The board seems to be composed of Oracle Employees, and 3 independents (possibly more who were not present?)
No, there are just three independents on the council. Without those three it's 100% run by Oracle, and while they may find bodies to fill the seats nobody will think they have any real influence over Oracle. In practice it's the community council that is being dissolved, at least the "community" part of it.
I think the short summary is that OpenOffice.org development is heavily dominated by one company who is slow to accept outside patches, requires copyright assignment and controls the direction it develops in, So far this has only lead to a set of extra patches (Go-oo), but with Sun being bought by Oracle the other contributors expect the situation to get worse and have decided to try reforming it as a community project. They've called it LibreOffice as Oracle owns the name but would ideally like to come to terms with Oracle and continue under the OpenOffice.org name. At least initially it seems that Oracle refuses the idea, and as they then see LibreOffice as a competing project this is bad news but not unexpected. I didn't expect Oracle to hand over the control so easily and suspect Oracle will not budge until most everybody else stand behind LibreOffice.
I would also point out that it's a church, by definition it's supposed to represent the will of $deity not the opinions of the general population or its members. In the old testament God drowned the world except for those on Noah's Ark. He obliterated entire cities like Sodom and Gomorrah for their sins. The argument that it is right because it is popular is quite well contradicted in scripture. There are many references to staying on the narrow path, that to stray and be sinful is easy while to stay true and rightous is hard. That people accept sin as normality is to them only proof the world has become a den of sin again. It is not a reason to question their own beliefs.
Where can I get someone to pay a million dollars so I can do substandard work?
You try claiming the next big work they want will take more than a million dollars in DEV/DBA work compared to buying a million dollar SAN. At this point three things could happen:
1. They say "um, never mind" 2. They pony up the cash 3. They call you on it
While I've seen some rather dysfunctional companies, I still haven't seen any where the PHBs try reestimating the IT cost themselves. Mind you, I haven't seen an overwhelming many companies that have a spare million dollars lying aorund either so I figure #1 would happen in 95% of the cases. But I actually think #2 would happen in 4% of the remaining cases and #3 only in 1%. Unless your costs are questioned before it leaves IT...
Long story short, I do understand Norwegian and your explaination is pretty much spot on what happened. The bot moved both buy and sell, they hit it with many small orders in one direction then one big in the other direction.
We should support voluntary adoption of the technology, while vigorously opposing efforts to make it mandatory.
Why do the words "useful idiot" spring to mind? As if todays "software is licensed, not sold" wasn't bad enough, Trusted Computing is the proverbial strings for making the user a puppet. I'm sick and tired of producers who can't let go of their products, but feel a disgusting need to micromanage what, where and how I can use it. Your delusional theory that consumers will have a choice is proven wrong by broad industry standards that mean you can either bend over or return to the stone age. DVDs and Blu-Rays are good examples, and even if you could find a DRM-free production your DVD/Blu-Ray player is still paying the DRM fee and supports it economically. Or even if you just want such a drive for your computer.
The same thing happens when two lovers promise to be faithful.
It's funny that you should mention marriage, because Trusted Computing is pretty much exactly opposite of what that is about. Trusted Computing is the obsessively jealous dominant girlfriend that demands to know where you've been, who you've been with, what you've been doing and wants total access and control over your life so you don't cheat on her. Most people would not put up with that, and neither do they want to put up with TC. It should be fairly obvious to everyone that Trusted Computing can not coexist with open source at any layer. It's possible to run open source on top of a closed OS, but it's impossible to run anything trusted on top of an open platform the user can modify. It has to be closed, signed, trusted turtles all the way down.
The goal of the FSF is to create a system the user can modify. The goal of trusted computing is to make a system the user can't modify. They are mutually exclusive options, there is no middle ground. To embrace trusted computing is to throw out everything the FSF has stood for in its entire existance. It would be to piss on everyone who has released their code under the GPL because it is supposed to be a license that demands the end user can modify it. You have very eloquently concealed this fundamental truths, but is really comes down to this binary choice. Your claim is that you don't have true freedom until you have the freedom to put a collar around your neck and make yourself a slave.
Most stock traders aren't targeting one other stock trader with a series of transactions, they manipulated that robot into giving them arbitrage. However, I thought their defense was quite strong in that a trade is a fact and can never be untrue as such. Poorly interpreting that trade makes you a bad investor. Repeatedly interpreting trades poorly makes you a bad investor with no learning ability. If that was illegal, there'd be lawsuits flying all over the stock market.
It's more like "Opera doesn't have $obscure_feature that is really important to me." and now it could be an extension. I like Opera, I find it works better out of the box than Firefox. Firefox can be custom tweaked in a zillion ways but it seems that because you got ten possible plugins they don't care how poor the default is. They'd rather just let the plugins fight it out than try picking one "best" and replacing the default.
The grandparent is too harsh but I think Apple still is hyped. They keep wearing a suit ten times the man inside, sure the company has grown but so equally has their hype. I know many people that are buying Apple products they'd never ever consider buying if it wasn't made by Apple, and I don't mean because their products are that revolutionary different. And in that sense, the stock market is not wrong. Are the consumers wrong? Well, I think this old chestnut fits: "The market can be wrong longer than you can be right."
Right now Apple can pick any market they want and have a burst start of loyal fans, press coverage and 3rd party developers. No chicken or egg problems that there's no users because there's no apps and there's no app developers because there's no users. Other companies spend years doing it, even running with losses to get into the market and still only get to be a player. Apple comes in with its new iShiny and gets to command an instant premium and actually casts a shadow of doom over the other players that their market is about to disappear.
Call it what you want, but that asset is real. Most companies out there would kill to have anything like it. And I'm pretty sure that it's going to keep earning Apple lots of money in the future too. In a way Apple has become the master of self-fulfilling prophecies, they come in convincing everybody this is how it will be and then that is exactly what happens. But the core of that power is hype, not fraudulent marketing kind of hype but the kind of hype that's apparently taken root in quite many people's heads.
Alright... you compare Apple shares to cash, which is fair enough. I assume though you know what buying cash is commonly called: currency speculation. As the term sort of gives away, it's speculation; very volatile with a rate of return to unpredictable to qualify as investment.
Nonsense. Having cash and putting that cash in the bank is anything but speculation. Trying to predict how exchange rates will fluctuate to profit from that is speculation, but is an extremely marginal use of money compared to the mere owning of cash.
I'll take the argument that the mouse is still the best device we have for pointing and clicking on things, sure. But I still fail to see how spreading three of my fingers across four movement buttons on a keyboard is a better experience than moving an analogue pad with my thumb for most things. They're really only any use if you've designed your RTS to require umpty-thrumpty buttons, rather than a more streamlined experience.
Every RTS on PC I've played in a long time uses the mouse for selecting units, groups, buildings, setting waypoints, targeting enemies and so on, you don't use the arrow keys for much. The keyboard is usually for speed dial to command groups, map areas, build queue, calling in reinforcements and things like that. They are usually accessible from the GUI, but the keyboard is faster just like knowing all the shortcuts in Word.
It's not like this is an overwhelming amount of choices. For example, in an RPG your mage may have 10 tactics slots - two for greater and lesser health potions, two for mana, three defensive and three offensive spells. It's still not that difficult to choose what you need. You could of course hide it all behind a two-level menu if you're out of buttons (use spell -> spell, use potion -> potion) but it only makes it more annoying to choose. Or you could simplify but then you generally turn it into a twitch/mash game with little strategic element.
Personally I don't see why, but it seems no console wants to take up the fight with the keyboard/mouse. You have buttons and sticks and motion sensors but nothing comes remotely close to the accuracy of the mouse allowing you to pinpoint targets a few pixels big in no time and the vast number of hotkeys on the keyboard. Obviously the downside is that you need a desk or table to use it well, I guess it just doesn't fit the "use case" of the box being hooked up to the TV and people using a lounge chair with the controller in hand.
The lead computers have had in graphics took a huge step up going from NTSC/PAL to 720p. Yes, I know computers had this resolution in the 1980s. The point is that the next generation is likely to be full HD, and 1920x1080 is very close to the maximum "normal" people have today as 95%+ of all gamers play at 1920x1200 or below and 16:10 monitors seem to be disappearing from the market. Sound? I expect full 7.1 with bitstreaming to be supported on the next generation, as all the latest generation graphics cards support it. The PS3 BluRay is already bigger than most DVD games for PC.
In short, I don't think hardware-wise the next generation consoles will in any meaningful way be performance limited. The biggest question is if someone wants to pick up the glove and really push FPS, RTS and MMORPG games for consoles using keyboard/mouse. Imagine for example if one of them managed to secure an exclusive console license for WoW then that would be a huge, huge seller. I don't know why it's not happening, I think the consoles have spent so much time selling themselves as not a PC that they can't imagine themselves being the PC.
Obviously I meant it relative to each other, and you'd have to work pretty hard to convince me the US is even to or worse than Europe. Of course neither is "perfectly" anarchist or totalitarian which would be the extremes of a weak and strong state. But you would expect to see a tendency, the more they lean in one direction the stronger the effect should be. If the effect doesn't kick in until you have a ideologically "pure" state then it is highly unlikely it will ever exist in the real world.
I can't exactly say I got statistics to back it up, but I don't know of many I'd consider stupid and very high on the corporate ladder. I think the biggest downside to being huge is that you spend a lot of time streamlining the process of what you are doing, which tends to cement the process to do exactly and only what you do today. Often you keep thinking the good old days will return so you keep on pushing ahead thinking this is only a dip in the market when it's really disappearing.
The other is that like a person that got really fat then went on a big diet will not be as lean as the person that stayed slim the whole time, companies often expand but as they downsize they don't lose all of it. Broken bones that didn't set quite right won't fix themselves, you'd have to operate to make it right. That kind of introspection is hard, it's a lot easier to manage growth where you have to have a really good business case than it is to manage slack and redundancy. It's a lot easier to limit raises than it is to do pay cuts. It's a lot easier to evaluate purchasing decisions than to replace old and overly expensive systems. Particularly systems that have served a large purpose, but for various reasons is now used for much less and isn't cost justified anymore.
Finally, and this is also a big one: It's a lot easier for a small company to find a new niche than it is for a huge company to find a new cash cow. Huge also means huge expenses, if your main market is heading for the brick wall, then you can't squeeze a 100,000 employee company into a 10,000 employee niche and going in ten different directions to make up the total is probably also not going to work. Even if you got good ideas and a healthy business as such the existing cost structure will just overwhelm you.
We shouldn't have released when we did, everyone knows it. The game wasn't done, but EA gave us a deadline and threatened the leaders of Mythic with pink slips. We slipped so many times
Just reading the summary, you'd think it says "we shipped too early". Only the few words I emphasized mentions the main point of the article, which is that the project was horribly mismanaged, had slipped many deadline and that more time would not have helped at all. It wasn't done but it was never going to get done, EA simply cut their losses and decided to stop throwing good money after bad. The rest is just seeing what could be salvaged...
If US people don't get it, they must be massively dense. I know my salary, of course I do and what I get paid out doesn't come close at all. How could people not realize there's a huge chunk missing? This sounds like an urban legend to me...
The only thing you fail to mention is that the "libertarian" examples you provided aren't libertarian at all. They are anarchistic.
You are trying very hard to argue that two shades of the same color are completely opposite. Not that wikipedia is that authoritative, but this seems quite well supported by citations:
Also identified is a large faction advocating minarchism, though libertarianism has also long been associated with anarchism (and sometimes is used as a synonym for such), especially outside of the United States. Anarchism remains one of the significant branches of libertarianism.
A strong state tends to amplify the influence of the wealthy, not mitigate it.
[reality check needed]
Let's take a case study: US: A "weak" state in terms of taxes and regulation Europe: Mostly "strong" states with more taxes and regulation
Where does wealth buy the most influence? The US. Sure, money talks in Europe too but not nearly as strongly. In fact, I would suggest that most of things that cause Americans to shout "Socialists!" are good for the masses, not the wealthy like universal health care, better unemployment/disability/retirement/whatever benefits, stronger consumer protection laws, stronger worker protection laws and so on. The wealthy could afford to buy it on their own and it'd probably be cheaper for them than the taxes they pay instead.
All of us have to deal with megacorporations even if we're not employed at them, many things have to be driven at a large industrial scale to be profitable today. They are the people that can and will screw you over because they're often a little oligarchy, sure they may push the customers around a little but in the end they can't leave the handful of companies that supply it. So you got burned by Intel and go AMD or burned by AMD and go Intel. And if you get burned by both? I suppose you might find a VIA board somewhere, but that's it.
They also supply many enough jobs that people will jump at them in a poor economy or even a not so poor one. The wealthy never have to deal with being a peon of an employee, the corporations run wild on behalf of their masters which are the wealthy ones we are talking about. You can pretend that "at will" is an equally strong tool in both directions but it's a lie, most companies can easily absorb losing an employee. Not so many employees can easily absorb losing their one and only job. Not to mention that in the US, your work is tied to your company health insurance.
The reason it seems like more laws means more laws written for the wealthy is because in the US the wealthy write the laws. Just FYI, that's not how it should work.
"Breaking the sound barrier" is at any time defined as going from subsonic to supersonic. If you do that, you've broken the barrier otherwise you haven't, no matter what speed you've been travelling. So umm somewhere on the way down, at whatever the local speed of sound is there?
Seriously, either you rely on password reuse, you have the world's greatest memory or your vitally dependend on some software to track your passwords and if you lost that, you've lost everything.
In order of difficulty and importance I remember roughly four passwords:
1. The full disk encryption, it's for everything I don't trust the intartubes with. 2. My online bank password, you can pull a lot of BS but don't touch my money. 3. My webmail password - both as it's personal and as it gives other logins. 4. My "everything else" password - for most forums and shit.
That does not count the PIN on my ATM card, my logins at work or any of the other of the many things I ought to remember. That also doesn't count that I regularly have to swap between three different user ids because "Kjella" is often taken. That's enough for one mind, and I've heard I'm fairly good at remembering things. For people that seem to have enough just remembering their PIN I just don't see it happening without help. And given the reliability of HDDs and most people's ability to take backups, I'd suggest a note in your wallet. And maybe a backup of that too, since I know several who have lost their wallet or had it stolen.
And when I say it developed its own approach, I mean it surprised me with its technique. Once the best AIs in the population were at the point where they trounce me consistently, I took a look at the AI's program genome to reverse-engineer its strategy. It turns out that early game, it would put a high priority on letting me take pieces. It also prioritized controlling side and corner pieces (not surprising), and ensuring it maintained flexible play options. Then, at a certain point in the game, it would change its strategy, and use its flexible position to take back the ground it gave initially. I'm no expert at Reversi, but this struck me as a very interesting and unexpected (to me) strategy.
Long story short, Reversi is dominated by the fact that there are 12 horribly bad moves (the three adjacent squares to every corner) and bad moves only tends to lead to an even more screwed position. "Ok I have to give the corner." "Ok he took the corner... now my choices are even worse." It would have been easier to see with a brute-forcing AI, but the general idea is to minimize your edge stones to limit the opponents' moves and force him into a line of play, not so much for your own flexibility. You don't mind grabbing stones if they're on the interior, they are possibilities. If you can force the opponent into such a bad sequence of moves with some air still on the table, you will win. This will absolutely devastate greedy players who grab as many as possible early.
The only reason you see a change in strategy is that it has been playing mirror images of itself, both players do their best to avoid taking edges and yielding corners so eventually as the board fills up you have to try a territory grab and avoid losing too much on the sides. One method to avoid losing too much on the edges is to force the opponent to fill the second to last, then fill the last position on the edge yourself. A short example with only the top two lines:
X-OOOO-X -XOXXOX-
So you've yielded the corners, but if he takes the left open spot you take the right and so keep 5/8 pieces on the row. Also if you can plant one between the corner and his own side that is good, example:
XOXXXX-- -XOXXOO-
If he takes the corner, you fill the row and get the six in the center. Taking the edge is even worse as you get the line and the corner. All these things means the edge game will be more of a draw between good opponents, so you have to try grabbing the center at some point when there's so many pieces out you won't get forced into anything bad. It doesn't quite sound like your AI would become a champ any time soon but it's still impressive work though.
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The board seems to be composed of Oracle Employees, and 3 independents (possibly more who were not present?)
No, there are just three independents on the council. Without those three it's 100% run by Oracle, and while they may find bodies to fill the seats nobody will think they have any real influence over Oracle. In practice it's the community council that is being dissolved, at least the "community" part of it.
I think the short summary is that OpenOffice.org development is heavily dominated by one company who is slow to accept outside patches, requires copyright assignment and controls the direction it develops in, So far this has only lead to a set of extra patches (Go-oo), but with Sun being bought by Oracle the other contributors expect the situation to get worse and have decided to try reforming it as a community project. They've called it LibreOffice as Oracle owns the name but would ideally like to come to terms with Oracle and continue under the OpenOffice.org name. At least initially it seems that Oracle refuses the idea, and as they then see LibreOffice as a competing project this is bad news but not unexpected. I didn't expect Oracle to hand over the control so easily and suspect Oracle will not budge until most everybody else stand behind LibreOffice.
Let's say what gamerankings says:
Final Fantasy XIV: 51.43%
Daikatana: 54.08%
That's a "throw it in the garbage bin and start over" rating.
I would also point out that it's a church, by definition it's supposed to represent the will of $deity not the opinions of the general population or its members. In the old testament God drowned the world except for those on Noah's Ark. He obliterated entire cities like Sodom and Gomorrah for their sins. The argument that it is right because it is popular is quite well contradicted in scripture. There are many references to staying on the narrow path, that to stray and be sinful is easy while to stay true and rightous is hard. That people accept sin as normality is to them only proof the world has become a den of sin again. It is not a reason to question their own beliefs.
Where can I get someone to pay a million dollars so I can do substandard work?
You try claiming the next big work they want will take more than a million dollars in DEV/DBA work compared to buying a million dollar SAN. At this point three things could happen:
1. They say "um, never mind"
2. They pony up the cash
3. They call you on it
While I've seen some rather dysfunctional companies, I still haven't seen any where the PHBs try reestimating the IT cost themselves. Mind you, I haven't seen an overwhelming many companies that have a spare million dollars lying aorund either so I figure #1 would happen in 95% of the cases. But I actually think #2 would happen in 4% of the remaining cases and #3 only in 1%. Unless your costs are questioned before it leaves IT...
Long story short, I do understand Norwegian and your explaination is pretty much spot on what happened. The bot moved both buy and sell, they hit it with many small orders in one direction then one big in the other direction.
We should support voluntary adoption of the technology, while vigorously opposing efforts to make it mandatory.
Why do the words "useful idiot" spring to mind? As if todays "software is licensed, not sold" wasn't bad enough, Trusted Computing is the proverbial strings for making the user a puppet. I'm sick and tired of producers who can't let go of their products, but feel a disgusting need to micromanage what, where and how I can use it. Your delusional theory that consumers will have a choice is proven wrong by broad industry standards that mean you can either bend over or return to the stone age. DVDs and Blu-Rays are good examples, and even if you could find a DRM-free production your DVD/Blu-Ray player is still paying the DRM fee and supports it economically. Or even if you just want such a drive for your computer.
The same thing happens when two lovers promise to be faithful.
It's funny that you should mention marriage, because Trusted Computing is pretty much exactly opposite of what that is about. Trusted Computing is the obsessively jealous dominant girlfriend that demands to know where you've been, who you've been with, what you've been doing and wants total access and control over your life so you don't cheat on her. Most people would not put up with that, and neither do they want to put up with TC. It should be fairly obvious to everyone that Trusted Computing can not coexist with open source at any layer. It's possible to run open source on top of a closed OS, but it's impossible to run anything trusted on top of an open platform the user can modify. It has to be closed, signed, trusted turtles all the way down.
The goal of the FSF is to create a system the user can modify. The goal of trusted computing is to make a system the user can't modify. They are mutually exclusive options, there is no middle ground. To embrace trusted computing is to throw out everything the FSF has stood for in its entire existance. It would be to piss on everyone who has released their code under the GPL because it is supposed to be a license that demands the end user can modify it. You have very eloquently concealed this fundamental truths, but is really comes down to this binary choice. Your claim is that you don't have true freedom until you have the freedom to put a collar around your neck and make yourself a slave.
Most stock traders aren't targeting one other stock trader with a series of transactions, they manipulated that robot into giving them arbitrage. However, I thought their defense was quite strong in that a trade is a fact and can never be untrue as such. Poorly interpreting that trade makes you a bad investor. Repeatedly interpreting trades poorly makes you a bad investor with no learning ability. If that was illegal, there'd be lawsuits flying all over the stock market.
http://mw1.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/open
9. h: not proprietary : available to third party developers
It's so established in use even the dictionary says your wrong.
It's more like "Opera doesn't have $obscure_feature that is really important to me." and now it could be an extension. I like Opera, I find it works better out of the box than Firefox. Firefox can be custom tweaked in a zillion ways but it seems that because you got ten possible plugins they don't care how poor the default is. They'd rather just let the plugins fight it out than try picking one "best" and replacing the default.
The grandparent is too harsh but I think Apple still is hyped. They keep wearing a suit ten times the man inside, sure the company has grown but so equally has their hype. I know many people that are buying Apple products they'd never ever consider buying if it wasn't made by Apple, and I don't mean because their products are that revolutionary different. And in that sense, the stock market is not wrong. Are the consumers wrong? Well, I think this old chestnut fits: "The market can be wrong longer than you can be right."
Right now Apple can pick any market they want and have a burst start of loyal fans, press coverage and 3rd party developers. No chicken or egg problems that there's no users because there's no apps and there's no app developers because there's no users. Other companies spend years doing it, even running with losses to get into the market and still only get to be a player. Apple comes in with its new iShiny and gets to command an instant premium and actually casts a shadow of doom over the other players that their market is about to disappear.
Call it what you want, but that asset is real. Most companies out there would kill to have anything like it. And I'm pretty sure that it's going to keep earning Apple lots of money in the future too. In a way Apple has become the master of self-fulfilling prophecies, they come in convincing everybody this is how it will be and then that is exactly what happens. But the core of that power is hype, not fraudulent marketing kind of hype but the kind of hype that's apparently taken root in quite many people's heads.
Alright... you compare Apple shares to cash, which is fair enough. I assume though you know what buying cash is commonly called: currency speculation. As the term sort of gives away, it's speculation; very volatile with a rate of return to unpredictable to qualify as investment.
Nonsense. Having cash and putting that cash in the bank is anything but speculation. Trying to predict how exchange rates will fluctuate to profit from that is speculation, but is an extremely marginal use of money compared to the mere owning of cash.
I'll take the argument that the mouse is still the best device we have for pointing and clicking on things, sure. But I still fail to see how spreading three of my fingers across four movement buttons on a keyboard is a better experience than moving an analogue pad with my thumb for most things. They're really only any use if you've designed your RTS to require umpty-thrumpty buttons, rather than a more streamlined experience.
Every RTS on PC I've played in a long time uses the mouse for selecting units, groups, buildings, setting waypoints, targeting enemies and so on, you don't use the arrow keys for much. The keyboard is usually for speed dial to command groups, map areas, build queue, calling in reinforcements and things like that. They are usually accessible from the GUI, but the keyboard is faster just like knowing all the shortcuts in Word.
It's not like this is an overwhelming amount of choices. For example, in an RPG your mage may have 10 tactics slots - two for greater and lesser health potions, two for mana, three defensive and three offensive spells. It's still not that difficult to choose what you need. You could of course hide it all behind a two-level menu if you're out of buttons (use spell -> spell, use potion -> potion) but it only makes it more annoying to choose. Or you could simplify but then you generally turn it into a twitch/mash game with little strategic element.
You almost had me going there until "amazing Windows Mobile 7". Too much...
Personally I don't see why, but it seems no console wants to take up the fight with the keyboard/mouse. You have buttons and sticks and motion sensors but nothing comes remotely close to the accuracy of the mouse allowing you to pinpoint targets a few pixels big in no time and the vast number of hotkeys on the keyboard. Obviously the downside is that you need a desk or table to use it well, I guess it just doesn't fit the "use case" of the box being hooked up to the TV and people using a lounge chair with the controller in hand.
The lead computers have had in graphics took a huge step up going from NTSC/PAL to 720p. Yes, I know computers had this resolution in the 1980s. The point is that the next generation is likely to be full HD, and 1920x1080 is very close to the maximum "normal" people have today as 95%+ of all gamers play at 1920x1200 or below and 16:10 monitors seem to be disappearing from the market. Sound? I expect full 7.1 with bitstreaming to be supported on the next generation, as all the latest generation graphics cards support it. The PS3 BluRay is already bigger than most DVD games for PC.
In short, I don't think hardware-wise the next generation consoles will in any meaningful way be performance limited. The biggest question is if someone wants to pick up the glove and really push FPS, RTS and MMORPG games for consoles using keyboard/mouse. Imagine for example if one of them managed to secure an exclusive console license for WoW then that would be a huge, huge seller. I don't know why it's not happening, I think the consoles have spent so much time selling themselves as not a PC that they can't imagine themselves being the PC.
Obviously I meant it relative to each other, and you'd have to work pretty hard to convince me the US is even to or worse than Europe. Of course neither is "perfectly" anarchist or totalitarian which would be the extremes of a weak and strong state. But you would expect to see a tendency, the more they lean in one direction the stronger the effect should be. If the effect doesn't kick in until you have a ideologically "pure" state then it is highly unlikely it will ever exist in the real world.
I can't exactly say I got statistics to back it up, but I don't know of many I'd consider stupid and very high on the corporate ladder. I think the biggest downside to being huge is that you spend a lot of time streamlining the process of what you are doing, which tends to cement the process to do exactly and only what you do today. Often you keep thinking the good old days will return so you keep on pushing ahead thinking this is only a dip in the market when it's really disappearing.
The other is that like a person that got really fat then went on a big diet will not be as lean as the person that stayed slim the whole time, companies often expand but as they downsize they don't lose all of it. Broken bones that didn't set quite right won't fix themselves, you'd have to operate to make it right. That kind of introspection is hard, it's a lot easier to manage growth where you have to have a really good business case than it is to manage slack and redundancy. It's a lot easier to limit raises than it is to do pay cuts. It's a lot easier to evaluate purchasing decisions than to replace old and overly expensive systems. Particularly systems that have served a large purpose, but for various reasons is now used for much less and isn't cost justified anymore.
Finally, and this is also a big one: It's a lot easier for a small company to find a new niche than it is for a huge company to find a new cash cow. Huge also means huge expenses, if your main market is heading for the brick wall, then you can't squeeze a 100,000 employee company into a 10,000 employee niche and going in ten different directions to make up the total is probably also not going to work. Even if you got good ideas and a healthy business as such the existing cost structure will just overwhelm you.
We shouldn't have released when we did, everyone knows it. The game wasn't done, but EA gave us a deadline and threatened the leaders of Mythic with pink slips. We slipped so many times
Just reading the summary, you'd think it says "we shipped too early". Only the few words I emphasized mentions the main point of the article, which is that the project was horribly mismanaged, had slipped many deadline and that more time would not have helped at all. It wasn't done but it was never going to get done, EA simply cut their losses and decided to stop throwing good money after bad. The rest is just seeing what could be salvaged...
If US people don't get it, they must be massively dense. I know my salary, of course I do and what I get paid out doesn't come close at all. How could people not realize there's a huge chunk missing? This sounds like an urban legend to me...
The only thing you fail to mention is that the "libertarian" examples you provided aren't libertarian at all. They are anarchistic.
You are trying very hard to argue that two shades of the same color are completely opposite. Not that wikipedia is that authoritative, but this seems quite well supported by citations:
Also identified is a large faction advocating minarchism, though libertarianism has also long been associated with anarchism (and sometimes is used as a synonym for such), especially outside of the United States. Anarchism remains one of the significant branches of libertarianism.
A strong state tends to amplify the influence of the wealthy, not mitigate it.
[reality check needed]
Let's take a case study:
US: A "weak" state in terms of taxes and regulation
Europe: Mostly "strong" states with more taxes and regulation
Where does wealth buy the most influence? The US. Sure, money talks in Europe too but not nearly as strongly. In fact, I would suggest that most of things that cause Americans to shout "Socialists!" are good for the masses, not the wealthy like universal health care, better unemployment/disability/retirement/whatever benefits, stronger consumer protection laws, stronger worker protection laws and so on. The wealthy could afford to buy it on their own and it'd probably be cheaper for them than the taxes they pay instead.
All of us have to deal with megacorporations even if we're not employed at them, many things have to be driven at a large industrial scale to be profitable today. They are the people that can and will screw you over because they're often a little oligarchy, sure they may push the customers around a little but in the end they can't leave the handful of companies that supply it. So you got burned by Intel and go AMD or burned by AMD and go Intel. And if you get burned by both? I suppose you might find a VIA board somewhere, but that's it.
They also supply many enough jobs that people will jump at them in a poor economy or even a not so poor one. The wealthy never have to deal with being a peon of an employee, the corporations run wild on behalf of their masters which are the wealthy ones we are talking about. You can pretend that "at will" is an equally strong tool in both directions but it's a lie, most companies can easily absorb losing an employee. Not so many employees can easily absorb losing their one and only job. Not to mention that in the US, your work is tied to your company health insurance.
The reason it seems like more laws means more laws written for the wealthy is because in the US the wealthy write the laws. Just FYI, that's not how it should work.
Yep, moderate headling -1, Troll (or +$$$, Pagehits if you're a slashdot editor).
"Breaking the sound barrier" is at any time defined as going from subsonic to supersonic. If you do that, you've broken the barrier otherwise you haven't, no matter what speed you've been travelling. So umm somewhere on the way down, at whatever the local speed of sound is there?
Seriously, either you rely on password reuse, you have the world's greatest memory or your vitally dependend on some software to track your passwords and if you lost that, you've lost everything.
In order of difficulty and importance I remember roughly four passwords:
1. The full disk encryption, it's for everything I don't trust the intartubes with.
2. My online bank password, you can pull a lot of BS but don't touch my money.
3. My webmail password - both as it's personal and as it gives other logins.
4. My "everything else" password - for most forums and shit.
That does not count the PIN on my ATM card, my logins at work or any of the other of the many things I ought to remember. That also doesn't count that I regularly have to swap between three different user ids because "Kjella" is often taken. That's enough for one mind, and I've heard I'm fairly good at remembering things. For people that seem to have enough just remembering their PIN I just don't see it happening without help. And given the reliability of HDDs and most people's ability to take backups, I'd suggest a note in your wallet. And maybe a backup of that too, since I know several who have lost their wallet or had it stolen.
And when I say it developed its own approach, I mean it surprised me with its technique. Once the best AIs in the population were at the point where they trounce me consistently, I took a look at the AI's program genome to reverse-engineer its strategy. It turns out that early game, it would put a high priority on letting me take pieces. It also prioritized controlling side and corner pieces (not surprising), and ensuring it maintained flexible play options. Then, at a certain point in the game, it would change its strategy, and use its flexible position to take back the ground it gave initially. I'm no expert at Reversi, but this struck me as a very interesting and unexpected (to me) strategy.
Long story short, Reversi is dominated by the fact that there are 12 horribly bad moves (the three adjacent squares to every corner) and bad moves only tends to lead to an even more screwed position. "Ok I have to give the corner." "Ok he took the corner... now my choices are even worse." It would have been easier to see with a brute-forcing AI, but the general idea is to minimize your edge stones to limit the opponents' moves and force him into a line of play, not so much for your own flexibility. You don't mind grabbing stones if they're on the interior, they are possibilities. If you can force the opponent into such a bad sequence of moves with some air still on the table, you will win. This will absolutely devastate greedy players who grab as many as possible early.
The only reason you see a change in strategy is that it has been playing mirror images of itself, both players do their best to avoid taking edges and yielding corners so eventually as the board fills up you have to try a territory grab and avoid losing too much on the sides. One method to avoid losing too much on the edges is to force the opponent to fill the second to last, then fill the last position on the edge yourself. A short example with only the top two lines:
So you've yielded the corners, but if he takes the left open spot you take the right and so keep 5/8 pieces on the row. Also if you can plant one between the corner and his own side that is good, example:
If he takes the corner, you fill the row and get the six in the center. Taking the edge is even worse as you get the line and the corner. All these things means the edge game will be more of a draw between good opponents, so you have to try grabbing the center at some point when there's so many pieces out you won't get forced into anything bad. It doesn't quite sound like your AI would become a champ any time soon but it's still impressive work though.