In Washington, employment alone is sufficient consideration for a non-compete agreement, provided the agreement is in place before you start working. Thats law geek for "Google and the doctor are up "#$%" creek". Since enforcement of the contract is legal in Washington, Google in all probability is legally liable there (there might be some jurisdictional issues, but don't count on it).
Its simply not feasible to have "players" administer a MMORPG server. This isn't Counterstrike, its not double-click on the.exe after twiddling two config files and watch it support 16 players continuously until you power down your machine. An MMORPG server with 10,000 players daily has a monthly bandwidth bill in the high gigabyte/low terrabyte range. Its also likely a cluser of machines, requiring 24-7 on-call tech support from a team of networking pros (and your players will go ape after literally 15 minutes of downtime). If your database gets corrupted or a dupe bug is found you have to have that fixed three hours ago. Persistence costs money, and a lot of it.
Its not the folks with CS degrees losing jobs at HP. One of the great things is that nobody ever fires the engineers in R&D. They'll fire your help desk, sales reps, phone support, and sometimes even your in-house IT team, but actual engineers (as opposed to people who are just tangentially hitched to the IT bandwagon) are all but immune.
Open source advocates do themselves no credit when they say "Spyware which takes advantages of weakness in the design of IE is Microsoft's problem, but spyware which takes advantages of weakness in the design of Firefox is the author's problem". If this were MSIE you can be 100% sure that somebody would be saying "Why, why, why does Windows even ALLOW users to run untrusted code?"
I think the idea is "Pay a little for downloading music today, avoid paying a lot for contributory copyright infringement tomorrow". Not that I think its a great idea, but it shows good faith on part of the University -- "We recognize our students download music, we tried to make the legal way as attractive as possible and have taken all reasonable steps to stop illegal downloading, so please don't sue us for a million billion dollars"
Your post seems to have been cut off. I presume the ending of that sentence was intended to be "little money, high speed Internet connections, large amounts of free time, and few compunctions about stealing when its unlikely they will be caught."
Don't worry -- after you get the bugs worked out it will only sell thirty-thousand copies, so its no big loss. On the plus side, you did go head to head with Duke Nukem Forever.
Yes, and if you throw out the stats entirely and make results completely random ("You deal Onyxia a massive blow with your [Fishing Pole]! She keels over, dead!") it will be harder still to reverse engineer. It will also kill your game almost as quickly as giving players the impression that they have no control over your mind-numbingly opaque system (and somebody is going to figure it out, anyhow -- it only takes one site to publish the results of 1000 repeated trials and then you're booched, to use the Puzzle Pirates term).
Hah, you might think that, except [i]they already admitted their intent is to commit the crime defined as DDOS[/i]. When they try to pull out that sophistry in a lawsuit, the spammer will say "Uh, he might *say* that now but earlier they were bragging in an article on the Internet that they wanted to slow spammer servers down. Here's a copy, judge, we highlighted the juicy bits." And then Blue Security is up a creek.
The analagous situation is posting in your blog "Tomorrow, I'm going to walk out of the Dunkin Donuts without paying for my donuts, and if I'm stopped I'll just say 'Hah, haven't had my coffee yet, of course I'll pay for the donuts, but I left my wallet in the car. Give me a moment' and then run for it". Then, the person goes ahead and robs Dunkin Donuts, exactly as described, and is promptly arrested (don't mess with the donut man, kiddies, he has friends in high places). At trial, he says "Eh, honest mistake" and the prosecutor says "Except we have specific evidence of intent. No donuts for you for a long, long time"
That would be... completely useless, because you've presumably mastered the complex concept that "Holding shift causes letters to become capital", like third-graders the world over, and do not need to look down at the keyboard while you type.
I'm left wondering why I would pay a single dollar for a programmable keyboard when there exists free software to do the same thing and I can touchtype. And I say this as someone who has to use three locales on his development machine as a regular basis. Its not like hunting and pecking in Japanese takes up so much of my time I would need labels to speed it up...
No, it wouldn't. The contribution to the TCO (warning: PHB-speak, but its useful here) is so minor. I live in Japan, land of the ungodly terrible energy prices, and was here for two months without a computer before it arrived. At relatively constant electricity usage otherwise (lights, refigerator, 2 hours of TV a night), the computer being on or on power-save pretty much constantly when I'm home and off when I'm at work, my electricity bill increased by $3 a month. Thats $36 a year, or approximately $120 over the useable lifetime of the computer. Try justifying that to a PHB when someone else says "Power-saving will cost, on average, 1 hour work of avoidable headaches for your knowledge workers a year" (and, incidentally, if power-saving tech adds $100 to the cost of the computer you can kiss your rump goodbye).
Because, and this is just a wild guess, there may actually be innocent people in Nigeria. There are kids studying there who would like to talk to parents, there are grandkids who would like to see their grandchildren before they die, there are even businessmen who complete legitimate transactions. I wish idiot moderators would stop modding up this sort of comment, it makes it that much more likely that some sysadmin with cotton candy between his ears would actually go ahead and do it. And they do! I work at a technology incubator in Japan and some poor sob at a major American university (name withheld to protect the clueless, but it shows up in the top fifty of the US News and World Report rankings) didn't get repeated invitations to participate at one of our conferences (and earn a low five figures speaking fee) because his technical department had/dev/null'ed all the mail from Japan.
In the MMORPG context, there will be stats somewhere in your system even if you obfuscate them (hard to code a database entry "Pollus is a wizard of mediocre skill except when it comes to casting Create Foozle"), and your players *will* discover the numericals basis for any information you pass to them. Look at Ultima Online, it tried to be opaque on most of the mechanics and ended up being target of some of the most sophisticated reverse engineering yet seen to that point.
Different strokes for different folks though -- I actually prefer the Nippon Ichi-style "spreadsheets with a gui" form of combat but if somebody wants "I deal the imp a mighty blow!" they can have their own little sub-genre without it hurting my enjoyment.
$21 million over 15,000 employees = $1400 of the average severance cost was as a direct result of her package. Not an insignificant number, also not a huge number compared to $78,000. Note that expenses associated with laying off an employee aren't limited to severance pay, though (just like costs associated with hiring aren't limited to salary).
Well, technically, its written communication, which would make it libel, and its written communication of an opinion, which would make it not-a-crime. You have to make a false statement of a material fact which is also damaging to reputation for it to be libel or slander.
Dude, the ticket is priced on the assumption that A will only be in the park consuming resources a limited number of days in the year. If you assume A has the write to sublet his season ticket ("arbitration", by the way, is a dispute-settlement via reference to a neutral mediation. "Arbitrage" is buying a commodity in one place and selling it in another at a higher price. Neither has anything to do with what you're talking about.), then they'll price the pass at expected use of 365 days a year instead of ~12. THEN you can complain about them "double dipping".
You'll note there are subscription schemes that do allow subletting, and you pay a premium for the right (the obvious example would be apartments -- check your local listing, $600 a month gets you a more desirable apartment if the contract doesn't allow you to sublet than if it does).
Dude, I don't know what kind of financial situation your school is in but some of the ones I've been in and taught at have difficulties with procuring chalk. You think we're going to spend a couple hundred dollars against the off-chance some six year old has a cardiac infraction? Though, honestly, most of them would put a bullet wound as a risk realistic enough to take steps to mitigate, sadly...
Trial 19438563945. Shrimp and banana. Total bust.
Trial 234545345234. Shrimp and strawberry slurpy. Tasty, no observable wound clotting properties.
Trial 3452342345. Shrimp and vinegar. Minor clotting effect observed, worth a more formal look.
Trial 2345234532. Shrimp and prune juice. Spilled on my lab coat, impossible to get out. Might be useful as a new kind of permanent ink? Or not, it still smells like shrimp and prune juice.
There are two uses for bandages: one is primary treatment of minor skin wounds, and the other is stabilizing a major wound until real treatment can be given to it. At $100, this is too pricey for a first-aid kit unless you're in a really high-risk situation for major trauma -- the only place outside of the military which strikes me as obvious is a construction site. Its not the sort of thing you can justify putting in the school room first aid kit. There's no real reason to give them to hospitals, since anyone requiring wound healing urgently enough to go to a hospital likely has other problems and has other, more HMO-approved solutions (like regular bandages, which work just fine at preventing you from bleeding to death when administered properly and not overwhelmed by the trauma).
In what fantasy world do you live in that gaming has EVER been non-corporate? Do the names Sega, Nintendo, Commodore, Sony, etc. ring any bells with you besides being included in the title of consoles? Hint: they're not orders of ascetic monks.
Granted, I wouldn't enjoy playing to, but to answer your question: the interface would have a branching menu system -- hit one button to "talk", brings up a menu of 10-12 categories with drill-down responses, and some of them auto-populate the sentence with information from the client. For example, if FFXI you'd hit [Talk] [Adventuring] [Looking for group] and it would spam general with "Looking for group" (and, as a bonus, display it in Japanese or English as appropriate) -- no reason a better implementation couldn't say "Level 32 eye-beam specced ranged attacker LFG".
On a tangent -- who else hates the idea of having to speak with people to play online games? I know, on an intellectual level, that one of the female Night Elf healers in my WoW guild is a male Australian currently in the sweaty teenager phase. He's a nice chap and all, but I'd prefer to not have that disconnect thrown at me every time I group with him/her/it/whatever.
How in movies you can say "This will open two years from now on July 4th" and everyone knows it probably will but with video games if you said the same thing anyone with an ounce of sense would say "Third quarter 2008 at the absolute earliest."?
When asked, Grace of God, of the United Kingdom, Canada and Her other Realms and Territories Queen, Head of the Commonwealth, Defender of the Faith, said of the matter: "Go for it, I've got no use for them anyway. All the worst parts of France and America with none of the food or guts that redeem them. I've been trying to pawn them off on another noble for thirty years but the only one who was interested was that grand-nephew six degrees removed from the Duke of Luxenbourg and he was far too decent of a chap to stick with them."
Asked about the impending transfer of soverignty from her ex-Majesty to Google, Canada was rather disappointed but unwilling to cause a fuss. Quebec was outraged but plans to observe the traditional proprieties with a full surrender ceremony.
I heard the government tried experimenting with adding a neutron or two sometime in the fifties, but it was a bomb and the reaction to it was nuclear. Still, you've got to give it to those government research types -- coming up with new isotopes of old elements is a real blast.
Slashdot Mirror
http://www.jacksonlewis.com/legalupdates/article.c fm?aid=662
Its simply not feasible to have "players" administer a MMORPG server. This isn't Counterstrike, its not double-click on the .exe after twiddling two config files and watch it support 16 players continuously until you power down your machine. An MMORPG server with 10,000 players daily has a monthly bandwidth bill in the high gigabyte/low terrabyte range. Its also likely a cluser of machines, requiring 24-7 on-call tech support from a team of networking pros (and your players will go ape after literally 15 minutes of downtime). If your database gets corrupted or a dupe bug is found you have to have that fixed three hours ago. Persistence costs money, and a lot of it.
Its not the folks with CS degrees losing jobs at HP. One of the great things is that nobody ever fires the engineers in R&D. They'll fire your help desk, sales reps, phone support, and sometimes even your in-house IT team, but actual engineers (as opposed to people who are just tangentially hitched to the IT bandwagon) are all but immune.
Open source advocates do themselves no credit when they say "Spyware which takes advantages of weakness in the design of IE is Microsoft's problem, but spyware which takes advantages of weakness in the design of Firefox is the author's problem". If this were MSIE you can be 100% sure that somebody would be saying "Why, why, why does Windows even ALLOW users to run untrusted code?"
I think the idea is "Pay a little for downloading music today, avoid paying a lot for contributory copyright infringement tomorrow". Not that I think its a great idea, but it shows good faith on part of the University -- "We recognize our students download music, we tried to make the legal way as attractive as possible and have taken all reasonable steps to stop illegal downloading, so please don't sue us for a million billion dollars"
Your post seems to have been cut off. I presume the ending of that sentence was intended to be "little money, high speed Internet connections, large amounts of free time, and few compunctions about stealing when its unlikely they will be caught."
Don't worry -- after you get the bugs worked out it will only sell thirty-thousand copies, so its no big loss. On the plus side, you did go head to head with Duke Nukem Forever.
Yes, and if you throw out the stats entirely and make results completely random ("You deal Onyxia a massive blow with your [Fishing Pole]! She keels over, dead!") it will be harder still to reverse engineer. It will also kill your game almost as quickly as giving players the impression that they have no control over your mind-numbingly opaque system (and somebody is going to figure it out, anyhow -- it only takes one site to publish the results of 1000 repeated trials and then you're booched, to use the Puzzle Pirates term).
The analagous situation is posting in your blog "Tomorrow, I'm going to walk out of the Dunkin Donuts without paying for my donuts, and if I'm stopped I'll just say 'Hah, haven't had my coffee yet, of course I'll pay for the donuts, but I left my wallet in the car. Give me a moment' and then run for it". Then, the person goes ahead and robs Dunkin Donuts, exactly as described, and is promptly arrested (don't mess with the donut man, kiddies, he has friends in high places). At trial, he says "Eh, honest mistake" and the prosecutor says "Except we have specific evidence of intent. No donuts for you for a long, long time"
I'm left wondering why I would pay a single dollar for a programmable keyboard when there exists free software to do the same thing and I can touchtype. And I say this as someone who has to use three locales on his development machine as a regular basis. Its not like hunting and pecking in Japanese takes up so much of my time I would need labels to speed it up...
No, it wouldn't. The contribution to the TCO (warning: PHB-speak, but its useful here) is so minor. I live in Japan, land of the ungodly terrible energy prices, and was here for two months without a computer before it arrived. At relatively constant electricity usage otherwise (lights, refigerator, 2 hours of TV a night), the computer being on or on power-save pretty much constantly when I'm home and off when I'm at work, my electricity bill increased by $3 a month. Thats $36 a year, or approximately $120 over the useable lifetime of the computer. Try justifying that to a PHB when someone else says "Power-saving will cost, on average, 1 hour work of avoidable headaches for your knowledge workers a year" (and, incidentally, if power-saving tech adds $100 to the cost of the computer you can kiss your rump goodbye).
Because, and this is just a wild guess, there may actually be innocent people in Nigeria. There are kids studying there who would like to talk to parents, there are grandkids who would like to see their grandchildren before they die, there are even businessmen who complete legitimate transactions. I wish idiot moderators would stop modding up this sort of comment, it makes it that much more likely that some sysadmin with cotton candy between his ears would actually go ahead and do it. And they do! I work at a technology incubator in Japan and some poor sob at a major American university (name withheld to protect the clueless, but it shows up in the top fifty of the US News and World Report rankings) didn't get repeated invitations to participate at one of our conferences (and earn a low five figures speaking fee) because his technical department had /dev/null'ed all the mail from Japan.
Different strokes for different folks though -- I actually prefer the Nippon Ichi-style "spreadsheets with a gui" form of combat but if somebody wants "I deal the imp a mighty blow!" they can have their own little sub-genre without it hurting my enjoyment.
$21 million over 15,000 employees = $1400 of the average severance cost was as a direct result of her package. Not an insignificant number, also not a huge number compared to $78,000. Note that expenses associated with laying off an employee aren't limited to severance pay, though (just like costs associated with hiring aren't limited to salary).
Well, technically, its written communication, which would make it libel, and its written communication of an opinion, which would make it not-a-crime. You have to make a false statement of a material fact which is also damaging to reputation for it to be libel or slander.
You'll note there are subscription schemes that do allow subletting, and you pay a premium for the right (the obvious example would be apartments -- check your local listing, $600 a month gets you a more desirable apartment if the contract doesn't allow you to sublet than if it does).
Dude, I don't know what kind of financial situation your school is in but some of the ones I've been in and taught at have difficulties with procuring chalk. You think we're going to spend a couple hundred dollars against the off-chance some six year old has a cardiac infraction? Though, honestly, most of them would put a bullet wound as a risk realistic enough to take steps to mitigate, sadly...
Trial 19438563945. Shrimp and banana. Total bust. Trial 234545345234. Shrimp and strawberry slurpy. Tasty, no observable wound clotting properties. Trial 3452342345. Shrimp and vinegar. Minor clotting effect observed, worth a more formal look. Trial 2345234532. Shrimp and prune juice. Spilled on my lab coat, impossible to get out. Might be useful as a new kind of permanent ink? Or not, it still smells like shrimp and prune juice.
There are two uses for bandages: one is primary treatment of minor skin wounds, and the other is stabilizing a major wound until real treatment can be given to it. At $100, this is too pricey for a first-aid kit unless you're in a really high-risk situation for major trauma -- the only place outside of the military which strikes me as obvious is a construction site. Its not the sort of thing you can justify putting in the school room first aid kit. There's no real reason to give them to hospitals, since anyone requiring wound healing urgently enough to go to a hospital likely has other problems and has other, more HMO-approved solutions (like regular bandages, which work just fine at preventing you from bleeding to death when administered properly and not overwhelmed by the trauma).
In what fantasy world do you live in that gaming has EVER been non-corporate? Do the names Sega, Nintendo, Commodore, Sony, etc. ring any bells with you besides being included in the title of consoles? Hint: they're not orders of ascetic monks.
This warm summer morning, Trolls on Slashdot attack me. Oh well, I'm still rich.
On a tangent -- who else hates the idea of having to speak with people to play online games? I know, on an intellectual level, that one of the female Night Elf healers in my WoW guild is a male Australian currently in the sweaty teenager phase. He's a nice chap and all, but I'd prefer to not have that disconnect thrown at me every time I group with him/her/it/whatever.
How in movies you can say "This will open two years from now on July 4th" and everyone knows it probably will but with video games if you said the same thing anyone with an ounce of sense would say "Third quarter 2008 at the absolute earliest."?
Asked about the impending transfer of soverignty from her ex-Majesty to Google, Canada was rather disappointed but unwilling to cause a fuss. Quebec was outraged but plans to observe the traditional proprieties with a full surrender ceremony.
I heard the government tried experimenting with adding a neutron or two sometime in the fifties, but it was a bomb and the reaction to it was nuclear. Still, you've got to give it to those government research types -- coming up with new isotopes of old elements is a real blast.