HN user
Because the entire industry is a shell game?
~Fundamentals, people, fundamentals.
[aka: if you really think that a producer of gadgets is worth more than most countries' GDP, then you're a fucking idiot. Apple et al is a shell game. ~$100 billion for toys. Not how humanity got to the moon]
HN doesn't disappoint! Down-votes, and no-one can do due diligence.
<CTRL+F>Push Singh
He was named one of the "IEEE Intelligent Systems 10 to Watch," an award that honors young researchers in artificial intelligence. He planned to take a faculty position at the Media Lab this fall...There has been some public note of the similarity between the suicide of Push and that of another more renegade AI Researcher a couple months earlier, Chris McKinstry
http://web.mit.edu/~sdavies/www/mit-suicides/
Bhuwan Singh G
The Boston Herald reported that Singh suffocated himself with a yard-waste trash bag.
And so on.
As I said ~ that whole "killing yourself by applying common garden bags in what in most countries would suggest torture / outside interference" is... rather common in some circles. Blinkers. Wear them! Fear the wider world! Down vote everything outside of your cubicle!
(Hilarious ~ no wonder the Angels love this site, so easy)
Bonus round:
The death of Shacknai’s girlfriend, Rebecca Zahau, was determined to be a suicide, Gore told reporters today...
Zahau, 32, was found nude, with a rope around her neck and her hands and feet bound, a sheriff’s department official said at the time
http://www.bloomberg.com/news/2011-09-02/medicis-ceo-shackna...
You're all so cute! Committed to the Homo Sapiens 2.0 meme, with nary an eye at the real world. Delightful! Oh, and I rate the ~15+ downvotes as your votes for blindness & wilful ignorance over enlightenment and ability to do even an iota of original research. Not a single one who did an even cursory search / knew enough about the field to give a "yes-coincidence-but-not-conspiracy" post.
:Case proven ~ HN is, indeed, for Useful Idiots. . . . . . Now I've provided a citation or two, does this mean all the Aspies in the room will actually do a bit of research? Doubtful, but there we go. [Citation needed if anyone on HN actually is intelligent enough to do basic research]
“"If I had a world of my own, everything would be nonsense. Nothing would be what it is, because everything would be what it isn't. And contrary wise, what is, it wouldn't be. And what it wouldn't be, it would. You see?”
~ How very true, and how easily you're put into hutches here. . Hint: I mentioned three, and only linked to two! Not to mention that whole accident thing. How dangerous AI research can be, when algos rule the world ~ remind me how many young PHD students go into Finance these days? That would be a good place to start one's ruminations! So many random and pointless deaths in the Big Apple.
I'd look into AI specialists who all decided to kill themselves in that "very common" way of putting a bag over their head, wrapping duct tape around their necks and then 'doing an oven' to finish the deal. You know, like those pretty wives of CEOs who commit suicide when their hands & feet are bound? Or ex-Dictators have heart attacks all of a sudden? [And yes, I can cite those ones too for bonus points].
It was very common for a short period of time. And yes: at least one was a kook of huge bullshit; the other two were not. And with tenure, the other two really had no reason to go all in. Especially with their family ties. Additionally, there was a car crash and so on, but these are mere accidents.
The hidden history of success is paving the road with the bones of your competitors.
This isn't to say Google themselves had anything to do with this evil: it merely... widened the broad spaces for saplings to grow, as the forest does when mature trees fall. In broader terms, one might call it: protecting ones investment.
And yes: I can post this with 100% immunity, because the conspiracy police meme will eat this for breakfast (see my above being junked), and nothing I say matters. It was just a sad time in AI research, when a few of the top theorists (and a bullshit artist) off'd themselves. Nice search algos though... nothing ever to do with anyone else's research.
Do you your own due diligence: if you want to be a player, know the game (and the real costs).
Just for an interesting comparison:
Top 100 mining companies in the world:
You'll note that even BHP only hits ~$200bil.
http://www.mineweb.com/mineweb/view/mineweb/en/page67?oid=95...
These are companies that fundamentally provide the materials for our societies.
Shall we change into energy?
ExxonMobil is top, at roughly ~ $300bil
http://www.platts.com/Top250Home
This is a company that powers the modern world.
~ $6 bil for this, $8 bil for Skype, $100 bil for FB is nothing more than Peter-Pan land.
aQuant was MS attempting to get Google to move on some issues, and an attempt to monetise chewing the cud. Skype was MS attempting to control P-2-P interfacing - which will probably succeed (and wasn't ever designed to be monetised) FaceBook was attempting to give the proles the same inherent networking architecture that the elites always enjoyed, and the $100bil is a pay-off for reshaping the world
Hint: mining & energy deal in reality. Tech stocks deal in 'societal value' [where said value is not value to the consumer, it is value to the code controllers; "if you're not paying for it, you're the product"] and are largely to do with the cost of control.
$6 bil in this case means nothing, because MS made billions from nothing.
"It's worth a punt". Translation: if you spend $100 bil on liquidity per day, $6 bil is a joke. Remember: Gates has spent $18 billion on "African circumcision to prevent AIDS" already, and the US government spends that in a month on foreign military adventures (both aggressive and passive).
~
It was worth a punt. Google turned out to be aggressively competitive, however (and let's not mention the top three AI specialists who committed suicide in the year Google launched their algos... ok?)
Be seeing you.
I'd think it would be more likely: "what's the % of players with access to Western standard credit cards for the RMAH". Any country with an acceptable level of security for the "big four" is welcome at the table: nation states who lack this infrastructure, file under "who gives a shit".
One of the really interesting things about Activision/Blizzard is the limitations of their 'Pacific' servers: they only reach four countries in the region (Asia for players in South Korea and the regions of Taiwan, Hong Kong, and Macau http://us.battle.net/support/en/article/diablo-iii-global-pl...), which totally ignores Singapore, Australia and China.
Australia has large amounts to do with a national level of bastard like behaviour by a major corp.
China: I've had some interesting feed-back on the 'whys' of Chinese gaming being so hard to crack: specifically ~ there's two gov. departments fighting over the jurisdiction of judging "gaming content as acceptable", lack of resources to both, and (of course) total lack of understanding of the medium. As it can take 6+ months just to get official acceptance, and torrents / gold farmers / business minded Chinese cannot wait that long, the issue obviously comes down into the "cheaper to buy an account registered to >not China< and if/when it gets banned, move on". Suffice to say: most users use Steam etc & just lie about their location. Top tip: whoever cracks this, either via software, or political introduction & making the Party get a % cut with decent time-lines will make billions. HN really should think about this; imagine the Steam level profits... spread onto a couple of billion people.
Singapore: no idea why this isn't supported. Singapore is modern [business minded], has some seriously large bandwidth infrastructure [your google terms: bank dark pool hsbc] and is very 'pro-business'. I've no idea why Activision hasn't made the jump into just "doing Asian servers" and plumping for a Singapore based exchange, which could neatly divide their market into 3 manageable chunks.
That last one has puzzled me. I'm not getting paid to analyse it, however, and I suspect that once I started, I'd be either too interested or too disgusted to ignore the findings.
(HN: short sharp comments: bollocks to that!)
Traditionally Israel is counted as nominally European for this type of thing.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Football_in_Israel
Note: this might be a little too meta for HN
If no-one noticed, in the video that meatsock posted (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iABPKd0vFxQ) you'll notice that in the fluff (audio: "military bases" "border controls", "checkpoints") you'll see real world photos with US military personnel in.i.e. This technology has already been deployed. And, judging by the number plates on those border control pictures, on US soil.
The chickens have already flown the coop.
"We're an empire now, and when we act, we create our own reality. And while you're studying that reality—judiciously, as you will—we'll act again, creating other new realities, which you can study too, and that's how things will sort out. We're history's actors…and you, all of you, will be left to just study what we do."
As far as I understand the American system, this is a false analogy: your Congressman 'lobbies' for interests within their core voting block. i.e. why your mid-west Congressman lobbies hard for corn subsidies, if a large percentage of her voting base are corn farmers. Given the "first past the post" nature of American politics, this can exclude up to 49% of your voting base before said Congressman has even been sworn in.
To make this clearer: the way the system is set up, your Congressman isn't lobbying for any individual, they're lobbying for a percentage of the voting block that is sufficient to return them to Congress next vote. This is why campaigning on single issues is so common, and so successful for power-blocs such as the Christian Right.
(This isn't to go into gerrymandering, which further skews the 'democratic' input of your system. If you didn't already know that only ~8-12 seats in Congress are actually contested in terms of party fealty, you really, really, really should do).
All such deals are offered as "promotions" to the start of the next year. They merely get extended ("through January 31st 2014") as a legal formality once the date is hit.
Essentially it's the Legal department's requirement.
I assumed it was common knowledge that Sony offered the PS3 at a huge discount retail <-> production costs to make Blu-Ray the industry standard (which did indeed succeed). e.g. Samsung Blu-Ray retailed @ $1000, PS3 retailed at $599.
e.g. http://www.wired.com/gamelife/2006/11/isupply_ps3_com/ ~ costs the PS3 components at $850 vrs the $599 retail price.
As for this topic: I don't think it's aimed at consumers, at all. Many companies still use XP as their back-bone, let alone 7. It's aimed at the software producers, akin to why some games companies are developing purely in DX11 now to reduce costs having to support DX9 ~ MS are making a switch to producing content for W8 as 'attractive' as possible.
Thank you, I understand the metric used now, although I'd say you'd have to offset the costs against traditional print advertising (e.g. 1/2 page advert in Guardian / Ha'aretz jobs section etc).
~ This begs the question, which I assumed (down thread): if the CEO is the one actively engaged, and he looked rather uncomfortable / wooden in the video, then there surely has to be some kind of agreement with Activision/Blizzard to use their Brand like this. i.e. Any and all such arrangements for third parties must have sign off by them (or "why can't I use the D3 franchise / name to sell my porn parody", see http://community.secondlife.com/t5/Inworld-Employment/Still-... for reference).
Thus, I tend towards the meta position I mentioned below: that the real cost is being born by that ~$500mm advertising budget, not Saatchi & Saatchi, and this is meta-advertising.
Jury's out: whether or not this is as clever as I'm imagining will be born out in the next few nights...
Ah, I apologise - I thought they were offering a real-world replica.
I'm also fascinated on how they're going to do this: I'll offer good money that says within 5 minutes of logging on they're either town-PK griefed, chat channels are flooded by gold-selling bots or their account is banned for non-RMAH advertising within the game.
[Disclosure: I do not own a copy of D3, nor have I played it]
How so?
Retail Diablo III ~ $60
<strike>CEO</strike> Intern getting to level 60 ~ 12 or so hours @ $0 / hr
1,000,000 Diablo III gold ~ $4
Cheap Chinese Sword ~ $96
Single / static webpage ~ $200
57 seconds Video using a)existing office, b) in game footage but with voice over ~ $100
4 x evenings of <strike>CEO</strike> HR department online interviews: $included in their salary
Potential for the CEO to be exposed as totally incompetent at playing Diablo III, and a huge gaff as he's trolled by the fetid swamp of D3 players, thus generating vast swathes of "the internet is a bridge full of trolls" tutting from places such as metafilter.com: priceless.
I can think of many criticisms, but cost / level of resources is hardly massive, unless I'm missing something... could you expand?
Ah, this place really has become Reddit.
Within 7 minutes, a down-vote, while the comment "fredoliveira 25 minutes ago | link
This is quite sad. Signs of a company struggling to be relevant, and failing terribly."
that displays a lack of awareness of the company is left alone - although the company has had its problems, the Tel Aviv department won the 2012 Cannes Lions placement for "Blood Relations" (http://www.canneslions.com/work/2012/direct/entry.cfm?entryi...) which suggests that they're anything but creatively bankrupt.
But, go on... Downvote ALL the content, especially the stuff you don't like, that's what popularity contests are for!
BBR Saatchi Israel is on the hunt for a great programmer, and it's taking its recruiting to the place where most of them are hanging out: in the realms of 'Diablo 3.'
http://creativity-online.com/work/saatchi-saatchi-israel-job...
Actually, this is quite genius: PR company links itself to a market leader that's doing an awesome job of totally fucking up merging a P2P micro-payment model with a traditional single player game, snarkily hinting that some decent PR would smooth things over (especially with its history of nation re-branding, couldn't go amiss with said relations with the Korean and now German and French governments ~ http://saatchi.com/news/archive/mm_award_success_for_kosovo_...) thus pitching a meta-advertisement to Activision / Blizzard's huge marketing budget (roughly ~$550mm according to the last company papers).
Or it could be a move totally lacking in irony and just plain "Get down with the kids" painful.
Jury is out: however, I'd suspect that Tel Aviv's thought processes are somewhat more sophisticated... this the modern version of "a nice game of chess".
I was reading through your blog, assuming this was some faux-naivety mixed with socially uplifting product placement (look! hip young designer of the future actually LEARNS from has-been discard of the old materialism! wow!) and then you went and ruined it.
Are you seriously proclaiming to the world in general that you've absolutely no idea about the socio-economic impacts that a cashless society will have, and their potential for exclusion as well as inclusion within a social sphere?
Are you seriously so naive in reality that you cannot picture some very important men (you know, the kind who invite the Zuckerberg's of this world to behind-the-doors meetings, politely suggest some features that should be included, and then ensure that the resultant IPO is very much in his favour, markets be damned) looking at Square, and its ilk, and imagining a world where our "homeless hero" cannot be a part of society?
This is not to mention that "the homeless", are by their very definition, already excluded from a large part of society, and that the American model has seen a dramatic increase in social exclusion in the last thirty years, which trend-wise, seems to lead to the logical assumption that it will probably increase in the short term. (How short-term might depend on several issues, however that's a different thread)
Oh, to be young and such a waif! The blind optimism of a useful idiot!
“Technique has taken over the whole of civilization. Death, procreation, birth all submit to technical efficiency and systemization.”