What determines how hard the fall will be isn't really how the economy changes, it's how far off the ground you build the bridge to nowhere. The average American has had good money and there's been a huge service industry built up to serve them - as long as dollars circulate against dollars the money stays in the system. With the outsourcing and imports more and more is now made somewhere else and just sold in the US. But no economic system can over time have a flow of value that only happens in one direction, at some point Americans have to produce value for the Chinese and Indians too. Otherwise it'll just be like eating off your savings, then your savings turns to loans, then those loans turn into bankruptcy. A retail channel is only valuable when your customers have money, if they run dry then the value of the US retail industry will tank with it. Same with all personal services, there's no money in being a hair dresser for people with no money.
The desire for something "new" is the hope that you'll hit some new fancy thing that'll again magnify our wealth over the BRIC world so this one-way trade can continue a little longer. That's not very realistic, despite the BS about an "knowledge economy". The world is no longer full of uneducated buffoons, these countries are just as capable of producing their own knowledge industry without a bunch of Americans and Europeans to think for them. I think we have to accept that soon we can't dodge them, we will have to compete with them. The only question is whether we can so more or less keep our standard of living while they catch up to it, or whether we'll take a hard fall - much harder than we already have. The latter could get very nasty, not as in "we have to cut public services" but as in "economic collapse, civil unrest, rioting and revolution" nasty.
Interesting, though this doesn't mean much. Trade will still be in USD, it's just loans will only be made in their own currencies.
Currency as an intermediate to make trade is necessary for liquidity, but it doesn't really provide stability. If I want to sell bread and buy a jacket, then I only care about the spot bread-jacket ratio. Whether I get 10 or 100 or 1000 dollars, interest or inflation doesn't matter as long as I immediately sell and buy something else. It doesn't even matter if we use euros or yen or rupees instead, it's only a convienience over trading goods directly.
What brings faith in a currency is the belief that you can get something for it a later stage. And with fiat economy, that really means "Will someone need dollars in the future?" Trade as I said doesn't really do that. Debt does that, it's a market of people who'll need dollars. What happens in an economic collapse when everyone tries getting out the door at the same time is a special case, but normally your mortgage is security to me that there's a worker who'll need dollars to pay that off. That if I save in dollars, I can use that later and convert into real products and services from you.
The same is true for nations, if the BRIC countries have debt in dollars it means they will need dollars. It makes the dollar a valuable currency to invest in, it's essentially the basis of the "almighty dollar" that's good everywhere. If they take debts in local currency, then it's not implied they'll ever need dollars. The dollar can tank and it won't effect internal BRIC debt. That makes the dollar less attractive to invest in.
I don't think e-books will accrue value in the same way an 1887 edition book will. They'll never be the rare first edition, signed by the author, only available in 674 copies around the world. All that will really matter is if someone has a copy that can be shared around. First off deposits will have been made with the library of congress, secondly there'll probably be hacks to do it and third if all else fails we can take pictures of the screen and OCR them to get the text - like Project Gutenberg has done with very many real books.
Honestly, I don't get why people seem so glum. With various digitization projects we're now storing far more of our cultural output than we've ever done, every song, every book, every tv series, every movie, every big and small happening is recorded for posterity both on their side and our side. It's not like the BBC would delete a Doctor Who episode today.
I do understand the part about wanting your own copy, like if Spotify disappeared you'd lose all "your" music, if Steam disappear you'd lose all "your" games and so on - and yes I heard their promises but they mean nothing when you're bankrupt. I still don't manage to buy the cultural doomsday predictions though, if something like that happened we'd all scamble to save what could be saved. And we'd still have a much better collection of the last 50 years than any other era in history.
Which says more about the beer prices in Norway...
Pardon me for saying so, but the biggest fans I've seen of the service are those who are total music fans, own plenty CDs, listens to plenty music, used to pay plenty for it. No doubt it's a great offer for everyone who listens to music all day long, it's a very vocal and happy minority. For a lot of people - like me - music isn't all that important. It's nice to have from time to time during exercise and travel and during parties, but I rarely if ever sit and simply listen to music. I didn't spend 1200 NOK/year on music before - that's 150 tracks at iTunes and you get to keep them forever so I'd actually have more like 1500-2000 by now. And I compare to the premium version because I can put those bought songs on my mobile. Particularly the 5 times/song means I can't listen to a few favorites I like, it's either buy, go premium or get out. I'll get out, thank you very much. Perhaps when you manage to look beyond your own situation you will see that Spotify for many people no longer makes sense.
I'm not sure what the logic you're trying to apply here is. That we have a common origin doesn't mean that we at any point have been united, since the first sibling rivalry we've fought man against man - and monkey against monkey before that, tribe against tribe, city against city, nation against nation, empire against empire. The strong have survived, the weak have been eradicated. When we've stood together it is usually because outside forces have threatened us all, an alliance of need not unity.
Hopefully, we'll be able to get our act together and stop blowing each other up (and also unite against a common enemy - government/power elites).
I don't see how, because I feel less and less kinship with those around me. In my immediate proximity there's almost no one with the same ethnic, cultural or religious background as me and the immigrants are equally divided among themselves. There's no "we" of any sense beyond us all being human beings, which is of course in some sense a good thing but as a united force standing up to governments and corporations I don't think so. If there's no "we", there's very little solidarity - people willing to stand up for others, people willing to lead, people willing to sacrifice. Here in Norway we just had a big scandal with enlisted men running and hiding when they thought they were ordered to defend against an armed assault without anyone telling them it was a drill, they had no intention of dying for king and country. During war they'd be up for a court-martial for treason, that's for sure.
I think Europe is heading the same way as the US, everyone for themselves. Fuck unions, fuck social programs, fuck getting politically involved and trying to change society I want what's mine and the rest can fend for themselves. That's like an open playground for organized elites, a population easily divided and conquered. Even the good that does happen like universal healthcare is so corrupted by the time it gets through the system it ends up bad, a boon to the health insurance industry rather than savings for an extremely overpriced healthcare that is far more expensive per capita than comparable countries. It's easy to control three hundred million ants when everyone wants to do their own thing.
Dingdingding, we have a winner. I often take what is a 50 minute flight. In practice city center - city center it takes me three to three and a half hours.
The train currently takes almost 7 hours. If they built high speed rail on the same distance it'll anywhere from 2h45 to 3h30. And then you can just take a seat and relax all the way.
The actual flight time is only a very small part unless you're crossing continents, which most of us don't do. Very often you'd get better value for your money renting a helicopter to cut down on your other travel time than to pay for a Concorde.
True, but it's very dangerous to start believing the boom-bust cycle is a natural thing and there will always be another boom. Growth will always return but I'm not confident the US - or us here in western Europe - will be in a position to take advantage of it. Never before have we faced this level of global competition from China on manufacturing and India on services with a mature Internet backbone to let people work globally. We will have to work extremely hard to justify the wage difference between us and them, or they will simply expand there not here.
The consumer side is not much better, we are all crumbling under our debt. We simply can not continue being the big spenders we were, which is unlike any previous recession after WWII. I don't think we will ever return to being that attractive a market as we have been up until now. Greece, Ireland, Portugal have already needed emergency loans and if Spain goes too then the EU is bankrupt. The US has a 1.5 trillion budget deficit and is in no position to help. People are talking about this being the worst economy since the Great Depression but they don't realize we're not at the bottom. We've fallen down to a ledge at the edge of the abyss and you'd better pray we manage to climb our way out.
They sell that version cheaper than the vanilla edition to suck you in (your local prices may vary). It is obvious which version EA want you to buy!
That's just how Steam makes money, they don't lower the prices as other retailers do. Oh, the 50-75% off prices may be good, but the full retail price is often *far* higher than other places.
That there's smart and stupid people is no surprise. But I still get surprised about how smart and stupid the one and same person can be. Not just for lack of domain knowledge, but one moment seeming like a highly intelligent being and the next a drooling idiot...
So the best thing to do is to take them to the moon and then take them outside the view the site directly. Can't have a helmet on as the visor could be an ultra high definition screen.
Now there's a mission we could fake, just make certain parts of it very realistic.
Errr... TFS says it's about savegames with download content activated. If you have a pirated version, you obviously won't have download content in them (at least I'd assume).
You assume wrong. As usual only the legitimate customers are screwed...
Are you trying to say a dog can't have evolved from a wolf, because we still have wolves? That a species branches off doesn't imply the old species must go extinct, they may very well exist in parallel. Even if it turns out a crossbreed isn't the transitional form and newer than that, it's still strong evidence of a common ancestry. That we today have mules is strong evidence of a past common evolution of donkeys and horses sharing ancestors.
In short, you're spouting creationist garbage and while it doesn't sound like you're one of them, you're certainly one of their useful idiots. Science is fallible, we know our knowledge is incomplete and keep improving it. Sometimes we learn that what we thought in the past was wrong, but we learn and improve. Like others have pointed out, filling one gap makes two new so you can't win.
First you'd have to tell me exactly what a native race is? What arbitrary point in time do you choose to freeze the "races". Is it 600 years ago prior to the European explorations? (...) And if you freeze history 50,000 years ago you won't have any Europeans!
Not that I'm siding with the racists but your logic that we can't find a purebred human is a bit like saying we can't find a purebred dog. Except we clearly have a standard of "races" and "mixed breeds" there, even though they all at some point come from domesticated wolves over the last 15000 years. I also think many would agree that some breeds are smarter and easier to train than others, that it's not just the same mind in the body of everything from a Chihuahua to a Great Dane.
Pretty much all we humans have done with regards to domestication of dogs, cats and other farm animals shows that strong selective breeding pressure works. I think it's a bit of denial to dispute that if we applied the same to ourselves we couldn't significantly alter the human race, inside and outside. Even just the few centuries of slavery where only the strong were picked, survived and bred have led to quite measurable differences between Afro-Americans and Africans.
Eugenics is the exact opposite of "all men are created equal", it's saying that from birth some of us are more desirable and others less desirable. That some of us should breed and others don't. You don't have to go far to find it, every time the word idiocracy is mentioned someone is on it. It's just a bit more politically correct to use intelligence rather than skin color as deciding factor, if you find any correlation though then hell is loose.
Not to casually talk about genocide, but the logic is to trim the evolutionary tree much like when you trim a physical tree. It's not because it is a dead branch, but because it leaves the other branches with more room and nourishment to grow. The idea is to go beyond natural selection and into self-selection, being our own gardener. Except that tree branches don't fight back and doesn't leave the same kind of bloody mess.
Coalition politics is far more of a mind game than that. If say the big party is 45%, your prospective coalition partner 10% and your hated enemy 45% what are your choices?
Even if you are "natural" coalition partners you're in a way equal in that neither can form a majority government without the other. Either you give them enough to cooperate with you, or you have to be a minority government. Which may work, but then you need to seek their cooperation on a case-by-case basis instead. But if you give them too much influence then the big party voters will be pissed that those 10% get far too much influence. Give them too little and the 10% party voters will be pissed that they might as well not be in the government at all, they get no say. It's more than possible to sell yourself short here.
Just as important as the issues you win, are the issues you don't lose. A good coalition win is something your voters want and their voters don't really care much either way. But if your voters will react very badly to it, then you have a much tougher "who gives in" problem. Great creativity must be used to make it seem like both sides got important concessions in those cases. If you fail at this, then it'll just look like one side had to bend over and take it, which rarely goes over well with the voters.
Even worse is it if your coalition partner can go both ways, even a 4% party in a 48-4-48 split has tremendous political power. Essentially the sides get into a "bidding war" of "we'll give you power equal to a 5% party" "6%" "7%" until finally someone got to give. And if they're something of a special interest party that's otherwise reasonable you might end up giving them something 95% of the people disagree with. Not that it's very different from the democrats or republicans doing something to please 5% of their voters.
In short, it's not just a math formula. Making a good coalition takes far more than that.
Not louder, lobbyists are more like a swarm of insects. You are far stronger, but every time you wave your hand at election time they just evade you. Then as soon as you're done they're back in full force. It's like a war of attrition on Wikipedia where one is unemployed and the other barely has time to check in once a week. It's not the person who is right that wins, it's the person with the most time. And lobbyists do have all day to lobby their view.
Even here in Norway only 90% of the households have Internet. The rest for the most part don't want it. There's people living without TV, A lot of things would be very odd not to have here in a western society but I don't consider them human rights.
Some rights are guaranteed public services, but they're in no way human rights. For example all permanent residences here in Norway is able to get a landline at a fixed rate. It's a subsidized service paid for by the government and the telco is compensated for it. Same with several other public utilities, mail delivery and many other things.
I don't think you should abuse the term "human rights" too much. That is to me fundamental needs that it'd be a violation of you not to give you. Food, water, shelter, medicine, basic education and so on. If your kids can't go to primary school without paying, that's a violation. Not getting on the Internet doesn't reach it to the ankles.
That said, it's probably a good idea in order to get people more educated and be part of the rest of society. That's more of a "best effort" project though, not that kind of fundamental right.
And what do you mean about forgetting all that was done before? They're planning to expand, not stay put or contract. Sounds like a good thing to me.
Despite how much they'd like you to believe they have infinitely many resources, "expand" usually translates to "smearing the resources we have even thinner". Let's face it, Linux on the desktop/laptop isn't exactly a smashing success, at least the web browsing statistics all put it below 1%.
First there was the desktop 1.0, it never really caught on but now it's full of desktop 2.0 which is roughly as annoying as web 2.0. I think the last fad was netbooks - now we're taking the netbooks, and then the netbook remixes didn't really catch on they either. So now they're going for tablets and smartphones and whatnot. And before that works well there's probably some other new fad they've jumped on. Or if not fad, it's still trying to bolt on more functionality on something that never finished. I just sorta feel it doesn't finish a race, it's always jumped on a new one that looks better.
"Unnaturally smooth." I love it. 24fps is unnaturally jerky. We're just used to it.
If Jackson was really being forward looking, he'd shoot at 30 or 60fps for people watching on computers.
Unfortunately he'll need good 24p compatibility with theaters, which pretty much rules that out. Ideally he'd shoot at 120 fps and do 5:1 for 24p cinemas and 2:1 reduction for 60 fps. It'd also be a decent 55554 pattern for 25 fps and 23232 for 50 fps for European TV broadcasts.
The downside is that this requires *much* more light sensitive cameras as they now have 1/120th of a second to catch an image instead of 1/48th or 1/24th. Not that it can't be done - still cameras capture lots in less than 1/120th of a second, but the whole system has to scale up for it. In any case, I'm happy to see 48 fps. It's a huge upgrade from 24 fps and I imagine a 4:5 pullup to 60 fps would look very good too.
If you were in a college that gave you a flexible background, skills that were transferrable across the industry, and exposure to a range of languages, you could find work that paid damn well after the crash.
If you're the kind who sought that kind of study and did well at it, you'd also be one of those kept on staff during the crash if you'd started working straight from high school. It's easier to stay once you have a foot inside than hit the "we're not hiring" wall, no matter if you're God's gife to CS. I graduated during a slump, two years earlier or two years later I'd be hired flat but not there and then.
Most of the time, but sometimes... worst case I had was when they needed to hold an online class, but the room didn't have enough network ports (they weren't wireless). To make a long story short, I was desperately thinking "Please just go down to the hardware store and buy a damn switch, just take it out of the consultancy budget for me" because I was about to tear all my hair out after endless meetings back and forth about finding another room (difficult), getting more ports (difficult), rescheduling (difficult), doing a rotated training (difficult) and every other impractical and irrational waste of everyone's time.
I've worked with many 250-1000 employee organizations, a few that were 10-100k total and never met a place yet that gave everyone admin rights. Probably the closest was one place that gave everyone in IT admin rights - developers, DBAs, server admins, desktop support didn't matter - with the message: You work in IT. You should know how to manage your own desktop. Mess it up and we will reimage it but we won't support it. Another had a development network where everyone was admin, completely zoned off network and separate PCs though.
The only real difference is how difficult it was to get something installed. The best had an extensive software catalog or otherwise a quick remote admin job to install it, with no real hassle - they just wanted control over what was installed for documentation and license control. The worst... pray that you never meet them. Unless you can bill them for it, apparently that goes off another budget.
Making stuff do what they're not supposed to do IS nerdy. Installing Linux on your toaster because you can. Making a BluRay play on Linux because it's not supposed to is nerdy. You're more looking down the hacker vs cracker line, but both are nerdy activities.
Besides, I've never considered clicking on torrents or putting a disc in the drive and click "Run" in AnyDVD to be particularly nerdy, that's script kiddie at best. You could probably teach a preschooler how to do it.
I do it because it's convenient, not to be cheap. I have a pretty full shelf of BluRays, but downloads are faster, easier, better quality and with RSS feeds it's already downloaded so it's instant satisfaction. I'd do the same on Windows, in fact I do after I switched back. Now I got more choices but they're still far inferior.
Some people don't have their head so far up their ass that they can't celebrate a great achievement of mankind unless they did it. The Soviets one-upped you. You one-upped them with Apollo. The world moved forward. Not everything has to be about you.
Slashdot Mirror
What determines how hard the fall will be isn't really how the economy changes, it's how far off the ground you build the bridge to nowhere. The average American has had good money and there's been a huge service industry built up to serve them - as long as dollars circulate against dollars the money stays in the system. With the outsourcing and imports more and more is now made somewhere else and just sold in the US. But no economic system can over time have a flow of value that only happens in one direction, at some point Americans have to produce value for the Chinese and Indians too. Otherwise it'll just be like eating off your savings, then your savings turns to loans, then those loans turn into bankruptcy. A retail channel is only valuable when your customers have money, if they run dry then the value of the US retail industry will tank with it. Same with all personal services, there's no money in being a hair dresser for people with no money.
The desire for something "new" is the hope that you'll hit some new fancy thing that'll again magnify our wealth over the BRIC world so this one-way trade can continue a little longer. That's not very realistic, despite the BS about an "knowledge economy". The world is no longer full of uneducated buffoons, these countries are just as capable of producing their own knowledge industry without a bunch of Americans and Europeans to think for them. I think we have to accept that soon we can't dodge them, we will have to compete with them. The only question is whether we can so more or less keep our standard of living while they catch up to it, or whether we'll take a hard fall - much harder than we already have. The latter could get very nasty, not as in "we have to cut public services" but as in "economic collapse, civil unrest, rioting and revolution" nasty.
Interesting, though this doesn't mean much. Trade will still be in USD, it's just loans will only be made in their own currencies.
Currency as an intermediate to make trade is necessary for liquidity, but it doesn't really provide stability. If I want to sell bread and buy a jacket, then I only care about the spot bread-jacket ratio. Whether I get 10 or 100 or 1000 dollars, interest or inflation doesn't matter as long as I immediately sell and buy something else. It doesn't even matter if we use euros or yen or rupees instead, it's only a convienience over trading goods directly.
What brings faith in a currency is the belief that you can get something for it a later stage. And with fiat economy, that really means "Will someone need dollars in the future?" Trade as I said doesn't really do that. Debt does that, it's a market of people who'll need dollars. What happens in an economic collapse when everyone tries getting out the door at the same time is a special case, but normally your mortgage is security to me that there's a worker who'll need dollars to pay that off. That if I save in dollars, I can use that later and convert into real products and services from you.
The same is true for nations, if the BRIC countries have debt in dollars it means they will need dollars. It makes the dollar a valuable currency to invest in, it's essentially the basis of the "almighty dollar" that's good everywhere. If they take debts in local currency, then it's not implied they'll ever need dollars. The dollar can tank and it won't effect internal BRIC debt. That makes the dollar less attractive to invest in.
I don't think e-books will accrue value in the same way an 1887 edition book will. They'll never be the rare first edition, signed by the author, only available in 674 copies around the world. All that will really matter is if someone has a copy that can be shared around. First off deposits will have been made with the library of congress, secondly there'll probably be hacks to do it and third if all else fails we can take pictures of the screen and OCR them to get the text - like Project Gutenberg has done with very many real books.
Honestly, I don't get why people seem so glum. With various digitization projects we're now storing far more of our cultural output than we've ever done, every song, every book, every tv series, every movie, every big and small happening is recorded for posterity both on their side and our side. It's not like the BBC would delete a Doctor Who episode today.
I do understand the part about wanting your own copy, like if Spotify disappeared you'd lose all "your" music, if Steam disappear you'd lose all "your" games and so on - and yes I heard their promises but they mean nothing when you're bankrupt. I still don't manage to buy the cultural doomsday predictions though, if something like that happened we'd all scamble to save what could be saved. And we'd still have a much better collection of the last 50 years than any other era in history.
Which says more about the beer prices in Norway...
Pardon me for saying so, but the biggest fans I've seen of the service are those who are total music fans, own plenty CDs, listens to plenty music, used to pay plenty for it. No doubt it's a great offer for everyone who listens to music all day long, it's a very vocal and happy minority. For a lot of people - like me - music isn't all that important. It's nice to have from time to time during exercise and travel and during parties, but I rarely if ever sit and simply listen to music. I didn't spend 1200 NOK/year on music before - that's 150 tracks at iTunes and you get to keep them forever so I'd actually have more like 1500-2000 by now. And I compare to the premium version because I can put those bought songs on my mobile. Particularly the 5 times/song means I can't listen to a few favorites I like, it's either buy, go premium or get out. I'll get out, thank you very much. Perhaps when you manage to look beyond your own situation you will see that Spotify for many people no longer makes sense.
I'm not sure what the logic you're trying to apply here is. That we have a common origin doesn't mean that we at any point have been united, since the first sibling rivalry we've fought man against man - and monkey against monkey before that, tribe against tribe, city against city, nation against nation, empire against empire. The strong have survived, the weak have been eradicated. When we've stood together it is usually because outside forces have threatened us all, an alliance of need not unity.
Hopefully, we'll be able to get our act together and stop blowing each other up (and also unite against a common enemy - government/power elites).
I don't see how, because I feel less and less kinship with those around me. In my immediate proximity there's almost no one with the same ethnic, cultural or religious background as me and the immigrants are equally divided among themselves. There's no "we" of any sense beyond us all being human beings, which is of course in some sense a good thing but as a united force standing up to governments and corporations I don't think so. If there's no "we", there's very little solidarity - people willing to stand up for others, people willing to lead, people willing to sacrifice. Here in Norway we just had a big scandal with enlisted men running and hiding when they thought they were ordered to defend against an armed assault without anyone telling them it was a drill, they had no intention of dying for king and country. During war they'd be up for a court-martial for treason, that's for sure.
I think Europe is heading the same way as the US, everyone for themselves. Fuck unions, fuck social programs, fuck getting politically involved and trying to change society I want what's mine and the rest can fend for themselves. That's like an open playground for organized elites, a population easily divided and conquered. Even the good that does happen like universal healthcare is so corrupted by the time it gets through the system it ends up bad, a boon to the health insurance industry rather than savings for an extremely overpriced healthcare that is far more expensive per capita than comparable countries. It's easy to control three hundred million ants when everyone wants to do their own thing.
Dingdingding, we have a winner. I often take what is a 50 minute flight. In practice city center - city center it takes me three to three and a half hours.
The train currently takes almost 7 hours. If they built high speed rail on the same distance it'll anywhere from 2h45 to 3h30. And then you can just take a seat and relax all the way.
The actual flight time is only a very small part unless you're crossing continents, which most of us don't do. Very often you'd get better value for your money renting a helicopter to cut down on your other travel time than to pay for a Concorde.
True, but it's very dangerous to start believing the boom-bust cycle is a natural thing and there will always be another boom. Growth will always return but I'm not confident the US - or us here in western Europe - will be in a position to take advantage of it. Never before have we faced this level of global competition from China on manufacturing and India on services with a mature Internet backbone to let people work globally. We will have to work extremely hard to justify the wage difference between us and them, or they will simply expand there not here.
The consumer side is not much better, we are all crumbling under our debt. We simply can not continue being the big spenders we were, which is unlike any previous recession after WWII. I don't think we will ever return to being that attractive a market as we have been up until now. Greece, Ireland, Portugal have already needed emergency loans and if Spain goes too then the EU is bankrupt. The US has a 1.5 trillion budget deficit and is in no position to help. People are talking about this being the worst economy since the Great Depression but they don't realize we're not at the bottom. We've fallen down to a ledge at the edge of the abyss and you'd better pray we manage to climb our way out.
you're, not your
Times three. The GP makes me think I should just hire Indians instead, both bastardize the English language but the Indians are cheaper...
They sell that version cheaper than the vanilla edition to suck you in (your local prices may vary). It is obvious which version EA want you to buy!
That's just how Steam makes money, they don't lower the prices as other retailers do. Oh, the 50-75% off prices may be good, but the full retail price is often *far* higher than other places.
That there's smart and stupid people is no surprise. But I still get surprised about how smart and stupid the one and same person can be. Not just for lack of domain knowledge, but one moment seeming like a highly intelligent being and the next a drooling idiot...
So the best thing to do is to take them to the moon and then take them outside the view the site directly. Can't have a helmet on as the visor could be an ultra high definition screen.
Now there's a mission we could fake, just make certain parts of it very realistic.
Errr... TFS says it's about savegames with download content activated. If you have a pirated version, you obviously won't have download content in them (at least I'd assume).
You assume wrong. As usual only the legitimate customers are screwed...
Are you trying to say a dog can't have evolved from a wolf, because we still have wolves? That a species branches off doesn't imply the old species must go extinct, they may very well exist in parallel. Even if it turns out a crossbreed isn't the transitional form and newer than that, it's still strong evidence of a common ancestry. That we today have mules is strong evidence of a past common evolution of donkeys and horses sharing ancestors.
In short, you're spouting creationist garbage and while it doesn't sound like you're one of them, you're certainly one of their useful idiots. Science is fallible, we know our knowledge is incomplete and keep improving it. Sometimes we learn that what we thought in the past was wrong, but we learn and improve. Like others have pointed out, filling one gap makes two new so you can't win.
First you'd have to tell me exactly what a native race is? What arbitrary point in time do you choose to freeze the "races". Is it 600 years ago prior to the European explorations? (...) And if you freeze history 50,000 years ago you won't have any Europeans!
Not that I'm siding with the racists but your logic that we can't find a purebred human is a bit like saying we can't find a purebred dog. Except we clearly have a standard of "races" and "mixed breeds" there, even though they all at some point come from domesticated wolves over the last 15000 years. I also think many would agree that some breeds are smarter and easier to train than others, that it's not just the same mind in the body of everything from a Chihuahua to a Great Dane.
Pretty much all we humans have done with regards to domestication of dogs, cats and other farm animals shows that strong selective breeding pressure works. I think it's a bit of denial to dispute that if we applied the same to ourselves we couldn't significantly alter the human race, inside and outside. Even just the few centuries of slavery where only the strong were picked, survived and bred have led to quite measurable differences between Afro-Americans and Africans.
Eugenics is the exact opposite of "all men are created equal", it's saying that from birth some of us are more desirable and others less desirable. That some of us should breed and others don't. You don't have to go far to find it, every time the word idiocracy is mentioned someone is on it. It's just a bit more politically correct to use intelligence rather than skin color as deciding factor, if you find any correlation though then hell is loose.
Not to casually talk about genocide, but the logic is to trim the evolutionary tree much like when you trim a physical tree. It's not because it is a dead branch, but because it leaves the other branches with more room and nourishment to grow. The idea is to go beyond natural selection and into self-selection, being our own gardener. Except that tree branches don't fight back and doesn't leave the same kind of bloody mess.
Coalition politics is far more of a mind game than that. If say the big party is 45%, your prospective coalition partner 10% and your hated enemy 45% what are your choices?
Even if you are "natural" coalition partners you're in a way equal in that neither can form a majority government without the other. Either you give them enough to cooperate with you, or you have to be a minority government. Which may work, but then you need to seek their cooperation on a case-by-case basis instead. But if you give them too much influence then the big party voters will be pissed that those 10% get far too much influence. Give them too little and the 10% party voters will be pissed that they might as well not be in the government at all, they get no say. It's more than possible to sell yourself short here.
Just as important as the issues you win, are the issues you don't lose. A good coalition win is something your voters want and their voters don't really care much either way. But if your voters will react very badly to it, then you have a much tougher "who gives in" problem. Great creativity must be used to make it seem like both sides got important concessions in those cases. If you fail at this, then it'll just look like one side had to bend over and take it, which rarely goes over well with the voters.
Even worse is it if your coalition partner can go both ways, even a 4% party in a 48-4-48 split has tremendous political power. Essentially the sides get into a "bidding war" of "we'll give you power equal to a 5% party" "6%" "7%" until finally someone got to give. And if they're something of a special interest party that's otherwise reasonable you might end up giving them something 95% of the people disagree with. Not that it's very different from the democrats or republicans doing something to please 5% of their voters.
In short, it's not just a math formula. Making a good coalition takes far more than that.
Not louder, lobbyists are more like a swarm of insects. You are far stronger, but every time you wave your hand at election time they just evade you. Then as soon as you're done they're back in full force. It's like a war of attrition on Wikipedia where one is unemployed and the other barely has time to check in once a week. It's not the person who is right that wins, it's the person with the most time. And lobbyists do have all day to lobby their view.
Even here in Norway only 90% of the households have Internet. The rest for the most part don't want it. There's people living without TV, A lot of things would be very odd not to have here in a western society but I don't consider them human rights.
Some rights are guaranteed public services, but they're in no way human rights. For example all permanent residences here in Norway is able to get a landline at a fixed rate. It's a subsidized service paid for by the government and the telco is compensated for it. Same with several other public utilities, mail delivery and many other things.
I don't think you should abuse the term "human rights" too much. That is to me fundamental needs that it'd be a violation of you not to give you. Food, water, shelter, medicine, basic education and so on. If your kids can't go to primary school without paying, that's a violation. Not getting on the Internet doesn't reach it to the ankles.
That said, it's probably a good idea in order to get people more educated and be part of the rest of society. That's more of a "best effort" project though, not that kind of fundamental right.
And what do you mean about forgetting all that was done before? They're planning to expand, not stay put or contract. Sounds like a good thing to me.
Despite how much they'd like you to believe they have infinitely many resources, "expand" usually translates to "smearing the resources we have even thinner". Let's face it, Linux on the desktop/laptop isn't exactly a smashing success, at least the web browsing statistics all put it below 1%.
First there was the desktop 1.0, it never really caught on but now it's full of desktop 2.0 which is roughly as annoying as web 2.0. I think the last fad was netbooks - now we're taking the netbooks, and then the netbook remixes didn't really catch on they either. So now they're going for tablets and smartphones and whatnot. And before that works well there's probably some other new fad they've jumped on. Or if not fad, it's still trying to bolt on more functionality on something that never finished. I just sorta feel it doesn't finish a race, it's always jumped on a new one that looks better.
"Unnaturally smooth." I love it. 24fps is unnaturally jerky. We're just used to it.
If Jackson was really being forward looking, he'd shoot at 30 or 60fps for people watching on computers.
Unfortunately he'll need good 24p compatibility with theaters, which pretty much rules that out. Ideally he'd shoot at 120 fps and do 5:1 for 24p cinemas and 2:1 reduction for 60 fps. It'd also be a decent 55554 pattern for 25 fps and 23232 for 50 fps for European TV broadcasts.
The downside is that this requires *much* more light sensitive cameras as they now have 1/120th of a second to catch an image instead of 1/48th or 1/24th. Not that it can't be done - still cameras capture lots in less than 1/120th of a second, but the whole system has to scale up for it. In any case, I'm happy to see 48 fps. It's a huge upgrade from 24 fps and I imagine a 4:5 pullup to 60 fps would look very good too.
If you were in a college that gave you a flexible background, skills that were transferrable across the industry, and exposure to a range of languages, you could find work that paid damn well after the crash.
If you're the kind who sought that kind of study and did well at it, you'd also be one of those kept on staff during the crash if you'd started working straight from high school. It's easier to stay once you have a foot inside than hit the "we're not hiring" wall, no matter if you're God's gife to CS. I graduated during a slump, two years earlier or two years later I'd be hired flat but not there and then.
Most of the time, but sometimes... worst case I had was when they needed to hold an online class, but the room didn't have enough network ports (they weren't wireless). To make a long story short, I was desperately thinking "Please just go down to the hardware store and buy a damn switch, just take it out of the consultancy budget for me" because I was about to tear all my hair out after endless meetings back and forth about finding another room (difficult), getting more ports (difficult), rescheduling (difficult), doing a rotated training (difficult) and every other impractical and irrational waste of everyone's time.
I've worked with many 250-1000 employee organizations, a few that were 10-100k total and never met a place yet that gave everyone admin rights. Probably the closest was one place that gave everyone in IT admin rights - developers, DBAs, server admins, desktop support didn't matter - with the message: You work in IT. You should know how to manage your own desktop. Mess it up and we will reimage it but we won't support it. Another had a development network where everyone was admin, completely zoned off network and separate PCs though.
The only real difference is how difficult it was to get something installed. The best had an extensive software catalog or otherwise a quick remote admin job to install it, with no real hassle - they just wanted control over what was installed for documentation and license control. The worst... pray that you never meet them. Unless you can bill them for it, apparently that goes off another budget.
On August 16, 1960, Colonel Kittinger jumped out of a hot air balloon at over 100,000 ft
Yes, he jumped from a balloon at 31,200 m up, this is nowhere near the KÃrmÃn line at 100,000 m which is commonly defined as the edge of space.
You must excuse him, he works for NASA...
Making stuff do what they're not supposed to do IS nerdy. Installing Linux on your toaster because you can. Making a BluRay play on Linux because it's not supposed to is nerdy. You're more looking down the hacker vs cracker line, but both are nerdy activities.
Besides, I've never considered clicking on torrents or putting a disc in the drive and click "Run" in AnyDVD to be particularly nerdy, that's script kiddie at best. You could probably teach a preschooler how to do it.
I do it because it's convenient, not to be cheap. I have a pretty full shelf of BluRays, but downloads are faster, easier, better quality and with RSS feeds it's already downloaded so it's instant satisfaction. I'd do the same on Windows, in fact I do after I switched back. Now I got more choices but they're still far inferior.
Some people don't have their head so far up their ass that they can't celebrate a great achievement of mankind unless they did it. The Soviets one-upped you. You one-upped them with Apollo. The world moved forward. Not everything has to be about you.