Heck, I'll build it for half that cost, supply my own labor, and even extend the line a couple of miles for free. As long as you don't mind the first station going up in Tijuana...
Over the last many years of writing many, many long emails and seeing them get ignored, I found I could instead send them to people who weren't incompetent.
Start trademarks, copyright, and registered IP at ten bucks for the first year and double it each subsequent year. Existing works get backdated to their original registration/lodgement date but only start being liable from one year after the new system is in place. I suspect there will not be much material over 30 years old that is retained, and most likely only a small minority over 15-20 years of age. Imagine nearly everything from pre-1980 becoming public domain.
Patents only to apply to physical creations and processes. Nothing involving creation or manipulation of ideas, logic, mathematics or other symbols. Patents infringing on any natural process or the results of natural processes shall have no area of authority or enforcement over those processes or examples. If you create a new material and it turns out it's already available in nature, tough noogies. And non-profit infringement is A-OK; if someone can duplicate your process or invention, they're perfectly allowed to use it in-house.
7 years on everything is fine. I'd also accept 11 years for media and literature.
Our greatest hope is that everything can blow up in everyone's face as big as possible with no real advantage to anyone in the end (that's right: dump as much spam in the fan as you can) and then we'll see how pointless it is to enforce software patents.
Much more likely: Whoever has the money at any given point will have the rules created and/or enforced largely to their personal preference. Anyone who might be in a position to counteract this will either be unable to extract themselves from a large pile of money, or will be outshouted by paid activists at all levels. Any progress will be tied up and delayed by paid lawyers and politicians, any proposed new law against their practices will have to swim uphill against a river of greased money, and in the very unlikely event that the relevant legal entities are ever brought to account, the individual people responsible will have already slipped out the back door with a bag of cash the size of Manhattan and have legged it for the horizon.
MS is a company with tons of spare cash, literally. Hitting them with a monetary penalty will make them laugh, and continue on their merry ways.
Perhaps a percentage-based fine? Such as a two-digit percentage of their global gross profit? Being hit with something like that, given their history of dubious practices likely to recur in future, could well see the stock price (and thus the value of assorted executives' portfolios) dipping noticeably.
the fuckers on Wall Street (whose genius caused our current recession) are too stupid to realize that a business that makes enough money one quarter a year while pleasing its customers is better than one that makes money four quarters a year while pissing them off.
But it's not. Better. For them, I mean. The gamers and the people actually in the industry don't have any say in it - it's the people who own the shares who realise that if they pressure companies as hard as possible to be profitable RIGHT NOW and damn the torpedoes, then the shareholders can move on to the next company once the current one gasps its last and gives up the ghost.
Perhaps a better strategy might be to disallow more than 49% of any corporate entity's shares from being traded on the stock exchange?
I was in tech support for about that long. It's interesting how much money you can make when you're the only tech out of 20 others who has more than 3 years' experience, the only tech out of 50 who has more than five years' experience, and the only tech out of ten thousand who can walk into a helpdesk and show them in one day how to cut their operational costs by seven figures while making the techs' lives about a thousand percent less stressful. In most business positions this expertise can be found in industry veterans who've kept their ears open over the years. In tech support, genuine long-termers are very difficult to find, and a percentage of those are, as you intimate, washouts who only retain their jobs out of inertia rather than ability.
Would it be a bad idea to nerf-balance in real time by applying an inverse multiplier to DPS and various other stats based on the percentage of currently-active characters on that server with that class/race?
Ideally, it would mean that any new class or race with over, say, m/2n active characters (where n is the number of character categories on a server and m is the total number of active characters in play on the server) would have its stats multiplied by m and divided by the number of active characters in that category. When a new category was introduced, it would become quickly popular with players as it would be up to twice as powerful as the average balanced character (even though starting at level 1). As the number of characters of that type increased, the stat/effect multiplier would fade until there were an equal fraction of new characters and old ones running around at any given time.
The advantage would be that if a character type got its baseline nerfed a little too much, it would become less popular to play at any given moment, making its multiplier increase, making it more popular again, bringing its multiplier back into balance with its popularity. Likewise, if it was made too powerful, more people would play it, its multiplier would drop, and it would effectively re-nerf itself back into that same balance again.
Sure, it'd only work on servers with enough players and active characters to make gaming the system more trouble than it was worth, but it would have the positive side that tracking the multipliers for each type would allow gaming companies to spot overpowered/nerfed classes fairly easily, simply because their multipliers would be consistently out of whack.
I'd posit that the individuality of a computer name, be it workstation, server, cluster or other resource, could do worse than to be based on the scarcity of the item.
If you only have a handful of workstations in a home or small office, call them Starbug, ZORG-169, Kevin, and Meebo.
If you have thirty thousand workstations in a national or international WAN, then they can count themselves lucky if their name is anything more than their asset tag. And at least with the asset tag, you can tell a caller to read it off the side of the PC and then use it to remotely access the thing. Tracking's not an issue - just tell all servers to keep records of which workstation names and MAC addresses log in through which ports on what switches every morning, and you'll have a fair chance to be able to spot when a computer mysteriously changes offices or departments. If there's accurate records of which ports lead to which cubicles, you can even physically track them around the company (and if you have security cams in the ceiling in all locations, you can literally be looking over a caller's shoulder seconds later).
I've found myself swapping in older mental device drivers when going back to cursive from typing. It may not slow me down all that much, but there's definite higher neural CPU load as the bitrotted processes are parity-matched and extrapolated on the fly.
When an interviewer says "Here's the spec for an internal language we use. You have one hour to write a program in this language which includes the following standard functions...", which school would you have liked to have been taught at?
As an IT grad, or even as a non-grad IT person, you'll find yourself in situations where you're thrown in the deep end with nothing more than some outdated refs - if you're lucky. You've got to be able to instantly scrape together fragments of data into a coherent framework and put that framework to use before your boss starts handing out pink slips. I'm not even a programmer and I've been hauled off on no notice to write some nationwide corporate application in a language I'd never seen to that point, simply because I made the mistake of mentioning I'd once tinkered with Perl for a couple of days.
Learn how to whip up basic versions of standard libraries in double-quick time. Not in one language, but in as many as you can lay your hands on. C. C++. Java. Python. Ruby. Haskell. Fortran. Perl. Befunge. Bash. Freakin' DOS batch code. Focus not on the vagaries of a single method, but on being able to feel the flow and curl of logic states and data. That way, it won't matter what language is in vogue by the time you hit the workforce, you'll be able to pick it up, swing it a few times to get the heft, and be ready to play ball.
Slashdot Mirror
Heck, I'll build it for half that cost, supply my own labor, and even extend the line a couple of miles for free. As long as you don't mind the first station going up in Tijuana...
Weather balloon with a stick of dynamite attached?
Hey, when it comes to technology, Australian politicians are able to give that impression ALL BY THEMSELVES, thank you very much!
Hold mah beer and click this!
Over the last many years of writing many, many long emails and seeing them get ignored, I found I could instead send them to people who weren't incompetent.
It really helps!
Start trademarks, copyright, and registered IP at ten bucks for the first year and double it each subsequent year. Existing works get backdated to their original registration/lodgement date but only start being liable from one year after the new system is in place. I suspect there will not be much material over 30 years old that is retained, and most likely only a small minority over 15-20 years of age. Imagine nearly everything from pre-1980 becoming public domain. Patents only to apply to physical creations and processes. Nothing involving creation or manipulation of ideas, logic, mathematics or other symbols. Patents infringing on any natural process or the results of natural processes shall have no area of authority or enforcement over those processes or examples. If you create a new material and it turns out it's already available in nature, tough noogies. And non-profit infringement is A-OK; if someone can duplicate your process or invention, they're perfectly allowed to use it in-house. 7 years on everything is fine. I'd also accept 11 years for media and literature.
Our greatest hope is that everything can blow up in everyone's face as big as possible with no real advantage to anyone in the end (that's right: dump as much spam in the fan as you can) and then we'll see how pointless it is to enforce software patents.
Much more likely: Whoever has the money at any given point will have the rules created and/or enforced largely to their personal preference. Anyone who might be in a position to counteract this will either be unable to extract themselves from a large pile of money, or will be outshouted by paid activists at all levels. Any progress will be tied up and delayed by paid lawyers and politicians, any proposed new law against their practices will have to swim uphill against a river of greased money, and in the very unlikely event that the relevant legal entities are ever brought to account, the individual people responsible will have already slipped out the back door with a bag of cash the size of Manhattan and have legged it for the horizon.
MS is a company with tons of spare cash, literally. Hitting them with a monetary penalty will make them laugh, and continue on their merry ways.
Perhaps a percentage-based fine? Such as a two-digit percentage of their global gross profit? Being hit with something like that, given their history of dubious practices likely to recur in future, could well see the stock price (and thus the value of assorted executives' portfolios) dipping noticeably.
the fuckers on Wall Street (whose genius caused our current recession) are too stupid to realize that a business that makes enough money one quarter a year while pleasing its customers is better than one that makes money four quarters a year while pissing them off.
But it's not. Better. For them, I mean. The gamers and the people actually in the industry don't have any say in it - it's the people who own the shares who realise that if they pressure companies as hard as possible to be profitable RIGHT NOW and damn the torpedoes, then the shareholders can move on to the next company once the current one gasps its last and gives up the ghost.
Perhaps a better strategy might be to disallow more than 49% of any corporate entity's shares from being traded on the stock exchange?
If they had been found guilty of being a criminal organization --
- They'd have claimed to be too big to fail? :)
It's easy to remember - 'business' is government approved.
Like waterboarding!
I just like the juxtaposition of "full dental" with "unlimited free soft drinks". :)
There are probably people who would pay for that experience...
If I sign a contract saying I agree to set fire to a busload of nuns and pay Fred $5000, and I don't pay Fred, can Fred sue me for breach of contract?
I was in tech support for about that long. It's interesting how much money you can make when you're the only tech out of 20 others who has more than 3 years' experience, the only tech out of 50 who has more than five years' experience, and the only tech out of ten thousand who can walk into a helpdesk and show them in one day how to cut their operational costs by seven figures while making the techs' lives about a thousand percent less stressful. In most business positions this expertise can be found in industry veterans who've kept their ears open over the years. In tech support, genuine long-termers are very difficult to find, and a percentage of those are, as you intimate, washouts who only retain their jobs out of inertia rather than ability.
They hiring?
Ideally, it would mean that any new class or race with over, say, m/2n active characters (where n is the number of character categories on a server and m is the total number of active characters in play on the server) would have its stats multiplied by m and divided by the number of active characters in that category. When a new category was introduced, it would become quickly popular with players as it would be up to twice as powerful as the average balanced character (even though starting at level 1). As the number of characters of that type increased, the stat/effect multiplier would fade until there were an equal fraction of new characters and old ones running around at any given time.
The advantage would be that if a character type got its baseline nerfed a little too much, it would become less popular to play at any given moment, making its multiplier increase, making it more popular again, bringing its multiplier back into balance with its popularity. Likewise, if it was made too powerful, more people would play it, its multiplier would drop, and it would effectively re-nerf itself back into that same balance again.
Sure, it'd only work on servers with enough players and active characters to make gaming the system more trouble than it was worth, but it would have the positive side that tracking the multipliers for each type would allow gaming companies to spot overpowered/nerfed classes fairly easily, simply because their multipliers would be consistently out of whack.
If you only have a handful of workstations in a home or small office, call them Starbug, ZORG-169, Kevin, and Meebo.
If you have thirty thousand workstations in a national or international WAN, then they can count themselves lucky if their name is anything more than their asset tag. And at least with the asset tag, you can tell a caller to read it off the side of the PC and then use it to remotely access the thing. Tracking's not an issue - just tell all servers to keep records of which workstation names and MAC addresses log in through which ports on what switches every morning, and you'll have a fair chance to be able to spot when a computer mysteriously changes offices or departments. If there's accurate records of which ports lead to which cubicles, you can even physically track them around the company (and if you have security cams in the ceiling in all locations, you can literally be looking over a caller's shoulder seconds later).
They could get re-elected.
I've found myself swapping in older mental device drivers when going back to cursive from typing. It may not slow me down all that much, but there's definite higher neural CPU load as the bitrotted processes are parity-matched and extrapolated on the fly.
Welcome to the wonderful world of system administration.
I'm waiting for someone to make enough money off unscrambling signals to be able to buy political influence and have the relevant law changed.
"It's my career!"
Government punishes you for thinking. Film at 11.
As an IT grad, or even as a non-grad IT person, you'll find yourself in situations where you're thrown in the deep end with nothing more than some outdated refs - if you're lucky. You've got to be able to instantly scrape together fragments of data into a coherent framework and put that framework to use before your boss starts handing out pink slips. I'm not even a programmer and I've been hauled off on no notice to write some nationwide corporate application in a language I'd never seen to that point, simply because I made the mistake of mentioning I'd once tinkered with Perl for a couple of days.
Learn how to whip up basic versions of standard libraries in double-quick time. Not in one language, but in as many as you can lay your hands on. C. C++. Java. Python. Ruby. Haskell. Fortran. Perl. Befunge. Bash. Freakin' DOS batch code. Focus not on the vagaries of a single method, but on being able to feel the flow and curl of logic states and data. That way, it won't matter what language is in vogue by the time you hit the workforce, you'll be able to pick it up, swing it a few times to get the heft, and be ready to play ball.