different truths can interact as long as there are not constraints that prevent them from interacting.
The Christian catechism has a question that is something like "Why did God create the world?" to which the official answer is "For his own glory." I never liked that answer and prefer to interpret its meaning more as "To explore the phase space of what is possible." Imagine you are a solitary intelligence with no constraints. What are you going to do? Maybe you start playing with what is possible with systems of constraints. So you put constaints on part of yourself and see what happens.
One of the things that happens is us. Our job is to see what happens when we do stuff. But we are still made out of God-stuff and are only constrained by the rules that we created for ourself. With infinite memory, there is no reason to throw anything away so we can be remembered for eternity and with infinite computation there is no reason to just archive stuff so we can keep running in some other system after we stop running in this constraint system. Since we are God, maybe we get to choose how we want to continue operating after we leave this world. Maybe to maintain a sense of "you" in the after life, the system in which you run is patterened after your beliefs. Or maybe not.
Based on the assumption that we have free will, and that free will gives us choice about how to spend our after life, what about people who find existence so terrible that they don't want to exist? Is oblivion an option? What about people who reject God (although they are really rejecting themselves)? What happens there? Disbelief in God is different from rejection of God. I've know athiests who fall into both camps (i.e. "I don't believe in God, but if he did exist I wouldn't like him" vs "I don't believe in God so whatever.")
I do believe there is right and wrong. I can think about things in my past that I regret. Those are parts of myself that I don't like. In other words, I reject those parts of myself. Since I am God-stuff, I believe that God tends to "reject" the same sort of things that I reject. This goes back to the knowledge of good and evil described in the Old Testament book of Genesis. When I die and get to view my entire life through the persepective of a larger consciousness, I don't want to reject who I am (I believe the message of forgiveness in the New Testament is intended to prevert this rejection).
But none of this is a rational argument other than (I think) the base case definition as God. The idea that the base case is an unconstrained intelligence and everything that follows from that might as well be fiction, but it is a fiction that meshes well with the Christian programming I received as a child.
By the way, since the purpose of us is the explore the phase space of what is possible, by being an athiest, your are exploring an important area of that phase space. I would like to thank you for your contribution. Also since you are God-stuff, your choice to explore that area means you won't be seeing any evidence of God during your time here. From your perspective, people who believe in God are actually following a belief system based on fairy tales. But from their perspective, those belief systems are true.
I've heard them referred to as Walking Dead.
I have a theory on why that is so common:
The entire economy is made up of supply chains. A produces something that B uses to produce something that C uses to produce something that is consumed by an end user. There is some amount of economic surplus that is necessary for a supply chain to be econmically viable. Free market theory says that competition will drive that surplus to the end consumer. But that takes time. In the short term, the surplus gets distributed across the supply chain. I theorize that negotiation power results in most of the surplus going to one entity in that supply chain. The rest become zombies or go out of business depending on market dynamics (and if they go out of business there often seems to be an unending supply of business people will make a go of it anyway).
Movie theater chains seem to be in the "go out of business" category. If movie studios are smart, they will give the theater chains just enough money to operate and keep them as zombies.
Survivorship bias.
I was thinking that Monsanto was going to sue him for using their patented lung-resistant pea seeds.
Most people don't even have a good idea what Net Neutrality means. It doesn't help that it means different things to different people.
What it means to me is this: If I pay for a pipe of a certain size from A to B, the ISP cannot differentiate pricing based on what I send down that pipe. They can't charge me more for video chat than email just because video chat competes with their phone system. They can't charge me more to watch Netflix online just because Netflix competes with their on-demand movie product. They can't make me pay more to access Google just because Google is making lots of money.
They can provide "first class" service by offering service at higher speed or lower latency or higher reliability. They can even sell bandwidth to Netflix so that Netflix can stream video containing ads to me at no cost on my part. But Netflix would be allowed to do whatever they want with that bandwidth.
I will be the first to admit that this will cut down on potential profits that can be earned by the ISP's. But they only reason they would be able to do that pricing transfer in the first place is because they have a government granted monopoly based on the right of way to lay cables. If they want a non-neutral net then we should take away that monopoly and watch their margins drop below zero as stupid competition saturates the market with supply.
And...
the original post:
http://groups.google.com/group/comp.sys.ibm.pc.games.action/browse_thread/thread/5f4cdcfc6f0f4475/fa9ec82fd97451ac?q=SPISPOPD
I didn't have to copy urban dictionary. I *lived* it.
For a sample of the madcap hijinks those kids we were got into, you can sample the usenet archives on google.
http://groups.google.com/group/comp.sys.ibm.pc.games.action/browse_thread/thread/827ff5b435a4f757/f4389053ce7cb2fd?q=SPISPOPD
I can't believe it has been 17 years.
I remember reading newsnet before DOOM came out. There was incredible buzz about the game. So much so that nearly every single post started with "DOOM:". People began to get tired of the prefix. Some suggested that the next game they get excited about have some super long name that couldn't be simply prefixed to a message title. Another person suggested the name "Smashing pumpkins into small piles of putrid debris." Yet another person countered that they would simply acronym it and all of the messages titles would be "SPISPOPD".
When DOOM was finally released, SPISPOPD was one of the cheat codes.
It was awesome.
So what?
I work at a company that sells products purchased with money that has been taxed.
My salary is still taxed.
If I hire someone, their income is taxed even though I paid taxes on the money I am using the pay them.
If it is income, then the IRS taxes it. If you have a virtual economy and there is any way to convert virtual goods back to real money, then the IRS is going to want to tax those virtual goods as if they are real money.
(I don't know if the EVE products meet that description).
All of the graphics in IE9 are build on top of Direct2D (including SVG). It is not just the canvas.
Are you entering the bugs you find at connect.microsoft.com?
Easy. When the spec is ambiguous you look at the competition and implement the spec in the same way as the majority.
Maybe you should tell your neighbor down the hall that he has two options:
1) Sell DVD's
2) Rent movies
If he is going to sell DVD's, then people are going to buy them and rent them out under first sale doctrine. The goal here is that revenue from purchases is more than you can extract from rentals.
Or he could end sales. Plan on all revenue coming from revenue sharing on rentals. Give copies to the rental companies. Charge a super-high purchase rate if people don't return them. Dictate the rental price and take a healthy share. Doing it this way would also allow transfer pricing on companies like Netflix. Columbia could have transfer pricing on the Netflix's digital business if it were not for the escape hatch the physical mailing business provides.
Unfortunately (for him), if the other studio's don't follow his lead, the end result will be fewer movies from Columbia being watched as consumers choose the competition. He could arrange collusion with his competition, but that would be illegal and probably more financially damaging in the long run.
If he wants to discuss real long term solutions to this problem, I am available for consulting.
Right. The people who use the software get to make as much money as they can. The people who write the software get to make as much as they can providing support (and since there is a larger pool of support than authors the supply/demand price curve says that isn't very much).
I think he means the open source software that Google used to develop their lucrative search and ad business. If they ever distribute those binaries outside of the company they will be required to release the source code as well.
In the novelization, it was explained that Skynet had sent agents back in time to begin takeover of our industrial complex. Most machines had been designed for remote control and the factors would switch over to churning out Hunter Killers on Judgement Day. The terminator was able to take over those cars because they had been designed to be taken over.
Although, in the book, most of the cars on the planet started driving themselves and killing humans on that day.
Back in the 90's Microsoft was dominating the OS industry. There wasn't really a choice. The Linux kernal joined forces with GNU to provide an alternative out of necessity. Today there is a lot more choice (largely due to Linux) and the driving necessity just isn't there any more. Young developers don't see a crusade they can join and wave their flag. They see just another career option (and one that seems to not pay as well as other options).
More likely: Microsoft identified areas they thought were important. They then made plans to implement and test those areas. Once the implementation was done and the tests passed (thereby 'validating' the tests) they were submitted to the working group. Tests can be tricky to write and it is a good idea to make sure they work as expected before putting them into production. It shouldn't be a surprise that tests submitted by Microsoft work on IE9.
SVG is still under development. The IE9 preview is going to fail on a lot of the full test suite because there is a still a lot of work to do on it.
A single photon took a single path through multiple local parallel worlds. If no information is gathered on which path it took, those worlds collapse back into a single world because the resulting states are indistinguishable. If you observe which path was taken, then you become entangled in one of the worlds. The part of your brain that remembers that observation is now spread across multiple worlds and as that memory affects more of the world that divergence continues. However, if you forget that fact and the fact affects nothing else, then the worlds will collapse back together.
If you observe multiple photons, you get a statistical effect where the combination of all possible paths of all possile photons are indistinguishable from each other. The end result is the same and the billions of multiple worlds collapsing into a single world observable as an interference pattern.
Worlds diverge and merge on a quantum scale but as information travels between bubbles the bits that remain distinct can grow. People often think of multiple worlds as entire parallel universes in bubbles next to each other, but it is more like a foam of lots of tiny interacting bubbles. When two parallel bubbles are similar enough, they can collapse back together.
This is why you will often get conflicting reports from witnesses about some event. Sometimes different events are actually observed, but the imperfect information processing ability of our brains allows the different events to collapse back together as long as the final outcome it the same. Similarly, if you can forget your past, you open the future to new possiblities. There is a reason Merlin lived time backwards.
What if you could create a quantum bubble the size of the Earth? What if you could then force its collapse? I think this is what the TV show Fringe is about. Walter did an experiment a long time ago to create a massive quantum super-position. He diverged the two worlds in an artifical way and now the superpositions are colliding in a very destructive way.
By the way, I made everything up here and I
highly doubt it has any basis in scientific fact.
I'm going to try to check your work.
We can construct a parse tree for a sentence by recursively grouping two groups into a single group. I believe the following is the correct parse tree for your original sentence.
{I {(can't believe) [that [they ((would be) (so shortsighted))]]}}
You want verbs to be the operators. "believe" and "be" are the verbs. "can't" and "would" are auxillery verbs. Those would be unary operators that act on a simple verb. But since a verb is acting as an operator, it is tough to enter a verb and then an auxillery. I'll treat the entire verb as a single unit (if I had a 'operate' button instead of requiring a symbol to operate then we could break apart the verb phrases). How does "that" fit in? I'm going to make "that" a unary operator to complete the predicate target. While I'm at it, "so" is an operator on a noun.
I -> (literal)
they -> (literal)
shortsighted (literal)
so -> ("so" + "shortsighted")
would be -> "they" + "would be" + "so shortsighted"
that -> "that" + "they would be so shortsighted"
can't believe -> "I" + "can't believe" + "that they would be so shortsighted"
I they shortsighted so would be that can't believe!
vs
I that they so shortsighted would be can't believe!
Pretty close, but I'm going to have to take points off for not considering grouping operations other than S-V-O.