Libertarians, like most Americans, demand to be safe at home and on
the streets. Libertarians would like all Americans to be healthy and
free of drug dependence. But drug laws don't help, they make things
worse.
The professional politicians scramble to make names for themselves
as tough anti-drug warriors, while the experts agree that the "war on
drugs" has been lost, and could never be won. The tragic victims of
that war are your personal liberty and its companion, responsibility.
It's time to consider the re-legalization of drugs.
The Lessons of Prohibition
In the 1920's, alcohol was made illegal by Prohibition. The result:
Organized Crime. Criminals jumped at the chance to supply the demand
for liquor. The streets became battlegrounds. The criminals bought off
law enforcement and judges. Adulterated booze blinded and killed
people. Civil rights were trampled in the hopeless attempt to keep
people from drinking.
When the American people saw what Prohibition was doing to them,
they supported its repeal. When they succeeded, most states legalized
liquor and the criminal gangs were out of the liquor business.
Today's war on drugs is a re-run of Prohibition. Approximately 40
million Americans are occasional, peaceful users of some illegal drug
who are no threat to anyone. They are not going to stop. The laws
don't, and can't, stop drug use.
Organized Crime Profits
Whenever there is a great demand for a product and government makes
it illegal, a black market always appears to supply the demand. The
price of the product rises dramatically and the opportunity for huge
profits is obvious. The criminal gangs love the situation, making
millions. They kill other drug dealers, along with innocent people
caught in the crossfire, to protect their territory. They corrupt
police and courts. Pushers sell adulterated dope and experimental
drugs, causing injury and death. And because drugs are illegal, their
victims have no recourse.
Crime Increases
Half the cost of law enforcement and prisons is squandered on drug
related crime. Of all drug users, a relative few are addicts who commit
crimes daily to supply artificially expensive habits. They are the
robbers, car thieves and burglars who make our homes and streets
unsafe.
An American Police State
Civil liberties suffer. We are all "suspects", subject to random
urine tests, highway check points and spying into our personal
finances. Your property can be seized without trial, if the police
merely claim you got it with drug profits. Doing business with cash
makes you a suspect. America is becoming a police state because of the
war on drugs.
America Can Handle Legal Drugs
Today's illegal drugs were legal before 1914. Cocaine was even found
in the original Coca-Cola recipe. Americans had few problems with
cocaine, opium, heroin or marijuana. Drugs were inexpensive; crime was
low. Most users handled their drug of choice and lived normal,
productive lives. Addicts out of control were a tiny minority.
The first laws prohibiting drugs were racist in origin -- to prevent
Chinese laborers from using opium and to prevent blacks and Hispanics
from using cocaine and marijuana. That was unjust and unfair, just as
it is unjust and unfair to make criminals of peaceful drug users today.
Some Americans will always use alcohol, tobacco, marijuana or other
drugs. Most are not addicts, they are social drinkers or occasional
users. Legal drugs would be inexpensive, so even addicts could support
their habits with honest work, rather than by crime. Organized crime
would be deprived of its profits. The police could return to protecting
us from real criminals; and there would be room enough in existing
prisons for them.
Try Personal Responsibility
It's time to re-legalize drugs and let people take responsibility
for themselves. Drug abuse is a tragedy and a sickness. Criminal laws
only drive the problem underground and put money in the pockets of the
criminal class. With drugs legal, compassionate people could do more to
educate and rehabilitate drug users who seek help. Drugs should be
legal. Individuals have the right to decide for themselves what to put
in their bodies, so long as they take responsibility for their actions.
From the Mayor of Baltimore, Kurt Schmoke, to conservative writer
and TV personality, William F. Buckley, Jr., leading Americans are now
calling for repeal of America's repressive and ineffective drug laws.
The Libertarian Party urges you to join in this effort to make our
streets safer and our liberties more secure.
Yes, I've seen several of these UXGA LCDs. They are incredible! Keep in mind that you can always run in 800x600 without aliasing. You made the right choice, especially if you play 3D games.
When was the last time you heard of a spammer/scammer hiring a lobbyist or making a campaign contribution? These e-slimebags don't have the resources of the "old economy" slimebags. That's why tree-killing landfill-filling postal spam continues unabated. That's why telemarketers interrupt our lives daily. It's a big dirty business with big dirty money going to big dirty politicians.
We need a universal opt-in policy for all forms of spam.
I would be interested in hearing some corroboration of your assertions. I'm sure it must pain you greatly to hear that something good has come of American foreign policy, and I'm as skeptical as the next guy, but you really need to support your claims. Otherwise, I think you'll be pigenholed as a knee-jerk naysayer.
This was an excellent ruling for three reasons:
(1) It interferes with the free market as little as possible, effectively creating a level playing field for anyone trying to supplant MS as the leading provider of office suites and servers. Note also, that the server market is the foothold needed by "alternative" OSs. To attack the desktop right now is foolish and self-defeating.
(2) MS is more likely to adhere to the reasonable restrictions imposed by this ruling. As long as they create superior software, they have nothing to fear. That's what we all wanted, right?
(3) Beating MS because of a court ruling would be a very hollow victory. This ruling allows OSS to beat MS on its own terms. And that is precisely what we will do.
I also bought an Inspiron 7500 because of the huge screen. My hinges have broken 3 times since March of 2000. On one of these occasions, Dell's parts department sent the wrong hinge three times. I had an unportable portable computer for around 3 weeks.
The worst thing of all is that Dell is content to keep replacing the hinges with the same cheap pot metal, instead of using steel like they should have in the first place.
In addition to being mostly unenforceable (because not all websites fall under the FTC's jurisdiction), this law ignores the capabilities of the browser itself. While I'm sure the politicians don't know this, it's easy to write a browser that prevents this sort of abuse. While it's tempting to throw legislation at a problem, it's foolish when there's an obvious solution. Don't we have enough unenforceable laws already?
Install an impenetrable door between the cabin and the cockpit. Isolate the cockpit's atmosphere from the cabin's. Install knock-out gas emitters in the cabin. Keep gas masks and a security officer in the cockpit.
Upon terrorist attack, release knock-out gas and handcuff the terrorist(s) inside a soundproof room in the back of the cabin. Then filter the cabin air to remove the gas. Celebrate.
(Optionally, a speaker and video camera could be installed in the "prison" area so that passengers could take turns berating the would-be terrorist.)
What happens when a celebrity's "voice" is used without permission? Would this application constitute reverse engineering and thus be legal? Would it be the aural equivalent of a trademark violation and thus be illegal? Will near-imperceptable modifications to the emulated voice pattern be sufficient to avoid litigation?
As we all know, the only thing that prevents users from formatting their drives and installing the OS is a little bit of knowledge. Personally, I don't know any experienced computer users who don't reformat their drives after getting a new computer.
We also know that many users would be happier with a different OS than the one that comes on their computers.
Finally, we're all well-aware of Microsoft's new Product Activation requirement, which ensures that WinXP will not continue running without activation.
The solution? Allow consumers to buy their choice of OS at the time of installation, instead of bundling it into the price of the new machine.
Require OEMs to ship computers with a set of CDs (or a bootable DVD) specially designed to install the user's choice of OS automatically. (The computer could still come preinstalled with XP, but the user would purchase XP at the time of activation, and only if they actually required a new license.) Various OS companies would pay a small fee to the OEM in order to have their OS included in the CD set. This small fee would cover the OEM's additional expenses, and ensure that only viable consumer OSs (like RedHat and BeOS) would be included. If the consumer chose an "alternative" OS, the OEM would have the option of outsourcing their support to the OS's distributor (and most probably would). Regardless, the OS vendors would recoup their "inclusion fee" if a reasonable number of users (>5%, probably) chose their OS.
It helps consumers because they get more choice. It helps Linux because it increases the user base. It even helps Microsoft, because they would no longer be a monopoly by any stretch of the imagination, and would be free to continue extending the Windows feature set and selling space on the desktop.
Do you realize that Slashdot has indirectly linked to fiscally conservative rhetoric? Here's a tasty sample:
"The most recent calculations show that the annual cost to consumers and taxpayers of [Organisation for Economic Cooperation and Development, OECD] 29 member countries' support for agriculture and horticulture amounts to US$361 billion. Such a large sum is difficult to grasp, but it is large enough to pay for a first class, round-the-world air ticket for each of the 56 million cows in the 29-member OECD's dairy herd, and to give each cow a further US$1450 spending money for her stopovers in the US, Europe and Asia. Or the cows could slum it in business class, and have US$2800 spending money. And they could have this sort of trip every year, thanks to the generosity of OECD consumers and taxpayers."
You can't have your cake and eat it, too. Either you support inherently ineffective "social programs" as espoused by your beloved Ralph (uri)Nader, or you don't. You cannot use Libertarian logic when it pleases you and ignore it when it doesn't. Sorry.
Actually, ZDNet has morphed into an anti-Microsoft alarmist website, as can be seen by the inane comments of its readers. As a matter of fact, I recently changed my homepage to Slashdot, because at least people on this board have well-reasoned argments against MS.
Maybe if the US spent more time thinking about how to make the rest of the world hate them less, instead of spending so much time (and money) on trying to protect itself from seemingly unstoppable terrorism, the net result would be cheaper and more effective.
First of all, how about opening the doors to immigrants? It's hard to hate a country that could provide a better lifestyle for you.
Next, we could think about providing substantial tax breaks to any private company that's willing to launch enough geosynchronous satellites to "wire" the world. It's also hard to hate anyone if you know enough about them.
Finally, if we were to decriminalize drug use (no, I don't use), we could reduce government spending, cut the police state (er, force), and render the drug cartels powerless in one fell swoop.
Yes. It's morally objectionable to make money. Especially when people are forced to use your search engine. After all, it's not like the money earned by those search engine CEOs goes back into the economy to provide jobs.
If you didn't gather from my first post, I'm talking about the first-level support guys. If you're actually capable of logical analysis, you're probably not first-level, and thus not likely to suggest irrelevant hypotheses.
Don't get me wrong. I'm polite to these people, but I get impatient when they suggest that I do something that's obviously useless. And no, I've actually never been wrong about that. The day that first-level support suggests something useful that I haven't already tried is the day I quit consulting.
I'm sorry if I have an "attitude problem" when some tech support d00der tells me to "check the connection on your DVD drive" when the drive reads data CDs but not data DVDs. Never mind that a physical connection problem is a logical impossibility in this scenario. It's on the flowchart, so we have to do it.
FWIW, I've been doing tech support for 13 years (5 years professionally and 2 years as a $100/hour freelance consultant). I have six certifications (for which I took no courses). So yes, I do have a problem when some $7/hour flowchart-following 3-months-experience lamer who doesn't even own a computer wants me to test for impossible conditions.
I can't count how many hours I've waited to get a real problem escalated to a tech who can do more than follow a "make sure it's plugged in/reboot the computer/reinstall Windows" flowchart. I've tried asking for problem escalation directly, but (since this is tantamount to telling the first-level guy he's stupid) this rarely works. Instead, the guy makes me follow every step of the flowchart. Since I'm not a moron, I've already tried all of the relevant steps. But the first-level guy doesn't actually understand how computers work, so he usually makes me follow the irrelevant steps as well. I've actually started lying about having already tried something, just so I can be escalated to someone who earns more than $7/hour.
The Solution:
Secretly maintain a "stupidity score" for each customer. Every time the customer calls in with a stupid question, they earn another "stupid point". The actual score would be calculated as follows:
(stupid points) / (number of calls) = stupidity score
This valuable metric could then be used to route calls. For instance, someone who was 90% stupid would have their call secretly routed to the "trained monkey" level, while someone who was 0% stupid would always have their call routed to the "guru" level. This would save everyone a great deal of time.
I'm sorry, but when you
1. take a job at a company with a lame business model, and
2. see that you're being paid a salary that's "too good to be true", and
3. don't save money for the future,
then can you really be surprised when your company's last public appearance is on fuckedcompany.com, and you end up in a homeless shelter?
>>One thing about obvious solutions is that if they're so obvious to you then they were probably obvious to others. Once you consider that you have to think about -why- they didn't use such an obvious solution.
>>In this case the reason why not is obvious, too.
You're not very polite for someone who seems to be wrong. (Sorry, couldn't resist saying that.)
>>Now, consider how much processor time it takes to run a game with it's AI and all that craziness. The load on the servers would be terrible if they had to run those parts of the game onserver all the time!
This statement is wrong for at least two reasons:
[1] You are assuming that Into Networks is making extremely bad decisions about which code to buffer (which I doubt, since buffering is their business). Basically any function that doesn't run frequently or require extremely low latency could be executed by the server. For example, the specific movements of Unreal bots would be determined on the client, while their long-term strategy could be calculated on the server. Anyone attempting to crack UT would need to reverse engineer the bots' decision-making through observation alone.
[2] You are severely underestimating how powerful servers can be. There are already websites that carry out extremely complex algorithms in real time for each and every visitor they receive. For example, Amazon uses pattern matching to produce individualized buying recommendations. MapQuest calculates complex driving directions (and creates custom maps) in a matter of milliseconds. Secure online transaction processing is extremely CPU intensive, yet e-commerce sites can handle thousands of transactions per second. Thanks to clustering technology and SMP, it seems that anything is possible.
Slashdot Mirror
Libertarians, like most Americans, demand to be safe at home and on the streets. Libertarians would like all Americans to be healthy and free of drug dependence. But drug laws don't help, they make things worse.
The professional politicians scramble to make names for themselves as tough anti-drug warriors, while the experts agree that the "war on drugs" has been lost, and could never be won. The tragic victims of that war are your personal liberty and its companion, responsibility. It's time to consider the re-legalization of drugs.
The Lessons of ProhibitionIn the 1920's, alcohol was made illegal by Prohibition. The result: Organized Crime. Criminals jumped at the chance to supply the demand for liquor. The streets became battlegrounds. The criminals bought off law enforcement and judges. Adulterated booze blinded and killed people. Civil rights were trampled in the hopeless attempt to keep people from drinking.
When the American people saw what Prohibition was doing to them, they supported its repeal. When they succeeded, most states legalized liquor and the criminal gangs were out of the liquor business.
Today's war on drugs is a re-run of Prohibition. Approximately 40 million Americans are occasional, peaceful users of some illegal drug who are no threat to anyone. They are not going to stop. The laws don't, and can't, stop drug use.
Organized Crime ProfitsWhenever there is a great demand for a product and government makes it illegal, a black market always appears to supply the demand. The price of the product rises dramatically and the opportunity for huge profits is obvious. The criminal gangs love the situation, making millions. They kill other drug dealers, along with innocent people caught in the crossfire, to protect their territory. They corrupt police and courts. Pushers sell adulterated dope and experimental drugs, causing injury and death. And because drugs are illegal, their victims have no recourse.
Crime IncreasesHalf the cost of law enforcement and prisons is squandered on drug related crime. Of all drug users, a relative few are addicts who commit crimes daily to supply artificially expensive habits. They are the robbers, car thieves and burglars who make our homes and streets unsafe.
An American Police StateCivil liberties suffer. We are all "suspects", subject to random urine tests, highway check points and spying into our personal finances. Your property can be seized without trial, if the police merely claim you got it with drug profits. Doing business with cash makes you a suspect. America is becoming a police state because of the war on drugs.
America Can Handle Legal DrugsToday's illegal drugs were legal before 1914. Cocaine was even found in the original Coca-Cola recipe. Americans had few problems with cocaine, opium, heroin or marijuana. Drugs were inexpensive; crime was low. Most users handled their drug of choice and lived normal, productive lives. Addicts out of control were a tiny minority.
The first laws prohibiting drugs were racist in origin -- to prevent Chinese laborers from using opium and to prevent blacks and Hispanics from using cocaine and marijuana. That was unjust and unfair, just as it is unjust and unfair to make criminals of peaceful drug users today.
Some Americans will always use alcohol, tobacco, marijuana or other drugs. Most are not addicts, they are social drinkers or occasional users. Legal drugs would be inexpensive, so even addicts could support their habits with honest work, rather than by crime. Organized crime would be deprived of its profits. The police could return to protecting us from real criminals; and there would be room enough in existing prisons for them.
Try Personal ResponsibilityIt's time to re-legalize drugs and let people take responsibility for themselves. Drug abuse is a tragedy and a sickness. Criminal laws only drive the problem underground and put money in the pockets of the criminal class. With drugs legal, compassionate people could do more to educate and rehabilitate drug users who seek help. Drugs should be legal. Individuals have the right to decide for themselves what to put in their bodies, so long as they take responsibility for their actions.
From the Mayor of Baltimore, Kurt Schmoke, to conservative writer and TV personality, William F. Buckley, Jr., leading Americans are now calling for repeal of America's repressive and ineffective drug laws. The Libertarian Party urges you to join in this effort to make our streets safer and our liberties more secure.
A country has a right to prohibit the import or availity of certainf thibgs, publcations, movies, pictures, magazines etc
That's a *very* slippery slope, my friend. Let's make molestation and exploitation illegal, but speech should always be free. No exceptions. Period.
Does "electronic junk" include Windows?
Yes, I've seen several of these UXGA LCDs. They are incredible! Keep in mind that you can always run in 800x600 without aliasing. You made the right choice, especially if you play 3D games.
When was the last time you heard of a spammer/scammer hiring a lobbyist or making a campaign contribution? These e-slimebags don't have the resources of the "old economy" slimebags. That's why tree-killing landfill-filling postal spam continues unabated. That's why telemarketers interrupt our lives daily. It's a big dirty business with big dirty money going to big dirty politicians.
We need a universal opt-in policy for all forms of spam.
I guess you've never heard of OpenSWF.ORG.
.SWF files.
Flash is an open standard, and it has been since early 2000. In fact, many companies (including Adobe) have released products that write
Hey, if this means I'll have to sit through fewer ads for feminine hygiene products, then I really don't see a problem.
I would be interested in hearing some corroboration of your assertions. I'm sure it must pain you greatly to hear that something good has come of American foreign policy, and I'm as skeptical as the next guy, but you really need to support your claims. Otherwise, I think you'll be pigenholed as a knee-jerk naysayer.
Man, I wish I could mod you up.
This was an excellent ruling for three reasons:
(1) It interferes with the free market as little as possible, effectively creating a level playing field for anyone trying to supplant MS as the leading provider of office suites and servers. Note also, that the server market is the foothold needed by "alternative" OSs. To attack the desktop right now is foolish and self-defeating.
(2) MS is more likely to adhere to the reasonable restrictions imposed by this ruling. As long as they create superior software, they have nothing to fear. That's what we all wanted, right?
(3) Beating MS because of a court ruling would be a very hollow victory. This ruling allows OSS to beat MS on its own terms. And that is precisely what we will do.
Darwinism works for everyone.
I also bought an Inspiron 7500 because of the huge screen. My hinges have broken 3 times since March of 2000. On one of these occasions, Dell's parts department sent the wrong hinge three times. I had an unportable portable computer for around 3 weeks.
The worst thing of all is that Dell is content to keep replacing the hinges with the same cheap pot metal, instead of using steel like they should have in the first place.
use kinetic energy to recharge the battery, like that Seiko watch? Seems to me like a $20 camera in a $200 watch. No thanks.
In addition to being mostly unenforceable (because not all websites fall under the FTC's jurisdiction), this law ignores the capabilities of the browser itself. While I'm sure the politicians don't know this, it's easy to write a browser that prevents this sort of abuse. While it's tempting to throw legislation at a problem, it's foolish when there's an obvious solution. Don't we have enough unenforceable laws already?
Gee, this would NEVER happen under a socialist regime! Good thing most of you want to make the government BIGGER!
Install an impenetrable door between the cabin and the cockpit. Isolate the cockpit's atmosphere from the cabin's. Install knock-out gas emitters in the cabin. Keep gas masks and a security officer in the cockpit.
Upon terrorist attack, release knock-out gas and handcuff the terrorist(s) inside a soundproof room in the back of the cabin. Then filter the cabin air to remove the gas. Celebrate.
(Optionally, a speaker and video camera could be installed in the "prison" area so that passengers could take turns berating the would-be terrorist.)
What happens when a celebrity's "voice" is used without permission? Would this application constitute reverse engineering and thus be legal? Would it be the aural equivalent of a trademark violation and thus be illegal? Will near-imperceptable modifications to the emulated voice pattern be sufficient to avoid litigation?
[waiting for the first stupid lawsuit]
As we all know, the only thing that prevents users from formatting their drives and installing the OS is a little bit of knowledge. Personally, I don't know any experienced computer users who don't reformat their drives after getting a new computer.
We also know that many users would be happier with a different OS than the one that comes on their computers.
Finally, we're all well-aware of Microsoft's new Product Activation requirement, which ensures that WinXP will not continue running without activation.
The solution? Allow consumers to buy their choice of OS at the time of installation, instead of bundling it into the price of the new machine.
Require OEMs to ship computers with a set of CDs (or a bootable DVD) specially designed to install the user's choice of OS automatically. (The computer could still come preinstalled with XP, but the user would purchase XP at the time of activation, and only if they actually required a new license.) Various OS companies would pay a small fee to the OEM in order to have their OS included in the CD set. This small fee would cover the OEM's additional expenses, and ensure that only viable consumer OSs (like RedHat and BeOS) would be included. If the consumer chose an "alternative" OS, the OEM would have the option of outsourcing their support to the OS's distributor (and most probably would). Regardless, the OS vendors would recoup their "inclusion fee" if a reasonable number of users (>5%, probably) chose their OS.
It helps consumers because they get more choice. It helps Linux because it increases the user base. It even helps Microsoft, because they would no longer be a monopoly by any stretch of the imagination, and would be free to continue extending the Windows feature set and selling space on the desktop.
Do you realize that Slashdot has indirectly linked to fiscally conservative rhetoric? Here's a tasty sample:
"The most recent calculations show that the annual cost to consumers and taxpayers of [Organisation for Economic Cooperation and Development, OECD] 29 member countries' support for agriculture and horticulture amounts to US$361 billion. Such a large sum is difficult to grasp, but it is large enough to pay for a first class, round-the-world air ticket for each of the 56 million cows in the 29-member OECD's dairy herd, and to give each cow a further US$1450 spending money for her stopovers in the US, Europe and Asia. Or the cows could slum it in business class, and have US$2800 spending money. And they could have this sort of trip every year, thanks to the generosity of OECD consumers and taxpayers."
You can't have your cake and eat it, too. Either you support inherently ineffective "social programs" as espoused by your beloved Ralph (uri)Nader, or you don't. You cannot use Libertarian logic when it pleases you and ignore it when it doesn't. Sorry.
[Waiting for my moderative spanking.]
Actually, ZDNet has morphed into an anti-Microsoft alarmist website, as can be seen by the inane comments of its readers. As a matter of fact, I recently changed my homepage to Slashdot, because at least people on this board have well-reasoned argments against MS.
Maybe if the US spent more time thinking about how to make the rest of the world hate them less, instead of spending so much time (and money) on trying to protect itself from seemingly unstoppable terrorism, the net result would be cheaper and more effective.
First of all, how about opening the doors to immigrants? It's hard to hate a country that could provide a better lifestyle for you.
Next, we could think about providing substantial tax breaks to any private company that's willing to launch enough geosynchronous satellites to "wire" the world. It's also hard to hate anyone if you know enough about them.
Finally, if we were to decriminalize drug use (no, I don't use), we could reduce government spending, cut the police state (er, force), and render the drug cartels powerless in one fell swoop.
Yes. It's morally objectionable to make money. Especially when people are forced to use your search engine. After all, it's not like the money earned by those search engine CEOs goes back into the economy to provide jobs.
/sarcasm
If you didn't gather from my first post, I'm talking about the first-level support guys. If you're actually capable of logical analysis, you're probably not first-level, and thus not likely to suggest irrelevant hypotheses.
Don't get me wrong. I'm polite to these people, but I get impatient when they suggest that I do something that's obviously useless. And no, I've actually never been wrong about that. The day that first-level support suggests something useful that I haven't already tried is the day I quit consulting.
I'm sorry if I have an "attitude problem" when some tech support d00der tells me to "check the connection on your DVD drive" when the drive reads data CDs but not data DVDs. Never mind that a physical connection problem is a logical impossibility in this scenario. It's on the flowchart, so we have to do it.
FWIW, I've been doing tech support for 13 years (5 years professionally and 2 years as a $100/hour freelance consultant). I have six certifications (for which I took no courses). So yes, I do have a problem when some $7/hour flowchart-following 3-months-experience lamer who doesn't even own a computer wants me to test for impossible conditions.
I can't count how many hours I've waited to get a real problem escalated to a tech who can do more than follow a "make sure it's plugged in/reboot the computer/reinstall Windows" flowchart. I've tried asking for problem escalation directly, but (since this is tantamount to telling the first-level guy he's stupid) this rarely works. Instead, the guy makes me follow every step of the flowchart. Since I'm not a moron, I've already tried all of the relevant steps. But the first-level guy doesn't actually understand how computers work, so he usually makes me follow the irrelevant steps as well. I've actually started lying about having already tried something, just so I can be escalated to someone who earns more than $7/hour.
The Solution:
Secretly maintain a "stupidity score" for each customer. Every time the customer calls in with a stupid question, they earn another "stupid point". The actual score would be calculated as follows:
(stupid points) / (number of calls) = stupidity score
This valuable metric could then be used to route calls. For instance, someone who was 90% stupid would have their call secretly routed to the "trained monkey" level, while someone who was 0% stupid would always have their call routed to the "guru" level. This would save everyone a great deal of time.
I'm sorry, but when you
1. take a job at a company with a lame business model, and
2. see that you're being paid a salary that's "too good to be true", and
3. don't save money for the future,
then can you really be surprised when your company's last public appearance is on fuckedcompany.com, and you end up in a homeless shelter?
>>One thing about obvious solutions is that if they're so obvious to you then they were probably obvious to others. Once you consider that you have to think about -why- they didn't use such an obvious solution.
After posting, I discovered that Into Networks (the provider of EB's streaming technology) certainly appears to be using this obvious solution:
"To enable you to play the latest graphic- and video-rich software titles without interruption, EB1 buffers bandwidth-sensitive data before launch."
>>In this case the reason why not is obvious, too.
You're not very polite for someone who seems to be wrong. (Sorry, couldn't resist saying that.)
>>Now, consider how much processor time it takes to run a game with it's AI and all that craziness. The load on the servers would be terrible if they had to run those parts of the game onserver all the time!
This statement is wrong for at least two reasons:
[1] You are assuming that Into Networks is making extremely bad decisions about which code to buffer (which I doubt, since buffering is their business). Basically any function that doesn't run frequently or require extremely low latency could be executed by the server. For example, the specific movements of Unreal bots would be determined on the client, while their long-term strategy could be calculated on the server. Anyone attempting to crack UT would need to reverse engineer the bots' decision-making through observation alone.
[2] You are severely underestimating how powerful servers can be. There are already websites that carry out extremely complex algorithms in real time for each and every visitor they receive. For example, Amazon uses pattern matching to produce individualized buying recommendations. MapQuest calculates complex driving directions (and creates custom maps) in a matter of milliseconds. Secure online transaction processing is extremely CPU intensive, yet e-commerce sites can handle thousands of transactions per second. Thanks to clustering technology and SMP, it seems that anything is possible.