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Comment: Pay good money to get there, but be bad at it? (Score 1, Insightful) 253

by Stolpskott (#46344001) Attached to: Blizzard To Sell Level 90 <em>WoW</em> Characters For $60

Paying to skip the whole boring leveling process is going to be a wet dream for a lot of impatient wannabes. But from my experience with MMOs based on leveling skills, you pretty much need to go through the leveling process to get to know the class, limitations, effective playstyles, rotations, and so on. Starting at max level is going to mean that you know nothing about the character class, so you will be a waste of a group/raid slot.
Cue lfg messages where the caller asks for members who have not bought their max level character...

Comment: Significantly less... but there is a reason (Score 1) 270

by Stolpskott (#46343969) Attached to: How much time do you spend gaming compared to 10 years ago?

10 years ago, I was on "gardening leave" for 6 months from a job, and once that leave finished, I got a very generous severance package. So for about 9 months in 2004, I was able to do whatever the hell I wanted with my time. Aside from a couple of "walkabout" vacations across Europe and the US, I had no trouble at all spending 12 hours a day playing games. Fun times... grinding toons in my favourite MMO at the time, usually depopulating Nym's Stronghold on Lok looking for a decent set of vibromotors... fun times.

Comment: Me = competitive, women = social? (Score 2) 320

by Stolpskott (#46285295) Attached to: E-Sports Gender Gap: 90+% Male

My first instinct was to think that the competitive nature of e-sports would be more likely to attract men than women, as men are "naturally" more competitive when playing games, while women (in my experience) tend to play games either to socialize or relax. It is a very broad brush to paint the two sexes with, but as we are basically looking at a sub-section of men (those who are interested in playing or watching e-sports) versus an entire gender (women, specifically why are there not more of them playing/watching e-sports) any comparisons are going to be a bit disingenuous.
However, I suspect that a large percentage of people who chose not to declare their gender in the survey are doing so out of a sense of privacy, rather than a desire to hide the "fact" that they are women... unless they are also attending the venue where the survey is taken while wearing androgynous clothing designed to mask their gender, and expect to be pounced on like an antelope surrounded by a pack of hungry lions if there is even a hint of femininity (disturbingly, that is probably not far from the truth in some cases).

Comment: Re:"educational" is not "fair use" (Score 3, Informative) 268

Quoting from 17 U.S.C 107:



the nature of the copyrighted work;





Comment: Their sandpit, their rules (Score 1) 573

by Stolpskott (#46171065) Attached to: HTML5 App For Panasonic TVs Rejected - JQuery Is a "Hack"

If you are having problems getting past this one (idiotic) App reviewer, then unless you have already gone through a successful app review process with another reviewer whom you can use for a second opinion or have an escalation point to request an appeal, then you have only two choices that I can see - give up on the idea, or rewrite the app without using jQuery (either by self-coding all of those elements, or taking the bits of jQuery that you need and packaging those separately.

Comment: Re:Devils Advocate (Score 1) 385

by Stolpskott (#46160291) Attached to: HP To Charge For Service Packs and Firmware For Out-of-Warranty Customers

Lets say you sell something you warrant to work for three years. Some four years later, there's some kind of security flaw - why should the company not need some extra funds to develop a fix? To my mind this change is something that will lead to better support for older products, because you can keep on paying and demanding fixes for your payments...

Let's say that I buy a brand new HP product, and then inside of 1 month I notice a bug in the firmware. It doesn't stop the system working, because that server is not hosting anything on its secondary RAID array other than a set of backup disks that I can put on a different controller (i.e. it causes a problem, but I have an easy and 100% effective workaround). However, I report the bug to HP. On that server, I download all available firmware updates and apply them as they are released.
3 years later, that system is out of warranty but I now need to start using that secondary disk array, and HP has now released a firmware patch to fix the bug that I reported when first using the system.
In this case, the "different controller" happened to be a RAID card that had been purchased for a different project which was on-off-on-off- and then finally back on, so we had to purchase another RAID card, which was a smaller expense than swapping out the entire HP server for one with different firmware (the other option we had).

At the time we had this issue, we could just download the patch from HP for our now out-of-warranty system. Under this new policy, we could not have done so.

If companies fix their firmware issues in a timely fashion, my problem does not arise. As it is, I can see a huge demand on Torrent sites for HP firmware updates coming up, or contract network professionals trying to build up firmware libraries through companies that do maintain their HP service agreements.

Comment: Step one, do not criticize. Step 2, document. (Score 3, Informative) 308

by Stolpskott (#46140591) Attached to: Ask Slashdot: What Do You Do If You're Given a Broken Project?






Comment: Re:munis are broke (Score 4, Informative) 430

by Stolpskott (#46119311) Attached to: Kansas To Nix Expansion of Google Fiber and Municipal Broadband

munis didn't fund wars... nice try though

Maybe not... but spending by Munis is also not responsible for the vast majority of US public debt. As of 2012 (the latest year-end I can find data for without logging into Bloomberg and compiling the data):
US local government debt as a percentage of GDP was around 7-8%.
US state government debt as a percentage of GDP was around 19-20%.
US federal government debt as a percentage of GDP was a touch over 120%.

So, by far the biggest contributor to US public debt is the US Federal Government, and by far the biggest single-ticket item of its expenditure is military spending ($700 Billion per year in direct contract awards), with massive spending on the conflicts in Iraq and Afghanistan. The most thorough study that I can find public reference to is by Brown University, which puts the cost of troop deployments in Iraq, Afghanistan and logistical support in Pakistan, plus domestic spending on debt interest to service that cost, at something over $6 Trillion so far, and that is only since 2003.
The study itself does not seem to be publicly available on the interwebs - Crawford, Neta and Catherine Lutz. "Economic and Budgetary Costs of the Wars in Afghanistan, Iraq and Pakistan to the United States: A Summary". Costs of War. Brown University.
But you can check out the Wikipedia article to get the basics: Financial cost of the Iraq War

Seeing as the current US Federal Debt burden is somewhere between $17 and $17.5 Trillion, the "non-War" debt burden is still a not-inconsiderable $11 Trillion, but the annual Military Gravy Train in the US dwarfs the rest of the debt components.

Comment: Bring in the IRS... (Score 0) 62

by Stolpskott (#46054509) Attached to: Searching For Dark Matter From Deep Under an Italian Mountain


Comment: Re:rubber-necker woot-woot (Score 1) 276

And if they tell you you're going to be safe, more than once, you're going to die.

Even worse, never, ever, agree to wear a red shirt and beam down to a planet with them. You probably have a better chance of survival by playing Russian Roulette with an automatic pistol...

Comment: Re:Basic Math (Score 1) 259

by Stolpskott (#46044569) Attached to: Up To a Quarter of California Smog Comes From China

Ok, so here's what doesn't make sense. If they're saying 25% of the smog came from china, then only 1.3% of the total smog is from goods produced for export to the US. On the other hand, if they're really saying that what they're saying, and 25% of total smog is from US goods, that means 470% of the smog in total is form China.

5. I'm really tired and I missed something. But I don't think I'm that tired.

The article is a bit whiffy when it comes to the figures, but the bit you are missing is that it is not just the smog from goods produced for export to the US that is making its way over to the US. If it was, that would be an interesting irony... I do not think it helps that the article seems to be at the same time trying to discuss the amount of pollution generated by Chinese manufacturing of goods for export to the US, while also discussing the amount of smog "exported" from China to the US. Those things are very easily confused.
So some of the smog generated by China that makes its way over to the US was generated by manufacturing processes for goods not destined for export to the US. :)


by Stolpskott (#46022113) Attached to: Linus Torvalds: Any CLA Is Fundamentally Broken

I was wondering how much Linus knows about Conjugated Linoleic Acids.

Quite a bit, it seems. After all, he has been able to analyse the CLAs produced by several other sources and determined that they are broken. So he must know as much or more about them than the FSF and Apache biochemists who produced the Acids for those organisations... although why the FSF and Apache Foundation would need or want such materials is beyond me...

Comment: You'll get lots of stupid questions post-interview (Score 1) 692

by Stolpskott (#46012651) Attached to: Blowing Up a Pointless Job Interview

First, you would be surprised how inter-connected a lot of these HR departments and technical team are - people moving from one company to another, or simply talking to each other about "asshat" candidates is very common.
I find that is more of a problem in smaller countries and specialized industries, such as the banking sector in Stockholm or Oslo... less of a problem in London or New York.
However, the rule is, as always, keep it professional in the interview. If you get the feeling that the role or the people or the company are not for you, explain to the interviewer calmly and rationally that you are not getting a good feeling about the situation, thank them for their time and wish them luck in filling the position. Then make your way out of the office and be thankful that you have only wasted an hour or two of your time. Certainly, that is not as satisfying as making a snarky comment, but you will find that all the pre-prepared snarky comments you walked in with are not appropriate for the situation, and all of the appropriate snarky comments you can come up with on the spot are insufficiently snarky to correctly encapsulate your sarcasm.

Plus, if you think the interview questions are stupid, wait until you meet the users. Asking stupid questions in the interview is a good way of weeding out the people who will be incapable of suppressing the urge to strangle the third user who asks a mortifyingly stupid question.

Comment: Re:NoScript (Score 1) 731

by Stolpskott (#45992513) Attached to: Ask Slashdot: Are AdBlock's Days Numbered?



6. Company loses potential customers to competitors.
7. (Competitors) Profit!!!!



Comment: Re:Double bind (Score 1) 1431

by Stolpskott (#45974413) Attached to: Man Shot To Death For Texting During Movie

An armed society is a polite society. When you know someone is probably able to kill you (justified or not), you tend to be much more polite to them. Take away people's ability to restrain rude fucks, and the rude fucks run riot through the life you're trying to live.

An armed society (with concealed carry) is a society in which the individuals fear other individuals because they might be carrying a gun. "This person might be carrying a gun so they can kill me, so I need to fear them."
Fear leads to one of two impulses - fight or flight. Flight, and the guy runs out of the theater. Fight, and the guy pulls his own gun because he feels threatened, and you have another Trayvon Martin incident, but with a few more witnesses and the possibility of a stray shot wounding or killing innocent bystanders.

Politeness comes from mutual respect, not from fear. Respect has nothing to do with guns, but with tolerance and empathy. Both needed to show a bit more tolerance and empathy for the wishes of the other, but neither did so one is now dead and the other will almost certainly spend the rest of their life in prison at the taxpayer's expense. Doesn't exactly sound like a win-win for the "Right to bear arms" lobby.
