The wording of the summary is confusing. Were there literally billions of bonds given incorrect AAA ratings, or were the incorrectly rated bonds worth billions of dollars because of the flawed rating?
Confusing summary aside, this is the biggest load of crap I've read in a long time. The financial world made a really bad guess on just how much "money" was really in the US economy and now they are paying for it. They can't actually be held accountable because then people might catch a glimpse of the fact that the financial wizards who run our lives are really full of shit. So instead of taking responsibility for their mistakes they are blaming it on a computer bug. How effin convienent for them.
"Hey everybody, we aren't fucking idiots. You see, it was the computer! I just told you what it told me on my screen. Hold on... my third trophy wife is on the phone... she's telling me that her and the Lamborghini are stuck in traffic somewhere between my multi-multi million dollar home and the club house where I spend multiple tens of thousands of dollars a year. I'll get back to you right after I blow a few more rails of coke!"
How the hell did these people get to be in charge of society?
The content is there but there isn't any incentive to do it. While I was levelling up to get to the Outlands on my last toon I was one of two people in Eastern Plaguelands. I was one of about ten people in Western Plaguelands. The content is there but the zones are completely dead. I've definitely never done any world PVP in EPL. It would be nice if they introduced some dailies for the now defunct zones, or maybe even did heroic level versions of some of the old instances.
Very well put. Although I could have played WoW during beta I didn't actually pick up the game for quite a while after that. When TBC came out I wasn't even level 58 yet and couldn't go to Outland. Once I did get out there it was great because I finally felt like I was part of the game, instead of someone who was still trying to catch up to everyone. I really do feel like I missed huge parts of the WoW experience though. I will never know what MC was like. I will never raid Scholomance or UBRS. I actually like the quest lore and the way that the game takes you through the world and introduces you to the history of the realm. I feel like I missed out on a lot of that.
However there isn't much that Blizzard can do about that. They would drive off players in droves if everyone still had to attune to MC or Oxyana's Lair because the guilds that did that three years ago would be bored sick. PVP servers would be complete gank fests as players with great gear came down to wreak havoc on the poor shmucks still stuck in 'old content' land.
If you can't afford to burn $15 a month then you probably have bigger concerns in your life than playing WoW. Anyone with a decent job who can afford a computer and internet connection can afford $15 a month to play WoW. If $15 is a big deal to you then yes, don't play WoW. You obviously have other pressing financial concerns that you need to deal with and your ability to deal with them is only going to be negatively impacted by the time you might spend playing WoW instead of addressing those concerns.
May well be true, but honestly... it still takes a beefy machine to run the game well.
It will not run like WoW runs, on a piece of crap machine and still quite playable.
Where do people get that WoW runs alright on a POS machine? I have a P4 3ghz with a gig of RAM and a 256MB GeForce6600 AGP card. That is a pretty craptastic machine and it isn't playable. I get 4fps in Shatt. I get 4fps in Gruuls. Maybe 10fps in Kara. It's so bad that I miss key attack animations from bosses. For example in Gruuls there is a cave in attack. I don't even get the associated animation. It wasn't until I saw it on my friend's computer that I even knew what it looked like.
I can quest just fine on my computer, but raiding is a joke.
Exactly. I just don't have the time or inclination to really get into anything else. I don't even really have the time to put into WoW when you get right down to it. I have the good fortune of being in a half way decent raiding guild simply because my girlfriend works with someone whose boyfriend is a raid leader. My girlfriend and I only play for a couple hours on Saturday night once or twice a month and maybe 4-6 hours over the course of the week.
I tried Everquest 2, which is pretty much exactly the same game but with better graphics and a worse interface. Are all MMOs like this? If so I really don't see why they carry so much interest.
The social aspect is what keeps them going. For example my girlfriend and I play on a server with a bunch of her co-workers. The game provides us something else to do on Saturday night when we don't really feel like going out. It is something to do if you have an hour or two to kill before bed during the week.
peoples friends and colleagues got them playing. That is exactly why Wow is so successful, people can easily recommend the game to friends knowing how the game plays for new users themselves.
You're right on the money. WoW is a game that you don't have to be a major computer geek to play. I've been playing computer games since the late 1980s but my girlfriend didn't even have her own computer until we started dating. Although we started playing on one server with some friends of mine, we are now playing on a server with a bunch of her co-workers. They're a raiding guild but we're casual players. We can show up and raid on Saturday night with them and do other things during the rest of the week. The fact that WoW can cater to the whole spectrum, from the casual gamers like us to the guys who make a job out of farming materials for potions and gear and what not for a raid is what keeps it successful. If you just want to play the game and raid you can go on a PvE server (FTL). If you want a more indepth and intense experience you can play on PvP.
I'd really like to see is some real world PVP, where you can take over towns and really make life miserable for the other side. It will never happen because the game isn't setup that way, but it seems to be the only element that WoW is really lacking. It would be great if they could set up certain zones to be just like the RTS game. The players would have to protect peons who gather wood and food and gold. Buildings would have to be built and maintained. Eventually one side would dominate the area and then there would have to some sort of epic NPC onslaught to reset everything back to normal. Perhaps each zone could have a specific third party race that the alliance and horde would have to gang up on to take out first. Once that race or faction was gone then they could get into the real business of going after each other. Obviously the system I've described isn't perfect but it could add a really engaging, dynamic aspect to the world.
I'm having a hard time following the logic here. Most people I know who are doing well in college or in the real world don't have lots of time to play video games. Following your logic those people should be drawn to WoW because it allows for casual players who can't devote their lives to it. Conversely, the people out there who have lots and lots of time to devote to a video game are the kids who can come home from school and jump onto the computer. Therefore if you have a game that requires long periods of time to get anywhere, you're going to end up with a lot of kids and basement dwellers who have all sorts of free time to spend on it.
I've had pretty good luck with Verizon DSL. For a moment I was considering switching to cable but with all of the horror stories I've seen around here regarding bitTorrent clients I've stayed away from cable. The only time I ever had a problem is when I was seeding some popular, copyrighted music that I pulled down off of a site that I found via a Google Search. It was kind of creepy. As long as I was seeding the file, my transfer rate went down to near zero. Once I stopped, it went back up to my full speed. I tried it out a few times over a couple of days just to make sure that I wasn't imagining things and sure enough, every time I seeded that one file my connection slowed to a crawl.
Sure, they can stay in the country but we don't have to support them. The system needs to reformed. If these kids who don't want to go to school do want welfare and everything else that are benefits of citizenship then they need to pay the cost of the benefits some how.
They don't want to help you graduate... they want to get paid. Schools lose money when students don't show up. The whole program is simple math. They are planning on spend X amount of money on preventative programs in hopes of securing Y amount of dollars per student kept in school. They just need to make sure that X is less than Y and I'm sure that there are all sorts of studies that have been done by the vendor to prove that their device will reduce truancy by Z percent and that Z percent is high enough so that X will be less than Y.
You have a valid question about security versus functionality but I don't get the sense that SELinux is too concerned with that. There are dozens of distros out there that will give you "functionality" straight out of the box. Ubuntu seems to be a popular distro for those who want things to "just work". It seems to me like SELinux is one of those tools in the toolbox that you use in specific situations that call for it. If you're running a desktop where you want to tinker with things all the time, SELinux is probably just going to frustrate you. On the other hand, if you're developing a financial network that is supposed to pass secure, encrypted data around and be resistant to attack, then you might appreciate the very finely grained controls that are available in SELinux.
I've known people who have been recruited by the NSA. The NSA and the government in general are just people. They are people who are focused on keeping the United States of America in the position of power that it has come to be in. The few guys I've known have been extremely intelligent. They are really good at solving problems and developing systems to address needs. They "understand" things on levels of complexity that most people don't even need to bother themselves with. I like using the tools that insanely smart people use. I don't have any problems standing on the shoulders of giants. It is in the best interests of the government for the information economy to be based on a solid foundation. One of the characteristics of a solid foundation is depth. Another characteristic is flexibility. It seems like SELinux has both of those. In fact it seems to embody them so much that it is a turn off to those without the time, inclination or capacity to fully exploit the foundation that has been provided.
Systems like SELinux are necessary to prove that things can be done. When intensely complex trust relationships and roles can be setup within a system, legislation can follow to mandate those controls. Imagine if the financial sector was required to fully track who accesses your information. Imagine if they had to limit access to your information based on which entity wanted the access. Imagine they should have to limit specific entities to specific types of access that can only be granted by following strict, fully auditable procedures. With a system like SELinux, those kind of things can be done. The private sector can't throw up their hands and say, "Oh, it's too complex. We don't even have the tools to do it with."
I think for most people there is a psychological relationship between how expensive something is and how good it is. If these things cost $20, no one would even consider the idea that they would make anyone play better, even if they were built exactly the same. At $300, though, people are more likely to believe it.
There is a relationship there. Pick up "Influence: The Psychology of Persuasion" if you want a good book on the subject of marketting and persuasion. Often times it is more difficult to give away "free" things than it is to get people to pay for them.
I was going for Funny but Insightful is what I got. There is obviously enough truth in there to resonate with moderators. Thanks for calling me a petulant child. That's great. Congratulations. Do you feel more comfortable now that you've fed your ego and demeaned me? You should consider going to work for the Pentagon. I hear that they are putting a big emphasis on communications these days.
As a counterpoint to your statement about very few governmental agencies being considered sponsors of terrorism, consider the number of people on government maintained no fly lists. You don't necessarily have to be a member of a foreign government to be opposed to US foreign policy and because of that opposition to be considered a threat.
I think this book is mis-information put out by al-CIAda.
I had similar thoughts. I wonder if the author bothers to dive into the collaboration between the CIA and Pakistani ISI during the creation of al-Qaeda back in the 1970s and 1980s.
I always thought that terrorists were anyone designated by the United States State Department, or Department of Fatherland Security as being opposed to US foreign policy.
Why do I have a feeling that if I sent an email to the President and Vice President threatening to kill them that they wouldn't have any problem retaining it? Maybe I should do it just to prove that they do have an effective email retention policy.;)
In the past the interns had to stay up all night with the paper shredders to get rid of the evidence. These days you just have to misplace a couple of backup tapes and fail to follow data retention procedures. The communication still takes place but the evidence trail is easier to get rid of.
Mod this guy +1 to counter act the FUD he corrected. Whoever the OP is running Exchange in a Fortune 500 company is a freaking moron. No POP3 support? It used to be turned on by default and still might be. No good way to backup Exchange? Try Veritas\Symantec (burn in hell Symantec) Backup Exec with the Exchange agent. Backing up and restoring entire mailboxes to a PST is trivial... it's called exmerge.
That's bullshit. I had a client that had to invest thousands of dollars in an email archiving system because the SEC mandated it. They were a four person "broker/dealer" that dealt with investments. You expect me to believe that the government can make demands of the private sector and then expect slack when they can't even do themselves what they ask others to do?
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Confusing summary aside, this is the biggest load of crap I've read in a long time. The financial world made a really bad guess on just how much "money" was really in the US economy and now they are paying for it. They can't actually be held accountable because then people might catch a glimpse of the fact that the financial wizards who run our lives are really full of shit. So instead of taking responsibility for their mistakes they are blaming it on a computer bug. How effin convienent for them.
"Hey everybody, we aren't fucking idiots. You see, it was the computer! I just told you what it told me on my screen. Hold on... my third trophy wife is on the phone... she's telling me that her and the Lamborghini are stuck in traffic somewhere between my multi-multi million dollar home and the club house where I spend multiple tens of thousands of dollars a year. I'll get back to you right after I blow a few more rails of coke!"
How the hell did these people get to be in charge of society?
The content is there but there isn't any incentive to do it. While I was levelling up to get to the Outlands on my last toon I was one of two people in Eastern Plaguelands. I was one of about ten people in Western Plaguelands. The content is there but the zones are completely dead. I've definitely never done any world PVP in EPL. It would be nice if they introduced some dailies for the now defunct zones, or maybe even did heroic level versions of some of the old instances.
However there isn't much that Blizzard can do about that. They would drive off players in droves if everyone still had to attune to MC or Oxyana's Lair because the guilds that did that three years ago would be bored sick. PVP servers would be complete gank fests as players with great gear came down to wreak havoc on the poor shmucks still stuck in 'old content' land.
If you can't afford to burn $15 a month then you probably have bigger concerns in your life than playing WoW. Anyone with a decent job who can afford a computer and internet connection can afford $15 a month to play WoW. If $15 is a big deal to you then yes, don't play WoW. You obviously have other pressing financial concerns that you need to deal with and your ability to deal with them is only going to be negatively impacted by the time you might spend playing WoW instead of addressing those concerns.
Where do people get that WoW runs alright on a POS machine? I have a P4 3ghz with a gig of RAM and a 256MB GeForce6600 AGP card. That is a pretty craptastic machine and it isn't playable. I get 4fps in Shatt. I get 4fps in Gruuls. Maybe 10fps in Kara. It's so bad that I miss key attack animations from bosses. For example in Gruuls there is a cave in attack. I don't even get the associated animation. It wasn't until I saw it on my friend's computer that I even knew what it looked like.
I can quest just fine on my computer, but raiding is a joke.
Exactly. I just don't have the time or inclination to really get into anything else. I don't even really have the time to put into WoW when you get right down to it. I have the good fortune of being in a half way decent raiding guild simply because my girlfriend works with someone whose boyfriend is a raid leader. My girlfriend and I only play for a couple hours on Saturday night once or twice a month and maybe 4-6 hours over the course of the week.
The social aspect is what keeps them going. For example my girlfriend and I play on a server with a bunch of her co-workers. The game provides us something else to do on Saturday night when we don't really feel like going out. It is something to do if you have an hour or two to kill before bed during the week.
You're right on the money. WoW is a game that you don't have to be a major computer geek to play. I've been playing computer games since the late 1980s but my girlfriend didn't even have her own computer until we started dating. Although we started playing on one server with some friends of mine, we are now playing on a server with a bunch of her co-workers. They're a raiding guild but we're casual players. We can show up and raid on Saturday night with them and do other things during the rest of the week. The fact that WoW can cater to the whole spectrum, from the casual gamers like us to the guys who make a job out of farming materials for potions and gear and what not for a raid is what keeps it successful. If you just want to play the game and raid you can go on a PvE server (FTL). If you want a more indepth and intense experience you can play on PvP.
I'd really like to see is some real world PVP, where you can take over towns and really make life miserable for the other side. It will never happen because the game isn't setup that way, but it seems to be the only element that WoW is really lacking. It would be great if they could set up certain zones to be just like the RTS game. The players would have to protect peons who gather wood and food and gold. Buildings would have to be built and maintained. Eventually one side would dominate the area and then there would have to some sort of epic NPC onslaught to reset everything back to normal. Perhaps each zone could have a specific third party race that the alliance and horde would have to gang up on to take out first. Once that race or faction was gone then they could get into the real business of going after each other. Obviously the system I've described isn't perfect but it could add a really engaging, dynamic aspect to the world.
I'm having a hard time following the logic here. Most people I know who are doing well in college or in the real world don't have lots of time to play video games. Following your logic those people should be drawn to WoW because it allows for casual players who can't devote their lives to it. Conversely, the people out there who have lots and lots of time to devote to a video game are the kids who can come home from school and jump onto the computer. Therefore if you have a game that requires long periods of time to get anywhere, you're going to end up with a lot of kids and basement dwellers who have all sorts of free time to spend on it.
This is the perfect answer. Mod this guy up.
I've had pretty good luck with Verizon DSL. For a moment I was considering switching to cable but with all of the horror stories I've seen around here regarding bitTorrent clients I've stayed away from cable. The only time I ever had a problem is when I was seeding some popular, copyrighted music that I pulled down off of a site that I found via a Google Search. It was kind of creepy. As long as I was seeding the file, my transfer rate went down to near zero. Once I stopped, it went back up to my full speed. I tried it out a few times over a couple of days just to make sure that I wasn't imagining things and sure enough, every time I seeded that one file my connection slowed to a crawl.
Sure, they can stay in the country but we don't have to support them. The system needs to reformed. If these kids who don't want to go to school do want welfare and everything else that are benefits of citizenship then they need to pay the cost of the benefits some how.
They don't want to help you graduate... they want to get paid. Schools lose money when students don't show up. The whole program is simple math. They are planning on spend X amount of money on preventative programs in hopes of securing Y amount of dollars per student kept in school. They just need to make sure that X is less than Y and I'm sure that there are all sorts of studies that have been done by the vendor to prove that their device will reduce truancy by Z percent and that Z percent is high enough so that X will be less than Y.
You have a valid question about security versus functionality but I don't get the sense that SELinux is too concerned with that. There are dozens of distros out there that will give you "functionality" straight out of the box. Ubuntu seems to be a popular distro for those who want things to "just work". It seems to me like SELinux is one of those tools in the toolbox that you use in specific situations that call for it. If you're running a desktop where you want to tinker with things all the time, SELinux is probably just going to frustrate you. On the other hand, if you're developing a financial network that is supposed to pass secure, encrypted data around and be resistant to attack, then you might appreciate the very finely grained controls that are available in SELinux.
Systems like SELinux are necessary to prove that things can be done. When intensely complex trust relationships and roles can be setup within a system, legislation can follow to mandate those controls. Imagine if the financial sector was required to fully track who accesses your information. Imagine if they had to limit access to your information based on which entity wanted the access. Imagine they should have to limit specific entities to specific types of access that can only be granted by following strict, fully auditable procedures. With a system like SELinux, those kind of things can be done. The private sector can't throw up their hands and say, "Oh, it's too complex. We don't even have the tools to do it with."
There is a relationship there. Pick up "Influence: The Psychology of Persuasion" if you want a good book on the subject of marketting and persuasion. Often times it is more difficult to give away "free" things than it is to get people to pay for them.
As a counterpoint to your statement about very few governmental agencies being considered sponsors of terrorism, consider the number of people on government maintained no fly lists. You don't necessarily have to be a member of a foreign government to be opposed to US foreign policy and because of that opposition to be considered a threat.
I had similar thoughts. I wonder if the author bothers to dive into the collaboration between the CIA and Pakistani ISI during the creation of al-Qaeda back in the 1970s and 1980s.
Please mod this up. The parent is short on knowledge and this is a worthwhile correction.
I always thought that terrorists were anyone designated by the United States State Department, or Department of Fatherland Security as being opposed to US foreign policy.
Those guys had some quality releases. Wasn't one of the founders of Razor 1911 involved in some political issues a few years ago too?
Why do I have a feeling that if I sent an email to the President and Vice President threatening to kill them that they wouldn't have any problem retaining it? Maybe I should do it just to prove that they do have an effective email retention policy. ;)
In the past the interns had to stay up all night with the paper shredders to get rid of the evidence. These days you just have to misplace a couple of backup tapes and fail to follow data retention procedures. The communication still takes place but the evidence trail is easier to get rid of.
Mod this guy +1 to counter act the FUD he corrected. Whoever the OP is running Exchange in a Fortune 500 company is a freaking moron. No POP3 support? It used to be turned on by default and still might be. No good way to backup Exchange? Try Veritas\Symantec (burn in hell Symantec) Backup Exec with the Exchange agent. Backing up and restoring entire mailboxes to a PST is trivial... it's called exmerge.
That's bullshit. I had a client that had to invest thousands of dollars in an email archiving system because the SEC mandated it. They were a four person "broker/dealer" that dealt with investments. You expect me to believe that the government can make demands of the private sector and then expect slack when they can't even do themselves what they ask others to do?