>If employers have to provide more benefits to lower-level employees, that means they are spending less elsewhere. That displacement will likely come out of taxable commercial expenses, thus both taking tax money from the government and damaging the growth potential of that organization (reducing future taxable income).
I've heard this argument advanced and I have two problems with it. Problem one: you are thinking like a typical American who believes the purpose of the economy is wealthy corporations. It's not. The purpose of economy is wealthy citizens. Now let's see what is the average country ratio of employers to employees ? 1 to 1000 doesn't sound unreasonable - which group should the government be protecting here ? Secondly - it's a false argument anyway. It's wrong on two levels. Firstly there is the mistake that if companies spend more on employees that's bad for the economy - it's not, it's not even bad for the company (except in the very short term) - increasing the buying power of employees means you have increased buying, consumption, purchasing- when all companies do that, they all benefit from each others employees buying their products more. Henry Ford understood that, and took it further making it a corporate policy to ensure that every single employee he has (including the damn janitor) can afford to buy his product. Result -damn near all of them did, that alone meant enough sales to cover the costs of those higher salaries, every sale there-after was a bonus. Sadly FORD forgot that lesson. The other reason is this: most of these other benefits are scientifically proven to increase overall productivity so in fact, they don't cost the employers anything, they all pay for themselves in increased production. Sadly that reimbursement doesn't show up on a balance sheet -well it is there but it's very nearly impossible to quantify and prove, which is why shortsighted management tends to ignore it. After all - by the time the productivity and morale hits an all-time low due to horrible working conditions, the employees are unionizing and you end up giving it to them anyway to stay in business, I won't be CEO anymore anyway - I'll have long since retired with more money than God.
>Jobs like janitor/fry cook/night stocker are all great jobs for teens and college kids. They're terrible places to find yourself at 40.
Not it's not -but not everybody is smart enough to get better. Like it or not - we don't all have the talents to be anything more than menial laborers, even if we did - education cost money - if your parents didn't have it, chances are you aren't going to have it either.
> I wouldn't want to be part of society that encouraged people to spend 40 hours a week doing such menial labor when they're older.
Of course it's good to encourage and promote education and reduce the number of people in that position - but a significant number of people will never have the option - they just aren't that smart. How would you reach this panacea you dream off ? Some kind of final solution to the idiot problem ?!?!?!
>Lastly, severance benefits in the US typically amount to unemployment pay. I personally know people in the US who have been living off of unemployment for over 2 years. This is exactly the kind of thing you are arguing in favor of here, and the kind of "welfare mom" I feel is an unnecessary burden on the government.
That happens here too - but why on earth are you taking ONE SINGLE labor law and then dismissing ALL labor laws because of the problems with that one ? How is making sure a pregnant woman can take maternity leave and have a job to come back to not GOOD for keeping people employed? How is making sure that if your child gets sick you can take time off to care for him in the same category ? How is making sure that before you're fired over bullshit you get a chance to explain your actions with council and a fair hearing remotely similar ? You're just throwing the baby out with the bathwater now.
South Africa. Sadly our maternity laws aren't as nice as Switzerland or Denmark's. We do have very good labor laws though - a natural side effect of a government that is utterly dependent on union support to get votes.
Make no mistake this is no paradise. We have one of the highest rates of violent crime in the world, massive government corruption, a current major attempt to steamroller through massive anti-free-press laws, huge poverty problems, massive service-delivery issues, - it's got a lot of problems indeed, but at least out labor laws are good and that's what is relevant to the discussion.
What makes it a third world country is this: 43% unemployment, 76% illiteracy, 82% of the population living below the official poverty line (that is below taxable income, with welfare sustainance from the other 18% - who earn salaries comparable to Europe - in fact most of us work for European countries who find they can pay us solid market related salaries and still save truckloads of money because of the favorable exchange rate).
We have massive poverty, massive problems of all sorts to deal with. But our government relies for it's vote massively on the unions who include most of that 82% poor people as members, if the unions ever tell their members to vote for the opposition - this government couldn't possibly survive an election. Result: damn good labour laws, regardless of whether you are in the rich 18% or the poor 82%
What the hell are you on about ? How is labour laws that protect workers from exploitation (the ones who don't get those things in their contracts because there are plenty of other people who can do the job) equated to wellfare ?
There are NO tax dollars spent on ANY of those things. Nobody is giving the poor money here. What we ARE doing is making sure that those people who do their jobs get a fair and decent wage, decent safety conditions, holidays (which ARE a health and safety issue) etc. by making laws that employers are required to comply with. If anything - those laws ENCOURAGE people to work. If your welfare check is better than the janitor job which is all you can get - of course you'll take wellfare. If the law makes sure that janitor job is better - then most people will take the job.
It's easy to say only "lazy" people can't get "Good jobs" - right - would you like to live in a country where there are no janitors at all ? No factory workers ? Where all the MacDonalds' have closed because there is nobody left who would possibly want to flip burgers to feed their kids ?
Sorry -but those people can't get your kind of benefits from negotiation - they have zero negotiating power, but they are still human beings and they deserve to have their human rights and human dignity protected by the state -that's the ONLY valid purpose the state has in fact ! This includes protecting those rights from unscrupulous employers. It also makes sound economic sense to establish labor laws that ensure employees will always be better off than welfare cases as it reduces your welfare burden.
How sad it must be to live in a country with such a narrowminded selfish culture that you honestly seem to believe that a law saying if you do your job you MUST be given at least 2 weeks holiday and if they fire you a fair hearing with council and a notice period with pay to find another job in so you don't lose your house and end up on the streets unable to ever do so... that laws like this are indistinguishable from WELLFARE to you
Sounds like we're in the same third world country:p - I actually forgot about the 3-month notice rules and the appeal court (and heck I've fought and won a case in that court once - got another 6 months pay in a settlement because I could prove the dismissal was unfair and both me and the employer agreed I wouldn't really want to go back).
>Spoken like someone who's never worked in the US.
Yes we foreigners know that you get to try and negotiate such things in contracts - and if you're lucky enough to be going for a rare job you may get decent ones. We also know what it's like to have sane levels of these things set out in LAW, and negotiate for extras ON TOP OF that. My country requires every employer to give employees at least 14 days a year of holiday time. But I have 21 - I got to start negotiating above that, but even the factory janitor can at least get his 14 days.
Excuse me. I live in a third world country. We have mandatory minimum leave. We have a limit on hours worked (40 hours per week, max of 5 hours overtime - it's ILLEGAL to allow more, and if it happens you have to give the time back as time off in the SAME week to compensate), we have mandated 1-hour lunch breaks and mandated 15-minute coffee breaks at least once per 4 hours, we have complete health and safety coverage including a law that states that in the event of *any* injury on duty no matter how minor or severe the employer is legally liable for any and all direct and indirect medical expenses resulting from said injury (hence most employers have IOD insurance), employers are not allowed to discriminate (among other things this bans the creation of any rule that only applies to one gender, race etc), you aren't allowed to fire anybody unless they've had three written warnings, written warnings can only be issued after a hearing where the employee has the right to council...
Sorry - but the US is actually WORSE than at least some third world countries when it comes to workers rights.
Oh and in case you were wondering, our economy is growing and our corporations do just fine despite these laws.
>BUT - if your site is on SuperFantasticCMS and you find that ten of the core modules have these kinds of issues, it's a no-brainer to elect to use this service instead of fixing those ten modules and then battling to get them folded in upstream.
You know you raise a point, SuperFantasticCMS is really generating shittier html with each release now and their all snotty about accepting patches - so the users forked it. You really ought to be using HyperFantasticCMS instead - it's had major code cleanups, the generated html is actually quite slick, the new theme engine doesn't look like it was designed by Jabba the Hut's understudy and they finally fixed that horrible memory leak in the plugin loader too !
I have a concern. The articles states zero effect on those people where the disease had progressed too far before the implant. I see nothing about this implant that will prevent further progression... So whose to say after getting the invasive (and expensive surgery) - it won't just stop working in a few years when the disease gets bad enough anyway ?
>*Secondary assumption: With that level of technology, they likely have FTL communications and FTL travel.
There is no reason why you need both. FTL travel is potentially a lot harder than FTL communications. At this stage we believe both to be probably impossible but we also have theories on how it may be possible to do both (the same theories applying to time travel actually). The thing is all the theories require energy and technologies which we are by no means certain are feasible. The one thing we can say is that to get a living organism through any such device (wormhole, circular-light-chamber - choose your sifi/current theory) alive... will require a whole other level of technology that is potentially even harder to build.
But messages don't care about comfort, their environmental tolerance is far higher than that of living organisms. FTL communications is needed if the spies notified them after news reports. FTL travel ? Why ? The spies could have been here for hundreds of years.
It's silly to assume that other species (especially any capable of interstellar contact or building the crafts to do interstellar travel) would be as shortlived as we are. There are numerous verterbrates on this planet that can outlive us twice over or more. A species with that level of technology will probably have a comparable level of medical technology and could simply naturally have a much longer lifespan... for them an 80 year trip may be no big deal at all.
>Why are so desperate to praise Blizzard all the time? The decision shouldn't have been made in the first place.
I am not praising blizzard at all - you are so ANTI-blizzard now that BALANCED and CONSTRUCTIVE critique looks like praise to you.
As for that statement. I agree, the decision was a bad one and should never have been made. Sony should never have put rootkits on CD's. Sony hasn't backed down on their reasoning for why it was okay one bit however. Blizzard changed the system. They are right- the forums DO need to force people into taking responsibility, they were wrong about HOW they were going to do it. What I read in their statement was: our users really don't like our idea, we accept that, we will therefore not go through with it.
Were you expecting moral and socially conscious behaviour from a corporation ? Dream on. It's against the LAW for them to even THINK like that. They are required by case-law in the USA to consider only ONE priority - ALWAYS. That priority is "increasing shareholder value". You want a corporation to do what you want- you make it so doing what you want will increase shareholder value MORE than doing what they had planned, or you make it clear that doing what they thought would increase it will piss of their customers to the point where they will actually lose a lot more than they could gain. Don't blame the companies for that- blame your own bloody stupid legal framework that basically means that every company EVER works like this.
The customers won that battle. There's no POINT in still fighting it now. We got much more important issues we should be demanding from them. In the end, we are customers - paying them for a service and we have a right to demand a certain quality of service and a certain measure of respect for our wishes. Making those wishes clear is good business. Continuing to mope about a past decision that they already changed because you don't think it should ever have been made (guess what - that same corporate priorities law also rather demands that companies be, by definition, idiots) distracts from that. Forget the forums. There are features we need them to pay attention to now - this is a good step - some of those features are now available. We SHOULD praise that, because that is how we let them know their customers approve - that's how we make sure they got a basis on which to tell the board "these features INCREASE your shareholder value more than the reasons you may have had to not want them". Then we can say "But we still demand you add the other features we want - a lot of us who don't use it now will use it then".
You want to deal with companies? Learn how they think, and then influence them based on the only motivation they understand- the only one they are legally ALLOWED to understand.
Or you could lobby to have the stupidest law in human history changed of course... good luck with THAT.
Your last sentence listed two problems: visible on other peoples friend list, and can't use a nickname. Guess what- this article is about how you can now NOT be visible on other people's friends list if you so choose.
In other words- half your CURRENT complaint is gone. The thing you mentioned was gone long ago.
Constructive critique is always useful - and blizzard has a decent track record of listening to it, moreso than most software companies in fact, being eternally pissed over a bad decision which they REVERSED in answer to the community's reaction kind of removes any motivation for them to give a damn what the community wants doesn't it ?
Then don't use it ? Nobody forces you to. If you don't like it in it's current state switch it off. If you find in future that new additions made it usable for you switch it on again... I am quite picky about my RealID friends list - in fact I have only three friends on it at all, but I wouldn't trade the the ability to talk to them - and our shared friends from their equally short lists back now - it's just so damn useful.
A very accurate analogy - you're like the guy who cries because the phone book exists and prints people's real names, addresses and numbers ! The fact that those who are concerned can get delisted seems to be enough for everybody else but not for you !
Why are you still screaming about the forums ? We already WON that battle - the company listened to their users and changed their stance ! What the hell more do you want from a company ?
This article is about them listening to users regarding the in-game version and adding features people wanted. The one you're getting vitriolic about and cussing over is one I already mentioned. These latest changes show them being responsive to people's concerns - even if clearly they are not getting the kind of high developer priority you demand - some of us think that what with having cataclysm in beta their developer resources may be a just a tad strained at the moment. It's a positive sign and promising with regard to getting the other features we would like in the near future.
I *like* realID - and I like these features so I can control it more. I got several alt characters, I do not want to lose my conversations - the SOCIAL aspect of a highly social game just because I switched alt. I don't want to lose the ability to talk to my guildies on the alliance side about tomorrow night's Lich King tactics just because I'm busy levelling my troll hunter. The only feature I would dearly love to see added is an invisible mode, so I can appear offline for those rare occasions when I actually don't want to talk to anybody (e.g. like when I'm doing AH-PVP which means I'm AFK for most of the time watching a movie on my other screen).
I think a very large part of the player base agrees with me. We freaked out about requiring it on forums, I personally would like to see it changed to be able to use a nickname rather than real name but other than that RealID is really not such a huge thing as people make it out to be. Quite the contrary - it's a logical extension of the same chat features that all online games have had back to the earliest MUD's.
I am all for constructive criticism to ask for features that allow users the control they should have over *any* form of communication their involved with but the vast majority of the reaction to realID is kneejerk shouting with absolutely no basis in any rational thinking.
>I don't think many even understand what rooting is and many more don't want to go through the trouble. I think Android has this as a weak point, many vendors releasing different hardware with different OS versions, it's also makes it harder for developers.
Well there's very little difficulty on the developers - the code compatibility across versions is actually extremely good, but what you're saying is true and one of the reasons google is changing some of the designs in the next version - specifically to modify the base design so that handset manufacturers CANNOT break compatibility anymore and the ability to upgrade for anybody can be ensured regardless of whether their handset manufacturer even exists anymore.
Okay so some people do it to get back features that third parties have stripped, I hadn't considered that since the providers in my country didn't do that. I don't know what ELSE they may have done of course, yet another reason I'm glad mine is rooted and running CyanoGenMod. My phone contains at least as much private data as my computer - and some more dangerous just by being a phone... I prefer to think the code on it is open.
Ubuntu contains a layer to prevent the average user from gaining root access - it's easy to work around and they even presetup sudo to make it easy - but there's a restriction in the design there. If I sell you a prebuilt ubuntu with the sudoers file edited away - is it Ubuntu trying to stop you from getting root privileges at all or is it me ?
That's the difference. The equivalent to a "sudo" command is already in Android - the handset makers decide to which extent you are able to run it (e.g. what's in the sudoers file) - but Android's root access is no more restricted than that of Linux- it's there but of course it's not the USUAL way to run, you access root when you HAVE to - you don't use it for normal operations.
Linux distro's all set you up with a normal user account to work under and admonish you to only go to root when you NEED to. Android has exactly that same level of restriction. Handset manufacturers sometimes go to some effort to make it harder to excercise the ability to gain root that Android has but this is not an Android thing. And deviating from the design doesn't prevent you calling it Android unless you deviate MUCH more radically than that. Ubuntu's approach to root passwords was entirely unique when they came up with it, but we didn't declare that Ubuntu isn't Linux !
You're right their pretty much arguing about which of the people who claimed they saw their imaginary friend has given the more flattering description !
>There are some Android phones you cannot currently root. If the system is really "designed to be rootable" as you assert, how come that is so?
These restrictions are added by the hardware manufacturers and DEVIATE from the android design - they do not exist in the upstream platform. Designing it to be hackable ipso facto means it can be hacked to try and make it harder for other people to hack it again. I don't blame google for not forcing the handset makers to stick to their ideals - many do, and the one Google themselves shipped had no restrictions at all but the handset manufacturers are their customers just like the users - to force THEM to a certain business model would be just as restrictive as forcing a certain usage model on the users is. Google doesn't do that, and android is designed not to do that- if handset makers change it, you can't fault Android for that. It would be like faulting the manufacturer of a 12-guage because somebody else sawed the barrel shorter and made a sawn-off.
The fact that every app I've ever wanted has been in the free section of the huge android marketplace certainly helps:D
Mind you, that included all the software I needed to root it. I could just install it on Sense and then run it - to disable the "security"... that's what I mean by a platform that actively encourages user exploration.
>The iPhone has the potential to be the IBM PC from the cellphones,
Aaah but you forget the IBM PC destroyed apple's once dominant position as PC supplier. So much so that nobody even refers to apple's computers as PC's anymore even though they invented them and coined the term in the first place !
If THAT didn't teach Steve that in the long run "open do whatever you want with it" always wins then nothing will.
On the other hand - apple's computers are STILL closed up "do only what we tell you" with them. Apple has positioned itself in antithesis to the clear market demand in PC's and manages to cling on to a niche market there for years now.
In the phone world - they are in exactly the same position now that they were in PC's in the 80's, but Android is the IBM PC of the phone world - which is why apple is trying so hard to shut it down or at least slow it down. This is why apple is suing HTC for example. The thing is - unless by some sort of anti-miracle they get Android killed on legal grounds apple's phone position is, just like the PC position was, only going to last for a while. The open nature (and resulting lower cost) of android will attract more and more users, just as IBM PC's nature did in the 80's. Ultimately the iPhone will end up just as Macs are today - a minority in the phone business used by a small niche-market of die-hard fans.
We've seen this exact history happen 20 years ago with the same company - and people made the exact same claims about why Apple was right and the PC would fail... there is no evidence whatsoever to suggest that the outcome will be any different. Steve Jobs doesn't actually care. He is a CEO - CEO's are in it for share-price today. His job won't depend on iPhone still being the market leader five years from now - it depends on being the market leader now. Five years from now Apple will be doing something else as their main income you can depend on it, just as the iPhone now makes far more money than Mac sales do.
Slashdot Mirror
Really now... when we have entire towns that depend on a single communal tap - and some that have not even that!
Don't let the rich 20% of us in the cities fool you - 80% of us live on the equivalent of less than 10 USD a month.
>If employers have to provide more benefits to lower-level employees, that means they are spending less elsewhere. That displacement will likely come out of taxable commercial expenses, thus both taking tax money from the government and damaging the growth potential of that organization (reducing future taxable income).
I've heard this argument advanced and I have two problems with it. Problem one: you are thinking like a typical American who believes the purpose of the economy is wealthy corporations. It's not. The purpose of economy is wealthy citizens. Now let's see what is the average country ratio of employers to employees ? 1 to 1000 doesn't sound unreasonable - which group should the government be protecting here ?
Secondly - it's a false argument anyway. It's wrong on two levels. Firstly there is the mistake that if companies spend more on employees that's bad for the economy - it's not, it's not even bad for the company (except in the very short term) - increasing the buying power of employees means you have increased buying, consumption, purchasing- when all companies do that, they all benefit from each others employees buying their products more. Henry Ford understood that, and took it further making it a corporate policy to ensure that every single employee he has (including the damn janitor) can afford to buy his product. Result -damn near all of them did, that alone meant enough sales to cover the costs of those higher salaries, every sale there-after was a bonus. Sadly FORD forgot that lesson. The other reason is this: most of these other benefits are scientifically proven to increase overall productivity so in fact, they don't cost the employers anything, they all pay for themselves in increased production. Sadly that reimbursement doesn't show up on a balance sheet -well it is there but it's very nearly impossible to quantify and prove, which is why shortsighted management tends to ignore it. After all - by the time the productivity and morale hits an all-time low due to horrible working conditions, the employees are unionizing and you end up giving it to them anyway to stay in business, I won't be CEO anymore anyway - I'll have long since retired with more money than God.
>Jobs like janitor/fry cook/night stocker are all great jobs for teens and college kids. They're terrible places to find yourself at 40.
Not it's not -but not everybody is smart enough to get better. Like it or not - we don't all have the talents to be anything more than menial laborers, even if we did - education cost money - if your parents didn't have it, chances are you aren't going to have it either.
> I wouldn't want to be part of society that encouraged people to spend 40 hours a week doing such menial labor when they're older.
Of course it's good to encourage and promote education and reduce the number of people in that position - but a significant number of people will never have the option - they just aren't that smart. How would you reach this panacea you dream off ? Some kind of final solution to the idiot problem ?!?!?!
>Lastly, severance benefits in the US typically amount to unemployment pay. I personally know people in the US who have been living off of unemployment for over 2 years. This is exactly the kind of thing you are arguing in favor of here, and the kind of "welfare mom" I feel is an unnecessary burden on the government.
That happens here too - but why on earth are you taking ONE SINGLE labor law and then dismissing ALL labor laws because of the problems with that one ? How is making sure a pregnant woman can take maternity leave and have a job to come back to not GOOD for keeping people employed? How is making sure that if your child gets sick you can take time off to care for him in the same category ? How is making sure that before you're fired over bullshit you get a chance to explain your actions with council and a fair hearing remotely similar ?
You're just throwing the baby out with the bathwater now.
South Africa.
Sadly our maternity laws aren't as nice as Switzerland or Denmark's. We do have very good labor laws though - a natural side effect of a government that is utterly dependent on union support to get votes.
Make no mistake this is no paradise. We have one of the highest rates of violent crime in the world, massive government corruption, a current major attempt to steamroller through massive anti-free-press laws, huge poverty problems, massive service-delivery issues, - it's got a lot of problems indeed, but at least out labor laws are good and that's what is relevant to the discussion.
This would be the Republic of South Africa.
What makes it a third world country is this: 43% unemployment, 76% illiteracy, 82% of the population living below the official poverty line (that is below taxable income, with welfare sustainance from the other 18% - who earn salaries comparable to Europe - in fact most of us work for European countries who find they can pay us solid market related salaries and still save truckloads of money because of the favorable exchange rate).
We have massive poverty, massive problems of all sorts to deal with. But our government relies for it's vote massively on the unions who include most of that 82% poor people as members, if the unions ever tell their members to vote for the opposition - this government couldn't possibly survive an election.
Result: damn good labour laws, regardless of whether you are in the rich 18% or the poor 82%
What the hell are you on about ?
How is labour laws that protect workers from exploitation (the ones who don't get those things in their contracts because there are plenty of other people who can do the job) equated to wellfare ?
There are NO tax dollars spent on ANY of those things. Nobody is giving the poor money here. What we ARE doing is making sure that those people who do their jobs get a fair and decent wage, decent safety conditions, holidays (which ARE a health and safety issue) etc. by making laws that employers are required to comply with.
If anything - those laws ENCOURAGE people to work. If your welfare check is better than the janitor job which is all you can get - of course you'll take wellfare. If the law makes sure that janitor job is better - then most people will take the job.
It's easy to say only "lazy" people can't get "Good jobs" - right - would you like to live in a country where there are no janitors at all ? No factory workers ? Where all the MacDonalds' have closed because there is nobody left who would possibly want to flip burgers to feed their kids ?
Sorry -but those people can't get your kind of benefits from negotiation - they have zero negotiating power, but they are still human beings and they deserve to have their human rights and human dignity protected by the state -that's the ONLY valid purpose the state has in fact ! This includes protecting those rights from unscrupulous employers. It also makes sound economic sense to establish labor laws that ensure employees will always be better off than welfare cases as it reduces your welfare burden.
How sad it must be to live in a country with such a narrowminded selfish culture that you honestly seem to believe that a law saying if you do your job you MUST be given at least 2 weeks holiday and if they fire you a fair hearing with council and a notice period with pay to find another job in so you don't lose your house and end up on the streets unable to ever do so... that laws like this are indistinguishable from WELLFARE to you
Sounds like we're in the same third world country :p - I actually forgot about the 3-month notice rules and the appeal court (and heck I've fought and won a case in that court once - got another 6 months pay in a settlement because I could prove the dismissal was unfair and both me and the employer agreed I wouldn't really want to go back).
>Spoken like someone who's never worked in the US.
Yes we foreigners know that you get to try and negotiate such things in contracts - and if you're lucky enough to be going for a rare job you may get decent ones. We also know what it's like to have sane levels of these things set out in LAW, and negotiate for extras ON TOP OF that.
My country requires every employer to give employees at least 14 days a year of holiday time. But I have 21 - I got to start negotiating above that, but even the factory janitor can at least get his 14 days.
Excuse me.
I live in a third world country.
We have mandatory minimum leave. We have a limit on hours worked (40 hours per week, max of 5 hours overtime - it's ILLEGAL to allow more, and if it happens you have to give the time back as time off in the SAME week to compensate), we have mandated 1-hour lunch breaks and mandated 15-minute coffee breaks at least once per 4 hours, we have complete health and safety coverage including a law that states that in the event of *any* injury on duty no matter how minor or severe the employer is legally liable for any and all direct and indirect medical expenses resulting from said injury (hence most employers have IOD insurance), employers are not allowed to discriminate (among other things this bans the creation of any rule that only applies to one gender, race etc), you aren't allowed to fire anybody unless they've had three written warnings, written warnings can only be issued after a hearing where the employee has the right to council...
Sorry - but the US is actually WORSE than at least some third world countries when it comes to workers rights.
Oh and in case you were wondering, our economy is growing and our corporations do just fine despite these laws.
>BUT - if your site is on SuperFantasticCMS and you find that ten of the core modules have these kinds of issues, it's a no-brainer to elect to use this service instead of fixing those ten modules and then battling to get them folded in upstream.
You know you raise a point, SuperFantasticCMS is really generating shittier html with each release now and their all snotty about accepting patches - so the users forked it. You really ought to be using HyperFantasticCMS instead - it's had major code cleanups, the generated html is actually quite slick, the new theme engine doesn't look like it was designed by Jabba the Hut's understudy and they finally fixed that horrible memory leak in the plugin loader too !
I have a concern. The articles states zero effect on those people where the disease had progressed too far before the implant. I see nothing about this implant that will prevent further progression...
So whose to say after getting the invasive (and expensive surgery) - it won't just stop working in a few years when the disease gets bad enough anyway ?
>*Secondary assumption: With that level of technology, they likely have FTL communications and FTL travel.
There is no reason why you need both. FTL travel is potentially a lot harder than FTL communications. At this stage we believe both to be probably impossible but we also have theories on how it may be possible to do both (the same theories applying to time travel actually). The thing is all the theories require energy and technologies which we are by no means certain are feasible. The one thing we can say is that to get a living organism through any such device (wormhole, circular-light-chamber - choose your sifi/current theory) alive... will require a whole other level of technology that is potentially even harder to build.
But messages don't care about comfort, their environmental tolerance is far higher than that of living organisms. FTL communications is needed if the spies notified them after news reports. FTL travel ? Why ?
The spies could have been here for hundreds of years.
It's silly to assume that other species (especially any capable of interstellar contact or building the crafts to do interstellar travel) would be as shortlived as we are. There are numerous verterbrates on this planet that can outlive us twice over or more.
A species with that level of technology will probably have a comparable level of medical technology and could simply naturally have a much longer lifespan... for them an 80 year trip may be no big deal at all.
>Why are so desperate to praise Blizzard all the time? The decision shouldn't have been made in the first place.
I am not praising blizzard at all - you are so ANTI-blizzard now that BALANCED and CONSTRUCTIVE critique looks like praise to you.
As for that statement. I agree, the decision was a bad one and should never have been made. Sony should never have put rootkits on CD's. Sony hasn't backed down on their reasoning for why it was okay one bit however. Blizzard changed the system. They are right- the forums DO need to force people into taking responsibility, they were wrong about HOW they were going to do it. What I read in their statement was: our users really don't like our idea, we accept that, we will therefore not go through with it.
Were you expecting moral and socially conscious behaviour from a corporation ? Dream on. It's against the LAW for them to even THINK like that. They are required by case-law in the USA to consider only ONE priority - ALWAYS. That priority is "increasing shareholder value". You want a corporation to do what you want- you make it so doing what you want will increase shareholder value MORE than doing what they had planned, or you make it clear that doing what they thought would increase it will piss of their customers to the point where they will actually lose a lot more than they could gain.
Don't blame the companies for that- blame your own bloody stupid legal framework that basically means that every company EVER works like this.
The customers won that battle. There's no POINT in still fighting it now. We got much more important issues we should be demanding from them. In the end, we are customers - paying them for a service and we have a right to demand a certain quality of service and a certain measure of respect for our wishes. Making those wishes clear is good business. Continuing to mope about a past decision that they already changed because you don't think it should ever have been made (guess what - that same corporate priorities law also rather demands that companies be, by definition, idiots) distracts from that.
Forget the forums. There are features we need them to pay attention to now - this is a good step - some of those features are now available. We SHOULD praise that, because that is how we let them know their customers approve - that's how we make sure they got a basis on which to tell the board "these features INCREASE your shareholder value more than the reasons you may have had to not want them". Then we can say "But we still demand you add the other features we want - a lot of us who don't use it now will use it then".
You want to deal with companies? Learn how they think, and then influence them based on the only motivation they understand- the only one they are legally ALLOWED to understand.
Or you could lobby to have the stupidest law in human history changed of course... good luck with THAT.
Your last sentence listed two problems: visible on other peoples friend list, and can't use a nickname.
Guess what- this article is about how you can now NOT be visible on other people's friends list if you so choose.
In other words- half your CURRENT complaint is gone. The thing you mentioned was gone long ago.
Constructive critique is always useful - and blizzard has a decent track record of listening to it, moreso than most software companies in fact, being eternally pissed over a bad decision which they REVERSED in answer to the community's reaction kind of removes any motivation for them to give a damn what the community wants doesn't it ?
Then don't use it ? Nobody forces you to. If you don't like it in it's current state switch it off. If you find in future that new additions made it usable for you switch it on again... I am quite picky about my RealID friends list - in fact I have only three friends on it at all, but I wouldn't trade the the ability to talk to them - and our shared friends from their equally short lists back now - it's just so damn useful.
A very accurate analogy - you're like the guy who cries because the phone book exists and prints people's real names, addresses and numbers ! The fact that those who are concerned can get delisted seems to be enough for everybody else but not for you !
And now half your complaint is gone - the other half is sure to follow. Seriously dude. Chill the fuck out.
Why are you still screaming about the forums ? We already WON that battle - the company listened to their users and changed their stance ! What the hell more do you want from a company ?
This article is about them listening to users regarding the in-game version and adding features people wanted. The one you're getting vitriolic about and cussing over is one I already mentioned. These latest changes show them being responsive to people's concerns - even if clearly they are not getting the kind of high developer priority you demand - some of us think that what with having cataclysm in beta their developer resources may be a just a tad strained at the moment. It's a positive sign and promising with regard to getting the other features we would like in the near future.
Can't you be happy about that ?
I *like* realID - and I like these features so I can control it more.
I got several alt characters, I do not want to lose my conversations - the SOCIAL aspect of a highly social game just because I switched alt. I don't want to lose the ability to talk to my guildies on the alliance side about tomorrow night's Lich King tactics just because I'm busy levelling my troll hunter.
The only feature I would dearly love to see added is an invisible mode, so I can appear offline for those rare occasions when I actually don't want to talk to anybody (e.g. like when I'm doing AH-PVP which means I'm AFK for most of the time watching a movie on my other screen).
I think a very large part of the player base agrees with me. We freaked out about requiring it on forums, I personally would like to see it changed to be able to use a nickname rather than real name but other than that RealID is really not such a huge thing as people make it out to be. Quite the contrary - it's a logical extension of the same chat features that all online games have had back to the earliest MUD's.
I am all for constructive criticism to ask for features that allow users the control they should have over *any* form of communication their involved with but the vast majority of the reaction to realID is kneejerk shouting with absolutely no basis in any rational thinking.
>I don't think many even understand what rooting is and many more don't want to go through the trouble. I think Android has this as a weak point, many vendors releasing different hardware with different OS versions, it's also makes it harder for developers.
Well there's very little difficulty on the developers - the code compatibility across versions is actually extremely good, but what you're saying is true and one of the reasons google is changing some of the designs in the next version - specifically to modify the base design so that handset manufacturers CANNOT break compatibility anymore and the ability to upgrade for anybody can be ensured regardless of whether their handset manufacturer even exists anymore.
Okay so some people do it to get back features that third parties have stripped, I hadn't considered that since the providers in my country didn't do that.
I don't know what ELSE they may have done of course, yet another reason I'm glad mine is rooted and running CyanoGenMod. My phone contains at least as much private data as my computer - and some more dangerous just by being a phone... I prefer to think the code on it is open.
Ubuntu contains a layer to prevent the average user from gaining root access - it's easy to work around and they even presetup sudo to make it easy - but there's a restriction in the design there. If I sell you a prebuilt ubuntu with the sudoers file edited away - is it Ubuntu trying to stop you from getting root privileges at all or is it me ?
That's the difference. The equivalent to a "sudo" command is already in Android - the handset makers decide to which extent you are able to run it (e.g. what's in the sudoers file) - but Android's root access is no more restricted than that of Linux- it's there but of course it's not the USUAL way to run, you access root when you HAVE to - you don't use it for normal operations.
Linux distro's all set you up with a normal user account to work under and admonish you to only go to root when you NEED to. Android has exactly that same level of restriction. Handset manufacturers sometimes go to some effort to make it harder to excercise the ability to gain root that Android has but this is not an Android thing.
And deviating from the design doesn't prevent you calling it Android unless you deviate MUCH more radically than that. Ubuntu's approach to root passwords was entirely unique when they came up with it, but we didn't declare that Ubuntu isn't Linux !
You're right their pretty much arguing about which of the people who claimed they saw their imaginary friend has given the more flattering description !
>There are some Android phones you cannot currently root. If the system is really "designed to be rootable" as you assert, how come that is so?
These restrictions are added by the hardware manufacturers and DEVIATE from the android design - they do not exist in the upstream platform. Designing it to be hackable ipso facto means it can be hacked to try and make it harder for other people to hack it again. I don't blame google for not forcing the handset makers to stick to their ideals - many do, and the one Google themselves shipped had no restrictions at all but the handset manufacturers are their customers just like the users - to force THEM to a certain business model would be just as restrictive as forcing a certain usage model on the users is. Google doesn't do that, and android is designed not to do that- if handset makers change it, you can't fault Android for that. It would be like faulting the manufacturer of a 12-guage because somebody else sawed the barrel shorter and made a sawn-off.
Okay - that may be true.
The fact that every app I've ever wanted has been in the free section of the huge android marketplace certainly helps :D
Mind you, that included all the software I needed to root it. I could just install it on Sense and then run it - to disable the "security"... that's what I mean by a platform that actively encourages user exploration.
>The iPhone has the potential to be the IBM PC from the cellphones,
Aaah but you forget the IBM PC destroyed apple's once dominant position as PC supplier. So much so that nobody even refers to apple's computers as PC's anymore even though they invented them and coined the term in the first place !
If THAT didn't teach Steve that in the long run "open do whatever you want with it" always wins then nothing will.
On the other hand - apple's computers are STILL closed up "do only what we tell you" with them. Apple has positioned itself in antithesis to the clear market demand in PC's and manages to cling on to a niche market there for years now.
In the phone world - they are in exactly the same position now that they were in PC's in the 80's, but Android is the IBM PC of the phone world - which is why apple is trying so hard to shut it down or at least slow it down. This is why apple is suing HTC for example.
The thing is - unless by some sort of anti-miracle they get Android killed on legal grounds apple's phone position is, just like the PC position was, only going to last for a while. The open nature (and resulting lower cost) of android will attract more and more users, just as IBM PC's nature did in the 80's.
Ultimately the iPhone will end up just as Macs are today - a minority in the phone business used by a small niche-market of die-hard fans.
We've seen this exact history happen 20 years ago with the same company - and people made the exact same claims about why Apple was right and the PC would fail... there is no evidence whatsoever to suggest that the outcome will be any different. Steve Jobs doesn't actually care. He is a CEO - CEO's are in it for share-price today.
His job won't depend on iPhone still being the market leader five years from now - it depends on being the market leader now. Five years from now Apple will be doing something else as their main income you can depend on it, just as the iPhone now makes far more money than Mac sales do.
Thanks though - it would never have occurred to me that this may even be possible though - so now I have motivation to go look :D