I guaran-fucking-tee you that if this were some rogue employee stealing the email of a company and selling it off, they'd go to jail for a long long time. I bet there's something behind the scenes keeping the email thief from going to jail and/or being sued.
You'll just be fired for 'not showing up for work' because the computer and ISP is your responsibility.
Honestly, why should the company care? They've got 10,000 people fighting tooth and nail over your job, and they'll be happy to take a few dollars less per hour.
Because you and others are willing to pay more for less. The market will continue to go in this direction until enough people drop service to make it unprofitable. They'll find the high point on the profit/effort graph and go with that price.
I don't think its a bad thing for companies to want to profit, but I DO think its a bad thing for them to offer less and charge more. This is the opposite of progress.
The above post is awesome. It clearly shows how much TW made from their high speed data services, and how much they had to spend to make that amount of money.
I don't see why this wasn't enacted many many years ago.
Comcast, for example, would buy all of a region's smaller cable companies and make them fly the Comcast banner. Then prices would jump 20-40% in the next year. Usually the buy-outs would have to be approved, and would be approved under the condition that Comcast provide similar service for similar prices.
Granted monopolies need to be policed like this. This isn't a case of other companies not wanting to bother with the cost and time to set up competition.
This is exactly what Time-Warner was banking on. You don't see cell phone companies deciding that unlimited text messaging is no longer unlimited, or that your 500 minutes isn't sustainable, so now you get 200 minutes. Mainly because cell phone companies have competition everywhere. If you don't like Sprint, try US Cellular or Verizon. Maybe even T-mobile. They all have their ups and downs, but more importantly, there are alternate choices. ISPs aren't always that way.
Hourly-fee dial-up ISPs went away pretty quickly once competitors started popping up. I think most broadband ISPs were starting out at the unlimited level to compete with dial-up ISPs, and now that the dial-up ISPs are no longer a threat, they want to reneg on the contracts they made us all sign. Not our fault your business model wasn't able to be supported, now honor our damn contracts.
When an accusation of sexual harassment is made, a company has only a few options.
1. Give the accused the benefit of the doubt and do a full investigation. Realize that its going to come down to the word of the accused versus the word of the accuser. Risk being sued and having bad publicity because accuser is unhappy that things didn't go their way.
2. Fire the accused and purge liability.
Would your company pay $100,000 and suffer bad publicity to keep you?
For most employees in the world, no.
Accusations of sexual harassment, rape, and other sex crimes often have dire consequences for the accused whether or not the accusation is true. At the least, you lose your job. At the most, you get a beatdown from an angry mob comprised of supporters of the accuser. Or killed. It has happened many times in the history of this country.
If you ever sign up for a site and don't have to give credit card info, try keeping your name phonetically the same but misspelling it for each site. Like Calvin could be Kalvin or Chalvin. Keep track of which sites use which misspellings. When you start getting email that says Chalvin you just won $50,000,000 in the (insert fake lottery)! You'll know which site has sold it, and can inform others.
Actually scaring someone into signing a contract that they don't understand invalidates the contract.
Example: What you're doing is illegal. Sign this paper and we'll go away. Ha! Now if you keep doing it we'll sue you since you signed a contract saying that you wouldn't do that!
The unfortunate side is that gaming usually favors people with the most time. There's nothing stopping an unemployed person living in mom's basement from sitting around all day and playing Counter-Strike. But the person that has the 9-5 job and the wife might get to play 30 minutes a night, if they aren't tired from the day. They're less likely to want to spend time to be competitive.
So what you end up with is someone that won $500 for being #1 at a tournament, but they've spent the past 12 months of their life practicing for it. Even an hour a day working at a job would be more than $500 in 12 months.
Unless they're rich or are being taken care of money-wise, no. I'd wager most of them don't have a future.
First they whine that unlimited is not unlimited. Then they put a number on what 'unlimited' is, and change the contract that you had already signed. Then they decide that they can actually give you the service you originally signed up for, but only if you pay them $150 more.
He's right, but military and police are two totally different worlds.
In 'The Field' the enemy is monitoring all kinds of communications. They have guards setup, probably scouts, sensors, etc.
In the domestic world, criminals rarely monitor anything beyond the end of their nose. Only a small percentage of criminals would be able to use this information to their advantage. The rest will continue to commit crimes and be caught, possibly more efficiently due to the new system described in the article.
The kinds of people who are listening to the police scanners or are willing to invest in the technology and skills required to use a system like this..well..the police don't often catch terrorists or smart criminals unless the criminals/terrorists seriously fuck up. Or confess.
We get to watch you lobby to Congress about how your company can't survive if they have to pay overtime benefits, but you make it clear that if you can't put in the 16 hours a day 6 days a week required to complete the game on time, we'll be shitlisted from the game industry.
We get to watch your marketing drones take expensive trips and have nice things, while you've reduced the number of fridges in the breakroom to one, to 'encourage people to eat healthy!'..has nothing to do with saving costs, I'm sure.
We get to watch the higher ups give us unrealistic goals. You want your own engine, you want a whole planet of scenery and stages, you want the latest and the greatest, and you want it to work on a Game Boy Advance. After all, that's what you promised Nintendo when they offered you a bonus to do so. You want it in a month, from Monday of two weeks ago.
We get to watch you use your corporate cards for lunch everyday, and dinner too during crunch time.
Then we get that lay-off notice right after the game is launched, with the new 'support' team you hired from a small university in India picking which desks will be theirs, while we're still sitting in them in shock.
In a perfect world, companies would want to profit. They would always look ahead to the future to ensure that they only took what the market could bear, for breaking the market would break their company just the same.
This is not a perfect world. Companies want to profit and destroy the competition and lock in their customers. They want to collude to lock out your cell phone's features that you paid several times over retail for, they want to change your contracts after you sign them and still bind you to them, they want to pack in all kinds of hidden fees and charges sixty-three pages deep into their contract, and most of all, they want to please the shareholders.
The shareholders ensure that only the biggest assholes will be in upper management. The shareholders want their profit check and they want it now. Who cares if the company isn't in business in 20 years? The shareholders have enough money to buy stock in other companies, and run them into the ground too.
Auction off something cheap, so some companies could get a start.
No big company would EVER use their resources to start a smaller puppet company who's sole intention was to buy a piece of the spectrum and sell service for rates as absurd as text messaging rates..just to keep the competition away.
Seems like every other video I go to watch is without audio due to 'complaints' and 'infringement'
While this is a good thing for those gameplay videos that involve rap being played at 2x the volume of the game's sounds, it is a BAD THING for things like anime music videos, or parody videos, etc.
Things that should be fair-use are being taken down for 'infringement'.
Perhaps someone could get away with a slander/libel case against whoever called it infringement when it was fair use?
Mold and staph are both very good at entrenching themselves into their environment. They basically form a base layer that they can attach to, and then they're much harder to get out. A good method of attacking mold or staph colonies would be to find something that breaks up their base layer so that they're exposed to the environment. Unfortunately, you need a chemical that can penetrate porous materials easily, and those chemicals don't tend to do well around the home.
I've been a nerd since I was born. Grew up with early computers. Watched them evolve until now. But nothing makes me feel dumber than trying a CAPTCHA 5 or 6 times and failing every time. Its a serious annoyance and I've seen WORSE that I haven't even attempted.
Sometimes even if you don't miss a payment. Wasn't there a court case a while back where a registrar held someone's domain hostage unless they paid thousands and thousands for a re-activation fee? Even though they weren't late on payments?
Most of the time squatting is done by the very people it benefits.
The car analogy would be if the car lot had bums sleeping in all the cars, and you had to pay the bum to leave so that you could purchase the car from the dealer. Only the bums were hired by the car lot to squeeze a little bit of extra money out of the buyer.
Actually, building a barebones system shouldn't be this complex at all.
You can build a decent machine that doesn't require a fan on the CPU at all. Granted, it wouldn't be very fast, I don't think the current setup is very fast either.
Just use onboard sound/video/data and use a cheap 200GB or so drive that will cost you $30 to replace, new, if it dies. Backup regularly and it shouldn't cost you more than $200 or so to replace most of the system. A UPS is important, though, as it will greatly extend the life of your power supply if it gets out of the infant mortality stage.
One of the big problems in the US is that people leave doctoring to the doctors.
You get two types of people. People that come in and just KNOW that they have non-Hodgkin's, and people that come in and are totally clueless. The first kind is actually the most dangerous. They don't like to think that their ten minutes on WebMD was shot down by someone with twenty years of experience. They hate it, in fact. The second kind are not likely to catch that their recurring colds and flus might be connected to their IV drug abuse down by the railroad depot.
If people spent some time reading about common medical ailments, their treatments, and complications, the world would be a MUCH better place. There should be two kinds of health class in high school. One that teaches you all about your body, how not to knock up / get knocked up, and one that teaches you about common ailments and their cures.
How many emergency room visits could be prevented because a parent recognized their kid coughing or sneezing as a cold instead of deciding that its Hantavirus that they contracted from the school parakeet?
Actually, this brings up an amusing point. Lets say that you did run a hosting service, and it was so hands-off that you actually did install claymores in the building. You had no staff.
Then someone breaks in, steals a claymore, then falls on their sword.
Their family sues you for millions because your building wasn't safe.
I can't take credit for saying this as I'm only parroting it from another source, Fark I believe, but someone said it was well-known in the security industry that April 1st is by far the most common date for new malware to go live, and is also a common date for existing malware to update.
Keep in mind that the government gave millions and millions to telcos/cable companies a few years ago to expand their infrastructure and provide better service, and service actually got WORSE overall for doing so.
Kind of like how I predict that when we bail out (insert car company) they'll reduce production models to 2 or 3 of the biggest SUVs they can find and bitch about not making money.
Slashdot Mirror
I agree. Its very disrespectful.
Its not much different than selling someone a car and then charging them an extra fee for the key to unlock the trunk.
I guaran-fucking-tee you that if this were some rogue employee stealing the email of a company and selling it off, they'd go to jail for a long long time. I bet there's something behind the scenes keeping the email thief from going to jail and/or being sued.
Immunity clause, maybe?
Some bribery of public officials?
Not the company's problem.
You'll just be fired for 'not showing up for work' because the computer and ISP is your responsibility.
Honestly, why should the company care? They've got 10,000 people fighting tooth and nail over your job, and they'll be happy to take a few dollars less per hour.
Why are you paying more?
Because you and others are willing to pay more for less. The market will continue to go in this direction until enough people drop service to make it unprofitable. They'll find the high point on the profit/effort graph and go with that price.
I don't think its a bad thing for companies to want to profit, but I DO think its a bad thing for them to offer less and charge more. This is the opposite of progress.
The above post is awesome. It clearly shows how much TW made from their high speed data services, and how much they had to spend to make that amount of money.
Mod parent up.
I don't see why this wasn't enacted many many years ago.
Comcast, for example, would buy all of a region's smaller cable companies and make them fly the Comcast banner. Then prices would jump 20-40% in the next year. Usually the buy-outs would have to be approved, and would be approved under the condition that Comcast provide similar service for similar prices.
Granted monopolies need to be policed like this. This isn't a case of other companies not wanting to bother with the cost and time to set up competition.
This is exactly what Time-Warner was banking on. You don't see cell phone companies deciding that unlimited text messaging is no longer unlimited, or that your 500 minutes isn't sustainable, so now you get 200 minutes. Mainly because cell phone companies have competition everywhere. If you don't like Sprint, try US Cellular or Verizon. Maybe even T-mobile. They all have their ups and downs, but more importantly, there are alternate choices. ISPs aren't always that way.
Hourly-fee dial-up ISPs went away pretty quickly once competitors started popping up. I think most broadband ISPs were starting out at the unlimited level to compete with dial-up ISPs, and now that the dial-up ISPs are no longer a threat, they want to reneg on the contracts they made us all sign. Not our fault your business model wasn't able to be supported, now honor our damn contracts.
When an accusation of sexual harassment is made, a company has only a few options.
1. Give the accused the benefit of the doubt and do a full investigation. Realize that its going to come down to the word of the accused versus the word of the accuser. Risk being sued and having bad publicity because accuser is unhappy that things didn't go their way.
2. Fire the accused and purge liability.
Would your company pay $100,000 and suffer bad publicity to keep you?
For most employees in the world, no.
Accusations of sexual harassment, rape, and other sex crimes often have dire consequences for the accused whether or not the accusation is true. At the least, you lose your job. At the most, you get a beatdown from an angry mob comprised of supporters of the accuser. Or killed. It has happened many times in the history of this country.
If you ever sign up for a site and don't have to give credit card info, try keeping your name phonetically the same but misspelling it for each site. Like Calvin could be Kalvin or Chalvin. Keep track of which sites use which misspellings. When you start getting email that says Chalvin you just won $50,000,000 in the (insert fake lottery)! You'll know which site has sold it, and can inform others.
Actually scaring someone into signing a contract that they don't understand invalidates the contract.
Example: What you're doing is illegal. Sign this paper and we'll go away. Ha! Now if you keep doing it we'll sue you since you signed a contract saying that you wouldn't do that!
The unfortunate side is that gaming usually favors people with the most time. There's nothing stopping an unemployed person living in mom's basement from sitting around all day and playing Counter-Strike. But the person that has the 9-5 job and the wife might get to play 30 minutes a night, if they aren't tired from the day. They're less likely to want to spend time to be competitive.
So what you end up with is someone that won $500 for being #1 at a tournament, but they've spent the past 12 months of their life practicing for it. Even an hour a day working at a job would be more than $500 in 12 months.
Unless they're rich or are being taken care of money-wise, no. I'd wager most of them don't have a future.
Is there anyone who didn't see this coming?
First they whine that unlimited is not unlimited. Then they put a number on what 'unlimited' is, and change the contract that you had already signed. Then they decide that they can actually give you the service you originally signed up for, but only if you pay them $150 more.
Isn't that kind of an oxymoron?
At least five hours isn't time enough to do that much damage, should one of them become self-aware.
He's right, but military and police are two totally different worlds.
In 'The Field' the enemy is monitoring all kinds of communications. They have guards setup, probably scouts, sensors, etc.
In the domestic world, criminals rarely monitor anything beyond the end of their nose. Only a small percentage of criminals would be able to use this information to their advantage. The rest will continue to commit crimes and be caught, possibly more efficiently due to the new system described in the article.
The kinds of people who are listening to the police scanners or are willing to invest in the technology and skills required to use a system like this..well..the police don't often catch terrorists or smart criminals unless the criminals/terrorists seriously fuck up. Or confess.
You, as an employer want crunch time?
What do we get out of it?
We get to watch you lobby to Congress about how your company can't survive if they have to pay overtime benefits, but you make it clear that if you can't put in the 16 hours a day 6 days a week required to complete the game on time, we'll be shitlisted from the game industry.
We get to watch your marketing drones take expensive trips and have nice things, while you've reduced the number of fridges in the breakroom to one, to 'encourage people to eat healthy!'..has nothing to do with saving costs, I'm sure.
We get to watch the higher ups give us unrealistic goals. You want your own engine, you want a whole planet of scenery and stages, you want the latest and the greatest, and you want it to work on a Game Boy Advance. After all, that's what you promised Nintendo when they offered you a bonus to do so. You want it in a month, from Monday of two weeks ago.
We get to watch you use your corporate cards for lunch everyday, and dinner too during crunch time.
Then we get that lay-off notice right after the game is launched, with the new 'support' team you hired from a small university in India picking which desks will be theirs, while we're still sitting in them in shock.
Lazziez faire doesn't work in reality.
In a perfect world, companies would want to profit. They would always look ahead to the future to ensure that they only took what the market could bear, for breaking the market would break their company just the same.
This is not a perfect world. Companies want to profit and destroy the competition and lock in their customers. They want to collude to lock out your cell phone's features that you paid several times over retail for, they want to change your contracts after you sign them and still bind you to them, they want to pack in all kinds of hidden fees and charges sixty-three pages deep into their contract, and most of all, they want to please the shareholders.
The shareholders ensure that only the biggest assholes will be in upper management. The shareholders want their profit check and they want it now. Who cares if the company isn't in business in 20 years? The shareholders have enough money to buy stock in other companies, and run them into the ground too.
Auction off something cheap, so some companies could get a start.
No big company would EVER use their resources to start a smaller puppet company who's sole intention was to buy a piece of the spectrum and sell service for rates as absurd as text messaging rates..just to keep the competition away.
Never!
Seems like every other video I go to watch is without audio due to 'complaints' and 'infringement'
While this is a good thing for those gameplay videos that involve rap being played at 2x the volume of the game's sounds, it is a BAD THING for things like anime music videos, or parody videos, etc.
Things that should be fair-use are being taken down for 'infringement'.
Perhaps someone could get away with a slander/libel case against whoever called it infringement when it was fair use?
Mold and staph are both very good at entrenching themselves into their environment. They basically form a base layer that they can attach to, and then they're much harder to get out. A good method of attacking mold or staph colonies would be to find something that breaks up their base layer so that they're exposed to the environment. Unfortunately, you need a chemical that can penetrate porous materials easily, and those chemicals don't tend to do well around the home.
That's where the issue is.
I've been a nerd since I was born. Grew up with early computers. Watched them evolve until now. But nothing makes me feel dumber than trying a CAPTCHA 5 or 6 times and failing every time. Its a serious annoyance and I've seen WORSE that I haven't even attempted.
Sometimes even if you don't miss a payment. Wasn't there a court case a while back where a registrar held someone's domain hostage unless they paid thousands and thousands for a re-activation fee? Even though they weren't late on payments?
Most of the time squatting is done by the very people it benefits.
The car analogy would be if the car lot had bums sleeping in all the cars, and you had to pay the bum to leave so that you could purchase the car from the dealer. Only the bums were hired by the car lot to squeeze a little bit of extra money out of the buyer.
Actually, building a barebones system shouldn't be this complex at all.
You can build a decent machine that doesn't require a fan on the CPU at all. Granted, it wouldn't be very fast, I don't think the current setup is very fast either.
Just use onboard sound/video/data and use a cheap 200GB or so drive that will cost you $30 to replace, new, if it dies. Backup regularly and it shouldn't cost you more than $200 or so to replace most of the system. A UPS is important, though, as it will greatly extend the life of your power supply if it gets out of the infant mortality stage.
One of the big problems in the US is that people leave doctoring to the doctors.
You get two types of people. People that come in and just KNOW that they have non-Hodgkin's, and people that come in and are totally clueless. The first kind is actually the most dangerous. They don't like to think that their ten minutes on WebMD was shot down by someone with twenty years of experience. They hate it, in fact. The second kind are not likely to catch that their recurring colds and flus might be connected to their IV drug abuse down by the railroad depot.
If people spent some time reading about common medical ailments, their treatments, and complications, the world would be a MUCH better place. There should be two kinds of health class in high school. One that teaches you all about your body, how not to knock up / get knocked up, and one that teaches you about common ailments and their cures.
How many emergency room visits could be prevented because a parent recognized their kid coughing or sneezing as a cold instead of deciding that its Hantavirus that they contracted from the school parakeet?
Actually, this brings up an amusing point. Lets say that you did run a hosting service, and it was so hands-off that you actually did install claymores in the building. You had no staff.
Then someone breaks in, steals a claymore, then falls on their sword.
Their family sues you for millions because your building wasn't safe.
Sorry, bad joke.
I can't take credit for saying this as I'm only parroting it from another source, Fark I believe, but someone said it was well-known in the security industry that April 1st is by far the most common date for new malware to go live, and is also a common date for existing malware to update.
Probably to maximize confusion.
Keep in mind that the government gave millions and millions to telcos/cable companies a few years ago to expand their infrastructure and provide better service, and service actually got WORSE overall for doing so.
Kind of like how I predict that when we bail out (insert car company) they'll reduce production models to 2 or 3 of the biggest SUVs they can find and bitch about not making money.