And don't forget it's a three year period, so the actual number of H1-B visa holders in the company could be as many as triple that. It will actually be somewhat less, because not everyone stays for the full three years, but there are certainly at least half a million people in the country on the H1-B visa. And that's not counting the other work visa types, such as the L-1. When you consider that the total number of engineering, programming, and technician jobs is around 4 million, it becomes clear just how big an impact visas have.
If a tool is for internal use only, it can have a messy UI. It can involve half a dozen different programs that must be used in a particular order. It can have crap documentation, relying on the developers' tribal knowledge. If you were to just "zip them up and putting them on an ftp", your community would turn on you in a heartbeat, declare that you don't care about supporting your game, and that this justifies pirating it. They'll spam every review site they can find with the worst scores that the site will accept. They'll spam your message boards with abuse, and drive away other customers.
I've seen gamer communities fly into a rage over much less. If you're going to publish mod tools, you need to actually do it right.
1. Dumbing things down just breeds better idiots who will then require even more dumbing down. Offering challenge above and beyond the players current ability is what grants the opportunity for improvement. You don't learn how to play by sticking with "I'm too young to die" mode.
How dare those people enjoy different things!?
Did you ever think, maybe some people don't care about honing a useless skill, and are just looking for some light entertainment?
It's not like hard games no longer exist. New ones are being made all the time. The casual market has been booming, so as a percentage, hardcore gaming is down, but why get upset over that?
Hollywood pushes out mindless crap like the Avengers, but that doesn't mean quality films no longer exist. The TV is full of reality shit, but there are still good programs to be found. Trashy romance novels make up a sizeable portion of book sales, but you can still find fantastic literature being written every year.
Stop dwelling on the fact that things you like aren't the most popular things. Unless the thing you like best is being angry, in which case, don't let me stop you.
Sure, a company can spend the time and effort to produce good mod tools, but that's not necessarily a good business decision.
Read that a few more times, to be sure it sinks in.
Skyrim? Good mod tools. DA:O? Good mod tools. XCom? Good mod tools. Fallout? Good mod tools. Dark Souls? You've gotta be fucking kidding me, there are no real mods for that game. Just a borderline essential fix to boost the resolution, and some texture replacements.
Every good example you gave had mod tools released by the developers. Those aren't free to make, ya know. The time and money spent developing those could go towards making a better game. You call it a "laziness issue", but that's absurd. Have you ever worked a real job? I guarantee you, the developers worked their fucking asses off to get those games out the door. If they didn't have mod tools, it's not because they were lazy, it's because they had finite resources, and decided those resources were better spent elsewhere.
It's not really that, either. It's that modding modern games is simply more difficult, because the games are more complex. Sure, a company can spend the time and effort to produce good mod tools, but that's not necessarily a good business decision. It's a major selling point for certain franchises, but not every game is going to develop a big modding community. Would Company of Heroes 2 have sold better if it had better modding support? Or would that just have been wasted money by the developer?
You also missed the part where Obama implemented a limited net neutrality via executive order, only to have that struck down by the courts, following a lawsuit by Verizon.
You also missed the part where Republicans cheered the court's ruling, declaring that net neutrality is "socialism".
Look here, or just google "obama net neutrality court" for a dozen other sources.
Here's the lede, in case you're too lazy to click:
A federal appeals court on Tuesday struck down regulations that require Internet providers to treat all traffic the same, dealing a potentially fatal blow to President Obama’s push for “net neutrality.”
Opponents of the rules, led by plaintiff Verizon, hailed the decision from the D.C. Circuit Court of Appeals as a victory over government meddling in the marketplace.
Rep. Marsha Blackburn (R-Tenn.), one of the biggest opponents of the Federal Communications Commission (FCC) rules in Congress, applauded the court for striking down “socialistic regulations.”
Do you get it yet? The Democrats have been fighting for years to try to keep net neutrality around. The Republicans have fought to destroy it. The Republicans won, because the courts were on their side. And now you blame...the Democrats.
This is why things will never get better. This is why you will lose everything, bit by bit. Because you don't pay attention, and you lash out at the same people who tried to fight for you. Really, you deserve to lose.
He might just suck at estimating weight. I used to play a game at work where we would have people guess how much a package weighed before putting it on a scale, and some people are really, jaw-droppingly bad at that sort of thing. It's sort of interesting how people can usually estimate lengths, and volumes, and temperatures quite well, but on weight they'll be off by a factor of five or more.
The perfect irony of course is that Google's own pagerank depends on cross-site linking... By robbing people of URLs, a future generation of net users will grow up never knowing how to share a page with their friends unless there's a sharing mechanism within the same site their friends already use.
Who say's you need a sharing mechanism within the site? I'm sure Google will let you click and drag the "Origin Chip" into Google Hangouts (tm). The fact that that lets them track what you share is just gravy.
Ehh, maybe so. Maybe the industry asked the DOJ for support. Maybe the DOJ didn't think the industry was handling it well and wanted to step in. Maybe they're wrong to do so. I don't know.
What I do know, is that a lot of people here seem to think that this is part of Obama's super-secret conspiracy to eradicate porn and fireworks and dating websites. And that's absolutely bonkers.
The answer is credit card fraud. That's what the DOJ is trying to go after here. If you google online ammo suppliers, you get a bunch of sites that look like they haven't been updated since '98. I have no doubt that the companies are perfectly reputable. But they might not have the tightest security when it comes to detecting fraudulent transactions.
No one is saying that they're engaged in anything illegal. No one is saying they're unstable, fly-by-night businesses. What the DOJ seems to think is that the payment processing companies they do business with might be turning a blind eye to fraud in order to make more money.
As with most stories on Slashdot these days, it's bullshit meant to make you scared and angry.
prosecutors are investigating whether third-party processors that route payments for merchants through banks are ignoring signs of fraud to rake in fees from transactions.
They're not trying to shut down porn -- what possible motive could they even have for that? They're trying to stop disreputable businesses from effectively robbing people a few nickels at a time. If innocent companies are getting caught in the crossfire, then the DOJ needs to do its job better. But quit hyperventilating. This is not some evil government plot to wipe out all of the fireworks stores and dating services in the country.
If you were anywhere near the internet last week, you would have come across reports of 'DarkMarket'
Can we get some editors to remove this crap? It's just a stupid marketing gimmick -- "What, you haven't heard of [PRODUCT_NAME]? You must be living under a rock! Everyone who's anyone knows about [PRODUCT_NAME]!"
We won't know the exact delta, but we'll have a much better idea. According to the article you linked, the difference between the old and new questions was about 2% in the total uninsured rate. If the upcoming Census report shows the uninsured numbers dropping by less than that, then that would be evidence that Obamacare was ineffective.
They have general ideas, not exact numbers. What more could you expect? The numbers will gain some precision after the Census releases its report later this year, but even then it's based on polling, so it won't be exactly right.
The CBO's current estimate is that Obamacare has reduced the net number of uninsured persons by 12 million just this year, and is on track to get another 14 million insured within a couple more years. I would have preferred single payer, but Obamacare is a LOT better than what we had before, and it's the best we could have gotten in the face of Republican obstruction.
You can call it "complete and utter crap" all day, but we all know that that's just because you want it to fail. You already admitted you're a libertarian -- you're philosophically opposed to the very thing that Obamacare sets out to accomplish.
I'm not saying the website isn't a big deal, but how many of those websites had the kind of advertising push that this one did?
While that is true, there was also an equally large advertising push trying to convince people not to enroll. That's something that Twitter and Facebook never had to confront.
"Regulation" in this case would be the FCC instituting net neutrality, so that the ISPs have to treat all comers equally. E.g., Comcast can't speed up Hulu at the expense of some small start-up video streaming site.
The big businesses want to kill net neutrality because that will let them crush any new start-ups, and ensure that they maintain control of what we watch for generations to come. Sites like Netflix never would have gotten off the ground without net neutrality.
The big businesses are trying to get rid of regulations, and you've twisted it around to say that we need to...get rid of regulations. Either you're confused, or just some corporate bootlicker.
Were you expecting him to fab his own chips? Maybe he should grow his own silicon wafers while he's at it. Although, if he really wants to make a DIY phone, he must first invent the universe.
The point of a class action suit is to punish the transgressor. No one victim is harmed enough for the suit to be worthwhile, but society still has an interest in dissuading future bad behavior. The suits are often long and complicated. If you don't pay the lawyers well, then you won't get good lawyers working for the class. Meanwhile, the corporation WILL have good lawyers.
Insistence that lawyers should make less money from class actions may be well-intentioned, but the result would just be corporations having (even more) freedom to fuck people over.
The Democrats tried to pass net neutrality into law through an act of Congress, so that we wouldn't need to rely on the FCC-commissioner-of-the-moment. The Republicans blocked it. Obama then implemented a reduced version of net neutrality through execute order. The courts struck that down. The Democrats tried again to pass net neutrality through Congress. The Republicans again blocked it. Now net neutrality is dead and gone, and the Republicans are claiming its the Democrats' fault.
I wish I could say this is unbelievably dishonest, but it's actually quite standard these days.
The latest CBO report shows that the law is on track to reduce the total number of uninsured people by 12 million this year. Page 8 of the PDF.
And if you check page 14, you'll see that that estimate was based on just enrolling 6 million people in the exchanges this year. The actual number is 8 million.
But keep lying. Maybe if you repeat it enough, it'll turn true!
That sunset clause is the ONLY reason Obama was able to get rid of even a portion of the tax cuts. The whole thing was about to expire, and he was able to force the Republicans to accept some tax increases since the alternative was much larger increases. If it hadn't been for that sunset clause, the Bush tax cuts would have lasted another 50 years.
Even assuming that you get your million dollars forty years before you plan to retire, you would need to pull in returns of more than 18% per year to hit a billion.
Slashdot Mirror
And don't forget it's a three year period, so the actual number of H1-B visa holders in the company could be as many as triple that. It will actually be somewhat less, because not everyone stays for the full three years, but there are certainly at least half a million people in the country on the H1-B visa. And that's not counting the other work visa types, such as the L-1. When you consider that the total number of engineering, programming, and technician jobs is around 4 million, it becomes clear just how big an impact visas have.
If a tool is for internal use only, it can have a messy UI. It can involve half a dozen different programs that must be used in a particular order. It can have crap documentation, relying on the developers' tribal knowledge. If you were to just "zip them up and putting them on an ftp", your community would turn on you in a heartbeat, declare that you don't care about supporting your game, and that this justifies pirating it. They'll spam every review site they can find with the worst scores that the site will accept. They'll spam your message boards with abuse, and drive away other customers.
I've seen gamer communities fly into a rage over much less. If you're going to publish mod tools, you need to actually do it right.
1. Dumbing things down just breeds better idiots who will then require even more dumbing down. Offering challenge above and beyond the players current ability is what grants the opportunity for improvement. You don't learn how to play by sticking with "I'm too young to die" mode.
How dare those people enjoy different things!?
Did you ever think, maybe some people don't care about honing a useless skill, and are just looking for some light entertainment?
It's not like hard games no longer exist. New ones are being made all the time. The casual market has been booming, so as a percentage, hardcore gaming is down, but why get upset over that?
Hollywood pushes out mindless crap like the Avengers, but that doesn't mean quality films no longer exist. The TV is full of reality shit, but there are still good programs to be found. Trashy romance novels make up a sizeable portion of book sales, but you can still find fantastic literature being written every year.
Stop dwelling on the fact that things you like aren't the most popular things. Unless the thing you like best is being angry, in which case, don't let me stop you.
Did you even bother to read what you quoted?
Sure, a company can spend the time and effort to produce good mod tools, but that's not necessarily a good business decision.
Read that a few more times, to be sure it sinks in.
Skyrim? Good mod tools.
DA:O? Good mod tools.
XCom? Good mod tools.
Fallout? Good mod tools.
Dark Souls? You've gotta be fucking kidding me, there are no real mods for that game. Just a borderline essential fix to boost the resolution, and some texture replacements.
Every good example you gave had mod tools released by the developers. Those aren't free to make, ya know. The time and money spent developing those could go towards making a better game. You call it a "laziness issue", but that's absurd. Have you ever worked a real job? I guarantee you, the developers worked their fucking asses off to get those games out the door. If they didn't have mod tools, it's not because they were lazy, it's because they had finite resources, and decided those resources were better spent elsewhere.
It's not really that, either. It's that modding modern games is simply more difficult, because the games are more complex. Sure, a company can spend the time and effort to produce good mod tools, but that's not necessarily a good business decision. It's a major selling point for certain franchises, but not every game is going to develop a big modding community. Would Company of Heroes 2 have sold better if it had better modding support? Or would that just have been wasted money by the developer?
Yup, 'cause those are literally the only two things in the world, and we can never ever talk about one without bringing up the other.
You missed the part where the House Republicans voted to end net neutrality years ago, only to be stopped by the Senate Democrats.
You also missed the part where Obama implemented a limited net neutrality via executive order, only to have that struck down by the courts, following a lawsuit by Verizon.
You also missed the part where Republicans cheered the court's ruling, declaring that net neutrality is "socialism".
Look here, or just google "obama net neutrality court" for a dozen other sources.
Here's the lede, in case you're too lazy to click:
A federal appeals court on Tuesday struck down regulations that require Internet providers to treat all traffic the same, dealing a potentially fatal blow to President Obama’s push for “net neutrality.”
Opponents of the rules, led by plaintiff Verizon, hailed the decision from the D.C. Circuit Court of Appeals as a victory over government meddling in the marketplace.
Rep. Marsha Blackburn (R-Tenn.), one of the biggest opponents of the Federal Communications Commission (FCC) rules in Congress, applauded the court for striking down “socialistic regulations.”
Do you get it yet? The Democrats have been fighting for years to try to keep net neutrality around. The Republicans have fought to destroy it. The Republicans won, because the courts were on their side. And now you blame ...the Democrats.
This is why things will never get better. This is why you will lose everything, bit by bit. Because you don't pay attention, and you lash out at the same people who tried to fight for you. Really, you deserve to lose.
He might just suck at estimating weight. I used to play a game at work where we would have people guess how much a package weighed before putting it on a scale, and some people are really, jaw-droppingly bad at that sort of thing. It's sort of interesting how people can usually estimate lengths, and volumes, and temperatures quite well, but on weight they'll be off by a factor of five or more.
The perfect irony of course is that Google's own pagerank depends on cross-site linking... By robbing people of URLs, a future generation of net users will grow up never knowing how to share a page with their friends unless there's a sharing mechanism within the same site their friends already use.
Who say's you need a sharing mechanism within the site? I'm sure Google will let you click and drag the "Origin Chip" into Google Hangouts (tm). The fact that that lets them track what you share is just gravy.
Ehh, maybe so. Maybe the industry asked the DOJ for support. Maybe the DOJ didn't think the industry was handling it well and wanted to step in. Maybe they're wrong to do so. I don't know.
What I do know, is that a lot of people here seem to think that this is part of Obama's super-secret conspiracy to eradicate porn and fireworks and dating websites. And that's absolutely bonkers.
The question is "high risk of what?"
The answer is credit card fraud. That's what the DOJ is trying to go after here. If you google online ammo suppliers, you get a bunch of sites that look like they haven't been updated since '98. I have no doubt that the companies are perfectly reputable. But they might not have the tightest security when it comes to detecting fraudulent transactions.
No one is saying that they're engaged in anything illegal. No one is saying they're unstable, fly-by-night businesses. What the DOJ seems to think is that the payment processing companies they do business with might be turning a blind eye to fraud in order to make more money.
As with most stories on Slashdot these days, it's bullshit meant to make you scared and angry.
prosecutors are investigating whether third-party processors that route payments for merchants through banks are ignoring signs of fraud to rake in fees from transactions.
They're not trying to shut down porn -- what possible motive could they even have for that? They're trying to stop disreputable businesses from effectively robbing people a few nickels at a time. If innocent companies are getting caught in the crossfire, then the DOJ needs to do its job better. But quit hyperventilating. This is not some evil government plot to wipe out all of the fireworks stores and dating services in the country.
If you were anywhere near the internet last week, you would have come across reports of 'DarkMarket'
Can we get some editors to remove this crap? It's just a stupid marketing gimmick -- "What, you haven't heard of [PRODUCT_NAME]? You must be living under a rock! Everyone who's anyone knows about [PRODUCT_NAME]!"
We won't know the exact delta, but we'll have a much better idea. According to the article you linked, the difference between the old and new questions was about 2% in the total uninsured rate. If the upcoming Census report shows the uninsured numbers dropping by less than that, then that would be evidence that Obamacare was ineffective.
They have general ideas, not exact numbers. What more could you expect? The numbers will gain some precision after the Census releases its report later this year, but even then it's based on polling, so it won't be exactly right.
The CBO's current estimate is that Obamacare has reduced the net number of uninsured persons by 12 million just this year, and is on track to get another 14 million insured within a couple more years. I would have preferred single payer, but Obamacare is a LOT better than what we had before, and it's the best we could have gotten in the face of Republican obstruction.
You can call it "complete and utter crap" all day, but we all know that that's just because you want it to fail. You already admitted you're a libertarian -- you're philosophically opposed to the very thing that Obamacare sets out to accomplish.
I'm not saying the website isn't a big deal, but how many of those websites had the kind of advertising push that this one did?
While that is true, there was also an equally large advertising push trying to convince people not to enroll. That's something that Twitter and Facebook never had to confront.
Wait, I think you're confused.
"Regulation" in this case would be the FCC instituting net neutrality, so that the ISPs have to treat all comers equally. E.g., Comcast can't speed up Hulu at the expense of some small start-up video streaming site.
The big businesses want to kill net neutrality because that will let them crush any new start-ups, and ensure that they maintain control of what we watch for generations to come. Sites like Netflix never would have gotten off the ground without net neutrality.
The big businesses are trying to get rid of regulations, and you've twisted it around to say that we need to ...get rid of regulations. Either you're confused, or just some corporate bootlicker.
Were you expecting him to fab his own chips? Maybe he should grow his own silicon wafers while he's at it. Although, if he really wants to make a DIY phone, he must first invent the universe.
The point of a class action suit is to punish the transgressor. No one victim is harmed enough for the suit to be worthwhile, but society still has an interest in dissuading future bad behavior. The suits are often long and complicated. If you don't pay the lawyers well, then you won't get good lawyers working for the class. Meanwhile, the corporation WILL have good lawyers.
Insistence that lawyers should make less money from class actions may be well-intentioned, but the result would just be corporations having (even more) freedom to fuck people over.
The Democrats tried to pass net neutrality into law through an act of Congress, so that we wouldn't need to rely on the FCC-commissioner-of-the-moment. The Republicans blocked it. Obama then implemented a reduced version of net neutrality through execute order. The courts struck that down. The Democrats tried again to pass net neutrality through Congress. The Republicans again blocked it. Now net neutrality is dead and gone, and the Republicans are claiming its the Democrats' fault.
I wish I could say this is unbelievably dishonest, but it's actually quite standard these days.
Great, go tell that to the people who lost a hand. I'm sure it will make them feel better.
Hurr, stupid idiots, having emotion! Why don't they just stop feeling things!?
The latest CBO report shows that the law is on track to reduce the total number of uninsured people by 12 million this year. Page 8 of the PDF.
And if you check page 14, you'll see that that estimate was based on just enrolling 6 million people in the exchanges this year. The actual number is 8 million.
But keep lying. Maybe if you repeat it enough, it'll turn true!
That sunset clause is the ONLY reason Obama was able to get rid of even a portion of the tax cuts. The whole thing was about to expire, and he was able to force the Republicans to accept some tax increases since the alternative was much larger increases. If it hadn't been for that sunset clause, the Bush tax cuts would have lasted another 50 years.
Even assuming that you get your million dollars forty years before you plan to retire, you would need to pull in returns of more than 18% per year to hit a billion.
No one can do that reliably. It's luck.