Poland, Hungary, Romania and Slovenia border Ukraine, and they are all in NATO. Europe is an inter-connected network of countries. It is absurd to say that there is no strategic interest for the US there.
This is a classic case of reading what you think you see rather than what someone wrote.
I did not say there was no strategic interest for the US there, I said the US has LESS of a strategic interest than Russia does.
Imagine if the US decided to send the Army into Mexico to deal with the drug cartel problem, then Russia protested and said we had no right to do that. Most Americans would tell Russia to butt out and stay on their side of the world. Mexico is clearly more important to the US than it is to Russia. So why is anyone shocked that Ukraine is more important to Russia than it is to the US?
The truth of the matter is that the West is wary or weary of wars at the moment and won't risk starting one with Russia, especially if the ISIL situation worsens and we have to start doing something serious militarily there.
Don't be silly, ISIL and Russia aren't even remotely in the same dept. Wary or not, only someone insane would even consider war with Russia outside of a major event, such as the invasion of Germany or France.
Russia could invade Georgia again, invade all of Ukraine, even attack Finland... the US wouldn't go to war over it. That could easily go nuclear and none of those countries are worth it.
For all the bullshit spewing about how the US "protects everyone else in the world and you would all be fucked without us", you folks certainly let Ukraine down.
Ukraine isn't in NATO and we have less of a strategic interest there than Russia does. If the US Government sent the Army into Northern Mexico, would you expect Russia to get involved?
If Russia tried to take part of Germany, you'd see the US Army deploy in large numbers to Germany. It would probably start WWIII, which is why Russia isn't going to do that.
For instance what does she do when she needs to ask about/buy something in a store or whatever? just expect everyone should make the exception for her and to learn and speak American because she can't be bothered to learn German? It's exactly that ignorant, arrogant mentality that causes Americans to often have such a bad reputation overseas.
*puts on America center of the world hat*
Well, Germans should learn English, as should everyone else.
We have 11 aircraft carriers, Germany has none. We have 10,000 nuclear weapons, Germany has none. The US Dollar is the world reserve currency, the German Euro is not.
Yep, they should speak English.:)
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In fairness, that is a bit of a parody of the average American's viewpoint, but it is also true to some extent.
That being said, learning another language can be good for the soul and for understanding other people and points of view, which isn't a bad thing.
Perhaps America would be better off if we required all students to learn another language.
Yep... The Strip was a series of "instanced zones" that didn't actually exist when you were walking around in the outside world.
That the outside world worked as good as it did is impressive, but you couldn't just "walk onto the strip" from the outside world, that is why you had loading screens.
Think back to FO3, remember Megaton? It was an "inside place", you couldn't get in other than through the door and it was a loading screen.
That is because in the world outside, nothing was actually inside the walls. Use the "no clipping" console command and walk through the walls. Nothing there.
---
My hope is that by designing for systems with 8GB of RAM from the start, such loading won't be required. If you can walk in and out of buildings and all areas across the world without loading screens, that would be pretty cool.
Allow me to make this simple, since you wish to belabor the fine print and miss the big picture.
The Earth's exact shape may not be mapped down to the last detail, but it is more or less known, to a degree that it DOESN'T have thousands of people arguing about it.
The climate? Not so much.
The degree to which the Earth's shape is "settled" is many orders of magnitude more than the degree to which climate change is "settled".
It's bad enough that the game will be crippled by design thanks to compatibility with the underpowered "next get" train wrecks.
Really? I don't see that as a problem. The only part of the PS4/XB1 consoles that is underpowered is the raw power of the CPU/GPU, but on the PC, you can simply have higher res textures and better features...
The benefit to the consoles is that being 8 core chips with 8GB of memory, the game can be set in a true open world.
FO3 for example had all kinds of "tricks" to work in the limited memory of the PS3, so much of Washington DC was really zoned areas with all that rubble to keep you from really exploring. There was nothing beyond it, because the world was broken up. That the open areas worked at all was a minor miricle, but keep in mind the game could never keep track of much in the world beyond your line of sight.
With respect to the hundreds of millions of people with a PS3/XBox 360, those systems are now 10 years old and have been holding back open world game design.
Yes, games like GTA V are on those systems and work, but that is perhaps the extreme limit of what those systems can do.
Given the jump from less than 1GB of RAM to 8GB of RAM, so much more of the game world can be left in memory, the "tricks" of FO3 no longer have to be used as much, where some items were "sort of" in the game world, but once out of sight, weren't kept track of.
There of course has to be an end to it, there are tons and tons of games for the PS3 and XBox 360, and more will come, but there has to be an end to it.
Let me toss another thought out... If you wanted 1,000 Baxters, do you think the price would remain the same?
How about 100,000?
That is one interesting thing about robots, at some point scale of manufacturing gets interesting, and once you've taught one of them something, they all know it.
Even if the cost of all the add-ons and the robot is equal to the cost of an employee's annual wage, the robot works 24/7, the human does not, and the robot likely will last for many years.
I don't know if we really are having global warming, or cooling, or anything... I am not convinced that we have enough data for a long enough period of time to be really sure.
Even if we were, we then don't know if mankind caused some of it, any of it, or all of it.
How do you know I had nothing to do with figuring out Earth's size?
It isn't that hard, a pretty darn accurate size of Earth was known 500 years ago, long before we had spaceships to go up and see it from orbit.
A simpler example would be gravity, that is an easy one to test yourself, what is the acceleration of Earth's gravity field. In this case, it is 9.8m/s2
It turns out to be part of the foundation of Science. In Mathematics, you *can* prove things. Done. That's the difference between math and science. You can never prove anything in Science, you can only *disprove* things. "Our earlier hypothesis turned out to be wrong. It turns out that the Earth is not flat. Also domestic sheep have evolved into a new species, they can no longer mate with wild-type sheep. Who knew? Well, some people did. Just not you."
Nonsense, of course you can prove stuff in science...
The Earth isn't flat, it is:
"The shape of Earth approximates an oblate spheroid, a sphere flattened along the axis from pole to pole such that there is a bulge around the equator. This bulge results from the rotation of Earth, and causes the diameter at the equator to be 43 kilometres (27 mi) larger than the pole-to-pole diameter. Thus the point on the surface farthest from Earth's center of mass is the Chimborazo volcano in Ecuador or HuascarÃn in Peru. The average diameter of the reference spheroid is about 12,742 kilometres (7,918 mi), which is approximately 40,000 km/Ï, because the meter was originally defined as 1/10,000,000 of the distance from the equator to the North Pole through Paris, France."
This is not "The Earth is Flat" or "The Earth is a round ball", it is neither, but we know exactly what shape it is, this fact is not in dispute. (at least not by 99.99999% of the people standing on Earth)
While I personally believe in man-made global warming, this sort of thing makes it hard to argue with someone who claims the researchers are just massaging the data until it shows what they think it should show.
Your words speak the truth...
You "personally believe" in man-made global warming... just like Christians "personally believe" in God.
I know a few Christians who think the matter is "settled" as well.
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To the point, I have no idea if we even have global warming, that point can be debated. Then the question is, if we have it, how much, if any, is man-made?
If media center or another similarly functioning program is not available I'm simply not going to upgrade. End of story.
Sooner or later, you won't have that choice... Media Center is dead, it just is... you can use it for awhile, but there is going to come a point where it is no longer supported/updated/works with whatever your cable company uses...
Microsoft made the choice to move away from it 3 years ago, fighting it is pointless.
Perhaps not, but at 8 hours a day, 5 days a week, 40 hours a year, that is more than $50 over 3 years, which more or less wipes out any savings from having purchased the AMD chip over the Intel chip.
It increases your carbon footprint (if you care about that sort of thing), and it is twice as bad if you have to AC the space, since that same heat must now be cooled, nearly doubling the cost to $100 over 3 years. That is somewhat removed if you otherwise would have heated the space of course.
Slashdot Mirror
I don't doubt a nice HVAC control could save money...
I just doubt that it needs to cost $2 million dollars...
So less than 2 dozen schools need to spend upwards of $2 million dollars to... control the HVAC?
Really?
That is the bigger issue, IMHO...
I owned a small computer networking business back in the 90s, we sold a LOT of those chips, and we of course called them P75s... :)
Poland, Hungary, Romania and Slovenia border Ukraine, and they are all in NATO. Europe is an inter-connected network of countries. It is absurd to say that there is no strategic interest for the US there.
This is a classic case of reading what you think you see rather than what someone wrote.
I did not say there was no strategic interest for the US there, I said the US has LESS of a strategic interest than Russia does.
Imagine if the US decided to send the Army into Mexico to deal with the drug cartel problem, then Russia protested and said we had no right to do that. Most Americans would tell Russia to butt out and stay on their side of the world. Mexico is clearly more important to the US than it is to Russia. So why is anyone shocked that Ukraine is more important to Russia than it is to the US?
The truth of the matter is that the West is wary or weary of wars at the moment and won't risk starting one with Russia, especially if the ISIL situation worsens and we have to start doing something serious militarily there.
Don't be silly, ISIL and Russia aren't even remotely in the same dept. Wary or not, only someone insane would even consider war with Russia outside of a major event, such as the invasion of Germany or France.
Russia could invade Georgia again, invade all of Ukraine, even attack Finland... the US wouldn't go to war over it. That could easily go nuclear and none of those countries are worth it.
Nope, but you and angel'o'sphere clearly understand a different version of English and view the world very differently than I do.
And that isn't likely to change. Nothing you say here, nor I say, is likely to change the other side's point of view.
Sigh ....
Sometimes you write something that half makes sense. But this again ... (shake heads).
Reading comprehension, it can be a good thing...
This is not the first time you've completely misread something I've posted.
Actually, I know they do... We've had a German AuPair, they all learn English in school these days. :)
Ha! That was funny, thanks for the laugh...
And of course... you're right! :)
I don't see anyone even threatening to invade German territory.
Of course you don't, because the US military would come to Germany's defense.
That protection is expensive and isn't paid for by Germany.
For all the bullshit spewing about how the US "protects everyone else in the world and you would all be fucked without us", you folks certainly let Ukraine down.
Ukraine isn't in NATO and we have less of a strategic interest there than Russia does. If the US Government sent the Army into Northern Mexico, would you expect Russia to get involved?
If Russia tried to take part of Germany, you'd see the US Army deploy in large numbers to Germany. It would probably start WWIII, which is why Russia isn't going to do that.
For instance what does she do when she needs to ask about/buy something in a store or whatever? just expect everyone should make the exception for her and to learn and speak American because she can't be bothered to learn German? It's exactly that ignorant, arrogant mentality that causes Americans to often have such a bad reputation overseas.
*puts on America center of the world hat*
Well, Germans should learn English, as should everyone else.
We have 11 aircraft carriers, Germany has none. We have 10,000 nuclear weapons, Germany has none. The US Dollar is the world reserve currency, the German Euro is not.
Yep, they should speak English. :)
---
In fairness, that is a bit of a parody of the average American's viewpoint, but it is also true to some extent.
That being said, learning another language can be good for the soul and for understanding other people and points of view, which isn't a bad thing.
Perhaps America would be better off if we required all students to learn another language.
Yep... The Strip was a series of "instanced zones" that didn't actually exist when you were walking around in the outside world.
That the outside world worked as good as it did is impressive, but you couldn't just "walk onto the strip" from the outside world, that is why you had loading screens.
Think back to FO3, remember Megaton? It was an "inside place", you couldn't get in other than through the door and it was a loading screen.
That is because in the world outside, nothing was actually inside the walls. Use the "no clipping" console command and walk through the walls. Nothing there.
---
My hope is that by designing for systems with 8GB of RAM from the start, such loading won't be required. If you can walk in and out of buildings and all areas across the world without loading screens, that would be pretty cool.
Allow me to make this simple, since you wish to belabor the fine print and miss the big picture.
The Earth's exact shape may not be mapped down to the last detail, but it is more or less known, to a degree that it DOESN'T have thousands of people arguing about it.
The climate? Not so much.
The degree to which the Earth's shape is "settled" is many orders of magnitude more than the degree to which climate change is "settled".
GTV V doesn't require the same level of detail across the world that FO does.
The cops aren't named across town, the world can be randomly generated as you travel.
Imagine a GTA that kept track of every car in the city. That isn't going to happen in the 256MB of RAM on a PS3.
FO4 will be able to keep track of NPCs far from your line of sight, what they are doing, and your actions can have a real effect on the world.
In FO3, your actions never really extended beyond your line of sight, other than scripted actions.
Who is really going to invade a country with nuclear arms?
Germany doesn't have nuclear weapons.
Sorry to dismantle your three-way false logic.
Except, you didn't, you proved his point by talking about the US nuclear umbrella.
It's bad enough that the game will be crippled by design thanks to compatibility with the underpowered "next get" train wrecks.
Really? I don't see that as a problem. The only part of the PS4/XB1 consoles that is underpowered is the raw power of the CPU/GPU, but on the PC, you can simply have higher res textures and better features...
The benefit to the consoles is that being 8 core chips with 8GB of memory, the game can be set in a true open world.
FO3 for example had all kinds of "tricks" to work in the limited memory of the PS3, so much of Washington DC was really zoned areas with all that rubble to keep you from really exploring. There was nothing beyond it, because the world was broken up. That the open areas worked at all was a minor miricle, but keep in mind the game could never keep track of much in the world beyond your line of sight.
With 8GB of system memory, they can.
With respect to the hundreds of millions of people with a PS3/XBox 360, those systems are now 10 years old and have been holding back open world game design.
Yes, games like GTA V are on those systems and work, but that is perhaps the extreme limit of what those systems can do.
Given the jump from less than 1GB of RAM to 8GB of RAM, so much more of the game world can be left in memory, the "tricks" of FO3 no longer have to be used as much, where some items were "sort of" in the game world, but once out of sight, weren't kept track of.
There of course has to be an end to it, there are tons and tons of games for the PS3 and XBox 360, and more will come, but there has to be an end to it.
Fair enough.
Let me toss another thought out... If you wanted 1,000 Baxters, do you think the price would remain the same?
How about 100,000?
That is one interesting thing about robots, at some point scale of manufacturing gets interesting, and once you've taught one of them something, they all know it.
Even if the cost of all the add-ons and the robot is equal to the cost of an employee's annual wage, the robot works 24/7, the human does not, and the robot likely will last for many years.
Very nice denialism.
You keep using the word denialism, it just makes you look more and more the fool.
Insulting anyone who doesn't agree with you doesn't bring people to your side.
The proper word is skeptic. I'm open to hearing more evidence and continuing to look into it, but the matter isn't settled just yet.
The very great preponderance of scientific evidence is that yes, in fact, we do have global warming.
You keep repeating that... doesn't make it right...
We might, the subject is still up for debate, yet for some reason you don't wish to debate it...
The question of how much, if any, is man made is also mostly (though not completely)
You say that with a degree of certainty that I do not believe is justified. You might think so, but your thinking so doesn't mean much.
You said that, I didn't.
I don't know if we really are having global warming, or cooling, or anything... I am not convinced that we have enough data for a long enough period of time to be really sure.
Even if we were, we then don't know if mankind caused some of it, any of it, or all of it.
How do you know I had nothing to do with figuring out Earth's size?
It isn't that hard, a pretty darn accurate size of Earth was known 500 years ago, long before we had spaceships to go up and see it from orbit.
A simpler example would be gravity, that is an easy one to test yourself, what is the acceleration of Earth's gravity field. In this case, it is 9.8m/s2
It turns out to be part of the foundation of Science. In Mathematics, you *can* prove things. Done. That's the difference between math and science. You can never prove anything in Science, you can only *disprove* things. "Our earlier hypothesis turned out to be wrong. It turns out that the Earth is not flat. Also domestic sheep have evolved into a new species, they can no longer mate with wild-type sheep. Who knew? Well, some people did. Just not you."
Nonsense, of course you can prove stuff in science...
The Earth isn't flat, it is:
"The shape of Earth approximates an oblate spheroid, a sphere flattened along the axis from pole to pole such that there is a bulge around the equator. This bulge results from the rotation of Earth, and causes the diameter at the equator to be 43 kilometres (27 mi) larger than the pole-to-pole diameter. Thus the point on the surface farthest from Earth's center of mass is the Chimborazo volcano in Ecuador or HuascarÃn in Peru. The average diameter of the reference spheroid is about 12,742 kilometres (7,918 mi), which is approximately 40,000 km/Ï, because the meter was originally defined as 1/10,000,000 of the distance from the equator to the North Pole through Paris, France."
This is not "The Earth is Flat" or "The Earth is a round ball", it is neither, but we know exactly what shape it is, this fact is not in dispute. (at least not by 99.99999% of the people standing on Earth)
While I personally believe in man-made global warming, this sort of thing makes it hard to argue with someone who claims the researchers are just massaging the data until it shows what they think it should show.
Your words speak the truth...
You "personally believe" in man-made global warming... just like Christians "personally believe" in God.
I know a few Christians who think the matter is "settled" as well.
---
To the point, I have no idea if we even have global warming, that point can be debated. Then the question is, if we have it, how much, if any, is man-made?
I use windows Media Center daily
If media center or another similarly functioning program is not available I'm simply not going to upgrade. End of story.
Sooner or later, you won't have that choice... Media Center is dead, it just is... you can use it for awhile, but there is going to come a point where it is no longer supported/updated/works with whatever your cable company uses...
Microsoft made the choice to move away from it 3 years ago, fighting it is pointless.
Perhaps not, but at 8 hours a day, 5 days a week, 40 hours a year, that is more than $50 over 3 years, which more or less wipes out any savings from having purchased the AMD chip over the Intel chip.
It increases your carbon footprint (if you care about that sort of thing), and it is twice as bad if you have to AC the space, since that same heat must now be cooled, nearly doubling the cost to $100 over 3 years. That is somewhat removed if you otherwise would have heated the space of course.