Posts by Tom 13 7544 publicly visible posts • joined 10 Jun 2009
adventure books, and role-playing and table-top board games
Only for a little while. We await the arrival of the killer app that will return us to RPGs that no MMO will ever be able to create: the ORPG. This killer app will provide video conference combined with onscreen display for the GM for maps and room displays, fight screen for combat, direct chat to the GM and private character chats.
The DOJ's Own PDF file Undercuts Their Case
But I guess nobody here bothered to read it. Ironically the key line is sandwiched between their highlighted quotes:
So even before Apple got on the scene, some booksellers were starting to withhold books from Amazon.
Essentially, the publishers realized they were being bled dry by Amazon and were looking for a way out. Jobs gave it to them. This suit is Bezos or his buddies trying to get even, and because the publishers already been bled out so much they didn't have the cash necessary to defend themselves from an intense government onslaught.
I'd never be able to get it down to 10. Hell I can't even remember the names of them all. I played a fair number of them. Space Harrier was another of my favorites.
On your anti-list I believe you are thinking of Draon's Lair. Cool graphics, lousy play. I watched other people play, It was 5 to 10 long seconds of staring at the screen, then a single sudden joystick move one way or the other to make it to the next interlude.
Yep. I could get one, maybe two time extensions on that one. It generally turned me off to those kinds of games forever. Yeah, I'll join in if the company has one of those team-building events at Dave and Busters, but only because it's required.
Spy Hunter was much more satisfying. In fact, I'd say the only one I played that was as bad as Pole position was something called Space Wars. It was two little ships that let two players shoot at each other. There was a star/black hole obstacle in the middle that could also blow up your ship. But at least on that one you knew up front you were only going to play for one minute and 30 seconds per coin.
That's what I really miss. Console games you just can't abuse the way you could a good standup machine in an arcade. Whether it was Space Invaders, Defender, Missile Command, Pacman or even Quix, you could really get into pushing that joystick around. And for the ultimate in frantic joystick jerking, it had to be Robotron.
Given that both of the arcades I frequented in the misspent time of my college years went bust about 10 years ago, I doubt it.
Dave and Busters claims to make a go of it. They will at least have a combination Ms. Pacman/Galaga machine in the joint. Possibly Joust. Maybe Quix. Definitely a Gauntlet II (but never Gauntlet I) machine. But yeah, after that it's all Time Crisis/House of the Dead XX shooters or multi-player road race games. But only in the half of the game room that isn't dedicated to those silly ticket dispensing gambling machines. Okay, skeeball can be fun for a little bit as can the laser shooting gallery, but not the games we enjoyed in our youth. Although I think I did see a Dig Dug machine on my last pass through.
On the upside, you can at least have a beer while you reminisce. Or in my case, a gin and tonic.
Guess you missed it. That ended about 5 years back now.
I case of doubt, check out the current Congressional hearings on:
IRS intimidation of political speech
AP wiretaps
Benghazi
There are others waiting in the wings that probably won't get any attention. Like Fast and Furious to name just one. I would have expected that one to gain some traction since it killed a lot of Mexicans, but it seems they can be tossed under the bus too if it fits other political purposes.
Yes, there are times that I curse Dell puzzles. But truth be told, I'd rather that than having to carry around a belt load of screwdriver bits: Philips, flathead, Torx, modified Torx, whatever those square things are called, etc. etc. And God help us all when somebody patents a new fastener.
That being said, the reality is they use the puzzles to reduce manufacturing costs. Seems counter-intuitive, but that's the root cause.
But I guess nobody here bothered to read it. Ironically the key line is sandwiched between their highlighted quotes:
So even before Apple got on the scene, some booksellers were starting to withhold books from Amazon.
Essentially, the publishers realized they were being bled dry by Amazon and were looking for a way out. Jobs gave it to them. This suit is Bezos or his buddies trying to get even, and because the publishers already been bled out so much they didn't have the cash necessary to defend themselves from an intense government onslaught.
Not at all.
If another retailer signed an agency agreement with different percentages based on sales volume, if he managed a better sales volume he could offer lower prices. The publisher would have to offer Apple the same agreement, but Apple would have to match the sales volume to get the discount.
For as much as I dislike Apple's my way or the highway approach to their hardware, I see nothing illegal about their agency agreement or the MFN clause.
Wrong on so many points.
There are competitors to Apple's iPad. Kindle is one of the primary ones. You don't have to buy from Apple to get the ebook. The difficulty does sort of lie within the combination of the agency pricing and the MFN clause. But what happened is the publishers finally started making money again so they only offered agency contracts to their other distributors when their old contracts expired. So there is no collusion to set prices, the market just worked out that way.
Increasing demand NEVER reduces prices, that's a function of increasing supply. Even the MFN clause doesn't stop prices from going down if supply increases. If I started a publishing company and offered Apple or any of the other vendors ebooks at an agency price of $7.99 they'd probably take it in a heartbeat. And if I had the resources to do that and could make a living at it I would. That nobody else is either indicates to me that the prices are at about what they need to be to support the market. Sort of like $1000/standard PC was the screwdriver shop price point about 10 years ago and it was $5000/standard PC 15 years ago.
He didn't say $9.99 was below cost, he said the prices Amazon was charging were below cost to the publishers. Jobs offered him a chance to make a profit. More to the point, whenever you have a sales agent consistently selling product below cost, you have the classic predatory monopoly situation: an agent who is able to indefinitely undercut a market segment because the agent is using profits from elsewhere to corner the market. Again I will point out it was Amazon exhibiting that power.
Also, you need to consider that ebooks aren't simply competing with ebooks. They compete directly with physical books. Maybe in the long run ebooks win out and physical ones go away (I hope not, but recognize the real possibility that before my life ends physical books will be artifacts of a bygone era), but until then the publisher needs both streams of revenue to survive. Indeed, the stream from the physical stream is currently more important to him. It's only price fixing if he colludes with other publishers to set the prices, not if he set prices in his best interest.
Apple did no such thing. They gave the distributors a lifeline and the distributors took it. If the other vendors really thought a lower price would sustain the distributor they could have negotiated for it. Yes, the benefits would also have gone to Apple, but they'd still have a better price point. And they'd need to compete on convenience and internal cost effectiveness.
Amazon might be selling at the price you want to purchase at. They might not be selling at a price authors or distributors can survive.
In fact, I've come to fear Amazon more than Apple or Google on the publishing front. If you want a company that can enforce real monopoly pricing, it's Amazon. They've already killed Borders here in the US. I don't doubt Barnes and Nobles is next.
Right on the first point, not so much on the second.
I know someone who was involved in iPhone and iPad sales at a major US national retailer. He said Jobs actually limited the availability of devices at release which added to the snob factor (only he calls it the "coolness" factor). That supported the super-high margins Apple commands for their inferior hardware. On the other hand, he still bought the iPhone because even though the hardware is inferior, Apple supports it for a longer time. So he's expecting a lower TCO over the 4-5 years he plans to own the phone.
But overall you are correct that it was the media manipulation, not the engineering that sold the product.
If it isn't, that's only because a lot of judges want to make more of an ass out of the law than is usual.
Granted, it is unexpected to see a judge actually implementing a reasonable man standard, but now that it's been done once it should be obvious to everyone else.
Well, the top Google reference says US electrical production figures are:
Coal 37%
Natural Gas 30%
Nuclear 19%
Hydropower 7%
Other Renewable 5%
Biomass 1.42%
Geothermal 0.41%
Solar 0.11%
Wind 3.46%
Petroleum 1%
Other Gases < 1%
So, yes, the shorthand reference would be 'No they don't.' More to the point, even with more real US dollars having been thrown at the so-called renewable energy source in the last 4 years than all of the rest of the electrical industry has over its lifetime they still make a negligible contribution and aren't likely to in my lifetime. And since the commie-green axis hates nukes, you don't get to count them with renewables.
That should probably be "I hate people who exhibit adult behavior."
I've known people 20 years older than me (I may not be over the hill, but I'm no spring chicken either) who exhibit behavior worse than your average teenager. Conversely, I've known some teenagers who exhibited more mature behavior than your average 35 year old.
All the money he made at PayPal is gone. And he's had a good number of companies go bankrupt that nobody talks about. Neither Tesla nor SolarCity would even be running now without heavy government subsidies. Maybe not directly to his company [although word is that's how he "paid off" his loan early (even though he has larger loans still outstanding)], but certainly to the purchasers of his electric vehicles.
And while this might be a news flash for you, NASA is not a private entity.
Maybe he does win. But never overlook the very high risk businesses in which he is engaged. I haven't played at his money level, but I have successfully engaged in high risk undertakings (unfortunately never for my own personal gain). When I did, I never pretended those activities were anything other than very high risk.
That $5 billion price tag is the one given by the bought politician to make it sound plausible. Multiply by 5 before it actually makes it through the government to start the project. Then another 10 times for the inevitable delays, unforeseen obstacles, environmental impact statements, and various and sundry lawsuits.
Hell, they can't even build an itsy-bitsy $300 million transit facility (read: parking garage only actually a through-way building for buses) in my neck of the woods.
Well, whatever it is, it's killed fewer brain cells than whatever you're shooting up with.
The US grid has had significant rolling brownout problems the last two or three years running. There is no excess generating capacity and the grid runs at too high an efficiency percentage during waking hours. The hours which are precisely the ones that will be used for those high capacity charging stations. Running the 110v line to the garage overnight may work in the rural and the less dense 'burbs, but move into any of the high density housing areas and there are no garages, which means you aren't running cords out the front door of your apartment/townhouse to charge your street parked car overnight.
You really ought to practice that before posting such drivel.
1. Pure drivel with no bearing on the current discussions.
2. Maybe in the UK they track with inflation, certainly not in the US. Even in the case of the UK, I expect that to the extent they aren't increasing in at the meter costs, it is because it is increasing in at the VAT costs. Here in the US we've seen year on year increases ranging from 3 to 7% for the last three years at least with more coming. The only deflationary pressure on this has been the huge influx of natural gas that has resulted from fracking operations on privately owned land. Now maybe a lot of that price pressure is because they've been artificially depressed over the previous 30 years, but that doesn't change the fact that they are going up. Increasing demand for them won't make them go lower.
3. We've needed more generating capacity for a good 15-20 years now. It's been systematically stymied by the commie-green axis. Wind, solar, and thermal simply can't make that up. And don't talk to me about nukes. The only thing the green-commie axis hates worse than coal or gas (petrol to you Brits) is nuclear. So no, those aren't coming online either. They can start building them (it's important to keep the rubes' hopes up), but they'll never produce an mw of power that feeds the grid. And that's assuming the grid can keep up with it. The only thing in worse shape than our power plant situation is the physical grid itself.
4. Probably, but again that's mostly because the commie-green axis won't let any new real power sources come on line. They may be willing to sacrifice a couple flocks of seagulls to placate the rubes about bringing new sources online, but that won't relieve the price pressure. And since the real goal is to depopulate the rubes, that pressure has to stay high.
They're about to run into a real life time paradox problem. Way back when Colin Baker was The Doctor it was established that the 13th (last according to canon at the time) incarnation was every bit as evil as the Master. And that he'd been offered all the previous regenerations if he could convict Baker in Trial of a Time Lord.
Not that this sort of problem is exactly new. After all, nobody could ever possibly need more than 640KB of memory on a computer, or even more than a couple dozen computers in the whole world. And after their brilliant idea of regeneration to bring in a new actor, who could possibly need another 11 actors for the role?
That's more apt than MS are willing to admit, and I hadn't realized just how much until this morning.
My dad who is not a computer type thinks it is finally time to take the plunge. For Christmas he got himself some non-name Android tablet thing and tried to configure it himself. I couldn't figure out the reset combination to try to fix it. He eventually took it back. I gave him a semi-fixed up laptop in May to replace it. This morning when I check WOOT they had a $300 reasonably powered laptop on one of the screens. When I saw it came with Windows 8 I stopped checking the rest of the specs. Yes, I might be able to install a Linux distro on it, and all he really wants to do is get an email account and check the web. But I don't personally use any Linux distros so I'm not going to put something on his PC that I can't support over the phone. So even at a really affordable price point, the Windows 8 logo stopped the sale before I really started to check it.
By now I'd expect you would have learned that Hope is not a plan, but I guess there's no hope for low information voters.
You can hope for the cure all you want, but until there is at least promising research pointing at an imminent cure, you don't plan on it. And in this case I'm not talking about 'promising' the way they do when Jerry's on TV raising money for his Kids (laudable as both actions are), I mean 'promising' in the way an investor means it when he sinks 10% of his cash into a pharmaceutical company.
Full disclosure: I didn't mark him either way.
This will get interesting. Google have been put in a situation where the best they can do is choose the least evil because a no evil solution doesn't exist.
I've puzzled over the problem for quite some time and still don't have even an inkling of a theoretical solution let alone a practical one. The reality is that the coders have to be the ones to issue the patch, sometimes that takes an awfully long time, and sometimes it isn't practical to uninstall or block whatever is broken until the patch is released. Here is one of the places where I do see an advantage for the publicly posted OSS source libraries. Any coder can post a fix so once disclosed the time to fix seems to fall drastically compared to closed/non-public source.
The reason the IRS got Al Capone, is that with the IRS unlike the courts, you usually have to prove your innocence.
That's not as true for multi-nationals. Because the the subcorps are legal entities existing in other jurisdictions, until such time as they transfer something form one place to another there is no record which is required to be reported to the IRS. So there is some sense in which the IRS has to prove that there should have been a transfer which should have generated the paperwork. So for them the IRS looks a bit more like the court system than it does to your average citizen.
Whatever entity is chosen to set the transfer price probably has a fair bit of leeway. Make no mistake about it what we would call the real cost of the widgets is nothing compared to the final price of the equipment. The whole purpose of the price setting operation is to maximize profit from whatever region they are transferring the widgets to. If the US, you can probably command $400-$500 street. For reasons I don't fully understand, they seem to be able to also make it the same numeral for Euros or Pounds. These days its probably the same for Canadian dollars although at one time it would be 10-15% more. Sell it for Pesos in Mexico and it will have a whole different price, maybe 50% of what it would be in exchange rate US dollars. Africa maybe 20-30%. Because of all those varying rates, the transfer rate for each operation will also be different. So your concept of a transfer price is entirely theoretical.
At least with physical widgets, there is some real world floor for the price even if it is minimal. I've bought software for a US based 501(c)3 organization. Most people wouldn't believe the discount rates. And I'm sure they still had a margin on it.
No we're not. That was their biggest crap idea and the one that needs fixed even more than the missing menu list.
Maybe, maybe they can have a common core base for both operating systems. But the two have distinctly different user interface needs, so they need different GUIs. Even Jobs wasn't this boneheaded and he was a dictatorial bastage. Sometimes brilliant, but a still a bastage.
That menu screen looks like crap. I'm a guy with almost no sense of aesthetics and that screen offends me. If Jobs were still alive we'd see a repeat of his Mac and PC guy commercials, and PC guy would be wearing it on his shirt.
Best menu was probably their 9x system, but they can't ever let anything be a best of. So they try to improve it and break it instead.
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