Facebook is as invasive as you let it be. I've got a name, 4 photos, a current city, and that's about it. I've got 40 friends, all either close family members, long-time friends I'm not near, or current friends that use facebook to organize get-togethers. I don't have all my exes, all the people knew in high school, all my friends' friends, or any such crap like that. I don't play any games, or have any of the data mining apps installed. (Not like there's much there anyway. Not even my likes and dislikes, age or birthday,
previous employers or anything.)
I get updates on the stuff that matters - beers down by the lake, friends getting married, my little cousin's transition from high school to college...it keeps me in the loop, and lets me get in touch with the people I want to get in touch with. Like the GP, I don't understand how Facebook can become the monster that it seems to be for many people.
I'm pretty damn selective about my friends. Quality over quantity. I've seen a single update from a single person (she was 16) who needed logs or some shit for a cabin. Her uncle gave her some, and it's now been 3-4 months since that single update.
I guess I can be pretty damn proud of my technically literate, non idiotic friends and family.
Really - my extended family who are a 1000 miles away are my friends, a couple of good ones from high school, a couple of good ones from college, a few former coworkers, and about a dozen current friends make up my network. I've got 40 total, and I could pull 5-10 of those off really.
If you accept every friend request from every moron you ever met, you'll surely be spammed with all sorts of stupid stuff. Pick wisely.
30, 15 years? If there is anything the past two years has taught us, it's that any company can disappear in a tenth the times you listed, at the most.
Still, your point is quite valid. And if you're talking 1960s, you may still be talking about paperbacks in readable condition. Go to hardcover, and if they've been stored someplace dry and not handled too much, you're talking hundreds of years of use. It's amazing to look around my house and realize how much isn't going to make it another 30 years, let alone another hundred. The appliances, all the portable electronics, the office chair, the window blinds, likely all the media on my computer. Yet at my elbow is a stack of D&D books. They'll be around in 30, perhaps 100 years. The boxed ones in the attic I have have been around for 30 already, and are pretty readable....
No, it's never worth pointing out a modding mistake. Let the mods fix it. At the best, you're wasting a mod point on you being modded offtopic - (see the reply of mine you replied to) at the worst, you're tempting a dumb moderator to give you an informative mod, like the great grandparent I replied to.
Ignore the trolls, even if they're moderated into visibility. They'll be below the waterline before too long. More quickly if you don't reply to them, and bring attention to their post.
...unless it's a remote login from someone who's not allowed to remote in, and your logs catch it, and you don't have anything better to do. You're pretty unlikely to notice an employee logging on as a different employee on a shared machine. I mean, when I worked IT, keeping tabs on the secretary and customer service reps' logins wasn't something that was on the front burner.
If they didn't have issues doing their jobs, there was a lot more important stuff to worry about.
Receptionists will share passwords so they can log in on each other's computers...
...if someone gets terminated, and they remember the passwords, they pose a security risk.
Their accounts ARE terminated at the same moment as their employment. But if they know the passwords for several other people's accounts, that doesn't help any. Rotating even once a month means that on average, a terminated person will only be able to log in for two weeks.
There is a major balance between security and user-hostility. It's hard to get right. As you pointed out, make it too "secure", and it gets hostile enough people just write down their passwords, and your security is killed. Make it too lax, and they're happy as hell, but your security is poor.
My personal setup (I've got near full control of my work machines) is to have robust passwords that don't change often. I try to make sure that any questionable or low-security site has my "less secure" passwords, and my really important stuff (financial, mostly) has very robust ones that aren't reused between sites.
For me, this works. However, this doesn't necessarily work in an environment with tons of users, who don't have a vested interest in security. Best I can come up with for that is to have some sort of one-time-pad on a separate system from the main system. You log in with your usename to the big system, and your password is a combination of a 6 character or so easy to remember one plus the pad from the other system. Let the easy passwd stay the same for 4-6 months at a time, but if you're not in the building, you can't access the pad to finish the passsword. Give your remote users a dongle.
However, this isn't overly easy to set up, will irritate users, and requires a lot more to implement than a hostile password policy. However, even if you had but 2-3 new pads every day, (every 8-12 hours) the same for all employees, even if it was written down it would be more secure than the normal method of writing down a 20 character password and sticking it to the monitor.
Was this your answer to what 'premium' content The Times should offer its readers?
There are lots and lots of options here...off the top of my head:
1) Access to every article of every edition. If someone comes unsubscribed from a Google link, they get the story they are looking for. Maybe the day's headlines. But that's it. Subscribers can get access to it all. 2) Links between articles, followup stories, categories to browse. Read an article on Xe Services LLC? Subscribers get a list of stories to pick from that go back years, including the name change (Blackwater Worldwide, for those that don't know) and all the controversy they've had. 3) Sudoku, crossword, all the rest of the semi-interactive entertainment 4) The ability to comment, perhaps? 5) Indexed, searchable, bookmarkable, clickable classified. Let anyone browse them like a paper. Give your subscribers beefed up tools to manage them. 6) Stock ticker links to company profiles, all the stories ever run about them, stock histories, etc. Again, let the non-subscribers see them like a newspaper page - static bits of information. 7) Set your website up like a newspaper for non-subscribers. Let them turn pages, navigate to page 6 to keep on reading. Give your subscribers links. Or "whole article on one page". 8) Links to every company, sports team, organization noted in your news for subscribers. Non-subscribers will need to google it.
There are lots of ways to still provide your information, but make it worthwhile for people to pay a little money. Many of these wouldn't be hard to code up templates for once. After that, you just publish your information as usual, and you automagically have benefits for subscribers, yet aren't pushing people away. And it shouldn't cost a ton of money to do so. Now, will everyone want to pay for these perks? Hell no. But I bet they'd get more money than they are getting now, with the dual failing options of "free" and "paywall".
Why bother replying to an AC post at -1? You do realize that pretty much nobody will see it, unless browsing at -1, right? And unless the AC is actively trolling and watching for replies, the original poster won't see your reply. If they are actively trolling, you're just making it all the more visible. Do the "adult" thing and ignore the troll. And what mod on crack thought it would be good to mod you informative, drawing yet more attention to the AC troll?
Don't feed the trolls. Ignore them, and let the mods make them disappear. It makes slashdot better for everybody.
My grandfather was on the microwave oven team at Raytheon. My mom has memories of how they had one in the early-mid 50s, when they cost thousands of dollars. The family was one of the test families for some of the first models, when most were built into convection ovens. (Radar Range) The idea was you'd put your frozen turkey in the oven, defrost it via microwave, and then cook it normally. All with the push of a button.
Long ago I had a skim through his book of patents his team invented - all microwave and radar stuff. If you've never heard of Raytheon, you don't know your commercial EM history...
My parents just got cable 3 or so years ago. Even in the 90s there was cable in town - it just ended 1.5 miles from their house. I talked a few time to the cable company, and even the linesmen working on it, and they all said that they hung cable based on the number of houses per mile. The next mile from the end of the line didn't meet that number. However, the next mile beyond that, should you be willing to split the cable down two main roads, did.
It took them 15 years to decide it was worth it, then only with a state grant to improve rural access to broadband.
I wonder, with the price of copper today and the state/federal grants for improving broadband, if it would be worth it to replace the current phone lines with fiber, and re-purpose the copper into the last half-mile/pole to home connection.
Snowed in during New Year's Eve, 2000, LAN party in the drafty basement of an old farmhouse with 8-9 good friends. Enough comps that we kept the basement warm, but the drafts were cold enough by the windows and doors that we could cool the drinks there. Half the Starcraft copies were legit, half were clones of one of the others. Internet connection was something like 300/100 kpbs DSL, or maybe it was still dialup at that point.
Regardless, LAN games don't need an internet connection beyond maybe a single one for patches that someone missed. I agree - some of my best LAN parties had little in the way of internet access. They had seclusion, good friends, good food, and lots of drinks. The games weren't even that important, really.
So as it stands now, the next one will be UT2004 and maybe Dawn of War. Starcraft 2 is out, and UT3 is enough of a pain that we likely won't play it unless on a very, very beefy internet connection.
Given misuse of this or a dozen men with fully automatic weapons, this will cause injuries. Bullets through your brainpan tend to cause death.
Are you really arguing that we need to worry about an injury rate of 0.3% or 3% or 30%, when the alternative is death? Because that sort of idiocy is what I was pointing out as a very poor rationale for holding back use on this weapon.
This is a weapon used by SOLDIERS for crowd control. They are currently using automatic weapons. Why is it so hard to see that there is a very, very good chance that this is a better option?
I don't disagree that non-lethal stuff gets used FAR more than is appropriate. However, to immediately disregard a new technology due to a 1/1000 chance of injury is disingenuous. I don't think it's appropriate to fear-monger this given the alternative.
The US has killed a lot of civilizations in Iraq and Afghanistan. If this gets them to instead give people cataracts a decade from now, it's a step up. If it's used as a weapon of terror, overused, and seriously injures thousands, it's not so cut and dried.
The bottom line is that it's likely going to get abused, as you noted. But machine guns can get just as abused. If this causes injury instead of death, it's a step forward. "Don't taze me bro!" got tazed. To be frank, that's better than getting shot. Is it abusive? Sure. Have people died from it? Yep. But by and large, they've lived through it and if needed, hired a lawyer. In my mind, that's better than their family hiring a lawyer for a wrongful death suit.
My point was that I grew up in those small towns. And I've not seen the sort of company-shunning mentioned in this thread due to out-of-work employee conduct.
Employees busted/impaired while at work? Maybe.
But I grew up in those sorts of small towns. I never saw any of the "your out of work actions gave the company a bad name" that was mentioned previously. You can say, "Just imagine" all you want. (I have a very good imagination, so I can!!) It doesn't change the fact that I've never seen nor heard of what you or anyone else in this thread is hypothesizing.
In high school, I was dropping my mom off at the doctor's in the nearby city one afternoon, when I broke one of my blinker covers. (Was squeezing into a narrow space, going about 0 mph because I was worried about hitting the bumper of the SUV next to me. Damn thing was *higher* than my bumper, so instead of touching, the SUV bumper cleared mine and took out the plastic covering my blinker.) At 8:30am the next morning, a kid in my school said to me, "so I heard you got into an accident last night..."
I grew up in one of those sorts of towns. And really, nothing reflected poorly on the local companies. Because anything YOU did was tied to YOU. Not to your company. Nobody decided not to go to the store I worked at because their employee had an accident. When a local guy got into an accident and got a DUI, everyone knew the lawyer he was going to hire, because he was one of the three in town. When he got off with a misdemeanor, everyone knew he was a drunk who got into an accident. But nobody boycotted his company. They might go in an harass him, but that was about it.
Big city anonymity does not exist in small towns.
It's true. but I've never seen the sort of "punish the company for bad employees" mentality of you and a couple other people in this thread. Did I just grow up in sensible towns, or is everyone just making up shit that doesn't happen in the real world?
From my experiences with drug users the fact that they use drugs does say a lot about how well they perform their jobs.
Great. Then don't do invasive drug testing, and base their employment on how well they perform their jobs. In my experience, most of the drug users I know were indistinguishable at their jobs from non-drug-users.
I lived most of my life in small towns. I must have been in some liberal paradise, because there were lots of local people busted for drugs. And lots of people *everybody* knew were doing drugs outside of work. But by and large, nobody gave too much of a shit. Why? They based that person's respect on how well they did their job, and who they were as citizens. Not whether or not they smoked a bit of weed in the evening to unwind before bed.
Is there a problem if one of your employees does drugs? Most likely not. If they have some serious addiction that requires them to do drugs during work, (cigarettes, cough, cough) that's a problem. But there are plenty of recreational drug users that I know that are able to do them after work, and on the weekends, and be a productive worker and member of society the rest of the time.
...it reflects pretty poorly on the company if you ever get publicly busted for drugs...
It only reflects poorly if your work performance was suffering and the company ignored that.
To be frank, your attitude towards drugs is either horribly misinformed, or you have a very skewed world view. Are you the son of a southern baptist minister by any chance?
As you pointed out, cops fire when scared. Soldiers fire when scared too. The difference is that there are a lot more of them, with a lot more heavy firepower shooting at you. And they also fire when not scared. No, they don't have enough ammo to shoot 1000 rounds at you. But given the choice of a scared cop blasting off rounds with a.45 and a soldier with ANY weapon, I'll take my choices with the cop.
Your average police firearm isn't fully automatic, doesn't have any sort of recoil suppressor, and doesn't get used often. Your average soldier is much, much better trained with their weapon than the average policeman is, and they get lots more practice, and lots more "actually shooting at people" than cops do.
A soldier's job is to make someone dead if they have to, or if they've been told to. A police officer's job is to not make people dead unless it's a last resort.
It's different training, different equipment, and a different mindset. Check this list and compare, say, 1950 onward. See the difference between soldiers firing on people and police firing on people?
Yes, a police sidearm and its load is more deadly than the average soldier's sidearm and load. But that doesn't mean much, when the soldier is better trained, with more shooting experience, an arsenal of other weapons, and a squad of trigger-happy guys with him.
Suppose there were some students protesting, and a poorly commanded group of soldiers were sent in to disperse them. Would you rather they have.45 caliber pistols and M1 rifles or this? Of the two, which is more likely to cause less death? The weapons designed to kill people, or the weapon designed to injure 1/1000 people?
No, this isn't a cure. But with as much as we can trust soldiers to do the right thing in a stressful, unfamiliar situation, it's far better than a rifle.
Did you even think about what you typed before you hit 'submit'? State Police will put 9 rounds into you, maximum. Soldiers will put that many in a burst, and you might get a couple bursts.
If you take a single shot from a state policeman's sidearm, and a single shot from a soldier's sidearm, I would agree with you. But many soldiers are behind SAWs like the BAR, or are looking down the barrel of an M2.
I don't give a shit what the ammo is made of - if it's got some metal in it, and is coming at me at 4, 5, 6 rounds per second, my survivability isn't going to be all that high.
Sure, a soldier's last-resort, government-issued sidearm isn't as lethal as a state police officer's privately purchased first line of defense. Why would you expect it to be, when the soldier has some badass firepower, and the state police officer has just a single sidearm, and maybe a shotgun in the trunk?
That said, I agree with your point continuing the GP's that international law regarding weapons of war is pretty backwards.
League of Legends has done this fairly successfully. (It's a clone by the original coders of the DoTA mod for WC3)
The game is free to download and play. You can play the entire game for free, but characters are limited on a weekly or monthly rotating basis. If you want access to your favorite ones all the time, you need to pay. Skins are pay, and some items you can purchase with in-game-earned-points are cheaper and easier to purchase with real money.
The end result is a game that's plenty playable for free. If you want to be a hardcore player, you're probably going to have to fork up some cash just so you can tweak your customized builds.
On top of that, it was $1 million in ADDITION to their previous sales. Not the only money they made. I don't know where all those games were financially beforehand, but if they were already making a profit, that's quite a lot on top. If they were in the red, it most likely put them in the black.
I was already thinking about half of what you said:
To prevent piracy, you need to to two things:
1) Produce a decent game, for a decent price, and not lie to and abuse your customers. 2) Ignore the douchebags who don't ever want to pay anything for anything.
If you fail to do #1, you create pirates because people don't want to pay a lot of money for garbage, and don't like being treated like shit. This ties into #2 - if you spend all your time worrying about pirates, and adding DRM and other idiocy, you end up producing more pirates.
It's not poor controls that are the problem. There are two big ones:
1) Not re-doing the menus. Assuming that people have a red 'X' to go back, etc. UT3 did this. Their menus might have been good for a console, but on a PC, they sucked ass. 2) Not allowing customized controls.
If you let a PC user customize, there won't be an issue with poor controls - they'll just set it up like the controls for their most played game of that genera. If you don't allow the user to customize on a PC, they're most likely going to be unhappy unless they are a wasd fan, and you set it up wasd.
Personally, from 15 or so years of playing FPS, I've transitioned to a "sdfc" key config so I have plenty of keys surrounding my movement keys. If I can't customize my movement to those keys, I'm never going to be happy playing a game. Those are burned into my muscle memory.
It isn't for big things like people. For little things that eat invertebrates the same size, it is a crisis. The plastic pieces are "feeding" the bottom of the food chain. Except that they don't have any nutritional value, and poison or choke up the stuff eating them. From a strictly concentration point of view, it's not overly scary. From a biological point of view, it is.
Slashdot Mirror
Facebook is as invasive as you let it be. I've got a name, 4 photos, a current city, and that's about it. I've got 40 friends, all either close family members, long-time friends I'm not near, or current friends that use facebook to organize get-togethers. I don't have all my exes, all the people knew in high school, all my friends' friends, or any such crap like that. I don't play any games, or have any of the data mining apps installed. (Not like there's much there anyway. Not even my likes and dislikes, age or birthday, previous employers or anything.)
I get updates on the stuff that matters - beers down by the lake, friends getting married, my little cousin's transition from high school to college...it keeps me in the loop, and lets me get in touch with the people I want to get in touch with. Like the GP, I don't understand how Facebook can become the monster that it seems to be for many people.
I'm pretty damn selective about my friends. Quality over quantity. I've seen a single update from a single person (she was 16) who needed logs or some shit for a cabin. Her uncle gave her some, and it's now been 3-4 months since that single update.
I guess I can be pretty damn proud of my technically literate, non idiotic friends and family.
Really - my extended family who are a 1000 miles away are my friends, a couple of good ones from high school, a couple of good ones from college, a few former coworkers, and about a dozen current friends make up my network. I've got 40 total, and I could pull 5-10 of those off really.
If you accept every friend request from every moron you ever met, you'll surely be spammed with all sorts of stupid stuff. Pick wisely.
30, 15 years? If there is anything the past two years has taught us, it's that any company can disappear in a tenth the times you listed, at the most.
Still, your point is quite valid. And if you're talking 1960s, you may still be talking about paperbacks in readable condition. Go to hardcover, and if they've been stored someplace dry and not handled too much, you're talking hundreds of years of use. It's amazing to look around my house and realize how much isn't going to make it another 30 years, let alone another hundred. The appliances, all the portable electronics, the office chair, the window blinds, likely all the media on my computer. Yet at my elbow is a stack of D&D books. They'll be around in 30, perhaps 100 years. The boxed ones in the attic I have have been around for 30 already, and are pretty readable....
No, it's never worth pointing out a modding mistake. Let the mods fix it. At the best, you're wasting a mod point on you being modded offtopic - (see the reply of mine you replied to) at the worst, you're tempting a dumb moderator to give you an informative mod, like the great grandparent I replied to.
Ignore the trolls, even if they're moderated into visibility. They'll be below the waterline before too long. More quickly if you don't reply to them, and bring attention to their post.
And you know this how?
...unless it's a remote login from someone who's not allowed to remote in, and your logs catch it, and you don't have anything better to do. You're pretty unlikely to notice an employee logging on as a different employee on a shared machine. I mean, when I worked IT, keeping tabs on the secretary and customer service reps' logins wasn't something that was on the front burner.
If they didn't have issues doing their jobs, there was a lot more important stuff to worry about.
Receptionists will share passwords so they can log in on each other's computers...
...if someone gets terminated, and they remember the passwords, they pose a security risk.
Their accounts ARE terminated at the same moment as their employment. But if they know the passwords for several other people's accounts, that doesn't help any. Rotating even once a month means that on average, a terminated person will only be able to log in for two weeks.
There is a major balance between security and user-hostility. It's hard to get right. As you pointed out, make it too "secure", and it gets hostile enough people just write down their passwords, and your security is killed. Make it too lax, and they're happy as hell, but your security is poor.
My personal setup (I've got near full control of my work machines) is to have robust passwords that don't change often. I try to make sure that any questionable or low-security site has my "less secure" passwords, and my really important stuff (financial, mostly) has very robust ones that aren't reused between sites.
For me, this works. However, this doesn't necessarily work in an environment with tons of users, who don't have a vested interest in security. Best I can come up with for that is to have some sort of one-time-pad on a separate system from the main system. You log in with your usename to the big system, and your password is a combination of a 6 character or so easy to remember one plus the pad from the other system. Let the easy passwd stay the same for 4-6 months at a time, but if you're not in the building, you can't access the pad to finish the passsword. Give your remote users a dongle.
However, this isn't overly easy to set up, will irritate users, and requires a lot more to implement than a hostile password policy. However, even if you had but 2-3 new pads every day, (every 8-12 hours) the same for all employees, even if it was written down it would be more secure than the normal method of writing down a 20 character password and sticking it to the monitor.
Was this your answer to what 'premium' content The Times should offer its readers?
There are lots and lots of options here...off the top of my head:
1) Access to every article of every edition. If someone comes unsubscribed from a Google link, they get the story they are looking for. Maybe the day's headlines. But that's it. Subscribers can get access to it all.
2) Links between articles, followup stories, categories to browse. Read an article on Xe Services LLC? Subscribers get a list of stories to pick from that go back years, including the name change (Blackwater Worldwide, for those that don't know) and all the controversy they've had.
3) Sudoku, crossword, all the rest of the semi-interactive entertainment
4) The ability to comment, perhaps?
5) Indexed, searchable, bookmarkable, clickable classified. Let anyone browse them like a paper. Give your subscribers beefed up tools to manage them.
6) Stock ticker links to company profiles, all the stories ever run about them, stock histories, etc. Again, let the non-subscribers see them like a newspaper page - static bits of information.
7) Set your website up like a newspaper for non-subscribers. Let them turn pages, navigate to page 6 to keep on reading. Give your subscribers links. Or "whole article on one page".
8) Links to every company, sports team, organization noted in your news for subscribers. Non-subscribers will need to google it.
There are lots of ways to still provide your information, but make it worthwhile for people to pay a little money. Many of these wouldn't be hard to code up templates for once. After that, you just publish your information as usual, and you automagically have benefits for subscribers, yet aren't pushing people away. And it shouldn't cost a ton of money to do so. Now, will everyone want to pay for these perks? Hell no. But I bet they'd get more money than they are getting now, with the dual failing options of "free" and "paywall".
Why bother replying to an AC post at -1? You do realize that pretty much nobody will see it, unless browsing at -1, right? And unless the AC is actively trolling and watching for replies, the original poster won't see your reply. If they are actively trolling, you're just making it all the more visible. Do the "adult" thing and ignore the troll. And what mod on crack thought it would be good to mod you informative, drawing yet more attention to the AC troll?
Don't feed the trolls. Ignore them, and let the mods make them disappear. It makes slashdot better for everybody.
My grandfather was on the microwave oven team at Raytheon. My mom has memories of how they had one in the early-mid 50s, when they cost thousands of dollars. The family was one of the test families for some of the first models, when most were built into convection ovens. (Radar Range) The idea was you'd put your frozen turkey in the oven, defrost it via microwave, and then cook it normally. All with the push of a button.
Long ago I had a skim through his book of patents his team invented - all microwave and radar stuff. If you've never heard of Raytheon, you don't know your commercial EM history...
You fund placing a 70m antenna in space, and everyone will call you a hero.
There is a reason the antenna needs to be that size, and there's a reason they are on earth...
My parents just got cable 3 or so years ago. Even in the 90s there was cable in town - it just ended 1.5 miles from their house. I talked a few time to the cable company, and even the linesmen working on it, and they all said that they hung cable based on the number of houses per mile. The next mile from the end of the line didn't meet that number. However, the next mile beyond that, should you be willing to split the cable down two main roads, did.
It took them 15 years to decide it was worth it, then only with a state grant to improve rural access to broadband.
I wonder, with the price of copper today and the state/federal grants for improving broadband, if it would be worth it to replace the current phone lines with fiber, and re-purpose the copper into the last half-mile/pole to home connection.
Snowed in during New Year's Eve, 2000, LAN party in the drafty basement of an old farmhouse with 8-9 good friends. Enough comps that we kept the basement warm, but the drafts were cold enough by the windows and doors that we could cool the drinks there. Half the Starcraft copies were legit, half were clones of one of the others. Internet connection was something like 300/100 kpbs DSL, or maybe it was still dialup at that point.
Regardless, LAN games don't need an internet connection beyond maybe a single one for patches that someone missed. I agree - some of my best LAN parties had little in the way of internet access. They had seclusion, good friends, good food, and lots of drinks. The games weren't even that important, really.
So as it stands now, the next one will be UT2004 and maybe Dawn of War. Starcraft 2 is out, and UT3 is enough of a pain that we likely won't play it unless on a very, very beefy internet connection.
But reportedly, not death.
And that's my point.
Given misuse of this or a dozen men with fully automatic weapons, this will cause injuries. Bullets through your brainpan tend to cause death.
Are you really arguing that we need to worry about an injury rate of 0.3% or 3% or 30%, when the alternative is death? Because that sort of idiocy is what I was pointing out as a very poor rationale for holding back use on this weapon.
This is a weapon used by SOLDIERS for crowd control. They are currently using automatic weapons. Why is it so hard to see that there is a very, very good chance that this is a better option?
I don't disagree that non-lethal stuff gets used FAR more than is appropriate. However, to immediately disregard a new technology due to a 1/1000 chance of injury is disingenuous. I don't think it's appropriate to fear-monger this given the alternative.
The US has killed a lot of civilizations in Iraq and Afghanistan. If this gets them to instead give people cataracts a decade from now, it's a step up. If it's used as a weapon of terror, overused, and seriously injures thousands, it's not so cut and dried.
The bottom line is that it's likely going to get abused, as you noted. But machine guns can get just as abused. If this causes injury instead of death, it's a step forward. "Don't taze me bro!" got tazed. To be frank, that's better than getting shot. Is it abusive? Sure. Have people died from it? Yep. But by and large, they've lived through it and if needed, hired a lawyer. In my mind, that's better than their family hiring a lawyer for a wrongful death suit.
My point was that I grew up in those small towns. And I've not seen the sort of company-shunning mentioned in this thread due to out-of-work employee conduct.
Employees busted/impaired while at work? Maybe.
But I grew up in those sorts of small towns. I never saw any of the "your out of work actions gave the company a bad name" that was mentioned previously. You can say, "Just imagine" all you want. (I have a very good imagination, so I can!!) It doesn't change the fact that I've never seen nor heard of what you or anyone else in this thread is hypothesizing.
Big city anonymity does not exist in small towns.
In high school, I was dropping my mom off at the doctor's in the nearby city one afternoon, when I broke one of my blinker covers. (Was squeezing into a narrow space, going about 0 mph because I was worried about hitting the bumper of the SUV next to me. Damn thing was *higher* than my bumper, so instead of touching, the SUV bumper cleared mine and took out the plastic covering my blinker.) At 8:30am the next morning, a kid in my school said to me, "so I heard you got into an accident last night..."
I grew up in one of those sorts of towns. And really, nothing reflected poorly on the local companies. Because anything YOU did was tied to YOU. Not to your company. Nobody decided not to go to the store I worked at because their employee had an accident. When a local guy got into an accident and got a DUI, everyone knew the lawyer he was going to hire, because he was one of the three in town. When he got off with a misdemeanor, everyone knew he was a drunk who got into an accident. But nobody boycotted his company. They might go in an harass him, but that was about it.
Big city anonymity does not exist in small towns.
It's true. but I've never seen the sort of "punish the company for bad employees" mentality of you and a couple other people in this thread. Did I just grow up in sensible towns, or is everyone just making up shit that doesn't happen in the real world?
From my experiences with drug users the fact that they use drugs does say a lot about how well they perform their jobs.
Great. Then don't do invasive drug testing, and base their employment on how well they perform their jobs. In my experience, most of the drug users I know were indistinguishable at their jobs from non-drug-users.
I lived most of my life in small towns. I must have been in some liberal paradise, because there were lots of local people busted for drugs. And lots of people *everybody* knew were doing drugs outside of work. But by and large, nobody gave too much of a shit. Why? They based that person's respect on how well they did their job, and who they were as citizens. Not whether or not they smoked a bit of weed in the evening to unwind before bed.
Is there a problem if one of your employees does drugs? Most likely not. If they have some serious addiction that requires them to do drugs during work, (cigarettes, cough, cough) that's a problem. But there are plenty of recreational drug users that I know that are able to do them after work, and on the weekends, and be a productive worker and member of society the rest of the time.
...it reflects pretty poorly on the company if you ever get publicly busted for drugs...
It only reflects poorly if your work performance was suffering and the company ignored that.
To be frank, your attitude towards drugs is either horribly misinformed, or you have a very skewed world view. Are you the son of a southern baptist minister by any chance?
I still disagree.
.45 and a soldier with ANY weapon, I'll take my choices with the cop.
As you pointed out, cops fire when scared. Soldiers fire when scared too. The difference is that there are a lot more of them, with a lot more heavy firepower shooting at you. And they also fire when not scared. No, they don't have enough ammo to shoot 1000 rounds at you. But given the choice of a scared cop blasting off rounds with a
Your average police firearm isn't fully automatic, doesn't have any sort of recoil suppressor, and doesn't get used often. Your average soldier is much, much better trained with their weapon than the average policeman is, and they get lots more practice, and lots more "actually shooting at people" than cops do.
A soldier's job is to make someone dead if they have to, or if they've been told to. A police officer's job is to not make people dead unless it's a last resort.
It's different training, different equipment, and a different mindset. Check this list and compare, say, 1950 onward. See the difference between soldiers firing on people and police firing on people?
Yes, a police sidearm and its load is more deadly than the average soldier's sidearm and load. But that doesn't mean much, when the soldier is better trained, with more shooting experience, an arsenal of other weapons, and a squad of trigger-happy guys with him.
While I'd tend to agree, how about some context:
.45 caliber pistols and M1 rifles or this? Of the two, which is more likely to cause less death? The weapons designed to kill people, or the weapon designed to injure 1/1000 people?
Suppose there were some students protesting, and a poorly commanded group of soldiers were sent in to disperse them. Would you rather they have
No, this isn't a cure. But with as much as we can trust soldiers to do the right thing in a stressful, unfamiliar situation, it's far better than a rifle.
Did you even think about what you typed before you hit 'submit'? State Police will put 9 rounds into you, maximum. Soldiers will put that many in a burst, and you might get a couple bursts.
If you take a single shot from a state policeman's sidearm, and a single shot from a soldier's sidearm, I would agree with you. But many soldiers are behind SAWs like the BAR, or are looking down the barrel of an M2.
I don't give a shit what the ammo is made of - if it's got some metal in it, and is coming at me at 4, 5, 6 rounds per second, my survivability isn't going to be all that high.
Sure, a soldier's last-resort, government-issued sidearm isn't as lethal as a state police officer's privately purchased first line of defense. Why would you expect it to be, when the soldier has some badass firepower, and the state police officer has just a single sidearm, and maybe a shotgun in the trunk?
That said, I agree with your point continuing the GP's that international law regarding weapons of war is pretty backwards.
League of Legends has done this fairly successfully. (It's a clone by the original coders of the DoTA mod for WC3)
The game is free to download and play. You can play the entire game for free, but characters are limited on a weekly or monthly rotating basis. If you want access to your favorite ones all the time, you need to pay. Skins are pay, and some items you can purchase with in-game-earned-points are cheaper and easier to purchase with real money.
The end result is a game that's plenty playable for free. If you want to be a hardcore player, you're probably going to have to fork up some cash just so you can tweak your customized builds.
This is the sort of game I'm likely to "pay" for.
On top of that, it was $1 million in ADDITION to their previous sales. Not the only money they made. I don't know where all those games were financially beforehand, but if they were already making a profit, that's quite a lot on top. If they were in the red, it most likely put them in the black.
I was already thinking about half of what you said:
To prevent piracy, you need to to two things:
1) Produce a decent game, for a decent price, and not lie to and abuse your customers.
2) Ignore the douchebags who don't ever want to pay anything for anything.
If you fail to do #1, you create pirates because people don't want to pay a lot of money for garbage, and don't like being treated like shit. This ties into #2 - if you spend all your time worrying about pirates, and adding DRM and other idiocy, you end up producing more pirates.
Luckily, the preview option will let you see that ahead of time....
It's not poor controls that are the problem. There are two big ones:
1) Not re-doing the menus. Assuming that people have a red 'X' to go back, etc. UT3 did this. Their menus might have been good for a console, but on a PC, they sucked ass.
2) Not allowing customized controls.
If you let a PC user customize, there won't be an issue with poor controls - they'll just set it up like the controls for their most played game of that genera. If you don't allow the user to customize on a PC, they're most likely going to be unhappy unless they are a wasd fan, and you set it up wasd.
Personally, from 15 or so years of playing FPS, I've transitioned to a "sdfc" key config so I have plenty of keys surrounding my movement keys. If I can't customize my movement to those keys, I'm never going to be happy playing a game. Those are burned into my muscle memory.
It isn't for big things like people. For little things that eat invertebrates the same size, it is a crisis. The plastic pieces are "feeding" the bottom of the food chain. Except that they don't have any nutritional value, and poison or choke up the stuff eating them. From a strictly concentration point of view, it's not overly scary. From a biological point of view, it is.