"The fact that something like OpenOffice, for example, can be created and distributed without spending millions of dollars, is right out there for everybody to see. If the public eventually recognizes it, our long-held perception of the value of a copy of something might change"
I think slashdotters seem to have a more expansive view of the kind "social engine" or whatever that you might find elsewhere. OK- Companies put out crappy bug ridden software. Nobody ever seems to really talk about WHY they do this: short, intense development cycles that do not leave time to finish the job properly or even go home at a reasonable time. Three years after the.com bubble burst, this is still the culture in IT. In OSS, it is done when it is done. People here tend to confuse taking the time to do it right with some kind of social movement.
"The same goes for the recording industry. If bands can generate fame and get better performance gigs by distributing free copies of their songs, there's no need for them to sign away their rights to a record company."
An old school capitalist would call that free samples. A modern one might call it guerilla marketing. I call it finally getting a free market in the music industry instead of having a cartel calling the shots.
"... they focus on strength areas like plot and storyline"
I have been writing a neverwinter nights modules for what seems like forever and I consider the authors tips, at least in the context of a "community mod", to be pure BS. Writing something good is hard, even on a platform like NWN where the game engine is already written for you and you can focus on the "plot and storyline". Doing it well is hard and takes a lot of work. Anyone who has ever written a large dialog tree for even a single conversation would know this. Think about what a players response to each line might be and write all the reasonable branches. By the time you have reached the grandchild node, it is immense. Oh and if any of these have a plot impact, or you include race or class based differences, it gets even more immense. Even a conversation between two NPCs to advance the plot can have you debugging for hours. A cut scene is a serious hair puller.
Blowing things up is the easy part. Fights are fast and simple to put together. Putting together an immersive environment with properly placed background noise and placeables - as opposed to empty and lifeless areas is difficult. Good, self consistent stories and smooth play are difficult. That is why 95% of the modules on neverwinter vault suck and that is also why my "soundstage" modules still have a toolset to gameplay time ratio of something like 100:1. And that is soundstage where I can keep track of the plot in a notebook becasue I will be DMing them later.
Oh and I periodically stop developing because I have a life; plain and simple. Wife, kids, job, friends, other hobbies. Sometimes I get sick of building and even play for a little while.
So here are my own tips on finishing the project:
1) If you have a spouse or significant other, they are simply a drag on your time and preventing you from delivering. Divorce is in order here. If you are not married, it is less of a hassle to extract yourself from this situation. 2) Kids? Give them up for adoption. 3) Friends. If they are not willing to help out on the project (remember the >1 developer rule), then they are not really your friends. Never speak to them about anything else for the duration of the project. 4) Other hobbies. And desires to do anything else with your free time is indicative of lack of focus. Sell your hot rod/mountain bike/golf clubs/books/whatever. 5) Getting bored with your project and need a break? This is the single biggest factor in not delivering. Oh, you say that you will take a break for a few days, watch that DVD, play, see friends, etc and then come back to work on your game again, but will you? Oh you might in a month or six, but your idea will be stale. REMEMBER - YOU ARE NOT DOING THIS TO HAVE FUN!!! Is the project starting to feel like you are still at work? You are. Now get back to that keyboard.
I would have to agree there. There is a huge difference between the nickel tag that just responds with its serial number and the RFID that we use for the security doors where I work. The latter can be preloaded as a debit card for junk food at the cafeteria. The former is just a UPC code that can be scanned by being in the vicinity of a reader.
Any smart retailer is going to use cheap read-only tags with limited info. Why? Well, they already have the relevant info (master data, etc) in their database. There is no need to duplicate it on the card. Plus, it takes time to read a card. It is more reliable to quickly scan a tag and then wait for info from a server than wait for a long scan, especially if the tag is moving.
And here is the clincher. People here are worried about retailers knowing what brand of jeans they wear, where they bought it, when and how much was paid. A retailer would love to know that about their customers, but would hate it is their competitors found out. It would be a goldmine for your CRM system and a nightmare if it is in your competitor's CRM system. Retailers are not going to pay extra to help their competitors out.
It does not give ammo; quite the opposite, but it would still give politicos MORE reason to want to do away with p2p. They are not going to say, "we don't like you trading government documents that are supposed to be public domain anyway". That won't cut it, at least in public. But I think this could make it more fashonable to talk about the evils of downloading music and that those pirate netweoks should be closed.
"blunt honesty" is overrated. You can be honest without being overly blunt. Blunt people tend to be ineffective in teams because they piss people off; causing personal issiues cloud cloud the problem at hand. My mother-in-law is the bluntest person I have ever met. Her "refreshing honesty" has been rewarded with problems with her kids and legal troubles with the neighbors. By contrast, by wife recently saved a project after she realized that the personell resource allocation was all fscked up; not by being blunt and pissing people off, but by being so smooth that everybody on the team thought the fiy was their own idea.
Why? Do you really think his hombrew stuff is any better than guys who have spent years in research. Crude cruise missles were used in WW2 and also in Iraq against the Americans. Crude cruise missles have squat for effectiveness.
With this kind of stuff, the basics are easy, it is the details that take decades of hard work to solve. Remember that Tomahawks are the Nth generation of cruise missle.
Wernher Von Braun was an amateur rocketeer in the 20's. After the Nazis came to power, he and others went to work for the government designing miliraty rockets. IIRC- it had something to do with getting aroung artillery restrictions following the Versais Treaty. Of course after the war, the Russians and American divvied up the German rocket scientists.
So the Versais Treaty led to the Peenemunde rocket program led to the Apollo landings. Go Figure.
"By the same token, what bonehead company would develop and sell a product which they could plainly see from a quick patent search was owned by another."
Easy: 1- Do patent database search. 2- "Who the hell is Intermec? Well, they are probably small. Lets develop our product and make them sue us if they can. 3- Profit!!!
"I'm disappointed to say that I have relatives that think profiling (of Middle Eastern people in this case) is okay, "
Amen Brother! I also muss fess up to relatives that think it is 100% ok and look at me like I have a second head when I argue against it. My original argument was made in haste and annoyance, but I still believe that such profiling reflects more in the proflier than the profilie. Lumping people into groups is something that we can all be prone to if we are not careful. I know that I have made assumptions based on outward appearances before and I am not proud of it.
About the GMO food example. Labeling is something that compabnies will not do willingly. It is actually ironic; in the US there are these wonderful "Food Facts" labels that simply don't exist in Europe. If you buy a snickers bar in the US, it will tell you just how unhealthy it is. If you buy the same bar - remember; same company, same product - in Europe, there is absulutely squat re. nutritional info. I would actually expect the opposite.
I agree 100% on labeling of GMO products. If they can convince me that it is in my interest (e.g. enhanced nutritional value, etc) to buy/eat them, then I will. Otherwise I will pass them by on the premise that I do not plan on being the guenea pig. This is where I disagree with those in favor of an outright ban (the prevaling attitude in the EU). I actually once heard the argument that "people would end up buying them anyway". Well, I can put that box of crackers back on the shelf after reading the label, yet it is assumed that for my own good I do not have the discipline. Actually I just used this as an example to point out that there is no monopoly anywhere on government that tries to 'protect' its population from themselves.
"These 'industries' produce nothing of any tangible value to the purpose of state, other than 'entertained citizenship'"
They make money. 1- Make cheezy action movie 2- Sell it all over the world 3- Profit
BTW-Porn falls under the same heading.
"yet they consume uncountable resources."
Oh dear, I have been hooked by a hard core green. Ummmm, heavy industry produces tangible things. It consumes vastly more energy and resources and often just produces and 'entertained citizenship'. Lets see mobile phones, SUVs (starting to see them in large numbers in Europe as well), even bicycles. IT involves a lot of nasty chemicals used to make computer parts. Software and Entertainment are about the least resource intensive busineses I can think of.
"We mostly vote according to the record of the MP rather than their advertising."
No more or less. You do this. I do this. Do your neighbors?
"We think that freedom of speech also means stuff that's unpopular, irrational and sometimes off colour."
I can't speak for the places where they spell it "colour", but generally it has been the case that freedom of speech is more extreme in the US than is the case for Continental Europe. The line between what is acceptable, but unsavory and what is incite-full is generally more liberal in the states. France and Nazi stuff for sale on Ebay comes to mind. Hate groups banned in Europe move their servers to the states. This is less the case post September 11, but given time to settle down, it will return to being this way.
"We rarely think that government should be protecting us against ourselves."
Ask a group of people anywhere if they want their government to protect them from themselves and would will probably get a unanimous NO. Now ask them if they want GM foods banned because they might not have the willpower to leave them on the supermarket shelves.
"We didn't allow the growth of an evangelist Christian super bloc with direct ties to government, then stick by the claim that our church and state are separated."
There is a lot of talk of the rise of evangelicals, but that is just media chatter. They have always been there and have always had political clout. And is not oppressing a block of voters that you disagree with undemocratic?
"We use democracy as a method of changing policy because we don't have access to armour-piercing bullets."
"Its hard to find sympathy for America and its RIAA, and its so-called 'industries'."
"It is hard to find sympathy for Europe and its GEMA, and its so-called 'industries'". See, a little noun replacement and we can offend a whole new group! What exactly are "so-called 'industries'"? Please define it Mr AC.
"This, coming from the same government who think its perfectly acceptable to "legally profit by inducing children to kill and steal (oil in Iraq)". As long as the U.S. falsely believes in its own security above all else, it will continue to be a criminal police state populated by hypocrites and irresponsible drones, run by the insane."
Oh boy! In case you did not know this; the electorate in the US is hoghly polarized about the current administration. Half the pupulation loves it and half of the population loathes it. As one of the "despise" half, I am offended by these generalizations of America. You dislike the politics of the current administration, so by extension you dislike me as well - even though we are likely of the same opinion wrt. the Bush administration. People like you give me the urge to vote Bush in November as my own way of saying "fsck you too".
I happen to live in Europe and I have encountered this high minded bigotry many times. Why not replace the word "American" with say Paki, Jew, Muslim, Turk, Nigger, Spic, Gook, etc and then think of what you would find "wrong" to say. Making hateful generalizations about ethnic groups or nationalities is at best moronic, and at worst small minded and dare I say - evil. It is the same thing that led to the Holocust, Dresden and Hiroshima, 9/11 and the Isreali-Palestenian conflict, Rowanda, Kosovo, etc.
Go ahead and mod me offtopic. Karma ain't everything.
Well, if you are not allowed to develop P2P in the US, then only foreign P2P apps will be available. Then we will hear about legislation to ban these evil foreign pirate apps......or sever the US from the rest of the internet. After all, the world is full of shady characters just waiting to pollute the minds of the young.
From the comments in the story, it is either a negative or a not likely. Otherwise they would have mentioned something that could turn out to be liquid methane.
This is a blatant attempt by Sony to get more people to use its online music service. I see a potential pitfall here. No, I actually see a white elephant for Sony. If it only plays ATRAC and every other player (IPOD included) supports the de-facto standard (MP3), it will fail in the market. Period. Are all of Sony's players ATRAC only? Why are they attaching their most recognized product name to this dud?
Proprietary standards work in segmented markets still in infancy. Like it or not people have MP3 collections and will not be keen on converting to use the device. Prediction - In 2005, Sony will release a walkman that also supports MP3.
Did you ship them overnight? In my experience with antibodies (used for flow cytometry), they always go next day air. Did you not track the package online? If it really was a red (overnight) shipment, it should have been there by noon (at least that is the case in the states). You did not stick around for the UPS man?
Here is a hint: If you will not stick around to wait for the package, don't order expensive-dry ice packed things at the end of the week.
I worked as a preloader about 12 years ago and Mac/Micro warehous was around the corner. Every day there would be tons of monitors, cpus, ect coming down the belt destined for that truck. Well, when it got really busy, the guys would just grab boxed off the conveyor belt and throw them onto the floor; and I do not mean the three foot drop from the conveyor, I mean the all the way to tire level (5-6 feet). I wonder how many people got broken monitors.
I think the difference between UPS and the rest is that UPS is a union shop (every employee is a Teamster). I saw horrible employes that never got fired because of the union. At Fedex, if you dropped a monitor 6 feet and then stepped on it, you would be fired. At UPS, a manager takes you aside and says "don't do it again".
IIRC- The wearer is not blinded, but the image is washed out. Overexposed you could say. You can't see squat, but YOUR vision is not affected if you take them off. Anyone with more recent NVG experience is welcome to confirm or rebut this.
Slashdot Mirror
"The fact that something like OpenOffice, for example, can be created and distributed without spending millions of dollars, is right out there for everybody to see. If the public eventually recognizes it, our long-held perception of the value of a copy of something might change"
.com bubble burst, this is still the culture in IT. In OSS, it is done when it is done. People here tend to confuse taking the time to do it right with some kind of social movement.
I think slashdotters seem to have a more expansive view of the kind "social engine" or whatever that you might find elsewhere. OK- Companies put out crappy bug ridden software. Nobody ever seems to really talk about WHY they do this: short, intense development cycles that do not leave time to finish the job properly or even go home at a reasonable time. Three years after the
"The same goes for the recording industry. If bands can generate fame and get better performance gigs by distributing free copies of their songs, there's no need for them to sign away their rights to a record company."
An old school capitalist would call that free samples. A modern one might call it guerilla marketing. I call it finally getting a free market in the music industry instead of having a cartel calling the shots.
Or bad news in a way...
Instead of actually building the thing, we can get into a winkie measuring contest about where to build it.
IIRC - there was an article in wired about that a year or so ago.
"... they focus on strength areas like plot and storyline"
I have been writing a neverwinter nights modules for what seems like forever and I consider the authors tips, at least in the context of a "community mod", to be pure BS. Writing something good is hard, even on a platform like NWN where the game engine is already written for you and you can focus on the "plot and storyline". Doing it well is hard and takes a lot of work. Anyone who has ever written a large dialog tree for even a single conversation would know this. Think about what a players response to each line might be and write all the reasonable branches. By the time you have reached the grandchild node, it is immense. Oh and if any of these have a plot impact, or you include race or class based differences, it gets even more immense. Even a conversation between two NPCs to advance the plot can have you debugging for hours. A cut scene is a serious hair puller.
Blowing things up is the easy part. Fights are fast and simple to put together. Putting together an immersive environment with properly placed background noise and placeables - as opposed to empty and lifeless areas is difficult. Good, self consistent stories and smooth play are difficult. That is why 95% of the modules on neverwinter vault suck and that is also why my "soundstage" modules still have a toolset to gameplay time ratio of something like 100:1. And that is soundstage where I can keep track of the plot in a notebook becasue I will be DMing them later.
Oh and I periodically stop developing because I have a life; plain and simple. Wife, kids, job, friends, other hobbies. Sometimes I get sick of building and even play for a little while.
So here are my own tips on finishing the project:
1) If you have a spouse or significant other, they are simply a drag on your time and preventing you from delivering. Divorce is in order here. If you are not married, it is less of a hassle to extract yourself from this situation.
2) Kids? Give them up for adoption.
3) Friends. If they are not willing to help out on the project (remember the >1 developer rule), then they are not really your friends. Never speak to them about anything else for the duration of the project.
4) Other hobbies. And desires to do anything else with your free time is indicative of lack of focus. Sell your hot rod/mountain bike/golf clubs/books/whatever.
5) Getting bored with your project and need a break? This is the single biggest factor in not delivering. Oh, you say that you will take a break for a few days, watch that DVD, play, see friends, etc and then come back to work on your game again, but will you? Oh you might in a month or six, but your idea will be stale. REMEMBER - YOU ARE NOT DOING THIS TO HAVE FUN!!! Is the project starting to feel like you are still at work? You are. Now get back to that keyboard.
"Let's consider the languages taught at school in Germany:
- German. Mandatory. Gosh."
Tell that to the locals where I live. I speak reasonably good german, but I have the hardest time understaning my next door neighbor's Badisch.
I would have to agree there. There is a huge difference between the nickel tag that just responds with its serial number and the RFID that we use for the security doors where I work. The latter can be preloaded as a debit card for junk food at the cafeteria. The former is just a UPC code that can be scanned by being in the vicinity of a reader.
Any smart retailer is going to use cheap read-only tags with limited info. Why? Well, they already have the relevant info (master data, etc) in their database. There is no need to duplicate it on the card. Plus, it takes time to read a card. It is more reliable to quickly scan a tag and then wait for info from a server than wait for a long scan, especially if the tag is moving.
And here is the clincher. People here are worried about retailers knowing what brand of jeans they wear, where they bought it, when and how much was paid. A retailer would love to know that about their customers, but would hate it is their competitors found out. It would be a goldmine for your CRM system and a nightmare if it is in your competitor's CRM system. Retailers are not going to pay extra to help their competitors out.
Unprofessional for a college? And to think that Pepsi paid for the hockey ring at the (shall remain unnamed) university where I went to grad school.
It does not give ammo; quite the opposite, but it would still give politicos MORE reason to want to do away with p2p. They are not going to say, "we don't like you trading government documents that are supposed to be public domain anyway". That won't cut it, at least in public. But I think this could make it more fashonable to talk about the evils of downloading music and that those pirate netweoks should be closed.
"blunt honesty" is overrated. You can be honest without being overly blunt. Blunt people tend to be ineffective in teams because they piss people off; causing personal issiues cloud cloud the problem at hand. My mother-in-law is the bluntest person I have ever met. Her "refreshing honesty" has been rewarded with problems with her kids and legal troubles with the neighbors. By contrast, by wife recently saved a project after she realized that the personell resource allocation was all fscked up; not by being blunt and pissing people off, but by being so smooth that everybody on the team thought the fiy was their own idea.
Why? Do you really think his hombrew stuff is any better than guys who have spent years in research. Crude cruise missles were used in WW2 and also in Iraq against the Americans. Crude cruise missles have squat for effectiveness.
With this kind of stuff, the basics are easy, it is the details that take decades of hard work to solve. Remember that Tomahawks are the Nth generation of cruise missle.
Babam!
Uncle Adolf!
Wernher Von Braun was an amateur rocketeer in the 20's. After the Nazis came to power, he and others went to work for the government designing miliraty rockets. IIRC- it had something to do with getting aroung artillery restrictions following the Versais Treaty. Of course after the war, the Russians and American divvied up the German rocket scientists.
So the Versais Treaty led to the Peenemunde rocket program led to the Apollo landings. Go Figure.
"By the same token, what bonehead company would develop and sell a product which they could plainly see from a quick patent search was owned by another."
Easy:
1- Do patent database search.
2- "Who the hell is Intermec? Well, they are probably small. Lets develop our product and make them sue us if they can.
3- Profit!!!
"I'm disappointed to say that I have relatives that think profiling (of Middle Eastern people in this case) is okay, "
Amen Brother! I also muss fess up to relatives that think it is 100% ok and look at me like I have a second head when I argue against it. My original argument was made in haste and annoyance, but I still believe that such profiling reflects more in the proflier than the profilie. Lumping people into groups is something that we can all be prone to if we are not careful. I know that I have made assumptions based on outward appearances before and I am not proud of it.
About the GMO food example. Labeling is something that compabnies will not do willingly. It is actually ironic; in the US there are these wonderful "Food Facts" labels that simply don't exist in Europe. If you buy a snickers bar in the US, it will tell you just how unhealthy it is. If you buy the same bar - remember; same company, same product - in Europe, there is absulutely squat re. nutritional info. I would actually expect the opposite.
I agree 100% on labeling of GMO products. If they can convince me that it is in my interest (e.g. enhanced nutritional value, etc) to buy/eat them, then I will. Otherwise I will pass them by on the premise that I do not plan on being the guenea pig. This is where I disagree with those in favor of an outright ban (the prevaling attitude in the EU). I actually once heard the argument that "people would end up buying them anyway". Well, I can put that box of crackers back on the shelf after reading the label, yet it is assumed that for my own good I do not have the discipline. Actually I just used this as an example to point out that there is no monopoly anywhere on government that tries to 'protect' its population from themselves.
Really? I don't watch much TV, so I never heard it. It is not my sig
"These 'industries' produce nothing of any tangible value to the purpose of state, other than 'entertained citizenship'"
They make money.
1- Make cheezy action movie
2- Sell it all over the world
3- Profit
BTW-Porn falls under the same heading.
"yet they consume uncountable resources."
Oh dear, I have been hooked by a hard core green. Ummmm, heavy industry produces tangible things. It consumes vastly more energy and resources and often just produces and 'entertained citizenship'. Lets see mobile phones, SUVs (starting to see them in large numbers in Europe as well), even bicycles. IT involves a lot of nasty chemicals used to make computer parts. Software and Entertainment are about the least resource intensive busineses I can think of.
"We mostly vote according to the record of the MP rather than their advertising."
No more or less. You do this. I do this. Do your neighbors?
"We think that freedom of speech also means stuff that's unpopular, irrational and sometimes off colour."
I can't speak for the places where they spell it "colour", but generally it has been the case that freedom of speech is more extreme in the US than is the case for Continental Europe. The line between what is acceptable, but unsavory and what is incite-full is generally more liberal in the states. France and Nazi stuff for sale on Ebay comes to mind. Hate groups banned in Europe move their servers to the states. This is less the case post September 11, but given time to settle down, it will return to being this way.
"We rarely think that government should be protecting us against ourselves."
Ask a group of people anywhere if they want their government to protect them from themselves and would will probably get a unanimous NO. Now ask them if they want GM foods banned because they might not have the willpower to leave them on the supermarket shelves.
"We didn't allow the growth of an evangelist Christian super bloc with direct ties to government, then stick by the claim that our church and state are separated."
There is a lot of talk of the rise of evangelicals, but that is just media chatter. They have always been there and have always had political clout. And is not oppressing a block of voters that you disagree with undemocratic?
"We use democracy as a method of changing policy because we don't have access to armour-piercing bullets."
But Armor piercing bullets are more fun!
"Its hard to find sympathy for America and its RIAA, and its so-called 'industries'."
"It is hard to find sympathy for Europe and its GEMA, and its so-called 'industries'". See, a little noun replacement and we can offend a whole new group! What exactly are "so-called 'industries'"? Please define it Mr AC.
"This, coming from the same government who think its perfectly acceptable to "legally profit by inducing children to kill and steal (oil in Iraq)". As long as the U.S. falsely believes in its own security above all else, it will continue to be a criminal police state populated by hypocrites and irresponsible drones, run by the insane."
Oh boy! In case you did not know this; the electorate in the US is hoghly polarized about the current administration. Half the pupulation loves it and half of the population loathes it. As one of the "despise" half, I am offended by these generalizations of America. You dislike the politics of the current administration, so by extension you dislike me as well - even though we are likely of the same opinion wrt. the Bush administration. People like you give me the urge to vote Bush in November as my own way of saying "fsck you too".
I happen to live in Europe and I have encountered this high minded bigotry many times. Why not replace the word "American" with say Paki, Jew, Muslim, Turk, Nigger, Spic, Gook, etc and then think of what you would find "wrong" to say. Making hateful generalizations about ethnic groups or nationalities is at best moronic, and at worst small minded and dare I say - evil. It is the same thing that led to the Holocust, Dresden and Hiroshima, 9/11 and the Isreali-Palestenian conflict, Rowanda, Kosovo, etc.
Go ahead and mod me offtopic. Karma ain't everything.
Well, if you are not allowed to develop P2P in the US, then only foreign P2P apps will be available. Then we will hear about legislation to ban these evil foreign pirate apps... ...or sever the US from the rest of the internet. After all, the world is full of shady characters just waiting to pollute the minds of the young.
Oh boy, I am on a soapbox today.
From the comments in the story, it is either a negative or a not likely. Otherwise they would have mentioned something that could turn out to be liquid methane.
and patched...
Now if only I can convince my wife to dump windows for linux, I would no longer be on this "patch, update antivirus, clean spyware" treadmill
This is a blatant attempt by Sony to get more people to use its online music service. I see a potential pitfall here. No, I actually see a white elephant for Sony. If it only plays ATRAC and every other player (IPOD included) supports the de-facto standard (MP3), it will fail in the market. Period. Are all of Sony's players ATRAC only? Why are they attaching their most recognized product name to this dud?
Proprietary standards work in segmented markets still in infancy. Like it or not people have MP3 collections and will not be keen on converting to use the device. Prediction - In 2005, Sony will release a walkman that also supports MP3.
Did you ship them overnight? In my experience with antibodies (used for flow cytometry), they always go next day air. Did you not track the package online? If it really was a red (overnight) shipment, it should have been there by noon (at least that is the case in the states). You did not stick around for the UPS man?
Here is a hint: If you will not stick around to wait for the package, don't order expensive-dry ice packed things at the end of the week.
Did the clone come from Mac Warehouse? If so, I knew the guys that dropped it.
I worked as a preloader about 12 years ago and Mac/Micro warehous was around the corner. Every day there would be tons of monitors, cpus, ect coming down the belt destined for that truck. Well, when it got really busy, the guys would just grab boxed off the conveyor belt and throw them onto the floor; and I do not mean the three foot drop from the conveyor, I mean the all the way to tire level (5-6 feet). I wonder how many people got broken monitors.
I think the difference between UPS and the rest is that UPS is a union shop (every employee is a Teamster). I saw horrible employes that never got fired because of the union. At Fedex, if you dropped a monitor 6 feet and then stepped on it, you would be fired. At UPS, a manager takes you aside and says "don't do it again".
IIRC- The wearer is not blinded, but the image is washed out. Overexposed you could say. You can't see squat, but YOUR vision is not affected if you take them off. Anyone with more recent NVG experience is welcome to confirm or rebut this.