And your preferred plan is what.. let the US wallow in the great depression for another 10? 20? 100 years? How long do you think it would have taken to recover if you leave the people who caused the problems (many of whom actually profited off the suffering of the masses) in charge of running the show?
Is there too much regulation? In some cases yes, in other cases no (and in a few cases there's probably not enough regulation..) But there's a whole lot of people, especially on the conservative side, who want to blindly just deregulate anything they can get away with and completely ignore (or "conveniently" forget) that most regulations were put in place for a reason. Sometimes the reasons were bad, sometimes the reasons aren't valid anymore.. but often they are and removing such regulations without caution is just playing with fire, and its only a matter of time before the country (and thanks to the US' economic power, sometimes the whole world) will get burned sooner or later.
Does it matter? Most of the time these things are already being sent via text message, Snapchat, or some other service that could potentially be intercepting and storing them. I mean there was that whole snappening thing a couple years ago that demonstrated exactly how ephemeral those photos weren't.
The fact that one more faceless corporation and its employees in a chain of faceless corporations can see your junk is a minor consideration compared to the risk of your friends, family, potential employers, etc seeing it.
Problem isn't the victim considering them compromising. The problem is the victim's family, friends, coworkers, boss, etc considering them compromising.
Really though, its a generational thing to some extent. By the time the children of the millennials are in their 40s or 50s and running the world, so many of them will have nudes, stupid social media posts, etc out in the world that its going to necessarily be a non-issue or for examples employers won't be able to find any employees that fit their "internet purity" conditions.
Its only a problem right now when the generation doing the hiring never really had to deal with these kind of things while the generation looking to be hired don't really care that much because everyone they know does it. Its the intersection of those two worlds where everything hits the fan.. well, in a generalized sense of course -- there will always be exceptions obviously.
Presumably they wouldn't be keeping copies of the photos -- just their hashes for comparison purposes. And in this case, specifically because of the situation you mention and similar possibilities there's a good chance that the company will comply (any particular employee may break the rules and say store a handful of pictures on their local PC drive or something but it almost certainly wouldn't be company policy.)
I wouldn't put it past them to run the photos through their facial recognition and whatnot before purging them though, just in case you had onlookers they could maybe identify and link to your profile in some manner..
Sure it works 100%, but its also the digital equivalent of abstinence-only. People like their sexy times and often don't think about or care about consequences when they're in the moment. Abstinence-only arguments basically go against human nature and therefore will never ever work in practice, even if they might in theory.
The problem is that you're living in the past. The US was the greatest country in the world and they were actually capable of doing "stuff." (By stuff, I assume you mean military actions and/or the space race, which was really a military action in itself if only a symbolic one.)
But that's all in the past. China is now doing stuff. India is now doing stuff. The EU has been doing stuff for a while. Hell, if you want to restrict yourself to military actions you could even claim that North Korea is doing "stuff" at this point. Meanwhile the US has decided to back off of that whole "science and technology" train because its getting inconvenient for their largest companies.
At this point, the US is waning and China in particular looks to be the new rising star. Whether the US will bother reacting in time to reverse that course, or if world events (such as trading nukes with North Korea) will change the whole game remains to be seen, but if things keep going as they are the US will be in Britain's shoes by the end of the century if not sooner -- still a strong world power to be sure, but no longer considered a superpower.
Also, you made yourself the global police. Most places on the planet would be quite happy if the US stepped the fuck off and let them run themselves. But that will never happen because then the US could no longer justify their insane military spending, and those poor billionaires at Halliburton and Lockheed-Martin would be sad.
So you just expect everyone to have a spare $100 million laying around to send up a satellite? That sounds realistic.
Corporations exist to do things that individuals couldn't afford to do on their own. But they have the down side of being 100% profit motivated, so if the project isn't going to show any sort of ROI it will never get corporate funding no matter how valuable it is.
OK so maybe a rich philanthropist can do it. Elon Musk has his hands full already trying to save the planet in other ways. Same with Bill Gates. And there just aren't that many other philanthropists out there with that kind of bank roll. Bezos seems to want to get into the rocket game but he's just doing it for the profit now that Musk has shown it can be done.
So who else could do this? Who else has the funding available to launch satellites and also a motivation other than pure profit? That leaves basically the government. True they have their own motivations that may not align with a satellite (hence defunding the one that was already there) but at least they have more than one motivation, and that motivation can be swayed by reasonable argument, or even by voters to some degree.
The problem with the whole "government shouldn't do anything" rhetoric is that there are some things that are worth doing, but simply have no other entity with both the capability and the desire to do them. Should the government try to do everything? Of course not. But there are some aspects of life that simply lead themselves more to a social solution than a profit-motivated solution. As with everything in life, balance is the key. A fully socialist system will break down to be sure, but a fully capitalist system would break down just as fast.
Wow I went typo pro on that post. Apologies to the grammar Nazis (is that still an acceptable term now that actual Nazis seem to be becoming a relevant thing again? Hm.)
Unfortunately given what these satellites were measuring, this is potentially a whole world problem. Sounds like other countries are stepping up to the plate though as the US falls further and further behind the tech race.
Its funny that right wingers love to shout "MAGA" while at the same time deriding, if not outright denying much of science. Yet all of the periods in history where America was considered to be at its greatest, were periods of high science and innovation, and going beyond America when we look back at our favorite historical eras -- Greece, Rome, Egypt, etc we also consider their greatest periods to be when they were focusing on science and technology (well, and imperial expansionism but that's another story..)
Really, the should be yelling "MAMA" (Make America Mediocre Again" since that seems to be the direction their policies and ideals are headed.
And if you don't use hyperbole, people won't have to disbelieve you since they won't be paying attention at all in our current era of "ooh shiny!" sensationalized media.
Really? The Air Force cares about measuring sea ice? Something tells me they don't have "the same" set of satellites. Even if one of the AF's satellites could be repurposed for NOAA's needs, that would mean the AF no longer has it available for their own use since NOAA would be using it basically 24/7.
Not everything is about zOMG global warming
No, its about money. Why would they spend money to put up a satellite that's just going to help us see that we need stricter pollution controls, which translates to money for big business. Fuck the planet, fuck the people as long as Exxon and Shell are able to pay their CEOs 10mill/year+bonuses!
Donald Trump himself might be stupid enough to deny climate change, but most of the GOP is more intelligent than him. They know whats going on and they don't care because they want to continue getting their "campaign contributions."
Just like not everything is about how there are really 57 genders
No.. only gender discrimination is about 57 genders. For everything else, it shouldn't matter if there's 57 or 2 or 1 gender. What the hell does it matter to you if I want to gender-identify with a pink and green polka-dot firetruck? I mean its certainly obnoxious when someone gets their undies in a bunch over not being called "zhe," but its equally as obnoxious to continue calling them "him" when you've already been informed of their preferred pronoun and you're just intentionally being a dick about it.
The dinosaurs weren't killed off by man either. Whether we want to blame ourselves or magic fairies randomly injecting carbon into the atmosphere for shits and giggles, the fact that its affecting our climate is not really in question and if we don't want to see what a desert planet looks like we should start doing something about it.
I mean if you saw a weed growing in your garden do you say to yourself "well a person didn't plant that so I guess the garden's fucked and I may as well just give up!" Of course not, you pull the damned weed. Who cares how the seed got there?
There's no reason they would have to keep all the filler that was used to stretch the trilogy out to 12 books + addendums/prequels/etc.
You could easily get an exciting 4 seasons out of WoT. Every third book was essentially a major climax, which would translate fairly straightforward into a season finale. You could maybe push it to 5 or 6 seasons if you reorganized events a bit and used some of the minor cliffhangers as season finales as well. But 4 is almost a gimme with that series if someone wanted to put the money in to do it well (ie: not like the existing low-budget adaptations that are kind of terrible.)
There's a lot of good books out there that could be potentially translated into stellar TV shows. The only reason to pick Lord of the Rings is brand recognition. Personally I think its a horrible choice given how recently the movies were made and the fact that they were.. decent but hardly great. The LoTR story is just too simple and straightforward by today's standards. And that's no knock against it -- it was the starting point for much of today's standards -- but there's been pushing 100 years of development since then in terms of storytelling and in terms of public experience with and expectations of fantasy settings.
I'd personally like to see Wheel of Time done well. I know its been attempted a once or twice but its always been low budget with poor production and barely gets any notice. I know a lot of fantasy-lovers dislike WoT due to.. reasons (writing style? The fact that what was intended to be a trilogy got stretched into 12 books and a lot of filler injected to make that happen? Other reasons?) But all that could potentially be cleaned up when adapting for TV -- cut the filler and focus on the main story.. much of the writing style is naturally cleaned up because you've got real scenery instead of having to just describe it and so on.)
Shannara is also a good series, though its kind of more in the LoTR vein where its fairly straightforward plot-wise. Its not until right near the very end that anyone really questions their choices or their quest for example -- the rest of it is (mostly) just beating the path toward the goal. That doesn't make it a bad series by any means, but it does mean its less viable as a (saleable) TV product if you're looking for a mass market audience.
Of course, having lots of potential for nude scenes helps too. Though as early GoT seasons showed, Hollywood isn't exactly adverse to making up scenes for the sole purpose of throwing around some boobies if they feel there isn't enough already.
I still don't get this. The character should be protected by trademark law which is valid until you stop using/enforcing it. I don't know why they (well, Disney specifically) feels the need to keep calling Mickey Mouse a copyright and screwing with copyright law. Steamboat Willy isn't exactly a big seller at this point and almost certainly never will be again. There must be something else they're trying to protect than just the image of their characters (that could be protected in other ways) or absurdly old animated shorts (that barely matter if at all.)
People make enough money to live on by throwing or kicking balls around, slapping rubber disks toward a net, punching each other in the face, etc.
People making money by "playing" games isn't exactly new. Of course just like physical sports, when you're playing at the professional level, its no longer just a game -- its a job and requires huge amounts of time and effort to maintain your skills at the peak level. Possibly even more effort than physical sports since in addition to maintaining their "fitness," players also have to continually keep up with changing game mechanics and metas as all major esports games are continually getting new units/avatars, balance tweaks, etc.
I just mentioned on a previous post, but I'm guessing the 19,000 APM is when two AIs are playing each other (and running as fast as the hardware allows) and its likely limited to a more realistic APM when playing against human opponents.
I was going to post something along those lines -- if we assume SC runs 20 game ticks per second, that's a maximum of 1200 APM even if Superman was playing.
But then I realized -- TFS wasn't strictly clear and its likely the 19000 APM games were probably coming from when it was two AIs training against each other rather than when it was playing against real opponents -- those games basically are run as fast as the hardware allows since they don't have to care about things like screen tearing, input device polling speed, allowing people with outdated hardware to still be able to compete, etc that the game has to be able to deal with when its a real person playing.
Go may only have a few dozen possibly moves per round, but the bot needs to be able to forecast multiple possibilities dozens or hundreds of rounds into the future to determine which move to make -- that's an exponential complexity and blows up really really fast. The challenge for Go (and Chess) bots is balancing the ability to forecast (power of the algorithm) against the amount of search tree pruning (speed of the algorithm.) Too much toward the former and the "player" becomes unresponsive. Too much toward the latter and the player becomes simply bad at the game. Really, this principle hasn't changed much since they first started building Chess bots. Hardware advances of course make the speed better, and now they're using neural nets to do the tree pruning because a) its more "intelligent" in the sense that it requires less direct human programming and b) it can potentially find ways to prune the tree that we humans would never dream of, thus making it at least in theory better than any possible direct-programmed bot, given enough training data.
StarCraft on the other hand is a very different style of game as you noted, but the problem isn't that there's so many possible things to do each game tick -- 99% of those things are irrelevant at any particular time and thus easily pruned out of the search tree in the first few layers. The big trick to StarCraft that the Google team was focusing on back when they announced this is the fact that you have imperfect knowledge -- that is, fog of war exists. Chess and Go and any other board game don't have that since they're based on games designed for humans sitting around a board. Things like card games have the hidden information aspect as well, but their search space is just too small, and outcomes too random (at least if its using a fair deck) to be an interesting project. Modern competitive like StarCraft, League of Legends, etc on the other hand have all of the hidden information going on but with very little randomness -- or at least, the randomness it does have is due to humans being unpredictable rather than being inherent to the game.
As for Civ7 or any other PVE game.. that's yet another whole ballpark. Competitive games work well because they're running on a level playing field meaning there's lots of relevant training data (recordings of real players) and they can also be trained by playing two copies of the AI against each other. Being the 'E' side of a PVE game has neither of those properties though, meaning that even if you create an AI it will be significantly harder to train it in any useful manner because there's almost no training data (you would have to iteratively set the bot parameters, find possibly hundreds or thousands of players willing to play against an absolutely terrible AI to generate some training, then plug that back in and iterate the whole thing again hundreds or thousands of times until the AI has learned enough to be useful.) And you can't just making a competing AI to be the player -- at least not up front -- or the two AI's will just run themselves into a loop that may have nothing to do with how a real player would react to anything. You might be able to get away with that after you've got enough real player data to use for training the player-emulating AI, but by that point you've probably already finished the majority of training your enemy AI anyway.
Having developers do some QA will teach them what pitfalls to watch for.
Having developers do some QA as a training exercise is one thing, having them do actual QA for a releasable product is another.
The argument that development and QA have different mindsets is both wrong and harmful.
The argument that they have the same mindset is even more wrong because its simply not true, at least in general. Developers tend to need time to ponder a problem and then rapid-fire out lines of code until they have a working solution. A very binge-and-purge style of work. QA on the other hand needs to be methodical and repetitive -- exactly the kind of tasks that programmers typically hate doing.
Does it help if QA knows how to program? Sure. Does it help if the programmers know how to test? Sure. But mixing the two up is kind of like trying to swap the architect and the foreman on a construction project -- sure there will be the odd person who can do both, and it helps if both knows at least a little about the others' work, but typically they're in two totally separate worlds and arbitrarily trying to cross them over just isn't going to be a great day.
Devs need to code with eliminating bugs as a priority
This is almost always more of a management issue than a developer issue. Sure there's always going to be devs with more ego than talent who just commit whatever garbage because hey there's no way they could be wrong, right? But for the most part bad code gets pushed because the devs are under a heavy time crunch or are being shuffled between projects faster than they can gain true understanding of any one of them or other such issues that the dev has little control over.
This is how it is typically done in engineering. A designer will hand their work over to another engineer to be checked. And the roles are swapped, so everyone gets to do both tasks. The person who finds the errors learns not to make them in their own work.
Which should be done anyway, really. But you still need a level of QA above that to catch things that no developer familiar with the project would ever think of. If you're developing software that uses say, a debit card reader and you have a bunch of test cards kicking around and so on, developers are likely to just grab one of the test cards and perform the tests. But they're not likely (or not as likely) as a decent tester to see what happens when they try to scan a credit card.. or their library card. Or that card that's almost snapped in half and held together by masking tape. Or the one that got cut and the magstrip is missing a corner but is still kind of readable, etc.
You can kind of get away with it if you have two dev teams that are working on entirely separate projects with little to no knowledge of what the other team is doing -- then you're at least removing as much bias as possible. You still have the issue that devs typically aren't good testers in general though.
Its still not really "fine," at least not on any sort of large scale. Programming and QA testing are actually quite different skill sets. Certainly there's some overlap (especially if you want/allow your testers to try and find the problem in the code rather than just reporting it) but they're definitely not the same role.
Add on to that the fact that programmers generally command higher wages than testers on average, and you end up with paying more for people to do a job they don't want to do and aren't especially good at. You're probably better off hiring a tester that can moonlight in another role (maybe even as a junior programmer if you have a second such person and avoid self-testing) than having the programmers moonlight as testers.
It's not protected, as long as the company disagrees with you?
No, its not protected at all. The first amendment only applies when the government is infringing free speech -- private entities, including companies, are not restricted in any way and can prevent all the free speech in the world if they want -- at least in whatever parts of the world they have jurisdiction over.
Now that said, barring things like libel, you're welcome to walk 10 feet away from the company's headquarters and on to private land and free speech the hell out of them if you want. They don't have any jurisdiction there. (Of course, they could file a complaint with the police and you may be removed on charged unrelated to your actual speech such as being a public nuisance, and there's room for argument there as that IS the government getting involved at that point, and its a "your right to speech vs everyone else' right to not be annoyed by you" problem at that point.)
Do you still think the company is ok to violate free speech?
I don't know if its "ok" morally, but its certainly ok legally since the company is (presumably) not a government entity and is thus not bound by the first amendment.
So only some people get protection from very powerful people?
This is a far far bigger problem than simple speech. We may see exactly how big a problem in the next few weeks if Trump decides to start pardoning people that Mueller's pulling in.
Slashdot Mirror
And your preferred plan is what.. let the US wallow in the great depression for another 10? 20? 100 years? How long do you think it would have taken to recover if you leave the people who caused the problems (many of whom actually profited off the suffering of the masses) in charge of running the show?
Is there too much regulation? In some cases yes, in other cases no (and in a few cases there's probably not enough regulation..) But there's a whole lot of people, especially on the conservative side, who want to blindly just deregulate anything they can get away with and completely ignore (or "conveniently" forget) that most regulations were put in place for a reason. Sometimes the reasons were bad, sometimes the reasons aren't valid anymore.. but often they are and removing such regulations without caution is just playing with fire, and its only a matter of time before the country (and thanks to the US' economic power, sometimes the whole world) will get burned sooner or later.
No. Do I prefer Facebook seeing compromising pictures of me rather than my employer? Definitely.
Does it matter? Most of the time these things are already being sent via text message, Snapchat, or some other service that could potentially be intercepting and storing them. I mean there was that whole snappening thing a couple years ago that demonstrated exactly how ephemeral those photos weren't.
The fact that one more faceless corporation and its employees in a chain of faceless corporations can see your junk is a minor consideration compared to the risk of your friends, family, potential employers, etc seeing it.
Problem isn't the victim considering them compromising. The problem is the victim's family, friends, coworkers, boss, etc considering them compromising.
Really though, its a generational thing to some extent. By the time the children of the millennials are in their 40s or 50s and running the world, so many of them will have nudes, stupid social media posts, etc out in the world that its going to necessarily be a non-issue or for examples employers won't be able to find any employees that fit their "internet purity" conditions.
Its only a problem right now when the generation doing the hiring never really had to deal with these kind of things while the generation looking to be hired don't really care that much because everyone they know does it. Its the intersection of those two worlds where everything hits the fan.. well, in a generalized sense of course -- there will always be exceptions obviously.
Presumably they wouldn't be keeping copies of the photos -- just their hashes for comparison purposes. And in this case, specifically because of the situation you mention and similar possibilities there's a good chance that the company will comply (any particular employee may break the rules and say store a handful of pictures on their local PC drive or something but it almost certainly wouldn't be company policy.)
I wouldn't put it past them to run the photos through their facial recognition and whatnot before purging them though, just in case you had onlookers they could maybe identify and link to your profile in some manner..
Sure it works 100%, but its also the digital equivalent of abstinence-only. People like their sexy times and often don't think about or care about consequences when they're in the moment. Abstinence-only arguments basically go against human nature and therefore will never ever work in practice, even if they might in theory.
Goatse and tubgirl have been around for a while..
The problem is that you're living in the past. The US was the greatest country in the world and they were actually capable of doing "stuff." (By stuff, I assume you mean military actions and/or the space race, which was really a military action in itself if only a symbolic one.)
But that's all in the past. China is now doing stuff. India is now doing stuff. The EU has been doing stuff for a while. Hell, if you want to restrict yourself to military actions you could even claim that North Korea is doing "stuff" at this point. Meanwhile the US has decided to back off of that whole "science and technology" train because its getting inconvenient for their largest companies.
At this point, the US is waning and China in particular looks to be the new rising star. Whether the US will bother reacting in time to reverse that course, or if world events (such as trading nukes with North Korea) will change the whole game remains to be seen, but if things keep going as they are the US will be in Britain's shoes by the end of the century if not sooner -- still a strong world power to be sure, but no longer considered a superpower.
Also, you made yourself the global police. Most places on the planet would be quite happy if the US stepped the fuck off and let them run themselves. But that will never happen because then the US could no longer justify their insane military spending, and those poor billionaires at Halliburton and Lockheed-Martin would be sad.
So you just expect everyone to have a spare $100 million laying around to send up a satellite? That sounds realistic.
Corporations exist to do things that individuals couldn't afford to do on their own. But they have the down side of being 100% profit motivated, so if the project isn't going to show any sort of ROI it will never get corporate funding no matter how valuable it is.
OK so maybe a rich philanthropist can do it. Elon Musk has his hands full already trying to save the planet in other ways. Same with Bill Gates. And there just aren't that many other philanthropists out there with that kind of bank roll. Bezos seems to want to get into the rocket game but he's just doing it for the profit now that Musk has shown it can be done.
So who else could do this? Who else has the funding available to launch satellites and also a motivation other than pure profit? That leaves basically the government. True they have their own motivations that may not align with a satellite (hence defunding the one that was already there) but at least they have more than one motivation, and that motivation can be swayed by reasonable argument, or even by voters to some degree.
The problem with the whole "government shouldn't do anything" rhetoric is that there are some things that are worth doing, but simply have no other entity with both the capability and the desire to do them. Should the government try to do everything? Of course not. But there are some aspects of life that simply lead themselves more to a social solution than a profit-motivated solution. As with everything in life, balance is the key. A fully socialist system will break down to be sure, but a fully capitalist system would break down just as fast.
Wow I went typo pro on that post. Apologies to the grammar Nazis (is that still an acceptable term now that actual Nazis seem to be becoming a relevant thing again? Hm.)
Unfortunately given what these satellites were measuring, this is potentially a whole world problem. Sounds like other countries are stepping up to the plate though as the US falls further and further behind the tech race.
Its funny that right wingers love to shout "MAGA" while at the same time deriding, if not outright denying much of science. Yet all of the periods in history where America was considered to be at its greatest, were periods of high science and innovation, and going beyond America when we look back at our favorite historical eras -- Greece, Rome, Egypt, etc we also consider their greatest periods to be when they were focusing on science and technology (well, and imperial expansionism but that's another story..)
Really, the should be yelling "MAMA" (Make America Mediocre Again" since that seems to be the direction their policies and ideals are headed.
Pfft why would we want Chinese technology? They're currently investing in things like clean energy and we don't need that shit over here!
And if you don't use hyperbole, people won't have to disbelieve you since they won't be paying attention at all in our current era of "ooh shiny!" sensationalized media.
the Air Force to have the same set of satellites
Really? The Air Force cares about measuring sea ice? Something tells me they don't have "the same" set of satellites. Even if one of the AF's satellites could be repurposed for NOAA's needs, that would mean the AF no longer has it available for their own use since NOAA would be using it basically 24/7.
Not everything is about zOMG global warming
No, its about money. Why would they spend money to put up a satellite that's just going to help us see that we need stricter pollution controls, which translates to money for big business. Fuck the planet, fuck the people as long as Exxon and Shell are able to pay their CEOs 10mill/year+bonuses!
Donald Trump himself might be stupid enough to deny climate change, but most of the GOP is more intelligent than him. They know whats going on and they don't care because they want to continue getting their "campaign contributions."
Just like not everything is about how there are really 57 genders
No.. only gender discrimination is about 57 genders. For everything else, it shouldn't matter if there's 57 or 2 or 1 gender. What the hell does it matter to you if I want to gender-identify with a pink and green polka-dot firetruck? I mean its certainly obnoxious when someone gets their undies in a bunch over not being called "zhe," but its equally as obnoxious to continue calling them "him" when you've already been informed of their preferred pronoun and you're just intentionally being a dick about it.
The dinosaurs weren't killed off by man either. Whether we want to blame ourselves or magic fairies randomly injecting carbon into the atmosphere for shits and giggles, the fact that its affecting our climate is not really in question and if we don't want to see what a desert planet looks like we should start doing something about it.
I mean if you saw a weed growing in your garden do you say to yourself "well a person didn't plant that so I guess the garden's fucked and I may as well just give up!" Of course not, you pull the damned weed. Who cares how the seed got there?
There's no reason they would have to keep all the filler that was used to stretch the trilogy out to 12 books + addendums/prequels/etc.
You could easily get an exciting 4 seasons out of WoT. Every third book was essentially a major climax, which would translate fairly straightforward into a season finale. You could maybe push it to 5 or 6 seasons if you reorganized events a bit and used some of the minor cliffhangers as season finales as well. But 4 is almost a gimme with that series if someone wanted to put the money in to do it well (ie: not like the existing low-budget adaptations that are kind of terrible.)
There's a lot of good books out there that could be potentially translated into stellar TV shows. The only reason to pick Lord of the Rings is brand recognition. Personally I think its a horrible choice given how recently the movies were made and the fact that they were.. decent but hardly great. The LoTR story is just too simple and straightforward by today's standards. And that's no knock against it -- it was the starting point for much of today's standards -- but there's been pushing 100 years of development since then in terms of storytelling and in terms of public experience with and expectations of fantasy settings.
I'd personally like to see Wheel of Time done well. I know its been attempted a once or twice but its always been low budget with poor production and barely gets any notice. I know a lot of fantasy-lovers dislike WoT due to.. reasons (writing style? The fact that what was intended to be a trilogy got stretched into 12 books and a lot of filler injected to make that happen? Other reasons?) But all that could potentially be cleaned up when adapting for TV -- cut the filler and focus on the main story.. much of the writing style is naturally cleaned up because you've got real scenery instead of having to just describe it and so on.)
Shannara is also a good series, though its kind of more in the LoTR vein where its fairly straightforward plot-wise. Its not until right near the very end that anyone really questions their choices or their quest for example -- the rest of it is (mostly) just beating the path toward the goal. That doesn't make it a bad series by any means, but it does mean its less viable as a (saleable) TV product if you're looking for a mass market audience.
Of course, having lots of potential for nude scenes helps too. Though as early GoT seasons showed, Hollywood isn't exactly adverse to making up scenes for the sole purpose of throwing around some boobies if they feel there isn't enough already.
I still don't get this. The character should be protected by trademark law which is valid until you stop using/enforcing it. I don't know why they (well, Disney specifically) feels the need to keep calling Mickey Mouse a copyright and screwing with copyright law. Steamboat Willy isn't exactly a big seller at this point and almost certainly never will be again. There must be something else they're trying to protect than just the image of their characters (that could be protected in other ways) or absurdly old animated shorts (that barely matter if at all.)
People make enough money to live on by throwing or kicking balls around, slapping rubber disks toward a net, punching each other in the face, etc.
People making money by "playing" games isn't exactly new. Of course just like physical sports, when you're playing at the professional level, its no longer just a game -- its a job and requires huge amounts of time and effort to maintain your skills at the peak level. Possibly even more effort than physical sports since in addition to maintaining their "fitness," players also have to continually keep up with changing game mechanics and metas as all major esports games are continually getting new units/avatars, balance tweaks, etc.
I just mentioned on a previous post, but I'm guessing the 19,000 APM is when two AIs are playing each other (and running as fast as the hardware allows) and its likely limited to a more realistic APM when playing against human opponents.
I was going to post something along those lines -- if we assume SC runs 20 game ticks per second, that's a maximum of 1200 APM even if Superman was playing.
But then I realized -- TFS wasn't strictly clear and its likely the 19000 APM games were probably coming from when it was two AIs training against each other rather than when it was playing against real opponents -- those games basically are run as fast as the hardware allows since they don't have to care about things like screen tearing, input device polling speed, allowing people with outdated hardware to still be able to compete, etc that the game has to be able to deal with when its a real person playing.
Go may only have a few dozen possibly moves per round, but the bot needs to be able to forecast multiple possibilities dozens or hundreds of rounds into the future to determine which move to make -- that's an exponential complexity and blows up really really fast. The challenge for Go (and Chess) bots is balancing the ability to forecast (power of the algorithm) against the amount of search tree pruning (speed of the algorithm.) Too much toward the former and the "player" becomes unresponsive. Too much toward the latter and the player becomes simply bad at the game. Really, this principle hasn't changed much since they first started building Chess bots. Hardware advances of course make the speed better, and now they're using neural nets to do the tree pruning because a) its more "intelligent" in the sense that it requires less direct human programming and b) it can potentially find ways to prune the tree that we humans would never dream of, thus making it at least in theory better than any possible direct-programmed bot, given enough training data.
StarCraft on the other hand is a very different style of game as you noted, but the problem isn't that there's so many possible things to do each game tick -- 99% of those things are irrelevant at any particular time and thus easily pruned out of the search tree in the first few layers. The big trick to StarCraft that the Google team was focusing on back when they announced this is the fact that you have imperfect knowledge -- that is, fog of war exists. Chess and Go and any other board game don't have that since they're based on games designed for humans sitting around a board. Things like card games have the hidden information aspect as well, but their search space is just too small, and outcomes too random (at least if its using a fair deck) to be an interesting project. Modern competitive like StarCraft, League of Legends, etc on the other hand have all of the hidden information going on but with very little randomness -- or at least, the randomness it does have is due to humans being unpredictable rather than being inherent to the game.
As for Civ7 or any other PVE game.. that's yet another whole ballpark. Competitive games work well because they're running on a level playing field meaning there's lots of relevant training data (recordings of real players) and they can also be trained by playing two copies of the AI against each other. Being the 'E' side of a PVE game has neither of those properties though, meaning that even if you create an AI it will be significantly harder to train it in any useful manner because there's almost no training data (you would have to iteratively set the bot parameters, find possibly hundreds or thousands of players willing to play against an absolutely terrible AI to generate some training, then plug that back in and iterate the whole thing again hundreds or thousands of times until the AI has learned enough to be useful.) And you can't just making a competing AI to be the player -- at least not up front -- or the two AI's will just run themselves into a loop that may have nothing to do with how a real player would react to anything. You might be able to get away with that after you've got enough real player data to use for training the player-emulating AI, but by that point you've probably already finished the majority of training your enemy AI anyway.
Having developers do some QA will teach them what pitfalls to watch for.
Having developers do some QA as a training exercise is one thing, having them do actual QA for a releasable product is another.
The argument that development and QA have different mindsets is both wrong and harmful.
The argument that they have the same mindset is even more wrong because its simply not true, at least in general. Developers tend to need time to ponder a problem and then rapid-fire out lines of code until they have a working solution. A very binge-and-purge style of work. QA on the other hand needs to be methodical and repetitive -- exactly the kind of tasks that programmers typically hate doing.
Does it help if QA knows how to program? Sure. Does it help if the programmers know how to test? Sure. But mixing the two up is kind of like trying to swap the architect and the foreman on a construction project -- sure there will be the odd person who can do both, and it helps if both knows at least a little about the others' work, but typically they're in two totally separate worlds and arbitrarily trying to cross them over just isn't going to be a great day.
Devs need to code with eliminating bugs as a priority
This is almost always more of a management issue than a developer issue. Sure there's always going to be devs with more ego than talent who just commit whatever garbage because hey there's no way they could be wrong, right? But for the most part bad code gets pushed because the devs are under a heavy time crunch or are being shuffled between projects faster than they can gain true understanding of any one of them or other such issues that the dev has little control over.
This is how it is typically done in engineering. A designer will hand their work over to another engineer to be checked. And the roles are swapped, so everyone gets to do both tasks. The person who finds the errors learns not to make them in their own work.
Which should be done anyway, really. But you still need a level of QA above that to catch things that no developer familiar with the project would ever think of. If you're developing software that uses say, a debit card reader and you have a bunch of test cards kicking around and so on, developers are likely to just grab one of the test cards and perform the tests. But they're not likely (or not as likely) as a decent tester to see what happens when they try to scan a credit card.. or their library card. Or that card that's almost snapped in half and held together by masking tape. Or the one that got cut and the magstrip is missing a corner but is still kind of readable, etc.
You can kind of get away with it if you have two dev teams that are working on entirely separate projects with little to no knowledge of what the other team is doing -- then you're at least removing as much bias as possible. You still have the issue that devs typically aren't good testers in general though.
Its still not really "fine," at least not on any sort of large scale. Programming and QA testing are actually quite different skill sets. Certainly there's some overlap (especially if you want/allow your testers to try and find the problem in the code rather than just reporting it) but they're definitely not the same role.
Add on to that the fact that programmers generally command higher wages than testers on average, and you end up with paying more for people to do a job they don't want to do and aren't especially good at. You're probably better off hiring a tester that can moonlight in another role (maybe even as a junior programmer if you have a second such person and avoid self-testing) than having the programmers moonlight as testers.
It's not protected, as long as the company disagrees with you?
No, its not protected at all. The first amendment only applies when the government is infringing free speech -- private entities, including companies, are not restricted in any way and can prevent all the free speech in the world if they want -- at least in whatever parts of the world they have jurisdiction over.
Now that said, barring things like libel, you're welcome to walk 10 feet away from the company's headquarters and on to private land and free speech the hell out of them if you want. They don't have any jurisdiction there. (Of course, they could file a complaint with the police and you may be removed on charged unrelated to your actual speech such as being a public nuisance, and there's room for argument there as that IS the government getting involved at that point, and its a "your right to speech vs everyone else' right to not be annoyed by you" problem at that point.)
Do you still think the company is ok to violate free speech?
I don't know if its "ok" morally, but its certainly ok legally since the company is (presumably) not a government entity and is thus not bound by the first amendment.
So only some people get protection from very powerful people?
This is a far far bigger problem than simple speech. We may see exactly how big a problem in the next few weeks if Trump decides to start pardoning people that Mueller's pulling in.