Of course, I live in the UK, which has substantially better labour laws than the US... This is the real crux of the issue. In the US, an employer can generally fire you "at will or at whim." This applies even for highly-skilled, white-collar professionals. It's also not uncommon for an employment contract to demand lengthy notice in the event of resignations (two, three, or even six months), while clearly establishing that your employer can terminate your job with no more notice than the time it takes to say "You're fired."
In addition, "golden handcuffs" are getting more common: Leaving your employer (even if through a no-fault layoff) often means you must immediately repay stock options, retirement fund matches, educational benefits, and bonuses from the last year or two.
And on top of all that, non-competition clauses are growing downright exploitative. A friend of mine is working under a contract stipulation that basically says "if you quit your job, you'll never work in IT in this state again."
It may not be SOP (yet), but it's certainly growing more and more common. Two of the contract companies with which I've worked in the last few years had similar policies for "outgoing personnel": No matter why you were leaving, they'd send security to frog-march you out the door. Even if you'd worked there for 20 years and were departing quite amicably.
The real question: Will they attempt to cripple P2P connections? Big upstream bandwidth is very appealing to torrenters and other file-sharers, but will Verizon pull a bait-and-switch by selling you a fat upstream pipeline then preventing you from using it the way you wanted?
That sounds consistent with the "deregulate and privatize EVERYTHING" push we've seen in government since the 1980s. The real question is "How can we reverse the trend, and ensure we won't be locked down to one service provider?"
It's not so much a question of "it's cheap so it's okay it's crap" as "the average consumer doesn't know or care why the $150 router is better than the $50 router, so he's going to choose the $50 router." The market forces conspire to make a $50 end-user router a safe bet for the manufacturer, especially if it looks cool and it's easy to set up.
John Q. Websurfer mostly cares about email and the World Wide Web (and maybe World of Warcraft); he doesn't care about loading his own firmwhatever or how many megathingies his router has, as long as it isn't a conspicuous (to him) failure.
I think it's basically a combination of two factors: The general interests of the US public, and masterful PR control.
On the first point, you have to look at what Clinton did versus what Bush did and continues to do. I think most United States citizens would look at the above article and say "Eh, so they used RNC email accounts for government business. Who cares? I use my work email for personal stuff all the time." It's just not an issue that grabs the attention of the Average Joe. On the other hand, the President getting a blow job is big news, because people are generally interested in sex. Half of the country seems to have a blue-nosed desire to regulate everybody's love life. The other half may not have thought it was a huge deal, but they still found the story interesting enough to keep talking about it, so the story just wouldn't die.
The other side of the issue is simple: The Republicans have amazing PR. Remember the attack ads during the 1998 and 2000 elections? Remember the plausible-deniability flacks pushing the "Clinton body count" conspiracy theory? Remember the right-wing news networks and talkshow hosts who kept flogging each scandal long after it had "joined the bleedin' choir invisibile"?
And today the Democrats are making the most of these gaffes by doing... well, nothing. We've never had a less popular sitting President guilty of more impeachable crimes, and they don't dare make a move... possibly because they think that the Republicans could beat them at that game, too. And they may be right.
I'd be a lot more excited if it weren't a level-based system; growth in "levels" was a fresh idea 30 years ago, but today there are better ways to handle character development. "No, you can't learn to swing this sword better without sacrificing a few wizard levels" makes zero sense. Point-buy systems are both more realistic and more fun, especially if you prefer a narrativist or simulationist outlook to a gamist approach.
I'm really not sure why anybody would write a level-based system these days, other than to fit the d20 branding. Would it be the end of the world if the new Star Wars game weren't d20-powered? If there's any brand that shouldn't need the d20 stamp to succeed as an RPG, Star Wars should be it.
"We actually did a survey, and we found it's an even distribution of CCP employees in the top ten alliances."
I'm sorry, but that's not a reassuring fact. Does that suggest that many of the top ten alliances have devs and GMs in them? Oh, well then surely there can't be any misbehavior going on there!
"And the person that did it, which I know really well, he doesn't understand himself, it just doesn't make any sense."
And just what the Hell does this mean? "He doesn't understand himself"? What, was he working late one night when he accidentally clicked on the "Abuse Position and Give Ph4t L3wt to Teammates" icon on his desktop instead of Microsoft Outlook?
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In addition, "golden handcuffs" are getting more common: Leaving your employer (even if through a no-fault layoff) often means you must immediately repay stock options, retirement fund matches, educational benefits, and bonuses from the last year or two.
And on top of all that, non-competition clauses are growing downright exploitative. A friend of mine is working under a contract stipulation that basically says "if you quit your job, you'll never work in IT in this state again."
It may not be SOP (yet), but it's certainly growing more and more common. Two of the contract companies with which I've worked in the last few years had similar policies for "outgoing personnel": No matter why you were leaving, they'd send security to frog-march you out the door. Even if you'd worked there for 20 years and were departing quite amicably.
The real question: Will they attempt to cripple P2P connections? Big upstream bandwidth is very appealing to torrenters and other file-sharers, but will Verizon pull a bait-and-switch by selling you a fat upstream pipeline then preventing you from using it the way you wanted?
That sounds consistent with the "deregulate and privatize EVERYTHING" push we've seen in government since the 1980s. The real question is "How can we reverse the trend, and ensure we won't be locked down to one service provider?"
It's not so much a question of "it's cheap so it's okay it's crap" as "the average consumer doesn't know or care why the $150 router is better than the $50 router, so he's going to choose the $50 router." The market forces conspire to make a $50 end-user router a safe bet for the manufacturer, especially if it looks cool and it's easy to set up.
John Q. Websurfer mostly cares about email and the World Wide Web (and maybe World of Warcraft); he doesn't care about loading his own firmwhatever or how many megathingies his router has, as long as it isn't a conspicuous (to him) failure.
I think it's basically a combination of two factors: The general interests of the US public, and masterful PR control.
On the first point, you have to look at what Clinton did versus what Bush did and continues to do. I think most United States citizens would look at the above article and say "Eh, so they used RNC email accounts for government business. Who cares? I use my work email for personal stuff all the time." It's just not an issue that grabs the attention of the Average Joe. On the other hand, the President getting a blow job is big news, because people are generally interested in sex. Half of the country seems to have a blue-nosed desire to regulate everybody's love life. The other half may not have thought it was a huge deal, but they still found the story interesting enough to keep talking about it, so the story just wouldn't die.
The other side of the issue is simple: The Republicans have amazing PR. Remember the attack ads during the 1998 and 2000 elections? Remember the plausible-deniability flacks pushing the "Clinton body count" conspiracy theory? Remember the right-wing news networks and talkshow hosts who kept flogging each scandal long after it had "joined the bleedin' choir invisibile"?
And today the Democrats are making the most of these gaffes by doing... well, nothing. We've never had a less popular sitting President guilty of more impeachable crimes, and they don't dare make a move... possibly because they think that the Republicans could beat them at that game, too. And they may be right.
I'd be a lot more excited if it weren't a level-based system; growth in "levels" was a fresh idea 30 years ago, but today there are better ways to handle character development. "No, you can't learn to swing this sword better without sacrificing a few wizard levels" makes zero sense. Point-buy systems are both more realistic and more fun, especially if you prefer a narrativist or simulationist outlook to a gamist approach.
I'm really not sure why anybody would write a level-based system these days, other than to fit the d20 branding. Would it be the end of the world if the new Star Wars game weren't d20-powered? If there's any brand that shouldn't need the d20 stamp to succeed as an RPG, Star Wars should be it.
"We actually did a survey, and we found it's an even distribution of CCP employees in the top ten alliances." I'm sorry, but that's not a reassuring fact. Does that suggest that many of the top ten alliances have devs and GMs in them? Oh, well then surely there can't be any misbehavior going on there! "And the person that did it, which I know really well, he doesn't understand himself, it just doesn't make any sense." And just what the Hell does this mean? "He doesn't understand himself"? What, was he working late one night when he accidentally clicked on the "Abuse Position and Give Ph4t L3wt to Teammates" icon on his desktop instead of Microsoft Outlook?