Jury Duty, along with voting, is a responsibility that every citizen of the United States has in exchange for the rights and privileges that we entertain. It isn't something to avoid. Every person who chooses not to vote, or intentionally evades jury duty is doing the country and themselves a great disservice.
How can you expect things to change if you let those in power define the conversation - or worse, be the only one to speak?
That is a specious analogy. If you subscribe to EVE Online, you are entering their property. They can perform any surveillance of your activities in the game, and are complete masters of what happens in that world (subject to certain laws of the user and system, such as child pornography and such.) They are under no obligation to tell you who the coders or GMs are when they are not performing GM duties.
The reality is that they cannot experience first-hand the issues that may be affecting certain systems without being in 0.0 fleet combat. Those fleet engagements, along with station building and production systems, may have flaws that will not be something that customers are able to trace - which means that they need to be able to see them in action themselves. If they were exposed, them the player-run organizations that they are part of would either not trust them like another player, or would ask for special favors - which would go against the point of exposing them in the first place. This isn't WOW, where you have a few thousand players on a given server, and that is it.
This is a system that averages more than 15,000 concurrent connections on a slow night. There is simply no way to load the test server up like Tranquility (the live server) will be loaded. This means that there isn't the option of keeping to Singularity (the test server) exclusively. Especially when they are trying to resolve lag issues involving fleet combat.
This is a game run by a company. Companies are composed of people - and people make mistakes. Yes, it was irresponsible for them to delay handling of the issue, and t20 should have been fired. But don't confuse the acknowledged mistake of one developer with a broken development model. They have built a good game mostly (in my view) precisely because they play the game as customers do.
You cannot replace first hand experience with a test server.
Because they need their anonymity in order to actually achieve the stated goal of playing the game to make it better. If all of the personnel of CCP that played EVE were to be 'outed', they would no longer be able to have legitimate positions in alliances that have the assets to use the high-end game mechanics - which you simply can't test under load on the test server, since the difference in population can be tens of thousands.
I think that CCP has the right policy of immediately deleting any outed GM/Employee character. Magnus Bergsson didn't specifically state that employees were ONLY in Top 10 alliances - he said that amongst the Top 10, there is a even distribution of GMs...and that carries a much different meaning.
As far as the hacker is concerned, he violated the EULA. Breaking the rules to point out that someone else is also breaking the rules doesn't make it right. I don't want that kind of person playing the game - he might try and hack the game too.
I play EVE - and while I may have been saddened by the t20 issue, I will continue to pay them money for their product because I find that it is a unique and highly entertaining game.
I have the feeling that Apple will stick with BIOS. Considering that Itanium is almost dead at this point.
Jobs would love to pull a Gates on Microsoft - and I see this as being the opening gambit. If you look at the trends for Apple in the last few years, it has become much more dependent on the peripherals such as the iPod, and less so on consumer hardware sales. Thus, I see a situation where Apple might open the doors for beige boxes - and when that happens, Microsoft will have a very big problem on their hands.
You were correct to recieve flak for that idea - it would completely destroy the internal economy of the US.
Consider how much of the inter-state commerce of this country is transferred via single drivers in semi-trucks, and you can see how this idea fails even the most casual reality check.
It isn't as clear-cut as you state it. The problem has more to do with how US law handles corporations. In many cases, corporations have rights that parallel citizens. And frankly, I would rather fight for my rights and lose that job than to bow to some corporate master at 8 in the morning. The difference between where we stand now and the situation that the book 1984 presents are merely incremental.
At the risk of sounding off-topic, let me explain -
There are two major positions on ethics:
Those that believe that ethics are static, and do not change per individual viewpoint
-or-
Ethics are personal opinion, and change with every person.
Now, since we have laws in this country that affect everyone, we have to assume that it is generally accepted that we believe in static ethics (this doesn't, BTW, mean we agree on what that ethical code is). If this is the case, and we see 'mere corruption' going on and fail to take umbrage at it, then we are condoning it.
When we, as citizens of a country stop worrying about corruption in politics, and the loss of rights it is the first sign that we have already lost them.
It shouldn't be a question about whether campaign contributions should be made by corporations - since they are not citizens (I'll get to the employees in a second) they should not be involved in politics at all.
Employees do not owe fealty to an organization - and they may not neccesarily agree with the corporation about policies that they want promoted in government. Individuals should always have the right to free speech, whether citizen or not - but only citizens can vote - and therefore only citizens should have impact on politics.
Personal Responcibility is not just about earning your own pay to live off of - it also entails watching the government - letting corporate greed control the destiny of our government is as wrong as doing nothing while a fascist leader kills millions.
In regards to your comment about Bush winning a second term - that had more to do with a flawed electoral system that left us with a choice between the lesser of two evils.
From my experience working a call center, it seems that the greatest problem involved is site bandwidth. Where I worked, we used thick clients that connected with Citrix to a main server that handled all the actual account manipulations. Our computers were relatively low-spec for the job, and definitely underpowered for the supervisors - but the greatest problem I saw was network bottlenecks caused serious delays in recieving info from the account server - which was the primary system we needed. Unless Gigabit ethernet becomes as commonplace as 10baseT, thin clients simply don't have a efficient method of working in large groups.
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Jury Duty, along with voting, is a responsibility that every citizen of the United States has in exchange for the rights and privileges that we entertain. It isn't something to avoid. Every person who chooses not to vote, or intentionally evades jury duty is doing the country and themselves a great disservice. How can you expect things to change if you let those in power define the conversation - or worse, be the only one to speak?
That is a specious analogy. If you subscribe to EVE Online, you are entering their property. They can perform any surveillance of your activities in the game, and are complete masters of what happens in that world (subject to certain laws of the user and system, such as child pornography and such.) They are under no obligation to tell you who the coders or GMs are when they are not performing GM duties.
The reality is that they cannot experience first-hand the issues that may be affecting certain systems without being in 0.0 fleet combat. Those fleet engagements, along with station building and production systems, may have flaws that will not be something that customers are able to trace - which means that they need to be able to see them in action themselves. If they were exposed, them the player-run organizations that they are part of would either not trust them like another player, or would ask for special favors - which would go against the point of exposing them in the first place. This isn't WOW, where you have a few thousand players on a given server, and that is it.
This is a system that averages more than 15,000 concurrent connections on a slow night. There is simply no way to load the test server up like Tranquility (the live server) will be loaded. This means that there isn't the option of keeping to Singularity (the test server) exclusively. Especially when they are trying to resolve lag issues involving fleet combat.
This is a game run by a company. Companies are composed of people - and people make mistakes. Yes, it was irresponsible for them to delay handling of the issue, and t20 should have been fired. But don't confuse the acknowledged mistake of one developer with a broken development model. They have built a good game mostly (in my view) precisely because they play the game as customers do.
You cannot replace first hand experience with a test server.Because they need their anonymity in order to actually achieve the stated goal of playing the game to make it better. If all of the personnel of CCP that played EVE were to be 'outed', they would no longer be able to have legitimate positions in alliances that have the assets to use the high-end game mechanics - which you simply can't test under load on the test server, since the difference in population can be tens of thousands.
I think that CCP has the right policy of immediately deleting any outed GM/Employee character. Magnus Bergsson didn't specifically state that employees were ONLY in Top 10 alliances - he said that amongst the Top 10, there is a even distribution of GMs...and that carries a much different meaning.
As far as the hacker is concerned, he violated the EULA. Breaking the rules to point out that someone else is also breaking the rules doesn't make it right. I don't want that kind of person playing the game - he might try and hack the game too.
I play EVE - and while I may have been saddened by the t20 issue, I will continue to pay them money for their product because I find that it is a unique and highly entertaining game.
I have the feeling that Apple will stick with BIOS. Considering that Itanium is almost dead at this point. Jobs would love to pull a Gates on Microsoft - and I see this as being the opening gambit. If you look at the trends for Apple in the last few years, it has become much more dependent on the peripherals such as the iPod, and less so on consumer hardware sales. Thus, I see a situation where Apple might open the doors for beige boxes - and when that happens, Microsoft will have a very big problem on their hands.
You were correct to recieve flak for that idea - it would completely destroy the internal economy of the US. Consider how much of the inter-state commerce of this country is transferred via single drivers in semi-trucks, and you can see how this idea fails even the most casual reality check.
It isn't as clear-cut as you state it. The problem has more to do with how US law handles corporations. In many cases, corporations have rights that parallel citizens. And frankly, I would rather fight for my rights and lose that job than to bow to some corporate master at 8 in the morning. The difference between where we stand now and the situation that the book 1984 presents are merely incremental.
At the risk of sounding off-topic, let me explain -
There are two major positions on ethics:
Those that believe that ethics are static, and do not change per individual viewpoint
-or-
Ethics are personal opinion, and change with every person.
Now, since we have laws in this country that affect everyone, we have to assume that it is generally accepted that we believe in static ethics (this doesn't, BTW, mean we agree on what that ethical code is). If this is the case, and we see 'mere corruption' going on and fail to take umbrage at it, then we are condoning it.
When we, as citizens of a country stop worrying about corruption in politics, and the loss of rights it is the first sign that we have already lost them.
It shouldn't be a question about whether campaign contributions should be made by corporations - since they are not citizens (I'll get to the employees in a second) they should not be involved in politics at all.
Employees do not owe fealty to an organization - and they may not neccesarily agree with the corporation about policies that they want promoted in government. Individuals should always have the right to free speech, whether citizen or not - but only citizens can vote - and therefore only citizens should have impact on politics.
Personal Responcibility is not just about earning your own pay to live off of - it also entails watching the government - letting corporate greed control the destiny of our government is as wrong as doing nothing while a fascist leader kills millions.
In regards to your comment about Bush winning a second term - that had more to do with a flawed electoral system that left us with a choice between the lesser of two evils.
From my experience working a call center, it seems that the greatest problem involved is site bandwidth. Where I worked, we used thick clients that connected with Citrix to a main server that handled all the actual account manipulations. Our computers were relatively low-spec for the job, and definitely underpowered for the supervisors - but the greatest problem I saw was network bottlenecks caused serious delays in recieving info from the account server - which was the primary system we needed. Unless Gigabit ethernet becomes as commonplace as 10baseT, thin clients simply don't have a efficient method of working in large groups.