Who in New York City is making this much money doing tech work? Seriously, I'm curious here. Last I checked the going rate seemed to be $50 to $80, maybe even less. If we're talking consulting work, I could see the rate being $100/hr, but otherwise paying that much to a tech for a normal week of time (I'm assuming 40 hours here) seems criminally inefficent, especially if we're talking about the jobs that are outsourced the most (ie. helpdesk). Of course, if I'm wrong on that, great! I look forward to saving up to buy my Manhattan apartment.
When Marx made that statement, he was refering to Religion as a tool used by the bourgeois to keep the proletarians blind to serious issues of the day. This is the *entire* quote:
"Religious suffering is, at one and the same time, the expression of real suffering and a protest against real suffering. Religion is the sigh of the oppressed creature, the heart of a heartless world, and the soul of soulless conditions. It is the opium of the people."
It's no longer on the current official website for John Kerry, but one of the issues he had a stance for was about copyright, in which he stated that he would vigorously defend America's copyright system against piracy. Taken directly from his website back in Feburary --
* Copyright-Based Industries Are Critical to Economic Growth: Products of the mind from America's scientists, engineers, computer programmers have little value without intellectual property protections. Copyright based industries alone now account for nearly 6% of all jobs in America and 7.75 % of GDP. These industries are in jeopardy because of the Bush Administration's failure to enforce international treaties to protect America's creative community from piracy.
* Stop Intellectual Piracy: The Office of the U.S. Trade Representative estimates that losses theft of U.S. intellectual property in 51 foreign countries total $9.7 billion. In China alone we lose $1.8 billion to piracy. Yet even where we have strong agreements, piracy remains a major problem due to a failure to fully implement the TRIPS agreement and an unwillingness or inability to crack down on the problem. A Kerry Administration will take theft of the jobs of America's creative workforce a trade and foreign policy priority.
If you'd like to see the website yourself, it's right here:
Sure it doesn't say anything about copyright/piracy in the US, but you can guage his opinion on copyright from those statements. I don't think his stance on copyright has changed, and he would most likely support the DMCA, if not strengthen it further.
I recently installed Fedora Core 2 on a computer alongside Windows 2000 and had no trouble dual booting.
That particular bug has been seen more often with the Test releases of Fedora Core, as should be expected. If it does happen to you, the problem can be easily fixed by running fixmbr in Recovery Console for 2000/XP.
Yeah, that's right. If its a signal comming into your computer over the Internet, there's nothing that says you can't block the port it comes into, or create a packet filtering system that searches for suspicious packets containing instructions to send massive voltages through your computer.
If you outlaw guns, only outlaws will have guns. The same thing can be said for this crap that Hatch is proposing. The people who are perpetuating the sharing MP3s, videos, videogames, and software will not "learn their lesson" as Hatch suggested, but quite a few innocent downloaders will, possibly at the expense of little over a thousand dollars.
This is not a problem that can be solved by people whom have little understanding of the way the Internet works.
It also decides what games we'll ever see. I don't know if you've heard about this, but Konami of Europe has decided to deny all of Europe Suikoden 3 because they felt it wouldn't make a profit for them.
Also, Suikoden 3 was pulled from the shelves in the states here as well. Konami has yet to comment on that, but I wouldn't rule out that Konami of America agreed with Konami of Europe about the profitability issue.
Things like this frustrate me to no end, because these are good games, and much more fun to play (at least for me) than some of the crap that's
being pushed out on the market, but time and time again the all mighty dollar will forever get in the way. But eh, it's a business, so I guess it's to be expected.
The ironic thing is that if an independent group ever translated Suikoden 3 into German/French/Italian and released it over there, Konami would shut them down faster than they could blink, crying "Theft! We're loosing money!" all the way, but eh, it's a business.
I think it can be argued either way about whether this person is a bitter gamer or trying to air how Sony views its consumers, but I've noticed an interesting parallel, one that seems to exist in all online gaming communities, and that is the existence of classes. You have three, the people in charge, the middlemen, and the players. The people in charge are often inaccessible, so their motives cannot be gauged, yet their actions can. The players see these actions and automatically assume the worst (because without knowing the reasoning behind the actions, loosing something you worked really hard on can make you angry), so you have the players holding contempt for the people in charge (i.e. Sony). The middlemen are like middle management, they report to the people in charge, and to the players, given only enough power to do their task, but never enough to resolve community issues. These are the people who would usually communicate with the players, and when the players see that there is nothing the middlemen can do, it only increases their frustration towards the leadership in general.
Maybe it's just me, but I see this all the time on Muds. Just replace Sony with The Administration, the GM volunteers with Wizards, and the players with...well players. I've been all three on many muds before, and I've seen this same story over and over again. There is always grief between the players and the administration, and both groups hold, at the least, a certain disrespect for the other. The players view the Administration as not caring for their needs, and the Administration views the players as needy children who will bite your head off if you don't do exactly what they say. The wizards are, of course, caught in the middle, as always.
The other parallel I see is the willingness of the players to take the abuse they are dealt from this system. Obviously, they are powerless to do anything about the situation they are in, aside from leaving, yet they choose to hold their abusers in contempt, and I agree, the only reason they do this is because they are addicted to that which they hate.
My question is why pay Sony $21/mo when you can just receive that kind of treatment for free on a MUD?
As a side note, the nerfing issue seems to fall into a documented prediction of failing Muds:
http://imaginaryrealities.imaginary.com:8080/volum e3/issue9/destroy.html
I admit not playing Everquest, but to those who do, take a look at that article and see if you can spot more of the symptoms written there.
Does anyone else notice how this article seems to think that sex/violence == a mature game == a good game? I mean, sure, the content could probably rate it an NC-17 rating, but does that necessarily mean the game is worth the money you pay for it?
What about a game like Final Fantasy Tactics, and how it portrayed the brutality of social rank, among other issues (eh, that might be a bad example)? Or what about a series like Arc the Lad, a trilogy of games that asks the question: How far will humanity go in their pursuit of power and knowledge?
I suppose I could pose the question of the maturity of these games, given the fact that they don't portray "mature content" in a way that GTA does, but a better question would be what will happen to the production of games like these if the industry hops on the GTA Bandwagon?
I imagine they'd do this by using tools much like
nslookup to return a domain based on IP address.
While this might stop your average computer user
(and even that would be questionable given how
many people trade movies), it won't stop people
who run servers and write their own Resource Records. At the most, the MPAA would reduce the
distribution of movies to those who have servers.
I see this as a problem for users of Windows XP, as well as anyone who decides they need to upgrade to the next generation of Windows after XP.
I am still using Windows 98 and haven't felt the need to upgrade at all. In school, I was taught that if something worked for you, why upgrade it?
The only people who will be affected by Palladium will be the users who upgrade to the latest version of Windows, put it on their system via Windows Update, or have Microsoft automatically update their system for them.
I don't see this being a problem for the informed computer user.
I, for one, will be looking forward to this series. I heard awhile back that a script was created based off The Book of Atrus to be made into a movie, but it never got the green light. There could be a very good chance that this miniseries will be using that script.
The Book of Atrus was an excelent read and a great canadate for a miniseries.
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Who in New York City is making this much money doing tech work? Seriously, I'm curious here. Last I checked the going rate seemed to be $50 to $80, maybe even less. If we're talking consulting work, I could see the rate being $100/hr, but otherwise paying that much to a tech for a normal week of time (I'm assuming 40 hours here) seems criminally inefficent, especially if we're talking about the jobs that are outsourced the most (ie. helpdesk). Of course, if I'm wrong on that, great! I look forward to saving up to buy my Manhattan apartment.
When Marx made that statement, he was refering to Religion as a tool used by the bourgeois to keep the proletarians blind to serious issues of the day. This is the *entire* quote:
"Religious suffering is, at one and the same time, the expression of real suffering and a protest against real suffering. Religion is the sigh of the oppressed creature, the heart of a heartless world, and the soul of soulless conditions. It is the opium of the people."
What does this have to do with gaming addiction?
It's no longer on the current official website for John Kerry, but one of the issues he had a stance for was about copyright, in which he stated that he would vigorously defend America's copyright system against piracy. Taken directly from his website back in Feburary --
* Copyright-Based Industries Are Critical to Economic Growth: Products of the mind from America's scientists, engineers, computer programmers have little value without intellectual property protections. Copyright based industries alone now account for nearly 6% of all jobs in America and 7.75 % of GDP. These industries are in jeopardy because of the Bush Administration's failure to enforce international treaties to protect America's creative community from piracy.
* Stop Intellectual Piracy: The Office of the U.S. Trade Representative estimates that losses theft of U.S. intellectual property in 51 foreign countries total $9.7 billion. In China alone we lose $1.8 billion to piracy. Yet even where we have strong agreements, piracy remains a major problem due to a failure to fully implement the TRIPS agreement and an unwillingness or inability to crack down on the problem. A Kerry Administration will take theft of the jobs of America's creative workforce a trade and foreign policy priority.
If you'd like to see the website yourself, it's right here:
John Kerry for President (Feburary '04)
Sure it doesn't say anything about copyright/piracy in the US, but you can guage his opinion on copyright from those statements. I don't think his stance on copyright has changed, and he would most likely support the DMCA, if not strengthen it further.
I recently installed Fedora Core 2 on a computer alongside Windows 2000 and had no trouble dual booting. That particular bug has been seen more often with the Test releases of Fedora Core, as should be expected. If it does happen to you, the problem can be easily fixed by running fixmbr in Recovery Console for 2000/XP.
Yeah, that's right. If its a signal comming into your computer over the Internet, there's nothing that says you can't block the port it comes into, or create a packet filtering system that searches for suspicious packets containing instructions to send massive voltages through your computer.
If you outlaw guns, only outlaws will have guns. The same thing can be said for this crap that Hatch is proposing. The people who are perpetuating the sharing MP3s, videos, videogames, and software will not "learn their lesson" as Hatch suggested, but quite a few innocent downloaders will, possibly at the expense of little over a thousand dollars.
This is not a problem that can be solved by people whom have little understanding of the way the Internet works.
It also decides what games we'll ever see. I don't know if you've heard about this, but Konami of Europe has decided to deny all of Europe Suikoden 3 because they felt it wouldn't make a profit for them.
Also, Suikoden 3 was pulled from the shelves in the states here as well. Konami has yet to comment on that, but I wouldn't rule out that Konami of America agreed with Konami of Europe about the profitability issue.
Things like this frustrate me to no end, because these are good games, and much more fun to play (at least for me) than some of the crap that's being pushed out on the market, but time and time again the all mighty dollar will forever get in the way. But eh, it's a business, so I guess it's to be expected.
The ironic thing is that if an independent group ever translated Suikoden 3 into German/French/Italian and released it over there, Konami would shut them down faster than they could blink, crying "Theft! We're loosing money!" all the way, but eh, it's a business.
I think it can be argued either way about whether this person is a bitter gamer or trying to air how Sony views its consumers, but I've noticed an interesting parallel, one that seems to exist in all online gaming communities, and that is the existence of classes. You have three, the people in charge, the middlemen, and the players. The people in charge are often inaccessible, so their motives cannot be gauged, yet their actions can. The players see these actions and automatically assume the worst (because without knowing the reasoning behind the actions, loosing something you worked really hard on can make you angry), so you have the players holding contempt for the people in charge (i.e. Sony). The middlemen are like middle management, they report to the people in charge, and to the players, given only enough power to do their task, but never enough to resolve community issues. These are the people who would usually communicate with the players, and when the players see that there is nothing the middlemen can do, it only increases their frustration towards the leadership in general.
m e3/issue9/destroy.html
I admit not playing Everquest, but to those who do, take a look at that article and see if you can spot more of the symptoms written there.
Maybe it's just me, but I see this all the time on Muds. Just replace Sony with The Administration, the GM volunteers with Wizards, and the players with...well players. I've been all three on many muds before, and I've seen this same story over and over again. There is always grief between the players and the administration, and both groups hold, at the least, a certain disrespect for the other. The players view the Administration as not caring for their needs, and the Administration views the players as needy children who will bite your head off if you don't do exactly what they say. The wizards are, of course, caught in the middle, as always.
The other parallel I see is the willingness of the players to take the abuse they are dealt from this system. Obviously, they are powerless to do anything about the situation they are in, aside from leaving, yet they choose to hold their abusers in contempt, and I agree, the only reason they do this is because they are addicted to that which they hate.
My question is why pay Sony $21/mo when you can just receive that kind of treatment for free on a MUD?
As a side note, the nerfing issue seems to fall into a documented prediction of failing Muds: http://imaginaryrealities.imaginary.com:8080/volu
This might have been said before, but ah well.
Does anyone else notice how this article seems to think that sex/violence == a mature game == a good game? I mean, sure, the content could probably rate it an NC-17 rating, but does that necessarily mean the game is worth the money you pay for it?
What about a game like Final Fantasy Tactics, and how it portrayed the brutality of social rank, among other issues (eh, that might be a bad example)? Or what about a series like Arc the Lad, a trilogy of games that asks the question: How far will humanity go in their pursuit of power and knowledge?
I suppose I could pose the question of the maturity of these games, given the fact that they don't portray "mature content" in a way that GTA does, but a better question would be what will happen to the production of games like these if the industry hops on the GTA Bandwagon?
I imagine they'd do this by using tools much like nslookup to return a domain based on IP address. While this might stop your average computer user (and even that would be questionable given how many people trade movies), it won't stop people who run servers and write their own Resource Records. At the most, the MPAA would reduce the distribution of movies to those who have servers.
I see this as a problem for users of Windows XP, as well as anyone who decides they need to upgrade to the next generation of Windows after XP. I am still using Windows 98 and haven't felt the need to upgrade at all. In school, I was taught that if something worked for you, why upgrade it? The only people who will be affected by Palladium will be the users who upgrade to the latest version of Windows, put it on their system via Windows Update, or have Microsoft automatically update their system for them. I don't see this being a problem for the informed computer user.
I, for one, will be looking forward to this series. I heard awhile back that a script was created based off The Book of Atrus to be made into a movie, but it never got the green light. There could be a very good chance that this miniseries will be using that script. The Book of Atrus was an excelent read and a great canadate for a miniseries.