I agree with your sentiment, but there are other considerations to make in a business setting. As far as simple costs go, the sticker price on another monitor might be $200, but there are often large costs beyond sticker price in the corporate world. The purchase has to be requested formally, then approved, then ordered, received, and installed. The real cost in accounting, paperwork, and labor could be a surprisingly large percentage of the final cost. Granted, there's almost no plausible final price at which this isn't a worthwhile investment if, as you say, the developer realizes even a fraction of a point in productivity gained, but never forget that nothing is cheap in business.
The other thing is that sometimes people can be irrational weasels. If getting a new monitor for this guy inspires someone from accounting to request one for better spreadsheet management, and ultimately everyone down to the mailboy starts thinking they need dual displays, that's a lot of money and annoyance in the short run in exchange for relatively small productivity gains in the long run. Then you factor in the relatively small possibilities that some people who get more screen space will therefore require more desk space and thus better furniture to accommodate it, which could lead to people needing more square footage, etc.
And god help the company if someone decides that they don't need a new monitor, but someone else got something cool so they want a better chair. Some people react irrationally to the perceived status inequality behind equipment purchases. It's pure monkey brain at work, but it creates a lot of tiresome whining and bloated spending sometimes.
Anyway, you're fundamentally right. In almost any imaginable it's probably better to buy the guy a new monitor, but don't underestimate the chain of annoyances such a purchase might cause.
Western is only 90 miles away from the University of Washington, which has one of the best public Computer Science departments in the country, so any Washington resident smart enough to deserve a subsidized education in CS has a *way* better option just down the road.
I see so many comments here on slashdot to the effect that recent computer science grads are perhaps 10% excellent, 35% trainable, and 55% total morons, yet when someone suggests closing a computer science department you all rush to criticize. I think it's the right thing to close this department, especially if it means making the department at UW a little bigger. Less duplication of resources, fewer incompetents admitted to CS programs in Washington state, and those who go to UW rather than Western will get a much better education.
There's no need for every basic discipline to have a degree granting department at every school, either. What's wrong with downgrading the department at Western to a non-degree granting teaching department, offering a minor and specializing in synergy classes for other sciences?
This is what 8 years of Bush bought us folks, a Supreme Court on the take (look it up, it's a fact that Clarance Thomas took bribes). Hopefully a few of 'em 'll retire while the Dems are in and Obama'll man up and put some liberals in.
Which will go stunningly well I'm sure. The courts will run like a well oiled machine then.
Call me jaded, but when I choose between modern liberals and modern conservatives I'm really choosing which set of rights I want them to try and take.
Um, are you aware that Clarence Thomas took office exactly ten years before Bush's inauguration? How exactly can he be blamed for Thomas' behavior? Furthermore, Bush nominated just two of the nine current justices. I understand that the balance of power in the court is always tenuous and that he nominated very conservative people, but 2 of 9 is hardly stacking the place.
You're also missing the point with your avowed hope that Obama'll "man up" and appoint some liberals. He won't appoint liberals, he'll appoint Democrats. Democrats are slightly better than Republicans, but they both suck. I'd much rather have nine generally conservative independents (and I mean true independents, not guys who are independent because they think George Will and the Constiution party are too gosh durned liberal) than any number of Democrats.
It's also worth noting that a copy of "Shakespeare's collected works" and some desks & chairs to sit around discussing Shakespeare in costs a little less than an Electron Microscope, or a fully stocked biology or chemistry lab. If your major requires significantly more expensive tools & materials as part of your studies than a liberal arts program, it's not entirely unreasonable to expect that the course of study would cost more.
So doesn't this mean the English majors are currently subsidizing the engineering majors? Why in that case should English majors continue to pay the same rates even as science departments shore up their cost disparity with tuition increases? Getting more money out of the science majors while leaving all others rates the same would amount to unjustified budget bloat unless they used the funds for across the board improvements or cut the English majors' tuition by at least a fraction of the increase imposed on science majors. Preferably they would do both.
Back home in Spokane, WA I met a guy and his wife who ran a candy shop at a country tourist attraction. He said whenever people didn't have enough money or said they'd lost their wallets he let them take whatever they wanted, gave them a business card, and asked them to mail a check when they went home.
They'd been open at least five years and he said he could count the number of people who'd stiffed him on one hand.
It's absolutely shocking how much your expectations of people change their actual behavior; look up the documentary "A Class Divided" from PBS for a good example.
Don't expect people to do wrong and act surprised when they don't. Expect them to do the right thing, treat them with respect, and you'll make a tangible difference in their choosing good behavior.
Do even the smallest amount of research on food in America and you'll realize that these "subsidies" are just regulatory money laundering for companies like Monsanto. The subsidies suppress the price of commodity crops below the cost of production, the farmers sell at what would be a loss without the subsidies (and buy their seed stock, equipment, etc. at prices they now can't afford without the subsidies), and everyone who sells seed, sells fertilizer or buys grain profits wildly at the expense of these subsidy programs. You have no idea how much more you pay for food than the supermarket price...it's staggering.
As subsidies exist today, farmers do in fact need them; corporate entities guarantee that farmers can't survive without them.
As for getting more efficiency from larger operations, keep in mind that only operations that play nice with the corporations who fuck up the market and steal the subsidies are *allowed* to be large operations. If you rock the boat, no one buys your corn and you go under. There are truly so few buyers that you will literally go out of business if just one or two companies refuse to buy from you. The larger operations you tout are either choosing between bankruptcy and graft or conscious shills of bastards raiding public money and national food security for profit.
... or add more value. Make the box something customers want, use e-ink displays on something included in the package. Stuff a Tee shirt or roll a poster in there. Add more digital content (games, featurettes, etc) since the file-sharing content tends to be just the bare product. Add a raffle ticket to each purchase that could win some one-of-a-kind memorabilia or else a signed picture.
That looks like adding gimmicks to me, not adding value. I enjoy a collector's edition occasionally, so I understand the appeal of an extra goody here and there for buying the physical box, but the issue is really the net cost they're charging for the core experience that a movie or game provides. If I'm interested in the product but view it as simple entertainment and a relatively mediocre experience (which almost all games and movies are), I'm not going to be happier about the high price because they gave me a T-shirt; why would I even want a bunch of extra mini-games, clothes, or collectibles to celebrate a mediocre product?
Furthermore, with video games there is typically available a version that is superior to the retail version in every way. A good pirate will be free of crazy DRM, include all of the available in-game collectibles or special items that are typically divided amongst different stores and purchase models in the retail version of the game, and lastly the pirated version typically includes the DRM for free, rather than charging you upwards of $10/hour of gameplay for bits of new content.
Wow...so we've got three choices: a guy who openly declares his current employer to be an advertising company masquerading as a benevolent information broker; a former boss of the most corrupt, cynical corporation in an industry that's famous all around for bribes, price fixing, and bad science for profit; and a bureaucrat. Is this Russian roulette or what?
I'm sure some people think that performing any action should also come with no consequences whatsoever...However, that's not how the real world works, at least not the civilized world.
Actually, in this case, that is exactly how the real, civilized world works. He didn't take an "action", he made a statement, and those two are very different things in civilized countries. Very few things are forbidden to say in a truly civilized society, and criticizing the establishment is never forbidden in a civilized society, whether the means of communication is operated by the establishment of said society or not. I understand that actions have consequences, but in many important ways speech is not action.
Yes - if you do it on their private forums. You can post that EA sucks and that Bioware sold out all you want, just not on their site. It's kinda like walking into someone's living room and taking a shit, you can't expect them to like it.
You have *got* to be kidding me. Asking if Bioware has "sold their souls to the EA devil?" constitutes some egregious offense analogous to taking a shit in someone's living room? An offense for which it was acceptable to ban him? I don't care if it's technically a private forum, if you believe free speech applies *anywhere*, you should be appalled at such retaliation for criticizing an establishment. Just because the forum's most cynical purpose is to help sell the game doesn't mean anyone benefits from silencing opposition; it just proves that EA cares more about appearances than about the satisfaction of their customers, and speaks volumes about how likely future game titles or forum policies are to take fan criticism into account.
EA may work directly for the stock holders, but they theoretically work for us, the gamers, and telling a customer you won't tolerate criticism of your product is delusional, possessive, and self-destructive.
I said northern Europe, not all of Europe. Italy, Spain, most baltic states, etc. suck at least as bad as the US, and they drag the stats way down while other countries do far better than the US.
Even assuming your linked data are completely accurate for all internet connections, however, I'd rather have a lower promise rating on more than twice as much usable bandwidth than deal with an "up to" 3mbps connection any longer.
So you're saying that "up to" means "at least"? Do you not realize that broadband bits cost 20-40 times less than commercial bandwidth, precisely because it's shared 20-40 times? Now you want the government to change the service level of a shared circuit to that of a dedicated circuit? Any idea what this does to prices? Any idea how you'd actually achieve this, since it's impossible to build a core network that can handle all the concurrent data that the end points can throw at it?
If dedicated lines are prohibitively expensive and an extremely robust "core network" impossible to build, why can so many service providers in northern Europe and southeast Asia provide an extremely consistent 100+ mbps, even at night when virtually everyone is online (say in South Korea), to every single household for anywhere from $10-$50/month? I understand that truly dedicated bandwidth costs more, but it's bullshit to claim that pure economics dictate paying $60+ per month for something that's been sold 20 to 40 times over.
Is Justice the final word on mergers? I thought the SEC and other financial watchdogs had to sign off on mergers like this, and not just the FCC or DOJ.
Maybe now we can stop trading food for inferior gasoline and get further ahead on things that make some sense. Trading food and water for something less efficient than gasoline but requiring almost all of the same cumbersome infrastructure? I still can't believe anyone went crazy for ethanol in the first place.
Many traditional stories about the discovery of coffee recount shepherds discovering its unusual properties after observing that their goats were unusually perky after munching a certain red berry, which turned out to contain coffee beans (which are technically seeds).
I certainly think this and other stories of discovering analgesics, psychoactives, etc. by observing animals are quite plausible.
So if Pickens buys water and his water actually becomes critical at some point, eminent domain will work, for once, as it was intended: the government will take the damn water and the public will at least be dealing with a regulated monopoly. Politicians can be bought in the short term, but an entire starving (thirsting) populace tends to destabilize the best of plans.
If you're an adult, you should know better. I see adults cross the street without looking while on the phone and not even notice me beeping at them. And this was back when I drove a beat up car that sounded like a Boeing 747.
For every adult pedestrian who's been hit for jaywalking while talking on their cell phone without looking, there's another who got hit in a signaled crosswalk by a driver on a cell phone who checked only the oncoming vehicle traffic before pulling out, a guy who had a car door opened in his face while riding a bicycle in a marked lane, or a pedestrian who got hit by a car on the god damn sidewalk. I've been hit all three of those ways.
I'm sick of self-righteous, insouciant comments such as yours (see also http://tech.slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=09/09/19/2026211) about how stupid pedestrians are, about how it's just legislation to protect idiots, etc. If you're driving 4,000 pounds of steel you have to be more careful than the guy driving 175 pounds of meat, and guy driving the meat deserves some extra warning, including an auditory warning, when you're not doing your job. If he walks out without looking, you hit him and he dies. If you fuck up, you hit him and he dies. Staying alive is all on the pedestrian, no matter who would be legally at fault if they get hit. Don't act like they're all idiots and pedestrian safety is a trivial problem and this just one more step into a total abdication of personal responsibility. This is serious stuff and I believe the majority of people who get hit by cars were not stupid and not doing the wrong thing. Your snarky anecdotes about idiot children and cell phone users are a strawman, drawing all attention away from the thousands of pedestrians who get hit and killed by bad drivers while the pedestrians were doing everything right.
I think you need to pay closer attention. The Democratic congress has worked almost every work day of each month, with some time off during the traditional times taken off. The Republicans are the ones who are never in session. during the Bush years, they worked 10 days a month... and the new house leadership has already scheduled next years session and they are back to 10 days a month.
Days spent in legislative session don't equate with days of productivity. If the congressmen are playing golf in Nassau whenever they're not in session, then of course it's irresponsible to meet just 10 days a month. If for those non-legislative days they're researching, reading bills, visiting their governor, writing bills, or holding meetings with entities such as the pentagon, the GAO, etc. then I'd rather they were out there looking hard at the real world and analyzing what perspective they should bring back to the full body. The alternative is a congress that spends all it's time dragging important people away from their jobs to testify and consult rather than seeing those people's work first hand where practical, a congress that spends more time arguing and politicking amongst themselves, creating alliances and self-reinforcing opinions, than critically analyzing reality.
A congress that meets every day is worse, in my opinion, than one that meets just 10 days a month, even if the other 20 days were golf vacations.
All the games you had to choose from in making your argument, and you choose Mass Effect? Really?
What about Deus Ex? In fact, Invisible War might make a better movie than the first one, even if it wasn't quite as good a game. Planescape: Torment could be the fantasy movie of the millenium. No One Lives Forever practically cries out to become a movie, even if it is similar to Austin Powers. Fallout 1 already *felt* like playing a movie.
His weird little cast list is especially odd. Notice how many of those choices look almost exactly like the character from the game? Who gives a crap? It should be enough to actually use the damn story they're given; asking the cast to almost perfectly resemble the game is just arbitrary and unimaginative, and lends the impression that fan boys don't want a movie but a two-hour cutscene re-rendering the entire game.
Gah! This is like the fifteenth population density excuse I've seen in this thread alone, and *every* thread about internet speeds is filled with population density arguments.
They're just not true. They look true, based on Japan and Korea, but look at European countries. Norway and Denmark are even less dense than the US, and they still kick our asses in broadband speed. We have shitty internet because of monopolies lying their asses off to the FCC and the public about how people "don't want" better internet than they already have and it would be prohibitively expensive to upgrade anyway. Population density doesn't mean shit, and if it did they would focus more heavily on WiMax or any of the half dozen other solid wireless broadband technologies that mainstream providers avoid like the plague; last mile problem solved.
I see your point, but I'd rather not rely entirely on inferences where the plain truth could and should be available. This article is an interview masquerading as hard journalism, and while you're probably right I wouldn't mind seeing more sources than the guy's lawyer: maybe they could quote some nice smart university professor who has experience and solid credentials to make the objection you just showed me, for example.
The article draws almost exclusively on the guy's lawyer for it's material: you know, the same lawyer who gets probably half a million out of this 'guilty' verdict? I can't imagine a worse primary source than that for informing any attempt at a factual, semi-serious debate on the case.
Furthermore, while I agree that hiring someone for a patently fabricated project and career track is unethical, I'm not convinced that Seagate did that here. Hiring a highly skilled individual long before urgently needing them isn't unethical; it's thinking ahead. Again, if they hired him exclusively to bullshit possible business partners and simultaneously could have foreseen wanting to get rid of him if or when this particular project died, then of course it's wrong, but the article doesn't go even halfway to convincing me of this supposition.
As an aside, I'm a little confused about how the lost time and the litigation process "ended" his career as a yield engineer. Have other people refused to hire him? Does the field change so fast that he truly doesn't know anything useful anymore and may as well have switched jobs? That whole thing smells of drumming up sympathy and inflating the measurable economic loss to seek a larger judgment, or perhaps getting those benefits to the case out of convenience after deciding voluntarily to give up the profession for the entrepreneurial endeavor the plaintiff is engaged in now.
One thing about the industry is that fuel costs are the single highest expense (even over the $100m/piece containerships), so it is in their best interest to be as efficient as possible. The most efficient container line has the lowest cost, and thus the highest profit or lowest rates. As long as regulations are in place to protect people from known harmful practices (like the fuel change in national waters), I don't think any more is necessary.
What rule says that the cheapest option, even the most fuel efficient option, will be the most environmentally friendly option? Even if fuel is the most expensive thing on the budget, it just doesn't follow that saving fuel will save the environment and save the company money at the same time, for multiple reasons.
For one thing, shippers aren't out there to save the environment: Imagine that instead of using ships they could do something like, I don't know, fire the cargo from one port to another with some sort of giant cannon, an option with 33% less total cost but using so much fuel and generating so much waste that the overall impact was 40% more particulate emissions to the environment than using boats? How many shippers wouldn't say "fuck yes!" in private while avoiding or spinning the whole environment issue in public? They're not explicitly trying to reduce fuel consumption, they're trying to reduce cost: they won't voluntarily take advantage of the many options, such as exotic catalytic converters or exhaust scrubbers, which substantially reduce emissions but have no impact at all on fuel burned.
Furthermore, saving fuel is not always saving the environment. A motorcycle pollutes way more than a car (I'll leave you to find the thousands of google hits on that), but it saves an individual rider both money and fuel versus driving a car. The same could apply for other comparisons of transportation methods as well.
It simply isn't true that the market will bear out the most environmentally friendly option, nor is it true that only minimal regulation to prevent obviously dangerous or deceptive practices (you mention fuel changing) is needed. No one makes the most money saving the planet; they make the most money making money.
Read the third paragraph from the bottom to see what's really happening. Carriers don't want boosters dead, they simply want to become the vendors rather than allow smaller companies a slice of the action.
Furthermore, look at what femtocells, the type of boosters Verizon and AT&T want to sell you, actually do: they "push wireless signals onto the Internet" to improve signal.
That's right, rather than upgrade networks that the iPhone and Droid will saturate to uselessness within the next year (I hear that in NYC AT&T is already almost worthless), they're pushing a device that works around their own incompetence by shoving your "wireless" signal back onto copper, fiber, or coax before it even leaves your house. They're not just avoiding the issue of under-developed networks, they've figured out how to charge you for it.
Rather than trying to ban unregulated devices and trying to transform our cell phones into wireless landlines wherever they can manage it, how about they propose better specifications for the "boosters" that actually boost a wireless signal, or spend some money on their damn networks?
Slashdot Mirror
I agree with your sentiment, but there are other considerations to make in a business setting. As far as simple costs go, the sticker price on another monitor might be $200, but there are often large costs beyond sticker price in the corporate world. The purchase has to be requested formally, then approved, then ordered, received, and installed. The real cost in accounting, paperwork, and labor could be a surprisingly large percentage of the final cost. Granted, there's almost no plausible final price at which this isn't a worthwhile investment if, as you say, the developer realizes even a fraction of a point in productivity gained, but never forget that nothing is cheap in business.
The other thing is that sometimes people can be irrational weasels. If getting a new monitor for this guy inspires someone from accounting to request one for better spreadsheet management, and ultimately everyone down to the mailboy starts thinking they need dual displays, that's a lot of money and annoyance in the short run in exchange for relatively small productivity gains in the long run. Then you factor in the relatively small possibilities that some people who get more screen space will therefore require more desk space and thus better furniture to accommodate it, which could lead to people needing more square footage, etc.
And god help the company if someone decides that they don't need a new monitor, but someone else got something cool so they want a better chair. Some people react irrationally to the perceived status inequality behind equipment purchases. It's pure monkey brain at work, but it creates a lot of tiresome whining and bloated spending sometimes.
Anyway, you're fundamentally right. In almost any imaginable it's probably better to buy the guy a new monitor, but don't underestimate the chain of annoyances such a purchase might cause.
Western is only 90 miles away from the University of Washington, which has one of the best public Computer Science departments in the country, so any Washington resident smart enough to deserve a subsidized education in CS has a *way* better option just down the road.
I see so many comments here on slashdot to the effect that recent computer science grads are perhaps 10% excellent, 35% trainable, and 55% total morons, yet when someone suggests closing a computer science department you all rush to criticize. I think it's the right thing to close this department, especially if it means making the department at UW a little bigger. Less duplication of resources, fewer incompetents admitted to CS programs in Washington state, and those who go to UW rather than Western will get a much better education.
There's no need for every basic discipline to have a degree granting department at every school, either. What's wrong with downgrading the department at Western to a non-degree granting teaching department, offering a minor and specializing in synergy classes for other sciences?
This is what 8 years of Bush bought us folks, a Supreme Court on the take (look it up, it's a fact that Clarance Thomas took bribes). Hopefully a few of 'em 'll retire while the Dems are in and Obama'll man up and put some liberals in.
Which will go stunningly well I'm sure. The courts will run like a well oiled machine then.
Call me jaded, but when I choose between modern liberals and modern conservatives I'm really choosing which set of rights I want them to try and take.
Um, are you aware that Clarence Thomas took office exactly ten years before Bush's inauguration? How exactly can he be blamed for Thomas' behavior? Furthermore, Bush nominated just two of the nine current justices. I understand that the balance of power in the court is always tenuous and that he nominated very conservative people, but 2 of 9 is hardly stacking the place.
You're also missing the point with your avowed hope that Obama'll "man up" and appoint some liberals. He won't appoint liberals, he'll appoint Democrats. Democrats are slightly better than Republicans, but they both suck. I'd much rather have nine generally conservative independents (and I mean true independents, not guys who are independent because they think George Will and the Constiution party are too gosh durned liberal) than any number of Democrats.
It's also worth noting that a copy of "Shakespeare's collected works" and some desks & chairs to sit around discussing Shakespeare in costs a little less than an Electron Microscope, or a fully stocked biology or chemistry lab. If your major requires significantly more expensive tools & materials as part of your studies than a liberal arts program, it's not entirely unreasonable to expect that the course of study would cost more.
So doesn't this mean the English majors are currently subsidizing the engineering majors? Why in that case should English majors continue to pay the same rates even as science departments shore up their cost disparity with tuition increases? Getting more money out of the science majors while leaving all others rates the same would amount to unjustified budget bloat unless they used the funds for across the board improvements or cut the English majors' tuition by at least a fraction of the increase imposed on science majors. Preferably they would do both.
Back home in Spokane, WA I met a guy and his wife who ran a candy shop at a country tourist attraction. He said whenever people didn't have enough money or said they'd lost their wallets he let them take whatever they wanted, gave them a business card, and asked them to mail a check when they went home.
They'd been open at least five years and he said he could count the number of people who'd stiffed him on one hand.
It's absolutely shocking how much your expectations of people change their actual behavior; look up the documentary "A Class Divided" from PBS for a good example.
Don't expect people to do wrong and act surprised when they don't. Expect them to do the right thing, treat them with respect, and you'll make a tangible difference in their choosing good behavior.
Do even the smallest amount of research on food in America and you'll realize that these "subsidies" are just regulatory money laundering for companies like Monsanto. The subsidies suppress the price of commodity crops below the cost of production, the farmers sell at what would be a loss without the subsidies (and buy their seed stock, equipment, etc. at prices they now can't afford without the subsidies), and everyone who sells seed, sells fertilizer or buys grain profits wildly at the expense of these subsidy programs. You have no idea how much more you pay for food than the supermarket price...it's staggering.
As subsidies exist today, farmers do in fact need them; corporate entities guarantee that farmers can't survive without them.
As for getting more efficiency from larger operations, keep in mind that only operations that play nice with the corporations who fuck up the market and steal the subsidies are *allowed* to be large operations. If you rock the boat, no one buys your corn and you go under. There are truly so few buyers that you will literally go out of business if just one or two companies refuse to buy from you. The larger operations you tout are either choosing between bankruptcy and graft or conscious shills of bastards raiding public money and national food security for profit.
... or add more value. Make the box something customers want, use e-ink displays on something included in the package. Stuff a Tee shirt or roll a poster in there. Add more digital content (games, featurettes, etc) since the file-sharing content tends to be just the bare product. Add a raffle ticket to each purchase that could win some one-of-a-kind memorabilia or else a signed picture.
That looks like adding gimmicks to me, not adding value. I enjoy a collector's edition occasionally, so I understand the appeal of an extra goody here and there for buying the physical box, but the issue is really the net cost they're charging for the core experience that a movie or game provides. If I'm interested in the product but view it as simple entertainment and a relatively mediocre experience (which almost all games and movies are), I'm not going to be happier about the high price because they gave me a T-shirt; why would I even want a bunch of extra mini-games, clothes, or collectibles to celebrate a mediocre product?
Furthermore, with video games there is typically available a version that is superior to the retail version in every way. A good pirate will be free of crazy DRM, include all of the available in-game collectibles or special items that are typically divided amongst different stores and purchase models in the retail version of the game, and lastly the pirated version typically includes the DRM for free, rather than charging you upwards of $10/hour of gameplay for bits of new content.
Wow...so we've got three choices: a guy who openly declares his current employer to be an advertising company masquerading as a benevolent information broker; a former boss of the most corrupt, cynical corporation in an industry that's famous all around for bribes, price fixing, and bad science for profit; and a bureaucrat.
Is this Russian roulette or what?
I'm sure some people think that performing any action should also come with no consequences whatsoever...However, that's not how the real world works, at least not the civilized world.
Actually, in this case, that is exactly how the real, civilized world works. He didn't take an "action", he made a statement, and those two are very different things in civilized countries. Very few things are forbidden to say in a truly civilized society, and criticizing the establishment is never forbidden in a civilized society, whether the means of communication is operated by the establishment of said society or not.
I understand that actions have consequences, but in many important ways speech is not action.
Yes - if you do it on their private forums. You can post that EA sucks and that Bioware sold out all you want, just not on their site.
It's kinda like walking into someone's living room and taking a shit, you can't expect them to like it.
You have *got* to be kidding me. Asking if Bioware has "sold their souls to the EA devil?" constitutes some egregious offense analogous to taking a shit in someone's living room? An offense for which it was acceptable to ban him? I don't care if it's technically a private forum, if you believe free speech applies *anywhere*, you should be appalled at such retaliation for criticizing an establishment. Just because the forum's most cynical purpose is to help sell the game doesn't mean anyone benefits from silencing opposition; it just proves that EA cares more about appearances than about the satisfaction of their customers, and speaks volumes about how likely future game titles or forum policies are to take fan criticism into account.
EA may work directly for the stock holders, but they theoretically work for us, the gamers, and telling a customer you won't tolerate criticism of your product is delusional, possessive, and self-destructive.
I said northern Europe, not all of Europe. Italy, Spain, most baltic states, etc. suck at least as bad as the US, and they drag the stats way down while other countries do far better than the US.
Even assuming your linked data are completely accurate for all internet connections, however, I'd rather have a lower promise rating on more than twice as much usable bandwidth than deal with an "up to" 3mbps connection any longer.
European Broadband Tests
So you're saying that "up to" means "at least"? Do you not realize that broadband bits cost 20-40 times less than commercial bandwidth, precisely because it's shared 20-40 times? Now you want the government to change the service level of a shared circuit to that of a dedicated circuit? Any idea what this does to prices? Any idea how you'd actually achieve this, since it's impossible to build a core network that can handle all the concurrent data that the end points can throw at it?
If dedicated lines are prohibitively expensive and an extremely robust "core network" impossible to build, why can so many service providers in northern Europe and southeast Asia provide an extremely consistent 100+ mbps, even at night when virtually everyone is online (say in South Korea), to every single household for anywhere from $10-$50/month? I understand that truly dedicated bandwidth costs more, but it's bullshit to claim that pure economics dictate paying $60+ per month for something that's been sold 20 to 40 times over.
Is Justice the final word on mergers? I thought the SEC and other financial watchdogs had to sign off on mergers like this, and not just the FCC or DOJ.
Maybe now we can stop trading food for inferior gasoline and get further ahead on things that make some sense. Trading food and water for something less efficient than gasoline but requiring almost all of the same cumbersome infrastructure? I still can't believe anyone went crazy for ethanol in the first place.
Many traditional stories about the discovery of coffee recount shepherds discovering its unusual properties after observing that their goats were unusually perky after munching a certain red berry, which turned out to contain coffee beans (which are technically seeds).
I certainly think this and other stories of discovering analgesics, psychoactives, etc. by observing animals are quite plausible.
So if Pickens buys water and his water actually becomes critical at some point, eminent domain will work, for once, as it was intended: the government will take the damn water and the public will at least be dealing with a regulated monopoly. Politicians can be bought in the short term, but an entire starving (thirsting) populace tends to destabilize the best of plans.
If you're an adult, you should know better. I see adults cross the street without looking while on the phone and not even notice me beeping at them. And this was back when I drove a beat up car that sounded like a Boeing 747.
For every adult pedestrian who's been hit for jaywalking while talking on their cell phone without looking, there's another who got hit in a signaled crosswalk by a driver on a cell phone who checked only the oncoming vehicle traffic before pulling out, a guy who had a car door opened in his face while riding a bicycle in a marked lane, or a pedestrian who got hit by a car on the god damn sidewalk. I've been hit all three of those ways.
I'm sick of self-righteous, insouciant comments such as yours (see also http://tech.slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=09/09/19/2026211) about how stupid pedestrians are, about how it's just legislation to protect idiots, etc. If you're driving 4,000 pounds of steel you have to be more careful than the guy driving 175 pounds of meat, and guy driving the meat deserves some extra warning, including an auditory warning, when you're not doing your job. If he walks out without looking, you hit him and he dies. If you fuck up, you hit him and he dies. Staying alive is all on the pedestrian, no matter who would be legally at fault if they get hit. Don't act like they're all idiots and pedestrian safety is a trivial problem and this just one more step into a total abdication of personal responsibility. This is serious stuff and I believe the majority of people who get hit by cars were not stupid and not doing the wrong thing. Your snarky anecdotes about idiot children and cell phone users are a strawman, drawing all attention away from the thousands of pedestrians who get hit and killed by bad drivers while the pedestrians were doing everything right.
I think you need to pay closer attention. The Democratic congress has worked almost every work day of each month, with some time off during the traditional times taken off. The Republicans are the ones who are never in session. during the Bush years, they worked 10 days a month... and the new house leadership has already scheduled next years session and they are back to 10 days a month.
Days spent in legislative session don't equate with days of productivity. If the congressmen are playing golf in Nassau whenever they're not in session, then of course it's irresponsible to meet just 10 days a month. If for those non-legislative days they're researching, reading bills, visiting their governor, writing bills, or holding meetings with entities such as the pentagon, the GAO, etc. then I'd rather they were out there looking hard at the real world and analyzing what perspective they should bring back to the full body. The alternative is a congress that spends all it's time dragging important people away from their jobs to testify and consult rather than seeing those people's work first hand where practical, a congress that spends more time arguing and politicking amongst themselves, creating alliances and self-reinforcing opinions, than critically analyzing reality.
A congress that meets every day is worse, in my opinion, than one that meets just 10 days a month, even if the other 20 days were golf vacations.
All the games you had to choose from in making your argument, and you choose Mass Effect? Really?
What about Deus Ex? In fact, Invisible War might make a better movie than the first one, even if it wasn't quite as good a game. Planescape: Torment could be the fantasy movie of the millenium. No One Lives Forever practically cries out to become a movie, even if it is similar to Austin Powers. Fallout 1 already *felt* like playing a movie.
His weird little cast list is especially odd. Notice how many of those choices look almost exactly like the character from the game? Who gives a crap? It should be enough to actually use the damn story they're given; asking the cast to almost perfectly resemble the game is just arbitrary and unimaginative, and lends the impression that fan boys don't want a movie but a two-hour cutscene re-rendering the entire game.
A press is a device for duplicating written matter.
Are you sure that the literal definition of "press" is the best one, and the most accurate one to the intent of the constitution?
Gah! This is like the fifteenth population density excuse I've seen in this thread alone, and *every* thread about internet speeds is filled with population density arguments.
They're just not true. They look true, based on Japan and Korea, but look at European countries. Norway and Denmark are even less dense than the US, and they still kick our asses in broadband speed. We have shitty internet because of monopolies lying their asses off to the FCC and the public about how people "don't want" better internet than they already have and it would be prohibitively expensive to upgrade anyway. Population density doesn't mean shit, and if it did they would focus more heavily on WiMax or any of the half dozen other solid wireless broadband technologies that mainstream providers avoid like the plague; last mile problem solved.
I see your point, but I'd rather not rely entirely on inferences where the plain truth could and should be available. This article is an interview masquerading as hard journalism, and while you're probably right I wouldn't mind seeing more sources than the guy's lawyer: maybe they could quote some nice smart university professor who has experience and solid credentials to make the objection you just showed me, for example.
The article draws almost exclusively on the guy's lawyer for it's material: you know, the same lawyer who gets probably half a million out of this 'guilty' verdict? I can't imagine a worse primary source than that for informing any attempt at a factual, semi-serious debate on the case.
Furthermore, while I agree that hiring someone for a patently fabricated project and career track is unethical, I'm not convinced that Seagate did that here. Hiring a highly skilled individual long before urgently needing them isn't unethical; it's thinking ahead. Again, if they hired him exclusively to bullshit possible business partners and simultaneously could have foreseen wanting to get rid of him if or when this particular project died, then of course it's wrong, but the article doesn't go even halfway to convincing me of this supposition.
As an aside, I'm a little confused about how the lost time and the litigation process "ended" his career as a yield engineer. Have other people refused to hire him? Does the field change so fast that he truly doesn't know anything useful anymore and may as well have switched jobs? That whole thing smells of drumming up sympathy and inflating the measurable economic loss to seek a larger judgment, or perhaps getting those benefits to the case out of convenience after deciding voluntarily to give up the profession for the entrepreneurial endeavor the plaintiff is engaged in now.
One thing about the industry is that fuel costs are the single highest expense (even over the $100m/piece containerships), so it is in their best interest to be as efficient as possible. The most efficient container line has the lowest cost, and thus the highest profit or lowest rates. As long as regulations are in place to protect people from known harmful practices (like the fuel change in national waters), I don't think any more is necessary.
What rule says that the cheapest option, even the most fuel efficient option, will be the most environmentally friendly option? Even if fuel is the most expensive thing on the budget, it just doesn't follow that saving fuel will save the environment and save the company money at the same time, for multiple reasons.
For one thing, shippers aren't out there to save the environment: Imagine that instead of using ships they could do something like, I don't know, fire the cargo from one port to another with some sort of giant cannon, an option with 33% less total cost but using so much fuel and generating so much waste that the overall impact was 40% more particulate emissions to the environment than using boats? How many shippers wouldn't say "fuck yes!" in private while avoiding or spinning the whole environment issue in public? They're not explicitly trying to reduce fuel consumption, they're trying to reduce cost: they won't voluntarily take advantage of the many options, such as exotic catalytic converters or exhaust scrubbers, which substantially reduce emissions but have no impact at all on fuel burned.
Furthermore, saving fuel is not always saving the environment. A motorcycle pollutes way more than a car (I'll leave you to find the thousands of google hits on that), but it saves an individual rider both money and fuel versus driving a car. The same could apply for other comparisons of transportation methods as well.
It simply isn't true that the market will bear out the most environmentally friendly option, nor is it true that only minimal regulation to prevent obviously dangerous or deceptive practices (you mention fuel changing) is needed. No one makes the most money saving the planet; they make the most money making money.
Read the third paragraph from the bottom to see what's really happening. Carriers don't want boosters dead, they simply want to become the vendors rather than allow smaller companies a slice of the action.
Furthermore, look at what femtocells, the type of boosters Verizon and AT&T want to sell you, actually do: they "push wireless signals onto the Internet" to improve signal.
That's right, rather than upgrade networks that the iPhone and Droid will saturate to uselessness within the next year (I hear that in NYC AT&T is already almost worthless), they're pushing a device that works around their own incompetence by shoving your "wireless" signal back onto copper, fiber, or coax before it even leaves your house. They're not just avoiding the issue of under-developed networks, they've figured out how to charge you for it.
Rather than trying to ban unregulated devices and trying to transform our cell phones into wireless landlines wherever they can manage it, how about they propose better specifications for the "boosters" that actually boost a wireless signal, or spend some money on their damn networks?