That's just anecdotal. What about instances where clear pilot error has caused fatal crashes? You can't just pick out particular instances, one way or the other, and made your judgment on the issue based on that. I honestly don't know whether it's true or not, not having looked at any data on it myself, but I think it's a huge mistake to jump to conclusions like that.
I think you underestimate the chain reaction effect that happens when an MMORPG doesn't "cater to a niche of Apple fans." The rather large WoW guild I was in at the time WAR launched discussed doing a mass guild reroll to WAR and then decided against it because a decent chunk of our members, all using Macs, didn't want to have to deal with installing Bootcamp. While only maybe five or six players couldn't physically play the game, they were popular enough among the other few dozen that everyone just ended up sticking with WoW after all.
So he was good enough to circumvent a system designed to prevent people like him from acheiving success and you say he wasn't successful? Just what exactly is your definition of success?!?
Being able to fake your way through a qualifications system does not mean you are going to be able to fake your way through the end job. If I forge a law school diploma it doesn't mean I'm suddenly magically qualified to be a lawyer.
One of the points of the movie that genes are not the sum of the person.
Except that more and more we are learning that they are. A good movie does not refute science just because it's entertaining.
As I mentioned in reply to the other comment on my post, this is due to the terrible rate of pay that Nigerian government workers get. Bribes are pretty much standard everywhere as supplemental to their basic income in order to raise it to a livable wage.
The entire problem with corruption stems from the average Nigerian government worker making the equivalent of maybe 50 USD per month. Because of this, bribery runs rampant, as they have a lot of trouble surviving on such a low salary with such supplementary income.
As an American who actually worked in Nigeria for awhile a few years ago, I can tell you what the problem may have very well been; he probably didn't give the proper cash "donations" to the right people.
I actually had some problems with getting in myself that my employer had specifically prepared me to deal with, giving me a supply of local cash and instructions to use it liberally to ease my travel process. 500 Naira in the right hands turned the officials from meddlesome and probing to very welcoming in record time.
Well it's a good thing you're sticking up for him, Thor.
Wind Up Sushi and Jesus Christ: Serial Rapist
on
Weird Presents Anyone?
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· Score: 4, Interesting
My best friend gave me these two extremely odd presents. The wind up sushi is a set of little plastic pieces of sushi which wind up and zoom across the floor. The set includes shrimp, three pieces of tuna, and salmon eggs.
Jesus Christ: Serial Rapist is a DVD, the front of which has pictures of crucified naked women and says, "First he nails you... then he NAILS you!" The back summarizes the movie as, "A schizophrenic thinks he is Jesus, and he wants payback! He crucifies and rapes the wives of his enemies. He films his deeds because he wants to make a new gospel - the Gospel of Blood!!!"
As someone who has been living in Abuja, Nigeria for the past two months, I would like to say, watching people pay for their rooms at the Hilton can be pretty hilarious.
You get a better exchange rate on the currency black market, so most people transfer their cash there. The problem is you're bound to whatever bills they have. It costs like N20,000 per night to stay at the Hilton, and when a friend of mine was staying for a week, the biggest bill he got from the black market was N50, with a lot of N10 and N5. He had to have people truck in his money in wheelbarrows, and it took them 45 minutes using money counting machines to count it all.
Which is why you use a telekinesis type spell to drop the bag of holding into the portable hole next to the head of the sleeping Great Wyrm while you're standing a few hundred feet away.
In most of the groups I've played in, extradimensional spaces became an artillery tactic rather than a storage space.:)
This is good news for me, but not because I like the XBox controllers. I actually can't stand them, they're way too big and clunky for me. As a big fan of the PS2 controllers though, this is great because you can buy adapters that let you use the PS2 controllers on the XBox. I don't use a single regular XBox controller, just PS2 ones now. These are the ones I have, and I've never had any problems with them. I'd test them out with this driver, but I'm currently out of the country on business. Anyone have an adapter and interested in checking out if they work?
I refuse to believe that all offices in Nigeria are built to the specification the parent poster cited. It's not every house in the US or Europe that would be free from flood or fire or any other disaster. Just because the poster has encountered a bad case does not justify generalising in that manner. Just because the poster claims to be in Nigeria does not make him an authority on nigerian affairs either!
You seem to be getting a tad irrationally defensive, responding to claims I never made.
I did not state that all offices in Nigeria are built without roofs. As a matter of fact, I specifically mentioned many of them do have roofs, which is why we were pissed about this one not having one. Neither did I ever claim to be an authority on Nigerian affairs (although my employer, who has been living here for four years and is close friends with many members of the Nigerian government is something of an authority on Nigerian affairs and agrees with my comments; hell, so do most of the Nigerians I've talked to). What I have done is present my experiences working so far in this country, and those experiences have been that the country isn't up to the same levels of Europe or America in areas of infrastructure.
so you should expect to explain technical details to your client in understandable language irrespective of wether they are african or not.
The point isn't whether these people are African, or American, or European, or Asian, or damned Martians. The point is that they have no technical background whatsoever, so it's much more difficult for them to get up to speed. It's exactly the same as teaching someone like my mother, who has almost no computer experience. While young people in most Western countries generally have had experience with computers through just tinkering around on home PCs, young people with this background in Nigeria are few and far between. This is changing now, as more cybercafes pop up all over the place, and in twenty years the children of Nigeria today will have far more early experience with it.
And besides all that, these people aren't even clients, they're supposed to be technical people themselves!
It's not about being American. It's about having grown up using computers, something nobody here has had access to. I'm sure anyone that grew up in a digital society could do the same thing.
God, some of you are so anti-American that you just don't get it. These guys have no more background experience using Unix than I do at surviving on the streets of Lagos. I mean, if you want to talk about arrogance, how arrogant is it of you to assume that I'm considering myself superior because I'm American and not because of the fact that I have, everyone try not to gasp in shock now, a technical background?
The funniest part is, I'm getting shit over being an American, whereas if I was from Britain or Canada, nobody would think twice about this.
Way to go on jumping all over the assumptions bandwagon, bonehead.
Riiight, I'm just making this up because I enjoy fabricating accounts of third world living conditions on the internet. I'm sure your pictures are much more reliable sources of information that my obviously lying ass that claims to have been walking around in these buildings.
What the hell would I have to gain by making up stories about this? You freely admit to being largely ignorant about this, having never been to Nigeria, and yet you still question the truth of my statements.
I never said the buildings weren't multistory, or that they weren't made of concrete or bricks. But they're made very shoddily, and with design flaws that cause major troubles for networking equipment! Is it that hard for you to understand that?
Africans aren't stupid, but they've had 'modernty' thrust onto them which they neither fully understand nor can cope with.
I think this definitely sums up the whole thing perfectly. It's completely true... the people here aren't dumb, and they're very interested in learning, but they've just been dumped into this digital age they really don't have the background for.
It reminds me of what the S. African government was trying to do to 'bridge the digital devide' - sending trucks laden with tens of thousands of dollars of computers into the poorest slums so they could browse all half dozen webpages in their language to help them out of extreme poverty.
This is also extremely true. They just seem to have weird priorities in general (not that Western nations don't a lot of the time). They're building this huge impressive monument nearby, and down the road there are people living in huts constructed from tarps and sheet metal.
Wow, somebody is rather easily insulted. Sorry for attempting to inject a little humor at the end of the comment there, my mistake.
Like I said, the individual offices DO have roofs. However, the hallway is completely open to the elements.
Have you ever been to any government buildings in Nigeria?
There's basically three layers; an outermost square of offices, a middle ring of a walkway, and an inner square that's just open air. There is NOTHING keeping the elements out between the inner square of open air and the walkway except four a three and a half foot tall railing, leaving some six feet of open air. Some of the buildings have a glass cover over the open air on the top floor, but this one doesn't, and there's no plans to put one. If it ever rains heavily with a wind, they're all completely fucked, because the wind blows the rain sideways into the hallway area, and the drainage isn't sufficient to get all the water out in time, so it floods and comes seeping under all the office doors.
Slashdot Mirror
That's just anecdotal. What about instances where clear pilot error has caused fatal crashes? You can't just pick out particular instances, one way or the other, and made your judgment on the issue based on that. I honestly don't know whether it's true or not, not having looked at any data on it myself, but I think it's a huge mistake to jump to conclusions like that.
I think you underestimate the chain reaction effect that happens when an MMORPG doesn't "cater to a niche of Apple fans." The rather large WoW guild I was in at the time WAR launched discussed doing a mass guild reroll to WAR and then decided against it because a decent chunk of our members, all using Macs, didn't want to have to deal with installing Bootcamp. While only maybe five or six players couldn't physically play the game, they were popular enough among the other few dozen that everyone just ended up sticking with WoW after all.
So he was good enough to circumvent a system designed to prevent people like him from acheiving success and you say he wasn't successful? Just what exactly is your definition of success?!?
Being able to fake your way through a qualifications system does not mean you are going to be able to fake your way through the end job. If I forge a law school diploma it doesn't mean I'm suddenly magically qualified to be a lawyer.
One of the points of the movie that genes are not the sum of the person.
Except that more and more we are learning that they are. A good movie does not refute science just because it's entertaining.
As I mentioned in reply to the other comment on my post, this is due to the terrible rate of pay that Nigerian government workers get. Bribes are pretty much standard everywhere as supplemental to their basic income in order to raise it to a livable wage.
The entire problem with corruption stems from the average Nigerian government worker making the equivalent of maybe 50 USD per month. Because of this, bribery runs rampant, as they have a lot of trouble surviving on such a low salary with such supplementary income.
As an American who actually worked in Nigeria for awhile a few years ago, I can tell you what the problem may have very well been; he probably didn't give the proper cash "donations" to the right people.
I actually had some problems with getting in myself that my employer had specifically prepared me to deal with, giving me a supply of local cash and instructions to use it liberally to ease my travel process. 500 Naira in the right hands turned the officials from meddlesome and probing to very welcoming in record time.
I'm just happy for all the fans from Norway that they included some Black Metal, Living Colour.
The first time I saw someone playing WC3, I thought "My life for the Horde!" was "My wife is a whore!"
No one at Slashdot, anyway!
Biddi wanna bidi boo!
Well it's a good thing you're sticking up for him, Thor.
My best friend gave me these two extremely odd presents. The wind up sushi is a set of little plastic pieces of sushi which wind up and zoom across the floor. The set includes shrimp, three pieces of tuna, and salmon eggs.
Jesus Christ: Serial Rapist is a DVD, the front of which has pictures of crucified naked women and says, "First he nails you... then he NAILS you!" The back summarizes the movie as, "A schizophrenic thinks he is Jesus, and he wants payback! He crucifies and rapes the wives of his enemies. He films his deeds because he wants to make a new gospel - the Gospel of Blood!!!"
Should be... interesting.
I only have one thing to say about this...
*best Samwise impression* PO-TA-TOES!
I can totally see how it could be construed as very confusing, what with all those four fingered yellow cartoon people walking around and all.
Well hey, some little girl had to put naked pictures of herself having sex with horses in clown outfits up there, right!?
Couldn't be worse than the last two Star Wars movies...
As someone who has been living in Abuja, Nigeria for the past two months, I would like to say, watching people pay for their rooms at the Hilton can be pretty hilarious.
You get a better exchange rate on the currency black market, so most people transfer their cash there. The problem is you're bound to whatever bills they have. It costs like N20,000 per night to stay at the Hilton, and when a friend of mine was staying for a week, the biggest bill he got from the black market was N50, with a lot of N10 and N5. He had to have people truck in his money in wheelbarrows, and it took them 45 minutes using money counting machines to count it all.
Which is why you use a telekinesis type spell to drop the bag of holding into the portable hole next to the head of the sleeping Great Wyrm while you're standing a few hundred feet away.
:)
In most of the groups I've played in, extradimensional spaces became an artillery tactic rather than a storage space.
This is good news for me, but not because I like the XBox controllers. I actually can't stand them, they're way too big and clunky for me. As a big fan of the PS2 controllers though, this is great because you can buy adapters that let you use the PS2 controllers on the XBox. I don't use a single regular XBox controller, just PS2 ones now. These are the ones I have, and I've never had any problems with them. I'd test them out with this driver, but I'm currently out of the country on business. Anyone have an adapter and interested in checking out if they work?
Errr, what's so bad about not trusting your government?
Call me crazy, but I think everyone should look at their government, or any government really, with a healthy dose of skepticism.
I refuse to believe that all offices in Nigeria are built to the specification the parent poster cited. It's not every house in the US or Europe that would be free from flood or fire or any other disaster. Just because the poster has encountered a bad case does not justify generalising in that manner. Just because the poster claims to be in Nigeria does not make him an authority on nigerian affairs either!
You seem to be getting a tad irrationally defensive, responding to claims I never made.
I did not state that all offices in Nigeria are built without roofs. As a matter of fact, I specifically mentioned many of them do have roofs, which is why we were pissed about this one not having one. Neither did I ever claim to be an authority on Nigerian affairs (although my employer, who has been living here for four years and is close friends with many members of the Nigerian government is something of an authority on Nigerian affairs and agrees with my comments; hell, so do most of the Nigerians I've talked to). What I have done is present my experiences working so far in this country, and those experiences have been that the country isn't up to the same levels of Europe or America in areas of infrastructure.
so you should expect to explain technical details to your client in understandable language irrespective of wether they are african or not.
The point isn't whether these people are African, or American, or European, or Asian, or damned Martians. The point is that they have no technical background whatsoever, so it's much more difficult for them to get up to speed. It's exactly the same as teaching someone like my mother, who has almost no computer experience. While young people in most Western countries generally have had experience with computers through just tinkering around on home PCs, young people with this background in Nigeria are few and far between. This is changing now, as more cybercafes pop up all over the place, and in twenty years the children of Nigeria today will have far more early experience with it.
And besides all that, these people aren't even clients, they're supposed to be technical people themselves!
It's not about being American. It's about having grown up using computers, something nobody here has had access to. I'm sure anyone that grew up in a digital society could do the same thing.
God, some of you are so anti-American that you just don't get it. These guys have no more background experience using Unix than I do at surviving on the streets of Lagos. I mean, if you want to talk about arrogance, how arrogant is it of you to assume that I'm considering myself superior because I'm American and not because of the fact that I have, everyone try not to gasp in shock now, a technical background?
The funniest part is, I'm getting shit over being an American, whereas if I was from Britain or Canada, nobody would think twice about this.
Way to go on jumping all over the assumptions bandwagon, bonehead.
Riiight, I'm just making this up because I enjoy fabricating accounts of third world living conditions on the internet. I'm sure your pictures are much more reliable sources of information that my obviously lying ass that claims to have been walking around in these buildings.
What the hell would I have to gain by making up stories about this? You freely admit to being largely ignorant about this, having never been to Nigeria, and yet you still question the truth of my statements.
I never said the buildings weren't multistory, or that they weren't made of concrete or bricks. But they're made very shoddily, and with design flaws that cause major troubles for networking equipment! Is it that hard for you to understand that?
Africans aren't stupid, but they've had 'modernty' thrust onto them which they neither fully understand nor can cope with.
I think this definitely sums up the whole thing perfectly. It's completely true... the people here aren't dumb, and they're very interested in learning, but they've just been dumped into this digital age they really don't have the background for.
It reminds me of what the S. African government was trying to do to 'bridge the digital devide' - sending trucks laden with tens of thousands of dollars of computers into the poorest slums so they could browse all half dozen webpages in their language to help them out of extreme poverty.
This is also extremely true. They just seem to have weird priorities in general (not that Western nations don't a lot of the time). They're building this huge impressive monument nearby, and down the road there are people living in huts constructed from tarps and sheet metal.
Wow, somebody is rather easily insulted. Sorry for attempting to inject a little humor at the end of the comment there, my mistake.
Like I said, the individual offices DO have roofs. However, the hallway is completely open to the elements.
Have you ever been to any government buildings in Nigeria?
There's basically three layers; an outermost square of offices, a middle ring of a walkway, and an inner square that's just open air. There is NOTHING keeping the elements out between the inner square of open air and the walkway except four a three and a half foot tall railing, leaving some six feet of open air. Some of the buildings have a glass cover over the open air on the top floor, but this one doesn't, and there's no plans to put one. If it ever rains heavily with a wind, they're all completely fucked, because the wind blows the rain sideways into the hallway area, and the drainage isn't sufficient to get all the water out in time, so it floods and comes seeping under all the office doors.