Funny, isn't it, how the white neighbourhood watch guy with a gun can get away with shooting someone to death on the grounds that "I felt threatened", whereas the black pedestrian fighting back against an armed man who was stalking him is a perfectly good reason for him to have been shot to death.
Presumably that teenager has just the same rights under the "stand your ground " laws as Zimmerman?
It is very, very roughly similar to Chaper 11. Not the same. To say that GAME "went into Chapter 11" would be completely incorrect. The UK & US have got different legal systems (as have all the other countries in the world), and these things aren't equivalent.
Going into administration means that the company's top management has been dissolved and replaced with an independent administrator, who's sole job is to make sure as much money is repaid to the creditors as possible. They might decide that winding up the company is the way to do it, or they may keep the company running and try to sell it as a going concern to someone else, perhaps after some drastic restructuring to make it more appealing. Usually it's a mix of the two.
Bearing in mind that this is a UK company, trading under UK law (and the article is also from the UK), the term "bankruptcy" wouldn't be used either- technically bankruptcy doesn't apply to companies in the UK, the term strictly applies to individuals and that set of laws work differently to company insolvency laws.
What you say is true, but there are other examples I could mention. Take book shops; reading is pretty much as solitary an experience as you can get, and it has quite rightly seen a huge push to online mail order companies (it was, of course, the original Amazon product). Bricks & mortar book shops have generally tried to compete using such selling points as coffee shops, comfy sofas, opportunities to thumb through a book before you buy it, displays of their most attractive (and most expensive) books to try to tempt the bibliophiles. That's exactly the equivalent of GAME putting in some comfy sofas and demo machines.
Ditto with record shops. HMV has taken the same approach as GAME ("cram in as much as we can and sell it as cheaply as possible), and is duly suffering the same trouble. There's an independent record shop in my town that is doing a roaring trade; as well as the CD's and vinyls, they've also got listening stations, turntables, and a "collectors corner" of desirable second hand items, collectors editions, and memorabilia. That gives them the edge that keeps the big-spenders coming.
Maybe you're right and it wouldn't have worked for GAME either way, but I do think they would have stood a far better chance going that route than by going the commodity route.
One thing I'm curious about- surely one type of planet would be a proto-star- a ball of hydrogen which doesn't have the mass to start fusion. That is, an object with the same composition as a star or a brown dwarf, but smaller.
If that is indeed a type of planet that can form, surely we would expect that sort of planet to have started forming at exactly the same time as the earliest stars. So you could look at this system as being almost a trinary star system, but where only one star is big enough to undergo fusion.
I'm genuinely asking by the way- please feel free to tell me why I'm wrong.
As mentioned in TFS, they were crazy when it came to sotre placement. In my town, there were two GAME stores and one Gamestation all on the same shopping high street. There used to be a third GAME in a department store two minutes walk away, and there was briefly a fourth GAME directly opposite one of the current two. They all stocked exactly the same thing, with no great specialisation. What on earth did they think they were trying to acheve?
Another reason- failure to move into the online space themselves. They do do online retailing these days, but they compare poorly to the likes of Amazon. When you're sat at your keyboard, and you open two websites, and one has a betteer range and is cheaper than the other, why would you use the latter? Instead of capitalising on their huge brand presence, they just let themselves slip. their digital download service isn't even run by them- it's just a rebadge of a whole different company's website.
A bigger reason, though, was just that they weren't pleasant places to be. They're competing against souless supermarkets and anonymous online mail-order companies. So what was their solution? Become as souless and supermarket-like as possible. Cram in as many shelves as possible, with no aisle space, no demo machines, no nice displays. Gaming is obviously a hobby which a lot of people take quite seriously, but instead of trying to tap into that sense of a hobbyist community, and trying to become a hub for that (lucrative) community, they just focussed on selling as many things as possible as efficiently as possible- something they couldn't hope to win on, against their competition. Compare and contrast with Games Workshop (seller of tabletop games and models); gangs of enthusiastic hobbyists hang around in there for hours at a time, playing games against each other, organising competitions, soaking up the atmosphere. You can buy Games Workshop models cheaper online or through some of the resellers- but the flagship shop is the place to be, and so is where most people buy their stuff from.
Are we not playing "security by obscurity" again? The old argument was that Macs were immune to viruses- when in actuallity it was just that teh Mac marke tshare was too small to attract a healthy ecosystem of malware. As the market share grew, so did the number of exploits.
With Windows Phone 7 market share still in the low single digits, it's no surprise that malware isn't prevalent. If the market share ever increases, you'd expect malware to increase too.
Note that I'm not claiming that the security in WP7 is any better or any worse than Android or iOS- for all I know you're right, and WP7 is amazing. All I'm saying is that counting exploits isn't a decent measure on its own.
I want to read it as being about how some pretty smart coders ran pretty sophisticated hacking ring and either be oblivious or indifferent to the fact that they were acting as modern-day thugs smashing up a rival's store.
Then one of us must have read it wrong. The way I read it, a wholly controlled subsidiary of News Corporation employed people to hack into rival companies technology and hand out the cracked code for free to anyone who wanted it. No-one would be oblivious or indifferent in this situation- that's cold-blooded criminality. That isn't intrepid youngsters being tricked into wrecking a company- that's Mafia hitmen being paid to take out a rival.
While it is obviously conceivable that neither Rupert Murdoch, nor James Murdoch, nor any senior figure in News Corp was aware of the systematic (and expensive) operation to destroy their biggest rival in the UK, it seems a little infeasible to me. And importantly, there are rules punishing criminal negligence almost as severely as criminal intent- that is, if the company that they're supposed to be running is committing massive and intentional crimes and due to their own incompetence they never realised it, they should still be going straight to the nearest criminal courtroom. Especially when you consider this instance of massive systemic criminality with other recent instances of massive systemic criminality (the tabloid phone hacking and the police corruption cases), the defence wears a little thin.
As the MP Tom Watson said, James Murdoch must be "the first Mafia boss in history who didn't know he was running a criminal enterprise."
Roughly speaking, I believe the SpaceX solution carries about half the payload of an ATV, and costs not substantially less than half the price. So you don't save vast sums of money doing it that way.
And as mentioned elsewhere, one of the ATV's main jobs is station-keeping: using its engines to boost the the ISS back into a higher orbit. That accounts for a fair chunk of the expense of the vehicle design, and is something that the Dragon can't do.
Ambition is great, but it isn't everything. The Shuttle was envisioned as being cheap and commodity-based space travel, but it turned out to be very expensive. The ambition was there, the intention was there, but the end result still didn't hit the mark.
SpaceX are a fantastic company, and I really do love what they're doing. But at the moment, the ESA is actually flying rockets to the ISS, right now, successfully and repeatedly. When SpaceX actually reach that stage, then we can start to criticise the incumbant players. Until then, it's all theoretical.
FWIW I heard rumours that Eve Online might start to have pilots wandering inside ships too.
That rumour has been going around for years- it was already an old rumour when I stopped playing 3 or so years ago.
As far as I'm aware, they've implemented some simple "walking in stations" concept, but since lost interest in developing it further. So probably going to be fully delivered at about the same time Satan goes shopping for wooly jumpers.
Ditto. From an interviewer point of view, the question might actually have some value for the opposite reason. Interviewer: "I need you to give me access to your Facebook account, Twitter account, webmail account, etc.". Interviewee "OK, no problem". Interviewer "Then you're a very foolish person who clearly gives not two damns about data privacy and are likely to be a complete liability to our company's data, network security and fraud defences. But thanks for your time".
My company's Info Security rules actively prohibit password sharing. My employer obviously wants a clear audit trail for any given action, because they want to know who to blame for fraud, monumental cock-ups, etc.
I didn't realise there were large companies that didn't do this. It seems like common sense.
The thought that someone would rather kill themselves than give up their house and rent an apartment (or a smaller house) is incredibly sad. It's only a house, in the end. Life must be easy come, easy go for some people.
I don't like the thought that some people will give up their one and only life over something so trivial. You'd need to prise my life out of my cold dead hands...
The obvious solution to your problems would be to grow something other than tomatoes as your main crop (tomatoes being lovely, but also being very seasonal and not all that versatile).
Try growing staples like potatoes, onions, etc. They last longer once harvested, have more varied growing seasons, are less vulnerable to your average wildlife, and more versatile in terms of what you can use them for. I gather that they're also harder to screw up and kill.
I say that last bit uncertainly, because I am an awful gardener who has never managed to keep a plant alive for more than a couple of months. So YMMV.
I wouldn't allow "cwm"- it's a Welsh word, and I've never seen it used in English in that spelling. "Coombe" is what I'd consider the English loan word. I would demand a dictionary challenge, good sir!
All R&D looks like "stupid pointless crap", right up until you come up with a best selling product. It's the classic case of Kodak and the world's first digital camera; pointless R&D, which was poo-poo'd- right before it became the next big thing.
Google are already pushing to get their gadgets into car dashboards (satnav and whatnot); if they play their cards right (and if it works) their driverless car technology could be huge- and the market lead, the patents, everything, will be all theirs. Or it'll turn out to be a duff, and it's only a few million dollars wasted.
Wait, you think that Apple is undervalued- Apple, as in the manufacturer of walkmans and laptops, and as in the most valuable company in the world? Apple, who's phone product has recently slipped in market share according to its rivals? Who (until now) pay no dividend, and who's success has historically always been tied to their ability to pick "the next big thing" successfully every few years?
I'm not trying to say Apple is a dead company or anything daft like that- it isn't, it's a very successful company, and a company which is likely to keep being very successful. But to call them "heavily under-valued" is madness.
The law is supposed to ensure that when you spend £150 on something, it is supposed to work for at least 2 years (excluding anything you do to break it). That is not an unreasonable expectation. Any company that is unable to promise that their high-end electrical products will last for 24 months really don't deserve any sympathy.That is already quite a low expectation of build quality.
You might have a point if you're talking about throw-away cheap electronics which you don't need to last 2 years; but Apple certainly don't fall into that category.
London's Underground is what is usually considered its "subway" system. It's the oldest in the world, and one of the most comprehensive.
This, however, is something else. This is a mainline railway route which is going under central London. Tube trains (on the London Underground) are small vehicles with an odd cross-section, so that they can go through smaller tunnels, and are powered by "four rail electrification". This new Crossrail line is designed for full-sized intercity trains, with normal overhead-wire electrification. This is part of why it's such a big project.
Care to post some? Which doesn't come from a motivated source (i.e., an early Christian sect)?
I actually tend to agree with you on the notion of "Jesus as a historical cult leader who was not magical", on the basis that there's never been a shortage of people starting cults, so there isn't likely to be much need to invent a fictitious person. However I've never seen or heard of any serious evidence that anyone meeting the description existed.
For one thing, there are no trustworthy sources. The only contemporaries who ever talked about Jesus tended to be followers. That's not to say that they're lying; it's just that they'd be saying it whether it was true or not.
The only question remains is "why should we bring back extinct or near extinct species" and "because we can" is not the acceptable answer.
Why not? Scientists can do whatever research they think is best, as long as someone wants to fund it and it isn't illegal. Humans are constantly doing things which have no useful purpose, just for the sake of doing them. If we didn't, the world would be a very dull place.
Are you a South Korean? Or Russian? You might be for all I know; but if you aren't, what business is it of yours? It's not your tax money being spent. If it were, you'd be allowed to voice your opinion at the ballot box, along with everyone else.
One is a crazy Stalinist dictatorship run by a military junta with a personality cult, and is home to outrageous poverty, while the other is a modern capitalist democracy with American military and financial backing. Also, they're technically at war.
High-level reunification effort or no, I think it's probably best if you keep the distinction in your mind for at least a teensy bit longer.
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Funny, isn't it, how the white neighbourhood watch guy with a gun can get away with shooting someone to death on the grounds that "I felt threatened", whereas the black pedestrian fighting back against an armed man who was stalking him is a perfectly good reason for him to have been shot to death.
Presumably that teenager has just the same rights under the "stand your ground " laws as Zimmerman?
It is very, very roughly similar to Chaper 11. Not the same. To say that GAME "went into Chapter 11" would be completely incorrect. The UK & US have got different legal systems (as have all the other countries in the world), and these things aren't equivalent.
Going into administration means that the company's top management has been dissolved and replaced with an independent administrator, who's sole job is to make sure as much money is repaid to the creditors as possible. They might decide that winding up the company is the way to do it, or they may keep the company running and try to sell it as a going concern to someone else, perhaps after some drastic restructuring to make it more appealing. Usually it's a mix of the two.
Bearing in mind that this is a UK company, trading under UK law (and the article is also from the UK), the term "bankruptcy" wouldn't be used either- technically bankruptcy doesn't apply to companies in the UK, the term strictly applies to individuals and that set of laws work differently to company insolvency laws.
What you say is true, but there are other examples I could mention. Take book shops; reading is pretty much as solitary an experience as you can get, and it has quite rightly seen a huge push to online mail order companies (it was, of course, the original Amazon product). Bricks & mortar book shops have generally tried to compete using such selling points as coffee shops, comfy sofas, opportunities to thumb through a book before you buy it, displays of their most attractive (and most expensive) books to try to tempt the bibliophiles. That's exactly the equivalent of GAME putting in some comfy sofas and demo machines.
Ditto with record shops. HMV has taken the same approach as GAME ("cram in as much as we can and sell it as cheaply as possible), and is duly suffering the same trouble. There's an independent record shop in my town that is doing a roaring trade; as well as the CD's and vinyls, they've also got listening stations, turntables, and a "collectors corner" of desirable second hand items, collectors editions, and memorabilia. That gives them the edge that keeps the big-spenders coming.
Maybe you're right and it wouldn't have worked for GAME either way, but I do think they would have stood a far better chance going that route than by going the commodity route.
One thing I'm curious about- surely one type of planet would be a proto-star- a ball of hydrogen which doesn't have the mass to start fusion. That is, an object with the same composition as a star or a brown dwarf, but smaller.
If that is indeed a type of planet that can form, surely we would expect that sort of planet to have started forming at exactly the same time as the earliest stars. So you could look at this system as being almost a trinary star system, but where only one star is big enough to undergo fusion.
I'm genuinely asking by the way- please feel free to tell me why I'm wrong.
Doesn't surprise me, for a variety of reasons.
As mentioned in TFS, they were crazy when it came to sotre placement. In my town, there were two GAME stores and one Gamestation all on the same shopping high street. There used to be a third GAME in a department store two minutes walk away, and there was briefly a fourth GAME directly opposite one of the current two. They all stocked exactly the same thing, with no great specialisation. What on earth did they think they were trying to acheve?
Another reason- failure to move into the online space themselves. They do do online retailing these days, but they compare poorly to the likes of Amazon. When you're sat at your keyboard, and you open two websites, and one has a betteer range and is cheaper than the other, why would you use the latter? Instead of capitalising on their huge brand presence, they just let themselves slip. their digital download service isn't even run by them- it's just a rebadge of a whole different company's website.
A bigger reason, though, was just that they weren't pleasant places to be. They're competing against souless supermarkets and anonymous online mail-order companies. So what was their solution? Become as souless and supermarket-like as possible. Cram in as many shelves as possible, with no aisle space, no demo machines, no nice displays. Gaming is obviously a hobby which a lot of people take quite seriously, but instead of trying to tap into that sense of a hobbyist community, and trying to become a hub for that (lucrative) community, they just focussed on selling as many things as possible as efficiently as possible- something they couldn't hope to win on, against their competition. Compare and contrast with Games Workshop (seller of tabletop games and models); gangs of enthusiastic hobbyists hang around in there for hours at a time, playing games against each other, organising competitions, soaking up the atmosphere. You can buy Games Workshop models cheaper online or through some of the resellers- but the flagship shop is the place to be, and so is where most people buy their stuff from.
Are we not playing "security by obscurity" again? The old argument was that Macs were immune to viruses- when in actuallity it was just that teh Mac marke tshare was too small to attract a healthy ecosystem of malware. As the market share grew, so did the number of exploits.
With Windows Phone 7 market share still in the low single digits, it's no surprise that malware isn't prevalent. If the market share ever increases, you'd expect malware to increase too.
Note that I'm not claiming that the security in WP7 is any better or any worse than Android or iOS- for all I know you're right, and WP7 is amazing. All I'm saying is that counting exploits isn't a decent measure on its own.
I want to read it as being about how some pretty smart coders ran pretty sophisticated hacking ring and either be oblivious or indifferent to the fact that they were acting as modern-day thugs smashing up a rival's store.
Then one of us must have read it wrong. The way I read it, a wholly controlled subsidiary of News Corporation employed people to hack into rival companies technology and hand out the cracked code for free to anyone who wanted it. No-one would be oblivious or indifferent in this situation- that's cold-blooded criminality. That isn't intrepid youngsters being tricked into wrecking a company- that's Mafia hitmen being paid to take out a rival.
While it is obviously conceivable that neither Rupert Murdoch, nor James Murdoch, nor any senior figure in News Corp was aware of the systematic (and expensive) operation to destroy their biggest rival in the UK, it seems a little infeasible to me. And importantly, there are rules punishing criminal negligence almost as severely as criminal intent- that is, if the company that they're supposed to be running is committing massive and intentional crimes and due to their own incompetence they never realised it, they should still be going straight to the nearest criminal courtroom. Especially when you consider this instance of massive systemic criminality with other recent instances of massive systemic criminality (the tabloid phone hacking and the police corruption cases), the defence wears a little thin.
As the MP Tom Watson said, James Murdoch must be "the first Mafia boss in history who didn't know he was running a criminal enterprise."
Roughly speaking, I believe the SpaceX solution carries about half the payload of an ATV, and costs not substantially less than half the price. So you don't save vast sums of money doing it that way.
And as mentioned elsewhere, one of the ATV's main jobs is station-keeping: using its engines to boost the the ISS back into a higher orbit. That accounts for a fair chunk of the expense of the vehicle design, and is something that the Dragon can't do.
Ambition is great, but it isn't everything. The Shuttle was envisioned as being cheap and commodity-based space travel, but it turned out to be very expensive. The ambition was there, the intention was there, but the end result still didn't hit the mark.
SpaceX are a fantastic company, and I really do love what they're doing. But at the moment, the ESA is actually flying rockets to the ISS, right now, successfully and repeatedly. When SpaceX actually reach that stage, then we can start to criticise the incumbant players. Until then, it's all theoretical.
FWIW I heard rumours that Eve Online might start to have pilots wandering inside ships too.
That rumour has been going around for years- it was already an old rumour when I stopped playing 3 or so years ago.
As far as I'm aware, they've implemented some simple "walking in stations" concept, but since lost interest in developing it further. So probably going to be fully delivered at about the same time Satan goes shopping for wooly jumpers.
Ditto. From an interviewer point of view, the question might actually have some value for the opposite reason. Interviewer: "I need you to give me access to your Facebook account, Twitter account, webmail account, etc.". Interviewee "OK, no problem". Interviewer "Then you're a very foolish person who clearly gives not two damns about data privacy and are likely to be a complete liability to our company's data, network security and fraud defences. But thanks for your time".
My company's Info Security rules actively prohibit password sharing. My employer obviously wants a clear audit trail for any given action, because they want to know who to blame for fraud, monumental cock-ups, etc.
I didn't realise there were large companies that didn't do this. It seems like common sense.
The thought that someone would rather kill themselves than give up their house and rent an apartment (or a smaller house) is incredibly sad. It's only a house, in the end. Life must be easy come, easy go for some people.
I don't like the thought that some people will give up their one and only life over something so trivial. You'd need to prise my life out of my cold dead hands...
The obvious solution to your problems would be to grow something other than tomatoes as your main crop (tomatoes being lovely, but also being very seasonal and not all that versatile).
Try growing staples like potatoes, onions, etc. They last longer once harvested, have more varied growing seasons, are less vulnerable to your average wildlife, and more versatile in terms of what you can use them for. I gather that they're also harder to screw up and kill.
I say that last bit uncertainly, because I am an awful gardener who has never managed to keep a plant alive for more than a couple of months. So YMMV.
Was the cave furnished, carpeted, and with electricity in every room? Gas stove in the corner?
It turns out redbrick and mortar doesn't burn that well either, but there's still plenty of pesky house fires.
Speak = spoke. So sneak = snoke?
I wouldn't allow "cwm"- it's a Welsh word, and I've never seen it used in English in that spelling. "Coombe" is what I'd consider the English loan word. I would demand a dictionary challenge, good sir!
All R&D looks like "stupid pointless crap", right up until you come up with a best selling product. It's the classic case of Kodak and the world's first digital camera; pointless R&D, which was poo-poo'd- right before it became the next big thing.
Google are already pushing to get their gadgets into car dashboards (satnav and whatnot); if they play their cards right (and if it works) their driverless car technology could be huge- and the market lead, the patents, everything, will be all theirs. Or it'll turn out to be a duff, and it's only a few million dollars wasted.
Wait, you think that Apple is undervalued- Apple, as in the manufacturer of walkmans and laptops, and as in the most valuable company in the world? Apple, who's phone product has recently slipped in market share according to its rivals? Who (until now) pay no dividend, and who's success has historically always been tied to their ability to pick "the next big thing" successfully every few years?
I'm not trying to say Apple is a dead company or anything daft like that- it isn't, it's a very successful company, and a company which is likely to keep being very successful. But to call them "heavily under-valued" is madness.
The law is supposed to ensure that when you spend £150 on something, it is supposed to work for at least 2 years (excluding anything you do to break it). That is not an unreasonable expectation. Any company that is unable to promise that their high-end electrical products will last for 24 months really don't deserve any sympathy.That is already quite a low expectation of build quality.
You might have a point if you're talking about throw-away cheap electronics which you don't need to last 2 years; but Apple certainly don't fall into that category.
London's Underground is what is usually considered its "subway" system. It's the oldest in the world, and one of the most comprehensive.
This, however, is something else. This is a mainline railway route which is going under central London. Tube trains (on the London Underground) are small vehicles with an odd cross-section, so that they can go through smaller tunnels, and are powered by "four rail electrification". This new Crossrail line is designed for full-sized intercity trains, with normal overhead-wire electrification. This is part of why it's such a big project.
Care to post some? Which doesn't come from a motivated source (i.e., an early Christian sect)?
I actually tend to agree with you on the notion of "Jesus as a historical cult leader who was not magical", on the basis that there's never been a shortage of people starting cults, so there isn't likely to be much need to invent a fictitious person. However I've never seen or heard of any serious evidence that anyone meeting the description existed.
For one thing, there are no trustworthy sources. The only contemporaries who ever talked about Jesus tended to be followers. That's not to say that they're lying; it's just that they'd be saying it whether it was true or not.
The only question remains is "why should we bring back extinct or near extinct species" and "because we can" is not the acceptable answer.
Why not? Scientists can do whatever research they think is best, as long as someone wants to fund it and it isn't illegal. Humans are constantly doing things which have no useful purpose, just for the sake of doing them. If we didn't, the world would be a very dull place.
Are you a South Korean? Or Russian? You might be for all I know; but if you aren't, what business is it of yours? It's not your tax money being spent. If it were, you'd be allowed to voice your opinion at the ballot box, along with everyone else.
One is a crazy Stalinist dictatorship run by a military junta with a personality cult, and is home to outrageous poverty, while the other is a modern capitalist democracy with American military and financial backing. Also, they're technically at war.
High-level reunification effort or no, I think it's probably best if you keep the distinction in your mind for at least a teensy bit longer.
Hardly "full speed". They've basically been told "you can join as soon as you get your democratic act together"- which this clearly isn't.