Every nation in the world will eventually require citizens to provide identification on demand in order to travel or purchase anything. I don't think there is any way to but the brakes on that.
There are exceptional situations where this is not true.
1. If can choose not to pay its bills. For example if austerity measures are necessary the government can refuse to pay interest on some debts. Now creditors will have difficulty selling such a debt. Buying and selling debt is a thing, and terms for borrowing money depend a lot on how you are rated with your current debts. The US is far away from being so poorly rated that they can't borrow money anymore, so it's probably not a realistic scenario.
2. The government could collapse due to war, civil unrest or overthrow. Usually the new country won't honor debts of the prior regime. The Confederacy had a lot of issues borrowing money in the last two years of the War. The first half of the war the CSA was so successful at raising money that the US was a bit unprepared as some assumed the rebellion couldn't last under to finance costly military action.
If the US has been caught spying on close allies like Germany and Israel, then you can reasonably assume that Russia, China, North Korea, and others are spying on the US. (we've caught Israel spying on the US for example)
At this point I assume that even the UK spies on the US. And that Sweden probably hosts spies from other countries at the Embassy of Sweden. I guess we all like keeping an eye on our friends and there is no such thing as absolute trust between nations.
I dunno, back in the day before cell phones, we were playing paper football with each other or something distracting like that.
Me too. But I think I could still hear and process a lecture while doing paper football. Maybe not 100%, but I think I absorbed some of the lecture.
Hell, I remember back in the day, when the first LED Mattel Football handheld game came out.
I'm from the Tiger Electronics and TI Calculator games era. I don't think I retained any of the lecture when I was playing these.
Kids will be kids, but I do feel that those distractions weren't quite so engrossing and distracting for as long a period of time.
Engrossing is definitely the word I was looking for. I think some allowances for differences between generations is acceptable as well. We can't realistically expect our children to have a childhood identical to our own. Especially since most kids aren't allowed to ride bikes around town from lunch till sunset. (sunrise to lunch was for church and chores.). There has to be some way for social interaction among peers in a world where parents try to protect children through physical isolation. It's no surprise that social networking and digital communication is popular with younger generations.
I wouldn't look at the law as a source of scientific truth. I don't have the data but I suspect there is measurable differences for students who play games during lectures versus those who are paying attention. But I'm skeptical there is as significant of a difference for students playing games after the lecture is over until the arbitrary start of the next class session.
I think sending texts during class on a basic cellphone is less distracting than a smartphone tied into dozens of apps and games. If you've ever tried to have a conversation with a child while they were playing an addictive mobile game, you'd know how little of what you say to them that they retain.
If kids are playing mobile games during class, it is effectively the same as not showing up to class at all.
As a Linux user I really appreciate that Steam works on Linux and there are several ported games. I think that's great.
But from a business standpoint I question if it is worth going after the 0.1% of linux gamers (as of 2017). I guess it depends on the development costs for a game publisher. If it amounts to flipping some build options on Unity and some additional testing, then maybe if it's a net profit for a game studio. If it involves new software architecture and implementation, then Linux support must be a labor of love rather than a smart business decision for a game studio.
P.S. - I use SDL2 for all my hobby game projects. It's great! (I'm a C dev so I'm biased toward C-friendly libraries and frameworks)
I mean sure, Linux won the phone market, home router market, and server market. But we can't call ourselves REAL men until we win the desktop market. Even if we overthrow the PC master race, somehow we'll never be as cool as they were.
I think it was a rhetorical question. Not that he was seeking the answer to it, but he was trying to make a point with it. But maybe I'm giving him too much credit.
Life isn't always about getting the schedule or job you want. Sometimes you have to suck it up and do what you need to do and stop whining about why you fail.
Science is about studying reality and discovering new things about the world around us. Optimizing behavior in light of the realities of biology would give us an edge over people who refuse to adapt.
Just because you turned out fine doing things sub-optimally isn't justification for future generations to continue to do things the same way. It's the sort of trap that conservative thinking falls into, and frankly it's a very lazy philosophy.
1. My internet is always on. So that in-house NAS is always available as long as my house has power. 2. At most I would be on the other side of the country. I'm not likely to travel outside of the US and still want to stream over my phone due to the roaming charges anyways.
Streaming MP3s over free hotel WiFi is not a big deal even on the other side of the world, since unidirectional streaming is not latency sensitive.
That checks out. Because I have some albums that I bought that now won't play on the Android app until I sign up for Prime Streaming. but if I carefully go into the menus and pick Download I can get around the restriction. Maybe it's a bug, but it's a rather convenient way for Amazon to influence us to buy yet another service from them.
I'm the 1% who actually used Amazon's MP3 upload feature. But it's trivial for me to uninstall Amazon's apps from my phone, tablet and PC and stream my CD/MP3 collection with a low-end home NAS.
I'm not sure what Amazon is thinking. They have to offer a lot of reasons to keep me on their ad-laden Music app.
Slashdot Mirror
Every nation in the world will eventually require citizens to provide identification on demand in order to travel or purchase anything. I don't think there is any way to but the brakes on that.
Most Swedes do not want to use cash as it requires you to carry around something of value to a mugger.
Why are Swedes getting mugged? It is not San Francisco.
It is completely able to pay its bills.
There are exceptional situations where this is not true.
1. If can choose not to pay its bills. For example if austerity measures are necessary the government can refuse to pay interest on some debts. Now creditors will have difficulty selling such a debt. Buying and selling debt is a thing, and terms for borrowing money depend a lot on how you are rated with your current debts. The US is far away from being so poorly rated that they can't borrow money anymore, so it's probably not a realistic scenario.
2. The government could collapse due to war, civil unrest or overthrow. Usually the new country won't honor debts of the prior regime. The Confederacy had a lot of issues borrowing money in the last two years of the War. The first half of the war the CSA was so successful at raising money that the US was a bit unprepared as some assumed the rebellion couldn't last under to finance costly military action.
I dunno man, seems like Russia actually poisons people just like in movies. Maybe all the other spy movie tropes are true too.
If the US has been caught spying on close allies like Germany and Israel, then you can reasonably assume that Russia, China, North Korea, and others are spying on the US. (we've caught Israel spying on the US for example)
At this point I assume that even the UK spies on the US. And that Sweden probably hosts spies from other countries at the Embassy of Sweden. I guess we all like keeping an eye on our friends and there is no such thing as absolute trust between nations.
I dunno, back in the day before cell phones, we were playing paper football with each other or something distracting like that.
Me too. But I think I could still hear and process a lecture while doing paper football. Maybe not 100%, but I think I absorbed some of the lecture.
Hell, I remember back in the day, when the first LED Mattel Football handheld game came out.
I'm from the Tiger Electronics and TI Calculator games era. I don't think I retained any of the lecture when I was playing these.
Kids will be kids, but I do feel that those distractions weren't quite so engrossing and distracting for as long a period of time.
Engrossing is definitely the word I was looking for. I think some allowances for differences between generations is acceptable as well. We can't realistically expect our children to have a childhood identical to our own. Especially since most kids aren't allowed to ride bikes around town from lunch till sunset. (sunrise to lunch was for church and chores.). There has to be some way for social interaction among peers in a world where parents try to protect children through physical isolation. It's no surprise that social networking and digital communication is popular with younger generations.
I wouldn't look at the law as a source of scientific truth. I don't have the data but I suspect there is measurable differences for students who play games during lectures versus those who are paying attention. But I'm skeptical there is as significant of a difference for students playing games after the lecture is over until the arbitrary start of the next class session.
I think sending texts during class on a basic cellphone is less distracting than a smartphone tied into dozens of apps and games. If you've ever tried to have a conversation with a child while they were playing an addictive mobile game, you'd know how little of what you say to them that they retain.
If kids are playing mobile games during class, it is effectively the same as not showing up to class at all.
Let's go back to sending children to work in coal mines. Their smartphones won't work down there.
As a Linux user I really appreciate that Steam works on Linux and there are several ported games. I think that's great.
But from a business standpoint I question if it is worth going after the 0.1% of linux gamers (as of 2017). I guess it depends on the development costs for a game publisher. If it amounts to flipping some build options on Unity and some additional testing, then maybe if it's a net profit for a game studio. If it involves new software architecture and implementation, then Linux support must be a labor of love rather than a smart business decision for a game studio.
P.S. - I use SDL2 for all my hobby game projects. It's great! (I'm a C dev so I'm biased toward C-friendly libraries and frameworks)
I mean sure, Linux won the phone market, home router market, and server market. But we can't call ourselves REAL men until we win the desktop market. Even if we overthrow the PC master race, somehow we'll never be as cool as they were.
Nethack, the greatest game ever made, runs on Linux.
I think it was a rhetorical question. Not that he was seeking the answer to it, but he was trying to make a point with it.
But maybe I'm giving him too much credit.
You mean like...
No. Not like that at all. Just because you were told one thing as a child some decades ago doesn't mean the information is still current or complete.
You're running ssh? Do you not care about security?!
They send me coupons for sandwiches. And probably sell my data to marketing firms, most likely for regional spending statistics.
Also with the account I can order online for pick up, and I get a free pastry sometimes (I think once a month?)
Do you really think you can boil a performance metric down into a single number? It's a multidimensional problem.
insult me in Latin, et tu brute?
I'm wrapping my cablemodem with tinfoil as we speak.
Unless you want to sell my information for marketing research and advertisement, then that's OK. (apparently)
Life isn't always about getting the schedule or job you want. Sometimes you have to suck it up and do what you need to do and stop whining about why you fail.
Science is about studying reality and discovering new things about the world around us. Optimizing behavior in light of the realities of biology would give us an edge over people who refuse to adapt.
Just because you turned out fine doing things sub-optimally isn't justification for future generations to continue to do things the same way. It's the sort of trap that conservative thinking falls into, and frankly it's a very lazy philosophy.
1. My internet is always on. So that in-house NAS is always available as long as my house has power.
2. At most I would be on the other side of the country. I'm not likely to travel outside of the US and still want to stream over my phone due to the roaming charges anyways.
Streaming MP3s over free hotel WiFi is not a big deal even on the other side of the world, since unidirectional streaming is not latency sensitive.
That checks out. Because I have some albums that I bought that now won't play on the Android app until I sign up for Prime Streaming. but if I carefully go into the menus and pick Download I can get around the restriction. Maybe it's a bug, but it's a rather convenient way for Amazon to influence us to buy yet another service from them.
I'm the 1% who actually used Amazon's MP3 upload feature. But it's trivial for me to uninstall Amazon's apps from my phone, tablet and PC and stream my CD/MP3 collection with a low-end home NAS.
I'm not sure what Amazon is thinking. They have to offer a lot of reasons to keep me on their ad-laden Music app.
You don't see them going to great lengths with their own line of coffeemakers now, do you?
That's because they all died from cancer.