Man, and here in Sweden people whine that it's a huge pain to pay back our Student loans, and they only cover cost of living since the tuition is for free (So people end up with 20-30k in loans on average).
Though from what I've read elsewhere in the threads much of the reason the tuition has gone up (in the public universities at least) is because they've lost a lot of public funding the last decade and are forced to make up for it.
When has it been done in the past? This isn't a rhetorical question but a genuine one as I'm not actually very well informed on the history of higher education funding systems.
You're making the false assumption that it's possible to provide university level education at a price that a normal student can afford. If you're wrong you've just collapsed the entire higher education system.
If 51% of the population wants the constitution changed, then the constitution will get changed. Whatever made you think that constitutions did anything more then make the process slower?
It's called Global Warming because the -average- temperature goes up. Because of ignorant people like you that are unable to understand what global average means, they decided to use the term Climate Change instead.
Well, I was thinking of the core gameplay. With a decent SDK it should take a professional coder only a few hours to get a basic Super Mario prototype going.
Obviously a full featured game takes much longer, but the prototype only needs a small level where you can jump around on platforms and kill enemies by landing on them to demonstrate the idea.
When I'm talking about vast amounts of time, I'm thinking about gameplay ideas that requires the game designer to implement sentient AI to work properly or when what you're actually doing is building some kind of simulator, the player just gets to watch it tick along.
Many game designers have a tendency to forget that what they're doing is making a game, if you build a huge pile of technology and slap some gameish aspect on it afterwards you've sorta approached it from the wrong angle.
""Saving for a rainy day" is NOT why insurance exists. Insurance is, by definition, a hedge against disasters. Two different things. Further, insurance does not pay out as much as it takes in (simple elementary-school math), so it doesn't even come close to meeting the definition of "savings". Nor does it address inflation. " I suppose we just have different ideas of what 'saving for a rainy day' means. I interpreted it as hedging against unexpected expenses by means of saving, I contrasted with insurance which hedges against unexpected expenses by paying someone to take the risk for you.
"This is the third point you missed (as I already mentioned above): inflation erodes the value of savings. Even Keynesian economists admit this. If you don't understand why erosion of savings is a bad thing, try being a retired person on a fixed income for a while. It will become very clear to you." As mentioned you can most of the time trivially out-save inflation by investing the money. This might lower the liquidity of your money but if you plan on actually saving that's usually not much of a problem.
"Savings does not "remove money from the economy"! It represents accumulation of capital that can be invested. The alternative is investing only borrowed money. Again, even Keynesians admit that the amount of savings in an economy is a valid indicator of health, as a pool of interest-free, investable capita. But Keynesians tend to give it less weight than other economists do. " It does. There's literally zero difference between putting money in a vault and burning the money. And there's no difference between taking the money out of the vault and printing money.
"As for investing in an index fund: as we clearly saw in 2008, with a fiat currency system, money invested in the market can literally disappear overnight. Hardly what I would consider to be a "secure" investment to leave around for posterity."
What the heck are you on about? Index funds are tied to the market as a whole, which means that as long as the market exists, your money is fine.
The value will obviously fluctuate on a day-to-day basis, because the market does so. But over long periods of time they're an extremely safe investment because the market as a whole can be counted on to steadily expand (The day the market as a whole can't recover any-more is probably the end of human civilization as we know it).
If you compare long term investments it's extremely hard to find investments that have had as good returns as investing in Index funds 50+ years ago has done.
Saving for a rainy day is why insurance exists and saving through investment doesn't really require any notable amount of money.
Talking about inflation as if it was horrible is hard when economists consider it a non-issue unless it goes hyper.
What exactly is the benefit of allowing people to bury money in their backyard and have it retain their value? Having people physically remove value from the economy is objectively bad, it's much healthier to have them invest it in a index fund and leave it there for 100 years instead.
Though there is no reason for services to do that. Locking your livelihood to something that can lose 9/10ths of its value in a few months is a guaranteed way to go bankrupt.
And in the end you have to transfer your money from coins to legal tender to pay taxes.
Actually it's the use of car parts for industrial or commercial use that can't be patented. However you're allowed to patent the use of car parts to improve cars. Scientific Research is interpreted as being commercial/industrial use and thus can't be patented.
In Europe it's almost never a question about "oh my, we shouldn't play God" in public debate since most countries have pushed religion out of the political sphere.
Rather the issue is that it's hard to distinguish bioengineering humans from racial biology, which is a field that Europe has shunned ever since the Nazi's lost the war since the fear is that those atrocities might happen again.
Generally gameplay ideas that requires vast amounts of time to implement are usually not very good ones. Most good games have really simple gameplay at their core.
Well, to be fair the Euro was a fuckup (The problem wasn't the idea of creating a common currency, it was allowing the PIIGS into it) that's by now far beyond the control of the individual member states.
The US has the ability to override, switch off, lower accuracy etc with their GPS system. They will not have the ability to do that with Galileo.
Originally the EU had also planned to have Galileo use the same frequency that GPS does, which means that not only could the US not turn it off, they couldn't jam it either because then they'd jam themselves too.
However after threatening to shoot any Galileo satellites using the GPS frequency down, the EU finally agreed to use different frequencies so jamming would be possible.
You can't patent work that relies on embryonic stem cells, but you're free to research them as much as you want. This decision is about patents and only patents.
This is because the EU only has the power to make economic decisions, like Patents. The actual criminal laws are made by the individual member states.
EU Patent laws prohibits biotechnological patents that are against the public good, clone humans, modify the germ line identity of humans, use embryos for industrial or commercial purposes and modify the genetic identity of animals in a way that causes suffering but doesn't give substantial medical benefit.
This patent came under the "uses of human embryos for industrial or commercial purposes" clause.
Huh? It's important to realize that the EU only regulates economic policies, not criminal ones. The member states have full independence on how they want to define murder.
Secondly the relevant law referred to is this: Article 6
1. Inventions shall be considered unpatentable where their commercial exploitation would be contrary to ordre public or morality; however, exploitation shall not be deemed to be so contrary merely because it is prohibited by law or regulation.
2. On the basis of paragraph 1, the following, in particular, shall be considered unpatentable:
(a) processes for cloning human beings;
(b) processes for modifying the germ line genetic identity of human beings;
(c) uses of human embryos for industrial or commercial purposes;
(d) processes for modifying the genetic identity of animals which are likely to cause them suffering without any substantial medical benefit to man or animal, and also animals resulting from such processes.
Slashdot Mirror
Man, and here in Sweden people whine that it's a huge pain to pay back our Student loans, and they only cover cost of living since the tuition is for free (So people end up with 20-30k in loans on average).
Though from what I've read elsewhere in the threads much of the reason the tuition has gone up (in the public universities at least) is because they've lost a lot of public funding the last decade and are forced to make up for it.
When has it been done in the past? This isn't a rhetorical question but a genuine one as I'm not actually very well informed on the history of higher education funding systems.
You're making the false assumption that it's possible to provide university level education at a price that a normal student can afford. If you're wrong you've just collapsed the entire higher education system.
The tricky part tends to be whether Fraud is part of the game or not.
You've really managed to confuse yourself.
1) There is no way to know that someone has fake pass codes. You ask him for his other code and he'll look at you like you're a moron.
2) Your assumption that the majority has to be fake codes has absolutely no basis.
3) There is no reason for most people to ever get more then one code. The fake codes are just to prevent voter intimidation.
If 51% of the population wants the constitution changed, then the constitution will get changed. Whatever made you think that constitutions did anything more then make the process slower?
It's called Global Warming because the -average- temperature goes up. Because of ignorant people like you that are unable to understand what global average means, they decided to use the term Climate Change instead.
While I do like that kind of games at times (Paradox almost only makes that genre) you're not going to get innovative gameplay out of them.
Well, I was thinking of the core gameplay. With a decent SDK it should take a professional coder only a few hours to get a basic Super Mario prototype going.
Obviously a full featured game takes much longer, but the prototype only needs a small level where you can jump around on platforms and kill enemies by landing on them to demonstrate the idea.
When I'm talking about vast amounts of time, I'm thinking about gameplay ideas that requires the game designer to implement sentient AI to work properly or when what you're actually doing is building some kind of simulator, the player just gets to watch it tick along.
Many game designers have a tendency to forget that what they're doing is making a game, if you build a huge pile of technology and slap some gameish aspect on it afterwards you've sorta approached it from the wrong angle.
Yes, and a meteorite may hit your head and kill you tomorrow. The point isn't that the mainstream currencies are safe, they are safe-er.
All currencies have some amount of volatility, however Bitcoins are -extremely- volatile and have -no mechanism- to control stability -what so ever-
""Saving for a rainy day" is NOT why insurance exists. Insurance is, by definition, a hedge against disasters. Two different things. Further, insurance does not pay out as much as it takes in (simple elementary-school math), so it doesn't even come close to meeting the definition of "savings". Nor does it address inflation. "
I suppose we just have different ideas of what 'saving for a rainy day' means. I interpreted it as hedging against unexpected expenses by means of saving, I contrasted with insurance which hedges against unexpected expenses by paying someone to take the risk for you.
"This is the third point you missed (as I already mentioned above): inflation erodes the value of savings. Even Keynesian economists admit this. If you don't understand why erosion of savings is a bad thing, try being a retired person on a fixed income for a while. It will become very clear to you."
As mentioned you can most of the time trivially out-save inflation by investing the money. This might lower the liquidity of your money but if you plan on actually saving that's usually not much of a problem.
"Savings does not "remove money from the economy"! It represents accumulation of capital that can be invested. The alternative is investing only borrowed money. Again, even Keynesians admit that the amount of savings in an economy is a valid indicator of health, as a pool of interest-free, investable capita. But Keynesians tend to give it less weight than other economists do. "
It does. There's literally zero difference between putting money in a vault and burning the money. And there's no difference between taking the money out of the vault and printing money.
"As for investing in an index fund: as we clearly saw in 2008, with a fiat currency system, money invested in the market can literally disappear overnight. Hardly what I would consider to be a "secure" investment to leave around for posterity."
What the heck are you on about? Index funds are tied to the market as a whole, which means that as long as the market exists, your money is fine.
The value will obviously fluctuate on a day-to-day basis, because the market does so. But over long periods of time they're an extremely safe investment because the market as a whole can be counted on to steadily expand (The day the market as a whole can't recover any-more is probably the end of human civilization as we know it).
If you compare long term investments it's extremely hard to find investments that have had as good returns as investing in Index funds 50+ years ago has done.
Saving for a rainy day is why insurance exists and saving through investment doesn't really require any notable amount of money.
Talking about inflation as if it was horrible is hard when economists consider it a non-issue unless it goes hyper.
What exactly is the benefit of allowing people to bury money in their backyard and have it retain their value? Having people physically remove value from the economy is objectively bad, it's much healthier to have them invest it in a index fund and leave it there for 100 years instead.
Though Keynesian economics consider the 96% money devaluation a good thing since it promotes investment.
Though there is no reason for services to do that. Locking your livelihood to something that can lose 9/10ths of its value in a few months is a guaranteed way to go bankrupt.
And in the end you have to transfer your money from coins to legal tender to pay taxes.
Best one out there? Handwritten IOU notes and shiny sea shells are both more stable and more useful currencies for actual use.
Bitcoin objectively worse as a currency then any other in current use.
Actually it's the use of car parts for industrial or commercial use that can't be patented. However you're allowed to patent the use of car parts to improve cars. Scientific Research is interpreted as being commercial/industrial use and thus can't be patented.
Well, that's why you have the competition. If you're lucky one of them might come up with something good.
In Europe it's almost never a question about "oh my, we shouldn't play God" in public debate since most countries have pushed religion out of the political sphere.
Rather the issue is that it's hard to distinguish bioengineering humans from racial biology, which is a field that Europe has shunned ever since the Nazi's lost the war since the fear is that those atrocities might happen again.
Generally gameplay ideas that requires vast amounts of time to implement are usually not very good ones. Most good games have really simple gameplay at their core.
Well, to be fair the Euro was a fuckup (The problem wasn't the idea of creating a common currency, it was allowing the PIIGS into it) that's by now far beyond the control of the individual member states.
As far as I can tell the truth is this.
The US has the ability to override, switch off, lower accuracy etc with their GPS system.
They will not have the ability to do that with Galileo.
Originally the EU had also planned to have Galileo use the same frequency that GPS does, which means that not only could the US not turn it off, they couldn't jam it either because then they'd jam themselves too.
However after threatening to shoot any Galileo satellites using the GPS frequency down, the EU finally agreed to use different frequencies so jamming would be possible.
You can't patent work that relies on embryonic stem cells, but you're free to research them as much as you want. This decision is about patents and only patents.
This is because the EU only has the power to make economic decisions, like Patents. The actual criminal laws are made by the individual member states.
It's a moral issue.
EU Patent laws prohibits biotechnological patents that are against the public good, clone humans, modify the germ line identity of humans, use embryos for industrial or commercial purposes and modify the genetic identity of animals in a way that causes suffering but doesn't give substantial medical benefit.
This patent came under the "uses of human embryos for industrial or commercial purposes" clause.
Huh? It's important to realize that the EU only regulates economic policies, not criminal ones. The member states have full independence on how they want to define murder.
Secondly the relevant law referred to is this:
Article 6
1. Inventions shall be considered unpatentable where their commercial exploitation would be contrary to ordre public or morality; however, exploitation shall not be deemed to be so contrary merely because it is prohibited by law or regulation.
2. On the basis of paragraph 1, the following, in particular, shall be considered unpatentable:
(a) processes for cloning human beings;
(b) processes for modifying the germ line genetic identity of human beings;
(c) uses of human embryos for industrial or commercial purposes;
(d) processes for modifying the genetic identity of animals which are likely to cause them suffering without any substantial medical benefit to man or animal, and also animals resulting from such processes.
Well, his argument was actually
"If a company can't get a patent based on my research, how will I convince them to implement my research?"
Though it sorta falls flat on its face. Companies fall over-themselves in the harsh competition to implement stuff that's out of patent protection.