It seems pretty apparent to me that sooner than most people realize capitalism as its been practiced for essentially all of human history won't be sustainable any more. Technological improvements create wealth out of thin air, but the economic system can easily turn this windfall into a negative for humanity. As technology makes stuff steadily cheaper the value of labor steadily drops while the value of capital increases as it requires less labor to generate more wealth. You've essentially end up with the people who own the robots that make the wealth (capital) on one side and on the other all the people who lack capital and need a "job" to support themselves. There's a lot of handwringing about a 10% unemployment rate in the US, what happens when we have 20% of the population that is *unemployable* at a wage which they can support themselves? 30%? 40%? What's the breaking point? Robots/computers/self driving cars don't need to replace all the engineers and doctors, our entire economic system will collapse once you can't earn a living in retail/food/manufacturing or anything else that doesn't require you to be above averagely smart. Its tragic that this seems like such a likely outcome of us generating more wealth than we ever have before. We just need to come up with a paradigm shift in how we distribute wealth, and good luck doing that without a hell of a lot of bloodshed.:/
The 'right to consume' as you put it is granted by natural law in the case of piracy. Humans have evolved to copy information liberally because the benefit of knowing where the good hunting is vastly out weights the cost of describing it. The artificial constraint of copyright is unnatural and goes against human nature. There is absolutely nothing immoral about copying things and the moral outrage seems to stem from this unnatural feeling that copying is theft. I'm not going to rehash arguments you've certainly already heard but let me ask you this: if there's a product that I'm not going to buy for the price/conditions it's offered at how is the world a better place by me doing without it? This has nothing to do with morality or theft because NOBODY WAS DEPRIVED OF ANYTHING. The morality issue does get a bit more murky if you're talking about something that you would have bought but instead pirated, but that seems to be a fairly small percentage of piracy and I'm unconvinced that its not largely offset by the free marketing piracy generates.
I don't know, interactions between multiple actors are often more complicated than can really be boiled down to "this one thing is the cause". Consider a similar kind of a spectrum of vaguely analogous examples.
If you pick up and play with a wild bear cub, is it the mother bear that "caused" the consequent mauling? The fact that you didn't know anything about bears isn't really a consideration for that question.
If walk through a rough part of time screaming "NIGGERS ARE WORTHLESS", what would you say "caused" you to end up in the hospital? The fact that we're talking about humans rather than bears doesn't really change the fact that even human animals will generally react in a certain way to certain stimulus.
And, to complete the arc, if you through social awkwardness or ignorance put yourself in a position of high risk to be bullied or raped - the fact that it's unintentional doesn't really alter the fact that your actions are part of the "cause" of the result.
I'm certainly not excusing the aggressor, just questioning the absolute "bullies cause bullying", "rapists cause rape". "Victim-blaming" is a very charged phrase that tries to frame the discussion in a very slanted way when what I think is really being said is that the aggressor should be punished *and* the victim educated on how to deal with strange dogs without being bit...or whatever. Claiming the victim had no part in "causing" the problem and has no responsibility is just ignoring the second half of that.
Yes, this is my experience with the game. I'm excited because of Bioware's pedigree, so I not only pre-order the game (something I rarely do) I also spring for the collectors edition with all the DLC. Release day, I excitedly download the game only to be hit with some bug related to their authentication servers not communicating amongst themselves which apparently hit most of the people who bought the game through stardock. After over an hour bounced around among various support people who didn't have any idea what was going on they said they'd get back to me. 4 days later they did. Meanwhile I get fed up and - timed it - spent 3.5 minutes to locate, download, install and launch a crack.
As a double strong "fuck you customer", not only can you not access the DLC without an active net connection, you can't play your save game which has touched the DLC, so assuming you don't want to just start a brand new game you can't play your game at all. So the other day when my flaky ISP is down and I can't do much else with my computer I figure it's a good time to play the new single player game I got. "Fuck you customer! You really should have just pirated the whole thing" Great job EA, I would love to support great games like this with my dollars but this is the last cent you'll ever get from me. You make it so....much...more...painful to actually buy the game.
So, since the concept of intellectual property exists solely to incentivize the creation of *stuff*, how exactly can you justify the patents/copyrights for all those "lost" sales?
Seems like both the usual knee jerk reactions are missing the point. Yep, filesharing inarguably hurts content distributors, I think the free advertising helps them is just a justification for what you wanted to do anyway - at least a large portion of the time. Indefinite copyright extensions, abolishment of fair use, and generally sticking it to the man have some valid points as well. The thing is, overall filesharing creates wealth, and I would argue is good for society as a whole. I'm an unabashed pirate, and though I spend roughly the same on software, music, and movies as I always have I get hundreds of times more media nowadays. It's debatable whether filesharing has reduced the amount of money I would have put into the system, but it has without a doubt provided vastly more benefit to me than my piracy has conceivably hurt content providers in theoretic lost revenue.
Look at it this way, lets assume for the sake of argument that wide spread piracy makes it much harder to make money with intellectual property, and consequently the amount of music/movies/software that is produced drops a whopping 50%. That's bad, right? Well, what if the average person is now consuming 10 times as much media as they used to? The net wealth creation is obviously positive. Particularly, some might argue, because the remaining work was less commercially motivated and more artistically inspired.
You've got to remember, the whole concept of intellectual property is an artificial abstract concept created to encourage creative works which are deemed to have value to our culture, leveraging our capitalistic economy to maximize the amount of artistic works people have access to. Does it suck to be a struggling artist trying to make a living? You bet. Is it an overall bad thing for society that artistic works are cheaper? The buggy whip analogy is too overplayed, but I'll argue that progress is usually painful for the minority while being greatly beneficial for society overall. I imagine the invention of theprinting press would have caused a similar shakeup if IP was as big an industry as it is today. It may be that the genie is out of the bottle and recording music is now in the very big list of things people enjoy that most people can't make a good living doing. Even if it became impossible to make any money at all (a situation I find hard to imagine) there would still be content produced due to human nature, and if the net consumption rises despite the drop in production then wealth is being created out of thin air.
I've played many different types of games competitively from FPSes to strategy games and been ranked pretty highly in some of them. While I won't knock anybody for what their preference is I find I vastly prefer games with a decent amount of randomness despite my above average skill level because they make for a very different type of gaming experience. The more static the game, the more there are optimal solutions - the best routes to run, the best spawns to camp, the best build order, etc. Perhaps you like trying to shave a second off of your optimized build order, or get the exact perfect timing to toss that grenade so it has a slightly higher chance of killing the guy who's about to spawn, that's fine, but I prefer to play a game where I need to think on my feet, adjust to unexpected occurrences and formulate my strategy on the fly rather than repeat very similar play experiences trying to optimize them.
Judicial randomness doesn't make things non-competitive, it makes things less formulaic and repetitious.
Oh, and FPSes won't be a legitimate competitive sport until there is a reasonable way to exclude outrageous cheaters.
Um, I don't know how it is where you work, but I am rarely given directives to get stuff 100% perfect, it's all about getting stuff done good enough and cheap enough (in terms of time). In the business world cruising through with B level compromises is EXACTLY what the best employees do, and being good at being lazy (read: cheap) takes a lot of creativity. Note, nobody is talking about really sloppy work, we're talking about B level stuff that could be polished a bit with a whole lot more effort. Spit an polish where it matters (which everyone has to do to get B's sometime) and don't worry about the finer details when it doesn't. Again, gross generalization, but I have to agree with the OP that the straight A students are in my experience not generally the ones you want when you've got to shoot from the hip (all too often the case in my experience). And I damn sure don't want to work with somebody who honestly believes that we should all be working 80 hours a week ("and doing extracurricular projects with ease"). Screw that, I'll get my work done good enough to make everybody happy then go home to live the rest of my life.
Well, seems like pretty much all those problems can be solved by having a well designed (yeah, I know that's the hard part;) ) cross game for the "monsters" to be playing. You don't want the "monsters" to be sitting around waiting for the "real" players to show up so that they can "play their role". You want to have the "monsters" engaging in their own game, which the "player" has to thwart in order to meet his own goals. Just as an example of what I'm talking about, imagine you've got a game of capture the flag going on, and then a "meta-player" shows up with uber equipment who's task is to grab both flags at once. He's got uber equipment but he never respawns so if you can kill him he'll be gone at which point you want to still be in a position of advantage over the other team, but if he does get both flags at once the game is over so you'll want to work together to a certain degree with the other team. That's just a (probably crappy) idea off the top of my head, but it illustrates what I'm talking about. If you want an idea like this to work, you have to basically have two different games going on, just expecting some people to sit around and play an AI role is indeed doomed to failure.
Implicit in your argument is that a completely free market is the most perfect state for our economy to be in...we don't need any labor protection laws, the free market will take care of everything! The problem with such utopian ideology is that the real world doesn't operate as a nice clean model. Is a race to the bottom in everyone's best interest? Is it really a good idea to let desperate people working in sweat shops set the rate of labor because they're willing to do your job(read: they like to eat most days and are trapped in a loser's game by the people around them with power)? Is it in society's best interest to allow giant corporations to consolidate power indefinitely (monopolies everywhere)? To pump pollution into the air because it's more cost effective? To advertise unethically (advertising cigarettes to children, etc.)?
My point is there is a reason we don't live in a perfect capitalistic economy, and that's because human nature is such that things turn pretty ugly as all the power consolidates in very tight pockets which exclude the vast majority of the population. The idea that wealth needs to be spread around has distasteful socialist implications, but it does seem to me that it's important to have an economy which benefits the majority of the population, not just a small subset. That's kinda the point of structuring an economy.
Am I entitled to my job? No, but I do expect and demand that the politicians which represent me craft laws to structure the economy such that most people have a reasonable opportunity to partake of the wealth of the world. How that relates to offshoring is a separate discussion, but just letting whatever happens happen, just because that's the most perfectly capitalistic thing to do strikes me as being particularly narrow minded.
Holy crap is that a terrible idea. Rewrite the constitution every decade? Are you out of your mind? Do you really want a rubber stamp congress working with George Bush/Bill Clinton/ to rewrite the scope of their own powers?
The constitution is a contract between the people of this country, you don't go renegotiating it unless you have a VERY good reason and damn near everybody agrees. Politicians already twist and pervert everything they can out of the words that are there, deciding that interstate comerce includes recreational pot use and due process isn't really necessary for enemies of the state. Can you imagine where we'd be if these weasels were allowed to change the very wording to conform to whatever the war on drugs/terror/copyright infringement/communism/alchohol/abortion/nazis dictated was necessary?
Yes its not perfect. Yes its dated. No, the government cannot be trusted to limit its own powers, that's the whole point of having a constitution. That's why we can "just update it".
This is excellent advice, it's exactly what I was going to say with one important addition: ask a financial geek who doesn't have a conflict of interest with you. Unfortunately, the fee and commission structures for a lot of financial professionals are such that their financial incintives are not aligned with yours because they're basically salesmen. What you want is a fee only advisor, sombody who for a set price will give you advice.
Given that you're a college student with presumably very limmited funds, what would probably be even better is to get good free financial geek advice (Posting this question to slashdot will get you a whole lot of ignorant IT geek advice). One good place to get good, free advice is www.fool.com (they'll definately try to get you to sign up for their pay services, but there is a lot of good stuff there for free). Take the slashdot advice in this regard with a very large grain of salt.
On that note, I'm not gonna tell you what I think you should do with your money.
I'm amazed at the vitriol coming out of all the geeks on this one. I guess a lot of people have had really bad experiences, but I would have expected interprising. I tell you what though, I love the self scan lanes BECAUSE of the fact that they are a little clunky and you have to learn how to use them. Why is that? Because 9 out of 10 times there is no line at all - its like having my own reserved lane and I figured out a long time ago how to work it. You just have to be smart enough to know when its the right tool for the job. You don't want to go there with your fully stuffed grocery cart (let the professionals handle that scanning) or stuff you know it has problems with (why in the hell would you try more than once to buy washers on one of these?), but if you're just buying a couple things for dinner, or just stopped by to get that box of nails you needed they make the perfect express lane.
Sorry to come across with tough love, but I'm gonna have to go ahead and call bullshit. I've been there, done that, and couldn't afford the T-shirt. I used to think "man, I cut all the corners I can and my paycheck is still gone!" Then my wife was put on long term bed rest for pregnancy complications, and I shortly lost my job. No income, first kid on the way, and we'd just signed the paperwork for our nice new house to raise a family in. You know what I learned? All that crap I "had to have", I really didn't. That incredible financial hardship was the best thing that could have possibly happened to us financially because now years later back with two healthy incomes we're saving about 40% of our income and are on track for a very early retirement. We also live very full lives in the here and now to.
American culture is very good about teaching you all about what you "deserve". It's also great at teaching you to be ashamed if you can't project a lifestyle that keeps up with the Joneses (who are incidentally swimming in debt to keep up with you). Guess what, the fact that you think you "deserve" something doesn't mean you can have it. You can have it...pay attention here...if you can afford it.
Take an honest look at every one of your recurring monthly bills. If you're honest with yourself, I'm betting pretty much every on of them is partially or completely a luxury. Americans "need" a new car for each adult. We "need" cell phones, high speed internet, premium cable, nice big houses out in the suburbs. Lets not forget that we "deserve" to treat ourselves to $5 cups of coffee every morning, and eating out fairly often (heck I don't have time to pack a lunch!).
But hey, I'm not gonna "lecture" you about saving for a rainy day, its all about priorities. For me, achieving financial independence so I can work only on stuff I want to is a higher priority than driving a brand new car so Muffy and Buffy don't look down their noses at me. What bothers me though is people who whine about not earning enough to make ends meet, when those ends include "a lifestyle we aren't ashamed of". If you can't afford something, you can tell yourself how much you deserve it all day long and it won't change the fact that most Americans don't know how to handle their finances like adults.
What you need to do, my friend, is figure out what you can afford and allocate your resources appropriately. Approaching things from the "I want", "I deserve" and even "I need" angle is a sure recipe for long term disaster. Don't buy things because you deserve them, buy them because you can afford them.
Heck, I haven't quite hit 30 yet and just look at what's changed in my lifetime already. All of this stuff would have been serious science fiction when I was born.
Modern PCs Robots on another planet Robots waging war Robotic vacuum cleaners Cloning Plasma TVs you can hang on a wall GPS Blogging The Internet RFID The Hubble Telescope Cell/Satelite phones Viagra Tasers Genetically engineered food crops Nanofiber clothing Video conferencing
Somehow I don't think a time traveler would spend much time wondering over email addresses on business cards.
Here's a device that will pass the wife test, but you can also dig in just about as far as you'd like. Dunno about other DVRs, but it was quite easy to slap a monster HDD into my Tivo and give it an order of magnitude more recording time. There is also loads of stuff you can tinker with if you're so inclined.
You say that like it's a bad thing. Don't get me wrong, living among the sheeple makes me grind my teeth on a daily basis, but when you put it into perspective like that junk faxes don't rate very high in the order of things that people have evolved to worry about. Heck, this isn't even ancient history, lots of people in the world TODAY have a non-trivial chance of thier cause of death being starvation, and as mind numbing as a lot of the entertainment offered to the masses is there is also a lot of good enriching stuff that beats staring at the mud wall in your hut. The reason most people don't care at a level deep enough to risk their life (as in revolution) is because for all the message board flaming this is not that big a deal in the grand scheme of things. Worrying about the *IAA bullying or the idiocy of patent law seems terribly important, till you point out that everybody in the first world lives in the most opulent luxury in history. Hell yeah bread and circuses keep me satisfied, there isn't a hell of a lot with a higher impact on my quality of life than food and entertainment. Everything else is nitpicking that seems terribly important because very few of us have ever had to worry about what really is important. Bread and circuses.
Wow, what unabashed classism. Yes, capitalism has its flaws, but you can't have the good without the bad. Your post is thinly veiled communist propaganda, you're pissed that some people have more than you.
The real problem is, there are no limits on how much gasoline, electricity, or natural gas one person is allowed to use.
Yes there are. There are economic limits, because we still live in a (mostly) capitalistic society. What you really mean is "to each according to his needs", the government should distribute resources rather than the market. Unfortunately, all that means is the asshole who has 7 pools is the asshole who has the right friends in the government instead of the asshole who has too much money.
Aside from that, the logistics of your vitriol don't even make sense. This guy uses what, 100, 200 times as much energy as the next guy? Guess what, for each guy with the type of resources to waste on that scale there are probably 50,000 (or more) who don't have enough money to just throw it away. Where do you suppose the biggest gains are to be had?
All you really seem to be pissed about is that rich people have a bigger piece of the pie. Well, that's the nature of capitalism.
If that means that your kids (and you) end up watching less (or no) TV, and skip almost every movie, can you argue that you have been harmed in some way?
Why yes, yes I can. I'm raising an American child, who needs to be able to function in American society. Do you think your kid can walk across the street in America without being exposed to violence and sexuality? How do you suppose your sheltered child, who's never been allowed to watch TV or any non G rated movie will cope when they go off to college? Obviously there is an inappropriate amount, but you can't function in this society without being desensitized a little.
Yes, sexual expression is only one part of the human experience, but you're the worst kind of head-in-the-sand ostrich to ignore that it is a particularly powerful one. Here's a news flash, teenagers' hormones are an absurdly powerful drive in their life. How does it benefit them to just tell them sex isn't important? Furthermore, how in the hell does being exposed to sexuality preclude learning how to relate to people in other ways? Because someone watches porn they lack the capacity for conversation? How about you teach your kids the difference rather than hoping they never see an exposed nipple?
Porn is a trap - it feeds the pleasure centers of the brain, devalues the humanity of the person being used for that pleasure, and damages people's ability to relate to one another in a healthy way. Real relationships are not self-focused, but must have a significant component of other-focus or they don't survive.
This is exactly the psychological damage that comes from feeling like sex is dirty and shameful. I enjoy my wife's body. That is no more demeaning to her than the fact that I enjoy her sense of humor. Yes, I'll admit I often talk to her just because I enjoy it. How shameful. I do lots of things just because I like to do them, including watching porn. There is nothing wrong with doing things solely because they're pleasurable. If you're merely arguing that things taken to excess can be bad, then I don't know exactly what your point is.
Well, there is a cost-benefit that skews things to suburban sprall. The extra 10 hours a week (1 hr. commute, twice a day, 5 times a week) is worth it for the standard of living increase you get vs renting an apartment across the street from where you work. One choice is to work 10 hours a week less. The other choice is to have three times the house, live in a good school district, and have neighbors of a similar socio-economic background with similar values (as in I like not having to lock my car at night).
The simple fact of the matter is that people like to have some elbow room. Its unreasonable to say "all you people, just cram together here because it makes things easier". A better solution is to have better mass transit, and a lot more telecommuting.
This is fine if your employees are commodities, but it seems like you're missing some fairly fundamental differences between IT workers and commodities. The biggest thing is we aren't swappable parts. Two 5 star developers are going to perform differently on virtually every task depending on their specific strengths and experiences. Your lowered pay just lost you your 5 star developer, but you can easily pick up a new one because of the increased supply. The only problem is it's gonna take this new guy over a year to come up to the same speed on your system as your old 5 star guy. What's that worth to you? Oops, now the new guy has been here awhile and wants a raise...
The other thing you fail to notice is that there is a large gradation of competence. If you want good people you have to attract them over the other jobs they could take. I'm sure I'm not alone in that I've got burned in the past by low-pay-with-big-future-reward compensation, through no fault of my own... and I won't willingly go into that situation again regardless of my high self esteem. Maybe you have trouble finding quality people because quality people don't have a problem landing a job more in line with their best interests. Why in the heck, working for a wage with no stake in the company, would I let my family's financial well being be contingent on managerial competence (a resource in such scarce supply)? Its bad enough I could get laid off at any time, but to also have my "real" wage held hostage is definitely not in my best interest, and fortunately as a valuable resource I've got a bit of negotiating leverage.
As you say, supply and demand. Competent IT workers ARE scarce, and not commodities. I'll leave it as an exercise for the reader as to what kind of IT employees one ends up with by trading them like commodities.
"those who know what they're worth"? The guy with no work experience who is too good to work in a cube knows what he's worth? Let me clue you in, in the workforce what you're worth is what someone else is willing to pay. You may think you're the hottest shit since sliced bread, but you've got to realize the realities of the industry we're in. Lots of overtime, PHBs, fear of outsourcing, and (way down the list of crappy things) cubicles are normal for this industry. The dot com bubble is long gone, the mythical fantasy job may exist but landing it is like winning the lottery. Granted, you should always be looking to improve yourself and your career, but holding out for a job on your terms (if your terms are unreasonable) is likely to leave you hungry a long time. Find a job with a good ballance of good things vs bad things and realize that the reason you get a paycheck is because nobody would do that job for free.
What I'm sick of is is the oversimplifying classification of this issue as spoiled brats stealing from the people that actually produce something. Illegal != Immoral. Intellectual property is an artificial, abstract concept whose purpose is the benefit of society as a whole. It's not a natural law, and there are an unlimmited number of ways that such a system could be structured. What I'm sick of is this uncomprehensible juvenile attitude 'I can do everything', 'I am entitled to everything' that is a cornerstone of corporate culture. The difference is, they've got the clout to mold the legal landscape such that many people won't even debate the issue because its just simply wrong to break the law. Bullshit. Piracy != theft. Illegal != immoral. The immorality of piracy is a tangential issue, but it's depressing to see the rampant lack of critical thinking caused by a strong desire to follow the rules and feel holier than others.
Well keep in mind its a numbers game. If you want a one in a million girl, you need to go through... anybody?...a million girls. I met my wife through match.com, but only after over three years, hundreds of women I exchanged emails with, dozens of women I talked to over the phone, and about 10 I met in person. Just think about it, if you're not looking for a mainstream girl (someone who doesn't mind your lack of social skills, someone to wait in line for days ahead of Episode III with you, whatever) you gotta realize that by definition a large percentage of women are not right for you. 20 different girls is nothing (though you may want to work on your approach if you're getting a very low response rate), keep in mind the bigger picture.
For what it's worth, I can give you some perspective on the other side of the fence via my discussions with women who have ads up. Any woman who is reasonably attractive looking gets ALOT of responses to their ads. Don't dismay though, as you'd expect the vast majority are creeps/loosers any reasonable women doesn't want to date. Just keep in mind that you've got a few sentences to make a first impression, and you need to stand out from the deluge. Spend some time on your introduction, maybe get a friend to look over it. Once you've got a good introduction written it's like a resume, no reason not to use it over and over again (make sure to personalize each one a little bit though). Don't get dismayed over a lack of response, a certain percentage of girls are just not gonna respond no matter what you write, the numbers just stack up that way.
Good luck, and don't get discouraged. No matter how undatable you are (no offense, I'm a sucky dater myself) there are women out there for you, its just a matter of how many you have to go through to find one.
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It seems pretty apparent to me that sooner than most people realize capitalism as its been practiced for essentially all of human history won't be sustainable any more. Technological improvements create wealth out of thin air, but the economic system can easily turn this windfall into a negative for humanity. As technology makes stuff steadily cheaper the value of labor steadily drops while the value of capital increases as it requires less labor to generate more wealth. You've essentially end up with the people who own the robots that make the wealth (capital) on one side and on the other all the people who lack capital and need a "job" to support themselves. There's a lot of handwringing about a 10% unemployment rate in the US, what happens when we have 20% of the population that is *unemployable* at a wage which they can support themselves? 30%? 40%? What's the breaking point? Robots/computers/self driving cars don't need to replace all the engineers and doctors, our entire economic system will collapse once you can't earn a living in retail/food/manufacturing or anything else that doesn't require you to be above averagely smart. Its tragic that this seems like such a likely outcome of us generating more wealth than we ever have before. We just need to come up with a paradigm shift in how we distribute wealth, and good luck doing that without a hell of a lot of bloodshed. :/
What's the value of the water you need to drink to survive? It's pretty ridiculous to ignore available supply in considering the price of something.
The 'right to consume' as you put it is granted by natural law in the case of piracy. Humans have evolved to copy information liberally because the benefit of knowing where the good hunting is vastly out weights the cost of describing it. The artificial constraint of copyright is unnatural and goes against human nature. There is absolutely nothing immoral about copying things and the moral outrage seems to stem from this unnatural feeling that copying is theft. I'm not going to rehash arguments you've certainly already heard but let me ask you this: if there's a product that I'm not going to buy for the price/conditions it's offered at how is the world a better place by me doing without it? This has nothing to do with morality or theft because NOBODY WAS DEPRIVED OF ANYTHING. The morality issue does get a bit more murky if you're talking about something that you would have bought but instead pirated, but that seems to be a fairly small percentage of piracy and I'm unconvinced that its not largely offset by the free marketing piracy generates.
I don't know, interactions between multiple actors are often more complicated than can really be boiled down to "this one thing is the cause".
Consider a similar kind of a spectrum of vaguely analogous examples.
If you pick up and play with a wild bear cub, is it the mother bear that "caused" the consequent mauling? The fact that you didn't know anything about bears isn't really a consideration for that question.
If walk through a rough part of time screaming "NIGGERS ARE WORTHLESS", what would you say "caused" you to end up in the hospital? The fact that we're talking about humans rather than bears doesn't really change the fact that even human animals will generally react in a certain way to certain stimulus.
And, to complete the arc, if you through social awkwardness or ignorance put yourself in a position of high risk to be bullied or raped - the fact that it's unintentional doesn't really alter the fact that your actions are part of the "cause" of the result.
I'm certainly not excusing the aggressor, just questioning the absolute "bullies cause bullying", "rapists cause rape". "Victim-blaming" is a very charged phrase that tries to frame the discussion in a very slanted way when what I think is really being said is that the aggressor should be punished *and* the victim educated on how to deal with strange dogs without being bit...or whatever. Claiming the victim had no part in "causing" the problem and has no responsibility is just ignoring the second half of that.
Yes, this is my experience with the game. I'm excited because of Bioware's pedigree, so I not only pre-order the game (something I rarely do) I also spring for the collectors edition with all the DLC. Release day, I excitedly download the game only to be hit with some bug related to their authentication servers not communicating amongst themselves which apparently hit most of the people who bought the game through stardock. After over an hour bounced around among various support people who didn't have any idea what was going on they said they'd get back to me. 4 days later they did. Meanwhile I get fed up and - timed it - spent 3.5 minutes to locate, download, install and launch a crack.
As a double strong "fuck you customer", not only can you not access the DLC without an active net connection, you can't play your save game which has touched the DLC, so assuming you don't want to just start a brand new game you can't play your game at all. So the other day when my flaky ISP is down and I can't do much else with my computer I figure it's a good time to play the new single player game I got. "Fuck you customer! You really should have just pirated the whole thing" Great job EA, I would love to support great games like this with my dollars but this is the last cent you'll ever get from me. You make it so....much...more...painful to actually buy the game.
So, since the concept of intellectual property exists solely to incentivize the creation of *stuff*, how exactly can you justify the patents/copyrights for all those "lost" sales?
Seems like both the usual knee jerk reactions are missing the point. Yep, filesharing inarguably hurts content distributors, I think the free advertising helps them is just a justification for what you wanted to do anyway - at least a large portion of the time. Indefinite copyright extensions, abolishment of fair use, and generally sticking it to the man have some valid points as well. The thing is, overall filesharing creates wealth, and I would argue is good for society as a whole. I'm an unabashed pirate, and though I spend roughly the same on software, music, and movies as I always have I get hundreds of times more media nowadays. It's debatable whether filesharing has reduced the amount of money I would have put into the system, but it has without a doubt provided vastly more benefit to me than my piracy has conceivably hurt content providers in theoretic lost revenue.
Look at it this way, lets assume for the sake of argument that wide spread piracy makes it much harder to make money with intellectual property, and consequently the amount of music/movies/software that is produced drops a whopping 50%. That's bad, right? Well, what if the average person is now consuming 10 times as much media as they used to? The net wealth creation is obviously positive. Particularly, some might argue, because the remaining work was less commercially motivated and more artistically inspired.
You've got to remember, the whole concept of intellectual property is an artificial abstract concept created to encourage creative works which are deemed to have value to our culture, leveraging our capitalistic economy to maximize the amount of artistic works people have access to. Does it suck to be a struggling artist trying to make a living? You bet. Is it an overall bad thing for society that artistic works are cheaper? The buggy whip analogy is too overplayed, but I'll argue that progress is usually painful for the minority while being greatly beneficial for society overall. I imagine the invention of theprinting press would have caused a similar shakeup if IP was as big an industry as it is today. It may be that the genie is out of the bottle and recording music is now in the very big list of things people enjoy that most people can't make a good living doing. Even if it became impossible to make any money at all (a situation I find hard to imagine) there would still be content produced due to human nature, and if the net consumption rises despite the drop in production then wealth is being created out of thin air.
I've played many different types of games competitively from FPSes to strategy games and been ranked pretty highly in some of them. While I won't knock anybody for what their preference is I find I vastly prefer games with a decent amount of randomness despite my above average skill level because they make for a very different type of gaming experience. The more static the game, the more there are optimal solutions - the best routes to run, the best spawns to camp, the best build order, etc. Perhaps you like trying to shave a second off of your optimized build order, or get the exact perfect timing to toss that grenade so it has a slightly higher chance of killing the guy who's about to spawn, that's fine, but I prefer to play a game where I need to think on my feet, adjust to unexpected occurrences and formulate my strategy on the fly rather than repeat very similar play experiences trying to optimize them.
Judicial randomness doesn't make things non-competitive, it makes things less formulaic and repetitious.
Oh, and FPSes won't be a legitimate competitive sport until there is a reasonable way to exclude outrageous cheaters.
Um, I don't know how it is where you work, but I am rarely given directives to get stuff 100% perfect, it's all about getting stuff done good enough and cheap enough (in terms of time). In the business world cruising through with B level compromises is EXACTLY what the best employees do, and being good at being lazy (read: cheap) takes a lot of creativity. Note, nobody is talking about really sloppy work, we're talking about B level stuff that could be polished a bit with a whole lot more effort. Spit an polish where it matters (which everyone has to do to get B's sometime) and don't worry about the finer details when it doesn't. Again, gross generalization, but I have to agree with the OP that the straight A students are in my experience not generally the ones you want when you've got to shoot from the hip (all too often the case in my experience). And I damn sure don't want to work with somebody who honestly believes that we should all be working 80 hours a week ("and doing extracurricular projects with ease"). Screw that, I'll get my work done good enough to make everybody happy then go home to live the rest of my life.
Well, seems like pretty much all those problems can be solved by having a well designed (yeah, I know that's the hard part ;) ) cross game for the "monsters" to be playing. You don't want the "monsters" to be sitting around waiting for the "real" players to show up so that they can "play their role". You want to have the "monsters" engaging in their own game, which the "player" has to thwart in order to meet his own goals. Just as an example of what I'm talking about, imagine you've got a game of capture the flag going on, and then a "meta-player" shows up with uber equipment who's task is to grab both flags at once. He's got uber equipment but he never respawns so if you can kill him he'll be gone at which point you want to still be in a position of advantage over the other team, but if he does get both flags at once the game is over so you'll want to work together to a certain degree with the other team. That's just a (probably crappy) idea off the top of my head, but it illustrates what I'm talking about. If you want an idea like this to work, you have to basically have two different games going on, just expecting some people to sit around and play an AI role is indeed doomed to failure.
Implicit in your argument is that a completely free market is the most perfect state for our economy to be in...we don't need any labor protection laws, the free market will take care of everything! The problem with such utopian ideology is that the real world doesn't operate as a nice clean model. Is a race to the bottom in everyone's best interest? Is it really a good idea to let desperate people working in sweat shops set the rate of labor because they're willing to do your job(read: they like to eat most days and are trapped in a loser's game by the people around them with power)? Is it in society's best interest to allow giant corporations to consolidate power indefinitely (monopolies everywhere)? To pump pollution into the air because it's more cost effective? To advertise unethically (advertising cigarettes to children, etc.)?
My point is there is a reason we don't live in a perfect capitalistic economy, and that's because human nature is such that things turn pretty ugly as all the power consolidates in very tight pockets which exclude the vast majority of the population. The idea that wealth needs to be spread around has distasteful socialist implications, but it does seem to me that it's important to have an economy which benefits the majority of the population, not just a small subset. That's kinda the point of structuring an economy.
Am I entitled to my job? No, but I do expect and demand that the politicians which represent me craft laws to structure the economy such that most people have a reasonable opportunity to partake of the wealth of the world. How that relates to offshoring is a separate discussion, but just letting whatever happens happen, just because that's the most perfectly capitalistic thing to do strikes me as being particularly narrow minded.
Holy crap is that a terrible idea. Rewrite the constitution every decade? Are you out of your mind? Do you really want a rubber stamp congress working with George Bush/Bill Clinton/ to rewrite the scope of their own powers?
The constitution is a contract between the people of this country, you don't go renegotiating it unless you have a VERY good reason and damn near everybody agrees. Politicians already twist and pervert everything they can out of the words that are there, deciding that interstate comerce includes recreational pot use and due process isn't really necessary for enemies of the state. Can you imagine where we'd be if these weasels were allowed to change the very wording to conform to whatever the war on drugs/terror/copyright infringement/communism/alchohol/abortion/nazis dictated was necessary?
Yes its not perfect. Yes its dated. No, the government cannot be trusted to limit its own powers, that's the whole point of having a constitution. That's why we can "just update it".
This is excellent advice, it's exactly what I was going to say with one important addition: ask a financial geek who doesn't have a conflict of interest with you. Unfortunately, the fee and commission structures for a lot of financial professionals are such that their financial incintives are not aligned with yours because they're basically salesmen. What you want is a fee only advisor, sombody who for a set price will give you advice.
Given that you're a college student with presumably very limmited funds, what would probably be even better is to get good free financial geek advice (Posting this question to slashdot will get you a whole lot of ignorant IT geek advice). One good place to get good, free advice is www.fool.com (they'll definately try to get you to sign up for their pay services, but there is a lot of good stuff there for free). Take the slashdot advice in this regard with a very large grain of salt.
On that note, I'm not gonna tell you what I think you should do with your money.
I'm amazed at the vitriol coming out of all the geeks on this one. I guess a lot of people have had really bad experiences, but I would have expected interprising. I tell you what though, I love the self scan lanes BECAUSE of the fact that they are a little clunky and you have to learn how to use them. Why is that? Because 9 out of 10 times there is no line at all - its like having my own reserved lane and I figured out a long time ago how to work it. You just have to be smart enough to know when its the right tool for the job. You don't want to go there with your fully stuffed grocery cart (let the professionals handle that scanning) or stuff you know it has problems with (why in the hell would you try more than once to buy washers on one of these?), but if you're just buying a couple things for dinner, or just stopped by to get that box of nails you needed they make the perfect express lane.
Sorry to come across with tough love, but I'm gonna have to go ahead and call bullshit. I've been there, done that, and couldn't afford the T-shirt. I used to think "man, I cut all the corners I can and my paycheck is still gone!" Then my wife was put on long term bed rest for pregnancy complications, and I shortly lost my job. No income, first kid on the way, and we'd just signed the paperwork for our nice new house to raise a family in. You know what I learned? All that crap I "had to have", I really didn't. That incredible financial hardship was the best thing that could have possibly happened to us financially because now years later back with two healthy incomes we're saving about 40% of our income and are on track for a very early retirement. We also live very full lives in the here and now to.
American culture is very good about teaching you all about what you "deserve". It's also great at teaching you to be ashamed if you can't project a lifestyle that keeps up with the Joneses (who are incidentally swimming in debt to keep up with you). Guess what, the fact that you think you "deserve" something doesn't mean you can have it. You can have it...pay attention here...if you can afford it.
Take an honest look at every one of your recurring monthly bills. If you're honest with yourself, I'm betting pretty much every on of them is partially or completely a luxury. Americans "need" a new car for each adult. We "need" cell phones, high speed internet, premium cable, nice big houses out in the suburbs. Lets not forget that we "deserve" to treat ourselves to $5 cups of coffee every morning, and eating out fairly often (heck I don't have time to pack a lunch!).
But hey, I'm not gonna "lecture" you about saving for a rainy day, its all about priorities. For me, achieving financial independence so I can work only on stuff I want to is a higher priority than driving a brand new car so Muffy and Buffy don't look down their noses at me. What bothers me though is people who whine about not earning enough to make ends meet, when those ends include "a lifestyle we aren't ashamed of". If you can't afford something, you can tell yourself how much you deserve it all day long and it won't change the fact that most Americans don't know how to handle their finances like adults.
What you need to do, my friend, is figure out what you can afford and allocate your resources appropriately. Approaching things from the "I want", "I deserve" and even "I need" angle is a sure recipe for long term disaster. Don't buy things because you deserve them, buy them because you can afford them.
Heck, I haven't quite hit 30 yet and just look at what's changed in my lifetime already. All of this stuff would have been serious science fiction when I was born.
Modern PCs
Robots on another planet
Robots waging war
Robotic vacuum cleaners
Cloning
Plasma TVs you can hang on a wall
GPS
Blogging
The Internet
RFID
The Hubble Telescope
Cell/Satelite phones
Viagra
Tasers
Genetically engineered food crops
Nanofiber clothing
Video conferencing
Somehow I don't think a time traveler would spend much time wondering over email addresses on business cards.
...Tivo is very hack friendly.
Here's a device that will pass the wife test, but you can also dig in just about as far as you'd like. Dunno about other DVRs, but it was quite easy to slap a monster HDD into my Tivo and give it an order of magnitude more recording time. There is also loads of stuff you can tinker with if you're so inclined.
You say that like it's a bad thing. Don't get me wrong, living among the sheeple makes me grind my teeth on a daily basis, but when you put it into perspective like that junk faxes don't rate very high in the order of things that people have evolved to worry about. Heck, this isn't even ancient history, lots of people in the world TODAY have a non-trivial chance of thier cause of death being starvation, and as mind numbing as a lot of the entertainment offered to the masses is there is also a lot of good enriching stuff that beats staring at the mud wall in your hut. The reason most people don't care at a level deep enough to risk their life (as in revolution) is because for all the message board flaming this is not that big a deal in the grand scheme of things. Worrying about the *IAA bullying or the idiocy of patent law seems terribly important, till you point out that everybody in the first world lives in the most opulent luxury in history. Hell yeah bread and circuses keep me satisfied, there isn't a hell of a lot with a higher impact on my quality of life than food and entertainment. Everything else is nitpicking that seems terribly important because very few of us have ever had to worry about what really is important. Bread and circuses.
The real problem is, there are no limits on how much gasoline, electricity, or natural gas one person is allowed to use.
Yes there are. There are economic limits, because we still live in a (mostly) capitalistic society. What you really mean is "to each according to his needs", the government should distribute resources rather than the market. Unfortunately, all that means is the asshole who has 7 pools is the asshole who has the right friends in the government instead of the asshole who has too much money.
Aside from that, the logistics of your vitriol don't even make sense. This guy uses what, 100, 200 times as much energy as the next guy? Guess what, for each guy with the type of resources to waste on that scale there are probably 50,000 (or more) who don't have enough money to just throw it away. Where do you suppose the biggest gains are to be had?
All you really seem to be pissed about is that rich people have a bigger piece of the pie. Well, that's the nature of capitalism.
Why yes, yes I can. I'm raising an American child, who needs to be able to function in American society. Do you think your kid can walk across the street in America without being exposed to violence and sexuality? How do you suppose your sheltered child, who's never been allowed to watch TV or any non G rated movie will cope when they go off to college? Obviously there is an inappropriate amount, but you can't function in this society without being desensitized a little.
Yes, sexual expression is only one part of the human experience, but you're the worst kind of head-in-the-sand ostrich to ignore that it is a particularly powerful one. Here's a news flash, teenagers' hormones are an absurdly powerful drive in their life. How does it benefit them to just tell them sex isn't important? Furthermore, how in the hell does being exposed to sexuality preclude learning how to relate to people in other ways? Because someone watches porn they lack the capacity for conversation? How about you teach your kids the difference rather than hoping they never see an exposed nipple?
Porn is a trap - it feeds the pleasure centers of the brain, devalues the humanity of the person being used for that pleasure, and damages people's ability to relate to one another in a healthy way. Real relationships are not self-focused, but must have a significant component of other-focus or they don't survive.
This is exactly the psychological damage that comes from feeling like sex is dirty and shameful. I enjoy my wife's body. That is no more demeaning to her than the fact that I enjoy her sense of humor. Yes, I'll admit I often talk to her just because I enjoy it. How shameful. I do lots of things just because I like to do them, including watching porn. There is nothing wrong with doing things solely because they're pleasurable. If you're merely arguing that things taken to excess can be bad, then I don't know exactly what your point is.
Well, there is a cost-benefit that skews things to suburban sprall. The extra 10 hours a week (1 hr. commute, twice a day, 5 times a week) is worth it for the standard of living increase you get vs renting an apartment across the street from where you work. One choice is to work 10 hours a week less. The other choice is to have three times the house, live in a good school district, and have neighbors of a similar socio-economic background with similar values (as in I like not having to lock my car at night).
The simple fact of the matter is that people like to have some elbow room. Its unreasonable to say "all you people, just cram together here because it makes things easier". A better solution is to have better mass transit, and a lot more telecommuting.
This is fine if your employees are commodities, but it seems like you're missing some fairly fundamental differences between IT workers and commodities. The biggest thing is we aren't swappable parts. Two 5 star developers are going to perform differently on virtually every task depending on their specific strengths and experiences. Your lowered pay just lost you your 5 star developer, but you can easily pick up a new one because of the increased supply. The only problem is it's gonna take this new guy over a year to come up to the same speed on your system as your old 5 star guy. What's that worth to you? Oops, now the new guy has been here awhile and wants a raise...
The other thing you fail to notice is that there is a large gradation of competence. If you want good people you have to attract them over the other jobs they could take. I'm sure I'm not alone in that I've got burned in the past by low-pay-with-big-future-reward compensation, through no fault of my own... and I won't willingly go into that situation again regardless of my high self esteem. Maybe you have trouble finding quality people because quality people don't have a problem landing a job more in line with their best interests. Why in the heck, working for a wage with no stake in the company, would I let my family's financial well being be contingent on managerial competence (a resource in such scarce supply)? Its bad enough I could get laid off at any time, but to also have my "real" wage held hostage is definitely not in my best interest, and fortunately as a valuable resource I've got a bit of negotiating leverage.
As you say, supply and demand. Competent IT workers ARE scarce, and not commodities. I'll leave it as an exercise for the reader as to what kind of IT employees one ends up with by trading them like commodities.
"those who know what they're worth"? The guy with no work experience who is too good to work in a cube knows what he's worth? Let me clue you in, in the workforce what you're worth is what someone else is willing to pay. You may think you're the hottest shit since sliced bread, but you've got to realize the realities of the industry we're in. Lots of overtime, PHBs, fear of outsourcing, and (way down the list of crappy things) cubicles are normal for this industry. The dot com bubble is long gone, the mythical fantasy job may exist but landing it is like winning the lottery. Granted, you should always be looking to improve yourself and your career, but holding out for a job on your terms (if your terms are unreasonable) is likely to leave you hungry a long time. Find a job with a good ballance of good things vs bad things and realize that the reason you get a paycheck is because nobody would do that job for free.
What I'm sick of is is the oversimplifying classification of this issue as spoiled brats stealing from the people that actually produce something. Illegal != Immoral. Intellectual property is an artificial, abstract concept whose purpose is the benefit of society as a whole. It's not a natural law, and there are an unlimmited number of ways that such a system could be structured. What I'm sick of is this uncomprehensible juvenile attitude 'I can do everything', 'I am entitled to everything' that is a cornerstone of corporate culture. The difference is, they've got the clout to mold the legal landscape such that many people won't even debate the issue because its just simply wrong to break the law. Bullshit. Piracy != theft. Illegal != immoral. The immorality of piracy is a tangential issue, but it's depressing to see the rampant lack of critical thinking caused by a strong desire to follow the rules and feel holier than others.
Well keep in mind its a numbers game. If you want a one in a million girl, you need to go through... anybody? ...a million girls. I met my wife through match.com, but only after over three years, hundreds of women I exchanged emails with, dozens of women I talked to over the phone, and about 10 I met in person. Just think about it, if you're not looking for a mainstream girl (someone who doesn't mind your lack of social skills, someone to wait in line for days ahead of Episode III with you, whatever) you gotta realize that by definition a large percentage of women are not right for you. 20 different girls is nothing (though you may want to work on your approach if you're getting a very low response rate), keep in mind the bigger picture.
For what it's worth, I can give you some perspective on the other side of the fence via my discussions with women who have ads up. Any woman who is reasonably attractive looking gets ALOT of responses to their ads. Don't dismay though, as you'd expect the vast majority are creeps/loosers any reasonable women doesn't want to date. Just keep in mind that you've got a few sentences to make a first impression, and you need to stand out from the deluge. Spend some time on your introduction, maybe get a friend to look over it. Once you've got a good introduction written it's like a resume, no reason not to use it over and over again (make sure to personalize each one a little bit though). Don't get dismayed over a lack of response, a certain percentage of girls are just not gonna respond no matter what you write, the numbers just stack up that way.
Good luck, and don't get discouraged. No matter how undatable you are (no offense, I'm a sucky dater myself) there are women out there for you, its just a matter of how many you have to go through to find one.