I agree with GooberToo here. Does your cell phone spark? Not if it is working properly, no. Can a cell phone fail - in some way, from some environmental factor - in a way in which it now does produce a spark? A spark significant to ignite fuel vapors? I think the odds are slim, but there are many brands and perhaps some will have some bizzare design elements.
That said, I doubt many, if any, of these fires actually stemmed from the phones. Static electricity is so prevalent and, as we have read, so frequently starts fires that more exotic causes seem spurious. If phones can ignite vapor, someone should have made a movie of it in a controlled environment by now.
I can think of two contributions cell phones can make to the well know scenerio of static electric fires at gas stations. First, they distract people. People on phones are not as focused, thus they may not do something they would normall do. Second, the phones could carry some ammount of static electricity. I doubt this is significant purely from an emperical standpoint. In dry, windy climates, I get zapped by my car all the time when I get out. I just don't get zapped by any cell phone I've ever had. Again, a malfunctioning one could, potentially, do it. Further, any excess would be released when you ground youself before fueling your car. I suppose some charge separation could occur between you and the phone as you activate the phone which could effectively introduce new static electricity mid-fueling, but again, you would be getting shocked by the phone all the time and it is unlikely.
Summary: I think it very unlikely, but I would not reject it out of hand (even after Mythbusters). ___________________________________ _________
DCowern already said this, but I wanted to rephrase it.
Guilds do have a currency "DKP" which you earn by showing up for and participating in events which help the guild members.
Also as DCowern said, platinum can become largely irrelivant at the high end. It's always nice, but the best gear, and much of the lesser gear, is flagged "no drop" means you can't transfer it to any other character - you can't sell it.
Money can't get you into the good guild, and money can't help a guild become better. In reality, its about relationships. It's about time.
Time is useful: guilds need members who will show up and participate. There are events you need hordes to do (maybe upwards of 50 people - although I'm no expert it fluctuates over time). By spending time playing with the guild at the arranged times, you get DKP - points which you spend to "buy" your gear when it comes up.
Some guilds allow bidding in terms of DKP to find who wants the item more. Others simply randomly determine who gets it between a group of people all of whom have sufficient DKP to buy it.
The DKP system is totally player run. If you change guilds don't expect to transfer you DKP to the new guild. Sometimes it happens (say when two guilds merge) and perhaps if a guild really wants you to switch, they may offer to match your DKP or they may just hand you (let you take) an item you need.
There is a third system within Everquest to buy gear. (First being platinum, second being your guild's DKP if you belong to such a guild). The third system seems very nice to me and it is basically the only one I currently use. I am a casual player.
This third system is the mission-point system. You do missions for NPC's. You earn points. The NPC's will sell you "no drop" gear for points - no refunds, no buy backs, etc. Some of this gear rivals the best available in game, anywhere.
Since the points here are with these NPC's, you can keep them when you change guild, you can have no guild etc. The missions take 1-2 hours to complete. Failure just means you don't gain any points (so you don't loose points). Thus you can form pickup groups (people you don't know) and band together for mutual benefit - and thus you get the social benefits - but you don't have to form long lasting "guild" relations with them. Nor do you have to trust your guild to go to zones where things you need drop (which may take a while for them to get around to doing). Everyone gets points all the time.
Further, the time interval is only 1-2 hours which is short compared to guild events ("raids") which may last 5+ hours and you have to attend continuously. Obviously some of us don't have this kind of time.
Although at first you may think this would weaken the guild system by allowing people to get great gear in another way, it did strengthen it somewhat in that you want to win the missions thus you want to group with good people thus you group within your guild or with other guilds with good reputations. Everquest is not brain surgery, but you do have to know a few things. This system exposed lots of people who really didn't know what they were doing and caused failure. It has been months since release and there is constant chatter on Everquest boards about poor play in missions. _______________________________________ ___
In LAUSD (Los Angeles Unified School District) you could easily make this kind of money...if you teach for 20 or 30 years. You probably start at $40-$50,000 (US) per year. Added benefits: job security, vacation time, virtually no boss. Added penalties: you are working in a very dangerous job which garners little respect and with very limited resources. Rules which you follow are arbitrary and change from year to year. Further, you are part social worker, part mentor, part teacher and you may be more of a parent to some kids then they have ever otherwise had (mixed bag).
Sure, there are nicer school districts, but they pay far less.
It is essentially hazard pay. Yes, it is high but we still have a huge shortage. Part of the No Child Left Behind act is essentially to require teachers to have credentials (which is a great) but no money was proveded to entice people to the profession or to get the provisional teachers to take the courses and get the credentials they need. So there is an even bigger demand for those with credentials. Of course, in California we are raising tuition thus making it harder for people to afford to get the credential. _____________________________________ __________
This project claims many big improvements. First, programmers will be available to help parallalize code of scientists, who may be experts at, say, weather or protein folding but may not be experts at parallel code. Further, the facility is supposed to be open to all scientists from all countries and funded by any agnecy. CPU cycles are to be distributed on a merit-only basis, and not kept witin DOE for DOE grantees to use, as apparently has happened within various agencies in the past.
The idea is to make it more like other national labs where - for example in neutron scattering - you don't have to be an expert on neutron scattering to use the facility. They have staff available to help and you may have a grant from NSF or NIH but you can use a facility run by DOE if that's the best one for the job.
I attended this session at the American Physical Society meeting this March and I'm assuming this is the project referred to in the talks - I apologize if I'm wrong there, but this is at least what is being discussed by people within DOE. I'm essentially just summarizing what I heard at the meeting so although it sounds like the obvious list of things to do, apparently it has not been done before.
The prospect of opening such facilities to all scientists from all nations is refreshing during a time where so many problems have arisen from lack of mobility of scientists. For example, many DOE facilities such as neutron scattering at Los Alamos (LANL) have historically relied on a fraction of foreign scientists to come and use the facility and this helps pay to maintain it. Much of this income has been lost and is not being compensated from other sources. Further, many legal immegrants working within the Physics community have had very serious visa problems preventing them from leaving the country to attend foreign conferences. The APS was held in Canada this year and the rate of people who could not show up to attend and speak was perhaps ten times greater then the APS conferences I attended previously. Although moving it to Canada helped many foreign scientists attend, it prevented a great deal of foreign scientists living within the US from going. Even with a visa to live and work within the US, they were not allowed to return to the US without additional paperwork which many people had difficulty getting.
Obviously, security is heightened after 9/11, as it should be. I'm bringing up the detrimental sides to such policies not to argue no such policies should have been implemented, but to suggest the benefits be weighed against the costs - and the obvious costs such as to certain facilities should either be compensated directly or we should be honest and realize we are (indirectly) cutting funding to facilities which are (partly) used for defence in order to increase security.
I mention LANL despite it's dubious history of retaining secrets because I have heard talks by people working there (this is after 9/11) on ways to detect various WMD crossing US boarders. Even though they personally are (probably) well funded, if they facilities they need to use don't operate any more this is a huge net loss. My understanding is that all national labs (in the US) have had similar losses from lost foreign use. ____________________________________________ ___
So I checked at Tim Berners-Lee is already in the Hall, thus it seems invention of the web browser, which was my only goal here, is covered. I guess more extensive backgrounds on all the individuals and the exact acomplishments they are to be enshrined for would be really helpful for the voting populace - although by a quick look at the posts above it doesn't look like lack of this kind of extensive background has limited the voting population. _____________________________________ ____
...was when the previous lander crashed because of a unit conversion problem. It shows the importance of units and unit conversion.
I use this in lecture and lab as an example of why we just can't assume the next person will kind of know what we are doing, even if we don't completely specify it. Ironically, I just mentioned it today before reading this story - but maybe I shouldn't mention that. Maybe someone will take it as evidence of a psychic connection between/. and me. _____________________________________
But the canals on Mars didn't correspond to any physical feature of Mars they were purely imaginary. There are lines on Mars, but they do not correspond to the maps made by Secchi (proper translation would be channels, not canals, but this is a historical accident). Whereas the face does in fact look like a face from a certain angle. There are photos of the same region from a different angle which do not look like a face. It's just random chance. It is a question of statistics. If we had found "So long and thanks for all the fish" spelled out in 10' high letters atop the highest mountain on Mars obviously the odds are astronomically against this being random chance.
At heart, we should ask what are the odds that a picture of a section of Mars would look something like a face. This is really a hard question because of our mind's ability to find patterns (and thus ignore little defects).
I imagine the computer program to recognize faces will be able to be used to form an answer to this question, but only when it is really perfected, and that is nontrivial as it is still being worked on. I suppose we could instead do it with random light/dark patters and human volunteers, but I bet it would get pretty dull ("is this a face? Nope. This one? Nope. This one? No", etc.).
Even if it is one in ten thousand, if you take enough photos of Mars...
Remember, the whole freaking Moon is supposed to have a face in it but everybody I ask sees it differently. I'm sure there is a "standard" face but somehow I'm not really keen to know it. ___________________________________
Actually, Andressen is the only one I was considering voting for. The web browser made the internet something everyone wanted to have and the interface to it seemed to come out of nowhere far after it was techincally achievable.
However, I didn't vote for anyone because I am not knowledgable enough to know how much of the credit Andressen really deserves - and GPLDAN may well be right that he deserves very little - I don't know, but statements like "he's failed at everything else he's ever done" don't lead me to believe GPLDAN is an unbiased observer.
Most all of the achievements on the list were worked on by many people and competing groups simultainously. This leads to complexity in awarding personal credit. First person to get it to work? First to make it work in a user friendly fashion? First to popularize it? Lifetime of good work? I assume this Hall of Fame has some criteria for selection which probably we should all read before voting, but I guess by leaving it unspecified, they are allowing us to determine what the rules should be for such a Hall.
My thought on Mosaic was that since it was technically achievable far earlier, but not implemented so it was revolutionary.
Whereas something like the C programming language is similar to other languages. Perhaps there is an even "better" langauge then C, but C became popular. It was an incremental change which was just big enough of an increment that people jumped onto it.
Certainly C is more widely used then Mosaic, but if C were not invented, people would have used a similar language, whereas if Mosaic were not invented we'd be using Gopher?
I completely agree. Either get paid by the hour worked or, if you can't do that (and it seems programmers just can't get that done) then form a union and enforce it.
I'm in a union, the CFA, and we elect our representatives. I don't elect the president of my university, nor the deans. I expect most people don't elect their boss. So the argument that the union will *make* you do anything is just childish when compared to the obvious counter-power which *does* in fact make you do stuff.
Unions work well for skilled labor, or for labor that must be done in a specific place. If the labor is unskilled, and can be moved abroad easily, it will always go to the lowest bidder. You can thank NAFTA for making it very easy to move the factories to Mexico, and once there companies found it very easy to move to China and now to Vietnam. I have a journal page on this with links and numbers and stuff.
As programmers, you are half way there: your jobs do require skill, but are very mobile. I would draw an analogy to the movie industry - in which virtually all the workers are unionized. They are very well compensated for the work they do down to the guy painting the set. Sure, some movies are moved to other places such as Canada for lower production costs - but there is a real core movie industry in the US. Obviously, the union is not a cureall but just read all the stories above of programmers getting ripped off. Similar things happened to me, personally, so I left the industry and you can too. (I still program and my programs are open source and used by others and I make about 30% more money per hour I work.)
However, perhaps/. needs something to generate rants and complaints. This way programmers can both complain about how horrible there jobs are and about how those jobs are moving overseas (if you think about it, aren't the employers doing you a favor?)
That was a joke. ___________________________________________ ____
So many problems are caused by buffer overflow - my impression is that this worm is one of them (but even if it isn't, I still have a question). Why is it that we have these problems?
Often I read something along the lines of: the C programming language singlehandedly invented many of these problems by not checking array boundaries or doing proper garbage collection, or something like this. The implication is that before C other languages did do this.
Is this true?
If so, isn't it just a matter of writing a compiler which checks array boundaries and re-compiling (insert your favorite OS here) with that compiler?
Obviously, I have the feeling this is far too simplistic. I'm a programmer but not a computer engineer. Is there a simple explanation/counter arugment? ____________________________________
I totally agree - most of it will be repetitive and thus turned off. However, it would be cool if, at some epic moments, the sounds could be on.
I wouldn't mind if, say, when I finish my "epic" quest which I may have spent 40 hours on, I get the 30 seconds of speach. And obviously, if there is just an on/off button I'm going to have it off.
So if anyone is listening, you may want to put a slider in: All speach Some speach Only really important speach No speach Or something like that. ___________________________________________ ____
They did a poll for us a while back which asked if we wanted Eq2 on something like 2-3 DVD's or just a bucket of CD's (I don't know 20-30???)
Even with all the graphics, I had no idea what they could be planning to stick on *that* much media - but with voice acting it makes more sense.
Only reason to send it over the internet is to protect those sounds from piracy, but I just can't imagine why they'd bother. Who would want a bunch of "I see you have collected the five bone chips. Here is your reward" type clips.
Hey maybe someone will sample them and put them in house music LOL. (ps - anyone else see that SNL where they played the little Everquest fanfaire?)
If they did want to (moderatly) protect it, could they just send a little decoding key? ____________________________________________
...when you consider they have over 400,000 subscriptions each at about US$10/month that is US$48 million per year.
Of course they have expenses, but MMORPG's can be run at big profit margins (thus the flood of new titles) if the economies of scale work well enough.
I'm just saying they probably didn't have to run out and get any investment capital for Eq2 as they are taking in so much money.
Lastly, I'm just giving a very rough estimate of the money. Many people pay per month at US$15/month but if you pay in, say, 2 year intervals you can pay only US$8.30 per month (IIRC). Heck, they have people on a special server paying (IIRC) US$30/month! Also, the 400,000 figure for accounts is rough, also. They claim to have over this number for years now, but it is well known they have a large quantity of comped (free) accounts. How many I cannot estimate. Further complicating the issue is their "all access" pass. I bet they count that one person paying the fixed ammount as one account on each game, but the money (roughly $20/month but you can get down to $16.67 by the year) is less then the sum of the 3 (4?) subscriptions together.
As many posters have mentioned above, clearly simply making more food is not the issue. If a region had never been able to feed its population, the population would have decreased to a level the land could support. These regions did have enough food, more people were born, and perhaps through one bump in a production/distribution chain, there is not enough food right now where it needs to be.
One of the reacurring bumps talked about above is food as a weapon. The "make people free" solution to has been offered, without specifics.
How can we contribute to making, or keeping, a large population "free", or at least free enough that food won't be withheld as a weapon?
One solution is economic (or political?): economic sanctions. Does this work? Has it worked? (I'm not claiming to have answers here).
Another solution is military. Foreign militaries may engender great hostility, such as the US in Somalia. Another option is regional militaries. I heard one exists in North Africa, near Liberia, but there was some hesitation for them to become involved.
Do these work?
There has been a great deal of discussion as to why the article does not reflect a realistic or complete solution. I would like to see some alternatives, and I hope some of the above can be starting points.
Why are people willing to pay for Windows? They have been using it, it is what they know. It has problems, they are willing to pay to have those problems fixed. Further, so many people use MS word that they have to buy the new version because they will get some random new word document they cannot view or edit otherwise.
Why is CompUSA stocked with Windows software? Because it is commonly used, so the market is bigger, so more software is written for it. Even if you are willing to pay more for a similar product under Linux, often it is not available. Of course, what is available is often free, but it may take an expert hours to complie it or set it up properly.
Why does so much hardware come with Windows drivers, but not linux drivers? Again, market size.
Why do some websites only work right under Internet Explorer? Guess.
Of course there are regions where the opposite is true. Often in science tools are only available for use under linux/unix - further, most expect you to be running some kind of unix if for no other reason then that you have xterms.
It's basically a historical accident - one came first, it became popular, people could switch, they are, but it is taking a long time and maybe Linux will become a huge desktop monopoly, maybe it won't. __________________________________________ ____
Ayaress is right. In general, you can't cheat in MMORPG's in the same way as people are saying you can cheat in CS. (I don't play CS, just what I have read).
However, there is cheating. Recently, Everquest had a little announcement about banning accounts and tyring to remove some money generated illegally. Compared to assured kill shots, this is rather mild.
Eq has been running for 5 years now, and a single cheat which generated loads of money could have totalled the system - and although prices grow lower over time (mudflation, as we all know) it does not seem the system is totally broken.
There are (or were) in-game aides to playing, such as programs to show you where all the enemies are, some to automate repetitive tradeskill activities, or move you to a specific location quickly (to "warp" you there). As far as I know, there is no program to just automatically level your person up. Most all of these programs are focused on getting in-game money, the value of which is rather limited. Sure having infinite money would get you better gear, but really nice gear you have to go get yourself (because it is not tradable between characters) and you have to have a certain minimum level to use (or at least gain the full benefit of) lots of gear.
People buying plat or characters (to "ebay") is probably far more prevelant, but still a tiny fraction of all users.
Likely the most annoying thing is new players who are "powerleveled" by their friends (who sit around healing, and generally helping out the young player) until they reach a level which frankly makes their lack of in-game knowledge dangerous to others.
In some sense, powerleveling is in the spirt of the cooperative game, so it is not even vaguely against the rules, yet it's consequences are significant compared with other forms of real cheating. _______________________________________ ______
I don't know why so many here are posting how much money they have made from software. It should be pretty obvious that there are very high paid programmers. It seems equally obvious that many programmers have really horrible jobs - long hours irregular pay and job security of turkeys in November.
It's particularly amusing to me to hear from earlier generations of programmers. If you were a programmer in the 70's, 80's, or even early 90's the market was very different than it is now. Tons of people have gotten into the industry. I would imagine "just avoid free software and you'll make bank" or "just contribute to free software and you'll make bank" were great pieces of advice years ago because both assumed you would be programming, and programming was a good job.
I write software but that's not what I'm really paid for, nor is it my defining skill so I can't really comment on the market or conditions directly but from what I hear it is pretty grim.
The last and most disturbing part is that tacitly so many of you are assuming you are going to have a great life if you make lots of money. The "putting food on the table" argument is not so valid in America because there are many, many other jobs you can take up - and from what I hear many/.ers are taking up - outside programming. Its not like we are starving to death here. Obviously, other countries differ.
I don't think anyone here is saying stay unemployed and write free software like mad out of Mom's basement for your whole life and refuse all paying jobs if/when they come because your free software is so great.
As several have suggested, you can write free software as a hobby. This is typically joined with come complaints about programming jobs. Why not get a different job that you enjoy and still program in your free time?
I don't see myself at the end of my life looking back and thinking "if only I had made more money". For me, having better relationships with people is worth a lot of potential money. I just can't imagine working with nasty, greedy people (or becoming one myself) just for a beautiful office or view. I enjoy my lifestyle far too much as it is. Obviously the choice is yours; I'm just saying if programming jobs suck for you maybe taking the paycut will be worth it. _____________________________________________ __
To first order, when you write a program, say pong, and open source it, make it free, you effectively prevent other people from making any money off pong. Nobody is going to pay for it if they can get it for free. First order loss.
But there is a second order effect: people enojoy pong. They want more sophisticated programs. You are opening the market for more that. Second order: gain.
Obviously pong is a weak case - a really strong case would be the web browsers. If you have to pay $50 for one, and they keep getting upgraded annually and you had to buy a new one to get new internet content each year the web would be about as useful as, say, ham radio.
Operating systems are also a good case. If it's too expensive it will limit the growth of the industry. (Now you are all going to cringe). MS windows is not really that expensive. This is partly because MS doesn't want to drive away potential customers for all their other software. They could charge more for the OS - people would buy it - but they not only loose one MS windows customer, but the MS office customer and perhaps some other random products (I don't know what all MS sells: video games perhaps? Finance software or is that in office?)
The first order loss is pretty obvious, but finite. The second order gain is amorphous, but long term. And I don't think I'm going to get alot of opposition here saying I think we are not close to ending what computers are capable of.
Saying that making free software will destroy the software market is obviously erronious, but so is not acknowledging that you are preventing some sales.
Should you advocate free software? Who the hell am I to tell you? You have to figure it out; it's your life.
I just wanted to point out the layers of effects in one post - I know that basically people have been going on and on about one or the other and pretending the other side doesn't exist.
As for the orders, its like Taylor expanding the cosine function: cos(x) = 1 - x^2/2! + x^4/4! -... its going to depend on what x is as to which term dominates, except there are tons of effective 'x''s in the problem.
Great idea. Perhaps stores could provide readers which have all such information stored in them. I'm envisioning palm-pilot-like devices, and the store syncs them whenever the information needs to be updated (say, nightly or weekly).
Of course, you're trusting the store's database. I was thinking of requiring all RFID tags to carry all this information around on them so they can be checked for veracity at any point in transit from point of origin to store shelf. Since it is *new* technology, manufacturer's don't have to use it and thus won't be excessively upset by having to add such information to it.
Requiring every mom'n'pop store to have and update a database with all the products information will be a burdon for them and a potential quagmire for regulators. So what if some tiny store somewhere re-writes the database so that it shows the workers were paid more highly than they really were, and thus a few more people may have bought that item.
The potential for abuse is greater, but of course it always exists with tags from the manufacturer as well. I was thinking there would be parts of the tag which would not change at all.
Again: this is all in line with capitalism. Consumers must be informed as to what they are buying, and how it was made. Currently, we just can't get the information as to whether the workers making our goods are paid a living wage.
I think it is an idea we can all agree on: right or left leaning. Just provide information and let the consumer choose. It could become fashionable to buy clothes made as cheaply as possible - I don't think it will to any great extent, but it could.
Certainly it imposes a burdon on companies and our government, but I think it is worth it. Storing the information on RFID tags is just convenient because the technology is new and it could be added before the tech becomes widespread. We could, for example, put the information up on the appropriate US federal webpage (or your home country).
At a minimum, prevailing wages from countries of origin should be provided and made available to the public. It would be a great thing for local newsmedia to cover: get the list from the government. Find the most embarasingly low wages paid anywhere. Go to the people actually buying the stuff and confront them (on camra) with the information and see what they do.
You'll get people who care, and those who don't. I can tell you a lot more people will care where I live now (Northridge, CA, USA) than where I was born, which is less than 200 miles away. So it is a local problem.
Lastly, it would add a huge benefit to the "made in the USA" (or "EU") label because you will realize that you actually are supporting far more reasonable wages than elsewhere.
Just let all information formats on RFID tags be public. Let anyone buy a reader. Obviously, going in to a store with a RFID tag re-writer would be a problem, but the checkout-register could doublecheck randomly.
Make storing customer personal information on such a tag a felony, even if the customer signs any forms indicating otherwise. Business can still use RFID for quick checkout, inventory management, etc.
Since we all have readers, we can doublecheck that the tags are, in fact, erased. I would suggest having readers all over the store, even on the way out. If they are not properly, totally erased, bring them back to the counter. Even 10% of customers doing it would provide major incentive to get the tags erased correctly, the first time.
In fact, why don't we walk around the store with RFID readers? That way we can check the real price of each item - no confusion or misleading shelf placement. If there is a rebate, that information should be on the tag.
Lastly, to achieve nirvana, all we have to do is require the wages of people who made the item on the RFID tags. That way the (now well informed) consumer can choose between shoes, clothing or other goods made in various countries - and actually be confronted with how little people earn in some places. Sure not everyone will care, but enough will.
Just FYI, the FBSS (flowing black silk sash) still sells right around 2500 platinum pieces on my server - same as it did years ago. It is basically in/deflation-immune. There are no crafted haste items (to my knowledge - perhaps there is some really out there one) but the supply of haste items is still small. And this is on an older server (Terris Thule, which was around in June 2000 when I started playing).
For the non-Everquesters: 2500 platinum coins is nothing to sneeze at. A very wealthy monster may carry 40 plat in coin, or perhaps drop an item which sells to a vendor for 100 plat.
Further, I have made all my money via tradeskills. You just have to sell what people want, in quantity. I go for consumable items: food, drink, arrows, armor dye, mostly, and items people need to get their tradeskills up.
Lastly, Eq has had massive influxes of cash and there are rumors of platinum duplication bugs even recently. Yet the economy is large enough that the whole thing has not been really destroyed: meaning there is fine gear available to buy or sell.
I'm not saying Eq economy is great - haven't played DAoC and I'm sure it's better than Everquest was when you left. Maybe it is still better now - I'm not saying it is hard to improve upon Eq either.
All I'm saying is the economy is not totally broken. If you left Luclin-era, you would be amazed at how cheap gear has become - but also how hard the newer MOB's (monsters) are which you have to fight to get the new, far better, gear.
We have all heard of "MUD-flation" in which money becomes worthless because there is no (or not very effective) means of removing money from the economy. Certainly lower end gear is basically worthless in Eq, but money is definately not.
Lastly, Eq just implemented a "tribue" system by which you can donate cash or gear to your home city for small ingame benefits. It is an *awesome* place to toss older, unwanted gear when you can't sell it to other players and the NPC vendors will not really give you much for them either.
Although they are having a hard time fine-tuning it, the tribute system is, potentially, a great way to limit the money supply.
In painful meetings, I just take notes: who is talking, about what, and for how long. I just quietly present the notes to whomever is running the meeting afterword and suggest what can be done to lessen the time wasting. Usually I start with stuff like: okay, during this 15 minuets you and Joe were talking about the upper shaping discriminator, did anyone else have to hear that?
I found it useful.
But then I left those kinds of jobs. I go to perhaps two bad meetings per year now. Yay!
be-fan wrote: "NAFTA really didn't cause all American jobs to be sucked to Mexico, did it???" no, no you have to look to China to find where those jobs went. They moved to Mexico, but US$400/month was not low enough. They moved to China but US$100/month is not low enough. They are currently moving to Vietnam where US$30/month is sounding better. This from marketplace.org, not exactly a basiton of liberal bias. Check out the Dec 9th episode.
All I ask is that the consumer know what pay the people making the shoes make. Then you can decide if you want to buy shoes make by people making $30/month or $400/month or whatever - information is also essential to capitalism.
I'm not saying you are wrong, only that I don't understand what you are referring to here. I read the reply below, which spoke of "providence". Is that part of it?
Slashdot Mirror
I agree with GooberToo here. Does your cell phone spark? Not if it is working properly, no. Can a cell phone fail - in some way, from some environmental factor - in a way in which it now does produce a spark? A spark significant to ignite fuel vapors? I think the odds are slim, but there are many brands and perhaps some will have some bizzare design elements.
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That said, I doubt many, if any, of these fires actually stemmed from the phones. Static electricity is so prevalent and, as we have read, so frequently starts fires that more exotic causes seem spurious. If phones can ignite vapor, someone should have made a movie of it in a controlled environment by now.
I can think of two contributions cell phones can make to the well know scenerio of static electric fires at gas stations. First, they distract people. People on phones are not as focused, thus they may not do something they would normall do. Second, the phones could carry some ammount of static electricity. I doubt this is significant purely from an emperical standpoint. In dry, windy climates, I get zapped by my car all the time when I get out. I just don't get zapped by any cell phone I've ever had. Again, a malfunctioning one could, potentially, do it. Further, any excess would be released when you ground youself before fueling your car. I suppose some charge separation could occur between you and the phone as you activate the phone which could effectively introduce new static electricity mid-fueling, but again, you would be getting shocked by the phone all the time and it is unlikely.
Summary: I think it very unlikely, but I would not reject it out of hand (even after Mythbusters).
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DCowern already said this, but I wanted to rephrase it.
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Guilds do have a currency "DKP" which you earn by showing up for and participating in events which help the guild members.
Also as DCowern said, platinum can become largely irrelivant at the high end. It's always nice, but the best gear, and much of the lesser gear, is flagged "no drop" means you can't transfer it to any other character - you can't sell it.
Money can't get you into the good guild, and money can't help a guild become better. In reality, its about relationships. It's about time.
Time is useful: guilds need members who will show up and participate. There are events you need hordes to do (maybe upwards of 50 people - although I'm no expert it fluctuates over time). By spending time playing with the guild at the arranged times, you get DKP - points which you spend to "buy" your gear when it comes up.
Some guilds allow bidding in terms of DKP to find who wants the item more. Others simply randomly determine who gets it between a group of people all of whom have sufficient DKP to buy it.
The DKP system is totally player run. If you change guilds don't expect to transfer you DKP to the new guild. Sometimes it happens (say when two guilds merge) and perhaps if a guild really wants you to switch, they may offer to match your DKP or they may just hand you (let you take) an item you need.
There is a third system within Everquest to buy gear. (First being platinum, second being your guild's DKP if you belong to such a guild). The third system seems very nice to me and it is basically the only one I currently use. I am a casual player.
This third system is the mission-point system. You do missions for NPC's. You earn points. The NPC's will sell you "no drop" gear for points - no refunds, no buy backs, etc. Some of this gear rivals the best available in game, anywhere.
Since the points here are with these NPC's, you can keep them when you change guild, you can have no guild etc. The missions take 1-2 hours to complete. Failure just means you don't gain any points (so you don't loose points). Thus you can form pickup groups (people you don't know) and band together for mutual benefit - and thus you get the social benefits - but you don't have to form long lasting "guild" relations with them. Nor do you have to trust your guild to go to zones where things you need drop (which may take a while for them to get around to doing). Everyone gets points all the time.
Further, the time interval is only 1-2 hours which is short compared to guild events ("raids") which may last 5+ hours and you have to attend continuously. Obviously some of us don't have this kind of time.
Although at first you may think this would weaken the guild system by allowing people to get great gear in another way, it did strengthen it somewhat in that you want to win the missions thus you want to group with good people thus you group within your guild or with other guilds with good reputations. Everquest is not brain surgery, but you do have to know a few things. This system exposed lots of people who really didn't know what they were doing and caused failure. It has been months since release and there is constant chatter on Everquest boards about poor play in missions.
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In LAUSD (Los Angeles Unified School District) you could easily make this kind of money...if you teach for 20 or 30 years. You probably start at $40-$50,000 (US) per year. Added benefits: job security, vacation time, virtually no boss. Added penalties: you are working in a very dangerous job which garners little respect and with very limited resources. Rules which you follow are arbitrary and change from year to year. Further, you are part social worker, part mentor, part teacher and you may be more of a parent to some kids then they have ever otherwise had (mixed bag).
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Sure, there are nicer school districts, but they pay far less.
It is essentially hazard pay. Yes, it is high but we still have a huge shortage. Part of the No Child Left Behind act is essentially to require teachers to have credentials (which is a great) but no money was proveded to entice people to the profession or to get the provisional teachers to take the courses and get the credentials they need. So there is an even bigger demand for those with credentials. Of course, in California we are raising tuition thus making it harder for people to afford to get the credential.
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This project claims many big improvements. First, programmers will be available to help parallalize code of scientists, who may be experts at, say, weather or protein folding but may not be experts at parallel code. Further, the facility is supposed to be open to all scientists from all countries and funded by any agnecy. CPU cycles are to be distributed on a merit-only basis, and not kept witin DOE for DOE grantees to use, as apparently has happened within various agencies in the past.
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The idea is to make it more like other national labs where - for example in neutron scattering - you don't have to be an expert on neutron scattering to use the facility. They have staff available to help and you may have a grant from NSF or NIH but you can use a facility run by DOE if that's the best one for the job.
I attended this session at the American Physical Society meeting this March and I'm assuming this is the project referred to in the talks - I apologize if I'm wrong there, but this is at least what is being discussed by people within DOE. I'm essentially just summarizing what I heard at the meeting so although it sounds like the obvious list of things to do, apparently it has not been done before.
The prospect of opening such facilities to all scientists from all nations is refreshing during a time where so many problems have arisen from lack of mobility of scientists. For example, many DOE facilities such as neutron scattering at Los Alamos (LANL) have historically relied on a fraction of foreign scientists to come and use the facility and this helps pay to maintain it. Much of this income has been lost and is not being compensated from other sources. Further, many legal immegrants working within the Physics community have had very serious visa problems preventing them from leaving the country to attend foreign conferences. The APS was held in Canada this year and the rate of people who could not show up to attend and speak was perhaps ten times greater then the APS conferences I attended previously. Although moving it to Canada helped many foreign scientists attend, it prevented a great deal of foreign scientists living within the US from going. Even with a visa to live and work within the US, they were not allowed to return to the US without additional paperwork which many people had difficulty getting.
Obviously, security is heightened after 9/11, as it should be. I'm bringing up the detrimental sides to such policies not to argue no such policies should have been implemented, but to suggest the benefits be weighed against the costs - and the obvious costs such as to certain facilities should either be compensated directly or we should be honest and realize we are (indirectly) cutting funding to facilities which are (partly) used for defence in order to increase security.
I mention LANL despite it's dubious history of retaining secrets because I have heard talks by people working there (this is after 9/11) on ways to detect various WMD crossing US boarders. Even though they personally are (probably) well funded, if they facilities they need to use don't operate any more this is a huge net loss. My understanding is that all national labs (in the US) have had similar losses from lost foreign use.
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So I checked at Tim Berners-Lee is already in the Hall, thus it seems invention of the web browser, which was my only goal here, is covered. I guess more extensive backgrounds on all the individuals and the exact acomplishments they are to be enshrined for would be really helpful for the voting populace - although by a quick look at the posts above it doesn't look like lack of this kind of extensive background has limited the voting population._ ____
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...was when the previous lander crashed because of a unit conversion problem. It shows the importance of units and unit conversion.
/. and me.
I use this in lecture and lab as an example of why we just can't assume the next person will kind of know what we are doing, even if we don't completely specify it. Ironically, I just mentioned it today before reading this story - but maybe I shouldn't mention that. Maybe someone will take it as evidence of a psychic connection between
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But the canals on Mars didn't correspond to any physical feature of Mars they were purely imaginary. There are lines on Mars, but they do not correspond to the maps made by Secchi (proper translation would be channels, not canals, but this is a historical accident). Whereas the face does in fact look like a face from a certain angle. There are photos of the same region from a different angle which do not look like a face. It's just random chance. It is a question of statistics. If we had found "So long and thanks for all the fish" spelled out in 10' high letters atop the highest mountain on Mars obviously the odds are astronomically against this being random chance.
At heart, we should ask what are the odds that a picture of a section of Mars would look something like a face. This is really a hard question because of our mind's ability to find patterns (and thus ignore little defects).
I imagine the computer program to recognize faces will be able to be used to form an answer to this question, but only when it is really perfected, and that is nontrivial as it is still being worked on. I suppose we could instead do it with random light/dark patters and human volunteers, but I bet it would get pretty dull ("is this a face? Nope. This one? Nope. This one? No", etc.).
Even if it is one in ten thousand, if you take enough photos of Mars...
Remember, the whole freaking Moon is supposed to have a face in it but everybody I ask sees it differently. I'm sure there is a "standard" face but somehow I'm not really keen to know it.
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Actually, Andressen is the only one I was considering voting for. The web browser made the internet something everyone wanted to have and the interface to it seemed to come out of nowhere far after it was techincally achievable.
However, I didn't vote for anyone because I am not knowledgable enough to know how much of the credit Andressen really deserves - and GPLDAN may well be right that he deserves very little - I don't know, but statements like "he's failed at everything else he's ever done" don't lead me to believe GPLDAN is an unbiased observer.
Most all of the achievements on the list were worked on by many people and competing groups simultainously. This leads to complexity in awarding personal credit. First person to get it to work? First to make it work in a user friendly fashion? First to popularize it? Lifetime of good work? I assume this Hall of Fame has some criteria for selection which probably we should all read before voting, but I guess by leaving it unspecified, they are allowing us to determine what the rules should be for such a Hall.
My thought on Mosaic was that since it was technically achievable far earlier, but not implemented so it was revolutionary.
Whereas something like the C programming language is similar to other languages. Perhaps there is an even "better" langauge then C, but C became popular. It was an incremental change which was just big enough of an increment that people jumped onto it.
Certainly C is more widely used then Mosaic, but if C were not invented, people would have used a similar language, whereas if Mosaic were not invented we'd be using Gopher?
I completely agree. Either get paid by the hour worked or, if you can't do that (and it seems programmers just can't get that done) then form a union and enforce it.
/. needs something to generate rants and complaints. This way programmers can both complain about how horrible there jobs are and about how those jobs are moving overseas (if you think about it, aren't the employers doing you a favor?)
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I'm in a union, the CFA, and we elect our representatives. I don't elect the president of my university, nor the deans. I expect most people don't elect their boss. So the argument that the union will *make* you do anything is just childish when compared to the obvious counter-power which *does* in fact make you do stuff.
Unions work well for skilled labor, or for labor that must be done in a specific place. If the labor is unskilled, and can be moved abroad easily, it will always go to the lowest bidder. You can thank NAFTA for making it very easy to move the factories to Mexico, and once there companies found it very easy to move to China and now to Vietnam. I have a journal page on this with links and numbers and stuff.
As programmers, you are half way there: your jobs do require skill, but are very mobile. I would draw an analogy to the movie industry - in which virtually all the workers are unionized. They are very well compensated for the work they do down to the guy painting the set. Sure, some movies are moved to other places such as Canada for lower production costs - but there is a real core movie industry in the US. Obviously, the union is not a cureall but just read all the stories above of programmers getting ripped off. Similar things happened to me, personally, so I left the industry and you can too. (I still program and my programs are open source and used by others and I make about 30% more money per hour I work.)
However, perhaps
That was a joke.
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So many problems are caused by buffer overflow - my impression is that this worm is one of them (but even if it isn't, I still have a question). Why is it that we have these problems?
Often I read something along the lines of: the C programming language singlehandedly invented many of these problems by not checking array boundaries or doing proper garbage collection, or something like this. The implication is that before C other languages did do this.
Is this true?
If so, isn't it just a matter of writing a compiler which checks array boundaries and re-compiling (insert your favorite OS here) with that compiler?
Obviously, I have the feeling this is far too simplistic. I'm a programmer but not a computer engineer. Is there a simple explanation/counter arugment?
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I totally agree - most of it will be repetitive and thus turned off. However, it would be cool if, at some epic moments, the sounds could be on.
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I wouldn't mind if, say, when I finish my "epic" quest which I may have spent 40 hours on, I get the 30 seconds of speach. And obviously, if there is just an on/off button I'm going to have it off.
So if anyone is listening, you may want to put a slider in:
All speach
Some speach
Only really important speach
No speach
Or something like that.
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I imagine it will be on the media.
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They did a poll for us a while back which asked if we wanted Eq2 on something like 2-3 DVD's or just a bucket of CD's (I don't know 20-30???)
Even with all the graphics, I had no idea what they could be planning to stick on *that* much media - but with voice acting it makes more sense.
Only reason to send it over the internet is to protect those sounds from piracy, but I just can't imagine why they'd bother. Who would want a bunch of "I see you have collected the five bone chips. Here is your reward" type clips.
Hey maybe someone will sample them and put them in house music LOL. (ps - anyone else see that SNL where they played the little Everquest fanfaire?)
If they did want to (moderatly) protect it, could they just send a little decoding key?
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...when you consider they have over 400,000 subscriptions each at about US$10/month that is US$48 million per year.
Of course they have expenses, but MMORPG's can be run at big profit margins (thus the flood of new titles) if the economies of scale work well enough.
I'm just saying they probably didn't have to run out and get any investment capital for Eq2 as they are taking in so much money.
Lastly, I'm just giving a very rough estimate of the money. Many people pay per month at US$15/month but if you pay in, say, 2 year intervals you can pay only US$8.30 per month (IIRC). Heck, they have people on a special server paying (IIRC) US$30/month! Also, the 400,000 figure for accounts is rough, also. They claim to have over this number for years now, but it is well known they have a large quantity of comped (free) accounts. How many I cannot estimate. Further complicating the issue is their "all access" pass. I bet they count that one person paying the fixed ammount as one account on each game, but the money (roughly $20/month but you can get down to $16.67 by the year) is less then the sum of the 3 (4?) subscriptions together.
As many posters have mentioned above, clearly simply making more food is not the issue. If a region had never been able to feed its population, the population would have decreased to a level the land could support. These regions did have enough food, more people were born, and perhaps through one bump in a production/distribution chain, there is not enough food right now where it needs to be.
One of the reacurring bumps talked about above is food as a weapon. The "make people free" solution to has been offered, without specifics.
How can we contribute to making, or keeping, a large population "free", or at least free enough that food won't be withheld as a weapon?
One solution is economic (or political?): economic sanctions. Does this work? Has it worked? (I'm not claiming to have answers here).
Another solution is military. Foreign militaries may engender great hostility, such as the US in Somalia. Another option is regional militaries. I heard one exists in North Africa, near Liberia, but there was some hesitation for them to become involved.
Do these work?
There has been a great deal of discussion as to why the article does not reflect a realistic or complete solution. I would like to see some alternatives, and I hope some of the above can be starting points.
This is the big difference.
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Why are people willing to pay for Windows? They have been using it, it is what they know. It has problems, they are willing to pay to have those problems fixed. Further, so many people use MS word that they have to buy the new version because they will get some random new word document they cannot view or edit otherwise.
Why is CompUSA stocked with Windows software? Because it is commonly used, so the market is bigger, so more software is written for it. Even if you are willing to pay more for a similar product under Linux, often it is not available. Of course, what is available is often free, but it may take an expert hours to complie it or set it up properly.
Why does so much hardware come with Windows drivers, but not linux drivers? Again, market size.
Why do some websites only work right under Internet Explorer? Guess.
Of course there are regions where the opposite is true. Often in science tools are only available for use under linux/unix - further, most expect you to be running some kind of unix if for no other reason then that you have xterms.
It's basically a historical accident - one came first, it became popular, people could switch, they are, but it is taking a long time and maybe Linux will become a huge desktop monopoly, maybe it won't.
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Ayaress is right. In general, you can't cheat in MMORPG's in the same way as people are saying you can cheat in CS. (I don't play CS, just what I have read).
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However, there is cheating. Recently, Everquest had a little announcement about banning accounts and tyring to remove some money generated illegally. Compared to assured kill shots, this is rather mild.
Eq has been running for 5 years now, and a single cheat which generated loads of money could have totalled the system - and although prices grow lower over time (mudflation, as we all know) it does not seem the system is totally broken.
There are (or were) in-game aides to playing, such as programs to show you where all the enemies are, some to automate repetitive tradeskill activities, or move you to a specific location quickly (to "warp" you there). As far as I know, there is no program to just automatically level your person up. Most all of these programs are focused on getting in-game money, the value of which is rather limited. Sure having infinite money would get you better gear, but really nice gear you have to go get yourself (because it is not tradable between characters) and you have to have a certain minimum level to use (or at least gain the full benefit of) lots of gear.
People buying plat or characters (to "ebay") is probably far more prevelant, but still a tiny fraction of all users.
Likely the most annoying thing is new players who are "powerleveled" by their friends (who sit around healing, and generally helping out the young player) until they reach a level which frankly makes their lack of in-game knowledge dangerous to others.
In some sense, powerleveling is in the spirt of the cooperative game, so it is not even vaguely against the rules, yet it's consequences are significant compared with other forms of real cheating.
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I don't know why so many here are posting how much money they have made from software. It should be pretty obvious that there are very high paid programmers. It seems equally obvious that many programmers have really horrible jobs - long hours irregular pay and job security of turkeys in November.
/.ers are taking up - outside programming. Its not like we are starving to death here. Obviously, other countries differ.
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It's particularly amusing to me to hear from earlier generations of programmers. If you were a programmer in the 70's, 80's, or even early 90's the market was very different than it is now. Tons of people have gotten into the industry. I would imagine "just avoid free software and you'll make bank" or "just contribute to free software and you'll make bank" were great pieces of advice years ago because both assumed you would be programming, and programming was a good job.
I write software but that's not what I'm really paid for, nor is it my defining skill so I can't really comment on the market or conditions directly but from what I hear it is pretty grim.
The last and most disturbing part is that tacitly so many of you are assuming you are going to have a great life if you make lots of money. The "putting food on the table" argument is not so valid in America because there are many, many other jobs you can take up - and from what I hear many
I don't think anyone here is saying stay unemployed and write free software like mad out of Mom's basement for your whole life and refuse all paying jobs if/when they come because your free software is so great.
As several have suggested, you can write free software as a hobby. This is typically joined with come complaints about programming jobs. Why not get a different job that you enjoy and still program in your free time?
I don't see myself at the end of my life looking back and thinking "if only I had made more money". For me, having better relationships with people is worth a lot of potential money. I just can't imagine working with nasty, greedy people (or becoming one myself) just for a beautiful office or view. I enjoy my lifestyle far too much as it is. Obviously the choice is yours; I'm just saying if programming jobs suck for you maybe taking the paycut will be worth it.
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To first order, when you write a program, say pong, and open source it, make it free, you effectively prevent other people from making any money off pong. Nobody is going to pay for it if they can get it for free. First order loss.
But there is a second order effect: people enojoy pong. They want more sophisticated programs. You are opening the market for more that. Second order: gain.
Obviously pong is a weak case - a really strong case would be the web browsers. If you have to pay $50 for one, and they keep getting upgraded annually and you had to buy a new one to get new internet content each year the web would be about as useful as, say, ham radio.
Operating systems are also a good case. If it's too expensive it will limit the growth of the industry. (Now you are all going to cringe). MS windows is not really that expensive. This is partly because MS doesn't want to drive away potential customers for all their other software. They could charge more for the OS - people would buy it - but they not only loose one MS windows customer, but the MS office customer and perhaps some other random products (I don't know what all MS sells: video games perhaps? Finance software or is that in office?)
The first order loss is pretty obvious, but finite. The second order gain is amorphous, but long term. And I don't think I'm going to get alot of opposition here saying I think we are not close to ending what computers are capable of.
Saying that making free software will destroy the software market is obviously erronious, but so is not acknowledging that you are preventing some sales.
Should you advocate free software? Who the hell am I to tell you? You have to figure it out; it's your life.
I just wanted to point out the layers of effects in one post - I know that basically people have been going on and on about one or the other and pretending the other side doesn't exist.
As for the orders, its like Taylor expanding the cosine function: cos(x) = 1 - x^2/2! + x^4/4! -... its going to depend on what x is as to which term dominates, except there are tons of effective 'x''s in the problem.
Great idea. Perhaps stores could provide readers which have all such information stored in them. I'm envisioning palm-pilot-like devices, and the store syncs them whenever the information needs to be updated (say, nightly or weekly).
Of course, you're trusting the store's database. I was thinking of requiring all RFID tags to carry all this information around on them so they can be checked for veracity at any point in transit from point of origin to store shelf. Since it is *new* technology, manufacturer's don't have to use it and thus won't be excessively upset by having to add such information to it.
Requiring every mom'n'pop store to have and update a database with all the products information will be a burdon for them and a potential quagmire for regulators. So what if some tiny store somewhere re-writes the database so that it shows the workers were paid more highly than they really were, and thus a few more people may have bought that item.
The potential for abuse is greater, but of course it always exists with tags from the manufacturer as well. I was thinking there would be parts of the tag which would not change at all.
Again: this is all in line with capitalism. Consumers must be informed as to what they are buying, and how it was made. Currently, we just can't get the information as to whether the workers making our goods are paid a living wage.
I think it is an idea we can all agree on: right or left leaning. Just provide information and let the consumer choose. It could become fashionable to buy clothes made as cheaply as possible - I don't think it will to any great extent, but it could.
Certainly it imposes a burdon on companies and our government, but I think it is worth it. Storing the information on RFID tags is just convenient because the technology is new and it could be added before the tech becomes widespread. We could, for example, put the information up on the appropriate US federal webpage (or your home country).
At a minimum, prevailing wages from countries of origin should be provided and made available to the public. It would be a great thing for local newsmedia to cover: get the list from the government. Find the most embarasingly low wages paid anywhere. Go to the people actually buying the stuff and confront them (on camra) with the information and see what they do.
You'll get people who care, and those who don't. I can tell you a lot more people will care where I live now (Northridge, CA, USA) than where I was born, which is less than 200 miles away. So it is a local problem.
Lastly, it would add a huge benefit to the "made in the USA" (or "EU") label because you will realize that you actually are supporting far more reasonable wages than elsewhere.
Just let all information formats on RFID tags be public. Let anyone buy a reader. Obviously, going in to a store with a RFID tag re-writer would be a problem, but the checkout-register could doublecheck randomly.
Make storing customer personal information on such a tag a felony, even if the customer signs any forms indicating otherwise. Business can still use RFID for quick checkout, inventory management, etc.
Since we all have readers, we can doublecheck that the tags are, in fact, erased. I would suggest having readers all over the store, even on the way out. If they are not properly, totally erased, bring them back to the counter. Even 10% of customers doing it would provide major incentive to get the tags erased correctly, the first time.
In fact, why don't we walk around the store with RFID readers? That way we can check the real price of each item - no confusion or misleading shelf placement. If there is a rebate, that information should be on the tag.
Lastly, to achieve nirvana, all we have to do is require the wages of people who made the item on the RFID tags. That way the (now well informed) consumer can choose between shoes, clothing or other goods made in various countries - and actually be confronted with how little people earn in some places. Sure not everyone will care, but enough will.
Just FYI, the FBSS (flowing black silk sash) still sells right around 2500 platinum pieces on my server - same as it did years ago. It is basically in/deflation-immune. There are no crafted haste items (to my knowledge - perhaps there is some really out there one) but the supply of haste items is still small. And this is on an older server (Terris Thule, which was around in June 2000 when I started playing).
For the non-Everquesters: 2500 platinum coins is nothing to sneeze at. A very wealthy monster may carry 40 plat in coin, or perhaps drop an item which sells to a vendor for 100 plat.
Further, I have made all my money via tradeskills. You just have to sell what people want, in quantity. I go for consumable items: food, drink, arrows, armor dye, mostly, and items people need to get their tradeskills up.
Lastly, Eq has had massive influxes of cash and there are rumors of platinum duplication bugs even recently. Yet the economy is large enough that the whole thing has not been really destroyed: meaning there is fine gear available to buy or sell.
I'm not saying Eq economy is great - haven't played DAoC and I'm sure it's better than Everquest was when you left. Maybe it is still better now - I'm not saying it is hard to improve upon Eq either.
All I'm saying is the economy is not totally broken. If you left Luclin-era, you would be amazed at how cheap gear has become - but also how hard the newer MOB's (monsters) are which you have to fight to get the new, far better, gear.
We have all heard of "MUD-flation" in which money becomes worthless because there is no (or not very effective) means of removing money from the economy. Certainly lower end gear is basically worthless in Eq, but money is definately not.
Lastly, Eq just implemented a "tribue" system by which you can donate cash or gear to your home city for small ingame benefits. It is an *awesome* place to toss older, unwanted gear when you can't sell it to other players and the NPC vendors will not really give you much for them either.
Although they are having a hard time fine-tuning it, the tribute system is, potentially, a great way to limit the money supply.
I'm hoping for the four groups of 99 berzerkers. Hehe.
In painful meetings, I just take notes: who is talking, about what, and for how long. I just quietly present the notes to whomever is running the meeting afterword and suggest what can be done to lessen the time wasting. Usually I start with stuff like: okay, during this 15 minuets you and Joe were talking about the upper shaping discriminator, did anyone else have to hear that?
I found it useful.
But then I left those kinds of jobs. I go to perhaps two bad meetings per year now. Yay!
be-fan wrote: "NAFTA really didn't cause all American jobs to be sucked to Mexico, did it???" no, no you have to look to China to find where those jobs went. They moved to Mexico, but US$400/month was not low enough. They moved to China but US$100/month is not low enough. They are currently moving to Vietnam where US$30/month is sounding better. This from marketplace.org, not exactly a basiton of liberal bias. Check out the Dec 9th episode.
All I ask is that the consumer know what pay the people making the shoes make. Then you can decide if you want to buy shoes make by people making $30/month or $400/month or whatever - information is also essential to capitalism.
What basic ideas and themes? Enlighten me.
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I'm not saying you are wrong, only that I don't understand what you are referring to here. I read the reply below, which spoke of "providence". Is that part of it?
Thanks.
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