The weird thing is, this is the standard knee-jerk reaction to any suggestion that the US system might not be optimal. Part of what you say is true, but a lot of it is just confused and/or completely missing the target.
For example, universal healthcare isn't free. But by GOD neither is the system of healthcare that you guys have. Infact the US healthcare is the most expensive on the planet pro capita, and it is so despite mediocre results. Several countries that spend -less- on healthcare nevertheless have significantly better results. For example, Sweden spends about 2/3rds of what you guys spend, and despite this has better longevity, lower child-mortality, better cancer-survivability, indeed it appears to me that in just about any quantifiable variable.
And you complain that these policies invariably lead to a government running eternally in debt. It's true that most governments have debt, but do you REALLY feel that the US system leads to less of those ? Do you honestly believe that the American government is better at avoiding debt than say the average european government ? The numbers don't agree with you, you know.... There's a handful of countries that are worse off (Iceland, Greece), but the large majority is doing MUCH better, indeed one or two have no debt whatsoever, Norway even has significant government-savings for future pensions.
Your claim that government freebies lead to plunging birthrates also doesn't ring true, at all. The oposite is true, actually. The women who live on welfare (in usa and elsewhere) get significantly MORE children than those who are well-educated and hard-working. Infact the factor that most strongly reduce birth-numbers are high education coupled with a poor or no system of maternity-leave and/or childcare No wonder, because it stands to reason that if you've got a good education, you want to use it too, educated women get children later, and thus tend to get fewer overall.
The good news is, if you adjust society so that having children and working is reasonably easy to combine, people do, this is the main reason why for example Norway has good birth-numbers whereas say Germany has poor ones. It's certainly not because Germany has more government freebies. (infact the oposite is true, they've got a lot LESS than norway does)
Yes, there's always be strata in a population. The degree to which society is divided is to a large degree influenced by politics though. If politics are bought and paid for, the tendency is that the already-rich get obscenely rich whereas the average people don't experience any great progress, and the poor stay as poor as they always where.
The gini-index is a measure of HOW stratified a society is, generally richer democratic countries have a -lower- index, whereas poor countries, and fascist-run countries have a higher one. USA is an outlier, have a look at the map: (data from CIA) http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Gini_Coefficient_World_CIA_Report_2009.png
Everywhere is stratified, the question is, does the university-professor make 10 times that of a burgerflipper, or does he make 3 times that of a burgerflipper ?
Oh, and obscene education-costs ? Wasn't I the one to recommend -universal- access to education ? Getting an education in Norway, -any- education, costs zero. Well, you still need to cover living-expenses, but there is no payment for the education itself. Access it determined by qualifications, not by ability-to-pay. Those students who have the best grades and/or do best at the intake-tests are allowed to get the attractive educations, rather than those students with the richest parents. Makes sense to me.
No it wouldn't. It's true that if everyone had more money, the average funeral would cost more. Because -some- people are money-constrainted. But most aren't. Most people don't opt to make a funeral that costs the maximum amount they could possibly pay. Indeed doing so would be monumentally stupid, it's hard to think of something STUPIDER to do with your money than spend it all on celebrating that somebody died.
It's cost-benefit like everything. Most people would want to spend some money, both as a token of respect to the dead, and also to provide a nice funeral for those still living. But spending twice the money does not give twice the benefit. No, it's more like, if everyone got $15K when a loved one died, the average funeral-price would rice by $5K.
It doesn't ensure it. But yeah, it raises the odds significantly. If Einstein, Newton or Hawking where female, and born in Saudi Arabia, would they ever have managed to amount to anything ? How many geniuses are we wasting today, how many have we wasted troughout history ?
Not at all. I said upper quartile, not upper 1%. We're talking 25% of the households in the country here, if both you and your partner have a university-degree and a full-time job, odds are income-wise you're upper-quartile. A quick search shows in USA it's more common to speak of quintiles, upper 1/5th, rather than upper 1/4th, so let's substitute that. To belong in the upper 1/5th, an individual would have to earn $52000+ a year. Households that earn more than $92K/year belong in the upper quintile of households.
These aren't ultra-rich. It's people doing well, but we're not talking 3-ferraris and a summerhouse in Monaco territory here.
But you are right, for the very rich, then in purely monetary terms, policies like universal education or healthcare are negative, not so much because they increase taxes, but because it tends to lift the salaries of the lower classes. The big "problem" for a rich person in say Sweden or Norway isn't that the taxes are so bad, the problem is that there isnt' a giant pool of people willing to work almost-for-free, thus he'll pay a lot more for simple services like gardening, housecleaning or hair-cutting.
But money isn't everything. Even the ultra-rich care about safety and security. They appreciate it if they don't have to live in a fortress, they think it's kinda cool if their kids can play on the streets in safety, they can afford 9-feet barbed-wire-topped fences around their houses, and armed guards, but would prefer living without. (in fairness USA ain't -that- bad, it's somewhere near the middle of the scale, these examples are more relevant if you look at a country with a VERY high income-difference like say South-Africa, rather than just high, as in USA)
Political discussion in USA is hampered by the fact that instead of discussing if a certain change is good or bad, frequently it's discussed if it'd be "socialist" or "communist", with the implied understanding that if yes, then it's nessecarily bad.
Which fails to be true offcourse. Communist dictatorships where abhorrent in many ways. It doesn't follow that any policy they might have supported, is automatically bad. This sort of black-white thinking is seriously broken. "If my enemies do that, I'll do the oposite, just because."
Universal access to education is a good example. Because what you say is true; while the people to benefit FIRST are the poor people who get a good education they wouldn't otherwise get, the rest of society benefits second, because with that education, the people will WORK, and pay TAXES, and in general contribute more than they otherwise would.
It's not hard to show that education-levels correlate positively with just about every positive thing you can think of, from low teenage-pregnancies, low crimerate, good health, low unemployment, etc etc etc. USA is not alone in accepting a large dirt-poor uneducated underclass. But it's not a clever thing to do. Even if you're in the upper quartile, it'd be beneficial to you to do something about it, your quality of life would improve, unless you LIKE high crime-rate in your society.
Yeah. But then you're talking in a certain political climate, not real prices.
If you purchase solar-panels, at unsubidized market-price, and install them, using standard labor at the normal rate, then sell the electricity generated at the typical spot-price for electricity, then you do not, infact, make a profit.
Yes, in many jurisdictions there's various subsidies that change this to the point that it can be profitable. But in those cases it's profitable because you get money from the state (in one form or another) and not because the activity as such is profitable.
It's the same in germany; it's profitable for a home-owner to install solar-cells on his roof. But that's only true because there's a state-guaranteed lowest-price that he gets for the electricity produced, and this price is substantially higher than the real market-value of electricity.
It doesn't have to be 2-3 years, that's nuts (if it was, people would build solar until the price of energy dropped enough that the payback-time rose)
But it -does- need to be significantly less than the expected lifetime of the panels. Current ones tend to be estimated at 20 years, though local conditions influence it a lot.
With a payback of 10 years, it'd probably be interesting.
At the moment though, you typically get around 2% of the purchase-and-installation cost in payback a year, so you'd recoup in 50 years... except they're dead long before and 2% is much too low a profit anyway (you'll get more by putting the money in the bank)
I dunno. I find a bot okay, but it should be extremely conservative, because it's so bad if it reverts edits that are in fact made in good faith (even if the edits themselves are bad).
It's possible Cluebot isn't conservative ENOUGH, but if you have a look at say the last 100 edits it's made, it's really hard to argue that they're not 99%+ bad-faith vandalism.
Well, yes, but it don't help much. True, the web-sql-user should only have access to information it needs to see. But that doesn't help you at all against the fact that a single web-user shouldn't nessecarily be able to see everything and do everything the web-server as such can see and do.
To make a concrete example, if you're making a internet-bank, then the web-frontend need to be able to see the account-balance and movements of everyone who has internet-banking, it also needs to be able to put in new transactions.
But it doesn't follow that Joe should be able to see Janes balance, or to transfer Janes balance to himself.
No web-frontend I know of create and use one sql-connection, with the apropriate rights, for every user of the web-application. I suspect that'd be very unwieldy to do anyway.
I think, there's enough people who don't consider that worthy of display, even as it is, human-made. And some of the ones who think it IS worthy, would still think so even if it was machine-made, and for roughly the same reason.
Some art is created primarily to create discussion, frequently to the topic of art itself. There's nothing art-critiques love as much as debating what exactly art is. This would fit them just FINE. Infact I'm sure they could discuss it for YEARS.
But *most* of the art people actually buy, have a much more mundane reason for existing. It's for decoration, for amusement, for the emotion it evokes in the viewer.
I don't think it does. Oh, it's perfectly possible that todays computer-programs aren't capable of composing good music, but that doesn't mean that NO computer-program can produce good music.
Music is, at the end of the day, soundwaves. Computers can definitely create those. It's all just a sum of a bunch of sine-waves, none of which have any intention whatsoever. Sure it's possible that the human who created them did, but we typically don't know that in any case.
It sounds very trollish. Free speech doesn't triumph all other considerations in ANY jurisdiction. It's quite common to have restrictions on "speech" that is produced from a criminal activity. (and bullying a child with Downs (or any other for that matter) *IS* illegal)
Your critique is true, but I feel it's missing the point. No the game doesn't succeed in (nor even try) really simulating the complicated world of human emotions, doing so would be incredibly hard, so what you get is a very much simplified linear system where feelings for you is represented on a one-dimensional scale from bad to good, and is influenced by dialogue, gifts, plot-choices, and performing special character-quests.
My point though, was that where the characters in Final Fantasy dream about one day daring to say "I love you", the Dragon-Age ones are adult sexual beings, some of which are bisexual, some of which will get jealous if you are in a relationship with more than one of them (Leliana gets pissed off at you if you sleep with Morrigan, for example), and yes they'll break up with you, permanently, or even fight you if you piss them off sufficiently.
I wasn't saying the system is very realistic. I was saying they're not 13-year-olds battling to come to terms with weird new hormones.
I dunno. The "immediately" part only applies if you start counting from the first letter-from-lawyer. If you count from when Google Italy actually received the first written complaint about the video, then it took more than 2 MONTHS before anything happened. (and there's no indication anything would've happened at all, if not for the lawyer-attention)
Browser-plugins for supporting media-formats have indeed been precisely what you say, a disaster. Java Applet here, Flash-thingie there (version such-and-such required) ActiveX-shit up left, and Shockwave there. Every one of which attempts to do, more or less, the same thing.
Security-holes abound, as do incompatibilities and performance-problems. (hands up everyone who's experienced multi-second browser-freeze, even on modern hardware, because some website is loading some ad that happens to be a flash or java-applet!)
On the other hand, browser-extensions for non-standard behaviour seem to work fine. Stuff like Xmarks, Adblock, various tab-tweaks etc. But these are extensions that are there because the USER has selected to install them, not because the website-developer has decided that you need SpecialPlugin version 7.0.321.9 to seee this page.
Sort of. There -is- a lot of graphics and story in Final Fantasy, but it's fundamentally, stories for kids, or at best teenagers. Children enjoy stories, as do many adults, but the stories tend to be DIFFERENT, and the stories in Final Fantasy, tend to be essentially fairytales.
You'll get young (typically 10-15 year old) characters, struggling with things like the relationship to their parents, their first love and daring to actually express same, clumsy misunderstandings, coming to terms with being responsible for oneself etc.
If you contrast, for example, the Romance in FF-10 with say the potential romance between Morrigan and the main-character in Dragon Age Origins, you can't help but conclude that the latter is more mature. Not primarily because there's sex (there is, but it's not the main focus), but also because the characters behave like, you know, ADULTS with adult issues, stuff you'd NEVER see in Final Fantasy.
FF is fine, but it's ultimately a fairytale for children.
True. The same thing happens if you ask a human to draw dots randomly on a piece of paper. They tend to AVOID clustering the dots, i.e. the dots are far too uniformly distributed, there should be some clusters of dots, and some larger areas with zero dots in them, but there tends to be neither.
It can guesstimate though. Which should I do ? Swap out this page that hasn't been accessed at all the last 2 hours, or drop this page of disk-cache that has been read 11 times, the last time 2 minutes ago.
It's a guess, but it's a REASONABLE guess that it's more clever to swap out the page.
But you're right, a drawback is that if you ain't used a program for a long time, then swapping it back in can mean a significant delay the moment you DO start using it again.
You see, it can make sense for the OS to swap out some not-recently-used pages of a program, to free up more memory for caching. For example. Say you're playing a game, but you've got firefox open. It could make sense to page out the entirety of firefox, so as to have more physical ram free for caching of game-content.
But this also means there's no reason to have insurance unless you intend to commit fraud. Think about it rationally. The insurance is priced according to payouts plus profits to the insurers. If a significant part of the payouts are fraudulent, that means you're paying for the real risk plus the fraudrisk, plus the profits of the insurer.
You're paying for 3 components, but only one of them (the real risk) is relevant to you. The rest is money that's actually even WORSE than throwing it out the money: instead you're willingly handing that money over to criminals.
Simple solution: Anyone who can afford to have an expensive mobile phone can afford to break or lose one, and cover the loss themselves. Say "no thanks" next time you're asked "do you want extended warranty with that?"
prepared statements solve 99% of it, agreed. You still need to find a reasonable solution to the remaining 1%, but even that isn't hard.
I'm talking of things like, sometimes it arises that it'd be useful to do some variant of "select $column_name from footable order by $some_column" which isn't, atleast not with all databases, doable as a prepared statement. (whereas stuff like "select name from person where id = $variable" which is much more typical, is.)
They're silly. A decade is a long time in broadband -- what was the typical connection-speed a decade ago ?
And 100 ain't a lot. They should just get done with it and do fibre, atleast to the curb, if not to the basement. We've got fibre-to-the-basement, and a choice of 3 plans: 100, 200 or 400mbps, symetrical. (i.e. the upload-speeds are equally fast)
And that's -today- not a decade from now.
I sometimes wonder if USA will keep lagging behind in broadband, if it'll be contagious in a sense, in that it'll lead to decreased influence on high-tech generally. Seems fairly likely to me.
Furthermore, the core clients, those arguably most in need of a proxy, say Iranian dissenters, not highschool-kids who want to do youtube from school, aren't even in the target demographic for most advertisers.
They have little free capital, and don't buy many products from typical advertisers, hell in many cases they couldn't even if they tried, it's not as if there's that many starbucks in Iran.
In short: It's no wonder the funding don't work well this way, and no, the trend isn't going to turn just from managing to piss off the users too.
True to some degree, but I don't think we disagree. Thing is, the standard-way of doing things tend to be a lot LESS crap-full than the hacks typically used to make stuff work in obsolete browsers.
Say the rounded boxes ?
standard way ? Make a single div, containing the content, give it a id, say 'leftmenu' and in the css you set leftmenu to have 'border-radius 10px'
Simple, standards-compliant, lynx-friendly, no-extra-downloads, works just FINE for browsers that don't do CSS.
The hacky way ? What people typically do now, to support ie-6 ?
Make a table, with 9 cells in it. Put the content in the middle-cell. Put gif-images depicting rounded corners in the corner-cells. Set cellspacing, cellpadding to 0.
A huge fucking mess, 5-6 extra gif-images to download. Looks like TOTAL crap in Lynx. fugly !
Agreed. But it's still a good thing to code to the standard, because it's also real that a site is easier to maintain the less browser-spesific hacks it employs.
It also matters what kinda functionality is lost in older browsers. If the site don't work at all with IE6, and 10% of the visitors use that, then that's definitely bad. If (to take a random example) border-radius isn't supported by IE-6, so those 10% visiting with that browser, get square corners rather than rounded ones, that may well be acceptable. (especially since supporting round corners in ie-6 means using fugly badly-maintainable hacks)
Slashdot Mirror
The weird thing is, this is the standard knee-jerk reaction to any suggestion that the US system might not be optimal. Part of what you say is true, but a lot of it is just confused and/or completely missing the target.
For example, universal healthcare isn't free. But by GOD neither is the system of healthcare that you guys have. Infact the US healthcare is the most expensive on the planet pro capita, and it is so despite mediocre results. Several countries that spend -less- on healthcare nevertheless have significantly better results. For example, Sweden spends about 2/3rds of what you guys spend, and despite this has better longevity, lower child-mortality, better cancer-survivability, indeed it appears to me that in just about any quantifiable variable.
And you complain that these policies invariably lead to a government running eternally in debt. It's true that most governments have debt, but do you REALLY feel that the US system leads to less of those ? Do you honestly believe that the American government is better at avoiding debt than say the average european government ? The numbers don't agree with you, you know.... There's a handful of countries that are worse off (Iceland, Greece), but the large majority is doing MUCH better, indeed one or two have no debt whatsoever, Norway even has significant government-savings for future pensions.
Your claim that government freebies lead to plunging birthrates also doesn't ring true, at all. The oposite is true, actually. The women who live on welfare (in usa and elsewhere) get significantly MORE children than those who are well-educated and hard-working. Infact the factor that most strongly reduce birth-numbers are high education coupled with a poor or no system of maternity-leave and/or childcare No wonder, because it stands to reason that if you've got a good education, you want to use it too, educated women get children later, and thus tend to get fewer overall.
The good news is, if you adjust society so that having children and working is reasonably easy to combine, people do, this is the main reason why for example Norway has good birth-numbers whereas say Germany has poor ones. It's certainly not because Germany has more government freebies. (infact the oposite is true, they've got a lot LESS than norway does)
Yes, there's always be strata in a population. The degree to which society is divided is to a large degree influenced by politics though. If politics are bought and paid for, the tendency is that the already-rich get obscenely rich whereas the average people don't experience any great progress, and the poor stay as poor as they always where.
The gini-index is a measure of HOW stratified a society is, generally richer democratic countries have a -lower- index, whereas poor countries, and fascist-run countries have a higher one. USA is an outlier, have a look at the map: (data from CIA) http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Gini_Coefficient_World_CIA_Report_2009.png
Everywhere is stratified, the question is, does the university-professor make 10 times that of a burgerflipper, or does he make 3 times that of a burgerflipper ?
Oh, and obscene education-costs ? Wasn't I the one to recommend -universal- access to education ? Getting an education in Norway, -any- education, costs zero. Well, you still need to cover living-expenses, but there is no payment for the education itself. Access it determined by qualifications, not by ability-to-pay. Those students who have the best grades and/or do best at the intake-tests are allowed to get the attractive educations, rather than those students with the richest parents. Makes sense to me.
No it wouldn't. It's true that if everyone had more money, the average funeral would cost more. Because -some- people are money-constrainted. But most aren't. Most people don't opt to make a funeral that costs the maximum amount they could possibly pay. Indeed doing so would be monumentally stupid, it's hard to think of something STUPIDER to do with your money than spend it all on celebrating that somebody died.
It's cost-benefit like everything. Most people would want to spend some money, both as a token of respect to the dead, and also to provide a nice funeral for those still living. But spending twice the money does not give twice the benefit. No, it's more like, if everyone got $15K when a loved one died, the average funeral-price would rice by $5K.
It doesn't ensure it. But yeah, it raises the odds significantly. If Einstein, Newton or Hawking where female, and born in Saudi Arabia, would they ever have managed to amount to anything ? How many geniuses are we wasting today, how many have we wasted troughout history ?
Not at all. I said upper quartile, not upper 1%. We're talking 25% of the households in the country here, if both you and your partner have a university-degree and a full-time job, odds are income-wise you're upper-quartile. A quick search shows in USA it's more common to speak of quintiles, upper 1/5th, rather than upper 1/4th, so let's substitute that. To belong in the upper 1/5th, an individual would have to earn $52000+ a year. Households that earn more than $92K/year belong in the upper quintile of households.
These aren't ultra-rich. It's people doing well, but we're not talking 3-ferraris and a summerhouse in Monaco territory here.
But you are right, for the very rich, then in purely monetary terms, policies like universal education or healthcare are negative, not so much because they increase taxes, but because it tends to lift the salaries of the lower classes. The big "problem" for a rich person in say Sweden or Norway isn't that the taxes are so bad, the problem is that there isnt' a giant pool of people willing to work almost-for-free, thus he'll pay a lot more for simple services like gardening, housecleaning or hair-cutting.
But money isn't everything. Even the ultra-rich care about safety and security. They appreciate it if they don't have to live in a fortress, they think it's kinda cool if their kids can play on the streets in safety, they can afford 9-feet barbed-wire-topped fences around their houses, and armed guards, but would prefer living without. (in fairness USA ain't -that- bad, it's somewhere near the middle of the scale, these examples are more relevant if you look at a country with a VERY high income-difference like say South-Africa, rather than just high, as in USA)
Political discussion in USA is hampered by the fact that instead of discussing if a certain change is good or bad, frequently it's discussed if it'd be "socialist" or "communist", with the implied understanding that if yes, then it's nessecarily bad.
Which fails to be true offcourse. Communist dictatorships where abhorrent in many ways. It doesn't follow that any policy they might have supported, is automatically bad. This sort of black-white thinking is seriously broken. "If my enemies do that, I'll do the oposite, just because."
Universal access to education is a good example. Because what you say is true; while the people to benefit FIRST are the poor people who get a good education they wouldn't otherwise get, the rest of society benefits second, because with that education, the people will WORK, and pay TAXES, and in general contribute more than they otherwise would.
It's not hard to show that education-levels correlate positively with just about every positive thing you can think of, from low teenage-pregnancies, low crimerate, good health, low unemployment, etc etc etc. USA is not alone in accepting a large dirt-poor uneducated underclass. But it's not a clever thing to do. Even if you're in the upper quartile, it'd be beneficial to you to do something about it, your quality of life would improve, unless you LIKE high crime-rate in your society.
Yeah. But then you're talking in a certain political climate, not real prices.
If you purchase solar-panels, at unsubidized market-price, and install them, using standard labor at the normal rate, then sell the electricity generated at the typical spot-price for electricity, then you do not, infact, make a profit.
Yes, in many jurisdictions there's various subsidies that change this to the point that it can be profitable. But in those cases it's profitable because you get money from the state (in one form or another) and not because the activity as such is profitable.
It's the same in germany; it's profitable for a home-owner to install solar-cells on his roof. But that's only true because there's a state-guaranteed lowest-price that he gets for the electricity produced, and this price is substantially higher than the real market-value of electricity.
It doesn't have to be 2-3 years, that's nuts (if it was, people would build solar until the price of energy dropped enough that the payback-time rose)
But it -does- need to be significantly less than the expected lifetime of the panels. Current ones tend to be estimated at 20 years, though local conditions influence it a lot.
With a payback of 10 years, it'd probably be interesting.
At the moment though, you typically get around 2% of the purchase-and-installation cost in payback a year, so you'd recoup in 50 years... except they're dead long before and 2% is much too low a profit anyway (you'll get more by putting the money in the bank)
I dunno. I find a bot okay, but it should be extremely conservative, because it's so bad if it reverts edits that are in fact made in good faith (even if the edits themselves are bad). It's possible Cluebot isn't conservative ENOUGH, but if you have a look at say the last 100 edits it's made, it's really hard to argue that they're not 99%+ bad-faith vandalism.
Uhm. No.
Well, yes, but it don't help much. True, the web-sql-user should only have access to information it needs to see. But that doesn't help you at all against the fact that a single web-user shouldn't nessecarily be able to see everything and do everything the web-server as such can see and do.
To make a concrete example, if you're making a internet-bank, then the web-frontend need to be able to see the account-balance and movements of everyone who has internet-banking, it also needs to be able to put in new transactions.
But it doesn't follow that Joe should be able to see Janes balance, or to transfer Janes balance to himself.
No web-frontend I know of create and use one sql-connection, with the apropriate rights, for every user of the web-application. I suspect that'd be very unwieldy to do anyway.
I think, there's enough people who don't consider that worthy of display, even as it is, human-made. And some of the ones who think it IS worthy, would still think so even if it was machine-made, and for roughly the same reason.
Some art is created primarily to create discussion, frequently to the topic of art itself. There's nothing art-critiques love as much as debating what exactly art is. This would fit them just FINE. Infact I'm sure they could discuss it for YEARS.
But *most* of the art people actually buy, have a much more mundane reason for existing. It's for decoration, for amusement, for the emotion it evokes in the viewer.
I don't think it does. Oh, it's perfectly possible that todays computer-programs aren't capable of composing good music, but that doesn't mean that NO computer-program can produce good music.
Music is, at the end of the day, soundwaves. Computers can definitely create those. It's all just a sum of a bunch of sine-waves, none of which have any intention whatsoever. Sure it's possible that the human who created them did, but we typically don't know that in any case.
It sounds very trollish. Free speech doesn't triumph all other considerations in ANY jurisdiction. It's quite common to have restrictions on "speech" that is produced from a criminal activity. (and bullying a child with Downs (or any other for that matter) *IS* illegal)
Your critique is true, but I feel it's missing the point. No the game doesn't succeed in (nor even try) really simulating the complicated world of human emotions, doing so would be incredibly hard, so what you get is a very much simplified linear system where feelings for you is represented on a one-dimensional scale from bad to good, and is influenced by dialogue, gifts, plot-choices, and performing special character-quests.
My point though, was that where the characters in Final Fantasy dream about one day daring to say "I love you", the Dragon-Age ones are adult sexual beings, some of which are bisexual, some of which will get jealous if you are in a relationship with more than one of them (Leliana gets pissed off at you if you sleep with Morrigan, for example), and yes they'll break up with you, permanently, or even fight you if you piss them off sufficiently.
I wasn't saying the system is very realistic. I was saying they're not 13-year-olds battling to come to terms with weird new hormones.
I dunno. The "immediately" part only applies if you start counting from the first letter-from-lawyer. If you count from when Google Italy actually received the first written complaint about the video, then it took more than 2 MONTHS before anything happened. (and there's no indication anything would've happened at all, if not for the lawyer-attention)
Agreed, sorta.
Browser-plugins for supporting media-formats have indeed been precisely what you say, a disaster. Java Applet here, Flash-thingie there (version such-and-such required) ActiveX-shit up left, and Shockwave there. Every one of which attempts to do, more or less, the same thing.
Security-holes abound, as do incompatibilities and performance-problems. (hands up everyone who's experienced multi-second browser-freeze, even on modern hardware, because some website is loading some ad that happens to be a flash or java-applet!)
On the other hand, browser-extensions for non-standard behaviour seem to work fine. Stuff like Xmarks, Adblock, various tab-tweaks etc. But these are extensions that are there because the USER has selected to install them, not because the website-developer has decided that you need SpecialPlugin version 7.0.321.9 to seee this page.
Sort of. There -is- a lot of graphics and story in Final Fantasy, but it's fundamentally, stories for kids, or at best teenagers. Children enjoy stories, as do many adults, but the stories tend to be DIFFERENT, and the stories in Final Fantasy, tend to be essentially fairytales.
You'll get young (typically 10-15 year old) characters, struggling with things like the relationship to their parents, their first love and daring to actually express same, clumsy misunderstandings, coming to terms with being responsible for oneself etc.
If you contrast, for example, the Romance in FF-10 with say the potential romance between Morrigan and the main-character in Dragon Age Origins, you can't help but conclude that the latter is more mature. Not primarily because there's sex (there is, but it's not the main focus), but also because the characters behave like, you know, ADULTS with adult issues, stuff you'd NEVER see in Final Fantasy.
FF is fine, but it's ultimately a fairytale for children.
True. The same thing happens if you ask a human to draw dots randomly on a piece of paper. They tend to AVOID clustering the dots, i.e. the dots are far too uniformly distributed, there should be some clusters of dots, and some larger areas with zero dots in them, but there tends to be neither.
True, the OS can't know.
It can guesstimate though. Which should I do ? Swap out this page that hasn't been accessed at all the last 2 hours, or drop this page of disk-cache that has been read 11 times, the last time 2 minutes ago.
It's a guess, but it's a REASONABLE guess that it's more clever to swap out the page.
But you're right, a drawback is that if you ain't used a program for a long time, then swapping it back in can mean a significant delay the moment you DO start using it again.
Actually, even that is inaccurate.
You see, it can make sense for the OS to swap out some not-recently-used pages of a program, to free up more memory for caching. For example. Say you're playing a game, but you've got firefox open. It could make sense to page out the entirety of firefox, so as to have more physical ram free for caching of game-content.
Life ain't so simple in a virtual world :-)
But this also means there's no reason to have insurance unless you intend to commit fraud. Think about it rationally. The insurance is priced according to payouts plus profits to the insurers. If a significant part of the payouts are fraudulent, that means you're paying for the real risk plus the fraudrisk, plus the profits of the insurer.
You're paying for 3 components, but only one of them (the real risk) is relevant to you. The rest is money that's actually even WORSE than throwing it out the money: instead you're willingly handing that money over to criminals.
Simple solution: Anyone who can afford to have an expensive mobile phone can afford to break or lose one, and cover the loss themselves. Say "no thanks" next time you're asked "do you want extended warranty with that?"
prepared statements solve 99% of it, agreed. You still need to find a reasonable solution to the remaining 1%, but even that isn't hard.
I'm talking of things like, sometimes it arises that it'd be useful to do some variant of "select $column_name from footable order by $some_column" which isn't, atleast not with all databases, doable as a prepared statement. (whereas stuff like "select name from person where id = $variable" which is much more typical, is.)
They're silly. A decade is a long time in broadband -- what was the typical connection-speed a decade ago ?
And 100 ain't a lot. They should just get done with it and do fibre, atleast to the curb, if not to the basement. We've got fibre-to-the-basement, and a choice of 3 plans: 100, 200 or 400mbps, symetrical. (i.e. the upload-speeds are equally fast)
And that's -today- not a decade from now.
I sometimes wonder if USA will keep lagging behind in broadband, if it'll be contagious in a sense, in that it'll lead to decreased influence on high-tech generally. Seems fairly likely to me.
Furthermore, the core clients, those arguably most in need of a proxy, say Iranian dissenters, not highschool-kids who want to do youtube from school, aren't even in the target demographic for most advertisers.
They have little free capital, and don't buy many products from typical advertisers, hell in many cases they couldn't even if they tried, it's not as if there's that many starbucks in Iran.
In short: It's no wonder the funding don't work well this way, and no, the trend isn't going to turn just from managing to piss off the users too.
True to some degree, but I don't think we disagree. Thing is, the standard-way of doing things tend to be a lot LESS crap-full than the hacks typically used to make stuff work in obsolete browsers.
Say the rounded boxes ?
standard way ? Make a single div, containing the content, give it a id, say 'leftmenu' and in the css you set leftmenu to have 'border-radius 10px'
Simple, standards-compliant, lynx-friendly, no-extra-downloads, works just FINE for browsers that don't do CSS.
The hacky way ? What people typically do now, to support ie-6 ?
Make a table, with 9 cells in it. Put the content in the middle-cell. Put gif-images depicting rounded corners in the corner-cells. Set cellspacing, cellpadding to 0.
A huge fucking mess, 5-6 extra gif-images to download. Looks like TOTAL crap in Lynx. fugly !
Agreed. But it's still a good thing to code to the standard, because it's also real that a site is easier to maintain the less browser-spesific hacks it employs.
It also matters what kinda functionality is lost in older browsers. If the site don't work at all with IE6, and 10% of the visitors use that, then that's definitely bad. If (to take a random example) border-radius isn't supported by IE-6, so those 10% visiting with that browser, get square corners rather than rounded ones, that may well be acceptable. (especially since supporting round corners in ie-6 means using fugly badly-maintainable hacks)