Does the MPAA/RIAA block have more lobby-power than all those companies combined?
Yes, the MAFIAA has been throwing dump trucks of money at our representatives since their inception. That's why there is so much bipartisan support for this bill; they buy off both sides equally...
I'd love to see Google de-list ALL SOPA/PIPA supporting organisations, even if its just for a day.
Which will immediately followed by: BREAKING NEWS, Google Declared a Monopoly, Justice Department promises "steep fines"...
The government isn't going to sit idly by and let Google exact their influence if it diminishes their own. I wouldn't be surprised if something like that would qualify as a "terrorist act". $10 says that, if this actually occurs, our lawmakers refer to it as a "digital 9/11". I know they'll work the 9/11 rhetoric in there somewhere...
I look at it like "the enemy of my enemy is my friend."
I don't have the financial resources to fight the government on a legal front. Megacorporations are just about the only entities that do. I know that they're only out for themselves, but fortunately, in this case, our wants are somewhat in alignment. Google, Amazon, Youtube, Facebook...all these companies are going to be severely fucked over by SOPA.
I'm not conceding anything to anyone; just because I support Google fighting the government over SOPA, that doesn't mean I'm going to support their use of tracking cookies and such to watch what we're doing on the internet, nor Facebook, nor any other company. However, the threat of SOPA transcends the threat of being tracked, in my opinion. The internet itself is going to be broken by this. The privacy fight can, and will, continue...but this is a much bigger problem at the moment.
Is that if SOPA gets passed that it could have positive consequences.
Yeah, like finally waking up a populace that's been asleep for many years. If this shit passes, the U.S.'s days are numbered. If you consider that a positive (and given the nature of our government, I absolutely fucking do) then that's probably about the only positive effect this shit is going to have.
Our founding fathers declared themselves an independent country and went to war over shit like this. No taxation without representation...are we truly represented in this government? The people? Of course not. It's time to stop trying to play their stupid game, the game is rigged against us from the start. It's time to start flipping boards...
We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness. That to secure these rights, Governments are instituted among Men, deriving their just powers from the consent of the governed, That whenever any Form of Government becomes destructive of these ends, it is the Right of the People to alter or to abolish it, and to institute new Government, laying its foundation on such principles and organizing its powers in such form, as to them shall seem most likely to effect their Safety and Happiness. Prudence, indeed, will dictate that Governments long established should not be changed for light and transient causes; and accordingly all experience hath shewn, that mankind are more disposed to suffer, while evils are sufferable, than to right themselves by abolishing the forms to which they are accustomed. But when a long train of abuses and usurpations, pursuing invariably the same Object evinces a design to reduce them under absolute Despotism, it is their right, it is their duty, to throw off such Government, and to provide new Guards for their future security.
Revolution is our birthright. The Bill of Rights grants all U.S. citizens the right of revolution by guaranteeing the freedoms that facilitate it, freedoms that our government has been trying to rein in with every passing year. Every branch of this government is corrupt. We have no representation in congress anymore. History has come full circle...
Time to start looking to those 2nd Amendment solutions, boys and girls. Put your trust in God, but keep your powder dry. I never in a million years thought I would see this in my lifetime, but it seems that it is inevitable at this point.
Nothing, because this bill isn't designed to help little people, it's designed to allow major corporations stamp out the little people and own the net.
I doubt that the reports are even going to be looked at unless they come from a lobbyist...us little people don't count for shit.
Yes yes, protests are all fine, but where were Google when SOPA was being drafted?
Getting slammed with anti-trust bullshit. Google is "the enemy" to a lot of people in Congress right now, because they're marching to the orders of the MAFIAA.
Besides, Google's testimony was pretty much completely dismissed by the committee right to their face. They more or less said "I don't understand how this is going to negatively effect the internet nor do I care." They never had any intention of listening to a fucking word anyone said in opposition.
Smokers are taxed regardless of where they smoke, so that is immaterial. I've known very, very few smokers that have imposed themselves on others by smoking around those that don't smoke, especially nowadays with the whole "smokers are second class citizens" thing. Plus there are many, many laws against smoking near public entrances and exits already.
When you drive while on the phone you put everyone around you at risk, yet there is no tax assessed when you buy a phone to cover injuries related to that, is there?
Like I said, most everyone is for a smoker's tax because, honestly, not many people smoke anymore. Propose a tax for their own bad habits, though, and all of a sudden there's a million reasons why there shouldn't be one.
Driving is definitely possible, but with the high cost of gas these days, it's not really that much cheaper than flying. Even if you pack all the food you'll need along the entire trip, you're still going to need a place to sleep at night. Now, I've done my fair share of cross-country road-trips, and I've spent many a night sleeping in my car at a rest area, but that's not really an option when you've got a family in tow. You could also camp, rather than stay in hotels (which we did a lot when I was a kid; I grew up an Army brat and moved constantly) but most people I've met aren't into camping their way across the country.
Trains aren't an option, either...they cost just as much as a flight; take the same, if not more, time to reach a destination (passenger trains regularly get stopped so that freight trains can pass them, for hours at a time sometimes) and honestly, unless you're going to a major city, odds are very high that the "train station" you're going to end up at is going to be a platform in the middle of nowhere with no place to rent a car, eat (unless you count vending machines or, if you're lucky, a gas station), or do anything really beyond wait for someone to come pick you up. Our rail infrastructure fucking sucks for long haul passenger runs. There are only a handful of routes left that even go cross country anymore. If we had real euro-style high speed rail that wasn't constantly being stopped for mile and a half long freight runs creeping along at 40 mph it would be more realistic of an option, but as it stands now, it's really not. I took Amtrak a few times as a kid and I just won't do that anymore until there are major improvements. The only up-side is the fact that you get a more comfortable seat.
Like it or not, the TSA is going to be pretty much everywhere. I'm sure that at some point in that not-to-distant future trying to avoid the TSA in itself will be a reason to be suspicious. We're literally going to have to stay in our homes or walk from point A to point B to avoid a possible search...
That 4th Amendment sure was cool, wasn't it? I'm gonna miss it....
I don't know, ask all the overweight people out there what's wrong with a junk food or fast food tax?
The cost of obesity on society is 100 times the cost of smoking on society, and we're footing the bill just the same as with smokers. Ask yourself this: if a parent allows their child to eat themselves into their own grave, does that constitute child abuse? Should the state be allowed to remove the child from a home that does not make sure their children are of a healthy body weight? If a child is severely underweight, the state will absolutely take a child into custody, it happens all the time. But overweight? Never.
So how do you feel about a crappy food tax? Because honestly, I find that nine times out of ten, the person that is all about the smokers tax thinks the shitty food tax is just going too far. That's not to say that it is always true, but it usually is. Smoking is considered the dirty habit, but cramming 10 servings of powdered mini donuts in your mouth in a single sitting isn't? Eating 3 Double Cheeseburgers for lunch with an extra large fries and half gallon of coke isn't a dirty habit, too?
And then there's the excuses "Why should I be punished for eating fast food once in a while?! I am not overweight!!" That's a bullshit excuse because not everyone that smokes gets fucking lung cancer, but they all pay the tax just the same, don't they? So the fact that a person is healthy and only eats a little candy is immaterial.
Mind you, I'm not a smoker, but I used to be, and it really was the increased cost of the things that encouraged me to quit...$7 a pack when I finally managed to lock myself in the house for 3 days without cigarettes and get off of them once and for all. I just find it funny how hypocritical most people are when it comes to smokers, and how easily they ignore their own bad habits. Human nature, I guess...
You've reminded me of something I've often fantasized about: a political debate, moderated by FactCheck.org in real time. Put a "Truth-O-Meter" in front of every podium, and as they're talking just swing the meter from true/???/false as applicable. It would be goddamned hysterical to see them try to bullshit while the red lights are going off and the needle is bouncing off of FALSE FALSE FALSE (I always imagine an audible alarm similar to an aircraft's "stall" warning going off...)
No politician in the world would agree to something like that, but damn would it be fun to watch. Hell, we could even turn it into a game show, have all the candidates compete for a cash prize directly to their election fund; 1 point for truth, 0 points for ???, and -1 point for false. Whoever uses the most factual information in their responses wins. Maybe it would even get people interested in politics again?
Either that or let's just open it up to physical combat already so we can at least get a real life President Dwayne Elizondo Mountain Dew Herbert Camacho elected. It'd probably be just as detrimental as the legitimate candidates are, but it'd be far more amusing at least.
And who gives a fuck about crapping on the clock? It's what, 10 minutes?
To be fair, I've known some Gold Medalist shitters out there that could stretch a bowel movement into a 30 minute adventure. These are often the same people that routinely stretch a 30 minute lunch to a full hour because "traffic was bad", which is often the same reason why they're 10 minutes late every day.
However, I've always believed in giving someone the benefit of the doubt, first. Treating everyone like a prisoner because of one or two douchebags that management doesn't have the sack to get rid of doesn't seem right to me. Passive-aggressive emails sent to everyone in the department don't help, either. Usually, everyone knows who an email like that is directed at, and that person is usually either too stupid to realize they're the problem, or don't give a shit because they know that nobody that even can do something will do something.
The alternative is to allow auto makers to do whatever they like and then deal with the resultant lawsuits after the fact. For instance, when you're sitting at a light in your Ford Caveat Emptor and someone plows into your rear-end, crippling you because it was poorly designed and you lacked the engineering background to know this before you bought the car.
How does the free-market correct for other people that may or may be driving responsibly? What if those people are in a Mad Max style war machine with spikes and blades welded all over the thing? How does the market correct the fact that you're dead now because of someone else? "Ha ha, should have bought a better car, asshole?"
The difference between the regulation and the free market you espouse is that a lot of injuries are prevented with the regulations. It is much more proactive. Your method would force people to choose between safety and cost, because we all know that automakers will already do whatever they fuck they can to get around spending money designing a vehicle. There are numerous examples. The Ford Pinto, Pontiac Fiero, Ford Bronco II, the Chevrolet Corvair...just to name a few.
I'd rather spend a few thousands bucks more on a car that meets a certain minimum safety standard, and I really have no desire to share the road with anyone in a vehicle that does not, because they're not the only ones that have to pay for their stupid mistakes, everyone around them does. We may not be able to protect everyone all the time, but we can at least try.
To be fair, I'm not anti-free market or pro-regulation in all things. For instance, if you want to eat or drink yourself into an early grave, that's your business, because the only person your hurting is you. But the free market can't correct everything. How many more people would have to be sickened by something before the market even knew there was something wrong? How many more people would have to die before the market figures out that a particular car is a death-trap, or that a certain building product causes cancer? The free market doesn't help me a fucking bit when I've got 3rd degree burns all over my body because you decided to buy the cheap piece of shit car that burst into flames at the moment of impact. I shouldn't have to drive an M1 Abrams tank to make sure my kids will get to school safely because you wanted to save a few dollars. Some things have a value that is not measured in dollars and cents.
Oh, obviously I never actually answer that way, and I know how to bullshit with the best of them, so I generally fare pretty well in interviews. The bullshitting gets extremely tiring, though. For once in my life I would like to just allow my body of work, and the praises of my former employers, speak for itself.
In my experiences, the places that most harp on "being a part of a family" and "a passionate work force" and all that other crap are exactly the opposite when actually employed there. Many times have I been told of expectations of self-motivation only to find out that everyone in a supervisory role in the place is a ridiculous micro-manager, patrolling his little section of cube world every 15 minutes. The "passion", I quickly discover, is the passion to hit the bar after work, and the "family" is incestuous and dysfunctional.
If everyone is bullshitting the answer, telling you want you want to hear, what the hell is the use of the question in the first place? Are you looking for someone to fill a certain position and do a job for you well, or are you looking for someone that is really good at giving interviews? Since when did the former require the latter? I've met plenty of people that are great at giving interviews and have turned out to be completely useless when it comes to actually producing something.
God I always hate those fucking questions. "Why did you chose to apply with us?" Because I need a fucking job! Why else do people apply for a job? Why is that not enough? "Where do you see yourself in five years?" Uh, gainfully employed? Do my life goals really matter to whether or not I can fill this position? What if I saw myself working at the fucking circus in five years, would that have a bearing on whether or not I was hired? Why? "What are your goals?" To make enough money to pay my bills with a little left over for fun once in a while? Is that too mundane?
Man, I despise interviews. I fantasize about going all Peter Gibbons in Office Space every time someone asks me one of these stupid, irrelevant questions, but my sense of self-preservation reigns in those crazy ideas.
That 99% of the population will just go to the 1% that knows how to pirate shit. The cat and mouse game will continue. There are already informal "clubs" springing up just to share media. As it is now, many people in our circle carry their huge external hard drives around with them everywhere they go, explicitly so we can share media with each other. I'm the music guy, another is the movie/tv guy, another is the windows software guy, then there's the Apple software guy...hell, I even know someone that has almost any ebook I would ever want, plus thousands of comic books in a variety of formats.
The irony in all of this is, they'll spend or otherwise forego billions of dollars fighting piracy when they could put that money into providing a better product with more value and sell more than they ever did. The RIAA has been fighting music piracy for over a decade and what did they gain? Nothing. How many billions did they waste?
Piracy is like the hydra, you cut off one head and two more grow in it's place. Wiping out Napster just moved everyone to Kazaa and Limewire. Fighting Limewire just moved everyone to P2P. Fighting P2P just moved everyone to digital locker sites, and SOPA will just move everyone to encrypt their traffic and give rise to the sneakernet once again, and the only way they're going to police that is to start searching people...and once that comes to pass the U.S. Government might as well start putting it's affairs in order, because it will not last long after that...
Exactly, because the only options one would have is to sue the government or some multi-billion dollar corporation. Neither is economically feasible to anyone that is not a government or multi-billion dollar corporation themselves, so in effect, no one else has any rights at all regarding this.
The assholes in government and corporate America would love nothing better than for all of us to shut the fuck up, come out and vote for the guy they tell us to every couple years, and buy their price-inflated shit on credit. Hell, with all the game playing going on with voter-ID laws and other disenfranchisement methods, it probably won't be long before the "vote for the guy they tell us to" isn't even an issue any more. They'll just make sure that only the people that support that guy get the opportunity to vote in the first place. People openly say things like "only property owners should be allowed to vote since they're the only ones with a vested interest in the economy anyway" nowadays. How long will it be until we start seeing these ideas gain traction in actual government? As long as the economy stays in the shitter (and with companies sitting on record amounts of cash, hiding it overseas without penalty, it will be) people will believe almost anything they're told out of desperation.
It's time to start taking a page out of our Founding Fathers book and arming ourselves. The government won't hesitate in pulling out all the stops in making sure they remain in power.
The only problem is: this is only enough to actually learn the material... you still don't get that "accredited" piece of paper.
Which is what it's all about, unfortunately. If employers stopped basing their decisions on where that magic piece of paper came from, and started basing their decisions on what the applicant actually knows and is capable of doing, then you would see the need for that magic piece of paper decline precipitously.
It's ridiculous, I know people that are completely self-taught with regards to IT that easily exceed the capabilities of their accredited counterparts, but they're forced to basically go throw money at a university just to buy a piece of paper, taking classes for no reason.
Of course, they've also been ramping up the amount of experience you get in the original starting areas due to the fact that the vast majority of their player-base is of higher level now and most people want to burn their way to cap as fast as possible to play with their friends in endgame content. Hell, don't the new classes start at like level 60 or something now?
I haven't played WoW in many years (vanilla WoW, pre-expansion), but it's pretty common in MMO's to start trivializing older content so that players can speed through it as fast as possible to catch up to the majority of the player-base, otherwise they're going to be running around in a ghost town and just quit the game. Final Fantasy XI was like this within just a few years of launch, once the Treasures of Aht Urhgan expansion came out, the old areas and old content was immediately diminished to the point where new players could literally shout for days trying to get parties together to complete necessary missions and come up empty-handed. It was a big problem that S-E ignored for years in lieu of adding more and more endgame content for an extremely vocal minority of players that burned through it in days, and the end result is that new players would just quit after a few months out of frustration. It was greatly exacerbated by the fact that FFXI was designed to be a party-based game, but from what I've heard from friends that still play WoW, it's just as bad there, especially with raiding. People just do not do the older raids anymore, even in lowbie groups.
Anyway, I went off on a tangent, but the point is, yes, you have an unlimited amount of time to get to 20. However, because of the adjustments, you're probably going to hit 20 in like a solid day of playing, unless you are deliberately trying not to level, at which point you have to wonder why the hell you are playing the game...
i just checked, apparently it's not against blizzard's EULA to do that.
Of course it's not, provided there is no funny business going on with them. Multi-boxing is just more money in subscriptions for them, as you obviously need to have a unique account per logged in toon.
I worked with a guy a few years ago that had six different accounts. He had written custom software to allow him to issue commands to each of his toons from a single U.I., so he was able to have all but one instance of WoW running in the background as it were. According to what he told me, as long as the commands being issued to a toon were issued by a human being, that was A-OK according to the ToS. Since he didn't automate anything (according to him) he was in the clear.
He paid $60 a month in subscription fees, though, so obviously Blizzard was getting their end.
A bunch of people that had nothing to do with the breach will more than likely end up losing their jobs over it (often the same people that warn about these vulnerabilities beforehand), while the retards that caused the breach, either through their ineptitude or refusal to spend money on proper security, walk away unharmed.
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Just remember, "job killing regulation" doesn't count when the jobs are in IT, apparently.
Does the MPAA/RIAA block have more lobby-power than all those companies combined?
Yes, the MAFIAA has been throwing dump trucks of money at our representatives since their inception. That's why there is so much bipartisan support for this bill; they buy off both sides equally...
I'd love to see Google de-list ALL SOPA/PIPA supporting organisations, even if its just for a day.
Which will immediately followed by: BREAKING NEWS, Google Declared a Monopoly, Justice Department promises "steep fines"...
The government isn't going to sit idly by and let Google exact their influence if it diminishes their own. I wouldn't be surprised if something like that would qualify as a "terrorist act". $10 says that, if this actually occurs, our lawmakers refer to it as a "digital 9/11". I know they'll work the 9/11 rhetoric in there somewhere...
I look at it like "the enemy of my enemy is my friend."
I don't have the financial resources to fight the government on a legal front. Megacorporations are just about the only entities that do. I know that they're only out for themselves, but fortunately, in this case, our wants are somewhat in alignment. Google, Amazon, Youtube, Facebook...all these companies are going to be severely fucked over by SOPA.
I'm not conceding anything to anyone; just because I support Google fighting the government over SOPA, that doesn't mean I'm going to support their use of tracking cookies and such to watch what we're doing on the internet, nor Facebook, nor any other company. However, the threat of SOPA transcends the threat of being tracked, in my opinion. The internet itself is going to be broken by this. The privacy fight can, and will, continue...but this is a much bigger problem at the moment.
Is that if SOPA gets passed that it could have positive consequences.
Yeah, like finally waking up a populace that's been asleep for many years. If this shit passes, the U.S.'s days are numbered. If you consider that a positive (and given the nature of our government, I absolutely fucking do) then that's probably about the only positive effect this shit is going to have.
Our founding fathers declared themselves an independent country and went to war over shit like this. No taxation without representation...are we truly represented in this government? The people? Of course not. It's time to stop trying to play their stupid game, the game is rigged against us from the start. It's time to start flipping boards...
We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness. That to secure these rights, Governments are instituted among Men, deriving their just powers from the consent of the governed, That whenever any Form of Government becomes destructive of these ends, it is the Right of the People to alter or to abolish it, and to institute new Government, laying its foundation on such principles and organizing its powers in such form, as to them shall seem most likely to effect their Safety and Happiness. Prudence, indeed, will dictate that Governments long established should not be changed for light and transient causes; and accordingly all experience hath shewn, that mankind are more disposed to suffer, while evils are sufferable, than to right themselves by abolishing the forms to which they are accustomed. But when a long train of abuses and usurpations, pursuing invariably the same Object evinces a design to reduce them under absolute Despotism, it is their right, it is their duty, to throw off such Government, and to provide new Guards for their future security.
Revolution is our birthright. The Bill of Rights grants all U.S. citizens the right of revolution by guaranteeing the freedoms that facilitate it, freedoms that our government has been trying to rein in with every passing year. Every branch of this government is corrupt. We have no representation in congress anymore. History has come full circle...
Time to start looking to those 2nd Amendment solutions, boys and girls. Put your trust in God, but keep your powder dry. I never in a million years thought I would see this in my lifetime, but it seems that it is inevitable at this point.
Nothing, because this bill isn't designed to help little people, it's designed to allow major corporations stamp out the little people and own the net.
I doubt that the reports are even going to be looked at unless they come from a lobbyist...us little people don't count for shit.
Yes yes, protests are all fine, but where were Google when SOPA was being drafted?
Getting slammed with anti-trust bullshit. Google is "the enemy" to a lot of people in Congress right now, because they're marching to the orders of the MAFIAA.
Besides, Google's testimony was pretty much completely dismissed by the committee right to their face. They more or less said "I don't understand how this is going to negatively effect the internet nor do I care." They never had any intention of listening to a fucking word anyone said in opposition.
Smokers are taxed regardless of where they smoke, so that is immaterial. I've known very, very few smokers that have imposed themselves on others by smoking around those that don't smoke, especially nowadays with the whole "smokers are second class citizens" thing. Plus there are many, many laws against smoking near public entrances and exits already.
When you drive while on the phone you put everyone around you at risk, yet there is no tax assessed when you buy a phone to cover injuries related to that, is there?
Like I said, most everyone is for a smoker's tax because, honestly, not many people smoke anymore. Propose a tax for their own bad habits, though, and all of a sudden there's a million reasons why there shouldn't be one.
Driving is definitely possible, but with the high cost of gas these days, it's not really that much cheaper than flying. Even if you pack all the food you'll need along the entire trip, you're still going to need a place to sleep at night. Now, I've done my fair share of cross-country road-trips, and I've spent many a night sleeping in my car at a rest area, but that's not really an option when you've got a family in tow. You could also camp, rather than stay in hotels (which we did a lot when I was a kid; I grew up an Army brat and moved constantly) but most people I've met aren't into camping their way across the country.
Trains aren't an option, either...they cost just as much as a flight; take the same, if not more, time to reach a destination (passenger trains regularly get stopped so that freight trains can pass them, for hours at a time sometimes) and honestly, unless you're going to a major city, odds are very high that the "train station" you're going to end up at is going to be a platform in the middle of nowhere with no place to rent a car, eat (unless you count vending machines or, if you're lucky, a gas station), or do anything really beyond wait for someone to come pick you up. Our rail infrastructure fucking sucks for long haul passenger runs. There are only a handful of routes left that even go cross country anymore. If we had real euro-style high speed rail that wasn't constantly being stopped for mile and a half long freight runs creeping along at 40 mph it would be more realistic of an option, but as it stands now, it's really not. I took Amtrak a few times as a kid and I just won't do that anymore until there are major improvements. The only up-side is the fact that you get a more comfortable seat.
Besides, TSA is moving to trains, so if you're trying to avoid having your rights violated, don't worry, they're going to violate them there, too. TSA is also starting to branch out to the highway as well, so no buses, either. You won't even be able to go to a sporting event or other large crowd event without the TSA being involved soon.
Like it or not, the TSA is going to be pretty much everywhere. I'm sure that at some point in that not-to-distant future trying to avoid the TSA in itself will be a reason to be suspicious. We're literally going to have to stay in our homes or walk from point A to point B to avoid a possible search...
That 4th Amendment sure was cool, wasn't it? I'm gonna miss it....
I don't know, ask all the overweight people out there what's wrong with a junk food or fast food tax?
The cost of obesity on society is 100 times the cost of smoking on society, and we're footing the bill just the same as with smokers. Ask yourself this: if a parent allows their child to eat themselves into their own grave, does that constitute child abuse? Should the state be allowed to remove the child from a home that does not make sure their children are of a healthy body weight? If a child is severely underweight, the state will absolutely take a child into custody, it happens all the time. But overweight? Never.
So how do you feel about a crappy food tax? Because honestly, I find that nine times out of ten, the person that is all about the smokers tax thinks the shitty food tax is just going too far. That's not to say that it is always true, but it usually is. Smoking is considered the dirty habit, but cramming 10 servings of powdered mini donuts in your mouth in a single sitting isn't? Eating 3 Double Cheeseburgers for lunch with an extra large fries and half gallon of coke isn't a dirty habit, too?
And then there's the excuses "Why should I be punished for eating fast food once in a while?! I am not overweight!!" That's a bullshit excuse because not everyone that smokes gets fucking lung cancer, but they all pay the tax just the same, don't they? So the fact that a person is healthy and only eats a little candy is immaterial.
Mind you, I'm not a smoker, but I used to be, and it really was the increased cost of the things that encouraged me to quit...$7 a pack when I finally managed to lock myself in the house for 3 days without cigarettes and get off of them once and for all. I just find it funny how hypocritical most people are when it comes to smokers, and how easily they ignore their own bad habits. Human nature, I guess...
[citation needed]
And we'd get to use a really fun squeegee!
You've reminded me of something I've often fantasized about: a political debate, moderated by FactCheck.org in real time. Put a "Truth-O-Meter" in front of every podium, and as they're talking just swing the meter from true/???/false as applicable. It would be goddamned hysterical to see them try to bullshit while the red lights are going off and the needle is bouncing off of FALSE FALSE FALSE (I always imagine an audible alarm similar to an aircraft's "stall" warning going off...)
No politician in the world would agree to something like that, but damn would it be fun to watch. Hell, we could even turn it into a game show, have all the candidates compete for a cash prize directly to their election fund; 1 point for truth, 0 points for ???, and -1 point for false. Whoever uses the most factual information in their responses wins. Maybe it would even get people interested in politics again?
Either that or let's just open it up to physical combat already so we can at least get a real life President Dwayne Elizondo Mountain Dew Herbert Camacho elected. It'd probably be just as detrimental as the legitimate candidates are, but it'd be far more amusing at least.
And who gives a fuck about crapping on the clock? It's what, 10 minutes?
To be fair, I've known some Gold Medalist shitters out there that could stretch a bowel movement into a 30 minute adventure. These are often the same people that routinely stretch a 30 minute lunch to a full hour because "traffic was bad", which is often the same reason why they're 10 minutes late every day.
However, I've always believed in giving someone the benefit of the doubt, first. Treating everyone like a prisoner because of one or two douchebags that management doesn't have the sack to get rid of doesn't seem right to me. Passive-aggressive emails sent to everyone in the department don't help, either. Usually, everyone knows who an email like that is directed at, and that person is usually either too stupid to realize they're the problem, or don't give a shit because they know that nobody that even can do something will do something.
The alternative is to allow auto makers to do whatever they like and then deal with the resultant lawsuits after the fact. For instance, when you're sitting at a light in your Ford Caveat Emptor and someone plows into your rear-end, crippling you because it was poorly designed and you lacked the engineering background to know this before you bought the car.
How does the free-market correct for other people that may or may be driving responsibly? What if those people are in a Mad Max style war machine with spikes and blades welded all over the thing? How does the market correct the fact that you're dead now because of someone else? "Ha ha, should have bought a better car, asshole?"
The difference between the regulation and the free market you espouse is that a lot of injuries are prevented with the regulations. It is much more proactive. Your method would force people to choose between safety and cost, because we all know that automakers will already do whatever they fuck they can to get around spending money designing a vehicle. There are numerous examples. The Ford Pinto, Pontiac Fiero, Ford Bronco II, the Chevrolet Corvair...just to name a few.
I'd rather spend a few thousands bucks more on a car that meets a certain minimum safety standard, and I really have no desire to share the road with anyone in a vehicle that does not, because they're not the only ones that have to pay for their stupid mistakes, everyone around them does. We may not be able to protect everyone all the time, but we can at least try.
To be fair, I'm not anti-free market or pro-regulation in all things. For instance, if you want to eat or drink yourself into an early grave, that's your business, because the only person your hurting is you. But the free market can't correct everything. How many more people would have to be sickened by something before the market even knew there was something wrong? How many more people would have to die before the market figures out that a particular car is a death-trap, or that a certain building product causes cancer? The free market doesn't help me a fucking bit when I've got 3rd degree burns all over my body because you decided to buy the cheap piece of shit car that burst into flames at the moment of impact. I shouldn't have to drive an M1 Abrams tank to make sure my kids will get to school safely because you wanted to save a few dollars. Some things have a value that is not measured in dollars and cents.
Maybe we should strap black boxes to all our politicians.
Explosives would be far more beneficial to society in general...
Oh, obviously I never actually answer that way, and I know how to bullshit with the best of them, so I generally fare pretty well in interviews. The bullshitting gets extremely tiring, though. For once in my life I would like to just allow my body of work, and the praises of my former employers, speak for itself.
In my experiences, the places that most harp on "being a part of a family" and "a passionate work force" and all that other crap are exactly the opposite when actually employed there. Many times have I been told of expectations of self-motivation only to find out that everyone in a supervisory role in the place is a ridiculous micro-manager, patrolling his little section of cube world every 15 minutes. The "passion", I quickly discover, is the passion to hit the bar after work, and the "family" is incestuous and dysfunctional.
If everyone is bullshitting the answer, telling you want you want to hear, what the hell is the use of the question in the first place? Are you looking for someone to fill a certain position and do a job for you well, or are you looking for someone that is really good at giving interviews? Since when did the former require the latter? I've met plenty of people that are great at giving interviews and have turned out to be completely useless when it comes to actually producing something.
God I always hate those fucking questions. "Why did you chose to apply with us?" Because I need a fucking job! Why else do people apply for a job? Why is that not enough? "Where do you see yourself in five years?" Uh, gainfully employed? Do my life goals really matter to whether or not I can fill this position? What if I saw myself working at the fucking circus in five years, would that have a bearing on whether or not I was hired? Why? "What are your goals?" To make enough money to pay my bills with a little left over for fun once in a while? Is that too mundane?
Man, I despise interviews. I fantasize about going all Peter Gibbons in Office Space every time someone asks me one of these stupid, irrelevant questions, but my sense of self-preservation reigns in those crazy ideas.
That 99% of the population will just go to the 1% that knows how to pirate shit. The cat and mouse game will continue. There are already informal "clubs" springing up just to share media. As it is now, many people in our circle carry their huge external hard drives around with them everywhere they go, explicitly so we can share media with each other. I'm the music guy, another is the movie/tv guy, another is the windows software guy, then there's the Apple software guy...hell, I even know someone that has almost any ebook I would ever want, plus thousands of comic books in a variety of formats.
The irony in all of this is, they'll spend or otherwise forego billions of dollars fighting piracy when they could put that money into providing a better product with more value and sell more than they ever did. The RIAA has been fighting music piracy for over a decade and what did they gain? Nothing. How many billions did they waste?
Piracy is like the hydra, you cut off one head and two more grow in it's place. Wiping out Napster just moved everyone to Kazaa and Limewire. Fighting Limewire just moved everyone to P2P. Fighting P2P just moved everyone to digital locker sites, and SOPA will just move everyone to encrypt their traffic and give rise to the sneakernet once again, and the only way they're going to police that is to start searching people...and once that comes to pass the U.S. Government might as well start putting it's affairs in order, because it will not last long after that...
Exactly, because the only options one would have is to sue the government or some multi-billion dollar corporation. Neither is economically feasible to anyone that is not a government or multi-billion dollar corporation themselves, so in effect, no one else has any rights at all regarding this.
The assholes in government and corporate America would love nothing better than for all of us to shut the fuck up, come out and vote for the guy they tell us to every couple years, and buy their price-inflated shit on credit. Hell, with all the game playing going on with voter-ID laws and other disenfranchisement methods, it probably won't be long before the "vote for the guy they tell us to" isn't even an issue any more. They'll just make sure that only the people that support that guy get the opportunity to vote in the first place. People openly say things like "only property owners should be allowed to vote since they're the only ones with a vested interest in the economy anyway" nowadays. How long will it be until we start seeing these ideas gain traction in actual government? As long as the economy stays in the shitter (and with companies sitting on record amounts of cash, hiding it overseas without penalty, it will be) people will believe almost anything they're told out of desperation.
It's time to start taking a page out of our Founding Fathers book and arming ourselves. The government won't hesitate in pulling out all the stops in making sure they remain in power.
The only problem is: this is only enough to actually learn the material... you still don't get that "accredited" piece of paper.
Which is what it's all about, unfortunately. If employers stopped basing their decisions on where that magic piece of paper came from, and started basing their decisions on what the applicant actually knows and is capable of doing, then you would see the need for that magic piece of paper decline precipitously.
It's ridiculous, I know people that are completely self-taught with regards to IT that easily exceed the capabilities of their accredited counterparts, but they're forced to basically go throw money at a university just to buy a piece of paper, taking classes for no reason.
Of course, they've also been ramping up the amount of experience you get in the original starting areas due to the fact that the vast majority of their player-base is of higher level now and most people want to burn their way to cap as fast as possible to play with their friends in endgame content. Hell, don't the new classes start at like level 60 or something now?
I haven't played WoW in many years (vanilla WoW, pre-expansion), but it's pretty common in MMO's to start trivializing older content so that players can speed through it as fast as possible to catch up to the majority of the player-base, otherwise they're going to be running around in a ghost town and just quit the game. Final Fantasy XI was like this within just a few years of launch, once the Treasures of Aht Urhgan expansion came out, the old areas and old content was immediately diminished to the point where new players could literally shout for days trying to get parties together to complete necessary missions and come up empty-handed. It was a big problem that S-E ignored for years in lieu of adding more and more endgame content for an extremely vocal minority of players that burned through it in days, and the end result is that new players would just quit after a few months out of frustration. It was greatly exacerbated by the fact that FFXI was designed to be a party-based game, but from what I've heard from friends that still play WoW, it's just as bad there, especially with raiding. People just do not do the older raids anymore, even in lowbie groups.
Anyway, I went off on a tangent, but the point is, yes, you have an unlimited amount of time to get to 20. However, because of the adjustments, you're probably going to hit 20 in like a solid day of playing, unless you are deliberately trying not to level, at which point you have to wonder why the hell you are playing the game...
i just checked, apparently it's not against blizzard's EULA to do that.
Of course it's not, provided there is no funny business going on with them. Multi-boxing is just more money in subscriptions for them, as you obviously need to have a unique account per logged in toon.
I worked with a guy a few years ago that had six different accounts. He had written custom software to allow him to issue commands to each of his toons from a single U.I., so he was able to have all but one instance of WoW running in the background as it were. According to what he told me, as long as the commands being issued to a toon were issued by a human being, that was A-OK according to the ToS. Since he didn't automate anything (according to him) he was in the clear.
He paid $60 a month in subscription fees, though, so obviously Blizzard was getting their end.
A bunch of people that had nothing to do with the breach will more than likely end up losing their jobs over it (often the same people that warn about these vulnerabilities beforehand), while the retards that caused the breach, either through their ineptitude or refusal to spend money on proper security, walk away unharmed.