They intend for it to take-off and land like a normal aircraft.
That means that at the start of the trip this vehicle will be in a horizontal position accelerating parallel to the ground.
You're better off thinking of it as an aircraft that can fly really high and turn into a space plane, which as a completely different paradigm from the "rocket pointing skywards and going up as fast as possible".
... countries like China is to force the issue via legislation...
Legislation in China is like putting perfume in a turd: if you're far enough you won't smell the turd and you might even smell the perfume, but once you get close enough, you'll definitely notice that the shit is still there.
The truth is that in China, unless there is some real political will from the top along with the appropriate amounts of stick and carrot, laws are worth less than the paper they are written on - local authorities will happily keep on doing whatever they think they need to do in order to meet their growth targets and pocket some money on the side from local "industrialists" whatever the law says.
Actually I remember the time when AOL started allowing their customers to access the Net.
Before that the Net was pretty much an inter-University network used mostly by the technically inclined, a small enough world that most people quickly learned and followed the rules of behavior (such as Read the FAQ first). After that, the whole place was pretty much invaded by clueless newbies and virtual hooligans (as seen from the point of view of somebody that mostly frequented the Usenet).
By comparison with the Net at the time, AOL as a gated community was more like a slum circled by barbed-wire.
That said, when AOL opened the gates, it started the shift where the Net went being mostly a geek toy to being a social phenomenon and an essential part of our society. In other words - it was openness to all that made the Internet become the socially and economically important infrastructure it is today.
I have a (tiny) company that imported and retailed low cost MP3 players from China. The devices were bought directly from the manufacturer. This specific player is of a design manufactured by multiple manufacturers, which makes me believe it was locally designed and sold to several manufacturers.
My experience has shown me the following: - Quality control was all over the place. One box of devices might have a rate of failure of 10% while another had a rate of failure of less than 2%. It literally looked like the rate of failure depended on whoever was doing QA at the time a batch of devices was made. - The final product is not the same as the samples you evaluate. For example, in my case the Firmware was different in the final version and even had one (small) feature missing. - The user manuals are in "Chinglisih". They also don't quite match what's in the box. - The design of the device lacks the tiny details which make for easier assembly and a more polished product. For example, in the devices we ordered the display component was manually aligned to the location of the transparent plastic window in the device's casing and glued to the circuit board. There were no grooves or notches inside the device's casing to guide the display into the proper place, which meant that often the display is tilted and/or off-center.
In my view, to have anything manufactured in China for a Western market you have to be big enough to provide in situ your own designs, your own QA and evaluate the manufacturing inputs yourself and impose some changes to some of the steps in the manufacturing process.
In other words, most Chinese manufacturers have problems in these areas (QA, design, manufacturing quality, efficiency) which have to be addressed by those companies that actually have goods made in China for sale to those markets in the West were shabby products are not acceptable.
Until this is solved, I find it highly unlikely that Chinese manufacturers will be able to move up-market on their own.
The problem of the legitimacy of games now is just like the problem of the legitimacy of rock-and-roll in the 1950s: - Like rock-and-roll, games as an entertainment medium has been mostly adopted by people of the newer generations. - Most people from older generations have never really experienced the new media (play games/listen to rock-and-roll) - Since they do not understand the new generation, those people from the older generation will rant about how the new media is doing all sorts of bad things to the new generation. - Politicians, which are mostly from the old generation and whose constituents are also mostly from that generation (younger people are less likely to vote than older people) will pick up on this and start ranting themselves.
Keep in mind that games have only started to become mainstream with young people a little over 10 years ago with the first gaming consoles (the small bunch of early players like me that started with things like ZX Spectrums or Atari machines are not mainstream).
I expect that this "legitimacy" problem will solve itself within 10 years once the current mainstream generation of gamers (which are now in their mid/late teens and early twenties) have turned into a sizable, politically active voting block.
[...] just send a check to the people [...] That would be almost $3000 apiece for every man, woman and child in the USA.
The problem of that is the following: - How much of that money would be spent and how much would be saved?
The modern financial system is (or at least was, until recently) a big machine designed to make money go around and around and around: - People buy stuff; that money goes to companies that sell the stuff; the companies then pay the salaries; the employees buy stuff with their salaries and so forth. In a similar way, companies buy stuff from other companies which in turn buy stuff from yet other companies. - Banks sit in the middle of another cycle where people put their money in savings accounts; banks lend that money to other people; people buy (big) stuff; yet other people receive money for the big stuff; those people the money in their savings accounts. This big money moving machine means that in practice, each dollar in circulation goes round and round, and represents a lot more wealth that if it just stays put.
The problem is that the machine is broken and money isn't going around - while before each dollar was being used to pay stuff 24 times (!) it's now not being passed quite as much - this means that that one dollar which was part of paying 4 or 5 salaries is now involved in paying just 1 or 2.
So, where are those dollars getting stuck: - People don't buy as much stuff as before. - Money which was going out to other countries to pay for things like oil is not coming back anymore (oil producing countries were some of the biggest lenders to the US). - Banks are receiving deposits but not lending that money onwards since they lost lots of money in credit derivatives and their capital ratios are under threat.
The US government is trying to find a way of pushing dollars into the system in such a way that it makes the wheels start turning again and that money starts going around.
Just giving money to people is unlikely to work since in the current conditions (fear and uncertainty) people are more likely to keep the money rather than spend it.
There are some radical ideas being discussed that do involve giving the money directly to people but in such a way that they are forced to spend it - for example as vouchers that quickly loose value as time goes by (say, each month the voucher is worth 20% less) which can be used to buy things in stores.
Personally I believe that giving the money to people in a quickly devaluating voucher form would go a lot farther in evenly, fairly spreading the money through the whole economy and making the economy wheels start rotating again than to give it directly to those companies that have the most lobbyists and whine the most...
I've been playing the Battlefield series of games in the PC since the original Battlefield 1942 (from 2002) and the progression from the earlier games to the later games has been: - The more recent games have been released with more bugs than the earlier games - Even though they started with more bugs, the more recent games have received fewer patches, fixing fewer bugs and often the patches added more bugs than they fixed
Certainly, for the later games on the series, EA seems to have moved most of the development team to new projects almost as soon as the game was out even though what was out in the shops and selling was pretty much Beta quality software.
This is especially insulting because this was happening at a time when the rest of the Software Industry was improving their track record of releasing adequately tested and finished software.
If you're planning on buying one of these for the PC, my recommendation is that you sit on the sidelines for one or two months, keeping an eye on the forums for report of problems with the games and checking if EA actually fixes the reported bugs.
Having had for a long time a high level on the three axis you listed above (which by the way are not true axis since they're correlated), I've long ago discovered the following: - The single most important set of skills for successfully keeping your job and/or finding a new job are social skills
Meeting and befriending people outside your inner circle will make it more likely that if the company downsizes your whole department you will get "fished" to another department if you're really good.
Being a friendly and pleasant person means you will be good at working in a group, something that is even more valuable than ultra-elite coding skills.
Self-confidence, a friendly manner and maybe some humor will make you come out a lot better in an interview. Awareness of other people's moods will help you detect what they're interested in and not interested in while discussing your CV and allow you to emphasize those things you're good at which are also important to the prospective employer you're interviewing with.
I think what shocks me most is the complete disconnect between the classes. The lower class is surprised that the elite is shitting on them? Talk about heads in the sand. Meanwhile the elite bankers at the top are shocked that they are being scrutinized so heavily. After all, "do you know who the fuck you are talking to?"
No, no, no - don't you know that America is a classless country where everybody has a chance to make it big and live the American dream.
There are no such things as elites oppressing the underdogs in the US - that's purely something that happens in socially decrepit places like France.
Clearly you've been missing the propaganda all these years.
Most of the increase in the size of deserts all over the world has been traced back to overgrazing by herds of domestic goats.
This is hardly a first world problem.
Other problems, such as starvation in certain parts of Ethiopia are due to explosive population growth and inheritance traditions leading to over-population and most plots of land being too small to sustain a family in the dry, little-fertile land of the area with the traditional farming techniques used there.
You could blame the 1st world for not helping enough or not helping adequately (such as going for "feed the children" campaigns instead of "reduce birth-rates" campaigns) but you can hardly blame the 1st world for the number of kids people in those places have.
Most rivers in China are heavily polluted, due to uncontrolled releases of deadly chemicals by the industry, runoff of nitrate compounds from intense farmed lands and direct release untreated sewage. Again, you can hardly blame the first world for that (you're more likely to find the blame in the weak environmental laws and corrupt officials in there).
That said, the first world maintains a style of life that would not be scalable to the whole of mankind without depleting the planet's resources and is only maintainable as long as we (first world) exploit the resources beyond our borders (minerals, plants and animals harvested and imported from other places) and suffer very little immediate effects from our pollution (such as C02 releases) or of the negative effects in the places from were the resources are being drawn.
In the big picture of how humanity is overusing the available resources, blame is pretty much evenly spread between first, second and third world.
American workers are the most productive in the world
I think you will find that in those US companies that are more productive than similar companies in other parts of the world, the main differentiators are the amount of capital investment (in buying better equipment) and R&D investment.
Certainly my experience working with US based IT development teams is that they work harder, produce more code as measured by code lines BUT their code has more bugs, is harder to maintain and often does not correctly implements the client's requirements. If measured by number of requirement function points successfully implemented per time unit they are actually not that productive.
Those US based teams I've worked with tended to be composed of intelligent, knowledgeable people which were disorganized, mostly reactive (not proactive) and chaotic. The end result was that they could quickly figure complex things out and come up with solutions to problems but the solutions often had bad side effects which could have been been predicted beforehand, decreased the overall maintainability of the software and turned out to actually not do what the client needed (since requirements weren't properly implemented).
IMHO, in the Software Services domain, there's loads of bright, highly competent Software developers in the US, but management sucks big-time and the subsequent lack of proper final-user-results oriented objectives, lack of a real structured development process in most groups and ignorance of human-productivity factors (long hours => tired people => lots of bugs => lots of debugging time => long hours) easily wipes out the gains of having bright Software developers.
Evaluation and bonus schemes that reward the short term and obvious (firefighting work) instead of the longer term and harder to discern (problem prevention work) just bred a culture of reactive Management and Software hacking instead of proactive Management Software Engineering.
Unfortunately most companies have a terrible record of cutting away the muscle along with the fat when doing a big downsizing.
The truth is, the way it usually goes is that:
Whole departments/groups are fired, competent people, incompetent people and everybody in between, all together. Badly managed teams will be thrown out, even if some (most) of the non-management people are competent.
The reasons for dismissal of someone are not explained to the ones that stay. Being fired or not starts getting perceived as a competence-independent event. A climate of fear and backstabbing ensues. The best people start looking for new jobs. The few companies that adopt a counter-cyclical posture and increase hiring start poaching the "star players" from the ones doing the downsizing.
Clearly this time around Microsoft is taking the proper approach to Marketing and starting a Viral Marketing campaign early enough to, in the minds of the consumers, build a positive image for their new OS before the cold shower of reality start pouring down.
I especially like the part where they keep comparing Windows 7 with Windows Vista (which is crap) instead of comparing it with Windows XP (the last good OS they made) - great way to nudge the online reviews and opinions to use an absurdly low basis of comparison AND get the suckers^H^H^H^H experimentalists that bought Windows Vista to upgrade again.
To however is behind this Marketing campaign: I salute you!
Basic rule #1 when receiving an impossible deadline:
Send an e-mail to your manager and a bunch of people saying "In my professional opinion this deadline is impossible to achieve. The ensuing late delivery will make us look bad in the eyes of the client/business/division for whom we are doing this job and we're better getting them an appropriately revised deadline now than looking bad by delivering late"
Then at any opportunity you have let people know (especially the above mentioned client/business/division) that the deadline is impossible and it was set/accepted by that manager without taking into account the professional opinion of the development team.
When the impossible dully fails to materialize, observe your manager trying and failing to deflect the blame.
Somebody please explain why should I pay good money (not to mention spend time) to go from Windows XP to Windows 7?
Even though I actually work in IT (and am thus a tinkerer when it comes to computers), with XP and Linux my PCs do pretty much all that I need - the only reason I can see to "upgrade" would be due to a new DirectX version which is released for Windows 7 only and forces me to upgrade (the kind of shitty move that MS tried with Windows Vista) in order to keep playing games on my PC.
P)lease spare me the "cool new widgets" or "fancy new filesystem that was promised last time around but didn't got released" sort of reasons - to enjoy cool new technology in computers you're better of turning to Linux.
You're probably playing the wrong FPS games online, probably even the wrong hardware: consoles are where you find the vast majority of kids and young teens (guess what's the age range where most "noob" and "fag" callers are?).
That said, as I got older (I'm on my middle thirties now) I moved away from the more pure quick-reactions games (eg Quake variants) since my speed of reaction is not as good as most younger players (and those games are the kind where an extra 200 ms make all the difference if you want to be competitive). I started playing games with capture-the-flag modes and vehicles (such as the Battlefield series) since in there superior tactical awareness does offset lower reaction speed. In that kind of online FPS it's perfectly possible to be on the top 10% of players even though you're in your thirties.
The purpose of this system has nothing to do with child pornography: - It's all about deploying a system that the government can use to control which information people can see and which they cannot.
In a place like Germany, with the past it has, I'm surprised that there is no huge public outrage to a government mandated and government controlled system that restricts people from viewing otherwise public information which the government chooses to restrict.
If this system does end up deployed, expect that a) The list of restricted sites will be confidential b) Non-mainstream political sites critical of the government will be blacklisted
As for not bombing civilians, if someone would convince the bad guys to quit hiding in civilian neighborhoods, homes, crowds, etc., we'd be quite happy to not inflict collateral damage in the process of killing said bad guys.
"As for not sending rockets to civilian areas, if someone would convince the bad guys to quit attacking civilian neighborhoods, homes, crowds, etc. with missiles, artillery, tanks and bombers and other military equipment against which we have little or no defense, we'd be quite happy to stop firing rockets against the homes of the bad guys that sent their army to kill us."
One man's terrorists are another man's freedom fighters and both sides ARE the bad guys to the other side - amazing concepts aren't they?
Certainly, an understanding of basic human group psychology (in a fight both sides promote the image that "we are the good guys, the others are the bad guys") seems to be beyond the intellectual ability of a many people....
Large boss, slightly human looking but with fiery red eyes and decaying flesh. Fights with a magical Tax Form and spawns an army of goblin-lawyers as adds.
Players will only have time to go OMGWTFBBQPWNED before they die.
Sarah Palin was what made the Republicans loose the Independent vote.
In the beginning McCain was very much seen as and independent thinker, one of the few Republicans not in bed and not in thrall with the religious-extreme-right-moralistic-evolution-denying part of the Republican party.
Then his campaign changed tack to attract that segment of their party, culminating with the choice of Sarah Palin as running mate for McCain.
The thought that if McCain became a president he could die in office (he is in his seventies) resulting in an extreme-right-religious-nut-Alaskan-redneck inheriting the office of United States President sent shivers down the back of the vast majority of Independent voters and pretty much killed any chance McCain had of getting their votes.
In the eyes of many people McCain started his campaign as "a forward thinking, independent minded Republican" and ended it as "the vehicle that will bring the Dark Age to the US"
As an American, your generalizations about England sound almost exactly like American culture.
The UK and especially England seem to have lost it's traditions and fallen-back to the American culture popularized by the American media.
Certainly, in London if you look around to young black people in poor neighborhoods you see that they dress in the same way, listen to the same music and organize themselves in gangs just like young blacks in poor US neighborhoods (at least in the same way as they are portrayed in movies and the television).
Its eerie and saddening to see the sons of African emigrants around here copying the bad bits of inner city African-American culture instead of the good things.
In a similar way, consumerism and extreme-individualism seem to have been copied from the US mold.
This might be why the UK and the US share the same kind of social problems.
Mainland Europe didn't adapt the American model quite so fast and so deeply (although things are moving in that direction) and doesn't yet have the same kind of social problems in a large scale.
Several years ago, i played EVE for a year (my first MMORPG).
Went through the whole learning the game, joined a corp, mined my way into 2x Battleships, went to zero space and participated in PvP battles, made loads of ISK (EVE currency) playing the inefficiencies of the market for Tech 2 components...
... then at some point I woke up to the fact that all that ISK just made me worry more, to the fact that most of the time in EVE was spent traveling from one place to another (and all systems look the same) and to the fact that EVE was more work than fun.
That's when I quit and started playing WoW (which at the time had just come out).
Now that I've played many more MMORPGs, looking back I can see that EVE was mostly composed of time sinks designed to waste players' time: - To get anywhere in the beginning of the game you have to spend most of your time mining (slow and boring), buying stuff in one system and selling in another (see next comment) or doing highly repetitive quests. - Once you move beyond the original systems your start spending most of your time traveling. For example, if your trip take you through 10 systems (not at all uncommon) it will take about 45 minutes on it's own through systems that pretty much all look the same. Zero space is huge and far from everything so you have to travel a lot to and from it and between areas there.
The whole economy of EVE is highly relying in there being masses of people doing the grunt work of mining asteroids for metals which are then hauled to a place with manufacturing facilities to use in making ships and weapons. These are then used (and destroyed) in battles in zero-space. Of all the steps in this process, the only one that is fun is the last one (battles in zero-space)
Slashdot Mirror
They intend for it to take-off and land like a normal aircraft.
That means that at the start of the trip this vehicle will be in a horizontal position accelerating parallel to the ground.
You're better off thinking of it as an aircraft that can fly really high and turn into a space plane, which as a completely different paradigm from the "rocket pointing skywards and going up as fast as possible".
Legislation in China is like putting perfume in a turd: if you're far enough you won't smell the turd and you might even smell the perfume, but once you get close enough, you'll definitely notice that the shit is still there.
The truth is that in China, unless there is some real political will from the top along with the appropriate amounts of stick and carrot, laws are worth less than the paper they are written on - local authorities will happily keep on doing whatever they think they need to do in order to meet their growth targets and pocket some money on the side from local "industrialists" whatever the law says.
Actually I remember the time when AOL started allowing their customers to access the Net.
Before that the Net was pretty much an inter-University network used mostly by the technically inclined, a small enough world that most people quickly learned and followed the rules of behavior (such as Read the FAQ first). After that, the whole place was pretty much invaded by clueless newbies and virtual hooligans (as seen from the point of view of somebody that mostly frequented the Usenet).
By comparison with the Net at the time, AOL as a gated community was more like a slum circled by barbed-wire.
That said, when AOL opened the gates, it started the shift where the Net went being mostly a geek toy to being a social phenomenon and an essential part of our society. In other words - it was openness to all that made the Internet become the socially and economically important infrastructure it is today.
I have a (tiny) company that imported and retailed low cost MP3 players from China. The devices were bought directly from the manufacturer. This specific player is of a design manufactured by multiple manufacturers, which makes me believe it was locally designed and sold to several manufacturers.
My experience has shown me the following:
- Quality control was all over the place. One box of devices might have a rate of failure of 10% while another had a rate of failure of less than 2%. It literally looked like the rate of failure depended on whoever was doing QA at the time a batch of devices was made.
- The final product is not the same as the samples you evaluate. For example, in my case the Firmware was different in the final version and even had one (small) feature missing.
- The user manuals are in "Chinglisih". They also don't quite match what's in the box.
- The design of the device lacks the tiny details which make for easier assembly and a more polished product. For example, in the devices we ordered the display component was manually aligned to the location of the transparent plastic window in the device's casing and glued to the circuit board. There were no grooves or notches inside the device's casing to guide the display into the proper place, which meant that often the display is tilted and/or off-center.
In my view, to have anything manufactured in China for a Western market you have to be big enough to provide in situ your own designs, your own QA and evaluate the manufacturing inputs yourself and impose some changes to some of the steps in the manufacturing process.
In other words, most Chinese manufacturers have problems in these areas (QA, design, manufacturing quality, efficiency) which have to be addressed by those companies that actually have goods made in China for sale to those markets in the West were shabby products are not acceptable.
Until this is solved, I find it highly unlikely that Chinese manufacturers will be able to move up-market on their own.
The problem of the legitimacy of games now is just like the problem of the legitimacy of rock-and-roll in the 1950s:
- Like rock-and-roll, games as an entertainment medium has been mostly adopted by people of the newer generations.
- Most people from older generations have never really experienced the new media (play games/listen to rock-and-roll)
- Since they do not understand the new generation, those people from the older generation will rant about how the new media is doing all sorts of bad things to the new generation.
- Politicians, which are mostly from the old generation and whose constituents are also mostly from that generation (younger people are less likely to vote than older people) will pick up on this and start ranting themselves.
Keep in mind that games have only started to become mainstream with young people a little over 10 years ago with the first gaming consoles (the small bunch of early players like me that started with things like ZX Spectrums or Atari machines are not mainstream).
I expect that this "legitimacy" problem will solve itself within 10 years once the current mainstream generation of gamers (which are now in their mid/late teens and early twenties) have turned into a sizable, politically active voting block.
Actually traveling to the future is extremely easy.
The hard part is getting there faster than one second a second.
The problem of that is the following:
- How much of that money would be spent and how much would be saved?
The modern financial system is (or at least was, until recently) a big machine designed to make money go around and around and around:
- People buy stuff; that money goes to companies that sell the stuff; the companies then pay the salaries; the employees buy stuff with their salaries and so forth. In a similar way, companies buy stuff from other companies which in turn buy stuff from yet other companies.
- Banks sit in the middle of another cycle where people put their money in savings accounts; banks lend that money to other people; people buy (big) stuff; yet other people receive money for the big stuff; those people the money in their savings accounts.
This big money moving machine means that in practice, each dollar in circulation goes round and round, and represents a lot more wealth that if it just stays put.
The problem is that the machine is broken and money isn't going around - while before each dollar was being used to pay stuff 24 times (!) it's now not being passed quite as much - this means that that one dollar which was part of paying 4 or 5 salaries is now involved in paying just 1 or 2.
So, where are those dollars getting stuck:
- People don't buy as much stuff as before.
- Money which was going out to other countries to pay for things like oil is not coming back anymore (oil producing countries were some of the biggest lenders to the US).
- Banks are receiving deposits but not lending that money onwards since they lost lots of money in credit derivatives and their capital ratios are under threat.
The US government is trying to find a way of pushing dollars into the system in such a way that it makes the wheels start turning again and that money starts going around.
Just giving money to people is unlikely to work since in the current conditions (fear and uncertainty) people are more likely to keep the money rather than spend it.
There are some radical ideas being discussed that do involve giving the money directly to people but in such a way that they are forced to spend it - for example as vouchers that quickly loose value as time goes by (say, each month the voucher is worth 20% less) which can be used to buy things in stores.
Personally I believe that giving the money to people in a quickly devaluating voucher form would go a lot farther in evenly, fairly spreading the money through the whole economy and making the economy wheels start rotating again than to give it directly to those companies that have the most lobbyists and whine the most ...
I've been playing the Battlefield series of games in the PC since the original Battlefield 1942 (from 2002) and the progression from the earlier games to the later games has been:
- The more recent games have been released with more bugs than the earlier games
- Even though they started with more bugs, the more recent games have received fewer patches, fixing fewer bugs and often the patches added more bugs than they fixed
Certainly, for the later games on the series, EA seems to have moved most of the development team to new projects almost as soon as the game was out even though what was out in the shops and selling was pretty much Beta quality software.
This is especially insulting because this was happening at a time when the rest of the Software Industry was improving their track record of releasing adequately tested and finished software.
If you're planning on buying one of these for the PC, my recommendation is that you sit on the sidelines for one or two months, keeping an eye on the forums for report of problems with the games and checking if EA actually fixes the reported bugs.
That's about the most naif thing I've ever heard.
Having had for a long time a high level on the three axis you listed above (which by the way are not true axis since they're correlated), I've long ago discovered the following:
- The single most important set of skills for successfully keeping your job and/or finding a new job are social skills
Meeting and befriending people outside your inner circle will make it more likely that if the company downsizes your whole department you will get "fished" to another department if you're really good.
Being a friendly and pleasant person means you will be good at working in a group, something that is even more valuable than ultra-elite coding skills.
Self-confidence, a friendly manner and maybe some humor will make you come out a lot better in an interview. Awareness of other people's moods will help you detect what they're interested in and not interested in while discussing your CV and allow you to emphasize those things you're good at which are also important to the prospective employer you're interviewing with.
And this is just the tip of the iceberg ...
No, no, no - don't you know that America is a classless country where everybody has a chance to make it big and live the American dream.
There are no such things as elites oppressing the underdogs in the US - that's purely something that happens in socially decrepit places like France.
Clearly you've been missing the propaganda all these years.
Most of the increase in the size of deserts all over the world has been traced back to overgrazing by herds of domestic goats.
This is hardly a first world problem.
Other problems, such as starvation in certain parts of Ethiopia are due to explosive population growth and inheritance traditions leading to over-population and most plots of land being too small to sustain a family in the dry, little-fertile land of the area with the traditional farming techniques used there.
You could blame the 1st world for not helping enough or not helping adequately (such as going for "feed the children" campaigns instead of "reduce birth-rates" campaigns) but you can hardly blame the 1st world for the number of kids people in those places have.
Most rivers in China are heavily polluted, due to uncontrolled releases of deadly chemicals by the industry, runoff of nitrate compounds from intense farmed lands and direct release untreated sewage. Again, you can hardly blame the first world for that (you're more likely to find the blame in the weak environmental laws and corrupt officials in there).
That said, the first world maintains a style of life that would not be scalable to the whole of mankind without depleting the planet's resources and is only maintainable as long as we (first world) exploit the resources beyond our borders (minerals, plants and animals harvested and imported from other places) and suffer very little immediate effects from our pollution (such as C02 releases) or of the negative effects in the places from were the resources are being drawn.
In the big picture of how humanity is overusing the available resources, blame is pretty much evenly spread between first, second and third world.
It's dishonesty and deception but not lying (since they don't actually say anything false). When politicians do it it's a form of spin
That said any form of dishonesty is morally reproachable whether it includes lies or not.
I think you will find that in those US companies that are more productive than similar companies in other parts of the world, the main differentiators are the amount of capital investment (in buying better equipment) and R&D investment.
Certainly my experience working with US based IT development teams is that they work harder, produce more code as measured by code lines BUT their code has more bugs, is harder to maintain and often does not correctly implements the client's requirements. If measured by number of requirement function points successfully implemented per time unit they are actually not that productive.
Those US based teams I've worked with tended to be composed of intelligent, knowledgeable people which were disorganized, mostly reactive (not proactive) and chaotic. The end result was that they could quickly figure complex things out and come up with solutions to problems but the solutions often had bad side effects which could have been been predicted beforehand, decreased the overall maintainability of the software and turned out to actually not do what the client needed (since requirements weren't properly implemented).
IMHO, in the Software Services domain, there's loads of bright, highly competent Software developers in the US, but management sucks big-time and the subsequent lack of proper final-user-results oriented objectives, lack of a real structured development process in most groups and ignorance of human-productivity factors (long hours => tired people => lots of bugs => lots of debugging time => long hours) easily wipes out the gains of having bright Software developers.
Evaluation and bonus schemes that reward the short term and obvious (firefighting work) instead of the longer term and harder to discern (problem prevention work) just bred a culture of reactive Management and Software hacking instead of proactive Management Software Engineering.
Unfortunately most companies have a terrible record of cutting away the muscle along with the fat when doing a big downsizing.
The truth is, the way it usually goes is that:
Clearly this time around Microsoft is taking the proper approach to Marketing and starting a Viral Marketing campaign early enough to, in the minds of the consumers, build a positive image for their new OS before the cold shower of reality start pouring down.
I especially like the part where they keep comparing Windows 7 with Windows Vista (which is crap) instead of comparing it with Windows XP (the last good OS they made) - great way to nudge the online reviews and opinions to use an absurdly low basis of comparison AND get the suckers^H^H^H^H experimentalists that bought Windows Vista to upgrade again.
To however is behind this Marketing campaign: I salute you!
Basic rule #1 when receiving an impossible deadline:
Send an e-mail to your manager and a bunch of people saying "In my professional opinion this deadline is impossible to achieve. The ensuing late delivery will make us look bad in the eyes of the client/business/division for whom we are doing this job and we're better getting them an appropriately revised deadline now than looking bad by delivering late"
Then at any opportunity you have let people know (especially the above mentioned client/business/division) that the deadline is impossible and it was set/accepted by that manager without taking into account the professional opinion of the development team.
When the impossible dully fails to materialize, observe your manager trying and failing to deflect the blame.
Hi,
Somebody please explain why should I pay good money (not to mention spend time) to go from Windows XP to Windows 7?
Even though I actually work in IT (and am thus a tinkerer when it comes to computers), with XP and Linux my PCs do pretty much all that I need - the only reason I can see to "upgrade" would be due to a new DirectX version which is released for Windows 7 only and forces me to upgrade (the kind of shitty move that MS tried with Windows Vista) in order to keep playing games on my PC.
P)lease spare me the "cool new widgets" or "fancy new filesystem that was promised last time around but didn't got released" sort of reasons - to enjoy cool new technology in computers you're better of turning to Linux.
You're probably playing the wrong FPS games online, probably even the wrong hardware: consoles are where you find the vast majority of kids and young teens (guess what's the age range where most "noob" and "fag" callers are?).
That said, as I got older (I'm on my middle thirties now) I moved away from the more pure quick-reactions games (eg Quake variants) since my speed of reaction is not as good as most younger players (and those games are the kind where an extra 200 ms make all the difference if you want to be competitive). I started playing games with capture-the-flag modes and vehicles (such as the Battlefield series) since in there superior tactical awareness does offset lower reaction speed. In that kind of online FPS it's perfectly possible to be on the top 10% of players even though you're in your thirties.
The purpose of this system has nothing to do with child pornography:
- It's all about deploying a system that the government can use to control which information people can see and which they cannot.
In a place like Germany, with the past it has, I'm surprised that there is no huge public outrage to a government mandated and government controlled system that restricts people from viewing otherwise public information which the government chooses to restrict.
If this system does end up deployed, expect that
a) The list of restricted sites will be confidential
b) Non-mainstream political sites critical of the government will be blacklisted
"As for not sending rockets to civilian areas, if someone would convince the bad guys to quit attacking civilian neighborhoods, homes, crowds, etc. with missiles, artillery, tanks and bombers and other military equipment against which we have little or no defense, we'd be quite happy to stop firing rockets against the homes of the bad guys that sent their army to kill us."
One man's terrorists are another man's freedom fighters and both sides ARE the bad guys to the other side - amazing concepts aren't they?
Certainly, an understanding of basic human group psychology (in a fight both sides promote the image that "we are the good guys, the others are the bad guys") seems to be beyond the intellectual ability of a many people. ...
Does this mean that online form still has the old form's stupid questions like:
- Are you traveling to the US with the intention of engaging in criminal activities?
?
In my view, the US is pre-selecting it's foreign born criminals on intelligence: any criminal with an IQ of less than 50 won't get in.
Will we get a Taxman mob?
Large boss, slightly human looking but with fiery red eyes and decaying flesh. Fights with a magical Tax Form and spawns an army of goblin-lawyers as adds.
Players will only have time to go OMGWTFBBQPWNED before they die.
Sarah Palin was what made the Republicans loose the Independent vote.
In the beginning McCain was very much seen as and independent thinker, one of the few Republicans not in bed and not in thrall with the religious-extreme-right-moralistic-evolution-denying part of the Republican party.
Then his campaign changed tack to attract that segment of their party, culminating with the choice of Sarah Palin as running mate for McCain.
The thought that if McCain became a president he could die in office (he is in his seventies) resulting in an extreme-right-religious-nut-Alaskan-redneck inheriting the office of United States President sent shivers down the back of the vast majority of Independent voters and pretty much killed any chance McCain had of getting their votes.
In the eyes of many people McCain started his campaign as "a forward thinking, independent minded Republican" and ended it as "the vehicle that will bring the Dark Age to the US"
The UK and especially England seem to have lost it's traditions and fallen-back to the American culture popularized by the American media.
Certainly, in London if you look around to young black people in poor neighborhoods you see that they dress in the same way, listen to the same music and organize themselves in gangs just like young blacks in poor US neighborhoods (at least in the same way as they are portrayed in movies and the television).
Its eerie and saddening to see the sons of African emigrants around here copying the bad bits of inner city African-American culture instead of the good things.
In a similar way, consumerism and extreme-individualism seem to have been copied from the US mold.
This might be why the UK and the US share the same kind of social problems.
Mainland Europe didn't adapt the American model quite so fast and so deeply (although things are moving in that direction) and doesn't yet have the same kind of social problems in a large scale.
Several years ago, i played EVE for a year (my first MMORPG).
Went through the whole learning the game, joined a corp, mined my way into 2x Battleships, went to zero space and participated in PvP battles, made loads of ISK (EVE currency) playing the inefficiencies of the market for Tech 2 components ...
That's when I quit and started playing WoW (which at the time had just come out).
Now that I've played many more MMORPGs, looking back I can see that EVE was mostly composed of time sinks designed to waste players' time:
- To get anywhere in the beginning of the game you have to spend most of your time mining (slow and boring), buying stuff in one system and selling in another (see next comment) or doing highly repetitive quests.
- Once you move beyond the original systems your start spending most of your time traveling. For example, if your trip take you through 10 systems (not at all uncommon) it will take about 45 minutes on it's own through systems that pretty much all look the same. Zero space is huge and far from everything so you have to travel a lot to and from it and between areas there.
The whole economy of EVE is highly relying in there being masses of people doing the grunt work of mining asteroids for metals which are then hauled to a place with manufacturing facilities to use in making ships and weapons. These are then used (and destroyed) in battles in zero-space. Of all the steps in this process, the only one that is fun is the last one (battles in zero-space)