I have the same problem - i tend to forget somebody's name in about 5 seconds after the first time i've heard it and i need a couple of interactions before i can memorize the name (less for pretty girls;))
Interestingly enough my memory for just about everything else is very good.
I've mostly solved the problem by the simple expedient of calling everybody "You there":)))
I'm a freelance software designer and developer. I have lots of tasks which consist on maintaining, bugfixing and extended software done by ofters. I get payed by the hour.
From my experience and judging by the significant amount of extra time that it costs to do those tasks on software done by people that were "training on the job" while designing/developing it, i can tell you that you're gonna keep paying for your "train on the job" policy for years to come... and then you'll have to scrap it and have it implemented all over again for yet more $$$.
The amount of people in management positions that sacrifice tons of future profit for pitiful savings in the present never ceases to amaze me...
The only really good thing i brought with me out of the University was the ability to learn fast and the proof (the degree itself) that i have the commitment necessary to go as far as getting a degree.
Beyond that the degree is just a piece of paper.
Going back to electronics as work just because i happen to have a degree on it would not solve the problem that i've ruined my hobby (programming). I might do a hobby out of electronics though;)
Your story sounds a lot like: "Even if life sucks there are ways of dealing with it and achieve inner peace"
I think your advice is useful for some people and not useful at all for others.
A good question to separate the ones that can follow your advice from the ones who can't would be: "When i don't like the way things are do i try to change those things or do i try to change myself?"
Actually it's common in MMORPGs that people will use items with lower stats even if they have slightly higher stats items simply because the lower stats ones look beter.
Also, for example in WoW, enchantments that give a cool shine to your weapons are much more popular than similar (or even more powerfull) enchantments that just enhance stats.
Thus all enchanters (selling enchantments) will actually advertise those enchantments by saying that they give "*whatever* glow on weapon". Often the stats of the enchantment won't even be mentioned.
In my experience as somebody that was there, "the work you love" is a moving target.
My personal story is one of jumping around in school from area to area trying to find what i liked the most. Going through highschool, i've tryed (the optional classes on) electronics, chemistry and biology. I went to the University and started on physics. A year later i moved to and eventualy got a degree in electronics engineering.
All the while, ever since i got my first computer (a ZX Spectrum 128A) i was doing programing for the fun.
Eventually when i got out of University i started work as a... software developer.
I spent the next couple of years marveling at how people were paying me to do something i would do for free:))))
Now, if i was still 25 the story would end here - unfortunatly things change...
The problem is, after some years working 8 h/day on something you love, it starts loosing it's appeal. To me it was a mix of: - It started loosing it's challenge. No challenge, no fun.
- By making my work out of my hobby i've placed myself in the situation of constantly having to do it, even if i don't feel like it. Thus for me software development morphed from fun to obligation.
- In the quest for keeping my work challenging i've been moving upscale - from developer to designer to technical architect/analyst. This means that: * It's harder to find a position at the level that i enjoy the most. * I have to do side tasks such as "career management" in order to position myself to land a job doing what i enjoy the most. By "career management" read "doing boring stuff for CV improvement purposes". * Higher level positions require me to develop skills other than the ones needed for software design and development - a slow process.
- There are few big (challenging) projects and many small (stupendously simple) projects/tasks. Thus when i started there were a lot of projects that i found fun, now there are few.
I still have moments of pure enjoyment from my work, but it went from 90% fun, 10% obligation to 10% fun, 90% obligation.
1) You have to invest a tremendous amount of time doing very boring tasks just to get a half-decent ship (100s of hours moving mined minerals from your cargo hold to an external container - during asteroid minig). 2) Traveling takes a long time and it's only interesting the first 1/2h you play the game. 3) The most interesting parts of the EVE universe (0.0 space) is fully PvP enabled and in practice controled by groups of corporations (corporations in EVE = guilds in other MMORPGs), know as alliances, which are mostly composed of those corporations that got there first. You'll be hard pressed to go there without getting your ship blown up (possibly making you loose the equivalent of many hours worth of mining asteroids)
After playing EVE online for many months i more or less came to the conclusion that the game pretty much consisted of time-sinks - ways of making you spend time without it actually being fun - and left (even though i had amassed a lot of virtual wealth in that game).
Stats are only important for 2 things: - Bigger stats open up new challenges (since beter stats = beter attack and defense), so you can see new places and fight new monsters - Bragging rights
One does not spend 5 hours killing Purple Dragons of Death just to get your level from 130 to 135, one does it because: - A level 135 can defeat the guardian of the magic cave of Zarathor (and go kill Pink Dragons of Ice), while a 130 can't - You get to brag to your teammates you're now 135
A bigger pull that stats are items. It's the satisfaction of getting those "Baby Pink Dragon of Ice Socks" (+5 to enchanting, glows pink) that you can only found at the very deepest levels of the Zarathor cave that makes your day.
An of course there's always yet another item that requires yet a higher level ("Gloves of Houling Night Witch Hair - +15 health, +8 strength)
My recent personal experience with one of EA's PC games (Battlefield 2) is that what could've been one of the best multiplayer FPSs of the decade was rushed out the door and ended up un-optimized (needs more than 1Gb memory), buggy and unbalanced.
To add injury to insult, they've been more busy putting out expansions than fixing bugs/improving code (2nd expansion in 6 months is coming out).
I get the impression that while most of the industry has moved onwards - in terms of beter testing, tuning and balancing their games before release - EA is still stuck in 1990s mode of ship it ASAP even if full of bugs 'cause their customers think that a game crashing is "normal".
Simply put, things that to you seem stupendously obvious (conclusions/insights), for a lot of people are things they can hardly begin to understand.
The higher one's inteligence, the higher the percentage of stupid people the world seems to contain.
It's hardly surprising that those that are very inteligent, find inteligence the most important characteristic of people and cannot bring themselfs to explain things at a level that non-experts/non-genious can understand will project an image of eccentricity.
It's not unusual to find those people in the "protected confines" of a university science department.
In my experience, the closest a Software Company or a Company's IT department is to the "Sweatshop Model of Software Development" the younger the people working there as developers.
You see, it's much more easy to convince a 20 year old with little industry experience to work 60h weeks than it is to convince a 30 year old with plenty of industry experience (and maybe a wife and kids at home).
A great deal of the management practices in this industry turns around suckering the naive into giving their free time to the company *sigh*
Actually in the water torture show they had 2 different setups for the water torture, one in which the person being tortured was just sitting on a comfy-chair, with no restraints and water dripping on his forehead and the other where the person being tortured was tied to a flat wood "torture table" and water driping on her forehead.
The confy-chair person had no problems whatsoever.
The person tied to a "torture table" panicked in less than 1h (even though she knew she would be released as soon as she asked).
The conclusion was that simply driping water in a person's forhead per-se doesn't work as torture. However, in combination with a "torture situation" (for example, bound to a flat wood table) it does work.
Interesting episode for those interested in psychology.
A point he made is that AJAX is nice and usefull for some cases but it still has problems.
The biggest point he made was that labeling stuff as Web 2.0 is simply marketing hype and an attempt at starting a new bubble.
[Bubbles are in practice a stockmarket supported pyramid scheme and as in all such schemes, the first ones in make the most money and last ones in loose the most money]
Concentrating on his points about the technology itself is totally missing the point of the article.
I've been toying for years with a couple of pet theories about the crisis with Democracy:
In a democratic system, people are suposed to elect some of their peers to represent them for a limited time period. The idea would be that elected representatives share opinions and experiences with the voters that chose them as representatives.
So what's going wrong?
- In most current implementations of Democracy, people don't personally know the people they vote for. In practice voting decisions are made on the basis of the image projected by the contestants (usually via the media), mostly during the campaign period. The result is that politicians are more worried about projecting the right image to their chosen target group than they are in actually doing policy choices according to the wishes of their voters. In practice people end up electing "salesmen" or "image experts" type of representative since those are the best at presenting the right image. In the same vein, exposure on the media is also important. In the US implementation of democracy more money available for the campaign means more exposure (mostly in the media). Thus either having the personal wealth to pay for a big campaign or receiving a lot of campaign contributions (in practice, owing a lot of favours) significantlty increases one's chances to be elected.
- Politicians have become professionals. Nowaydays they are in practice a separate group within the wider society. This has gone to such a point that politics has become a family business (the scion of a politician is probably a politician himself). Simply put: most politicians are not the peers of their constituents anymore - their life experience is far removed from the one of the people they suposedly represent, and they have trouble identifying themselfs with the "man on the street". What we see in practice is that politicians spend a lot of time doing policy about thing that only affect politicians. In practice they mostly defend and represent the social group from which they come - the "political class".
- Clubism. A lot of people chose political parties as they choose sports clubs - out of emotion. This means a lot of voters keep on voting for the same party (and defending them) no mater what, in the end the because they feel emotionally connected to it (in other words, they like it, it's THEIR party). The end result is that politicians can count on a unflinching, unthinking core of supporters and are much more at ease to make policies that actually have negative effects to the persons they supposedly represent.
I have two real-life arguments that counter your less state = more equality argument.
First one is based on the values for the Gini coeficient. From the values for this coeficient in 2004, we get that Sweden (where state participation in public life and taxes are big) country has a gini coeficient of 0.250 while the USA (smaller state intervetion in public life, smaller taxes) has a gini coeficient of 0.408.
Meaning inequality of income in the USA is almost twice as much as in Sweden.
The second argument is to look at a country where there is no state at all - Somalia. Somehow, for all the grandeur of your arguments, the de facto result of removing the state is hardly equality... instead power and money end up flowing to those with the most guns.
The argument that less state intervention = increased productivity for a society is still very much open to debated. However, please do not insult our inteligence by arguing that less state intervention = more equality, something which history has been proving wrong since the stone-age.
Spoken like someone who's never had an idea worth any money.
Let's stop bullshitting ourselves and just admit the truth: you want the sweat of other people's brow and you don't want to have to pay for it.
Actually, with the patent system as it is now, those that have patents are actually the ones stealing the sweat out of everybody else's brow.
I'll give you an example: - When in the software development domain, a person or group is asked to find a solution for a specific problem, said person or group will probably come up, totally on their own, with one of more solutions which they find have already been patented. Even further, some of these patented solutions have never been implemented - a "patent factory" has produced those patents by the simple expedient of sitting in a room and thinking about software/IT implementations of existing solutions for existing problems. We're talking about patents being given for (almost literally) an idea pulled out of someone's ass.
So what do we (hard-working, non-ip-lawyers) do when we have to solve a problem and (on our own) come up with a solution which (although extraordinarily obvious for someone in the field) is already patented? - Either pay, or try to find a non-patented solution
Either way, it's our sweat because some commons thief spent a day in a room in 199x comming up with patents for adding wireless to existing real world processes.
Gifted but very immature people are also very much on display on the online gaming world.
Somehow the percieved anonimity of the online world will have many persons behaving in an anti-social way in the virtual world, something which they would not do in the real world were that sort of behaviour often has consequences.
Some of them are even gifted at what they do (granted, being gifted in a FPS/MMORPG is not in the same class as being gifted as a software developer).
As a longtime online FPS player i can tell you that both mater.
Latency maters because it impacts both the time it takes for you to be informed of an event in the gaming world (somebody firing a missile at you) and the time it takes for your reaction to be reflected in the game world (you droping flares). It literally means the difference between life and death (although in a virtual way).
Bandwidth matters with relation to the amount of events that can happen in the game world and which are visible to (and/or affect) you. Basically the more the bandwith the more players you can play with at the same time in the same area of the virtual world (think enourmous, flat battlefields with hundreds of players battling it out all at the same time). Current games go around this by either limiting the number of players in the virtual world or by designing the virtual world in such a way that at any one time most players are not visible to other players (information about events generated by non-visible players does not need to be sent).
Things like Battlefield 2 are already exploring the limits of this in 64 player servers (granted, this is EA so they rushed the release and probably didn't optimize the code quite as much as they could)
It's called consumer protection, maybe you've heard of it?
On this side of the pond we're very big on trying to protect consumers from extorsionist behaviour by companies in monopoly positions, busting cartels, punishing companies that lie to their customers, avoiding overuse of shared resources (for example the environment), that kind of thing.
No worries though - i believe we are moving in the direction of the american model of "voluntary" industry regulations and corporate buying of legislation.
I suspect males, being in average more logically giften but less socially gifted than females (i might be stereotyping a bit here), will take more shit (read overwork in both school and work) than women.
Or turning things around, it's more likelly to find males willing to put up with lots of work for little respect/rewards (except personal satisfaction) than it is to find females.
Putting this together with the current lack of respect/admiration in the Western society for Engineering occupations in general (by comparisson with, for example, Law or Management), it might explain a lot.
As a side note, i went to a technical (read engineering) university (about 7 years ago), and at the time ALL degrees had a higher proportion of males than females, and the vast majority had a 2 to 3 or worse ratio. Come to think of it, CS wasn't even the worse off (in my own classes, for electronics engineering, we had 3 women out of 40 pupils)
But Mr. Bitch didn't want to pay for it then fuel costs went up. Oh crap. So if someone complains about something (think 'squeaky wheel'), they're [the airline industry] going to oil the squeak. Well they can't get rid of the passenger so how about we get rid of the meals altogether so they don't have something to complain about.
Your assumption was that when faced with some people complaining about the quality of the meals the airlines decided to remove meals from coach in flights all together. From your implied causal relation (complainers complaining => airlines remove meals) you go into a enourmous rant.
How about if the airlines removed meals to reduce costs because of rising fuel costs and/or increased competition from budget airlines?
I reckon that if we use this assumption instead we can rant all the way up to SUV owners, the chinese industry (big consumers of raw materials) and/or people that choose to fly with budget airlines instead of with "normal" ones.
Indeed Private came to mind as one of the few porn companies that actually does (some) hardcore movies which actually have a storyline and decent scenarios. (this type of "quality" porn is targeted at the couples market, there is at least another company - Adam & Eve i believe - specialized in this kind of porn)
Two questions arise though: - What is more important for selling Private movies - beautifull women in hardcore action or great storylines and good scenarios. Putting things another way, if Private had less good looking women, less or no hardcore action but beter scenarios, beter storylines and maybe even HD resolution would they sell more or sell less? - How big a part of the industry is Private in term of sales?
Answers being: - Probably less, even if they kept the beautiful women and just reduced the quality of the action, eventually they would come into competetion with the softcore part of the industry such as Playboy, and further downstream even Hollywood. Even if they keep the "quality" of the action and the women, beter storylines, beter scenarios and filming and releasing HD quality products all costs more money. Would it really be worth it in increased sales? Doubt it, especially in an early adopter scenario where the proportion of your customers that can use your products is a small percentage of the total porn digital media market. - In 2004 Private made £24.4m in revenue out of an industry total of £33bn (source http://insight.zdnet.co.uk/business/employment/0,3 9020484,39237409-3,00.htm). In other words, they're less than 0.1% of the industry. Enough said.
In a fragmented industry such as porn, Private is hardly an important player, a "crest of the wave" early adopter or a trend setter.
Slashdot Mirror
I have the same problem - i tend to forget somebody's name in about 5 seconds after the first time i've heard it and i need a couple of interactions before i can memorize the name (less for pretty girls ;))
:)))
Interestingly enough my memory for just about everything else is very good.
I've mostly solved the problem by the simple expedient of calling everybody "You there"
Portuguese is both spoken in Portugal and Brasil.
Still, for example the slang word use in Portugal for "traffic jam" (bicha) is the slang word in Brasil for "gay".
Talking about the congestion on the streets of Lisbon takes a whole new meaning in Brasil.
I'm a freelance software designer and developer. I have lots of tasks which consist on maintaining, bugfixing and extended software done by ofters. I get payed by the hour.
... and then you'll have to scrap it and have it implemented all over again for yet more $$$.
...
From my experience and judging by the significant amount of extra time that it costs to do those tasks on software done by people that were "training on the job" while designing/developing it, i can tell you that you're gonna keep paying for your "train on the job" policy for years to come
The amount of people in management positions that sacrifice tons of future profit for pitiful savings in the present never ceases to amaze me
The only really good thing i brought with me out of the University was the ability to learn fast and the proof (the degree itself) that i have the commitment necessary to go as far as getting a degree.
;)
Beyond that the degree is just a piece of paper.
Going back to electronics as work just because i happen to have a degree on it would not solve the problem that i've ruined my hobby (programming). I might do a hobby out of electronics though
Your story sounds a lot like:
"Even if life sucks there are ways of dealing with it and achieve inner peace"
I think your advice is useful for some people and not useful at all for others.
A good question to separate the ones that can follow your advice from the ones who can't would be: "When i don't like the way things are do i try to change those things or do i try to change myself?"
Actually it's common in MMORPGs that people will use items with lower stats even if they have slightly higher stats items simply because the lower stats ones look beter.
Also, for example in WoW, enchantments that give a cool shine to your weapons are much more popular than similar (or even more powerfull) enchantments that just enhance stats.
Thus all enchanters (selling enchantments) will actually advertise those enchantments by saying that they give "*whatever* glow on weapon". Often the stats of the enchantment won't even be mentioned.
In my experience as somebody that was there, "the work you love" is a moving target.
... software developer.
:))))
...
My personal story is one of jumping around in school from area to area trying to find what i liked the most. Going through highschool, i've tryed (the optional classes on) electronics, chemistry and biology. I went to the University and started on physics. A year later i moved to and eventualy got a degree in electronics engineering.
All the while, ever since i got my first computer (a ZX Spectrum 128A) i was doing programing for the fun.
Eventually when i got out of University i started work as a
I spent the next couple of years marveling at how people were paying me to do something i would do for free
Now, if i was still 25 the story would end here - unfortunatly things change
The problem is, after some years working 8 h/day on something you love, it starts loosing it's appeal. To me it was a mix of:
- It started loosing it's challenge. No challenge, no fun.
- By making my work out of my hobby i've placed myself in the situation of constantly having to do it, even if i don't feel like it. Thus for me software development morphed from fun to obligation.
- In the quest for keeping my work challenging i've been moving upscale - from developer to designer to technical architect/analyst. This means that:
* It's harder to find a position at the level that i enjoy the most.
* I have to do side tasks such as "career management" in order to position myself to land a job doing what i enjoy the most. By "career management" read "doing boring stuff for CV improvement purposes".
* Higher level positions require me to develop skills other than the ones needed for software design and development - a slow process.
- There are few big (challenging) projects and many small (stupendously simple) projects/tasks. Thus when i started there were a lot of projects that i found fun, now there are few.
I still have moments of pure enjoyment from my work, but it went from 90% fun, 10% obligation to 10% fun, 90% obligation.
1) You have to invest a tremendous amount of time doing very boring tasks just to get a half-decent ship (100s of hours moving mined minerals from your cargo hold to an external container - during asteroid minig).
2) Traveling takes a long time and it's only interesting the first 1/2h you play the game.
3) The most interesting parts of the EVE universe (0.0 space) is fully PvP enabled and in practice controled by groups of corporations (corporations in EVE = guilds in other MMORPGs), know as alliances, which are mostly composed of those corporations that got there first. You'll be hard pressed to go there without getting your ship blown up (possibly making you loose the equivalent of many hours worth of mining asteroids)
After playing EVE online for many months i more or less came to the conclusion that the game pretty much consisted of time-sinks - ways of making you spend time without it actually being fun - and left (even though i had amassed a lot of virtual wealth in that game).
There's a lot more to it that stats.
Stats are only important for 2 things:
- Bigger stats open up new challenges (since beter stats = beter attack and defense), so you can see new places and fight new monsters
- Bragging rights
One does not spend 5 hours killing Purple Dragons of Death just to get your level from 130 to 135, one does it because:
- A level 135 can defeat the guardian of the magic cave of Zarathor (and go kill Pink Dragons of Ice), while a 130 can't
- You get to brag to your teammates you're now 135
A bigger pull that stats are items. It's the satisfaction of getting those "Baby Pink Dragon of Ice Socks" (+5 to enchanting, glows pink) that you can only found at the very deepest levels of the Zarathor cave that makes your day.
An of course there's always yet another item that requires yet a higher level ("Gloves of Houling Night Witch Hair - +15 health, +8 strength)
My recent personal experience with one of EA's PC games (Battlefield 2) is that what could've been one of the best multiplayer FPSs of the decade was rushed out the door and ended up un-optimized (needs more than 1Gb memory), buggy and unbalanced.
To add injury to insult, they've been more busy putting out expansions than fixing bugs/improving code (2nd expansion in 6 months is coming out).
I get the impression that while most of the industry has moved onwards - in terms of beter testing, tuning and balancing their games before release - EA is still stuck in 1990s mode of ship it ASAP even if full of bugs 'cause their customers think that a game crashing is "normal".
Are they also like this outside PC gaming?
Is that most other people seem stupid to you.
Simply put, things that to you seem stupendously obvious (conclusions/insights), for a lot of people are things they can hardly begin to understand.
The higher one's inteligence, the higher the percentage of stupid people the world seems to contain.
It's hardly surprising that those that are very inteligent, find inteligence the most important characteristic of people and cannot bring themselfs to explain things at a level that non-experts/non-genious can understand will project an image of eccentricity.
It's not unusual to find those people in the "protected confines" of a university science department.
In my experience, the closest a Software Company or a Company's IT department is to the "Sweatshop Model of Software Development" the younger the people working there as developers.
You see, it's much more easy to convince a 20 year old with little industry experience to work 60h weeks than it is to convince a 30 year old with plenty of industry experience (and maybe a wife and kids at home).
A great deal of the management practices in this industry turns around suckering the naive into giving their free time to the company *sigh*
Actually in the water torture show they had 2 different setups for the water torture, one in which the person being tortured was just sitting on a comfy-chair, with no restraints and water dripping on his forehead and the other where the person being tortured was tied to a flat wood "torture table" and water driping on her forehead.
The confy-chair person had no problems whatsoever.
The person tied to a "torture table" panicked in less than 1h (even though she knew she would be released as soon as she asked).
The conclusion was that simply driping water in a person's forhead per-se doesn't work as torture. However, in combination with a "torture situation" (for example, bound to a flat wood table) it does work.
Interesting episode for those interested in psychology.
A point he made is that AJAX is nice and usefull for some cases but it still has problems.
The biggest point he made was that labeling stuff as Web 2.0 is simply marketing hype and an attempt at starting a new bubble.
[Bubbles are in practice a stockmarket supported pyramid scheme and as in all such schemes, the first ones in make the most money and last ones in loose the most money]
Concentrating on his points about the technology itself is totally missing the point of the article.
I've been toying for years with a couple of pet theories about the crisis with Democracy:
In a democratic system, people are suposed to elect some of their peers to represent them for a limited time period. The idea would be that elected representatives share opinions and experiences with the voters that chose them as representatives.
So what's going wrong?
- In most current implementations of Democracy, people don't personally know the people they vote for. In practice voting decisions are made on the basis of the image projected by the contestants (usually via the media), mostly during the campaign period. The result is that politicians are more worried about projecting the right image to their chosen target group than they are in actually doing policy choices according to the wishes of their voters. In practice people end up electing "salesmen" or "image experts" type of representative since those are the best at presenting the right image. In the same vein, exposure on the media is also important. In the US implementation of democracy more money available for the campaign means more exposure (mostly in the media). Thus either having the personal wealth to pay for a big campaign or receiving a lot of campaign contributions (in practice, owing a lot of favours) significantlty increases one's chances to be elected.
- Politicians have become professionals. Nowaydays they are in practice a separate group within the wider society. This has gone to such a point that politics has become a family business (the scion of a politician is probably a politician himself). Simply put: most politicians are not the peers of their constituents anymore - their life experience is far removed from the one of the people they suposedly represent, and they have trouble identifying themselfs with the "man on the street". What we see in practice is that politicians spend a lot of time doing policy about thing that only affect politicians. In practice they mostly defend and represent the social group from which they come - the "political class".
- Clubism. A lot of people chose political parties as they choose sports clubs - out of emotion. This means a lot of voters keep on voting for the same party (and defending them) no mater what, in the end the because they feel emotionally connected to it (in other words, they like it, it's THEIR party). The end result is that politicians can count on a unflinching, unthinking core of supporters and are much more at ease to make policies that actually have negative effects to the persons they supposedly represent.
How to fix this?
No worries, i'm sure some brave people will sneak mini-recorders into the the booths hidden in their asses.
A new meaning for "brown noise"???!
I have two real-life arguments that counter your less state = more equality argument.
... instead power and money end up flowing to those with the most guns.
First one is based on the values for the Gini coeficient. From the values for this coeficient in 2004, we get that Sweden (where state participation in public life and taxes are big) country has a gini coeficient of 0.250 while the USA (smaller state intervetion in public life, smaller taxes) has a gini coeficient of 0.408.
Meaning inequality of income in the USA is almost twice as much as in Sweden.
The second argument is to look at a country where there is no state at all - Somalia. Somehow, for all the grandeur of your arguments, the de facto result of removing the state is hardly equality
The argument that less state intervention = increased productivity for a society is still very much open to debated. However, please do not insult our inteligence by arguing that less state intervention = more equality, something which history has been proving wrong since the stone-age.
Spoken like someone who's never had an idea worth any money.
Let's stop bullshitting ourselves and just admit the truth: you want the sweat of other people's brow and you don't want to have to pay for it.
Actually, with the patent system as it is now, those that have patents are actually the ones stealing the sweat out of everybody else's brow.
I'll give you an example:
- When in the software development domain, a person or group is asked to find a solution for a specific problem, said person or group will probably come up, totally on their own, with one of more solutions which they find have already been patented.
Even further, some of these patented solutions have never been implemented - a "patent factory" has produced those patents by the simple expedient of sitting in a room and thinking about software/IT implementations of existing solutions for existing problems. We're talking about patents being given for (almost literally) an idea pulled out of someone's ass.
So what do we (hard-working, non-ip-lawyers) do when we have to solve a problem and (on our own) come up with a solution which (although extraordinarily obvious for someone in the field) is already patented?
- Either pay, or try to find a non-patented solution
Either way, it's our sweat because some commons thief spent a day in a room in 199x comming up with patents for adding wireless to existing real world processes.
Gifted but very immature people are also very much on display on the online gaming world.
Somehow the percieved anonimity of the online world will have many persons behaving in an anti-social way in the virtual world, something which they would not do in the real world were that sort of behaviour often has consequences.
Some of them are even gifted at what they do (granted, being gifted in a FPS/MMORPG is not in the same class as being gifted as a software developer).
As a longtime online FPS player i can tell you that both mater.
Latency maters because it impacts both the time it takes for you to be informed of an event in the gaming world (somebody firing a missile at you) and the time it takes for your reaction to be reflected in the game world (you droping flares). It literally means the difference between life and death (although in a virtual way).
Bandwidth matters with relation to the amount of events that can happen in the game world and which are visible to (and/or affect) you. Basically the more the bandwith the more players you can play with at the same time in the same area of the virtual world (think enourmous, flat battlefields with hundreds of players battling it out all at the same time). Current games go around this by either limiting the number of players in the virtual world or by designing the virtual world in such a way that at any one time most players are not visible to other players (information about events generated by non-visible players does not need to be sent).
Things like Battlefield 2 are already exploring the limits of this in 64 player servers (granted, this is EA so they rushed the release and probably didn't optimize the code quite as much as they could)
I believe the core of the parent poster argument is about availablility of 3rd party products and maturity of the language.
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Yet you choose to conter only the the argument that you yourself saw as moth
It's called consumer protection, maybe you've heard of it?
On this side of the pond we're very big on trying to protect consumers from extorsionist behaviour by companies in monopoly positions, busting cartels, punishing companies that lie to their customers, avoiding overuse of shared resources (for example the environment), that kind of thing.
No worries though - i believe we are moving in the direction of the american model of "voluntary" industry regulations and corporate buying of legislation.
I suspect males, being in average more logically giften but less socially gifted than females (i might be stereotyping a bit here), will take more shit (read overwork in both school and work) than women.
Or turning things around, it's more likelly to find males willing to put up with lots of work for little respect/rewards (except personal satisfaction) than it is to find females.
Putting this together with the current lack of respect/admiration in the Western society for Engineering occupations in general (by comparisson with, for example, Law or Management), it might explain a lot.
As a side note, i went to a technical (read engineering) university (about 7 years ago), and at the time ALL degrees had a higher proportion of males than females, and the vast majority had a 2 to 3 or worse ratio. Come to think of it, CS wasn't even the worse off (in my own classes, for electronics engineering, we had 3 women out of 40 pupils)
Your logic breaks at this point:
But Mr. Bitch didn't want to pay for it then fuel costs went up. Oh crap. So if someone complains about something (think 'squeaky wheel'), they're [the airline industry] going to oil the squeak. Well they can't get rid of the passenger so how about we get rid of the meals altogether so they don't have something to complain about.
Your assumption was that when faced with some people complaining about the quality of the meals the airlines decided to remove meals from coach in flights all together. From your implied causal relation (complainers complaining => airlines remove meals) you go into a enourmous rant.
How about if the airlines removed meals to reduce costs because of rising fuel costs and/or increased competition from budget airlines?
I reckon that if we use this assumption instead we can rant all the way up to SUV owners, the chinese industry (big consumers of raw materials) and/or people that choose to fly with budget airlines instead of with "normal" ones.
Yes i do watch porn.
3 9020484,39237409-3,00.htm). In other words, they're less than 0.1% of the industry. Enough said.
Indeed Private came to mind as one of the few porn companies that actually does (some) hardcore movies which actually have a storyline and decent scenarios. (this type of "quality" porn is targeted at the couples market, there is at least another company - Adam & Eve i believe - specialized in this kind of porn)
Two questions arise though:
- What is more important for selling Private movies - beautifull women in hardcore action or great storylines and good scenarios. Putting things another way, if Private had less good looking women, less or no hardcore action but beter scenarios, beter storylines and maybe even HD resolution would they sell more or sell less?
- How big a part of the industry is Private in term of sales?
Answers being:
- Probably less, even if they kept the beautiful women and just reduced the quality of the action, eventually they would come into competetion with the softcore part of the industry such as Playboy, and further downstream even Hollywood. Even if they keep the "quality" of the action and the women, beter storylines, beter scenarios and filming and releasing HD quality products all costs more money. Would it really be worth it in increased sales? Doubt it, especially in an early adopter scenario where the proportion of your customers that can use your products is a small percentage of the total porn digital media market.
- In 2004 Private made £24.4m in revenue out of an industry total of £33bn (source http://insight.zdnet.co.uk/business/employment/0,
In a fragmented industry such as porn, Private is hardly an important player, a "crest of the wave" early adopter or a trend setter.