This is exactly why I don't like PvP games. I don't have the time to invest into gaining some reasonable level of skill, nor do I want to pay more than I already have for the game. I think there is something fundamentally wrong with paying $20 (or $60) for a game, then double that to get "the full game" - you know, the stuff the "game of the year edition" will have. Even more so when those extras become a "pay to win" model.
One of my buddies is into the CoD games and each time a new one came out, he'd want to play vs mode against me. EVERY game would be something like 20-0, and there was no handicap setting that would help the one-shot-one-kill behavior of the game. On the other hand, Blizzard had a reasonable approach with Starcraft 2 by allowing those competitive players to play ladder matches and attempt to climb ranks, while those that didn't care would get paired up with people that have similar win/loss ratios. League of Legends is similar in placing similarly leveled (experienced) players against one another. I still play against computer opponents though - there's only so much losing to teenage korean kids that somehow know my mom that I can be bothered to put up with.
This number has floated around a few times this year.
Personally I think if there is a decline, it's due to mankind's smash-and-grab of as much land as we can take, filling it with concrete and asphalt, then spraying pesticides everywhere. We hose down crops with insecticides as well, though that practice seems to be (I'm no farmer) waning. I don't like bugs in my house, and have pest control treat our lawns for fire ants - those guys are assholes - quarterly. Not trying to be a hypocrite... but you look at suburban strip malls, or downtown skyscrapers and just were are we supposed to have bugs, birds and more?
More nature preserves and parks maybe? Do these numbers actually count bugs in the wilderness?
The funny part: I was never intended to be used for identification. The SOLE purpose of the Social Security Number was to track income and earnings for later disbursement from the Social Security fund.
IANAL, but I read that as, legally, Financial Institutions and Healthcare providers have no basis for needing your SSN. Unfortunately, it's just become used as a national ID.
At the retirement party for one of my best managers I asked him one question: "What's your secret to being a great manager?" his answer: "My only job is to enable my people to do theirs."
Sure, one person may not have applied the patch. But it wasn't that persons fault that a process wasn't followed, that the appropriate funding was available, that assorted checks and balances were in place, and that IV&V didn't happen. That falls on management.
This is the same scapegoating VW tried to get away with in their "Rogue Engineer" nonsense.
Normally when we say "NRA" we think "Republican" and, at least for me, "old stuffy gun-toting white guy". That ignores the appeal that Republicans are having with the disenfranchised younger generation. Not only is there the "old rich folk" Republicans, but the younger "If you vote with us you'll be like us when you're older" Republicans. You know, those late teen and 20-somethings that came into a Democratic-led economy and were unable to get jobs due all kinds of reasons - such as H1B's.
So now the Democrats are scraping by with the liberal-minded middle-management level people that were fortunate enough to get a well-paying job before the curve. And, like you said, those people don't show up in droves to voice an opinion.
Of course, there's many more factors at play, but I wanted to point out it's not all the out-of-touch rich people passing the laws.
I've been calling the blind followers of political parties names like "Republemmings" for years. Either people are too busy/lazy to do some research, or otherwise can't be bothered to form their own educated opinion. So they turn to someone they've never met that is able to form some complete, persuasive sentences, and blindly follow what they say.
I've known some PhD's that take *everything* Limbaugh says as gospel and honestly though the Earth would spin off it's axis and go straight into the sun when Obama got elected. I've also seen plenty of people bashing Bush Jr, Sr, and our Cheeto-in-chief (see?) without actually having a solid stance for their vitriol.
We were migrating toward one of two hive minds long before Facebook, it just sped up the transition.
There is an app, it's called Moment. it takes your battery usage (a screenshot of it, due to iOS limitations and such) and can show you how usage compares daily - if you actively take those screen shots.
Granted this app is for monitoring your usage in the hopes that you can break some bad habits... but it's still useful to see which app is eating the most battery.
One of the tenets of GPL v2 (which is A LOT of software out there) is that if you expand or modify, you are obligated to share those expansions and modifications. Sure, there is a difference between "Open Source" and "Free Software", but they aren't truly embracing the notion of "Open Source". If they were, we'd be able to inspect *all* of it.
You provide many examples of where MS wasn't involved in the self-inflicted gunshot wounds... but fail to provide any where they were. Wikipedia lists Java, Messaging, browsers, and even Adobe's PDF format.
I'd contend that Nokia was example as well. They send Stephen Elop over, have him dismantle stuff from the inside so their stock tanks, MS buys Nokia (Embrace), pushed a windows phone or 2 (Extend), then sells the shell of Nokia off (Extinguish).
So you're saying I should sell my car and ride a cow to work?
Bonus that after a couple years I can get a new model and eat the old one. Not so sure my neighbors would appreciate it when the exhaust starts leaking sludge though...
Combine this data with the leak of personal information from OPM a few years ago, and you have yourself a nice list of people to target - folks with active (or recently active) security clearances THAT ALSO have debt issues.
It just got that much easier to make a target list.
Simple? Sure. The default screen is uncluttered, there aren't a lot of right-click or modifier-click actions by default.
Featureless? Arguable. KDE lets you customize everything down to the pixel. I prefer having the one selector for a theme in Gnome (via Gnome Tweak) to trying to remember the 2-3 places in KDE to change the overall look/feel. Why do I need to remember to change where I go to switch window colors, window borders, desktop theme (which only changes the panel and menu), and more just to give my desktop a new theme?
Uncustomizable? Look at the plugins. Vanilla Gnome 3 is pretty unusable for a power user... but for a non-techie, its pretty damn close to Mac OS usable in its simplicity. For power users, there's always the plugins to get the old-style start menu, assorted taskbar entries, change window behavior, add/remove taskbars, add a fully customizable dock, and so on.
Powerful? 20 years ago Gnome was a mess too. I still have a hard time divining what the difference is between Applications->System Tools and System->Administration. At least in Windows 95 there was "Control Panel" (to say nothing of Windows 10's mess of configuration windows)
Compared to 20 years ago, EVERY UI is bloated. Windows 95 came on a CD and could be installed (with some work) in 200 MB. Windows 7 comes along at 50 GB, Windows 10 is about the same. My Ubuntu Gnome install sits somewhere around 8GB with dev software installed. Computers have changed a lot in 20 years - we've gone from 600 MHz Pentiums to 4.2 GHz 8-core desktops.
I'll reply here instead of the same comments at this level.
Folks need to remember you own your computer, but not the Windows OS. By accepting the Windows EULA, you are agreeing to a lease of their software. You don't own it, never have, never will. Since the OS is property of MS, it stands to reason (law is a different question) that they would have access to their own stuff.
Now, if they used that access to get PII without consent, then MS would be up shit creek.
Who's going to pay $100 million dollars or more to make yet another made-for-tv movie?
The content creators. Looking at many of the TV shows nowadays it's not a far-off concept for some shows to get there. The Flash and Supergirl have some really good special effects, as does Agents of Shield. Sure, they aren't an hour of Hulk and Iron Man duking it out and destroying entire cities, but they still look better than many movies made 10 years ago.
Besides, not having the budget for lots of explosions and lens flares would mean more movies with exciting stories. No more Michael Bay movies is an added bonus.
Novels, Comics, textbooks, journals, lesson plans, instruction manuals, warranty information, contracts, flyers, bills, advertisements, receipts, photographs, the list goes on.
One example of massive printing is Aircraft Manuals and other related stuff. A car manual and such are likely 100 pages max, but there's one per car. Aircraft manuals and Technical Orders can be on the order of 800+ pages, and they *must* be accessible in the aircraft (at least, DoD regs say so). Most of the older DoD systems have tech orders that are only in paper form, and can only be requested in paper form.
Not to mention all the bills, advertisements, junk mail we all get. My house likely gets 50 pages of junk a week, some more than others.
Meanwhile most civilized countries are laughing at us.
To the best of my knowledge, the US is the only country that actually cares about skin color in any way. Employers catalog it so they can show "diversity". We use it in everyday speech "those mexican people over there". We use it in our news "unidentified black male".
Instead of focusing on color, why don't we focus on capability? There are women who are strong enough to be firefighters. There are very well regarded male nurses and teachers. There's nothing stopping anyone from being successful at anything. If we could get rid of these artificial walls in our society, then we'd all be better off.
I'd much rather have a surgeon that got a 4.0 in all their PhD classes than "the black one to fill our diversity requirements". But that's just me.
Years ago I got mail from them regarding my credit card. I had been signed up for "Credit Defense", which WF charged some % of your monthly balance to put toward a pot that you could draw on should you be unemployed for a length of time. I didn't think much of it and didn't care because I didn't have a high balance.
Fast forward a few years and couple moves later and my balance was a bit higher. To top things off, this charge was getting between $50 and $60 every month, which was making payments harder. Basically my story was a lot like this guys. I called up WF, they told me to call this third party company. I call them "Sorry, I can't refund". So I broken record the assholes, "So send me to someone who can". A few people later and I can "file a complaint" or whatever their lingo was. They had to prove that I had signed a document allowing them to charge me. They couldn't, so I got refunded near $2k for my troubles. No bogus charges since.
If it weren't for having my longest running line of credit with them, I'd have walked into a branch, shredded my credit card and given them the two finger salute years ago.
It's called Nominative Determinism, and it happens today. Many names have their origins in what the person did (e.g. "Smith" as a blacksmith), but now we find humor when that person ends up getting a job fitting their name. I knew a PhD with the last name Blaise (pronounce "Blaze") who specialized in pyrotechnics.
The Federal Poverty Level of a single person is ~$11,800/yr. At that rate, that poor bastard would need to work at the same wage for 16,949.15 YEARS to just earn the difference between Jeff and Bills net worth ($200Mil). Hell, at $100K a year for a working professional, that's 2,000 years.
Further perspective, Land owners like Ted Turner made $1.7Billion (in the 1980's) and owns 590,823 acres - just shy of 3 Rhode Islands. Not sure how much Ted spent on his land, but imagine a ranch 45 times that size... or nearly 150 Rhode Islands.
I'm more interested in the breakdown of these "users". How many are pets? Bands? Brand names? Corporations? TV Shows? "collector" accounts that only spew reddit images? Deities? Magazines?
I have no doubt Failbook is popular. I just think that the numbers are inflated by including the accounts that aren't directly tied to a living being. I'm pretty sure whoever runs the "God" Failbook page has at least one other account...
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This is exactly why I don't like PvP games. I don't have the time to invest into gaining some reasonable level of skill, nor do I want to pay more than I already have for the game. I think there is something fundamentally wrong with paying $20 (or $60) for a game, then double that to get "the full game" - you know, the stuff the "game of the year edition" will have. Even more so when those extras become a "pay to win" model.
One of my buddies is into the CoD games and each time a new one came out, he'd want to play vs mode against me. EVERY game would be something like 20-0, and there was no handicap setting that would help the one-shot-one-kill behavior of the game. On the other hand, Blizzard had a reasonable approach with Starcraft 2 by allowing those competitive players to play ladder matches and attempt to climb ranks, while those that didn't care would get paired up with people that have similar win/loss ratios. League of Legends is similar in placing similarly leveled (experienced) players against one another. I still play against computer opponents though - there's only so much losing to teenage korean kids that somehow know my mom that I can be bothered to put up with.
This number has floated around a few times this year.
Personally I think if there is a decline, it's due to mankind's smash-and-grab of as much land as we can take, filling it with concrete and asphalt, then spraying pesticides everywhere. We hose down crops with insecticides as well, though that practice seems to be (I'm no farmer) waning. I don't like bugs in my house, and have pest control treat our lawns for fire ants - those guys are assholes - quarterly. Not trying to be a hypocrite... but you look at suburban strip malls, or downtown skyscrapers and just were are we supposed to have bugs, birds and more?
More nature preserves and parks maybe? Do these numbers actually count bugs in the wilderness?
I'd wager most users wouldn't know their CPU was pegged, they have no idea what Task Manager or "top" are... much less how to open it or read it.
For them, they just see "My browser is really slow" or "this site is slow" and don't think much of it.
The real question is how long until this "feature" is included in WordPress?
The funny part: I was never intended to be used for identification. The SOLE purpose of the Social Security Number was to track income and earnings for later disbursement from the Social Security fund.
IANAL, but I read that as, legally, Financial Institutions and Healthcare providers have no basis for needing your SSN. Unfortunately, it's just become used as a national ID.
At the retirement party for one of my best managers I asked him one question: "What's your secret to being a great manager?" his answer: "My only job is to enable my people to do theirs."
Sure, one person may not have applied the patch. But it wasn't that persons fault that a process wasn't followed, that the appropriate funding was available, that assorted checks and balances were in place, and that IV&V didn't happen. That falls on management.
This is the same scapegoating VW tried to get away with in their "Rogue Engineer" nonsense.
Normally when we say "NRA" we think "Republican" and, at least for me, "old stuffy gun-toting white guy". That ignores the appeal that Republicans are having with the disenfranchised younger generation. Not only is there the "old rich folk" Republicans, but the younger "If you vote with us you'll be like us when you're older" Republicans. You know, those late teen and 20-somethings that came into a Democratic-led economy and were unable to get jobs due all kinds of reasons - such as H1B's.
So now the Democrats are scraping by with the liberal-minded middle-management level people that were fortunate enough to get a well-paying job before the curve. And, like you said, those people don't show up in droves to voice an opinion.
Of course, there's many more factors at play, but I wanted to point out it's not all the out-of-touch rich people passing the laws.
I've been calling the blind followers of political parties names like "Republemmings" for years. Either people are too busy/lazy to do some research, or otherwise can't be bothered to form their own educated opinion. So they turn to someone they've never met that is able to form some complete, persuasive sentences, and blindly follow what they say.
I've known some PhD's that take *everything* Limbaugh says as gospel and honestly though the Earth would spin off it's axis and go straight into the sun when Obama got elected. I've also seen plenty of people bashing Bush Jr, Sr, and our Cheeto-in-chief (see?) without actually having a solid stance for their vitriol.
We were migrating toward one of two hive minds long before Facebook, it just sped up the transition.
There is an app, it's called Moment. it takes your battery usage (a screenshot of it, due to iOS limitations and such) and can show you how usage compares daily - if you actively take those screen shots.
Granted this app is for monitoring your usage in the hopes that you can break some bad habits... but it's still useful to see which app is eating the most battery.
One of the tenets of GPL v2 (which is A LOT of software out there) is that if you expand or modify, you are obligated to share those expansions and modifications. Sure, there is a difference between "Open Source" and "Free Software", but they aren't truly embracing the notion of "Open Source". If they were, we'd be able to inspect *all* of it.
You provide many examples of where MS wasn't involved in the self-inflicted gunshot wounds... but fail to provide any where they were. Wikipedia lists Java, Messaging, browsers, and even Adobe's PDF format.
I'd contend that Nokia was example as well. They send Stephen Elop over, have him dismantle stuff from the inside so their stock tanks, MS buys Nokia (Embrace), pushed a windows phone or 2 (Extend), then sells the shell of Nokia off (Extinguish).
So you're saying I should sell my car and ride a cow to work?
Bonus that after a couple years I can get a new model and eat the old one. Not so sure my neighbors would appreciate it when the exhaust starts leaking sludge though...
Combine this data with the leak of personal information from OPM a few years ago, and you have yourself a nice list of people to target - folks with active (or recently active) security clearances THAT ALSO have debt issues.
It just got that much easier to make a target list.
Simple? Sure. The default screen is uncluttered, there aren't a lot of right-click or modifier-click actions by default.
Featureless? Arguable. KDE lets you customize everything down to the pixel. I prefer having the one selector for a theme in Gnome (via Gnome Tweak) to trying to remember the 2-3 places in KDE to change the overall look/feel. Why do I need to remember to change where I go to switch window colors, window borders, desktop theme (which only changes the panel and menu), and more just to give my desktop a new theme?
Uncustomizable? Look at the plugins. Vanilla Gnome 3 is pretty unusable for a power user... but for a non-techie, its pretty damn close to Mac OS usable in its simplicity. For power users, there's always the plugins to get the old-style start menu, assorted taskbar entries, change window behavior, add/remove taskbars, add a fully customizable dock, and so on.
Powerful? 20 years ago Gnome was a mess too. I still have a hard time divining what the difference is between Applications->System Tools and System->Administration. At least in Windows 95 there was "Control Panel" (to say nothing of Windows 10's mess of configuration windows)
Compared to 20 years ago, EVERY UI is bloated. Windows 95 came on a CD and could be installed (with some work) in 200 MB. Windows 7 comes along at 50 GB, Windows 10 is about the same. My Ubuntu Gnome install sits somewhere around 8GB with dev software installed. Computers have changed a lot in 20 years - we've gone from 600 MHz Pentiums to 4.2 GHz 8-core desktops.
That's not true, they'll still have the resource-hogging, CPU crippling formerly-good-but-couldn't-keep-up browser thing goin for them.
I'll reply here instead of the same comments at this level.
Folks need to remember you own your computer, but not the Windows OS. By accepting the Windows EULA, you are agreeing to a lease of their software. You don't own it, never have, never will. Since the OS is property of MS, it stands to reason (law is a different question) that they would have access to their own stuff.
Now, if they used that access to get PII without consent, then MS would be up shit creek.
Hey Mr CEO, you've still got a little egg on your face. Right there on your chin.
Who's going to pay $100 million dollars or more to make yet another made-for-tv movie?
The content creators. Looking at many of the TV shows nowadays it's not a far-off concept for some shows to get there. The Flash and Supergirl have some really good special effects, as does Agents of Shield. Sure, they aren't an hour of Hulk and Iron Man duking it out and destroying entire cities, but they still look better than many movies made 10 years ago.
Besides, not having the budget for lots of explosions and lens flares would mean more movies with exciting stories. No more Michael Bay movies is an added bonus.
Paper is everywhere. Just off the top of my head:
Novels, Comics, textbooks, journals, lesson plans, instruction manuals, warranty information, contracts, flyers, bills, advertisements, receipts, photographs, the list goes on.
One example of massive printing is Aircraft Manuals and other related stuff. A car manual and such are likely 100 pages max, but there's one per car. Aircraft manuals and Technical Orders can be on the order of 800+ pages, and they *must* be accessible in the aircraft (at least, DoD regs say so). Most of the older DoD systems have tech orders that are only in paper form, and can only be requested in paper form.
Not to mention all the bills, advertisements, junk mail we all get. My house likely gets 50 pages of junk a week, some more than others.
If only we could make a pesticide that wasn't harmful to bees, but fatal to hornets. Those assholes.
Meanwhile most civilized countries are laughing at us.
To the best of my knowledge, the US is the only country that actually cares about skin color in any way. Employers catalog it so they can show "diversity". We use it in everyday speech "those mexican people over there". We use it in our news "unidentified black male".
Instead of focusing on color, why don't we focus on capability? There are women who are strong enough to be firefighters. There are very well regarded male nurses and teachers. There's nothing stopping anyone from being successful at anything. If we could get rid of these artificial walls in our society, then we'd all be better off.
I'd much rather have a surgeon that got a 4.0 in all their PhD classes than "the black one to fill our diversity requirements". But that's just me.
Years ago I got mail from them regarding my credit card. I had been signed up for "Credit Defense", which WF charged some % of your monthly balance to put toward a pot that you could draw on should you be unemployed for a length of time. I didn't think much of it and didn't care because I didn't have a high balance.
Fast forward a few years and couple moves later and my balance was a bit higher. To top things off, this charge was getting between $50 and $60 every month, which was making payments harder. Basically my story was a lot like this guys. I called up WF, they told me to call this third party company. I call them "Sorry, I can't refund". So I broken record the assholes, "So send me to someone who can". A few people later and I can "file a complaint" or whatever their lingo was. They had to prove that I had signed a document allowing them to charge me. They couldn't, so I got refunded near $2k for my troubles. No bogus charges since.
If it weren't for having my longest running line of credit with them, I'd have walked into a branch, shredded my credit card and given them the two finger salute years ago.
It's called Nominative Determinism, and it happens today. Many names have their origins in what the person did (e.g. "Smith" as a blacksmith), but now we find humor when that person ends up getting a job fitting their name. I knew a PhD with the last name Blaise (pronounce "Blaze") who specialized in pyrotechnics.
I liked how the safe cracker in Italian Job looked much better.
The Federal Poverty Level of a single person is ~$11,800/yr. At that rate, that poor bastard would need to work at the same wage for 16,949.15 YEARS to just earn the difference between Jeff and Bills net worth ($200Mil). Hell, at $100K a year for a working professional, that's 2,000 years.
Further perspective, Land owners like Ted Turner made $1.7Billion (in the 1980's) and owns 590,823 acres - just shy of 3 Rhode Islands. Not sure how much Ted spent on his land, but imagine a ranch 45 times that size... or nearly 150 Rhode Islands.
I'm more interested in the breakdown of these "users". How many are pets? Bands? Brand names? Corporations? TV Shows? "collector" accounts that only spew reddit images? Deities? Magazines?
I have no doubt Failbook is popular. I just think that the numbers are inflated by including the accounts that aren't directly tied to a living being. I'm pretty sure whoever runs the "God" Failbook page has at least one other account...