The credit report will show if you miss payments, but not if you pay off in full or the minimum payment (although there is an outstanding credit field, but that's a current figure only, it's useful in Ability To Repay calculations, but not as an indicator of 'profitability'). This will show up as a "number of months you are in arrears" for a particular month, historically, on your credit report. Usually after a few months it will default. Most lenders won't lend to anyone who had missed two or three payments in a row, never mind defaulters. Nor will they lend to people with four or five total missed payments over all their lines of credit, within the past year/two years/etc (depending on their criteria).
Not having credit means the lender can't do a risk assessment, which is used to provide better rates for safer customers.
Now it does seem that the credit report industry in the US is very wide ranging and intrusive based upon other posts here. Historical salary details is clearly very wrong and can be abused by employers to reduce salaries for new hires.
Not having credit on your credit report is not as bad as having bad credit on your credit report. Of course some lenders will not lend to both these groups, but they're low-risk lenders really, with good rates.
It is sad, but you are practically required to get a credit card and pay it off in full each month, in order to eventually get a mortgage and loans (rate for risk) that aren't very high rates. Bad credit will stop you getting a mortgage and loans of course. Or your bank, which has access to your bank statements, may be the best route if you have little credit.
"This process of sell, collect, report delinquent, has happened to me 3 times with my old Sears card"
Hmm, three times. Some people have this ability, it's called learning. If the second time is "fool on me", what is the third time?
Stop using store cards. They're high rates and dodgy. Use a proper credit card.
Make a damn Notice Of Correction on your credit rating to state what has happened (although I suspect there's more to this story, who mails cheques these days, cheques died out ten years ago). AND FOR FUCKS SAKE STOP BUYING STUFF ON STORE CREDIT.
I don't find death marches stressful if they're well managed, and with a few people in at the same time they can be quite fun, and dinner is paid for. More than two weeks would be asking a lot though.
I find poor management stressful, and abusive expectations that ruin your life very stressful. And such levels of ongoing stress aren't worth it. Like you, I'd prefer to earn less and be happier, and live longer as a result.
You are correct, it is a scam, and the only way to work it is to stop working overtime when comp time hits 5 days, until you've taken the comp time. Your current policy is similar, and really good for employee morale and productivity. Death marches are counter productive, and shouldn't ever last more than two weeks of 2 hours overtime a day, or one week of 3 hours overtime a day, and the latter shouldn't happen at all except if the work load means lots of breaks for the developers. Tiredness induced bugs help no-one. It's simple IT management, and I'll not work under a boss who hasn't been in IT all the way up. I've got a friend who is on a two month long death march to make a new boss' deadline, and that's simply out of order, even though he is getting comp time and it's signed off.
Many IT professionals think they're too smart for union membership, but some of us aren't good at arguing our case and get stiffed. Obviously by the third time you would you would have the balls to say "you want me, you've made an offer, so let's discuss these points on the contract about 'extra work as necessary to complete the task' to see what you mean". Sadly, if you're three months out of work and living on your credit card, you might not have a real choice. Stronger laws about salaried worker hours and renumeration are required to protect those that are taken advantage of.
I'm lucky in some ways that I have a flexible job regarding working hours, in a country where I get 28 days holiday minimum (I get 33, but might ask for more) including 8 bank holidays. Also the boss is French, and forces us to take the holidays. I was coming in at 10.30am recently, and we kept meeting at the office door as he was turning up at the same time. The work gets done, and we're all happy, and he knows that simple tasks of paper can take longer than what seems like a huge project.
Firstly, get the nagios emails sent to your team at work as well as yourself.
Secondly, when you start to deal with the nagios error at 2am, send an email saying "I am looking into this now", and when you're done at 3am, send an email saying "All done now, see you at 10, I need my sleep more than ever now!". Screw what other people say, make sure your boss knows every single time you work out of hours via the aforementioned email. Bosses like reading emails that says "Problem fixed." anyway. Also make a note in a log book so you can demonstrate your out of hours company-saving efforts at review time.
Secondly, you only get one life, and within that life you only get one chance to be 20/30/40/50. Don't waste that time on work, unless you're working for yourself and doing well enough to retire well earlier than you would have otherwise. Take that time off, and be anal about it.
Thirdly, look for another job once the market picks up. If you're good, and willing to be on call, then you're valuable, and you can go somewhere where working hours aren't set in concrete, bound with leather and chained to the ground because the boss is ex-military and gets up at 6am everyday and expects everyone else to.
OnLive will not be a viable option for most people.
Firstly, the streaming video quality will be quite poor.
Secondly if the video is a high enough bitrate, ISPs will get upset and eventually start filtering it. That, or you're on a metered plan and will only be able to game a few times a month.
Peak gaming hours are probably also peak internet surfing hours, and many ISPs struggle to provide webpages in a decent time, never mind decent definition streaming video.
You'll get better video quality out of a $50 video card in your current PC. Anyone releasing games exclusively onto OnLive is nothing short of barking mad.
And I've never heard of the other mechanism, I presume it is similar.
The way you rush to debunk the "PS3 fanboy", missing his point entirely (i.e., those aspects don't sell the hardware, having fun with your mates does), just goes to show that you are a clear-cut 360 fanboy.
You can watch DVDs? Why would you do this - a DVD player is cheap, doesn't sound like a turbo-jet, and doesn't get a red ring of death. A PS3 owner can watch DVDs and BluRays, and the hardware gets top reviews for these functions.
XBox live is superior? Is it? Two years ago it clearly was, but is that the case now? What about people who don't care about it? What about people who have to spend a lot for the 360 wireless dongle to get online? What about 5 years of live - an extra $150+ on the price of the hardware.
The 360 uses proprietary APIs for its controllers, which is why getting third party controllers is really difficult. The PS3 uses standard bluetooth. And they're useful on the PC, for PC games that benefit from analogue controllers.
The PS3 has reliable hardware. RROD on the 360 pretty much makes this one a dead win for the PS3. Sorry. I think that technically, the 360 is better hardware, the graphics hardware especially is better, but reliability is a major issue for many purchasers. Also it has more features built-in by default, such as wireless. I do think the ability to run Linux is worthless, the hardware hasn't got the necessary RAM for a decent experience. Likewise the web browser is awkward, even with a Bluetooth keyboard (do they work with the 360?)
However Linux is a lot better than it used to be in this regard.
Sadly I've had to go to CLI around 100x this year on my netbook to get the slightly different hardware properly supported, and I now refuse to do the OS upgrade (to Ubuntu 9.4) because it will break it all again.
And on my more normal desktop machine (which I did upgrade to 9.4), I've had to go to CLI to do a few things, like install standard Sun Java over the broken Java that Ubuntu ships by default. Mostly I use the CLI to run OpenVPN to work, the desktop Ubuntu doesn't offer that as a GUI feature, although the netbook does (?). Then again my netbook mplayer offers more features than the desktop version (where I most want the NVIDIA acceleration support).
Most power users who dislike Windows and don't want to spend their evenings fixing their computers moved to Macs years ago, and aren't coming back.
Go out, have a beer, drive. Go out, have two beers, wait a bit (have a coke) and drive. Go out, have three beers, get a lift, hail a taxi or get public transport.
The limit is around 4 units of alcohol, a beer has around 2.5 units. The body can process 1 unit an hour if it is mostly sober.
I'm all for people being able to destroy themselves, but not really in favour of them being able to destroy other people's lives.
Any decent university course is done with an academic aim, where they can pick the best of the bunch for higher academic study (PhDs in return for cheap lab work, lecturing, and supervising). Any decent university will tell you the undergraduate courses are an annoyance to the real aim of the university - research and buying property. However if it is a decent, recognised, university, that name on your degree is worth a lot.
The problem in business is lack of technical grades for promotion in many companies, meaning the best technical people have to go into management to get more money, thus eventually losing their skills as their hairstyle gets pointier. Sadly most people barely manage to think, so when you get a technical expert you really want to keep them, and reward them.
Not when prospective employers Google her name and find all this stuff out about her.
"Bachelor of Business Administration" in "IT"... what's that then? A six month part-time course for people who are looking to move from IT support roles (the blokes in The IT Crowd) into IT management roles (the useless woman manager in The IT Crowd)? I.e., something you do five years into your IT support job.
It's certainly not a 3 year degree course, it's way way too specialised. It's not "Business Administration". It's not "IT" (whatever that actually is as a study term). It's "IT Business Administration". Most companies don't need secretaries for the IT directors and managers any more...
Thanks for the Slashdot password email (I assume it was you, your post time is the same as the email I received). At least Slashdot had the wherewithal to generate a random password and email it to me.
And yes, someone who has privileged access is another issue.
So yeah, stick the "What's your pet's name?" question that most sites use as an insecurity measure on the Request Password function, making the job of the attacker more difficult - you need both access to the email account, and to know something about the person you are attacking.
(Yes, I know the email account is probably littered with pictures of darling little Tibbles and the exact above wouldn't work either.)
By the way, you might want to contact the police handling this case with that information. And probably AOL as well.
You force the person to change it when they next login after you've sent the email. You also timeout the temporary password after a day or less.
And indeed, texting the password could be an option, although that would require the customer's phone number and would cost a little bit of money. However it's cheaper than handling a support phone call.
You should never email a password that the customer will use on an ongoing basis. It should be a temporary token for resetting the password when they next log in.
And this is why businesses shouldn't email out customer passwords in emails.
I get angry every time I get an email sayign "thanks for joining, your password is : xtyzseh85". REALLY? Like I just didn't enter that on your site. Also it suggests that the password is stored in clear text in their database, a big worry.
What if you forget your password, you might ask? Well then you email out a temporary password, and set a flag in your database that the person is required to change their password when they log in. This vastly reduces the window of opportunity a thief would have (technically they could follow the "forgotten email?" path on the website, and intercept the emailed temporary password. Maybe the solution is temporary passwords sent by text to account holder phone, or one of those "what is your favourite colour?" questions before the password email is sent).
Second issue - people using poor passwords. These people clearly had the keys to their $100k+ accounts available behind a paper screen door. Should we blame Yahoo! for this?
Note that the crime is still entirely down to the criminal who did it, and not the people for having poor passwords, nor the registrar who allowed the domain transfer in good faith (although there must be questions asked about their notification procedures, the owners should have got an email about the transfer, and thus should have been able to get this sorted out BEFORE the domain auction was finished).
I think that Microsoft is trying to get people to keep on buying the 360, even though many people might be thinking "I'll wait to see what they'll release next year". That's why they're so vocal that Natal will be entirely available to the current 360 as well.
The 360 and the PS3 aren't powerful enough for all games to run 1080p easily. Never mind 1080p/60, or 1080p/120 (for 3D displays).
Therefore they will both get an update, maybe a year later than the usual update cycle would suggest (i.e., 2012) because of the recession and also there's a lack of rumours. It won't be an earth-shattering change. PS3 may use a 32nm PowerXCell32 derivative with GT300+ graphics, 360 may use a six-eight core version of their current tri-core, with whatever AMD come out with graphics-wise next year. Note that these changes will be far more evolutionary, and may even only be enough to allow games to run in 1080p/120 on the PS4/"1080", which still running in 720p/60 on the PS3/360.
Or I could be entirely wrong... but I personally think that the current consoles are only 50% of what is needed for a long-term 1080p system, not the 100% that Sony and Microsoft would have us believe.
Interestingly, the news came as a total surprise to Fredrik, Gottfrid and Peter who said they received no official summons and were not aware of the case.
I care more about knowing where known pickpockets are, in relation to my current whereabouts.
Not whether someone got caught taking a piss behind a bush, or who had sex with someone two years younger than them when they were a teenager.
When you overextend a label such as 'sex offender' (adding noise to signal), the label becomes meaningless, and those that actually deserve that label are less noticeable in the noise.
But not before dumb vigilantes attack a few paediatricians...
Thank you for clarifying the entire story, or non-story as it turns out to be.
What had appeared to be an amusing but sad story about a music label shooting itself in the foot actually turns out to be a non-story about a business cutting some unnecessary legacy costs to the non-detriment of anyone.
Seen people's marriages break up because of WoW. Well, a marriage and a bunch of relationships.
Seen children go neglected.
Far more often not seen the players for months on end, until they're pale, wan, gaunt shadows of their former selves who have nothing to talk about because their life is WoW and delivered food.
I'd say that the players in these situations had an addiction.
I'd also say that 80% of players didn't have these problems, and that WoW addiction is a symptom of a deeper problem for those that did.
Well I guess at school in the 80s we learned Logo as a first language, and that's certainly quite different, when you get past turtle graphics. Of course it was used because the turtle graphics were more interesting than learning about closures and lambda calculus.
I really do think the first language has to be the hook, to get those that are willing to be caught, caught. In the end it will be different languages for different people. I don't think Basic was that dangerous if you accepted it for what it was at the time, good for some things, simple to learn but quite well featured, not good enough for things you eventually wanted to do, and thus you learned assembler, or C later on.
Oh I agree about that, but there's a stage beforehand where the person gets caught in the sweet sticky nectar trap of the programming bug, and I think that's what we are finding out - the first language to use, the one that will grab the imagination, and make them get a hard on about going further.
Lots of formal CS courses do functional programming first, it's more mathematical which is good for a decent computer science degree, and it gives nobody a head start, because lots of students previously did a C-like or scripting languages before, but very few do ML or Haskell.
Slashdot Mirror
The credit report will show if you miss payments, but not if you pay off in full or the minimum payment (although there is an outstanding credit field, but that's a current figure only, it's useful in Ability To Repay calculations, but not as an indicator of 'profitability'). This will show up as a "number of months you are in arrears" for a particular month, historically, on your credit report. Usually after a few months it will default. Most lenders won't lend to anyone who had missed two or three payments in a row, never mind defaulters. Nor will they lend to people with four or five total missed payments over all their lines of credit, within the past year/two years/etc (depending on their criteria).
Not having credit means the lender can't do a risk assessment, which is used to provide better rates for safer customers.
Now it does seem that the credit report industry in the US is very wide ranging and intrusive based upon other posts here. Historical salary details is clearly very wrong and can be abused by employers to reduce salaries for new hires.
Just use a "Query" report instead of an "Application" report. Equifax have this functionality, and I imagine Experian do as well.
The Application reports (logged when someone applied for credit) shows up on all credit reports as part of the search history.
The Query reports don't show up, but you can't use them for credit applications. You still need the customer's permission, of course.
Not having credit on your credit report is not as bad as having bad credit on your credit report. Of course some lenders will not lend to both these groups, but they're low-risk lenders really, with good rates.
It is sad, but you are practically required to get a credit card and pay it off in full each month, in order to eventually get a mortgage and loans (rate for risk) that aren't very high rates. Bad credit will stop you getting a mortgage and loans of course. Or your bank, which has access to your bank statements, may be the best route if you have little credit.
"This process of sell, collect, report delinquent, has happened to me 3 times with my old Sears card"
Hmm, three times. Some people have this ability, it's called learning. If the second time is "fool on me", what is the third time?
Stop using store cards. They're high rates and dodgy. Use a proper credit card.
Make a damn Notice Of Correction on your credit rating to state what has happened (although I suspect there's more to this story, who mails cheques these days, cheques died out ten years ago). AND FOR FUCKS SAKE STOP BUYING STUFF ON STORE CREDIT.
Sanity is priceless.
I don't find death marches stressful if they're well managed, and with a few people in at the same time they can be quite fun, and dinner is paid for. More than two weeks would be asking a lot though.
I find poor management stressful, and abusive expectations that ruin your life very stressful. And such levels of ongoing stress aren't worth it. Like you, I'd prefer to earn less and be happier, and live longer as a result.
You are correct, it is a scam, and the only way to work it is to stop working overtime when comp time hits 5 days, until you've taken the comp time. Your current policy is similar, and really good for employee morale and productivity. Death marches are counter productive, and shouldn't ever last more than two weeks of 2 hours overtime a day, or one week of 3 hours overtime a day, and the latter shouldn't happen at all except if the work load means lots of breaks for the developers. Tiredness induced bugs help no-one. It's simple IT management, and I'll not work under a boss who hasn't been in IT all the way up. I've got a friend who is on a two month long death march to make a new boss' deadline, and that's simply out of order, even though he is getting comp time and it's signed off.
Many IT professionals think they're too smart for union membership, but some of us aren't good at arguing our case and get stiffed. Obviously by the third time you would you would have the balls to say "you want me, you've made an offer, so let's discuss these points on the contract about 'extra work as necessary to complete the task' to see what you mean". Sadly, if you're three months out of work and living on your credit card, you might not have a real choice. Stronger laws about salaried worker hours and renumeration are required to protect those that are taken advantage of.
I'm lucky in some ways that I have a flexible job regarding working hours, in a country where I get 28 days holiday minimum (I get 33, but might ask for more) including 8 bank holidays. Also the boss is French, and forces us to take the holidays. I was coming in at 10.30am recently, and we kept meeting at the office door as he was turning up at the same time. The work gets done, and we're all happy, and he knows that simple tasks of paper can take longer than what seems like a huge project.
Firstly, get the nagios emails sent to your team at work as well as yourself.
Secondly, when you start to deal with the nagios error at 2am, send an email saying "I am looking into this now", and when you're done at 3am, send an email saying "All done now, see you at 10, I need my sleep more than ever now!". Screw what other people say, make sure your boss knows every single time you work out of hours via the aforementioned email. Bosses like reading emails that says "Problem fixed." anyway. Also make a note in a log book so you can demonstrate your out of hours company-saving efforts at review time.
Secondly, you only get one life, and within that life you only get one chance to be 20/30/40/50. Don't waste that time on work, unless you're working for yourself and doing well enough to retire well earlier than you would have otherwise. Take that time off, and be anal about it.
Thirdly, look for another job once the market picks up. If you're good, and willing to be on call, then you're valuable, and you can go somewhere where working hours aren't set in concrete, bound with leather and chained to the ground because the boss is ex-military and gets up at 6am everyday and expects everyone else to.
OnLive will not be a viable option for most people.
Firstly, the streaming video quality will be quite poor.
Secondly if the video is a high enough bitrate, ISPs will get upset and eventually start filtering it. That, or you're on a metered plan and will only be able to game a few times a month.
Peak gaming hours are probably also peak internet surfing hours, and many ISPs struggle to provide webpages in a decent time, never mind decent definition streaming video.
You'll get better video quality out of a $50 video card in your current PC. Anyone releasing games exclusively onto OnLive is nothing short of barking mad.
And I've never heard of the other mechanism, I presume it is similar.
The way you rush to debunk the "PS3 fanboy", missing his point entirely (i.e., those aspects don't sell the hardware, having fun with your mates does), just goes to show that you are a clear-cut 360 fanboy.
You can watch DVDs? Why would you do this - a DVD player is cheap, doesn't sound like a turbo-jet, and doesn't get a red ring of death. A PS3 owner can watch DVDs and BluRays, and the hardware gets top reviews for these functions.
XBox live is superior? Is it? Two years ago it clearly was, but is that the case now? What about people who don't care about it? What about people who have to spend a lot for the 360 wireless dongle to get online? What about 5 years of live - an extra $150+ on the price of the hardware.
The 360 uses proprietary APIs for its controllers, which is why getting third party controllers is really difficult. The PS3 uses standard bluetooth. And they're useful on the PC, for PC games that benefit from analogue controllers.
The PS3 has reliable hardware. RROD on the 360 pretty much makes this one a dead win for the PS3. Sorry. I think that technically, the 360 is better hardware, the graphics hardware especially is better, but reliability is a major issue for many purchasers. Also it has more features built-in by default, such as wireless. I do think the ability to run Linux is worthless, the hardware hasn't got the necessary RAM for a decent experience. Likewise the web browser is awkward, even with a Bluetooth keyboard (do they work with the 360?)
You are entirely correct.
However Linux is a lot better than it used to be in this regard.
Sadly I've had to go to CLI around 100x this year on my netbook to get the slightly different hardware properly supported, and I now refuse to do the OS upgrade (to Ubuntu 9.4) because it will break it all again.
And on my more normal desktop machine (which I did upgrade to 9.4), I've had to go to CLI to do a few things, like install standard Sun Java over the broken Java that Ubuntu ships by default. Mostly I use the CLI to run OpenVPN to work, the desktop Ubuntu doesn't offer that as a GUI feature, although the netbook does (?). Then again my netbook mplayer offers more features than the desktop version (where I most want the NVIDIA acceleration support).
Most power users who dislike Windows and don't want to spend their evenings fixing their computers moved to Macs years ago, and aren't coming back.
It's not difficult.
Go out, have a beer, drive.
Go out, have two beers, wait a bit (have a coke) and drive.
Go out, have three beers, get a lift, hail a taxi or get public transport.
The limit is around 4 units of alcohol, a beer has around 2.5 units. The body can process 1 unit an hour if it is mostly sober.
I'm all for people being able to destroy themselves, but not really in favour of them being able to destroy other people's lives.
Ah well, someone thought it would be funny! Somehow.
Any decent university course is done with an academic aim, where they can pick the best of the bunch for higher academic study (PhDs in return for cheap lab work, lecturing, and supervising). Any decent university will tell you the undergraduate courses are an annoyance to the real aim of the university - research and buying property. However if it is a decent, recognised, university, that name on your degree is worth a lot.
The problem in business is lack of technical grades for promotion in many companies, meaning the best technical people have to go into management to get more money, thus eventually losing their skills as their hairstyle gets pointier. Sadly most people barely manage to think, so when you get a technical expert you really want to keep them, and reward them.
Not when prospective employers Google her name and find all this stuff out about her.
"Bachelor of Business Administration" in "IT" ... what's that then? A six month part-time course for people who are looking to move from IT support roles (the blokes in The IT Crowd) into IT management roles (the useless woman manager in The IT Crowd)? I.e., something you do five years into your IT support job.
It's certainly not a 3 year degree course, it's way way too specialised. It's not "Business Administration". It's not "IT" (whatever that actually is as a study term). It's "IT Business Administration". Most companies don't need secretaries for the IT directors and managers any more...
Thanks for the Slashdot password email (I assume it was you, your post time is the same as the email I received). At least Slashdot had the wherewithal to generate a random password and email it to me.
And yes, someone who has privileged access is another issue.
So yeah, stick the "What's your pet's name?" question that most sites use as an insecurity measure on the Request Password function, making the job of the attacker more difficult - you need both access to the email account, and to know something about the person you are attacking.
(Yes, I know the email account is probably littered with pictures of darling little Tibbles and the exact above wouldn't work either.)
By the way, you might want to contact the police handling this case with that information. And probably AOL as well.
You force the person to change it when they next login after you've sent the email. You also timeout the temporary password after a day or less.
And indeed, texting the password could be an option, although that would require the customer's phone number and would cost a little bit of money. However it's cheaper than handling a support phone call.
You should never email a password that the customer will use on an ongoing basis. It should be a temporary token for resetting the password when they next log in.
And this is why businesses shouldn't email out customer passwords in emails.
I get angry every time I get an email sayign "thanks for joining, your password is : xtyzseh85". REALLY? Like I just didn't enter that on your site. Also it suggests that the password is stored in clear text in their database, a big worry.
What if you forget your password, you might ask? Well then you email out a temporary password, and set a flag in your database that the person is required to change their password when they log in. This vastly reduces the window of opportunity a thief would have (technically they could follow the "forgotten email?" path on the website, and intercept the emailed temporary password. Maybe the solution is temporary passwords sent by text to account holder phone, or one of those "what is your favourite colour?" questions before the password email is sent).
Second issue - people using poor passwords. These people clearly had the keys to their $100k+ accounts available behind a paper screen door. Should we blame Yahoo! for this?
Note that the crime is still entirely down to the criminal who did it, and not the people for having poor passwords, nor the registrar who allowed the domain transfer in good faith (although there must be questions asked about their notification procedures, the owners should have got an email about the transfer, and thus should have been able to get this sorted out BEFORE the domain auction was finished).
I think that Microsoft is trying to get people to keep on buying the 360, even though many people might be thinking "I'll wait to see what they'll release next year". That's why they're so vocal that Natal will be entirely available to the current 360 as well.
The 360 and the PS3 aren't powerful enough for all games to run 1080p easily. Never mind 1080p/60, or 1080p/120 (for 3D displays).
Therefore they will both get an update, maybe a year later than the usual update cycle would suggest (i.e., 2012) because of the recession and also there's a lack of rumours. It won't be an earth-shattering change. PS3 may use a 32nm PowerXCell32 derivative with GT300+ graphics, 360 may use a six-eight core version of their current tri-core, with whatever AMD come out with graphics-wise next year. Note that these changes will be far more evolutionary, and may even only be enough to allow games to run in 1080p/120 on the PS4/"1080", which still running in 720p/60 on the PS3/360.
Or I could be entirely wrong... but I personally think that the current consoles are only 50% of what is needed for a long-term 1080p system, not the 100% that Sony and Microsoft would have us believe.
Interestingly, the news came as a total surprise to Fredrik, Gottfrid and Peter who said they received no official summons and were not aware of the case.
From one of the linked articles that you read.
I care more about knowing where known pickpockets are, in relation to my current whereabouts.
Not whether someone got caught taking a piss behind a bush, or who had sex with someone two years younger than them when they were a teenager.
When you overextend a label such as 'sex offender' (adding noise to signal), the label becomes meaningless, and those that actually deserve that label are less noticeable in the noise.
But not before dumb vigilantes attack a few paediatricians ...
Thank you for clarifying the entire story, or non-story as it turns out to be.
What had appeared to be an amusing but sad story about a music label shooting itself in the foot actually turns out to be a non-story about a business cutting some unnecessary legacy costs to the non-detriment of anyone.
Seen people's marriages break up because of WoW. Well, a marriage and a bunch of relationships.
Seen children go neglected.
Far more often not seen the players for months on end, until they're pale, wan, gaunt shadows of their former selves who have nothing to talk about because their life is WoW and delivered food.
I'd say that the players in these situations had an addiction.
I'd also say that 80% of players didn't have these problems, and that WoW addiction is a symptom of a deeper problem for those that did.
Well I guess at school in the 80s we learned Logo as a first language, and that's certainly quite different, when you get past turtle graphics. Of course it was used because the turtle graphics were more interesting than learning about closures and lambda calculus.
I really do think the first language has to be the hook, to get those that are willing to be caught, caught. In the end it will be different languages for different people. I don't think Basic was that dangerous if you accepted it for what it was at the time, good for some things, simple to learn but quite well featured, not good enough for things you eventually wanted to do, and thus you learned assembler, or C later on.
Oh I agree about that, but there's a stage beforehand where the person gets caught in the sweet sticky nectar trap of the programming bug, and I think that's what we are finding out - the first language to use, the one that will grab the imagination, and make them get a hard on about going further.
Lots of formal CS courses do functional programming first, it's more mathematical which is good for a decent computer science degree, and it gives nobody a head start, because lots of students previously did a C-like or scripting languages before, but very few do ML or Haskell.
Well at least the iPhone is safe...
Will Flash just die already! We have the video tag, IE users can suck it up as well. FlashBlock for Firefox, but what to use for Chrome?