crystalis's comments

There's a meaningful distinction between 'pay to play' "can't wait" farmville, 'pay to play' random drop, tradeable, gameplay-available goods a la tf2, 'pay to play' cosmetics a la tf2 hats and hon skins, and 'pay to play' in-game advantages a la a lot of Korean MMOs and HoN's early-access hero stuff. Valve is toeing the line, HoN is straddling it, and Korean MMOs and "social" games have thumbed their nose at it.

"A fanatic is one who can't change his mind and won't change the subject."

Do the 10% of applicants you want somehow not fall under sales or development?

One of the benefits of being on a team is that you just need one guy to know how to do all of that and everyone gets the benefit.

Perhaps some modifications to /bestcomments would ameliorate the need for visible comment scores as a consumption guide. A tiny star or somesuch that linked to the /bestcomments page would seem to fit natural use pretty well.

Meta-comment follows:

Would you have replied if comment scores were displayed?

You should consider the timescale and degree as well. A billion generations of AI will pass in the relative blink of an eye, allow for no response, and in almost every failure case will irrevocably destroy everything humans value.

GMO happens slower and is somewhat more manageable.

The internet sales tax honor system is more of an oner system. You have to go out of your way to do all the bookkeeping yourself to reward unwarranted rent-seeking.

Forgive my statistical ignorance, but isn't this form of cheating easily remedied by substituting a different class of characteristic functions?

If a different class of functions doesn't exist, it seems like your classmates just had better study material.

(I'm thinking about a calculus test with a previously unseen e^x. Wouldn't knowing the answer from looking at a previous year's test be more akin to 'learning' than 'cheating'?)

I'm not trying to argue, I was simply trying to discover how much he thought popularity matters. If he figured van Gogh was unimportant, it'd be pointless to try to convince him that sometimes having companies doing interesting things is worthwhile.

(On another note, is Mac OS 9 valuable now? Will it become more valuable eventually? Should Apple just have closed shop since they had a small marketshare and a product that isn't valuable now? Could the lessons learned from the Newton have possibly been applied to make some other kind of consumer device?)

Do you also think we'd be better off without the many van Gogh paintings that didn't sell during his lifetime?

Without points, I mostly just read posts from users whose comments used to show a lot of points. Without points, that list only gets smaller for me.

Flours today are more refined and more likely to be bleached.

Extended with fillers and soaked in sweeteners is stated to be how "grains are typically available to us." Wonderbread is a fair example, and the "standard" muffin that typically has 30 or more grams of sugar is another. Oatmeal today, in its most common presentations, will have a great deal of sugar.

> If it's right for artists to expect, even demand, payment for the value they provide, then piracy is wrong.

> If it's alright to extract value from people's work without compensating them as long as they aren't directly impacted, piracy is OK.

I think this is a good place from which to look at piracy, but you should also consider the Kafkas, van Goghs, and Dickinsons.

They might be drowning pigs to find the swimmers.

Video games all seem to tell the same story: 8 or 9 pirates to 1 legitimate user (http://www.gamasutra.com/php-bin/news_index.php?story=17350 http://www.wired.com/gamelife/2009/04/stardock-88-per/)

Pirates converted to legitimate customers (in the face of DRM or other obstruction of the pirated form) at a rough rate of 1 customer per 1000 defrayed pirates. This seems to indicate a rough ratio of 1000 As to 1 B. Are a thousand sales worth a million users?

Scrolls sounds just like Spectromancer, from Richard Garfield and Skaff Elias (of MTG) and Alexey Stankevich (creator of Astral Tournament). You should check it out: http://www.spectromancer.com

All of the stories that bother to look at numbers seem to look something like this: http://www.gamasutra.com/php-bin/news_index.php?story=17350 http://www.wired.com/gamelife/2009/04/stardock-88-per/

In games, pirates seem to outnumber legitimate customers roughly 9:1, but pirates convert to legitimate customers (in the face of DRM or other obstruction of the pirated form) at a rough rate of 1 customer per 1000 defrayed pirates.

Musically? Looking at Radiohead's In Rainbows, 'most customers' paid nothing, but the album still netted more money in two months than their previous album had in four years. (https://secure.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/en/wiki/In_Rainbows#S...)

Saul Williams had a relatively contemporary offering of a free/$5 album that in two months (and with producer Trent Reznor's extra exposure) sold as many copies as his previous album had sold in four years while garnering four times as many free downloads. He's had two albums since, but I don't know what the sales are like for either of them.

It's also worth noting that there were a fair number of torrented downloads of both albums, which should shift numbers closer to the observed game piracy numbers.

There's enough users that each 3 second downtime is long enough to get someone who submits stories like 'WHY WAS REDDIT DOWN' and enough upvotes to stay on the front page long enough for everyone else to see it. And then recency effect kicks in as soon as reddit is down for another 4 seconds later on.

"I'll listen to these podcasts and that audiobook on my trip, but I don't want them in my collection once I've listened to them..." for an obvious scenario.