Actually, there's a pretty hefty amount of evidence that Brian Krebs is white.
Or do you mean that it helped?
I agree that the person who made that statement is doing so with no foundation in this specific incident, but I do think it's reasonable for someone to make that statement in a broader sense, since there have been plenty of incidents where police over-reacted to unarmed black persons with one or a few dozen bullets (just google "police shoot/kill unarmed black man").
Which was one of the most curios parts of the story, because I would expect said warning to be blown off as paranoia and forgotten when it came time to respond. This whole thing could have ended very badly. Even with the most level-headed and respectable cops.
I once called the police, because I had moved into a new home and woke up in the middle of the night to what sounded like someone coming in through a window. I didn't realize the weather had changed and it was windy and noisy up-stairs. While the cops were on their way, I grabbed a bat and went to checkout the whole house. When the cops arrived, they were pretty insistent that I drop that bat immediately (for obvious reasons - I could have been the intruder and be coming back with a bloody bat from bashing the owner's head in, for all they knew).
Of course, I am white, also. So they afforded me the time to react before taking any measures we'd both regret. Or . . . mostly I would regret.:D
This wouldn't be nearly as dangerous if we didn't live in a society where a significant portion of our law-enforcement feel like above-the-law gung-ho cowboys looking to shoot now and ask questions later that respond to "large black ex-military man in a green truck" by shooting asian women in a blue van. Cops are trained to approach every incident as a potentially dangerous or life-threatening one and it's pretty much to the point where citizens need to treat every encounter with the police as a potentially deadly one.
I'm a bit tired of everything having to be celebrated when it's "the first time . . . . for a woman" to do something. I suppose it still even being remotely worth commenting on when it happens is sort of the point, though.
At any rate, I've had the fortune to work with some fucking amazing women in my career. Not as a CEO or anything, yet, but as managers and colleagues and they have earned everything they've achieved and then some. If anything, stories about successful women just sort of tire me, because I've been in a career where they have been fairly plentiful and rather excellent, so it feels like "business as usual", as far as I'm concerned.
Even though our government uses Drupal (or, rather, the people they pay tens of millions of dollars per website to make that end up just being done with Drupal), I tend to advise people against it as often as possible. The whole PHP foundation of it just doesn't cut it for me. Granted, it's a decent system -- especially for free -- but the PHP part gives me discomfort after watching it on the web for the last decade and a half.
As someone who built and maintained a community with 100k users for over a dozen years and did so without charging a dime for the significant services it offered nor plastered it with ads, my view is that people seeking to make money on the internet with advertising and various SEO bullshit are on-par with people who try to get rich with snail-mail chain-letter schemes.
I pay for a lot of content online. I hate advertising. If the threat is that all the commercial enterprises are going to vanish from the internet and we're going to end up back in a time when the internet was for enthusiasts generating and trading information and content among each other without having to monetize absolutely every fucking page load, then by all means -- I'm on board.
Sorry, I have seen what the internet looks like without an adblocker and it's total shit. It's like having Times Square, Hong Kong, or Vegas at night all shoved in your eyeballs when you're just trying to read that tiny two inch wide square of actual content in the middle of it.
If you want some money and your content is worth it, give me an option to pay for it. I am a subscriber to GiantBomb.com (another gamesite), because I like their content and because I can then block their ads and feel good about it. (By the way, their subscriptions are $50/yr -- and I'm paid-up three years in advance). I chip in to a nice handful of websites who offer the option. It's a better bargain than having ads shoved in my face every second of the day (which might be fine for today's ADHD children that know no other world, but not for me).
Further, I remember a time when the internet wasn't all about a bunch of commercial enterprises trying to weasel every last buck from every inch of "real estate". Believe it or not, there used to be a period in which people made pretty awesome content. For free. Because they were interested in it. There was a time when every mommy-blogger with four readers a month didn't plaster her shitty web pages with endless Goodle AdSense ads or other crap, just to make seven cents per year.
If you can't afford to give your content away (because it's what you do for a living), then it should presumably be worth charging for. Even just a tiny bit. If you are focusing on making your way by shoving advertising in your audience's face, then it probably means most of your content is unoriginal copy and paste crap that is on every other website out there and as a result, of course you're having a hard time monetizing it. Even by way of advertising, because you're banking on your audience being either too stupid to adblock or too naive to give a shit that every inch of everything they consume every second of every day is just awash in stupid marketing. Further, what is the point of advertising to an audience that clearly doesn't want advertising? Do you seriously think that these people using adblock are going to click on your advertisements and go give those companies business? Of course not -- so the only thing you are even remotely risking losing is the occasional accidental click from someone who means to click on a headline and clicks on your shitty animated Halo 4 ad.
Ultimately, the question a lot of places like this are asking is how do we compete with free, when free is often as good or even better than what we're charging for (directly or with ads).
Perhaps the answer is -- you don't. If you offer something both valuable and unique, people would pay for it. Otherwise, all you can do is throw up ads and play the numbers with link-bait. An audience will just as likely move somewhere else if you are so swarmed in ads and, because your content isn't valuable enough to charge for, that probably means there is somewhere else these people can go. They aren't trapped between your content and no content. They -- your audience -- have all the options in the world. You're one who is trapped.
Your content is worth what it is worth and throwing ads up on it doesn't make it more valuable.
Not any more. Now days, most companies have betas that you have to pay $10-30 to participate in or buy another game to participate in. Or pre-order the game to participate in.
Of course, I don't know why anyone would want to participate in a beta. That just sounds like doing work for your recreational time.
Most services like Steam and Origin will shut down your account (and, therefore, all the games you "own" within it) if you do a credit card chargeback (as is your right as a customer of the credit card company).
I don't want a free game. I just want my money back. I've had no problems connecting and playing -- the game is just shit. This isn't SimCity. This is . . . a sort of high-gloss facebook game. Giving me a free game (that I probably already own) does nothing for me. Just give me my money back and you MIGHT have a chance of me returning to Origin as a customer. Maybe (and I buy a LOT of stuff).
Can we stop with the fucking flood of shitty BitCoin stories? What is this, 2011 and 2012 all over again?
We get it. A bunch of dumbasses are bitmining bitcoins and new world currency and blah blah blah.
Wake me up when you can do something useful with these bitcoins. last I saw, I could buy shitty overpriced Windows laptops, shampoo, speaker cable, and subscriptions at a few websites.
My question has always been -- so what if it does? When you have free speech and we accept the obvious -- that you are responsible for your actions -- whether or not something might slightly nudge you in one direction or another is irrelevant. What, because one nutjob out of every 60,000,000 goes berzerk and -- among the billions of variables in his life, having played a video game or watched a movie or listened to a song at some point in his existence is one of those variables -- so what? We're going to dump the most primary human right overboard for that one in sixty-billion-chance person who *might* have had something to do with "consuming media"? Fucking of course not.
So we have to grow the fuck up and accept that bad shit happens, unpredictable shit happens, and nothing we can do is necessarily going to change that. Especially when there is no evidence supporting these claims. This study is one of the rare ones that shows any correlation of violence and even then, so fucking what? The closest anyone has come is scapegoating awful mass murder on videogames because "this guy once enjoyed videogames like every other person between the age of two and fifty" and, therefore, it wasn't the guns or mental health or state of mind or anything else that spurred the person into taking action . . . but "entertainment/media".
Let's move on to more meaningful discussions. These are irrelevant.
I've heard a few people with bitcoins complaining about how they can't do anything with them and they're locked in. Apparently there's an online store that catalogs all the stuff you can buy all over the place, with bitcoins . . . and it looked to me like the kind of shitty collection of stuff you'd expect at a flea market. High priced low-end windows laptops and speaker wire and shampoo and shit.
I asked a handful of people around me in the last few days, what they understood "due process" to mean. I was kind of shocked. To a person, each said "it means that you have a right to a trial as soon as reasonable". The concept of it being fair and being a trial in the standard court system as all of your fellow citizens and of your treatment not being unreasonable or arbitrary never once even came up.
Anyway, it all reminds me of President Nixon's statement to Frost: "When the President does it, that means it is not illegal."
Any time the question begins with "does the government have the right to . .." the answer is yes. For the short-term, you might get lucky and have some supreme court judge with a spine intervene. You might even get the other two branches of government to stand up and stop being the pussy-yes-men to the executive branch that they've become in the last twelve years, for a bit.
Ultimately, though, the government has the right to do whatever the fuck it wants and there's not a god damn thing you can do to stop it.
"So what this guy wants is to tax a service that the USPS doesn't provide, to help fund the USPS. That's fucking idiotic. " The idea that things should only be taxed to support that thing is a common fallacy that is actually very bad. Schools, fire, police and many other citizen services have nothing to tax to support just them. So you need a wide net.
Then let's tax soda drinking to apply to the USPS. They has just as much involvement in soda production and consumption as they do in delivery of email. Supporting a service that is becoming almost anachronistic by taxing a more efficient and wisely used service seems a little myopic, to me. Maybe a little disingenuous, also.
"It's 2013 and nobody uses the USPS for anything that is time sensitive. " not true, but not as time sensitive as it use to be. I advocate 3 day postal delivery. 1 day sounds nice but do you know they move over 200 Billion pieces of mail a year? You aren't delivering that in a day.
No, you're not delivering that in a day. So what? Most people do not need the mailman to deliver to them six days per week. One day is likely sufficient. That doesn't mean the entire postal service just works one day a week. It means they delivery to different fucking people each day of the week. The same way trash service runs every day, but not to every house every day. Instead of making six visits to my house every week to deliver me 24 pieces of junk mail, just visit me once and do it. Six visits per week, dropping off small amounts of stuff each time, is pretty inefficient.
Plus, that is only saving on careers, it all has to be processed every day. NEWS FLASH, the is more to the USPS then the person putting mail in your box.
"The only thing I get in my mail is junk. I have a trash min literally at my door, just so I can reach out the door, get the mail, and directly dump it into the trash every day." becasue that's easier then filling out PS Form 1500: Application for Listing and/or Prohibitory Order?
". I do not need mail delivery five "
Sorry, but I don't see any logic there. There's a lot of people doing a lot of things at the post office and there's a certain amount of mail to delivery, so the ONLY ANSWER IS TO KEEP DELIVERING EVERY DAY. Seriously? You don't think there's maybe a more efficient option?
you aren't the only person that uses it, jackass.
Sorry, it's not 1950, anymore. USPS usage has changed significantly and the primary purpose it serves today is delivery of junkmail. As far as filling out a form not to receive junk mail anymore -- it's cute that you think it has any impact. I've lived in my house for several years and I receive a fucking ton of mail for people who haven't lived here in this entire time. I still receive mail for people who lived here before the last people lived here in the early 90s. I have contacted the post office. They've told me there is nothing that can be done. I had the same experience at the apartment I lived in for six years, too. The mailbox was jammed full with mail every day for seven different occupants who hadn't lived there in at least the six years I was there.
As for the junk itself? I've signed up for the lists. I've called the numbers on every catalog and piece of junkmail I get and asked to be taken off. It changes little and it does nothing to assuage the bulk-spam that just gets dropped off at every door every week. I get many pounds of mail on an almost daily basis for these other people who don't live here and haven't for ages. Add the junkmail to that. How is this an efficient setup? How is having a service go to people's doors almost every day of the week to deliver huge quantities of mail not intended for them plus garbage even remotely useful or beneficial? All you need is a backbone service that provides a way for people to communicate as a bottom-rung option.
By "stop the mail service", you mean what I actually suggested, which is "don't deliver mail six fucking days a week, since most time-sensitive materials that need a more granular service aren't being sent by USPS and one day would do"?
So what this guy wants is to tax a service that the USPS doesn't provide, to help fund the USPS. That's fucking idiotic. Second, if you want to reduce the cost of the USPS, don't stop delivery on Saturday. Stop it on EVERY day of the week, except one. It's 2013 and nobody uses the USPS for anything that is time sensitive. The only thing I get in my mail is junk. I have a trash min literally at my door, just so I can reach out the door, get the mail, and directly dump it into the trash every day. Anything that is a package, I get through UPS or FEDEX or DHL. Almost everything else is handled online. I do not need mail delivery five or six days every fucking week just for the one letter that a person might send me two or three times a year. Weekly delivery would completely suffice.
The point is that there simply isn't that much going on, server-side, or the amount of data transmitted would surely have to be much larger and the idea that it's somehow doing all the calculations server-side that should otherwise have been occurring on your i7-3770K has to be bullshit.
Though, 33mb/hr is only 72kbps. More than a 56k modem, but that's about it. But that's a different point, which isn't what I was intending to make.
Ultimately, I don't think there will be a significant ding to their sales, unfortunately (though they could still claim there is). From what I've seen, most actual reviews are glowing about every aspect of the game except the server connection problems. I've been following SimCity a bit and never ran across any of the "hey, there really isn't any single-player ability and you have tiny cities" thing until after launch (we'd always been told that you could still choose to play a single player game just as you always used to, which simply isn't the case).
Additionally, it has such a strong history as a beloved franchise, that most who have played the series in the past were probably like me and just bought it on faith, because . . . well, fuck, it's SimCity. We know what a SimCity game is and if you want to play it.
These initial screw-ups and all sorts of shitty DRM rarely seems to actually have a lingering impact on games, from what I've observed. People just trudge on through, like cows being nudged into the factory to have the little cow-brain-bolt thingy fired at their heads.
DF isn't exactly the same type of simulation, but it's a far better example of what just a couple guys can do (in only about six years, so far, I believe). A lot of the industry could be served by paying attention to it.
DF has a steep learning curve, but O'Reilly published a pretty great book on playing it, last year:
Slashdot Mirror
Actually, there's a pretty hefty amount of evidence that Brian Krebs is white.
Or do you mean that it helped?
I agree that the person who made that statement is doing so with no foundation in this specific incident, but I do think it's reasonable for someone to make that statement in a broader sense, since there have been plenty of incidents where police over-reacted to unarmed black persons with one or a few dozen bullets (just google "police shoot/kill unarmed black man").
Which was one of the most curios parts of the story, because I would expect said warning to be blown off as paranoia and forgotten when it came time to respond. This whole thing could have ended very badly. Even with the most level-headed and respectable cops.
I once called the police, because I had moved into a new home and woke up in the middle of the night to what sounded like someone coming in through a window. I didn't realize the weather had changed and it was windy and noisy up-stairs. While the cops were on their way, I grabbed a bat and went to checkout the whole house. When the cops arrived, they were pretty insistent that I drop that bat immediately (for obvious reasons - I could have been the intruder and be coming back with a bloody bat from bashing the owner's head in, for all they knew).
Of course, I am white, also. So they afforded me the time to react before taking any measures we'd both regret. Or . . . mostly I would regret. :D
This wouldn't be nearly as dangerous if we didn't live in a society where a significant portion of our law-enforcement feel like above-the-law gung-ho cowboys looking to shoot now and ask questions later that respond to "large black ex-military man in a green truck" by shooting asian women in a blue van. Cops are trained to approach every incident as a potentially dangerous or life-threatening one and it's pretty much to the point where citizens need to treat every encounter with the police as a potentially deadly one.
I'm a bit tired of everything having to be celebrated when it's "the first time . . . . for a woman" to do something. I suppose it still even being remotely worth commenting on when it happens is sort of the point, though.
At any rate, I've had the fortune to work with some fucking amazing women in my career. Not as a CEO or anything, yet, but as managers and colleagues and they have earned everything they've achieved and then some. If anything, stories about successful women just sort of tire me, because I've been in a career where they have been fairly plentiful and rather excellent, so it feels like "business as usual", as far as I'm concerned.
You must be new here. :)
Even though our government uses Drupal (or, rather, the people they pay tens of millions of dollars per website to make that end up just being done with Drupal), I tend to advise people against it as often as possible. The whole PHP foundation of it just doesn't cut it for me. Granted, it's a decent system -- especially for free -- but the PHP part gives me discomfort after watching it on the web for the last decade and a half.
As someone who built and maintained a community with 100k users for over a dozen years and did so without charging a dime for the significant services it offered nor plastered it with ads, my view is that people seeking to make money on the internet with advertising and various SEO bullshit are on-par with people who try to get rich with snail-mail chain-letter schemes.
I pay for a lot of content online. I hate advertising. If the threat is that all the commercial enterprises are going to vanish from the internet and we're going to end up back in a time when the internet was for enthusiasts generating and trading information and content among each other without having to monetize absolutely every fucking page load, then by all means -- I'm on board.
Sorry, I have seen what the internet looks like without an adblocker and it's total shit. It's like having Times Square, Hong Kong, or Vegas at night all shoved in your eyeballs when you're just trying to read that tiny two inch wide square of actual content in the middle of it.
If you want some money and your content is worth it, give me an option to pay for it. I am a subscriber to GiantBomb.com (another gamesite), because I like their content and because I can then block their ads and feel good about it. (By the way, their subscriptions are $50/yr -- and I'm paid-up three years in advance). I chip in to a nice handful of websites who offer the option. It's a better bargain than having ads shoved in my face every second of the day (which might be fine for today's ADHD children that know no other world, but not for me).
Further, I remember a time when the internet wasn't all about a bunch of commercial enterprises trying to weasel every last buck from every inch of "real estate". Believe it or not, there used to be a period in which people made pretty awesome content. For free. Because they were interested in it. There was a time when every mommy-blogger with four readers a month didn't plaster her shitty web pages with endless Goodle AdSense ads or other crap, just to make seven cents per year.
If you can't afford to give your content away (because it's what you do for a living), then it should presumably be worth charging for. Even just a tiny bit. If you are focusing on making your way by shoving advertising in your audience's face, then it probably means most of your content is unoriginal copy and paste crap that is on every other website out there and as a result, of course you're having a hard time monetizing it. Even by way of advertising, because you're banking on your audience being either too stupid to adblock or too naive to give a shit that every inch of everything they consume every second of every day is just awash in stupid marketing. Further, what is the point of advertising to an audience that clearly doesn't want advertising? Do you seriously think that these people using adblock are going to click on your advertisements and go give those companies business? Of course not -- so the only thing you are even remotely risking losing is the occasional accidental click from someone who means to click on a headline and clicks on your shitty animated Halo 4 ad.
Ultimately, the question a lot of places like this are asking is how do we compete with free, when free is often as good or even better than what we're charging for (directly or with ads).
Perhaps the answer is -- you don't. If you offer something both valuable and unique, people would pay for it. Otherwise, all you can do is throw up ads and play the numbers with link-bait. An audience will just as likely move somewhere else if you are so swarmed in ads and, because your content isn't valuable enough to charge for, that probably means there is somewhere else these people can go. They aren't trapped between your content and no content. They -- your audience -- have all the options in the world. You're one who is trapped.
Your content is worth what it is worth and throwing ads up on it doesn't make it more valuable.
Not any more. Now days, most companies have betas that you have to pay $10-30 to participate in or buy another game to participate in. Or pre-order the game to participate in.
Of course, I don't know why anyone would want to participate in a beta. That just sounds like doing work for your recreational time.
Most services like Steam and Origin will shut down your account (and, therefore, all the games you "own" within it) if you do a credit card chargeback (as is your right as a customer of the credit card company).
I don't want a free game. I just want my money back. I've had no problems connecting and playing -- the game is just shit. This isn't SimCity. This is . . . a sort of high-gloss facebook game. Giving me a free game (that I probably already own) does nothing for me. Just give me my money back and you MIGHT have a chance of me returning to Origin as a customer. Maybe (and I buy a LOT of stuff).
Can we stop with the fucking flood of shitty BitCoin stories? What is this, 2011 and 2012 all over again?
We get it. A bunch of dumbasses are bitmining bitcoins and new world currency and blah blah blah.
Wake me up when you can do something useful with these bitcoins. last I saw, I could buy shitty overpriced Windows laptops, shampoo, speaker cable, and subscriptions at a few websites.
My question has always been -- so what if it does? When you have free speech and we accept the obvious -- that you are responsible for your actions -- whether or not something might slightly nudge you in one direction or another is irrelevant. What, because one nutjob out of every 60,000,000 goes berzerk and -- among the billions of variables in his life, having played a video game or watched a movie or listened to a song at some point in his existence is one of those variables -- so what? We're going to dump the most primary human right overboard for that one in sixty-billion-chance person who *might* have had something to do with "consuming media"? Fucking of course not.
So we have to grow the fuck up and accept that bad shit happens, unpredictable shit happens, and nothing we can do is necessarily going to change that. Especially when there is no evidence supporting these claims. This study is one of the rare ones that shows any correlation of violence and even then, so fucking what? The closest anyone has come is scapegoating awful mass murder on videogames because "this guy once enjoyed videogames like every other person between the age of two and fifty" and, therefore, it wasn't the guns or mental health or state of mind or anything else that spurred the person into taking action . . . but "entertainment/media".
Let's move on to more meaningful discussions. These are irrelevant.
I've heard a few people with bitcoins complaining about how they can't do anything with them and they're locked in. Apparently there's an online store that catalogs all the stuff you can buy all over the place, with bitcoins . . . and it looked to me like the kind of shitty collection of stuff you'd expect at a flea market. High priced low-end windows laptops and speaker wire and shampoo and shit.
And we're going to be, for the rest of our lives. Probably the lives of our children, too.
I asked a handful of people around me in the last few days, what they understood "due process" to mean. I was kind of shocked. To a person, each said "it means that you have a right to a trial as soon as reasonable". The concept of it being fair and being a trial in the standard court system as all of your fellow citizens and of your treatment not being unreasonable or arbitrary never once even came up.
Anyway, it all reminds me of President Nixon's statement to Frost: "When the President does it, that means it is not illegal."
As soon as the drone starts firing on you, you're now engaged in combat. :D
Any time the question begins with "does the government have the right to . . ." the answer is yes . For the short-term, you might get lucky and have some supreme court judge with a spine intervene. You might even get the other two branches of government to stand up and stop being the pussy-yes-men to the executive branch that they've become in the last twelve years, for a bit.
Ultimately, though, the government has the right to do whatever the fuck it wants and there's not a god damn thing you can do to stop it.
"So what this guy wants is to tax a service that the USPS doesn't provide, to help fund the USPS. That's fucking idiotic. "
The idea that things should only be taxed to support that thing is a common fallacy that is actually very bad.
Schools, fire, police and many other citizen services have nothing to tax to support just them. So you need a wide net.
Then let's tax soda drinking to apply to the USPS. They has just as much involvement in soda production and consumption as they do in delivery of email. Supporting a service that is becoming almost anachronistic by taxing a more efficient and wisely used service seems a little myopic, to me. Maybe a little disingenuous, also.
"It's 2013 and nobody uses the USPS for anything that is time sensitive. "
not true, but not as time sensitive as it use to be. I advocate 3 day postal delivery. 1 day sounds nice but do you know they move over 200 Billion pieces of mail a year? You aren't delivering that in a day.
No, you're not delivering that in a day. So what? Most people do not need the mailman to deliver to them six days per week. One day is likely sufficient. That doesn't mean the entire postal service just works one day a week. It means they delivery to different fucking people each day of the week. The same way trash service runs every day, but not to every house every day. Instead of making six visits to my house every week to deliver me 24 pieces of junk mail, just visit me once and do it. Six visits per week, dropping off small amounts of stuff each time, is pretty inefficient.
Plus, that is only saving on careers, it all has to be processed every day. NEWS FLASH, the is more to the USPS then the person putting mail in your box.
"The only thing I get in my mail is junk. I have a trash min literally at my door, just so I can reach out the door, get the mail, and directly dump it into the trash every day." becasue that's easier then filling out PS Form 1500: Application for Listing and/or Prohibitory Order?
". I do not need mail delivery five "
Sorry, but I don't see any logic there. There's a lot of people doing a lot of things at the post office and there's a certain amount of mail to delivery, so the ONLY ANSWER IS TO KEEP DELIVERING EVERY DAY. Seriously? You don't think there's maybe a more efficient option?
you aren't the only person that uses it, jackass.
Sorry, it's not 1950, anymore. USPS usage has changed significantly and the primary purpose it serves today is delivery of junkmail. As far as filling out a form not to receive junk mail anymore -- it's cute that you think it has any impact. I've lived in my house for several years and I receive a fucking ton of mail for people who haven't lived here in this entire time. I still receive mail for people who lived here before the last people lived here in the early 90s. I have contacted the post office. They've told me there is nothing that can be done. I had the same experience at the apartment I lived in for six years, too. The mailbox was jammed full with mail every day for seven different occupants who hadn't lived there in at least the six years I was there.
As for the junk itself? I've signed up for the lists. I've called the numbers on every catalog and piece of junkmail I get and asked to be taken off. It changes little and it does nothing to assuage the bulk-spam that just gets dropped off at every door every week. I get many pounds of mail on an almost daily basis for these other people who don't live here and haven't for ages. Add the junkmail to that. How is this an efficient setup? How is having a service go to people's doors almost every day of the week to deliver huge quantities of mail not intended for them plus garbage even remotely useful or beneficial? All you need is a backbone service that provides a way for people to communicate as a bottom-rung option.
If the postal service focused on
By "stop the mail service", you mean what I actually suggested, which is "don't deliver mail six fucking days a week, since most time-sensitive materials that need a more granular service aren't being sent by USPS and one day would do"?
"IMPOSSIBLE TO CONTROL".
Though a negative to doctors, teachers, employers, and every level of government imaginable -- that is quite a positive trait.
So what this guy wants is to tax a service that the USPS doesn't provide, to help fund the USPS. That's fucking idiotic. Second, if you want to reduce the cost of the USPS, don't stop delivery on Saturday. Stop it on EVERY day of the week, except one. It's 2013 and nobody uses the USPS for anything that is time sensitive. The only thing I get in my mail is junk. I have a trash min literally at my door, just so I can reach out the door, get the mail, and directly dump it into the trash every day. Anything that is a package, I get through UPS or FEDEX or DHL. Almost everything else is handled online. I do not need mail delivery five or six days every fucking week just for the one letter that a person might send me two or three times a year. Weekly delivery would completely suffice.
The point is that there simply isn't that much going on, server-side, or the amount of data transmitted would surely have to be much larger and the idea that it's somehow doing all the calculations server-side that should otherwise have been occurring on your i7-3770K has to be bullshit.
Though, 33mb/hr is only 72kbps. More than a 56k modem, but that's about it. But that's a different point, which isn't what I was intending to make.
Ultimately, I don't think there will be a significant ding to their sales, unfortunately (though they could still claim there is). From what I've seen, most actual reviews are glowing about every aspect of the game except the server connection problems. I've been following SimCity a bit and never ran across any of the "hey, there really isn't any single-player ability and you have tiny cities" thing until after launch (we'd always been told that you could still choose to play a single player game just as you always used to, which simply isn't the case).
Additionally, it has such a strong history as a beloved franchise, that most who have played the series in the past were probably like me and just bought it on faith, because . . . well, fuck, it's SimCity. We know what a SimCity game is and if you want to play it.
These initial screw-ups and all sorts of shitty DRM rarely seems to actually have a lingering impact on games, from what I've observed. People just trudge on through, like cows being nudged into the factory to have the little cow-brain-bolt thingy fired at their heads.
DF isn't exactly the same type of simulation, but it's a far better example of what just a couple guys can do (in only about six years, so far, I believe). A lot of the industry could be served by paying attention to it.
DF has a steep learning curve, but O'Reilly published a pretty great book on playing it, last year:
Getting Started With Dwarf Fortress.