In many places like here in Texas it is already the law that anyone over 18 carry ID.
That sounds kind of commie in my view. I remember during the cold war period that we were told one of the evil things about commie countries is that they required people to walk around with papers proving who they were. Further, it was also seen that required identification was a precursor to the Mark of the Beast.
But times change and it seems ironic that some of the same people opposed to a universal ID in the past are now advocating for it today (political pragmatism doing what it takes to discourage the wrong sorts of people from voting).
My Real ID cost me $35 in fees. That can't be required for voting purposes because it violates the poll tax amendment. It might be an optional method of course, but can't be *required*. And I know many people who are NOT getting their Real ID. Especially some more conservative or libertarian types who are opposed to such forms of official government ID.
First step is that you need to prove that a voter ID will reduce fraud. Otherwise I don't see it passing constitutional muster.
Ie, if the voter has to pay any fee whatsoever for a voter ID, it violates the 24th amendment. The 14th amendment prohibits denying or abridging the rights to vote except in cases of rebellion and crime.
The state will go to any length to be sure that the citizens there pay their taxes, so they should also go to any length to make sure that they are able to vote.
Because of history! We have a very long history of voter suppression in this country. There is a higher bar to overcome before enacting any sort of voting laws. Voting is a right that every citizen should have, it is not a right that needs to be earned or that one has to qualify for, and one should never have to pay for that right. We have constitional amendments demanding that voting is a right. Even a single person who is discouraged to vote because of a voter Id law is one too many!
The questions is, WHY do so many places with the biggest and most blatant history of voting suppression feel so strongly on this matter? I would trust this idea better if it didn't come from those people because they have a known agenda of trying to disenfranchise voters. The defense of these voter ID laws sound just the same as the defenses made when proof of paying a certain tax was a voting requirement, or literacy tests, etc.
Yes, but it was the only major casue of voter fraud to come out, despite assertions that voter fraud is rampant and that we need more hurdles like voter ID laws.
We have a health care system that is the envy of people only if they are very rich. If you are poor we have a terrible health care system. Major health care issues in can cause bankruptcies in many homes, what other first world country lets this sort of thing happen?
Which is why many SUVs are technically listed as light trucks and have fewer emissions requirements, even though the vast majority of them are used as basic daily commuter vehicles and never once for "truck" uses.
Part of problem with digitally distributed is that some of the typical market forces no longer appear. You have extremely low production costs (making a new copy is trivial). You have extremely low costs for storing inventory (it's all digital). And there's no external distributor who's buying for $x and trying to resell for $y.
This was one of the biggest things I saw when digital games became popular and physical copies started going away. With a physical copy of a game you'd see the price drop by at least half after a year, and the stores were giving even bigger discounts because they needed to get those older games off of the shelves. With digital copies I've seen a game last more than a couple year while not dropping the price more than $10, and all the while there are zero discount or bargain bin copies of the game because of DRM. And not unsurprisingly, going to a digital format did NOT lower costs to the consumer; the lower costs of production were not passed along.
Economic marketing decisions appear to be mostly based upon how much money they think they can extract rather than on trying to increase margins by loweroing production and distribution costs.
This is a bit like saying sometimes you get a great career in professional sports and therefore going with the sports scholarship and taking the dumbed down classes rather than learning a useful skill is a great idea. There may be 10 great positions available out there but you have a hundred thousand people all trying to get them.
Yup, if you want a decent job with some amount of security and a salary to get slightly ahead of the pack, then you need to not be a member of the crowd that all do the same thing. If a huge number of people can do your job and everyone has the exact same set of skills that they learned in a certification course and the goal is for everyone to be a cookie-cutter clone of each other, then expect your job to be outsourced to the cheapest person. But if you can do a job where there's more demand for it than the supply, and you can do it better than your peers, then generally you'll do well in that job.
But not hundreds of thousands of hours of serious computer programming necessarily. Most of the work involves creating assets and shoving them into a big database and others taking those assets and linking them together and a few who write in some simplified scripting language. Only a handful of people will actually be adding code or extensions to the game engine.
Of course they copy other games' look and feel, since originality is in short supply. No one wants to try something different because that's risky.
Using pre-made game engines means that the "hard" stuff is done already. What's left is often the tedious parts; making all the lego pieces for the assets (sounds, textures, models). I was suprised at this quote in the summary:
(experienced programmers at the richest studios can make six figures),
Believe me, the game engine developers are making six figure salaries, and so are the game designers and the majority of everyone writing actual code. So the fact that they had to point out the "six figures" part implies that most of the workers are either seriously underpaid or they're not in major US metropolitan areas (yup, lots of game people off in eastern Europe for this reason).
Games are getting more expensive too because they're being treated like blockbuster movies. Tons of expensive cut scenes (some games are nothing more than cut scenes with some minigames or QTEs in the middle), full voice acting, many gigabytes of textures, and maybe if they have time they bother with a story or gameplay. They are rushed out the door because they have deadlines - they gotta get it out in time for Christmas, every single year.
Just like blockbuster movies they have endlessly rehashed franchises, reboots, and copies of whatever genre seemed to sell a lot in the previous year, but no time or money for actual originality. But that's ok because the vast majority of the customers don't care, they probably won't even play the games to the end since they only buy whatever is the most popular and stop playing it when something new comes out (if they play something old they're laughed at by their friends), and the customers don't mind that they're only renting games instead of owning them.
Just like Hollywood, the interesting stuff happens with the independent developers and producers.
Xbox users seriously pay $20/month just to play games, and they're not revolting? (well, some of them are kinda revolting but no more so than gamers on other platforms)
Companies make a business out of creating randomized patents. The patent creators probably have zero interest in them becoming an actual product. Many companies give out bonuses for filing patents, or worse, create patent quotas for some departments. Seriously I've been somewhere that had a goal for X patents per quarter even for software or firmware. So, churn, churn, churn, and come up with stupid ideas to keep the execs happy.
The patent office doesn't work that way anymore. Everything is granted now, provided the necessary paperwork has been done. Any issues of a patent being valid or not is now decided after the fact in a lawsuit.
The article seems backwards to me. Dumping standalone games and going to games that require phone-home server approval and then going further to always-in-the-clouds games, this is the OPPOSITE of cutting the cord. This is like tying your umbilical back on again.
Jesus, get over it already, Obama won in 2008 and the same people who bitched and moaned about him for 8 years and declared from the highest pulpits that they would keep him to a one term president and now the mental giants who declare "now that our guy is in office, we want you to shut up!"
So which is, we're only allowed to criticize Democratic politicians who win but have to keep quiet about Republican presidents? There's so much hypocrisy out there it's ridiculous, but that's the nature of politics. Spend four years in a investigation of Bill Clinton with nothing substantial to show for it, but literally some of the same people who were cheerleading that witchhunt were the ones insisting that there should have been no investigation this time. More hypocrisy.
The only real political ideals anyone has these days is "our guys good, your guys bad!" Anyone sane in this country is opting out of politics.
Slashdot Mirror
It would swirl the drain faster if it weren't for all the slimy hair stuck in it.
In many places like here in Texas it is already the law that anyone over 18 carry ID.
That sounds kind of commie in my view. I remember during the cold war period that we were told one of the evil things about commie countries is that they required people to walk around with papers proving who they were. Further, it was also seen that required identification was a precursor to the Mark of the Beast.
But times change and it seems ironic that some of the same people opposed to a universal ID in the past are now advocating for it today (political pragmatism doing what it takes to discourage the wrong sorts of people from voting).
My Real ID cost me $35 in fees. That can't be required for voting purposes because it violates the poll tax amendment. It might be an optional method of course, but can't be *required*. And I know many people who are NOT getting their Real ID. Especially some more conservative or libertarian types who are opposed to such forms of official government ID.
First step is that you need to prove that a voter ID will reduce fraud. Otherwise I don't see it passing constitutional muster.
Ie, if the voter has to pay any fee whatsoever for a voter ID, it violates the 24th amendment. The 14th amendment prohibits denying or abridging the rights to vote except in cases of rebellion and crime.
The state will go to any length to be sure that the citizens there pay their taxes, so they should also go to any length to make sure that they are able to vote.
When it comes to voting, you should cater to everyone who is constitutionally allowed to vote regardless of the expense to the state.
Because of history! We have a very long history of voter suppression in this country. There is a higher bar to overcome before enacting any sort of voting laws. Voting is a right that every citizen should have, it is not a right that needs to be earned or that one has to qualify for, and one should never have to pay for that right. We have constitional amendments demanding that voting is a right. Even a single person who is discouraged to vote because of a voter Id law is one too many!
The questions is, WHY do so many places with the biggest and most blatant history of voting suppression feel so strongly on this matter? I would trust this idea better if it didn't come from those people because they have a known agenda of trying to disenfranchise voters. The defense of these voter ID laws sound just the same as the defenses made when proof of paying a certain tax was a voting requirement, or literacy tests, etc.
Yes, but it was the only major casue of voter fraud to come out, despite assertions that voter fraud is rampant and that we need more hurdles like voter ID laws.
We have a health care system that is the envy of people only if they are very rich. If you are poor we have a terrible health care system. Major health care issues in can cause bankruptcies in many homes, what other first world country lets this sort of thing happen?
Which is why many SUVs are technically listed as light trucks and have fewer emissions requirements, even though the vast majority of them are used as basic daily commuter vehicles and never once for "truck" uses.
Part of problem with digitally distributed is that some of the typical market forces no longer appear. You have extremely low production costs (making a new copy is trivial). You have extremely low costs for storing inventory (it's all digital). And there's no external distributor who's buying for $x and trying to resell for $y.
This was one of the biggest things I saw when digital games became popular and physical copies started going away. With a physical copy of a game you'd see the price drop by at least half after a year, and the stores were giving even bigger discounts because they needed to get those older games off of the shelves. With digital copies I've seen a game last more than a couple year while not dropping the price more than $10, and all the while there are zero discount or bargain bin copies of the game because of DRM. And not unsurprisingly, going to a digital format did NOT lower costs to the consumer; the lower costs of production were not passed along.
Economic marketing decisions appear to be mostly based upon how much money they think they can extract rather than on trying to increase margins by loweroing production and distribution costs.
This is a bit like saying sometimes you get a great career in professional sports and therefore going with the sports scholarship and taking the dumbed down classes rather than learning a useful skill is a great idea. There may be 10 great positions available out there but you have a hundred thousand people all trying to get them.
Yup, if you want a decent job with some amount of security and a salary to get slightly ahead of the pack, then you need to not be a member of the crowd that all do the same thing. If a huge number of people can do your job and everyone has the exact same set of skills that they learned in a certification course and the goal is for everyone to be a cookie-cutter clone of each other, then expect your job to be outsourced to the cheapest person. But if you can do a job where there's more demand for it than the supply, and you can do it better than your peers, then generally you'll do well in that job.
But not hundreds of thousands of hours of serious computer programming necessarily. Most of the work involves creating assets and shoving them into a big database and others taking those assets and linking them together and a few who write in some simplified scripting language. Only a handful of people will actually be adding code or extensions to the game engine.
Of course they copy other games' look and feel, since originality is in short supply. No one wants to try something different because that's risky.
Using pre-made game engines means that the "hard" stuff is done already. What's left is often the tedious parts; making all the lego pieces for the assets (sounds, textures, models). I was suprised at this quote in the summary:
(experienced programmers at the richest studios can make six figures),
Believe me, the game engine developers are making six figure salaries, and so are the game designers and the majority of everyone writing actual code. So the fact that they had to point out the "six figures" part implies that most of the workers are either seriously underpaid or they're not in major US metropolitan areas (yup, lots of game people off in eastern Europe for this reason).
Games are getting more expensive too because they're being treated like blockbuster movies. Tons of expensive cut scenes (some games are nothing more than cut scenes with some minigames or QTEs in the middle), full voice acting, many gigabytes of textures, and maybe if they have time they bother with a story or gameplay. They are rushed out the door because they have deadlines - they gotta get it out in time for Christmas, every single year.
Just like blockbuster movies they have endlessly rehashed franchises, reboots, and copies of whatever genre seemed to sell a lot in the previous year, but no time or money for actual originality. But that's ok because the vast majority of the customers don't care, they probably won't even play the games to the end since they only buy whatever is the most popular and stop playing it when something new comes out (if they play something old they're laughed at by their friends), and the customers don't mind that they're only renting games instead of owning them.
Just like Hollywood, the interesting stuff happens with the independent developers and producers.
Don't worry about it too much. I'm sure these kids will grow up to be the nurses at our old folks home.
Xbox users seriously pay $20/month just to play games, and they're not revolting?
(well, some of them are kinda revolting but no more so than gamers on other platforms)
People who got a job: The economy is awesome! Trump is a genius!
People who lost a job: The economy sucks! Trump will fix this!
If there was not t-shirt involved then why bother?
Companies make a business out of creating randomized patents. The patent creators probably have zero interest in them becoming an actual product. Many companies give out bonuses for filing patents, or worse, create patent quotas for some departments. Seriously I've been somewhere that had a goal for X patents per quarter even for software or firmware. So, churn, churn, churn, and come up with stupid ideas to keep the execs happy.
Where are they going to find enough politicians to power the fleet?
The patent office doesn't work that way anymore. Everything is granted now, provided the necessary paperwork has been done. Any issues of a patent being valid or not is now decided after the fact in a lawsuit.
The article seems backwards to me. Dumping standalone games and going to games that require phone-home server approval and then going further to always-in-the-clouds games, this is the OPPOSITE of cutting the cord. This is like tying your umbilical back on again.
Jesus, get over it already, Obama won in 2008 and the same people who bitched and moaned about him for 8 years and declared from the highest pulpits that they would keep him to a one term president and now the mental giants who declare "now that our guy is in office, we want you to shut up!"
So which is, we're only allowed to criticize Democratic politicians who win but have to keep quiet about Republican presidents? There's so much hypocrisy out there it's ridiculous, but that's the nature of politics. Spend four years in a investigation of Bill Clinton with nothing substantial to show for it, but literally some of the same people who were cheerleading that witchhunt were the ones insisting that there should have been no investigation this time. More hypocrisy.
The only real political ideals anyone has these days is "our guys good, your guys bad!" Anyone sane in this country is opting out of politics.