A downtown studio apartment costs $350 per month, in a new highrise about a block away from the center of downtown, decently low crime area, with all utilities included.
Dude, I live in Columbia, South Carolina, which is pretty low cost of living, not exactly NYC or LA. Lowest rent I've found here (looked for absolutely lowest while I was in college, couldn't afford anything else) was $400 / month, utilities NOT included, and pretty damn far from downtown. In order to avoid buying a car, I lived downtown, where the cheapest I found was $750 / month. I could only afford it at the time because I was sharing the place with roommates. Where do you live? I might move there. If renting were much cheaper than my mortgage, it can make sense to sell the house and rent, and invest the difference (as it turns out, if I don't want any roommates, my mortgage is about $200 cheaper than what it would cost me to rent a small apartment, although that's because I'm not looking for the absolute cheapest I can get anymore).
Health insurance for a young, healthy person who doesn't smoke is $40 per month when I checked last week (100% coverage, $5,000 deductible, $3M maximum).
I'm 28, in shape, don't smoke, never had any major health issues. My $5,000 deductible insurance runs at $120 / month. Of course, the only reason a $5,000 deductible is reasonable is because I can afford to keep some money in an HSA. People living paycheck to paycheck don't have money lying around to pay for deductibles. Granted, I don't get health insurance through my employer, which is most often significantly cheaper, but I work for a startup. They weren't able to negotiate very reasonable group prices, it came out to about the same if I were going to get it through them. This is why I left health insurance out of those requirements.
I don't doubt your numbers, and I would say that where you live, minimum wage is actually livable wage, barring unexpected expenses. I still don't think that applies to most places in the US (mostly due to anecdotal experience based on places I've lived, so I concede I might be wrong), and if every unskilled laborer moved to the few places that are like that, it wouldn't be sustainable.
Sounds like a miserable day for everybody concerned: the TSA agent presumably just doing her job, and the woman who got subjected to that job.
The problem, of course, is that this is the TSA agent's job. You can't get away with sexual assault and claim it's ok because it's in your job description.
BS. Anyone who has cash flow can save money. Or they are dying of starvation. The likelihood of someone having literally only exactly enough to "survive" is practically zero. One can ALWAYS sacrifice current consumption for future gain. Whether that means eating rice instead of bread, or living with your parents instead of your own apartment, or making extra effort to pick up discarded cans for recycling (sacrificing leisure time).
Do a little experiment. Get the minimum wage figures, and figure out how much you get per month. Assume you pay no taxes, since theoretically you're getting all of that back anyway at the end of the year. Find out what it costs to rent a really, really cheap place in your area. In a horrible neighborhood. I'm talking about what it requires for you to have basic shelter, where the only requirements are electricity (need to store food in a refrigerator), and indoor plumbing (you can't hold a job if you can't shower). Determine how much it would cost to pay for that electricity and water. Assume bare minimums here, just take a non-zero value. Determine how much food costs, and for the sake of argument, this person lives on ramen alone. Eats nothing else. You may also assume that this person lives within walking distance of where they work, so they will have no transportation costs. This person never spends any money on entertainment, they will never become unemployed, they will never become sick (otherwise we'd have to factor in health insurance, and that'd definitely break the budget).
Turns out that depending on where you live, minimum wage won't even cover the rent for that shack in a bad neighborhood. In other places, you might be able to determine that there's some money left over after my minimum living requirements stated above. If that's the case, I want you to calculate how much they will have saved after 50 years of working (you can assume their salary follows inflation, so keep all costs the same for all 50 years). That means they started working at 20 and retired at 70. Assume they've invested in the stock market and got a steady 10% growth every single year. You might be surprised to find that investments don't yield as much as you think they do.
Even assuming these ideal conditions, I guarantee you that the result will be that they won't have enough money saved over to last them and 20 years of life, living in the same poor conditions. I know this from experience. I'm not a debtor, but I lived my childhood as one. My parents weren't skilled enough to get high paying jobs, and there wasn't enough left over to save. We weren't starving, but that doesn't mean that sometimes we wouldn't have to do that 1-2 day fast until payday came along and we could buy food again. My parents were, however, smart enough to explain to me the value of an education, so that I wouldn't be in the same situation. With what I earn today, I find that it's rather easy to save for retirement, even as I send my parents some extra money every month to help out since they had a grand total of 20k saved in a 401k and social security isn't enough to fill in the gap.
I find that people who believe what you do have always been in the same situation as I am, where it's always easy to save some extra money by not buying that new iPad thingy. You see other people who earn the same as you do being financially irresponsible and you assume that's the reason EVERYONE has for not doing as well as you do. Financial irresponsibility can ruin you regardless of your income, I agree. However, a minimum income is required before financial responsibility is even an option.
Negus...has struck back with a £10 million false dismissal suit alleging a culture of drunken parties and claiming that other (Male) management at Microsoft were so drunk they followed a female Microsoft UK manager into the ladies' lavatories.
So because someone else acted improperly, he thinks it was OK for him to do so too? I hope he gets laughed out of court.
Did you miss the part of the article where he denied the accusations against him? Or the one where the investigation turned out no proof of the allegations?
He's not saying, "everybody else was acting improperly, so it was ok for me to do it." He's saying, "I was acting properly amidst massive impropriety. If anything, they fired me because I wasn't playing along."
Whether you believe him or not is moot. The question is, can he prove his allegations while Microsoft can't prove theirs? If that's the case, not only should this not be dismissed, but he should win.
Sounds like he's building something like a "skydiving tunnel" but that's not exactly a zero-G simulator...
Yeah. As any skydiver will tell you, what we call "free fall" is not the same physicists call free fall. We're definitely not at zero-g (we don't feel like we're falling, just like there's a lot of wind), and we most certainly don't move in the same way astronauts would move at zero-g. It's more akin to how a plane flies...you change your body position in relation to the relative wind, and that causes the wind to turn / move you. That training wouldn't help at all.
That is the only gripe I've had with it at work. Most scribbling I do is easy with a finger but sometimes more finite control, or just not having my hand in the way, would be nice. The newer, longer capacitive stylus' are suppose to be good to so I plan to place an order soon.
If using your finger works at all for what you do, any stylus is pretty much going to be fantastic, so I highly recommend you buy one.
In my case, I often need to solve equations at work and would like to get rid of the huge amount of scratch paper at my desk, while maintaining the ability to save the useful portions. As it is, not only is writing on the iPad far too slow because of the errors, but the real estate issue is a big deal. I usually can't fit an equation in a line in the evernote app that would fit in half that space if I'm writing with pen and paper. So I end up using an entire "page" without getting far enough, which means I'd have to do too much back-and-forth between pages, and that's just both incredibly slow and super-annoying.
I'm with the "most people" here. I'd never thought of doing that before, and have never factorised something not containing a variable.
Of course you have. You did right here:
I did £30 - (30 / 2 / 2), which seems about as fast as any method with ¼ or ¾.
Which is pretty much the same idea. Dividing by half is easier than dividing by 4, so factor that 4.
Yet I did all the mathematics I could at school, including "Further Maths" (which only a tiny, tiny number of people do), and then ½ a year of maths at university.
Which is my point. You absolutely got taught that (a + b) * (c + d) = a*c + a*d + b*c + b*d, but nobody ever bothers to tell you that's pretty useful in mental arithmetic. We're teaching the stuff, but we're not bringing it home, which causes two problems: First, people don't always know how to apply what they're taught; and second, people forget everything after they leave school, because they've never used what they've been taught.
Demonstration: find a store with a sale, "25% off marked price". Pick something that's marked £30, walk to the checkout and hand over £22.50 (exactly) before the barcode is scanned. Many people will be impressed.
Part of it is that they teach the concept of associative and commutative operations in school, but they stopped teaching why it's useful. I'm not sure the teachers understand why it's useful, because I'm not sure that they've been taught it either:)
Basically, when you ask somebody, "what's 25% of 30?", they start setting up a multiplication by 0.25 in their heads. They multiply by 5, they go to the next line and offset when multiplying by 2, they add the two lines, they figure out where to put the decimal. If they understand fractions (unfortunately also pretty rare), they might start dividing by 4, which is certainly way better. Those of us who understand commutative properties handles multiples of 10 and 5 more easily by instantly thinking "10% of 30 is 3, 2*3 is 20%. The other 5% is half of 10%, so 3/2, so the answer is 6 + 1.5, 7.5". Math with multiples of 5 and 10 is easy, but that's not what most people are trying to do.:)
You can impress a lot of people with the ability to quickly multiply numbers with 2 or 3 digits in your head. The really easy way of doing that is by using associative and commutative properties with multiples of 10 and adding up the numbers. 23 * 47 = 20 * 40 + 3 * 40 + 20 * 7 + 3 * 7. Each of those terms are easy to compute by just knowing the multiplication table, and you can sum them up as you go, so you only need a running sum in memory, not each individual term. People who are good at mental math do that, people who are not start setting it up in their minds as they would in the notebook, worrying about carrying digits and whanot.
It's not acceptable to say "I can't read", or "I can't write a letter", but it is acceptable to say "oh, I'm no good at maths" or "I can't understand my gas bill".
That's because a lot of people aren't good at math, so they have a large clique with which to reinforce the perception that it's ok. If we start teaching kids to be good at math again, then people who don't know math will be in the minority and it won't be acceptable to be in that group. It's the same reason why illiteracy is not acceptable, we live in nations with close to 100% literacy rates.
The best thing it does that a notebook (this is assuming pen and paper notebook) can't is get my notes on my computer. I write once in evernote/awesome note/whatever note application and it's then everywhere I will need it. Same for using dropbox and scibbling apps.
I really wanted to use it for that purpose, but found it pretty much impossible to. I got a nice stylus, but the delay between sensing what I'm writing and actually writing something means that often there will be errors because it didn't pick up part of what I was writing, or I moved outside the dead palm area and it picked up the palm of my hand, or whatever. The stylus for that type of capacitive screens as opposed to the resistive types also needs to be pretty thick at the point of contact, so it turns out that you don't have nearly as much real estate as you would in a paper pad of the same size.
Since you're using your iPad for this purpose regularly, do you have any recommendations?
Well I said it either came from nothing, or something. I don't know why you read that as "it must have come from something" since I gave the alternative of nothing right before the option of something. Is there something other than nothing and something I am missing?
Yes, and I believe I explained it. The option of not "coming" from anything. It wasn't created, it was always there.
The fact is the universe either came from nothing or came from something else outside of the universe, and as we are inside the universe it is rather impossible to tell which of those things it is.
Considering that one of the most fundamental laws of physics is conservation of energy, I don't know how you come to the conclusion that the universe "must" have come from something. Since matter can neither be created nor destroyed, isn't there a very real possibility that there was never a point in time where the universe didn't exist?
I'm not a physicist, but my understanding from all those physics books they write for laymen is that time itself begins at the big bang, making the question of what existed before the big bang nonsensical. There is no before.
What about actual ballot voting? "Use your smartphone to video yourself filling out the ballot with the cadidates I like, and I'll be watching from outside the booth to make sure you drop it in the ballot box without spoiling it and getting another."
That's another very good point.
My personal belief is that you're pointing out very real holes in the system that need to be patched. No cell phones / recording devices in the booth should be a rule. I still don't think any of this is an argument for online voting. It's an argument for fixing very real problems we have right now.
Really? 100 hours of entertainment at $60 seems like a deal to me compared to say 2 hours for $10 at the movies. In fact, pretty much all other forms of entertainment typically cost something in the region of $5 an hour. By that measure, games are insanely cheap.
You can typically buy a full season of a TV show for roughly $25. On average, a season is 22 episodes. Entertainment as a function of time varies, but for a 45-minute show, that's $1.14 per 45 minutes, beating the $5 an hour mark fairly well.
The real problem is that money per hour of entertainment is not a good measure. I'm not willing to pay $10 to watch a 1.5 hours movie at the theater (which means I've quit going to the theater), but I'm willing to drop $50 for 55 seconds of freefall fun when I go skydiving (still having to rent gear, ack). What you're actually determines how much time you expect to get out of it and how much you're willing to pay, not the time alone. You wouldn't pay the same amount to watch a 5-minute short as you do to watch a 90 minute movie.
I agree with the grandparent, and I don't pay $60 for games. I wait 1 or 2 years, then I get the game once they're $20.
But you looking for the story? Yeah well, most games seem to have a problem conveying even that anymore. Look at DA2. Some people will say OOH GREAT STORY!!!!1!
Yeah, I've cut down on gaming a whole lot since the fall of adventure games. I miss the days of Tex Murphy. Games like Under a Killing Moon, that's what I'm looking for.
That said, in the absence of greatness, I'll take the Mass Effect, Arkham Asylum, and even Dragon Age games of today. No, they're not incredibly interesting stories, but at least it's something to keep me interested as I progress and the plot unfolds.
Grinding in RPGs does suck, but it's a result of the genre. It's replicating the feel of tabletop RPGs where you need to make gain experience and make your characters stronger before you can beat the more challenging enemies.
One might note that that's a feature that has progressively been less common in TRPGs, for much the same reasont that it sucks in CRPGs, even though TRPGs (with a good GM) have a much greater ability to mitigate the feel of boring-repetitive-grind when they do use that structure than CRPGs have.
Agreed. The grinding sucks anywhere. One of the hallmarks of a good GM is that his story has enough content that you can buff up your character as needed to complete the campaign, all by doing interesting things along the way. That takes a lot of work, which is why it's hard to find good GMs:)
I'm not sure what low UID's have to do with anything. I can be just as stupid as anyone here, I promise =)
I wasn't implying stupidity on anyone's part, and I hope I didn't come across that way. I was using the UID as a method for determining age. Yours is lower than mine, and I remember those days, so I would expect you to be old the enough to remember them too. Didn't peg you for someone whose first console was a Playstation 2:)
I think you're misunderstanding me. My argument isn't that games used to be shorter. It's that they weren't artificially longer like they are now, and I believe strategy guides, GameFAQs, etc. are to blame. There are very few "secrets" baked into a game anymore, and if some special item is hidden, there's little to no chance you'll find it without the aid of some guide.
Yeah, I did misunderstand you. I accept that argument. What I thought you were arguing is that games used to be short, then when people asked for longer games, they started making them artificially long in order to both give the gamers what they perceived they want as well as sell more strategy guides. You're arguing for half of that, games used to be long but interesting, but then they became short (in terms of content), but time-consuming. I think anyone who played the first Mass Effect and all the crappy side quests that were all EXACTLY THE SAME would have to agree with you. That's definitely not what I want when I say I want a longer game. I like the idea of side quests you don't need to complete, but they should be interesting quests. They did a little better in Mass Effect 2 regarding the side quests, but still not great.
So when I see a/. article like this one, where it's possible they've realized the toll all this freely available information is having on gaming as a whole and are finally cutting the fat to deal with it, you can imagine my frustration at all the crying that games won't be so long, as if that's the only measure of a great game.
You know, if they were going to sell me a $10 10-hour game, I'd be ok with that, but they're still going to charge $60. I want $60 worth of content. Sometimes we argue that we want "longer games" when what we mean to say is that we want "more content." We do that because more content necessarily leads to a longer game and that's a way to put a number to the amount of stuff in the game. As you've reminded us though, longer games don't necessarily equate to greater content.
Don't all the same objections apply to mail-in ballots?
That's true, and it's why many countries require you to provide a valid excuse about why you can't go to the polling station. I don't know what it's like in Canada, I think about half the states in the US require you to provide a justification each time you use a mail-in ballot.
Video games (RPGs in particular) were doomed exactly when strategy guides became a decent source of revenue. Instead of challenging a gamer's problem-solving skills, this forced developers to artificially lengthen games, by either requiring the player to grind for experience points, or to grind in order to raise his/her skill level. Personally, I prefer to work on my skills in a game, but each is still technically grinding.
You have a low enough UID that I wouldn't expect hearing something like that from you. When exactly in the past do you remember games being shorter than they are now? The medium started with arcade games that were never meant to end. You'd just be playing the same thing over and over again trying to get a high score. Once the medium went home, there was once again no ending to games like H.E.R.O. on the Atari 2600. Push forward to the 8-bit days, how long were RPG games like Zelda or Phantasy Star? Those games pretty much started the strategy guide era and they were already pretty long. Phantasy Star already required a fair amount of grinding. Platformers took "only" about 4 hours of play, sure, but they didn't let you save...you had to play it through from beginning to end in one go, which meant you'd actually spend upwards of 50-60 hours total in the game, playing the same early levels and dying until you got good enough at them. Once again, many people never finished the games, and that's the way it's supposed to be. Back in those days you could tell someone with pride, "I finished Ghouls 'n Goblins, including when they make you start over again with a harder difficulty." Your friends would look at you in awe, call bullshit, and make you do it again in front of them.
Grinding in RPGs does suck, but it's a result of the genre. It's replicating the feel of tabletop RPGs where you need to make gain experience and make your characters stronger before you can beat the more challenging enemies.
Why do people enjoy playing against a computer? I play COD, Quake Live, Battlefield, and several others, never touched the single person mode, can't stand playing a computer, it isn't interesting. But playing people, much more fun (and aggravation) than any computer opponent, they learn and adapt, conversation is possible and the greatest blast of all, a pub game where your human team actually works together.
It should all be multiplayer IMO, but apparently some people like playing machines.
Different people have different tastes, I guess. I never touch the multiplayer mode with any game.
Mostly what I'm looking for in a game is the story. The parts where I need to go around and do stuff is either interesting if it's well integrated with the story, or parts that I'd rather skip to get to the next cutscene if it's not. Not all of us play for the challenge, some of us approach the medium as a more interactive form of a movie.
Bah. If we can file our taxes electronically, we can vote electronically.
Tax filing doesn't suffer from the same problems. If somebody pays you to vote for a particular person, they can just stand next to you as you do it in order to verify that you did indeed vote as you promised. With a true secret ballot, the only thing they can verify is that you actually went into the booth. You could have voted for somebody else, you could have left it blank and not voted for anyone. This discourages the practice.
You could also be coerced into voting for someone by your boss or by your union. Basically, online voting is a horrible idea, even assuming the software is perfectly secure.
Frankly, I think that garbage collection is overused, and I would love to just have some variables declared such that the garbage collector will be responsible for clearing them, and other variables which I'm responsible for manually freeing. However, your examples are pretty much perfect examples of the advantages of garbage collection.
Garbage collection solves a few problems by creating a huge pile of new ones, like objects staying around when you thought they'd gone because someone somewhere still has a reference to them...
If some code still has a pointer to a memory location you've freed, you're going to run into trouble when they try to access it. You don't want that memory freed.
...or randomly disappearing because you forgot to keep a reference to them.
Without garbage collection, that's known as a memory leak.
The problem is that Chrome and Firefox 6-week updates can and do change functionality and break internal APIs. Regardless of whether those browsers raise the major version number, addons can break.
Well, stop that. It's not that you can't make those changes, but that's why there's a difference between everyone getting nightly trunk builds and actual releases. Keep any changes that break the API for yearly releases, and update the major version number then. Place any updates that are just security and bug fixes into a faster release schedule, and don't update the major version number for those. It's not that hard, it's pretty standard practice.
Firefox is moving to allow that approach with the jetpack SDK.
Which is great, but it doesn't change any of the above.
However addons that don't use that SDK are relying on internal Firefox APIs, and the power and flexibility that that gives does mean they are at risk for breaking.
Nobody is complaining that you guys are breaking those add-ons. We're complaining that you're breaking them too often. Just queue up those changes for a release that is on a longer schedule, just like you guys used to do.
Honestly guys, being more like Chrome doesn't help you. The users firefox had that wanted Chrome are already using Chrome. You're about to lose those of us who haven't changed browsers for the precise reason that we don't like Chrome. Part of the reason we don't like Chrome is because their add-ons don't have the same advanced functionality firefox add-ons do, because firefox add-ons can use the internal API. Stop breaking those every six weeks, that's why we haven't left. Feel free to make changes that break them on a yearly or at most 6-month basis.
On the other hand, the alternative is to continue with a slow release schedule, which we feel has bigger problems and would annoy more users. For example, FF8 will have much better memory usage than Firefox 4. Releasing new versions quickly lets users get that benefit quicker.
That's not a bigger problem that annoy more users. Unless the user is encountering a particular bug, users considering having to upgrade an annoyance. When we open up the browsers to go to our home page and a window pops up that says, "there's a new release available" the instant response is "goddamnit, now I'm going to have to restart this thing". The only exception to this is if there's been something broken with the browser and we think, "maybe they fixed that issue."
For new features, once a year is more than enough, once every six months if you want to be seen as fast moving (and, of course, if you need to release security fixes, then you release ahead of schedule, you don't have a choice there). In general, users don't like fast upgrades.
I'll stop responding after this but I'll add this note on the final part of your comment - this isn't about "we" and whether it's "fair" isn't another discussion. The question is exactly about whether you (in 'your world') feel that it is wrong to hold him responsible for actions actually carried out by others but actively instigated by him.
The reason it's a separate discussion is because we'd now have to go into my beliefs about "right" and "wrong"
I don't believe in absolute morals. I think the default state is that anyone can do anything they want. I'm not a religious man, and I believe we're just animals. Killing each other is, from a personal perspective, horrifying. From a universal perspective, no different than a lion killing another lion.
We are, however, social animals, so we have preservation instincts. We are also intelligent enough to realize that if we just allow the stronger to go and take whatever they want, then we'll spend all our time defending our life and property. For this reason, and for this reason only, we create a society that agrees killing is wrong, and agrees on rights of property. People inside this society agree to not kill each other, not to steal from one another, and any other laws they think would make for a better society. Anyone breaks those rules, we have the means to enforce it: no person is strong enough to fight against the entire society.
When we deal with people who have formed different societies based on different rules, they haven't agreed to our rules, and we haven't agreed to theirs. So the rules that apply to your society don't apply when you deal with them. Therefore you need a military, to prevent other societies from trying to enforce their rules on you. When they do something that harms your society, you have no right to try them according to your rules, they're not members of your society. You might, however, be strong enough to do something else about it.
Crap. You can't really have this much difficulty considering the implications of your opinions. Suppose that someone who is an American citizen, living in America, does exactly the same thing as Osama bin Laden. Do you think he should be able to be tried for his crimes or do you think it's okay as long as someone else did the actual killing?
I don't think it would be "ok", as in morally ok. I'm not advocating hurting people here, directly or indirectly. Honestly, your scenario is very emotional, and I do find it difficult to reason through it. In attempting to leave emotion out of it, and to just think through this in a logically consistent manner, I have to say that if you were not directly involved in killing people, and if everyone else who was directly involved could have made a conscious choice to not kill those people, then they should be the only ones to hold responsibility for the action.
Or are you now of the opinion that money probably actually changed hands in which case he could be tried but if it didn't then no?
You have good points, and my position was indeed inconsistent. Alright, paying someone to perform an illegal action is no different than asking somebody to perform an illegal action, in that in either case you're not actually performing the action. Forced to make that choice, I'd rather make it legal for people to hire criminals than making it illegal to incite others to criminal activity via speech. In the end, the responsibility should lie on the shoulders of the person who performed the action, and nobody else.
Or do you think he can't be tried because it would be somehow wrong (?) to put him on trial for what you see as being other people's actions but that the military could be sent in to shoot him untried because then you can apply a different test?
No, I don't believe the military or any other branch of government should have the right to do anything to any citizen or legal resident without trial.
Slashdot Mirror
A downtown studio apartment costs $350 per month, in a new highrise about a block away from the center of downtown, decently low crime area, with all utilities included.
Dude, I live in Columbia, South Carolina, which is pretty low cost of living, not exactly NYC or LA. Lowest rent I've found here (looked for absolutely lowest while I was in college, couldn't afford anything else) was $400 / month, utilities NOT included, and pretty damn far from downtown. In order to avoid buying a car, I lived downtown, where the cheapest I found was $750 / month. I could only afford it at the time because I was sharing the place with roommates. Where do you live? I might move there. If renting were much cheaper than my mortgage, it can make sense to sell the house and rent, and invest the difference (as it turns out, if I don't want any roommates, my mortgage is about $200 cheaper than what it would cost me to rent a small apartment, although that's because I'm not looking for the absolute cheapest I can get anymore).
Health insurance for a young, healthy person who doesn't smoke is $40 per month when I checked last week (100% coverage, $5,000 deductible, $3M maximum).
I'm 28, in shape, don't smoke, never had any major health issues. My $5,000 deductible insurance runs at $120 / month. Of course, the only reason a $5,000 deductible is reasonable is because I can afford to keep some money in an HSA. People living paycheck to paycheck don't have money lying around to pay for deductibles. Granted, I don't get health insurance through my employer, which is most often significantly cheaper, but I work for a startup. They weren't able to negotiate very reasonable group prices, it came out to about the same if I were going to get it through them. This is why I left health insurance out of those requirements.
I don't doubt your numbers, and I would say that where you live, minimum wage is actually livable wage, barring unexpected expenses. I still don't think that applies to most places in the US (mostly due to anecdotal experience based on places I've lived, so I concede I might be wrong), and if every unskilled laborer moved to the few places that are like that, it wouldn't be sustainable.
Sounds like a miserable day for everybody concerned: the TSA agent presumably just doing her job, and the woman who got subjected to that job.
The problem, of course, is that this is the TSA agent's job. You can't get away with sexual assault and claim it's ok because it's in your job description.
BS. Anyone who has cash flow can save money. Or they are dying of starvation. The likelihood of someone having literally only exactly enough to "survive" is practically zero. One can ALWAYS sacrifice current consumption for future gain. Whether that means eating rice instead of bread, or living with your parents instead of your own apartment, or making extra effort to pick up discarded cans for recycling (sacrificing leisure time).
Do a little experiment. Get the minimum wage figures, and figure out how much you get per month. Assume you pay no taxes, since theoretically you're getting all of that back anyway at the end of the year. Find out what it costs to rent a really, really cheap place in your area. In a horrible neighborhood. I'm talking about what it requires for you to have basic shelter, where the only requirements are electricity (need to store food in a refrigerator), and indoor plumbing (you can't hold a job if you can't shower). Determine how much it would cost to pay for that electricity and water. Assume bare minimums here, just take a non-zero value. Determine how much food costs, and for the sake of argument, this person lives on ramen alone. Eats nothing else. You may also assume that this person lives within walking distance of where they work, so they will have no transportation costs. This person never spends any money on entertainment, they will never become unemployed, they will never become sick (otherwise we'd have to factor in health insurance, and that'd definitely break the budget).
Turns out that depending on where you live, minimum wage won't even cover the rent for that shack in a bad neighborhood. In other places, you might be able to determine that there's some money left over after my minimum living requirements stated above. If that's the case, I want you to calculate how much they will have saved after 50 years of working (you can assume their salary follows inflation, so keep all costs the same for all 50 years). That means they started working at 20 and retired at 70. Assume they've invested in the stock market and got a steady 10% growth every single year. You might be surprised to find that investments don't yield as much as you think they do.
Even assuming these ideal conditions, I guarantee you that the result will be that they won't have enough money saved over to last them and 20 years of life, living in the same poor conditions. I know this from experience. I'm not a debtor, but I lived my childhood as one. My parents weren't skilled enough to get high paying jobs, and there wasn't enough left over to save. We weren't starving, but that doesn't mean that sometimes we wouldn't have to do that 1-2 day fast until payday came along and we could buy food again. My parents were, however, smart enough to explain to me the value of an education, so that I wouldn't be in the same situation. With what I earn today, I find that it's rather easy to save for retirement, even as I send my parents some extra money every month to help out since they had a grand total of 20k saved in a 401k and social security isn't enough to fill in the gap.
I find that people who believe what you do have always been in the same situation as I am, where it's always easy to save some extra money by not buying that new iPad thingy. You see other people who earn the same as you do being financially irresponsible and you assume that's the reason EVERYONE has for not doing as well as you do. Financial irresponsibility can ruin you regardless of your income, I agree. However, a minimum income is required before financial responsibility is even an option.
Negus...has struck back with a £10 million false dismissal suit alleging a culture of drunken parties and claiming that other (Male) management at Microsoft were so drunk they followed a female Microsoft UK manager into the ladies' lavatories.
So because someone else acted improperly, he thinks it was OK for him to do so too? I hope he gets laughed out of court.
Did you miss the part of the article where he denied the accusations against him? Or the one where the investigation turned out no proof of the allegations?
He's not saying, "everybody else was acting improperly, so it was ok for me to do it." He's saying, "I was acting properly amidst massive impropriety. If anything, they fired me because I wasn't playing along."
Whether you believe him or not is moot. The question is, can he prove his allegations while Microsoft can't prove theirs? If that's the case, not only should this not be dismissed, but he should win.
Sounds like he's building something like a "skydiving tunnel" but that's not exactly a zero-G simulator...
Yeah. As any skydiver will tell you, what we call "free fall" is not the same physicists call free fall. We're definitely not at zero-g (we don't feel like we're falling, just like there's a lot of wind), and we most certainly don't move in the same way astronauts would move at zero-g. It's more akin to how a plane flies...you change your body position in relation to the relative wind, and that causes the wind to turn / move you. That training wouldn't help at all.
That is the only gripe I've had with it at work. Most scribbling I do is easy with a finger but sometimes more finite control, or just not having my hand in the way, would be nice. The newer, longer capacitive stylus' are suppose to be good to so I plan to place an order soon.
If using your finger works at all for what you do, any stylus is pretty much going to be fantastic, so I highly recommend you buy one.
In my case, I often need to solve equations at work and would like to get rid of the huge amount of scratch paper at my desk, while maintaining the ability to save the useful portions. As it is, not only is writing on the iPad far too slow because of the errors, but the real estate issue is a big deal. I usually can't fit an equation in a line in the evernote app that would fit in half that space if I'm writing with pen and paper. So I end up using an entire "page" without getting far enough, which means I'd have to do too much back-and-forth between pages, and that's just both incredibly slow and super-annoying.
I'm with the "most people" here. I'd never thought of doing that before, and have never factorised something not containing a variable.
Of course you have. You did right here:
I did £30 - (30 / 2 / 2), which seems about as fast as any method with ¼ or ¾.
Which is pretty much the same idea. Dividing by half is easier than dividing by 4, so factor that 4.
Yet I did all the mathematics I could at school, including "Further Maths" (which only a tiny, tiny number of people do), and then ½ a year of maths at university.
Which is my point. You absolutely got taught that (a + b) * (c + d) = a*c + a*d + b*c + b*d, but nobody ever bothers to tell you that's pretty useful in mental arithmetic. We're teaching the stuff, but we're not bringing it home, which causes two problems: First, people don't always know how to apply what they're taught; and second, people forget everything after they leave school, because they've never used what they've been taught.
Demonstration: find a store with a sale, "25% off marked price". Pick something that's marked £30, walk to the checkout and hand over £22.50 (exactly) before the barcode is scanned. Many people will be impressed.
Part of it is that they teach the concept of associative and commutative operations in school, but they stopped teaching why it's useful. I'm not sure the teachers understand why it's useful, because I'm not sure that they've been taught it either :)
Basically, when you ask somebody, "what's 25% of 30?", they start setting up a multiplication by 0.25 in their heads. They multiply by 5, they go to the next line and offset when multiplying by 2, they add the two lines, they figure out where to put the decimal. If they understand fractions (unfortunately also pretty rare), they might start dividing by 4, which is certainly way better. Those of us who understand commutative properties handles multiples of 10 and 5 more easily by instantly thinking "10% of 30 is 3, 2*3 is 20%. The other 5% is half of 10%, so 3/2, so the answer is 6 + 1.5, 7.5". Math with multiples of 5 and 10 is easy, but that's not what most people are trying to do. :)
You can impress a lot of people with the ability to quickly multiply numbers with 2 or 3 digits in your head. The really easy way of doing that is by using associative and commutative properties with multiples of 10 and adding up the numbers. 23 * 47 = 20 * 40 + 3 * 40 + 20 * 7 + 3 * 7. Each of those terms are easy to compute by just knowing the multiplication table, and you can sum them up as you go, so you only need a running sum in memory, not each individual term. People who are good at mental math do that, people who are not start setting it up in their minds as they would in the notebook, worrying about carrying digits and whanot.
It's not acceptable to say "I can't read", or "I can't write a letter", but it is acceptable to say "oh, I'm no good at maths" or "I can't understand my gas bill".
That's because a lot of people aren't good at math, so they have a large clique with which to reinforce the perception that it's ok. If we start teaching kids to be good at math again, then people who don't know math will be in the minority and it won't be acceptable to be in that group. It's the same reason why illiteracy is not acceptable, we live in nations with close to 100% literacy rates.
The best thing it does that a notebook (this is assuming pen and paper notebook) can't is get my notes on my computer. I write once in evernote/awesome note/whatever note application and it's then everywhere I will need it. Same for using dropbox and scibbling apps.
I really wanted to use it for that purpose, but found it pretty much impossible to. I got a nice stylus, but the delay between sensing what I'm writing and actually writing something means that often there will be errors because it didn't pick up part of what I was writing, or I moved outside the dead palm area and it picked up the palm of my hand, or whatever. The stylus for that type of capacitive screens as opposed to the resistive types also needs to be pretty thick at the point of contact, so it turns out that you don't have nearly as much real estate as you would in a paper pad of the same size.
Since you're using your iPad for this purpose regularly, do you have any recommendations?
Well I said it either came from nothing, or something. I don't know why you read that as "it must have come from something" since I gave the alternative of nothing right before the option of something. Is there something other than nothing and something I am missing?
Yes, and I believe I explained it. The option of not "coming" from anything. It wasn't created, it was always there.
The fact is the universe either came from nothing or came from something else outside of the universe, and as we are inside the universe it is rather impossible to tell which of those things it is.
Considering that one of the most fundamental laws of physics is conservation of energy, I don't know how you come to the conclusion that the universe "must" have come from something. Since matter can neither be created nor destroyed, isn't there a very real possibility that there was never a point in time where the universe didn't exist?
I'm not a physicist, but my understanding from all those physics books they write for laymen is that time itself begins at the big bang, making the question of what existed before the big bang nonsensical. There is no before.
What about actual ballot voting? "Use your smartphone to video yourself filling out the ballot with the cadidates I like, and I'll be watching from outside the booth to make sure you drop it in the ballot box without spoiling it and getting another."
That's another very good point.
My personal belief is that you're pointing out very real holes in the system that need to be patched. No cell phones / recording devices in the booth should be a rule. I still don't think any of this is an argument for online voting. It's an argument for fixing very real problems we have right now.
Really? 100 hours of entertainment at $60 seems like a deal to me compared to say 2 hours for $10 at the movies. In fact, pretty much all other forms of entertainment typically cost something in the region of $5 an hour. By that measure, games are insanely cheap.
You can typically buy a full season of a TV show for roughly $25. On average, a season is 22 episodes. Entertainment as a function of time varies, but for a 45-minute show, that's $1.14 per 45 minutes, beating the $5 an hour mark fairly well.
The real problem is that money per hour of entertainment is not a good measure. I'm not willing to pay $10 to watch a 1.5 hours movie at the theater (which means I've quit going to the theater), but I'm willing to drop $50 for 55 seconds of freefall fun when I go skydiving (still having to rent gear, ack). What you're actually determines how much time you expect to get out of it and how much you're willing to pay, not the time alone. You wouldn't pay the same amount to watch a 5-minute short as you do to watch a 90 minute movie.
I agree with the grandparent, and I don't pay $60 for games. I wait 1 or 2 years, then I get the game once they're $20.
But you looking for the story? Yeah well, most games seem to have a problem conveying even that anymore. Look at DA2. Some people will say OOH GREAT STORY!!!!1!
Yeah, I've cut down on gaming a whole lot since the fall of adventure games. I miss the days of Tex Murphy. Games like Under a Killing Moon, that's what I'm looking for.
That said, in the absence of greatness, I'll take the Mass Effect, Arkham Asylum, and even Dragon Age games of today. No, they're not incredibly interesting stories, but at least it's something to keep me interested as I progress and the plot unfolds.
One might note that that's a feature that has progressively been less common in TRPGs, for much the same reasont that it sucks in CRPGs, even though TRPGs (with a good GM) have a much greater ability to mitigate the feel of boring-repetitive-grind when they do use that structure than CRPGs have.
Agreed. The grinding sucks anywhere. One of the hallmarks of a good GM is that his story has enough content that you can buff up your character as needed to complete the campaign, all by doing interesting things along the way. That takes a lot of work, which is why it's hard to find good GMs :)
I'm not sure what low UID's have to do with anything. I can be just as stupid as anyone here, I promise =)
I wasn't implying stupidity on anyone's part, and I hope I didn't come across that way. I was using the UID as a method for determining age. Yours is lower than mine, and I remember those days, so I would expect you to be old the enough to remember them too. Didn't peg you for someone whose first console was a Playstation 2 :)
I think you're misunderstanding me. My argument isn't that games used to be shorter. It's that they weren't artificially longer like they are now, and I believe strategy guides, GameFAQs, etc. are to blame. There are very few "secrets" baked into a game anymore, and if some special item is hidden, there's little to no chance you'll find it without the aid of some guide.
Yeah, I did misunderstand you. I accept that argument. What I thought you were arguing is that games used to be short, then when people asked for longer games, they started making them artificially long in order to both give the gamers what they perceived they want as well as sell more strategy guides. You're arguing for half of that, games used to be long but interesting, but then they became short (in terms of content), but time-consuming. I think anyone who played the first Mass Effect and all the crappy side quests that were all EXACTLY THE SAME would have to agree with you. That's definitely not what I want when I say I want a longer game. I like the idea of side quests you don't need to complete, but they should be interesting quests. They did a little better in Mass Effect 2 regarding the side quests, but still not great.
So when I see a /. article like this one, where it's possible they've realized the toll all this freely available information is having on gaming as a whole and are finally cutting the fat to deal with it, you can imagine my frustration at all the crying that games won't be so long, as if that's the only measure of a great game.
You know, if they were going to sell me a $10 10-hour game, I'd be ok with that, but they're still going to charge $60. I want $60 worth of content. Sometimes we argue that we want "longer games" when what we mean to say is that we want "more content." We do that because more content necessarily leads to a longer game and that's a way to put a number to the amount of stuff in the game. As you've reminded us though, longer games don't necessarily equate to greater content.
Don't all the same objections apply to mail-in ballots?
That's true, and it's why many countries require you to provide a valid excuse about why you can't go to the polling station. I don't know what it's like in Canada, I think about half the states in the US require you to provide a justification each time you use a mail-in ballot.
Video games (RPGs in particular) were doomed exactly when strategy guides became a decent source of revenue. Instead of challenging a gamer's problem-solving skills, this forced developers to artificially lengthen games, by either requiring the player to grind for experience points, or to grind in order to raise his/her skill level. Personally, I prefer to work on my skills in a game, but each is still technically grinding.
You have a low enough UID that I wouldn't expect hearing something like that from you. When exactly in the past do you remember games being shorter than they are now? The medium started with arcade games that were never meant to end. You'd just be playing the same thing over and over again trying to get a high score. Once the medium went home, there was once again no ending to games like H.E.R.O. on the Atari 2600. Push forward to the 8-bit days, how long were RPG games like Zelda or Phantasy Star? Those games pretty much started the strategy guide era and they were already pretty long. Phantasy Star already required a fair amount of grinding. Platformers took "only" about 4 hours of play, sure, but they didn't let you save...you had to play it through from beginning to end in one go, which meant you'd actually spend upwards of 50-60 hours total in the game, playing the same early levels and dying until you got good enough at them. Once again, many people never finished the games, and that's the way it's supposed to be. Back in those days you could tell someone with pride, "I finished Ghouls 'n Goblins, including when they make you start over again with a harder difficulty." Your friends would look at you in awe, call bullshit, and make you do it again in front of them.
Grinding in RPGs does suck, but it's a result of the genre. It's replicating the feel of tabletop RPGs where you need to make gain experience and make your characters stronger before you can beat the more challenging enemies.
Why do people enjoy playing against a computer? I play COD, Quake Live, Battlefield, and several others, never touched the single person mode, can't stand playing a computer, it isn't interesting.
But playing people, much more fun (and aggravation) than any computer opponent, they learn and adapt, conversation is possible and the greatest blast of all, a pub game where your human team actually works together.
It should all be multiplayer IMO, but apparently some people like playing machines.
Different people have different tastes, I guess. I never touch the multiplayer mode with any game.
Mostly what I'm looking for in a game is the story. The parts where I need to go around and do stuff is either interesting if it's well integrated with the story, or parts that I'd rather skip to get to the next cutscene if it's not. Not all of us play for the challenge, some of us approach the medium as a more interactive form of a movie.
Bah. If we can file our taxes electronically, we can vote electronically.
Tax filing doesn't suffer from the same problems. If somebody pays you to vote for a particular person, they can just stand next to you as you do it in order to verify that you did indeed vote as you promised. With a true secret ballot, the only thing they can verify is that you actually went into the booth. You could have voted for somebody else, you could have left it blank and not voted for anyone. This discourages the practice.
You could also be coerced into voting for someone by your boss or by your union. Basically, online voting is a horrible idea, even assuming the software is perfectly secure.
Frankly, I think that garbage collection is overused, and I would love to just have some variables declared such that the garbage collector will be responsible for clearing them, and other variables which I'm responsible for manually freeing. However, your examples are pretty much perfect examples of the advantages of garbage collection.
Garbage collection solves a few problems by creating a huge pile of new ones, like objects staying around when you thought they'd gone because someone somewhere still has a reference to them...
If some code still has a pointer to a memory location you've freed, you're going to run into trouble when they try to access it. You don't want that memory freed.
...or randomly disappearing because you forgot to keep a reference to them.
Without garbage collection, that's known as a memory leak.
The problem is that Chrome and Firefox 6-week updates can and do change functionality and break internal APIs. Regardless of whether those browsers raise the major version number, addons can break.
Well, stop that. It's not that you can't make those changes, but that's why there's a difference between everyone getting nightly trunk builds and actual releases. Keep any changes that break the API for yearly releases, and update the major version number then. Place any updates that are just security and bug fixes into a faster release schedule, and don't update the major version number for those. It's not that hard, it's pretty standard practice.
Firefox is moving to allow that approach with the jetpack SDK.
Which is great, but it doesn't change any of the above.
However addons that don't use that SDK are relying on internal Firefox APIs, and the power and flexibility that that gives does mean they are at risk for breaking.
Nobody is complaining that you guys are breaking those add-ons. We're complaining that you're breaking them too often. Just queue up those changes for a release that is on a longer schedule, just like you guys used to do.
Honestly guys, being more like Chrome doesn't help you. The users firefox had that wanted Chrome are already using Chrome. You're about to lose those of us who haven't changed browsers for the precise reason that we don't like Chrome. Part of the reason we don't like Chrome is because their add-ons don't have the same advanced functionality firefox add-ons do, because firefox add-ons can use the internal API. Stop breaking those every six weeks, that's why we haven't left. Feel free to make changes that break them on a yearly or at most 6-month basis.
On the other hand, the alternative is to continue with a slow release schedule, which we feel has bigger problems and would annoy more users. For example, FF8 will have much better memory usage than Firefox 4. Releasing new versions quickly lets users get that benefit quicker.
That's not a bigger problem that annoy more users. Unless the user is encountering a particular bug, users considering having to upgrade an annoyance. When we open up the browsers to go to our home page and a window pops up that says, "there's a new release available" the instant response is "goddamnit, now I'm going to have to restart this thing". The only exception to this is if there's been something broken with the browser and we think, "maybe they fixed that issue."
For new features, once a year is more than enough, once every six months if you want to be seen as fast moving (and, of course, if you need to release security fixes, then you release ahead of schedule, you don't have a choice there). In general, users don't like fast upgrades.
I'll stop responding after this but I'll add this note on the final part of your comment - this isn't about "we" and whether it's "fair" isn't another discussion. The question is exactly about whether you (in 'your world') feel that it is wrong to hold him responsible for actions actually carried out by others but actively instigated by him.
The reason it's a separate discussion is because we'd now have to go into my beliefs about "right" and "wrong"
I don't believe in absolute morals. I think the default state is that anyone can do anything they want. I'm not a religious man, and I believe we're just animals. Killing each other is, from a personal perspective, horrifying. From a universal perspective, no different than a lion killing another lion.
We are, however, social animals, so we have preservation instincts. We are also intelligent enough to realize that if we just allow the stronger to go and take whatever they want, then we'll spend all our time defending our life and property. For this reason, and for this reason only, we create a society that agrees killing is wrong, and agrees on rights of property. People inside this society agree to not kill each other, not to steal from one another, and any other laws they think would make for a better society. Anyone breaks those rules, we have the means to enforce it: no person is strong enough to fight against the entire society.
When we deal with people who have formed different societies based on different rules, they haven't agreed to our rules, and we haven't agreed to theirs. So the rules that apply to your society don't apply when you deal with them. Therefore you need a military, to prevent other societies from trying to enforce their rules on you. When they do something that harms your society, you have no right to try them according to your rules, they're not members of your society. You might, however, be strong enough to do something else about it.
Crap. You can't really have this much difficulty considering the implications of your opinions. Suppose that someone who is an American citizen, living in America, does exactly the same thing as Osama bin Laden. Do you think he should be able to be tried for his crimes or do you think it's okay as long as someone else did the actual killing?
I don't think it would be "ok", as in morally ok. I'm not advocating hurting people here, directly or indirectly. Honestly, your scenario is very emotional, and I do find it difficult to reason through it. In attempting to leave emotion out of it, and to just think through this in a logically consistent manner, I have to say that if you were not directly involved in killing people, and if everyone else who was directly involved could have made a conscious choice to not kill those people, then they should be the only ones to hold responsibility for the action.
Or are you now of the opinion that money probably actually changed hands in which case he could be tried but if it didn't then no?
You have good points, and my position was indeed inconsistent. Alright, paying someone to perform an illegal action is no different than asking somebody to perform an illegal action, in that in either case you're not actually performing the action. Forced to make that choice, I'd rather make it legal for people to hire criminals than making it illegal to incite others to criminal activity via speech. In the end, the responsibility should lie on the shoulders of the person who performed the action, and nobody else.
Or do you think he can't be tried because it would be somehow wrong (?) to put him on trial for what you see as being other people's actions but that the military could be sent in to shoot him untried because then you can apply a different test?
No, I don't believe the military or any other branch of government should have the right to do anything to any citizen or legal resident without trial.