Renters get their deposit back if they don't do anything to "damage" an account -- getting demoted to lower levels, ditching in-game possessions or violating the games' terms of service, Smith said.
Considering that the sheer act of transferring an account in this manner is a violation of most of these games' terms of service, does that make this operation one giant and very public scam?
The guy also claims that people won't mind account renters more than they do account buyers. That's not true, because a rented account (especially at these prices) is likely to be rented to new people all the time, meaning that the rented account's characters will never get played by anyone who's actually halfway decent at playing. At least the owner of a purchased account might eventually figure out what the hell he's doing.
Anyway, is this a particularly commonplace occurrence, or just a stand-alone example of recruiters gone amok? There's a followup article to the one you linked, and it notes that a few readers wrote to the reporter to indicate they had been pressured heavily by their recruiters as well. No details on the severity were given, so some people might be equating "frequent and annoying telephone calls" with the shenanigans the Seattle recruiters were pulling.
BTW, the followup article also mentions some good ways to get recruiters off your back, like mentioning (true or not) that you're a regular drug user, a convicted felon, or even better yet, that you're gay.
One thing that would make this system unreasonable is DRM encumbrance. It's obvious that there is/will be DRM with such systems, but how restrictive is it compared to, say, iTMS?
Also, according to the article, there is a "phone home" component to the software, in that it reports unauthorized music sharing to the recording industry. Personally, I don't think I can deal with the possibility of the software I'm using creating a legal liability due to things I have no control over, like bugs, communications errors, etc.
My point was that Halliburton doesn't participate in recruitment of soldiers into the actual military, so even mentioning them clouds the discussion about military recruiting with irrelevant information. Saying that the military is inefficient with its recruitment money because Halliburton also hires people from less affluent parts of the country is as illogical as saying that the military is inefficient because street gangs also take in people from less affluent areas. In other words, they really don't have anything to do with one another.
(I guess instead of trying to be clever, I should have been blunt.)
TSO was probably mentioned because it's a lot easier to get demographics on the player base for TSO than Sims 2. (That is, Maxis probably knows how many TSO players are/were women, but not necessarily how many Sims 2 players are.)
As for why women don't get into games programming, I personally think the problem isn't specifically with the setup in games programming, computer science, or the sciences in general. Rather, there are societal differences from early childhood between boys and girls that pressure each to head in a different direction. These differences stem at least somewhat from genetic predispositions toward the more primitive aspects of life that have been put in place via evolutionary mechanisms. The result is that women tend toward medicine and the life sciences (nurturing professions), while men tend toward engineering (building professions).
The way our society strongly predisposes each gender in a particular direction from an early age (from the toys parents buy from their children to the sorts of advertising that children are blasted with on TV), it's difficult to say how reversible the trend is (that is, how much of it is due to aspects of the reproductive drive, and how much is just from the expectations put on children from the beginning, like whether the baby's room gets painted pink or blue).
The typical tactic is to make federal funding of state projects contingent upon the states passing a particular law. The states, in most (if not all) cases, would have the authority to prevent municipalities from exercising eminent domain.
But when you mention privatizing Social Security, you contradict your point. Privatization of Social Security is about lessening the government's involvement in retirement savings, not increasing it.
And as for contracting with private companies for military support and Iraq reconstruction, well, that's what companies do and have been doing throughout most of US history, whether it's Winchester or Colt supplying firearms to soldiers during the 1800s, Ford et al. manufacturing military vehicles during World War II, or Lockheed Martin et al. designing and manufacturing new fighters and bombers.
Yes, the Army Corps of Engineers does public works projects all the time, but they can only do so much before outside assistance is needed. Aside from them, really the only internally-developed and produced military projects have been top-secret things like the Manhattan Project (and much of the subsequent nuclear program). Just about everything else gets contracted out, usually to American companies, and believe it or not, our economy and our populace benefits from it.
"Preying"? You make it sound like the recruiters are kidnapping these kids and pressing them into service.
There's a reason why recruiters focus on poorer areas in their recruiting drives. The military offers a steady job for four years with additional compensation for people who go to college afterwards. It also offers the possibility of making one's career in the military. When you compare that to the alternative - working in low-wage blue collar jobs, when you're working at all - people in poor areas find the military to be an attractive option. In more affluent areas, recruitment isn't as worthwhile, because most kids have the resources already available to them to take a different (safer, easier, higher-paying) career path by going to college immediately.
This isn't some insidious plot to enlist underprivileged kids. It's an appropriate allocation of recruitment resources to the areas of the country where recruitment will be the most successful. In other words, this is the military being efficient.
Any other time, people would be complaining about how the military wastes so much money - but in this case, where the military is managing its resources well, they're accused of being nefarious. I guess they just can't win.
so that ends the "they are making more than the programmers" arguement.
That never has been an argument. What everyone's been saying is that programmers work 60+ hours a week for two years straight, yet a voice actor comes in for a few hours and makes more than $150 an hour. If a programmer got paid that kind of rate, they'd be raking in close to half a million dollars a year.
Next arguement "They will have to hire less programmers...skimp in other places...etc" You have no frigging CLUE what you are talking about...
Actually, you're the one with "no frigging CLUE". Where do you think the residuals will come from? Out of the profits that the publishers expect to get from a product? Bahaha. Think again. That money will come out of the money that currently goes to developers, which means that residuals for voice actors will negatively impact the people who actually make the games.
Have you ever considered that once one group gets it the others will have that much more leverage to get such treatment...
Then here's a solution: SAG/AFTRA convinces games industry workers to unionize, and fights to get residuals included in the games industry workers' contracts. Once that happens, SAG/AFTRA will have a much easier time getting the games industry to give residuals to voice actors.
But no, SAG isn't interested in helping out anybody but the brand-name actors in the highest profile positions within the organization. If they were interested in helping out the rank-and-file voice actors, they would have accepted the contract (which included a minimum pay rate increase) as it stands right now instead of quibbling over residuals.
That must be why they consistently ignored the plaintive cries from programmers, artists, designers, and other members of the game development teams that they deserve residuals before voice actors do.
The SAG execs don't give a rat's ass about the games industry, or about their own rank-and-file members, for that matter. They saw an opportunity to land some significant cash in the form of residuals for their top members whenever popular games sign brand-name actors (think the GTA series). The earlier contract agreement already gave a significant boost in minimum wages, which any union that actually cared about the bulk of its members should be happy about.
For that matter, high school textbooks are often rife with factual errors, misconceptions, and opinions stated as facts. At least with Wikipedia, there's an opportunity to correct these problems for free.
In my city, they recently passed an ordinance explicitly giving people permission to take appliances, furniture, and other large items from off the treelawn when other people were throwing them out. You still can't root around through their garbage for thrown out mail, documents, etc., but you can take the big stuff that isn't bagged or boxed up.
And what, you think Justin Timberlake being cast in Shrek 3 because he's boning Cameron Diaz is a good thing? People need to start giving props for talent, instead of fellating people whose only claim to fame is that they are famous.
Having a specialty "class" be more powerful than a generic, well-rounded "class" isn't really all that different from vice versa. Either way, if one is more powerful than the other, tons of people will go with the more powerful way.
The difference is that dying in a stand-up fight is a lot less annoying than dying to the cheese factor. When I played waaay back during beta, the sheer vast number of stealthers, snipers, and Reaver pilots was ridiculous, and you could bet dollars to donuts that you'd die to one of those three things. Now, the game is more balanced, and while people still use stealth, sniper rifles, and Reavers to score kills, it's not any more than the people Gal-dropping towers with heavy weapons and MAXes. Those specialized tools are just that now - specialized - meaning they are situationally very useful, but don't mean an automatic win anymore.
Considering that he's been doing voice work for 40 years, I think he's earned the right to take it easy these days. He did voices in most of the well-known action cartoons in the 80s (he was Optimus Prime, for example), so it's not like he's a nobody.
I mean, sure, I'd be even more impressed if they got Frank Welker on board, but his voice doesn't have that resonating quality that Cullen's voice has.
There may be a potential DMCA violation involved with doing this, especially if credit card company-issued smart cards contain proprietary copyrighted information on them. In any case, the threat of a lawsuit (whether it's valid or not) may be enough to silence any efforts to figure out what sorts of personally identifiable info is stored on these cards.
Greeting Card: "Come, comrade Bender! We must take to the streets!" Bender: "Um, is this the boring, peaceful kind of taking to the streets?" Greeting Card: "No, the kind with looting! And maybe starting a few fires." Bender: "Yes! In your face, Gandhi!"
Unfortunately, computers are pretty good at finding virtual needles in virtual haystacks, as long as they're given enough time. Hell, even grep is like lowering a gigantic electromagnet over a haystack that may or may not have needles hidden in it, and I'm sure the feds have tools a lot more specialized than that.
Generally, an ISP will dutifully route packets intended for you to your box, even if it's turned off, and won't get involved in determining whether or not your host is active.
The war of intellectual property versus fair use seems to be fairly non-partisan. Of the current federal legislators endorsed by IPac, two are Democrats and three are Republicans. The chief enemies of fair use (Ernest Hollings {retired}, Howard Berman, Orrin Hatch) also come from both sides of the aisle.
Re:Automatic DDoS mitigation at backbone level
on
Zombie Report By ISP
·
· Score: 1
The compliance doesn't come from the RFC itself. It comes from adoption of the RFC's standard by the top-level ISPs (the backbone providers) who have the muscle to force compliance upon their customers and who have the incentive (in terms of significantly reduced traffic) to adopt the standard.
The little guys (end-user ISPs) have compliance mandated upon them by the fact that if they don't comply, they eventually get a lot of their address space blacklisted by a process not under their control. Either way, the zombie hosts are blacklisted - the question is whether the little ISPs want to be in control of that process or not.
Slashdot Mirror
Renters get their deposit back if they don't do anything to "damage" an account -- getting demoted to lower levels, ditching in-game possessions or violating the games' terms of service, Smith said.
Considering that the sheer act of transferring an account in this manner is a violation of most of these games' terms of service, does that make this operation one giant and very public scam?
The guy also claims that people won't mind account renters more than they do account buyers. That's not true, because a rented account (especially at these prices) is likely to be rented to new people all the time, meaning that the rented account's characters will never get played by anyone who's actually halfway decent at playing. At least the owner of a purchased account might eventually figure out what the hell he's doing.
So I've heard.
Anyway, is this a particularly commonplace occurrence, or just a stand-alone example of recruiters gone amok? There's a followup article to the one you linked, and it notes that a few readers wrote to the reporter to indicate they had been pressured heavily by their recruiters as well. No details on the severity were given, so some people might be equating "frequent and annoying telephone calls" with the shenanigans the Seattle recruiters were pulling.
BTW, the followup article also mentions some good ways to get recruiters off your back, like mentioning (true or not) that you're a regular drug user, a convicted felon, or even better yet, that you're gay.
One thing that would make this system unreasonable is DRM encumbrance. It's obvious that there is/will be DRM with such systems, but how restrictive is it compared to, say, iTMS?
Also, according to the article, there is a "phone home" component to the software, in that it reports unauthorized music sharing to the recording industry. Personally, I don't think I can deal with the possibility of the software I'm using creating a legal liability due to things I have no control over, like bugs, communications errors, etc.
My point was that Halliburton doesn't participate in recruitment of soldiers into the actual military, so even mentioning them clouds the discussion about military recruiting with irrelevant information. Saying that the military is inefficient with its recruitment money because Halliburton also hires people from less affluent parts of the country is as illogical as saying that the military is inefficient because street gangs also take in people from less affluent areas. In other words, they really don't have anything to do with one another.
(I guess instead of trying to be clever, I should have been blunt.)
TSO was probably mentioned because it's a lot easier to get demographics on the player base for TSO than Sims 2. (That is, Maxis probably knows how many TSO players are/were women, but not necessarily how many Sims 2 players are.)
As for why women don't get into games programming, I personally think the problem isn't specifically with the setup in games programming, computer science, or the sciences in general. Rather, there are societal differences from early childhood between boys and girls that pressure each to head in a different direction. These differences stem at least somewhat from genetic predispositions toward the more primitive aspects of life that have been put in place via evolutionary mechanisms. The result is that women tend toward medicine and the life sciences (nurturing professions), while men tend toward engineering (building professions).
The way our society strongly predisposes each gender in a particular direction from an early age (from the toys parents buy from their children to the sorts of advertising that children are blasted with on TV), it's difficult to say how reversible the trend is (that is, how much of it is due to aspects of the reproductive drive, and how much is just from the expectations put on children from the beginning, like whether the baby's room gets painted pink or blue).
Sorry, but all the contractors who are war-profiteering (Halliburton and it's subsidiaries)
Halliburton is involved in military recruitment? Wow, I guess you learn something every day.
The typical tactic is to make federal funding of state projects contingent upon the states passing a particular law. The states, in most (if not all) cases, would have the authority to prevent municipalities from exercising eminent domain.
But when you mention privatizing Social Security, you contradict your point. Privatization of Social Security is about lessening the government's involvement in retirement savings, not increasing it.
And as for contracting with private companies for military support and Iraq reconstruction, well, that's what companies do and have been doing throughout most of US history, whether it's Winchester or Colt supplying firearms to soldiers during the 1800s, Ford et al. manufacturing military vehicles during World War II, or Lockheed Martin et al. designing and manufacturing new fighters and bombers.
Yes, the Army Corps of Engineers does public works projects all the time, but they can only do so much before outside assistance is needed. Aside from them, really the only internally-developed and produced military projects have been top-secret things like the Manhattan Project (and much of the subsequent nuclear program). Just about everything else gets contracted out, usually to American companies, and believe it or not, our economy and our populace benefits from it.
"Preying"? You make it sound like the recruiters are kidnapping these kids and pressing them into service.
There's a reason why recruiters focus on poorer areas in their recruiting drives. The military offers a steady job for four years with additional compensation for people who go to college afterwards. It also offers the possibility of making one's career in the military. When you compare that to the alternative - working in low-wage blue collar jobs, when you're working at all - people in poor areas find the military to be an attractive option. In more affluent areas, recruitment isn't as worthwhile, because most kids have the resources already available to them to take a different (safer, easier, higher-paying) career path by going to college immediately.
This isn't some insidious plot to enlist underprivileged kids. It's an appropriate allocation of recruitment resources to the areas of the country where recruitment will be the most successful. In other words, this is the military being efficient.
Any other time, people would be complaining about how the military wastes so much money - but in this case, where the military is managing its resources well, they're accused of being nefarious. I guess they just can't win.
so that ends the "they are making more than the programmers" arguement.
That never has been an argument. What everyone's been saying is that programmers work 60+ hours a week for two years straight, yet a voice actor comes in for a few hours and makes more than $150 an hour. If a programmer got paid that kind of rate, they'd be raking in close to half a million dollars a year.
Next arguement "They will have to hire less programmers...skimp in other places...etc" You have no frigging CLUE what you are talking about...
Actually, you're the one with "no frigging CLUE". Where do you think the residuals will come from? Out of the profits that the publishers expect to get from a product? Bahaha. Think again. That money will come out of the money that currently goes to developers, which means that residuals for voice actors will negatively impact the people who actually make the games.
Have you ever considered that once one group gets it the others will have that much more leverage to get such treatment...
Then here's a solution: SAG/AFTRA convinces games industry workers to unionize, and fights to get residuals included in the games industry workers' contracts. Once that happens, SAG/AFTRA will have a much easier time getting the games industry to give residuals to voice actors.
But no, SAG isn't interested in helping out anybody but the brand-name actors in the highest profile positions within the organization. If they were interested in helping out the rank-and-file voice actors, they would have accepted the contract (which included a minimum pay rate increase) as it stands right now instead of quibbling over residuals.
You left Lauren Green off your list. :)
Perhaps the most unsung hottie of the news world is Becky Quick of CNBC.
And my personal favorite from Fox News - Jennifer Eccleston - is now with CNN.
Really?
That must be why they consistently ignored the plaintive cries from programmers, artists, designers, and other members of the game development teams that they deserve residuals before voice actors do.
The SAG execs don't give a rat's ass about the games industry, or about their own rank-and-file members, for that matter. They saw an opportunity to land some significant cash in the form of residuals for their top members whenever popular games sign brand-name actors (think the GTA series). The earlier contract agreement already gave a significant boost in minimum wages, which any union that actually cared about the bulk of its members should be happy about.
For that matter, high school textbooks are often rife with factual errors, misconceptions, and opinions stated as facts. At least with Wikipedia, there's an opportunity to correct these problems for free.
but the HD-DVD camp argues that lower manufacturing costs make for a cheaper, more consumer-friendly product.
And then DRM encumbrance makes "consumer-friendliness" irrelevant.
In my city, they recently passed an ordinance explicitly giving people permission to take appliances, furniture, and other large items from off the treelawn when other people were throwing them out. You still can't root around through their garbage for thrown out mail, documents, etc., but you can take the big stuff that isn't bagged or boxed up.
And what, you think Justin Timberlake being cast in Shrek 3 because he's boning Cameron Diaz is a good thing? People need to start giving props for talent, instead of fellating people whose only claim to fame is that they are famous.
Having a specialty "class" be more powerful than a generic, well-rounded "class" isn't really all that different from vice versa. Either way, if one is more powerful than the other, tons of people will go with the more powerful way.
The difference is that dying in a stand-up fight is a lot less annoying than dying to the cheese factor. When I played waaay back during beta, the sheer vast number of stealthers, snipers, and Reaver pilots was ridiculous, and you could bet dollars to donuts that you'd die to one of those three things. Now, the game is more balanced, and while people still use stealth, sniper rifles, and Reavers to score kills, it's not any more than the people Gal-dropping towers with heavy weapons and MAXes. Those specialized tools are just that now - specialized - meaning they are situationally very useful, but don't mean an automatic win anymore.
Considering that he's been doing voice work for 40 years, I think he's earned the right to take it easy these days. He did voices in most of the well-known action cartoons in the 80s (he was Optimus Prime, for example), so it's not like he's a nobody.
I mean, sure, I'd be even more impressed if they got Frank Welker on board, but his voice doesn't have that resonating quality that Cullen's voice has.
Well, they did get Peter Cullen to do the narration, so that's gotta count for something.
There may be a potential DMCA violation involved with doing this, especially if credit card company-issued smart cards contain proprietary copyrighted information on them. In any case, the threat of a lawsuit (whether it's valid or not) may be enough to silence any efforts to figure out what sorts of personally identifiable info is stored on these cards.
Greeting Card: "Come, comrade Bender! We must take to the streets!"
Bender: "Um, is this the boring, peaceful kind of taking to the streets?"
Greeting Card: "No, the kind with looting! And maybe starting a few fires."
Bender: "Yes! In your face, Gandhi!"
Unfortunately, computers are pretty good at finding virtual needles in virtual haystacks, as long as they're given enough time. Hell, even grep is like lowering a gigantic electromagnet over a haystack that may or may not have needles hidden in it, and I'm sure the feds have tools a lot more specialized than that.
Generally, an ISP will dutifully route packets intended for you to your box, even if it's turned off, and won't get involved in determining whether or not your host is active.
The war of intellectual property versus fair use seems to be fairly non-partisan. Of the current federal legislators endorsed by IPac, two are Democrats and three are Republicans. The chief enemies of fair use (Ernest Hollings {retired}, Howard Berman, Orrin Hatch) also come from both sides of the aisle.
The compliance doesn't come from the RFC itself. It comes from adoption of the RFC's standard by the top-level ISPs (the backbone providers) who have the muscle to force compliance upon their customers and who have the incentive (in terms of significantly reduced traffic) to adopt the standard.
The little guys (end-user ISPs) have compliance mandated upon them by the fact that if they don't comply, they eventually get a lot of their address space blacklisted by a process not under their control. Either way, the zombie hosts are blacklisted - the question is whether the little ISPs want to be in control of that process or not.