More generally, he stated that there is no actual data to support the notion that race does not contribute to intelligence, making a specific reference to Africans, and which happens to be a politically incorrect notion, but is still an accurate statement.
This does not mean that members of one race are necessarily intellectually inferior to another, it only means that there exists some sizable amount of data which merely suggests it as a possibility, and that no data has yet been accumulated which can actually show that this is not the case. The strongest objection to the conclusion comes from a political reaction to it, and does not arise from the data itself. It would have been far more interesting to do a detailed exploration on exactly why the data appeared to indicate that than to simply make the statement about the data that he did, since there was absolutely no possible way to interpret it without him being seen as racist.
Unless you want to argue that living creatures cannot be intelligent, there is no reason that exists that would preclude artificial intelligence in a machine, since all living organisms are, in fact, machines.
As I said, they could, at least in theory, reimburse customers for the extra electricity that the modem uses so it would cost the consumer nothing.
Enabling the mobile hotspot on my cell phone is a different story, since the cell phone is battery powered, and the hotspot will drain the battery more quickly than normal. Although this will not increase my monthly costs by any significant amount, it *does* have a significant impact on the convenience of the cell phone, which will need to be recharged more frequently, or even worse, may end up running out of power when it otherwise would not have, and during a time when I was actually requiring use of it. For something that's plugged into the wall 24/7, that is not an issue. The only factor that costs the customer anything at all that they weren't already paying for and personally getting use out of is the electricity to power the public hotspot.
Comcast does not currently reimburse their customers for the electricity usage that the hotspot incurs, but even if they did, the amount would not be very much, and probably wouldn't feel remotely justified by the amount that people are complaining about it.
Considering the fact that one is probably generally not just using a modem as a hotspot for comcast, but is actually getting some personal use out of it, and considering that, for example, to declare even a *portion* of your rent or mortgage as a business expense in a home business you have to actually almost *exclusively* dedicate some square footage of your home, such as a den or what have you, to that business, and not use it for any personal purposes (cheaters on this front get dinged a lot if they are unfortunate enough to get audited, and the likelihood of a home business owner being audited in any given year is not insignificant), so I'd suggest that the fact that the modem might be taking up some real estate in one's home that they pay tax on is not grounds for compensation to that effect, since they are getting use out of the modem that has nothing to do with what may be benefiting comcast.
Even if you wanted to argue that the customers deserve more compensation than 50cents per month because of the real estate used by the modem, considering they can easily take up less than a tenth of a square foot, plugging that into the average square-foot rate for real estate in the area where the customer lives would probably only amount to perhaps a only a few additional pennies per month. If you factor in the notion that it would not be reasonable to compensate them for 100% of that, becuase the customer is getting some use out of the modem as well, it probably doesn't even work out to a whole penny.
As for bandwidth, if the public wifi is not on the same hotspot that the customer is expected to use, then the customer has the full wifi bandwidth, and anyone on the router's public wifi hotspot will not generally impact any upstream wired connectivity. And hey, it's comcast's network... they have a right to put whatever equipment they want on their own network. The modem that they you lease from them to use their network belongs to *THEM*... the fact that it may be in your home does not make it your property.
As for the impacts on the customer's network... it's not on the customer's network. It would be on comcast's network, unless the customer is expected to use the same hotspot that the router is supposed to have open to the public, which is probably not going to be the case.
The modem uses a certain amount of power, regardless if wifi is enabled or not. But the wifi does draw some additional power, and this can be computed.
But for what it's worth, on a modern wireless router, if the wifi were being used 24 hours a day, the annual bill for just its usage would run at somewhere around six bucks per year.
So to keep things fair, I would think,that comcast subscribers who have their modems used in this way should probably receive a monthly rebate on their bill of 50 cents, since that wifi is being used for comcast's purposes.
My point is that Windows has never been particularly recommended over other platforms as a platform for Android development over other platforms except by parties that already had a bias towards windows development before they were doing android development in the first place.
Okay... but other than people who advocate using visual studio for doing Android development, when was having windows otherwise ever listed as a recommended prerequisite for Android programming? Don't you think that Android Studio itself would have only been released for Windows if that were the case?
Well, all the people who published works before 1710 had no copyrights
In general, they had no printing press either... Copying was a difficult and expensive enough proposition that a natural exclusivity existed even without copyright. Once copying technologies started becoming affordable, an alternative mechanism was required to allow creators to publish their works, and retain their otherwise natural exclusivity rights that they would only have had by not publishing at all in an age where copying was becoming increasingly affordable.
You misunderstand my point... I was not talking about indefinite copyright terms, I was talking about copyright itself as a concept. How many people would publish if no option to have a copyright existed at all? And what is the point of having a copyright in the first place if the creator isn't supposed to be permitted to try and exercise control over who may copy their works?
Which is about as much of a selling point for people who don't use windows as saying that something requires an iphone for people only use Android. In other words, it's an anti-selling point.
Creators have some natural control over their creations, which they could theoretically maintain indefinitely by keeping whatever they had created to themselves, and never allowing anyone else to see it in the first place. Barring independent invention, it's a fairly natural exclusivity that copyright is simply an extension of, and which coincidentally encourages a creator to publish, as long as society abides by the social contract that they will respect the creator's intentions.
Care to take a guess how many people would willfully publish their stuff if everything that they published had to become public domain? Sure, there'd be some... but anything of quality would certainly get lost in an endless ocean of tripe that nobody cared enough about to ever want to have a copyright in the first place.
If it were a harmless hack, perhaps... except it seems that the hackers are threatening the lives and safety of real people who happen to work for or be related to people who work for Sony. No matter how much one might dislike Sony for their practices, nobody deserves that.
I'm saying that in my experience as a video game developer, the trend by companies that I've worked for seems to be to try to offer you a respectable salary in the first place to compensate to some degree for the times come that you *are* needed to put in a lot of extra hours. You aren't paid any extra for that time, but you aren't being paid too shabbily anyways... If such companies moved to paying overtime, then the base salary would need to be radically reduced, reducing it as an attractive choice for university graduates.
Pretty bad, perhaps. Being unemployed is worse. Clearly you've never been faced with having to accept a job for less than what you probably fairly deserved for that work or faced being homeless.
Hiring more people doesn't necessarily get the job done any faster. Especially in something like video game development.
The point of paying what is generally a respectable salary in the first place is to compensate the employee for the extra hours they will have to put in during crunch time, where the employee will not generally receive any additional income as a result of their additional efforts beyond a basic 40 hour work week. Ideally this wouldn't happen at all, but we don't live in an ideal world. Simply saying that is unacceptable will not change it any more than wishing on a star would.
I'm not saying that it's fair for video game studios to expect this from developers, but I'm saying that it *IS* something that is to be realistically expected, because without it, most game companies would just fold completely, or else game developers would either have to work almost entirely on commission, with a base salary comparable to that of a newly hired Walmart employee (and there wouldn't be any studios left at all capable of developing some of the really big titles). Why would anyone bother getting a degree in computer science for a career like that, exactly?
Considering there are no shortage of companies that won't even do *THAT* much, yes... that's nice.
And to be fair, the salary as a game developer isn't too shabby.... even after factoring the extra hours worked.
And of course, when the alternative is possible homelessness, nearly anything where you have a steady income is going to look pretty damn attractive.
However, with regards to the pretty much ubiquitous expectation by game studios, regardless of their size, that programmers be willing to work as long as it takes to get the job done without getting paid any more than whatever they had initially agreed to work for as a weekly or monthly salary, one could probably make a reasonable argument that game development may simply be an unhealthy, and possibly even toxic work environment.
Sure... and it's possible that any particular person might win a lottery someday. That doesn't mean it's likely to happen or something that is to be expected;.
I've worked for several companies in this industry, and although certainly some are better than others, there's not one of them I've encountered that won't at least occasionally expect you to put in whatever extra unpaid time it takes to get the job completed on schedule. Ideally, such crunch scenarios wouldn't happen, but the reality is that estimating the time it will take to complete certain things is something as complex as a computer game is an art that even highly experienced developers in the industry will frequently flounder in. Some companies are a lot nicer about working overtime than others. The last two I worked for would at least buy the developers dinner to eat while they worked if they stayed past about 7:30 or so.... and people who really burned the midnight oil on a job were almost always given at least one paid day off afterwards.
Working what usually amounts for myself to no more than a dozen or so extra unpaid hours a week is more than worth being able to still live without resorting to begging on the street.
Hiring more staff to handle the load won't get a job done any faster in certain types of industries, because the work being done is intellectually challenging, and not just physical labour. Hiring more people in such cases introduces a great deal of communication overhead which can rapidly outpace any otherwise expected increase in productivity from having more people working on the job.
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More generally, he stated that there is no actual data to support the notion that race does not contribute to intelligence, making a specific reference to Africans, and which happens to be a politically incorrect notion, but is still an accurate statement.
This does not mean that members of one race are necessarily intellectually inferior to another, it only means that there exists some sizable amount of data which merely suggests it as a possibility, and that no data has yet been accumulated which can actually show that this is not the case. The strongest objection to the conclusion comes from a political reaction to it, and does not arise from the data itself. It would have been far more interesting to do a detailed exploration on exactly why the data appeared to indicate that than to simply make the statement about the data that he did, since there was absolutely no possible way to interpret it without him being seen as racist.
Unless you want to argue that living creatures cannot be intelligent, there is no reason that exists that would preclude artificial intelligence in a machine, since all living organisms are, in fact, machines.
What year is being projected, based on both the current population and its current increase levels, as when the world will run out of resources?
As I said, they could, at least in theory, reimburse customers for the extra electricity that the modem uses so it would cost the consumer nothing.
Enabling the mobile hotspot on my cell phone is a different story, since the cell phone is battery powered, and the hotspot will drain the battery more quickly than normal. Although this will not increase my monthly costs by any significant amount, it *does* have a significant impact on the convenience of the cell phone, which will need to be recharged more frequently, or even worse, may end up running out of power when it otherwise would not have, and during a time when I was actually requiring use of it. For something that's plugged into the wall 24/7, that is not an issue. The only factor that costs the customer anything at all that they weren't already paying for and personally getting use out of is the electricity to power the public hotspot.
Comcast does not currently reimburse their customers for the electricity usage that the hotspot incurs, but even if they did, the amount would not be very much, and probably wouldn't feel remotely justified by the amount that people are complaining about it.
Considering the fact that one is probably generally not just using a modem as a hotspot for comcast, but is actually getting some personal use out of it, and considering that, for example, to declare even a *portion* of your rent or mortgage as a business expense in a home business you have to actually almost *exclusively* dedicate some square footage of your home, such as a den or what have you, to that business, and not use it for any personal purposes (cheaters on this front get dinged a lot if they are unfortunate enough to get audited, and the likelihood of a home business owner being audited in any given year is not insignificant), so I'd suggest that the fact that the modem might be taking up some real estate in one's home that they pay tax on is not grounds for compensation to that effect, since they are getting use out of the modem that has nothing to do with what may be benefiting comcast.
Even if you wanted to argue that the customers deserve more compensation than 50cents per month because of the real estate used by the modem, considering they can easily take up less than a tenth of a square foot, plugging that into the average square-foot rate for real estate in the area where the customer lives would probably only amount to perhaps a only a few additional pennies per month. If you factor in the notion that it would not be reasonable to compensate them for 100% of that, becuase the customer is getting some use out of the modem as well, it probably doesn't even work out to a whole penny.
As for bandwidth, if the public wifi is not on the same hotspot that the customer is expected to use, then the customer has the full wifi bandwidth, and anyone on the router's public wifi hotspot will not generally impact any upstream wired connectivity. And hey, it's comcast's network... they have a right to put whatever equipment they want on their own network. The modem that they you lease from them to use their network belongs to *THEM*... the fact that it may be in your home does not make it your property.
As for the impacts on the customer's network... it's not on the customer's network. It would be on comcast's network, unless the customer is expected to use the same hotspot that the router is supposed to have open to the public, which is probably not going to be the case.
But for what it's worth, on a modern wireless router, if the wifi were being used 24 hours a day, the annual bill for just its usage would run at somewhere around six bucks per year.
So to keep things fair, I would think,that comcast subscribers who have their modems used in this way should probably receive a monthly rebate on their bill of 50 cents, since that wifi is being used for comcast's purposes.
My point is that Windows has never been particularly recommended over other platforms as a platform for Android development over other platforms except by parties that already had a bias towards windows development before they were doing android development in the first place.
Okay... but other than people who advocate using visual studio for doing Android development, when was having windows otherwise ever listed as a recommended prerequisite for Android programming? Don't you think that Android Studio itself would have only been released for Windows if that were the case?
In general, they had no printing press either... Copying was a difficult and expensive enough proposition that a natural exclusivity existed even without copyright. Once copying technologies started becoming affordable, an alternative mechanism was required to allow creators to publish their works, and retain their otherwise natural exclusivity rights that they would only have had by not publishing at all in an age where copying was becoming increasingly affordable.
You misunderstand my point... I was not talking about indefinite copyright terms, I was talking about copyright itself as a concept. How many people would publish if no option to have a copyright existed at all? And what is the point of having a copyright in the first place if the creator isn't supposed to be permitted to try and exercise control over who may copy their works?
Which is about as much of a selling point for people who don't use windows as saying that something requires an iphone for people only use Android. In other words, it's an anti-selling point.
That's all very well and good unless one doesn't own windows.
Creators have some natural control over their creations, which they could theoretically maintain indefinitely by keeping whatever they had created to themselves, and never allowing anyone else to see it in the first place. Barring independent invention, it's a fairly natural exclusivity that copyright is simply an extension of, and which coincidentally encourages a creator to publish, as long as society abides by the social contract that they will respect the creator's intentions.
Care to take a guess how many people would willfully publish their stuff if everything that they published had to become public domain? Sure, there'd be some... but anything of quality would certainly get lost in an endless ocean of tripe that nobody cared enough about to ever want to have a copyright in the first place.
If it were a harmless hack, perhaps... except it seems that the hackers are threatening the lives and safety of real people who happen to work for or be related to people who work for Sony. No matter how much one might dislike Sony for their practices, nobody deserves that.
[nt]
I'm wondering this as well... there's reference to requests or demands, but absolutely no indication of what they are.
I cannot for the life of me imagine what on earth an apparent terrorist organization would want from an entertainment company.
Yeah... and actually threatening people's lives is really such an effective way to accomplish that.
Or are you suggesting that computer piracy has much more in common with conventional piracy than most might think?
I'm saying that in my experience as a video game developer, the trend by companies that I've worked for seems to be to try to offer you a respectable salary in the first place to compensate to some degree for the times come that you *are* needed to put in a lot of extra hours. You aren't paid any extra for that time, but you aren't being paid too shabbily anyways... If such companies moved to paying overtime, then the base salary would need to be radically reduced, reducing it as an attractive choice for university graduates.
Pretty bad, perhaps. Being unemployed is worse. Clearly you've never been faced with having to accept a job for less than what you probably fairly deserved for that work or faced being homeless.
Hiring more people doesn't necessarily get the job done any faster. Especially in something like video game development.
The point of paying what is generally a respectable salary in the first place is to compensate the employee for the extra hours they will have to put in during crunch time, where the employee will not generally receive any additional income as a result of their additional efforts beyond a basic 40 hour work week. Ideally this wouldn't happen at all, but we don't live in an ideal world. Simply saying that is unacceptable will not change it any more than wishing on a star would.
I'm not saying that it's fair for video game studios to expect this from developers, but I'm saying that it *IS* something that is to be realistically expected, because without it, most game companies would just fold completely, or else game developers would either have to work almost entirely on commission, with a base salary comparable to that of a newly hired Walmart employee (and there wouldn't be any studios left at all capable of developing some of the really big titles). Why would anyone bother getting a degree in computer science for a career like that, exactly?
Considering there are no shortage of companies that won't even do *THAT* much, yes... that's nice.
And to be fair, the salary as a game developer isn't too shabby.... even after factoring the extra hours worked.
And of course, when the alternative is possible homelessness, nearly anything where you have a steady income is going to look pretty damn attractive.
However, with regards to the pretty much ubiquitous expectation by game studios, regardless of their size, that programmers be willing to work as long as it takes to get the job done without getting paid any more than whatever they had initially agreed to work for as a weekly or monthly salary, one could probably make a reasonable argument that game development may simply be an unhealthy, and possibly even toxic work environment.
Sure... and it's possible that any particular person might win a lottery someday. That doesn't mean it's likely to happen or something that is to be expected;.
Computer game development.
I've worked for several companies in this industry, and although certainly some are better than others, there's not one of them I've encountered that won't at least occasionally expect you to put in whatever extra unpaid time it takes to get the job completed on schedule. Ideally, such crunch scenarios wouldn't happen, but the reality is that estimating the time it will take to complete certain things is something as complex as a computer game is an art that even highly experienced developers in the industry will frequently flounder in. Some companies are a lot nicer about working overtime than others. The last two I worked for would at least buy the developers dinner to eat while they worked if they stayed past about 7:30 or so.... and people who really burned the midnight oil on a job were almost always given at least one paid day off afterwards.
Working what usually amounts for myself to no more than a dozen or so extra unpaid hours a week is more than worth being able to still live without resorting to begging on the street.
Hiring more staff to handle the load won't get a job done any faster in certain types of industries, because the work being done is intellectually challenging, and not just physical labour. Hiring more people in such cases introduces a great deal of communication overhead which can rapidly outpace any otherwise expected increase in productivity from having more people working on the job.