Because many game's sales over time tends to look like a logarithmic curve. Sales are stacked at the launch and drop dramatically after that, flattening into a long tail.
Of course.
But does anybody really think there are a millions of people sitting there 3 days after release going "OMG its not cracked yet, and I can't get it for free...you win $publisher$, take my $80!"
I just have a hard time seeing that.
Instead of thinking... well its a single player game anyway*, so I'll play something else for a week or two, it'll be cracked, and I'll keep my $80 for a video card upgrade or whatever...
* Online/multiplayer games generally require accounts these days so 'cracking' them is relatively meaningless.
That just doing your job doesn't automatically make you a 'hero'.
Being a steelworker on a skyscraper doesn't automatically make you a hero. Being a fisherman on a tuna boat doesn't automatically make you a here. Being in the military doesn't automatically make you a hero.
Or, if it does make you a hero, then being a hero doesn't mean anything at all.
At that point, if they don't find any evidence they'll just plant some.
Your argument fails.
If you are dealing with a situation where they are at the point of planting evidence, then they will plant evidence. They hardly need to access your phone for THAT.
And if you were super clever and had a 'super duper secure phone'.... or perhaps just lucky that your battery was dead...
They'd still find a way to plant evidence on you if THAT was the game they were playing.
Why involve employers, churches, etc. at all? That's where Obamacare went wrong.
I agree with you there... but it would NEVER have passed otherwise. Its a step forward from where we were, but its not a destination.
"No more kids while on benefits. Birth control will be provided to you free of charge. If you have a kid while on benefits, you can chose to either put the kid up for adoption where it will be raised outside the cycle of poverty or leave the program."
Meh. Just giving them the free birth control might be enough to make a big different, and doesn't open that can of worms. Confiscating children from unwilling parents so you can put them up for adoption is pretty unworkable.
, but so was Swift's idea for dealing with children.
Nobody took Swift's idea seriously either. We need solutions that are actually workable.
I don't blame them, but clearly what we're doing hasn't done jack to fix the problem either and it is naive to think if we just do more of the same (and I mean more $$$ thrown down the same programs) it will get better.
That the programs haven't fixed the problem is true. But to argue the programs have had no effect is something else entirely. Cut the programs and the homeless people don't go away, they just get more desperate and crime goes up and you pay for it that way. Yay, I get to keep $1000 more in taxes so I can pay $1500 more for policing and prisons.
And worse the police and prisons aren't a solution either. They don't fix the problem, and they would cost more than the programs you don't like.
So, I'm with you... things need improvement... but you are just handwaving that we should do something else / something better. But what? That's the hard question.
Cancelling the programs isn't a good option. It won't make things better, and won't even save any money in the big picture -- where if anything it will cost more.
They built one of the greatest buildings ever designed, it's still stands today because of their unquestionable skill. They knew exactly what the risks were when they started that Job. Even today construction workers risk their lives to build masterpieces. Any of them could easily get a job building ranch style houses in the Midwest for about the same pay, yet they chose no to.
Wow. That's some real hero worship.
My grandfather worked on one of those megaprojects. It wasn't really some noble pursuit. That was his trade and it was where the work was.
They certainly took pride in it of course, as they are, after all a big, highly visible, project. But nothing so grand as you make out.
People were injured, and died. It was certainly dangerous work. But he certainly didn't think it was especially "heroic" work.
Those of us sitting in chairs with our lumbar support and wrist protecting keyboard trays have no business declaring anything about the goals and risk of men that do real work for a living.
Right because, as even the 20th century steelworkers knew, a real hero works the tuna boats, where each season its not a question of whether someone would die, it was just a question of whom.
Those steelworkers with their safety lines attached to rigid structures on dry land, and for whom when the weather becomes just too wild can go back inside and have a coffee to wait it out instead of riding it out in small tub on an angry sea.
What does a steelworkers know of real work?/sarcasm
Ok... clearly sarcasm, and you clearly realizes Macs aren't impervious to this and making fun of people who beleive macs are immune... but I can't decide whether or not the you realize this particular vulnerability actually does affect OS X.
Your claim that this is not an isolated event is also an extraordinary claim that requires extraordinary evidence.
LMAO. Whatever... let me google that for you; here you go...
In 2011, the FBI reported 1,572 hate crime victims targeted based on a sexual orientation bias, making up 20.4% of the total hate crimes for that year. Of the total victims, 56.7% were targeted based on anti-male homosexual bias, 29.6% were targeted based on anti-homosexual bias, and 11.1% were targeted based on anti-female homosexual bias.
But then everyone *wants* to believe gay-bashing is an epidemic
Epidemic? I didn't claim it was or wasn't an epidemic. It happens though, and its not an isolated event. Any search engine will trivially return piles of independent verifiable incidents.
So where is your evidence that this happens. Where is all this horrifying discrimination and racist violence against straight white male right handed people you claim to have been the victim of for the last 20 years? That's worse than what any homosexual suffers?
To those modding it a troll...give me a break. No straight white male has suffered more bigotry and intolerance than "any homosexual". Worst case this twit lost out on a scholarship or a job due to some sort of affirmative action, and thinks that injustice somehow not only equals but outweighs what gays face routinely.
If this guy has really been discriminated on that scale, its an extraordinary claim that requires extraordinary evidence. Otherwise I stand by it. Brain diarrhea and all.
Beat you with a crowbar? And rammed your car for being a straight white male? And this was done by liberals?
I seriously doubt it.
Or more accurately, even if you were beaten with a crowbar by "liberals" it was probably nothing to do with you being white/straight/male/middleclass and everything to with you being an asshole.
And your final sentence is indicative of just the oppression I've been first to suffer for being born this way.
I'm white/straight/middleclass/male too... but I'm left handed -- lucky for me right? I must be the only thing that keeps me safe from the liberal crowbar beatings.
as a cisgender (god I hate that this term even exists), middle class, right handed, white male I've suffered more bigotry and intolerance over the last 20 years than any homosexual
Really?
Your own family attacked you with a crowbar? Then smashed your windshield with it, then rammed your car with a pickup truck?
And they did it because you are a straight, middle class, right handed white male?
Do you filter any of the diarrhea that dribbles out of your mouth at all?
The population of people born with all those advantages but who still end up on the dole is pretty damn large.
Sure. Being born with advantages doesn't mean you'll succeed, or have the drive to succeed even if it would have been relatively easy for you.
But that really has no bearing on the fact that once your at the bottom, it is that many times harder to get out.
More importantly, its a generational cycle -- if you remove the supports the children of those at the bottom will have virtually no upward mobility either.
We want class mobility to have a healthy society.
What, pray tell, has 50 years of the war on poverty and all its social welfare programs costing $22T and counting (and adding about $1T annually now) done to *actually* change the life of the inner-city urban poor, the rural poor, the homeless drunks and addicts?
Take a look at the poor in an actual 3rd world country. Consider the relative standards of life. Consider the relative class mobility. Then tell me our "poor" aren't doing a LOT better than they are. A good reason why is precisely because the support we provide, small as it is, is enough to give those with drive the opportunity to succeed.
Lots of stories of poor people winning the lottery and being broke again in a few years.
Managing money is a skill itself. Putting a lot of water in a leaking bucket isn't going to fix the bucket.
But there are many many people who have succeeded on their own.
Sure there are. But we aren't all Oprah.
Can we do anything about women like this "I got 15 kids & 3 baby daddy's"
The Idiocracy phenomena, right?:)
I agree with you, I'd like to see that fixed. I'm not sure what the solution is... but a good start of it would be free birth control. Obamacare got that RIGHT, but its not good enough yet. Free birth control should be universally available. It won't eliminate the problem entirely but its a huge step. And I'm not talking just free condoms... I'm talking the pill, IUDs, for women, RISUG type tech for men, no co-pays, no exceptions for the church.
As a society we should be making that available to everyone. I'm not going to force men and women not to have children -- the slippery slope once you start deciding who can and who can't have kids is just too great. But unwanted pregnancy should be eliminated from the first world.
the homeless drunks and addicts?
That's another difficult problem. But more those people are more than just poor... they're 'broken'. Its not merely lack of education and money. They aren't Eddie Murphy from Trading Places... and just need the opportunity. You give them a job and they wouldn't show up. You give them a home and they'd shit in the bedroom and sell the lightbulbs. They're mentally handicapped, autistic, obsessive compulsive, and then toss alcohol and drugs on top of that. Then add in various further health issues, complications from their lifestyle, etc.
I don't know what the solution is, but blaming them for it is just silly.
Why should the rest of us bend over backward to compensate for the shortcomings of unmotivated people with no drive to better themselves?
Who says they lack 'drive'?
How many people have REALLY had to raise themselves up from their bootstraps?
Not me, that's for sure. I'm smart enough, I'm successful enough, I'm self employed... but my parents gave me access to computers and the internet from the beginning, I was encouraged in school, they helped me pay for university, they drove me to my first job interview, helped me get to and from work by driving me and picking me up as much as they could (10 minutes by car vs 1.5 hours or more by bus) until I had my own car, got me driving lessons and let me use their cars to practice, and my first 'real job' in my field... my father knew people and got me connected.
Sure I'm motivated... sure I took the initiative to transition from employee to contractor, I worked and went to school full time, I paid most of my tuition myself, bought my own car... but I had plenty of help.
If I'd been born to poor parents with little drive of their own, in public housing, with no internet or computers, no one helping me get and hold my first jobs... would I be where I am today? Most probably not. Even if I had the same amount of "drive"; it might not have been "enough" drive to get from there to where I am now.
So yeah, I think its worth giving people in those circumstances a little help to break out of that cycle. Maybe they aren't all as unmotivated as you think. Maybe they have just as much drive as you or I do but have have much bigger obstacles to climb.
Especially as it is a cycle. The lack of success makes it difficult to self motivate, that difficulty self motivating further limits prospects of success. So, yeah, give them access to the internet -- some of them will use it to find jobs, some of their kids will use it to educate themselves and find and develop opportunities they never would have otherwise had.
Why not?
What is your alternative? Ignore them? What is that going to accomplish? It not like they will all just go away. Its not like the problem will solve itself by magic.
And if things get bad enough for enough of them eventually they rise up in a mob and burn down the homes of those who have anything. History has shown us that countless times. So if you still need a self-interested reason to make life livable for your fellow citizens, how about, "If you don't sooner or later they'll get desperate enough and angry enough to burn your house down, with you in it."
. If you don't know how to negotiate them, learn how. If you don't have skills worth negotiation, learn some.
Yeah, good advice, but its not that simple. As you say, that all requires some skills in marketing, accounting, business management, negotiation, law, etc, etc.
They spent 10+ year in school learning about esoteric academic pursuit. They didn't have time to pick up an MBA on the side. And reading a self-help "How to make friends and influence people book" isn't going to make up for that. Worse, they have to take their minimal business and negotiation skills and deal with management that has ONLY done that. That's all they do. That's what they do. That's what they went to school to learn to do.
Its simply not going to be a 'fair' negotiation. Not ever.
Nobody else will ever have your financial interests as their top priority. It's all up to you.
Hence the need to unionize. Sure, paying someone (union reps/management) to represent your interests isn't perfect. They still ultimately have their own interests at heart -- but by paying them to represent you at least you pull some strings -- and they at least bring to the table the experience, knowledge, and skills you don't have to deal with management effectively on your own.
Further, unions benefit from the collective bargaining power that an individual employee rarely has. After all, the employer can generally live just fine if you stop showing up for work... but you still need to buy groceries and pay the mortgage, making most employment negotiations inherently largely one-sided.
I recognize that unions have issues, but your suggestion that everyone can simply learn a whole new field of expertise on top of the one they trained for, and magically not need to eat or shelter their family so as to have a level playing field when negotiating employment terms is naive beyond beleif.
Sure... some of us, once we're established, have money saved up, have income separate from work, and have experience and skills and knowledge that are uniquely valuable... we start to have bargaining power when it comes to employment.
But most people don't. And there is no simple way of resolving that. Unions are a better option than most.
It doesn't fucking matter what workers were, who they were, or where they came from. They and the company are bound by our laws while they're here.
Lets say your an IT contractor in Rajkot, India, you negotiate $1000 to deploy some systems onsite for a week, the company covers your living expenses. The put you on a plane from Rajkot to Mumbai, you work long hours for a week, you get paid and you go home happy.
A week later, you negotiate another $1000 to deploy some more systems, onsite. They put you on a plane, and this time you land in New York, work long hours for a week, you get paid and you go home: a) happy? b) horrifically exploited and ridiculously underpaid?
What's the difference?
Not that I'm disagreeing with you here -- I DO think it was egregious and expoitative. But its a little more complicated than simply paying them less than miniumum wage as you allege.
For example lets say your an odd jobs contractor just getting started. You get offered a contract to install a window -- you have a look and agree to $50 thinking it will take a couple hours. Turns out it was more complicated than you thought, you spend all day on it and are now effectively making less than minimum wage? Is that illegal? Not even slightly.
The exception to this is if you are in debt to the private business. In that case, they must take cash, as it is "legal tender for all debts, public and private".
Not necessarily. Read the snopes link i posted. It covers that too.
" However, legal tender is the default method of payment assumed in contractual agreements involving debts and payments for goods or services unless otherwise specified."
unless otherwise specified
If the contract that put you in debt specifies a different method of payment, then the alternate method is legally binding, and other party is NOT obligated to take legal tender as payment. (ie you could enter a rent agreement that requires cheques; and the landlord could refuse your offer to pay in nickles without discharging the debt -- ie he could suggest you take the nickles to the bank, count them, and have them issue cashiers cheque instead. And the courts would uphold that.
That said, legally you can pay the IRS in pennies. But legally they can make you count them, in front of them, to make sure they are all there.
As for employees, there's not a lot you can do about that other than monitor their activity on the production server and restrict access.
Only storing individually salted hashes instead of plaintext passwords goes a long way to mitigating what even a disgruntled or corrupt employee can do with the password database.
Granted if the employee corruption (or hacker) runs long enough and deep enough, they could add code at front end to capture and dump passwords as they are being submitted prior to being hashed.
As a bit of a tangent...
I ran a web forum for a while once (relating to a competitive multiplayer game), and it occurred to me at the time just how trivial it would be for me to log login attempts and build a database of email account + passwords.
Based on the likelihood of password reuse, that list would likely prove valuable in general (and would probably have given me access to game accounts of a disturbingly high percentage of my fellow players, allies and opponents.
Even failed login attempts precding successful ones may be valuable, under the assumption that they used one of their real passwords on my site by accident. (I know I've done that... tried to log into site x with password for site y.)
Never use the same password on two sites that matter to you even in the slightest.
The only thing they are not allowed to do is to decline to accept legal tender. I.e. they legally aren't allowed to reject a $100 if it is a genuine bill, regardless of what store policy is.
This is false.
This article is only tangentially related to your claim, but it explicity addresses your particular variation.
"private businesses are still free to specify which forms of legal tender they will accept. If a shop doesn't want to take any currency larger than $20 bills, or they don't want to take pennies at all, or they want to be paid in nothing but dimes, they're entitled to do so"
The general issue with Bennett Haselton is simple.
Everyone else in the world submits articles, slashdot summarizes them, links back to the full article, and the comments here ensue.
In some cases the article links are just a link back to the article submitters own blog (and this is gently mocked but usually tolerated), in other cases the links are broken (also mocked), in some cases they are linked to an unrelated article (you bet we mock this too), and very occasionally for those people who enjoy the thrill of the hunt, they do go back to an original article in some legitimate or quasi-legitimate source of news. (Hooray!) (In which case we can mock everyone who didn't read TFA.)
Bennett however, as if you've read any of his articles you will know, is special. He read about the virtues of conciseness, efficiency, brevity and then wrote a short epic about how why they really shouldn't apply to him.
When he looked at what it would take to get his very own blog up and running he quickly realized that it was a pretty serious undertaking. He'd have to register somewhere, choose a password, maybe even pick a theme. Do you know how much that would cut into his actual writing time? Several minutes, at least, and he really just doesn't have that kind of time to spare, what with already being slammed just keeping up with writing down every thought that pops into his brain.
So, long story slightly less long, he decided why not just use slashdot itself as his very own personal blog? It saves him having to sign up for one, and better still he argues, saves us a mouse click by eliminating that superfluous step of having to click through to get to the full article.
After having this explained to him, Bennett rejected the argument and suggested we should be delighted at being able to reach his thoughts without having to make that one extra click to an external source.
So now we just mock Bennett.
I think that sums it up fairly concisely, at least relative to what Bennett would have said.;)
So yes, you can probe all day with a random mac. Just expect to have to reveal a session-consistent mac when you try to connect.
But that's the use case most of us actually have. If I'm at the mall, I'm not in range of any known network. Of course my phone doesn't know that -- so it needs to probe.
Meanwhile, I'm at the mall, and the mall is very interested in where I am, how long I spend there, how often I come back, etc... so they are tracking those probes, and building a profile on the activity from that MAC.
I'm not actually connected to any network. Nor do I expect to connect to any network.
Therefore the probes should always be random.
Once that's determined that HEY there IS a known network in range, THEN and ONLY THEN it can use a non-random mac. If I connect to a network, then I implicitly submit to some level of tracking -- the network implicitly needs to know where I am and whether I am connected so it can route traffic to me.
I used to work at a financial company where the web server didn't have physical connectivity to the DB,
I suspect you meant something entirely different from what you said. The webserver cannot be air-gapped from the password database unless you literallly have a person sitting between the two systems keying requests from one into the other and back again. Otherwise they most assuredly ARE physically connected in some way.
Personally, I think passwords should be stored in plain text in the DB as a reminder to all developers
Then your DBA has all the passwords, and your one bribed, disgruntled, or incompetent DBA away from a massive leak.
suggesting that storing your DB credentials in your web code was OK as long as you "secured" it
I'm generally ok with this. You shouldn't be embedding your root or sa or whatever database credentials in the website but its not necessarily improper to embed limited access credentials to the database in the web app that needs that access.
On windows, for example, one can put database credentials (for a limited account that only has access to specified views and or stored procedures) in the web.config and encrypt it. This seems entirely reasonable to me.
How did you get to 90% if you're only using 2.5-5% per year?
a) I'm not at 90%; as it happens I'm at around 50%. I said when I reach 90% it will take a year or 2 to reach 95%
b) I didn't start at 0% and then average a couple percent a year. I was at 30-40% within a week of setting up the new home PC.
I copied my 10,000 track music library. So 50GB or so right there. And another several thousand digital images, scans, and so forth. I have a small library of ISOs I keep on the drive worth another 20-30GB. A handful of movies. A couple dozen games and large applications installed... the steam folder alone is 300GB. (And I have only a fraction of my library installed; but its the fraction I always go back to plus what's new that I'm playing now. So although its was 250GB+ within a week of setting up the PC... its only grown another 50GB in the last couple years.
And now that its all set up, it grows, but not especially quickly. I add a few hundred audio tracks, and a few hundred photos a year, email, documents, tax records, etc... everything else is fairly steady state.
In my experiences, a 90 percent full drive has as much time left before running out as it did a decade ago.
In your experience maybe. Not in mine.
I don't use 10s of GB at a time. If I start a new torrent, dump my phones camera onto my computer, or install a new game that eats a several GB. But everything else is pretty steady state with very slow steady growth. I don't download a lot of torrents on this particular PC, and sometimes remove old ones, I install a few new games a year and sometimes uninstall old ones...
When I hit 90% full on my current data drive, I'm probably 1 to 2 years out from hitting 95%.
Slashdot Mirror
Because many game's sales over time tends to look like a logarithmic curve. Sales are stacked at the launch and drop dramatically after that, flattening into a long tail.
Of course.
But does anybody really think there are a millions of people sitting there 3 days after release going "OMG its not cracked yet, and I can't get it for free...you win $publisher$, take my $80!"
I just have a hard time seeing that.
Instead of thinking... well its a single player game anyway*, so I'll play something else for a week or two, it'll be cracked, and I'll keep my $80 for a video card upgrade or whatever...
* Online/multiplayer games generally require accounts these days so 'cracking' them is relatively meaningless.
What is the point here?
That just doing your job doesn't automatically make you a 'hero'.
Being a steelworker on a skyscraper doesn't automatically make you a hero. Being a fisherman on a tuna boat doesn't automatically make you a here. Being in the military doesn't automatically make you a hero.
Or, if it does make you a hero, then being a hero doesn't mean anything at all.
At that point, if they don't find any evidence they'll just plant some.
Your argument fails.
If you are dealing with a situation where they are at the point of planting evidence, then they will plant evidence. They hardly need to access your phone for THAT.
And if you were super clever and had a 'super duper secure phone' .... or perhaps just lucky that your battery was dead...
They'd still find a way to plant evidence on you if THAT was the game they were playing.
No, real life.
Idiocracy IS real life.
Why involve employers, churches, etc. at all? That's where Obamacare went wrong.
I agree with you there... but it would NEVER have passed otherwise. Its a step forward from where we were, but its not a destination.
"No more kids while on benefits. Birth control will be provided to you free of charge. If you have a kid while on benefits, you can chose to either put the kid up for adoption where it will be raised outside the cycle of poverty or leave the program."
Meh. Just giving them the free birth control might be enough to make a big different, and doesn't open that can of worms. Confiscating children from unwilling parents so you can put them up for adoption is pretty unworkable.
, but so was Swift's idea for dealing with children.
Nobody took Swift's idea seriously either. We need solutions that are actually workable.
I don't blame them, but clearly what we're doing hasn't done jack to fix the problem either and it is naive to think if we just do more of the same (and I mean more $$$ thrown down the same programs) it will get better.
That the programs haven't fixed the problem is true. But to argue the programs have had no effect is something else entirely. Cut the programs and the homeless people don't go away, they just get more desperate and crime goes up and you pay for it that way. Yay, I get to keep $1000 more in taxes so I can pay $1500 more for policing and prisons.
And worse the police and prisons aren't a solution either. They don't fix the problem, and they would cost more than the programs you don't like.
So, I'm with you... things need improvement... but you are just handwaving that we should do something else / something better. But what? That's the hard question.
Cancelling the programs isn't a good option. It won't make things better, and won't even save any money in the big picture -- where if anything it will cost more.
They built one of the greatest buildings ever designed, it's still stands today because of their unquestionable skill. They knew exactly what the risks were when they started that Job. Even today construction workers risk their lives to build masterpieces. Any of them could easily get a job building ranch style houses in the Midwest for about the same pay, yet they chose no to.
Wow. That's some real hero worship.
My grandfather worked on one of those megaprojects. It wasn't really some noble pursuit. That was his trade and it was where the work was.
They certainly took pride in it of course, as they are, after all a big, highly visible, project. But nothing so grand as you make out.
People were injured, and died. It was certainly dangerous work. But he certainly didn't think it was especially "heroic" work.
Those of us sitting in chairs with our lumbar support and wrist protecting keyboard trays have no business declaring anything about the goals and risk of men that do real work for a living.
Right because, as even the 20th century steelworkers knew, a real hero works the tuna boats, where each season its not a question of whether someone would die, it was just a question of whom.
Those steelworkers with their safety lines attached to rigid structures on dry land, and for whom when the weather becomes just too wild can go back inside and have a coffee to wait it out instead of riding it out in small tub on an angry sea.
What does a steelworkers know of real work? /sarcasm
Whatever happened to Id Software?
The graphics engine programmer from ID, John Carmack, works for Oculus Rift. It was kind of newsworthy around here.
So if you think they should source programming talent from Id... your a bit late to the party. Unless you think they really need John Romero too... ?
Ok... clearly sarcasm, and you clearly realizes Macs aren't impervious to this and making fun of people who beleive macs are immune... but I can't decide whether or not the you realize this particular vulnerability actually does affect OS X.
Your claim that this is not an isolated event is also an extraordinary claim that requires extraordinary evidence.
LMAO. Whatever... let me google that for you; here you go...
In 2011, the FBI reported 1,572 hate crime victims targeted based on a sexual orientation bias, making up 20.4% of the total hate crimes for that year. Of the total victims, 56.7% were targeted based on anti-male homosexual bias, 29.6% were targeted based on anti-homosexual bias, and 11.1% were targeted based on anti-female homosexual bias.
http://www.fbi.gov/about-us/cj...
But then everyone *wants* to believe gay-bashing is an epidemic
Epidemic? I didn't claim it was or wasn't an epidemic. It happens though, and its not an isolated event. Any search engine will trivially return piles of independent verifiable incidents.
So where is your evidence that this happens. Where is all this horrifying discrimination and racist violence against straight white male right handed people you claim to have been the victim of for the last 20 years? That's worse than what any homosexual suffers?
Yeah, I'm still waiting on that.
To those modding it a troll...give me a break. No straight white male has suffered more bigotry and intolerance than "any homosexual". Worst case this twit lost out on a scholarship or a job due to some sort of affirmative action, and thinks that injustice somehow not only equals but outweighs what gays face routinely.
As for the crowbar incident I mentioned.
http://www.omaha.com/news/man-...
That's not exactly an isolated event.
If this guy has really been discriminated on that scale, its an extraordinary claim that requires extraordinary evidence. Otherwise I stand by it. Brain diarrhea and all.
No, liberals did.
Beat you with a crowbar? And rammed your car for being a straight white male? And this was done by liberals?
I seriously doubt it.
Or more accurately, even if you were beaten with a crowbar by "liberals" it was probably nothing to do with you being white/straight/male/middleclass and everything to with you being an asshole.
And your final sentence is indicative of just the oppression I've been first to suffer for being born this way.
I'm white/straight/middleclass/male too... but I'm left handed -- lucky for me right? I must be the only thing that keeps me safe from the liberal crowbar beatings.
as a cisgender (god I hate that this term even exists), middle class, right handed, white male I've suffered more bigotry and intolerance over the last 20 years than any homosexual
Really?
Your own family attacked you with a crowbar? Then smashed your windshield with it, then rammed your car with a pickup truck?
And they did it because you are a straight, middle class, right handed white male?
Do you filter any of the diarrhea that dribbles out of your mouth at all?
The population of people born with all those advantages but who still end up on the dole is pretty damn large.
Sure. Being born with advantages doesn't mean you'll succeed, or have the drive to succeed even if it would have been relatively easy for you.
But that really has no bearing on the fact that once your at the bottom, it is that many times harder to get out.
More importantly, its a generational cycle -- if you remove the supports the children of those at the bottom will have virtually no upward mobility either.
We want class mobility to have a healthy society.
What, pray tell, has 50 years of the war on poverty and all its social welfare programs costing $22T and counting (and adding about $1T annually now) done to *actually* change the life of the inner-city urban poor, the rural poor, the homeless drunks and addicts?
Take a look at the poor in an actual 3rd world country. Consider the relative standards of life. Consider the relative class mobility. Then tell me our "poor" aren't doing a LOT better than they are. A good reason why is precisely because the support we provide, small as it is, is enough to give those with drive the opportunity to succeed.
Lots of stories of poor people winning the lottery and being broke again in a few years.
Managing money is a skill itself. Putting a lot of water in a leaking bucket isn't going to fix the bucket.
But there are many many people who have succeeded on their own.
Sure there are. But we aren't all Oprah.
Can we do anything about women like this "I got 15 kids & 3 baby daddy's"
The Idiocracy phenomena, right? :)
I agree with you, I'd like to see that fixed. I'm not sure what the solution is... but a good start of it would be free birth control. Obamacare got that RIGHT, but its not good enough yet. Free birth control should be universally available. It won't eliminate the problem entirely but its a huge step. And I'm not talking just free condoms... I'm talking the pill, IUDs, for women, RISUG type tech for men, no co-pays, no exceptions for the church.
As a society we should be making that available to everyone. I'm not going to force men and women not to have children -- the slippery slope once you start deciding who can and who can't have kids is just too great. But unwanted pregnancy should be eliminated from the first world.
the homeless drunks and addicts?
That's another difficult problem. But more those people are more than just poor ... they're 'broken'. Its not merely lack of education and money. They aren't Eddie Murphy from Trading Places... and just need the opportunity. You give them a job and they wouldn't show up. You give them a home and they'd shit in the bedroom and sell the lightbulbs. They're mentally handicapped, autistic, obsessive compulsive, and then toss alcohol and drugs on top of that. Then add in various further health issues, complications from their lifestyle, etc.
I don't know what the solution is, but blaming them for it is just silly.
Why should the rest of us bend over backward to compensate for the shortcomings of unmotivated people with no drive to better themselves?
Who says they lack 'drive'?
How many people have REALLY had to raise themselves up from their bootstraps?
Not me, that's for sure. I'm smart enough, I'm successful enough, I'm self employed... but my parents gave me access to computers and the internet from the beginning, I was encouraged in school, they helped me pay for university, they drove me to my first job interview, helped me get to and from work by driving me and picking me up as much as they could (10 minutes by car vs 1.5 hours or more by bus) until I had my own car, got me driving lessons and let me use their cars to practice, and my first 'real job' in my field ... my father knew people and got me connected.
Sure I'm motivated... sure I took the initiative to transition from employee to contractor, I worked and went to school full time, I paid most of my tuition myself, bought my own car... but I had plenty of help.
If I'd been born to poor parents with little drive of their own, in public housing, with no internet or computers, no one helping me get and hold my first jobs... would I be where I am today? Most probably not. Even if I had the same amount of "drive"; it might not have been "enough" drive to get from there to where I am now.
So yeah, I think its worth giving people in those circumstances a little help to break out of that cycle. Maybe they aren't all as unmotivated as you think. Maybe they have just as much drive as you or I do but have have much bigger obstacles to climb.
Especially as it is a cycle. The lack of success makes it difficult to self motivate, that difficulty self motivating further limits prospects of success. So, yeah, give them access to the internet -- some of them will use it to find jobs, some of their kids will use it to educate themselves and find and develop opportunities they never would have otherwise had.
Why not?
What is your alternative? Ignore them? What is that going to accomplish? It not like they will all just go away. Its not like the problem will solve itself by magic.
And if things get bad enough for enough of them eventually they rise up in a mob and burn down the homes of those who have anything. History has shown us that countless times. So if you still need a self-interested reason to make life livable for your fellow citizens, how about, "If you don't sooner or later they'll get desperate enough and angry enough to burn your house down, with you in it."
. If you don't know how to negotiate them, learn how. If you don't have skills worth negotiation, learn some.
Yeah, good advice, but its not that simple. As you say, that all requires some skills in marketing, accounting, business management, negotiation, law, etc, etc.
They spent 10+ year in school learning about esoteric academic pursuit. They didn't have time to pick up an MBA on the side. And reading a self-help "How to make friends and influence people book" isn't going to make up for that. Worse, they have to take their minimal business and negotiation skills and deal with management that has ONLY done that. That's all they do. That's what they do. That's what they went to school to learn to do.
Its simply not going to be a 'fair' negotiation. Not ever.
Nobody else will ever have your financial interests as their top priority. It's all up to you.
Hence the need to unionize. Sure, paying someone (union reps/management) to represent your interests isn't perfect. They still ultimately have their own interests at heart -- but by paying them to represent you at least you pull some strings -- and they at least bring to the table the experience, knowledge, and skills you don't have to deal with management effectively on your own.
Further, unions benefit from the collective bargaining power that an individual employee rarely has. After all, the employer can generally live just fine if you stop showing up for work... but you still need to buy groceries and pay the mortgage, making most employment negotiations inherently largely one-sided.
I recognize that unions have issues, but your suggestion that everyone can simply learn a whole new field of expertise on top of the one they trained for, and magically not need to eat or shelter their family so as to have a level playing field when negotiating employment terms is naive beyond beleif.
Sure... some of us, once we're established, have money saved up, have income separate from work, and have experience and skills and knowledge that are uniquely valuable... we start to have bargaining power when it comes to employment.
But most people don't. And there is no simple way of resolving that. Unions are a better option than most.
It doesn't fucking matter what workers were, who they were, or where they came from. They and the company are bound by our laws while they're here.
Lets say your an IT contractor in Rajkot, India, you negotiate $1000 to deploy some systems onsite for a week, the company covers your living expenses. The put you on a plane from Rajkot to Mumbai, you work long hours for a week, you get paid and you go home happy.
A week later, you negotiate another $1000 to deploy some more systems, onsite. They put you on a plane, and this time you land in New York, work long hours for a week, you get paid and you go home:
a) happy?
b) horrifically exploited and ridiculously underpaid?
What's the difference?
Not that I'm disagreeing with you here -- I DO think it was egregious and expoitative. But its a little more complicated than simply paying them less than miniumum wage as you allege.
For example lets say your an odd jobs contractor just getting started. You get offered a contract to install a window -- you have a look and agree to $50 thinking it will take a couple hours. Turns out it was more complicated than you thought, you spend all day on it and are now effectively making less than minimum wage? Is that illegal? Not even slightly.
The exception to this is if you are in debt to the private business. In that case, they must take cash, as it is "legal tender for all debts, public and private".
Not necessarily. Read the snopes link i posted. It covers that too.
" However, legal tender is the default method of payment assumed in contractual agreements involving debts and payments for goods or services unless otherwise specified."
unless otherwise specified
If the contract that put you in debt specifies a different method of payment, then the alternate method is legally binding, and other party is NOT obligated to take legal tender as payment. (ie you could enter a rent agreement that requires cheques; and the landlord could refuse your offer to pay in nickles without discharging the debt -- ie he could suggest you take the nickles to the bank, count them, and have them issue cashiers cheque instead. And the courts would uphold that.
That said, legally you can pay the IRS in pennies. But legally they can make you count them, in front of them, to make sure they are all there.
As for employees, there's not a lot you can do about that other than monitor their activity on the production server and restrict access.
Only storing individually salted hashes instead of plaintext passwords goes a long way to mitigating what even a disgruntled or corrupt employee can do with the password database.
Granted if the employee corruption (or hacker) runs long enough and deep enough, they could add code at front end to capture and dump passwords as they are being submitted prior to being hashed.
As a bit of a tangent...
I ran a web forum for a while once (relating to a competitive multiplayer game), and it occurred to me at the time just how trivial it would be for me to log login attempts and build a database of email account + passwords.
Based on the likelihood of password reuse, that list would likely prove valuable in general (and would probably have given me access to game accounts of a disturbingly high percentage of my fellow players, allies and opponents.
Even failed login attempts precding successful ones may be valuable, under the assumption that they used one of their real passwords on my site by accident. (I know I've done that... tried to log into site x with password for site y.)
Never use the same password on two sites that matter to you even in the slightest.
The only thing they are not allowed to do is to decline to accept legal tender. I.e. they legally aren't allowed to reject a $100 if it is a genuine bill, regardless of what store policy is.
This is false.
This article is only tangentially related to your claim, but it explicity addresses your particular variation.
http://www.snopes.com/business...
"private businesses are still free to specify which forms of legal tender they will accept. If a shop doesn't want to take any currency larger than $20 bills, or they don't want to take pennies at all, or they want to be paid in nothing but dimes, they're entitled to do so"
The general issue with Bennett Haselton is simple.
Everyone else in the world submits articles, slashdot summarizes them, links back to the full article, and the comments here ensue.
In some cases the article links are just a link back to the article submitters own blog (and this is gently mocked but usually tolerated), in other cases the links are broken (also mocked), in some cases they are linked to an unrelated article (you bet we mock this too), and very occasionally for those people who enjoy the thrill of the hunt, they do go back to an original article in some legitimate or quasi-legitimate source of news. (Hooray!) (In which case we can mock everyone who didn't read TFA.)
Bennett however, as if you've read any of his articles you will know, is special. He read about the virtues of conciseness, efficiency, brevity and then wrote a short epic about how why they really shouldn't apply to him.
When he looked at what it would take to get his very own blog up and running he quickly realized that it was a pretty serious undertaking. He'd have to register somewhere, choose a password, maybe even pick a theme. Do you know how much that would cut into his actual writing time? Several minutes, at least, and he really just doesn't have that kind of time to spare, what with already being slammed just keeping up with writing down every thought that pops into his brain.
So, long story slightly less long, he decided why not just use slashdot itself as his very own personal blog? It saves him having to sign up for one, and better still he argues, saves us a mouse click by eliminating that superfluous step of having to click through to get to the full article.
After having this explained to him, Bennett rejected the argument and suggested we should be delighted at being able to reach his thoughts without having to make that one extra click to an external source.
So now we just mock Bennett.
I think that sums it up fairly concisely, at least relative to what Bennett would have said. ;)
So yes, you can probe all day with a random mac. Just expect to have to reveal a session-consistent mac when you try to connect.
But that's the use case most of us actually have. If I'm at the mall, I'm not in range of any known network. Of course my phone doesn't know that -- so it needs to probe.
Meanwhile, I'm at the mall, and the mall is very interested in where I am, how long I spend there, how often I come back, etc... so they are tracking those probes, and building a profile on the activity from that MAC.
I'm not actually connected to any network. Nor do I expect to connect to any network.
Therefore the probes should always be random.
Once that's determined that HEY there IS a known network in range, THEN and ONLY THEN it can use a non-random mac. If I connect to a network, then I implicitly submit to some level of tracking -- the network implicitly needs to know where I am and whether I am connected so it can route traffic to me.
I used to work at a financial company where the web server didn't have physical connectivity to the DB,
I suspect you meant something entirely different from what you said. The webserver cannot be air-gapped from the password database unless you literallly have a person sitting between the two systems keying requests from one into the other and back again. Otherwise they most assuredly ARE physically connected in some way.
Personally, I think passwords should be stored in plain text in the DB as a reminder to all developers
Then your DBA has all the passwords, and your one bribed, disgruntled, or incompetent DBA away from a massive leak.
suggesting that storing your DB credentials in your web code was OK as long as you "secured" it
I'm generally ok with this. You shouldn't be embedding your root or sa or whatever database credentials in the website but its not necessarily improper to embed limited access credentials to the database in the web app that needs that access.
On windows, for example, one can put database credentials (for a limited account that only has access to specified views and or stored procedures) in the web.config and encrypt it. This seems entirely reasonable to me.
How did you get to 90% if you're only using 2.5-5% per year?
a) I'm not at 90%; as it happens I'm at around 50%. I said when I reach 90% it will take a year or 2 to reach 95%
b) I didn't start at 0% and then average a couple percent a year. I was at 30-40% within a week of setting up the new home PC.
I copied my 10,000 track music library. So 50GB or so right there. And another several thousand digital images, scans, and so forth. I have a small library of ISOs I keep on the drive worth another 20-30GB. A handful of movies. A couple dozen games and large applications installed... the steam folder alone is 300GB. (And I have only a fraction of my library installed; but its the fraction I always go back to plus what's new that I'm playing now. So although its was 250GB+ within a week of setting up the PC... its only grown another 50GB in the last couple years.
And now that its all set up, it grows, but not especially quickly. I add a few hundred audio tracks, and a few hundred photos a year, email, documents, tax records, etc... everything else is fairly steady state.
do we have any pieces by Bennett Haselton on the Ebola outbreak or diseases in general?
Indeed, perhaps he could present us with 'A Modest Proposal' that came to him whilst reading the messages in his alphabits.
But you are four years past the safe lifespan of your disk, and when needed, it could fail.
Hence... backups.
Hoarding capacity for a decade is as foolish as running out of space tomorrow.
Hoarding capacity? I don't even really know what that is supposed to mean.
In my experiences, a 90 percent full drive has as much time left before running out as it did a decade ago.
In your experience maybe. Not in mine.
I don't use 10s of GB at a time. If I start a new torrent, dump my phones camera onto my computer, or install a new game that eats a several GB. But everything else is pretty steady state with very slow steady growth. I don't download a lot of torrents on this particular PC, and sometimes remove old ones, I install a few new games a year and sometimes uninstall old ones...
When I hit 90% full on my current data drive, I'm probably 1 to 2 years out from hitting 95%.