I'm sure everyone is getting real sick of at least 1 person per thread posting a "How is this news" comment... but for fucks sake. 1 guy, working in an apple store, SAYS he is unionizing. That's the story? I worked with a guy at Best Buy who said "Hey, we should try to form a union!" once. He didn't make front page of Slashdot.
What it does want is failsafe communication with its own sympathisers, clients and agents. People make comments along the lines of "what about if they start censoring us?" Did you not notice? Will you consider your news media uncensored simply because nobody puts a 2 minute ad on national TV or a full page ad in the NYT explaining that it's already happened? Wake up. Did you not notice that you are never [b]allowed[/b] to hear or read your enemies' words directly or in full? You are only [b]allowed[/b] to digest small pieces, decontextualised and presented by public relations people masquerading as journalists.
Really? You're unable to Google information on Al Quaeda? You're unable to view Afghan or Pakistani news sources direct by going to their websites? I get that it's cool to act like America is censoring you, and that you're so hard done by living in this "repressive" "freedom hating" state. But if you wanted more than just the sound bite they give you on CNN, you have the Internet, and you can look it up. The only thing stopping you is your inability to read another language. Comparing your primary news source not giving you enough information to hear both sides of a story with a country that actively shuts down the entire Internet to prevent dissidents from effectively communicating is fucking childish.
When driving, for example, it is next to impossible to resist answering the phone when it rings. And you know that last-second thought you just had? You've got to call someone right now because it might leave your head in the time it takes to at least get to a stop light or to pull over.
Your assumption that we all feel a phone call must be answered or responded to as soon as humanly possible is completely misplaced. When I get a phone call while driving, I ignore it. I don't feel any pavlovian desire to dig through my pocket and answer it, and I CERTAINLY don't consider pulling over or phoning back at a stoplight. Aside from the fact that where I live it would be illegal for me to answer it while driving, I am confident that there is no phone call so pressing that it can't wait until I arrive at my destination. Additionally, I think it's ridiculous that people seem to be getting less and less patient with regards to making phone calls. No one seems to be able to leave a message, or wait a few hours to get called back. This sort of expectation that you'll get a response immediately is absurd. And on the receiving end of things, being unwilling to wait for an appropriate time to call back, for fear that you'll then not get a response on the other side, is equally absurd. We all used to get by just fine only having a phone in our house. Now go chat on your cellphone on someone else's damn lawn!
Some people will tell you the simplest answer is don't push your technical staff to be sales people, and there is some merit to this. I've worked in a lot of different "technical" environments, and I could count the number of technical support or engineering staff that "liked" sales on a single hand. But business is business, and if you can make more money, that only ensures their jobs stay secure. Engineers may not recognize this as a valid argument though. They will counter with "us being able to do our jobs without having to sell also keeps this company afloat." They are of course correct, if you didn't need them for the job they are doing... you wouldn't have hired them. So, burdening them with extra responsibilities can have detrimental effects. The last job I worked at had a sales quota for every member of it's technical staff. The staff despised this, despite the fact that the commission they were paid was identical to what the sales staff were paid. Many engineers will strongly dislike sales... so IMO putting a quota on your engineering staff would be a HUGE mistake. That being said, it'd definitely worth giving the engineering staff the tools an incentives to make sales, without making it a requirement. Then you can have the best of both worlds: Engineering making sales, without destroying morale that comes with forcing sales.
So on to how to actually implement it. First off there is nothing worse than there being discrepancy between commission in two departments, assuming the entire sale can be processed by each department of their own accord. If an engineering staff signs up a customer for a product, he should get the same commission the sales staff would get for it. If there was a difference, it wouldn't take long for engineering to find that out, and I promise they will not be pleased that they are getting less commission for doing the same amount of work as their sales counterparts. Having engineers be capable of placing the entire order themselves id ideal. Sales might be a little peeved that engineering can put sales through themselves... but that's like being upset they aren't being handed free sales they don't have to work for anymore. Another commenter suggested a varying commission bracket for inside sales vs outside sales, and this makes a lot of sense to me too.
Now, if engineering is not capable of putting a sale through themselves, and it HAS to be sent to a sales rep... you have a problem. There isn't going to be any one way to do this perfectly. If an engineer sends a "sale" down to sales to be completed, how do you compensate each member appropriately? Well, if you try to split the commission 50/50 you're going to have situations where an engineer says he "sold" a product, and a sales staff says the customer got down and asked 30 minutes more worth of questions, and so he didn't put the engineering staff's name on the sale. This will be common, and it will be a headache. It's also terrible for morale, as THIS is exactly what would create animosity, so that's no good. The other option, which will not disrupt morale or create animosity but will cost you more money, is to have the sales staff put the engineering staff's name on a sale... and give the engineering staff 50% of what you gave the sales staff. Sales is not going to be upset about putting the engineering staff name on now since they get all the commission they were going to get anyways, and the engineering staff will hopefully understand that "closing the sale" part can be tricky and it's worth the extra commission. This has some of it's own problems too though. It leaves the possibility for fraud open a little too easily. If an engineer and a sales staff get friendly, you might notice one of your engineers is pass a LOT of sales down to a specific sales team member.
So, in closing, here is (IMO) the best way to handle it:
Do not have sales quota on your Engineering staff.
Give your engineering staff the tools to fully place an order themselves.
What good points exactly were these? The article was essentially just an advertisement for Rift, or at the most, a writer who likes Rift. I don't have a problem with authors who want to write about how cool they think a game is, but don't lure me there by deliberately mis-representing the article, it had little to NOTHING to say about the idea of an MMO Bubble.
I'm just glad I never gave them my credit card number (fortunately, I never bought anything on PSN). Now, I wouldn't give them a credit card number on a *dare*. Hell, I won't even give them my real *name* ever again.
Forget the Credit Card Number. I had that canceled the moment I heard there was a "possible" problem. That took about 10 minutes on the phone with my bank, and they were more than happy to oblige. Credit card numbers can be changed, Passwords can be changed. I'm 100 times more concerned about the fact that someone has the REST of my personal information that I CAN'T change. Identity theft is way scarier than credit card theft. I've HAD my credit card stolen and used. The Bank didn't have a problem canceling it before too much was spent, and I only had to pay for what I ordered myself. It was pretty hassle free. But identity theft can happen without you knowing it, and it can go on for some time before you're even aware there is a problem. There will continue to be the THREAT of identity theft essentially until I move, or until I change my name. And they didn't even ENCRYPT that data. -_-
For 60,000 you think they could have made it indoor.. Considering Canada is -40 three quarters of the time, and yes, I do live in Canada. Though 30 drinks later I'm pretty sure no one cares about the temperature.. But 30 drinks later I don't think people care where they go either.
You may live in Canada, but you certainly don't live in Victoria, where it NEVER gets to -40, period.
When you work for your local Cable Company, you usually get a pretty sweet deal on Cable. I was paying 50 bucks to get every single channel available to us. Including the expensive channels (Foreign Language or Porn, etc.) But when you own all the channels, you learn something really important. There is usually nothing good on. As soon as I stopped working for them and I was expected to pay regular prices, I canceled my Cable and I have never looked back. The only channel I sometimes wish I still had was Discovery, but I can live just fine without it.
I setup a fairly inexpensive Desktop computer to exclusively handle all my Media needs. It was about 600 bucks or so, but I easily saved that much money by canceling my cable in less than a year. I leave a wireless Keyboard and Mouse connected and on my coffee table, and I just run whatever I need to run. It also has the added bonus that sometimes there is a call for the Internet in your living room when you have company, and I can easily say I don't think I'll ever go without a media center style PC in my living room again.
If MS actually released some decent upgrades to its old crap they could help people who can't afford to upgrade their PC constantly. If IE9/10 was available XP (as other browsers more capable browsers are) then IE6 would be dead and buried. Clearly MS doesn't want IE6 gone badly enough, or are their browser developers not as capable as EVERY other browser make out there?
Not sure what you're basing this on. IE 7 has been out for ages, and is available for XP. Lots of people still use IE 6. IE 8 is also available for XP, still there are people on IE 6. Why on earth would IE 9 or IE 10 Make a difference to the IE 6 market share?
I'm in a pretty similar boat to you myself. Wife isn't working (no kids thankfully), I was laid off from my previous job a while ago now, had trouble finding new work. Got in a car crash and my car was written off, didn't even pay down the loan I still had left over on it. Couldn't get a loan for a new car because I was unemployed... thought an operation was going to be covered by my medical plan, but due to the timing of my layoff and the operation, it wasn't. Now I'm TRYING to go back to school while somehow paying rent and managing to keep myself and my wife fed. I'm not feeling the love for my fellow man all that much either.
But Society isn't just a give and take thing. It's not about what society has "done" for you or what you "do" for society. Society is a structure. Roads, Grocery Stores, Hospitals, ISPs, Schools; they are more than just buildings and corporations, they are the structure that is our society, and someone else is working to make those things possible. Sometimes it's easy for the structure to fade into the background, but it's there, and we need it. When I go to the store and buy Potatoes, I don't think about the farm that grew them, the trucks that brought them to the store, the shelf stockers that brought them out. They do it to make money, sure, but I pay what, 10 bucks for a bag of potatoes? Around here, minimum wage is 10 bucks an hour. So for one hours work, I'm getting a bag of potatoes. That's a pretty good deal really, I wager it would take me way longer than 1 hour to pull a bag of potatoes out of thin air. Even if you don't think it's doing anything for you, you're using Society every single day. If society really fell apart, would we even be able to live I wonder? Can you truly say that you could be 100% self sufficient if you were sent naked into the forests? I know I couldn't do it. The structure of society keeps us all alive. We need it, even if we don't always notice it. I get that it can feel like Society isn't really helping us out... but that's like saying my bones didn't help me when I needed to lift that heavy bag of sand. No bones = no lifting. No Society = no School, no Roads, no Internet. We all have a vested interest in keeping society from crumbling.
But it's not just the structure, it's the people who are currently working to keep that structure in tact. Take the shelf stockers for example. If he wasn't there, we'd have to buy our food from a warehouse or drive directly to a farm. He is spending his time, by choice or otherwise, doing this so that we can shop in a comfortable store.There is a real live person, with real live goals and dreams, making sure my grocery store has cranberry juice on the shelf. I don't care that he's being paid, he's doing a service for society, and every person who shops there is having their life made just a little more convenient through his work. What am I doing for him right now? You could argue I'm paying money to the store to pay his wages, but those shelves would be stocked even if I had never shopped there. So really, I'm doing nothing for him right now (because I'm unemployed). There are thousands of other people out there doing me services right now, that I am doing nothing for at this point. There's a Doctor who is available in case I have a heart attack, there's a gas station that is keeping gas stocked so it's available when I want it. I can sense the argument "This is all in the interest of getting your money" but my money will be earned by my doing a job as well. I'll be paid for doing something with my time, just like the Stock Boy is being paid for his time. I'll come in with Money from My Time, and exchange it for services made possible with his time. Money is just the surface. Under it all, what's really happening is we are doing things for each other. We are exchanging our time and services for each others time and services... it's just much more complicated than it used to be.
So how are you going to get that money so that you can exchange it for other services? This is where I believe contributing to so
If you truly believe that the only reason anyone does anything ever is for personal gain or profit, I feel sorry for you. People do jobs for more reasons than just the pay. I'm not saying we should all go work for free. We all need to live, and eat, and to some extent be comfortable with our lives. But beyond a certain yearly salary, it stops being "Do you own a house and car" and starts being "How big is your house, and how nice is your car." How big and how nice does your stuff really need to be for you to be satisfied? Or will you ever be satisfied and will you always want bigger and nicer? If working in Engineering made you minimum wage, I'd agree with you that it's not an option, but it doesn't. One other commenter mentioned he capped out at a "measly" 75k a year. NOBODY needs more than 75k a year to live comfortably. Hell, you could reasonably support a family of 4 on 75k a year if you budget right.
And you say it'll take you 2-6 I think you said years of your salary to pay off those loans. I assume you're using this as justification to seek the higher paying job, and I can understand that. But what were you going to do with that money otherwise? Hoard it away? Invest it so that you can hopefully have a million dollars by the time you retire, and can have a comfortable retirement? I get what you're saying that you're working for those years, and you are. You're also saying if you make more money, it'll be like you're working less years for the same debt to disappear. But you're going to be working those years anyways. You're suggesting if you pay it off sooner, it'll cost you less. Again, you're correct. But you assume that having less money must be a bad thing. Again, if you couldn't afford to put food on your table, or have at least a somewhat comfortable lifestyle, I'd agree with you. But we're talking about the difference between driving a Honda and driving a BMW. Between a Condo and a 1/4 acre. Like so many others, we're all brainwashed into believing with every fiber of our body that More Money = Good and Less Money = Bad. This doesn't necessarily have to be the case.
But if that's what it takes to make you happy, I'm not going to be able to change your mind, and you're certainly not alone in that. I just know I'd rather make a humble wage and feel good about what I do, than make 6 figures and not feel I'm contributing anything real to the rest of the world.
I need to follow this up. I think I lost my point in there. It might seem like I'm very anti-capitalist, and that's not true. I think Capitalism has brought us a great many things. The point I was trying to make was this: Even if Ford was just trying to make a buck, even if Edison made the light bulb just so he could be rich, at the end of the day these were things that changed the world. I'm not saying someone is wrong for trying to make money, far from it. But forgoing the possibility of being part of something that could change the world (however unlikely) because you'd rather spend your life SOLELY collecting money... that's something different.
If you truly believe that the only reason anyone does anything ever is for personal gain or profit, I feel sorry for you. People do jobs for more reasons than just the pay. I'm not saying we should all go work for free. We all need to live, and eat, and to some extent be comfortable with our lives. But beyond a certain yearly salary, it stops being "Do you own a house and car" and starts being "How big is your house, and how nice is your car." How big and how nice does your stuff really need to be for you to be satisfied? Or will you ever be satisfied and will you always want bigger and nicer? If working in Engineering made you minimum wage, I'd agree with you that it's not an option, but it doesn't. One other commenter mentioned he capped out at a "measly" 75k a year. NOBODY needs more than 75k a year to live comfortably. Hell, you could reasonably support a family of 4 on 75k a year if you budget right.
And you say it'll take you 2-6 I think you said years of your salary to pay off those loans. I assume you're using this as justification to seek the higher paying job, and I can understand that. But what were you going to do with that money otherwise? Hoard it away? Invest it so that you can hopefully have a million dollars by the time you retire, and can have a comfortable retirement? I get what you're saying that you're working for those years, and you are. You're also saying if you make more money, it'll be like you're working less years for the same debt to disappear. But you're going to be working those years anyways. You're suggesting if you pay it off sooner, it'll cost you less. Again, you're correct. But you assume that having less money must be a bad thing. Again, if you couldn't afford to put food on your table, or have at least a somewhat comfortable lifestyle, I'd agree with you. But we're talking about the difference between driving a Honda and driving a BMW. Between a Condo and a 1/4 acre. Like so many others, we're all brainwashed into believing with every fiber of our body that More Money = Good and Less Money = Bad. This doesn't necessarily have to be the case.
But if that's what it takes to make you happy, I'm not going to be able to change your mind, and you're certainly not alone in that. I just know I'd rather make a humble wage and feel good about what I do, than make 6 figures and not feel I'm contributing anything real to the rest of the world.
You're not seeing the big picture here. We have Universities, Public Education, the whole nine yards, BECAUSE our Society has been built upon the importance of education over the preceding hundreds of years. You're not being paid to go to University, but the fact that there is a university there for you to attend, you owe to the society you live in. The fact that you are on the Internet, you owe to human society. SOMEONE had to invent it so you could use it. The amount of things you take for granted is shocking. Go move to Africa for a while and see what society there provides you with and maybe you'll think differently.
Why shouldn't I be envious, and why shouldn't I leave my boss high and dry for a different job that pays twice as much?
Hopefully because you need more than just a higher pay bracket to be happy with your job and therefore happy with your life. My most recent job was working in a call center offering technical support. They could have been paying me 100,000 k a year, and I guarantee I still wouldn't be happy when I got to work every morning. I'd just have a bigger house and nicer car to leave work in and go home to. I'm not saying being motivated by money is wrong, especially when you have a crushing debt load to pay off after university. I'm just saying I'd rather be happy every day I go into work, and be making the bare minimum to get by, than be making tons of money and hate my job. And as far as I am aware, Programming and Engineering type jobs aren't exactly the bare minimum.;)
I plan to do the same. I think I'm even fortunate enough to have someone running in my riding, so they'll definitely get my vote. They'll never get elected, but I don't know if that's the point. If they can get enough votes that the other parties look at them and say "Hey, what are they doing to get all those votes? Maybe if we did what they do, we could take those votes back." And naturally, if suddenly the Liberal Party had the same policies as Pirate Party regarding Copyright, they'd have won my vote.
You know, car analogies are supposed to make your point EASIER to understand. If I didn't know any better, I'd think you were actually just trying to talk about cars there!
And while total surveillance would result in an increase in solved criminal cases which would probably reduce some kinds of crime, others would still exist: many instances of violent crime are committed in the heat of the moment, others are the result of negligence. Neither would be affected by total surveillance, although I'm sure you could come up with some scifi handwaving argument, like saying that the tendency to assault somebody can be determined from genetic traits and previous surveillance like observed shouting or threatening behaviour. And so on...
Oh you silly commenter. Don't you remember? We'd all have chips in our brains! That way, if someone thinks about committing murder, the police can swoop in to stop him! Hmm, or maybe we can just give him a quick long range ZAP to remind him he's being watched. That oughta straighten him out. Why, pretty soon, he won't even think about murder he'll be so conditioned not to! Problem obviously and handily solved with little or no drawbacks.
The market penetration of game consoles has been decreasing ever since the 80's.
Subject says it all.
Show me the report that suggest the NES sold through more consoles than the PS2, and then we'll talk. Show me the report that suggest more people owned a single Gaming Console in the 80s than do in the 00s and then we'll talk. Back that up with ANYTHING, and then we'll talk.
Honor only goes so far, is it honorable to let your countrymen and woman die because you are too stubborn to accept help from other nations when your infrastructure is failing and the simple lack of fresh water and food will kill people?
And you're right, it's not unkind or stubborn, it's downright stupid. Save your people, work on saving face afterwards
Just because you and I don't agree with a cultural practice, doesn't make it wrong.
Jeopardy is not Strategy. Jeopardy is taxing the computers ability to understand reasonably complex language, and find the solution to a question. A computer has a database of answers, and there is only 1 correct one to select. Football strategy does not imply only 1 right answer. It relies on so many more things than that. All in all, a pretty ridiculous statement.
Shooting this down without having a discussion about it is terribly short sighted. We keep complaining that the RIAA and co need to think of better business models. Maybe this is it. I am not opposed to paying 10 dollars a month to download as much music as I want. I am however opposed to it being tacked onto my Internet bill against my will. So why not make this an Opt In option? People who don't download music don't need to Opt In. I could Opt In and download whatever I want without fear of legal reprisal. I don't think that's such a terrible deal. Next it'll be Hollywood wanting it's 10 bucks a month, or Book Publishers. Again, I'd be happy to pay 10 bucks a month to be able to legally download all the movies or books I want to. As long as it's my choice, I think that's a really reasonable price to pay. Having the Internet cost 100 bucks a month because of Entertainment Taxes when all you want is Wikipedia is ridiculous. Being given the OPTION to pay 100 bucks a month with all that Entertainment legally included is actually fairly reasonable.
Slashdot Mirror
I'm sure everyone is getting real sick of at least 1 person per thread posting a "How is this news" comment... but for fucks sake. 1 guy, working in an apple store, SAYS he is unionizing. That's the story? I worked with a guy at Best Buy who said "Hey, we should try to form a union!" once. He didn't make front page of Slashdot.
What it does want is failsafe communication with its own sympathisers, clients and agents. People make comments along the lines of "what about if they start censoring us?" Did you not notice? Will you consider your news media uncensored simply because nobody puts a 2 minute ad on national TV or a full page ad in the NYT explaining that it's already happened? Wake up. Did you not notice that you are never [b]allowed[/b] to hear or read your enemies' words directly or in full? You are only [b]allowed[/b] to digest small pieces, decontextualised and presented by public relations people masquerading as journalists.
Really? You're unable to Google information on Al Quaeda? You're unable to view Afghan or Pakistani news sources direct by going to their websites? I get that it's cool to act like America is censoring you, and that you're so hard done by living in this "repressive" "freedom hating" state. But if you wanted more than just the sound bite they give you on CNN, you have the Internet, and you can look it up. The only thing stopping you is your inability to read another language. Comparing your primary news source not giving you enough information to hear both sides of a story with a country that actively shuts down the entire Internet to prevent dissidents from effectively communicating is fucking childish.
So where is my classic slashdot then?
When driving, for example, it is next to impossible to resist answering the phone when it rings. And you know that last-second thought you just had? You've got to call someone right now because it might leave your head in the time it takes to at least get to a stop light or to pull over.
Your assumption that we all feel a phone call must be answered or responded to as soon as humanly possible is completely misplaced. When I get a phone call while driving, I ignore it. I don't feel any pavlovian desire to dig through my pocket and answer it, and I CERTAINLY don't consider pulling over or phoning back at a stoplight. Aside from the fact that where I live it would be illegal for me to answer it while driving, I am confident that there is no phone call so pressing that it can't wait until I arrive at my destination. Additionally, I think it's ridiculous that people seem to be getting less and less patient with regards to making phone calls. No one seems to be able to leave a message, or wait a few hours to get called back. This sort of expectation that you'll get a response immediately is absurd. And on the receiving end of things, being unwilling to wait for an appropriate time to call back, for fear that you'll then not get a response on the other side, is equally absurd. We all used to get by just fine only having a phone in our house. Now go chat on your cellphone on someone else's damn lawn!
Doesn't he know there are MUCH easier ways to look at naked women using a computer?
Some people will tell you the simplest answer is don't push your technical staff to be sales people, and there is some merit to this. I've worked in a lot of different "technical" environments, and I could count the number of technical support or engineering staff that "liked" sales on a single hand. But business is business, and if you can make more money, that only ensures their jobs stay secure. Engineers may not recognize this as a valid argument though. They will counter with "us being able to do our jobs without having to sell also keeps this company afloat." They are of course correct, if you didn't need them for the job they are doing... you wouldn't have hired them. So, burdening them with extra responsibilities can have detrimental effects. The last job I worked at had a sales quota for every member of it's technical staff. The staff despised this, despite the fact that the commission they were paid was identical to what the sales staff were paid. Many engineers will strongly dislike sales... so IMO putting a quota on your engineering staff would be a HUGE mistake. That being said, it'd definitely worth giving the engineering staff the tools an incentives to make sales, without making it a requirement. Then you can have the best of both worlds: Engineering making sales, without destroying morale that comes with forcing sales.
So on to how to actually implement it. First off there is nothing worse than there being discrepancy between commission in two departments, assuming the entire sale can be processed by each department of their own accord. If an engineering staff signs up a customer for a product, he should get the same commission the sales staff would get for it. If there was a difference, it wouldn't take long for engineering to find that out, and I promise they will not be pleased that they are getting less commission for doing the same amount of work as their sales counterparts. Having engineers be capable of placing the entire order themselves id ideal. Sales might be a little peeved that engineering can put sales through themselves... but that's like being upset they aren't being handed free sales they don't have to work for anymore. Another commenter suggested a varying commission bracket for inside sales vs outside sales, and this makes a lot of sense to me too.
Now, if engineering is not capable of putting a sale through themselves, and it HAS to be sent to a sales rep... you have a problem. There isn't going to be any one way to do this perfectly. If an engineer sends a "sale" down to sales to be completed, how do you compensate each member appropriately? Well, if you try to split the commission 50/50 you're going to have situations where an engineer says he "sold" a product, and a sales staff says the customer got down and asked 30 minutes more worth of questions, and so he didn't put the engineering staff's name on the sale. This will be common, and it will be a headache. It's also terrible for morale, as THIS is exactly what would create animosity, so that's no good. The other option, which will not disrupt morale or create animosity but will cost you more money, is to have the sales staff put the engineering staff's name on a sale... and give the engineering staff 50% of what you gave the sales staff. Sales is not going to be upset about putting the engineering staff name on now since they get all the commission they were going to get anyways, and the engineering staff will hopefully understand that "closing the sale" part can be tricky and it's worth the extra commission. This has some of it's own problems too though. It leaves the possibility for fraud open a little too easily. If an engineer and a sales staff get friendly, you might notice one of your engineers is pass a LOT of sales down to a specific sales team member.
So, in closing, here is (IMO) the best way to handle it:
Do not have sales quota on your Engineering staff.
Give your engineering staff the tools to fully place an order themselves.
Allow engineering to defer a
What good points exactly were these? The article was essentially just an advertisement for Rift, or at the most, a writer who likes Rift. I don't have a problem with authors who want to write about how cool they think a game is, but don't lure me there by deliberately mis-representing the article, it had little to NOTHING to say about the idea of an MMO Bubble.
I'm just glad I never gave them my credit card number (fortunately, I never bought anything on PSN). Now, I wouldn't give them a credit card number on a *dare*. Hell, I won't even give them my real *name* ever again.
Forget the Credit Card Number. I had that canceled the moment I heard there was a "possible" problem. That took about 10 minutes on the phone with my bank, and they were more than happy to oblige. Credit card numbers can be changed, Passwords can be changed. I'm 100 times more concerned about the fact that someone has the REST of my personal information that I CAN'T change. Identity theft is way scarier than credit card theft. I've HAD my credit card stolen and used. The Bank didn't have a problem canceling it before too much was spent, and I only had to pay for what I ordered myself. It was pretty hassle free. But identity theft can happen without you knowing it, and it can go on for some time before you're even aware there is a problem. There will continue to be the THREAT of identity theft essentially until I move, or until I change my name. And they didn't even ENCRYPT that data. -_-
For 60,000 you think they could have made it indoor.. Considering Canada is -40 three quarters of the time, and yes, I do live in Canada. Though 30 drinks later I'm pretty sure no one cares about the temperature.. But 30 drinks later I don't think people care where they go either.
You may live in Canada, but you certainly don't live in Victoria, where it NEVER gets to -40, period.
When you work for your local Cable Company, you usually get a pretty sweet deal on Cable. I was paying 50 bucks to get every single channel available to us. Including the expensive channels (Foreign Language or Porn, etc.) But when you own all the channels, you learn something really important. There is usually nothing good on. As soon as I stopped working for them and I was expected to pay regular prices, I canceled my Cable and I have never looked back. The only channel I sometimes wish I still had was Discovery, but I can live just fine without it.
I setup a fairly inexpensive Desktop computer to exclusively handle all my Media needs. It was about 600 bucks or so, but I easily saved that much money by canceling my cable in less than a year. I leave a wireless Keyboard and Mouse connected and on my coffee table, and I just run whatever I need to run. It also has the added bonus that sometimes there is a call for the Internet in your living room when you have company, and I can easily say I don't think I'll ever go without a media center style PC in my living room again.
If MS actually released some decent upgrades to its old crap they could help people who can't afford to upgrade their PC constantly. If IE9/10 was available XP (as other browsers more capable browsers are) then IE6 would be dead and buried. Clearly MS doesn't want IE6 gone badly enough, or are their browser developers not as capable as EVERY other browser make out there?
Not sure what you're basing this on. IE 7 has been out for ages, and is available for XP. Lots of people still use IE 6. IE 8 is also available for XP, still there are people on IE 6. Why on earth would IE 9 or IE 10 Make a difference to the IE 6 market share?
I'm in a pretty similar boat to you myself. Wife isn't working (no kids thankfully), I was laid off from my previous job a while ago now, had trouble finding new work. Got in a car crash and my car was written off, didn't even pay down the loan I still had left over on it. Couldn't get a loan for a new car because I was unemployed... thought an operation was going to be covered by my medical plan, but due to the timing of my layoff and the operation, it wasn't. Now I'm TRYING to go back to school while somehow paying rent and managing to keep myself and my wife fed. I'm not feeling the love for my fellow man all that much either.
But Society isn't just a give and take thing. It's not about what society has "done" for you or what you "do" for society. Society is a structure. Roads, Grocery Stores, Hospitals, ISPs, Schools; they are more than just buildings and corporations, they are the structure that is our society, and someone else is working to make those things possible. Sometimes it's easy for the structure to fade into the background, but it's there, and we need it. When I go to the store and buy Potatoes, I don't think about the farm that grew them, the trucks that brought them to the store, the shelf stockers that brought them out. They do it to make money, sure, but I pay what, 10 bucks for a bag of potatoes? Around here, minimum wage is 10 bucks an hour. So for one hours work, I'm getting a bag of potatoes. That's a pretty good deal really, I wager it would take me way longer than 1 hour to pull a bag of potatoes out of thin air. Even if you don't think it's doing anything for you, you're using Society every single day. If society really fell apart, would we even be able to live I wonder? Can you truly say that you could be 100% self sufficient if you were sent naked into the forests? I know I couldn't do it. The structure of society keeps us all alive. We need it, even if we don't always notice it. I get that it can feel like Society isn't really helping us out... but that's like saying my bones didn't help me when I needed to lift that heavy bag of sand. No bones = no lifting. No Society = no School, no Roads, no Internet. We all have a vested interest in keeping society from crumbling.
But it's not just the structure, it's the people who are currently working to keep that structure in tact. Take the shelf stockers for example. If he wasn't there, we'd have to buy our food from a warehouse or drive directly to a farm. He is spending his time, by choice or otherwise, doing this so that we can shop in a comfortable store.There is a real live person, with real live goals and dreams, making sure my grocery store has cranberry juice on the shelf. I don't care that he's being paid, he's doing a service for society, and every person who shops there is having their life made just a little more convenient through his work. What am I doing for him right now? You could argue I'm paying money to the store to pay his wages, but those shelves would be stocked even if I had never shopped there. So really, I'm doing nothing for him right now (because I'm unemployed). There are thousands of other people out there doing me services right now, that I am doing nothing for at this point. There's a Doctor who is available in case I have a heart attack, there's a gas station that is keeping gas stocked so it's available when I want it. I can sense the argument "This is all in the interest of getting your money" but my money will be earned by my doing a job as well. I'll be paid for doing something with my time, just like the Stock Boy is being paid for his time. I'll come in with Money from My Time, and exchange it for services made possible with his time. Money is just the surface. Under it all, what's really happening is we are doing things for each other. We are exchanging our time and services for each others time and services... it's just much more complicated than it used to be.
So how are you going to get that money so that you can exchange it for other services? This is where I believe contributing to so
If you truly believe that the only reason anyone does anything ever is for personal gain or profit, I feel sorry for you. People do jobs for more reasons than just the pay. I'm not saying we should all go work for free. We all need to live, and eat, and to some extent be comfortable with our lives. But beyond a certain yearly salary, it stops being "Do you own a house and car" and starts being "How big is your house, and how nice is your car." How big and how nice does your stuff really need to be for you to be satisfied? Or will you ever be satisfied and will you always want bigger and nicer? If working in Engineering made you minimum wage, I'd agree with you that it's not an option, but it doesn't. One other commenter mentioned he capped out at a "measly" 75k a year. NOBODY needs more than 75k a year to live comfortably. Hell, you could reasonably support a family of 4 on 75k a year if you budget right.
And you say it'll take you 2-6 I think you said years of your salary to pay off those loans. I assume you're using this as justification to seek the higher paying job, and I can understand that. But what were you going to do with that money otherwise? Hoard it away? Invest it so that you can hopefully have a million dollars by the time you retire, and can have a comfortable retirement? I get what you're saying that you're working for those years, and you are. You're also saying if you make more money, it'll be like you're working less years for the same debt to disappear. But you're going to be working those years anyways. You're suggesting if you pay it off sooner, it'll cost you less. Again, you're correct. But you assume that having less money must be a bad thing. Again, if you couldn't afford to put food on your table, or have at least a somewhat comfortable lifestyle, I'd agree with you. But we're talking about the difference between driving a Honda and driving a BMW. Between a Condo and a 1/4 acre. Like so many others, we're all brainwashed into believing with every fiber of our body that More Money = Good and Less Money = Bad. This doesn't necessarily have to be the case.
But if that's what it takes to make you happy, I'm not going to be able to change your mind, and you're certainly not alone in that. I just know I'd rather make a humble wage and feel good about what I do, than make 6 figures and not feel I'm contributing anything real to the rest of the world.
I need to follow this up. I think I lost my point in there. It might seem like I'm very anti-capitalist, and that's not true. I think Capitalism has brought us a great many things. The point I was trying to make was this: Even if Ford was just trying to make a buck, even if Edison made the light bulb just so he could be rich, at the end of the day these were things that changed the world. I'm not saying someone is wrong for trying to make money, far from it. But forgoing the possibility of being part of something that could change the world (however unlikely) because you'd rather spend your life SOLELY collecting money... that's something different.
If you truly believe that the only reason anyone does anything ever is for personal gain or profit, I feel sorry for you. People do jobs for more reasons than just the pay. I'm not saying we should all go work for free. We all need to live, and eat, and to some extent be comfortable with our lives. But beyond a certain yearly salary, it stops being "Do you own a house and car" and starts being "How big is your house, and how nice is your car." How big and how nice does your stuff really need to be for you to be satisfied? Or will you ever be satisfied and will you always want bigger and nicer? If working in Engineering made you minimum wage, I'd agree with you that it's not an option, but it doesn't. One other commenter mentioned he capped out at a "measly" 75k a year. NOBODY needs more than 75k a year to live comfortably. Hell, you could reasonably support a family of 4 on 75k a year if you budget right.
And you say it'll take you 2-6 I think you said years of your salary to pay off those loans. I assume you're using this as justification to seek the higher paying job, and I can understand that. But what were you going to do with that money otherwise? Hoard it away? Invest it so that you can hopefully have a million dollars by the time you retire, and can have a comfortable retirement? I get what you're saying that you're working for those years, and you are. You're also saying if you make more money, it'll be like you're working less years for the same debt to disappear. But you're going to be working those years anyways. You're suggesting if you pay it off sooner, it'll cost you less. Again, you're correct. But you assume that having less money must be a bad thing. Again, if you couldn't afford to put food on your table, or have at least a somewhat comfortable lifestyle, I'd agree with you. But we're talking about the difference between driving a Honda and driving a BMW. Between a Condo and a 1/4 acre. Like so many others, we're all brainwashed into believing with every fiber of our body that More Money = Good and Less Money = Bad. This doesn't necessarily have to be the case.
But if that's what it takes to make you happy, I'm not going to be able to change your mind, and you're certainly not alone in that. I just know I'd rather make a humble wage and feel good about what I do, than make 6 figures and not feel I'm contributing anything real to the rest of the world.
You're not seeing the big picture here. We have Universities, Public Education, the whole nine yards, BECAUSE our Society has been built upon the importance of education over the preceding hundreds of years. You're not being paid to go to University, but the fact that there is a university there for you to attend, you owe to the society you live in. The fact that you are on the Internet, you owe to human society. SOMEONE had to invent it so you could use it. The amount of things you take for granted is shocking. Go move to Africa for a while and see what society there provides you with and maybe you'll think differently.
Why shouldn't I be envious, and why shouldn't I leave my boss high and dry for a different job that pays twice as much?
Hopefully because you need more than just a higher pay bracket to be happy with your job and therefore happy with your life. My most recent job was working in a call center offering technical support. They could have been paying me 100,000 k a year, and I guarantee I still wouldn't be happy when I got to work every morning. I'd just have a bigger house and nicer car to leave work in and go home to. I'm not saying being motivated by money is wrong, especially when you have a crushing debt load to pay off after university. I'm just saying I'd rather be happy every day I go into work, and be making the bare minimum to get by, than be making tons of money and hate my job. And as far as I am aware, Programming and Engineering type jobs aren't exactly the bare minimum. ;)
I plan to do the same. I think I'm even fortunate enough to have someone running in my riding, so they'll definitely get my vote. They'll never get elected, but I don't know if that's the point. If they can get enough votes that the other parties look at them and say "Hey, what are they doing to get all those votes? Maybe if we did what they do, we could take those votes back." And naturally, if suddenly the Liberal Party had the same policies as Pirate Party regarding Copyright, they'd have won my vote.
Either /. commenter creativity has hit a new low, or Texas's reputation is so overpowering that such jokes are inevitable.
A little from column A, a little from column B.
You know, car analogies are supposed to make your point EASIER to understand. If I didn't know any better, I'd think you were actually just trying to talk about cars there!
And while total surveillance would result in an increase in solved criminal cases which would probably reduce some kinds of crime, others would still exist: many instances of violent crime are committed in the heat of the moment, others are the result of negligence. Neither would be affected by total surveillance, although I'm sure you could come up with some scifi handwaving argument, like saying that the tendency to assault somebody can be determined from genetic traits and previous surveillance like observed shouting or threatening behaviour. And so on...
Oh you silly commenter. Don't you remember? We'd all have chips in our brains! That way, if someone thinks about committing murder, the police can swoop in to stop him! Hmm, or maybe we can just give him a quick long range ZAP to remind him he's being watched. That oughta straighten him out. Why, pretty soon, he won't even think about murder he'll be so conditioned not to! Problem obviously and handily solved with little or no drawbacks.
The market penetration of game consoles has been decreasing ever since the 80's.
Subject says it all. Show me the report that suggest the NES sold through more consoles than the PS2, and then we'll talk. Show me the report that suggest more people owned a single Gaming Console in the 80s than do in the 00s and then we'll talk. Back that up with ANYTHING, and then we'll talk.
Running in Opera 11 and it works great! Pretty awesome job.
Honor only goes so far, is it honorable to let your countrymen and woman die because you are too stubborn to accept help from other nations when your infrastructure is failing and the simple lack of fresh water and food will kill people?
And you're right, it's not unkind or stubborn, it's downright stupid. Save your people, work on saving face afterwards
Just because you and I don't agree with a cultural practice, doesn't make it wrong.
Jeopardy is not Strategy. Jeopardy is taxing the computers ability to understand reasonably complex language, and find the solution to a question. A computer has a database of answers, and there is only 1 correct one to select. Football strategy does not imply only 1 right answer. It relies on so many more things than that. All in all, a pretty ridiculous statement.
Shooting this down without having a discussion about it is terribly short sighted. We keep complaining that the RIAA and co need to think of better business models. Maybe this is it. I am not opposed to paying 10 dollars a month to download as much music as I want. I am however opposed to it being tacked onto my Internet bill against my will. So why not make this an Opt In option? People who don't download music don't need to Opt In. I could Opt In and download whatever I want without fear of legal reprisal. I don't think that's such a terrible deal. Next it'll be Hollywood wanting it's 10 bucks a month, or Book Publishers. Again, I'd be happy to pay 10 bucks a month to be able to legally download all the movies or books I want to. As long as it's my choice, I think that's a really reasonable price to pay. Having the Internet cost 100 bucks a month because of Entertainment Taxes when all you want is Wikipedia is ridiculous. Being given the OPTION to pay 100 bucks a month with all that Entertainment legally included is actually fairly reasonable.