You could more easily & more morally establish some "class action legal defense groups" for people that fit into the same basic class. Or, even easier, simply organize the DIY legal defense framework offering free forms for court filings and such. It's much more likely that all 23k will file some forms that'll cost the plaintiffs thousands in legal fees.
You could alternatively just organize an Anonymous operation to publish the work/home addresses, phones, emails, IPs, etc. for all lawyers involved. In many cases, anonymous would dig up dirt on the lawyers that'd make their lives rather unpleasant, ala cheating husbands and offenses warranting disbarment. In other cases, simply receiving hundreds or thousands of emails telling them what a bad person they were might influence their thinking. In all cases, there would be a significant fear that the bad publicity would drive away unrelated customers and damage their ability to win court cases. And there would be many law firms being hacked and having their clients files posted all over the internet, again damaging their broader business, exposing offenses warranting disbarment, etc.
There isn't any useful president from the mp3.com case because a "music locker" requires that people rip & upload the songs themselves, meaning it'll go into a long legal fight, and google has far more money than the labels.
In fact, if any label gets too uppity, google can simply buy them outright or coerce their owners. Warner Music's entire market cap is only $1.22B, meaning google could easily just buy them outright and terminate the upper management, legal team, etc. All the others are small subsidiaries inside much large companies that might see little benefit in tangling with Google.
I doubt EMI's owner Citigroup would tangle with Google, even though their market cap is 129B. Any bank likes keeping rich people happy. If they did, I'm sure google could launch a hedge fund to poach Citigroup's best quantitative analysis, then let the rest of the financial industry eat them alive. Sony and Vivendi (UMG) have market caps of 29B and 23B, respectively. I'd imagine their less vulnerable to talent poaching than Citigroup too, but you might still threaten some executive and board member positions by working through their larger stock holders.
A cheaper solution might just be threatening to provide lawyers for all the little people they've extorted money from by threatening to sue, a few $40k per year ambulance chasers could drag any label through thousands of expensive lawsuits for years.
Interesting, that seem very odd to me, but maybe I'm not a good judge. I've always had some big project on the go though throughout my life. It was developing my BBS software in High School. Various acceptably sized development projects as summer jobs. University homeworks are obviously minor projects, but often I'd take a grad course that required way more work. And then I launched into working on a classification project during my PhD. And I feel completely lost now that I'm quitting academia for industry but don't yet know what I'll be developing in industry. Alright, thanks for the introspective moment.;)
Yeah, that's theoretically possible, but highly unlikely for memory leaks. You're point is more valid if you replace "memory leak" by "buffer overrun" or "crypto implementation mistake" since people obviously hunt those down independently.
I'd still take the buffer overrun hunter over the guy who's website is light on code and heavy on photoshop, css, etc. though. Worst case scenario : You've hired a good quality assurance guy for the wrong job, well that'll likely save you money over the long run.
Isn't this old hat? Doesn't everyone ask for a code sample?
I feel however that 'I did this, all by myself!' isn't the best metric.
I'd rather hire the kid who's code sample consists of fixing 5 memory leaks in 5 different open source libraries. He'll write solid code.
I'd rather not hire as a "coder" the kid who's website took him 40 hours in photoshop, several hours configuring Drupal, and another several hours writing a Drupal extension that should've taken him 20 min. He might be more artist than programmer.
In fact, that's a pretty good interview tactic : Ask them in advance to find & fix a memory leak in some open source C library so they can explain it at the interview. Hint : Find a crap library with many leaks.
Wall St. has been giving all the stock broker jobs to geeks. Advertising jobs are going to geeks.
We might actually create a fairly pleasant world eventually.
There is also the issue that people who don't understand jake shit are being dis-enfranchised, but that might be temporary, i.e. eventually we might create a society in which ignorance of mathematics, science, and programming is widely understood to directly lead to poverty.
Classes are great for teaching "theory" to "practical people" because the "theory oriented guy" teaching the class understands what "trying things" means in his particular domain. I'd imagine you've used some calculous for work on occasion, but presumably you'd never have sat down and just tried things involving integrals.
I'd expect all those system administration courses are designed for people who don't know soo much about computers, but need some elementary networking theory before they'll become remotely competent administrators. If this guy's a developer, then he's likely already seen anything those students would find "theoretical", meaning he's already well set up for "just trying" more practical stuff.
I'd imagine he'd happily attract the trolls early to negotiate a pyramid scheme settlement, i.e. ReadHat will publicly pay but RedHat takes a cut from any future settlements by other victims.
There were also hoards of VoIP companies offering those services for under half the price charged by Skype, although some bundled the in-dial and out-dial. In fact, there are only a very few marketing heavy VoIP providers like Vonage charging more than Skype. The real issues are :
(1) Skype's user experience obliterates every other VoIP provider : Download & run Skype, make account, done. No tweak this setting if you use symmetric NAT. No please pay us first. etc.
(2) Skype has NAT traversal that afaik equals or beats any other VoIP software & provider combo. In fact, they use almost exactly the same NAT traversal tricks, but they may ask other clients to provide TURN (relay) when STUN fails, and maybe their STUN servers are better too. TURN gets expensive if the calls are all free.
(3) Skpye simplifies finding people you know who use Skype. And they've always encouraged people to talk to strangers, making it more likely that your friends already use Skype.
(4) Skype's encryption gives small businesses greater confidence.
If you wish to compete with Skype, you must (a) match them on PTSN price while offering awesome STUN and TURN, (b) match or beat them at friend finding, (c) beat them on encryption, i.e. use an open source client, preferably Zfone, and (d) offer "something more".
I think the logical "something more" might be encrypted friend-to-friend file sharing, perhaps with discussion threads ala facebook's photos. All IM clients offer file transfers, but no popular ones offer file sharing.
There was a nice Frenchman named Joseph-Ignace Guillotine who helped invent kinda the European analog of the U.S.'s 2nd Amendment. There are always issues with what constitutes civil society, but people proposing intellectual slavery should be reminded that less seemingly civil resolutions exist.
Brazil saved aids patients all over the world by breaking the patents on anti-retrovirals. If no country had been willing, then extra-legal lethal force could've very quickly become a civilized response.
I'll be happy if Sweden just fines Apple a few tens of millions because Safari's cookie management feature simply don't work. "Accept cookies : Only form sites I visit" has basically never worked. And cookies you delete using "Show Cookies" aren't actually deleted either.
Any cheating you witness inside the U.S. and E.U. is likely endemic of the whole discipline. There are specific political factors massively encouraging cheating and crap publication in some other countries however. In particular, there is a very mindless "paper counting" mentality in China, even ignoring impact factor.
China could greatly reduce this problem by counting eigenfactor instead, but that'd make the central government look bad, as well as penalizing their professors who've been playing their system and/or got their job via family connections. Don't hold your breath!
I know many fine Chinese researchers working in the U.S. but China itself is publishing a river of sewage.
Ain't even that the "dregs" return home but more academic politics inside China. If China wanted, they could greatly improve the situation by considering eigenfactor, instead of simply publication counting. Yet, I doubt they'll do so. That'd require (a) acknowledging that their current publications suck and (b) penalizing all the professors who've either played the Chinese game, including the crappy ones who got their jobs through family connections.
All the stock brokers are now being pulled from MIT & co.'s STEM programs. Aren't you glad knowing the guys making all that money loved science & designing things in High School?
Google & others are making significant progress towards populating marketing with the same crowd too. There is also a lively field of academic business research desperately trying to ensure that STEM majors are more qualified than undergrad business majors.
Sales may take slightly longer though. Sorry, people still love a good bullshit artist.
Humans are clever beasties. Ain't no shortage of clever kids with STEM degrees.
There are likely more different personality types studying in STEM programs of course, perhaps reducing the proportion of Feynmans and Sagans for PBS specials, or replacing them with asses like Venter. We're still seeing top notch research from the young STEM PhDs graduating form top tier universities though.
There are also middle tier universities that graduate some weak PhDs because they've over admitting them for the cheap TA teaching. Yet, all those people move quickly into teaching at your weaker liberal arts collages however. Ergo, they weren't even counted for the statistics being discussed.
All that's peanuts compared with the simple observation that every good professor has more than one good graduate student, that's an exponential function my friend. All those researchers got jobs way back simply because university enrollments were actually growing vaguely exponentially, even back before the Cold War, G.I. bill, etc. All that's finished now. Even if we sent every kid to university, even if all those new students were too stupid to get PhDs, we'd still never create enough professorships for the researchers being produced now.
Academia simply must learn that most people who earn PhDs shouldn't try becoming professors. We're doing exactly that by sending so many STEM grads into finance, business, advertising, etc.
I'd recommend running an concerted campaign by slashdot based "trolls" to trash the PS4 itself, all it's games, and all game companies that make games for the PS4. Every PS4 related product gets derided mercilessly on Amazon, Review sites, blogs, etc.
Just fyi, I've been absolutely thrilled by Portal 2, clearly the best game produced by anyone for any platform since well Portal, maybe since Starcraft. And it'll never appear on the PS3 or PS4 if Valve is to be believed.
Good point. I guess that's why they make you upload your files rather than skipping uploads who's hash already exists, i.e. they actually compare the files before deduplication, any instant uploads would only be copying your friend's shared files.
Imho, you should use SHA-256 and AES-256 of course, not the SHA-128 and AES-128 used by git and wuala, massively reducing your collision chances. You realize that 2^256 is roughly 10^77, just shy of the popular 4*10^79 to 10^81 rage people like for the number of atoms in the universe. And asymptotically the number pigeons grows quadratically while the number of pigeon holes grows exponentially.
If you use dropbox on truecrypt encrypted containers, then you'll mostly lose dropbox's archival features.
Wuala has an incredibly simply but very clever algorithm for handling data deduplication on the server, along with rudimentary file versioning, while simultaneously handling on encryption on the client.
How you ask? Easy, you encrypt every file using it's own SHA as the AES key, but then you use the new encrypted file's SHA as the DHT index for retrieval. You need both SHA values to access a file of course, but who cares.
There are only three major flaws in Wuala :
- Any final object yields a unique second SHA for the DHT, enabling data deduplication and instantaneous uploads, but also enabling draconian copyright enforcement under the DMCA. Imagine torrentting a movie only for the MPAA to delete it from your private cloud drive!
- It's closed source! wtf?!? Is anyone really stupid enough to trust closed source encryption software these days? How does anyone know they don't secretly copy the original SHA / AES key?
- It's written in Java. Ack, a slow filesystem driver! (Alright, this third comment is pure trolling. I'll admit server side Java isn't that slow anymore, assuming you avoid all that double copy display idiocy.)
I've been considering writing a custom backend for libgit2 that implements this "original SHA as AES key" approach for storing git repositories in some basic DHT. It ain't a direct translation of course. You'd either need to completely forego git compatibility on the local repository by making all object ids into 2*256=512 or 2*512=1024 bit ids. Or, better yet, create some object packing layer places multiple git objects into a single encrypted object, but must provide some git object index for lookups into encrypted packed objects.
Homefront was obviously built by xenophobic right-wing American gamers for xenophobic right-wingers American gamers. Ergo, we shouldn't really be giving them the billboard space by discussing them, that said :
If you're a xenophobic right-wing American gamer, what do you most hate? That's right, your ass being regularly smeared by foreigners. I content that Homefront's storyline was optimized fairly perfectly for this demographic :
Iran is U.S. enemy no. 1, but you never see Iranian gamers. I guess Iranians are too busy either protesting their government or trying to learn physics. North Korean gamers are even rarer given their internet restrictions. South Korean gamers are another mater entirely though. Has any xenophobic right-wing American gamer ever beaten any but the youngest n00b South Korean? Seriously!
Homefront's verbal assault on North Korean gammers has several effects : First, South Korea banned the game, ensuring that South Korean players are rare. Also, European and South American gamers will avoid the obviously xenophobic right-wing American bullshit. Ergo, America's xenophobic right-wing gamers will survive longer playing against their own wussy kind. Second, they'll enjoy belittling their most loathed enemy, Korean gamers who routinely whip their ass in real games.
In short, if you just all around suck, then make a game nobody buy losers wants to play. Ain't complex.
We expect the world population to be decreasing by mid century, thanks mostly to the liberation of women in the 2nd & 3rd world.
There is a very real risk that'll lead to serious currency deflation almost everywhere because land, blue chip stocks, blue chip corporate bonds, etc. are all less valuable once everyone's revenues start falling. It might turn out that small caps become the only growth opportunity for investors, chasing mountains of capital into VC funds, etc.
I'd expect the politicians will prevent this by printing more money to buoy up land and stock prices, perhaps even eliminating income tax in favor of inflation.
Umm, last I herd, the requirements for like half the Wall St. jobs were : - PhD in mathematics or physics - lots of programming experience I'm sure you might also get the job with another hard science or engineering degree, so long as you could pass their interviews, which apparently get targets pretty heavily towards mathematical games.
A business degree usually just means your suitable for managing people who couldn't get admitted to your school, wherever that happened to be. I'd imagine finance degree means roughly the same thing.
Economics isn't necessarily the same however, more like studying Theology, i.e. you might've really learned something, but..
Slashdot Mirror
You could more easily & more morally establish some "class action legal defense groups" for people that fit into the same basic class. Or, even easier, simply organize the DIY legal defense framework offering free forms for court filings and such. It's much more likely that all 23k will file some forms that'll cost the plaintiffs thousands in legal fees.
You could alternatively just organize an Anonymous operation to publish the work/home addresses, phones, emails, IPs, etc. for all lawyers involved. In many cases, anonymous would dig up dirt on the lawyers that'd make their lives rather unpleasant, ala cheating husbands and offenses warranting disbarment. In other cases, simply receiving hundreds or thousands of emails telling them what a bad person they were might influence their thinking. In all cases, there would be a significant fear that the bad publicity would drive away unrelated customers and damage their ability to win court cases. And there would be many law firms being hacked and having their clients files posted all over the internet, again damaging their broader business, exposing offenses warranting disbarment, etc.
There isn't any useful president from the mp3.com case because a "music locker" requires that people rip & upload the songs themselves, meaning it'll go into a long legal fight, and google has far more money than the labels.
In fact, if any label gets too uppity, google can simply buy them outright or coerce their owners. Warner Music's entire market cap is only $1.22B, meaning google could easily just buy them outright and terminate the upper management, legal team, etc. All the others are small subsidiaries inside much large companies that might see little benefit in tangling with Google.
I doubt EMI's owner Citigroup would tangle with Google, even though their market cap is 129B. Any bank likes keeping rich people happy. If they did, I'm sure google could launch a hedge fund to poach Citigroup's best quantitative analysis, then let the rest of the financial industry eat them alive. Sony and Vivendi (UMG) have market caps of 29B and 23B, respectively. I'd imagine their less vulnerable to talent poaching than Citigroup too, but you might still threaten some executive and board member positions by working through their larger stock holders.
A cheaper solution might just be threatening to provide lawyers for all the little people they've extorted money from by threatening to sue, a few $40k per year ambulance chasers could drag any label through thousands of expensive lawsuits for years.
Interesting, that seem very odd to me, but maybe I'm not a good judge. I've always had some big project on the go though throughout my life. It was developing my BBS software in High School. Various acceptably sized development projects as summer jobs. University homeworks are obviously minor projects, but often I'd take a grad course that required way more work. And then I launched into working on a classification project during my PhD. And I feel completely lost now that I'm quitting academia for industry but don't yet know what I'll be developing in industry. Alright, thanks for the introspective moment. ;)
It's called the tor "browser bundle" for a reason. You never use your default browser under Tor.
Yeah, end node sniffing must be addressed through https-everywhere or a vpn of course.
Yeah, that's theoretically possible, but highly unlikely for memory leaks. You're point is more valid if you replace "memory leak" by "buffer overrun" or "crypto implementation mistake" since people obviously hunt those down independently.
I'd still take the buffer overrun hunter over the guy who's website is light on code and heavy on photoshop, css, etc. though. Worst case scenario : You've hired a good quality assurance guy for the wrong job, well that'll likely save you money over the long run.
Isn't this old hat? Doesn't everyone ask for a code sample?
I feel however that 'I did this, all by myself!' isn't the best metric.
I'd rather hire the kid who's code sample consists of fixing 5 memory leaks in 5 different open source libraries. He'll write solid code.
I'd rather not hire as a "coder" the kid who's website took him 40 hours in photoshop, several hours configuring Drupal, and another several hours writing a Drupal extension that should've taken him 20 min. He might be more artist than programmer.
In fact, that's a pretty good interview tactic : Ask them in advance to find & fix a memory leak in some open source C library so they can explain it at the interview. Hint : Find a crap library with many leaks.
This.
Wall St. has been giving all the stock broker jobs to geeks.
Advertising jobs are going to geeks.
We might actually create a fairly pleasant world eventually.
There is also the issue that people who don't understand jake shit are being dis-enfranchised, but that might be temporary, i.e. eventually we might create a society in which ignorance of mathematics, science, and programming is widely understood to directly lead to poverty.
Classes are great for teaching "theory" to "practical people" because the "theory oriented guy" teaching the class understands what "trying things" means in his particular domain. I'd imagine you've used some calculous for work on occasion, but presumably you'd never have sat down and just tried things involving integrals.
I'd expect all those system administration courses are designed for people who don't know soo much about computers, but need some elementary networking theory before they'll become remotely competent administrators. If this guy's a developer, then he's likely already seen anything those students would find "theoretical", meaning he's already well set up for "just trying" more practical stuff.
I'd imagine he'd happily attract the trolls early to negotiate a pyramid scheme settlement, i.e. ReadHat will publicly pay but RedHat takes a cut from any future settlements by other victims.
There were also hoards of VoIP companies offering those services for under half the price charged by Skype, although some bundled the in-dial and out-dial. In fact, there are only a very few marketing heavy VoIP providers like Vonage charging more than Skype. The real issues are :
(1) Skype's user experience obliterates every other VoIP provider : Download & run Skype, make account, done. No tweak this setting if you use symmetric NAT. No please pay us first. etc.
(2) Skype has NAT traversal that afaik equals or beats any other VoIP software & provider combo. In fact, they use almost exactly the same NAT traversal tricks, but they may ask other clients to provide TURN (relay) when STUN fails, and maybe their STUN servers are better too. TURN gets expensive if the calls are all free.
(3) Skpye simplifies finding people you know who use Skype. And they've always encouraged people to talk to strangers, making it more likely that your friends already use Skype.
(4) Skype's encryption gives small businesses greater confidence.
If you wish to compete with Skype, you must (a) match them on PTSN price while offering awesome STUN and TURN, (b) match or beat them at friend finding, (c) beat them on encryption, i.e. use an open source client, preferably Zfone, and (d) offer "something more".
I think the logical "something more" might be encrypted friend-to-friend file sharing, perhaps with discussion threads ala facebook's photos. All IM clients offer file transfers, but no popular ones offer file sharing.
There was a nice Frenchman named Joseph-Ignace Guillotine who helped invent kinda the European analog of the U.S.'s 2nd Amendment. There are always issues with what constitutes civil society, but people proposing intellectual slavery should be reminded that less seemingly civil resolutions exist.
Brazil saved aids patients all over the world by breaking the patents on anti-retrovirals. If no country had been willing, then extra-legal lethal force could've very quickly become a civilized response.
I'll be happy if Sweden just fines Apple a few tens of millions because Safari's cookie management feature simply don't work. "Accept cookies : Only form sites I visit" has basically never worked. And cookies you delete using "Show Cookies" aren't actually deleted either.
And that's the whole point!
If ssh had been proprietary like skype, wuala, or your vpn, well we'd never see the problem published.
All crypto products should obviously be open source, that'd cover many VPN solutions. Wuala should be open source for the same reason.
Any cheating you witness inside the U.S. and E.U. is likely endemic of the whole discipline. There are specific political factors massively encouraging cheating and crap publication in some other countries however. In particular, there is a very mindless "paper counting" mentality in China, even ignoring impact factor.
China could greatly reduce this problem by counting eigenfactor instead, but that'd make the central government look bad, as well as penalizing their professors who've been playing their system and/or got their job via family connections. Don't hold your breath!
I know many fine Chinese researchers working in the U.S. but China itself is publishing a river of sewage.
Ain't even that the "dregs" return home but more academic politics inside China. If China wanted, they could greatly improve the situation by considering eigenfactor, instead of simply publication counting. Yet, I doubt they'll do so. That'd require (a) acknowledging that their current publications suck and (b) penalizing all the professors who've either played the Chinese game, including the crappy ones who got their jobs through family connections.
All the stock brokers are now being pulled from MIT & co.'s STEM programs. Aren't you glad knowing the guys making all that money loved science & designing things in High School?
Google & others are making significant progress towards populating marketing with the same crowd too. There is also a lively field of academic business research desperately trying to ensure that STEM majors are more qualified than undergrad business majors.
Sales may take slightly longer though. Sorry, people still love a good bullshit artist.
Humans are clever beasties. Ain't no shortage of clever kids with STEM degrees.
There are likely more different personality types studying in STEM programs of course, perhaps reducing the proportion of Feynmans and Sagans for PBS specials, or replacing them with asses like Venter. We're still seeing top notch research from the young STEM PhDs graduating form top tier universities though.
There are also middle tier universities that graduate some weak PhDs because they've over admitting them for the cheap TA teaching. Yet, all those people move quickly into teaching at your weaker liberal arts collages however. Ergo, they weren't even counted for the statistics being discussed.
All that's peanuts compared with the simple observation that every good professor has more than one good graduate student, that's an exponential function my friend. All those researchers got jobs way back simply because university enrollments were actually growing vaguely exponentially, even back before the Cold War, G.I. bill, etc. All that's finished now. Even if we sent every kid to university, even if all those new students were too stupid to get PhDs, we'd still never create enough professorships for the researchers being produced now.
Academia simply must learn that most people who earn PhDs shouldn't try becoming professors. We're doing exactly that by sending so many STEM grads into finance, business, advertising, etc.
You were silly for ever sing their phone. I'd imagine that /etc/hosts can cure these issues for their laptops.
I'd recommend running an concerted campaign by slashdot based "trolls" to trash the PS4 itself, all it's games, and all game companies that make games for the PS4. Every PS4 related product gets derided mercilessly on Amazon, Review sites, blogs, etc.
Just fyi, I've been absolutely thrilled by Portal 2, clearly the best game produced by anyone for any platform since well Portal, maybe since Starcraft. And it'll never appear on the PS3 or PS4 if Valve is to be believed.
Good point. I guess that's why they make you upload your files rather than skipping uploads who's hash already exists, i.e. they actually compare the files before deduplication, any instant uploads would only be copying your friend's shared files.
Imho, you should use SHA-256 and AES-256 of course, not the SHA-128 and AES-128 used by git and wuala, massively reducing your collision chances. You realize that 2^256 is roughly 10^77, just shy of the popular 4*10^79 to 10^81 rage people like for the number of atoms in the universe. And asymptotically the number pigeons grows quadratically while the number of pigeon holes grows exponentially.
If you use dropbox on truecrypt encrypted containers, then you'll mostly lose dropbox's archival features.
Wuala has an incredibly simply but very clever algorithm for handling data deduplication on the server, along with rudimentary file versioning, while simultaneously handling on encryption on the client.
How you ask? Easy, you encrypt every file using it's own SHA as the AES key, but then you use the new encrypted file's SHA as the DHT index for retrieval. You need both SHA values to access a file of course, but who cares.
There are only three major flaws in Wuala :
- Any final object yields a unique second SHA for the DHT, enabling data deduplication and instantaneous uploads, but also enabling draconian copyright enforcement under the DMCA. Imagine torrentting a movie only for the MPAA to delete it from your private cloud drive!
- It's closed source! wtf?!? Is anyone really stupid enough to trust closed source encryption software these days? How does anyone know they don't secretly copy the original SHA / AES key?
- It's written in Java. Ack, a slow filesystem driver! (Alright, this third comment is pure trolling. I'll admit server side Java isn't that slow anymore, assuming you avoid all that double copy display idiocy.)
I've been considering writing a custom backend for libgit2 that implements this "original SHA as AES key" approach for storing git repositories in some basic DHT. It ain't a direct translation of course. You'd either need to completely forego git compatibility on the local repository by making all object ids into 2*256=512 or 2*512=1024 bit ids. Or, better yet, create some object packing layer places multiple git objects into a single encrypted object, but must provide some git object index for lookups into encrypted packed objects.
Homefront was obviously built by xenophobic right-wing American gamers for xenophobic right-wingers American gamers. Ergo, we shouldn't really be giving them the billboard space by discussing them, that said :
If you're a xenophobic right-wing American gamer, what do you most hate? That's right, your ass being regularly smeared by foreigners. I content that Homefront's storyline was optimized fairly perfectly for this demographic :
Iran is U.S. enemy no. 1, but you never see Iranian gamers. I guess Iranians are too busy either protesting their government or trying to learn physics. North Korean gamers are even rarer given their internet restrictions. South Korean gamers are another mater entirely though. Has any xenophobic right-wing American gamer ever beaten any but the youngest n00b South Korean? Seriously!
Homefront's verbal assault on North Korean gammers has several effects : First, South Korea banned the game, ensuring that South Korean players are rare. Also, European and South American gamers will avoid the obviously xenophobic right-wing American bullshit. Ergo, America's xenophobic right-wing gamers will survive longer playing against their own wussy kind. Second, they'll enjoy belittling their most loathed enemy, Korean gamers who routinely whip their ass in real games.
In short, if you just all around suck, then make a game nobody buy losers wants to play. Ain't complex.
We expect the world population to be decreasing by mid century, thanks mostly to the liberation of women in the 2nd & 3rd world.
There is a very real risk that'll lead to serious currency deflation almost everywhere because land, blue chip stocks, blue chip corporate bonds, etc. are all less valuable once everyone's revenues start falling. It might turn out that small caps become the only growth opportunity for investors, chasing mountains of capital into VC funds, etc.
I'd expect the politicians will prevent this by printing more money to buoy up land and stock prices, perhaps even eliminating income tax in favor of inflation.
Umm, last I herd, the requirements for like half the Wall St. jobs were :
- PhD in mathematics or physics
- lots of programming experience
I'm sure you might also get the job with another hard science or engineering degree, so long as you could pass their interviews, which apparently get targets pretty heavily towards mathematical games.
A business degree usually just means your suitable for managing people who couldn't get admitted to your school, wherever that happened to be. I'd imagine finance degree means roughly the same thing.
Economics isn't necessarily the same however, more like studying Theology, i.e. you might've really learned something, but..