This is true, but the key difference is that people aren't mucking about with the latest installation of their airbag, and criminals aren't gaining access to peoples' cars without their knowledge and tampering with the airbag; in other words, if the airbag fails it's very likely the manufacturer's fault, they exercise almost total control over the system in the vast majority of cars.
Contrast this to computer security problems, which are sometimes the fault of the security provider (in this case Microsoft) but just as often (if not more often) is the result of user interference (people misunderstanding how the security system works or disabling security altogether) and malicious intent.
The real culprit isn't Microsoft, but the people who write malware; for some reason we don't spend much time blaming the criminal and we heap all our discontent on Microsoft. Maybe because they're the easy target here. At any rate, hopefully this shows why a lawsuit against Microsoft is illogical; they do not have sufficient control over the situation to prosecute them.
I think "government" implies majority support from all agencies.
We've repeatedly shown that various federal agencies can have all the necessary pieces of information to stop physical security breaches, but the government as a whole is powerless unless the agencies' interoperability is very good. Just because federal agency A says/knows/wants something doesn't mean the government as a whole says/knows/wants the same thing.
IE (4-5-6) has always been a complete disappointment, and the day someone told me about the plucky little upstart Firebird 0.6, I never had to use it as my main browser again.
IE4 was terrible, and 6 was the one that drove me to Firefox never to return, but I quite liked IE5 at the time.
The new generation of people growing up with these things will be much less susceptible to anti-technological fear mongering.
Nonsense. It's human nature, and that doesn't change. The new generation won't fear cell phones or nuclear power, but they'll have their picket signs out to warn about the evils of something newer. People worried about cell phones and the like, and who want to return to a simpler life, don't typically reject toasters and refrigerators. It's all based in fear of the unknown, not a fear of technology per se.
Am I the only one that thinks 29 (or even 25) hours per week spent on an online game is grossly excessive?
Almost certainly not. You know, when I went through a short phase of being in love with football, it's pretty much all I did. I read magazines and books about football, I watched high school, college, and pro games on TV (and occasionally in person,) and I played in two leagues simultaneously. I even played a little soccer and rugby because then I could play football-like sports almost year-round. I only stopped because I finally tore an ACL and walked around on it for six months, missing a season, and by the time I went to a doctor and got it fixed and rehabbed, the passion had waned. I played in another couple of leagues but it wasn't the same.
What's interesting to me is that during those four years, not one person said to me that I needed to "get a life," or suggested that I was wasting my time. Nobody thought that the time I spent thinking about that game was excessive. Nobody criticized me even once I'd injured myself. Why do video games get these kinds of responses, while other pastimes do not? Note that the complaints are very specific; it's always a problem with the amount of time spent on one thing. But as much time as I spend gaming now (well in excess of your 25 hour a week mark), it is still less than I spent weekly on football; in addition, it's less intrusive on other peoples' lives, since they don't get dragged out to games, they can watch whatever they want on TV, etc. Is the problem that I am having fun without you?
There probably also something going on with the fact that as many as 20% of females in the sample were LGBT. What that is would require another study to determine.
It would not surprise me to hear that people who feel marginalized by society were overrepresented in rabid consumption of escapist fare.
Sorry you MMO freaks, MMOs aren't real games past a couple of months of play!
Couldn't agree more. After the first couple of months you've got all the base skills mastered and after that it's just running around killing stuff on new maps. Not at all like a manly first-person shooter, or a studly RTS. You sure out-geeked those MMORPGers, keep it up and someday some aliens will recognize your latent greatness (what with humans being ill-equipped to do so, and all.)
Just because the CEO's work results in a larger financial transaction doesn't mean he is more productive; he's just doing his job, same as the coder. If they both come in and work hard for eight hours every day, their productivity is equal. The CEO needs to be paid more because the requirements are higher; the position seeks to attract the most applicants in an effort to attract the most qualified applicant. Beyond the amount of money needed to affect that attraction, CEO pay is both wasteful and unfair.
I don't claim to know what that amount should be. Perhaps a CEO really should make fifty or a hundred times the highest paid coder, though I would guess it should be significantly lower. Currently CEOs are routinely pulling down up to four hundred times the average worker's salary. That is obviously too high, and is the result of business forces that have nothing to do with fair compensation or the worth of a CEO, any more than housing prices set by the market were based in reality.
The CEO has no deal to make if not for the workers. He is not some Adonis from on high come to save the company and create money from thin air. He is a representative. His talents can have great value, but with very few exceptions his impact in real terms is going to be overshadowed by that of hundreds of workers. If this weren't the case, nobody could ever successfully strike.
Bank tellers handle a lot more cash in a given day than any programmer but are paid considerably less, so worth isn't based on the amount of money you move around.
Can you explain why a CEO is always more productive than any of his workers? Surely with the gap in salaries there is no room for overlap; he must always and without exception be a far more effective worker. How can this be true?
I'm also not sure that holding up a game that gets weekly maintenance is a very good support for the argument that games shouldn't have bugs. WotLK is a very good piece of software, but it had several major bugs on release and continues to have bugs to this day. Hit the WoW forums sometime; even after you weed out the vast majority of posts that are spam, whining, and/or stupid you are left with several bugs for each class that are both legitimate and often long-standing. One quick example off the top of my head is pet pathing, which has been bugged for over a year now. Blizzard makes fun games but WoW is not some shining example of bug-free game deployment.
The problem isnt with the drivers, although sometimes driver makers FIX THE BUGS IN 3RD PARTY GAMES
You have it wrong. When a driver fixes a bug, it's because the game developer wrote code using a function that the driver wasn't supporting properly; the bug was in the driver, and was revealed by the game, not contained within the game itself. You can prove me wrong: show me one game in the last seven years that had a single bug which was resolved by installing a new video driver regardless of the make or model of video card. You won't find one. No single game developer or publisher has the pull to make this happen.
The problem is almost certainly the copy protection mechanism.
They were tested and verified; thousands and thousands of other people played Mass Effect with no problem. Nobody is using you as a Beta. It is not possible to test all combinations, and moreover the fix, when you find one, will be on your end, because if it were the code everyone would be experiencing the same difficulty. The inability of even technically competent gamers to grasp this basic point is the best argument against enforced refunds in my opinion. People are able to tell when a phone doesn't work; with a game all they know is that it isn't working. You can't tell where the problem lies, so you just blame the game reflexively. Natural, but very often wrong. If the company wants to give you a refund that's fine but you'd both be better served if you weren't so adamant that the game was the problem and actually worked to find the real culprit; you might get to play a great game and the company would retain your money and your custom.
You do realize that every single game that runs fine for you is running terribly for someone else. If a bug isn't very widespread it probably isn't the game's fault. Some games really are buggy messes but Mass Effect isn't one of them.
That was the point actually, you did get the very good analogy. People will ask for refunds on games when there is nothing actually wrong with the game itself; the problem lies in their environment at home or in the way that they installed it. You can go to just about any game's forum and find at least one post ranting about how the developer is incompetent and released a crap game that doesn't run, even though the rest of the forum is full of posts by people who are playing it with no problem.
So I have a serious question for you... This country has gone 200+ years without health care coverage for everyone. What changed in the past few years that makes the world any different?
Serious answer: I don't think that should be a consideration. The world went centuries without democracy but we still decided we'd be better off with it, and I think we were right. We have changed many things in this country for the better, even though the status quo was not destroying us. Universal suffrage, social security, and now gay marriage. Those are all improvements in life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness for all Americans. We don't make these changes because the alternative is destruction, we make them because they're right.
You can't just walk into a dealership and demand the Corvette at the price of the Cobalt. Research, money and time went into making the Corvette what it is.
Nobody is doing this. As a nation we are already paying for the Corvette, and all we're getting is the Cobalt. We are asking why this is. I think it's a fair question.
If you want to pay less in health care, maybe you should consider if your life is worth your children paying the rest of their life for the few years you may have left. Can you look your kids in the face and tell them you are worth the million dollar treatment that has a 35% chance of extending your life 6 months?
Shouldn't that be their call? Monetary value must be assigned by the buyer.
The doctor actually *dropped* my third child, luckily the nurse caught her after a short bounce off of the table. It still burns me up how much I had to pay that doctor to fumble my child.
We have pretty close to universal health care, provided that you define health care as, "we will help you if you are about to drop dead." That's only a small piece of most people's definition, though. It's also an inefficient and expensive system. It would be a lot cheaper, more efficient, and improve our quality of life to try to detect problems before they become life-threatening. To do that, we're going to need real universal health care, and not just universal ambulances.
It's possible to live without universal healthcare, as millions of americans prove every day.
Millions of Americans could also prove that it's possible to live without food, it's just that the program wouldn't last very long. You're taking a short-term view of a long-term problem. What's the difference in life expectancy for those millions? What's the difference in rates of terminal illness because they couldn't get early detection? ER can absolutely turn you away if all you want is a breast exam. How much money are we spending just because people can't go in for checkups? If you think you have a simple solution to a complex problem, you very probably don't have a strong understanding of the problem.
I think you're overestimating the consistency of people's searches on the Internet. I'm sure a lot of people have apparently inconsistent search terms that are legitimate. I've searched for things I wasn't interested in, because I didn't know what they were. I've searched for positions with which I've disagreed, for products I would never buy, and for people I would avoid meeting given the chance. This is why Google privacy issues don't worry me much; I do think you could get a pretty good idea of the things I like because I search for those things more often, but if you're building a profile on me as a person from my search terms, you're going to fail. I don't think random searches will be distinguishable from normal noise for people who surf the web a lot (which I assume includes anyone on slashdot.)
These things seem contradictory to me; if they protect my privacy in a way that I can completely trust, then they can't know who I am at all; otherwise, we've already got as much trust as we're ever going to have in anyone in Google. If they have no idea who I am, then what's their killer business plan? They have the best chance of selling me things I like, but they can't know what I like unless they have a pretty good idea of who I am.
I see the post is modded insightful so perhaps I'm being obtuse. In broad terms, what sort of scheme do you think would accomplish this?
Because they only way to make the cops become something other than corrupt power-mongering jerks is to stand up, make a fuss, get noticed, and have someone above those cops do something about it. Which takes public outcry and attention.
If everyone rolls over, it no longer matters if what they are doing is wrong: They got away with it. With a cop, you have the chance you might be able to make a change by standing up to them. (At least in a country where the government is still concerned with public opinion.)
I disagree. The only way to make cops become something other than corrupt power-mongering jerks is to ask why they are corrupt power-mongering jerks. Perhaps you will find that it is not a profession conducive to workers with a finely honed sense of balance and thoughtfulness. Perhaps you will find that the very best police officers make decisions very quickly with limited information. Perhaps you will find that in fact we simply don't have enough qualified people who want to be police officers to fill the rolls, and so less qualified and even unqualified people get in.
I'm not saying that any of that is the case. I'm saying that getting a bully in trouble with the principal doesn't turn him into prom queen; in fact it doesn't actually change anything in the long run except to ensure that only bullies good at not getting caught thrive. We need to look at underlying causes and address those instead of fighting symptoms.
I find it interesting that people simultaneously hold the opinion that nothing justifies a policeman's aggression and yet think nothing of advocating aggression against policemen.
You do realize that the very kind of generalization and dehumanization you're performing here is the root of the actions which you are protesting, right? The bad cop thinks exactly like this about you.
Slashdot Mirror
This is true, but the key difference is that people aren't mucking about with the latest installation of their airbag, and criminals aren't gaining access to peoples' cars without their knowledge and tampering with the airbag; in other words, if the airbag fails it's very likely the manufacturer's fault, they exercise almost total control over the system in the vast majority of cars.
Contrast this to computer security problems, which are sometimes the fault of the security provider (in this case Microsoft) but just as often (if not more often) is the result of user interference (people misunderstanding how the security system works or disabling security altogether) and malicious intent.
The real culprit isn't Microsoft, but the people who write malware; for some reason we don't spend much time blaming the criminal and we heap all our discontent on Microsoft. Maybe because they're the easy target here. At any rate, hopefully this shows why a lawsuit against Microsoft is illogical; they do not have sufficient control over the situation to prosecute them.
I think "government" implies majority support from all agencies. We've repeatedly shown that various federal agencies can have all the necessary pieces of information to stop physical security breaches, but the government as a whole is powerless unless the agencies' interoperability is very good. Just because federal agency A says/knows/wants something doesn't mean the government as a whole says/knows/wants the same thing.
IE (4-5-6) has always been a complete disappointment, and the day someone told me about the plucky little upstart Firebird 0.6, I never had to use it as my main browser again.
IE4 was terrible, and 6 was the one that drove me to Firefox never to return, but I quite liked IE5 at the time.
The new generation of people growing up with these things will be much less susceptible to anti-technological fear mongering.
Nonsense. It's human nature, and that doesn't change. The new generation won't fear cell phones or nuclear power, but they'll have their picket signs out to warn about the evils of something newer. People worried about cell phones and the like, and who want to return to a simpler life, don't typically reject toasters and refrigerators. It's all based in fear of the unknown, not a fear of technology per se.
the Cxx (COO, CFO, whatever) who made that decision should be beaten to death with his own intestines
Wow! That's a bit harsh just for a 0.1% loss of productivity!
It's on the same scale as their rewards system. A 0.1% gain in productivity would have set him up for life.
Am I the only one that thinks 29 (or even 25) hours per week spent on an online game is grossly excessive?
Almost certainly not. You know, when I went through a short phase of being in love with football, it's pretty much all I did. I read magazines and books about football, I watched high school, college, and pro games on TV (and occasionally in person,) and I played in two leagues simultaneously. I even played a little soccer and rugby because then I could play football-like sports almost year-round. I only stopped because I finally tore an ACL and walked around on it for six months, missing a season, and by the time I went to a doctor and got it fixed and rehabbed, the passion had waned. I played in another couple of leagues but it wasn't the same.
What's interesting to me is that during those four years, not one person said to me that I needed to "get a life," or suggested that I was wasting my time. Nobody thought that the time I spent thinking about that game was excessive. Nobody criticized me even once I'd injured myself. Why do video games get these kinds of responses, while other pastimes do not? Note that the complaints are very specific; it's always a problem with the amount of time spent on one thing. But as much time as I spend gaming now (well in excess of your 25 hour a week mark), it is still less than I spent weekly on football; in addition, it's less intrusive on other peoples' lives, since they don't get dragged out to games, they can watch whatever they want on TV, etc. Is the problem that I am having fun without you?
There probably also something going on with the fact that as many as 20% of females in the sample were LGBT. What that is would require another study to determine.
It would not surprise me to hear that people who feel marginalized by society were overrepresented in rabid consumption of escapist fare.
Sorry you MMO freaks, MMOs aren't real games past a couple of months of play!
Couldn't agree more. After the first couple of months you've got all the base skills mastered and after that it's just running around killing stuff on new maps. Not at all like a manly first-person shooter, or a studly RTS. You sure out-geeked those MMORPGers, keep it up and someday some aliens will recognize your latent greatness (what with humans being ill-equipped to do so, and all.)
See you on the mothership, my brother.
I do not understand your argument.
Just because the CEO's work results in a larger financial transaction doesn't mean he is more productive; he's just doing his job, same as the coder. If they both come in and work hard for eight hours every day, their productivity is equal. The CEO needs to be paid more because the requirements are higher; the position seeks to attract the most applicants in an effort to attract the most qualified applicant. Beyond the amount of money needed to affect that attraction, CEO pay is both wasteful and unfair.
I don't claim to know what that amount should be. Perhaps a CEO really should make fifty or a hundred times the highest paid coder, though I would guess it should be significantly lower. Currently CEOs are routinely pulling down up to four hundred times the average worker's salary. That is obviously too high, and is the result of business forces that have nothing to do with fair compensation or the worth of a CEO, any more than housing prices set by the market were based in reality.
The CEO has no deal to make if not for the workers. He is not some Adonis from on high come to save the company and create money from thin air. He is a representative. His talents can have great value, but with very few exceptions his impact in real terms is going to be overshadowed by that of hundreds of workers. If this weren't the case, nobody could ever successfully strike.
Bank tellers handle a lot more cash in a given day than any programmer but are paid considerably less, so worth isn't based on the amount of money you move around.
Can you explain why a CEO is always more productive than any of his workers? Surely with the gap in salaries there is no room for overlap; he must always and without exception be a far more effective worker. How can this be true?
He predicted someone would post that.
Your comment that GA-ASI does not make voting machines has been recorded. Have a nice day!
I'm also not sure that holding up a game that gets weekly maintenance is a very good support for the argument that games shouldn't have bugs. WotLK is a very good piece of software, but it had several major bugs on release and continues to have bugs to this day. Hit the WoW forums sometime; even after you weed out the vast majority of posts that are spam, whining, and/or stupid you are left with several bugs for each class that are both legitimate and often long-standing. One quick example off the top of my head is pet pathing, which has been bugged for over a year now. Blizzard makes fun games but WoW is not some shining example of bug-free game deployment.
The problem isnt with the drivers, although sometimes driver makers FIX THE BUGS IN 3RD PARTY GAMES
You have it wrong. When a driver fixes a bug, it's because the game developer wrote code using a function that the driver wasn't supporting properly; the bug was in the driver, and was revealed by the game, not contained within the game itself. You can prove me wrong: show me one game in the last seven years that had a single bug which was resolved by installing a new video driver regardless of the make or model of video card. You won't find one. No single game developer or publisher has the pull to make this happen.
The problem is almost certainly the copy protection mechanism.
This on the other hand is very likely true.
They were tested and verified; thousands and thousands of other people played Mass Effect with no problem. Nobody is using you as a Beta. It is not possible to test all combinations, and moreover the fix, when you find one, will be on your end, because if it were the code everyone would be experiencing the same difficulty. The inability of even technically competent gamers to grasp this basic point is the best argument against enforced refunds in my opinion. People are able to tell when a phone doesn't work; with a game all they know is that it isn't working. You can't tell where the problem lies, so you just blame the game reflexively. Natural, but very often wrong. If the company wants to give you a refund that's fine but you'd both be better served if you weren't so adamant that the game was the problem and actually worked to find the real culprit; you might get to play a great game and the company would retain your money and your custom.
You do realize that every single game that runs fine for you is running terribly for someone else. If a bug isn't very widespread it probably isn't the game's fault. Some games really are buggy messes but Mass Effect isn't one of them.
That was the point actually, you did get the very good analogy. People will ask for refunds on games when there is nothing actually wrong with the game itself; the problem lies in their environment at home or in the way that they installed it. You can go to just about any game's forum and find at least one post ranting about how the developer is incompetent and released a crap game that doesn't run, even though the rest of the forum is full of posts by people who are playing it with no problem.
So I have a serious question for you... This country has gone 200+ years without health care coverage for everyone. What changed in the past few years that makes the world any different?
Serious answer: I don't think that should be a consideration. The world went centuries without democracy but we still decided we'd be better off with it, and I think we were right. We have changed many things in this country for the better, even though the status quo was not destroying us. Universal suffrage, social security, and now gay marriage. Those are all improvements in life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness for all Americans. We don't make these changes because the alternative is destruction, we make them because they're right.
You can't just walk into a dealership and demand the Corvette at the price of the Cobalt. Research, money and time went into making the Corvette what it is.
Nobody is doing this. As a nation we are already paying for the Corvette, and all we're getting is the Cobalt. We are asking why this is. I think it's a fair question.
If you want to pay less in health care, maybe you should consider if your life is worth your children paying the rest of their life for the few years you may have left. Can you look your kids in the face and tell them you are worth the million dollar treatment that has a 35% chance of extending your life 6 months?
Shouldn't that be their call? Monetary value must be assigned by the buyer.
The doctor actually *dropped* my third child, luckily the nurse caught her after a short bounce off of the table. It still burns me up how much I had to pay that doctor to fumble my child.
Now you know how NFL owners feel.
We have pretty close to universal health care, provided that you define health care as, "we will help you if you are about to drop dead." That's only a small piece of most people's definition, though. It's also an inefficient and expensive system. It would be a lot cheaper, more efficient, and improve our quality of life to try to detect problems before they become life-threatening. To do that, we're going to need real universal health care, and not just universal ambulances.
It's possible to live without universal healthcare, as millions of americans prove every day.
Millions of Americans could also prove that it's possible to live without food, it's just that the program wouldn't last very long. You're taking a short-term view of a long-term problem. What's the difference in life expectancy for those millions? What's the difference in rates of terminal illness because they couldn't get early detection? ER can absolutely turn you away if all you want is a breast exam. How much money are we spending just because people can't go in for checkups? If you think you have a simple solution to a complex problem, you very probably don't have a strong understanding of the problem.
Well depends what you define as broadband I suppose.
Okay.
...and the latency is terrible
Not that.
I think you're overestimating the consistency of people's searches on the Internet. I'm sure a lot of people have apparently inconsistent search terms that are legitimate. I've searched for things I wasn't interested in, because I didn't know what they were. I've searched for positions with which I've disagreed, for products I would never buy, and for people I would avoid meeting given the chance. This is why Google privacy issues don't worry me much; I do think you could get a pretty good idea of the things I like because I search for those things more often, but if you're building a profile on me as a person from my search terms, you're going to fail. I don't think random searches will be distinguishable from normal noise for people who surf the web a lot (which I assume includes anyone on slashdot.)
These things seem contradictory to me; if they protect my privacy in a way that I can completely trust, then they can't know who I am at all; otherwise, we've already got as much trust as we're ever going to have in anyone in Google. If they have no idea who I am, then what's their killer business plan? They have the best chance of selling me things I like, but they can't know what I like unless they have a pretty good idea of who I am.
I see the post is modded insightful so perhaps I'm being obtuse. In broad terms, what sort of scheme do you think would accomplish this?
Because they only way to make the cops become something other than corrupt power-mongering jerks is to stand up, make a fuss, get noticed, and have someone above those cops do something about it. Which takes public outcry and attention.
If everyone rolls over, it no longer matters if what they are doing is wrong: They got away with it. With a cop, you have the chance you might be able to make a change by standing up to them. (At least in a country where the government is still concerned with public opinion.)
I disagree. The only way to make cops become something other than corrupt power-mongering jerks is to ask why they are corrupt power-mongering jerks. Perhaps you will find that it is not a profession conducive to workers with a finely honed sense of balance and thoughtfulness. Perhaps you will find that the very best police officers make decisions very quickly with limited information. Perhaps you will find that in fact we simply don't have enough qualified people who want to be police officers to fill the rolls, and so less qualified and even unqualified people get in.
I'm not saying that any of that is the case. I'm saying that getting a bully in trouble with the principal doesn't turn him into prom queen; in fact it doesn't actually change anything in the long run except to ensure that only bullies good at not getting caught thrive. We need to look at underlying causes and address those instead of fighting symptoms.
I find it interesting that people simultaneously hold the opinion that nothing justifies a policeman's aggression and yet think nothing of advocating aggression against policemen.
You do realize that the very kind of generalization and dehumanization you're performing here is the root of the actions which you are protesting, right? The bad cop thinks exactly like this about you.