Aaron England - Slashdot User

Comment Car dealerships have a legal monopoly (Score 1) 160

by Aaron England on Wednesday October 09, 2013 @02:10PM (#45083555) Attached to: Car Dealers vs the Web: GM Shifts Toward Online Purchasing

Has anyone ever wondered why we buy cars the way we do? If you wanted to buy a banana, you wouldn't go to a banana store. You would go to a grocery store and pick from a multitude of different fruits. Yet with (new) cars, there is no grocery store equivalent. Why is that? Well the reason is that in all 50 states dealerships have established a legal monopoly which basically prohibits this.

Planet Money did a podcast on this very issue.

Comment Re:Altruism vs profit. (Score 1) 156

by Aaron England on Thursday June 07, 2012 @01:50PM (#40247043) Attached to: Intel Builds On Top of Android, But Hedges On Open-Sourcing Improvements

Intel is a public company. They have a fiduciary duty to be profitable not charitable.

Comment Re:Yes, Russia better worry the most (Score 5, Interesting) 243

by Aaron England on Monday February 07, 2011 @04:27PM (#35129778) Attached to: Iran's New Space Program

Because instability in the Middle East raises oil prices and as of 2009 Russia surpassed Saudi Arabia as the world's largest oil exporter.

EVE Online Battle Breaks Records (And Servers) 308

Posted by Soulskill on Tuesday January 05, 2010 @02:09AM from the blame-it-on-the-torrents dept.

captainktainer writes "In one of the largest tests of EVE Online's new player sovereignty system in the Dominion expansion pack, a fleet of ships attempting to retake a lost star system was effectively annihilated amidst controversy. Defenders IT Alliance, a coalition succeeding the infamous Band of Brothers alliance (whose disbanding was covered in a previous story), effectively annihilated the enemy fleet, destroying thousands of dollars' worth of in-game assets. A representative of the alliance claimed to have destroyed a minimum of four, possibly five or more of the game's most expensive and powerful ship class, known as Titans. Both official and unofficial forums are filled with debate about whether the one-sided battle was due to difference in player skill or the well-known network failures after the release of the expansion. One of the attackers, a member of the GoonSwarm alliance, claims that because of bad coding, 'Only 5% of [the attackers] loaded,' meaning that lag prevented the attackers from using their ships, even as the defenders were able to destroy those ships unopposed. Even members of the victorious IT Alliance expressed disappointment at the outcome of the battle. CCP, EVE Online's publisher, has recently acknowledged poor network performance, especially in the advertised 'large fleet battles' that Dominion was supposed to encourage, and has asked players to help them stress test their code on Tuesday. Despite the admitted network failure, leaders of the attacking force do not expect CCP to replace lost ships, claiming that it was their own fault for not accounting for server failures. The incident raises questions about CCP's ability to cope with the increased network use associated with their rapid growth in subscriptions."

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