If I recall correctly, Obamacare's vote was divided by party lines. The only way it passed was by courting independent seats into joining the democrats. Courting independent seats means you need to offer them some red meat to bring them to your side. A third party doesn't necessarily need to win a presidency or a congressional to have weight in politics. Even failed campaigns split evenly between Dem Repub can be upset by a third party which the 2 big parties will need to coax over to their side. Adjusting your platform to invite votes from a third party that holds 5% of the vote makes a difference when Dem and Repub can only come up with with 46% each.

Think about what the GOP was like before the Tea Party rose up. The tea party didn't rise up as a separate class, it got absorbed. Sure there was some bluster about rejecting all incumbents and running separately, but that went away pretty quickly and they became part of the GOP. But in the meantime, the Tea Party minority has enough marginal power to swing the larger GOP party itself over towards their side of the political spectrum, resulting in a massive shift to the right and the current shutdown battle. There isn't a battle between the Democratic and Republican parties, there isn't even a discussion going on between them. All of the battles are taking place within the GOP party between the Tea Party faction and the traditional GOP officeholders. Even moderate GOP politicians who have not lost their seats, are forced to move their platforms to the right to avoid getting a primary challenge to the right.

Basically, third party voters don't even need to win elections to make a difference.

Actually, the Dems have held the popular vote in each election since Obama came into office, and the GOP only held onto house seats by playing with the districts:

http://www.motherjones.com/politics/2012/11/republicans-gerrymandering-house-representatives-election-chart

Hypothetical example: If there are 2 open seats and 100k voters which are 80k Dem and 20k GOP,
you can rearrange the outline of distict borders to put 80k dems in one district, and 20k GOP in another district. Then we have 1 Dem rep, and 1 GOP rep, and there you have a "close" "50%" vote.

Valuation of intangible assets like a brand is (big surprise) very subjective. It's typically based on a combination of management data, management estimates, and extrapolation by the valuation consultants. Most likely it's primarily based on some estimate of how much of a premium Apple gets to charge it's customer for it's brand by carving that piece out of their margin and then extrapolating the income from that brand-distinction out into the future. Then they'd take that whole amount, then present-value it all based on an incremental borrowing rate to come up with a number, and compare it with some comparable brand values for reasonableness.

I've had to read through several valuation reports for start-up acquisitions, they're usually hundreds of pages of documentation of associated factors and weighting of different calculation methodologies, but when it all comes down to it, they hinge on inputs that are best guess estimates that are used because it's the best conclusion that management, valuation consultants, and their auditors could reach. Ultimately there is something intangible about the company causing it to be valued so much more than it's book value, and the assigned value of the intangible asset here is all they have in lieu of more reliable information like the sale of a comparable intangible asset in an open market (like how houses are valued).

Coca-cola, when you get down to it, just sells flavored sugar water. There's hundreds of sodas out there that taste just as good, but make terrible volumes and margins compared to Coke. Aside from their massive distribution and bottling contracting, all they've got is their brand which they juice up regularly with lots and lots of advertisement. Slashdot is constantly talking about how Apple's devices are overpriced, and come with an "apple tax" where customers are paying ridiculous premiums just to buy into the cult of Apple. I'm not terribly surprised that Apple's brand value would compete with Coke's. Which brand is valued higher is meaningless to me since both of them are just based on contrived estimates and a small change to the input estimates for either one would probably flip the ranking.

Yeah, I don't think N.Korea's population is actually getting fooled by the propaganda either. I mean, when your babies are starving to death and your whole family is skin and bones, seeing a posters everywhere of your plump, obese great leader telling you how great your life is doesn't really inspire loyalty or confidence.

I wonder how laser weapons would change the nature of smallarms combat. I've heard that most of the shots are fired to suppress the enemy so that you can maneuver. With a silent and invisible laser beam, the missed shots might not put the same fear of death into the enemy as the crack and zip of a bullet that almost took your life. If a squad can't intimidate the enemy into not shooting and getting back down into cover, wouldn't they just end up pinned down?

I guess people have already talked death about all the limitations a laser rifle would have... so what is the long term vision for how a laser weapon would provide a benefit in small arms combat? Could it fire more accurately at longer ranges and still carry enough killing power? Or perhaps the lack of recoil would help it kill enemies more effectively while other bullet-based weapons provide covering fire?

No need for third-party involvement there:

"Buttons

Every button and input zone has been placed based on frequency of use, precision required and ergonomic comfort. There are a total of sixteen buttons on the Steam Controller. Half of them are accessible to the player without requiring thumbs to be lifted from the trackpads, including two on the back. All controls and buttons have been placed symmetrically, making left or right handedness switchable via a software config checkbox."

http://store.steampowered.com/livingroom/SteamController/

To that end, nearly all AAA shooters attempt to address fine aim control using "magnetic" crosshairs. Sensitivity on the sticks start with a base acceleration and top speed. But if you intersect a target with the crosshairs, a "soft-lock" engages where the crosshairs are partially dragged along in the general direction that the target moves, while sensitivity is temporarily reduced to allow for finer control of where you target. Crosshair sensitivity is commonly reduced when aiming-down-sights as well. In effect, the idea of having a broad movement and a fine movement control is being addressed contextually by the game. This requires a lot of refinement specific to each game, and resulting in some really really shitty controls in the earlier years of console shooters. They've improved considerably since then, and the general concept of how to apply soft-lock aiming has become common knowledge among dev studios.

This is important because the vast majority of development hours will be directed towards analog-stick based control for xbox and playstation releases. This means that when PC versions are released, developers can piggy-back this aim tuning for steam's controller as well, since it was already produced for the console version.

To that end, FPS game controller layouts typically don't map the fire button to the click-in of the right stick, precisely because you lose precision during click-in. Typically they use a non-thumb button like the right trigger for firing to avoid jostling the thumb position. They also require only very light pressure to trigger firing for the same reason.

Can't really imagine the click-in of the trackpad has having too wide a range of functionality, because of shifting during click-in. It might be limited to 8-way directionality on the left side? One of my concerns with the right side is that it seems the entire surface will click-in, which means you can't hit for example, top quadrant,and left quadrant (X+Y on an xbox360 controller) simultaneously. If they were to simply map the upper left area as X+Y there might be too many accidental inputs.

If I could give Valve some feedback, I'd like those concentric circle ridges to also have an overlaid "X" ridge to show the borders of the top/bottom/left/right quadrants as well as show an exact location for intermediate directions directly under the ridges of the "X". That might return the possibly of functional X+Y button combinations using this device.

Actually, they can be speakers:

"This haptic capability provides a vital channel of information to the player - delivering in-game information about speed, boundaries, thresholds, textures, action confirmations, or any other events about which game designers want players to be aware. It is a higher-bandwidth haptic information channel than exists in any other consumer product that we know of.

As a parlour trick they can even play audio waveforms and function as speakers."

Important difference here is that you have tactile feedback on your thumbs position relative to the center.

Furthermore, since the surface is clickable, it can be customized to only register input upon click-in...like a D-pad! On the right side of the controller, the trackpad 4 quadrants can function as a replacement XYBA. Mappings which are traditionally assigned to clicking a stick in, can be moved to the back of the controller.

I am cautiously optimistic about the design of this controller, it all hinges upon the execution of these ideas and the quality of construction. If nothing else, it would be a better way to play FPS and RTS games since it replaces relative input (i.e stick position relative to cetner), with absolute input (the input starts and stops in sync with the start and stop of the thumb movement).

Instead of constant movement towards a target, and having to time the release of the stick with the time of interception, you move until matched with the target and then stop moving, akin to a mouse input. I have not seen trackpad sensitivity that can sufficiently replace mouse input, but Valve is claiming to have reached unprecedented levels of trackpad precision. Really can't judge the capability of this controller until real-world feedback comes in, but at least conceptually, I can see this being a step-up from the controller input already popularized on Xbox and PS platforms.

Corporate accounting doesn't call the shots, accounting tells managements the results of the shots that have been called. Finance takes accounting's results, evaluates and extrapolates, and makes plans for the future. Somewhere between management and finance, decisions get made. Ya got the wrong guy.

The only companies that get run by accountants are accounting companies.

I had posted awhile ago asking what the disadvantage would be in using a similar approach based on 1 second intervals.

The response I had gotten is that while some financial market activity is based on information on the real world, a lot of it is based on information on the financial market itself. In other words, a company sees other companies freaking out over say, an event, like a change in a CEO, and selling, so the company will want to join the others and sell sell sell before they get left behind. This can steamroll into a long disastrous run on that stock. The price of the stock flashes downward until it hits the bottom that some of the companies feel is still worthwhile. Then that price starts to drift upward. Other companies see the stock turning and buy buy buy.

What is the REAL increase/decrease that should be associated with the change in the CEO? There really isn't any way to measure that. Instead the "wisdom" of the crowds drifts up and down until finally, in aggregate, the market settles down on a decision about the best approximation of the price impact.

Now, if trading is delayed, we'll still have increase/decrease cycles like that, and they won't be nearly as sharp since people will have more time to think and process the real world information received about the change in leadership. However, there really is no concrete way to know how the price of a stock should change because of the change in leadership, the only way to price that out is to let the market feel out it's "mood" and let the up/down shock work itself out and settle on a conclusion. Delaying the trading reduces the magnitude of the shock, but also lengthens that shock period out. Thus, the speed at which markets process information about the economy is slowed down. In the milliseconds of HFT, regular joes processing trades daily or monthly don't have to worry as much about the brief shock of volatility since they have a much longer holding period, during which the shocks have already worked themselves out.

Not a great argument in my opinion, and I didn't see any supporting study (a very difficult thing to experiment on!), but it was an answer to my question on how someone might want to defend HFT. I hope I represented that argument properly.

I do trust Valve, but the parent brings up an important point.

The difference between a PC and a console isn't hardware, it's about control. The hardware and interfaces will all change over time, but the real distinction is who gets to say what happens on the platform. For PCs, users control the environment. For consoles, a company is controlling the environment. There are benefits to users owning the environment, and benefits to a company controlling the environment.

The SteamMachine appears to be a weird hybrid between the two ends of the spectrum, and seems to be giving up the most significant advantages of both ends unless this starts to drive some major changes in game development.

The probability adjusted value of a $1 dollar ticket to get a 100mil payout with a 1 in 175mil chance of winning is 100 is a little over 57 cents.

Why pay $1 to get $0.57 back?

Lottery tickets and gambling in general is mainly about buying hope. You lose a little money, but get a little temporary hope in the meantime that you get to enjoy until the results come in. Nothing wrong with a little entertainment as long as you know what you're paying for it.

On the other hand, the recent powerball lottery with a $2 ticket, and a 400mil payout has a little under $2.29 payout. A positive return...assuming you welcome taking on the level of risk involved to sink enough money to realize the desired outcome. But it's not crazy to buy a ticket or two when the jackpot is that high.

Check out "The Witness", an upcoming by Jonathan Blow (known for Braid).

It's a single person on a beautiful uninhabited island, you walk around calming exploring and solving puzzles from a first-person perspective. The puzzles as a whole tell a larger story through the perspectives gained by each.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Witness_(2014_video_game)

Look up some youtube vids of the demos shown at PAX. Games like this are Myst's legacy.

Why didn't Myst change the face of gaming? It's just not a popular formula. But it's ok to cater to a niche if you do it well.