It depends on what you need to protect. You don't need to cover every inch of coastline to protect the most populated areas. Consider Fudai, one of the few towns that survived the March 2011 tsunami, because its mayor in the 1970s insisted on building a seawall that was 50% higher than most people thought was necessary. Now, this seawall didn't protect everything - Fudai still had tremendous damage to its docks and the boats therein, but all the peoples' houses, the school, etc, escaped unharmed. That makes it a heck of a lot easier to repair the damage than if you're trying to repair the entire town, nevermind the loss of life.
Consider also the case of the town of Fudai, whose mayor in the 1970s, insisted on building a 15.5 meter (51 foot) seawall to protect against tsunamis. This was much higher than most people thought was necessary at the time, but it saved the town from the March 2011 tsunami.
Did you even bother to look at the two games I linked?
Did you bother to read what I wrote?
Gen Con can absolutely set rules for what sort of content can be presented, or what constitutes appropriate attire for the convention, just like any other business can.
What they can't do is discriminate solely on the basis of race, ethnicity, religion, sexual orientation, etc. Have they done any of that? No? I didn't think so.
"The law is in response to assholes making trouble and causing timid, straight-laced shop-owners to lose heaps of money. Instead of choosing another business to get their goods, the troublemakers insist on bringing grief to one shop."
Er.
Just what sort of situation do you think is going on here?
We're not talking about a gay couple coming in and wanting to have sex on the countertops.
We're talking about something like this:
Customer walks in, asks to order a cake for a wedding. Shopkeeper asks relevant questions like what sort of flavor, decorations. Customer responds, and mentions wanting two groom dolls or two bride dolls, or to have it made out to "Adam and Steve." Shopkeeper refuses because it's for a gay wedding.
This isn't any different, or any less distasteful, if they were being refused because the Shopkeeper learned it was for an interracial wedding, or an interfaith wedding.
Religious Freedom should be about conducting your private life as you see fit. It should not be about forcing your beliefs onto others, nor about using those beliefs as an excuse to discriminate in otherwise public commerce, or to refuse to do the job you were hired to do (such as fill prescriptions).
If I run a business, I can refuse to serve people based on their conduct in my establishment, or for failure to follow non-discriminatory rules.
For instance, I can specify that there will be no public sexual activity in my bakery, and I would likely be well within my rights to kick out anyone who breaks that rule, whether they're gay, straight, or "American Pie" reenactors.
I could likewise make a rule against trying to incite violence or hate, and I'd probably be in the clear to eject anyone that was doing so, since I'm banning conduct - and particularly conduct that is disruptive to my business and my other customers. I could probably be sued over it, depending on how I enforced it, but I'd have a reasonable leg to stand on in court.
So yes - I expect GenCon would be perfectly fine if you wanted to do something like come and play some games of Third Reich (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rise_and_Decline_of_the_Third_Reich). You might even be able to run a game about the Holocaust like Brenda Romero's "Train" ( http://venturebeat.com/2013/05/11/brenda-romero-train-board-game-holocaust/ ) so long as it's about illustrating/teaching a point, and not celebrating or making light of such a horrific subject.
But if you cross a line beyond which most people would say it's objectionable content - well, that's a different story. In that case, those groups would be banned not because of their race, ethnicity, religion, or sexual orientation, but because of what they're trying to do there. See the difference?
More specifically it was American/British/Dutch, as China was already at war with Japan at the time, having been invaded in 1937. America was the organizing power though. Britain and the Dutch were embroiled in a war with Nazi Germany, and would have been hesitant to take such action without American guarantees/involvement. The idea, generally, was to force Japan to back down and end the war with China, and it followed on the heels of earlier action such as freezing Japanese assets in the US, and embargoing the sale of things like scrap metal to Japan.
It wasn't so much about their economy though, as the fact that Japan did not produce enough fuel and other POL products to run its military. Had they done nothing, they would have run out of fuel for their planes and ships, rubber for tires, etc. Not only would they be unable to continue their invasion of China, they would also be unable to fight back against the USA/Britain/etc should it come to war at a later point.
Essentially the Oil Embargo brought matters to a head, and forced Japan to choose between caving to the demands, or going to war, regardless of how bad the odds might be. Human nature, unfortunately, is to choose the latter - i.e. "not without a fight."
You're right though - it is an interesting question, of how far a nation can go in using economic means to influence or deter other nations, without resorting to warfare, or pushing another nation to outright warfare. The USA/etc _did_ push Japan into a corner in 1941, but that doesn't mean they weren't right to do so in the context. We should definitely have expected the eventual result, though.
The USA is in the process of destroying old chemical weapons stockpiles, as are the Russians. Getting rid of the stuff isn't easy, or cheap. According to semi-unreliable sources (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chemical_Weapons_Convention), the USA has gotten rid of approximately 90% of its stockpiles, while the Russians have gotten rid of 78%.
Assad made a decision to ditch his chemical weapons in order to avoid military intervention by the USA.
Not all "WMDs" are alike though. Nuclear weapons are weapons of state preservation in a way that Chemical weapons have never been. Chemical Weapons are nasty stuff, to be sure - but in terms of history, they've been more of a liability than an advantage. I can't think of any state that managed to stave off invasion because it had chemical weapons, and at least one was invaded in part because they were alleged to have chemical weapons.
If anything, the lesson will be that Chemical Weapons are a bigger liability than benefit, and that Nuclear Weapons development is a gamble - but if it pays off, you're set. Once you have the bomb, you're not going to get attacked, though getting there is a dangerous proposition.
Existing law already expects that a business owner or employee who sees evidence of criminal activity report that activity to the police. Failing to do so - such as developing pictures that are clearly criminal in nature (not that anyone really develops pictures anymore, but it's a good example) - makes one complicit in the crime.
But then, we're not talking about criminal activity here. We're talking about perfectly legal activity, and discrimination against people solely because they belong to a particular group.
So, you think that people should be free to discriminate, for any reason? That it's okay so long as it's just private citizens, and not the government?
So by that line of thinking, it would be okay for there to be a town where:
-The local bus company won't serve ($category) people. -The local taxi company won't serve ($category) people. -The local restaurant won't seat/serve ($category) people. -The local real estate agency won't sell homes to ($category) people. -The local baker won't bake cakes/pies/etc for ($category) people.
Putting it in the context of "religion" doesn't make it any better. Nor does it make it any better regardless of whether ($category) is Black, Gay, Hispanic, Jewish, Muslim, or, yes, even Christian.
Here's an idea. Maybe, if your religion says you can't serve everyone else in society equally, then you shouldn't be choosing to work in a role where the rest of society expects you to treat everyone equally and fairly in public life? If I'm a religious conscientious objector who believes it's wrong to kill people under any circumstances, should I be able to voluntarily join the Army and then be exempt from anything to do with shooting anything or anyone? Of course not.
Yes, this is a very salient point. While Ukraine is unlikely to be completely taken over by Russia, it certainly goes to show how tangible weapons would be a lot more reassuring to a threatened nation than toothless paper "guarantees" of the sort Ukraine received.
It's an interesting question why one of the two major island nations that is a staunch ally of the USA relies solely on the US nuclear umbrella as deterrent, but the other maintains its own, separate, nuclear force. That's not to say that Britain _should_ get rid of its nuclear weapons, or to suggest that Japan should develop them, either - it's just something of an interesting parallel. Of course, it probably has mostly to do with Japanese aversion to nuclear weapons (due to being the only people nukes were used against), and general adherence to their postwar pacifism.
And Malaysia for Rubber, as well. They did so in part because the USA had organized a trade embargo on oil, rubber, and related POL products, in response to the Japanese invasion of China (and the subsequent occupation of the French colonies in Indochina).
The Philippines was the forwardmost US military base in the Pacific at the time, and sat directly astride the ocean route from Malaysia/Indonesia to Japan. But moreover it was fully expected by Japan that the US would declare war in response to any attack on British or Dutch possessions in East Asia, so Japan struck first, bombing the Pacific Fleet in Pearl Harbor, and following up with invasions of key strategic and economic locations.
What's worse is that this doesn't take into account the fact that OTHER drivers are likely not obeying the speed limits. Depending on the road, that can be anywhere from 5-10 mph over the limit.
You know what's been proven to be more dangerous, in terms of causing more accidents, than exceeding the speed limit? Relative Velocity - Too big of a difference in speed compared to the other cars on the road. Someone doing 40mph when everyone else is doing 50mph is actually a bigger danger, even if they're the ones breaking the law.
If anything though, we need to better adjust the speed limits of various roads as technology advances. It's probably a lot safer on any given road, at a given speed, than it was 50 years ago, but how many have had their speed limits increased? Furthermore, our ability to strictly govern vehicle speed has also increased. Shouldn't that get taken into account too?
So by all means, strictly limit speeding, but we'd better also take into account the speeds that are actually traveled on the appropriate roads.
It's also sort of funny just how strongly the idea of the Bechdel Test has taken hold, even to the point that the underlying idea has been somewhat lost. It made a point of how unusual it was for movies to treat women as independent characters, rather than as attachments or ornaments to the male characters. It's not a perfect test though - for instance, the last James Bond movie passes the Bechdel test, yet is probably far and away from what anyone would consider remotely feminist, that one scene aside.
Now, as for this proposed test, I would suggest that the problems of gender disparity are already known, and something like this isn't going to significantly improve anything. It would likely lead to companies gaming the system, making sure they had exactly enough to pass the "test", so they could slap the seal on their product. Worse, it would divert resources and attention from the real problems, which lie in various points along the educational pipeline and career, nevermind the attitudes that it would create on the programming teams - "Oh, she's just here for Bechdel compliance."
Bottom line, if we want more women in tech, we need to focus on encouraging more women in tech, not by establishing silly metrics to highlight something that is already a well known condition.
I wasn't aware that there were only two choices ever. Even in the overly restrictive American two-party system, there are differences in views on both the left and right about how far to go. I would posit that the Republican Party, and the Conservative/Right Wing in general has more coherence in their views, but I can easily think of examples where some of them want more government regulation (generally with enforcing morality or attempting to do so). As for the left, there's a reason that Will Rogers has a famous quote, "I am not a member of any organized political party. I am a Democrat." There are more politicians of both parties that certainly meet those standards, but let's not tar them all with the same brush, and let's certainly not decry the entire political spectrum of belief on those lines.
Furthermore, it is entirely possible that someone may believe we are too far, or not far enough, along the acceptable spectrum of government regulation or involvement on a given issue, without supporting the maximal end point. "Government regulation" is not a binary thing, and we're not stuck choosing between totalitarianism and anarchy. Just because I might think that we need more FCC action to encourage competition in the ISP market doesn't mean I want to see the ISPs nationalized and run by the Government, just in the same way that if I think that there's too much regulation it doesn't mean I want complete anarchy, either.
Probably the first hurdle to pass in defining "cyber incidents" (and setting aside the overuse of the cyber- prefix in the present day and age) is the fact that non-technical, and in some cases even non-IT Security people really don't have a good basis for discerning what is or isn't significant. I'm reminded of one news article where the NYPD (or some similar state/local agency) announced that they suffered something like 500,000 "cyber attacks" from Chinese and other IP addresses in the span of several months. The nature of those attacks?
Port Scans.
Further complicating this is the fact that there's a lot of money involved. "There are lots of attacks, so you should buy my services" or "My agency gets attacked, so I need funding for security" are common themes. That's not to say there isn't a threat, or that attacks don't occur; just that some people have an incentive to turn up the threat meter, which makes establishing a clear answer more difficult. It's very easy to play with the definitions to turn out numbers of "incidents" without sufficient context. I easily see untold numbers of bad things in any given day; but most of those are automatically handled by the existing systems. Should those be counted, or are we only concerned with things that actually cause noticeable impact beyond my monitoring screen?
Lastly, when we say "incident", are we talking about operator/programmer/etc error, or are we talking about deliberate malicious action? By Weiss's definition, we're including the former, but that's quite a stretch to equate them to "attacks." Even if those incidents should probably be of concern, though, do they fall under Security's purview, or should they have been handled by some other business unit? As an IT Security professional, my job is to protect the network - it's not to make sure that everyone in the company is doing their jobs correctly.
e got such a militarized police force thanks in large part to the "War on Terror." combined with the "War on Drugs." The former has provided far too much military gear to local police departments based on absurd overreactions to ridiculously rare events that hold an outsized power over the imagination of many people. The latter has provided the excuse to put many of these things to use on a regular basis.
Paradox is usually pretty good with DLCs. There's a lot of cosmetic crap available (unit packs, sprites, etc), but that's all cosmetic. There's a lot of gameplay DLCs, but it's all to add stuff. Taking Crusader Kings 2 (CK2) as an example, you have DLCs that add stuff like playing as a Muslim Ruler (which is more than just unlocking countries - there are entirely different gameplay mechanics), another that adds a new scenario that starts two centuries earlier and adds more gameplay to Norse and other pagan religions, a DLC that adds India to the game, etc. They're all largely independent, and you can select/deselect them as desired. For instance, a lot of people didn't like the Sunset Invasion DLC because it's ahistorical, but it's trivially easy to turn that off, or just not buy it in the first place.
And at the same time, the game is extremely mod-friendly. Fans have even made full conversion mods that turn the game into Lord of the Rings, Tamriel (the world from the Elder Scrolls games), or Game of Thrones.
If anything, the only bad thing about Paradox is the ridiculous amounts of time I've sunk into some of their games.
Yes, and the reviews I've been looking at included a number of games, including Crysis 3, Bioshock Infinite, BF4, the latest Tomb Raider, etc, because you need to see a wider range to get a general idea of the performance. I've actually never played Crysis or any of its sequels, but it's sort of infamous as being a massive graphics power hog, to the point that "My system gets X frames per second of Crysis" became something of a bragging point of how powerful your gaming machine is, hence why I used that as the example in my post.
On the other hand, as I remarked to a friend when discussing graphics cards the other day, it seems to me that none of the numbers on the cards really matter - RAM, Clock Speed, etc. There are so many variables that you might as well say that it has 12 GigaDrawing Cores and 256 SuperShaders with a 1.5 TeraTransit Hop Interval. What really matters is the final performance, using the universal standard measure of FoC(3), aka "Frames (per second) of Crysis3".
Honestly, when I look at graphics cards (and I'm currently doing so for my next system), that's what matters to me most in comparing them - looking at benchmark results among all the major games. Certainly Nvidia should be telling us up front how the architecture works, and that you have 3.5GB of main/fast memory or whatever, but benchmark statistics from 3rd parties seem to me to not only be more important, but not exactly (or at least not easily) fakeable.
That said, it's interesting to me that the benchmarks I've seen for this card mark it as inferior to the 295X2, which is not only almost a year older, but significantly cheaper. I'm personally hesitant to go with AMD, as my current experience with AMD drivers on my desktop has been downright horrible, compared to a relatively painless experience with my current laptop running an Nvidia card, but I have to wonder what's going on when Nvidia comes out with something like this, a year later, and at seemingly worse performance.
However, as a gamer, and even as someone who is profoundly wary of DRM schemes, I find that Steam at least offers some advantages to me, the user. Once I purchase a game, I can download it to any machine I like, so if I get a new computer, or my old hard drive crashes, I still have all my games. I can even delete games I'm not playing to save disk space, and reload them later if I so feel like it. I can get updates and fixes quickly and seamlessly. It may be relatively minor, but it's something that the service offers me. It's also very easy to find and buy new games, new expansions for ones I have, etc.
In turn, I'm tied to the service for those games, but the restrictions have not proven intrusive to me in my regular playing. I can play offline, and really haven't had any problems with that. About the only thing I've found I can't do is play two online games at once on two computers side by side - but I can play one offline while the other is online.
Now, you may find the tradeoff isn't worth it for you, and that's certainly fair - but at least Steam offers something to the user, where most DRM schemes are solely hassles to the customer for the benefit of the company (Ubisoft, EA, etc).
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It depends on what you need to protect. You don't need to cover every inch of coastline to protect the most populated areas. Consider Fudai, one of the few towns that survived the March 2011 tsunami, because its mayor in the 1970s insisted on building a seawall that was 50% higher than most people thought was necessary. Now, this seawall didn't protect everything - Fudai still had tremendous damage to its docks and the boats therein, but all the peoples' houses, the school, etc, escaped unharmed. That makes it a heck of a lot easier to repair the damage than if you're trying to repair the entire town, nevermind the loss of life.
Consider also the case of the town of Fudai, whose mayor in the 1970s, insisted on building a 15.5 meter (51 foot) seawall to protect against tsunamis. This was much higher than most people thought was necessary at the time, but it saved the town from the March 2011 tsunami.
No, no, they didn't forget about it - the sword is powered by the desperation of the pilots, so it's only worth using when things get really bad.
Did you even bother to look at the two games I linked?
Did you bother to read what I wrote?
Gen Con can absolutely set rules for what sort of content can be presented, or what constitutes appropriate attire for the convention, just like any other business can.
What they can't do is discriminate solely on the basis of race, ethnicity, religion, sexual orientation, etc. Have they done any of that? No? I didn't think so.
"The law is in response to assholes making trouble and causing timid, straight-laced shop-owners to lose heaps of money. Instead of choosing another business to get their goods, the troublemakers insist on bringing grief to one shop."
Er.
Just what sort of situation do you think is going on here?
We're not talking about a gay couple coming in and wanting to have sex on the countertops.
We're talking about something like this:
Customer walks in, asks to order a cake for a wedding.
Shopkeeper asks relevant questions like what sort of flavor, decorations.
Customer responds, and mentions wanting two groom dolls or two bride dolls, or to have it made out to "Adam and Steve."
Shopkeeper refuses because it's for a gay wedding.
This isn't any different, or any less distasteful, if they were being refused because the Shopkeeper learned it was for an interracial wedding, or an interfaith wedding.
Religious Freedom should be about conducting your private life as you see fit. It should not be about forcing your beliefs onto others, nor about using those beliefs as an excuse to discriminate in otherwise public commerce, or to refuse to do the job you were hired to do (such as fill prescriptions).
If I run a business, I can refuse to serve people based on their conduct in my establishment, or for failure to follow non-discriminatory rules.
For instance, I can specify that there will be no public sexual activity in my bakery, and I would likely be well within my rights to kick out anyone who breaks that rule, whether they're gay, straight, or "American Pie" reenactors.
I could likewise make a rule against trying to incite violence or hate, and I'd probably be in the clear to eject anyone that was doing so, since I'm banning conduct - and particularly conduct that is disruptive to my business and my other customers. I could probably be sued over it, depending on how I enforced it, but I'd have a reasonable leg to stand on in court.
So yes - I expect GenCon would be perfectly fine if you wanted to do something like come and play some games of Third Reich (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rise_and_Decline_of_the_Third_Reich). You might even be able to run a game about the Holocaust like Brenda Romero's "Train" ( http://venturebeat.com/2013/05/11/brenda-romero-train-board-game-holocaust/ ) so long as it's about illustrating/teaching a point, and not celebrating or making light of such a horrific subject.
But if you cross a line beyond which most people would say it's objectionable content - well, that's a different story. In that case, those groups would be banned not because of their race, ethnicity, religion, or sexual orientation, but because of what they're trying to do there. See the difference?
More specifically it was American/British/Dutch, as China was already at war with Japan at the time, having been invaded in 1937. America was the organizing power though. Britain and the Dutch were embroiled in a war with Nazi Germany, and would have been hesitant to take such action without American guarantees/involvement. The idea, generally, was to force Japan to back down and end the war with China, and it followed on the heels of earlier action such as freezing Japanese assets in the US, and embargoing the sale of things like scrap metal to Japan.
It wasn't so much about their economy though, as the fact that Japan did not produce enough fuel and other POL products to run its military. Had they done nothing, they would have run out of fuel for their planes and ships, rubber for tires, etc. Not only would they be unable to continue their invasion of China, they would also be unable to fight back against the USA/Britain/etc should it come to war at a later point.
Essentially the Oil Embargo brought matters to a head, and forced Japan to choose between caving to the demands, or going to war, regardless of how bad the odds might be. Human nature, unfortunately, is to choose the latter - i.e. "not without a fight."
You're right though - it is an interesting question, of how far a nation can go in using economic means to influence or deter other nations, without resorting to warfare, or pushing another nation to outright warfare. The USA/etc _did_ push Japan into a corner in 1941, but that doesn't mean they weren't right to do so in the context. We should definitely have expected the eventual result, though.
The USA is in the process of destroying old chemical weapons stockpiles, as are the Russians. Getting rid of the stuff isn't easy, or cheap. According to semi-unreliable sources (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chemical_Weapons_Convention), the USA has gotten rid of approximately 90% of its stockpiles, while the Russians have gotten rid of 78%.
Assad made a decision to ditch his chemical weapons in order to avoid military intervention by the USA.
Not all "WMDs" are alike though. Nuclear weapons are weapons of state preservation in a way that Chemical weapons have never been. Chemical Weapons are nasty stuff, to be sure - but in terms of history, they've been more of a liability than an advantage. I can't think of any state that managed to stave off invasion because it had chemical weapons, and at least one was invaded in part because they were alleged to have chemical weapons.
If anything, the lesson will be that Chemical Weapons are a bigger liability than benefit, and that Nuclear Weapons development is a gamble - but if it pays off, you're set. Once you have the bomb, you're not going to get attacked, though getting there is a dangerous proposition.
Existing law already expects that a business owner or employee who sees evidence of criminal activity report that activity to the police. Failing to do so - such as developing pictures that are clearly criminal in nature (not that anyone really develops pictures anymore, but it's a good example) - makes one complicit in the crime.
But then, we're not talking about criminal activity here. We're talking about perfectly legal activity, and discrimination against people solely because they belong to a particular group.
So, you think that people should be free to discriminate, for any reason? That it's okay so long as it's just private citizens, and not the government?
So by that line of thinking, it would be okay for there to be a town where:
-The local bus company won't serve ($category) people.
-The local taxi company won't serve ($category) people.
-The local restaurant won't seat/serve ($category) people.
-The local real estate agency won't sell homes to ($category) people.
-The local baker won't bake cakes/pies/etc for ($category) people.
Putting it in the context of "religion" doesn't make it any better. Nor does it make it any better regardless of whether ($category) is Black, Gay, Hispanic, Jewish, Muslim, or, yes, even Christian.
Here's an idea. Maybe, if your religion says you can't serve everyone else in society equally, then you shouldn't be choosing to work in a role where the rest of society expects you to treat everyone equally and fairly in public life? If I'm a religious conscientious objector who believes it's wrong to kill people under any circumstances, should I be able to voluntarily join the Army and then be exempt from anything to do with shooting anything or anyone? Of course not.
History is rife with examples of people who've tried to repeal, ignore, or twist the laws of supply and demand.
Some of those people have proved far more successful at it than others.
Yes, this is a very salient point. While Ukraine is unlikely to be completely taken over by Russia, it certainly goes to show how tangible weapons would be a lot more reassuring to a threatened nation than toothless paper "guarantees" of the sort Ukraine received.
It's an interesting question why one of the two major island nations that is a staunch ally of the USA relies solely on the US nuclear umbrella as deterrent, but the other maintains its own, separate, nuclear force. That's not to say that Britain _should_ get rid of its nuclear weapons, or to suggest that Japan should develop them, either - it's just something of an interesting parallel. Of course, it probably has mostly to do with Japanese aversion to nuclear weapons (due to being the only people nukes were used against), and general adherence to their postwar pacifism.
And Malaysia for Rubber, as well. They did so in part because the USA had organized a trade embargo on oil, rubber, and related POL products, in response to the Japanese invasion of China (and the subsequent occupation of the French colonies in Indochina).
The Philippines was the forwardmost US military base in the Pacific at the time, and sat directly astride the ocean route from Malaysia/Indonesia to Japan. But moreover it was fully expected by Japan that the US would declare war in response to any attack on British or Dutch possessions in East Asia, so Japan struck first, bombing the Pacific Fleet in Pearl Harbor, and following up with invasions of key strategic and economic locations.
What's worse is that this doesn't take into account the fact that OTHER drivers are likely not obeying the speed limits. Depending on the road, that can be anywhere from 5-10 mph over the limit.
You know what's been proven to be more dangerous, in terms of causing more accidents, than exceeding the speed limit? Relative Velocity - Too big of a difference in speed compared to the other cars on the road. Someone doing 40mph when everyone else is doing 50mph is actually a bigger danger, even if they're the ones breaking the law.
If anything though, we need to better adjust the speed limits of various roads as technology advances. It's probably a lot safer on any given road, at a given speed, than it was 50 years ago, but how many have had their speed limits increased? Furthermore, our ability to strictly govern vehicle speed has also increased. Shouldn't that get taken into account too?
So by all means, strictly limit speeding, but we'd better also take into account the speeds that are actually traveled on the appropriate roads.
It's also sort of funny just how strongly the idea of the Bechdel Test has taken hold, even to the point that the underlying idea has been somewhat lost. It made a point of how unusual it was for movies to treat women as independent characters, rather than as attachments or ornaments to the male characters. It's not a perfect test though - for instance, the last James Bond movie passes the Bechdel test, yet is probably far and away from what anyone would consider remotely feminist, that one scene aside.
Now, as for this proposed test, I would suggest that the problems of gender disparity are already known, and something like this isn't going to significantly improve anything. It would likely lead to companies gaming the system, making sure they had exactly enough to pass the "test", so they could slap the seal on their product. Worse, it would divert resources and attention from the real problems, which lie in various points along the educational pipeline and career, nevermind the attitudes that it would create on the programming teams - "Oh, she's just here for Bechdel compliance."
Bottom line, if we want more women in tech, we need to focus on encouraging more women in tech, not by establishing silly metrics to highlight something that is already a well known condition.
I wasn't aware that there were only two choices ever. Even in the overly restrictive American two-party system, there are differences in views on both the left and right about how far to go. I would posit that the Republican Party, and the Conservative/Right Wing in general has more coherence in their views, but I can easily think of examples where some of them want more government regulation (generally with enforcing morality or attempting to do so). As for the left, there's a reason that Will Rogers has a famous quote, "I am not a member of any organized political party. I am a Democrat." There are more politicians of both parties that certainly meet those standards, but let's not tar them all with the same brush, and let's certainly not decry the entire political spectrum of belief on those lines.
Furthermore, it is entirely possible that someone may believe we are too far, or not far enough, along the acceptable spectrum of government regulation or involvement on a given issue, without supporting the maximal end point. "Government regulation" is not a binary thing, and we're not stuck choosing between totalitarianism and anarchy. Just because I might think that we need more FCC action to encourage competition in the ISP market doesn't mean I want to see the ISPs nationalized and run by the Government, just in the same way that if I think that there's too much regulation it doesn't mean I want complete anarchy, either.
Probably the first hurdle to pass in defining "cyber incidents" (and setting aside the overuse of the cyber- prefix in the present day and age) is the fact that non-technical, and in some cases even non-IT Security people really don't have a good basis for discerning what is or isn't significant. I'm reminded of one news article where the NYPD (or some similar state/local agency) announced that they suffered something like 500,000 "cyber attacks" from Chinese and other IP addresses in the span of several months. The nature of those attacks?
Port Scans.
Further complicating this is the fact that there's a lot of money involved. "There are lots of attacks, so you should buy my services" or "My agency gets attacked, so I need funding for security" are common themes. That's not to say there isn't a threat, or that attacks don't occur; just that some people have an incentive to turn up the threat meter, which makes establishing a clear answer more difficult. It's very easy to play with the definitions to turn out numbers of "incidents" without sufficient context. I easily see untold numbers of bad things in any given day; but most of those are automatically handled by the existing systems. Should those be counted, or are we only concerned with things that actually cause noticeable impact beyond my monitoring screen?
Lastly, when we say "incident", are we talking about operator/programmer/etc error, or are we talking about deliberate malicious action? By Weiss's definition, we're including the former, but that's quite a stretch to equate them to "attacks." Even if those incidents should probably be of concern, though, do they fall under Security's purview, or should they have been handled by some other business unit? As an IT Security professional, my job is to protect the network - it's not to make sure that everyone in the company is doing their jobs correctly.
e got such a militarized police force thanks in large part to the "War on Terror." combined with the "War on Drugs." The former has provided far too much military gear to local police departments based on absurd overreactions to ridiculously rare events that hold an outsized power over the imagination of many people. The latter has provided the excuse to put many of these things to use on a regular basis.
Paradox is usually pretty good with DLCs. There's a lot of cosmetic crap available (unit packs, sprites, etc), but that's all cosmetic. There's a lot of gameplay DLCs, but it's all to add stuff. Taking Crusader Kings 2 (CK2) as an example, you have DLCs that add stuff like playing as a Muslim Ruler (which is more than just unlocking countries - there are entirely different gameplay mechanics), another that adds a new scenario that starts two centuries earlier and adds more gameplay to Norse and other pagan religions, a DLC that adds India to the game, etc. They're all largely independent, and you can select/deselect them as desired. For instance, a lot of people didn't like the Sunset Invasion DLC because it's ahistorical, but it's trivially easy to turn that off, or just not buy it in the first place.
And at the same time, the game is extremely mod-friendly. Fans have even made full conversion mods that turn the game into Lord of the Rings, Tamriel (the world from the Elder Scrolls games), or Game of Thrones.
If anything, the only bad thing about Paradox is the ridiculous amounts of time I've sunk into some of their games.
Yes, and the reviews I've been looking at included a number of games, including Crysis 3, Bioshock Infinite, BF4, the latest Tomb Raider, etc, because you need to see a wider range to get a general idea of the performance. I've actually never played Crysis or any of its sequels, but it's sort of infamous as being a massive graphics power hog, to the point that "My system gets X frames per second of Crysis" became something of a bragging point of how powerful your gaming machine is, hence why I used that as the example in my post.
It's certainly a legitimate question.
On the other hand, as I remarked to a friend when discussing graphics cards the other day, it seems to me that none of the numbers on the cards really matter - RAM, Clock Speed, etc. There are so many variables that you might as well say that it has 12 GigaDrawing Cores and 256 SuperShaders with a 1.5 TeraTransit Hop Interval. What really matters is the final performance, using the universal standard measure of FoC(3), aka "Frames (per second) of Crysis3".
Honestly, when I look at graphics cards (and I'm currently doing so for my next system), that's what matters to me most in comparing them - looking at benchmark results among all the major games. Certainly Nvidia should be telling us up front how the architecture works, and that you have 3.5GB of main/fast memory or whatever, but benchmark statistics from 3rd parties seem to me to not only be more important, but not exactly (or at least not easily) fakeable.
That said, it's interesting to me that the benchmarks I've seen for this card mark it as inferior to the 295X2, which is not only almost a year older, but significantly cheaper. I'm personally hesitant to go with AMD, as my current experience with AMD drivers on my desktop has been downright horrible, compared to a relatively painless experience with my current laptop running an Nvidia card, but I have to wonder what's going on when Nvidia comes out with something like this, a year later, and at seemingly worse performance.
I'm partial to Spartan Heuristic Internet Transceiver, myself.
Steam is certainly not without its drawbacks.
However, as a gamer, and even as someone who is profoundly wary of DRM schemes, I find that Steam at least offers some advantages to me, the user. Once I purchase a game, I can download it to any machine I like, so if I get a new computer, or my old hard drive crashes, I still have all my games. I can even delete games I'm not playing to save disk space, and reload them later if I so feel like it. I can get updates and fixes quickly and seamlessly. It may be relatively minor, but it's something that the service offers me. It's also very easy to find and buy new games, new expansions for ones I have, etc.
In turn, I'm tied to the service for those games, but the restrictions have not proven intrusive to me in my regular playing. I can play offline, and really haven't had any problems with that. About the only thing I've found I can't do is play two online games at once on two computers side by side - but I can play one offline while the other is online.
Now, you may find the tradeoff isn't worth it for you, and that's certainly fair - but at least Steam offers something to the user, where most DRM schemes are solely hassles to the customer for the benefit of the company (Ubisoft, EA, etc).