Blockbuster once called a collections agency on me for a $8.00 late fee. I have a policy of paying late fees only if/when I actually go back and rent another movie. In reality that's exactly what they want, another trip to the store. However calling a collection agency guaranteed that I'd be getting all my future DVDs from Netflix or PirateBay. I don't feel like I owe late fees, unless I wish to check out another DVD. Probably if I read the fine print, I'd realize Blockbuster views late fees differently. However, Blockbuster is on my shitlist forever none-the-less. They could have made more money from me, if they didn't get greedy.
Sending debt collections companies, or the appearance of them should be the last resort for seriously delinquent customers who are basically trying to steal (or are bankrupt). I'm not sure when it started that collections agencies became the guaranteed repeat business tool.
Or maybe just religious maniacs who'd find any excuse at all to make headlines.
War on terror, no war on terror; Israeli support, no israeli support, it doesn't matter. It's not really about religion. Religion is just an amplifier for feelings that already exist. It's still about have's and have nots. We have everything BUT oil, they have only oil. But oil is fundamental to modern society. Hence we are perpetually annoyed at getting our arms twisted over oil prices, they are always feeling like they're being robbed. Israel is a distraction, useful for stirring up the looneys just like saying "abortion" is here.
All vectors indicate we should work very hard to not need oil ASAP. I suspect that will precipitate a short term rise in terrorism, followed by a period of prolonged silence.
I'd say that is the case here and we are not bothered by AMD's lawsuit. Our managers have informed us of the case and gave the coordinates of our lawyer responsible for it. That's pretty much it, life is normal.
I can't imagine anyone being sidetracked for a document preservation project. To me this case is good for those 32 companies (unless one is Intel), it will ensure that we continue to get the best prices on our product without being forced into vendor lock in. If only we could find a way to put Microsoft in its place (practically).
There is no DRM hard core enough to not be pirated. If they give you something, no matter how CIA/NSA/KGB/QRS encrypted that you can watch on your own TV set, it will be cracked. The player will just generate more heat and cost more than it should.
It's not that hackers are smart, but that DRM simply can not ever work. "DVD Jon" is only successful because he understands this obvious fact.
The only question is will the content be sold conveniently and cheaply enough that no one would want to bother pirating it.
I've done my time uberguilding in EQ, it was not that much fun. I enjoyed only beating the content and getting places/gear I couldn't have gotten solo. It was fun one time through, and good guilds could beat content without effort. Once you knew the "secret" fights were boring.
I agree current MMOGs are all about enforced socialization. I do not believe that is either the ideal or the be all, end all of what a MMOG could be.
To me, the ideal MMOG is 100% opposite. People are smart but independent. They make good adversaries. Computers are stupid, but have infinite patience. They make good partners.
I think it's misleading that one sweatshop worker could do that. That # sounds like what a small group of farmers could do. I think a single person, with a small set of built characters could farm perhaps $1k-$2k/month. Gold just doesn't sell that well for the time spent, at least in WoW.
Now a group of people, with some vertical integration of item + money farming, can probably do far better. The reason is that people buy gold so they can buy items at inflated costs. The more gold they buy, the more the items can inflate. The market fixes itself only when the price of enough gold to buy a desireable item becomes more than the average player wants to spend.
It beats McDonalds & that ilk, but we're all better off getting real jobs than selling MMOG money. We're better off playing MMOGs only enough that we're still having fun, and turning off our monthly subscription once it gets boring and repetitive enough that we'd buy items with real world $. That might force the MMOG market to get real.
Because the current generation of MMOGs puts a very high value on time, mostly because YOUR time is free, content developers time is very expensive.
Simply put, this exists because building your character is not fun, mostly. The quests get boring and repetitive and do not contribute much if any to some overarching storyline (thus you do not care about them, they are obstacles to conquer or avoid). All that remains is to collect all the baddest ass items, which often are either rare drops or very hard to get without convincing your 11 best friends to waste a night of their lives helping you get it. This is better than EQ, which required your 71 best friends (at least for the newest of new content). So the easy way is to buy them.
MMOGs are bad, but it's a compelling enough genre that people suffer through.
I think to some extent that's true in all states regardless of the funding model. School district performance has almost always seemed closely correlated with the price of a house in the area (except maybe inside NYC). I have heard some states have a flat property tax, but I have never lived in such a place.
In TX there's no state income tax (but plenty of property and sales taxes), and the districts seem to perform wildly different based on where the zone line is drawn in the sand. However, that's how I remember it being in every other place I have lived except perhaps NYC (where good neighborhoods border bad ones and get zoned to the same school anyway).
That is in fact one good way of screwing Microsoft and anyone foolish enough to make games exclusively for their game system. I'm all for it, when do we start?
It is not banned in TX wholesale. My understanding, which is not complete as I don't have kids yet, is that each "ISD" (Independent School District?) has the power to set its own curriculum. Mine seems to teach both, I find this to be a horrible failure in society (that and the fact that PE is taught more rigorously than math, at least here). Creationism is not science, period.
I'm finding there are 2 types of Texans, one I dislike a lot, and the other I like a lot. The neo-con lunatic is the kind I can't abide, but I'm finding these are not natives, they seem to be imported. The other kind of Texan is the gun toting, fuck government, don't tax me, if-I-want-to-kill-myself-being-stupid-let-me kind. I like them a lot and I did not find this in either California or anywhere in the north east.
One again the pompous argument that somehow reading books is beter than watching TV or playing video games. In particular, reading classics.
Until someone can scientifically prove that reading books is in fact better in some dimension that we can all agree is critical, I will continue to point out the pretension and elitism of such statements.
Shakespeare can be skipped, with no ill effect, except for those who intend upon pursuing the arts. Nothing Shakespeare wrote is original, nor has he cornered the market on those storylines.
Personally I take a good story anywhere I can find it, books, games, movies, TV, word of mouth. Exactly what sensory input I use to absorb it is really irrelevant.
Other than potential equipment destruction, I think it's a doubly false problem because I don't think a big earthquake there is going to harm the environment like as if a big meltdown occured at a fission plant.
They should consider it a victory that people are investigating all forms of alternative energy sources.
I agree, I see no harm in the supreme court ruling they are common carriers. I think it came down to semantics over wording. The right thing to do is change the law, but under prevailing winds you may as well be seeking an audience with God himself.
Except that there are many reasons when doing bodily harm is legally justifiable. I.e. self defense. I.e. to overth...oh wait, I shouldn't say that out loud.
It's not justifiable to release software for the purpose of infringing on copyrights. That should be obvious right? If all you are doing is enabling an illegal activity, then why shouldn't you be responsible for the consequences? It makes sense.
It would have been Evil (TM) if they had ruled that creating any software that COULD be used to promote copyright infringement puts liability on you. That would be truly awful, and if someone rules that we should be more proactive in ensuring our rights to bear arms are thoroughly protected, we'll be needing them soon. I highly doubt they'll do that however, in fact it would surprise me if such a case even came before the supreme court, because they would be forced to publically smack it down.
Threatening letters from lawyers work a lot more when the recipient isn't really sure...
There are arguments about people who install linux on such equipment qualifies for "defacement" of property. I've worked at two companies where some IT manager tried that. I don't think anyone wants to try to make that case.
If you break hardware then they can argue you've hurt them. If you modify software, it's hard for them to show damages. They're going to have to wipe and ghost the system anyhow for the next user. What have you done that has hurt their ability to re-use the system?
Same with insurance, it'd be really hard to get away with that for long although in that case they have YOUR money, so you have to go fight to get it back. Still, class action suits have a way of happening and people have no patience with schools acting aggressively.
I think I did not attend my last 3 months of high school, totally flaked on 2 "required' projects and basically disappeared (I was hand coding the mandelbrot set in assembly using some VESA book I found. It was quite hard to get info about the FPU so it was sorta trial and error). I may have showed up once or twice I can't recall, it was a busy period.
So my GPA went from 4.0 to 3.65 or some nonsense (Amazing how 8 Fs in the last quarter can really make a difference!). Didn't seem to affect anything, it's expensive for colleges to refuse admission they already gave you (it's hard for them to go as people they've already rejected), and high schools can't really hold you back. All those lame threats they make are really just that. Anyway no one checks, it goes right in there with your permanent record.
I'd be more concerned about getting stuck with criminal charges right as you turn 18. That's nasty and really can affect you even if it doesn't stick.
"Do you know how fast you were going?" "Yes officer, of course."
"How fast were you going?" (infinite viable responses) My fav: "I was going the correct speed for the conditions." Backup: "How fast WAS I going officer?"
Or you can stay quiet, I don't recommend that though. They seem to be able to ignore the constant stream of bullshit excuses they hear all day, but attitude may set them off. They don't want to be doing traffic duty, but they don't have the correct credentials to be stopping real crime so they're stuck on shit work.
Well don't mess with their routers, even without eating onions. Routers and their configurations are really their property, tampering, even to help them should only be done with permission.
You should never need to mess with such things however. If you can get web access, there is a way to get full internet access without hacking anything. I've never been stopped and I'm not much of an IT person.
I think everything you said indicates a clear message: companies want skilled workers for the lowest possible price. So the US is less plush than Europe, and we're being outsourced. Hence Europe is by extension, way too expensive. (I'm not arguing that Europeans are ridiculous for negotiating good working conditions, they're not)
This "labor shortage" is political nonsense. It's not true. There's a shortage of labor willing to work at the price companies want to pay, that is true. The market of local employees was driving prices up, hence corporations wish to go elsewhere. The labor shortage is just smoke and mirrors to confuse the issue. "Oh we can't find people with all these [ridiculous] skills! There's a shortage!!!", translation: We're seriously going to argue that a BS CS with no documented Java experience cannot learn Java without 4 more years of education because you the public doens't know any better. In reality his 15 years of experience is making him ask for a six figure salary we don't want to pay sub-manager employees.
I honestly had a manager turn away resumes of people who did not have experience with a particular schematics capture tool. They were all EEs, probably most of them can solve all kinds of bizarre differential equations and understand very complex things about electromagnetic behavior (noteably at high speeds). He turned them down because they didn't document that they could use a mouse to draw wires with a new tool (something draftsmen used to do before we turned them into computers)! He then explained to HR that he could not find qualified candidates, that she should move a couple headcount in shang-hai into his cost center (headcount there is 1/5 US headcount). He didn't even interview them, just moved a couple "head count". This is the shortage, a shortage of people whose primary skills are to be cheap.
The question should be asked why India and China have so many engineers pulling at the bit. The answer is simple, they get paid top dollar to be engineers in those countries. We think they're getting paid peanuts, but for where they live they're making out well. So what if the degree is really hard, boy will it pay off! Around here, the degree is really hard, doesn't pay that great, why mess with it?
The only good news is that eventually, 15 years from now, this wealth of cheap engineers will have evaporated, and maybe, finally, companies will either pay what they should, or we'll have to start inventing a lot more pet rocks. It'll be interesting to see how all this turns out, a lot more interesting if I were sitting on a fat wad of cash and could spend the intervening time not worrying about my job.
You can be more rebellious, doubly so since you're a senior.
Altering the OS of your school provided laptop is probably not illegal, depending on what exactly you do. Unless you're unleashing a virus or destroying hardware, I really doubt anything will stick. I'm guessing this is the kind of thing the ACLU would help you with if you actually got in trouble.
Accessing material over the internet by using existing holes in school firewalls/proxies is NOT illegal. Most of us do it all the time at work because our IT departments are insane (but leave port 80 open with a proxy to censor us...may as well just leave them all wide open). Anyway unless you are attacking their network (router, firewall, proxy) in some way, it's not illegal or even immoral.
Now hacking in to their network, changing grades, destroying machines, altering network configurations, that's all illegal, immoral and just plain mean spirited. As with any other crime however, you should absolutely not admit to anyone what you've done without the counsel of a lawyer. This goes for any crime, even a speeding ticket. You have the right to remain silent, use it. Even if they promise to let you off, bring in a lawyer. Never play around with such things, I know some honest people who thought they were doing the right thing and got it handed to them. The right thing is to remain silent.
The more money it costs to enforce idiotic network policies and excess legal entanglements, the less likely anyone is going to want to be involved with it. If it isn't actively hurting someone, then I think after this neo-fascist insanity passes, people will ignore it.
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Blockbuster once called a collections agency on me for a $8.00 late fee. I have a policy of paying late fees only if/when I actually go back and rent another movie. In reality that's exactly what they want, another trip to the store. However calling a collection agency guaranteed that I'd be getting all my future DVDs from Netflix or PirateBay. I don't feel like I owe late fees, unless I wish to check out another DVD. Probably if I read the fine print, I'd realize Blockbuster views late fees differently. However, Blockbuster is on my shitlist forever none-the-less. They could have made more money from me, if they didn't get greedy.
Sending debt collections companies, or the appearance of them should be the last resort for seriously delinquent customers who are basically trying to steal (or are bankrupt). I'm not sure when it started that collections agencies became the guaranteed repeat business tool.
Or maybe just religious maniacs who'd find any excuse at all to make headlines.
War on terror, no war on terror; Israeli support, no israeli support, it doesn't matter. It's not really about religion. Religion is just an amplifier for feelings that already exist. It's still about have's and have nots. We have everything BUT oil, they have only oil. But oil is fundamental to modern society. Hence we are perpetually annoyed at getting our arms twisted over oil prices, they are always feeling like they're being robbed. Israel is a distraction, useful for stirring up the looneys just like saying "abortion" is here.
All vectors indicate we should work very hard to not need oil ASAP. I suspect that will precipitate a short term rise in terrorism, followed by a period of prolonged silence.
I'd say that is the case here and we are not bothered by AMD's lawsuit. Our managers have informed us of the case and gave the coordinates of our lawyer responsible for it. That's pretty much it, life is normal.
I can't imagine anyone being sidetracked for a document preservation project. To me this case is good for those 32 companies (unless one is Intel), it will ensure that we continue to get the best prices on our product without being forced into vendor lock in. If only we could find a way to put Microsoft in its place (practically).
There is no DRM hard core enough to not be pirated. If they give you something, no matter how CIA/NSA/KGB/QRS encrypted that you can watch on your own TV set, it will be cracked. The player will just generate more heat and cost more than it should.
It's not that hackers are smart, but that DRM simply can not ever work. "DVD Jon" is only successful because he understands this obvious fact.
The only question is will the content be sold conveniently and cheaply enough that no one would want to bother pirating it.
I've done my time uberguilding in EQ, it was not that much fun. I enjoyed only beating the content and getting places/gear I couldn't have gotten solo. It was fun one time through, and good guilds could beat content without effort. Once you knew the "secret" fights were boring.
I agree current MMOGs are all about enforced socialization. I do not believe that is either the ideal or the be all, end all of what a MMOG could be.
To me, the ideal MMOG is 100% opposite. People are smart but independent. They make good adversaries. Computers are stupid, but have infinite patience. They make good partners.
I think it's misleading that one sweatshop worker could do that. That # sounds like what a small group of farmers could do. I think a single person, with a small set of built characters could farm perhaps $1k-$2k/month. Gold just doesn't sell that well for the time spent, at least in WoW.
Now a group of people, with some vertical integration of item + money farming, can probably do far better. The reason is that people buy gold so they can buy items at inflated costs. The more gold they buy, the more the items can inflate. The market fixes itself only when the price of enough gold to buy a desireable item becomes more than the average player wants to spend.
It beats McDonalds & that ilk, but we're all better off getting real jobs than selling MMOG money. We're better off playing MMOGs only enough that we're still having fun, and turning off our monthly subscription once it gets boring and repetitive enough that we'd buy items with real world $. That might force the MMOG market to get real.
Because the current generation of MMOGs puts a very high value on time, mostly because YOUR time is free, content developers time is very expensive.
Simply put, this exists because building your character is not fun, mostly. The quests get boring and repetitive and do not contribute much if any to some overarching storyline (thus you do not care about them, they are obstacles to conquer or avoid). All that remains is to collect all the baddest ass items, which often are either rare drops or very hard to get without convincing your 11 best friends to waste a night of their lives helping you get it. This is better than EQ, which required your 71 best friends (at least for the newest of new content). So the easy way is to buy them.
MMOGs are bad, but it's a compelling enough genre that people suffer through.
I think to some extent that's true in all states regardless of the funding model. School district performance has almost always seemed closely correlated with the price of a house in the area (except maybe inside NYC). I have heard some states have a flat property tax, but I have never lived in such a place.
In TX there's no state income tax (but plenty of property and sales taxes), and the districts seem to perform wildly different based on where the zone line is drawn in the sand. However, that's how I remember it being in every other place I have lived except perhaps NYC (where good neighborhoods border bad ones and get zoned to the same school anyway).
That is in fact one good way of screwing Microsoft and anyone foolish enough to make games exclusively for their game system. I'm all for it, when do we start?
You're either a really bad shot, or a really good one. Or you can just buy one.
For shame, you should concentrate on the drinking first (so it gets good and dark), then play with explosives!
But as long as something blows up, it's really not a loss.
It is not banned in TX wholesale. My understanding, which is not complete as I don't have kids yet, is that each "ISD" (Independent School District?) has the power to set its own curriculum. Mine seems to teach both, I find this to be a horrible failure in society (that and the fact that PE is taught more rigorously than math, at least here). Creationism is not science, period.
I'm finding there are 2 types of Texans, one I dislike a lot, and the other I like a lot. The neo-con lunatic is the kind I can't abide, but I'm finding these are not natives, they seem to be imported. The other kind of Texan is the gun toting, fuck government, don't tax me, if-I-want-to-kill-myself-being-stupid-let-me kind. I like them a lot and I did not find this in either California or anywhere in the north east.
No way, that'll never happen. That's just taking it too far.
On a side note, I have to leave Texas before my children get in to school. I already had my "linux" fish ripped off my car once since I moved here.
One again the pompous argument that somehow reading books is beter than watching TV or playing video games. In particular, reading classics.
Until someone can scientifically prove that reading books is in fact better in some dimension that we can all agree is critical, I will continue to point out the pretension and elitism of such statements.
Shakespeare can be skipped, with no ill effect, except for those who intend upon pursuing the arts. Nothing Shakespeare wrote is original, nor has he cornered the market on those storylines.
Personally I take a good story anywhere I can find it, books, games, movies, TV, word of mouth. Exactly what sensory input I use to absorb it is really irrelevant.
Other than potential equipment destruction, I think it's a doubly false problem because I don't think a big earthquake there is going to harm the environment like as if a big meltdown occured at a fission plant.
They should consider it a victory that people are investigating all forms of alternative energy sources.
I'd probably want to buy a Ford again if that were the case. As it stands I think I'd rather have my head run through a cheese grater.
I agree, I see no harm in the supreme court ruling they are common carriers. I think it came down to semantics over wording. The right thing to do is change the law, but under prevailing winds you may as well be seeking an audience with God himself.
Except that there are many reasons when doing bodily harm is legally justifiable. I.e. self defense. I.e. to overth...oh wait, I shouldn't say that out loud.
It's not justifiable to release software for the purpose of infringing on copyrights. That should be obvious right? If all you are doing is enabling an illegal activity, then why shouldn't you be responsible for the consequences? It makes sense.
It would have been Evil (TM) if they had ruled that creating any software that COULD be used to promote copyright infringement puts liability on you. That would be truly awful, and if someone rules that we should be more proactive in ensuring our rights to bear arms are thoroughly protected, we'll be needing them soon. I highly doubt they'll do that however, in fact it would surprise me if such a case even came before the supreme court, because they would be forced to publically smack it down.
Threatening letters from lawyers work a lot more when the recipient isn't really sure...
Learn to read, then learn to flame properly.
There are arguments about people who install linux on such equipment qualifies for "defacement" of property. I've worked at two companies where some IT manager tried that. I don't think anyone wants to try to make that case.
If you break hardware then they can argue you've hurt them. If you modify software, it's hard for them to show damages. They're going to have to wipe and ghost the system anyhow for the next user. What have you done that has hurt their ability to re-use the system?
Same with insurance, it'd be really hard to get away with that for long although in that case they have YOUR money, so you have to go fight to get it back. Still, class action suits have a way of happening and people have no patience with schools acting aggressively.
I think I did not attend my last 3 months of high school, totally flaked on 2 "required' projects and basically disappeared (I was hand coding the mandelbrot set in assembly using some VESA book I found. It was quite hard to get info about the FPU so it was sorta trial and error). I may have showed up once or twice I can't recall, it was a busy period.
So my GPA went from 4.0 to 3.65 or some nonsense (Amazing how 8 Fs in the last quarter can really make a difference!). Didn't seem to affect anything, it's expensive for colleges to refuse admission they already gave you (it's hard for them to go as people they've already rejected), and high schools can't really hold you back. All those lame threats they make are really just that. Anyway no one checks, it goes right in there with your permanent record.
I'd be more concerned about getting stuck with criminal charges right as you turn 18. That's nasty and really can affect you even if it doesn't stick.
This one is as old as the hills.
"Do you know how fast you were going?"
"Yes officer, of course."
"How fast were you going?"
(infinite viable responses)
My fav: "I was going the correct speed for the conditions."
Backup: "How fast WAS I going officer?"
Or you can stay quiet, I don't recommend that though. They seem to be able to ignore the constant stream of bullshit excuses they hear all day, but attitude may set them off. They don't want to be doing traffic duty, but they don't have the correct credentials to be stopping real crime so they're stuck on shit work.
Well don't mess with their routers, even without eating onions. Routers and their configurations are really their property, tampering, even to help them should only be done with permission. You should never need to mess with such things however. If you can get web access, there is a way to get full internet access without hacking anything. I've never been stopped and I'm not much of an IT person.
I think everything you said indicates a clear message: companies want skilled workers for the lowest possible price. So the US is less plush than Europe, and we're being outsourced. Hence Europe is by extension, way too expensive. (I'm not arguing that Europeans are ridiculous for negotiating good working conditions, they're not)
This "labor shortage" is political nonsense. It's not true. There's a shortage of labor willing to work at the price companies want to pay, that is true. The market of local employees was driving prices up, hence corporations wish to go elsewhere. The labor shortage is just smoke and mirrors to confuse the issue. "Oh we can't find people with all these [ridiculous] skills! There's a shortage!!!", translation: We're seriously going to argue that a BS CS with no documented Java experience cannot learn Java without 4 more years of education because you the public doens't know any better. In reality his 15 years of experience is making him ask for a six figure salary we don't want to pay sub-manager employees.
I honestly had a manager turn away resumes of people who did not have experience with a particular schematics capture tool. They were all EEs, probably most of them can solve all kinds of bizarre differential equations and understand very complex things about electromagnetic behavior (noteably at high speeds). He turned them down because they didn't document that they could use a mouse to draw wires with a new tool (something draftsmen used to do before we turned them into computers)! He then explained to HR that he could not find qualified candidates, that she should move a couple headcount in shang-hai into his cost center (headcount there is 1/5 US headcount). He didn't even interview them, just moved a couple "head count". This is the shortage, a shortage of people whose primary skills are to be cheap.
The question should be asked why India and China have so many engineers pulling at the bit. The answer is simple, they get paid top dollar to be engineers in those countries. We think they're getting paid peanuts, but for where they live they're making out well. So what if the degree is really hard, boy will it pay off! Around here, the degree is really hard, doesn't pay that great, why mess with it?
The only good news is that eventually, 15 years from now, this wealth of cheap engineers will have evaporated, and maybe, finally, companies will either pay what they should, or we'll have to start inventing a lot more pet rocks. It'll be interesting to see how all this turns out, a lot more interesting if I were sitting on a fat wad of cash and could spend the intervening time not worrying about my job.
You can be more rebellious, doubly so since you're a senior.
Altering the OS of your school provided laptop is probably not illegal, depending on what exactly you do. Unless you're unleashing a virus or destroying hardware, I really doubt anything will stick. I'm guessing this is the kind of thing the ACLU would help you with if you actually got in trouble.
Accessing material over the internet by using existing holes in school firewalls/proxies is NOT illegal. Most of us do it all the time at work because our IT departments are insane (but leave port 80 open with a proxy to censor us...may as well just leave them all wide open). Anyway unless you are attacking their network (router, firewall, proxy) in some way, it's not illegal or even immoral.
Now hacking in to their network, changing grades, destroying machines, altering network configurations, that's all illegal, immoral and just plain mean spirited. As with any other crime however, you should absolutely not admit to anyone what you've done without the counsel of a lawyer. This goes for any crime, even a speeding ticket. You have the right to remain silent, use it. Even if they promise to let you off, bring in a lawyer. Never play around with such things, I know some honest people who thought they were doing the right thing and got it handed to them. The right thing is to remain silent.
The more money it costs to enforce idiotic network policies and excess legal entanglements, the less likely anyone is going to want to be involved with it. If it isn't actively hurting someone, then I think after this neo-fascist insanity passes, people will ignore it.