Too late and little comfort for those individuals in the "non-rational" companies who were fired (and possibly saw their careers go down the drain) because they were "too cautious".
For most traders, as an individual the "rational" thing to do was "do the same that all around you are doing and keep your concerns to yourself".
The ones that rode the ride all the way to the crash are the ones that still have millions in the bank from the last 5 years' bonuses.
In a couple of year time when the next boom comes, all this will be forgotten, "aggressive trading" will be all the rage again and caution will be thrown to the winds.
Do you have any sources that backup your national and cultural stereotypes and your sweeping generalisations?
I'm Portuguese, I lived in Holland for 8 years and I've been living in England for the past 2 years.
In addition to English and Portuguese I also speak Dutch, French and Spanish and can understand some Italian and German.
The points I made above come from my observations from the countries I lived in and from watching TV from several other countries (since I can understand their language).
As somebody pointed up, the same kind of cultural crisis is happening in other countries, not just the UK. The difference is that in the UK (or at least England where I live) and from what I can see, the process is a lot more advanced and there are a lot more social ills than either in Portugal or Holland.
From my living experience there, and in my opinion: - The reason why things are not as bad in Portugal is because family bonds there are very strong still, people are in general much less prone to violence and parent still teach "respect for others" to their kids. Also the country is still very culturally uniform and has a large number of traditions which are still celebrated in the media. - The reason why things are not as bad in Holland is because people as individuals are also concerned with being a good part of society and thus balance their individual needs with being accepted by society (while in England the individual is supreme and absolute selfishness is acceptable). In Holland if you behave like an asshole you will be told that you are an asshole (Dutch people can be very direct and "in your face", some people confuse this with lack of politeness), while in England if you do that, your palls will cheer you, everybody else will shut up and you might even get your own TV Show.
Maybe you guys might want to figure out why the "young people" are pissed off and do something about it?
Food for thought: - There is no family culture in England like there is in Mediterranean countries (think the whole "mama" thing in Italy) - There is no overall, unified set of traditions in England other than "go out and get pissed on Fridays" - Media continuously pushes the image that happiness comes from buying stuff. - There is no feeling of social responsibility like there is in Nordic and Germanic countries (for example, in Holland being called anti-social - asociaal - is actually an insult). Around here people are taught it's everybody for themselves and don't mind the others. - The local heroes that youths aim to emulate are not those of science, culture or law - they're mostly "celebs" whose business is show-business and whose product is being scandalous. - Parents are not made to take responsibility for the actions of their kids. - A culture of political correctness, small-powers, centralized command-and-control and common law has taken away or distorted the powers of punishment/reward from socially-important actors such as teachers and social workers.
I've lived in 3 countries by now and the UK is the one country where I feel the most that I'm surrounded by the sheeple.
Once again the local wolves are increasing their powers to fleece the sheeple - I'm not surprised.
The pound is weak, it's highly likely that Britain is going to be the European country worst affected by the recession (in the last couple of years all the sheeple where busy getting themselves further and further into debt to buy all the useless consumer goods they saw on the tele - all that debt will need to be unwound now) and the current "throwing money into the fire to keep us warm" policies will mean higher taxes in the future:
There is a lot less money to be made by expert foreign workers in UK for now and for the coming 2 to 5 years.
I bet most people will forget that the UK is deeper in the shit-pit than almost everybody else due to the current government's past policies and will just eat up the spin being put out by the Prime Minister (which never misses an opportunity to say that the recession came from outside the UK) and re-elect Labour 'cause "they save us from a deeper recession".
I'm working on my plan to move to a better country as we speak.
... so when the economy is up advertising is up and when the economy is down advertising is down.
When companies are struggling to make it to the next fiscal year, the first thing they cut is their marketing budget (surprise, surprise)
Advertising on the Internet is affected just like other advertising - so it's going down at the moment and will go up when the economy starts to pick up again.
All these explanations about how stuff done via the Internet is somehow special are just a throwback to the previous bubble when loads of "consultants" and "experts" made a living out of spewing bullshit about how the Internet was special and the "growth" it drove was permanent and would keep going forever (i think most of us remember how that went...)
I think part of the reason why MMORPGs continue to increase in popularity in the PC gaming space is that latest crop of non MMO games is composed mostly of "me-too" titles (games based on previously successful games) and ultra-extreme-DRM filled games (which often won't run because of the DRM or even make your PC unstable because the install buggy drivers).
Personally in the last year I went back to MMORPGs (in the past I used to play EVE-Online and WoW) with LOTRO because I felt that most newer PC games were too simple, too much alike games I had played to death already and/or too risky to install (due to their rootkit-like DRM and the instability problems that often come with it).
Successful MMORPGs like LOTRO and WoW have a huge value for money to gamers because their content is enormous (they're huge virtual worlds) they support multiple playing forms (PvP, solo PvE, cooperative PvE) and they keep getting expanded: to keep people playing and paying their monthly fees, games with a PvE side must continuously expand with new areas/items.
About LOTRO: Before Mines of Moria, LOTRO was indeed getting a bit stale and the number of players online at any time was dwindling. This was visible both in PvE and PvP.
Immediately when MoM came out the number of players online increased a lot (doubled or tripled). At the moment most people are more or less done with exploring the new areas and are starting to do mostly group instances to acquire the necessary kit to go do the single new Raid area that came with MoM (most LOTRO players are casual players, hence the number of power-players that went trough all the new content in 2 or 3 weeks is very low).
To keep momentum going more content will have to start being released in the next month or two (Turbine, the makers of the game, usually release free expansions - "books" - about once every 2 months). As pointed above, the continued success of a MMORPG depends a lot on keeping a steady stream of new content coming out to keep players playing (and paying).
This will inevitably be modded troll, but it is all too often that people forget that video games, like movies and books, are essentially toys/time wasters.
Not "time wasting" but instead "entertaining". Different things.
If one wants to "waste time" there are plenty of ways of doing it which are not entertaining (for example: count to 1 million in your head)
The difference between entertainment and pure time wasting is that the first is supposed to be enjoyable.
Which brings us around to the point that games (and videos and books) should be enjoyable (fun). Clearly people are using some kind of criteria to choose the games, movies and books they spend time with (otherwise why would some be great successes and others flops) and it seems logical that the main criteria would be enjoyment.
Ask for their advice when there is a technical question/problem to sort out
Actually listen and seriously conjsider their responses. Do not assume that your technial expertise from X years ago makes your able to know the best solutions all the time
Challenge their assumptions - have them explain why do they think their solution is better
Let people know the business reasons for why a technically inferior solution was chosen
Keep telling that authenticity spiel to yourself when your character gets Pwned in PvP by a little kid that bought a Sword of Pwnage and a Dollar Potion of Mega-boost with his daddy's credit card.
Game items that you can buy with real money should never change game balance in any way - they should be pure vanity items. Even XP boosters are bad for the game...
I vaguely remember that he was one to the people consistently pushing for extensions to copyright length here in the UK.
Note how here in the UK copyright is now Life + 70 years...
In my opinion, his choice for DRM free formats is a natural followup to the same considerations that lead Recording Companies to go ahead and support the new Amazon music store which sells DRM free music in MP3 format: they were scared shitless that Apple was becoming the Microsoft of the Digital Music Distribution world and thus the de facto gatekeeper for the future of music distribution.
That and he can afford it, seeing that he's gonna keep getting payed for the rest of his life for his 6 months of light work in 1966 and all little pieces here and there of followup work...
US media is very distinctly biased and partial compared with the media in other Western nations - just go check European news outlets like BBC and TV5 (if you can speak French) and you'll see what I mean.
Let me just point this out: most issues are portrayed in the US media as having two sides - a Democratic and a Republican. How often is any other point of view considered in most mainstream news media in the US?
That said, the media in the US is not a mouthpiece for the state in that it does not constantly parrot the words of those current serving as elected officials. It is instead a mouthpiece for the establishment: Democrats + Republicans + lobbyists
The religious right is against millions-of-years-ago storytelling that masquerades as hard science.
<irony> It's clear from your neutral, non-emotionally charged and logical words and arguments that you are not at all pushing an agenda. </irony>
Having been raised in a deeply catholic country and having studied science at an University along with some colleagues and even teachers which were both scientists AND Christians it never ceases to amaze me how the US seems to produce scores and scores of uneducated, anti-education, ignorant and even downright dumb "believers", incapable of reconciling religion with science.
Quick hint: it's perfectly possible to believe both in God and in the Big-Bang - they're not at all mutually exclusive as long as you look at the bible as a book full of allegories instead of trying to believe that the English translation is literally the word of Jesus.
I used to live in Holland, more specifically in the Amsterdam area.
In there you're free to buy and smoke pot if you want (coffeeshops are widespread in Amsterdam) and there are some projects going on that provide the drugs to hard-drug users.
I noticed two things: - In Amsterdam, it's mostly the foreigners that go to the coffeeshops. Most dutch people either don't smoke the stuff with any regularity or are not doing it in the open, even though marijuana is widely available and you're not shunned by society for smoking it. - Of all the big cities I've been in or lived in, Amsterdam is the place with the fewest (visible) junkies on it's streets.
The impression from my time in Holland and in other countries is that: - Making drugs illegal and restricted just increases their appeal to certain people (a bit like luxury items are inherently more appealing when their supply is restricted). Making them easily available means that they are common and not especially cool in any way: mostly people try it once and think "so what's the big deal?". - When consuming drugs is illegal then those that need help cannot get it. Many addicts (drug addicts or otherwise) will seek help (or they're friends or family will seek help for them) to break the addiction if they think they will not be thrown in jail and can succeed.
My overall point being that widespread gun availability means that both the good guys and the bad guys find it easier to get their hands on guns.
From here come a couple of effects: - While in an environment where guns are tightly controlled, a thief might or not have a gun, in and environment where guns are easy to come by, a thief almost always has a gun. This is because they can get hold of one easily, because they can't be imprisoned by just carrying a gun (when guns are outlawed, only bad guys - or cops - have guns, so anybody caught with a gun which is not a cop goes to jail) and because they expect other people to have a gun so they need their own gun as an equalizer. In practice this results in more violent crimes and more deaths, not less.
- The bad guys will carry guns and use them because they expect others to also have guns. They are also much more likely to shoot first since if they do not, there is a higher danger that they will get killed by those on the other side.
- A gun is a ranged weapon. In the case of many guns (for example handguns) it can also easily be concealed. This makes it a lot more easy to catch a target unaware and hit him from a distance. It also means that escape is a lot harder (and very much dependent on luck) than with a melee weapon. Guess who is more likely to use a gun as a ranged surprise killer - the good guys or the bad guys?
- Due to their inherent nature, handguns are a lot more likely to kill than other weapons of a similar size. In an environment where guns are widespread, crimes of passion or rage are a lot more likely to result in deaths than when only crude, less powerful weapons are available.
While a gun will give his wearer an emotional feeling of power and security, if it comes as part of a system where guns are easily available, the actual security of the wearer is in fact decreased in that they are more likely to get killed. Human beings being human, the knowledge that the probability of one's violent death is now higher does not come as a true feeling of insecurity, because deep down we are unable to accept the possibility of our own demise and we all believe that violent death "will not happen to me".
How about emotional pressure (appealing to one's feelings), social pressure (you will be shunned/respected by your peers), flight (as in - run away)?
1. Reason (This isn't Star Trek's Vulcan; emotions and reason are intertwined)
2. Reason (why the social pressure works)
3. Force (physical removal of problem).
I suppose if you (re)define Reason to mean any level of human interaction that does not involve physical contact and (re)define Force to mean any level of human interaction that does involve physical contact then "Reason OR Force" covers the full universe of possibilities.
In that case I'm curious about something: - If a thief is trying to steal from me and I make a funny fart so that he laughs and decides to leave me alone, is that Reason or Force?
With no guns you're limited mostly to using methods that require more physical strength.
I incorrectly phrased this. In that context I meant: - With no guns, thief and other crocks are limited mostly to using methods that require more physical strength.
The point being that guns empower the bad guys just as much as they empower the goods guys.
In addition to that, a widespread availability of guns makes the bad guys be more prone to use extreme violence "just in case" the good guys might have a gun.
Last but not least, the "empowerment" that any single person gets with a gun is tightly related to their willingness (not just intellectual but moral and emotional - the right there in the moment split second hesitate or not) to kill someone.
Just for the fun of it I'll pick some random pieces and demonstrate the flawed logic in them:
Then there's the argument that the gun makes confrontations lethal that otherwise would only result in injury. This argument is fallacious in several ways. Without guns involved, confrontations are won by the physically superior party inflicting overwhelming injury on the loser.
People who think that fists, bats, sticks, or stones don't constitute lethal force watch too much TV, where people take beatings and come out of it with a bloody lip at worst. The fact that the gun makes lethal force easier works solely in favor of the weaker defender, not the stronger attacker. If both are armed, the field is level.
Actually the field is not made level, it's just tilted differently: with 2 persons armed with a gun facing each other, the person that has the least amount of moral/ethical restraint with regards to killing another person wins - they kill the other one, so game over (think about it, a cold-blooded killer face to face with somebody that never killed anything in his life, both with guns - who wins?)
Human beings only have two ways to deal with one another: reason and force. If you want me to do something for you, you have a choice of either convincing me via argument, or make me do your bidding under threat of force. Every human interaction falls into one of those two categories, without exception. Reason or force, that's it.
How about emotional pressure (appealing to one's feelings), social pressure (you will be shunned/respected by your peers), flight (as in - run away)?
I would hardly classify any of those as either reason or force.
When I carry a gun, you cannot deal with me by force. You have to use reason and try to persuade me, because I have a way to negate your threat or employment of force.
Of course I can deal with you by force - after all, the same laws the let you have a gun, let me have a gun too: i just shoot you in the back, you die and I take your stuff...
If I thought you didn't have a gun I might just try and knock you out - but if you MIGHT have a gun, I'm not taking the risk of getting shot so i'll shoot you before you even see me.
The gun is the only personal weapon that puts a 100-pound woman on equal footing with a 220-pound mugger, a 75-year old retiree on equal footing with a 19-year old gang banger, and a single guy on equal footing with a carload of drunk guys with baseball bats. The gun removes the disparity in physical strength, size, or numbers between a potential attacker and a defender.
Please note my point above that the one with the least amount of moral/ethical restraint about killing people wins.
Also, guns just mean that cold-blooded killers can now kill from their early childhood (once they're strong enough to hold a gun) until they're so old they became too weak to hold a gun: that's at least 70 years of glorious murdering
With no guns you're limited mostly to using methods that require more physical strength.
Guns also empower those that are morally flawed and weak - a gun lets them be violent criminals.
For all the baiting on his post i agree with the basic point of the parent poster: - The original series was better than the sequel
I'm old enough to have seen it during my early teens when it first came out, and even though the special effects now look dated, for the time it was a great SciFi action series that really made you want to be there and fly space fighters with the rest of them.
The sequel on the other hand is not at all quite as exciting: the thrilling sequences of action are fewer that the long drawn sequences of intrigue and/or inner-conflict and to add insult to injury the action sequences are frequently interrupted by shots of the faces of some or other "intrigue" character standing in the bridge of Battlestar Galactica with the look of somebody fighting an internal conflicts.
The single most boring thing about the new Battlestart Galactica series were all the philosophical / internal-conflict / interpersonal-power-play scenes which were used as cheap filler (no FX = cheap) in between the action scenes.
Now they want to do a series which consists almost entirely of cheap filler scenes???
The 1980s are calling and they want their Dallas clone back...
I'm hardly working in the UK 'cause I'm a charitable person.
That said, if the new proposed high rate of tax does come into effect in 2011 I'll be decamping for better pastures: as a serial emigrant, with portable skills and speaking 5 languages I can easily go to where my income is maximized (taking in account that moving countries can cost between £500 and £3000 depending on how much stuff u move, not to mention lost income during the time u are not working).
The ability and willingness to use and produce documentation demonstrates awareness of the life-cycle of software and the need for ease of evolution, support and maintainability of software.
I don't care how fast you are at coding, if you're not aware that most of the time spent working in software is spent on post-release bug-fixing, performance improvements, new feature development and upgrading then you're not the expert developer you believe you are.
If you can't see that by not producing either a user manual or a technical manual, in the future people will need to reverse engineer to code to actually figure our the details of what the software does, then you're not the expert developer you believe you are.
If you're not aware that 5 months down the line after release, you or the poor sod that was brought to maintain the software you developed will struggle to fix/upgrade it because you didn't even documented the code, then you're not the expert developer you believe you are.
If you're not aware that over the life-cycle of a piece of software, the least documented code is the one that ages the fastest (as people change a badly understood piece of code it becomes spaghetti code faster and is hacked more often in strange ways), then you're not the expert developer you believe you are.
The only reason for a real Software Engineer not to document when given the chance is to create a situation where they become irreplaceable 'cause they're the only person that can maintain a certain application or system - hardly an ethical thing to do, although understandable in the current economic climate.
That said, as with everything there is a balance between documenting enough and documenting too much - too much mandatory documentation is just bureaucracy and a waste of time.
The locals (yes, I'm living here ATM) are constantly brainwashed by the local politicians and media with bullshit talk of British exceptionalism and that only bad things come from the EU.
Well, I have news for you: - The Empire is long gone. Nowadays the only thing the British are exceptional at is extra shoddy management (as compared with Northern European nations - I've lived in Holland so i can compare), an unhealthy level of consumption of stories about (mostly media created) celebs and ever lowering standards of education. - The UK politicians actually use European institutions to introduce controversial laws into the UK by the back door. They then proceed to blame the "unaccountable" EU, thus getting the law they want without the blame. Yet, somehow it seems that most of the locals don't see through the thin veil of deceit (see my comment above about "ever lowering standards of education") and proceed to repeat all the pap about the dictatorship of the EU overriding national sovereignty...
I work in Investment Banking in London and from the percentage of non-brits in positions of importance here (something like 70% or more) it seems to me that the (in the past) most successful economic activity in the UK is only here because foreigners choose to come here. My personal pet theory is that due to the popularity of English as a second language (thanks to Americans made movies and TV series) people find it much more easy to move here (i remember how hard it was to learn Dutch when I went to Holland).
</rant>
That said, although I'm pro-European (after all, it allows me and many like me - including many brits - to live and work anywhere we choose in Europe) I do believe that the EU institutions as they are at the moment are not democratic and representative enough and that at least the European Commission and the European Council need to be scrapped or loose a lot of their power.
It is our duty as citizens to follow the laws, to follow the moral contract made by our ancestors who founded the country and the sovereign people among which we live now: to which we are all therefore bound (as individuals), and it is unethical to abandon our duties, or violate rules we agree to follow without very good reasons.
Ah yes - the good old argument of every jailer and executioner in every nasty dictatorship in the history of mankind:
"It was my duty as a citizen to follow the law, not to challenge it. That is why I did what I did"
---
I've got news for you: your mind is the first bastion of freedom.
Those that blindly follow (orders, laws, leaders) without ever questioning them even in their minds have willingly chosen to be the serfs of the will of others.
A extra detail I forgot to add (I hate to reply to myself):
Investment Banking is the place where people have to work the hardest (as measured by number of hours worked per week) of all places I've worked in (although a lot of the extra time spent is due to the low time efficiency of the business processes around here - though that's another topic).
A trader in London typically comes in at 7:00 - 7:30 AM for the morning meeting before opening of trading in the European markets, works all day through to closing of the markets and then does all kinds of post-trading activities (like marking the prices in the books) plus a number of other non-trading related activities. In the places I've been working I usually see traders leaving between 5:30 - 6:00 PM although some (mostly junior traders) might stay around for a while longer.
Also many traders will come in on weekends to do things like analyzing trading scenarios when the market is not running. Again, this is especially true of junior traders and some high-fliers.
Anybody thinking that getting into the highly paying Investment Banking positions is easy without a good degree and really good Math grades and that once in you make millions without much work is suffering from such a level of reality dysfunction that they risk tearing a hole in the space-time continuum.
As somebody working as a freelancer in Investment banking in London (freelancers change companies more often) and in the front-office (thus I see and talk to traders every day) I can tell you that the vast majority of traders and senior analysts (the best paying positions here - these are the guys that used to get the million dollar bonuses) are NOT UK nationals.
Apparently, most UK nationals don't have a strong enough background in Maths to qualify.
Slashdot Mirror
Too late and little comfort for those individuals in the "non-rational" companies who were fired (and possibly saw their careers go down the drain) because they were "too cautious".
For most traders, as an individual the "rational" thing to do was "do the same that all around you are doing and keep your concerns to yourself".
The ones that rode the ride all the way to the crash are the ones that still have millions in the bank from the last 5 years' bonuses.
In a couple of year time when the next boom comes, all this will be forgotten, "aggressive trading" will be all the rage again and caution will be thrown to the winds.
I'm Portuguese, I lived in Holland for 8 years and I've been living in England for the past 2 years.
In addition to English and Portuguese I also speak Dutch, French and Spanish and can understand some Italian and German.
The points I made above come from my observations from the countries I lived in and from watching TV from several other countries (since I can understand their language).
As somebody pointed up, the same kind of cultural crisis is happening in other countries, not just the UK. The difference is that in the UK (or at least England where I live) and from what I can see, the process is a lot more advanced and there are a lot more social ills than either in Portugal or Holland.
From my living experience there, and in my opinion:
- The reason why things are not as bad in Portugal is because family bonds there are very strong still, people are in general much less prone to violence and parent still teach "respect for others" to their kids. Also the country is still very culturally uniform and has a large number of traditions which are still celebrated in the media.
- The reason why things are not as bad in Holland is because people as individuals are also concerned with being a good part of society and thus balance their individual needs with being accepted by society (while in England the individual is supreme and absolute selfishness is acceptable). In Holland if you behave like an asshole you will be told that you are an asshole (Dutch people can be very direct and "in your face", some people confuse this with lack of politeness), while in England if you do that, your palls will cheer you, everybody else will shut up and you might even get your own TV Show.
Food for thought:
- There is no family culture in England like there is in Mediterranean countries (think the whole "mama" thing in Italy)
- There is no overall, unified set of traditions in England other than "go out and get pissed on Fridays"
- Media continuously pushes the image that happiness comes from buying stuff.
- There is no feeling of social responsibility like there is in Nordic and Germanic countries (for example, in Holland being called anti-social - asociaal - is actually an insult). Around here people are taught it's everybody for themselves and don't mind the others.
- The local heroes that youths aim to emulate are not those of science, culture or law - they're mostly "celebs" whose business is show-business and whose product is being scandalous.
- Parents are not made to take responsibility for the actions of their kids.
- A culture of political correctness, small-powers, centralized command-and-control and common law has taken away or distorted the powers of punishment/reward from socially-important actors such as teachers and social workers.
<rant type="major">
I've lived in 3 countries by now and the UK is the one country where I feel the most that I'm surrounded by the sheeple.
Once again the local wolves are increasing their powers to fleece the sheeple - I'm not surprised.
The pound is weak, it's highly likely that Britain is going to be the European country worst affected by the recession (in the last couple of years all the sheeple where busy getting themselves further and further into debt to buy all the useless consumer goods they saw on the tele - all that debt will need to be unwound now) and the current "throwing money into the fire to keep us warm" policies will mean higher taxes in the future:
There is a lot less money to be made by expert foreign workers in UK for now and for the coming 2 to 5 years.
I bet most people will forget that the UK is deeper in the shit-pit than almost everybody else due to the current government's past policies and will just eat up the spin being put out by the Prime Minister (which never misses an opportunity to say that the recession came from outside the UK) and re-elect Labour 'cause "they save us from a deeper recession".
I'm working on my plan to move to a better country as we speak.
</rant>
... so when the economy is up advertising is up and when the economy is down advertising is down.
When companies are struggling to make it to the next fiscal year, the first thing they cut is their marketing budget (surprise, surprise)
Advertising on the Internet is affected just like other advertising - so it's going down at the moment and will go up when the economy starts to pick up again.
All these explanations about how stuff done via the Internet is somehow special are just a throwback to the previous bubble when loads of "consultants" and "experts" made a living out of spewing bullshit about how the Internet was special and the "growth" it drove was permanent and would keep going forever (i think most of us remember how that went ...)
I think part of the reason why MMORPGs continue to increase in popularity in the PC gaming space is that latest crop of non MMO games is composed mostly of "me-too" titles (games based on previously successful games) and ultra-extreme-DRM filled games (which often won't run because of the DRM or even make your PC unstable because the install buggy drivers).
Personally in the last year I went back to MMORPGs (in the past I used to play EVE-Online and WoW) with LOTRO because I felt that most newer PC games were too simple, too much alike games I had played to death already and/or too risky to install (due to their rootkit-like DRM and the instability problems that often come with it).
Successful MMORPGs like LOTRO and WoW have a huge value for money to gamers because their content is enormous (they're huge virtual worlds) they support multiple playing forms (PvP, solo PvE, cooperative PvE) and they keep getting expanded: to keep people playing and paying their monthly fees, games with a PvE side must continuously expand with new areas/items.
About LOTRO:
Before Mines of Moria, LOTRO was indeed getting a bit stale and the number of players online at any time was dwindling. This was visible both in PvE and PvP.
Immediately when MoM came out the number of players online increased a lot (doubled or tripled). At the moment most people are more or less done with exploring the new areas and are starting to do mostly group instances to acquire the necessary kit to go do the single new Raid area that came with MoM (most LOTRO players are casual players, hence the number of power-players that went trough all the new content in 2 or 3 weeks is very low).
To keep momentum going more content will have to start being released in the next month or two (Turbine, the makers of the game, usually release free expansions - "books" - about once every 2 months). As pointed above, the continued success of a MMORPG depends a lot on keeping a steady stream of new content coming out to keep players playing (and paying).
Not "time wasting" but instead "entertaining". Different things.
If one wants to "waste time" there are plenty of ways of doing it which are not entertaining (for example: count to 1 million in your head)
The difference between entertainment and pure time wasting is that the first is supposed to be enjoyable.
Which brings us around to the point that games (and videos and books) should be enjoyable (fun). Clearly people are using some kind of criteria to choose the games, movies and books they spend time with (otherwise why would some be great successes and others flops) and it seems logical that the main criteria would be enjoyment.
Keep telling that authenticity spiel to yourself when your character gets Pwned in PvP by a little kid that bought a Sword of Pwnage and a Dollar Potion of Mega-boost with his daddy's credit card.
Game items that you can buy with real money should never change game balance in any way - they should be pure vanity items. Even XP boosters are bad for the game ...
I vaguely remember that he was one to the people consistently pushing for extensions to copyright length here in the UK.
Note how here in the UK copyright is now Life + 70 years ...
In my opinion, his choice for DRM free formats is a natural followup to the same considerations that lead Recording Companies to go ahead and support the new Amazon music store which sells DRM free music in MP3 format: they were scared shitless that Apple was becoming the Microsoft of the Digital Music Distribution world and thus the de facto gatekeeper for the future of music distribution.
That and he can afford it, seeing that he's gonna keep getting payed for the rest of his life for his 6 months of light work in 1966 and all little pieces here and there of followup work ...
US media is very distinctly biased and partial compared with the media in other Western nations - just go check European news outlets like BBC and TV5 (if you can speak French) and you'll see what I mean.
Let me just point this out: most issues are portrayed in the US media as having two sides - a Democratic and a Republican. How often is any other point of view considered in most mainstream news media in the US?
That said, the media in the US is not a mouthpiece for the state in that it does not constantly parrot the words of those current serving as elected officials. It is instead a mouthpiece for the establishment: Democrats + Republicans + lobbyists
<irony>
It's clear from your neutral, non-emotionally charged and logical words and arguments that you are not at all pushing an agenda.
</irony>
Having been raised in a deeply catholic country and having studied science at an University along with some colleagues and even teachers which were both scientists AND Christians it never ceases to amaze me how the US seems to produce scores and scores of uneducated, anti-education, ignorant and even downright dumb "believers", incapable of reconciling religion with science.
Quick hint: it's perfectly possible to believe both in God and in the Big-Bang - they're not at all mutually exclusive as long as you look at the bible as a book full of allegories instead of trying to believe that the English translation is literally the word of Jesus.
I used to live in Holland, more specifically in the Amsterdam area.
In there you're free to buy and smoke pot if you want (coffeeshops are widespread in Amsterdam) and there are some projects going on that provide the drugs to hard-drug users.
I noticed two things:
- In Amsterdam, it's mostly the foreigners that go to the coffeeshops. Most dutch people either don't smoke the stuff with any regularity or are not doing it in the open, even though marijuana is widely available and you're not shunned by society for smoking it.
- Of all the big cities I've been in or lived in, Amsterdam is the place with the fewest (visible) junkies on it's streets.
The impression from my time in Holland and in other countries is that:
- Making drugs illegal and restricted just increases their appeal to certain people (a bit like luxury items are inherently more appealing when their supply is restricted). Making them easily available means that they are common and not especially cool in any way: mostly people try it once and think "so what's the big deal?".
- When consuming drugs is illegal then those that need help cannot get it. Many addicts (drug addicts or otherwise) will seek help (or they're friends or family will seek help for them) to break the addiction if they think they will not be thrown in jail and can succeed.
My overall point being that widespread gun availability means that both the good guys and the bad guys find it easier to get their hands on guns.
From here come a couple of effects:
- While in an environment where guns are tightly controlled, a thief might or not have a gun, in and environment where guns are easy to come by, a thief almost always has a gun. This is because they can get hold of one easily, because they can't be imprisoned by just carrying a gun (when guns are outlawed, only bad guys - or cops - have guns, so anybody caught with a gun which is not a cop goes to jail) and because they expect other people to have a gun so they need their own gun as an equalizer. In practice this results in more violent crimes and more deaths, not less.
- The bad guys will carry guns and use them because they expect others to also have guns. They are also much more likely to shoot first since if they do not, there is a higher danger that they will get killed by those on the other side.
- A gun is a ranged weapon. In the case of many guns (for example handguns) it can also easily be concealed. This makes it a lot more easy to catch a target unaware and hit him from a distance. It also means that escape is a lot harder (and very much dependent on luck) than with a melee weapon. Guess who is more likely to use a gun as a ranged surprise killer - the good guys or the bad guys?
- Due to their inherent nature, handguns are a lot more likely to kill than other weapons of a similar size. In an environment where guns are widespread, crimes of passion or rage are a lot more likely to result in deaths than when only crude, less powerful weapons are available.
While a gun will give his wearer an emotional feeling of power and security, if it comes as part of a system where guns are easily available, the actual security of the wearer is in fact decreased in that they are more likely to get killed. Human beings being human, the knowledge that the probability of one's violent death is now higher does not come as a true feeling of insecurity, because deep down we are unable to accept the possibility of our own demise and we all believe that violent death "will not happen to me".
I suppose if you (re)define Reason to mean any level of human interaction that does not involve physical contact and (re)define Force to mean any level of human interaction that does involve physical contact then "Reason OR Force" covers the full universe of possibilities.
In that case I'm curious about something:
- If a thief is trying to steal from me and I make a funny fart so that he laughs and decides to leave me alone, is that Reason or Force?
I incorrectly phrased this. In that context I meant:
- With no guns, thief and other crocks are limited mostly to using methods that require more physical strength.
The point being that guns empower the bad guys just as much as they empower the goods guys.
In addition to that, a widespread availability of guns makes the bad guys be more prone to use extreme violence "just in case" the good guys might have a gun.
Last but not least, the "empowerment" that any single person gets with a gun is tightly related to their willingness (not just intellectual but moral and emotional - the right there in the moment split second hesitate or not) to kill someone.
Just for the fun of it I'll pick some random pieces and demonstrate the flawed logic in them:
Actually the field is not made level, it's just tilted differently: with 2 persons armed with a gun facing each other, the person that has the least amount of moral/ethical restraint with regards to killing another person wins - they kill the other one, so game over (think about it, a cold-blooded killer face to face with somebody that never killed anything in his life, both with guns - who wins?)
How about emotional pressure (appealing to one's feelings), social pressure (you will be shunned/respected by your peers), flight (as in - run away)?
I would hardly classify any of those as either reason or force.
Of course I can deal with you by force - after all, the same laws the let you have a gun, let me have a gun too: i just shoot you in the back, you die and I take your stuff ...
If I thought you didn't have a gun I might just try and knock you out - but if you MIGHT have a gun, I'm not taking the risk of getting shot so i'll shoot you before you even see me.
Please note my point above that the one with the least amount of moral/ethical restraint about killing people wins.
Also, guns just mean that cold-blooded killers can now kill from their early childhood (once they're strong enough to hold a gun) until they're so old they became too weak to hold a gun: that's at least 70 years of glorious murdering
With no guns you're limited mostly to using methods that require more physical strength.
Guns also empower those that are morally flawed and weak - a gun lets them be violent criminals.
For all the baiting on his post i agree with the basic point of the parent poster:
- The original series was better than the sequel
I'm old enough to have seen it during my early teens when it first came out, and even though the special effects now look dated, for the time it was a great SciFi action series that really made you want to be there and fly space fighters with the rest of them.
The sequel on the other hand is not at all quite as exciting: the thrilling sequences of action are fewer that the long drawn sequences of intrigue and/or inner-conflict and to add insult to injury the action sequences are frequently interrupted by shots of the faces of some or other "intrigue" character standing in the bridge of Battlestar Galactica with the look of somebody fighting an internal conflicts.
The single most boring thing about the new Battlestart Galactica series were all the philosophical / internal-conflict / interpersonal-power-play scenes which were used as cheap filler (no FX = cheap) in between the action scenes.
Now they want to do a series which consists almost entirely of cheap filler scenes???
The 1980s are calling and they want their Dallas clone back ...
Money, obviously.
I'm hardly working in the UK 'cause I'm a charitable person.
That said, if the new proposed high rate of tax does come into effect in 2011 I'll be decamping for better pastures: as a serial emigrant, with portable skills and speaking 5 languages I can easily go to where my income is maximized (taking in account that moving countries can cost between £500 and £3000 depending on how much stuff u move, not to mention lost income during the time u are not working).
The ability and willingness to use and produce documentation demonstrates awareness of the life-cycle of software and the need for ease of evolution, support and maintainability of software.
I don't care how fast you are at coding, if you're not aware that most of the time spent working in software is spent on post-release bug-fixing, performance improvements, new feature development and upgrading then you're not the expert developer you believe you are.
If you can't see that by not producing either a user manual or a technical manual, in the future people will need to reverse engineer to code to actually figure our the details of what the software does, then you're not the expert developer you believe you are.
If you're not aware that 5 months down the line after release, you or the poor sod that was brought to maintain the software you developed will struggle to fix/upgrade it because you didn't even documented the code, then you're not the expert developer you believe you are.
If you're not aware that over the life-cycle of a piece of software, the least documented code is the one that ages the fastest (as people change a badly understood piece of code it becomes spaghetti code faster and is hacked more often in strange ways), then you're not the expert developer you believe you are.
The only reason for a real Software Engineer not to document when given the chance is to create a situation where they become irreplaceable 'cause they're the only person that can maintain a certain application or system - hardly an ethical thing to do, although understandable in the current economic climate.
That said, as with everything there is a balance between documenting enough and documenting too much - too much mandatory documentation is just bureaucracy and a waste of time.
I bet you live in the UK.
<rant target="average_brit">
The locals (yes, I'm living here ATM) are constantly brainwashed by the local politicians and media with bullshit talk of British exceptionalism and that only bad things come from the EU.
Well, I have news for you: ...
- The Empire is long gone. Nowadays the only thing the British are exceptional at is extra shoddy management (as compared with Northern European nations - I've lived in Holland so i can compare), an unhealthy level of consumption of stories about (mostly media created) celebs and ever lowering standards of education.
- The UK politicians actually use European institutions to introduce controversial laws into the UK by the back door. They then proceed to blame the "unaccountable" EU, thus getting the law they want without the blame. Yet, somehow it seems that most of the locals don't see through the thin veil of deceit (see my comment above about "ever lowering standards of education") and proceed to repeat all the pap about the dictatorship of the EU overriding national sovereignty
I work in Investment Banking in London and from the percentage of non-brits in positions of importance here (something like 70% or more) it seems to me that the (in the past) most successful economic activity in the UK is only here because foreigners choose to come here. My personal pet theory is that due to the popularity of English as a second language (thanks to Americans made movies and TV series) people find it much more easy to move here (i remember how hard it was to learn Dutch when I went to Holland).
</rant>
That said, although I'm pro-European (after all, it allows me and many like me - including many brits - to live and work anywhere we choose in Europe) I do believe that the EU institutions as they are at the moment are not democratic and representative enough and that at least the European Commission and the European Council need to be scrapped or loose a lot of their power.
Ah yes - the good old argument of every jailer and executioner in every nasty dictatorship in the history of mankind:
"It was my duty as a citizen to follow the law, not to challenge it. That is why I did what I did"
---
I've got news for you: your mind is the first bastion of freedom.
Those that blindly follow (orders, laws, leaders) without ever questioning them even in their minds have willingly chosen to be the serfs of the will of others.
You sir, are not a man but a sheep.
A extra detail I forgot to add (I hate to reply to myself):
Investment Banking is the place where people have to work the hardest (as measured by number of hours worked per week) of all places I've worked in (although a lot of the extra time spent is due to the low time efficiency of the business processes around here - though that's another topic).
A trader in London typically comes in at 7:00 - 7:30 AM for the morning meeting before opening of trading in the European markets, works all day through to closing of the markets and then does all kinds of post-trading activities (like marking the prices in the books) plus a number of other non-trading related activities. In the places I've been working I usually see traders leaving between 5:30 - 6:00 PM although some (mostly junior traders) might stay around for a while longer.
Also many traders will come in on weekends to do things like analyzing trading scenarios when the market is not running. Again, this is especially true of junior traders and some high-fliers.
Anybody thinking that getting into the highly paying Investment Banking positions is easy without a good degree and really good Math grades and that once in you make millions without much work is suffering from such a level of reality dysfunction that they risk tearing a hole in the space-time continuum.
As somebody working as a freelancer in Investment banking in London (freelancers change companies more often) and in the front-office (thus I see and talk to traders every day) I can tell you that the vast majority of traders and senior analysts (the best paying positions here - these are the guys that used to get the million dollar bonuses) are NOT UK nationals.
Apparently, most UK nationals don't have a strong enough background in Maths to qualify.
I was hopping for something like a roll-up OLED screen with a bendable plastic base.
Instead what we get is basically 2 traditional color LCD screens mounted on a swivel.
Nothing to see here ....