I'm not sure where your getting that number, but from everything I've read/learned, electrons travel at about 6 meters a second (minute?) in copper communications wire
That must have been a bitch when most of the telecommunications network was built from copper (like a decade ago).
I agree with parent, the interview is stupid, it is just one person whining because the 'cheater' beat him. I agree that what would be interesting is to interview the developers of the cheats.
It's impossible for a cheater to win. People who face cheaters get irritated because they completely ruin the game, not because they're such potent adversaries.
Even when you aren't getting shot by magic bullets from adversaries who can track you and shoot you through walls, once cheaters have permeated a domain you can no longer enjoy the game: Instead of ceding that your opponnet played better, once there's cheaters in the mix you can never savour a loss (to put it in a funny but truthful way). Suspicion and bitterness overtake the game (on both sides. I was pretty good at Urban Terror, and my abilities were endlessly chalked up to "cheats" by my victims. I could never enjoy my wins, and they couldn't enjoy their loss or learn from it, because the game was saturated by cheaters).
I agree that what would be interesting is to interview the developers of the cheats.
I think what motivates the creator of the cheats is clear to us all. Hell, I would never spam, but creating spam-track avoidance software has always intrigued me because it's a challenge. I'm sure the cheat developers are just playing their own game, and they are legitimately winning.
The people destroying online games, however, are just the scriptkiddy wankers, and really I doubt the actual developers behind the cheat (who do legitimate, real work for their achievements) ever really even bother using their cheats online.
I don't understand why news outlets get so upset when sites like google point people to their content. They should think of it as free advertising.
And a lot of people see it as exactly that, and are thankful for the traffic Google sends their way. I get about 140 referrals from Google a day, and am very welcoming to the Google spiders.
Nonetheless, this argument is very similar to the "Musicians should see Napster as an advertising medium to sell concert tickets" debate — some musicians do, while others don't, and it isn't really fair for people to declare that those who don't should just suck it and tow the line.
In this case the creators of the actual content (or the people who paid AP or CP or UP or Reuters or whoever originated the content — they do have to pay them, and can't say "Well we're giving Reuters free advertising!") decided that they didn't consider it kosher as simply free advertising, and the model didn't work for them. They asked Google to start either sharing some of the lucre that Google is making from the server — and google is making a lot of money from these sorts of services, and they aren't doing it because of benevolence – or stop acting as repeaters for their content.
I love how you can just ignore a multimillion dollar judgement. It's their attitude that I find amusing - they really couldn't give a shit.
They aren't really ignoring the judgement. Instead they looked at it, discovered it is legally enforceable, and told the Illinois Court to get lost. They've declared the judgement irrelevant.
I was there (literally, as it turns out) when MTV launched in '82, and I can tell you that everyone I knew just kept their tube on that channel cuz there was no where else you could see these vids or hear these artists.
So true. Up here in Canada we had MuchMusic, and like described it basically was just videos around the clock, so many used it as a radio of sorts, with bonus visuals. At most there were "theme shows" such as the rap hour, the heavy metal hour, the alternative hour, and so on.
Nowadays it's almost impossible to actually catch videos on it, as instead it's hours and hours of lame shows (such as the "get a bunch of completely clueless hasbeens to give commentary over a video that you wish you could just watch and listen to, but instead you get to hear some guy who was on some 90s sitcom giving his "funny" opinion on it).
but MY generation will NOT pay major labels to promote THEIR albums.
Um, okay. Then what's the problem — They'll pull their "promotions" and you'll have no problem with it, right?
Way back in the stone age when one business existed to profit largely via the work of another (see Napster, YouTube, etc. Though YouTube has far more legitimacy given the vast number of user contributed, non-pirated content), the copyright system is geared to demand compensation. Sort of like how the GPL, via the same copyright, is geared to demand its own sort of payment.
I haven't seen anything on consoles that even compairs to a decent gaming PC setup in terms of graphics. People must be comparing $400 bare bone Dell systems when they come to that conclusion...
I'm constantly aghast at the terrible framerates many consoles fall to in efforts to try to look somewhat as capable as even a modest PC rig. Seriously, console fanatics can claim that it doesn't matter, but it seriously ruins immersion when something blowing up or lots of characters drops the framerate to 7 fps, suddenly looking jarring.
I have been constantly disappointed with the next generation gaming rigs -- their prowess has been grossly overestimated.
If employers weren't getting information that they deemed to be valuable from them, they wouldn't do 'em.
I think deemed is a rather important word there. Businesses have spent billions upon billions (or trillions) on dubious snakeoil and magic fix-alls, and HR is no less susceptible to trends than any other. If they're paying a headhunter $2000 to find an employee, why not toss in an extra $100 because someone is claiming that a magic number solves all.
To double the nonsense factor, the standard in the industry is to vet all candidates, make a contingent offer, and then just before starting day, and sometimes after, actually do credit checks and so on. Of course that system is bullshit, because if they decide they don't like your score, but you've already quit your last job, moved, etc, what are you to do?
I have not seen this... How your FICO score is calcualted is actually done by an algorithim
The rest of your truly informative and well-written reply pretty much agreed with exactly what I originally stated.:-) I didn't say a set of people with exactly the same credit profiles, but rather all with perfect payment histories.
One might have rainy day credit with perfect payment, while another might be maxed out on extensive store-card credit, albeit making the payments, while someone else might have never missed a payment, but they've always made the minimum. Simply making payments doesn't give one a perfect score.
Of course it's a racket. The credit scoring companies secure huge profits by getting other industries to rely on their scores to make judgements.
It isn't just the credit scoring companies -- Financial services companies want the ability give out massive amounts of credit loosely, to anyone with a pulse, and they want basically a mob-like ability to make damn sure you pay it back (even though they price risk in, they basically want to turn the odds even more in their favour, so to speak). Expect to see more of this (e.g. "Credit scores will now be used to determine mandatory curfew times").
Imagine a Grade 6 teacher who could put your name on a master "naughty" list for life, scaring you from talking out in class otherwise the rest of your life will be screwed. Same sort of idea.
For better or worse, that is statistically proveable with relative ease. In that particular case, the ability to manage debt and the ability to absorb the risk without involving your insurance company is what the better rate is for. Given that someone with a high credit score is unlikely to pass that risk on to the insurance company, an argument can be made that it is in fact correct and accurate to not force them to pay the higher premium.
See, again people have drawn presumptive anecdotes, and called it evidence. The point was that the insurance industry couldn't make a reasonably accurate correlation between credit scores and insurance worthiness/cost -- It was just yet another axis to penalize people (make enough axis and soon enough everyone can be a bad insurance risk, worthy of terrible rates. It's one of those nice industries where natural collusion means that everyone follows the same profit lines, so it pays off big). If they could convincingly demonstrate an actual (not fictitious scenarios) case, perhaps they would have a point, but they couldn't.
Question to thread: Please post information about these "trade secrets" and "magic". It would be interesting to see real, cited references.
You write that in what appears a sarcastic tone, implying doubt about my "statements". Yet these machinations of the credit industry are hardly hidden - a one-second google search yielded http://www.privacyrights.org/fs/fs6c-CreditScores. htm.
This yields nugglets such as-
The exact formula of the FICO and other scoring models is a trade secret
Points are given or taken away based on the amount of available credit used. Certainly, using the maximum amount on your credit card and paying only the minimum each month can lower your score. But, using a large percentage of your available credit each month, even when you pay the bills faithfully, can detract points if you are carrying a high balance at the time your credit history is scored.
Who's more likely to embezzle from you, the guy with a good debt-to-income ratio who makes his payments on time, or the guy who's deeply in debt an makes only the minimum payment every month?
My kneejerk reaction is, like most people, to envision the guy deep in debt as a shady, irresponsible person, and the former as a responsible, librarian sort. Yet I realize that is 99% because that sort of image has been pushed on me by the industry.
In reality, barring any actual metrics I think there is no way of saying. It's entirely possible that the former is so paranoid about their credit score and social standing, that they embezzle, while the latter is desperate to keep their job to try to dig themselves out of their hole, and wouldn't dare offend their employer. I mean when you hear about embezzling, one often hears about people embezzling hundreds of thousands of dollars. Surely they didn't use that to pay off their delinquent student loans (indeed, usually they bought lots of properties, having investments -- they're models of credit worthiness).
What if some staffing consultant company one day decided that people who eat bran for breakfast are better employees (they're in cahoots with the bran industry, after all, serving each other's interests. They want to make sure you really suffer if you haven't been a fan of bran), therefore they're going to do a bran profile of all employees.
If you don't have enough bran in your history, sorry - no job for you. I guess you'll have to beg to try to start getting some bran.
Oh but don't think you'll sneak around this: They're going to do hair sampling and talk to former roommates to determine if you ate bran years ago. Simply towing the line now isn't satisfactory.
Maybe they'll do a "former lover" test to determine if you called within 6 days, and how your performance was in bed. Surely some loose, anecdotal correlation can be drawn there as well.
Sounds sort of arbitrary and ridiculous, doesn't it?
Because it is. It would be one thing if an unbiased research paper drew a strong/strong correlation between credit worthiness and performance on the job, but simply taking the word of a guy who's agenda is being served. No thanks.
Here in Canada there have been some efforts to ban any industry (for instance car insurance companies determining your rates based on your credit worthiness. Sure, they can say "Oh, but people with bad credit are more likely to be worse drivers!", but failing actual credible results, thankfully most people say "bullshit") from using metrics that haven't been positively and strongly correlated with the result they're trying to test.
Credit cards are meant to be used, they don't give you a bad credit history.
Are you kidding?
Between a set of people with perfect payment histories, credit ratings will vary dramatically. While credit is meant to be used, there are all sorts of magic (and often trade secret) formulas for determining patterns in your financial behaviour that will bite you. Maybe you always made every payment on time, but if you ever paid the minimum, or exceeded some unknown level on your credit, then your score suffers.
So, what if a candidate's credit history is a result of not finding a job. I've seen stories of (especially) IT people with long careers summarily right-sized out of their jobs. I've read articles (Enron?) of employees who lost their life savings and retirement funding because of (ironically) mismanagement at the top.
Remember that the quote in question is by a recruitment/staffing company, and they're always trying to sell the snake oil that they have a magic formula that can give you a nice metric of the worth of a prospect.
For the reasons you mentioned, and more, the fundemental premise is full of shit, and Mr. Greenberg (an "industrial psychologist"? His credentials would have a bit more credibility if he were speaking as an unencumbered academic, purely making a quantitative statement. Instead he's some shill trying to use some paper to sell some nonsense) is pretty unconvincing.
That is, unless "growing up with a silver spoon and parents who bail you out of every financial misstep" is a critical element in hiring.
You should have read the summary, and the article, to find out how this type of disposal works. In effect, this technique does result in the combustion of the garbage. Instead of using a flame to ignite the waste, as in traditional methods of incineration, electricity is used. Vaporization is nothing more than extremely rapid combusion.
I realize that my quotes seemed to imply something, but my intent was not to question whether it was burning or not, but rather to deride the fact that the bureaucrat in question simply discounts an entire spectrum of options because it falls under the blanket of burning. In this case it's burned in a way that -- supposedly, though of course there should be countless checks and assurances -- is very environmentally sound. It isn't like putting a pile of tires in the back and torching it.
I mean seriously, it's not like Toronto is doing this without Lansing's permission or anything...
The state and region despise the trash coming in, but the private dump legally has the right to operate their business, and NAFTA has stipulations saying that the government can pick and choose trade (within reason). Nonethless the state and country governments have been hard at work looking for ways around that.
Here in the Halton region, which is comprised of some suburbs just West of the Toronto metro, there has been some talk of building one of these plants (although they've tossed around the number $700 million). This is an effort to deal with the reality of garbage, not to mention that reality that Toronto has been giving the entire country a continual black-eye by shipping waste to Michigan (if I were a Michiganer, I'd be pissed to be another regions dumping ground. Even as an Ontarian, the endless row of trash hauling trucks, each leaving a wake of loose garbage, is untenable).
But despite the reality that no one wants to build dumps, and Toronto has been spending millions shipping it to an entirely different country, there are still the head-in-the-sand dreamers who would rather the issue just disappears. A prominent Toronto city bureaucrat, for instance, has poo-poohed the idea, decrying the vile idea of "burning" waste. They'd rather drive it 500 miles in transport trucks to dump it somewhere else.
Slashdot Mirror
That must have been a bitch when most of the telecommunications network was built from copper (like a decade ago).
"Can you hear me now?"
(A year later in Las Angelas)
"Yes, I can hear you!"
It's impossible for a cheater to win. People who face cheaters get irritated because they completely ruin the game, not because they're such potent adversaries.
Even when you aren't getting shot by magic bullets from adversaries who can track you and shoot you through walls, once cheaters have permeated a domain you can no longer enjoy the game: Instead of ceding that your opponnet played better, once there's cheaters in the mix you can never savour a loss (to put it in a funny but truthful way). Suspicion and bitterness overtake the game (on both sides. I was pretty good at Urban Terror, and my abilities were endlessly chalked up to "cheats" by my victims. I could never enjoy my wins, and they couldn't enjoy their loss or learn from it, because the game was saturated by cheaters).
I think what motivates the creator of the cheats is clear to us all. Hell, I would never spam, but creating spam-track avoidance software has always intrigued me because it's a challenge. I'm sure the cheat developers are just playing their own game, and they are legitimately winning.
The people destroying online games, however, are just the scriptkiddy wankers, and really I doubt the actual developers behind the cheat (who do legitimate, real work for their achievements) ever really even bother using their cheats online.
And a lot of people see it as exactly that, and are thankful for the traffic Google sends their way. I get about 140 referrals from Google a day, and am very welcoming to the Google spiders.
Nonetheless, this argument is very similar to the "Musicians should see Napster as an advertising medium to sell concert tickets" debate — some musicians do, while others don't, and it isn't really fair for people to declare that those who don't should just suck it and tow the line.
In this case the creators of the actual content (or the people who paid AP or CP or UP or Reuters or whoever originated the content — they do have to pay them, and can't say "Well we're giving Reuters free advertising!") decided that they didn't consider it kosher as simply free advertising, and the model didn't work for them. They asked Google to start either sharing some of the lucre that Google is making from the server — and google is making a lot of money from these sorts of services, and they aren't doing it because of benevolence – or stop acting as repeaters for their content.
Seems reasonable to me.
They aren't really ignoring the judgement. Instead they looked at it, discovered it is legally enforceable, and told the Illinois Court to get lost. They've declared the judgement irrelevant.
So true. Up here in Canada we had MuchMusic, and like described it basically was just videos around the clock, so many used it as a radio of sorts, with bonus visuals. At most there were "theme shows" such as the rap hour, the heavy metal hour, the alternative hour, and so on.
Nowadays it's almost impossible to actually catch videos on it, as instead it's hours and hours of lame shows (such as the "get a bunch of completely clueless hasbeens to give commentary over a video that you wish you could just watch and listen to, but instead you get to hear some guy who was on some 90s sitcom giving his "funny" opinion on it).
Um, okay. Then what's the problem — They'll pull their "promotions" and you'll have no problem with it, right?
Way back in the stone age when one business existed to profit largely via the work of another (see Napster, YouTube, etc. Though YouTube has far more legitimacy given the vast number of user contributed, non-pirated content), the copyright system is geared to demand compensation. Sort of like how the GPL, via the same copyright, is geared to demand its own sort of payment.
This is true. I offer my apologies.
I'm one of the least nerdly people here, so...
HA HA HA!
See - I don't mean to insult you but...it's because you don't know better. Seriously. It is worth debating such a ridiculous point further.
I'm constantly aghast at the terrible framerates many consoles fall to in efforts to try to look somewhat as capable as even a modest PC rig. Seriously, console fanatics can claim that it doesn't matter, but it seriously ruins immersion when something blowing up or lots of characters drops the framerate to 7 fps, suddenly looking jarring.
I have been constantly disappointed with the next generation gaming rigs -- their prowess has been grossly overestimated.
I think deemed is a rather important word there. Businesses have spent billions upon billions (or trillions) on dubious snakeoil and magic fix-alls, and HR is no less susceptible to trends than any other. If they're paying a headhunter $2000 to find an employee, why not toss in an extra $100 because someone is claiming that a magic number solves all.
To double the nonsense factor, the standard in the industry is to vet all candidates, make a contingent offer, and then just before starting day, and sometimes after, actually do credit checks and so on. Of course that system is bullshit, because if they decide they don't like your score, but you've already quit your last job, moved, etc, what are you to do?
The rest of your truly informative and well-written reply pretty much agreed with exactly what I originally stated.
One might have rainy day credit with perfect payment, while another might be maxed out on extensive store-card credit, albeit making the payments, while someone else might have never missed a payment, but they've always made the minimum. Simply making payments doesn't give one a perfect score.
It isn't just the credit scoring companies -- Financial services companies want the ability give out massive amounts of credit loosely, to anyone with a pulse, and they want basically a mob-like ability to make damn sure you pay it back (even though they price risk in, they basically want to turn the odds even more in their favour, so to speak). Expect to see more of this (e.g. "Credit scores will now be used to determine mandatory curfew times").
Imagine a Grade 6 teacher who could put your name on a master "naughty" list for life, scaring you from talking out in class otherwise the rest of your life will be screwed. Same sort of idea.
See, again people have drawn presumptive anecdotes, and called it evidence. The point was that the insurance industry couldn't make a reasonably accurate correlation between credit scores and insurance worthiness/cost -- It was just yet another axis to penalize people (make enough axis and soon enough everyone can be a bad insurance risk, worthy of terrible rates. It's one of those nice industries where natural collusion means that everyone follows the same profit lines, so it pays off big). If they could convincingly demonstrate an actual (not fictitious scenarios) case, perhaps they would have a point, but they couldn't.
You write that in what appears a sarcastic tone, implying doubt about my "statements". Yet these machinations of the credit industry are hardly hidden - a one-second google search yielded http://www.privacyrights.org/fs/fs6c-CreditScores
This yields nugglets such as-
My kneejerk reaction is, like most people, to envision the guy deep in debt as a shady, irresponsible person, and the former as a responsible, librarian sort. Yet I realize that is 99% because that sort of image has been pushed on me by the industry.
In reality, barring any actual metrics I think there is no way of saying. It's entirely possible that the former is so paranoid about their credit score and social standing, that they embezzle, while the latter is desperate to keep their job to try to dig themselves out of their hole, and wouldn't dare offend their employer. I mean when you hear about embezzling, one often hears about people embezzling hundreds of thousands of dollars. Surely they didn't use that to pay off their delinquent student loans (indeed, usually they bought lots of properties, having investments -- they're models of credit worthiness).
Weird. I guess Slashdot doesn't like strong. Sorry about that.
You realize that's what they're called, right? You know - it isn't an insult.
Ah, it's my stalker again. You should really see a psychologist. I'm 100% serious. You have some problems.
What if some staffing consultant company one day decided that people who eat bran for breakfast are better employees (they're in cahoots with the bran industry, after all, serving each other's interests. They want to make sure you really suffer if you haven't been a fan of bran), therefore they're going to do a bran profile of all employees.
If you don't have enough bran in your history, sorry - no job for you. I guess you'll have to beg to try to start getting some bran.
Oh but don't think you'll sneak around this: They're going to do hair sampling and talk to former roommates to determine if you ate bran years ago. Simply towing the line now isn't satisfactory.
Maybe they'll do a "former lover" test to determine if you called within 6 days, and how your performance was in bed. Surely some loose, anecdotal correlation can be drawn there as well.
Sounds sort of arbitrary and ridiculous, doesn't it?
Because it is. It would be one thing if an unbiased research paper drew a strong/strong correlation between credit worthiness and performance on the job, but simply taking the word of a guy who's agenda is being served. No thanks.
Here in Canada there have been some efforts to ban any industry (for instance car insurance companies determining your rates based on your credit worthiness. Sure, they can say "Oh, but people with bad credit are more likely to be worse drivers!", but failing actual credible results, thankfully most people say "bullshit") from using metrics that haven't been positively and strongly correlated with the result they're trying to test.
Are you kidding?
Between a set of people with perfect payment histories, credit ratings will vary dramatically. While credit is meant to be used, there are all sorts of magic (and often trade secret) formulas for determining patterns in your financial behaviour that will bite you. Maybe you always made every payment on time, but if you ever paid the minimum, or exceeded some unknown level on your credit, then your score suffers.
Remember that the quote in question is by a recruitment/staffing company, and they're always trying to sell the snake oil that they have a magic formula that can give you a nice metric of the worth of a prospect.
For the reasons you mentioned, and more, the fundemental premise is full of shit, and Mr. Greenberg (an "industrial psychologist"? His credentials would have a bit more credibility if he were speaking as an unencumbered academic, purely making a quantitative statement. Instead he's some shill trying to use some paper to sell some nonsense) is pretty unconvincing.
That is, unless "growing up with a silver spoon and parents who bail you out of every financial misstep" is a critical element in hiring.
I realize that my quotes seemed to imply something, but my intent was not to question whether it was burning or not, but rather to deride the fact that the bureaucrat in question simply discounts an entire spectrum of options because it falls under the blanket of burning. In this case it's burned in a way that -- supposedly, though of course there should be countless checks and assurances -- is very environmentally sound. It isn't like putting a pile of tires in the back and torching it.
The state and region despise the trash coming in, but the private dump legally has the right to operate their business, and NAFTA has stipulations saying that the government can pick and choose trade (within reason). Nonethless the state and country governments have been hard at work looking for ways around that.
Here in the Halton region, which is comprised of some suburbs just West of the Toronto metro, there has been some talk of building one of these plants (although they've tossed around the number $700 million). This is an effort to deal with the reality of garbage, not to mention that reality that Toronto has been giving the entire country a continual black-eye by shipping waste to Michigan (if I were a Michiganer, I'd be pissed to be another regions dumping ground. Even as an Ontarian, the endless row of trash hauling trucks, each leaving a wake of loose garbage, is untenable).
But despite the reality that no one wants to build dumps, and Toronto has been spending millions shipping it to an entirely different country, there are still the head-in-the-sand dreamers who would rather the issue just disappears. A prominent Toronto city bureaucrat, for instance, has poo-poohed the idea, decrying the vile idea of "burning" waste. They'd rather drive it 500 miles in transport trucks to dump it somewhere else.