If you bother to do any research you'll find that from entrepreneurs to economists to business magazines to the mostly incompetent mainstream media, the consensus everywhere outside of pure propaganda for the 1% is that "the rich" are not job creators but wealth-hoarders.
You are cordially invited to go fuck yourself with a red hot poker.
We could always revalue the currency, so that pennies, nickles, and so on are actually relevant denominations again. But that would really drive home to the public how much inflation there's been in their lifetimes, and the government certainly doesn't want anyone thinking about the causes of inflation...
Not exactly. What I notice about ads is that they often try to load in a higher quality than the video I'm watching, then stutter and choke on the crappy bandwidth that is the best I can get where I live. Or they try to do something fancy and interactive, and hang or crash my browser. And then I wonder again why I'm not just downloading my content from the pirate bay...
Being human. Our attention drifts. We get distracted. No one (not counting Google's driverless car) is a perfect driver. Close calls are going to happen. The only question is when they do, do we want drivers motivated by safety and situational awareness, or terrified that their (likely mandatory) car insurance bill is going to go up by hundreds of dollars a year?
"You could get a phantascopic system planted directly on your retinas, just as Bud's sound system lived on his eardrums. You could even get telaesthetics patched into your spinal column at various key vertebrae. But this was said to have its drawbacks: some concerns about long-term nerve damage, plus it was rumored that hackers for big media companies had figured out a way to get through the defenses that were built into such systems, and run junk advertisements in your peripheral vision (or even spang in the middle) all the time - even when your eyes were closed. Bud knew a guy like that who'd somehow gotten infected with a meme that ran advertisements for roach motels, in Hindi, superimposed on the bottom right-hand corner of his visual field, twenty-four hours a day, until the guy whacked himself."
-Neil Stephenson
The Diamond Age, or, A Young Lady's Illustrated Primer
How do people even use the web without ad-blocking? I've found myself ad-blockless from time to time for various reasons, usually because I'm not using my own machine. Without regard for the quality (or lack thereof) of content, I find much of the advertising on the web renders it simply unusable.
Perhaps he doesn't know how offensive the ads a given site presents are until he visits?
As for your comments about slashdot, perhaps he's got the same little box of text in the upper right-hand corner of the page that many of us do. If you're unaware that this box exists, I have to wonder why anyone reading this should bother taking your words seriously. Just FYI, it says:
"As our way of thanking you for your positive contributions to Slashdot, you are eligible to disable advertising."
"It is stealing because you are denying the revenue stream."
No.
Apparently the abuse of the word "stealing" by the MAFIAA is starting to cause etymological damage among the public. While you have every right to discontinue your business or to control access to it, you damn well do not get to open your doors to the public and then claim that if they come in and look at your wares without buying they are somehow "stealing". There is no "right" for any given business model to be profitable.
If you (and other businessmen) are worried that obnoxious, overdone ads are damaging the effectiveness of ads, then they (and you) need to STOP the people who are abusing advertising by throwing seizure-inducing crap in my face. Or, at the least, create a discriminating group of curated and trusted advertisers whose content we, the users, can trust to not adversely effect our use of the web. What you don't need to do is to sue your potential customers in pursuit of some imaginary god-given right to profit no matter what.
Someone should attach a circuit board along with some wires and blinking lights to the gas pipelines. That should get the government right on top of the problem.
No, no. You're thinking in the right direction, but not going far enough. A mere 'massive' pay raise can't possibly help the company enough to pull it out of the slump it's in. HP executives need a truly epic pay raise, at least two orders of magnitude more than there making now. And as for having workers work longer hours... while I'm sure you didn't plan on paying those workers for longer hours, more work does mean more costs for HP. Along with gargantuan pay raises, HP needs to fire workers. Lots of workers. Workers are an unnecessary expense in this day and age. Big executive pay packages and a fat balance sheet for a quarter or two, that's all any company needs.
I can't get google's app to run in my browser, but if it's leaving out stars like Wolf-359 what's the point?
Sol Station has had similar functionality since 2001, and afaik doesn't leave anything out. Although the interface probably isn't as polished, it works just fine: http://www.solstation.com/47ly-ns.htm
Citizen Joe Average doesn't care. To him, all IP and related issues are grouped together and it doesn't matter if they're called copyright, trademarks, or patents. And thanks to persistent over-reach and abuse of them by megacorps, he almost certainly now believes they're all idiotic schemes, and he will honor them exactly as much as he needs to in order to stay away from jail and massive fines, and not one iota more. Megacorps have broken the idea of IP for the foreseeable future, and it looks like they're working on destroying property law and democracy. How many more beneficial, hard-won aspects of civilized society do we let them destroy before we start getting rid of them?
While in general I agree that America has much less social mobility than it pretends to, Bill Clinton came from a middle-class background (at best) and did go on to become president and a multimillionaire based of his talent and ability.
So, the only non-raid sources of level 289+ gear are... player crafted items and dailies. A quick search reveals that there are exactly two crafted items available for any given spec, AND that making those items takes a fair amount of rare materials that... only come from raids. In other words, to get the best gear before raiding you need to run dailies. Claiming they're optional or that players don't need to do them appears rather disingenuous. If players aspire to be at the top of the game's internal hierarchy (and let's be honest, that's the whole point to playing for many if not most players) then dailies are only optional in the same sense that playing the game is optional.
EVE Online is generally viewed as quite successful commercially and critically. Despite having "only" 400,000 players, it's still going strong almost a decade after launch.
Why else do they provide massive incentives for doing exactly that (logging in every day) and punish (via delayed or inaccessible rewards) players who don't? It seems foolish to me, because as you pointed out, a player who logs in once a month for 2 hours and still pays his subscription is at least as profitable as one who spends 2 hours every day online. But... logging in every day (and performing the requisite tasks) gets you crafting points, cooking goodies, points to spend on gear, bonus points, rep with factions, pets, mounts, achievements, and more gold than you can shake a stick at. Try to play for 8, 12, or 16 hours every weekend and you'll still find your character outclassed by those for whom WoW is a daily habit.
Why do they push such a seemingly nonsensical model of gameplay? Idk, but I have a few theories. Maybe they're planning to monetize something (their next game?) via advertising, and being able to show potential ad buyers/investors foo-million eyeball hours is vital to the business plan. Or maybe they believe that literally making players into WoW addicts is necessary to keep them from quitting. Or maybe it has something to do with the business model for the Asian half of their playerbase, where, from what I understand, the players pay for playtime by the hour instead of a monthly subscription.
Full disclosure: I used to play WoW 20+ hours per week, but quit completely about a year ago. Amazing how much more free time I have now.
Saudi Arabia has an incredibly corrupt government; oppresses neighboring populations, such as when they sent soldiers into Bahrain to shut-down "Arab Spring" protests there; extensively oppresses their own population, denying basic human rights; supports and export religious extremism and hate speech, from places like Somalia where it has become an international problem, to here in the United States; regularly aids and abets the kidnapping of minors who hold American citizenship, a problem that's bad enough that the State Department has a web page devoted to it; and still, over a decade after 9/11, continues to fund terrorists.
Slashdot Mirror
The corporations have gone rampant.
If you bother to do any research you'll find that from entrepreneurs to economists to business magazines to the mostly incompetent mainstream media, the consensus everywhere outside of pure propaganda for the 1% is that "the rich" are not job creators but wealth-hoarders.
You are cordially invited to go fuck yourself with a red hot poker.
We could always revalue the currency, so that pennies, nickles, and so on are actually relevant denominations again. But that would really drive home to the public how much inflation there's been in their lifetimes, and the government certainly doesn't want anyone thinking about the causes of inflation...
Nothing except the United States government. They smacked down e-gold nice and hard.
http://www.justice.gov/opa/pr/2007/April/07_crm_301.html
I'm still confused as to why I'd ever want to replace my HP 48GX.
Someone with mod points, plz mod parent up. It's funny AND true.
The US has ridiculously high health care costs and outcomes that range from mediocre to crappy compared to pretty much any other first world country.
Hey now, movie trailers are an art form. They're frequently better than the films they advertise. :-)
Not exactly. What I notice about ads is that they often try to load in a higher quality than the video I'm watching, then stutter and choke on the crappy bandwidth that is the best I can get where I live. Or they try to do something fancy and interactive, and hang or crash my browser. And then I wonder again why I'm not just downloading my content from the pirate bay...
Being human. Our attention drifts. We get distracted. No one (not counting Google's driverless car) is a perfect driver. Close calls are going to happen. The only question is when they do, do we want drivers motivated by safety and situational awareness, or terrified that their (likely mandatory) car insurance bill is going to go up by hundreds of dollars a year?
"You could get a phantascopic system planted directly on your retinas, just as Bud's sound system lived on his eardrums. You could even get telaesthetics patched into your spinal column at various key vertebrae. But this was said to have its drawbacks: some concerns about long-term nerve damage, plus it was rumored that hackers for big media companies had figured out a way to get through the defenses that were built into such systems, and run junk advertisements in your peripheral vision (or even spang in the middle) all the time - even when your eyes were closed. Bud knew a guy like that who'd somehow gotten infected with a meme that ran advertisements for roach motels, in Hindi, superimposed on the bottom right-hand corner of his visual field, twenty-four hours a day, until the guy whacked himself."
-Neil Stephenson
The Diamond Age, or, A Young Lady's Illustrated Primer
How do people even use the web without ad-blocking? I've found myself ad-blockless from time to time for various reasons, usually because I'm not using my own machine. Without regard for the quality (or lack thereof) of content, I find much of the advertising on the web renders it simply unusable.
Perhaps he doesn't know how offensive the ads a given site presents are until he visits?
As for your comments about slashdot, perhaps he's got the same little box of text in the upper right-hand corner of the page that many of us do. If you're unaware that this box exists, I have to wonder why anyone reading this should bother taking your words seriously. Just FYI, it says:
"As our way of thanking you for your positive contributions to Slashdot, you are eligible to disable advertising."
"It is stealing because you are denying the revenue stream."
No.
Apparently the abuse of the word "stealing" by the MAFIAA is starting to cause etymological damage among the public. While you have every right to discontinue your business or to control access to it, you damn well do not get to open your doors to the public and then claim that if they come in and look at your wares without buying they are somehow "stealing". There is no "right" for any given business model to be profitable.
If you (and other businessmen) are worried that obnoxious, overdone ads are damaging the effectiveness of ads, then they (and you) need to STOP the people who are abusing advertising by throwing seizure-inducing crap in my face. Or, at the least, create a discriminating group of curated and trusted advertisers whose content we, the users, can trust to not adversely effect our use of the web. What you don't need to do is to sue your potential customers in pursuit of some imaginary god-given right to profit no matter what.
Someone should attach a circuit board along with some wires and blinking lights to the gas pipelines. That should get the government right on top of the problem.
Their heads will explode.
On second thought... yes by all means, tell the Republicans!
No, no. You're thinking in the right direction, but not going far enough. A mere 'massive' pay raise can't possibly help the company enough to pull it out of the slump it's in. HP executives need a truly epic pay raise, at least two orders of magnitude more than there making now. And as for having workers work longer hours... while I'm sure you didn't plan on paying those workers for longer hours, more work does mean more costs for HP. Along with gargantuan pay raises, HP needs to fire workers. Lots of workers. Workers are an unnecessary expense in this day and age. Big executive pay packages and a fat balance sheet for a quarter or two, that's all any company needs.
I can't get google's app to run in my browser, but if it's leaving out stars like Wolf-359 what's the point?
Sol Station has had similar functionality since 2001, and afaik doesn't leave anything out. Although the interface probably isn't as polished, it works just fine:
http://www.solstation.com/47ly-ns.htm
Citizen Joe Average doesn't care. To him, all IP and related issues are grouped together and it doesn't matter if they're called copyright, trademarks, or patents. And thanks to persistent over-reach and abuse of them by megacorps, he almost certainly now believes they're all idiotic schemes, and he will honor them exactly as much as he needs to in order to stay away from jail and massive fines, and not one iota more. Megacorps have broken the idea of IP for the foreseeable future, and it looks like they're working on destroying property law and democracy. How many more beneficial, hard-won aspects of civilized society do we let them destroy before we start getting rid of them?
While in general I agree that America has much less social mobility than it pretends to, Bill Clinton came from a middle-class background (at best) and did go on to become president and a multimillionaire based of his talent and ability.
Well, he was at least smart enough to figure out that dropping out of the public eye was the best thing to do after eight years of his "leadership".
So, the only non-raid sources of level 289+ gear are... player crafted items and dailies. A quick search reveals that there are exactly two crafted items available for any given spec, AND that making those items takes a fair amount of rare materials that... only come from raids. In other words, to get the best gear before raiding you need to run dailies. Claiming they're optional or that players don't need to do them appears rather disingenuous. If players aspire to be at the top of the game's internal hierarchy (and let's be honest, that's the whole point to playing for many if not most players) then dailies are only optional in the same sense that playing the game is optional.
EVE Online is generally viewed as quite successful commercially and critically. Despite having "only" 400,000 players, it's still going strong almost a decade after launch.
Why else do they provide massive incentives for doing exactly that (logging in every day) and punish (via delayed or inaccessible rewards) players who don't? It seems foolish to me, because as you pointed out, a player who logs in once a month for 2 hours and still pays his subscription is at least as profitable as one who spends 2 hours every day online. But... logging in every day (and performing the requisite tasks) gets you crafting points, cooking goodies, points to spend on gear, bonus points, rep with factions, pets, mounts, achievements, and more gold than you can shake a stick at. Try to play for 8, 12, or 16 hours every weekend and you'll still find your character outclassed by those for whom WoW is a daily habit.
Why do they push such a seemingly nonsensical model of gameplay? Idk, but I have a few theories. Maybe they're planning to monetize something (their next game?) via advertising, and being able to show potential ad buyers/investors foo-million eyeball hours is vital to the business plan. Or maybe they believe that literally making players into WoW addicts is necessary to keep them from quitting. Or maybe it has something to do with the business model for the Asian half of their playerbase, where, from what I understand, the players pay for playtime by the hour instead of a monthly subscription.
Full disclosure: I used to play WoW 20+ hours per week, but quit completely about a year ago. Amazing how much more free time I have now.
Saudi Arabia has an incredibly corrupt government; oppresses neighboring populations, such as when they sent soldiers into Bahrain to shut-down "Arab Spring" protests there; extensively oppresses their own population, denying basic human rights; supports and export religious extremism and hate speech, from places like Somalia where it has become an international problem, to here in the United States; regularly aids and abets the kidnapping of minors who hold American citizenship, a problem that's bad enough that the State Department has a web page devoted to it; and still, over a decade after 9/11, continues to fund terrorists.
Bush the Lesser was an idiot.