Sorry, Mr. Dowd. There is no such thing as ethics anymore. There is only more money.
My school works extremely closely with the DoD. Subsequently, most of the people that graduate end up working there through job placements (they guarantee a job within 6 months of graduation). Needless to say, I'll probably have to turn down a few offers which will invalidate my guarantee. I'll be broke, but at least I'll be able to look at myself in the mirror every morning.
I've always been for the revocation of a corporate charter for any serious crimes. Those that involve the death or disablility of a person or repeated, flagrant violations of the law should meet with serious consequences.
As a poster in another thread mentioned, $10 million is chump change for Sony. Now something like $1 billion will get them to change their ways. If you could save $1,000 for your business by dumping all your trash into a river, and the fine is only $100, it is simply good business to ignore the law.
It would depend on Canadian laws regarding who owns the physical lines. Our PSTN is owned by the people (government), so if you're going to use them, you're going to have to put up with a lot of regulations regarding what you can and can't do with the lines.
Now our cable system is privately owned. In that case, I'd be inclined to agree. Since Telus is apparenly offering DSL over publicly owned lines, I must disagree.
People regularly sell gold and items in the game on eBay and other such auction sites. I'm sure many people could make a decent living selling this stuff to "rich westerners" as they see it.
Actually, for many of these Chinese, playing WoW is their job. Read up on any WoW forums about the "sweatshops". Excerpt:
In the average sweatshop you have 1 person manning 2 or 3 computers. The first 1 or 2 computers is a charecter being ran by simple macros(and looting programs) requiring minimal player interaction, farming scarlet monestary for example. The final one is usually a level 60 rogue farming difficult mobs, such as the elites in tyr's hand. ( If you go to tyr's hand on any server you will find about 5 to 10 rogues farming 24/7, all chinese)
The biggest issue with the chinese farmer sweatshops where players get payed 37 cents an hour to farm gold, is that there are always employees that speak english near by. These employees who have a degree in english have 3 main functions. 1.) Sell items to players in IF/ORG trade. 2.) Assist other employees with player interaction. 3.) Respond to GM tells.
the ATI support is terrible, presumably because nVidia is the way it's meant to be played.
I think that is an interesting point. I'll admit up front that I only buy ATI, but I think the lack of support for ATI cards by the people at EA is insane. Basically, they're alienating a very large section of their potiential customer base by effectively flipping the bird to anyone who doesn't have an nVidia card. I've heard from people that EA basically tells you that they don't support anything but nVidia cards.
You'd think these people would want as many happy customers as possible, but I think this "political" decision to only really support nVidia cards might come back to kick them in the nuts.
AFAIK, the game will simply refuse to install if you don't have at least a Radeon 8500 or FX5700 with 128MB memory. Your processor is just above the min. specs as well (1.7MHz Athlon... so you'll be close).
What is the big problem is RAM. It needs at least 512MB to load and many people with 1GB have been having trouble with swapping even at medium texture levels. Depending on how much RAM you have, you'll be lucky if you can run it on the lowest settings.
Those of us who can't part with as much cash as we'd like can certainly help out by donating spare cycles to Folding@Home. Protein folding simulations have applications in helping cure Alzheimer's as well as cystic fibrosis and mad cow disease.
If it is making over a billion per quarter in profit, why will they fire people who made it happen?
Since there is no such thing as "too much profit", cutting your labor expenses will obviously increase next quarter's profit. And then next quarter a new round of layoffs will increase next quarter's profit and so on until no one works for the company and you have maximum profit.
Of course, since they laid off all of the people who made it happen, they're going to fall behind in R&D, etc. their stock price will plummet and someone will end up buying them out for their name.
Repeat after me, "stock price is all that matters".
Even if they did have double-digit unemployment, it doesn't really matter because those countries have a comprehensive welfare state which will take care of you if you are ever jobless.
Congressmen (and women) prefer to recieve email instead of snail mail due to increased security after the anthrax scares a few years ago. Most of their websites reflect this. Your state congress may not have such restrictions in place, so YMMV.
I agree with you regarding using a pre-formatted is effectively spam, but it doesn't hurt to look at a few of them for some helpful points on the issue. Use them to help craft your communication so you don't sound like some lame kid whining about something.
I think the best thing to do is call you congressmens' offices and then follow-up with an email.
Ron Paul pretty much does that already. He's offically a Republican, but claims to be libertarian. He votes against every last appropriations bill and often votes against simple resolutions like "Commending country X for having free and fair elections".
1) Dean has no bearing on party policy. His job is to keep the grassroots liberals silent while making sure they're still donating their money to the party.
2) Nancy Pelosi is a congresswoman from San Francisco. By their standards, she's pretty moderate. Making her minority leader, once again, doesn't mean anything.
Look at Presidental races. The last liberal the Democrats nominated was in 1988 (Dukakis). The Republicans made the mistake of toying with a moderate in '96 (Dole) and he got hammered.
If the Democrats had a similar platform in terms of how much it resonated with their base it would include:
Abolition of the death penalty Universal health care Slashed military spending (by at least 33%) Immediate withdrawl from Iraq Increased TANF/Welfare Spending
Your average Democrat is somewhere just to the right of Dean. The average Democratic politician is simliar to John Kerry.
I know some really liberal dems that hate her for no reason and would likly vote republican or not vote if she ran.
Congrats. You've stumbled on the reason why 3rd parties will not take hold in the USA. Your very liberal Democrats will vote for an assumed conservative Republican rather than vote for any liberal minor party candidate. Apparently voting for Nader over Clinton is throwing your vote away, but voting for $REPUBLICAN over Clinton is stategic voting.
If the UN would keep to doing what it was supposed to do and created to do instead of trying to act as some sort of half-assed world government, then we mightn't have as many conservatives and libertarians wanting us to recall our ambassadors.
It was originally meant to simply be a place where all the countries of the world could get together in one place and talk diplomacy. Politicians then figured whenever some multi-country undertaking was to take place, it should just be put under the watchful eye of the UN. This was convenient, but made the UN a huge bureaucratic nightmare with the security council and council on human rights, etc.
I understand fully. They are not mutually exclusive.
If 51% of people think GTA should be banned, then that is the position of such Democrats. Then, since she knows better than you (assuming you are one of the 49% that don't think GTA should be banned), she will proceed to ban it.
The way you put it was about as elegant as I did in the previous post, so hopefully between our 3 posts, people are getting the point.
She might as well pander as far right as she can so she can practically own the swing vote.
That strategy didn't work well with Mr. Gore or Mr. Kerry. In this case, I think you may be right, though. The soccer mom center-right will vote for her because she's female... not to mention many of the anarcho-feminists coming out of the woodwork to vote for her.
She's already starting her run to the center for her presidential bid in 2008. Hopefully most people will see right through this.
She represents the worst of the Democrats in that she doesn't have any positions that won't change based on tomorrow's opinion poll. Not only that, she repesents the "government knows better than you" wing as well.
I started a little fan site detailing the history of a country group -- I won't name them, but they became famous and then infamous within the span of 5 years.
Depends on what you call a built system. I just upgrade piece by piece when something is obsolete or broke. Each time, though, my floppy gets moved right along with everything else (although I do recall not having it hooked into the power supply for over 3 months and not noticing).
The widspread ownership of guns is not the problem we have in our society. Canada has about as many guns per captia as we do, and they aren't offing each other left and right because of it. There are very many responsible gun owners in the US (and Canada).
Our problem is our "shoot first, ask questions later" mentality. It can be seen in our foreign policy and domestic policy. Instead of trying to prevent social and domestic problems, we throw money at it. If that doesn't work, we bomb it. If that doesn't work, we declare the problem solved (read: best left to the market) and move on.
Slashdot Mirror
I recall the story of the gentleman who used his RAM disk for a swap file ...
Sorry, Mr. Dowd. There is no such thing as ethics anymore. There is only more money.
My school works extremely closely with the DoD. Subsequently, most of the people that graduate end up working there through job placements (they guarantee a job within 6 months of graduation). Needless to say, I'll probably have to turn down a few offers which will invalidate my guarantee. I'll be broke, but at least I'll be able to look at myself in the mirror every morning.
I've always been for the revocation of a corporate charter for any serious crimes. Those that involve the death or disablility of a person or repeated, flagrant violations of the law should meet with serious consequences.
As a poster in another thread mentioned, $10 million is chump change for Sony. Now something like $1 billion will get them to change their ways. If you could save $1,000 for your business by dumping all your trash into a river, and the fine is only $100, it is simply good business to ignore the law.
It would depend on Canadian laws regarding who owns the physical lines. Our PSTN is owned by the people (government), so if you're going to use them, you're going to have to put up with a lot of regulations regarding what you can and can't do with the lines.
Now our cable system is privately owned. In that case, I'd be inclined to agree. Since Telus is apparenly offering DSL over publicly owned lines, I must disagree.
People regularly sell gold and items in the game on eBay and other such auction sites. I'm sure many people could make a decent living selling this stuff to "rich westerners" as they see it.
Actually, for many of these Chinese, playing WoW is their job. Read up on any WoW forums about the "sweatshops". Excerpt:
In the average sweatshop you have 1 person manning 2 or 3 computers. The first 1 or 2 computers is a charecter being ran by simple macros(and looting programs) requiring minimal player interaction, farming scarlet monestary for example. The final one is usually a level 60 rogue farming difficult mobs, such as the elites in tyr's hand. ( If you go to tyr's hand on any server you will find about 5 to 10 rogues farming 24/7, all chinese)
The biggest issue with the chinese farmer sweatshops where players get payed 37 cents an hour to farm gold, is that there are always employees that speak english near by. These employees who have a degree in english have 3 main functions.
1.) Sell items to players in IF/ORG trade.
2.) Assist other employees with player interaction.
3.) Respond to GM tells.
In Korea, only old people read Roland Piqupaille articles.
the ATI support is terrible, presumably because nVidia is the way it's meant to be played.
I think that is an interesting point. I'll admit up front that I only buy ATI, but I think the lack of support for ATI cards by the people at EA is insane. Basically, they're alienating a very large section of their potiential customer base by effectively flipping the bird to anyone who doesn't have an nVidia card. I've heard from people that EA basically tells you that they don't support anything but nVidia cards.
You'd think these people would want as many happy customers as possible, but I think this "political" decision to only really support nVidia cards might come back to kick them in the nuts.
AFAIK, the game will simply refuse to install if you don't have at least a Radeon 8500 or FX5700 with 128MB memory. Your processor is just above the min. specs as well (1.7MHz Athlon ... so you'll be close).
What is the big problem is RAM. It needs at least 512MB to load and many people with 1GB have been having trouble with swapping even at medium texture levels. Depending on how much RAM you have, you'll be lucky if you can run it on the lowest settings.
Those of us who can't part with as much cash as we'd like can certainly help out by donating spare cycles to Folding@Home. Protein folding simulations have applications in helping cure Alzheimer's as well as cystic fibrosis and mad cow disease.
If it is making over a billion per quarter in profit, why will they fire people who made it happen?
Since there is no such thing as "too much profit", cutting your labor expenses will obviously increase next quarter's profit. And then next quarter a new round of layoffs will increase next quarter's profit and so on until no one works for the company and you have maximum profit.
Of course, since they laid off all of the people who made it happen, they're going to fall behind in R&D, etc. their stock price will plummet and someone will end up buying them out for their name.
Repeat after me, "stock price is all that matters".
Even if they did have double-digit unemployment, it doesn't really matter because those countries have a comprehensive welfare state which will take care of you if you are ever jobless.
Congressmen (and women) prefer to recieve email instead of snail mail due to increased security after the anthrax scares a few years ago. Most of their websites reflect this. Your state congress may not have such restrictions in place, so YMMV.
I agree with you regarding using a pre-formatted is effectively spam, but it doesn't hurt to look at a few of them for some helpful points on the issue. Use them to help craft your communication so you don't sound like some lame kid whining about something.
I think the best thing to do is call you congressmens' offices and then follow-up with an email.
Ron Paul pretty much does that already. He's offically a Republican, but claims to be libertarian. He votes against every last appropriations bill and often votes against simple resolutions like "Commending country X for having free and fair elections".
1) Dean has no bearing on party policy. His job is to keep the grassroots liberals silent while making sure they're still donating their money to the party.
2) Nancy Pelosi is a congresswoman from San Francisco. By their standards, she's pretty moderate. Making her minority leader, once again, doesn't mean anything.
Look at Presidental races. The last liberal the Democrats nominated was in 1988 (Dukakis). The Republicans made the mistake of toying with a moderate in '96 (Dole) and he got hammered.
If the Democrats had a similar platform in terms of how much it resonated with their base it would include:
Abolition of the death penalty
Universal health care
Slashed military spending (by at least 33%)
Immediate withdrawl from Iraq
Increased TANF/Welfare Spending
Your average Democrat is somewhere just to the right of Dean. The average Democratic politician is simliar to John Kerry.
I know some really liberal dems that hate her for no reason and would likly vote republican or not vote if she ran.
Congrats. You've stumbled on the reason why 3rd parties will not take hold in the USA. Your very liberal Democrats will vote for an assumed conservative Republican rather than vote for any liberal minor party candidate. Apparently voting for Nader over Clinton is throwing your vote away, but voting for $REPUBLICAN over Clinton is stategic voting.
If the UN would keep to doing what it was supposed to do and created to do instead of trying to act as some sort of half-assed world government, then we mightn't have as many conservatives and libertarians wanting us to recall our ambassadors.
It was originally meant to simply be a place where all the countries of the world could get together in one place and talk diplomacy. Politicians then figured whenever some multi-country undertaking was to take place, it should just be put under the watchful eye of the UN. This was convenient, but made the UN a huge bureaucratic nightmare with the security council and council on human rights, etc.
No one really knows.
I just find it funny that the Republican strategy of campaigning to their base has worked very well and the Democrats haven't picked up on that.
Well, I voted for Badnarik because Nader wasn't an option on the ballot in Ohio.
I hope that helps.
I understand fully. They are not mutually exclusive.
If 51% of people think GTA should be banned, then that is the position of such Democrats. Then, since she knows better than you (assuming you are one of the 49% that don't think GTA should be banned), she will proceed to ban it.
The way you put it was about as elegant as I did in the previous post, so hopefully between our 3 posts, people are getting the point.
She might as well pander as far right as she can so she can practically own the swing vote.
... not to mention many of the anarcho-feminists coming out of the woodwork to vote for her.
That strategy didn't work well with Mr. Gore or Mr. Kerry. In this case, I think you may be right, though. The soccer mom center-right will vote for her because she's female
She's already starting her run to the center for her presidential bid in 2008. Hopefully most people will see right through this.
She represents the worst of the Democrats in that she doesn't have any positions that won't change based on tomorrow's opinion poll. Not only that, she repesents the "government knows better than you" wing as well.
I started a little fan site detailing the history of a country group -- I won't name them, but they became famous and then infamous within the span of 5 years.
User homepage: http://www.dixie-chicks.com/
I have a feeling we all know what band you're talking about. And even then, the article to which you refer talks about them as well.
Depends on what you call a built system. I just upgrade piece by piece when something is obsolete or broke. Each time, though, my floppy gets moved right along with everything else (although I do recall not having it hooked into the power supply for over 3 months and not noticing).
The widspread ownership of guns is not the problem we have in our society. Canada has about as many guns per captia as we do, and they aren't offing each other left and right because of it. There are very many responsible gun owners in the US (and Canada).
Our problem is our "shoot first, ask questions later" mentality. It can be seen in our foreign policy and domestic policy. Instead of trying to prevent social and domestic problems, we throw money at it. If that doesn't work, we bomb it. If that doesn't work, we declare the problem solved (read: best left to the market) and move on.