Any parent who gives a young child unsupervised access to the Internet, filters or no, is irresponsible.
Unfortunately this generation of parent wants to turn their kids loose on the internet, with cable TV, etc, and reserve the right to bitch to the government about regulating them down to a form that is appropriate for them.
I don't have children, but if I ever do, the computers won't be in bedrooms unless they have no internet connectivity.
"Sadly, this is the attitude of many in sales in this country. Good Business is how much you can milk from your customers and how fast regardless of the consequences. I sat with a couple of sales guys (friends at that) last weekend who bragged back and forth about how they were literally screwing associates. "
This sort of thing usually gets the scum in the end though. You can screw someone once on a sale, and make more money than you deserved, but to succeed with it forever you have to make sure the customer never knows he got jobbed.
Which is hard to do, especially when such crap is being done at the level Office Depot is, it will get out. All it takes is one disgruntled employee.
I suspect that Best Buy will soon be in trouble. They do similar things with deceptive practices, for example, putting people who only buy items on sale on a "blacklist" etc. Retailers like that are not destined to the longevity of a Sears or JCPenney. Really, the Wal-Mart model is best, get the product as cheaply as possible to sell to the customer at the lowest possible price. They don't care about add ons and don't try to sell you crap you didn't get to the register with, I've never had that happen even once at Wal-Mart.
At Best Buy, it's pain and torture to try to get out of there with the pair of $16 HEADPHONES I bought without them trying to shove magazines at me, and an extended warranty that costs more than... what I bought.
"In the end, all it tells us is that you stick your head in the sand and ignore what people say for nonsensical reasons. Since you appear to be very confident of your position, perhaps instead you could make a coherant logical argument for it. Then there would be something to debate besides whether you're an intellectually dishonest douchebag or a clueless ignoramus."
I apologize, because I forget that "Man Made Global Warming" has more or less become a religion, since, like God, it has followers who believe in something that cannot be unequivocally proven to exist. I didn't mean to insult your faith.
That said, I don't believe in it. Nor will I be goaded into guilt over the fact that I drive a gasoline powered car (which uses less gas in a year than The Goreacle's fleet uses in a month) and I like to (gasp!) eat steaks. Sorry, I produce less pollution and "greenhouse gasses" than ONE of The Goreacle's "man made global warming" chicken little fests. Which ironically always seem to occur in places where record cold or some freak WINTER type event happens.
This movement has nothing to do with the environment. It has nothing to do with climate change. It has EVERYTHING to do with money and control. The Goreacle gets rich selling "carbon credits" which is the snake oil of the modern age. Politicians who embrace the hoax use it to violate our Constitution and gain even more control at the expense of individual liberty.
"Your argument make no sense, and is in fact pretty childish. The goal is to reduce the overall carbon emition, but it makes perfect sense to "spend" carbon emission in something if we think this will help us reduce it considerably elsewhere. This is a perfectly sound investment. "
The whole "theory" of MAN MADE climate change is backed more by faith than fact. If you really want to examine what causes climate change, a SOLAR observatory would achieve more than one meant to monitor C02. The Sun is a gigantic mostly stable nuclear fusion reaction. It's emissions are NOT constant, sometimes it's more active, sometimes it's less active. We're now in a period of LESS active solar activity, and as a consequence, we're cooling. In the previous decades we had a much more active Solar cycle.
Records, both fossil and historical, show that the Earth has been much hotter AND much cooler than it currently is. For example, in ancient times, the Romans were able to build WINERIES in Britain! And in the 1800's, they were able to hold ice fairs on the Thames river in London. 10,000 years ago most of the world was covered in ice.
I'd like to know what Human industry caused all that climate change. Fact of the matter is, we, humans have VERY LITTLE to do with the climate, if anything at all. About the only thing we could do to destroy the Earth would be to release every nuke we have, and even that wouldn't be enough to end all life, nor would it stop the planet from renewing itself in the future.
The whole man made global warming movement is nothing but a profiteering scheme for opportunists (Gore) and a cloak for those ("former" socialists) to dupe people with false alarmism to accept draconian restrictions on individual freedom.
As I said, when The Goreacle and other global warming alarmists start LIVING like things are the crisis they say it is, I'll take them seriously. Until then, I view their "movement" as pseudo-science at best, and a poorly cloaked religious cult at worst.
As one who does not buy into the "man made" global warming hoax I note that the attempted launch had a "carbon footprint" bigger than the Goreacle's.
When those who keep preaching the global warming hysteria start ACTING like it's a real crisis (by giving up their limos, huge houses, and private jets, which generate more pollution in a year than I will in my lifetime) then I'll start taking them seriously.
It's a shame about the satellite though, if it'd taken an honest assessment it would have proven that nature generates far FAR more C02 than does human activity.
SOE has been foundering for quite some time, and not just because of the Star Wars Galaxies NGE debacle (which cost them 200,000 subscribers). They also have shot themselves in the foot with EQ/EQ2 subscribers by opening up RMT stores (cash for items you can't get ingame) after promising that RMT wouldn't exist on any but the "Station Exchange" servers.
DCMMO is essentially seen internally at SOE as the "save the company" project. This is THE game that must achieve huge success so as to save the jobs of debris like John Smedley and Chris Cao.
So, senior SOE managers have taken to MICROmanaging this game's development. The effect has been a revolving door Dev team. They can't keep one. They are on at least their third producer and Lead Dev. They have been in such dire straits that the last two have been recycled from the grade D- Star Wars Galaxies NGE team. And I can tell you from experience, those guys would do well to thread their shoelaces properly, much less develop a decent game.
If you want a new superhero game, I suggest following Cryptic's "Champions Online". Cryptic has the experience, and the talent, to produce a good game in this genre. SOE hasn't accomplished anything but acquiring a deserved reputation for piss poor quality, and continual betrayal of their players.
Disclaimer: I am not a member of Goonswarm, but I live in 0.0 and am in an alliance that is part of their coalition
BOB should have been disbanded by CCP back when they were caught red handed with CCP Devs in their leadership handing them stuff like candy (the infamous T20 scandal). As has been proven by information "liberated" from their message boards, BOB leadership was WELL aware of what was going on.
Also, BOB was the king of metagaming, account hacking, etc, and to see them fall as a result of it is deserved.
This man was leading a group that bombed the US Capitol and the Pentagon. He's a terrorist, and has only a legal technicality to thank for the fact that he's alive much less running around free and publishing papers as a "professor".
Indeed, the fact that Ayers IS employed in academia itself is far greater argument that the US educational system is broken beyond repair. Why is he bitching about Bill Gates? Even if you argue that his school projects are failing/have failed, at least Gates is using HIS OWN MONEY and not spending taxpayer money on failed government schools. IMHO, a true stalin-lefty like Ayers is probably harping on this more as a reason to promote government solutions to the problem with education (despite it being the main problem) over private ones.
"Thats a misconception. They want you to think you do, however just because you enter a school doesn't give them the right to remove your rights."
This is correct, especially given that most schools are government entities, and workers there government employees. The Constitution specifically lays down rights that it expressly forbids the government to infringe upon, hence no legislature ("Congress shall make no law") can grant them such authority.
If a policeman can't do it to you because it's an infringement of rights, you can bet your ass a teacher or school administrator also can't do it for the same reason.
If this "evidence" was gained due to an illegal search by government school employees, then it's "spoiled" evidence that can't be used.
We need more prosecutions of overzealous prosecutors and judges.
Start putting some of them in the klink and then maybe you will have some rational common sense return to the legal system.
Child porn laws exist and were CLEARLY intended to apply to ADULTS who created, obtained, or distributed such photos/whatever.
Anyone who has baby pictures better burn them/destroy the evidence... IMHO, this is a way of manufacturing a crime in order to make some idiot prosecutor and the equally irresponsible court that will hear this look like they are doing something.
Once could be an "isolated incident". But this is the second big scam involving Belkin, in the wake of the router that basically had built in adware...
Seems to me that Belkin has a culture of corporate corruption over there. The best way to assure us that they have realized their mistake and to correct the problem is for heads to roll. Seems to me they have corrupt management. That needs to go.
"Campaign finance law isn't about the speech, it's about the money. I'm all in favor of restricting bribery. "
The reforms do nothing to prevent bribery. But they DO prevent you or me from organizing and collectively spending money to make political speech which we couldn't afford individually, AND to petition our government (also a specific Constitutional right).
Saying that this is legal is like saying that you HAVE freedom of the press, but only if you, ALONE, as an individual can afford to buy, operate, print, and then (for no money) distribute the paper.
Well, given that a wedge has ALREADY been driven into that by the so-called "campaign finance reform" law, and serious proposals to censor political opinion radio, TV, and the internet even via the so-called "fairness doctrine" which would be a sledgehammer driving that wedge all the way THROUGH, tell me why government types aren't thinking of this?
The "freedom" I'd like to see removed is that of treasonous legislators to make law they KNOW violates the Constitution.
What part of "shall make NO LAW" can't they understand?
At the very least, legislators who VOTE for crap like this, and executives who SIGN such flagrantly illegal things into law should have to REPAY all the frivilous legal expenses that will be incurred by the taxpayer when this crap gets shot down in court.
"They'd go out of business, but I'm OK with them trying.
Like it or not, CA has serious power problems. Unlike the "sane" parts of the country, CA is the only US state where per-capita energy consumption has been flat for around 30 years. All because of "crazy" regulations. Yet it's insightful to hate all regulations."
The reason why we don't have power shortages where I live (which is a net electricity PRODUCER btw) is because we have... uh power plants.
The loony CA government won't ALLOW new power plants to be built, when there is plenty of demand and no reason why it can't be done, which means they have to GET power from other states.
If California doesn't mind being in the dark or wants to keep voting in people who will make it so that goods cost them more than they do in any other state, fine. But I don't want to deal with it.
The technology of today allows even coal fired power plants to be vastly cleaner in the past. Not to mention nuclear, which is not only the CLEANEST method of power generation there is, it's also the most efficient. If Californians are happy to be Luddites, let them pay for the privilege, not citizens of other states.
...An industry would look a state like CA that wants to foist stupid regulations upon them STRAIGHT in the eye and tell them to "go suck it". Californians just simply would have to go to other states (thus losing the morons in Sacramento some serious tax revenue) to buy these things.
What will happen is that this will make these products more expensive for those of us who live in the sane part of America. It's all about foisting a radical green agenda on the rest of us.
If California wants to be crazy, fine, to each his own. But don't force ME to have to pay for it.
"And I'd hardly call Eve a major success... I'd agree, the Eve intro was horrible and put me off, another customer lost."
EVE is a major success. It's currently behind only WOW in the US/EU amongst full subscription MMORPGs. That is a distant second, but look at all the WOW clones the market's ONLY skills based non level based, non static class MMO is ahead of!
EVE has in excess of 300,000 subscribers and this past weekend set a new concurrent player record of 45,000. That is even more amazing when you realize that unlike WOW and pretty much every other MMO which have more than one server limited to maybe 2-3,000 concurrent players each EVE has only one server which means EVERYONE plays in the same game world.
With universities demanding more and more in tuition and tax funding, any IP that they obtain or create should be public domain just as with anything the government creates.
Patenting student ideas and then profiting off them is wrong. At most, a university should get a royalty free license IF the student patents one of his or her own ideas.
All this is going to do is encourage brilliant students to CONCEAL any marketable ideas they come up with while in school and thus is actually counter productive. I know that if I were in the same situation, I'd keep such an idea to myself and then "discover" it after I graduated.
No public funding for universities that register patents for profit instead of public domain. Let them choose one or the other.
How can it possibly be in the economic interest of the US to allow a corporation to lay off/fire workers and then not allow them to accept a job in their own field?
To side with RIM would be to side with forcing the taxpayers to pay unemployment/welfare benefits while the corp gets off scott free. I say make RIM pay these benefits if this is how they want it. In fact, I think that if such "noncompete" crap is to be legal at ALL, it should be allowed ONLY if the corporation pays the worker his/her regular salary NOT to work.
I find it funny how corporations are "gung ho capitalists" when it comes to axing thousands of workers on a whim for their benefit, but become devout orthodox Stalinists when it comes to workers going elsewhere for THEIR benefit...
SOE has been foundering now for years. In a time when the MMO industry has been growing, SOE has shrunk. If you look at mmogdata.voig.com or mmoprgchart, you see that they've lost more than half their subscribers since 2005 across all their games.
Of course most of the wounds to SOE are self inflicted. Such as the Star Wars Galaxies NGE which cost them by some estimates 80-90% of their player base and a HELL of a lot of reputation, this when SOE didn't have that great of one to begin with, what with being caught doing things like releasing EQ expansions unfinished and gating content, etc.
Fact of the matter is, people flee SOE games because the company lacks any sort of ethics or integrity. John Smedley is a pathological liar who will promise that things won't happen that the player bases don't want, then turn right around and do them, usually sprung on players overnight with no warning.
For example, he flatly denied that RMT would be coming to the EQ2 servers that weren't part of "station exchange". The new pay for items system that is the subject of this article was literally sprung on everyone overnight, one day it wasn't there, next day it was IN THE GAME, no warning, just an obscure reference in the patch notes. Of course this has caused massive outrage.
BTW, this new "macrotranscam" system isn't SOE's ONLY RMT scheme they have going. Their card games are even worse. In the card game, there are now loot cards that grant exclusive in game items, some of which are superior to anything available in game. They won't publish the odds, so buying the "card" decks amounts to gambling. There has been discussion that this may in fact be illegal under the US online gambling ban...
SOE being SOE, you know that they won't be able to resist the temptation to make even more things RMT exclusive, and where they aren't, to not tinker with loot drop rates to tempt people to pay for things that they could earn.
Fact is, I believe that RMT the way SOE is doing it is destined to fail. It's unproven first off whether this sort of scheme will work in the first place, and it's definitely going to be rejected when tied to games that charge a FULL PRICE subscription fee. People simply aren't going to fall for that. The only place, IMHO, RMT might work is in a game where there is no sub fee, or as an alternative to a sub fee, to "pay as you go" up to and stopping at the price of a full sub fee.
In the past, Smed has pimped RMT as a way to get people past the "barrier" of the full price sub fee. To no one's surprise he's using it as a way to get people past the "barrier" of thinking that $14.99 a month plus paying extra for expansions is enough money to play his mediocre buggy games.
" Yea, and unions are going to stop offshoring...How exactly?
If I could come up with one thing that would drive offshoring, it would be unions. Might stop H1Bs, but at least H1B's come HERE to work. Accelerate offshoring, and they don't have to come here anymore. "
Unions would greatly accelerate outsourcing. Unions are like government programs/agencies. They originally exist for a purpose, outlive that purpose, and then become more interested in their own self-perpetuation and political power than anything else.
Unions outliving their usefulness are why there are lots of things no longer produced in the US.
Slashdot Mirror
Any parent who gives a young child unsupervised access to the Internet, filters or no, is irresponsible.
Unfortunately this generation of parent wants to turn their kids loose on the internet, with cable TV, etc, and reserve the right to bitch to the government about regulating them down to a form that is appropriate for them.
I don't have children, but if I ever do, the computers won't be in bedrooms unless they have no internet connectivity.
"Sadly, this is the attitude of many in sales in this country. Good Business is how much you can milk from your customers and how fast regardless of the consequences. I sat with a couple of sales guys (friends at that) last weekend who bragged back and forth about how they were literally screwing associates. "
This sort of thing usually gets the scum in the end though. You can screw someone once on a sale, and make more money than you deserved, but to succeed with it forever you have to make sure the customer never knows he got jobbed.
Which is hard to do, especially when such crap is being done at the level Office Depot is, it will get out. All it takes is one disgruntled employee.
I suspect that Best Buy will soon be in trouble. They do similar things with deceptive practices, for example, putting people who only buy items on sale on a "blacklist" etc. Retailers like that are not destined to the longevity of a Sears or JCPenney. Really, the Wal-Mart model is best, get the product as cheaply as possible to sell to the customer at the lowest possible price. They don't care about add ons and don't try to sell you crap you didn't get to the register with, I've never had that happen even once at Wal-Mart.
At Best Buy, it's pain and torture to try to get out of there with the pair of $16 HEADPHONES I bought without them trying to shove magazines at me, and an extended warranty that costs more than... what I bought.
Pisses me off. Just take my money so I can leave.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Neverwinter_Nights_(AOL_game)
Neverwinter Nights, the first graphical MMORPG, had all the elements most modern ones have (though far cruder of course), ran from 1991 to 1997.
There are, of course MUD's far older than that which were persistent worlds.
"In the end, all it tells us is that you stick your head in the sand and ignore what people say for nonsensical reasons. Since you appear to be very confident of your position, perhaps instead you could make a coherant logical argument for it. Then there would be something to debate besides whether you're an intellectually dishonest douchebag or a clueless ignoramus."
I apologize, because I forget that "Man Made Global Warming" has more or less become a religion, since, like God, it has followers who believe in something that cannot be unequivocally proven to exist. I didn't mean to insult your faith.
That said, I don't believe in it. Nor will I be goaded into guilt over the fact that I drive a gasoline powered car (which uses less gas in a year than The Goreacle's fleet uses in a month) and I like to (gasp!) eat steaks. Sorry, I produce less pollution and "greenhouse gasses" than ONE of The Goreacle's "man made global warming" chicken little fests. Which ironically always seem to occur in places where record cold or some freak WINTER type event happens.
This movement has nothing to do with the environment. It has nothing to do with climate change. It has EVERYTHING to do with money and control. The Goreacle gets rich selling "carbon credits" which is the snake oil of the modern age. Politicians who embrace the hoax use it to violate our Constitution and gain even more control at the expense of individual liberty.
"Your argument make no sense, and is in fact pretty childish. The goal is to reduce the overall carbon emition, but it makes perfect sense to "spend" carbon emission in something if we think this will help us reduce it considerably elsewhere. This is a perfectly sound investment.
"
The whole "theory" of MAN MADE climate change is backed more by faith than fact. If you really want to examine what causes climate change, a SOLAR observatory would achieve more than one meant to monitor C02. The Sun is a gigantic mostly stable nuclear fusion reaction. It's emissions are NOT constant, sometimes it's more active, sometimes it's less active. We're now in a period of LESS active solar activity, and as a consequence, we're cooling. In the previous decades we had a much more active Solar cycle.
Records, both fossil and historical, show that the Earth has been much hotter AND much cooler than it currently is. For example, in ancient times, the Romans were able to build WINERIES in Britain! And in the 1800's, they were able to hold ice fairs on the Thames river in London. 10,000 years ago most of the world was covered in ice.
I'd like to know what Human industry caused all that climate change. Fact of the matter is, we, humans have VERY LITTLE to do with the climate, if anything at all. About the only thing we could do to destroy the Earth would be to release every nuke we have, and even that wouldn't be enough to end all life, nor would it stop the planet from renewing itself in the future.
The whole man made global warming movement is nothing but a profiteering scheme for opportunists (Gore) and a cloak for those ("former" socialists) to dupe people with false alarmism to accept draconian restrictions on individual freedom.
As I said, when The Goreacle and other global warming alarmists start LIVING like things are the crisis they say it is, I'll take them seriously. Until then, I view their "movement" as pseudo-science at best, and a poorly cloaked religious cult at worst.
Funny, figured the gaians with mod points would strike :)
As one who does not buy into the "man made" global warming hoax I note that the attempted launch had a "carbon footprint" bigger than the Goreacle's.
When those who keep preaching the global warming hysteria start ACTING like it's a real crisis (by giving up their limos, huge houses, and private jets, which generate more pollution in a year than I will in my lifetime) then I'll start taking them seriously.
It's a shame about the satellite though, if it'd taken an honest assessment it would have proven that nature generates far FAR more C02 than does human activity.
I buy an iphone. I own it. How can Apple tell me what to do with it after I hand over my cash and have receipt in hand?
SOE has been foundering for quite some time, and not just because of the Star Wars Galaxies NGE debacle (which cost them 200,000 subscribers). They also have shot themselves in the foot with EQ/EQ2 subscribers by opening up RMT stores (cash for items you can't get ingame) after promising that RMT wouldn't exist on any but the "Station Exchange" servers.
DCMMO is essentially seen internally at SOE as the "save the company" project. This is THE game that must achieve huge success so as to save the jobs of debris like John Smedley and Chris Cao.
So, senior SOE managers have taken to MICROmanaging this game's development. The effect has been a revolving door Dev team. They can't keep one. They are on at least their third producer and Lead Dev. They have been in such dire straits that the last two have been recycled from the grade D- Star Wars Galaxies NGE team. And I can tell you from experience, those guys would do well to thread their shoelaces properly, much less develop a decent game.
If you want a new superhero game, I suggest following Cryptic's "Champions Online". Cryptic has the experience, and the talent, to produce a good game in this genre. SOE hasn't accomplished anything but acquiring a deserved reputation for piss poor quality, and continual betrayal of their players.
Disclaimer: I am not a member of Goonswarm, but I live in 0.0 and am in an alliance that is part of their coalition
BOB should have been disbanded by CCP back when they were caught red handed with CCP Devs in their leadership handing them stuff like candy (the infamous T20 scandal). As has been proven by information "liberated" from their message boards, BOB leadership was WELL aware of what was going on.
Also, BOB was the king of metagaming, account hacking, etc, and to see them fall as a result of it is deserved.
"Academia would never work unless it was allowed to induce controversy sometimes."
Terrorism isn't controversy. It's murder.
This man was leading a group that bombed the US Capitol and the Pentagon. He's a terrorist, and has only a legal technicality to thank for the fact that he's alive much less running around free and publishing papers as a "professor".
Indeed, the fact that Ayers IS employed in academia itself is far greater argument that the US educational system is broken beyond repair. Why is he bitching about Bill Gates? Even if you argue that his school projects are failing/have failed, at least Gates is using HIS OWN MONEY and not spending taxpayer money on failed government schools. IMHO, a true stalin-lefty like Ayers is probably harping on this more as a reason to promote government solutions to the problem with education (despite it being the main problem) over private ones.
"Thats a misconception. They want you to think you do, however just because you enter a school doesn't give them the right to remove your rights."
This is correct, especially given that most schools are government entities, and workers there government employees. The Constitution specifically lays down rights that it expressly forbids the government to infringe upon, hence no legislature ("Congress shall make no law") can grant them such authority.
If a policeman can't do it to you because it's an infringement of rights, you can bet your ass a teacher or school administrator also can't do it for the same reason.
If this "evidence" was gained due to an illegal search by government school employees, then it's "spoiled" evidence that can't be used.
We need more prosecutions of overzealous prosecutors and judges.
Start putting some of them in the klink and then maybe you will have some rational common sense return to the legal system.
Child porn laws exist and were CLEARLY intended to apply to ADULTS who created, obtained, or distributed such photos/whatever.
Anyone who has baby pictures better burn them/destroy the evidence... IMHO, this is a way of manufacturing a crime in order to make some idiot prosecutor and the equally irresponsible court that will hear this look like they are doing something.
Once could be an "isolated incident". But this is the second big scam involving Belkin, in the wake of the router that basically had built in adware...
Seems to me that Belkin has a culture of corporate corruption over there. The best way to assure us that they have realized their mistake and to correct the problem is for heads to roll. Seems to me they have corrupt management. That needs to go.
This isn't their first bout with dodgy behavior, there was the router that would redirect traffic to an ad page every so often.
Simply put there are tons of competitors of theirs who make better products who don't behave the way they do.
"Campaign finance law isn't about the speech, it's about the money. I'm all in favor of restricting bribery. "
The reforms do nothing to prevent bribery. But they DO prevent you or me from organizing and collectively spending money to make political speech which we couldn't afford individually, AND to petition our government (also a specific Constitutional right).
Saying that this is legal is like saying that you HAVE freedom of the press, but only if you, ALONE, as an individual can afford to buy, operate, print, and then (for no money) distribute the paper.
"What about Freedom of speech?"
Well, given that a wedge has ALREADY been driven into that by the so-called "campaign finance reform" law, and serious proposals to censor political opinion radio, TV, and the internet even via the so-called "fairness doctrine" which would be a sledgehammer driving that wedge all the way THROUGH, tell me why government types aren't thinking of this?
The "freedom" I'd like to see removed is that of treasonous legislators to make law they KNOW violates the Constitution.
What part of "shall make NO LAW" can't they understand?
At the very least, legislators who VOTE for crap like this, and executives who SIGN such flagrantly illegal things into law should have to REPAY all the frivilous legal expenses that will be incurred by the taxpayer when this crap gets shot down in court.
"They'd go out of business, but I'm OK with them trying.
Like it or not, CA has serious power problems. Unlike the "sane" parts of the country, CA is the only US state where per-capita energy consumption has been flat for around 30 years. All because of "crazy" regulations. Yet it's insightful to hate all regulations."
The reason why we don't have power shortages where I live (which is a net electricity PRODUCER btw) is because we have... uh power plants.
The loony CA government won't ALLOW new power plants to be built, when there is plenty of demand and no reason why it can't be done, which means they have to GET power from other states.
If California doesn't mind being in the dark or wants to keep voting in people who will make it so that goods cost them more than they do in any other state, fine. But I don't want to deal with it.
The technology of today allows even coal fired power plants to be vastly cleaner in the past. Not to mention nuclear, which is not only the CLEANEST method of power generation there is, it's also the most efficient. If Californians are happy to be Luddites, let them pay for the privilege, not citizens of other states.
...An industry would look a state like CA that wants to foist stupid regulations upon them STRAIGHT in the eye and tell them to "go suck it". Californians just simply would have to go to other states (thus losing the morons in Sacramento some serious tax revenue) to buy these things.
What will happen is that this will make these products more expensive for those of us who live in the sane part of America. It's all about foisting a radical green agenda on the rest of us.
If California wants to be crazy, fine, to each his own. But don't force ME to have to pay for it.
"And I'd hardly call Eve a major success... I'd agree, the Eve intro was horrible and put me off, another customer lost."
EVE is a major success. It's currently behind only WOW in the US/EU amongst full subscription MMORPGs. That is a distant second, but look at all the WOW clones the market's ONLY skills based non level based, non static class MMO is ahead of!
EVE has in excess of 300,000 subscribers and this past weekend set a new concurrent player record of 45,000. That is even more amazing when you realize that unlike WOW and pretty much every other MMO which have more than one server limited to maybe 2-3,000 concurrent players each EVE has only one server which means EVERYONE plays in the same game world.
With universities demanding more and more in tuition and tax funding, any IP that they obtain or create should be public domain just as with anything the government creates.
Patenting student ideas and then profiting off them is wrong. At most, a university should get a royalty free license IF the student patents one of his or her own ideas.
All this is going to do is encourage brilliant students to CONCEAL any marketable ideas they come up with while in school and thus is actually counter productive. I know that if I were in the same situation, I'd keep such an idea to myself and then "discover" it after I graduated.
No public funding for universities that register patents for profit instead of public domain. Let them choose one or the other.
How can it possibly be in the economic interest of the US to allow a corporation to lay off/fire workers and then not allow them to accept a job in their own field?
To side with RIM would be to side with forcing the taxpayers to pay unemployment/welfare benefits while the corp gets off scott free. I say make RIM pay these benefits if this is how they want it. In fact, I think that if such "noncompete" crap is to be legal at ALL, it should be allowed ONLY if the corporation pays the worker his/her regular salary NOT to work.
I find it funny how corporations are "gung ho capitalists" when it comes to axing thousands of workers on a whim for their benefit, but become devout orthodox Stalinists when it comes to workers going elsewhere for THEIR benefit...
SOE has been foundering now for years. In a time when the MMO industry has been growing, SOE has shrunk. If you look at mmogdata.voig.com or mmoprgchart, you see that they've lost more than half their subscribers since 2005 across all their games.
Of course most of the wounds to SOE are self inflicted. Such as the Star Wars Galaxies NGE which cost them by some estimates 80-90% of their player base and a HELL of a lot of reputation, this when SOE didn't have that great of one to begin with, what with being caught doing things like releasing EQ expansions unfinished and gating content, etc.
Fact of the matter is, people flee SOE games because the company lacks any sort of ethics or integrity. John Smedley is a pathological liar who will promise that things won't happen that the player bases don't want, then turn right around and do them, usually sprung on players overnight with no warning.
For example, he flatly denied that RMT would be coming to the EQ2 servers that weren't part of "station exchange". The new pay for items system that is the subject of this article was literally sprung on everyone overnight, one day it wasn't there, next day it was IN THE GAME, no warning, just an obscure reference in the patch notes. Of course this has caused massive outrage.
BTW, this new "macrotranscam" system isn't SOE's ONLY RMT scheme they have going. Their card games are even worse. In the card game, there are now loot cards that grant exclusive in game items, some of which are superior to anything available in game. They won't publish the odds, so buying the "card" decks amounts to gambling. There has been discussion that this may in fact be illegal under the US online gambling ban...
SOE being SOE, you know that they won't be able to resist the temptation to make even more things RMT exclusive, and where they aren't, to not tinker with loot drop rates to tempt people to pay for things that they could earn.
Fact is, I believe that RMT the way SOE is doing it is destined to fail. It's unproven first off whether this sort of scheme will work in the first place, and it's definitely going to be rejected when tied to games that charge a FULL PRICE subscription fee. People simply aren't going to fall for that. The only place, IMHO, RMT might work is in a game where there is no sub fee, or as an alternative to a sub fee, to "pay as you go" up to and stopping at the price of a full sub fee.
In the past, Smed has pimped RMT as a way to get people past the "barrier" of the full price sub fee. To no one's surprise he's using it as a way to get people past the "barrier" of thinking that $14.99 a month plus paying extra for expansions is enough money to play his mediocre buggy games.
No thanks.
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Yea, and unions are going to stop offshoring...How exactly?
If I could come up with one thing that would drive offshoring, it would be unions. Might stop H1Bs, but at least H1B's come HERE to work. Accelerate offshoring, and they don't have to come here anymore.
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Unions would greatly accelerate outsourcing. Unions are like government programs/agencies. They originally exist for a purpose, outlive that purpose, and then become more interested in their own self-perpetuation and political power than anything else.
Unions outliving their usefulness are why there are lots of things no longer produced in the US.