And then when a thousand/. geeks go looking for the hidden "internet address" and find it - the Government can say "Look we have 1000 internet terrorists attacking us, we need to have better control over the internet!.":(
It seems very common on/. to find people who associate both "Fascism" and "Communism" with the political left - leaving I suppose the political right as the only "good" form of government in their eyes. I cannot understand this level of ignorance and I assume its either willful, or the result of constant repetition by other political conservatives who want to distance themselves from any fascist associations.
Once more though: * Extreme Left Political position: Communism * Moderate Left Political position: Socialism * Middle of the road - the term to use varies considerably (Up here in Canada we use "Liberal" but down in the USA "Liberal" usually is associated with "Socialist" which in turn means "Communist" to most people apparently). I suppose you can use "Democrat" in the US, but since the Democrats (from a Canadian perspective at any rate) seem to be rather rightwing generally, perhaps that is incorrect. * Moderate Right Political position: Republicanism * Extreme Right Political position: Fascism
Personally I think the Democrats in the US are by and large Moderate Right, and the Republicans are somewhere between Moderate Right and further Right but not quite Fascists.
Answer B is the only answer for ANY business in a Capitalist system. Maximize profits. The only reason to do anything else is if the company decides that doing something else will increase profits more than continuing down the current path. So any company like Apple will only decide to improve worker conditions or pay more wages to the workers if enough bad publicity or consumer pressure is put on them that it is likely to decrease sales. A Corporation ONLY does the moral thing if its forced to. Any other decision is bad for business. Capitalism and the current Corporate system is in no way moral if its going to be efficient. All decisions are based on improving profits.Any company that acts morally when not forced to is doing it wrong and opens itself up to being beaten by its competitors who don't make the same mistake. I am not saying there is a better way, but I do wish people would stop talking in terms of Corporations as if they care about their customers. They only care insofar as it affects their profits.
The problem is that Science requires some thinking to understand. You might even need to know something to follow it. Being told "Its all a hoax, we don't need to do anything and it won't cost you anything" by some Right Wing politician is much easier. All you have to do is trust your corporate masters and mouth whatever lies they tell you to speak and you can be a great shill. No knowledge is required, no extra thought, no specific education etc. You just need to spout back whatever you are told to spout back and you can ignore that geeky "science" shit that you don't want to believe it anyways. In any debate involving Politicians and Scientists, the Politicians will win simply because the majority of the population/voters are too fucking ignorant and/or stupid to follow any logical argument. Sadly I think this will mean that many 10s of millions of people may have to die first before the RW public will accept that maybe there is some truth to that "climate change" stuff. I won't hold my breath though As someone once said, "its too bad stupidity isn't painful":(
The US is run by Corporations who are quite willing to break any law. Warmongering is merely the result of the fact that war is good for business. Oh, there are some figureheads called Elected Officials in the mix somewhere but they just do what they are told if they want to retain power and influence. When they retire they get a fat well paying position working for their corporate masters. The US is an empire, ostensibly a democracy internally, outside its borders it is not very different from the Roman Empire in its actions.
The problem is not how Socialist (look up the word, it has a different meaning outside of the US) Canada is or has been in the past - its how incredibly Right Wing our current Conservative government is. Yes, somehow my fellow Canadian citizens were STUPID enough to elect the worst politician this country has ever seen into a majority government. I don't expect that is going to get any better until (sadly) a lot of the older generation dies off (as people get older they tend to be more conservative and we have a big bubble of older citizens etc). Harper does whatever the fuck he wants, taking his lead from whatever his masters in the Republican party tell him to do.
In most of Canada you are limited to just 1 or 2 potential sources for a net connection. Many years ago the various companies divided up the country between them, agreeing to operate only in certain areas so as to reduce the competition (This should of course be illegal I think but the CRTC has never said so). The two biggest companies out west are Shaw Cable and Rogers TV. They do not compete according to that agreement. Shaw (I think) left operating in Calgary entirely, and Rogers stopped operating in Victoria etc. In the east Bell is a major player I believe. For a long time there was zero competition effectively in much of Canada. Now Telus - originally a telephone company - sells Cable services in "competition" in areas that either Rogers or Shaw operate in (the quotes are there because for the most part, the services of Telus cost the same as those of the competition and there is no real competition at all. Certainly there has never been a price war that drove the rates *down*, they only go up over time). Bell apparently owns most of the physical structure of the internet in Canada and so has an overall control of the network that lets them affect the price for everyone.
There is no real competition for Cable internet, television or cell-phone services here in Canada. The CRTC does virtually nothing to foster it that I can see. But then the CRTC usually just rubberstamps everything that the companies suggest, unless there is huge public outcry. I presume the various companies have just gotten together to agree on prices more or less and the government can't be bothered to investigate. Certainly we pay a LOT for those services up here ($100 per month for internet, home phone and basic cable is probably typical. If you want all the specialty channels its probably around $175 per month).
Its sad to see just how ignorant and filled with hatred those people posting there are - and obviously not a single one of them has "gotten" the message of Jesus and the Christian religion. How can people call themselves Christian then spout vitriol like that against someone who believes something different than they do? First off its obvious the ministers/pastors/priests of whatever version of Christianity they belong to are NOT doing their duty or don't understand their own relgion. Christianity is apparently serving as a justification for hatred and bigotry more than as a reason to do good deeds these days.
Of course, most of those posts seem to come from teenagers still attending high school, so expecting anything intelligent from them is perhaps a bit much. However there were a LOT of comments in those posts that could be construed as threats of violence or death. It would do the world good to see those people prosecuted.
No, I am not a Christian, although I have friends who are and who are mostly okay (except for their extreme bias towards anyone in another relgion). I have friends who are members of other religions and those who are atheists as well of course, also mostly okay.
Yeah you can't expect anything from the Conservatives under Harper. If it doesn't: a) Give Harper more power, or b) Give money to Big Businesses that have contributed to his election, or c) Make Canada more like a Republican-Inspired police state d) Do something substantial to bring money to the Praries,... it wont happen on his watch.
I am so ashamed of my fellow Canadian citizens for electing Stephen Harper. How can they have been so incredibly stupid?
Although I used to play tabletop RPGs quite a bit, and still do from time to time, I long since stopped buying the requisite manuals and props for the most part.
I do play MMOs a lot of the time. I suspect that paying the $15/mo fee for an MMO for one year is about the same, or cheaper than buying manuals, maps, miniatures, paint not to mention the requisite pizza etc, for an entire year. You don't have to do either but once you get invested you tend to spend.
Now I do think playing an MMO is far preferable over having a Cable TV subscription, and far far cheaper. I dropped cable tv for just that reason - then stopped playing MMOs when they killed SWG (I have looked at SWTOR but its shit by comparison - a polished turd as they say).
I wouldn't say there was much of a difference between the crowds I have met playing tabletop and those in an MMO (in fact the 2 overlap quite often) except that the tabletop players are usually quite polite, and the players online are often the rudest Mofos I meet.
Your not going to be sticking extra "u"s in words, your going to join the rest of the world in not omitting them when you spell. Think of it as correcting a habit of faulty spelling:P
If only the deaths due to famine could be limited to those who are most responsible for causing the problem - but it will be limited to the poor people mostly in the third world.
Meanwhile we have all the climate change deniers to help prop up the corporations and countries who are causing the problem and ensure that it gets worse faster.
China doesn't control the key DNS servers used by everyone everywhere though. It doesn't control the.com registry - if someone loses their domain name then they have to be removed from the DNS listings don't they?
I know the US operates on a double standard - they insist on the rule of law inside the US (although thats debatable these days I suppose) but they also insist on applying US law to citizens of other countries who violated no law in their own country but did violate a US law. Worse yet other countries seem willing to extradite those people to the US, or at least consider it.
Still it could be worse, at least its currently unlikely that the SOPA legislation when passed will ever be combined with the NDAA to permit the MAFIAA to arbitrarily have someone arrested and held indefinitely without being charged or tried. That would be a frightening combo:P
They have done a pretty decent job of getting the word out about the Telecom's and Big Media's attempts to shape Canada to be another of their bitches.
Of course, Athens had a few thousand bona-fide citizens but was supported by over 100,000 slaves and foreigners who did the work. So the "democracy" was kinda like ours mostly if we were to only allow the 1% to have the vote.:)
Its very simple really: when trying to determine WHY the US has taken military action of some sort - look to see which US Corporations will benefit the most and you have found the *real* reason the US is dropping bombs. Oh, there are some exceptions - at the micro level (killing Bin Laden for instance was a political coups for the sitting President), but on the macro level, it is always economics I think. Not that this marks it as different from just about any other country, but the US is the one country in the world that is more or less *always* at war somewhere. If they don't get drawn into one, they start it. I am sure there will be some conflict with Iran, its just too perfect for the military industrial complex in the US. The US isn't in any other war at the moment, and a new war with a new opponent is a great way to ensure a lot of US corporations make big bank - at the expense of all those honest US soldiers who have to conduct it mind you. I have BTW massive respect for the US military and its heroic members (despite a few exceptions), but they don't make the policy, they just have to carry it out.
I have always been surprised that MS didn't produce its own version of Linux to be honest. It wouldn't cost them anything appreciable to do so and if there were something called "Microsoft Linux" out there, the average user would be liable to accept it - since they already accept any version of Windows (and of course a sizable percentage of computer users don't know what OS they are running or get it confused with their browser etc). They could then bundle it with proprietary software that runs their other software like Office etc. Yeah they will lose some money on OS sales, but if any company can take the hit, MS is high on the list. All they have to do is ensure the proprietary stuff they bundle with it is superior to anything else out there and they can effectively "own" Linux as far as most people are concerned.
Substitute "Capitalism" for "Communism" and the exact same thing can be said about the USA. They have a strong belief that the US system is superior to all other systems, and they have freely interfered with the politics of other countries via military and political intervention and of course lots of espionage. Now, the US system is superior to Communism as implemented by the USSR, but I am not really sure Corporatism as implemented in the west is all that superior in the long run. Both are vile systems IMHO.
The first computer company I worked at, I was the new guy in tech support. I spent 2 (paid) weeks learning how to use the software I would be supporting and then got toured around to the various other departments. While visiting the sales department I watched and listened as the sales guy in front of me sold a customer our top end package (several thousand bucks plus yearly support contract) by offering the customer various features that they insisted were necessary. The customer upon being told all the things they required were in fact supported, paid for the software. The sales guy hung up - then looked at me and said, I sure hope the next version supports at least some of that stuff, cause the current one doesn't support it at all. He got his sale though, and it would be left to someone else to resolve the issue (most likely the folks in Tech support). I have seen many examples since where the sales and marketing fuckwads would LIE to get a sale and leave someone else holding the bag. I was visiting a software company in my home town, and listened in while the owner and the chief developer discussed a new product. Nothing had been done other than the advertising artwork. While I was there, the owner sold several copies of the program, promising it in a few weeks. He collected the information and processed the CC information. Then he turned to the developer and said "How long till its ready?", and the developer responded "Oh, 6 months or so". At another company, our network guy hacked together a small program to perform some specific function. It was badly written and he said it was - only he needed to know how to work it since it was only for internal use. He accidentally let a Sales guy see it and had to explain what it did, telling him at the same time it was for internal use only, the developers had never seen it, etc. The sales guy turned around and sold our software to a major company *based on the existence of this unofficial hacked-together tool*. It was enough to close the deal. Result: Development had to be brought in and programmers and resources had to be devoted to developing a releasable version of this product ASAP. The company had no interest in developing this product of course and it took away from other critical development but the sales guy forced them to do it or lose a major client. I worked briefly in the marketing department of the same company as I was working on their website development. The marketing people had pretty much zero interest in being accurate and the sales people were mostly like the folks in the examples above.
Sales and Marketing might be a necessary evil but they are still evil and I left that company knowing that I could never be part of either sales or marketing because I have some integrity. I have never seen any in any S&M (joke intended) personnel. If I put down Sales and Marketing, its because they are lying assholes within my experience and I have no evidence to support that anyone in Sales or Marketing at a software company is actually honest.
Probably pilots of regular aircraft resenting having the drones piloted by lowly "non-comms". After all the regular pilots are seemingly on the way out and thus its likely that many are being converted over to drone piloting. RHIP
For the worst example of this, look at Games Workshop. They sell incredibly expensive miniatures for their various game rulesets, then update and change the rules continuously so that the *best* minis to have change, and people need to buy all different miniatures at outrageous prices. They run a tournament system to ensure people have to keep up with the current ruleset. I don't play any of there games but the games club I attend up at my old Alma Mater (University of Victoria, in BC), has a whole cadre of people who are constantly painting up new minis and complaining about the cost:P
Me, I do Napoleonics - using a friend's miniatures:P
Yeah. I find it hard to believe all of these posters are claiming the books are hard to read and/or boring. I read them the first time at about age 12. I have read them many times since. Loved them every time, both for the style of the stories and the majestic way they are related. Certainly they are not at all hard to read for me in any regard. They are definitely not dull. The movies are terrific. Sure, some things got mangled a bit but I approve of the changes (Tom Bombadil was no loss for me at all. Least favourite parts of the entire storyline for me). I have to assume that its just a matter of how good a reader you are. I don't want to sound offensive or like I am trying to be superior - although I am sure some will take it that way - but you need to be a good reader to absorb a long and complex book. You need to be able to read at about the same speed you can think. Perhaps thats a lost art these days. God knows what most folks here would think of my favourite author Patrick O'Brian, with his 22+ volume series of the Aubrey-Maturin books set in the Napoleonic Wars. All written more or less in the prose of the time as well.
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And then when a thousand /. geeks go looking for the hidden "internet address" and find it - the Government can say "Look we have 1000 internet terrorists attacking us, we need to have better control over the internet!." :(
It seems very common on /. to find people who associate both "Fascism" and "Communism" with the political left - leaving I suppose the political right as the only "good" form of government in their eyes. I cannot understand this level of ignorance and I assume its either willful, or the result of constant repetition by other political conservatives who want to distance themselves from any fascist associations.
Once more though:
* Extreme Left Political position: Communism
* Moderate Left Political position: Socialism
* Middle of the road - the term to use varies considerably (Up here in Canada we use "Liberal" but down in the USA "Liberal" usually is associated with "Socialist" which in turn means "Communist" to most people apparently). I suppose you can use "Democrat" in the US, but since the Democrats (from a Canadian perspective at any rate) seem to be rather rightwing generally, perhaps that is incorrect.
* Moderate Right Political position: Republicanism
* Extreme Right Political position: Fascism
Personally I think the Democrats in the US are by and large Moderate Right, and the Republicans are somewhere between Moderate Right and further Right but not quite Fascists.
Answer B is the only answer for ANY business in a Capitalist system. Maximize profits. The only reason to do anything else is if the company decides that doing something else will increase profits more than continuing down the current path. So any company like Apple will only decide to improve worker conditions or pay more wages to the workers if enough bad publicity or consumer pressure is put on them that it is likely to decrease sales. A Corporation ONLY does the moral thing if its forced to. Any other decision is bad for business.
Capitalism and the current Corporate system is in no way moral if its going to be efficient. All decisions are based on improving profits.Any company that acts morally when not forced to is doing it wrong and opens itself up to being beaten by its competitors who don't make the same mistake.
I am not saying there is a better way, but I do wish people would stop talking in terms of Corporations as if they care about their customers. They only care insofar as it affects their profits.
The problem is that Science requires some thinking to understand. You might even need to know something to follow it. :(
Being told "Its all a hoax, we don't need to do anything and it won't cost you anything" by some Right Wing politician is much easier. All you have to do is trust your corporate masters and mouth whatever lies they tell you to speak and you can be a great shill. No knowledge is required, no extra thought, no specific education etc. You just need to spout back whatever you are told to spout back and you can ignore that geeky "science" shit that you don't want to believe it anyways.
In any debate involving Politicians and Scientists, the Politicians will win simply because the majority of the population/voters are too fucking ignorant and/or stupid to follow any logical argument.
Sadly I think this will mean that many 10s of millions of people may have to die first before the RW public will accept that maybe there is some truth to that "climate change" stuff. I won't hold my breath though
As someone once said, "its too bad stupidity isn't painful"
The US is run by Corporations who are quite willing to break any law. Warmongering is merely the result of the fact that war is good for business. Oh, there are some figureheads called Elected Officials in the mix somewhere but they just do what they are told if they want to retain power and influence. When they retire they get a fat well paying position working for their corporate masters.
The US is an empire, ostensibly a democracy internally, outside its borders it is not very different from the Roman Empire in its actions.
The problem is not how Socialist (look up the word, it has a different meaning outside of the US) Canada is or has been in the past - its how incredibly Right Wing our current Conservative government is. Yes, somehow my fellow Canadian citizens were STUPID enough to elect the worst politician this country has ever seen into a majority government. I don't expect that is going to get any better until (sadly) a lot of the older generation dies off (as people get older they tend to be more conservative and we have a big bubble of older citizens etc).
Harper does whatever the fuck he wants, taking his lead from whatever his masters in the Republican party tell him to do.
In most of Canada you are limited to just 1 or 2 potential sources for a net connection. Many years ago the various companies divided up the country between them, agreeing to operate only in certain areas so as to reduce the competition (This should of course be illegal I think but the CRTC has never said so). The two biggest companies out west are Shaw Cable and Rogers TV. They do not compete according to that agreement. Shaw (I think) left operating in Calgary entirely, and Rogers stopped operating in Victoria etc. In the east Bell is a major player I believe. For a long time there was zero competition effectively in much of Canada. Now Telus - originally a telephone company - sells Cable services in "competition" in areas that either Rogers or Shaw operate in (the quotes are there because for the most part, the services of Telus cost the same as those of the competition and there is no real competition at all. Certainly there has never been a price war that drove the rates *down*, they only go up over time).
Bell apparently owns most of the physical structure of the internet in Canada and so has an overall control of the network that lets them affect the price for everyone.
There is no real competition for Cable internet, television or cell-phone services here in Canada. The CRTC does virtually nothing to foster it that I can see. But then the CRTC usually just rubberstamps everything that the companies suggest, unless there is huge public outcry. I presume the various companies have just gotten together to agree on prices more or less and the government can't be bothered to investigate. Certainly we pay a LOT for those services up here ($100 per month for internet, home phone and basic cable is probably typical. If you want all the specialty channels its probably around $175 per month).
Its sad to see just how ignorant and filled with hatred those people posting there are - and obviously not a single one of them has "gotten" the message of Jesus and the Christian religion. How can people call themselves Christian then spout vitriol like that against someone who believes something different than they do? First off its obvious the ministers/pastors/priests of whatever version of Christianity they belong to are NOT doing their duty or don't understand their own relgion.
Christianity is apparently serving as a justification for hatred and bigotry more than as a reason to do good deeds these days.
Of course, most of those posts seem to come from teenagers still attending high school, so expecting anything intelligent from them is perhaps a bit much. However there were a LOT of comments in those posts that could be construed as threats of violence or death. It would do the world good to see those people prosecuted.
No, I am not a Christian, although I have friends who are and who are mostly okay (except for their extreme bias towards anyone in another relgion). I have friends who are members of other religions and those who are atheists as well of course, also mostly okay.
Yeah you can't expect anything from the Conservatives under Harper. If it doesn't: ... it wont happen on his watch.
a) Give Harper more power, or
b) Give money to Big Businesses that have contributed to his election, or
c) Make Canada more like a Republican-Inspired police state
d) Do something substantial to bring money to the Praries,
I am so ashamed of my fellow Canadian citizens for electing Stephen Harper. How can they have been so incredibly stupid?
Although I used to play tabletop RPGs quite a bit, and still do from time to time, I long since stopped buying the requisite manuals and props for the most part.
I do play MMOs a lot of the time. I suspect that paying the $15/mo fee for an MMO for one year is about the same, or cheaper than buying manuals, maps, miniatures, paint not to mention the requisite pizza etc, for an entire year. You don't have to do either but once you get invested you tend to spend.
Now I do think playing an MMO is far preferable over having a Cable TV subscription, and far far cheaper. I dropped cable tv for just that reason - then stopped playing MMOs when they killed SWG (I have looked at SWTOR but its shit by comparison - a polished turd as they say).
I wouldn't say there was much of a difference between the crowds I have met playing tabletop and those in an MMO (in fact the 2 overlap quite often) except that the tabletop players are usually quite polite, and the players online are often the rudest Mofos I meet.
Your not going to be sticking extra "u"s in words, your going to join the rest of the world in not omitting them when you spell. Think of it as correcting a habit of faulty spelling :P
If only the deaths due to famine could be limited to those who are most responsible for causing the problem - but it will be limited to the poor people mostly in the third world.
Meanwhile we have all the climate change deniers to help prop up the corporations and countries who are causing the problem and ensure that it gets worse faster.
China doesn't control the key DNS servers used by everyone everywhere though. It doesn't control the .com registry - if someone loses their domain name then they have to be removed from the DNS listings don't they?
I know the US operates on a double standard - they insist on the rule of law inside the US (although thats debatable these days I suppose) but they also insist on applying US law to citizens of other countries who violated no law in their own country but did violate a US law. Worse yet other countries seem willing to extradite those people to the US, or at least consider it.
Still it could be worse, at least its currently unlikely that the SOPA legislation when passed will ever be combined with the NDAA to permit the MAFIAA to arbitrarily have someone arrested and held indefinitely without being charged or tried. That would be a frightening combo :P
The USA has the best politicians money can buy! :(
http://www.openmedia.ca/
They have done a pretty decent job of getting the word out about the Telecom's and Big Media's attempts to shape Canada to be another of their bitches.
Of course, Athens had a few thousand bona-fide citizens but was supported by over 100,000 slaves and foreigners who did the work. So the "democracy" was kinda like ours mostly if we were to only allow the 1% to have the vote. :)
Its very simple really: when trying to determine WHY the US has taken military action of some sort - look to see which US Corporations will benefit the most and you have found the *real* reason the US is dropping bombs. Oh, there are some exceptions - at the micro level (killing Bin Laden for instance was a political coups for the sitting President), but on the macro level, it is always economics I think.
Not that this marks it as different from just about any other country, but the US is the one country in the world that is more or less *always* at war somewhere. If they don't get drawn into one, they start it.
I am sure there will be some conflict with Iran, its just too perfect for the military industrial complex in the US. The US isn't in any other war at the moment, and a new war with a new opponent is a great way to ensure a lot of US corporations make big bank - at the expense of all those honest US soldiers who have to conduct it mind you.
I have BTW massive respect for the US military and its heroic members (despite a few exceptions), but they don't make the policy, they just have to carry it out.
Grad Students are just the larval form of Interns in the business world.
I prefer "straet" myself :P
I have always been surprised that MS didn't produce its own version of Linux to be honest. It wouldn't cost them anything appreciable to do so and if there were something called "Microsoft Linux" out there, the average user would be liable to accept it - since they already accept any version of Windows (and of course a sizable percentage of computer users don't know what OS they are running or get it confused with their browser etc). They could then bundle it with proprietary software that runs their other software like Office etc. Yeah they will lose some money on OS sales, but if any company can take the hit, MS is high on the list. All they have to do is ensure the proprietary stuff they bundle with it is superior to anything else out there and they can effectively "own" Linux as far as most people are concerned.
Substitute "Capitalism" for "Communism" and the exact same thing can be said about the USA. They have a strong belief that the US system is superior to all other systems, and they have freely interfered with the politics of other countries via military and political intervention and of course lots of espionage. Now, the US system is superior to Communism as implemented by the USSR, but I am not really sure Corporatism as implemented in the west is all that superior in the long run. Both are vile systems IMHO.
The first computer company I worked at, I was the new guy in tech support. I spent 2 (paid) weeks learning how to use the software I would be supporting and then got toured around to the various other departments. While visiting the sales department I watched and listened as the sales guy in front of me sold a customer our top end package (several thousand bucks plus yearly support contract) by offering the customer various features that they insisted were necessary. The customer upon being told all the things they required were in fact supported, paid for the software.
The sales guy hung up - then looked at me and said, I sure hope the next version supports at least some of that stuff, cause the current one doesn't support it at all. He got his sale though, and it would be left to someone else to resolve the issue (most likely the folks in Tech support).
I have seen many examples since where the sales and marketing fuckwads would LIE to get a sale and leave someone else holding the bag.
I was visiting a software company in my home town, and listened in while the owner and the chief developer discussed a new product. Nothing had been done other than the advertising artwork. While I was there, the owner sold several copies of the program, promising it in a few weeks. He collected the information and processed the CC information. Then he turned to the developer and said "How long till its ready?", and the developer responded "Oh, 6 months or so".
At another company, our network guy hacked together a small program to perform some specific function. It was badly written and he said it was - only he needed to know how to work it since it was only for internal use. He accidentally let a Sales guy see it and had to explain what it did, telling him at the same time it was for internal use only, the developers had never seen it, etc. The sales guy turned around and sold our software to a major company *based on the existence of this unofficial hacked-together tool*. It was enough to close the deal. Result: Development had to be brought in and programmers and resources had to be devoted to developing a releasable version of this product ASAP. The company had no interest in developing this product of course and it took away from other critical development but the sales guy forced them to do it or lose a major client.
I worked briefly in the marketing department of the same company as I was working on their website development. The marketing people had pretty much zero interest in being accurate and the sales people were mostly like the folks in the examples above.
Sales and Marketing might be a necessary evil but they are still evil and I left that company knowing that I could never be part of either sales or marketing because I have some integrity. I have never seen any in any S&M (joke intended) personnel. If I put down Sales and Marketing, its because they are lying assholes within my experience and I have no evidence to support that anyone in Sales or Marketing at a software company is actually honest.
Probably pilots of regular aircraft resenting having the drones piloted by lowly "non-comms". After all the regular pilots are seemingly on the way out and thus its likely that many are being converted over to drone piloting. RHIP
For the worst example of this, look at Games Workshop. They sell incredibly expensive miniatures for their various game rulesets, then update and change the rules continuously so that the *best* minis to have change, and people need to buy all different miniatures at outrageous prices. They run a tournament system to ensure people have to keep up with the current ruleset. :P
I don't play any of there games but the games club I attend up at my old Alma Mater (University of Victoria, in BC), has a whole cadre of people who are constantly painting up new minis and complaining about the cost
Me, I do Napoleonics - using a friend's miniatures :P
Yeah. I find it hard to believe all of these posters are claiming the books are hard to read and/or boring. I read them the first time at about age 12. I have read them many times since. Loved them every time, both for the style of the stories and the majestic way they are related. Certainly they are not at all hard to read for me in any regard. They are definitely not dull.
The movies are terrific. Sure, some things got mangled a bit but I approve of the changes (Tom Bombadil was no loss for me at all. Least favourite parts of the entire storyline for me).
I have to assume that its just a matter of how good a reader you are. I don't want to sound offensive or like I am trying to be superior - although I am sure some will take it that way - but you need to be a good reader to absorb a long and complex book. You need to be able to read at about the same speed you can think. Perhaps thats a lost art these days.
God knows what most folks here would think of my favourite author Patrick O'Brian, with his 22+ volume series of the Aubrey-Maturin books set in the Napoleonic Wars. All written more or less in the prose of the time as well.