More generically: - A film played in real-time (i.e. 1h film playing = 1h of time in what is being filmed) about pretty much anybody in the world would be extraordinarilly boring for almost anybody else. - A tweets is equivalent to a small text description of an instant in such a film.
I've been working in IT as a Software Developer for 15 years now, worked for 10 companies in 3 different countries (i've been a freelancer/contractor for the last 7 years) and across 4 different industries (IT Services, IT Products, Finance, Publishing)
I can tell you that, if you're a really gifted Software Developer in the beginning of your career, the best places to work don't even appear in these surveys: - In my experience, the best place to start in IT as a Software Developer is a small IT consultancy
In big companies, bureaucracy is rife and mind-numbing - things like getting access to a development Linux machine for example can take from several days (if all you need is an account on an existing machine) to months (if you need a new machine). In a small company you can set-up your own machine (dual boot ur desktop: no prob) or just have a chat with you friendly local sysadmin (often another developer) to get access to one - in a big company you have to fill-in one or more request forms and if it's only getting a new account in an existing machine if you're lucky it will end up in the queue for some guy in India to do at the end of the following week.
In small companies, if you're good you'll be noticed (you're not just another number in a ledger) and they'll give you all kinds of challenging stuff to do - in the beginning of your career this is the fastest way to get exposures to all kinds of technologies. In a large company you're stuck in a corner doing a limited number of things, probably working on an existing, long lived system, whose only educational value is to be an example of how not to design/code software and you won't easilly become known in other teams as being a really good coder and thus getting a chance to work on other systems.
Working in an IT company is better that in a non-IT one for a very simple reason: - In an IT company (especially services) you are in a profit-centre: the group you are in contributes directly or in a very straightforward way to the company's revenues and profit. They'll be a lot more keen on best practices (including such basic ones as promoting code reuse) and actual development processes (for example Agile) usually with a much beter approach to preparing for a project before coding even starts. - In a non-IT company you're in a cost-centre: the group you are in costs money and does not visibly contribute to the company's bottom line. There will much less emphasys in optimizing the software development process (since it's results are not as easy to measure) and, especially in large companies, you are much less likelly to find widespread code-reuse programs or any kind of formal or semi-formal software development process (large company's CTOs are often promoted from infrastructure groups - i.e. setting up networks, installing systems - or the business, and are better know for their self-promotion or golfing skills than for their strategic approach to IT).
As for the difference between IT Products and IT Services companies, the former just have a much smaller variance of technologies you might be exposed to (since they concentrate on a couple of products) while the later, having many projects for many client will have a lot more opportunities for learning new technologies.
I strongly advise you to keep away from large well know IT Consultancies since: - They're sweat shops - They outsource most of the low level work to India and as an entry level developer you will end up doing only local installation/maintenance tasks (that cannot be outsourced) and/or being trained as a Consultant (which is more of salesman than a techie).
I've been working as a freelancer in IT for large banks in London for a couple of years now and all of them have Charity programs.
The common thing to all those programs is that employees are expected to donate their own personal time and/or money to make the company look good. I have yet to see one in which the company donated worker-hours to charity.
It's all PR on the cheap: that's the way they work.
Thus I'm not at all surprised when their "Diversity" programs tend to really be about projecting an image of "forward thinking and hip" to attract young (and easilly impressed) employees and pre-emptivelly avoid anti-discrimination laws and lawsuits, not about being inclusive.
I work in the UK as a freelancer in IT and I need to have my own company, pay taxes and have an accountant.
I used to work in Holland as a freelancer in IT in there I needed to... you guessed it... have a company and an accountant.
Even if you don't want to have your own company, there are in fact schemes like "Umbrela Companies" which are in fact accountant managed companies who will temporary "employ" the freelancers and pass them all the income from their contracts minus tax and their part of corporation costs. These are however less tax efficient (you are taxed as an employee and income usually pays more taxes than dividends or capital gains) than just having your own company.
I'm sure Ukraine has some smart accountants who would love to setup some scheme like this.
Somehow I suspect that the real concern here is that freelancers will have to start paying real taxes like everybody else (my hearth weeps) instead of getting their roads, schools and law-enforcement for free.
I don't know about you guys, but with myself I noticed that when my car radio is playing an "agressive" (for example, heavy metal) or fast beat kind of music my driving gets a lot more reckless than after I've just had a session of playing GTA.
In fact, interestingly enough, while playing GTA I find myself tunning the in-game car radio for that kind of tunes much more than slower/placid ones.
Funilly enough, I work as an IT freelancer for investment banks and I've noticed that traders and analysts in those banks (those guys that make the million $ bonuses) are essentially salesmen: most of their time is spent finding and doing "deals", not creating new products or finding new ways to beat the market.
In fact, most of the work done in IT for those banks is around automating thinks like pricing and market-making to let the traders concentrate on selling their "products".
It's not overly surprised that those who deal directly with money get the highest monetary rewards (as bonuses or comissions) since their contribution to the company's bottom-line is (at least on the short term) very easy to measure (they make sure that negative effects usually only come due long after the bonus has been cashed).
Saudi Arabia is one huge nanny state where their nationals are directly or indirectly kept by the state thanks to the oil money.
Their problem is that they're pulling out the oil from the ground faster that anybody else all the while their native population (thus, not counting all the foreign nationals brough in for the "dirty jobs") has been fast growing - they're expected to pretty much run out of oil before the end of this century and the way things are going their population will be 3 times larger but the state will have no money for them.
This kind of thing is already happening with Dubai (which had a lot less oil to begin with), which is why they have been trying hard to diversify their economy into pretty much any area where they think there might be a future.
Dubai is a small place, reasonable well located, with a small population which their leaders have tried hard to get educated, so they might manage to transform themselves into the Singapore of the Middle East. Saudi Arabia, being much bigger, much more closed to the world and whose only claims to greatness are Oil and an exceptionally extremist strain of Islam (Wahabism), is unlikelly to be able to do so.
Who do you think works for the corporations? Answer: The taxpayers.
The percentage of a corporation's revenue that ends up in the hands of any of it's workers not having a CxO title is very small, especially in non-service industries (such as mining).
Corporations don't increase salaries just because they're making more money, just like they don't decrease product prices just because labour/inputs costs went down. Both markets are set by the offer-vs-demand balance, not by a specific company's success.
It's more likelly that the additional wealth from mining in Afghanistan would end up in: - Extra bonuses for CxOs and directors - Extra dividends/stock price increases for shareholder - Money misdirected to some "big men" in the Afghanistani administration - Protection money for the local warlords - Extra profits for weapons dealers for the weapons bought by the Afghanistani government and the local warlords so that the above-mentioned "big men" and warlords can hold on to the new wealth generating mining areas.
All other things being equal, there is a higher chance of you feeling like wanting sex after watching people doing it than the chance of you getting bloodlust after watching violence.
While if you sucumb to "feeling like wanting sex" doesn't usually harm others, sucumbing to "getting bloodlust" is highly likelly to harm others.
The GP point still stands: sex (which harms nobody) is taboo while violence (most definitely harmful) is commonplace in cinema and literature.
Even if seeing sex in movies is more likelly to make you want to have sex than seeing violence is likelly to make you want to go on a rampage, that is not a reason to not show sex on movies while still showing violence since even frequent mass-orgies after movies would harm less people than a single individual going on a rampage.
Clearly the majority of voters in Turkey want a religious party at the helm - otherwise they would've voted for someone else. Turkey is a Democratic country (now that the Generals are under control). [You're either pro-Democracy or against it - if you support a coup when you don't like the results then you're against Democracy]
Whether the turkish want sharia law or not is a totally different thing: while Turkey has some cases of some the most backwards practices in muslim countries (like honor killings), there's no religious police going around beating up girls for having been seen with boys (like in Iran) and burkas are hardly popular.
The impression I get from Turkey is pretty much like my own country (Portugal) from 20 or 30 years ago: while a minority of mostly city living, more educated people don't want religion mixed with politics, the majority which are mostly poorly-educated and living outside cities does want a religion-influenced government. If it's like in my own country, urbanization and near-universal education will sort this out soon enough.
Too bad they're not showing the hundreds or even thousands of hours worth of mining that went into making the largest ships.
Or the 2 years worth of subscription that went into getting the ability to pilot the more advanced ones (learning skills is on a clock using real life time).
Yes, I've played EVE in the past: left when I came to the conclusion it's too much like work, only slower.
EVE has a lot of grassroots advertising above and beyond what it's size would seem to justify because it is fun for the small group you've been there for a long time and belong to one of the player Alliances that control the space with the rarest minerals. It's not really fun for newer players - addictive perhaps, but not fun.
Because of how skills are learned over a period using real-life time (u need not be logged-in for the time to count) a new player can never catch up on an older player. Also the economy is based around the mining of minerals (used for making ships), the most common (least valueable and used in larger quantities for ship making) are found in safe NPC controlled space while the least common are found only in player controlled space (where if you don't belong to the right group you'll be shot on sight).
Somebody has to spend hours and hours mining all those low level minerals needed for making the largest ships for the players in those player Alliances that control "unsafe" space and who beter than newer players (who cannot go outside safe space without being shot) who are suppose to "work" before they get to have fun in PvP?
It is in the best interest of the estabilished players to get as much fresh meat as possible into the game to do the mining.
If you have several years of EVE under your belt and are in a player Alliance you're probably having some fun fights once in a while (a lot of time is wasted in other things and you still have to do some mining of higher level minerals), but if you're not one of those then the game is much lot less interesting than the fanboys portray it.
Normally I drink 2 or 3 expressos a day (equivalent to 3-4 cups of american style coffee each) and often I take cafeine-vacations (currently on one of those) where I completly stop drinking cofee and cafeinated drinks.
It takes about 1-1.5 weeks until the withdrawal sympthoms are over.
After that you actually start sleeping better and will feel less sleepy in the morning than when you drank cofee.
Currently I'm experimenting with drinking american style coffee cups once in a while (once or twice a week) but that stuff is a bit like cafeinated dish washing water for me...
It seem nowadays there are a lot of politicians out who often think of children and sex on the same sentence.
It kind of reminds me of all those raving anti-gay politicians that turn out to be gay themselves: often an obsession with a specific subject of a sexual nature is because those that obsess about it have "forbiden urges" themselves.
ID isn't sciency because it makes no statements that can be tested.
Here's a simple short example of that sort of thing: "The world and everything in it, including this article and your memory of having read it came to be 1 second ago"
Now try and disprove it.
This kind of thing is in the realm of philosophy, not science.
The attempts by large groups to dominate the weak occurred long before capitalism, and will continue should capitalism ever cease to exist. It is simply one model of domination. There are many more in existence.
The thing is, Capitalism + Democracy are "sold" to the masses as Freedom. In fact, the US, the largest country which has adopted that model activelly tries to export it's version of it to other countries and continously brain-washes their own people with the idea that everybody has a chance to raise to the top (not quite so: the US' upwards-mobility rating is lower than most countries).
At least with Feudalism the Peasents weren't bulshited about their function being anything other than produce wealth for the Nobility - not so with Capitalism.
Capitalism is maintained by marketting (it is mercantilistic in nature and only really works as long as the masses remain convinced that all hapiness comes from consuming short-lived goods and services) so in the war of ideas, the only way to balance it is to constantly point out that "The King has no clothes".
Microsoft was force to make the Windows code available to the Chinese government so you can be pretty damn sure that said code made it's way to the state hackers and was thoroughly checked. It's quite likelly that Windows has one or more backdoors put in place at request from some US 3-letter agency, so now the Chinese also can use those for (economic) espionage and cyberwarfare.
Under that scenario, the best option for any company large enough to have social/economical impact worldwide and/or which competes with a Chinese company is to get rid of the compromiside OS.
Nowadays, if you want good, experienced people, you have to go for freelancers (aka contractors). Certainly this is the case in places like London and most of Europe, not sure about Canada. The recession changed that for a bit (when lots of freelancer went permanent 'cause they couldn't find contracts) but that time is past.
The reason for this is that there are only two real career upgrade paths for techical people beyond a certain level of expertise: - Management - Freelancing (there are too few Technical Architect positions and few companies actually have Technical Analysts as part of their development process).
so all the exceptionally qualified techies which are ambitious and driven but don't want to go into management end up freelancing simply because it's the only way to increase your income at that point.
All it takes for a quasi-perpetually growing economy is for more people to get into the workforce.
more workers * same productivity per worker = higher GDP.
This doesn't mean that the average salary goes up if GDP grows due to more people joining the workforce (in fact it would remain roughly the same) but it does mean there is more cream to be skimmed from the top (which is why nowadays the wealthiest individuals are now much wealthier versus the average than in the past).
For most people, contrary to the idea that many governments are/were pushing, it's not total GDP growth that maters (since that can be due to more working people), it's GDP per-capita (since that means more productivity per worker): if worker productivity increases then their work is worth more and their salaries go up.
While the GP has a point that by definition perpetual growth is impossible, the scale of time until we exhaust all available resources on our planet is roughly the same scale as that until the Sun turns into a nova (very literally: our planet is constantly being topped-up with the most basic of resources, energy, from the sun), so "end of growth" is not a problem we need to worry about for the World.
That said, for the more developed nations that use the highest amounts of resources per-capita, an ending to economic growth (and even a reversal) is a realistic problem since we seem to be going into a spiral where all we produce are ways of increasing market efficiency (and deceive the suckers) which suffers from diminishing returns and artificial monopolies to take money away from the many and give it to the few (i.e. intellectual property).
In developed nations we are reaching an inflection point (if we haven't passed it already) where the restrictions to cooperation and the spread of ideas from things like IP laws and the misallocation of economic resources from productive uses into piramid-like schemes (i.e. banking) is outweighting the good sides of those systems. At that point, productivity per worker will start to go down and with that so will average salaries.
I'm starting to think that the only way to get rid of this kind of law is for as many people to suffer as much as possible.
Really, the "Common Joe/Jane" won't be aware of this and it's implications until he/she loses his/her Internet connection 'cause the neighbours kid hacked into their WiFi and used it to download music.
My hope is that, once enough people loose their connections like this, there will be a backslash against this kind of laws (potentially, even against the whole Media Industry).
There are plenty of ways by which this kind of laws will be self destructive: - As more and more people become aware of these actions (either because they're directly affected or because they know someone that is), they will tend to migrate to ISPs that "don't do this to people". Smart, small ISPs can use this to gain market share from the incumbents. Eventually even the incumbents will start becoming slow and obstructionist with regards to requests to cut people's connections... - Plenty of governments are passing "Right to a broadband connection" laws. There is a growing awareness that the Internet has become essential for the prosperity and competitiveness of developed nations. At the same time, Government has been putting more and more services on the Net. This will intensify as the need for the state to cut custs means that many services are moved to the Net.In this scenario, cutting people's Internet connections en masse is bad for countries' futures and bad for governments' bottom-lines. - There is no country in the world where the Media Industry produces enough wealth to overset the losses in productivity and efficiency of not having large segments that country's population connected. On the balance, these kind of measures make a country less competitive, not more - countries with smaller Media Industries will be the first to break ranks (or not get into it at all), thus boosting their own competivity.
Don't forget that teenagers and kids are the ones that do the most sharing online: there are a lot of families with kids out there - if this is really applied there will soon enough be lots of stories in the press.
The way I see it, we as Internet savy and technology aware people should help this allong by providing the "neighbours" kid with easy to use tools to hack into those WiFi connections and make it easy for anybody to denounce anybody else for Copyright Theft (incorrect word used on purpose) and have their connections closed. In fact, the ideal scenario is whole neighbourhoods going down because of some kid or the local misadjusted teenager accusing half his neighbours of Copyright Theft.
Only when these kinds of laws are taken to their natural conclusion (in a world where everything is copyrighted) will they be repelled - maybe we might even leverage the backslash to cleanup Intellectual Property legislation...
Funilly enough I have a somewhat similar experience as you although in my case it as more like: - EVE Online - WOW just after release - Guild Wars - LOTRO - Tried Warhammer Onlime - Tried D&D Online - Back to WoW, 4 years after I left.
I pretty much came to a similar conclusion: they're all very much the same.
Yet, at around the time I was getting fed-up with LOTRO I found out that for me (an Explorer in the Bartle types), it's fun enough to start on an MMORPG, see most of the content and then leave for another MMORPG (or whatever Sngle Player game catches my attention).
In other words, if you like exploring and experiencing the content of a game, then you can approach MMORPGs as just RPGs that happen to have huge amounts of content to experience and be online.
Once you start seing them as "just another game, only bigger" it becomes natural to join the game, have some fun, see a bit of everything and eventually get bored, at which point you can move on to a different one. Nobody says that you can't come back at a later date once the developers add more content. Certainly it seems to be working for me.
Treat an MMORPG like you would a Single Player RPG only with much more content and something you can take a break of and when you come back there will be new stuff in the game for you to see and experience.
And if you blow in the competition you get to keep ALL of your price fixed profits. What kind of a system is this? Am I missing something here? How exactly are these companies being punished so that they won't do this again?
That's how they catch them. It creates a nice Prisioner's Dilema where the first to break ranks get's away with it.
Countries that have laws for this experience much higher rates of catching price-fixing cartels than those who don't.
Hell they are probably already learning from their mistakes and looking to secure another price fixing scam for the immediate future.
After they have proven themselves as snitches, who exactly would trust them and get in a price fixing cartel with them?
Slashdot Mirror
More generically:
- A film played in real-time (i.e. 1h film playing = 1h of time in what is being filmed) about pretty much anybody in the world would be extraordinarilly boring for almost anybody else.
- A tweets is equivalent to a small text description of an instant in such a film.
I've been working in IT as a Software Developer for 15 years now, worked for 10 companies in 3 different countries (i've been a freelancer/contractor for the last 7 years) and across 4 different industries (IT Services, IT Products, Finance, Publishing)
I can tell you that, if you're a really gifted Software Developer in the beginning of your career, the best places to work don't even appear in these surveys:
- In my experience, the best place to start in IT as a Software Developer is a small IT consultancy
In big companies, bureaucracy is rife and mind-numbing - things like getting access to a development Linux machine for example can take from several days (if all you need is an account on an existing machine) to months (if you need a new machine). In a small company you can set-up your own machine (dual boot ur desktop: no prob) or just have a chat with you friendly local sysadmin (often another developer) to get access to one - in a big company you have to fill-in one or more request forms and if it's only getting a new account in an existing machine if you're lucky it will end up in the queue for some guy in India to do at the end of the following week.
In small companies, if you're good you'll be noticed (you're not just another number in a ledger) and they'll give you all kinds of challenging stuff to do - in the beginning of your career this is the fastest way to get exposures to all kinds of technologies. In a large company you're stuck in a corner doing a limited number of things, probably working on an existing, long lived system, whose only educational value is to be an example of how not to design/code software and you won't easilly become known in other teams as being a really good coder and thus getting a chance to work on other systems.
Working in an IT company is better that in a non-IT one for a very simple reason:
- In an IT company (especially services) you are in a profit-centre: the group you are in contributes directly or in a very straightforward way to the company's revenues and profit. They'll be a lot more keen on best practices (including such basic ones as promoting code reuse) and actual development processes (for example Agile) usually with a much beter approach to preparing for a project before coding even starts.
- In a non-IT company you're in a cost-centre: the group you are in costs money and does not visibly contribute to the company's bottom line. There will much less emphasys in optimizing the software development process (since it's results are not as easy to measure) and, especially in large companies, you are much less likelly to find widespread code-reuse programs or any kind of formal or semi-formal software development process (large company's CTOs are often promoted from infrastructure groups - i.e. setting up networks, installing systems - or the business, and are better know for their self-promotion or golfing skills than for their strategic approach to IT).
As for the difference between IT Products and IT Services companies, the former just have a much smaller variance of technologies you might be exposed to (since they concentrate on a couple of products) while the later, having many projects for many client will have a lot more opportunities for learning new technologies.
I strongly advise you to keep away from large well know IT Consultancies since:
- They're sweat shops
- They outsource most of the low level work to India and as an entry level developer you will end up doing only local installation/maintenance tasks (that cannot be outsourced) and/or being trained as a Consultant (which is more of salesman than a techie).
I've been working as a freelancer in IT for large banks in London for a couple of years now and all of them have Charity programs.
The common thing to all those programs is that employees are expected to donate their own personal time and/or money to make the company look good. I have yet to see one in which the company donated worker-hours to charity.
It's all PR on the cheap: that's the way they work.
Thus I'm not at all surprised when their "Diversity" programs tend to really be about projecting an image of "forward thinking and hip" to attract young (and easilly impressed) employees and pre-emptivelly avoid anti-discrimination laws and lawsuits, not about being inclusive.
Oh noes.
They found my archive with 10 years of posts from alt.sex.stories
I work in the UK as a freelancer in IT and I need to have my own company, pay taxes and have an accountant.
I used to work in Holland as a freelancer in IT in there I needed to ... you guessed it ... have a company and an accountant.
Even if you don't want to have your own company, there are in fact schemes like "Umbrela Companies" which are in fact accountant managed companies who will temporary "employ" the freelancers and pass them all the income from their contracts minus tax and their part of corporation costs. These are however less tax efficient (you are taxed as an employee and income usually pays more taxes than dividends or capital gains) than just having your own company.
I'm sure Ukraine has some smart accountants who would love to setup some scheme like this.
Somehow I suspect that the real concern here is that freelancers will have to start paying real taxes like everybody else (my hearth weeps) instead of getting their roads, schools and law-enforcement for free.
I don't know about you guys, but with myself I noticed that when my car radio is playing an "agressive" (for example, heavy metal) or fast beat kind of music my driving gets a lot more reckless than after I've just had a session of playing GTA.
In fact, interestingly enough, while playing GTA I find myself tunning the in-game car radio for that kind of tunes much more than slower/placid ones.
Funilly enough, I work as an IT freelancer for investment banks and I've noticed that traders and analysts in those banks (those guys that make the million $ bonuses) are essentially salesmen: most of their time is spent finding and doing "deals", not creating new products or finding new ways to beat the market.
In fact, most of the work done in IT for those banks is around automating thinks like pricing and market-making to let the traders concentrate on selling their "products".
It's not overly surprised that those who deal directly with money get the highest monetary rewards (as bonuses or comissions) since their contribution to the company's bottom-line is (at least on the short term) very easy to measure (they make sure that negative effects usually only come due long after the bonus has been cashed).
Saudi Arabia is one huge nanny state where their nationals are directly or indirectly kept by the state thanks to the oil money.
Their problem is that they're pulling out the oil from the ground faster that anybody else all the while their native population (thus, not counting all the foreign nationals brough in for the "dirty jobs") has been fast growing - they're expected to pretty much run out of oil before the end of this century and the way things are going their population will be 3 times larger but the state will have no money for them.
This kind of thing is already happening with Dubai (which had a lot less oil to begin with), which is why they have been trying hard to diversify their economy into pretty much any area where they think there might be a future.
Dubai is a small place, reasonable well located, with a small population which their leaders have tried hard to get educated, so they might manage to transform themselves into the Singapore of the Middle East. Saudi Arabia, being much bigger, much more closed to the world and whose only claims to greatness are Oil and an exceptionally extremist strain of Islam (Wahabism), is unlikelly to be able to do so.
The percentage of a corporation's revenue that ends up in the hands of any of it's workers not having a CxO title is very small, especially in non-service industries (such as mining).
Corporations don't increase salaries just because they're making more money, just like they don't decrease product prices just because labour/inputs costs went down. Both markets are set by the offer-vs-demand balance, not by a specific company's success.
It's more likelly that the additional wealth from mining in Afghanistan would end up in:
- Extra bonuses for CxOs and directors
- Extra dividends/stock price increases for shareholder
- Money misdirected to some "big men" in the Afghanistani administration
- Protection money for the local warlords
- Extra profits for weapons dealers for the weapons bought by the Afghanistani government and the local warlords so that the above-mentioned "big men" and warlords can hold on to the new wealth generating mining areas.
Most of us are brain-whores for some company or other but only lawyers specialize in S&M.
While if you sucumb to "feeling like wanting sex" doesn't usually harm others, sucumbing to "getting bloodlust" is highly likelly to harm others.
The GP point still stands: sex (which harms nobody) is taboo while violence (most definitely harmful) is commonplace in cinema and literature.
Even if seeing sex in movies is more likelly to make you want to have sex than seeing violence is likelly to make you want to go on a rampage, that is not a reason to not show sex on movies while still showing violence since even frequent mass-orgies after movies would harm less people than a single individual going on a rampage.
Clearly the majority of voters in Turkey want a religious party at the helm - otherwise they would've voted for someone else. Turkey is a Democratic country (now that the Generals are under control).
[You're either pro-Democracy or against it - if you support a coup when you don't like the results then you're against Democracy]
Whether the turkish want sharia law or not is a totally different thing: while Turkey has some cases of some the most backwards practices in muslim countries (like honor killings), there's no religious police going around beating up girls for having been seen with boys (like in Iran) and burkas are hardly popular.
The impression I get from Turkey is pretty much like my own country (Portugal) from 20 or 30 years ago: while a minority of
mostly city living, more educated people don't want religion mixed with politics, the majority which are mostly poorly-educated and living outside cities does want a religion-influenced government. If it's like in my own country, urbanization and near-universal education will sort this out soon enough.
Too bad they're not showing the hundreds or even thousands of hours worth of mining that went into making the largest ships.
Or the 2 years worth of subscription that went into getting the ability to pilot the more advanced ones (learning skills is on a clock using real life time).
Yes, I've played EVE in the past: left when I came to the conclusion it's too much like work, only slower.
EVE has a lot of grassroots advertising above and beyond what it's size would seem to justify because it is fun for the small group you've been there for a long time and belong to one of the player Alliances that control the space with the rarest minerals. It's not really fun for newer players - addictive perhaps, but not fun.
Because of how skills are learned over a period using real-life time (u need not be logged-in for the time to count) a new player can never catch up on an older player.
Also the economy is based around the mining of minerals (used for making ships), the most common (least valueable and used in larger quantities for ship making) are found in safe NPC controlled space while the least common are found only in player controlled space (where if you don't belong to the right group you'll be shot on sight).
Somebody has to spend hours and hours mining all those low level minerals needed for making the largest ships for the players in those player Alliances that control "unsafe" space and who beter than newer players (who cannot go outside safe space without being shot) who are suppose to "work" before they get to have fun in PvP?
It is in the best interest of the estabilished players to get as much fresh meat as possible into the game to do the mining.
If you have several years of EVE under your belt and are in a player Alliance you're probably having some fun fights once in a while (a lot of time is wasted in other things and you still have to do some mining of higher level minerals), but if you're not one of those then the game is much lot less interesting than the fanboys portray it.
Normally I drink 2 or 3 expressos a day (equivalent to 3-4 cups of american style coffee each) and often I take cafeine-vacations (currently on one of those) where I completly stop drinking cofee and cafeinated drinks.
It takes about 1-1.5 weeks until the withdrawal sympthoms are over.
After that you actually start sleeping better and will feel less sleepy in the morning than when you drank cofee.
Currently I'm experimenting with drinking american style coffee cups once in a while (once or twice a week) but that stuff is a bit like cafeinated dish washing water for me ...
That would be "homolibrium"
A good thing too.
It seem nowadays there are a lot of politicians out who often think of children and sex on the same sentence.
It kind of reminds me of all those raving anti-gay politicians that turn out to be gay themselves: often an obsession with a specific subject of a sexual nature is because those that obsess about it have "forbiden urges" themselves.
Somehow those two concepts just poped-up linked in my mind.
ID isn't sciency because it makes no statements that can be tested.
Here's a simple short example of that sort of thing:
"The world and everything in it, including this article and your memory of having read it came to be 1 second ago"
Now try and disprove it.
This kind of thing is in the realm of philosophy, not science.
The thing is, Capitalism + Democracy are "sold" to the masses as Freedom. In fact, the US, the largest country which has adopted that model activelly tries to export it's version of it to other countries and continously brain-washes their own people with the idea that everybody has a chance to raise to the top (not quite so: the US' upwards-mobility rating is lower than most countries).
At least with Feudalism the Peasents weren't bulshited about their function being anything other than produce wealth for the Nobility - not so with Capitalism.
Capitalism is maintained by marketting (it is mercantilistic in nature and only really works as long as the masses remain convinced that all hapiness comes from consuming short-lived goods and services) so in the war of ideas, the only way to balance it is to constantly point out that "The King has no clothes".
Microsoft was force to make the Windows code available to the Chinese government so you can be pretty damn sure that said code made it's way to the state hackers and was thoroughly checked. It's quite likelly that Windows has one or more backdoors put in place at request from some US 3-letter agency, so now the Chinese also can use those for (economic) espionage and cyberwarfare.
Under that scenario, the best option for any company large enough to have social/economical impact worldwide and/or which competes with a Chinese company is to get rid of the compromiside OS.
Nowadays, if you want good, experienced people, you have to go for freelancers (aka contractors). Certainly this is the case in places like London and most of Europe, not sure about Canada. The recession changed that for a bit (when lots of freelancer went permanent 'cause they couldn't find contracts) but that time is past.
The reason for this is that there are only two real career upgrade paths for techical people beyond a certain level of expertise:
- Management
- Freelancing
(there are too few Technical Architect positions and few companies actually have Technical Analysts as part of their development process).
so all the exceptionally qualified techies which are ambitious and driven but don't want to go into management end up freelancing simply because it's the only way to increase your income at that point.
All it takes for a quasi-perpetually growing economy is for more people to get into the workforce.
more workers * same productivity per worker = higher GDP.
This doesn't mean that the average salary goes up if GDP grows due to more people joining the workforce (in fact it would remain roughly the same) but it does mean there is more cream to be skimmed from the top (which is why nowadays the wealthiest individuals are now much wealthier versus the average than in the past).
For most people, contrary to the idea that many governments are/were pushing, it's not total GDP growth that maters (since that can be due to more working people), it's GDP per-capita (since that means more productivity per worker): if worker productivity increases then their work is worth more and their salaries go up.
While the GP has a point that by definition perpetual growth is impossible, the scale of time until we exhaust all available resources on our planet is roughly the same scale as that until the Sun turns into a nova (very literally: our planet is constantly being topped-up with the most basic of resources, energy, from the sun), so "end of growth" is not a problem we need to worry about for the World.
That said, for the more developed nations that use the highest amounts of resources per-capita, an ending to economic growth (and even a reversal) is a realistic problem since we seem to be going into a spiral where all we produce are ways of increasing market efficiency (and deceive the suckers) which suffers from diminishing returns and artificial monopolies to take money away from the many and give it to the few (i.e. intellectual property).
In developed nations we are reaching an inflection point (if we haven't passed it already) where the restrictions to cooperation and the spread of ideas from things like IP laws and the misallocation of economic resources from productive uses into piramid-like schemes (i.e. banking) is outweighting the good sides of those systems. At that point, productivity per worker will start to go down and with that so will average salaries.
I'm starting to think that the only way to get rid of this kind of law is for as many people to suffer as much as possible.
Really, the "Common Joe/Jane" won't be aware of this and it's implications until he/she loses his/her Internet connection 'cause the neighbours kid hacked into their WiFi and used it to download music.
My hope is that, once enough people loose their connections like this, there will be a backslash against this kind of laws (potentially, even against the whole Media Industry).
There are plenty of ways by which this kind of laws will be self destructive: ...
- As more and more people become aware of these actions (either because they're directly affected or because they know someone that is), they will tend to migrate to ISPs that "don't do this to people". Smart, small ISPs can use this to gain market share from the incumbents. Eventually even the incumbents will start becoming slow and obstructionist with regards to requests to cut people's connections
- Plenty of governments are passing "Right to a broadband connection" laws. There is a growing awareness that the Internet has become essential for the prosperity and competitiveness of developed nations. At the same time, Government has been putting more and more services on the Net. This will intensify as the need for the state to cut custs means that many services are moved to the Net.In this scenario, cutting people's Internet connections en masse is bad for countries' futures and bad for governments' bottom-lines.
- There is no country in the world where the Media Industry produces enough wealth to overset the losses in productivity and efficiency of not having large segments that country's population connected. On the balance, these kind of measures make a country less competitive, not more - countries with smaller Media Industries will be the first to break ranks (or not get into it at all), thus boosting their own competivity.
Don't forget that teenagers and kids are the ones that do the most sharing online: there are a lot of families with kids out there - if this is really applied there will soon enough be lots of stories in the press.
The way I see it, we as Internet savy and technology aware people should help this allong by providing the "neighbours" kid with easy to use tools to hack into those WiFi connections and make it easy for anybody to denounce anybody else for Copyright Theft (incorrect word used on purpose) and have their connections closed. In fact, the ideal scenario is whole neighbourhoods going down because of some kid or the local misadjusted teenager accusing half his neighbours of Copyright Theft.
Only when these kinds of laws are taken to their natural conclusion (in a world where everything is copyrighted) will they be repelled - maybe we might even leverage the backslash to cleanup Intellectual Property legislation ...
Funilly enough I have a somewhat similar experience as you although in my case it as more like:
- EVE Online
- WOW just after release
- Guild Wars
- LOTRO
- Tried Warhammer Onlime
- Tried D&D Online
- Back to WoW, 4 years after I left.
I pretty much came to a similar conclusion: they're all very much the same.
Yet, at around the time I was getting fed-up with LOTRO I found out that for me (an Explorer in the Bartle types), it's fun enough to start on an MMORPG, see most of the content and then leave for another MMORPG (or whatever Sngle Player game catches my attention).
In other words, if you like exploring and experiencing the content of a game, then you can approach MMORPGs as just RPGs that happen to have huge amounts of content to experience and be online.
Once you start seing them as "just another game, only bigger" it becomes natural to join the game, have some fun, see a bit of everything and eventually get bored, at which point you can move on to a different one. Nobody says that you can't come back at a later date once the developers add more content. Certainly it seems to be working for me.
Treat an MMORPG like you would a Single Player RPG only with much more content and something you can take a break of and when you come back there will be new stuff in the game for you to see and experience.
That's how they catch them. It creates a nice Prisioner's Dilema where the first to break ranks get's away with it.
Countries that have laws for this experience much higher rates of catching price-fixing cartels than those who don't.
After they have proven themselves as snitches, who exactly would trust them and get in a price fixing cartel with them?