Except the movie was just bad. There was absolutely no story and the characters were so utterly dull I didn't care what happened to them. Then there was the frame speed ups which were done so badly I initially thought my playback system was borked. That opening scene when he tries to escape getting branded was so bad I almost stopped the movie right there.
Where as as soon as I finished installing windows 10 I typed "Why is windows 10 so ugly" into google. Perhaps I really am getting old but this is how I use my desktop and start menu. I put short cuts to the programs I use all the time on my desktop. I put shortcuts in the task bar to programs I use continuously. And I use the start menu to browse everything else. I find the windows 10 start menu unintuitive. But perhaps that is because I haven't used windows 8 at all so I missed a generation of training.
The other thing I was a little confused about is the app store thing. If I install the VLC app from the app store wtf am I actually getting? I'm assuming I'm getting some random winRT thing and not "proper" VLC. But there is nothing there that explains it. God damn I'm getting old.
I think the big issues is that to do a true economy is really really really hard. X3 was single threaded and if you had a lot of ships you could bring the whole system to its knees. It was one of the reasons so many were hanging out for X-Rebirth. All people really wanted was a rewrite of the original engine to handle multiple threads so that they could actually run a full economy. Lets not even talk about what we got instead....
The other challenge is you need other active actors and these are also incredibly hard to do in something like X. It's painful enough watching the AI in civilisation. I can't image how rubbish the AI of X would have been if they had tried to include growing territory or trade empires.
Agreed. One point though is that the price of an input is no determiner as the the price/value of a final product. Price of a final product is a function of supply vs demand. Of course if your final product is worth less than the inputs you will go broke, but that too is reality.
X3 came close to making it work. Particularly if you played albion prelude and ran a few of the balancing mods. It was far from perfect, but it is the best space one I played.
The real issue was that you were the only active player in the universe. If a sector had no energy cells the AI would never build a solar station anywhere near it. If there were crystal shortages no one would build crystal mines. In fact if you destroyed a station all that would happen is that a ship would turn up and try to build an identical one in the same spot. It was how you managed to get some of the terran stations which had no wider equivalent. Blow up one of their stations, wait for the cargo ship with the replacement on board to arrive and then capture it.
X3 came close-ish to achieving it. The price of a good was relative to the available stock. Some stations consumed certain items to make others so over time their stock levels would drop and they would offer more and more money to restock. Energy cells were the base resource used by most stations so they were a good place to start in the economy.
The real problem though was there was no real top end consumers creating enough demand so the game dumped resources at various points to keep everything moving. And it was too easy to dominate the whole economy with a super station. Your personal business empire kept expanding but nothing else did. If you picked one of the unknown sectors to build your base you became an economic god with nothing that could stand in your way.
In comparison to the states a lot of things are expensive and our tax rates are definitely higher. Though it may surprise you to know that Australia's Tax to GDP ratio is the 5th lowest in the OECD - http://www.treasury.gov.au/Pol....It is however not just tax that makes the difference in the costs. Australia is a small market of only 23 million people, this means those costs which hardly change between selling 50 and selling 1,000,000 are higher per product. In addition business that are domestically based have had, until recently, very little competition. It's not like you can drive across a border. The net effect has been poor levels of efficiency and supply line control.
That said the taxes do make things more expensive, but to be honest I am quite comfortable with that. We are no where near as socialist as say France, but we are no where near the US either. A big one for me is the universal healthcare, and the safety net welfare system that Australia has which the US doesn't.
I have been to the US a number of times and I am always struck by the number of disaffected people. There is a section of the US population which do amazingly well for themselves and a section that just look lost. It is those people who just look lost that I find sad. I'm sure that opportunities exist for them to better their lot in life, but I'm not convinced they know how, and without some kind of support they never will.
A final consideration is that median salaries are higher in Australia, $57,980, than the US, $26,695. So is something costs $1 in the US it really needs to be $2 in Australia for the real costs to be the same. PPP comparison between US and AUS is currently 1.4 so if you are earning in Australia it will tend to go further because you are earning more.
In the end it is all about choices and a large part is probably what you are brought up with experiencing. I grew up with the idea of universal healthcare and universal high quality education as the norm. It was only as I got older that I realised that not everywhere else in the world was the same.
I appreciate that there aren't any sound waves at the table. But would the vibrations not use the cup as a sounding board? ie Vibrations --> cup --> cup base vibrates --> soundwaves? A speaker after all is just a driver vibrating a sound board of some description.
I would assume that the frequency of the vibrations wouldn't be able to change across medium, otherwise the sound would change. The magnitude however may be too small to convert to airborne sound waves loud enough to hear.
Seriously? So your argument is basically I know better than you so Nyah. I researched it so my opinion is better than yours? I disagree with you so you must know nothing?
You don't present a case. You pick a bunch of things which you think support your argument and then hold them out there. Not to mention your facts are complete bollocks. For example at the end of WW2 the US presence in Okinawa contributed just over 50% of the total income on the region, mainly in wages. By the 80's it had fallen to single digit levels (c 5% not 2%) and has hovered at that level since. Source: http://www.pref.okinawa.jp/sit...
So your argument that the desire for them to leave is lined up with the decrease in US presence is crap. It simply isn't true.
In addition it is not the Japanese government who wants the US bases gone. It is the local Okinawa residents and local government. The Japanese National government wants the bases to stay because they are currently a key part of Japan's strategic defence arrangements.
I take your word for it that you have looked into it and that you are well read on the topic. I will leave you your title of world's best condescender because I frankly wouldn't want that title.
Solar makes huge sense, especially since I am in Brisbane, Australia and get massive amounts of sun. They also do feed in tariffs here which for a period were stupidly generous.
The rates I quoted there are also industrial rates hence the variability. Most residences are just on a single tariff which is fixed and average around the 25c/kWh. I have a 5kw solar system and often have a credit balance on my electricity bill. Prior to that though I could easily have a $1000 per quarter bill.
As for energy availability, I sit in the middle of the largest coal exporting region in the world, where they have just built 2 huge LNG compression and export ports because we have so much gas and lets not mention one of the largest deposits of uranium in the world as well......Yet that is my power price.
And you cannot completely disregard them either. No, you should not make fine detail decisions around the comparison between statistics gathered by different organisations under different criteria. But to completely discount them is also foolish.
There is a major disparity between the reported cases of rape in Japan and the US. Some of these will be differences in the laws and what qualifies as rape, for example Japan has a much narrower definition of rape than the US does. Some of the cases that would qualify as rape in the US will be reported as Indecent Assault in Japan. A much bigger influencer however, would be the Japanese culture which would see the woman keeping quiet due to shame.
However taking all of that out of it. Your original assertion was that objections to the US base in Okinawa were all about money. And that the claims about rape were "concocted to support the above position". You then go on to say that the US policy was to give bags of money to anyone who claims a random guy raped them and that this was potentially creating false rape reports. However you are now saying you don't know anything about rape statistics in Okinawa. So which is it?
I would also add. You clearly have little to no exposure to Japan or Japanese culture. A Japanese person would be very unlikely to make a false claim of rape for money. Such a claim, true or false, would lead to the person being marginalised by the community and the sense of Japanese honour is so strong that you even see it in how they speak / write about money. Without going into great depths about it I think it can be summed up in the difference between kane and okane. Kane is the Japanese word for money and it is almost always combined with the honorific o. Money made through dishonourable means is referred to a kane and the money you get for working etc is okane.
When you consider that the Japanese society places honour and shame around the source of money, the societal pressure to not make a rape claim, false or true, for money should be obvious.
As for my source of information, I can speak basic Japanese, I have travelled there many times, I am formally qualified to a tertiary level in Asian business operations and culture and I work with Japanese companies operating both in Japan and elsewhere.
Hmmmm, assuming you are correct about the rate of rapes, perhaps the Japanese on the island still have a right to be fucked off with the US base on the grounds of rape. The rate of reported rape in the US is 26 / 100,000 population. The rate of rape reported in Japan is 1.2 / 100,000. I don't know about you but if the rate of rape around the US base is consistent with continental US rates then the base is responsible for a 2166% increase in rape rate, and I would be pretty upset about that.
I suspect you would shell it. A pre-stressed concrete arch over the road surface would remove a lot of the problems. The vehicles themselves will act as all year round heaters and ventilation would be relatively simple.
The economic cost is not born solely by the port operator. It is distributed across the entire economy that is exposed to that transport link.
If you can't get to work because of a train strike, your employer loses the money that you would have produced for them on that day. If you are a contractor you just lost that days pay. Your employers clients lost that day of productivity towards an outcome, ie if you are a developer your product is now a day later. The coffee shop you would have bought your lunch from lost a sale, the news agent that you buy your newpaper from lost a sale etc etc etc.
The economic cost to the train operator is simply your lost fare and any contractual penalties that may now suffer. This is dwarfed by the wider economic loss caused by critical transport strikes but the train operator is neither motivated by them, or able to get money from those sufferers to pay more to the drivers.
1549 was into a smooth river and there was a pilot in control and he had power. Realistically MH came down after running out of fuel, with no one controlling it. Auto pilot wouldn't have been able to detect the water level and who knows what it would have been trying to do with no power and a glide decent.
The only argument where MH comes down in the Indian ocean with a live pilot at the stick would be either a suicidal pilot or a pilot under duress.
More likely it hit the water nose down in an unpowered glide. It may or may not have hit flat, who knows. But it would have been coming into rough water which makes it much more likely it tumbled.
If you assume 100% coverage of the land mass you are looking at between 1600 & 1700 balloons! And that is assuming that you don't build in an overlap.
I would so love to know how they plan to handle the movement of the balloons. I understand the principal of moving them up or down to get them into different wind streams but how are they doing the height adjustment in such a way that they can stay up for extended periods? Nothing on their website.
True, it wasn't a really accurate video but I thought offset the "it was water, plane should be fine" argument.
I believe the plane probably hit the water unguided and un-powered. I suspect it flew along the guessed flight path on auto till the fuel ran out and then glided into the water. Meaning it would have come down nose in first if nothing else. Also in the period after the crash weather was disrupting the search and those storms had come in from where the plane was thoughts to have gone down. It would likely have meant that the sea would have been anything other than smooth like 1549's was.
There would have to be a pretty big step up in resolution for use in that type of environment and I'm not convinced a high-res camera on a stick wouldn't be a hell of a lot more effective.
Watch this - https://www.youtube.com/watch?... - Ethiopian Airlines Flight 961. Water is terrible to land on. Let alone exposed middle of the indian ocean chopped up by the wind water.
Please watch this - https://www.youtube.com/watch?... This is the video of Ethiopian Airlines Flight 961 trying to land on the ocean. THAT is a close to a gentle ditching as you are going to get and you think it would have remained intact???
Unless you have a cable card that needs the DRM in WMC go and have a look at KODI. Chances are it even natively supports your remote, given that for a while there Microsoft made by far the best remote and receiver combo. I currently run Kodi on linux machines using microsoft MCE remotes and IR receivers.
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Except the movie was just bad. There was absolutely no story and the characters were so utterly dull I didn't care what happened to them. Then there was the frame speed ups which were done so badly I initially thought my playback system was borked. That opening scene when he tries to escape getting branded was so bad I almost stopped the movie right there.
Where as as soon as I finished installing windows 10 I typed "Why is windows 10 so ugly" into google. Perhaps I really am getting old but this is how I use my desktop and start menu. I put short cuts to the programs I use all the time on my desktop. I put shortcuts in the task bar to programs I use continuously. And I use the start menu to browse everything else. I find the windows 10 start menu unintuitive. But perhaps that is because I haven't used windows 8 at all so I missed a generation of training.
The other thing I was a little confused about is the app store thing. If I install the VLC app from the app store wtf am I actually getting? I'm assuming I'm getting some random winRT thing and not "proper" VLC. But there is nothing there that explains it. God damn I'm getting old.
I think the big issues is that to do a true economy is really really really hard. X3 was single threaded and if you had a lot of ships you could bring the whole system to its knees. It was one of the reasons so many were hanging out for X-Rebirth. All people really wanted was a rewrite of the original engine to handle multiple threads so that they could actually run a full economy. Lets not even talk about what we got instead....
The other challenge is you need other active actors and these are also incredibly hard to do in something like X. It's painful enough watching the AI in civilisation. I can't image how rubbish the AI of X would have been if they had tried to include growing territory or trade empires.
Agreed. One point though is that the price of an input is no determiner as the the price/value of a final product. Price of a final product is a function of supply vs demand. Of course if your final product is worth less than the inputs you will go broke, but that too is reality.
X3 came close to making it work. Particularly if you played albion prelude and ran a few of the balancing mods. It was far from perfect, but it is the best space one I played.
The real issue was that you were the only active player in the universe. If a sector had no energy cells the AI would never build a solar station anywhere near it. If there were crystal shortages no one would build crystal mines. In fact if you destroyed a station all that would happen is that a ship would turn up and try to build an identical one in the same spot. It was how you managed to get some of the terran stations which had no wider equivalent. Blow up one of their stations, wait for the cargo ship with the replacement on board to arrive and then capture it.
X3 came close-ish to achieving it. The price of a good was relative to the available stock. Some stations consumed certain items to make others so over time their stock levels would drop and they would offer more and more money to restock. Energy cells were the base resource used by most stations so they were a good place to start in the economy.
The real problem though was there was no real top end consumers creating enough demand so the game dumped resources at various points to keep everything moving. And it was too easy to dominate the whole economy with a super station. Your personal business empire kept expanding but nothing else did. If you picked one of the unknown sectors to build your base you became an economic god with nothing that could stand in your way.
In comparison to the states a lot of things are expensive and our tax rates are definitely higher. Though it may surprise you to know that Australia's Tax to GDP ratio is the 5th lowest in the OECD - http://www.treasury.gov.au/Pol... .It is however not just tax that makes the difference in the costs. Australia is a small market of only 23 million people, this means those costs which hardly change between selling 50 and selling 1,000,000 are higher per product. In addition business that are domestically based have had, until recently, very little competition. It's not like you can drive across a border. The net effect has been poor levels of efficiency and supply line control.
That said the taxes do make things more expensive, but to be honest I am quite comfortable with that. We are no where near as socialist as say France, but we are no where near the US either. A big one for me is the universal healthcare, and the safety net welfare system that Australia has which the US doesn't.
I have been to the US a number of times and I am always struck by the number of disaffected people. There is a section of the US population which do amazingly well for themselves and a section that just look lost. It is those people who just look lost that I find sad. I'm sure that opportunities exist for them to better their lot in life, but I'm not convinced they know how, and without some kind of support they never will.
A final consideration is that median salaries are higher in Australia, $57,980, than the US, $26,695. So is something costs $1 in the US it really needs to be $2 in Australia for the real costs to be the same. PPP comparison between US and AUS is currently 1.4 so if you are earning in Australia it will tend to go further because you are earning more.
In the end it is all about choices and a large part is probably what you are brought up with experiencing. I grew up with the idea of universal healthcare and universal high quality education as the norm. It was only as I got older that I realised that not everywhere else in the world was the same.
I appreciate that there aren't any sound waves at the table. But would the vibrations not use the cup as a sounding board? ie Vibrations --> cup --> cup base vibrates --> soundwaves? A speaker after all is just a driver vibrating a sound board of some description.
I would assume that the frequency of the vibrations wouldn't be able to change across medium, otherwise the sound would change. The magnitude however may be too small to convert to airborne sound waves loud enough to hear.
Seriously? So your argument is basically I know better than you so Nyah. I researched it so my opinion is better than yours? I disagree with you so you must know nothing?
You don't present a case. You pick a bunch of things which you think support your argument and then hold them out there. Not to mention your facts are complete bollocks. For example at the end of WW2 the US presence in Okinawa contributed just over 50% of the total income on the region, mainly in wages. By the 80's it had fallen to single digit levels (c 5% not 2%) and has hovered at that level since. Source: http://www.pref.okinawa.jp/sit...
So your argument that the desire for them to leave is lined up with the decrease in US presence is crap. It simply isn't true.
In addition it is not the Japanese government who wants the US bases gone. It is the local Okinawa residents and local government. The Japanese National government wants the bases to stay because they are currently a key part of Japan's strategic defence arrangements.
I take your word for it that you have looked into it and that you are well read on the topic. I will leave you your title of world's best condescender because I frankly wouldn't want that title.
Solar makes huge sense, especially since I am in Brisbane, Australia and get massive amounts of sun. They also do feed in tariffs here which for a period were stupidly generous.
The rates I quoted there are also industrial rates hence the variability. Most residences are just on a single tariff which is fixed and average around the 25c/kWh. I have a 5kw solar system and often have a credit balance on my electricity bill. Prior to that though I could easily have a $1000 per quarter bill.
As for energy availability, I sit in the middle of the largest coal exporting region in the world, where they have just built 2 huge LNG compression and export ports because we have so much gas and lets not mention one of the largest deposits of uranium in the world as well......Yet that is my power price.
Surely any kind of diaphragm or sounding board placed on the spots would become speakers, or am I missing something?
My Mercedes E250 CDI gets 36.5 mpg in everyday city driving and it is the epitome of safe and comfortable.
That is so unbelievably cheap!!!! I knew the US was cheaper for power than Australia but.... WOW.
See here - https://www.dews.qld.gov.au/en...
Fixed charge 106.72c / day tje 29.845c/kWh peak, 21.125c/kWh shoulder, 16.262c/kWh off-peak.....
And you cannot completely disregard them either. No, you should not make fine detail decisions around the comparison between statistics gathered by different organisations under different criteria. But to completely discount them is also foolish.
There is a major disparity between the reported cases of rape in Japan and the US. Some of these will be differences in the laws and what qualifies as rape, for example Japan has a much narrower definition of rape than the US does. Some of the cases that would qualify as rape in the US will be reported as Indecent Assault in Japan. A much bigger influencer however, would be the Japanese culture which would see the woman keeping quiet due to shame.
However taking all of that out of it. Your original assertion was that objections to the US base in Okinawa were all about money. And that the claims about rape were "concocted to support the above position". You then go on to say that the US policy was to give bags of money to anyone who claims a random guy raped them and that this was potentially creating false rape reports. However you are now saying you don't know anything about rape statistics in Okinawa. So which is it?
I would also add. You clearly have little to no exposure to Japan or Japanese culture. A Japanese person would be very unlikely to make a false claim of rape for money. Such a claim, true or false, would lead to the person being marginalised by the community and the sense of Japanese honour is so strong that you even see it in how they speak / write about money. Without going into great depths about it I think it can be summed up in the difference between kane and okane. Kane is the Japanese word for money and it is almost always combined with the honorific o. Money made through dishonourable means is referred to a kane and the money you get for working etc is okane.
When you consider that the Japanese society places honour and shame around the source of money, the societal pressure to not make a rape claim, false or true, for money should be obvious.
As for my source of information, I can speak basic Japanese, I have travelled there many times, I am formally qualified to a tertiary level in Asian business operations and culture and I work with Japanese companies operating both in Japan and elsewhere.
Hmmmm, assuming you are correct about the rate of rapes, perhaps the Japanese on the island still have a right to be fucked off with the US base on the grounds of rape. The rate of reported rape in the US is 26 / 100,000 population. The rate of rape reported in Japan is 1.2 / 100,000. I don't know about you but if the rate of rape around the US base is consistent with continental US rates then the base is responsible for a 2166% increase in rape rate, and I would be pretty upset about that.
I suspect you would shell it. A pre-stressed concrete arch over the road surface would remove a lot of the problems. The vehicles themselves will act as all year round heaters and ventilation would be relatively simple.
The economic cost is not born solely by the port operator. It is distributed across the entire economy that is exposed to that transport link.
If you can't get to work because of a train strike, your employer loses the money that you would have produced for them on that day. If you are a contractor you just lost that days pay. Your employers clients lost that day of productivity towards an outcome, ie if you are a developer your product is now a day later. The coffee shop you would have bought your lunch from lost a sale, the news agent that you buy your newpaper from lost a sale etc etc etc.
The economic cost to the train operator is simply your lost fare and any contractual penalties that may now suffer. This is dwarfed by the wider economic loss caused by critical transport strikes but the train operator is neither motivated by them, or able to get money from those sufferers to pay more to the drivers.
1549 was into a smooth river and there was a pilot in control and he had power. Realistically MH came down after running out of fuel, with no one controlling it. Auto pilot wouldn't have been able to detect the water level and who knows what it would have been trying to do with no power and a glide decent.
The only argument where MH comes down in the Indian ocean with a live pilot at the stick would be either a suicidal pilot or a pilot under duress.
More likely it hit the water nose down in an unpowered glide. It may or may not have hit flat, who knows. But it would have been coming into rough water which makes it much more likely it tumbled.
If you assume 100% coverage of the land mass you are looking at between 1600 & 1700 balloons! And that is assuming that you don't build in an overlap.
I would so love to know how they plan to handle the movement of the balloons. I understand the principal of moving them up or down to get them into different wind streams but how are they doing the height adjustment in such a way that they can stay up for extended periods? Nothing on their website.
I suspect that he is referring to the fact Sri Lanka was a huge trade node during the 15th to 18th centuries.
True, it wasn't a really accurate video but I thought offset the "it was water, plane should be fine" argument.
I believe the plane probably hit the water unguided and un-powered. I suspect it flew along the guessed flight path on auto till the fuel ran out and then glided into the water. Meaning it would have come down nose in first if nothing else. Also in the period after the crash weather was disrupting the search and those storms had come in from where the plane was thoughts to have gone down. It would likely have meant that the sea would have been anything other than smooth like 1549's was.
There would have to be a pretty big step up in resolution for use in that type of environment and I'm not convinced a high-res camera on a stick wouldn't be a hell of a lot more effective.
Finding a structural piece like a high speed flap does tend to rule out the plain surviving.....
Watch this - https://www.youtube.com/watch?... - Ethiopian Airlines Flight 961. Water is terrible to land on. Let alone exposed middle of the indian ocean chopped up by the wind water.
Please watch this - https://www.youtube.com/watch?... This is the video of Ethiopian Airlines Flight 961 trying to land on the ocean. THAT is a close to a gentle ditching as you are going to get and you think it would have remained intact???
Unless you have a cable card that needs the DRM in WMC go and have a look at KODI. Chances are it even natively supports your remote, given that for a while there Microsoft made by far the best remote and receiver combo. I currently run Kodi on linux machines using microsoft MCE remotes and IR receivers.