Some players enjoy leveling, others do not.

Guild Wars 2 solved this issue beautifully I felt.

When you enter a zone your hp, damage etc gets scaled to the level of the area. Only down-scaled however so you cannot just jump to high level areas immediately.

This DOES mean that your friends at higher levels can play with you though,which a bunch of my friends did. Worked great.

Sadly the game didnt really 'last' for us for a variety of other reasons.

I would not pay to level up an alt... but if I were to start on a new server? I actually might.

Starting out on a new server, even with heirlooms you still end up sometimes strapped for cash.
Boosting up to 90 so you have a 'money-runner' so to speak might be worth it.

Personally I've leveled up probably 30 characters since I started playing shortly after launch in EU.. I find it enjoyable compared to a lot of other time-wasters. Sometimes I just want to mindlessly derp around after a long day of figuring shit out at work.

I doubt I will make use of it, but I can see situations where I could.
Especially with the amusing exchange rate/cost of living difference between the US and where I live... 60 bucks is roughly 4 pints :p

They require a social account to 'outsource' the verification of non-bot accounts.
Doesnt work well, but still...

Account-less commenting was ruined by trolls years ago.

They know the exact cause of the problem, they just wont tell us.

"This is a known issue with the ProLiant 380DL G5 series."

Yet they do not consider it a production flaw or a bug, even though it will require a motherboard replacement to fix. They consider it "not our problem" so customers are left to hunt the market for refurb machines to replace em.. (we're locked into a certain line due to the HUGE costs of re-certifying the system if we change anything..)

Where I work the engineers pick the hardware. Not a bad place in that way.

On several servers over the course of 4 years?...

Yeah.... this is going to bite them in the ass... hard.

We recently had an issue with HP servers showing temperatures of 255C on motherboard sensors...
They said this was a firmware issue and told us to flash the bios to fix this. We did... the sensor now shows -127C. Big help.

It actually required a motherboard replacement and they claimed this was -not- a warranty issue because the server was too old. In the meantime we've had 4 more servers have this issue, which makes them unusable in our environment (oil rig HMI).

Would they now not give us the fix without us feeding them a bit of cash? Fuck them.

Because if they do not they're probably violating all sorts of laws?

They talked about blocking news sites, social networks and music streaming services where I work.

That talk lasted about 3 days after the department meeting, then it went dead silent on the issue.

Management were told in no uncertain terms that if this were to happen, people would stop all goodwill towards the company and just do EXACTLY what was required by them to get paid, and nothing more... Aaaaand the blocking talk went silent ;)

There is a third issue here...

Unless the segment of drug users is fairly large, blanket testing does not pay for itself.
So even if the two other issues were ignored, it would still be a bad idea.

Costs money, different budget from any losses so the manager in charge of the expense will reject your proposal.
He has no motivation to spend the extra money to secure the system as he is not the one who is fucked if they get hacked.

Sad but true in many cases...

Getting caught with your pants down or a major shutdown due to a breach could put you in legal trouble.

So they're usually kept hushed the hell down by most companies.

Especially if you have a separate emergency shutdown (ESD) system that is fully up and running...

Goes something like this:

"Shit, close that valve we're getting an over-pressure on line 3"
"Valve closed"
"Bah, too slow, we're in a blowdown..."

Aaaand you have 300 feet of flame coming from the flare. Fun times for all :p

If only I wasnt under multiple NDAs I'd love to describe how insane the offshore oil business really is when it comes to security....

Some examples:

We have people accessing the secure clients from onshore using RDP, the security for that is implemented as read-only users on the domain offshore... so it assumes there are no flaws in the RDP client for an unpatched Windows 2003 server... yay.....

They gave access to the raw OPC servers for a data logging service that is managed from a 3rd party office on shore... With no access control implemented so that they could save 5000 dollars... this on a rig that produces 50 million USD worth of product -a day-.

Nobody get security at these companies, nobody. It is painful to watch your audit get marginalized because any fix will cost money.
Especially if the whole security upgrade to patch up at least 20 serious issues cost less than 10 minutes of downtime... sigh.

These rigs tend to have a top-level operator system based on windows, with limited patching and a variety of issues. Why?
Building a custom system is expensive, and any losses from breaches are gambled on by managers who are not personally responsible for anything. All they care about is short term goals and their next bonus...

I stopped feeling bad for them years ago when yet another security flaw was reported and ignored. It will bite them in the ass eventually, until then, they wont learn a thing.