Wrong. The reason it doesn't work that way is because there's just simply too much traffic for the size and number of streets. If you could actually force people to drive that way in a big city like NYC or Chicago you'd have traffic at a crawl ALL THE TIME rather than just rush hour.

This needs to be modded up. Even in a fairly non-congested city like Columbus, OH where I live, it still gets congested enough that you just can't simply follow the letter of the law because traffic would go nowhere. Safe following distance is always the first thing to go, and it's not just out of stupidity, it's also out of necessity - and that's when it's not rush hour.

And there's about a dozen of those active at most, at any given time. So the handful that are active encounter a bug, we shoot them down and ground the rest until we figure it out. Maybe a few hundred people die, maybe a few thousand, but probably no one at all. Yep, that's almost as devastating as nuclear war.

No, I glossed over that because everyone on /. already realizes that, although you in your arrogance assume you're the only one and that eveyone else is just ignorant and wrong. And also because it doesn't matter in this discussion, because this is not a discussion on exactly what all AI could possibly include, but rather a discussion about things that can threaten the very existence of humanity as a species (and potentially all life as we know it on planet earth).

The rest of your tripe is strictly about AI in the financial world, which, while damaging to our wallets and potentially modern civilization, has no way to actually threaten our species. Sure, having the economy tank overnight would be bad, but it's not even remotely comparable to a nuclear holocaust, or a planet turned to desert or ice through climate change, or the drastic global impacts that current rogue biotech could have if released in the wild. And as I said in my previous post, any AI we presently have isn't remotely capable of anything like that.

And yes, the distinction is important here. AI can easily control something like finances that is confined completely to the digital world - but the digital world can't physically harm us or threaten our existence as a species. That requires interfacing with the physical world, and that's where AI as a threat falls apart. Worst-case scenario, we bomb the power source the AI depends on, game over. Maybe a few thousand people die as collateral damage. But even something on that scale is a long ways off yet, if it will ever exist at all.

No, I don't think climate change or rogue biotech are as much of a current threat as nuclear war, but I think they have a lot more potential to be real threats than AI does any time soon, if ever.

Mod up informative.

So basically, if you already own the hard copy, we'll sell you a digital copy that costs us nothing for just $5! Wow, what a generous offer!

How about this instead: for a $5 yearly fee, you can download any ebooks for free if you already own the hard copy. Now that's an offer I could get on board with.

I think they make a lot more than I do for the time I spend working. But clearly their writing is far more important than anything I'd ever do.

Perhaps, but that's a different discussion. However the interesting thing here is that in many cases, the paperback is actually cheaper than the e-book.

An e-book doesn't need that any more than the variety of games you find in the humble bundles, which is what is being compared here. If they choose to pay extra for that, well, that's on them. That doesn't increase the value of the product.

Uh, yeah, and I mentioned editors as part of the cost/time investment in getting a text ready to be published.

I dunno, when I spend more time working I like to get paid more. Don't you?

So then going by that, the per hour cost for creating a game should be a good deal more than writing a book, because it requires good writing skills in addition to other skills.

And any game that is good enough to turn a profit also requires just as much (if not more) thinking about what to put into it.

And none of the games we're talking about here are stupid shit like yet another pong rehash. Those games don't even make it to Steam. Some of those games in those bundles are pretty damn good, and provide far more hours of entertainment than any e-book you'll ever buy. And they take more time and creativity to produce. Yet they generally sell for less than the average e-book.

Which is completely irrelevant in this discussion, because the same applies equally to game developers.

You also don't have any good arguments either way.

It's pretty obvious why e-books are priced the way they are. The book industry is dominated by large established corporations, and the nature of the industry makes it a lot harder for newcomers to breakout and become popular than in the video-game industry. Thus, the corporations can set whatever prices they want without fear of competition, because the majority of the competition will never be discovered by the customers anyway.

It's different with video games where you not only have word-of-mouth advertising, but you can also see what games your friends are playing (yes, steam can almost always tell you what game your friends are playing even if it's not a steam game), often see how many hours they play it, and talk to them in real-time while you're playing them. As a result, it's much easier for indie games and new developers to make a big splash (Minecraft is a perfect example) and the big players are forced to adapt or die. And guess what - the big players who aren't adapting ARE dying.

So what is the proper price for e-books? The price the market would dictate if the collusion between the big players were abolished. Failing that, the solution is a Steam-like platform for e-books, which works on all e-book readers as well as PCs; one that lets you add friends, see your friends' libraries, see your friends' friends, see what books they're reading at any given time, chat with friends via IM or VOIP, etc. (Some of these features, obviously, would be opt-in.) Create a ubiquitous platform like that for e-books and you'll see the newcomers and indie writers suddenly having some relevance - and just like in the video game industry, the big publishing houses will have to adapt or die.

Hard copies have a lot of other additional costs involved that digital copies do not.

Things like:

- Attractive cover design
- Shelf space at a store (not applicable to etailers like Amazon of course)
- Climate-controlled storage warehouse before they get to the store
- Shipping during various stages (don't forget packing material costs)

And then of course there's the other actual costs of printing that you already mentioned, which can be fairly expensive if you go with high-quality materials and a high-quality production process.

Even though those costs may seem trivial, for a book that sells any significant number of copies, the total in extra costs incurred for the hard copies is still almost certainly more than the costs actually involved in producing a production-ready text (writing & editing).

So you can buy their entire catalog for the total sum of $15? Because that's about the only way that could be a good sale. And even that's questionable without knowing what they've got in their catalog.

Sure, let's run with the ebooks vs. steam games comparison. Even small indie games take a lot more man-hours and monetary investment to create than the average ebook. A book typically takes one person less than a year to write, and another one or two people a few months to edit. Since we're focusing solely on the e-book here, you don't need to worry about any of the other costs typically involved in creating a book, such as cover design, etc. So if a small indie game that took probably 2x-10x more time to create sells for $5-10 on average, the average ebook should sell for about $.50-$5. Then they throw those same indie games in the bundles that usually bring about $5-10 for about as many games, so the sales for ebooks should be about $.10-$1 per book.

And this is why the vast majority of geeks realize that ebooks are grossly overpriced.

And I think you're grossly misunderstanding AI as used in this context, and grossly overestimating the amount of control it has even on systems where it is present.

First, the context here is things that are a threat to human civilization as a whole. The other three things are plausible threats in this context. AI is not. For AI to be a threat in this context, it not only has to have significant capability to do damage, it also has to be able to take the crucial step of cutting off human control entirely and still continue to do its damage. Current AI is not even remotely close to this.

Second, anywhere AI is currently used it has so little control over the systems it's laughable.

Frankly, I'm not convinced we even have the capability to design an AI system that's capable of truly being a threat.

Likewise. Really makes one wonder just how accidental this really was.

I see that as a good thing. And I have to admit, there have been times I was impaired by non-chemical means and should not have been driving.

While I'm inclined to agree with you, I also believe there are lots of situations where people get an unexpected double shift. Especially in the medical field I would think. For myself, the only times I was in a situation where I was driving when I was too tired, it was by my own poor judgement and nothing else. Honestly, that kind of thing should be punishable just as DUI. Fortunately I never caused an accident, but there was at least once it could have been REALLY bad. (I woke up when my tires went off the OTHER side of the road, still doing 50+ MPH, on a busy state highway. How I didn't have a head-on collision is beyond me.)

But how do you deal with it if the boss asks you to work a second shift in the ER because someone else couldn't make it? I don't know. I don't work in the medical industry so all I can do is speculate.