JustiFi

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Authors:
(1) Ankur Nath, Department of Computer Science and Engineering, Texas A&M University;
(2) Alan Kuhnle, Department of Computer Science and Engineering, Texas A&M University. Table of Links Abstract & Introduction Related work Evaluation for Max-Cut Evaluation for SAT Summary and Outlook, References Supplementary Materials 5 SUMMARY and OUTLOOK Through our empirical evaluations, our goal is to promote an insightful comparison within the research focusing on the intersection of combinatorial optimization and machine learning. In order to provide the research community with valuable guidance, we believe it is imperative to communicate both the strengths and weaknesses of the proposed approaches. Poor instances and baseline selection may give the wrong impression about the performance of learned heuristics. Specifically, it is important to articulate the degree of improvement achieved through integrating classical heuristics with deep learning architectures and conduct a thorough comparison with classical heuristics. This will aid in elucidating the degree to which deep learning architectures enhance integrated heuristics. It assists in ascertaining whether the integration endeavor is justified and warrants the allocation of computational resources, time, and investment necessary for integrating deep learning with classical heuristics. References Albert, R. and Barab´asi, A.-L. (2002). Statistical mechanics of complex networks. Reviews of modern physics, 74(1):47. Barrett, T., Clements, W., Foerster, J., and Lvovsky, A. (2020). Exploratory combinatorial optimization with reinforcement learning. In Proceedings of the AAAI conference on artificial intelligence, volume 34, pages 3243–3250. Barrett, T. D., Parsonson, C. W., and Laterre, A. (2022). Learning to solve combinatorial graph partitioning problems via efficient exploration. arXiv preprint arXiv:2205.14105. Battiti, R. and Protasi, M. (1997). Reactive search, a history-sensitive heuristic for max-sat. Journal of Experimental Algorithmics (JEA), 2:2–es. Battiti, R. and Tecchiolli, G. (1994). The reactive tabu search. ORSA journal on computing, 6(2):126–140. Bello, I., Pham, H., Le, Q. V., Norouzi, M., and Bengio, S. (2016). Neural combinatorial optimization with reinforcement learning. arXiv preprint arXiv:1611.09940. Bengio, Y., Lodi, A., and Prouvost, A. (2021). Machine learning for combinatorial optimization: a methodological tour d’horizon. European Journal of Operational Research, 290(2):405–421. Benlic, U. and Hao, J.-K. (2013). Breakout local search for the max-cutproblem. Engineering Applications of Artificial Intelligence, 26(3):1162–1173. Boettcher, S. and Percus, A. G. (2001). Extremal optimization for graph partitioning. Physical Review E, 64(2):026114. CPLEX (2023). Cplex. https://www.ibm.com/products/ilog-cplexoptimization-studio/cplex-optimizer. Dong, Y., Goldberg, A. V., Noe, A., Parotsidis, N., Resende, M. G., and Spaen, Q. (2021). New instances for maximum weight independent set from a vehicle routing application. In Operations Research Forum, volume 2, pages 1–6. Springer. E´en, N. and S¨orensson, N. (2003). An extensible satsolver. In International conference on theory and applications of satisfiability testing, pages 502–518. Springer. Elsokkary, N., Khan, F. S., La Torre, D., Humble, T. S., and Gottlieb, J. (2017). Financial portfolio management using d-wave quantum optimizer: The case of abu dhabi securities exchange. Technical report, Oak Ridge National Lab.(ORNL), Oak Ridge, TN (United States). Erd˝os, P., R´enyi, A., et al. (1960). On the evolution of random graphs. Publ. math. inst. hung. acad. sci, 5(1):17–60. Festa, P. and Resende, M. G. (2009). Hybrid grasp heuristics. In Foundations of Computational Intelligence Volume 3: Global Optimization, pages 75–100. Springer. Flint, A. and Blaschko, M. (2012). Perceptron learning of sat. Advances in neural information processing systems, 25. Fujishige, S. (2005). Submodular functions and optimization. Elsevier. Ganesh, V., Singh, R., Near, J. P., and Rinard, M. (2009). Avatarsat: An auto-tuning boolean sat solver. Glover, F. (1990). Tabu search: A tutorial. Interfaces, 20(4):74–94. Goemans, M. X. and Williamson, D. P. (1995). Improved approximation algorithms for maximum cut and satisfiability problems using semidefinite programming. Journal of the ACM (JACM), 42(6):1115–1145. Grozea, C. and Popescu, M. (2014). Can machine learning learn a decision oracle for np problems? a test on sat. Fundamenta Informaticae, 131(3- 4):441–450. Haim, S. and Walsh, T. (2009). Restart strategy selection using machine learning techniques. In International Conference on Theory and Applications of Satisfiability Testing, pages 312–325. Springer. Helmberg, C. and Rendl, F. (2000). A spectral bundle method for semidefinite programming. SIAM Journal on Optimization, 10(3):673–696. Hoos, H. H. et al. (2002). An adaptive noise mechanism for walksat. In AAAI/IAAI, pages 655–660. Jaszczur, S., Luszczyk, M., and Michalewski, H. (2020). Neural heuristics for sat solving. arXiv preprint arXiv:2005.13406. Karp, R. M. (1972). Reducibility among Combinatorial Problems, pages 85–103. Springer US, Boston, MA. Khalil, E., Dai, H., Zhang, Y., Dilkina, B., and Song, L. (2017). Learning combinatorial optimization algorithms over graphs. Advances in neural information processing systems, 30. KhudaBukhsh, A. R., Xu, L., Hoos, H. H., and LeytonBrown, K. (2016). Satenstein: Automatically building local search sat solvers from components. Artificial Intelligence, 232:20–42. Kirkpatrick, S., Gelatt Jr, C. D., and Vecchi, M. P. (1983). Optimization by simulated annealing. science, 220(4598):671–680. Kurin, V., Godil, S., Whiteson, S., and Catanzaro, B. (2020). Can q-learning with graph networks learn a generalizable branching heuristic for a sat solver? Advances in Neural Information Processing Systems, 33:9608–9621. Lauria, M., Elffers, J., Nordstr¨om, J., and Vinyals, M. (2017). Cnfgen: A generator of crafted benchmarks. In Theory and Applications of Satisfiability Testing–SAT 2017: 20th International Conference, Melbourne, VIC, Australia, August 28–September 1, 2017, Proceedings 20, pages 464–473. Springer. Lederman, G., Rabe, M., Seshia, S., and Lee, E. A. (2019). Learning heuristics for quantified boolean formulas through reinforcement learning. In International Conference on LearningRepresentations. Leleu, T., Yamamoto, Y., McMahon, P. L., and Aihara, K. (2019). Destabilization of local minima in analog spin systems by correction of amplitude heterogeneity. Physical review letters,122(4):040607. Li, C. M., Wei, W., and Zhang, H. (2007). Combining adaptive noise and look-ahead in local search for sat. In Theory and Applications of Satisfiability Testing– SAT 2007: 10th International Conference, Lisbon, Portugal, May 28-31, 2007. Proceedings 10, pages 121–133. Springer. Liang, J. H., Ganesh, V., Poupart, P., and Czarnecki, K. (2016). Learning rate based branching heuristic for sat solvers. In Theory and Applications of Satisfiability Testing–SAT 2016: 19th International Conference, Bordeaux, France, July 5-8, 2016, Proceedings 19, pages 123–140. Springer. Manchanda, S., Mittal, A., Dhawan, A., Medya, S., Ranu, S., and Singh, A. (2019). Learning heuristics over large graphs via deep reinforcement learning. arXiv preprint arXiv:1903.03332. Mazure, B., Sais, L., and Gr´egoire, E. (1997). Tabu ´ search for sat. In Proceedings of the fourteenth national conference on artificial intelligence and ninth conference on Innovative applications of artificial intelligence, pages 281–285. McAllester, D., Selman, B., Kautz, H., et al. (1997). Evidence for invariants in local search. In AAAI/IAAI, pages 321–326. Rhode Island, USA. Mitchell, D., Selman, B., Levesque, H., et al. (1992). Hard and easy distributions of sat problems. In Aaai, volume 92, pages 459–465. Perdomo-Ortiz, A., Dickson, N., Drew-Brook, M., Rose, G., and Aspuru-Guzik, A. (2012). Finding low-energy conformations of lattice protein models by quantum annealing. Scientific reports, 2(1):1–7. Selman, B., Kautz, H. A., Cohen, B., et al. (1993). Local search strategies for satisfiability testing. Cliques, coloring, and satisfiability, 26:521–532. Selman, B., Mitchell, D. G., and Levesque, H. J. (1996). Generating hard satisfiability problems. Artificial intelligence, 81(1-2):17–29. Tiunov, E. S., Ulanov, A. E., and Lvovsky, A. (2019). Annealing by simulating the coherent ising machine. Optics express, 27(7):10288–10295. Toenshoff, J., Ritzert, M., Wolf, H., and Grohe, M. (2019). Graph neural networks for maximum constraint satisfaction. Frontiers in artificial intelligence, 3:580607. Venturelli, D. and Kondratyev, A. (2019). Reverse quantum annealing approach to portfolio optimization problems. Quantum Machine Intelligence, 1(1- 2):17–30. Wolpert, D. H. and Macready, W. G. (1997). No free lunch theorems for optimization. IEEE transactions on evolutionary computation, 1(1):67–82. Ye, Y. (2003). The gset dataset. https://web.stanford.edu/ yyye/yyye/Gset/. Yolcu, E. and P´oczos, B. (2019). Learning local search heuristics for boolean satisfiability. Advances in Neural Information Processing Systems, 32. This paper is available on arxiv under CC 4.0 DEED license. Authors: (1) Ankur Nath, Department of Computer Science and Engineering, Texas A&M University; (2) Alan Kuhnle, Department of Computer Science and Engineering, Texas A&M University. Authors: Authors: (1) Ankur Nath, Department of Computer Science and Engineering, Texas A&M University; (2) Alan Kuhnle, Department of Computer Science and Engineering, Texas A&M University. Table of Links Abstract & Introduction Abstract & Introduction Related work Related work Evaluation for Max-Cut Evaluation for Max-Cut Evaluation for SAT Evaluation for SAT Summary and Outlook, References Summary and Outlook, References Supplementary Materials Supplementary Materials 5 SUMMARY and OUTLOOK Through our empirical evaluations, our goal is to promote an insightful comparison within the research focusing on the intersection of combinatorial optimization and machine learning. In order to provide the research community with valuable guidance, we believe it is imperative to communicate both the strengths and weaknesses of the proposed approaches. Poor instances and baseline selection may give the wrong impression about the performance of learned heuristics. Specifically, it is important to articulate the degree of improvement achieved through integrating classical heuristics with deep learning architectures and conduct a thorough comparison with classical heuristics. This will aid in elucidating the degree to which deep learning architectures enhance integrated heuristics. It assists in ascertaining whether the integration endeavor is justified and warrants the allocation of computational resources, time, and investment necessary for integrating deep learning with classical heuristics. References Albert, R. and Barab´asi, A.-L. (2002). Statistical mechanics of complex networks. Reviews of modern physics, 74(1):47. Barrett, T., Clements, W., Foerster, J., and Lvovsky, A. (2020). Exploratory combinatorial optimization with reinforcement learning. In Proceedings of the AAAI conference on artificial intelligence, volume 34, pages 3243–3250. Barrett, T. D., Parsonson, C. W., and Laterre, A. (2022). Learning to solve combinatorial graph partitioning problems via efficient exploration. arXiv preprint arXiv:2205.14105. Battiti, R. and Protasi, M. (1997). Reactive search, a history-sensitive heuristic for max-sat. Journal of Experimental Algorithmics (JEA), 2:2–es. Battiti, R. and Tecchiolli, G. (1994). The reactive tabu search. ORSA journal on computing, 6(2):126–140. Bello, I., Pham, H., Le, Q. V., Norouzi, M., and Bengio, S. (2016). Neural combinatorial optimization with reinforcement learning. arXiv preprint arXiv:1611.09940. Bengio, Y., Lodi, A., and Prouvost, A. (2021). Machine learning for combinatorial optimization: a methodological tour d’horizon. European Journal of Operational Research, 290(2):405–421. Benlic, U. and Hao, J.-K. (2013). Breakout local search for the max-cutproblem. Engineering Applications of Artificial Intelligence, 26(3):1162–1173. Boettcher, S. and Percus, A. G. (2001). Extremal optimization for graph partitioning. Physical Review E, 64(2):026114. CPLEX (2023). Cplex. https://www.ibm.com/products/ilog-cplexoptimization-studio/cplex-optimizer. Dong, Y., Goldberg, A. V., Noe, A., Parotsidis, N., Resende, M. G., and Spaen, Q. (2021). New instances for maximum weight independent set from a vehicle routing application. In Operations Research Forum, volume 2, pages 1–6. Springer. E´en, N. and S¨orensson, N. (2003). An extensible satsolver. In International conference on theory and applications of satisfiability testing, pages 502–518. Springer. Elsokkary, N., Khan, F. S., La Torre, D., Humble, T. S., and Gottlieb, J. (2017). Financial portfolio management using d-wave quantum optimizer: The case of abu dhabi securities exchange. Technical report, Oak Ridge National Lab.(ORNL), Oak Ridge, TN (United States). Erd˝os, P., R´enyi, A., et al. (1960). On the evolution of random graphs. Publ. math. inst. hung. acad. sci, 5(1):17–60. Festa, P. and Resende, M. G. (2009). Hybrid grasp heuristics. In Foundations of Computational Intelligence Volume 3: Global Optimization, pages 75–100. Springer. Flint, A. and Blaschko, M. (2012). Perceptron learning of sat. Advances in neural information processing systems, 25. Fujishige, S. (2005). Submodular functions and optimization. Elsevier. Ganesh, V., Singh, R., Near, J. P., and Rinard, M. (2009). Avatarsat: An auto-tuning boolean sat solver. Glover, F. (1990). Tabu search: A tutorial. Interfaces, 20(4):74–94. Goemans, M. X. and Williamson, D. P. (1995). Improved approximation algorithms for maximum cut and satisfiability problems using semidefinite programming. Journal of the ACM (JACM), 42(6):1115–1145. Grozea, C. and Popescu, M. (2014). Can machine learning learn a decision oracle for np problems? a test on sat. Fundamenta Informaticae, 131(3- 4):441–450. Haim, S. and Walsh, T. (2009). Restart strategy selection using machine learning techniques. In International Conference on Theory and Applications of Satisfiability Testing, pages 312–325. Springer. Helmberg, C. and Rendl, F. (2000). A spectral bundle method for semidefinite programming. SIAM Journal on Optimization, 10(3):673–696. Hoos, H. H. et al. (2002). An adaptive noise mechanism for walksat. In AAAI/IAAI, pages 655–660. Jaszczur, S., Luszczyk, M., and Michalewski, H. (2020). Neural heuristics for sat solving. arXiv preprint arXiv:2005.13406. Karp, R. M. (1972). Reducibility among Combinatorial Problems, pages 85–103. Springer US, Boston, MA. Khalil, E., Dai, H., Zhang, Y., Dilkina, B., and Song, L. (2017). Learning combinatorial optimization algorithms over graphs. Advances in neural information processing systems, 30. KhudaBukhsh, A. R., Xu, L., Hoos, H. H., and LeytonBrown, K. (2016). Satenstein: Automatically building local search sat solvers from components. Artificial Intelligence, 232:20–42. Kirkpatrick, S., Gelatt Jr, C. D., and Vecchi, M. P. (1983). Optimization by simulated annealing. science, 220(4598):671–680. Kurin, V., Godil, S., Whiteson, S., and Catanzaro, B. (2020). Can q-learning with graph networks learn a generalizable branching heuristic for a sat solver? Advances in Neural Information Processing Systems, 33:9608–9621. Lauria, M., Elffers, J., Nordstr¨om, J., and Vinyals, M. (2017). Cnfgen: A generator of crafted benchmarks. In Theory and Applications of Satisfiability Testing–SAT 2017: 20th International Conference, Melbourne, VIC, Australia, August 28–September 1, 2017, Proceedings 20, pages 464–473. Springer. Lederman, G., Rabe, M., Seshia, S., and Lee, E. A. (2019). Learning heuristics for quantified boolean formulas through reinforcement learning. In International Conference on LearningRepresentations. Leleu, T., Yamamoto, Y., McMahon, P. L., and Aihara, K. (2019). Destabilization of local minima in analog spin systems by correction of amplitude heterogeneity. Physical review letters,122(4):040607. Li, C. M., Wei, W., and Zhang, H. (2007). Combining adaptive noise and look-ahead in local search for sat. In Theory and Applications of Satisfiability Testing– SAT 2007: 10th International Conference, Lisbon, Portugal, May 28-31, 2007. Proceedings 10, pages 121–133. Springer. Liang, J. H., Ganesh, V., Poupart, P., and Czarnecki, K. (2016). Learning rate based branching heuristic for sat solvers. In Theory and Applications of Satisfiability Testing–SAT 2016: 19th International Conference, Bordeaux, France, July 5-8, 2016, Proceedings 19, pages 123–140. Springer. Manchanda, S., Mittal, A., Dhawan, A., Medya, S., Ranu, S., and Singh, A. (2019). Learning heuristics over large graphs via deep reinforcement learning. arXiv preprint arXiv:1903.03332. Mazure, B., Sais, L., and Gr´egoire, E. (1997). Tabu ´ search for sat. In Proceedings of the fourteenth national conference on artificial intelligence and ninth conference on Innovative applications of artificial intelligence, pages 281–285. McAllester, D., Selman, B., Kautz, H., et al. (1997). Evidence for invariants in local search. In AAAI/IAAI, pages 321–326. Rhode Island, USA. Mitchell, D., Selman, B., Levesque, H., et al. (1992). Hard and easy distributions of sat problems. In Aaai, volume 92, pages 459–465. Perdomo-Ortiz, A., Dickson, N., Drew-Brook, M., Rose, G., and Aspuru-Guzik, A. (2012). Finding low-energy conformations of lattice protein models by quantum annealing. Scientific reports, 2(1):1–7. Selman, B., Kautz, H. A., Cohen, B., et al. (1993). Local search strategies for satisfiability testing. Cliques, coloring, and satisfiability, 26:521–532. Selman, B., Mitchell, D. G., and Levesque, H. J. (1996). Generating hard satisfiability problems. Artificial intelligence, 81(1-2):17–29. Tiunov, E. S., Ulanov, A. E., and Lvovsky, A. (2019). Annealing by simulating the coherent ising machine. Optics express, 27(7):10288–10295. Toenshoff, J., Ritzert, M., Wolf, H., and Grohe, M. (2019). Graph neural networks for maximum constraint satisfaction. Frontiers in artificial intelligence, 3:580607. Venturelli, D. and Kondratyev, A. (2019). Reverse quantum annealing approach to portfolio optimization problems. Quantum Machine Intelligence, 1(1- 2):17–30. Wolpert, D. H. and Macready, W. G. (1997). No free lunch theorems for optimization. IEEE transactions on evolutionary computation, 1(1):67–82. Ye, Y. (2003). The gset dataset. https://web.stanford.edu/ yyye/yyye/Gset/. Yolcu, E. and P´oczos, B. (2019). Learning local search heuristics for boolean satisfiability. Advances in Neural Information Processing Systems, 32. This paper is available on arxiv under CC 4.0 DEED license. This paper is available on arxiv under CC 4.0 DEED license. available on arxiv

Assessing the Justification for Integrating Deep Learning in Combinatorial Optimization

United States v. Apple INC Court Filing, retrieved on March 21, 2024 is part of . You can jump to any part in this filing . This part is 12 of 25. HackerNoon’s Legal PDF Series here VI. Privacy, Security, and Other Alleged Countervailing Factors Do Not Justify Apple’s Anticompetitive Conduct 141. There are no valid, procompetitive benefits of Apple’s exclusionary conduct that would outweigh its anticompetitive effects. Apple’s moat building has not resulted in lower prices, higher output, improved innovation, or a better user experience for smartphone users. 142. Apple markets itself on the basis of privacy and security to differentiate itself from what competition is left in the smartphone market. But this does not justify Apple’s monopolistic and anticompetitive conduct. Apple imposes contractual restraints on app creation and distribution, imposes hefty fees on many types of smartphone interactions, and conditionally restricts API access on its smartphone platform simply because it can. There are limited if any competitive constraints on this conduct. As a point of comparison, Apple does not engage in such conduct on its Mac laptops and computers. It gives developers the freedom to distribute software directly to consumers on Mac without going through an Apple-controlled app store and without paying Apple app store fees. This still provides a safe and secure experience for Mac users, demonstrating that Apple’s control over app distribution and creation on the iPhone is substantially more restrictive than necessary to protect user privacy and security. 143. In fact, many alternative technologies that Apple’s conduct suppresses would enhance user security and privacy. For example, Apple’s conduct targeting digital wallets forces users to share information with Apple even if they would prefer to share that information solely with their bank, medical provider, or other trusted third party. In particular, when an iPhone user provisions a credit or debit card into Apple Wallet, Apple intervenes in a process that could otherwise occur directly between the user and card issuer introducing an additional point of failure for privacy and security. Likewise, super apps or alternative app stores could offer users and their families a more curated selection of apps that better protect user privacy and security. Indeed, Apple allows enterprise and public sector customers to offer more curated app stores on employee iPhones because it better protects privacy and security. 144. Apple is also willing to make the iPhone less secure and less private if that helps maintain its monopoly power. For example, text messages sent from iPhones to Android phones are unencrypted as a result of Apple’s conduct. If Apple wanted to, Apple could allow iPhone users to send encrypted messages to Android users while still using iMessage on their iPhone, which would instantly improve the privacy and security of iPhone and other smartphone users. 145. Similarly, Apple is willing to sacrifice user privacy and security in other ways so long as doing so benefits Apple. For example, Apple allows developers to distribute apps through its App Store that collect vast amounts of personal and sensitive data about users—including children—at the expense of its users’ privacy and security. Apple also enters agreements to share in the revenue generated from advertising that relies on harvesting users’ personal data. For example, Apple accepts massive payments from Google to set its search engine as the default in the Safari web browser even though Apple recognizes that other search engines better protect user privacy. 146. Finally, Apple selectively enforces its rules and contractual restrictions for app distribution and app creation. For example, when it benefits Apple to do so, Apple permits developers to introduce mini programs, stream content from the cloud, use virtual currency, and receive special permissions or access APIs not automatically available to everyone. 147. Ultimately, Apple chooses to make the iPhone private and secure when doing so benefits Apple; Apple chooses alternative courses when those courses help Apple protect its monopoly power. Apple’s conduct underscores the pretextual nature of any claim that Apple’s conduct is justified by protecting user privacy or security. Continue Reading . Here About HackerNoon Legal PDF Series: We bring you the most important technical and insightful public domain court case filings. This court case retrieved on March 21, 2024, from is part of the public domain. The court-created documents are works of the federal government, and under copyright law, are automatically placed in the public domain and may be shared without legal restriction. justice.gov

Apple Points to Privacy and Security As Justification for Its Anticompetitive Conduct

United States Of America. v. Microsoft Corporation Court Filing by Thomas Penfield Jackson, November 5, 1999 is part of . You can jump to any part in this filing . This is part 37 of 58. HackerNoon’s Legal PDF Series here iii. Lack of Justification 175. No technical reason can explain Microsoft’s refusal to license Windows 95 without Internet Explorer 1.0 and 2.0. The version of Internet Explorer (1.0) that Microsoft included with the original OEM version of Windows 95 was a separable, executable program file supplied on a separate disk. Web browsing thus could be installed or removed without affecting the rest of Windows 95's functionality in any way. The same was true of Internet Explorer 2.0. Microsoft, moreover, created an easy way to remove Internet Explorer 1.0 and 2.0 from Windows 95 after they had been installed, via the “Add/Remove” panel. This demonstrates the absence of any technical reason for Microsoft’s refusal to supply Windows 95 without Internet Explorer 1.0 and 2.0. Similarly, there is no technical justification for Microsoft’s refusal to license Windows 95 to OEMs with Internet Explorer 3.0 or 4.0 uninstalled, or for its refusal to permit OEMs to uninstall Internet Explorer 3.0 or 4.0. Microsoft’s decision to provide users with an “uninstall” procedure for Internet Explorer 3.0 and 4.0 and its decision to promote Internet Explorer on the basis of that feature demonstrate that there was no technical or quality-related reason for refusing to permit OEMs to use this same feature. Microsoft would not have permitted users to uninstall Internet Explorer, nor would consumers have demanded such an option, if the process would have fragmented or degraded the other functionality of the operating system. As with Windows 95, there is no technical justification for Microsoft’s refusal to meet consumer demand for a browserless version of Windows 98. Microsoft could easily supply a version of Windows 98 that does not provide the ability to browse the Web, and to which users could add the browser of their choice. Indicative of this is the fact that it remains possible to remove Web browsing functionality from Windows 98 without adversely affecting non-Web browsing features of Windows 98 or the functionality of applications running on the operating system. In fact, the revised version of Professor Felten’s prototype removal program produces precisely this result when run on a computer with Windows 98 installed. In his direct testimony, Felten provides a full technical description of what his prototype removal program does. This description includes a list of the twenty-one methods of initiating Web browsing in Windows 98 that were known to Felten when he developed his program. When the revised version of Felten’s program is run on a computer with Windows 98 and no other software installed, Web browsing is not initiated in response to any of these methods. James Allchin tried to show at trial, by way of a videotaped demonstration, that the functionality of Internet Explorer could still be enabled, even after the prototype removal program had been run, by manually adding a new entry to the Windows Registry database. During Felten’s rebuttal testimony, one of Microsoft’s attorneys directed Felten to perform a second demonstration intended to show that the functionality of Internet Explorer could still be enabled, even after the prototype removal program had been run, by hitting the “control” and “N” keys simultaneously after running the Windows Update feature. Neither of these methods of initiating Web browsing was among the twenty-one documented methods known to Felten when he developed his program. Furthermore, the latter demonstration was hardly a reliable test of Felten’s program, because the Encompass shell browser and other applications had been installed on the Windows 98 PC system used in the demonstration. At most, the two demonstrations indicate that Felten did not know all of the methods of initiating Web browsing in Windows 98 when he developed his program, and that he did not include steps in his program to prevent the invocation of Internet Explorer’s functionality in response to methods of which he was unaware. Microsoft has special knowledge of its own products, and it alone chooses which functionalities in its products are to be documented and which are to be left undocumented. Felten was aware of this fact, and he himself noted that his own documentation of initiation methods was not exhaustive. Allchin also attempted to show that Felten’s program causes performance degradations in Windows 98, as well as malfunctions in certain Windows 98 applications and the Windows Update feature of Windows 98. Those demonstrations, however, were performed on a PC on which several third-party software programs had been installed in addition to Windows 98, and which had been connected to the Internet via a dial-up connection. Felten’s program was not intended to be definitive and had not been verified under preconditions other than those for which it was designed. Thus, there was no reason to expect that his program would operate flawlessly during Allchin’s demonstrations, and nothing can be inferred from any failure to do so. In fact, the revised version of Felten’s program does not degrade the performance or stability of Windows 98 in any way. To the contrary, according to several standard programs used by Microsoft to measure system performance, the removal of Internet Explorer by the prototype program slightly improves the overall speed of Windows 98. Given Microsoft’s special knowledge of its own products, the company is readily able to produce an improved implementation of the concept illustrated by Felten’s prototype removal program. In particular, Microsoft can easily identify browsing-specific code that could be removed from shared files, thereby reducing the operating system’s memory and hard disk requirements and obtaining performance improvements even beyond those achieved by Felten. Microsoft contends that Felten’s prototype removal program does not remove Internet Explorer’s Web browsing functionalities, but rather “hides” those functionalities from the perspective of the user. In support of that contention, Microsoft points out that Felten’s program removes only a small fraction of the code in Windows 98, so that the hard drive still contains almost all of the code that had been executed in the course of providing Internet Explorer’s Web browsing functionalities. Some of that code is left on the hard drive because it also supports Windows 98's operating system functionalities. Microsoft did not offer any analytical basis, however, for distinguishing this sharing of code from the code sharing that exists between all Windows applications and the operating system functionalities in Windows 98. While Microsoft’s observation suggests that Felten’s program does not greatly reduce Windows 98's “footprint” on the hard disk, that point is irrelevant to the question of whether Felten’s program removes Internet Explorer’s functionalities from Windows 98. This is because the functionalities of a software product are not provided by the mere presence of code on a computer’s hard drive. For software code to provide any functionalities at all the code must be loaded into the computer’s dynamic memory and executed. To uninstall a software program or to remove a set of functionalities from a software program, it is not necessary to delete all of the software code that is executed in the course of providing those functionalities. It is sufficient to delete and/or modify enough of the program so as to prevent the code in question from being executed. This deletion and modification is precisely what Felten’s program does to Windows 98. After Felten’s program has been run, the software code that formerly had been executed in the course of providing Web browsing functionalities is no longer executed. Web browsing functionalities are not merely “hidden” from the user. To the contrary, Felten’s program deletes and modifies enough of Windows 98 so as to prevent the necessary code from being executed altogether. Since code that is not to be executed does not need to be loaded into memory, Felten’s program is able to reduce the memory allocated to Windows 98 by approximately twenty percent. As an abstract and general proposition, many — if not most — consumers can be said to benefit from Microsoft’s provision of Web browsing functionality with its Windows operating system at no additional charge. No consumer benefit can be ascribed, however, to Microsoft’s refusal to offer a version of Windows 95 or Windows 98 without Internet Explorer, or to Microsoft’s refusal to provide a method for uninstalling Internet Explorer from Windows 98. In particular, Microsoft’s decision to force users to take the browser in order to get the non- Web browsing features of Windows 98, including support for new Internet protocols and data formats is, as Allchin put it, simply a choice about “distribution.” As Felten’s program demonstrated, it is feasible for Microsoft to supply a version of Windows 98 that does not provide the ability to browse the Web, to which users could add a browser of their choice. Microsoft could then readily offer “integrated” Internet Explorer Web browsing functionality as well, either as an option that could be selected by the end user or the OEM during the Windows 98 setup procedure, or as a “service pack upgrade.” Unlike a “pocket part” supplement to a book, a software upgrade need not consist only of new material. A service pack upgrade may install a combination of new software files and/or replacements for existing software files. The use of such service packs to distribute new functionality is a standard feature of Windows applications generally. Microsoft could offer “integrated” Internet Explorer Web browsing functionality as a service pack upgrade that would locate the relevant software and replace it with the current Windows 98 software. In this way, any consumer who wished to do so could easily acquire all of the functionality, features, and performance of the current version of Windows 98 by obtaining the browserless operating system package and the service pack upgrade and then installing them together. Microsoft contends that a service pack must necessarily be deemed part of the operating system when it replaces and adds a large number of core operating system files in the process of upgrading the operating system to a higher level of functionality. This contention is false. Both Microsoft Word, an application program, and Norton Utilities, a suite of utility and application programs, replace and add files to Windows without thereby becoming part of the operating system. Microsoft’s actual use of a service pack upgrade to offer integrated Internet Explorer Web browsing functionality (Internet Explorer 4.0) separately from the Windows 95 operating system illustrates the feasibility of this approach. In fact, it produces results remarkably similar to those that could be achieved by offering integrated Internet Explorer Web browsing functionality as a separate service pack upgrade to a browserless Windows 98 operating system. When installed together by the end user, the combined software provides nearly all of the features that Microsoft attributes to the “integrated” design of Windows 98. Of the missing features, all but WebTV for Windows can be obtained by thereafter installing a separately obtained copy of Internet Explorer 5.0. Microsoft has presented no evidence that the WebTV functionality could not easily be included in the stand-alone version of Internet Explorer 5.0. Therefore, Microsoft could offer consumers all the benefits of the current Windows 98 package by distributing the products separately and allowing OEMs or consumers themselves to combine the products if they wished. In fact, operating system vendors other than Microsoft currently succeed in offering “integrated” features similar to those that Microsoft advertises in Windows 98 while still permitting the removal of the browser from the operating system. If consumers genuinely prefer a version of Windows bundled with Internet Explorer, they do not have to be forced to take it; they can choose it in the market. Windows 98 offers some benefits unrelated to browsing that a consumer cannot obtain by combining Internet Explorer with Windows 95. For example, Windows 98 includes support for new hardware technologies and data formats that consumers may desire. While nevertheless preferring to do without Web browsing, Microsoft has forced Windows users who do not want Internet Explorer to nevertheless license, install, and use Internet Explorer to obtain the unrelated benefits. Although some consumers might be inclined to go without Windows 98's new non-browsing features in order to avoid Internet Explorer, OEMs are unlikely to facilitate that choice, because they want consumers to use an operating system that supports the new hardware technologies they seek to sell. Microsoft’s argument that binding the browser to the operating system is reasonably necessary to preserve the “integrity” of the Windows platform is likewise specious. First, concern with the integrity of the platform cannot explain Microsoft’s original decision to bind Internet Explorer to Windows 95, because Internet Explorer 1.0 and 2.0 did not contain APIs. Second, concern with the integrity of the platform cannot explain Microsoft’s refusal to offer OEMs the option of uninstalling Internet Explorer from Windows 95 and Windows 98 because APIs, like all other shared files, are left on the system when Internet Explorer in uninstalled. Third, Microsoft’s contention that offering OEMs the choice of whether or not to install certain browser-related APIs would fragment the Windows platform is unpersuasive because OEMs operate in a competitive market and thus have ample incentive to include APIs (including non-Microsoft APIs) required by the applications that their customers demand. Fourth, even if there were some potential benefit associated with the forced licensing of a single set of APIs to all OEMs, such justification could not apply in this case, because Microsoft itself precipitates fragmentation of its platform by continually updating various portions of the Windows installed base with new APIs. ISVs have adapted to this reality by redistributing needed APIs with their applications in order to ensure that the necessary APIs are present when the programs are launched. To the same end, Microsoft makes the APIs it ships with Internet Explorer available to third-party developers for distribution with their own products. Moreover, Microsoft itself bundles APIs — including those distributed with Internet Explorer — with a number of the applications that it distributes separately from Windows. Microsoft also contends that by providing “best of breed” implementations of various functionalities, a vendor of a popular operating system can benefit consumers and improve the efficiency of the software market generally, because the resulting standardization allows ISVs to concentrate their efforts on developing complementary technologies for the industry leaders. Microsoft’s refusal to offer a version of Windows 98 in which its Web browser is either absent or removable, however, had no such purpose. Rather, it had the purpose and effect of quashing innovation that exhibited the potential to facilitate the emergence of competition in the market for Intel-compatible PC operating systems. Furthermore, there is only equivocal support for the proposition that Microsoft will ultimately prove to be the source of a “best of breed” Web browser. In fact, there is considerable evidence to the contrary. Both Microsoft and the plaintiffs have used product evaluations to support their claims about the relationship between innovations in Web browser technology and consumer choices regarding the use of Web browsers. These product evaluations generally compare Internet Explorer with Navigator by identifying the beneficial and detrimental features of each. Because the evaluations disagree as to which features are most important, there is no consensus as to which is the best browser overall. When read together, the evaluations also do not identify any existing Web browser as being “best of breed” in the sense of being at least as good as all others in all significant respects. Moreover, there is nothing in the evaluations, nor anywhere else in the evidence, to suggest that further innovation efforts by vendors other than Microsoft in the field of Web browser technology are no longer necessary or desirable. To the contrary, many of the product reviews suggest further innovations in both Microsoft and non- Microsoft Web browsers that would benefit consumers. Despite differences in emphasis, the product evaluations do generally concur as to which browser features are beneficial, which browser features are detrimental, and why. Thus, the evaluations provide extensive detailed information about consumer preferences that can be used to predict likely directions in the evolution of Web browser technology. First, the evaluations suggest that, although most Web publishers charge nothing for access to their sites, consumers recognize that there are search and communication costs associated with Web transactions. Accordingly, consumers prefer, and benefit from, innovations in Web browser technology that reduce these costs. Second, consumers recognize that the Web contains a vast and growing range of digital information resources, many of which contain viruses that are capable of causing devastating and irreversible harm to their security and privacy interests. Accordingly, consumers prefer, and benefit from, innovations in Web browser technology that help them identify and avoid harmful Web resources. Third, consumers recognize that they frequently lack adequate information to enable them to assess accurately the costs, risks, and benefits of performing a particular Web transaction. Accordingly, consumers prefer, and benefit from, innovations in Web browser technology that help them assess these costs, risks, and benefits prior to performing the transaction. The reduction of search and communication costs, the identification and avoidance of harmful Web resources, and the provision of more accurate information as to the costs, risks, and benefits of performing Web transactions are just three of the many possible areas of innovation in the field of Web browser technology. Far from demonstrating that Internet Explorer is currently a “best of breed” Web browser, the evidence reveals Microsoft’s awareness of the need for continuous improvement of its products. For example, Microsoft frequently releases “patches” to address security and privacy vulnerabilities in Internet Explorer as they are discovered. In sum, there is no indication that Microsoft is destined to provide a “best of breed” Web browser that makes continuing, competitively driven innovations unproductive. Continue reading . here About We bring you the most important technical and insightful public domain court case filings. HackerNoon Legal PDF Series: This court case Civil Action No. 98-1232 (TPJ) retrieved on 2-07-2023, from is part of the public domain. The court-created documents are works of the federal government, and under copyright law, are automatically placed in the public domain and may be shared without legal restriction. justice.gov

The Lack of Justification: Why Did Microsoft Do That?

Last words justified the colonists’ presentiment

Edison's Conquest of Mars by Garrett Putman Serviss is part of the HackerNoon Books Series. You can jump to any chapter in this book here . Chapter II Edison's Conquest of Mars Chapter II This enthusiasm would have had but little justification had Mr. Edison done nothing more than invent a machine which could navigate the atmosphere and the regions of interplanetary space. He had, however, and this fact was generally known, although the details had not yet leaked out—invented also machines of war intended to meet the utmost that the Martians could do for either offence or defence in the struggle which was now about to ensue. A Wonderful Instrument. Acting upon the hint which had been conveyed from various investigations in the domain of physics, and concentrating upon the problem all those unmatched powers of intellect which distinguished him, the great inventor had succeeded in producing a little implement which one could carry in his hand, but which was more powerful than any battleship that ever floated. The details of its mechanism could not be easily explained, without the use of tedious technicalities and the employment of terms, diagrams and mathematical statements, all of which would lie outside the scope of this narrative. But the principle of the thing was simple enough. It was upon the great scientific doctrine, which we have since seen so completely and brilliantly developed, of the law of harmonic vibrations, extending from atoms and molecules at one end of the series up to worlds and suns at the other end, that Mr. Edison based his invention. Every kind of substance has its own vibratory rhythm. That of iron differs from that of pine wood. The atoms of gold do not vibrate in the same time or through the same range as those of lead, and so on for all known substances, and all the chemical elements. So, on a larger scale, every massive body has its period of vibration. A great suspension bridge vibrates, under the impulse of forces that are applied to it, in long periods. No company of soldiers ever crosses such a bridge without breaking step. If they tramped together, and were followed by other companies keeping the same time with their feet, after a while the vibrations of the bridge would become so great and destructive that it would fall in pieces. So any structure, if its vibration rate is known, could easily be destroyed by a force applied to it in such a way that it should simply increase the swing of those vibrations up to the point of destruction. Now Mr. Edison had been able to ascertain the vibratory swing of many well-known substances, and to produce, by means of the instrument which he had contrived, pulsations in the ether which were completely under his control, and which could be made long or short, quick or slow, at his will. He could run through the whole gamut from the slow vibrations of sound in air up to the four hundred and twenty-five millions of millions of vibrations per second of the ultra red rays. Having obtained an instrument of such power, it only remained to concentrate its energy upon a given object in order that the atoms composing that object should be set into violent undulation, sufficient to burst it asunder and to scatter its molecules broadcast. This the inventor effected by the simplest means in the world—simply a parabolic reflector by which the destructive waves could be sent like a beam of light, but invisible, in any direction and focused upon any desired point. Testing the "Disintegrator." I had the good fortune to be present when this powerful engine of destruction was submitted to its first test. We had gone upon the roof of Mr. Edison's laboratory and the inventor held the little instrument, with its attached mirror, in his hand. We looked about for some object on which to try its powers. On a bare limb of a tree not far away, for it was late in the Fall, sat a disconsolate crow. "Good," said Mr. Edison, "that will do." He touched a button at the side of the instrument and a soft, whirring noise was heard. "Feathers," said Mr. Edison, "have a vibration period of three hundred and eighty-six million per second." He adjusted the index as he spoke. Then, through a sighting tube, he aimed at the bird. "Now watch," he said. The Crow's Fate. Another soft whirr in the instrument, a momentary flash of light close around it, and, behold, the crow had turned from black to white! "Its feathers are gone," said the inventor; "they have been dissipated into their constituent atoms. Now, we will finish the crow." The First Test of the Disintegrator. Another soft whirr in the instrument, a momentary flash of light close around it, and, behold, the crow had turned from black to white! Instantly there was another adjustment of the index, another outshooting of vibratory force, a rapid up and down motion of the index to include a certain range of vibrations, and the crow itself was gone—vanished in empty space! There was the bare twig on which a moment before it had stood. Behind, in the sky, was the white cloud against which its black form had been sharply outlined, but there was no more crow. Bad for the Martians. "That looks bad for the Martians, doesn't it?" said the Wizard. "I have ascertained the vibration rate of all the materials of which their war engines whose remains we have collected together are composed. They can be shattered into nothingness in the fraction of a second. Even if the vibration period were not known, it could quickly be hit upon by simply running through the gamut." "Hurrah!" cried one of the onlookers. "We have met the Martians and they are ours." Such in brief was the first of the contrivances which Mr. Edison invented for the approaching war with Mars. And these facts had become widely known. Additional experiments had completed the demonstration of the inventor's ability, with the aid of his wonderful instrument, to destroy any given object, or any part of an object, provided that that part differed in its atomic constitution, and consequently in its vibratory period, from the other parts. A most impressive public exhibition of the powers of the little disintegrator was given amid the ruins of New York. On lower Broadway a part of the walls of one of the gigantic buildings, which had been destroyed by the Martians, impended in such a manner that it threatened at any moment to fall upon the heads of the passers-by. The Fire Department did not dare touch it. To blow it up seemed a dangerous expedient, because already new buildings had been erected in its neighborhood, and their safety would be imperiled by the flying fragments. The fact happened to come to my knowledge. "Here is an opportunity," I said to Mr. Edison, "to try the powers of your machine on a large scale." "Capital!" he instantly replied. "I shall go at once." Disintegrating a Building. For the work now in hand it was necessary to employ a battery of disintegrators, since the field of destruction covered by each was comparatively limited. All of the impending portions of the wall must be destroyed at once and together, for otherwise the danger would rather be accentuated than annihilated. The disintegrators were placed upon the roof of a neighboring building, so adjusted that their fields of destruction overlapped one another upon the wall. Their indexes were all set to correspond with the vibration period of the peculiar kind of brick of which the wall consisted. Then the energy was turned on, and a shout of wonder arose from the multitudes which had assembled at a safe distance to witness the experiment. Only a Cloud Remained. The wall did not fall; it did not break asunder; no fragments shot this way and that and high in the air; there was no explosion; no shock or noise disturbed the still atmosphere—only a soft whirr, that seemed to pervade everything and to tingle in the nerves of the spectators; and—what had been was not! The wall was gone! But high above and all around the place where it had hung over the street with its threat of death there appeared, swiftly billowing outward in every direction, a faint, bluish cloud. It was the scattered atoms of the destroyed wall. A Marvellous Scientific Triumph. Only a soft whirr, that seemed to pervade everything and to tingle in the nerves of the spectators, and—what had been was not! The wall was gone! And now the cry "On to Mars!" was heard on all sides. But for such an enterprise funds were needed—millions upon millions. Yet some of the fairest and richest portions of the earth had been impoverished by the frightful ravages of those enemies who had dropped down upon them from the skies. Still, the money must be had. The salvation of the planet, as everybody was now convinced, depended upon the successful negotiation of a gigantic war fund, in comparison with which all the expenditures in all of the wars that had been waged by the nations for 2,000 years would be insignificant. The electrical ships and the vibration engines must be constructed by scores and thousands. Only Mr. Edison's immense resources and unrivaled equipment had enabled him to make the models whose powers had been so satisfactorily shown. But to multiply these upon a war scale was not only beyond the resources of any individual—hardly a nation on the globe in the period of its greatest prosperity could have undertaken such a work. All the nations, then, must now conjoin. They must unite their resources, and, if necessary, exhaust all their hoards, in order to raise the needed sum. The Yankees Lead. Negotiations were at once begun. The United States naturally took the lead, and their leadership was never for a moment questioned abroad. Washington was selected as the place of meeting for a great congress of the nations. Washington, luckily, had been one of the places which had not been touched by the Martians. But if Washington had been a city composed of hotels alone, and every hotel so great as to be a little city in itself, it would have been utterly insufficient for the accommodation of the innumerable throngs which now flocked to the banks of the Potomac. But when was American enterprise unequal to a crisis? The necessary hotels, lodging houses and restaurants were constructed with astounding rapidity. One could see the city growing and expanding day by day and week after week. It flowed over Georgetown Heights; it leaped the Potomac; it spread east and west, south and north; square mile after square mile of territory was buried under the advancing buildings, until the gigantic city, which had thus grown up like a mushroom in a night, was fully capable of accommodating all its expected guests. At first it had been intended that the heads of the various governments should in person attend this universal congress, but as the enterprise went on, as the enthusiasm spread, as the necessity for haste became more apparent through the warning notes which were constantly sounded from the observatories where the astronomers were nightly beholding new evidences of threatening preparations in Mars, the kings and queens of the old world felt that they could not remain at home; that their proper place was at the new focus and centre of the whole world—the city of Washington. Without concerted action, without interchange of suggestion, this impulse seemed to seize all the old world monarchs at once. Suddenly cablegrams flashed to the Government at Washington, announcing that Queen Victoria, the Emperor William, the Czar Nicholas, Alphonso of Spain, with his mother, Maria Christina; the old Emperor Francis Joseph and the Empress Elizabeth, of Austria; King Oscar and Queen Sophia, of Sweden and Norway; King Humbert and Queen Margherita, of Italy; King George and Queen Olga, of Greece; Abdul Hamid, of Turkey; Tsait'ien, Emperor of China; Mutsuhito, the Japanese Mikado, with his beautiful Princess Haruko; the President of France, the President of Switzerland, the First Syndic of the little republic of Andorra, perched on the crest of the Pyrenees, and the heads of all the Central and South American republics, were coming to Washington to take part in the deliberations, which, it was felt, were to settle the fate of earth and Mars. One day, after this announcement had been received, and the additional news had come that nearly all the visiting monarchs had set out, attended by brilliant suites and convoyed by fleets of warships, for their destination, some coming across the Atlantic to the port of New York, others across the Pacific to San Francisco, Mr. Edison said to me: "This will be a fine spectacle. Would you like to watch it?" "Certainly," I replied. A Grand Spectacle. The Ship of Space was immediately at our disposal. I think I have not yet mentioned the fact that the inventor's control over the electrical generator carried in the car was so perfect that by varying the potential or changing the polarity he could cause it slowly or swiftly, as might be desired, to approach or recede from any object. The only practical difficulty was presented when the polarity of the electrical charge upon an object in the neighborhood of the car was unknown to those in the car, and happened to be opposite to that of the charge which the car, at that particular moment, was bearing. In such a case, of course, the car would fly toward the object, whatever it might be, like a pith ball or a feather, attracted to the knob of an electrical machine. In this way, considerable danger was occasionally encountered, and a few accidents could not be avoided. Fortunately, however, such cases were rare. It was only now and then that, owing to some local cause, electrical polarities unknown to or unexpected by the navigators, endangered the safety of the car. As I shall have occasion to relate, however, in the course of the narrative, this danger became more acute and assumed at times a most formidable phase, when we had ventured outside the sphere of the earth and were moving through the unexplored regions beyond. On this occasion, having embarked, we rose rapidly to a height of some thousands of feet and directed our course over the Atlantic. When half way to Ireland, we beheld, in the distance, steaming westward, the smoke of several fleets. As we drew nearer a marvellous spectacle unfolded itself to our eyes. From the northeast, their great guns flashing in the sunlight and their huge funnels belching black volumes that rested like thunder clouds upon the sea, came the mighty warships of England, with her meteor flag streaming red in the breeze, while the royal insignia, indicating the presence of the ruler of the British Empire, was conspicuously displayed upon the flagship of the squadron. Following a course more directly westward appeared, under another black cloud of smoke, the hulls and guns and burgeons of another great fleet, carrying the tri-color of France, and bearing in its midst the head of the magnificent republic of western Europe. Further south, beating up against the northerly winds, came a third fleet with the gold and red of Spain fluttering from its masthead. This, too, was carrying its King westward, where now, indeed, the star of empire had taken its way. Universal Brotherhood. Rising a little higher, so as to extend our horizon, we saw coming down the English channel, behind the British fleet, the black ships of Russia. Side by side, or following one another's lead, these war fleets were on a peaceful voyage that belied their threatening appearance. There had been no thought of danger to or from the forts and ports of rival nations which they had passed. There was no enmity, and no fear between them when the throats of their ponderous guns yawned at one another across the waves. They were now, in spirit, all one fleet, having one object, bearing against one enemy, ready to defend but one country, and that country was the entire earth. It was some time before we caught sight of the Emperor William's fleet. It seems that the Kaiser, although at first consenting to the arrangement by which Washington had been selected as the assembling place for the nations, afterwards objected to it. Kaiser Wilhelm's Jealousy. "I ought to do this thing myself," he had said. "My glorious ancestors would never have consented to allow these upstart Republicans to lead in a warlike enterprise of this kind. What would my grandfather have said to it? I suspect that it is some scheme aimed at the divine right of kings." But the good sense of the German people would not suffer their ruler to place them in a position so false and so untenable. And swept along by their enthusiasm the Kaiser had at last consented to embark on his flagship at Kiel, and now he was following the other fleets on their great mission to the Western Continent. Why did they bring their warships when their intentions were peaceable, do you ask? Well, it was partly the effect of ancient habit, and partly due to the fact that such multitudes of officials and members of ruling families wished to embark for Washington that the ordinary means of ocean communications would have been utterly inadequate to convey them. After we had feasted our eyes on this strange sight, Mr. Edison suddenly exclaimed: "Now let us see the fellows from the rising sun." Over the Mississippi. The car was immediately directed toward the west. We rapidly approached the American coast, and as we sailed over the Alleghany Mountains and the broad plains of the Ohio and the Mississippi, we saw crawling beneath us from west, south and north, an endless succession of railway trains bearing their multitudes on to Washington. With marvellous speed we rushed westward, rising high to skim over the snow-topped peaks of the Rocky Mountains and then the glittering rim of the Pacific was before us. Half way between the American coast and Hawaii we met the fleets coming from China and Japan. Side by side they were ploughing the main, having forgotten, or laid aside, all the animosities of their former wars. I well remember how my heart was stirred at this impressive exhibition of the boundless influence which my country had come to exercise over all the people of the world, and I turned to look at the man to whose genius this uprising of the earth was due. But Mr. Edison, after his wont, appeared totally unconscious of the fact that he was personally responsible for what was going on. His mind, seemingly, was entirely absorbed in considering problems, the solution of which might be essential to our success in the terrific struggle which was soon to begin. Back to Washington. "Well, have you seen enough?" he asked. "Then let us go back to Washington." As we speeded back across the continent we beheld beneath us again the burdened express trains rushing toward the Atlantic, and hundreds of thousands of upturned eyes watched our swift progress, and volleys of cheers reached our ears, for every one knew that this was Edison's electrical warship, on which the hope of the nation, and the hopes of all the nations, depended. These scenes were repeated again and again until the car hovered over the still expanding capital on the Potomac, where the unceasing ring of hammers rose to the clouds. About HackerNoon Book Series: We bring you the most important technical, scientific, and insightful public domain books. This book is part of the public domain. Garrett Putman Serviss (2006). Edison's Conquest of Mars. Urbana, Illinois: Project Gutenberg. Retrieved October 2022 https://www.gutenberg.org/cache/epub/19141/pg19141-images.html This eBook is for the use of anyone anywhere at no cost and with almost no restrictions whatsoever. You may copy it, give it away or re-use it under the terms of the Project Gutenberg License included with this eBook or online at www.gutenberg.org , located at https://www.gutenberg.org/policy/license.html .

This enthusiasm would have had but little justification

“We believe in breaking the rules. We believe in bucking the trends. We believe in Living Different.” These words are emblazoned on the website, and they capture the spirit and strategy that CEO, Zach Frantz, has used to build and grow his business. Tempered with experience and rationality, this unconfined mindset has made Wildland Coffee a reliable business that caters to an overlooked and lucrative customer base. His central creed is to grow organically and maintain profitability. He asked how can you be profitable when you’re big if you can’t prove yourself when you’re small. His departure from established norms can be seen in his branding, team building, and marketing. Wildland Coffee The Power of Organic Growth When thinking of any well-known business, the things that immediately come to mind are the essence of the brand. Whether it is jingles, logos, mascots, menu items, or the clientele, many corporations and businesses seek to create a rewarding brand, which generates a flood of images and memories that encourage a consumer to choose their product over a competitor. In fact, many people view the brand as synonymous with the business it represents. It is difficult to argue with anyone actively pursuing a recognizable and memorable brand. The sight of McDonald’s arches can send a car full of kids into a frenzy, that will only be satiated by Happy Meals. Chevy and Ford owners proudly bash each other, with a lifetime dedication to their vehicle of choice. The same can be seen between Miller and Budweiser. Businesses that have nothing to do with interior decorating or apparel can sell mountains of novelty mirrors, lamps, rugs, shirts, and hats. A good brand can capture a loyal customer base while opening opportunities for merchandising and other partnerships. Despite all the benefits listed above and the encouragement of numerous mentors and colleagues to develop a brand, Frantz knew that the cost could cripple his business before it had a chance to start. Hiring a market analyst and graphic designer to develop logos, mottos, and fonts, buying t-shirts, stickers, and hats to give away, and purchasing ad space are all expensive investments without any immediate return. Frantz stated that his previous venture fell victim to exceeding its boundaries in this way, hence his propensity to natural, justified growth. He also understood that these brands didn’t magically materialize overnight. They earned their reputation over years of business and millions in sales, which some people can forget or take for granted. In line with this thought, he focused on a very specific product for a very specific audience. In this case, convenient and tasty coffee for outdoor enthusiasts. This decision was not made hastily or impulsively. Frantz knew the people he was targeting. He understood their interests, their frustrations, their budgets, and how to endear his coffee to fit their active, outdoor hobbies and lifestyles. From his passion and his subject matter expertise, his brand would organically emerge from continued exposure and customer interaction, as the number one coffee brand for outdoor enthusiasts. Collective Knowledge and Skills Another topic that arises is that many successful entrepreneurs tout the crucial importance of a solid team for growing a business. It is not uncommon for a CEO to directly credit their company’s prosperity to the effort and knowledge of those who work for them. When faced with an unfamiliar problem or an ever-expanding list of obligations, many people immediately seek out workers with the skills to fill the gaps that they cannot. Aside from issues requiring reaction, fresh eyes and differing viewpoints are often the source of proactive measures. This can help in a multitude of ways, such as finding new customers, reducing costs, or generating brand interest. There is no shortage of success stories, where massive credit is bestowed upon the team, and the business leader charged headfirst into growing their team. However, this is another area where Zach breaks from the crowd. He is in no hurry to start hiring people, until the growth and profits demand it. Currently, he single-handedly manages all aspects of Wildland Coffee, performing all day-to-day tasks with his own hands. He stated that team building will happen once he can no longer scale, and as long as there is a direct return on this investment. As mentioned before, many company leaders default to finding those workers who are strong where they are weak, often at the first sign of difficulty. This has a domino effect. Costs for desks, phones, and renting office space increase. Hiring people to support the front-line workers drives up overhead, such as pay roll accountants and human resources to name a few. Frantz understands that this is a pitfall, if the demand doesn’t justify the cut into the profits. A second motivator is a desire to learn. Frantz embraces the challenge to become proficient in the areas of business where he is inexperienced. He believes a good boss must understand the processes and struggles that each employee faces. In a way, organic growth in his capabilities is just as important as the organic growth of Wildland’s profits. That is not to say that Frantz doesn’t utilize the expertise and reach of other people. He has sought out other entrepreneurs for mentorship, as well as engaging experts on Linkedin. Through these connections, he is able to leverage a wealth of knowledge and great ideas, from outside his organization. Precise Advertising Expenditure Another crucial field in expanding a business is marketing. The amount of reverence corporations place on advertising and outreach is impossible to miss. Anywhere from 15% to 25% of television time is dedicated to commercials. This is even being seen in places that were once thought free from their influence, such as movie theaters or premium cable channels. Entire networks, like the QVC, exist for vendors to showcase their products to potential consumers. Newspapers and magazines are loaded with ads, and countless billboards line the streets and highways of countries around the world. Although market research and targeted campaigns are used, it is clear that businesses take a shotgun approach to gaining views and traffic, all in the pursuit of making sales. The amount of money spent is staggering. Sometimes this investment pays off, but it can be a major risk for newer companies with smaller budgets. Frantz understands the limitations he has for investing in advertising and has done so in a cautious and calculated manner. This includes purchasing Amazon ads, where he mitigated his risk, by controlling his spending. Coordinating with Youtubers and other social media influencers was also a method to get Wildland Coffee in front of new potential customers. Overtime, he turned these agreements into more formal partnerships, making sure they yielded a certain return on investment. Establishing a detailed plan ensured that ambition and overly optimistic projections wouldn’t eat into his profitability. Along side these advertising efforts, Frantz engaged in a traditional, grass roots outreach, calling vendors and wholesalers. This also included attending events and conventions for outdoor enthusiasts, and directly engaging attendees. Through these interactions, he was able to overcome two major obstacles to his product, namely confusion and skepticism. Wildland’s products are a new, unique style of coffee, utilizing single use bags that are more a line with tea. After educating people on the product, they naturally became skeptical of the quality, which Frantz was able to quickly assuage. Unorthodox Avenues of Success Despite his unorthodox stances or counterculture approach to these critical business elements, Frantz has developed a successful method to grow his business. His desire to grow organically, with his brand, with his sales, and with his own skills, has placed Wildland Coffee on a steady, reliable path to becoming a highly respected and sought-after product for his target audience. He is a firm believer that there is no single path to success, which has empowered him to break rules, buck trends, and grow his company the way he sees fit. His final words of wisdom were, “the contradictory voices in one’s head are a creation of their own, and they don’t have to listen to them.” Based on his decisions and the benefits he has reaped, he has shown that he didn’t have to listen to the contradictory voices outside his head, even when their intentions were good.

How to build a profitable business using natural justified growth

A war has this peculiar thing about it. It’s a social practice that publicly violates the most universally acknowledged ethical restriction - the commandment against killing - and yet is a common vocation. Albeit one that is unquestionably controversial. From a global perspective, only a minor share of countries do not have a functioning military. As a result, a country's overall competency is generally equated with its capacity to wage war in the 21st century. And whether you like it or not, we are all involved: as taxpayers, we fund the war artillery, and as citizens, we recognize and support the troops who put their lives on the line for us during a war. Why? because it requires them to get their hands dirty for us, so we can continue living our convenient modern lives, in our expensive homes. Also, because no one seems to be genuinely disputing this. Whatever perspective we take, war entails death, which makes it problematic, even if it appears to be appropriate and even necessary at times. However, civilian deaths are not inescapable. The military does usually decide on an acceptable number ahead of any planned attack. The resulting civilian deaths may appear to be unavoidable tragedies, yet they are not. Casualties among civilians are not inevitable. They are an option. The assumption that civilians are entitled to distinct protection in times of war is generally presumed rather than established. When in reality, the population inside a projected explosion radius is generally surveilled and estimated by a national military to estimate how many people would die in its attacks. It also establishes a limit on how many innocent citizens each order is allowed to harm inadvertently. This non-combatant cutoff value (NCV), is likely the most stringent rule of war, and it differs by location for political reasons. But the problem is that the idea of civilian or non-combatant immunity is doubly difficult to apply. On one hand, it's impossible to see the difference between the two groups of individuals - combatant and non-combatant - so the issue of whether one should be protected over the other is faulty from the outset. On the other hand, the prioritization of a feature of action – intention – whose meaning and ramifications are far more problematic than most discussions of war ethics recognise. Despite this, the idea is still at the heart of a lot of debate globally. As a result, we must consider why it is so important and what role it plays in war debates. If war is humanity's curse, the massacre of the vulnerable is its most heinous incarnation. Thousands, if not millions, of young soldiers die, and their losses are grieved yet accepted. Conversely, the killings of a handful women, children, or the elderly at the hands of the military elicits outrage. Such killings have been condemned from the dawn of time as brutal, unethical, and atrocious. Ethical prescriptions and international law have both denounced the evil and attempted to limit it if not eradicate entirely. It is only natural to have more concern for our own countrymen as opposed to foreigners. Your love for your friends and family will not and cannot be equal to your love for a stranger hundreds of miles away in a foreign nation. But does this concern and love give you the permission to kill that stranger in order to attain your objectives? I’ll just leave you with this thought here: Although legally veracious, our utilitarian stance is neither courageous nor ethically ambitious for a superpower committed to the belief that all men are created equal.

Civilian Casualties as Collateral Damage: Are they Justified?

Víctimas civiles como daños colaterales: ¿están justificados?

Les victimes civiles comme dommages collatéraux : sont-elles justifiées ?

संपार्श्विक क्षति के रूप में नागरिक हताहत: क्या वे उचित हैं?

巻き添え被害としての民間人の死傷者は正当化されるか?

Vítimas civis como danos colaterais: são justificadas?

Thương vong dân sự do Thiệt hại Tài sản đảm bảo: Có Chính đáng không?

作为附带损害的平民伤亡：它们是否合理？

I am no fan of the power that Apple and Google assert over the ecosystem of mobile developers with the power to pull any app, effectively cutting them off from a large percentage of smartphone users. In fact, I’ve , more akin to Big Brother than companies which uphold our democratic and free market traditions, and should be regulated, . So you would be surprised to learn that I contend that both Google and Apple’s action this week with Parler, a social media app popular with Trump supporters, were entirely proper. argued that they are de facto monopolies even broken up as part of the Big Tech antitrust suit Just last week, the riots of Trump supporters who broke into the Capitol building and stopped the counting of the electoral votes has had ripples in the tech industry. Social media giants like Twitter and Facebook have moved to ban President Trump for fear that he would incite his followers to return to the capital for a repeat performance just before or on the day of President-elect Biden’s inauguration. This has caused many conservatives to accuse big tech of “censorship”. In response to these bans, many Trump supporters (and he had over 80 million on Twitter alone) have moved to Parler, making it the number one downloaded app in the app store just before the ban. Parler has gained steam since the recent election since Twitter and Facebook started labelling Trump’s charges of “election fraud” as disputed, pitching itself as social media without censorship and without rules who were tired of having their election fraud claims questioned. , which appealed to Trump’s base, In response, among growing evidence that to plan the descent on DC on January 6th specifically to disrupt the electoral college count. This coupled with a number of extremists on the platform (and on other social media) threatening to “Hang Pence” since the Vice President announced that he would not (and in fact, could not) over turn the results of the election as Trump supporters wanted him to. social media in general, and Parler in particular, had been used by Trump supporters Apple initially sent a letter to Parler saying that its app would be removed within 24 hours if it wasn’t able to police itself and abide by the rules of the App Store, that it had received numerous complaints that the app “was used to plan, , coordinate and facilitate the illegal activities in Washington D.C. on January 6th, 20201” and that it “appears to continue to be used to plan and facilitate yet further illegal and dangerous activities.” Within 24 hours, the Parler app, which was the #1 downloaded app during the previous few days, was removed from the Apple App Store as well. which alleged Since 2010, when I helped create one of the first successful apps on the Apple App Store, I have been arguing that Apple in particular (and to a lesser extent, Google), not only applies the rules of its app stores capriciously, kicking out whoever it wants, but this dynamic results in anticompetitive behavior. Basically, my argument was that these two app stores (though Apple more so than Google), act as de-facto monopolies with the power to cut off any business from its customers since there isn’t a good way to get your app onto an iPhone or iPad without going through the App Store, discouraging competition and ultimately harming consumers. So why wouldn’t I agree then, with many conservatives, who believe that kicking Parler out of the App Store is another example of abusing their monopolistic powers? My original argument was quite simple — Apple and Google shouldn’t have the power to stop people from installing whatever they want on their computers, just as, once upon a time, neither Microsoft nor IBM could control what apps you installed on your Windows PC. Mobile phones are the most popular computing platform in history and no one (or two companies) should be able to control everything you do on these devices. The problem is not just that a company like Apple is free to create its own guidelines and enforce them inconsistently. It’s that the “app store” guidelines are not approved by any elected bodies and are not laws by any means and so it cannot be the ultimate arbiter of what consumers can or cannot get access to. However, I never argued that Apple or Google’s App Stores should be used to plan, encourage and incite illegal activities (against which there are already laws) or overthrow of democratically elected governments, which it’s becoming increasingly clear that Parler was being used for by extremists. Using a simple analogy, in the video game space, for example, there are many social casino apps, such as virtual slot machines — which do not allow real money gambling because that would be against the laws of most states in the US. As a result, Google and Apple do not allow real-money gambling in apps in the US app stores. Some countries, such as Korea, for example, don’t even allow “simulated gambling”, and Apple and Google have had to block virtual gambling apps in those countries, while they are allowed in the US. There is however, a line here that is more nuanced than it looks at first. Where do you draw the line? For example, in case of the dark web marketplace Silk Road, it was being used to facilitate criminal activities, including murder and kidnapping, using Bitcoin, which is harder to trace than bank transfers of money. This doesn’t mean that Bitcoin should be outlawed, since there is no law against using Bitcoin to pay people for services. The Justice Department did in fact, realize there was criminal activity and ended up arresting Ross Ulbricht, the founder of the Silk Road (who some sources have said was ). recently being considered for a pardon by President Trump Silk Road was set up explicitly for facilitating illegal activity. Parler wasn’t necessarily set up for facilitating illegal activity, though it’s “no rules” ethic and popularity among far right sites made it an attractive place for those contemplating such activities to plan, indoctrinate and recruit more “revolutionaries”. Simply removing Parler from the app stores didn’t kill it. In fact, users could still go on their website and continue to use the app. Moreover, on Android, you can install apps without an app store, and there are many app stores as alternatives to the Google Play store, though it is by far the most popular in the US. In China, for example, some of these app stores are even more popular than Google Play and follow a different set of rules. I have also argued that Apple should allow other app stores on its platform as well, just as Google does, which may have different sets of guidelines (though of course, they also presumably wouldn’t allow illegal activity to be going on). However, Amazon also decided, following the lead of the app stores, to remove Parler’s AWS (Amazon Web Services) hosting services, upon which hte app was based, and this became an even bigger issue for Parler.  It has has brought the app and website down. This means that Parler will have to rebuilt its tech infrastructure from the ground up to work on a different technology stack, which is not very easy to do. Many conservatives are now using the “free speech” argument, saying that “Big Tech”(Apple, Google, Amazon, Facebook, Twitter) is trying to silence conservative voices. Parler . You could argue that Fox News, perhaps the largest conservative outlet, has apps that are thriving on these channels. While that may or may not be the case, that is an entirely different point. even initiated a lawsuit against Amazon It would be easier for Parler to simply crack down on illegal activity than to rebuild from the ground up. This is easier said than done in Trump world, which has been fed (and have believed), on social platforms like Facebook and Twitter and Parler, that the election was stolen from them and they have to “rise up” against the oppression! Already, there are many Trump supporting websites that are planning another incursion into Washington to try to overturn the inauguration, this time with a lot more weapons.. Neither Apple nor Google should forced to be a party to that. Although I have argued repeatedly that Google and Apple have entirely too much power with their App Stores, in this case, I think they acted properly. Rizwan Virk is a venture capitalist, founder of Play Labs @ MIT and the author of “The Simulation Hypothesis: An MIT Computer Scientist Shows Why AI, Quantum Physics and Eastern Mystics Agree We Are in a Video Game.” Follow him via his website at www.zenentrepreneur.com or on Twitter @rizstanford.

Apple and Google Have Too Much Power On Their App Stores, But Kicking Out Parler is Justified

Over this current and passing generation of gaming consoles, we've witnessed the rise of the almighty live service game. What I like to think of as the AAA adaptation of mobile gaming mechanics and MMO hits like World of Warcraft, wrapped in a blockbuster console game setting. Player retention, daily logins, battle passes - buzzwords that are part and parcel with the Games as a Service business model permeate throughout these titles that vie for our hard-earned time and money. To quote a good friend - the "ecosystem" has become the dirtiest word in the industry, with developers and publishers alike looking for ways to keep players engaged long-term. What started with the odd PC only expansion model in the 90's, blossomed into DLC, Season Passes and now Games as a Service. A system that consists of some sort of persistent online world, a gameplay loop designed to be engaging (usually) with constant daily events, new loot and bigger content drops that add new wrinkles every so often. All with the intent of keeping players engaged for years. A goal that you set yourself is more powerful than a goal that is set for you. After reviewing (classic shameless plug tactic) and stumbling on particular Game Maker's Toolkit video during my daily YouTube scroll, I got to not so subtly start thinking about the links between the Overjustification Effect - A phenomenon in which being rewarded for doing something actually diminishes the intrinsic motivation to perform that action - and the causal effect this has on the GaaS business model. Not content to use just one example, I wanted to compare this with Destiny 2, as its recent move to the F2P model (Free 2 Play) provided a much needed and in my opinion is one of the standard bearers for the AAA blockbuster model in question. Marvel's Avengers this boost in returning players The Over-justification Effect is a phenomenon in which being rewarded for doing something actually diminishes the intrinsic motivation to perform that action. To use just one example, I wanted to compare this with Destiny 2, as it's recent move to the F2P model (Free 2 Play)  provided a much needed and in my opinion is one of the standard bearers for the AAA blockbuster model in question. boost in returning players The Intrinsic Incentive of Gaming To dive deeper, we must first look at what the motivations are to play a video game. On the most basic level it is because they are designed to be engaging and fun; there's a reason why , you know? Mario has his own theme park Whether you get into gaming at a young age or just randomly decided to drop money on a console/PC of choice to see what 'all the fuss is about', once you've found the interest, there is an intrinsic motivation to keep playing i.e. doing a task for yourself - because it is enjoyable and feels rewarding. Other factors that might influence your intrinsic decision making might boil down to your personal tastes, the kinds of experiences you like or perhaps the brand/marketing attached to a video game. In the case of both Avengers and Destiny 2, there is ample reason under each category for interested parties to invest. One leans heavily on the branding, Marvel's cabal of ever increasing revenue from the MCU has re-introduced an entire generation to the concept of the superhero and how to capture their comic book counterparts larger than life stories in a digestible and, more importantly, entertaining fashion. This is why they have completely dominated the box office over the course of 10 years. Destiny meanwhile has (relatively) humbler roots coming from the storied developers over at Bungie; the studio that changed the console FPS landscape with Halo. A sequel to their first foray into GaaS, Destiny 2 marks a somewhat return to form for the studio. After an initially to the first game, this sequel proved the concept still had legs, improving on all aspects (particularly its story component) and even breaking away from their Activision overlords to chart a new course on the F2P market. middling reception Whatever the motivation may be for you however, I've chosen these games based off these factors with one continuing to trend in the trades (if not for great reasons) and the other remaining a constant in the gaming community writ large that has learned and grown in the years since launch. An Extrinsic Level Event - Developer Intent Like the intrinsic before it, is the equal and opposite behavior behind a persons motivation i.e. doing something for the promise of a reward or avoiding punishment (the latter possibly not related). As a developer, the basic need to provide a fun experience for a broad audience is the intent. To do so, that often requires enticing the player by creating a reason, usually through gameplay, to keep them coming back for more. For the GaaS model, this design concept must run a bit deeper - after all, these games are supposed to last for years right? extrinsic motivation Taking a look at the older of the two concepts, Destiny 2 first and foremost doubles down on a gameplay level. The moment to moment action is quick, combat encounters require twitch reflexes, tactical thinking and enemy mob management to overcome. The player feels engaged in the fight throughout and while fights are deliberately frenetic - rarely do they feel so difficult as to become overwhelming or unfair, particularly when playing solo. The power fantasy of being a badass Titan or Warlock is empowering and the game smartly rewards you for making it out of a scrap alive. Enter the loot drop; a mechanic that, while not entirely new in concept to gaming, is the crux of the extrinsic GaaS motivation. With every encounter dropping some form of loot, the promise of more and better gear, at higher levels or in the next quest or bounty becomes enticing. Sure, it's important that what is left of humanity and civilization isn't destroyed but I could use that shiny new gun this vendor on IO has promised for shooting 15 Vex and look good doing it so.... Enticing Design - The Avengers Initiative Likewise, Crystal Dynamics Avengers attempts to deploy that same enticing scenario. But unlike Destiny, there is a larger emphasis on your chosen hero than on the larger mechanics of the game world. To become an Avenger is like a dream come true for a lot of people. These characters have an accumulative history spanning 80 years. That is a lot of nostalgia and personal attachment for any product and taking into consideration the modern successes of these characters, any excuse to be directly involved as a player is simply icing on an already intrinsically lavish cake. On a gameplay level, the third person brawling action ensures you see every frame of animation as Captain America hurls his shield at AIM bots galore. Outside of the story beats that task you with bringing these characters together, the extrinsic motivation comes from molding your Cap/Thor/Other to your liking - to the image you have always had in your head - by asking you to repeat rotating mission types and pick up faction challenges to gain the resources needed to truly bring your hero closer to that pedestal. Finding New Ways to Motivate Them Gear, material, power levels, resources & materials... THINGS. The Endgame that is the crux and currency of these services. Knowing you can only spend so many hours campaigning before you run out of things to do. Once the story is done the grind rises and now all those hours you spent not bothering too much with the nitty gritty details are front and center. This is also where the intrinsic value of the game diminishes, after the credits roll but the game keeps going. Maybe you're delighted that there is still more to do, that there is no reset button and you can take your character and the hours of gameplay logged even further. But then you notice that, the NPC's don't carry the same lively feeling they once did. Their dialog on a loop as you go through the same cycle of menu hopping to get to the next daily mission. Environments become overly familiar, instead of exploring every nook and cranny you now have figured out the shortest possible route to make things easier as you make your way to the next objective. The drive to discover more is gone because you've more or less discovered everything the game has to offer. So now, the issue becomes player engagement. For some of course, the story doesn't matter so much as the gameplay and so any excuse to play will suffice but for others, more incentive is needed. Now we enter the realm of the extrinsic motivations required to keep playing. Broken, Beat & Bored This is where developers, I believe, have the most difficult time transitioning players too. With Destiny 2, despite learning a lot from its predecessor, still there were issues surrounding a , how new DLC had level gated previously accessible content and caused players to distrust the developers for weeks until a more comprehensive and honest approach was taken by Bungie to engage more with their community. lack of transparency in how XP was being rewarded I should point out that, despite a rough launch, the intervening years have proved Destiny's cache with its community. It just seems to be the same old story regardless of who is behind the wheel. History repeats... The reason I bring this up is, as the above image shows, the Endgame is still very much a problem. As of this writing, almost every article related to The Avengers video game revolves around a lack of content, zero communication from developers and a in player retention. massive drop off News items that gamers around the world have heard consistently with each new GaaS game release. Something is always broken, content is never enough for its fans and the practices employed to keep people engaged become chores. These chores can take the form of swapping out weapons / armor and cosmetic skins on a regular basis. While Destiny's gear, armor and cosmetics are tied together, any potential loot drop after a boss fight for example, might not suit a characters build and therefore lead to more meaningful gameplay decisions for the player. The same cannot be said for Avengers. Since the focus is on the Hero, the gear required to increase your power level takes a back seat to cosmetics. In a single play session the gear you pick up will consistently be better than the one collected mere minutes before. Compounding this issue is that gear - being separate from the cosmetics locked behind the battle pass grind - offers no real value to the player outside of making numbers go up. This arbitrarily inflates the value of cosmetics that instead of promoting player engagement - feels grating, unnecessary and more importantly, unfair. From the Pinnacle to the Pit - The Over-justification It might seem unfair of me to dunk so heavily on these titles. Let's be fair, it's not like they haven't succeeded in the sales department and would we be talking right now if these games hadn't left such a large mark on the gaming community? Probably not, but as these services gain more popularity among AAA publishers there is a clear failure to listen with each release, my question is why developers are intent on repeating the same mistakes over and over - further diluting the genre and the brand attached. Why should we continue to spend money on these titles when each new take offers less than what came before only to include it later behind a paywall? Add to that the need for developers to design and redesign player incentives, instead of providing a service that feels welcoming and not overbearing. Whether you are a newcomer to a now 7 year old franchise in Destiny or just dropped 60 dollars on the new Avengers title, the service is the same yet the quality varies wildly. Throughout all this there is very clearly a reason people keep coming back. These games are fun - but maybe the bells and whistles of inventory management, daily grind, the (had to throw this in here) of cosmetics and level-gating content is something that can be trimmed in such a way as to not feel mandatory? I am no game developer, I have no knowledge to go off of, only trust in the feelings I get as a gamer and arm chair critic. fashion souls There is a lot of truth in the saying "less is more", playing the game should be the most rewarding aspect, not checking off a todo list. Ultimately I write this because you already have our attention - maybe stop trying to grab it?

The Over-justification Effect of Games as a Service

The cryptocurrency world is littered with buzzwords and acronyms if nothing else. DYOR is one of them and it takes the spotlight in this article because investors either: A. Have not recognized that there are different methods for conducting a research or B. Have their own interpretation of what constitutes a research. Exhibit A: “I have $x, what coin/token should I invest in?” Exhibit B: “Is this coin/token useful?” Exhibit A and B are often met with the same response “DYOR”. I hate to pop the bubble but asking a question is researching and is categorized as an ‘opinion based research method’ according to explorable.com Asking questions about a coin/token to gather information from the public may not be some people’s preference but nothing is wrong with it; unless they are explicitly interpreting it as financial advice. Reading white papers, glancing LinkedIn profiles and browsing websites are all methods of researching BUT asking questions based on the ‘noise’ surrounding a coin/token is a method as well. It should yield: The purpose of the coin, the team, the objectives, etc. Keep in mind as well that no research method is fool proof either; it can be debatable as to which is more accurate but none is a guarantee. For every person that asks “Have you read the white paper?”. You can bet your bottom dollar that majority of them just skimmed through. So, where did they gain the confidence to suggests that the white paper is gospel? For every person that says “This is a great team”. They are only reading past accomplishments and keep in mind that great individuals don’t always make a great team. So how could anyone arrive at this conclusion? For every person that says “Great tech”. Majority of them couldn’t execute “Hello World” in JavaScript. So how did they arrive at this conclusion? For every person that says “The team has experience”. Experience with what? If it’s still very early days in the crypto world in terms of tech then does experience really matter? The past also dictates that people who have minimal experience generally rise to the very top in tech: Bill Gates, Elon Musk, Steve Jobs, Mark Zuckerberg, Jeff Bezos didn’t work for a decade/decades at a fortune 500 company before making their impact. So, how can you guarantee that a CISCO executive with ten (10) years plus experience will execute better than the guy sitting in a small room in Italy? Finally, the big one — If you read the whitepaper, researched the team, read their website and had a one on one conversation with the founder but found out you were the “only” person supporting the project would you put your money there? If the answer is no, then your research is at least in some sense based on exactly the same philosophy as someone asking a question (the majority’s perception). So, the next time someone says “I have $x, what coin/token should I invest in?” or “Is this coin/token useful?” remember that this is the method of research they chose. You don’t have to agree with it, but respect it. In other words, “DYOR” is misused.

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