Expect to be "underpaid" as an intern because most of your compensation isn't in money, it's in invaluable experience. You will learn more in a month on a real job than you will in years in a classroom.
And the company gets a ton of nearly free labor in the process.
My interns also get an education that is far superior to what they get in any school and not only don't have to pay for it, they get paid for it.
The company is footing the bill too when they pay ME to teach interns, fyi.
That being said, an $8/hr intership is right next to a face slap. I made $10 doing dishes, and $12-$13 (underpaid, friends made 18) at my first internship.
It's this sort of attitude that I've found common as the "millennials" apply for internships. I've been an IT professional for 16 years now, and I started at the bottom, raw, and learned from experienced people when I started. I didn't make $10/hr, nor even $8. Expect to be "underpaid" as an intern because most of your compensation isn't in money, it's in invaluable experience. You will learn more in a month on a real job than you will in years in a classroom.
Back when I started, they didn't have IT degrees, or even programs in colleges. And, I wish they still didn't, a lot of what they teach is garbage that has to be unlearned in the real world.
My advice to anyone wanting to get into this field: In your first job or internship, don't worry about money. You arent' going to make much, because, frankly, until you have a year's experience on the job you aren't worth any. Be prepared to work, and work hard. Soak up everything like a sponge, and don't be afraid to ask questions. Be prepared to work all hours, we don't only work 8-5, we work whenever there IS work. Above all, though, this is a career for those who love this sort of thing, it's challenging beyond most any profession, as there are OFTEN difficult problems to solve. You are paid not for what you know, but what you are able to solve.
The only people this is going to hurt are people who sell large screen TV's in California, and the moronic government that will now miss out on the revenue from it.
Unless they are prepared to guard the borders to check Californians for "illegal" large screen TV's people will still get what they want.
Most traffic stops are nothing more than you being the random loser in the Revenue Patrol lottery. Adding more stupid things that they can ticket you for has nothing to do with safety, everything to do with revenue collection.
I used to buy a lot of music. But that was before pretty much all new pop/rock became nothing more but the same talentless cookie cutter template done over and over and over. My desire for new music died with the death of the guitar solo, which was around 1994 or so.
I already have all the stuff I really want from the 60's-80's classic rock era, and you couldn't PAY me to download the current emotrash crap.
Frankly, I think the RIAA and their foreign bretheren know that the industry is dead, and want to continue to make money over and over again on stuff that is 25+ years old and long since "paid for". I also think the current talentless generation of "artists" is by design, there probably are as many talented people today as there were 20+ years ago, but they just don't get record contracts anymore as they can't be controlled, used, abused, sucked dry, then left on the corner turning tricks for crack like these manufactured "wonders" of today can be.
When I do stumble onto FM radio these days, especially to a rock station, it amazes me how long this crappy, played out, "whinerband" emo sound has outlived whatever usefulness it once had. People used to say the "hair bands" of my day lacked talent. Yet, that era lasted what, 4 years, and today they STILL play it and people will still go to see those bands.
Obama has already supported a Chavez puppet, Zelaya, in Honduras who illegall sought another term as President. He was outsted because of it. Obama turned on Honduras and refuses to recognize the election to replace Zelaya...
This makes the current US regime very hostile to Democracy vs dictators...
Yes, I know this too. The problem is that the First Amendment's scope is really only limited to the Federal government. The First Amendment doesn't protect you from being fired by your boss if your boss is a private individual who disagrees with your public acts of free speech. The First Amendment doesn't protect you from the Mafia. It doesn't protect you from a lynch mob. It doesn't protect you from the court of public opinion. It doesn't protect you from being ostracized by your peers.
Uh, OK. How do you propose to bring about a society in which everyone respects the free exchange of ideas, and a government that can perfectly protect everyone who expresses an unpopular opinion?
The First Amendment's free speech clause is very misunderstood these days, thanks to decades of piss poor civics and history education in the government schools. Thankfully I wasn't mis-educated in one of them.
The First Amendment isn't in there to protect popular speech. It's in there to protect UNPOPULAR speech, so that people who say something that the government or even a large majority of the people CAN say it without being thrown in jail.
Does anyone want to live in a society where I can't say "Bush was an idiot and Barak Obama is too" without being thrown in the gulag? Well, that day is coming. They already want to restrict blogs.
People like this need to understand who is actually making the purchasing decisions for software such as what Kaspersky makes.
It's people like us. And we tend to be very libertarian when it comes to free speech and anonymity. The guys in the suits who sign the PO's don't make these kinds of decisions in reality because they don't want to get the blame for a bad decision made out of ignorance.
I, too, will make sure his product doesn't grace the door where I work. And we, in fact, just happen to be looking for a new Corporate antivirus/spyware/spam suite now that our McAfee contract has (thank God) ended. They were on our list to evaluate. They won't be on Monday when I get to work.
As others have said, physical passports in the REAL world did nothing to stop terrorists from coming in. They also do nothing to stop millions of Mexican peasants who can't even speak English from crossing the border, getting driver's licenses, and getting jobs despite the fact that all THAT is supposed to require passports and documentation.
Considering how much easier it is to forge stuff that is in 1's and 0's than paper, do the math. All this "Internet Passport" idea is going to do is make it easy for oppressive countries like China, Russia, and yes, add the United States to that list too with that wannabe Hugo Chavez in the white house. His people also want to regulate speech on the internet and have a goon in the FCC already proposing it. This will only punish the honest, criminals will never submit to it. Suggesting that ending anonymity for web surfing is going to end whatever problem he is proposing it as a solution for is going to be as effective as gun bans have been at ending crime. Zip, Zero, Nada effect.
Fact of the matter is, the Internet interprets censorship as damage and routes around it. The only way to change that is to tear it down and redesign it from scratch to be the KGB controlled streets of the Soviet Union. Thank God it was designed in the 1970's in this case.
The only thing that surprises me is that out of the seven billion people on this planet, there are enough of them dumb enough to buy ANYTHING from a company like this for it to stay in business.
Well, I have LONG ago ceased to buy Sony, and I did it because of the Star Wars Galaxies NGE. Indeed, I've used my position as head of IT at my company, which is one of the larger businesses in it's industry in the Eastern USA, to make sure that Sony isn't even CONSIDERED for purchases. I cost them $50K worth of plasma displays, for example, when we rolled out a videoconferencing system simply by taking Sony off the bid specs as a valid provider when we bid it out.
Sony is not a reputable company, and they do not make better products than alternate vendors. Sad thing about that is that 20 years ago no one had a better reputation than Sony and their products were ALWAYS a cut above anything similar. It's taken them this long to live off the capital of their once great name to reach the point of near bankruptcy.
Sony is REPEATEDLY caught doing nefarious things. Rootkits on a CD. Deleting 2/3rds of a MMO (The Star Wars Galaxies NGE) the day after selling an expansion for it, which included features marketed that applied to the 2/3rds that got deleted. They've gotten caught multiple times price fixing CDs. They have released a version of the PSP, called the PSPGo that requires you to repurchase all your games. They've also been caught deploying astroturfers and viral marketers to fake reviews and artificially pump their products.
They also run what I believe is an illegal international lottery with respect to their "trading" card games in their MMOs.
So why would it surprise anyone that Sony, not exactly well known for the quality of their coding work (if SOE is representative of it) would release a buggy firmware that destroys hardware and then make people pay $150 to fix their own defect?
Sony is all about revenue streams! Stealing from their customers is just yet another one of those.
This suit is going to cost them millions and will no doubt harm their reputation even more than all of the above have. Sony must not care about their reputation, since they do nothing at all constructive to improve it. Hint: repeatedly assfucking your customers does NOT a good reputation make.
Which was... "DUH!". Galileo discovered the "huge rings around Saturn". But reading deeper this is a fascinating find, that the invisible portion of the rings are way bigger than the spectacularly visible ones.
So many blogs and websites are nothing but shills for publishers and vendors and don't disclose it. This should stop unethical companies like Sony sending out their paid astroturfers and viral marketers without it being disclosed.
I also wonder how sites like MMORPG will survive when they have to disclose payments from publishers (like SOE) along with fluff pieces and "interviews" about them.
Proven batshit crazy nutjobs like Jack Thompson should be banned from filing lawsuits himself and should have a sane person appointed on his behalf to judge as to whether or not to file a suit.
I've read some comments here that are just flat out not true about the current state of the NGE Game (I refuse to call the current iteration "Star Wars Galaxies", that game died in 2005, the NGE resembles it only graphically). If you are interested in Star Wars Galaxies, visit the emulator site (www.swgemu.com).
First off, closing 12 of 25 servers is still going to leave a bunch of empty servers, they might have enough players left to support 4-5 at most, 13 is still ridiculous. I laugh at those who say they still have "100K" players. ROFL! The NGE hasn't had that many subscribers since 2006. SOE will not release subscriber numbers (for obvious reasons) but the best estimates have them at or below 10-15K.
As has been stated here before, the NGE happened back in 2005. It was the second and worse of two cataclysmic game changes made within a 6 month period. The Combat Downgrade (the first change) is perhaps looked at more kindly now than it was back then since at least it didn't delete 2/3rds of the game and turn it into "Benny Hill visits the Gungans". The combat system introduced with the NGE didn't and still does not work properly, is action (and thus network packet) intensive and generates crippling lag whenever there is any decent number of people in any area pvp'ing or even killing NPCs. SOE has done nothing to fix this, or other glaring bugs (such as targeting of mobs that can shoot you from inside objects and terrain). Even if you accept the NGE concept, of dumbing the game down into 9 "iconic and Star Wars-Y" classes, it just plain does not work even as designed. Forcing the remaining population to clump into fewer servers is going to worsen, not improve, the game experience.
The current game is not only broken to shit, but SOE continues to abuse what customers they have left. They recently purged the player "senate" of every member that had the slightest notion that they were there to represent *gasp!* PLAYERS rather than shill for SOE, and the new "community relations" guy they brought in recently is prone to psychotic outbursts on the forums and has all the outward appearance of someone who is mentally unstable and could snap at any second under the slightest pressure.
SOE can't find time to fix bugs. But they CAN find time to add what is the absolute biggest RMT scam in the whole industry. They call it a trading card game. I call it an illegal interstate/international lottery. You aren't actually paying directly for highly desirable (and exclusive) in game items and content via RMT, you are essentially buying lottery tickets for the CHANCE to get these things. Amongst the TCG lottery items are things that players have asked them to add for YEARS to the game, such as a house to display pets (called a barn) and a private hangar to store your ships.
The RMT loot lottery card "game" gets multiple expansions a year. The NGE hasn't had an expansion in 4 years, since "Trials of Obi-Wan" which was released under the CU system, then mostly deleted when the NGE game out. This was one of SOE's most infamous scams in and of itself, we were charged for that expansion literally the DAY BEFORE the NGE was announced! Features were advertised, yes, ADVERTISED for the expansion that they knew were going to be deleted 3 weeks after it was released.
Frankly, I'm more amazed that John Smedley and his cronies aren't in JAIL for the fraud they have committed with this game than I am that 4 years later, the NGE still exists as Station Pass filler. Frankly, Smed and his boys are so untrustworthy I'd not buy a dollar from them for 50 cents.
At any rate, myself and many of the 240,000+ former customers of Star Wars Galaxies celebrate the closure of 12 NGE servers, and we look forward to the demise of the remaining 13. For those getting ripped off by SOE, you can't say we didn't warn you.
Enjoy the stormtrooper zombies they are adding soon (yes, I am serious, they are adding these). The rest of us will play real games like EVE, wait for TOR and hope it's good (at least it's not SOE) and play Star Wars Galaxies via the emulator.
This company just can't help itself. They are just totally evil from top to bottom.
It just never occurs to them in advance that their customers don't like having it suddenly shoved up the ass without lube, and can only "hear them" after they are already white hot angry.
Since the Star Wars Galaxies NGE debacle, I've refused to buy anything with the Sony brand on it. I see that they are just as ethical as ever.
Anyone who thinks they can change the weather is either absorbed in hubris or insane.
A Hurricane can't be stopped or prevented. Or influenced in any way by anything human beings could do to it. You could detonate the largest nuclear bomb ever made in the middle of a hurricane and it wouldn't even dent it. A hurricane has so much energy that it releases more energy than all explosives ever detonated by humans every MINUTE...
[quote]Does the driver enjoy this? Of course not but, hey, tough luck and just think of this as the price that drivers pay for having large chunks of public space devoted almost exclusively to them (in certain urban areas that is almost 40% of *all* land). And it is no coincidence that that in most places in the world defensive driving is not a "nice thing to do" but is the law (even if it is not called by that name). [/quote]
Drivers PAY for this space, in my state 50 cents a gallon is taken in taxes. Not to mention the costs of license, registration, insurance, etc. Other than sales tax on purchase does a cyclist pay anything at all for the road? And, actually, the driver is PAYING also for what paths are made for bicycles, which, IMHO is an abuse of the gasoline tax, which should go EXCLUSIVELY to road infrastructure maintenance and construction.
"Make your own lane"? WTF? Why should someone on a bicycle be able to do that when someone in a car can't? Besides, if you are in a car, YOU are the one actually PAYING for the road to begin with (gasoline taxes).
Bike riders put themselves in danger because they don't obey the rules of the road, instead, pretending to be a car when it's advantageous (ie: riding in the middle of the lane) and being a pedestrian when it isn't (ie: running red lights and stop signs).
If they obey traffic laws and avoid roads where the speed limit is higher than they can ride, they will be safe.
What idiot in marketing (marketing majors have no souls) convinced an even bigger idiot in management that this would be a good idea?
People LOVE popups, right, everyone knows this, right?
A stunt like this isn't going to increase sales, it's going to DECREASE them. And, this is yet another example why I DO NOT run any sort of automatic update. I update software/drivers, etc, when I feel a NEED to do so, if it's working, leave it alone. Updates only usually end up in adding more bloat to a system anyway, look at how Acrobat reader is 10 times the size it was a couple years ago yet doesn't do anything significantly different.
The niche channels should really be marketing themselves directly to customers online anyways. No reason to allocate a premium chunk of cable resources (whether that's bandwidth, or just an identifiable number) for something only an exceptional minority will want.
You are right about that. If I could pay a few dollars a month to have access to History, A&E, Biography, Discovery, etc on the web or via podcast, I'd do it, and really wouldn't even WANT cable any more.
I have relatives that worship Disney. They go to Disneyland 4-5 times a year, buy up every DVD they put out, and one of them even has their bathroom painted to look like a Dalmatian, with little Dalmatian statues scattered about everywhere. It's scary. That being said I hope this blows up in their face. I hope that people realize that the good wholesome fantasy world Walt set out to create is dead, and what's left is just a giant faceless corporation with their tentacles raping our society like a scene out of a Urotsukidji manga. It would be nice to see a boycott over this.
This is very true. When Walt Disney was alive, that company used to stand for something and mean something. Now it's no better than any other entertainment company, except that they haven't yet depleted all of the past reputation of the "Old" Disney.
They've been in decline, actually for years now. I expect that in another generation or two (once the last of the generations that grew up with the "Old" Disney quit having kids, the nostalgia will be gone and they will be in a world of hurt.
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Expect to be "underpaid" as an intern because most of your compensation isn't in money, it's in invaluable experience. You will learn more in a month on a real job than you will in years in a classroom.
And the company gets a ton of nearly free labor in the process.
My interns also get an education that is far superior to what they get in any school and not only don't have to pay for it, they get paid for it.
The company is footing the bill too when they pay ME to teach interns, fyi.
Florida (Orlando) here, $7.25/hr.
That being said, an $8/hr intership is right next to a face slap. I made $10 doing dishes, and $12-$13 (underpaid, friends made 18) at my first internship.
It's this sort of attitude that I've found common as the "millennials" apply for internships. I've been an IT professional for 16 years now, and I started at the bottom, raw, and learned from experienced people when I started. I didn't make $10/hr, nor even $8. Expect to be "underpaid" as an intern because most of your compensation isn't in money, it's in invaluable experience. You will learn more in a month on a real job than you will in years in a classroom.
Back when I started, they didn't have IT degrees, or even programs in colleges. And, I wish they still didn't, a lot of what they teach is garbage that has to be unlearned in the real world.
My advice to anyone wanting to get into this field: In your first job or internship, don't worry about money. You arent' going to make much, because, frankly, until you have a year's experience on the job you aren't worth any. Be prepared to work, and work hard. Soak up everything like a sponge, and don't be afraid to ask questions. Be prepared to work all hours, we don't only work 8-5, we work whenever there IS work. Above all, though, this is a career for those who love this sort of thing, it's challenging beyond most any profession, as there are OFTEN difficult problems to solve. You are paid not for what you know, but what you are able to solve.
The only people this is going to hurt are people who sell large screen TV's in California, and the moronic government that will now miss out on the revenue from it.
Unless they are prepared to guard the borders to check Californians for "illegal" large screen TV's people will still get what they want.
Most traffic stops are nothing more than you being the random loser in the Revenue Patrol lottery. Adding more stupid things that they can ticket you for has nothing to do with safety, everything to do with revenue collection.
I used to buy a lot of music. But that was before pretty much all new pop/rock became nothing more but the same talentless cookie cutter template done over and over and over. My desire for new music died with the death of the guitar solo, which was around 1994 or so.
I already have all the stuff I really want from the 60's-80's classic rock era, and you couldn't PAY me to download the current emotrash crap.
Frankly, I think the RIAA and their foreign bretheren know that the industry is dead, and want to continue to make money over and over again on stuff that is 25+ years old and long since "paid for". I also think the current talentless generation of "artists" is by design, there probably are as many talented people today as there were 20+ years ago, but they just don't get record contracts anymore as they can't be controlled, used, abused, sucked dry, then left on the corner turning tricks for crack like these manufactured "wonders" of today can be.
When I do stumble onto FM radio these days, especially to a rock station, it amazes me how long this crappy, played out, "whinerband" emo sound has outlived whatever usefulness it once had. People used to say the "hair bands" of my day lacked talent. Yet, that era lasted what, 4 years, and today they STILL play it and people will still go to see those bands.
Go figure.
Not at all.
Obama has already supported a Chavez puppet, Zelaya, in Honduras who illegall sought another term as President. He was outsted because of it. Obama turned on Honduras and refuses to recognize the election to replace Zelaya...
This makes the current US regime very hostile to Democracy vs dictators...
Yes, I know this too. The problem is that the First Amendment's scope is really only limited to the Federal government. The First Amendment doesn't protect you from being fired by your boss if your boss is a private individual who disagrees with your public acts of free speech. The First Amendment doesn't protect you from the Mafia. It doesn't protect you from a lynch mob. It doesn't protect you from the court of public opinion. It doesn't protect you from being ostracized by your peers.
Hence, the importance of anonymous free speech.
Godwin's Law [wikipedia.org], triggered already?
Sorry, dude, but you just lost the debate.
The Soviets murdered millions more than the Nazis did. So did the Maoists.
Oh, and all three regimes (Germany, USSR, Red China) also killed people who dared to commit acts of anonymous free speech.
Uh, OK. How do you propose to bring about a society in which everyone respects the free exchange of ideas, and a government that can perfectly protect everyone who expresses an unpopular opinion?
The First Amendment's free speech clause is very misunderstood these days, thanks to decades of piss poor civics and history education in the government schools. Thankfully I wasn't mis-educated in one of them.
The First Amendment isn't in there to protect popular speech. It's in there to protect UNPOPULAR speech, so that people who say something that the government or even a large majority of the people CAN say it without being thrown in jail.
Does anyone want to live in a society where I can't say "Bush was an idiot and Barak Obama is too" without being thrown in the gulag? Well, that day is coming. They already want to restrict blogs.
People like this need to understand who is actually making the purchasing decisions for software such as what Kaspersky makes.
It's people like us. And we tend to be very libertarian when it comes to free speech and anonymity. The guys in the suits who sign the PO's don't make these kinds of decisions in reality because they don't want to get the blame for a bad decision made out of ignorance.
I, too, will make sure his product doesn't grace the door where I work. And we, in fact, just happen to be looking for a new Corporate antivirus/spyware/spam suite now that our McAfee contract has (thank God) ended. They were on our list to evaluate. They won't be on Monday when I get to work.
As others have said, physical passports in the REAL world did nothing to stop terrorists from coming in. They also do nothing to stop millions of Mexican peasants who can't even speak English from crossing the border, getting driver's licenses, and getting jobs despite the fact that all THAT is supposed to require passports and documentation.
Considering how much easier it is to forge stuff that is in 1's and 0's than paper, do the math. All this "Internet Passport" idea is going to do is make it easy for oppressive countries like China, Russia, and yes, add the United States to that list too with that wannabe Hugo Chavez in the white house. His people also want to regulate speech on the internet and have a goon in the FCC already proposing it. This will only punish the honest, criminals will never submit to it. Suggesting that ending anonymity for web surfing is going to end whatever problem he is proposing it as a solution for is going to be as effective as gun bans have been at ending crime. Zip, Zero, Nada effect.
Fact of the matter is, the Internet interprets censorship as damage and routes around it. The only way to change that is to tear it down and redesign it from scratch to be the KGB controlled streets of the Soviet Union. Thank God it was designed in the 1970's in this case.
The only thing that surprises me is that out of the seven billion people on this planet, there are enough of them dumb enough to buy ANYTHING from a company like this for it to stay in business.
Well, I have LONG ago ceased to buy Sony, and I did it because of the Star Wars Galaxies NGE. Indeed, I've used my position as head of IT at my company, which is one of the larger businesses in it's industry in the Eastern USA, to make sure that Sony isn't even CONSIDERED for purchases. I cost them $50K worth of plasma displays, for example, when we rolled out a videoconferencing system simply by taking Sony off the bid specs as a valid provider when we bid it out.
Sony is not a reputable company, and they do not make better products than alternate vendors. Sad thing about that is that 20 years ago no one had a better reputation than Sony and their products were ALWAYS a cut above anything similar. It's taken them this long to live off the capital of their once great name to reach the point of near bankruptcy.
Sony is REPEATEDLY caught doing nefarious things. Rootkits on a CD. Deleting 2/3rds of a MMO (The Star Wars Galaxies NGE) the day after selling an expansion for it, which included features marketed that applied to the 2/3rds that got deleted. They've gotten caught multiple times price fixing CDs. They have released a version of the PSP, called the PSPGo that requires you to repurchase all your games. They've also been caught deploying astroturfers and viral marketers to fake reviews and artificially pump their products.
They also run what I believe is an illegal international lottery with respect to their "trading" card games in their MMOs.
So why would it surprise anyone that Sony, not exactly well known for the quality of their coding work (if SOE is representative of it) would release a buggy firmware that destroys hardware and then make people pay $150 to fix their own defect?
Sony is all about revenue streams! Stealing from their customers is just yet another one of those.
This suit is going to cost them millions and will no doubt harm their reputation even more than all of the above have. Sony must not care about their reputation, since they do nothing at all constructive to improve it. Hint: repeatedly assfucking your customers does NOT a good reputation make.
Which was... "DUH!". Galileo discovered the "huge rings around Saturn". But reading deeper this is a fascinating find, that the invisible portion of the rings are way bigger than the spectacularly visible ones.
So many blogs and websites are nothing but shills for publishers and vendors and don't disclose it. This should stop unethical companies like Sony sending out their paid astroturfers and viral marketers without it being disclosed.
I also wonder how sites like MMORPG will survive when they have to disclose payments from publishers (like SOE) along with fluff pieces and "interviews" about them.
Is tort and legal system reform...
Proven batshit crazy nutjobs like Jack Thompson should be banned from filing lawsuits himself and should have a sane person appointed on his behalf to judge as to whether or not to file a suit.
I've read some comments here that are just flat out not true about the current state of the NGE Game (I refuse to call the current iteration "Star Wars Galaxies", that game died in 2005, the NGE resembles it only graphically). If you are interested in Star Wars Galaxies, visit the emulator site (www.swgemu.com).
First off, closing 12 of 25 servers is still going to leave a bunch of empty servers, they might have enough players left to support 4-5 at most, 13 is still ridiculous. I laugh at those who say they still have "100K" players. ROFL! The NGE hasn't had that many subscribers since 2006. SOE will not release subscriber numbers (for obvious reasons) but the best estimates have them at or below 10-15K.
As has been stated here before, the NGE happened back in 2005. It was the second and worse of two cataclysmic game changes made within a 6 month period. The Combat Downgrade (the first change) is perhaps looked at more kindly now than it was back then since at least it didn't delete 2/3rds of the game and turn it into "Benny Hill visits the Gungans". The combat system introduced with the NGE didn't and still does not work properly, is action (and thus network packet) intensive and generates crippling lag whenever there is any decent number of people in any area pvp'ing or even killing NPCs. SOE has done nothing to fix this, or other glaring bugs (such as targeting of mobs that can shoot you from inside objects and terrain). Even if you accept the NGE concept, of dumbing the game down into 9 "iconic and Star Wars-Y" classes, it just plain does not work even as designed. Forcing the remaining population to clump into fewer servers is going to worsen, not improve, the game experience.
The current game is not only broken to shit, but SOE continues to abuse what customers they have left. They recently purged the player "senate" of every member that had the slightest notion that they were there to represent *gasp!* PLAYERS rather than shill for SOE, and the new "community relations" guy they brought in recently is prone to psychotic outbursts on the forums and has all the outward appearance of someone who is mentally unstable and could snap at any second under the slightest pressure.
SOE can't find time to fix bugs. But they CAN find time to add what is the absolute biggest RMT scam in the whole industry. They call it a trading card game. I call it an illegal interstate/international lottery. You aren't actually paying directly for highly desirable (and exclusive) in game items and content via RMT, you are essentially buying lottery tickets for the CHANCE to get these things. Amongst the TCG lottery items are things that players have asked them to add for YEARS to the game, such as a house to display pets (called a barn) and a private hangar to store your ships.
The RMT loot lottery card "game" gets multiple expansions a year. The NGE hasn't had an expansion in 4 years, since "Trials of Obi-Wan" which was released under the CU system, then mostly deleted when the NGE game out. This was one of SOE's most infamous scams in and of itself, we were charged for that expansion literally the DAY BEFORE the NGE was announced! Features were advertised, yes, ADVERTISED for the expansion that they knew were going to be deleted 3 weeks after it was released.
Frankly, I'm more amazed that John Smedley and his cronies aren't in JAIL for the fraud they have committed with this game than I am that 4 years later, the NGE still exists as Station Pass filler. Frankly, Smed and his boys are so untrustworthy I'd not buy a dollar from them for 50 cents.
At any rate, myself and many of the 240,000+ former customers of Star Wars Galaxies celebrate the closure of 12 NGE servers, and we look forward to the demise of the remaining 13. For those getting ripped off by SOE, you can't say we didn't warn you.
Enjoy the stormtrooper zombies they are adding soon (yes, I am serious, they are adding these). The rest of us will play real games like EVE, wait for TOR and hope it's good (at least it's not SOE) and play Star Wars Galaxies via the emulator.
I don't like the idea of BUYING something and then having my use of it monitored. That's no different than spyware.
Apple gets forgiven for everything, but if Microsoft even hinted of this they'd get flamed.
Had Apple won the PC wars of the 80's they'd be a far greater satan than Microsoft ever tried to be.
This company just can't help itself. They are just totally evil from top to bottom.
It just never occurs to them in advance that their customers don't like having it suddenly shoved up the ass without lube, and can only "hear them" after they are already white hot angry.
Since the Star Wars Galaxies NGE debacle, I've refused to buy anything with the Sony brand on it. I see that they are just as ethical as ever.
Anyone who thinks they can change the weather is either absorbed in hubris or insane.
A Hurricane can't be stopped or prevented. Or influenced in any way by anything human beings could do to it. You could detonate the largest nuclear bomb ever made in the middle of a hurricane and it wouldn't even dent it. A hurricane has so much energy that it releases more energy than all explosives ever detonated by humans every MINUTE...
[quote]Does the driver enjoy this? Of course not but, hey, tough luck and just think of this as the price that drivers pay for having large chunks of public space devoted almost exclusively to them (in certain urban areas that is almost 40% of *all* land). And it is no coincidence that that in most places in the world defensive driving is not a "nice thing to do" but is the law (even if it is not called by that name).
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Drivers PAY for this space, in my state 50 cents a gallon is taken in taxes. Not to mention the costs of license, registration, insurance, etc. Other than sales tax on purchase does a cyclist pay anything at all for the road? And, actually, the driver is PAYING also for what paths are made for bicycles, which, IMHO is an abuse of the gasoline tax, which should go EXCLUSIVELY to road infrastructure maintenance and construction.
"Make your own lane"? WTF? Why should someone on a bicycle be able to do that when someone in a car can't? Besides, if you are in a car, YOU are the one actually PAYING for the road to begin with (gasoline taxes).
Bike riders put themselves in danger because they don't obey the rules of the road, instead, pretending to be a car when it's advantageous (ie: riding in the middle of the lane) and being a pedestrian when it isn't (ie: running red lights and stop signs).
If they obey traffic laws and avoid roads where the speed limit is higher than they can ride, they will be safe.
What idiot in marketing (marketing majors have no souls) convinced an even bigger idiot in management that this would be a good idea?
People LOVE popups, right, everyone knows this, right?
A stunt like this isn't going to increase sales, it's going to DECREASE them. And, this is yet another example why I DO NOT run any sort of automatic update. I update software/drivers, etc, when I feel a NEED to do so, if it's working, leave it alone. Updates only usually end up in adding more bloat to a system anyway, look at how Acrobat reader is 10 times the size it was a couple years ago yet doesn't do anything significantly different.
The niche channels should really be marketing themselves directly to customers online anyways. No reason to allocate a premium chunk of cable resources (whether that's bandwidth, or just an identifiable number) for something only an exceptional minority will want.
You are right about that. If I could pay a few dollars a month to have access to History, A&E, Biography, Discovery, etc on the web or via podcast, I'd do it, and really wouldn't even WANT cable any more.
This is very true. When Walt Disney was alive, that company used to stand for something and mean something. Now it's no better than any other entertainment company, except that they haven't yet depleted all of the past reputation of the "Old" Disney.
They've been in decline, actually for years now. I expect that in another generation or two (once the last of the generations that grew up with the "Old" Disney quit having kids, the nostalgia will be gone and they will be in a world of hurt.