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Comment: Re:20,000 H1Bs for the country vs 320 million citi (Score 1) 288

by artor3 (#47080981) Attached to: HP Makes More Money, Cuts 16,000 Jobs

And don't forget it's a three year period, so the actual number of H1-B visa holders in the company could be as many as triple that. It will actually be somewhat less, because not everyone stays for the full three years, but there are certainly at least half a million people in the country on the H1-B visa. And that's not counting the other work visa types, such as the L-1. When you consider that the total number of engineering, programming, and technician jobs is around 4 million, it becomes clear just how big an impact visas have.

Comment: The human is just a passenger (Score 4, Insightful) 301

If the car is truly "fully autonomous" as the question suggests, then the human is just a passenger. Since when do we need a license or insurance to be a passenger? Some age restriction would be nice, so that little five-year-old Jimmy doesn't steal the family car for an automated trip to Disney World, but anything beyond that is just clinging to the past.

Comment: Re:Bullshit (Score 4, Insightful) 101

by artor3 (#46996571) Attached to: In the New Age of Game Development, Gamers Have More Power Than Ever

If a tool is for internal use only, it can have a messy UI. It can involve half a dozen different programs that must be used in a particular order. It can have crap documentation, relying on the developers' tribal knowledge. If you were to just "zip them up and putting them on an ftp", your community would turn on you in a heartbeat, declare that you don't care about supporting your game, and that this justifies pirating it. They'll spam every review site they can find with the worst scores that the site will accept. They'll spam your message boards with abuse, and drive away other customers.

I've seen gamer communities fly into a rage over much less. If you're going to publish mod tools, you need to actually do it right.

Comment: Re: I never asked for this (Score 2) 101

by artor3 (#46996523) Attached to: In the New Age of Game Development, Gamers Have More Power Than Ever

1. Dumbing things down just breeds better idiots who will then require even more dumbing down. Offering challenge above and beyond the players current ability is what grants the opportunity for improvement. You don't learn how to play by sticking with "I'm too young to die" mode.

How dare those people enjoy different things!?

Did you ever think, maybe some people don't care about honing a useless skill, and are just looking for some light entertainment?

It's not like hard games no longer exist. New ones are being made all the time. The casual market has been booming, so as a percentage, hardcore gaming is down, but why get upset over that?

Hollywood pushes out mindless crap like the Avengers, but that doesn't mean quality films no longer exist. The TV is full of reality shit, but there are still good programs to be found. Trashy romance novels make up a sizeable portion of book sales, but you can still find fantastic literature being written every year.

Stop dwelling on the fact that things you like aren't the most popular things. Unless the thing you like best is being angry, in which case, don't let me stop you.

Comment: Re:Bullshit (Score 1) 101

by artor3 (#46996475) Attached to: In the New Age of Game Development, Gamers Have More Power Than Ever

Did you even bother to read what you quoted?

Sure, a company can spend the time and effort to produce good mod tools, but that's not necessarily a good business decision.

Read that a few more times, to be sure it sinks in.

Skyrim? Good mod tools.
DA:O? Good mod tools.
XCom? Good mod tools.
Fallout? Good mod tools.
Dark Souls? You've gotta be fucking kidding me, there are no real mods for that game. Just a borderline essential fix to boost the resolution, and some texture replacements.

Every good example you gave had mod tools released by the developers. Those aren't free to make, ya know. The time and money spent developing those could go towards making a better game. You call it a "laziness issue", but that's absurd. Have you ever worked a real job? I guarantee you, the developers worked their fucking asses off to get those games out the door. If they didn't have mod tools, it's not because they were lazy, it's because they had finite resources, and decided those resources were better spent elsewhere.

Comment: Re:Bullshit (Score 1, Interesting) 101

It's not really that, either. It's that modding modern games is simply more difficult, because the games are more complex. Sure, a company can spend the time and effort to produce good mod tools, but that's not necessarily a good business decision. It's a major selling point for certain franchises, but not every game is going to develop a big modding community. Would Company of Heroes 2 have sold better if it had better modding support? Or would that just have been wasted money by the developer?

Comment: Re:Wow, the Republicans... (Score 1) 194

by artor3 (#46963993) Attached to: Shunting the FCC To the Slow Lane

You missed the part where the House Republicans voted to end net neutrality years ago, only to be stopped by the Senate Democrats.

You also missed the part where Obama implemented a limited net neutrality via executive order, only to have that struck down by the courts, following a lawsuit by Verizon.

You also missed the part where Republicans cheered the court's ruling, declaring that net neutrality is "socialism".

Look here, or just google "obama net neutrality court" for a dozen other sources.

Here's the lede, in case you're too lazy to click:

A federal appeals court on Tuesday struck down regulations that require Internet providers to treat all traffic the same, dealing a potentially fatal blow to President Obama’s push for “net neutrality.”

Opponents of the rules, led by plaintiff Verizon, hailed the decision from the D.C. Circuit Court of Appeals as a victory over government meddling in the marketplace.

Rep. Marsha Blackburn (R-Tenn.), one of the biggest opponents of the Federal Communications Commission (FCC) rules in Congress, applauded the court for striking down “socialistic regulations.”

Do you get it yet? The Democrats have been fighting for years to try to keep net neutrality around. The Republicans have fought to destroy it. The Republicans won, because the courts were on their side. And now you blame ...the Democrats.

This is why things will never get better. This is why you will lose everything, bit by bit. Because you don't pay attention, and you lash out at the same people who tried to fight for you. Really, you deserve to lose.

Comment: Re:Episode V! (Score 2) 457

by artor3 (#46937021) Attached to: Favorite Star Wars Movie?

It's not like Luke spent hours flying through that trench. They flew towards it in open space, but you can't just fly in a straight line in the middle of a dogfight. They got as close as they reasonably could, and at that point it made more sense to fly within the trench and take cover from some of the guns. If they had been flying, say, a few kilometers above the surface, they would have been exposed to ALL of the surface guns, rather than just those that could shoot within the trench.

Comment: Re:Zoned? (Score 4, Interesting) 105

by artor3 (#46924879) Attached to: Computer Game Reveals 'Space-Time' Neurons In the Eye

He might just suck at estimating weight. I used to play a game at work where we would have people guess how much a package weighed before putting it on a scale, and some people are really, jaw-droppingly bad at that sort of thing. It's sort of interesting how people can usually estimate lengths, and volumes, and temperatures quite well, but on weight they'll be off by a factor of five or more.



Posted by timothy

Comment: Re:Please try harder. (Score 1) 327

The perfect irony of course is that Google's own pagerank depends on cross-site linking... By robbing people of URLs, a future generation of net users will grow up never knowing how to share a page with their friends unless there's a sharing mechanism within the same site their friends already use.

Who say's you need a sharing mechanism within the site? I'm sure Google will let you click and drag the "Origin Chip" into Google Hangouts (tm). The fact that that lets them track what you share is just gravy.

Comment: Re:Don't Misunderstand Me... (Score 2) 548

by artor3 (#46905753) Attached to: Reason Suggests DoJ Closing Porn Stars' Bank Accounts

Ehh, maybe so. Maybe the industry asked the DOJ for support. Maybe the DOJ didn't think the industry was handling it well and wanted to step in. Maybe they're wrong to do so. I don't know.

What I do know, is that a lot of people here seem to think that this is part of Obama's super-secret conspiracy to eradicate porn and fireworks and dating websites. And that's absolutely bonkers.

Comment: Re:Don't Misunderstand Me... (Score 4, Insightful) 548

by artor3 (#46904821) Attached to: Reason Suggests DoJ Closing Porn Stars' Bank Accounts

The question is "high risk of what?"

The answer is credit card fraud. That's what the DOJ is trying to go after here. If you google online ammo suppliers, you get a bunch of sites that look like they haven't been updated since '98. I have no doubt that the companies are perfectly reputable. But they might not have the tightest security when it comes to detecting fraudulent transactions.

No one is saying that they're engaged in anything illegal. No one is saying they're unstable, fly-by-night businesses. What the DOJ seems to think is that the payment processing companies they do business with might be turning a blind eye to fraud in order to make more money.
