Somehow militaries across the world have enforced the policy of not using frangible bullets and blinding lasers. However, more recently snipers have been watering it down at the peripheries by using hollow point match projectiles. While they technically are hollow points, they aren't the same as what most people think are hollow points, in that they are done so because they are consistent and accurate, and aren't designed with terminal ballistics in mind.
Furthermore, frangible projectiles are still manufactured, for hunting, and blinding lazers do exist.
So I'm not sure what you're saying, because I get the feeling that in both those instances, there isn't really any sort of countering technology that could minimise or mitigate against the effects of those weapons.
This is probably why 'they' would want it banned; purely because it's a weapon that they can't guarantee control over, or can't guarantee that they can counter this technology. So it would make sense to use diplomacy to try to make sure no one uses it.
MS's translator is generally good, I like using it on my phone, the camera translation is a particularly nice feature, but the one language which I'm constantly having to go to google for translations is latin. Why won't they add it in? For a lot of educated disciplines, science, law, latin is a used, and sometimes it's helpful for some decent translating.
Also forgot to add that the game sites also tend to gloss over issues which plague a lot of games. Namely debilitating DRM, day one DLC and early access. If they don't stand up for the consumer, then what are they for?
A big part of the problem recently is that 'consuming opinions' means that you are getting all the internal bias of the reviewer, warts and all. That means if they get all antsy about not having a playable female character, then the game is toast. If the game has been criticised by Anita Sarkeesian (or will be) then it's awful. If it doesn't cater to alphabet soup people, then it's sucking up to the privileged white males and therefore bad.
So when you have opinions, all you end up with is the game 'media' pushing drivel such as depression quest and gone home. While review scores have plenty of problems, it also allows the consumer to also compare review sites. With a subjective opinion piece, where you have plenty of writers who make a point of not being objective, it just becomes a piece on what's bothering the writer this week.
People like totalbiscuit have proven that you can review games, and still be objective and fair. So while reviews are intrinsically an opinion, some are far more valid than others, and most of these game sites, are best forgotten about.
I'm of a similar opinion. Score aggregation is a far more reliable method of determining the quality of a game, very quickly. It's not perfect, but it works rather nicely for me.
The problem that has been happening is the stupid score of 7/10, which demonstrates the stupid offset that game reviewers have been applying to their scores. 7/10 is more or less the average game, and anything below is usually crap (or niche) and anything above is ok. The dumbest thing about it is scores 0-5 essentially are varying levels of garbage. I think some review sites have copped flack over this, as it's rather ridiculous. There has also been pressure to get good reviews, otherwise reviewers get dropped out of the "club", and won't get free review copies, access to people for interviews or taken to junkets.
So while I don't always look at individual scores, because, especially now, they tend to be meaningless on their own, aggregating them makes heaps of sense, that is until many review sites stop providing scores to aggregate. This is what I think it's about. A lot of review sites are being attacked on a couple of fronts, there's the people who don't bother with them, and then there's 'let's plays' on youtube. I guess these websites try to make out that it's their writing which should be consumed. The problem with this is that with the gradual push for yellow journalism in gaming media, it means that they can't be scrutinesed for piling on games that don't fit in with their world view, like polygon did with bayonetta 2. I don't read eurogamer anyway, so it's no problem for me.
My first (and only) experience with android was heavily coloured by optus. Similar to telstra, they just don't release updates. What I learnt is, if you buy a carrier locked android phone, you're going to have a bad time. You never ever get a carrier locked android phone, it just adds another piece to the chain, and while the manufacturers are slow to release the updates, the carriers are even worse, and what for? They only install bloatware anyway.
The more complex analysis I've been reading about is that this is all stemming from a creep of 'cultural marxism' from academia. The thinking behind much of this is definitely marxist because as you say, it's about equal outcomes. For much of this cultural issues relating to gender or sexuality, the minorities are very much so, minorities, and market forces are essentially forcing them out. People aren't interested in products for that minority, so they don't get made because they don't sell.
Unfortunately what has crept in is the idea that every minority must be represented. This is particularly prominent in the video game industry where there's a race to the bottom to force in various minority figures, not because it makes any artistic sense, but because well, they need to be represented. As a result, we get fairly ridiculously contrived characters that do nothing except pander to those minorities, and generally annoy the mainstream market. A case in point is the developer bioware, who have gone out of their way to force their political viewpoints through their characters, and as a result, they've suffered.
So going back to cultural marxism, it's a case of forcing parity, as you have identified, rather than allowing it happen on its own and stabilise according to market demands. When it comes to something like this topic of male dominance in technical fields, well it's clear, there's absolutely no barrier preventing females from doing CS or programming, or any other male dominated fields, such as engineering. Therefore, the thinking is that clearly, capitalist ideology has failed to achieve their desires, so they need to force competing ideologies to counter it. Marxist ideologies are particularly useful for them because it enables authoritarian attitudes ahead of libertarian ones. They see the privileged people as controlling the means of production (i.e. the majority determine the market) and therefore need to take that away from the majority by making the market pander to the minorities and remove market forces from the equation. This is precisely what we are seeing here; structure things so that the majority can't participate.
The thing is, people have researched the topic in more depth, and you can find that while girls do play games, the games they do play are not the same as boys. This is why, in spite of this 50% are female, the main market is the one dominated by males, which is why the industry works quite hard in targeting that audience.
I was taught that you treat "air" as an ideal gas when there's no phase change. This was thermodynamics though. There may be an issue with humidity, but I have my doubts whether that will play a large role.
I get the feeling that maybe because there is worldwide pressure to do something about tax issues where money earned in one jurisdiction is taxed (at a lower rate) in another. This may be a case of the US government trying to tax it so that they get the money, and fight off other countries from having access to these funds. Ultimately I don't know, but one of our more colourful Australian politicians has a saying which I can probably change one word so that it applies in all cases; Never get in between a politician and a bucket of money...
I decided to go nvidia this round, had issues with my previous AMD gpu where certain functions didn't work properly. The one that annoyed me the most was that I have a 1920x1200 monitor, which is an older model that won't do 1:1 pixel scaling, so if a 1920x1080 signal gets fed, it will stretch it to full screen. The AMD software could be set to maintain the aspect ratio, so it didn't bother me, after a certain update, that feature stopped working, and no matter how hard I tried, it would always stretch the display. Using nvidia now, and able to get the letterboxed image again.
GPU's are easy to change, 16:10 monitors not so much. There's no way I'm departing from 16:10!
As a windows phone user, they screwed up office on it as well. I had previously an android phone which included some variant with office compatibility courtesy of samsung, and it supported all excel functions, meanwhile the microsoft version is heavily nerfed. Some spreadsheets I was using on my phone, no longer worked properly, which was a rather big nuisance. But windows phone does one major thing a lot better than android; updates and bug fixes.
Yea, my perception of windows 8/8.1 is that under the hood it's very good, better than 7. It's all in the UI which is completely idiotic. I have no idea how they were able to screw it up so badly. However, a couple of UI features were improved in 8, but for the most part, they stuffed up.
Brianna Wu was caught subsequently did admit to using at least one sockpuppet (twitter handle was BROLOLZ). Other ones, the evidence doesn't definitively prove anything, but are highly suspicious. Hopefully the FBI is taking it seriously.
There was a bit of a conspiracy, because, while there's no concrete evidence, it appeared that a few of the 'victims' were working really hard through the use of sockpuppets, to try to build the foundations for a larger harassment campaign.
I heard that a major problem in Africa is a burial custom where they pour water over the deceased persons body and then relatives drink the water. No idea whether this is true at all, but if it is, you would sort of think that there needs to be a fairly serious education campaign to control it. Ebola isn't that contagious considering it needs direct contact with bodily fluids, so something has to be happening which is consistently putting people at risk.
In the grander scheme of things, it's not that important, it is what got the ball rolling though. Again, people were generally suspicious about the nepotism and cronyism, but there never was any solid proof. Even the firing of Jeff Gerstmann, people knew that it was probably due to pressure for the bad review, but there wasn't proof of anything, and certainly no names to attach to it, just two very large companies.
This time, it's different. There's names, there's evidence, there's clear indications that from some, they've been participating in some very dubious ethical practice. There's clear examples of a general antipathy from game 'journalists' towards their readers (many 'gamers are dead' articles in a few hours). The point is, to deny that Quinn did anything wrong, would basically admit that GamerGate is a beat up over nothing. It became a lot bigger than Quinn, but don't forget, it wasn't just the relationships she had, she also concocted that there was a harassment campaign against her last year, after her game didn't get greenlit. Because it followed the narrative many of these 'journalists' want to hear, they didn't do any basic fact checking, just took her word for it, and she reaped massive publicity for it.
I don't think it's character assassination, but if you do, you should have a look at what happened to Max Tempkin and Brad Wardell. They were accused of rape, and the 'journalists' had a field day defaming and character assassinating them without a shred of evidence, just an allegation. Now, they've all found their morals when one of their own (i.e. self styled social justice warrior [yes Quinn called herself that iirc]) got some unwanted attention that was very damaging to the movement because of the incestuous relationships in the industry. The logs from the gamejournopros list proved that they had absolutely no intention of covering it. They didn't, they banned discussion, banned people who mentioned anything. Certainly haven't apologised when they defamed others though, they just went back and tried to quietly sanitise their articles. That's why GamerGate is all about journalistic integrity and ethics; the 'journalists' have clearly demonstrated that they are unrepentant and unapologetic about not having any.
Slashdot Mirror
I never got XP mode to run anything properly anyway.
Somehow militaries across the world have enforced the policy of not using frangible bullets and blinding lasers. However, more recently snipers have been watering it down at the peripheries by using hollow point match projectiles. While they technically are hollow points, they aren't the same as what most people think are hollow points, in that they are done so because they are consistent and accurate, and aren't designed with terminal ballistics in mind.
Furthermore, frangible projectiles are still manufactured, for hunting, and blinding lazers do exist.
So I'm not sure what you're saying, because I get the feeling that in both those instances, there isn't really any sort of countering technology that could minimise or mitigate against the effects of those weapons.
This is probably why 'they' would want it banned; purely because it's a weapon that they can't guarantee control over, or can't guarantee that they can counter this technology. So it would make sense to use diplomacy to try to make sure no one uses it.
MS's translator is generally good, I like using it on my phone, the camera translation is a particularly nice feature, but the one language which I'm constantly having to go to google for translations is latin. Why won't they add it in? For a lot of educated disciplines, science, law, latin is a used, and sometimes it's helpful for some decent translating.
Also forgot to add that the game sites also tend to gloss over issues which plague a lot of games. Namely debilitating DRM, day one DLC and early access. If they don't stand up for the consumer, then what are they for?
A big part of the problem recently is that 'consuming opinions' means that you are getting all the internal bias of the reviewer, warts and all. That means if they get all antsy about not having a playable female character, then the game is toast. If the game has been criticised by Anita Sarkeesian (or will be) then it's awful. If it doesn't cater to alphabet soup people, then it's sucking up to the privileged white males and therefore bad.
So when you have opinions, all you end up with is the game 'media' pushing drivel such as depression quest and gone home. While review scores have plenty of problems, it also allows the consumer to also compare review sites. With a subjective opinion piece, where you have plenty of writers who make a point of not being objective, it just becomes a piece on what's bothering the writer this week.
People like totalbiscuit have proven that you can review games, and still be objective and fair. So while reviews are intrinsically an opinion, some are far more valid than others, and most of these game sites, are best forgotten about.
I've never used it for one simple reason; Bad Rats...
I'm of a similar opinion. Score aggregation is a far more reliable method of determining the quality of a game, very quickly. It's not perfect, but it works rather nicely for me.
The problem that has been happening is the stupid score of 7/10, which demonstrates the stupid offset that game reviewers have been applying to their scores. 7/10 is more or less the average game, and anything below is usually crap (or niche) and anything above is ok. The dumbest thing about it is scores 0-5 essentially are varying levels of garbage. I think some review sites have copped flack over this, as it's rather ridiculous. There has also been pressure to get good reviews, otherwise reviewers get dropped out of the "club", and won't get free review copies, access to people for interviews or taken to junkets.
So while I don't always look at individual scores, because, especially now, they tend to be meaningless on their own, aggregating them makes heaps of sense, that is until many review sites stop providing scores to aggregate. This is what I think it's about. A lot of review sites are being attacked on a couple of fronts, there's the people who don't bother with them, and then there's 'let's plays' on youtube. I guess these websites try to make out that it's their writing which should be consumed. The problem with this is that with the gradual push for yellow journalism in gaming media, it means that they can't be scrutinesed for piling on games that don't fit in with their world view, like polygon did with bayonetta 2. I don't read eurogamer anyway, so it's no problem for me.
The question that really should be asked is why is the department of homeland security giving out so much military gear to police departments?
My first (and only) experience with android was heavily coloured by optus. Similar to telstra, they just don't release updates. What I learnt is, if you buy a carrier locked android phone, you're going to have a bad time. You never ever get a carrier locked android phone, it just adds another piece to the chain, and while the manufacturers are slow to release the updates, the carriers are even worse, and what for? They only install bloatware anyway.
The more complex analysis I've been reading about is that this is all stemming from a creep of 'cultural marxism' from academia. The thinking behind much of this is definitely marxist because as you say, it's about equal outcomes. For much of this cultural issues relating to gender or sexuality, the minorities are very much so, minorities, and market forces are essentially forcing them out. People aren't interested in products for that minority, so they don't get made because they don't sell.
Unfortunately what has crept in is the idea that every minority must be represented. This is particularly prominent in the video game industry where there's a race to the bottom to force in various minority figures, not because it makes any artistic sense, but because well, they need to be represented. As a result, we get fairly ridiculously contrived characters that do nothing except pander to those minorities, and generally annoy the mainstream market. A case in point is the developer bioware, who have gone out of their way to force their political viewpoints through their characters, and as a result, they've suffered.
So going back to cultural marxism, it's a case of forcing parity, as you have identified, rather than allowing it happen on its own and stabilise according to market demands. When it comes to something like this topic of male dominance in technical fields, well it's clear, there's absolutely no barrier preventing females from doing CS or programming, or any other male dominated fields, such as engineering. Therefore, the thinking is that clearly, capitalist ideology has failed to achieve their desires, so they need to force competing ideologies to counter it. Marxist ideologies are particularly useful for them because it enables authoritarian attitudes ahead of libertarian ones. They see the privileged people as controlling the means of production (i.e. the majority determine the market) and therefore need to take that away from the majority by making the market pander to the minorities and remove market forces from the equation. This is precisely what we are seeing here; structure things so that the majority can't participate.
The thing is, people have researched the topic in more depth, and you can find that while girls do play games, the games they do play are not the same as boys. This is why, in spite of this 50% are female, the main market is the one dominated by males, which is why the industry works quite hard in targeting that audience.
I was taught that you treat "air" as an ideal gas when there's no phase change. This was thermodynamics though. There may be an issue with humidity, but I have my doubts whether that will play a large role.
I get the feeling that maybe because there is worldwide pressure to do something about tax issues where money earned in one jurisdiction is taxed (at a lower rate) in another. This may be a case of the US government trying to tax it so that they get the money, and fight off other countries from having access to these funds. Ultimately I don't know, but one of our more colourful Australian politicians has a saying which I can probably change one word so that it applies in all cases; Never get in between a politician and a bucket of money...
Probably, the older I get, the more cynical I get, and all I can see is that business tends to lobby government for freedom from competition.
It's probably a case of companies buying keys in a cheap region, and selling them to people who otherwise would have to pay more in their region.
I decided to go nvidia this round, had issues with my previous AMD gpu where certain functions didn't work properly. The one that annoyed me the most was that I have a 1920x1200 monitor, which is an older model that won't do 1:1 pixel scaling, so if a 1920x1080 signal gets fed, it will stretch it to full screen. The AMD software could be set to maintain the aspect ratio, so it didn't bother me, after a certain update, that feature stopped working, and no matter how hard I tried, it would always stretch the display. Using nvidia now, and able to get the letterboxed image again.
GPU's are easy to change, 16:10 monitors not so much. There's no way I'm departing from 16:10!
As a windows phone user, they screwed up office on it as well. I had previously an android phone which included some variant with office compatibility courtesy of samsung, and it supported all excel functions, meanwhile the microsoft version is heavily nerfed. Some spreadsheets I was using on my phone, no longer worked properly, which was a rather big nuisance. But windows phone does one major thing a lot better than android; updates and bug fixes.
Viola is actually a larger violin.
Yea, my perception of windows 8/8.1 is that under the hood it's very good, better than 7. It's all in the UI which is completely idiotic. I have no idea how they were able to screw it up so badly. However, a couple of UI features were improved in 8, but for the most part, they stuffed up.
I have a kitchen sink!
Brianna Wu was caught subsequently did admit to using at least one sockpuppet (twitter handle was BROLOLZ). Other ones, the evidence doesn't definitively prove anything, but are highly suspicious. Hopefully the FBI is taking it seriously.
There was a bit of a conspiracy, because, while there's no concrete evidence, it appeared that a few of the 'victims' were working really hard through the use of sockpuppets, to try to build the foundations for a larger harassment campaign.
I heard that a major problem in Africa is a burial custom where they pour water over the deceased persons body and then relatives drink the water. No idea whether this is true at all, but if it is, you would sort of think that there needs to be a fairly serious education campaign to control it. Ebola isn't that contagious considering it needs direct contact with bodily fluids, so something has to be happening which is consistently putting people at risk.
In the grander scheme of things, it's not that important, it is what got the ball rolling though. Again, people were generally suspicious about the nepotism and cronyism, but there never was any solid proof. Even the firing of Jeff Gerstmann, people knew that it was probably due to pressure for the bad review, but there wasn't proof of anything, and certainly no names to attach to it, just two very large companies.
This time, it's different. There's names, there's evidence, there's clear indications that from some, they've been participating in some very dubious ethical practice. There's clear examples of a general antipathy from game 'journalists' towards their readers (many 'gamers are dead' articles in a few hours). The point is, to deny that Quinn did anything wrong, would basically admit that GamerGate is a beat up over nothing. It became a lot bigger than Quinn, but don't forget, it wasn't just the relationships she had, she also concocted that there was a harassment campaign against her last year, after her game didn't get greenlit. Because it followed the narrative many of these 'journalists' want to hear, they didn't do any basic fact checking, just took her word for it, and she reaped massive publicity for it.
I don't think it's character assassination, but if you do, you should have a look at what happened to Max Tempkin and Brad Wardell. They were accused of rape, and the 'journalists' had a field day defaming and character assassinating them without a shred of evidence, just an allegation. Now, they've all found their morals when one of their own (i.e. self styled social justice warrior [yes Quinn called herself that iirc]) got some unwanted attention that was very damaging to the movement because of the incestuous relationships in the industry. The logs from the gamejournopros list proved that they had absolutely no intention of covering it. They didn't, they banned discussion, banned people who mentioned anything. Certainly haven't apologised when they defamed others though, they just went back and tried to quietly sanitise their articles. That's why GamerGate is all about journalistic integrity and ethics; the 'journalists' have clearly demonstrated that they are unrepentant and unapologetic about not having any.