Obviously you haven't been to the Bethesda forums lately.
Seems like half the quests have quest-breaking bugs in them, the quest-givers are randomly killed off by rampaging dragons in the middle of missions or are killed by "other" quests that pop enemies up near quest givers (one of them comes to mind during the mage's guild story arc in nearby Winterhold). There are a whole host of quests that get un-droppable items "stuck" in inventory permanently, using up precious carrying capacity.
And then there are the plethora of graphical and major AI glitches that have plagued the Xbox360 and PS3 ports - Dragons flying backwards, getting stuck in mountains, causing bugs all over. Or, required-pickup quest items that get knocked around during boss fights by "explosions" (spells, dead summons, the breath weapon, etc) and fall through the game's geometry, thus breaking the quests in that way.
Sure, on the PC you can just "cheat" your way in using console commands to fix it. But you have no luck on the consoles that way, for console players the game is just fucking buggy as hell and broken.
Not the VGA awards - just the holiday shopping cycle in general. Companies are desperate to make their product the "hot christmas gift title", because it increases sales - shipping a buggy product is no big deal to them in the modern "ship now, patch later" ecosystem of Xbox Live, PC, and PS3. Wii isn't much better, sure there's no "ship now patch later", there's just "ship now and if there's a game breaking bug, too fucking bad" like we saw with Metroid: Other M.
Maybe it's the rush of deadlines to get product out for the holidays?
For instance, Bethesda. Skyrim comes out, they obviously should have taken a couple more months to bug-test given everything that's being found in the game constantly breaking - but they wanted it out early November so they could get the holiday sales.
Pilots work out...a lot. A hell of a lot. They do a lot of strength exercises, including push-presses and other exercises that work the back, because in the course of these exercises they ALSO end up building up their legs. As a method of fighting black-out, they tense their legs to tighten the muscles and help push air up into their upper body (away from where it tends to go during positive high-g manuvers). Yes, there is the flight suit that squeezes them as well, but every bit counts. And since the ring that starts the emergency system is forward and beneath the pilot, that means that they would be using their back to pull against that 40-lb resistance...
Actually no, they're expected to twist and turn to reach the ring while held in place by an insanely tight harness. This ain't no Cessna. Further, they're then expected to pull the ring in a direction away from their body - it's stupidly designed in the most un-ergonomic way possible.
After a minute without air? That's what it feels like to be working out hard...and since he wouldn't have been exercising vigorously during that minute, he'd have had plenty of glucose on hand, so his muscles could easily have worked using anaerobic respiration long enough for one pull of a ring.
A minute without air? I have an idea. We put a stopwatch on you and make you hold your breath while sitting in a chair. I'll put a 40-lb weight with a pop-tab on top under the chair between your legs and we'll see if you can manage to reach down, find it, then lift it a couple inches after you hold your breath an entire minute. If you're even awake still. And that test STILL won't account for the vertigo and g-forces involved in the dive and attempting a dive recovery.
Furthermore, how is this supposed to be harder based on how fast you're moving? I fly in airplanes all the time, and I don't notice that it gets harder to lift things or move around based on how fast or slow the plane flies.
And I doubt that you, Cessna-boy, even get CLOSE to the g-forces involved in the kind of maneuvers done by military pilots, especially those trying to pull out of a dive.
And even if all of this WAS a tall order, that's exactly what fighter pilots are trained for; that's why so few people who apply are accepted, and why so few who are accepted make the grade in training.
Which is why, when they get into the air, they should be confident that someone has fucking sanity-checked the design of the safety features aboard the aircraft. Clearly, in this case, that was NOT done.
Actually, going after the Korean DVD vendor would be a better place to start. He's actually making a profit from criminal activity.
Going after the warehouse that's making the DVDs the Korean is selling is an even BETTER proposal. Hell, we have DVD Sniffing Dogs to check cargo containers for undeclared shipments of bootleg DVDs that come from overseas (china, mostly).
Meanwhile, go to Hong Kong or most places in South America (Brazil's particularly bad for it) and you won't find a single legitimate console or game in stores. What you will find is a shop where they sell you a modchipped console, then you bring a box to the guy at the counter who nods, goes into the back, and comes back 5 minutes later with a burned copy of whatever disc you indicated; if it's a PC disc, there'll probably be a no-cd crack included on the disc. When the local government shuts these guys down, you can be sure that it's not because they broke the law, but because they didn't make their bribery payments to the right guy on time.
A generic is, by definition, a medication that has the same exact active component.
Binders and coatings can make a huge difference.
Often too, the "Generic" in the term most often used for these programs is an earlier formulation that's gone out of patent (see the revolving door "we changed it just enough to re-patent it" scam that so many drug companies come up with). Depending on how it's produced, the newly "generic" older formulation may have different effects for different individuals, or may have different effectiveness for different symptoms/diseases based on dosage timing or minor chemical differences.
"Hey, I constantly forget my password. I demand, that we don't use access control anymore. At home in my windows pc I don't need to login either".
I worked for a while in education. You have NO idea how often that exact line of questioning came up.
When it comes to a Principal, Superintendent, or Dean who's demanding that their newly purchased laptop "had better not have any fucking password crap on it", that's when the IT department starts to cry.
Agreed - the fault is on Google for not finding a better way to handle situations like this.
There are any number of ways they could have fixed the situation, or allowed for this sort of use with parental approval; instead, they went for the least common denominator "fuck you kid, come back when you're 18."
Yes but the policy was put in place during a time when the Republicans controlled 100% of the federal legislative line (House, Senate, Congress) and were screwing with the funding that comes from Medicaid/Medicare, forcing states to try to do precisely this.
And it's not just Washington state, this is happening across the nation. Where I live, public medical care (which my grandmother is on) REFUSES to pay for a prescribed non-generic medication if there is a "generic alternative" available, even if her doctor's specifically prescribed the non-generic due to previous reactions to the generic or the generic not being effective in the patient's case.
So yes, I blame the Republicans. They were in charge federally, they're the ones on the "cut costs cut costs cut costs we don't give a fuck about human lives" bandwagon. You think what Washington State has right now is bad, imagine what it'll be like when these retarded motherfuckers pass something like the "Ryan Plan" where everyone has to hunt for private insurance and hope to god that they don't have a preexisting condition that'll prevent them from getting it.
I can't believe this got modded down already - the idea of trying to hold bad news for a day when the media won't be looking is a longstanding trend. West Wing even referred to the "friday trash day" theory, where the White House would let little stories they wanted buried in a rush on fridays, giving them a scant few column inches on a day when nobody pays attention to the news anyways, forgotten by Monday.
I can completely believe that the SOPA pushers would try to schedule a vote for a day when "something else" has media attention.
Yes, I'm sure there is a giant conspiracy to prevent your aunt from voting. I don't think it takes 5 years to establish state residency anywhere.
Fuck you, asshole. The military shipped them around every year and a half, and then in 3 states, she had to fight with them over residency because the Republicans running voter registration were trying to claim that spouses living on military base property were not "in the state" for purposes of residency.
If it's a giant Republican conspiracy, then why did Congress pass a law supporting absentee military ballots that Obama has been slow to implement?
Let's read your article, shall we you fucking liar? First point: it's a 2009 law - e.g. BEFORE the Republicans took over Congress. So it'd be the DEMOCRATS trying to enfranchise the military. Interesting.
Second point: They're comparing 2008 numbers (a Presidential election year) to 2010 numbers (an off year), but comparing by "percentage of military personnel." For reference comparison, in 2008, voter turnout in the US as a whole was 56.8%, while in 2010, it was only 37.8% - while at the same time, military participation (as a "percentage of eligible") declined from 5.5% to 4.6% VOTING ABSENTEE; the numbers by your dishonest "study" fail to account for military personnel attempting to vote in person stationed in the USA, and yes, most US military personnel are stationed at home. So if anything, Military absentee voting under the DEMOCRAT-passed MOVE Act beat the odds and didn't decrease as much as the national average, despite the transition between a Presidential election year and an off year.
Now kindly pull your head out of your ass and stop quoting dishonest fucking right wing stooges.
Actually, YES. Military veterans who can't operate a car due to blinding or paralysis or leg amputation, for starters. Republicans have also been on the forefront of trying to get as many absentee military ballots thrown out as possible, since the rank-and-file are paid shit wages thanks to the machinations of those same Republicans and tend, being poor and supporting families on wages that require public assistance (fully 40% of the US military families are so poor they qualify for food stamps!), to vote Democrat.
Oh, and let's not forget the machinations of Republicans trying to make it as difficult as possible for military spouses to vote in the state they live in when their spouse is shipped to another "home base" in another state. My aunt was disenfranchised by the lying Republican assholes for 5 years due to all that crap.
Republicans like to play a good verbal game of claiming to "support the troops", but they don't mean a word of it.
VA cards are FEDERALLY issued. But that shouldn't matter, apparently, if your goal (like many Republicans) is to disenfranchise people who serve/served their country honorably in the military.
Indeed, a cursory google search on the terms "Indiana 2008 voter fraud" shows that... oh hey, not a SINGLE verifiable or reputable news source went anywhere near this nonsensical lie of a story.
A lot of right-wing nutcase blogs, and of course that fraudulent liar Breitbart (known mostly for faking videos himself) all over it. And if we follow your link we find they are... ah, yes. "The New American", front group for those rabid nutwingers the John Birch Society.
And we wonder why the US can't manage to get 50% turnout even in a presidential election year?
In Texas, student ID cards are no longer be valid for voting; neither are ID cards issued by the federal Veterans Administration. All those students and war vets need to do is go buy a gun: concealed weapons permits are acceptable at the polls.
Republicans all sing from the same hymnal on this one: voting must be tightly controlled to prevent fraud. Never mind that there is no fraud. Indeed, the Brennan Center found that voter fraud is so "exceedingly rare" that "one is more likely to be struck by lightning than to commit voter fraud." Mickey Mouse was not allowed to register. Paul Newman did not vote from beyond the grave. Hordes of undocumented Mexicans have not stuffed ballot boxes (though a great many new, legal Latino voters have registered in Florida, Texas and other large states).
But why let the facts get in the way of rigging an election?
The difference is whether you have a workable, sustainable, working system or a broken, exploitable system.
Yahoo Answers's system is pretty clearly exploitable. Want to get someone banned? 6 dummy accounts will do the trick - their "ban process" automatically bans someone after 6 complaints. Amazon has some funny reviews, some funnier ones, but more importantly, they actually have humans check on complaints if there's an indication that stuff indicated here is going on.
The uglier truth is that for many sites - slashdot included - the real exploit is held by people who can do precisely what TFA's authors describe: running hundreds of accounts, commanding click-up or click-down votes through them or (in the case of Slashdot) farming for mod points. Evolving Slashdot policy has actually made this worse, not better, for three reasons I'll crib from an earlier thread:
The worst part? You can't ever see who downmodded. Sometimes you can see the reasons, but the modpoint harvesters get wise to the tricks - currently, you'll see the majority of modpoint harvesters downmodding as "Offtopic" and "Overrated" because those didn't go through the metamod system. Although, come to think of it, I don't think I've seen a metamod nag in 3 months... do they even have that system any more?
For my reality: DHL > UPS = FedEx > USPS. UPS and FedEx are interchangeable, I've had the same issues (drivers not leaving attempted delivery tags, even missing packages because they were too fucking lazy to leave a contact tag for a package that required signature) with both.
UPS and FedEx are also MASTERS of lying out their asses, either pushing the doorbell once and running straight for the goddamn truck, or not knocking/ringing at all and just claiming they "attempted delivery" even if they never came near your door, relying on home delivery recipients to have the tracking number and be checking the tracking website every fucking day even if it's something that was pre-ordered a while ago or if it's something that they might not have known was coming (like a surprise birthday or christmas gift!).
It is 10:30 and I can punch up UPS or FedEx online and get someone out here by noon too! Noon today, that is.
I wonder where you work. Where I work, if I call up UPS or FedEx or go into their system online (makes no difference) today, I'll be lucky to get someone out here by thursday to pick the damn thing up even if we paid for overnight - the only way to get true "overnight" is to take it direct to the central depot downtown as an "overnight" from one other suburb branches sits around in the suburb depot all night before they truck it to the central depot in the morning.
I have to second those who've defended DHL on this thread, I really miss having them around, the service I got from them was top-notch while the UPS and FedEx are horribly incompetent and incredibly rude.
I would agree to a requirement that no candidate be allowed to take office unless they had garnered a vote count equal to (50% + 1) of the registered, eligible voters for that election.
If only 49% of the people voted in the election, obviously 51% of them wanted "None Of The Above."
See above, where I said, and I quote, "I don't give a crap about the warranty." Typical Sony fanboi troll, reading comprehension below kindergarten level.
Thats a kind-of where you're wrong, as much as I hate to admit Sony has a point.
What point might that be?
If you want to connect the hardware to their networks, they should be allowed to stop you running custom code.
I don't give a flying FUCK about their networks. Since the Sony break-in, I've had my box firewalled off from their fucking network, and it's never going near them again.
Also, although probably not the case now, but perhaps when it was first released they would have sold the hardware at a loss based on the fact that barring any illegal activity, the only way you can use the hardware is to purchase their 99% profit margin games.
I fail to see where shitty planning on their part constitutes an obligation on my part to buy ANYTHING from them. I bought a piece of hardware. If they sold it at a loss, and I don't buy "enough" games from them to make up for it, then they don't have enough games worth buying. There is no contractual obligation for me to buy anything else from them.
Phone again fall in to the same category. Buggy firmware could cause big problems to their networks, so restricting the ability to load custom firmware is in their best interests.
And oddly enough, with phones, the FTC already ruled that the benefit to consumers to open the phones OUTWEIGHS the benefit to the phone carriers to "secure their networks" in that sense. So you're already wrong.
When you buy such a device, you are buying hardware, as well as a license to use the included software or firmware often under the condition that the software not be modified by the end user. This is where many of the physical good analogies break down.
Thus, it should be my RIGHT to install an open source version of software, any software OS or package, that runs on the device.
And it should be CRIMINAL behavior on the part of the asshat corporations, to interfere with this right.
At the same time, I bought *HARDWARE*. Sony shouldn't be able to tell me that I can't load custom firmware on it with the ability to run Linux, for example. The PS3 would make a GREAT media center to stream from my TV recording box, save that I can't load a custom firmware package for Linux AND keep the ability to run current games.
I only wish we could get it a step further and actually make it illegal for companies like the phone companies to do what they've done - sure it's "legal" to root your phone, but they keep trying to make it *impossible* by fucking with the shipped/official firmware.
Slashdot Mirror
Whats broke?
Obviously you haven't been to the Bethesda forums lately.
Seems like half the quests have quest-breaking bugs in them, the quest-givers are randomly killed off by rampaging dragons in the middle of missions or are killed by "other" quests that pop enemies up near quest givers (one of them comes to mind during the mage's guild story arc in nearby Winterhold). There are a whole host of quests that get un-droppable items "stuck" in inventory permanently, using up precious carrying capacity.
And then there are the plethora of graphical and major AI glitches that have plagued the Xbox360 and PS3 ports - Dragons flying backwards, getting stuck in mountains, causing bugs all over. Or, required-pickup quest items that get knocked around during boss fights by "explosions" (spells, dead summons, the breath weapon, etc) and fall through the game's geometry, thus breaking the quests in that way.
Sure, on the PC you can just "cheat" your way in using console commands to fix it. But you have no luck on the consoles that way, for console players the game is just fucking buggy as hell and broken.
Not the VGA awards - just the holiday shopping cycle in general. Companies are desperate to make their product the "hot christmas gift title", because it increases sales - shipping a buggy product is no big deal to them in the modern "ship now, patch later" ecosystem of Xbox Live, PC, and PS3. Wii isn't much better, sure there's no "ship now patch later", there's just "ship now and if there's a game breaking bug, too fucking bad" like we saw with Metroid: Other M.
Maybe it's the rush of deadlines to get product out for the holidays?
For instance, Bethesda. Skyrim comes out, they obviously should have taken a couple more months to bug-test given everything that's being found in the game constantly breaking - but they wanted it out early November so they could get the holiday sales.
Oh for fuck's sake.
Pilots work out...a lot. A hell of a lot. They do a lot of strength exercises, including push-presses and other exercises that work the back, because in the course of these exercises they ALSO end up building up their legs. As a method of fighting black-out, they tense their legs to tighten the muscles and help push air up into their upper body (away from where it tends to go during positive high-g manuvers). Yes, there is the flight suit that squeezes them as well, but every bit counts. And since the ring that starts the emergency system is forward and beneath the pilot, that means that they would be using their back to pull against that 40-lb resistance...
Actually no, they're expected to twist and turn to reach the ring while held in place by an insanely tight harness. This ain't no Cessna. Further, they're then expected to pull the ring in a direction away from their body - it's stupidly designed in the most un-ergonomic way possible.
After a minute without air? That's what it feels like to be working out hard...and since he wouldn't have been exercising vigorously during that minute, he'd have had plenty of glucose on hand, so his muscles could easily have worked using anaerobic respiration long enough for one pull of a ring.
A minute without air? I have an idea. We put a stopwatch on you and make you hold your breath while sitting in a chair. I'll put a 40-lb weight with a pop-tab on top under the chair between your legs and we'll see if you can manage to reach down, find it, then lift it a couple inches after you hold your breath an entire minute. If you're even awake still. And that test STILL won't account for the vertigo and g-forces involved in the dive and attempting a dive recovery.
Furthermore, how is this supposed to be harder based on how fast you're moving? I fly in airplanes all the time, and I don't notice that it gets harder to lift things or move around based on how fast or slow the plane flies.
And I doubt that you, Cessna-boy, even get CLOSE to the g-forces involved in the kind of maneuvers done by military pilots, especially those trying to pull out of a dive.
And even if all of this WAS a tall order, that's exactly what fighter pilots are trained for; that's why so few people who apply are accepted, and why so few who are accepted make the grade in training.
Which is why, when they get into the air, they should be confident that someone has fucking sanity-checked the design of the safety features aboard the aircraft. Clearly, in this case, that was NOT done.
Actually, going after the Korean DVD vendor would be a better place to start. He's actually making a profit from criminal activity.
Going after the warehouse that's making the DVDs the Korean is selling is an even BETTER proposal. Hell, we have DVD Sniffing Dogs to check cargo containers for undeclared shipments of bootleg DVDs that come from overseas (china, mostly).
Meanwhile, go to Hong Kong or most places in South America (Brazil's particularly bad for it) and you won't find a single legitimate console or game in stores. What you will find is a shop where they sell you a modchipped console, then you bring a box to the guy at the counter who nods, goes into the back, and comes back 5 minutes later with a burned copy of whatever disc you indicated; if it's a PC disc, there'll probably be a no-cd crack included on the disc. When the local government shuts these guys down, you can be sure that it's not because they broke the law, but because they didn't make their bribery payments to the right guy on time.
A generic is, by definition, a medication that has the same exact active component.
Binders and coatings can make a huge difference.
Often too, the "Generic" in the term most often used for these programs is an earlier formulation that's gone out of patent (see the revolving door "we changed it just enough to re-patent it" scam that so many drug companies come up with). Depending on how it's produced, the newly "generic" older formulation may have different effects for different individuals, or may have different effectiveness for different symptoms/diseases based on dosage timing or minor chemical differences.
"Hey, I constantly forget my password. I demand, that we don't use access control anymore. At home in my windows pc I don't need to login either".
I worked for a while in education. You have NO idea how often that exact line of questioning came up.
When it comes to a Principal, Superintendent, or Dean who's demanding that their newly purchased laptop "had better not have any fucking password crap on it", that's when the IT department starts to cry.
Agreed - the fault is on Google for not finding a better way to handle situations like this.
There are any number of ways they could have fixed the situation, or allowed for this sort of use with parental approval; instead, they went for the least common denominator "fuck you kid, come back when you're 18."
Yes but the policy was put in place during a time when the Republicans controlled 100% of the federal legislative line (House, Senate, Congress) and were screwing with the funding that comes from Medicaid/Medicare, forcing states to try to do precisely this.
And it's not just Washington state, this is happening across the nation. Where I live, public medical care (which my grandmother is on) REFUSES to pay for a prescribed non-generic medication if there is a "generic alternative" available, even if her doctor's specifically prescribed the non-generic due to previous reactions to the generic or the generic not being effective in the patient's case.
So yes, I blame the Republicans. They were in charge federally, they're the ones on the "cut costs cut costs cut costs we don't give a fuck about human lives" bandwagon. You think what Washington State has right now is bad, imagine what it'll be like when these retarded motherfuckers pass something like the "Ryan Plan" where everyone has to hunt for private insurance and hope to god that they don't have a preexisting condition that'll prevent them from getting it.
I can't believe this got modded down already - the idea of trying to hold bad news for a day when the media won't be looking is a longstanding trend. West Wing even referred to the "friday trash day" theory, where the White House would let little stories they wanted buried in a rush on fridays, giving them a scant few column inches on a day when nobody pays attention to the news anyways, forgotten by Monday.
I can completely believe that the SOPA pushers would try to schedule a vote for a day when "something else" has media attention.
Yes, I'm sure there is a giant conspiracy to prevent your aunt from voting. I don't think it takes 5 years to establish state residency anywhere.
Fuck you, asshole. The military shipped them around every year and a half, and then in 3 states, she had to fight with them over residency because the Republicans running voter registration were trying to claim that spouses living on military base property were not "in the state" for purposes of residency.
If it's a giant Republican conspiracy, then why did Congress pass a law supporting absentee military ballots that Obama has been slow to implement?
Let's read your article, shall we you fucking liar? First point: it's a 2009 law - e.g. BEFORE the Republicans took over Congress. So it'd be the DEMOCRATS trying to enfranchise the military. Interesting.
Second point: They're comparing 2008 numbers (a Presidential election year) to 2010 numbers (an off year), but comparing by "percentage of military personnel." For reference comparison, in 2008, voter turnout in the US as a whole was 56.8%, while in 2010, it was only 37.8% - while at the same time, military participation (as a "percentage of eligible") declined from 5.5% to 4.6% VOTING ABSENTEE; the numbers by your dishonest "study" fail to account for military personnel attempting to vote in person stationed in the USA, and yes, most US military personnel are stationed at home. So if anything, Military absentee voting under the DEMOCRAT-passed MOVE Act beat the odds and didn't decrease as much as the national average, despite the transition between a Presidential election year and an off year.
Now kindly pull your head out of your ass and stop quoting dishonest fucking right wing stooges.
Actually, YES. Military veterans who can't operate a car due to blinding or paralysis or leg amputation, for starters. Republicans have also been on the forefront of trying to get as many absentee military ballots thrown out as possible, since the rank-and-file are paid shit wages thanks to the machinations of those same Republicans and tend, being poor and supporting families on wages that require public assistance (fully 40% of the US military families are so poor they qualify for food stamps!), to vote Democrat.
Oh, and let's not forget the machinations of Republicans trying to make it as difficult as possible for military spouses to vote in the state they live in when their spouse is shipped to another "home base" in another state. My aunt was disenfranchised by the lying Republican assholes for 5 years due to all that crap.
Republicans like to play a good verbal game of claiming to "support the troops", but they don't mean a word of it.
VA cards are FEDERALLY issued. But that shouldn't matter, apparently, if your goal (like many Republicans) is to disenfranchise people who serve/served their country honorably in the military.
Indeed, a cursory google search on the terms "Indiana 2008 voter fraud" shows that... oh hey, not a SINGLE verifiable or reputable news source went anywhere near this nonsensical lie of a story.
A lot of right-wing nutcase blogs, and of course that fraudulent liar Breitbart (known mostly for faking videos himself) all over it. And if we follow your link we find they are... ah, yes. "The New American", front group for those rabid nutwingers the John Birch Society.
In the US, they just stop you from voting if you are in a group likely to vote the wrong way.
And we wonder why the US can't manage to get 50% turnout even in a presidential election year?
In Texas, student ID cards are no longer be valid for voting; neither are ID cards issued by the federal Veterans Administration. All those students and war vets need to do is go buy a gun: concealed weapons permits are acceptable at the polls.
Republicans all sing from the same hymnal on this one: voting must be tightly controlled to prevent fraud. Never mind that there is no fraud. Indeed, the Brennan Center found that voter fraud is so "exceedingly rare" that "one is more likely to be struck by lightning than to commit voter fraud." Mickey Mouse was not allowed to register. Paul Newman did not vote from beyond the grave. Hordes of undocumented Mexicans have not stuffed ballot boxes (though a great many new, legal Latino voters have registered in Florida, Texas and other large states).
But why let the facts get in the way of rigging an election?
The difference is whether you have a workable, sustainable, working system or a broken, exploitable system.
Yahoo Answers's system is pretty clearly exploitable. Want to get someone banned? 6 dummy accounts will do the trick - their "ban process" automatically bans someone after 6 complaints. Amazon has some funny reviews, some funnier ones, but more importantly, they actually have humans check on complaints if there's an indication that stuff indicated here is going on.
The uglier truth is that for many sites - slashdot included - the real exploit is held by people who can do precisely what TFA's authors describe: running hundreds of accounts, commanding click-up or click-down votes through them or (in the case of Slashdot) farming for mod points. Evolving Slashdot policy has actually made this worse, not better, for three reasons I'll crib from an earlier thread:
#1 - The best posters never moderate. They're involved in discussions, and you can never moderate AND post in the same thread.
#2 - It's too easy for the modpoint-harvesters to attack someone's karma; you can go into people's posting history as far as you want, and downmod weeks-old posts for no reason other than to bury karma.
#3 - The hidden gem: Slashdot implemented something akin to Yahoo's completely retarded "auto ban" function. To wit: "Also, if a single user is moderated down several times in a short time frame, a temporary ban will be imposed on that user... a cooling off period if you will. It lasts for 72 hours, or more for users who have posted a ton." The end result here is that the modpoint harvesters have been given a weapon - they control a "ban button" with which to attack not only the karma of their targets, but the posting rights of their targets.
The worst part? You can't ever see who downmodded. Sometimes you can see the reasons, but the modpoint harvesters get wise to the tricks - currently, you'll see the majority of modpoint harvesters downmodding as "Offtopic" and "Overrated" because those didn't go through the metamod system. Although, come to think of it, I don't think I've seen a metamod nag in 3 months... do they even have that system any more?
For my reality: DHL > UPS = FedEx > USPS. UPS and FedEx are interchangeable, I've had the same issues (drivers not leaving attempted delivery tags, even missing packages because they were too fucking lazy to leave a contact tag for a package that required signature) with both.
UPS and FedEx are also MASTERS of lying out their asses, either pushing the doorbell once and running straight for the goddamn truck, or not knocking/ringing at all and just claiming they "attempted delivery" even if they never came near your door, relying on home delivery recipients to have the tracking number and be checking the tracking website every fucking day even if it's something that was pre-ordered a while ago or if it's something that they might not have known was coming (like a surprise birthday or christmas gift!).
It is 10:30 and I can punch up UPS or FedEx online and get someone out here by noon too! Noon today, that is.
I wonder where you work. Where I work, if I call up UPS or FedEx or go into their system online (makes no difference) today, I'll be lucky to get someone out here by thursday to pick the damn thing up even if we paid for overnight - the only way to get true "overnight" is to take it direct to the central depot downtown as an "overnight" from one other suburb branches sits around in the suburb depot all night before they truck it to the central depot in the morning.
I have to second those who've defended DHL on this thread, I really miss having them around, the service I got from them was top-notch while the UPS and FedEx are horribly incompetent and incredibly rude.
You don't send anyone. You tell the first two to piss off because they both lost, and then hold another election.
I would agree to a requirement that no candidate be allowed to take office unless they had garnered a vote count equal to (50% + 1) of the registered, eligible voters for that election.
If only 49% of the people voted in the election, obviously 51% of them wanted "None Of The Above."
See above, where I said, and I quote, "I don't give a crap about the warranty." Typical Sony fanboi troll, reading comprehension below kindergarten level.
Thats a kind-of where you're wrong, as much as I hate to admit Sony has a point.
What point might that be?
If you want to connect the hardware to their networks, they should be allowed to stop you running custom code.
I don't give a flying FUCK about their networks. Since the Sony break-in, I've had my box firewalled off from their fucking network, and it's never going near them again.
Also, although probably not the case now, but perhaps when it was first released they would have sold the hardware at a loss based on the fact that barring any illegal activity, the only way you can use the hardware is to purchase their 99% profit margin games.
I fail to see where shitty planning on their part constitutes an obligation on my part to buy ANYTHING from them. I bought a piece of hardware. If they sold it at a loss, and I don't buy "enough" games from them to make up for it, then they don't have enough games worth buying. There is no contractual obligation for me to buy anything else from them.
Phone again fall in to the same category. Buggy firmware could cause big problems to their networks, so restricting the ability to load custom firmware is in their best interests.
And oddly enough, with phones, the FTC already ruled that the benefit to consumers to open the phones OUTWEIGHS the benefit to the phone carriers to "secure their networks" in that sense. So you're already wrong.
When you buy such a device, you are buying hardware, as well as a license to use the included software or firmware often under the condition that the software not be modified by the end user. This is where many of the physical good analogies break down.
Thus, it should be my RIGHT to install an open source version of software, any software OS or package, that runs on the device.
And it should be CRIMINAL behavior on the part of the asshat corporations, to interfere with this right.
I don't give a crap about the warranty.
At the same time, I bought *HARDWARE*. Sony shouldn't be able to tell me that I can't load custom firmware on it with the ability to run Linux, for example. The PS3 would make a GREAT media center to stream from my TV recording box, save that I can't load a custom firmware package for Linux AND keep the ability to run current games.
I only wish we could get it a step further and actually make it illegal for companies like the phone companies to do what they've done - sure it's "legal" to root your phone, but they keep trying to make it *impossible* by fucking with the shipped/official firmware.
I think that brainless MBA down the hallway from me just jizzed his pants because he read your post and thought those were actual buzzwords.