But people come to doctors for a bit more than just to answer the question of "what do I have". There might be a useful conversation about what to do about it.
Fair enough, but I've always ALSO been able to find the usual treatment for my self-diagnosed problems online, and every time I've been to the doctor in the last 10 years or so (which is admittedly only a handful of times) the doctor's proscribed treatment was exactly what the internet suggested. Usually the "useful conversation" was only useful for me because it was impossible for me to get the necessary medication without a prescription.
It's funny, because I would expect slashdot readers to be much less susceptible to trollish "I'll see if I can actually trick anyone into thinking that I'm being serious with this obviously fake, incredibly stupid post" sort of thing. But apparently not.
That being said, it's a great subject for trooling. And good troll will tell you that you need to make a post that is:
1. Obviously wrong
2. About a subject that's complicated enough that it would take someone significant time/effort to properly explain why the original post is wrong
3. Stupid enough that you can get a laugh at the expense of all the people who took your post seriously and put in significant time/effort to respond
I would like to see a study comparing patient's success rates at self-diagnosis with google vs. a doctor's diagnosis success rate. Every time I've had to go to the doctor lately I've successfully diagnosed myself with the internet and known the treatment before I went, only to pay $120 for a doctor to look at me for 5 minutes and say what I had already guessed.
Lack of a demo implies that you were interested in the game and considering purchasing it in the first place. You can't assume that it's even possible to convert pirates into customers, because demand does strange things when cost is zero. Do you think that a teenager who downloads many gigs of mp3s actually has ANY interest in listening to the complete works of Blue Oyster Cult? Was there ANY chance that he was going to go out and buy the CDS with all those song if they weren't available for free online? No, of course not - in the vast majority of cases if they weren't free, he simply wouldn't have any interest in them. It's the same thing here; many/most game pirates just wouldn't have any interest in it at all if they had to pay anything other than zero for it.
I was going to say almost exactly the same thing, but you beat me to it. I'm sure this isn't what this game developer wants to hear, but usually when I play a pirated game it's because otherwise I simply wouldn't have played it. It's much the same with people who download music. Do you really think that a teenager who downloads a bajillion songs (many by groups that he has never even heard of, but what the hell, he can get it with a click of a mouse at no cost) would have purchased the CDs with all those songs if they hadn't been available for free online? No, of course not - if it wasn't available for free, he just wouldn't listen to/own the vast majority of them. It's pointless to try to convert people like me into customers, because even if piracy became impossible tomorrow people like me would simply stop playing your games at all rather than buy them. While I realize that isn't likely to be too encouraging to a game developer who want people to buy his product, it might at least be comforting to know that a large chunk of pirates aren't actually "costing you money," since they wouldn't have purchased your game in the first place.
I actually went to their web page, and it seemed pretty clear that it was a tongue-in-cheek joke. Although I'm sure they're all having a BIG laugh at how worked up everyone is getting over the whole thing.
And even more to the point, the labor cost makes up a pretty trivial percentage of the final price of something like fast food. If we assume that there are three workers involved in cooking/serving/working the cash register and they each have to spend 1 minute working on my order, that's only three man-minutes worth of value. If they are all making $8/hour, that means the labor cost of my food at the restaurant was about 40 cents. Knock that up to $16/hour and the price of your food goes up another 40 cents. I don't know about you, but I would be happy to pay a few tens of cents extra for my meal if it meant that the three people who prepared it were all making a living wage.
How about hotel workers? In heavily unionized areas hotel workers earn around $20/hour, at a job that requires virtually no special skills or education and has no physical risk. In non-unionized areas the average is around $7-8, which is about what you would expect for such a job. Although $20/hour isn't great by IT standards, it certainly isn't bad either.
Indeed. The average [i]starting[/i] pay for a longshorman is $25/hour, with a 40 hour work week. This is for a job that basically requires no skills or education. It always amuses me when IT people talk about how they would hate to be unionized, then go on to work a 50+ hour week for pathetic pay at a job that actually requires skills and education.
Remember when the Delta rocket flew and then fell over and burst into flames because of failed landing gear? LANDING GEAR! Something trivial to engineer (compared to the rest), and the project is shelved because of that failure.
The funding was cut before the landing gear problem. It was originally developed as a military craft. Then the military decided that they didn't want it after all, so they gave it to NASA to mess around with. When it failed they were basically just burning through what little money they still had by making test flights. When it crashed because of the landing gear problem there wasn't any money to fix it.
Check your numbers. The Proton has a LEO capacity of 22 tons and a launch price of $100 million/launch, while the Falcon 9 heavy has a LEO capacity of 27 tons at a price of $78 million/launch.
I agree - the current attitude that an employee must already be an expert when you hire him is really obnoxious. If you assume that the employee is going to be working there for years, the training time that it might take them to get familiar with something new is pretty trivial, especially if they are intelligent and hard-working. You see that exact attitude reflected in the article; they lament how difficult it is to find someone who knows COBOL rather than just, you know, buying some books on COBOL and telling one of their current employees to read them and learn.
Actually, this story is about how California can't screw their state workers to make a political point, right?
I took it as a story about how none of the current employees are able to learn a programing language. Seriously, just make someone read some books and learn how to do it. If they make learning the language their full-time job, they should be able to tinker with the payroll system in waaaaay less than 6 months. Hell, most people could probably learn German in six months if they worked at it 40 hours/week, let alone a programing language.
Any programmer that can't learn COBOL in a few weeks is not much of a programmer
That was my first thought as well. I've never programed in COBOL, so I don't actually know how difficult it is to program in, but how long could it possibly take one of their existing employees to just learn the damn thing? Just buy some books and make somebody read them.
I don't really understand the obsession with having lists of people who can fly/can't fly/require extra screening/whatever. You know how they check your identity at the airport? The look at your driver's license. Are we really supposed to assume that these terrorists are willing and able to learn to fly a passenger airliner, but aren't able to conjure up a fake ID good enough to fool the community college dropout TSA "guard" who glances at it, checks to make sure it's the same name as the name on your ticket, and then passes you through? I don't really know how hard it is to buy or make a good fake ID, but I'm guessing it's about a billion times easier than, say, learning to fly a plane. For keeping under-aged kids out of bars, okay, looking at the driver's license seems reasonable. But stopping determined terrorists? Give me a break. Oh, wait, it DOESN'T even stop kids from getting into bars. But, yeah, surely it will still stop those terrorists...
Actually, I don't really have a problem with cell phone companies, insurance agencies, etc. using a social security number to keep track of customers. It's a unique identifier that's useful for distinguishing people who have the same name (and maybe even the same address), so keeping track of customers with it seems appropriate. The problem is that they like to pretend that knowing person X's social security number magically proves that you are in fact person X, which is absurd.
I never said that I don't have a problem with what this guy did. I think he's an ass. I was simply pointing out that the suicide hotline analogy was bullshit.
That's a bad example. People who call a suicide hotline are looking for help, while this guy was looking for a way to cheat on his wife. A better example would be a "how to spit in people's food and get away with it" hotline.
That was my first thought as well. How do they know that a terrorist wouldn't just add himself to the list? Or, if that's not possible, simply impersonate someone who is on the list? Since apparently the list of all 33k people is now floating around, they would have plenty of choices of people to impersonate.
I wonder how much one can get per personnal record for selling this sort of data to organized crime. And cover your ass by reporting a stolen laptop.
Or perhaps more likely, simply losing the laptop (or accidentally ruining it by spilling your soda on it, or whatever) and trying to cover your ass by reporting it stolen.
The ridiculous thing, in my option, isn't that people aren't careful with "personal information" - it's that banks, credit card companies, etc. all like to pretend that knowing a social security number magically proves that you are who you claim to be. I shouldn't have to keep my information secret just because it makes things convenient for some company that wants to give credit cards/loans/whatever worth thousands of dollars to people that they have never met, via the mail.
That's an idiotic business plan, and it shouldn't be my problem that people try to scam them.
That was my first thought as well. When some random company that sells carpet or bulldozers or hamburgers makes stupid decisions about data security and customer information is stolen, yeah, it's idiotic. But these guys are supposed to be a security company.
Other than the "bait" not pretending to be 17, what's the difference?
The fact that the guy didn't think he was going to meet an under-aged girl is the difference between a guy attempting to commit a felony and a guy attempting to engage in legal activities with a fellow adult. That's not enough of a difference for you?
Slashdot Mirror
But people come to doctors for a bit more than just to answer the question of "what do I have". There might be a useful conversation about what to do about it.
Fair enough, but I've always ALSO been able to find the usual treatment for my self-diagnosed problems online, and every time I've been to the doctor in the last 10 years or so (which is admittedly only a handful of times) the doctor's proscribed treatment was exactly what the internet suggested. Usually the "useful conversation" was only useful for me because it was impossible for me to get the necessary medication without a prescription.
It's funny, because I would expect slashdot readers to be much less susceptible to trollish "I'll see if I can actually trick anyone into thinking that I'm being serious with this obviously fake, incredibly stupid post" sort of thing. But apparently not.
That being said, it's a great subject for trooling. And good troll will tell you that you need to make a post that is:
1. Obviously wrong
2. About a subject that's complicated enough that it would take someone significant time/effort to properly explain why the original post is wrong
3. Stupid enough that you can get a laugh at the expense of all the people who took your post seriously and put in significant time/effort to respond
I would like to see a study comparing patient's success rates at self-diagnosis with google vs. a doctor's diagnosis success rate. Every time I've had to go to the doctor lately I've successfully diagnosed myself with the internet and known the treatment before I went, only to pay $120 for a doctor to look at me for 5 minutes and say what I had already guessed.
Lack of a demo implies that you were interested in the game and considering purchasing it in the first place. You can't assume that it's even possible to convert pirates into customers, because demand does strange things when cost is zero. Do you think that a teenager who downloads many gigs of mp3s actually has ANY interest in listening to the complete works of Blue Oyster Cult? Was there ANY chance that he was going to go out and buy the CDS with all those song if they weren't available for free online? No, of course not - in the vast majority of cases if they weren't free, he simply wouldn't have any interest in them. It's the same thing here; many/most game pirates just wouldn't have any interest in it at all if they had to pay anything other than zero for it.
I was going to say almost exactly the same thing, but you beat me to it. I'm sure this isn't what this game developer wants to hear, but usually when I play a pirated game it's because otherwise I simply wouldn't have played it. It's much the same with people who download music. Do you really think that a teenager who downloads a bajillion songs (many by groups that he has never even heard of, but what the hell, he can get it with a click of a mouse at no cost) would have purchased the CDs with all those songs if they hadn't been available for free online? No, of course not - if it wasn't available for free, he just wouldn't listen to/own the vast majority of them. It's pointless to try to convert people like me into customers, because even if piracy became impossible tomorrow people like me would simply stop playing your games at all rather than buy them. While I realize that isn't likely to be too encouraging to a game developer who want people to buy his product, it might at least be comforting to know that a large chunk of pirates aren't actually "costing you money," since they wouldn't have purchased your game in the first place.
Indeed - just looking at their web page makes it pretty clear that it's a joke. And a pretty funny one, considering how worked up everyone is getting!
I actually went to their web page, and it seemed pretty clear that it was a tongue-in-cheek joke. Although I'm sure they're all having a BIG laugh at how worked up everyone is getting over the whole thing.
And even more to the point, the labor cost makes up a pretty trivial percentage of the final price of something like fast food. If we assume that there are three workers involved in cooking/serving/working the cash register and they each have to spend 1 minute working on my order, that's only three man-minutes worth of value. If they are all making $8/hour, that means the labor cost of my food at the restaurant was about 40 cents. Knock that up to $16/hour and the price of your food goes up another 40 cents. I don't know about you, but I would be happy to pay a few tens of cents extra for my meal if it meant that the three people who prepared it were all making a living wage.
How about hotel workers? In heavily unionized areas hotel workers earn around $20/hour, at a job that requires virtually no special skills or education and has no physical risk. In non-unionized areas the average is around $7-8, which is about what you would expect for such a job. Although $20/hour isn't great by IT standards, it certainly isn't bad either.
Indeed. The average [i]starting[/i] pay for a longshorman is $25/hour, with a 40 hour work week. This is for a job that basically requires no skills or education. It always amuses me when IT people talk about how they would hate to be unionized, then go on to work a 50+ hour week for pathetic pay at a job that actually requires skills and education.
Remember when the Delta rocket flew and then fell over and burst into flames because of failed landing gear? LANDING GEAR! Something trivial to engineer (compared to the rest), and the project is shelved because of that failure.
The funding was cut before the landing gear problem. It was originally developed as a military craft. Then the military decided that they didn't want it after all, so they gave it to NASA to mess around with. When it failed they were basically just burning through what little money they still had by making test flights. When it crashed because of the landing gear problem there wasn't any money to fix it.
Source? Space.com says that a Proton is "more than $100 million" http://www.space.com/missionlaunches/proton_launch_011201.html But if you have a source with a different price, I would be very interested to see it.
Check your numbers. The Proton has a LEO capacity of 22 tons and a launch price of $100 million/launch, while the Falcon 9 heavy has a LEO capacity of 27 tons at a price of $78 million/launch.
I agree - the current attitude that an employee must already be an expert when you hire him is really obnoxious. If you assume that the employee is going to be working there for years, the training time that it might take them to get familiar with something new is pretty trivial, especially if they are intelligent and hard-working. You see that exact attitude reflected in the article; they lament how difficult it is to find someone who knows COBOL rather than just, you know, buying some books on COBOL and telling one of their current employees to read them and learn.
Actually, this story is about how California can't screw their state workers to make a political point, right?
I took it as a story about how none of the current employees are able to learn a programing language. Seriously, just make someone read some books and learn how to do it. If they make learning the language their full-time job, they should be able to tinker with the payroll system in waaaaay less than 6 months. Hell, most people could probably learn German in six months if they worked at it 40 hours/week, let alone a programing language.
Any programmer that can't learn COBOL in a few weeks is not much of a programmer
That was my first thought as well. I've never programed in COBOL, so I don't actually know how difficult it is to program in, but how long could it possibly take one of their existing employees to just learn the damn thing? Just buy some books and make somebody read them.
I don't really understand the obsession with having lists of people who can fly/can't fly/require extra screening/whatever. You know how they check your identity at the airport? The look at your driver's license. Are we really supposed to assume that these terrorists are willing and able to learn to fly a passenger airliner, but aren't able to conjure up a fake ID good enough to fool the community college dropout TSA "guard" who glances at it, checks to make sure it's the same name as the name on your ticket, and then passes you through? I don't really know how hard it is to buy or make a good fake ID, but I'm guessing it's about a billion times easier than, say, learning to fly a plane. For keeping under-aged kids out of bars, okay, looking at the driver's license seems reasonable. But stopping determined terrorists? Give me a break. Oh, wait, it DOESN'T even stop kids from getting into bars. But, yeah, surely it will still stop those terrorists...
Actually, I don't really have a problem with cell phone companies, insurance agencies, etc. using a social security number to keep track of customers. It's a unique identifier that's useful for distinguishing people who have the same name (and maybe even the same address), so keeping track of customers with it seems appropriate. The problem is that they like to pretend that knowing person X's social security number magically proves that you are in fact person X, which is absurd.
I never said that I don't have a problem with what this guy did. I think he's an ass. I was simply pointing out that the suicide hotline analogy was bullshit.
That's a bad example. People who call a suicide hotline are looking for help, while this guy was looking for a way to cheat on his wife. A better example would be a "how to spit in people's food and get away with it" hotline.
That was my first thought as well. How do they know that a terrorist wouldn't just add himself to the list? Or, if that's not possible, simply impersonate someone who is on the list? Since apparently the list of all 33k people is now floating around, they would have plenty of choices of people to impersonate.
I wonder how much one can get per personnal record for selling this sort of data to organized crime. And cover your ass by reporting a stolen laptop.
Or perhaps more likely, simply losing the laptop (or accidentally ruining it by spilling your soda on it, or whatever) and trying to cover your ass by reporting it stolen.
The ridiculous thing, in my option, isn't that people aren't careful with "personal information" - it's that banks, credit card companies, etc. all like to pretend that knowing a social security number magically proves that you are who you claim to be. I shouldn't have to keep my information secret just because it makes things convenient for some company that wants to give credit cards/loans/whatever worth thousands of dollars to people that they have never met, via the mail. That's an idiotic business plan, and it shouldn't be my problem that people try to scam them.
That was my first thought as well. When some random company that sells carpet or bulldozers or hamburgers makes stupid decisions about data security and customer information is stolen, yeah, it's idiotic. But these guys are supposed to be a security company.
Other than the "bait" not pretending to be 17, what's the difference?
The fact that the guy didn't think he was going to meet an under-aged girl is the difference between a guy attempting to commit a felony and a guy attempting to engage in legal activities with a fellow adult. That's not enough of a difference for you?