You really have no idea what logic is, do you. You've confused micro for macro and can't even see it in yourself. Yet for anyone who has studied economics, it's clear that the opportunity cost of everything is all the other opportunities that the same could have purchased. In other words, the price of building a new bridge is all the other options, like resurfacing the roads, building a school, or adding an extra lane to a well-travelled highway.
When we say there was a lost opportunity in economics, it doesn't mean anything like what you seem to believe.
You just have to stop flying. Yeah, yeah, some people HAVE to, but a huge part of it is discretionary. Vacations, places you could drive to, etc.
I love this asshole. Yes, please give up one of the few things left to Americans; their pitifully short number of vacation days. Instead, stay at home. Like we don't work hard enough already. Wanna know what most people fly to? Not to have fun, but to go see family. They do it to go see the people they love. That's what Americans do on their rare time off. And this asshole says "Americans are sheep".
Yeah. Sure. Okay. Maybe they're just working themselves to death trying to live paycheck to paycheck because 85 people in the world control more wealth than the next 3.5 billion: And guess where over half of those 85 people live? Go on, guess.
You don't blame the people at the bottom for the excesses of those at the top; That's called being a douchebag. Put the blame right where it belongs: At the top.
The military will deny that the misconduct in any way affected the ability of the military to maintain or operate the missiles. Thus... Why are officers having to cheat on an exam if it's already been demonstrated they are competent? Conclusion: The tests were probably irrelevant and/or too difficult relative to the task they were assigned. In other words, the test was defective, not the soldiers.
Right now, some black person out there might have the cure for cancer, but society will never get it because he didn't have the money to finish college. Right now, some woman out there has a solution in her head that'll take CPU performance to the next level because of a radical new way of thinking about the problem, but she went into nursing instead.
You had a point until that part of total bullshit.
Sir, my point was that when we deny someone an opportunity, a door is closed. We'll never know for sure what the damage is, it's incalculable. But we can be assured that by doing something they don't love, they'll be less motivated and contribute less. They produce less, and thus society derives less benefit. When you multiply this by millions of people who are discriminated against, you can see that there's a significant loss of productivity. The example of a cure for cancer or a better CPU architecture was just that, an example. We'll never know, for example, how much more technology and scientific advancement we would have gotten out of Niccoli Tesla if he hadn't been hunted by the government and pursued by the giant douchebag known as Thomas Edison, but we can be sure we missed out on things.
If women make up the minority in one field, then they make the majority in another.
Yes, well... I suppose if Job A makes $100,000 a year and Job B makes $20,000 a year, if 50 people from Group A are in Job A, and 50 people from Group B are in Job B, then we have no reason to suggest that something could be amiss here.
Care to spell out the laws that prohibit them from entering the field?
I wasn't aware that the law was the only way someone could be discriminated against. Thanks for reminding me of that. I retract all previous statements. We licked that whole racist problem the day we made it illegal. Nothing to see here, move along.
And your hypothetical example of "OMG A PERSON IN THE RIGHT POSITION COULD BE DOING SOMETHING" is flat-out horrible.
Yes, I can understand how judging people on the basis of the abilities, instead of their sex organs, could be a confusing concept to some.
Seriously, where does that point of yours even go? Have everyone master every single profession, just so we can be sure we're not missing on any talent?
When we judge people only by the strength of their contributions, and give them equal opportunity to pursue the fields of their choice, then we have met our social obligation. But until our expectations of others are truly equal, any answer to this question will simply reflect our own prejudices.
"I am a woman, therefore I deserve special treatment. All men have it easy because they are men. I have statistics to prove that I deserve special consideration because there are less women then men in certain fields."
The statistics are that women make up nearly 52% of the general population. They make up 53% of all college graduates. Yet they make up an average of just 15% in STEM fields. On average, they make just $58,000 a year compared to $85,000 for men. And while on average, women have been improving their numbers in STEM fields, it's gone the other way in IT; Women received 29.6 percent of computer science B.A.â(TM)s in 1991, compared with 18.2 percent in 2010. Up here in Minnesota where I live, women make up less than 5% of senior IT positions.
You say "Who cares" and that gets you a big +5, and that should be a big +500 indicator of why the problem is so huge. It's precisely because of attitudes like this. You should care. Right now, some black person out there might have the cure for cancer, but society will never get it because he didn't have the money to finish college. Right now, some woman out there has a solution in her head that'll take CPU performance to the next level because of a radical new way of thinking about the problem, but she went into nursing instead.
Every time you create an inequality in society, we all lose out. You should care because putting the most qualified person in a position where they can do the most good, benefits all of us more than the unequal way things are done today.
Do women deserve special consideration? No. Do women deserve equal consideration? Yes! Your post makes it plain exactly what's wrong with our industry: You've confused one for the other, and you don't even see it in your own comments. It's easy for a woman to see, but for a man, if this little microcosm on an internet forum is any indication, it's quite difficult. Nobody until now even pointed out the incongruency.
that's not true...meth, heroin, and coke are for more addictive than alcohol
And in the first sentence, you completely lost all your credibility. Did anyone say it wasn't true? Did I say those things were less harmful than alcohol? No. Nothing like that was said. What I was saying was the drugs that are equally or less harmful than already legal drugs should not be illegal. That's it. That's all. I never said which drugs.
that fails to satiate the power grab of being able to arrest dissenters at any time for having a tiny bit of drug planted on or near them by the Powers That Be.
They can just plant a pirated movie. Stiffer fine. Point is, the arguments for criminalization are based on a lie: Properly regulated, there wouldn't be any more harm from most of these drugs than what you can do getting piss drunk.... which is legal. Until they ban alcohol, anything less dangerous than that is a disengenuous argument; It's hypocricy.
Is he saying that 1.5TB drives are all 5 years old? If you look at the table in TFA, it talks about "release date" -- which may well be some time ago, but I'm sure 1.5TB drives may had new, even if the design hasn't changed in a while.
I think the takeaway here is this man is neither terribly detail-oriented nor well-suited for his line of work. Things like date of manufacture, make and model, I/O amount, number of power cycles, environment, etc., are all obvious things to record to an experienced IT person. He appears to have done very little of that. He is a bean counter pretending to be an engineer.
And since the government just printed stacks and stacks of money to bail out the whole mess and put a splint on the economy, it's all pretty much the same virtual game.
There's a small difference: When you fuck up in a game, nobody trusts you anymore. This guy has a lot to answer for, and chances are good he won't be in a leadership position much longer. Those losses are just gone, and only the people who followed him pay for it, nobody else.
In real life, you can fuck up a lot and everyone else but you pays for it. Nobody's gonna pay this guy billions as a bonus for screwing up.
I enjoy Tarantino films as much as the next red blooded male, but really, what is a Tarantino script:
Suddenly, a wild lawyer appeared and that poster was never heard from again. Well, anyway. Tarantino hasn't thought things through... or rather, he's stubbornly short sighted and cares only about item 8 on your list. But here's the problem: The moment you take away fair use like this, published or not, copyrighted or not, you pretty much make an end of democracy. What a bold claim! Surely you must be trolling! Except I'm not: How do you think a democracy can exist if the population is illiterate and doesn't know anything about anything because it's suddenly illegal to talk about? Because that's what copyright will do if it's left unchecked: Everything can be copyright, and if you eliminate fair use, then what's left is a tax on all communication, thought, ideas, and exchanges. There is no more public domain, and people may not even be entitled to speak their own words in public because those can be copyrighted too. Now it becomes a case of only those with money can speak, write, etc.
No work of art is worth losing your entire cultural identity for.
Thats an almost slanderous claim, there was one case (5 years ago?) where one employee went "Rogue" and consipered with players for personal benefit, that event caused the company to create an internal investigation unit to make sure it doesnt happen again.
Yes, the "slanderous" claim... that word, I do not think it means what you think it means. Firstly, for it to be slander, it would have to be untrue. Alas... as you just said, it is totally, completely, and utterly true. Oops!
The company involved goes to great lengths to ensure they dont interfere with the games economy without good cause. They have an economist to monitor the health of the economy, and a reserve bank for the rare occasion that the ingame value of PLEX varies too much (i think they have only acted once or twice and there is oversight).
They don't "interfere with the game's economy"? A month's worth of game time costs $9.95... a plex costs about $15 and does the same thing in game. And since Sir You Obviously Weren't There has forgotten... players protested en masse in a place in game called "Jita" over this "pay to win" model, many quit, and the server crashed several times as they tried (and succeeded) to overload the blade the busiest system in game. So yeah, please stop drinking the koolaid... Eve is a very interesting game, but CCP can and does make mistakes. Big ones. Stackless Python for the backend comes to mind... necessitating this "time dilation" they speak of... which is really code for "The server's so fucking overloaded everything's running like shit."
Quick question: Is it customary to setup autopay to pay for the account on the very second it comes due in EVE?
Depends. Most serious eve players have multiple accounts. Some have them backed by credit card, some don't. It isn't strictly necessary thanks to PLEX to actually pay to use the game... some do, some don't.
Stop talking nonsense and trying to rationalize, please. I understand that losing hurts, but don't be a silly liar.
I understand that you have poor luck with thinking, but don't take out your inadequacies on someone else hoping if you yell loudly enough, they won't notice your own stupidity. A rather trivial case of a database entry not updating correctly is what's at the heart of this massive blow-up. But consider that they tweak things all the time, and major, super huge, universe-affecting things just stop working for days on end. Now, how likely is it that if super epic failures like that happen... that the minor stuff is less likely to occur.
Sorry, not a lie, you're just too stupid to brain today.
Everything in that story just about is wrong. Firstly, "Over 70 of the game's biggest and most expensive ships, the Titans, were destroyed. Individual Titans can be worth upwards of 200 billion ISK, which is worth around $5,000."... They aren't actually worth that. Because the game offers the ability to exchange realworld money for a "plex" -- this valuation is almost twice what you'd pay for game time if you bought it straight up. In other words, it's the highest valuation possible. Realistically, it'd be worth less than half that.
Secondly, the guy responsible, a 29 year old banker who was literally asleep when it all went down, insists that the virtual money was in the account and it was set to autopay. People close to this suggest the word for this is "bullshit", but it has been "petitioned" -- a claim by a player that the server screwed up. This isn't without precident, as the game is currently limping about with it standings system broken. Standings is basically Eve's IFF system. Right now, nobody in the game can tell friend from foe. Needless to say, it's a massive issue. So it's possible they farked up, but unlikely.
There are allegations as well that CCP intentionally did this to drive up the price of PLEX (and in fact, just about every resource in the game)... which has happened. And CCP has colluded with players before to give valuable assets out -- and admitted to this.
In short, while the cover story smells of stupidity, greed could also be in play.
In fact, it seems this issue has already left one Model S owner stranded with a dead battery nearly 100 miles from the nearest charging station.
Your quote from Futurama is amusing, but there's something even more amusing, or sad, depending on how you look at it. It's that one dude's car died, and somehow this is a reflection on the entire model line? I live in Minnesota, in the coldest major city by average temperature and up here, every cold snap results in thousands of dead batteries. The number one call out for tow truck companies out here isn't a flat tire but a dead battery. And simple physics provide plenty of explanation for why this is; Yet somehow, out of the thousands of cars that wouldn't start (to the point that it's a running joke: "Come for the low unemployment rate and good schools, stay because your car won't start")... one dude got selected and they say his electric car is somehow defective because of this?
Dude... if ONE car dies during a cold snap out of the entire model line, that's not a problem, that's an engineering success up here of epic proportions when it comes to cars. Maybe you've heard about our roads? We only have two seaons: Winter and road construction. Believe me... if a line of cars can survive up here and only one of them goes tits up in the cold, then someone's doing it right.
Every utopian prediction for the future from the most authoritarian to anarchist depends on humanity getting very good at recycling. Every new process that can get something valuable from *ahem* unsorted wastes is a step to a positive need-free future.
That would be another case of learning from nature.
If you ask me, the OP hasn't learned anything. He used the phrase "need-free future" which pretty much put him somewhere on the intelligence scale between below average and creationist. Humans will always need yummy nitrogen-oxygen mixtures, food, fresh water, and social contact. Run out of any of those four basic things and what you get is either death, or something close to it. There's more things people would probably put into the 'needs' category, but the point here is that there is no such thing as a "need free" future, and whether it's utopia or dystopia you believe in, the question we all face is not whether or not we have a future, but rather what kind it will be as numbers increase and resources diminish.
If our previous 20,000 years of history is any indication, there's only one way it ends: With a lot of death. Whether it's due to plague, starvation, or war, eventually a large portion of the human race is going to die. Recycling is a good idea, but humanity's survival doesn't depend on it... it's a quality of life issue, not one of survival of the species. We can use up our whole planet and render it into a wasteland and there will still be humans on it.. they just won't be very happy.
Have any other techies found a replacement for their N900?"
A sledgehammer, but it really is a poor substitute. They aren't as strong as the N900 was. As I understand it, the replacement program for the Space Shuttle suffered a major setback after they were discontinued; they're having to rely on conventional heat shielding now to re-enter the atmosphere.
Figures it'd take an anoymous coward to ruin the joke by posting the answer...;) You were supposed to make some snide comment about how I couldn't do math and I needed "more training"... not be all intelligent and shit. Guh! Know your place, Anon!
1. Someone will publish it to Youtube and it will promptly be blocked because of some automated cease and desist that algorithmically determined that there was a set of two notes that, if piped through a cat being boiled, then fed through a synthesizer and finally broadcast over shortwave halfway around the world, might vaguely resemble their copyrighted work. If you were drunk.
2. Someone will (correctly) observe that it has more artistic value than the last couple of One Direction albums.
3. Someone will comment on how it's an epic waste of tax dollars, and demand to know what possible value the entire field of science and technology has. They will do this using a computer, sitting in a temperature controlled building, connected to a power grid, which has CNN streaming on TV in the background through a satellite. They will not see the irony.
This chart has some interesting tidbits on laws that were just put in place in the Ukraine.
This picture has some interesting commentary on protesters who carry government-regulated and controlled tracking devices with full surveillance capabilities while trying to piss in the government's cheerios.
NSAs actions regarding surveillance are worse than the wettest dreams the East German StaSi could ever have imagined, for several reasons:
Are you really going to go full retard on me? Show me where the NSA created a secret police force in another country (repeatedly), and trained them, created a large network of "sleeper agents", assisted in smuggling in weapons and nuclear secrets, created and financed a terrorist organization responsible for thousands of civilian deaths, deseceration of cemeteries, orchestrated a large-scale industrial chemical disaster solely to distract from domestic problems, numerous assassinations, and routinely engaged in psychological warfare of social undesireables so extreme that its victims often committed suicide or went insane.
Please, show me this amazing and never-before documented evidence you have about comparable NSA activities. Because that is what the Stasi did in East Germany. To compare them to the NSA is, to put it mildly, intellectually dishonest. While you're at it, invest in a double-wrapped tin foil hat, because apparently single-ply isn't getting the job done with you anymore.
Is it calling from 1990, when that would be relevant?
Oh, I'm sorry, do you think the NCA, Mossad, Al-amn al-Watani, Ministry Of Intelligence and Security, State Security Department, etc., don't spy on their own citizens too?
The NSA got caught. That's the distinction here. Not what they're doing. Everyone else is doing the same damn thing, they just didn't leave a cheeky 20-something unattended in the server room of their security archives.
I don't think the NSA is the worst of the lot, not by a long shot. There's plenty of recent historical examples of shit other intelligence agencies have done that make what the NSA is doing today look rather germane. There is no reason, whatsoever, to believe that they all suddenly reformed the day a wild Snowden appeared, and it was only the big, bad, evil NSA, that continued to rape, pillage, and whatever else.
No country would put its intelligence agencies at a competitive disadvantage merely to satisfy the petty outrage of an internet pundit.
Slashdot Mirror
You really have no idea what logic is, do you. You've confused micro for macro and can't even see it in yourself. Yet for anyone who has studied economics, it's clear that the opportunity cost of everything is all the other opportunities that the same could have purchased. In other words, the price of building a new bridge is all the other options, like resurfacing the roads, building a school, or adding an extra lane to a well-travelled highway.
When we say there was a lost opportunity in economics, it doesn't mean anything like what you seem to believe.
You just have to stop flying. Yeah, yeah, some people HAVE to, but a huge part of it is discretionary. Vacations, places you could drive to, etc.
I love this asshole. Yes, please give up one of the few things left to Americans; their pitifully short number of vacation days. Instead, stay at home. Like we don't work hard enough already. Wanna know what most people fly to? Not to have fun, but to go see family. They do it to go see the people they love. That's what Americans do on their rare time off. And this asshole says "Americans are sheep".
Yeah. Sure. Okay. Maybe they're just working themselves to death trying to live paycheck to paycheck because 85 people in the world control more wealth than the next 3.5 billion: And guess where over half of those 85 people live? Go on, guess.
You don't blame the people at the bottom for the excesses of those at the top; That's called being a douchebag. Put the blame right where it belongs: At the top.
The military will deny that the misconduct in any way affected the ability of the military to maintain or operate the missiles.
Thus...
Why are officers having to cheat on an exam if it's already been demonstrated they are competent?
Conclusion:
The tests were probably irrelevant and/or too difficult relative to the task they were assigned. In other words, the test was defective, not the soldiers.
Right now, some black person out there might have the cure for cancer, but society will never get it because he didn't have the money to finish college. Right now, some woman out there has a solution in her head that'll take CPU performance to the next level because of a radical new way of thinking about the problem, but she went into nursing instead.
You had a point until that part of total bullshit.
Sir, my point was that when we deny someone an opportunity, a door is closed. We'll never know for sure what the damage is, it's incalculable. But we can be assured that by doing something they don't love, they'll be less motivated and contribute less. They produce less, and thus society derives less benefit. When you multiply this by millions of people who are discriminated against, you can see that there's a significant loss of productivity. The example of a cure for cancer or a better CPU architecture was just that, an example. We'll never know, for example, how much more technology and scientific advancement we would have gotten out of Niccoli Tesla if he hadn't been hunted by the government and pursued by the giant douchebag known as Thomas Edison, but we can be sure we missed out on things.
So STEM jobs are worth, on average, and additional $18,900 per year. Looks like the people not going into STEM careers are picking the wrong major.
No, I think you misunderstand: Men in STEM fields make $18.900 more per year than wome in STEM fields.
If women make up the minority in one field, then they make the majority in another.
Yes, well... I suppose if Job A makes $100,000 a year and Job B makes $20,000 a year, if 50 people from Group A are in Job A, and 50 people from Group B are in Job B, then we have no reason to suggest that something could be amiss here.
Care to spell out the laws that prohibit them from entering the field?
I wasn't aware that the law was the only way someone could be discriminated against. Thanks for reminding me of that. I retract all previous statements. We licked that whole racist problem the day we made it illegal. Nothing to see here, move along.
And your hypothetical example of "OMG A PERSON IN THE RIGHT POSITION COULD BE DOING SOMETHING" is flat-out horrible.
Yes, I can understand how judging people on the basis of the abilities, instead of their sex organs, could be a confusing concept to some.
Seriously, where does that point of yours even go? Have everyone master every single profession, just so we can be sure we're not missing on any talent?
When we judge people only by the strength of their contributions, and give them equal opportunity to pursue the fields of their choice, then we have met our social obligation. But until our expectations of others are truly equal, any answer to this question will simply reflect our own prejudices.
"I am a woman, therefore I deserve special treatment. All men have it easy because they are men. I have statistics to prove that I deserve special consideration because there are less women then men in certain fields."
The statistics are that women make up nearly 52% of the general population. They make up 53% of all college graduates. Yet they make up an average of just 15% in STEM fields. On average, they make just $58,000 a year compared to $85,000 for men. And while on average, women have been improving their numbers in STEM fields, it's gone the other way in IT; Women received 29.6 percent of computer science B.A.â(TM)s in 1991, compared with 18.2 percent in 2010. Up here in Minnesota where I live, women make up less than 5% of senior IT positions.
You say "Who cares" and that gets you a big +5, and that should be a big +500 indicator of why the problem is so huge. It's precisely because of attitudes like this. You should care. Right now, some black person out there might have the cure for cancer, but society will never get it because he didn't have the money to finish college. Right now, some woman out there has a solution in her head that'll take CPU performance to the next level because of a radical new way of thinking about the problem, but she went into nursing instead.
Every time you create an inequality in society, we all lose out. You should care because putting the most qualified person in a position where they can do the most good, benefits all of us more than the unequal way things are done today.
Do women deserve special consideration? No. Do women deserve equal consideration? Yes! Your post makes it plain exactly what's wrong with our industry: You've confused one for the other, and you don't even see it in your own comments. It's easy for a woman to see, but for a man, if this little microcosm on an internet forum is any indication, it's quite difficult. Nobody until now even pointed out the incongruency.
that's not true...meth, heroin, and coke are for more addictive than alcohol
And in the first sentence, you completely lost all your credibility. Did anyone say it wasn't true? Did I say those things were less harmful than alcohol? No. Nothing like that was said. What I was saying was the drugs that are equally or less harmful than already legal drugs should not be illegal. That's it. That's all. I never said which drugs.
Learn to read, bud.
that fails to satiate the power grab of being able to arrest dissenters at any time for having a tiny bit of drug planted on or near them by the Powers That Be.
They can just plant a pirated movie. Stiffer fine. Point is, the arguments for criminalization are based on a lie: Properly regulated, there wouldn't be any more harm from most of these drugs than what you can do getting piss drunk.... which is legal. Until they ban alcohol, anything less dangerous than that is a disengenuous argument; It's hypocricy.
Is he saying that 1.5TB drives are all 5 years old? If you look at the table in TFA, it talks about "release date" -- which may well be some time ago, but I'm sure 1.5TB drives may had new, even if the design hasn't changed in a while.
I think the takeaway here is this man is neither terribly detail-oriented nor well-suited for his line of work. Things like date of manufacture, make and model, I/O amount, number of power cycles, environment, etc., are all obvious things to record to an experienced IT person. He appears to have done very little of that. He is a bean counter pretending to be an engineer.
And since the government just printed stacks and stacks of money to bail out the whole mess and put a splint on the economy, it's all pretty much the same virtual game.
There's a small difference: When you fuck up in a game, nobody trusts you anymore. This guy has a lot to answer for, and chances are good he won't be in a leadership position much longer. Those losses are just gone, and only the people who followed him pay for it, nobody else.
In real life, you can fuck up a lot and everyone else but you pays for it. Nobody's gonna pay this guy billions as a bonus for screwing up.
I enjoy Tarantino films as much as the next red blooded male, but really, what is a Tarantino script:
Suddenly, a wild lawyer appeared and that poster was never heard from again. Well, anyway. Tarantino hasn't thought things through... or rather, he's stubbornly short sighted and cares only about item 8 on your list. But here's the problem: The moment you take away fair use like this, published or not, copyrighted or not, you pretty much make an end of democracy. What a bold claim! Surely you must be trolling! Except I'm not: How do you think a democracy can exist if the population is illiterate and doesn't know anything about anything because it's suddenly illegal to talk about? Because that's what copyright will do if it's left unchecked: Everything can be copyright, and if you eliminate fair use, then what's left is a tax on all communication, thought, ideas, and exchanges. There is no more public domain, and people may not even be entitled to speak their own words in public because those can be copyrighted too. Now it becomes a case of only those with money can speak, write, etc.
No work of art is worth losing your entire cultural identity for.
Thats an almost slanderous claim, there was one case (5 years ago?) where one employee went "Rogue" and consipered with players for personal benefit, that event caused the company to create an internal investigation unit to make sure it doesnt happen again.
Yes, the "slanderous" claim... that word, I do not think it means what you think it means. Firstly, for it to be slander, it would have to be untrue. Alas... as you just said, it is totally, completely, and utterly true. Oops!
The company involved goes to great lengths to ensure they dont interfere with the games economy without good cause. They have an economist to monitor the health of the economy, and a reserve bank for the rare occasion that the ingame value of PLEX varies too much (i think they have only acted once or twice and there is oversight).
They don't "interfere with the game's economy"? A month's worth of game time costs $9.95... a plex costs about $15 and does the same thing in game. And since Sir You Obviously Weren't There has forgotten... players protested en masse in a place in game called "Jita" over this "pay to win" model, many quit, and the server crashed several times as they tried (and succeeded) to overload the blade the busiest system in game. So yeah, please stop drinking the koolaid... Eve is a very interesting game, but CCP can and does make mistakes. Big ones. Stackless Python for the backend comes to mind... necessitating this "time dilation" they speak of... which is really code for "The server's so fucking overloaded everything's running like shit."
Quick question: Is it customary to setup autopay to pay for the account on the very second it comes due in EVE?
Depends. Most serious eve players have multiple accounts. Some have them backed by credit card, some don't. It isn't strictly necessary thanks to PLEX to actually pay to use the game... some do, some don't.
Stop talking nonsense and trying to rationalize, please. I understand that losing hurts, but don't be a silly liar.
I understand that you have poor luck with thinking, but don't take out your inadequacies on someone else hoping if you yell loudly enough, they won't notice your own stupidity. A rather trivial case of a database entry not updating correctly is what's at the heart of this massive blow-up. But consider that they tweak things all the time, and major, super huge, universe-affecting things just stop working for days on end. Now, how likely is it that if super epic failures like that happen... that the minor stuff is less likely to occur.
Sorry, not a lie, you're just too stupid to brain today.
Everything in that story just about is wrong. Firstly, "Over 70 of the game's biggest and most expensive ships, the Titans, were destroyed. Individual Titans can be worth upwards of 200 billion ISK, which is worth around $5,000." ... They aren't actually worth that. Because the game offers the ability to exchange realworld money for a "plex" -- this valuation is almost twice what you'd pay for game time if you bought it straight up. In other words, it's the highest valuation possible. Realistically, it'd be worth less than half that.
Secondly, the guy responsible, a 29 year old banker who was literally asleep when it all went down, insists that the virtual money was in the account and it was set to autopay. People close to this suggest the word for this is "bullshit", but it has been "petitioned" -- a claim by a player that the server screwed up. This isn't without precident, as the game is currently limping about with it standings system broken. Standings is basically Eve's IFF system. Right now, nobody in the game can tell friend from foe. Needless to say, it's a massive issue. So it's possible they farked up, but unlikely.
There are allegations as well that CCP intentionally did this to drive up the price of PLEX (and in fact, just about every resource in the game)... which has happened. And CCP has colluded with players before to give valuable assets out -- and admitted to this.
In short, while the cover story smells of stupidity, greed could also be in play.
In fact, it seems this issue has already left one Model S owner stranded with a dead battery nearly 100 miles from the nearest charging station.
Your quote from Futurama is amusing, but there's something even more amusing, or sad, depending on how you look at it. It's that one dude's car died, and somehow this is a reflection on the entire model line? I live in Minnesota, in the coldest major city by average temperature and up here, every cold snap results in thousands of dead batteries. The number one call out for tow truck companies out here isn't a flat tire but a dead battery. And simple physics provide plenty of explanation for why this is; Yet somehow, out of the thousands of cars that wouldn't start (to the point that it's a running joke: "Come for the low unemployment rate and good schools, stay because your car won't start")... one dude got selected and they say his electric car is somehow defective because of this?
Dude... if ONE car dies during a cold snap out of the entire model line, that's not a problem, that's an engineering success up here of epic proportions when it comes to cars. Maybe you've heard about our roads? We only have two seaons: Winter and road construction. Believe me... if a line of cars can survive up here and only one of them goes tits up in the cold, then someone's doing it right.
Every utopian prediction for the future from the most authoritarian to anarchist depends on humanity getting very good at recycling. Every new process that can get something valuable from *ahem* unsorted wastes is a step to a positive need-free future.
That would be another case of learning from nature.
If you ask me, the OP hasn't learned anything. He used the phrase "need-free future" which pretty much put him somewhere on the intelligence scale between below average and creationist. Humans will always need yummy nitrogen-oxygen mixtures, food, fresh water, and social contact. Run out of any of those four basic things and what you get is either death, or something close to it. There's more things people would probably put into the 'needs' category, but the point here is that there is no such thing as a "need free" future, and whether it's utopia or dystopia you believe in, the question we all face is not whether or not we have a future, but rather what kind it will be as numbers increase and resources diminish.
If our previous 20,000 years of history is any indication, there's only one way it ends: With a lot of death. Whether it's due to plague, starvation, or war, eventually a large portion of the human race is going to die. Recycling is a good idea, but humanity's survival doesn't depend on it... it's a quality of life issue, not one of survival of the species. We can use up our whole planet and render it into a wasteland and there will still be humans on it.. they just won't be very happy.
Have any other techies found a replacement for their N900?"
A sledgehammer, but it really is a poor substitute. They aren't as strong as the N900 was. As I understand it, the replacement program for the Space Shuttle suffered a major setback after they were discontinued; they're having to rely on conventional heat shielding now to re-enter the atmosphere.
Figures it'd take an anoymous coward to ruin the joke by posting the answer... ;) You were supposed to make some snide comment about how I couldn't do math and I needed "more training"... not be all intelligent and shit. Guh! Know your place, Anon!
Five things will happen because of this:
1. Someone will publish it to Youtube and it will promptly be blocked because of some automated cease and desist that algorithmically determined that there was a set of two notes that, if piped through a cat being boiled, then fed through a synthesizer and finally broadcast over shortwave halfway around the world, might vaguely resemble their copyrighted work. If you were drunk.
2. Someone will (correctly) observe that it has more artistic value than the last couple of One Direction albums.
3. Someone will comment on how it's an epic waste of tax dollars, and demand to know what possible value the entire field of science and technology has. They will do this using a computer, sitting in a temperature controlled building, connected to a power grid, which has CNN streaming on TV in the background through a satellite. They will not see the irony.
This chart has some interesting tidbits on laws that were just put in place in the Ukraine.
This picture has some interesting commentary on protesters who carry government-regulated and controlled tracking devices with full surveillance capabilities while trying to piss in the government's cheerios.
NSAs actions regarding surveillance are worse than the wettest dreams the East German StaSi could ever have imagined, for several reasons:
Are you really going to go full retard on me? Show me where the NSA created a secret police force in another country (repeatedly), and trained them, created a large network of "sleeper agents", assisted in smuggling in weapons and nuclear secrets, created and financed a terrorist organization responsible for thousands of civilian deaths, deseceration of cemeteries, orchestrated a large-scale industrial chemical disaster solely to distract from domestic problems, numerous assassinations, and routinely engaged in psychological warfare of social undesireables so extreme that its victims often committed suicide or went insane.
Please, show me this amazing and never-before documented evidence you have about comparable NSA activities. Because that is what the Stasi did in East Germany. To compare them to the NSA is, to put it mildly, intellectually dishonest. While you're at it, invest in a double-wrapped tin foil hat, because apparently single-ply isn't getting the job done with you anymore.
Is it calling from 1990, when that would be relevant?
Oh, I'm sorry, do you think the NCA, Mossad, Al-amn al-Watani, Ministry Of Intelligence and Security, State Security Department, etc., don't spy on their own citizens too?
The NSA got caught. That's the distinction here. Not what they're doing. Everyone else is doing the same damn thing, they just didn't leave a cheeky 20-something unattended in the server room of their security archives.
I don't think the NSA is the worst of the lot, not by a long shot. There's plenty of recent historical examples of shit other intelligence agencies have done that make what the NSA is doing today look rather germane. There is no reason, whatsoever, to believe that they all suddenly reformed the day a wild Snowden appeared, and it was only the big, bad, evil NSA, that continued to rape, pillage, and whatever else.
No country would put its intelligence agencies at a competitive disadvantage merely to satisfy the petty outrage of an internet pundit.