I highly agree with this. It's extortion at best, treason at worst. The reason it exists is because SOMEONE with influence values profits of the RIAA over the stability and economic health of the United States. To sell out your own country like this is scummy. I honestly am surprised this wasn't attached to a 'help the troops! save the children!' bill.
The local quickie oil change place hires people with very basic mechanical knowledge because changing the oil is fucking easy. A full service garage moves in to the area and hires a bunch of the same types because they're 'good with cars.'
A college graduate has been proven to be able to pass the trials and tribulations of college. It might not be THAT difficult depending on your degree, but all college degrees require some modicum of self sufficiency and self motivation. Believe me, there are PLENTY of people out there who have neither, and will not do an ounce of work unless their supervisor checks up on them every ten minutes. True, there are college graduates that do this too, but I'd bet the majority of them aren't.
People would be much more interested in science if science had marketing degrees.
Science just isn't interesting enough to most people, so most people are utterly clueless about it. I mean, who cares how microwave ovens work as long as they cook your food and do a decent job at doing it? Most people do not need to think about science at all in their lives. The closest they come to chemical reactions is knowing not to mix bleach with ammonia and that baking a cake is a one way process.
Just like math. How many people need to use functions above add/subtract/multiply/divide in their daily lives? I've never once had to use anything but those unless it was school related. Actually I take that back, when I was a teenager I remember showing some people the magic of sin/tan/cos when my dad took me to his construction job once. They were awestruck that they didn't have to look in a big manual for a list of values and could just keep a calculator with them.
To be honest, I'm glad it's that way. Could you imagine having to work complex equations to do something in everyday life? It would be exhausting, even if it weren't calculus.
Here's how it would go. "Do you still talk to your old girlfriends?" "No, not really. Why do you ask?" "LIAR! I saw that MSN notification. Why are you still talking to them?" "I'm not 'talking to them.' My ex added me to her friend's list." "So you ARE 'talking to them.'" "I haven't talked to her in over a year." "But it says you're friends with her! You have to talk to someone to be friends with them!" "No you don't..all they have to do is add you!" "If you think I'm stupid, you're WRONG."
Here's how it really goes: "Oo, she has a nice ass." [girlfriend glares] "Why are you looking at her ass?" "Well, she walked by, I just kind of glanced there." "Why didn't you glance the other way?" "I don't know, I just didn't." "What's wrong with my ass?" "Nothing's wrong with your ass, I was just making an observation." "Are you saying my ass is fat?" "No not at all, I love your ass."
The next day: "My boyfriend doesn't like my ass any more..I don't think he loves me." "Aw, it's okay sugar, there's boys everywhere! Let me introduce you to my friend Ronaldo, he's single!" "Well, okay, since my boyfriend obviously doesn't love me anymore."
A week later: "Well since you have an infatuation with other women's asses, I'm leaving you for Ronaldo. At least HE says I have a nice ass!"
Anyone with reading comprehension skills can add insight to a high level discussion in any topic. Most reporting websites and thus stories we get here on Slashdot seem to be written to be readable by anyone that wants to take the time to read it and not be shy about looking up words they don't understand. You don't need a degree for this.
You need a degree to actually go to the lab and design experiments and make predictions. Your degree came because you spent years studying the subject at hand. You know where the field was before, and you know where it might be in the future. You know most of those words without having to look them up, and more importantly, you know the implications and concepts behind them.
Give it a try. Learn some basic economics concepts (high school stuff) and then browse a high end hardcore financial forum and see if you can sound smart. It's not hard at all.
Here in the United States, when it comes to copyrights, we haven't been standing for a while now. We've been bent over and taking it from behind. Companies are well on their way to getting their dream of perpetual copyright, and are also on the verge of being able to calculate lawsuit settlements in with their planned revenue. They want to build a magic device within the United States' legal system to let them have their cake and eat it too. Currently they're exploring the option of just having their customers bake them a new cake as fast as they can eat the old one.
The Early Termination fee is two things. One, it's a way for the company to recoup their costs of you running off with a smart phone that retails for $500+. Two, it's a way for them to ensure that none of their sheep go running off to other pastures as soon as they look a little greener. They've pretty much figured out that two years is the optimal length for a contract. Long enough to where you'll have their income coming in for a while and can make plans around that, but short enough to where you'll splurge for the most expensive phone every two years (with new two year contract, of course!) because you've had two years to save up for it.
I think a reboot of the cell phone industry really needs to happen here in the United States. I can go to Walmart right now and buy a prepaid phone for $20 or so with lots of features. Or I can go buy the same one at a cell phone store that's linked ONLY to one provider and costs $100. Free with two year plan, though..
The reason the peons at the bottom have almost no authority is because they have so little vested interest in the company. If Verizon were to suddenly disappear, the least affected employees would be the ones in the entry level jobs and the higher ups. Everyone else gets to reboot their careers.
Your government has been running roughshod over your rights (and the rights of other nations) for centuries now. This is just par for the course because you, the citizens, allow this to happen. Every time something like this is passed, the citizens all bitch and moan about it, but the people in power always cheer and applaud. Does that sound like a democracy to you? If you want it stopped, you know which boxes to use, and in what order. There are fates worse than death, and that's living to see your country turn into a totalitarian nightmare straight out of 1984 because you and your fellow citizens did nothing about it.
I'm pretty sure phones are designed to be one button away from a multiple dollar data fee if you don't have a data plan. Every phone I owned would happily connect to some webpage owned by the cell phone company and proceed to download 200-300k before you could figure out you hit the wrong button. Moreover, some of them have flat out refused to stop downloading the page until it's done, meaning that you just got dinged a megabyte on your ten cents per kilobyte lack of data plan.
Very very sick people need some kind of hope even if it's a 1% chance of a cure or treatment rather than the 100% chance that they'll die from whatever they have. No, instead they shoot themselves up with heavy metals they ordered from China or go to foreign countries and spend thousands and thousands of dollars and demand something they heard about on the internet to be injected into their body with no testing.
The vision of the bionic eye will not be affected to you and me, since the signal gets recorded before the signal gets processed by the brain. We don't have the technology to turn brain signals into recordable senses yet anyway. This means that you might see some twitching of the eye, but it won't be blurry when recorded. He, however, will likely see blurred vision if he himself can see through the eye, because the brain's interpretation of signals changes when liquored up.
Nuclear? Holy shit, they must mean like..nuclear bombs and stuff. Nuclear bombs release a lot of pollution which will end up killing our favorite poster animals that everyone loves and it will kill people too. Remember Chernobyl? Surely all nuclear power plants are just like Chernobyl, nuclear medicine is like an injectable atomic bomb just waiting to go off and cause everyone around you to mutate or die of radiation poisoning!
Nuclear fusion must be much worse!
It goes without saying that most rabid environmentalists wanted to have an art degree.
Perhaps they should punish people that are OBVIOUSLY tethering and let the people who aren't continue to have their unlimited service. You can't use 65GB of service on a smart phone in a month without tethering. I'd find it hard to believe the device has enough space to store downloads that big and I find it harder to believe someone found a megabyte webpage and sat there refreshing it 65,000 times.
I'm a healthy adult and a trial and/or jail would traumatize me too, especially since I would know that it's going to be a show trial. Even if I were found not guilty of 90% of the counts, they'd still throw me in jail for ten years for 'failure to appear' or something because they got their asses handed to them in the security department.
Climate control is easier in the basement. You can build big fuckoff heat exchangers that go under ground level and surface however far from the building you want them to surface.
Simpler wiring plans because you don't have to run big industrial power cables up to the top floor and the data lines don't have to go far to get to the basement.
All that being said, below-ground server rooms should have some method to be able to seal themselves off from the rest of the world in case of flooding. Perhaps the elevator or hallway door can form a decent seal, whereas everything else is already as sealed as it can be. Perhaps sealing everything also cuts power so nothing overheats.
United States corporations work on extortion. The legal system favors corporations far too much to have a fair chance in court. If you bring suit against a large company and lose you'll probably have to pay their legal fees too, and 80% of the citizens here could not ever hope to afford those kinds of expenses. The result is that not many people file suit, and most of the ones that do are just plain crazy and have no qualms with being a million or more in debt for the rest of their lives.
This is EXACTLY THE SAME as saying, "Sorry, no refund on your car. The welding machine messed up and welded the doors shut. We aren't responsible for what our machines do." and then saying, "We sent this to our legal department and they agree that it wasn't our fault the welding machine messed up so we don't have to pay you."
I take that back, it would be a terrible idea. Employers would mess with the devices until they said 'work' all the time and then fire people they caught doing anything else. Employers today think they know better than doctors and psychologists anyway..and that everyone should be 100% capable of working for 8 hours straight without going to the bathroom or spending a single second stretching or blinking.
It wouldn't be a bad idea really. I'm sure with enough studies we can see how often the average person must be 'distracted' before productivity takes a nosedive.
We elect officials. Some officials are corrupted. We elected corrupted officials. Corrupted officials take bribes. Bribes are given by corporations. Corporations expect the support of the officials. Corporations exist to profit. Officials take bribes and support the corporations. We elect officials to help corporations profit.
SC2 will end up being the same way. Already there are only a few dominating strategies out there and if you scout the enemy base early in the game you know exactly what to counter for. I've noticed some of the higher end players pretending to tech up one way and end up teching their REAL strategy up at another base (known as a proxy), or by simply hiding their real teching buildings out of normal scouting paths.
Slashdot Mirror
I highly agree with this. It's extortion at best, treason at worst. The reason it exists is because SOMEONE with influence values profits of the RIAA over the stability and economic health of the United States. To sell out your own country like this is scummy. I honestly am surprised this wasn't attached to a 'help the troops! save the children!' bill.
A car analogy:
The local quickie oil change place hires people with very basic mechanical knowledge because changing the oil is fucking easy. A full service garage moves in to the area and hires a bunch of the same types because they're 'good with cars.'
A college graduate has been proven to be able to pass the trials and tribulations of college. It might not be THAT difficult depending on your degree, but all college degrees require some modicum of self sufficiency and self motivation. Believe me, there are PLENTY of people out there who have neither, and will not do an ounce of work unless their supervisor checks up on them every ten minutes. True, there are college graduates that do this too, but I'd bet the majority of them aren't.
People would be much more interested in science if science had marketing degrees.
Science just isn't interesting enough to most people, so most people are utterly clueless about it. I mean, who cares how microwave ovens work as long as they cook your food and do a decent job at doing it? Most people do not need to think about science at all in their lives. The closest they come to chemical reactions is knowing not to mix bleach with ammonia and that baking a cake is a one way process.
Just like math. How many people need to use functions above add/subtract/multiply/divide in their daily lives? I've never once had to use anything but those unless it was school related. Actually I take that back, when I was a teenager I remember showing some people the magic of sin/tan/cos when my dad took me to his construction job once. They were awestruck that they didn't have to look in a big manual for a list of values and could just keep a calculator with them.
To be honest, I'm glad it's that way. Could you imagine having to work complex equations to do something in everyday life? It would be exhausting, even if it weren't calculus.
Here's how it would go.
"Do you still talk to your old girlfriends?"
"No, not really. Why do you ask?"
"LIAR! I saw that MSN notification. Why are you still talking to them?"
"I'm not 'talking to them.' My ex added me to her friend's list."
"So you ARE 'talking to them.'"
"I haven't talked to her in over a year."
"But it says you're friends with her! You have to talk to someone to be friends with them!"
"No you don't..all they have to do is add you!"
"If you think I'm stupid, you're WRONG."
You're living in a fantasy world.
Here's how it really goes:
"Oo, she has a nice ass."
[girlfriend glares]
"Why are you looking at her ass?"
"Well, she walked by, I just kind of glanced there."
"Why didn't you glance the other way?"
"I don't know, I just didn't."
"What's wrong with my ass?"
"Nothing's wrong with your ass, I was just making an observation."
"Are you saying my ass is fat?"
"No not at all, I love your ass."
The next day:
"My boyfriend doesn't like my ass any more..I don't think he loves me."
"Aw, it's okay sugar, there's boys everywhere! Let me introduce you to my friend Ronaldo, he's single!"
"Well, okay, since my boyfriend obviously doesn't love me anymore."
A week later:
"Well since you have an infatuation with other women's asses, I'm leaving you for Ronaldo. At least HE says I have a nice ass!"
Anyone with reading comprehension skills can add insight to a high level discussion in any topic. Most reporting websites and thus stories we get here on Slashdot seem to be written to be readable by anyone that wants to take the time to read it and not be shy about looking up words they don't understand. You don't need a degree for this.
You need a degree to actually go to the lab and design experiments and make predictions. Your degree came because you spent years studying the subject at hand. You know where the field was before, and you know where it might be in the future. You know most of those words without having to look them up, and more importantly, you know the implications and concepts behind them.
Give it a try. Learn some basic economics concepts (high school stuff) and then browse a high end hardcore financial forum and see if you can sound smart. It's not hard at all.
Here in the United States, when it comes to copyrights, we haven't been standing for a while now. We've been bent over and taking it from behind. Companies are well on their way to getting their dream of perpetual copyright, and are also on the verge of being able to calculate lawsuit settlements in with their planned revenue. They want to build a magic device within the United States' legal system to let them have their cake and eat it too. Currently they're exploring the option of just having their customers bake them a new cake as fast as they can eat the old one.
The Early Termination fee is two things. One, it's a way for the company to recoup their costs of you running off with a smart phone that retails for $500+. Two, it's a way for them to ensure that none of their sheep go running off to other pastures as soon as they look a little greener. They've pretty much figured out that two years is the optimal length for a contract. Long enough to where you'll have their income coming in for a while and can make plans around that, but short enough to where you'll splurge for the most expensive phone every two years (with new two year contract, of course!) because you've had two years to save up for it.
I think a reboot of the cell phone industry really needs to happen here in the United States. I can go to Walmart right now and buy a prepaid phone for $20 or so with lots of features. Or I can go buy the same one at a cell phone store that's linked ONLY to one provider and costs $100. Free with two year plan, though..
The reason the peons at the bottom have almost no authority is because they have so little vested interest in the company. If Verizon were to suddenly disappear, the least affected employees would be the ones in the entry level jobs and the higher ups. Everyone else gets to reboot their careers.
Your government has been running roughshod over your rights (and the rights of other nations) for centuries now. This is just par for the course because you, the citizens, allow this to happen. Every time something like this is passed, the citizens all bitch and moan about it, but the people in power always cheer and applaud. Does that sound like a democracy to you? If you want it stopped, you know which boxes to use, and in what order. There are fates worse than death, and that's living to see your country turn into a totalitarian nightmare straight out of 1984 because you and your fellow citizens did nothing about it.
I'm pretty sure phones are designed to be one button away from a multiple dollar data fee if you don't have a data plan. Every phone I owned would happily connect to some webpage owned by the cell phone company and proceed to download 200-300k before you could figure out you hit the wrong button. Moreover, some of them have flat out refused to stop downloading the page until it's done, meaning that you just got dinged a megabyte on your ten cents per kilobyte lack of data plan.
I wholeheartedly agree with this.
Very very sick people need some kind of hope even if it's a 1% chance of a cure or treatment rather than the 100% chance that they'll die from whatever they have. No, instead they shoot themselves up with heavy metals they ordered from China or go to foreign countries and spend thousands and thousands of dollars and demand something they heard about on the internet to be injected into their body with no testing.
The vision of the bionic eye will not be affected to you and me, since the signal gets recorded before the signal gets processed by the brain. We don't have the technology to turn brain signals into recordable senses yet anyway. This means that you might see some twitching of the eye, but it won't be blurry when recorded. He, however, will likely see blurred vision if he himself can see through the eye, because the brain's interpretation of signals changes when liquored up.
Nuclear? Holy shit, they must mean like..nuclear bombs and stuff. Nuclear bombs release a lot of pollution which will end up killing our favorite poster animals that everyone loves and it will kill people too. Remember Chernobyl? Surely all nuclear power plants are just like Chernobyl, nuclear medicine is like an injectable atomic bomb just waiting to go off and cause everyone around you to mutate or die of radiation poisoning!
Nuclear fusion must be much worse!
It goes without saying that most rabid environmentalists wanted to have an art degree.
Perhaps they should punish people that are OBVIOUSLY tethering and let the people who aren't continue to have their unlimited service. You can't use 65GB of service on a smart phone in a month without tethering. I'd find it hard to believe the device has enough space to store downloads that big and I find it harder to believe someone found a megabyte webpage and sat there refreshing it 65,000 times.
Virtual On always did really well..I'm still trying to figure out why there's no massive VO release with multiplayer.
What kind of compensation are the makers going to offer everyone who's system they hosed?
I'm a healthy adult and a trial and/or jail would traumatize me too, especially since I would know that it's going to be a show trial. Even if I were found not guilty of 90% of the counts, they'd still throw me in jail for ten years for 'failure to appear' or something because they got their asses handed to them in the security department.
Climate control is easier in the basement. You can build big fuckoff heat exchangers that go under ground level and surface however far from the building you want them to surface.
Simpler wiring plans because you don't have to run big industrial power cables up to the top floor and the data lines don't have to go far to get to the basement.
All that being said, below-ground server rooms should have some method to be able to seal themselves off from the rest of the world in case of flooding. Perhaps the elevator or hallway door can form a decent seal, whereas everything else is already as sealed as it can be. Perhaps sealing everything also cuts power so nothing overheats.
United States corporations work on extortion. The legal system favors corporations far too much to have a fair chance in court. If you bring suit against a large company and lose you'll probably have to pay their legal fees too, and 80% of the citizens here could not ever hope to afford those kinds of expenses. The result is that not many people file suit, and most of the ones that do are just plain crazy and have no qualms with being a million or more in debt for the rest of their lives.
This is EXACTLY THE SAME as saying, "Sorry, no refund on your car. The welding machine messed up and welded the doors shut. We aren't responsible for what our machines do." and then saying, "We sent this to our legal department and they agree that it wasn't our fault the welding machine messed up so we don't have to pay you."
I take that back, it would be a terrible idea. Employers would mess with the devices until they said 'work' all the time and then fire people they caught doing anything else. Employers today think they know better than doctors and psychologists anyway..and that everyone should be 100% capable of working for 8 hours straight without going to the bathroom or spending a single second stretching or blinking.
It wouldn't be a bad idea really. I'm sure with enough studies we can see how often the average person must be 'distracted' before productivity takes a nosedive.
Profits, of course!
We elect officials.
Some officials are corrupted.
We elected corrupted officials.
Corrupted officials take bribes.
Bribes are given by corporations.
Corporations expect the support of the officials.
Corporations exist to profit.
Officials take bribes and support the corporations.
We elect officials to help corporations profit.
SC2 will end up being the same way. Already there are only a few dominating strategies out there and if you scout the enemy base early in the game you know exactly what to counter for. I've noticed some of the higher end players pretending to tech up one way and end up teching their REAL strategy up at another base (known as a proxy), or by simply hiding their real teching buildings out of normal scouting paths.