The foreign sports betting thing I think was actually the most agregious of the lot. They other two were accusations of criminal activity, how those were dealt with were part law enforcement issues and part internet bully. Blocking a spanish sports betting website, that was legally operating in Spain, for spanish customers (and not US customers) is a serious governance problem.
This is the problem with the pirate party writing half of it. They believe in an anarchic internet, when none such a thing can exist easily.
What the ITU probably wants, like with phone service and radio communications, is to make sure that, for example, all DNS servers on 'the Internet' can talk to each other in some agreed upon fashion (if you want your countries DNS to talk to the others, if not that's on you, but if I type a russian URL into a canadian DNS it should have the same results as one in Russia or China). They want to make sure that if the UN recognizes Palestine, or Somaliland as countries they can get a TLD. They want to make sure it's not the US deciding that the Free Syrian Army is now the legitimate DNS holder for Syria and cutting off everyone else for the fun of it.
And so on.
Also, a couple of weeks ago Google was down for about 7 minutes when some Indonesian regional ISP accidentally broadcast that google servers where being their gateways rather than where they actually were. It caused no end of a mess, and from what I understand the resolution basically involved some non google engineer calling up some network admin he happened to know at the place and telling them they broke the internet. Stuff like that should not A: be possible and B: not rely on personal relationships to resolve.
Right, but the rich countries (that pay the most) were reducing consumption in the 1988-2000 range, maybe a bit later than that even, while the poor countries were picking up consumption.
And then they started to take off like a rocket.
Coal had fallen out of favour as one of those 'we're not going to eliminate it over night' kind of things. And then china decided it liked being able to power factories and TVs.
It's both a giant stab at the ITU and the US. They don't want a single entity in control, and they want to make sure all stakeholders are considered collaboratively (which is what the ITU is anyway, but at a different level). In other words, we don't like the current setup, but we thing the ITU being in charge could be worse.
It plants itself firmly in the camp of open internet, something the US has consistently stood against in one way or another (blocking foreign sports betting, arresting Kim Dotcom, Going after wikileaks payments etc.).
That disassociation causes a lot of problems for soldiers after the fact.
Survivor guilt, PTSD, that sort of thing. Empathetic and ruthless objectivity happens but it's not necessarily healthy. Granted, soldiers are the wrong sort of people to face this problem in the first place because you're imposing inherently contradictory goals on someone who lacks years of experience at life trying to grapple with these things already. Have empathy for your own side but no empathy for the other, or the people you're going to get killed.
That was why dehumanizing the other guys was somewhat easier, they weren't real people you killed, they weren't good people or the like, so you don't need to have empathy for them. Officers didn't associate with 'the men' because they might become to attached, and leadership is from the upper, good class not lower, parasite classes because getting them killed was no problem, the existed to serve. As we've moved away from those attitudes as a society it becomes harder and more conflicting to be off killing each other on the whims of leadership.
The post you were replying to is a bit over extreme I agree. Everyone is somewhere on a spectrum of empathy and apathy to antipathy (hating everyone). You definitely don't want the latter in charge, sort of self evidently, you don't want people who think bankrupting customers is good for them. But the other two, it's not like you want people who have absolutely no empathy, they need to appreciate what the numbers actually mean to deal with them. But you still need to make decisions based on the numbers. Sometimes more apparently empathetic behaviour emerges because two objectively behaving sides collide, both look at the data for their problem and behave in the optimal way for them. Corporations aim to maximize return to shareholders, governments aim to improve lives of the maximum number of people and the two orbit around each other a bit. The US is troubling because the government seems to have shifted too far in the direction of aiming to improve the corporate bottom line rather than the average bottom line of its citizens, it is a spectrum, but you can be too far one way or the other.
Sure, I didn't mean to imply ICBM's have no guidance in the last phase. Most of the ballistic missiles the north koreans and Iranians sell, or the gazans make are on the very low end of sophistication. There are significantly more advanced options available if you want to spend more than 1000 dollars.
Seoul has about 3x as many people as israel in 1/4th the area (the Seoul capital area, http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_urban_areas_by_population). Iron dome can afford to ignore a lot more rockets because a lot more of them aren't going to hit anything, and hamas is firing dozens of rockets at a time. North korea would be firing thousands, in a semi coordinated fashion and quite likely take steps to interfere with a similar system.
It's not that a similar attempt would do nothing, but between a massed artillery barrage and a land offensive at close range Seoul would be in serious trouble. It's only about 40Km from Seoul to the DMZ. It's a very difficult position to be in.
The distinction in terminology these days between rocket and missile is that a rocket is unguided and a missile is guided.
Ballistic missiles are guided for the powered part of flight (which is short, but still a phase). Rockets are aimed and shot. One could envision a cell phone guided rocket or something, but that's more effort than it's worth for hamas. You have to know what you're planning to shoot at, and where it is, have somewhere to calibrate your weapons etc. The value of these rockets is the terror effect because they can land anywhere, and they cost nothing to make so you can fire a lot of them, and if they miss or get shot down it's no big loss.
Also, extremely short range rockets have the advantage that even with air raid sirens people don't have time to get anywhere particularly safe.
Hamas also have russian, chinses and or iranian designed truck/shoulder launched rockets, those are what are hitting places like tel aviv. They're relatively sophisticated, relatively expensive, and smuggled in from Iran via sudan -> Egypt, or built in Gaza as kinds shitty versions of the originals. These are the Fajr -5 (chinese-Iranian origin, can hit Tel Aviv), and "Grad Rockets" which are russian and might make 40Km on a good day.
As hard as it was to make the mac version likely. That's kinda it. mac is 1/10th windows, linux is 1/10th mac. (not quite of course, I think it's 89/9.5/1.5). If it cost you 300k to make a mac version even if it costs 100k to make a linux version, you're still no where near justifying the cost.
360 offers the best market for making games, at least if you're a/. er. (The PS3 is comparably good overall, and better in some markets, but if your target market is english language consumers you target the 360 first).
Really it's only valve that has comitted to it. Everyone else is 360/PS3/PC/XB3/PS4/WiiU.
But ya, that's the thing, if you're going to support 3 platforms, or 4 if you have a mac code path, adding one more isn't nearly as much work. So if you can use Unity (which plans to support linux now), or Unreal (which might try and support linux) or Source (which will), you're ok. But everyone else, who's a single platform product, it's still a huge undertaking.
Well that's the trick with republicans retaining control of at least one part of government. They can jam up the process on anything inconvenient. That was the point for them all along.
I agree that it's not clear what Obama and the democrats in general would do if given the chance anyway. We can all pontificate over what they think they might want to do, but I have no idea what they'd actually be able to wrangle their own party into given the opportunity.
Not necessarily. They'll probably get a flood of purchases from people when they go live on itunes, people who wanted their music could still order CD's and rip them. And their primary compensation at this point might not be from music sales anyway.
This may have actually made them money, people who only wanted on track gave up and bought a CD and ripped it, as long as the amount they earned from that is more than they lost to piracy from people not wanting to buy a full album for one song they ended up ahead, and demographics have now shifted so far that no one in their target customer base is going to be buying full CD's anyway.
They only really get to sell you a song once on CD or iTunes, you don't need to buy it to format shift it after all. So the more CD's they sold for 10 dollars rather than single tracks for 1 the better (for them). But the market I suspect finally fell out completely for CD's in the last year. Even dedicated music shops near where I am don't allocate more than a third of their floorspace to CD's anymore. There might be a few specialty hold outs, but that who industry is gone, finally.
My take is less about the big titles, I fully expect that if linux (or mac) gets enough market share any of the half a million plus sales games will make ports for the other platforms. I suspect the cutoff is that you'd need to sell 50 or 60k extra copies for it to be worthwhile. Stuff like Guildwars, Skyrim WoW, those will have a linux version the moment the think they can break even on it.
The problem is all of the marginal games that might only break 50 or 60k copies total. Niche stuff, grand strategy games, silly platformers, jagged alliance (squad based turn based tactical games), the X series, that sort of thing. Some of them will work under Wine, but the developers just do not have the time to do anything to support it.
They needed something worthwhile in the tablet space sooner rather than later.
Windows 8 was their miserable attempt at that. And the thing is, it has some good ideas, even live tiles is actually a good concept once you play with it a little. But everything else... not so much.
I agree, they'd have been better to wait, but well, like the people predicting better sales and being disappointed, they were all drinking the microsoft kool-aid.
And how much did it cost to send them through these reviews? How much of a fight with the union?
As I said elsewhere, this is becoming a problem we're much more likely to fight now in canada with the elimination of mandatory retirement at 65. If this was behaviour from a 30 or 40 year old they'd be out the door no matter what, but someone in their late 50's or early 60's and you are starting to get into politics and press. If the person is going to go quietly on their own in 3 or 4 years it's not worth making a fuss and risking a lot of bad press. Just about everyone over 50 has had some sort of medical problem and you don't want to hear "Local university tries to fire professor after heart surgery/cancer/spouse with some problem/etc." It's not worth it. Worse still is if they're liked by students even though they don't do anything else in their job or make your staff situation a mess. Again, you're playing politics, but you don't want a bunch of students talking about how the university is trying to fire their favourite prof for saying controversial things (no, we're firing him for not doing his job doesn't usually go over well).
Firing people is possible, is necessary, and we're going to see more of it. But it's still a pain to have to actually do.
Sometimes a bit of both. Depends on the reputation of where you are, and the reputation of the professor. In my case the guy had a number of years experience where I was, but I could certainly see someone going to the US from the UK and being appalled, we've had more than a few talks from physics profs in the US that were doing 'research' that wasn't even at a third year level. Though that was 10 years ago, so I don't know the situation today.
I've been involved in comp sci at all of Guelph, Trent, University of Western Ontario, Laurier, Queens, and York. All in ontario. Though I have friends at waterloo (and I know they're more math heavy than the others) I've never helped make a course for them or taught there.
And yes, my Physics degree (guelph) was a major in physics and a minor in maths and lots of comp sci people do a lot of maths, just not calculus and in many cases not stats, which you need some of for grad school. Set theory and linear algebra are bit more common for the comp sci people.
Though I do agree, different schools are more or less maths heavy, lots of comp sci grads are not maths people at all, which is odd, but if you don't like calculus or linear algebra or stats you can still be a half decent software developer.
That's crazy for the sake of being crazy. Nothing entirely wrong with it, but you need to start with actually knowing the material before you get to go the crazy routes.
Every computer science program has some minimal introduction to digital logic and programming, both of those skills, at a basic level are requisites for science. You may not never need (or want) java in physics, but you need to know how to write basic code in matlab and write basic scripts for data manipulation.
I agree that computer science varies wildly from place to place, Waterloo guys a couple hours from here are much more theoretical than the wildfred laurier types who are much more hardware, where I and UofT are both more balanced.
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The foreign sports betting thing I think was actually the most agregious of the lot. They other two were accusations of criminal activity, how those were dealt with were part law enforcement issues and part internet bully. Blocking a spanish sports betting website, that was legally operating in Spain, for spanish customers (and not US customers) is a serious governance problem.
That is what this is going to have to come to.
The US demonstrably cannot be trusted, people have bought into the propaganda that the ITU doing it must be bad, so time to move on.
This is the problem with the pirate party writing half of it. They believe in an anarchic internet, when none such a thing can exist easily.
What the ITU probably wants, like with phone service and radio communications, is to make sure that, for example, all DNS servers on 'the Internet' can talk to each other in some agreed upon fashion (if you want your countries DNS to talk to the others, if not that's on you, but if I type a russian URL into a canadian DNS it should have the same results as one in Russia or China). They want to make sure that if the UN recognizes Palestine, or Somaliland as countries they can get a TLD. They want to make sure it's not the US deciding that the Free Syrian Army is now the legitimate DNS holder for Syria and cutting off everyone else for the fun of it.
And so on.
Also, a couple of weeks ago Google was down for about 7 minutes when some Indonesian regional ISP accidentally broadcast that google servers where being their gateways rather than where they actually were. It caused no end of a mess, and from what I understand the resolution basically involved some non google engineer calling up some network admin he happened to know at the place and telling them they broke the internet. Stuff like that should not A: be possible and B: not rely on personal relationships to resolve.
Right, but the rich countries (that pay the most) were reducing consumption in the 1988-2000 range, maybe a bit later than that even, while the poor countries were picking up consumption.
And then they started to take off like a rocket.
Coal had fallen out of favour as one of those 'we're not going to eliminate it over night' kind of things. And then china decided it liked being able to power factories and TVs.
It pushes the price down to the point of being affordable to those who couldn't afford it before.
It means more people using it because they are, individually, using less of it, but there are more of them. A lot more. China and india sort of thing.
It's both a giant stab at the ITU and the US. They don't want a single entity in control, and they want to make sure all stakeholders are considered collaboratively (which is what the ITU is anyway, but at a different level). In other words, we don't like the current setup, but we thing the ITU being in charge could be worse.
It plants itself firmly in the camp of open internet, something the US has consistently stood against in one way or another (blocking foreign sports betting, arresting Kim Dotcom, Going after wikileaks payments etc.).
Now what will plan B look like...
That disassociation causes a lot of problems for soldiers after the fact.
Survivor guilt, PTSD, that sort of thing. Empathetic and ruthless objectivity happens but it's not necessarily healthy. Granted, soldiers are the wrong sort of people to face this problem in the first place because you're imposing inherently contradictory goals on someone who lacks years of experience at life trying to grapple with these things already. Have empathy for your own side but no empathy for the other, or the people you're going to get killed.
That was why dehumanizing the other guys was somewhat easier, they weren't real people you killed, they weren't good people or the like, so you don't need to have empathy for them. Officers didn't associate with 'the men' because they might become to attached, and leadership is from the upper, good class not lower, parasite classes because getting them killed was no problem, the existed to serve. As we've moved away from those attitudes as a society it becomes harder and more conflicting to be off killing each other on the whims of leadership.
The post you were replying to is a bit over extreme I agree. Everyone is somewhere on a spectrum of empathy and apathy to antipathy (hating everyone). You definitely don't want the latter in charge, sort of self evidently, you don't want people who think bankrupting customers is good for them. But the other two, it's not like you want people who have absolutely no empathy, they need to appreciate what the numbers actually mean to deal with them. But you still need to make decisions based on the numbers. Sometimes more apparently empathetic behaviour emerges because two objectively behaving sides collide, both look at the data for their problem and behave in the optimal way for them. Corporations aim to maximize return to shareholders, governments aim to improve lives of the maximum number of people and the two orbit around each other a bit. The US is troubling because the government seems to have shifted too far in the direction of aiming to improve the corporate bottom line rather than the average bottom line of its citizens, it is a spectrum, but you can be too far one way or the other.
Sure, I didn't mean to imply ICBM's have no guidance in the last phase. Most of the ballistic missiles the north koreans and Iranians sell, or the gazans make are on the very low end of sophistication. There are significantly more advanced options available if you want to spend more than 1000 dollars.
Orders of magnitude problem.
Seoul has about 3x as many people as israel in 1/4th the area (the Seoul capital area, http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_urban_areas_by_population). Iron dome can afford to ignore a lot more rockets because a lot more of them aren't going to hit anything, and hamas is firing dozens of rockets at a time. North korea would be firing thousands, in a semi coordinated fashion and quite likely take steps to interfere with a similar system.
It's not that a similar attempt would do nothing, but between a massed artillery barrage and a land offensive at close range Seoul would be in serious trouble. It's only about 40Km from Seoul to the DMZ. It's a very difficult position to be in.
The distinction in terminology these days between rocket and missile is that a rocket is unguided and a missile is guided.
Ballistic missiles are guided for the powered part of flight (which is short, but still a phase). Rockets are aimed and shot. One could envision a cell phone guided rocket or something, but that's more effort than it's worth for hamas. You have to know what you're planning to shoot at, and where it is, have somewhere to calibrate your weapons etc. The value of these rockets is the terror effect because they can land anywhere, and they cost nothing to make so you can fire a lot of them, and if they miss or get shot down it's no big loss.
Also, extremely short range rockets have the advantage that even with air raid sirens people don't have time to get anywhere particularly safe.
Hamas also have russian, chinses and or iranian designed truck/shoulder launched rockets, those are what are hitting places like tel aviv. They're relatively sophisticated, relatively expensive, and smuggled in from Iran via sudan -> Egypt, or built in Gaza as kinds shitty versions of the originals. These are the Fajr -5 (chinese-Iranian origin, can hit Tel Aviv), and "Grad Rockets" which are russian and might make 40Km on a good day.
As hard as it was to make the mac version likely. That's kinda it. mac is 1/10th windows, linux is 1/10th mac. (not quite of course, I think it's 89/9.5/1.5). If it cost you 300k to make a mac version even if it costs 100k to make a linux version, you're still no where near justifying the cost.
360 offers the best market for making games, at least if you're a /. er. (The PS3 is comparably good overall, and better in some markets, but if your target market is english language consumers you target the 360 first).
Really it's only valve that has comitted to it. Everyone else is 360/PS3/PC/XB3/PS4/WiiU.
But ya, that's the thing, if you're going to support 3 platforms, or 4 if you have a mac code path, adding one more isn't nearly as much work. So if you can use Unity (which plans to support linux now), or Unreal (which might try and support linux) or Source (which will), you're ok. But everyone else, who's a single platform product, it's still a huge undertaking.
That's just that bethesda is bad at writing on the PS3, I'm sure they'd release it if they could get it to work.
Sure, it's was a stupid plan then, it's a stupid plan now. You guys got screwed. But at least you didn't end up as part of france.
Well that's the trick with republicans retaining control of at least one part of government. They can jam up the process on anything inconvenient. That was the point for them all along.
I agree that it's not clear what Obama and the democrats in general would do if given the chance anyway. We can all pontificate over what they think they might want to do, but I have no idea what they'd actually be able to wrangle their own party into given the opportunity.
Not necessarily. They'll probably get a flood of purchases from people when they go live on itunes, people who wanted their music could still order CD's and rip them. And their primary compensation at this point might not be from music sales anyway.
This may have actually made them money, people who only wanted on track gave up and bought a CD and ripped it, as long as the amount they earned from that is more than they lost to piracy from people not wanting to buy a full album for one song they ended up ahead, and demographics have now shifted so far that no one in their target customer base is going to be buying full CD's anyway.
They only really get to sell you a song once on CD or iTunes, you don't need to buy it to format shift it after all. So the more CD's they sold for 10 dollars rather than single tracks for 1 the better (for them). But the market I suspect finally fell out completely for CD's in the last year. Even dedicated music shops near where I am don't allocate more than a third of their floorspace to CD's anymore. There might be a few specialty hold outs, but that who industry is gone, finally.
Their radio play was the equivalent of itunes free 30 second intro to a single song.
If you believe an 'album' is really one long track then giving away one part of it is just the preview for the rest of it.
My take is less about the big titles, I fully expect that if linux (or mac) gets enough market share any of the half a million plus sales games will make ports for the other platforms. I suspect the cutoff is that you'd need to sell 50 or 60k extra copies for it to be worthwhile. Stuff like Guildwars, Skyrim WoW, those will have a linux version the moment the think they can break even on it.
The problem is all of the marginal games that might only break 50 or 60k copies total. Niche stuff, grand strategy games, silly platformers, jagged alliance (squad based turn based tactical games), the X series, that sort of thing. Some of them will work under Wine, but the developers just do not have the time to do anything to support it.
They needed something worthwhile in the tablet space sooner rather than later.
Windows 8 was their miserable attempt at that. And the thing is, it has some good ideas, even live tiles is actually a good concept once you play with it a little. But everything else... not so much.
I agree, they'd have been better to wait, but well, like the people predicting better sales and being disappointed, they were all drinking the microsoft kool-aid.
And how much did it cost to send them through these reviews? How much of a fight with the union?
As I said elsewhere, this is becoming a problem we're much more likely to fight now in canada with the elimination of mandatory retirement at 65. If this was behaviour from a 30 or 40 year old they'd be out the door no matter what, but someone in their late 50's or early 60's and you are starting to get into politics and press. If the person is going to go quietly on their own in 3 or 4 years it's not worth making a fuss and risking a lot of bad press. Just about everyone over 50 has had some sort of medical problem and you don't want to hear "Local university tries to fire professor after heart surgery/cancer/spouse with some problem/etc." It's not worth it. Worse still is if they're liked by students even though they don't do anything else in their job or make your staff situation a mess. Again, you're playing politics, but you don't want a bunch of students talking about how the university is trying to fire their favourite prof for saying controversial things (no, we're firing him for not doing his job doesn't usually go over well).
Firing people is possible, is necessary, and we're going to see more of it. But it's still a pain to have to actually do.
Sometimes a bit of both. Depends on the reputation of where you are, and the reputation of the professor. In my case the guy had a number of years experience where I was, but I could certainly see someone going to the US from the UK and being appalled, we've had more than a few talks from physics profs in the US that were doing 'research' that wasn't even at a third year level. Though that was 10 years ago, so I don't know the situation today.
I've been involved in comp sci at all of Guelph, Trent, University of Western Ontario, Laurier, Queens, and York. All in ontario. Though I have friends at waterloo (and I know they're more math heavy than the others) I've never helped make a course for them or taught there.
And yes, my Physics degree (guelph) was a major in physics and a minor in maths and lots of comp sci people do a lot of maths, just not calculus and in many cases not stats, which you need some of for grad school. Set theory and linear algebra are bit more common for the comp sci people.
Though I do agree, different schools are more or less maths heavy, lots of comp sci grads are not maths people at all, which is odd, but if you don't like calculus or linear algebra or stats you can still be a half decent software developer.
That's crazy for the sake of being crazy. Nothing entirely wrong with it, but you need to start with actually knowing the material before you get to go the crazy routes.
Every computer science program has some minimal introduction to digital logic and programming, both of those skills, at a basic level are requisites for science. You may not never need (or want) java in physics, but you need to know how to write basic code in matlab and write basic scripts for data manipulation.
I agree that computer science varies wildly from place to place, Waterloo guys a couple hours from here are much more theoretical than the wildfred laurier types who are much more hardware, where I and UofT are both more balanced.