She got someone sacked. That's not expressing her opinion, that's actionable under UK libel law.
Her actions were definitely offensive. The conversation she overheard may have been offensive to her (and by all accounts at least part of it was misinterpreted by her, and how the fuck do you avoid offending someone determined to misinterpret shit) but I find most people respond quite well to, "Guys, you're making me feel uncomfortable. Could you discuss something else?"
I don't want to work with people that lack a sense of proportion, that take offence at any tiny thing, that have no sense of humour and that can't at least attempt to resolve conflict in a sensible manner.
Wait, I have to change my behaviour depending on the gender of the person I'm with? You sexist fuck.
I treat women equally. It's what I've been told my entire life that I must do. Now you're telling me I'll get into shit for it?
I can't win. I wont play if I can't win. Fuck 'em, they can deal with it or they can fuck off.
In the workplace this translates to: I bitch about the company having a 'Women's Network' and not a Men's one. (Hell, I joined the Women's Network - to be fair, they welcomed me.) I point out the hypocrisy that men have to wear suit+tie, women can wear slacks+t-shirt. I point out that giving carparking spaces to women ahead of men "because they're scared of being attacked" is actually counter-intuitive, given that men are far more likely to be attacked. I bitch about the disparity between maternity and paternity pay. I bitch when a man is expected to work longer hours but the woman is allowed to leave early for her kids. (Hey - that man has kids too!)
I also support women getting promoted, getting equal pay and being able to make the same politically incorrect jokes as men. Just don't expect me to act differently because they're women.
Balanced portfolio? Using stocks to get a return on relatively liquid assets? The only loan he mentioned is a mortgage, and it's difficult to raise additional funds through that route if he needs cash quickly. Accepting the interest costs may be worth reducing his risk exposure to a short term cash shortage.
It's why I have a mortgage despite having the cash to clear it. I can't even justify holding the cash in an offset account; it means I'm paying no interest on the mortgage, but at the 1.25% interest rate I'd be far better off taking all of that cash, and all of the money available to me in a mortgage reserve account, and investing it somewhere. I can invest risk free (i.e. UK government backed) and tax free at 2.25% return, giving me a clear risk free 1% ROI.
If the bank could do that without me, it wouldn't bother to have me as a customer. That doesn't mean that it's not a viable way for me to generate cash. It's also not a great return, but it is risk free; Dodgy G33za no doubt takes a more balanced risk approach and is happy with the returns he's getting, alongside the risk exposure and access to funds that it gives him.
At its heart, traditional banking is about linking people with money to people that need money. Banks generate income through commission, in the form of fees and/or interest. Why wouldn't you be able to skip the middleman and do that better yourself?
Borrowing money to invest it is easy. It's sometimes the sensible thing to do. When you've already borrowed money, investing further funds as opposed to paying off the loan is always a sensible thing to consider, and for me, would actually be far more sensible than avoiding interest on the borrowings.
It's all down to risk appetite, financial discipline, market knowledge and self-awareness on all of those things.
If you can't work for profit entities for free, half the open source movement would be in prison. Schools would have no trips. Millions of people word be in prison.
OK, this is the US. Scratch that last one.
But seriously, no unpaid work? No volunteering? No helping out? I don't believe you.
Yeah, it would benefit from actual graphics, and particularly from a modern UI with little things like templates - design a 'standard bedroom' and just paste it where you want it, with the appropriate build orders for the various bed, wardrobe, door, etc.
None of that impacts the gameplay, but it would make it far more accessible. Unless you count "forgetting to make enough beds" as part of the gameplay, which to be fair in a way it is. The comedy oversights lead to some of the more interesting emergent outcomes.
They need not micromanage every single product release, but major product releases such as SimCity they definitely should have been ware of aware of the risks of a DRM-based launch
Given that strong DRM comes as standard on most major games - not just EAs - the risks were relatively low.
Hell, the game outsold expectations, even with DRM. When the board were presented risk/revenue expectations, they weren't being misled at all.
Reputational risk is a very different thing, and it's not unreasonable for the board to take the position that everyone does DRM, all the customers know they do DRM and although a small minority will bitch about it, it doesn't prevent (and may even boost) sales.
The only difference this time is that it wasn't a small minority bitching about it.
One bloke intent on building a game so deep that it takes sixteen materials and four different crafts to create a metal bucket (then measures individual happiness on how pretty it is) is modelling individual actors right down to the loss of an arm, the saving that makes in gloves, the work that individual can now do and how upset his family are about it.
And EA with a budget in the tens of millions can't even work out basics such as 'works here, earns that, lives there, wants food/entertainment/job/sleep'..
Hell, the Tropico series manages it, and they depict all of the individuals. Crunching the numbers in the background without displaying each person is easier, and should scale up to SimCity levels. Certainly for the first few hundred thousand.
There are very very few review sites (if any?) now that review honestly and independently.
I can't promise that they're completely independent, but the reviews at RockPaperShotgun are not the usual fawning affair.
They're not even traditional reviews. No scores. No awards (except the 25 games of Christmas). Just discussion on upcoming games, and the journalist's thoughts on the released game that he/she just played.
The journalists also participate in the discussions on each article, addressing any challenges to the article, giving a little more info, etc.
If you want non-PC game reviews, I've no idea where you should go. But if you want high quality commentary on PC gaming, including indie, kickstarter funded games, major blockbusters, the good and the bad, and the weird little things produced in a 48 hour game-jam, try RPS. They do PC gaming.
Lets face it, Square Enix probably didn't pay for this review:
This narrative, which offers not a single twist, surprise, or even interesting notion, is shoved down your throat at every opportunity, the controls constantly wrestled from your hands as it crucially needs to take over to stop you from doing something it might not like. This is so deeply at the core of every element of the game that you can't even shimmy along a ledge without the game doing the bits where you go past a pillar for you. Run toward a building and scoooop, control is stolen, the camera jerked upward, because you might not have looked up at the pretty thing they drew. It feels like a combination of arrogance and deep paranoia. "You might play the game wrong! Let me do it!"
He's taking Mario out of a role that would suit the athleticism of a man to replace him with a woman. He then portrays Mario as a helpless captive of an ape.
The emasculation of a strong male role model is not necessary to achieve gender equality, yet that is what he's done.
Regarding making children happy: I refer you to the phrases 'Daddy's Girl' and 'Mummy's Boy'. Like it or not, those are the stereotypical factions within a nuclear family and thus his actions are indeed gender normative.
The Hulk or Superman aren't FEMALE sex fantasies, they're MALE power fantasies.
Oh, ok. That's not sexist at all then.
Hang on - I'm a man, and I don't fantasise about being muscle-bound and powerful. Stop fucking stereotyping me you sexist cunt.
(before we get to all the other feminist issues surrounding equality of pay, access to health services, work, etc., etc.)
..and life expectancy, retirement age on a state pension (in the UK), equality of childbirth time off work, custody and access to children following divorce, safety from assault, legalised workplace discrimination against me, etc., etc.
Don't fucking pretend it's all one-way traffic.
Trust me, I think equality's a fantastic ideal. I'd love to get some.
There's some really great free content and services out there. However, most of my favourite sites go back to the days before financial exploitation, or are ones I'm paying for already.
So on the whole I think I agree. Lets kill off all ad-supported sites. Except Youtube.
How long does it take you to read a letter, find out the authorised approach to respond to it, check 48 different databases, extract the relevant data, validate it, cleanse it of any data that might identify other individuals, collate it, and send a response to the individual making the SAR?
If it took you more than 20 minutes then even paying someone minimum wage to do all that (which is very unlikely, it'll be a little more than that) your company just made a loss on responding to the SAR.
It deprives you of the ability to save your game, blow the city to hell with disasters, and resume playing afterwards. People might laugh at this, but that has been a huge part of the Sim City experience since the very first release in 1989.
A huge part? It's been the best part!
Losing that capability destroys the game completely for people that are interested in the 'what if' scenarios rather than a linear progession.
Can my city survive a flood/fire/bridge collapse/attack from a renowned overgrown Japanese reptile?
Shit, next you'll be telling me this messed up version doesn't support infinite cash hacks?
Or possibly just arrest him, charge him with assault, wrongful imprisonment and theft, and let the appropriate sentence be applied should he be found guilty.
Slashdot Mirror
She got someone sacked. That's not expressing her opinion, that's actionable under UK libel law.
Her actions were definitely offensive. The conversation she overheard may have been offensive to her (and by all accounts at least part of it was misinterpreted by her, and how the fuck do you avoid offending someone determined to misinterpret shit) but I find most people respond quite well to, "Guys, you're making me feel uncomfortable. Could you discuss something else?"
I don't want to work with people that lack a sense of proportion, that take offence at any tiny thing, that have no sense of humour and that can't at least attempt to resolve conflict in a sensible manner.
Why is it so hard to keep it clean around women?
Wait, I have to change my behaviour depending on the gender of the person I'm with? You sexist fuck.
I treat women equally. It's what I've been told my entire life that I must do. Now you're telling me I'll get into shit for it?
I can't win. I wont play if I can't win. Fuck 'em, they can deal with it or they can fuck off.
In the workplace this translates to: I bitch about the company having a 'Women's Network' and not a Men's one. (Hell, I joined the Women's Network - to be fair, they welcomed me.) I point out the hypocrisy that men have to wear suit+tie, women can wear slacks+t-shirt. I point out that giving carparking spaces to women ahead of men "because they're scared of being attacked" is actually counter-intuitive, given that men are far more likely to be attacked. I bitch about the disparity between maternity and paternity pay. I bitch when a man is expected to work longer hours but the woman is allowed to leave early for her kids. (Hey - that man has kids too!)
I also support women getting promoted, getting equal pay and being able to make the same politically incorrect jokes as men. Just don't expect me to act differently because they're women.
Ding Dongle, surely?
Prescribing a placebo can heal the patient. How is that unethical?
There's strong research backing this, btw.
Balanced portfolio? Using stocks to get a return on relatively liquid assets? The only loan he mentioned is a mortgage, and it's difficult to raise additional funds through that route if he needs cash quickly. Accepting the interest costs may be worth reducing his risk exposure to a short term cash shortage.
It's why I have a mortgage despite having the cash to clear it. I can't even justify holding the cash in an offset account; it means I'm paying no interest on the mortgage, but at the 1.25% interest rate I'd be far better off taking all of that cash, and all of the money available to me in a mortgage reserve account, and investing it somewhere. I can invest risk free (i.e. UK government backed) and tax free at 2.25% return, giving me a clear risk free 1% ROI.
If the bank could do that without me, it wouldn't bother to have me as a customer. That doesn't mean that it's not a viable way for me to generate cash. It's also not a great return, but it is risk free; Dodgy G33za no doubt takes a more balanced risk approach and is happy with the returns he's getting, alongside the risk exposure and access to funds that it gives him.
At its heart, traditional banking is about linking people with money to people that need money. Banks generate income through commission, in the form of fees and/or interest. Why wouldn't you be able to skip the middleman and do that better yourself?
Borrowing money to invest it is easy. It's sometimes the sensible thing to do. When you've already borrowed money, investing further funds as opposed to paying off the loan is always a sensible thing to consider, and for me, would actually be far more sensible than avoiding interest on the borrowings.
It's all down to risk appetite, financial discipline, market knowledge and self-awareness on all of those things.
If you can't work for profit entities for free, half the open source movement would be in prison. Schools would have no trips. Millions of people word be in prison.
OK, this is the US. Scratch that last one.
But seriously, no unpaid work? No volunteering? No helping out? I don't believe you.
Wait, there's an electric car with a real-world 300 mile range?
I'm still struggling with the idea of a 15 mile detour to wait 30 minutes before you can keep driving.
This technology is not yet sensibly viable.
Yeah, it would benefit from actual graphics, and particularly from a modern UI with little things like templates - design a 'standard bedroom' and just paste it where you want it, with the appropriate build orders for the various bed, wardrobe, door, etc.
None of that impacts the gameplay, but it would make it far more accessible. Unless you count "forgetting to make enough beds" as part of the gameplay, which to be fair in a way it is. The comedy oversights lead to some of the more interesting emergent outcomes.
. It cost the owed party twice the amount (e.g. his cash out of pocket and the money he'd never get from you)
No, the money was in a bag with rope attached, so that they could haul it back ashore.
They need not micromanage every single product release, but major product releases such as SimCity they definitely should have been ware of aware of the risks of a DRM-based launch
Given that strong DRM comes as standard on most major games - not just EAs - the risks were relatively low.
Hell, the game outsold expectations, even with DRM. When the board were presented risk/revenue expectations, they weren't being misled at all.
Reputational risk is a very different thing, and it's not unreasonable for the board to take the position that everyone does DRM, all the customers know they do DRM and although a small minority will bitch about it, it doesn't prevent (and may even boost) sales.
The only difference this time is that it wasn't a small minority bitching about it.
I don't give a crap what each invidual sim thinks, they can suck donkey balls for all i care.
Ah, now I understand why SimCity wasn't for you. Try http://www.farming-simulator.com/
One bloke intent on building a game so deep that it takes sixteen materials and four different crafts to create a metal bucket (then measures individual happiness on how pretty it is) is modelling individual actors right down to the loss of an arm, the saving that makes in gloves, the work that individual can now do and how upset his family are about it.
And EA with a budget in the tens of millions can't even work out basics such as 'works here, earns that, lives there, wants food/entertainment/job/sleep'..
Hell, the Tropico series manages it, and they depict all of the individuals. Crunching the numbers in the background without displaying each person is easier, and should scale up to SimCity levels. Certainly for the first few hundred thousand.
There are very very few review sites (if any?) now that review honestly and independently.
I can't promise that they're completely independent, but the reviews at RockPaperShotgun are not the usual fawning affair.
They're not even traditional reviews. No scores. No awards (except the 25 games of Christmas). Just discussion on upcoming games, and the journalist's thoughts on the released game that he/she just played.
The journalists also participate in the discussions on each article, addressing any challenges to the article, giving a little more info, etc.
If you want non-PC game reviews, I've no idea where you should go. But if you want high quality commentary on PC gaming, including indie, kickstarter funded games, major blockbusters, the good and the bad, and the weird little things produced in a 48 hour game-jam, try RPS. They do PC gaming.
Lets face it, Square Enix probably didn't pay for this review:
This narrative, which offers not a single twist, surprise, or even interesting notion, is shoved down your throat at every opportunity, the controls constantly wrestled from your hands as it crucially needs to take over to stop you from doing something it might not like. This is so deeply at the core of every element of the game that you can't even shimmy along a ledge without the game doing the bits where you go past a pillar for you. Run toward a building and scoooop, control is stolen, the camera jerked upward, because you might not have looked up at the pretty thing they drew. It feels like a combination of arrogance and deep paranoia. "You might play the game wrong! Let me do it!"
(shamelessly lifted from http://www.rockpapershotgun.com/2013/03/06/wot-i-think-tomb-raider/ )
If you're not an addict, it's a pleasant diversion, and if you're an addict, no amount of DRM will stop you from lining up at the EA store.
Nonsense. If you're an addict you're going to take the easiest possible route to feed your addiction. On the PC that's going to be MMOs or Steam.
EA store? Far too much hassle. I'm too addicted to sit around watching a game tell me I can't play.
He's taking Mario out of a role that would suit the athleticism of a man to replace him with a woman. He then portrays Mario as a helpless captive of an ape.
The emasculation of a strong male role model is not necessary to achieve gender equality, yet that is what he's done.
Regarding making children happy: I refer you to the phrases 'Daddy's Girl' and 'Mummy's Boy'. Like it or not, those are the stereotypical factions within a nuclear family and thus his actions are indeed gender normative.
No. I use the word 'cunt' to describe people of all genders. See also: Cock.
No, he's not (necessarily) a feminist. Indeed, he's destroying the man's role in society in favour of pushing a female superiority agenda.
Or maybe he's making his daughter happy. Sounds pretty gender normative to me; how feminist is _that_?
The Hulk or Superman aren't FEMALE sex fantasies, they're MALE power fantasies.
Oh, ok. That's not sexist at all then.
Hang on - I'm a man, and I don't fantasise about being muscle-bound and powerful. Stop fucking stereotyping me you sexist cunt.
(before we get to all the other feminist issues surrounding equality of pay, access to health services, work, etc., etc.)
..and life expectancy, retirement age on a state pension (in the UK), equality of childbirth time off work, custody and access to children following divorce, safety from assault, legalised workplace discrimination against me, etc., etc.
Don't fucking pretend it's all one-way traffic.
Trust me, I think equality's a fantastic ideal. I'd love to get some.
Don't like that? Don't use it. Faculty should be more than capable of sourcing their own email service.
How the fuck does an employer scanning emails relate remotely to academic independence?
Your employer reads your emails. Expect it, accept it, don't use their email system for anything you don't want them to know.
It's been the simple truth for two fucking decades.
Look at it another way.
You're pissed off because checking Slashdot from your phone costs 40c.
A farmer in Africa spends a day's wages to find out why his cows are dying.
You pay more, but he gets to survive another year. Take your pick.
There's some really great free content and services out there. However, most of my favourite sites go back to the days before financial exploitation, or are ones I'm paying for already.
So on the whole I think I agree. Lets kill off all ad-supported sites. Except Youtube.
How long does it take you to read a letter, find out the authorised approach to respond to it, check 48 different databases, extract the relevant data, validate it, cleanse it of any data that might identify other individuals, collate it, and send a response to the individual making the SAR?
If it took you more than 20 minutes then even paying someone minimum wage to do all that (which is very unlikely, it'll be a little more than that) your company just made a loss on responding to the SAR.
It deprives you of the ability to save your game, blow the city to hell with disasters, and resume playing afterwards. People might laugh at this, but that has been a huge part of the Sim City experience since the very first release in 1989.
A huge part? It's been the best part!
Losing that capability destroys the game completely for people that are interested in the 'what if' scenarios rather than a linear progession.
Can my city survive a flood/fire/bridge collapse/attack from a renowned overgrown Japanese reptile?
Shit, next you'll be telling me this messed up version doesn't support infinite cash hacks?
Or possibly just arrest him, charge him with assault, wrongful imprisonment and theft, and let the appropriate sentence be applied should he be found guilty.
Sorry, was I meant to overreact too?