I was referring to the very small percentage of people who are immune to HIV, and trying to figure out what causes that, and how to get it into the rest of us.
If it was 2004 it was probably on equipment designed before 2001. How much software do you know that works properly without modification from pre-windows XP days?
I agree, it's a nuisance, but this is an archival question. Someone bought a system, ran it for 4 years, and realized it was a disaster for whatever reason and tossed it, ( my money is on a requirement for windows 2000 or windows 98 or the like, or that it relied on SPARC or some niche architecture that you just can't get anymore) , at the time they made the assessment that the written records and description of the results was good enough. This guy is, in-specific asking for some of the data analysis to be essentially re-done. That means it's probably a custom job, and the NHS doesn't have the hardware or software to run whatever is needed.
And that nonsense might be exactly why after 4 years they turfed the system out. It seemed like a good idea at the time, but if you can't migrate it to x86 windows 7, time to find an alternative. There is data they've taken from this that the guy does have too, it doesn't have the full scan to be reproduced, so someone did the maths and figured the medical benefit of running that system for an extra 4 years (until today) or porting so they could get the full records, was outweighed by how much it would cost, since they do have partial records anyway.
Unless you're too old, or too fat, or smoke, or you die in the two years you're waiting for treatment.
Which is still a better reason than you happen to be poor and couldn't get treatment until you had to go to the emergency room and by then it was too late.
If the system is rationed based purely on money (and much as we rail on it from the outside, that isn't quite the case with the US system) a rich guy who has a private doctor is, in effect, denying 1999 other people access to that doctor*.
In the UK system when someone dies waiting for treatment that is a problem to be fixed, and if it happens enough in one hospital or under similar circumstances the government looks to do something about it. In the US system if someone dies before receiving treatment that is a cost savings to insurance companies, or a lost sales opportunity to hospitals. The system is adversarial but not in a good way.
Believe it or not, for people who are very sick especially, sometimes the best treatment is to let them die peacefully and without a lot of risky surgeries or medications, and just manage their pain. The US doesn't like to talk about end of life, but I'd rather live on average 2 weeks less - and not spend them being propped up by a dozen very expensive machines that ultimately aren't going to do me any good anyway. The people in that situation are usually fat, old, smoked, or all of the above. Sure, 20 and 30 year olds get cancer, and if that happens to you you'd be much better off in europe or canada than the US, but if you're 70 and have an aggressive cancer, or you've suffered a crippling heart attack/stroke from your weight or smoking, well, you may get much more machines that go 'bing!' in the US, but most of the time they won't actually do you much good.
*only partially made up statistic, I believe GP's see an average of 2000-3000 patients a year, but the 'Doctors per capita' is about 2-4/1000 (http://www.nationmaster.com/graph/hea_phy_per_1000_peo-physicians-per-1-000-people), working out to somewhere between 250 and 500 patients per year. Except in san marino, but well, they don't count (city state).
, assuming that they can't work out a payment plan.
bankruptcy being a more and more common 'payment plan'.
If I can't afford to pay, the hospital has to write it off as a loss
You mean what you said
In which case everybody else has to pay for it.
Hospitals don't have some magic source of money. They are, ultimately, insured by the government against losses incurred treating people who go to the emergency room. Now the trick here is that they aren't owned by the government (as in the NHS system) so their incentive is to get as much money from you, or from the government as possible. In the NHS system their objective is to do find the optimal balance between spending and demonstrable health outcomes.
Hospitals in the US are first and foremost interested in their bottom line. Health is a means to make money like any other business, you want to do it just well enough you can get paid, and you do the minimum required for regulatory compliance. The UK system is fundamentally different, because the owners of the hospital (the public) are also their customers, and politicians like an issue they can get behind in the UK as much as in the US, so if you don't have demonstrable benefit for the cost in the UK you're in trouble. In the US as long as you can get paid for a cost, whether it provides any benefit or not is all that matters.
health records are probably under the purview of the NHS one way or another. Someone looked at the numbers and figured that it wasn't an effective use of taxpayer money.
Or this guy was sent 1000 notices for 15 years saying to pick up his records for 10 pounds, didn't, and is now on the hook for a specialist.
Well if you look at who is at the industrial park at the 407 and Leslie (where ATI HQ is in Markham, just outside Toronto), qualcomm seems to have setup shop, and has a conspicuously large number of job openings for graphics people...
There's nothing left of the company now, and what is left has the vultures, notably qualcomm, feasting on its remains. The main potentially profitable enterprise from the old AMD was globalfoundries, and that's a separate company now.
AMD is basically just a chip design firm now, they sold their ARM business to qualcomm a couple of years ago (the snapdragon and adreno products), and they are going to struggle to catch back up to the big ARM guys at this point, and the GPU products business will probably be absorbed by someone.
To use the VAT example. The shipper needs to charge tax to amazon. In some places in the EU you can get a breakdown of all of the value added to an item (and by extension all of the companies in the chain, each of whom claim a portion of the total tax).
In the US system it's different, in that taxes are administered at the point of sale, so rather than adding taxation at each point in the production and distribution the final retailer needs to charge you tax on everything.
Amazon's shippers probably engage in a similar scheme to amazon, where they try and locate themselves in such a way as to minimize their own tax liabilities, and limit the tax they have to charge amazon etc.
From the perspective of the tax creator anything that might add value along the way (labour) is taxable. If that value is basically fictional (i.e. highly paid work no one wants to pay for), it doesn't really change how you calculate the tax being applied.
Add in the EU, which is like the US, but with potentially one extra layer of government, since the EU has local, provincial (your "State"), Federal and EU level rules, and there are 27 federal governments, with god knows how many provinces etc.
And then there's india, china, japan, south america etc.
Web businesses essentially do business with potentially every country in the world, and that can be a nightmare, because your local rules for dealing with every country can be different, and you may only need to look up trading rules to some company in northern nigeria once. But one mistake can be the end of you.
This is why the EU has a value added tax. It doesn't matter how the value was added to the product, it's taxable. This conceptually makes sense if you consider the basic unit of value is labour - labour is used to extract the resources that make things, and to convert the resources into other things. So any use of labour can be taxed.
In north america we have various 'goods' taxes, (usually provincial or state taxes), but some are goods and services taxes. Varies a lot by place.
Fuck that. I am a saver and I am tired of getting my ass handed to me every time there is a downturn, because motherfuckers happily living on credit need to be saved.....Me being a saver should tell you everything you need to know what i think about government debt incurred on my behalf. There should be none.
So move somewhere else. If you don't like the government borrowing money on your behalf move somewhere being forced to balance their budget. Like Greece.
Fortunately you aren't an economist, of if you are, you're a terrible one and should find a new job.
You want stable economy? Set up incentive structure right because illusion of safety provided by shitload of govt red tape works only until it doesn't. Currently world economy is structurally biased towards irresponsibility and you wonder why shit hits the fan?
You are, essentially contradicting yourself. Shit hit the fan a lot less in Europe than the US because they had a much stronger safety net. Shit is hitting the fan now in europe because their safety net is managed at the wrong level (it would be like the US federal government spending 1% of GDP rather than the current 25 or so). The US economy, because it has a weak safety net is biased towards irresponsibility, essentially if you don't hit it rich you're fucked - so everyone is trying to get rich or die trying - whereas a stronger safety net in europe means people can actually have half decent lives on smaller incomes.
facebook stock? Everybody knew it was junk, nobody makes you park in it. Gold? Not possible, you'd have to corner the market full of central banks and i don't see that. With govt mandated legal tender it's not so simple. The point is, with stocks, commodities and what not you have a choice, you can plan, you can come up with strategy. If you fail, basically it's your fault. When your own govt fucks you over, it's game over. They can put you in jail if you don't cooperate.
Obviously not, or it would have immediately dropped 50% and not taken several months to go from 38 bucks a share down to 21. Everyone I knew at Facebook fled like rats from a sinking ship the moment they could, but obviously a lot of investors got screwed. Whether that was fraud or their own stupidity is harder to say. Also, gold prices have dropped about 10% from their high less than a year ago. And no one has cornered the market on gold. Also the reverse is true too, gold went up - way up- since 2008, which sounds good, but when it's done that in the past (including in the 1980's) it dropped like a rock when the economy started to pick up. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Gold_price_in_USD.png
Nowadays both private citizens and governments fund unproductive consumption with debt. Joe Sixpacks buy flatscreen tvs and iphones they can't afford, while govts fill the holes in budget caused mainly by warfare and welfare.
Business != economics. Please try not to confuse the two. Most especially on government spending, where their spending becomes your income, your spending becomes their income. Warfare and welfare are essentially re distributive in nature, you take money from people paying tax, and give to to other people, they in turn use that money to buy things, which becomes tax revenue. If you cut spending - any spending, that means there's less demand for goods and it becomes a bit of an austerity death spiral. Even the double dip in the UK and the disaster that are greece and spain prove this point adequately to anyone with a minimum of brain power. The time to cut government spending is when unemployment is low, wealth relatively well distributed, and an inadequate supply of labour, right now is essentially the exact opposite of that, government needs to expand taxation and expand employment - the latter being much more important than the former, even if that incurs debt, the debt can be paid off when people have jobs (
If there was ever any thought of wanting the game to run on Linux or Mac, why did he base it on CryENGINE to begin with?
Because for most projects those are nonsense pipe dreams. 90% of the desktop market is windows, and a large portion of the mac and linux gamers have windows installs already. Doing a Mac/Linux port is good press and good karma, and sometimes a way to keep the linux/mac nerds on staff happy, but from a business perspective it's usually mind numbingly stupid, and throwing money away on bad ideas is a way to find yourself looking for work.
Now this is where kickstarter comes in. Developing a linux port is a fixed cost basically (it doesn't increase the more linux users there are), and on kickstarter you can have people pay 400 or 500 dollars for basically a copy of your game and some novelty junk because they really want to see it happen. And if you fuck it up and the linux port sucks... well you already have their money!
Now the thing here is they're banking on the press this gets them. I bet the 1% of desktop users who are on linux lean gamer more than the general windows population, but odds are they aren't going to sell 20% of their copies to linux. I'd be pleasantly surprised if they do, but I wouldn't count on it. On other hand, this got them free press with nerds who can afford decent computers, and it makes a nice addon to their fundraising efforts.
Also, it's not like the the game is half written in C++ and you're buying it. At this stage of the game they can probably change engines or any number of things. It's still at least 2 years away (officially). They've got a lot of stuff done, but it's not too late to change some or all of it and re-use all the art, or just port the whole engine. I'm sure CryEngine is looking at multiplatform support beyond just PC and Android (PS4 and XB3), and once you're going 3 or 4 platforms adding another is not nearly as bad as adding a second. It's not trivial, but with enough interest I'm sure they can pitch that to actual investors as worth trying. In fact I wouldn't be surprised if the CryEngine people are some of the few who actually know what the PS4 and XB3 will really be and already have deep multiplatform support working that us small time indy developers don't get to know about.
this goes to the 'only one on an island not needing to lock their door'. Windows phone is too small to matter much - it's not like MS products don't have known, exploited vulnerabilities, just in terms of the most exploited ones they aren't that bad. They seem to be reasonably on top of fixing things overall. At least relatively to Java and Flash.
The US has had fine health care for a very long time. Better in quality and quantity than most of the rest of the world.
As I said, the US is relatively honest, compared to say, north korea. If you would prefer, the US is relatively honest compared to most of the world, I'll grant you, but being the richest country in the world, and 8th per capita* means you should be able to reach goal higher than 'top half'. If I were to guess, the US i, top quarter or so, behind northern europe and a couple of other places, but well ahead of southern europe, south america and all of asia and africa. But the healthcare, wealth distribution and media are significantly worse than most of the countries with reasonably comparable GDP, and in large part that is because those countries are more functioning more honest societies.
Quit confusing insurance with the care that insurance purchases.
Depends. If you pay $1 for the same thing I get for $0.95 then you might have an argument, when you pay close to double for on average worse care, you're getting hosed. Medicare, medicaid and the US government health plans are actually pretty good I'll grant you.
What I don't understand is this insistence from so many quarters that profitable (aka successful) business should be punished
What you don't understand is that this is not what's happening, and so that's why you're confused. You've been convinced in the reality of a straw man, and now you're arguing with him. You're Clint Eastwood talking to an empty chair. But thanks for trying. The actual argument is that everyone should have opportunity, and very successful enterprises should be willing to kick it forward and help the next guy be as successful as they were. It's also a problem that if businesses are sitting on cash and not investing that you need to create product demand (so they will invest in growth to meet demand), the reason US interest rates are through the floor is that businesses have cash and aren't investing it. It would be better for everyone if they just spent the money, but on an individual basis they won't do that, so government could tax/borrow the money away to create jobs to create demand - at which point the government would need to borrow less money but there would be less available to borrow etc. There is quite a lot of very good analytical research on this topic.
mediocre schemes guaranteed to be unable to handle the load that was formerly satisfied by the businesses that it replaced.
Well the current US healthcare system spends more money than anyone else, and doesn't cover 50 million people, and covers millions more monstrously inefficiently. You've clearly bought into the misguided belief that just because it works in Switzerland and Japan and Massachusetts that there is no reason to believe it won't work for the entire US. Because... 'merica is different! Except, it isn't. Sorry to burst your bubble, which you, presumably, will choose to patch back up with false narratives and republican talking points and then continue to live in. Reality however, is moving on without you.
*And I will point out many of the wealthier per capita counties, excepting Norway and Luxembourg and switzerland, are significantly worse places to live on average than the US. So the US should easily be top 4th or 5th in rankings like education and healthcare etc. But it isn't.
sanctions on what? on countries? sanctions are on unwashed masses of those countries who may or may not support to offficial policy, but the govt? It will always manage to feed itself, just look at NKorea.
I wasn't suggesting sanctions work or don't work, or a good idea or bad. But they exist and legal rules, and if you're trying to use bitcoins to sell rabits for food to north korean peasants you could be signing yourself up for a world of legal trouble.
And what if it's your own country that announces it's going to fuck you over and inflate 50% of your life savings overnight and there will be capital flow controls?
The same thing that doesn't stop gold from crashing overnight or facebook stock dropping 50%. If you have all of your money in 'cash' or in a single 'thing' including bitcoins you can be screwed.
On top of that, inflating 50% of your life savings, as you put it, also makes your debt 50% easier to pay off with your foreign assets, and your debt all counted, includes government debt incurred on your behalf.
You mean like the entire range of Fortune 500 companies and the associated persons?
and as I said, it undermines the basis of a functioning society. Look at how long and hard the US has had to fight for healthcare, look at wealth distribution, the constant lies told by the corporate media etc. And they are, including fortune 500 companies, on the scale of things, relatively honest. Compared to say, north korea.
Extortion, sourcing of underage material without being responsible for its production, advertising revenue from high traffic sites.
Imagine you did a data dump of all of the women in (e.g.) the netherlands on facebook. And posted it on a website, where it could be indexed, rated searched etc. You'd probably get a huge crush of traffic, and traffic = revenue.
You're thinking from the perspective of a product - you don't need to pay because someone else is monetizing you visiting their site- which is true, what they need is a way to get product, and if you're googling images of naked women, you're a product they can sell if they can just get you to click on their link rather than someone else's....
Well the central authority is built into how it was designed in the first place. You don't need a persistent authority because the core monetary rules of the currency exist from its inception and are unchangeable.
This is of course one of the two fatal flaws of bit coins - like gold - you severely limit the flexibility of the currency to cope with a crisis. And secondly, alternate currencies are essentially a mechanism to dodge tax (including barter), they have other advantages and disadvantages*, but you can use them to dodge tax, which means governments are going to clamp down on it, as it undermines the basis of a functioning society when people are legally dodging large amounts of tax.
And yes, much of this is like regulating the chips in a casino.
*Those advantages and disadvantages matter a lot of course. The primary benefit of Bitcoins is anonymity, which can be accomplished other ways with regular currency (cash..). But that could potentially be a serious drawback if it can be used to circumvent sanctions for example.
This is one of those things that will be hard to judge.
First off, there are more android installs than iOS, and a lot of them are older versions which aren't getting updates etc. I see what google et.al. are doing but that market fragmentation will eventually be a security nightmare.
Secondly, MS moves something like 250 million copies of windows a year, and yes, turnover is going down, but that means there are still a billion windows PC's in the wild. The smartphone market has much higher turnover, in part because of carrier subsidies and the noticeable performance improvements still happening, and in part because cell phones are just much more likely to physically fail than a desktop, so I would be surprised if there are 300 million iOS devices in the wild at all. Officially they've sold 400 million iOS devices (http://news.cnet.com/8301-13579_3-57511323-37/apple-by-the-numbers-84m-ipads-400m-ios-devices-350m-ipods-sold/) through june, but a LOT of those are replacements for older iOS devices at this point (it would be a bit like MS talking about how many copies of windows it has sold since 2007 versus how many are actually in use).
Lastly, a lot of mobile devices may have vulnerabilities than can be exploited but that don't put users at risk because users don't behave in a way that exposes them to much risk. If you aren't regularly grabbing new apps, or trying to click links in e-mails or the like, well, you're not a power user but you're not at a great deal of risk either. The only person on an island doesn't really gain much by locking their door sort of thing. And we all know hackers are after things worth money. Desktops are worth money, banking information is worth money, (and banking is becoming more popular on smartphones to be sure), pictures of naked women are worth money (and those are certainly on phones....), but it's hard to know if hackers, especially serious ones, are going to refocus on desktops, because now if you have a desktop you're probably a serious productivity person, which means you have something worth stealing.
The desktop is a platform, and when the rules where made and contracts signed about microsofts various breaches the desktop was *the* platform. They don't get to just ignore legally binding contracts because you don't think they apply to your business anymore.
Now I grant you the reason all a lot of these things were '10 years' rules is because in 10 years the market could change a lot, and I suspect they can get away with a lot today that they couldn't 5 years ago, but even then, if they did it 5 years ago and it was illegal 5 years ago they could still be fighting about it in court 20 years from now.
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I was referring to the very small percentage of people who are immune to HIV, and trying to figure out what causes that, and how to get it into the rest of us.
If it was 2004 it was probably on equipment designed before 2001. How much software do you know that works properly without modification from pre-windows XP days?
I agree, it's a nuisance, but this is an archival question. Someone bought a system, ran it for 4 years, and realized it was a disaster for whatever reason and tossed it, ( my money is on a requirement for windows 2000 or windows 98 or the like, or that it relied on SPARC or some niche architecture that you just can't get anymore) , at the time they made the assessment that the written records and description of the results was good enough. This guy is, in-specific asking for some of the data analysis to be essentially re-done. That means it's probably a custom job, and the NHS doesn't have the hardware or software to run whatever is needed.
And that nonsense might be exactly why after 4 years they turfed the system out. It seemed like a good idea at the time, but if you can't migrate it to x86 windows 7, time to find an alternative. There is data they've taken from this that the guy does have too, it doesn't have the full scan to be reproduced, so someone did the maths and figured the medical benefit of running that system for an extra 4 years (until today) or porting so they could get the full records, was outweighed by how much it would cost, since they do have partial records anyway.
Unless you're too old, or too fat, or smoke, or you die in the two years you're waiting for treatment.
Which is still a better reason than you happen to be poor and couldn't get treatment until you had to go to the emergency room and by then it was too late.
If the system is rationed based purely on money (and much as we rail on it from the outside, that isn't quite the case with the US system) a rich guy who has a private doctor is, in effect, denying 1999 other people access to that doctor*.
In the UK system when someone dies waiting for treatment that is a problem to be fixed, and if it happens enough in one hospital or under similar circumstances the government looks to do something about it. In the US system if someone dies before receiving treatment that is a cost savings to insurance companies, or a lost sales opportunity to hospitals. The system is adversarial but not in a good way.
Believe it or not, for people who are very sick especially, sometimes the best treatment is to let them die peacefully and without a lot of risky surgeries or medications, and just manage their pain. The US doesn't like to talk about end of life, but I'd rather live on average 2 weeks less - and not spend them being propped up by a dozen very expensive machines that ultimately aren't going to do me any good anyway. The people in that situation are usually fat, old, smoked, or all of the above. Sure, 20 and 30 year olds get cancer, and if that happens to you you'd be much better off in europe or canada than the US, but if you're 70 and have an aggressive cancer, or you've suffered a crippling heart attack/stroke from your weight or smoking, well, you may get much more machines that go 'bing!' in the US, but most of the time they won't actually do you much good.
*only partially made up statistic, I believe GP's see an average of 2000-3000 patients a year, but the 'Doctors per capita' is about 2-4/1000 (http://www.nationmaster.com/graph/hea_phy_per_1000_peo-physicians-per-1-000-people), working out to somewhere between 250 and 500 patients per year. Except in san marino, but well, they don't count (city state).
, assuming that they can't work out a payment plan.
bankruptcy being a more and more common 'payment plan'.
If I can't afford to pay, the hospital has to write it off as a loss
You mean what you said
In which case everybody else has to pay for it.
Hospitals don't have some magic source of money. They are, ultimately, insured by the government against losses incurred treating people who go to the emergency room. Now the trick here is that they aren't owned by the government (as in the NHS system) so their incentive is to get as much money from you, or from the government as possible. In the NHS system their objective is to do find the optimal balance between spending and demonstrable health outcomes.
Hospitals in the US are first and foremost interested in their bottom line. Health is a means to make money like any other business, you want to do it just well enough you can get paid, and you do the minimum required for regulatory compliance. The UK system is fundamentally different, because the owners of the hospital (the public) are also their customers, and politicians like an issue they can get behind in the UK as much as in the US, so if you don't have demonstrable benefit for the cost in the UK you're in trouble. In the US as long as you can get paid for a cost, whether it provides any benefit or not is all that matters.
This.
health records are probably under the purview of the NHS one way or another. Someone looked at the numbers and figured that it wasn't an effective use of taxpayer money.
Or this guy was sent 1000 notices for 15 years saying to pick up his records for 10 pounds, didn't, and is now on the hook for a specialist.
I just hope that if it happens, Qualcomm doesn't drop all non-Android Linux support.
hard to say, Qualcomm doesn't seem even remotely interested in the desktop market, but that's what acquisitions are for.
Well if you look at who is at the industrial park at the 407 and Leslie (where ATI HQ is in Markham, just outside Toronto), qualcomm seems to have setup shop, and has a conspicuously large number of job openings for graphics people...
, there won't be anything left of the company.
There's nothing left of the company now, and what is left has the vultures, notably qualcomm, feasting on its remains. The main potentially profitable enterprise from the old AMD was globalfoundries, and that's a separate company now.
AMD is basically just a chip design firm now, they sold their ARM business to qualcomm a couple of years ago (the snapdragon and adreno products), and they are going to struggle to catch back up to the big ARM guys at this point, and the GPU products business will probably be absorbed by someone.
A very small percentage of the population makes them. One option for a vaccine is to try and hack that immunity into the rest of us.
Are you counting overseas territories like Gibraltar?
The UK is probably the easiest to deal with, although scotish and welsh devolution is going to start to create headaches.
To use the VAT example. The shipper needs to charge tax to amazon. In some places in the EU you can get a breakdown of all of the value added to an item (and by extension all of the companies in the chain, each of whom claim a portion of the total tax).
In the US system it's different, in that taxes are administered at the point of sale, so rather than adding taxation at each point in the production and distribution the final retailer needs to charge you tax on everything.
Amazon's shippers probably engage in a similar scheme to amazon, where they try and locate themselves in such a way as to minimize their own tax liabilities, and limit the tax they have to charge amazon etc.
From the perspective of the tax creator anything that might add value along the way (labour) is taxable. If that value is basically fictional (i.e. highly paid work no one wants to pay for), it doesn't really change how you calculate the tax being applied.
but far from "thousands".
Add in the EU, which is like the US, but with potentially one extra layer of government, since the EU has local, provincial (your "State"), Federal and EU level rules, and there are 27 federal governments, with god knows how many provinces etc.
And then there's india, china, japan, south america etc.
Web businesses essentially do business with potentially every country in the world, and that can be a nightmare, because your local rules for dealing with every country can be different, and you may only need to look up trading rules to some company in northern nigeria once. But one mistake can be the end of you.
This is why the EU has a value added tax. It doesn't matter how the value was added to the product, it's taxable. This conceptually makes sense if you consider the basic unit of value is labour - labour is used to extract the resources that make things, and to convert the resources into other things. So any use of labour can be taxed.
In north america we have various 'goods' taxes, (usually provincial or state taxes), but some are goods and services taxes. Varies a lot by place.
Fuck that. I am a saver and I am tired of getting my ass handed to me every time there is a downturn, because motherfuckers happily living on credit need to be saved. ....Me being a saver should tell you everything you need to know what i think about government debt incurred on my behalf. There should be none.
So move somewhere else. If you don't like the government borrowing money on your behalf move somewhere being forced to balance their budget. Like Greece.
Fortunately you aren't an economist, of if you are, you're a terrible one and should find a new job.
You want stable economy? Set up incentive structure right because illusion of safety provided by shitload of govt red tape works only until it doesn't. Currently world economy is structurally biased towards irresponsibility and you wonder why shit hits the fan?
You are, essentially contradicting yourself. Shit hit the fan a lot less in Europe than the US because they had a much stronger safety net. Shit is hitting the fan now in europe because their safety net is managed at the wrong level (it would be like the US federal government spending 1% of GDP rather than the current 25 or so). The US economy, because it has a weak safety net is biased towards irresponsibility, essentially if you don't hit it rich you're fucked - so everyone is trying to get rich or die trying - whereas a stronger safety net in europe means people can actually have half decent lives on smaller incomes.
facebook stock? Everybody knew it was junk, nobody makes you park in it. Gold? Not possible, you'd have to corner the market full of central banks and i don't see that. With govt mandated legal tender it's not so simple.
The point is, with stocks, commodities and what not you have a choice, you can plan, you can come up with strategy. If you fail, basically it's your fault. When your own govt fucks you over, it's game over. They can put you in jail if you don't cooperate.
Obviously not, or it would have immediately dropped 50% and not taken several months to go from 38 bucks a share down to 21. Everyone I knew at Facebook fled like rats from a sinking ship the moment they could, but obviously a lot of investors got screwed. Whether that was fraud or their own stupidity is harder to say. Also, gold prices have dropped about 10% from their high less than a year ago. And no one has cornered the market on gold. Also the reverse is true too, gold went up - way up- since 2008, which sounds good, but when it's done that in the past (including in the 1980's) it dropped like a rock when the economy started to pick up. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Gold_price_in_USD.png
Nowadays both private citizens and governments fund unproductive consumption with debt. Joe Sixpacks buy flatscreen tvs and iphones they can't afford, while govts fill the holes in budget caused mainly by warfare and welfare.
Business != economics. Please try not to confuse the two. Most especially on government spending, where their spending becomes your income, your spending becomes their income. Warfare and welfare are essentially re distributive in nature, you take money from people paying tax, and give to to other people, they in turn use that money to buy things, which becomes tax revenue. If you cut spending - any spending, that means there's less demand for goods and it becomes a bit of an austerity death spiral. Even the double dip in the UK and the disaster that are greece and spain prove this point adequately to anyone with a minimum of brain power. The time to cut government spending is when unemployment is low, wealth relatively well distributed, and an inadequate supply of labour, right now is essentially the exact opposite of that, government needs to expand taxation and expand employment - the latter being much more important than the former, even if that incurs debt, the debt can be paid off when people have jobs (
If there was ever any thought of wanting the game to run on Linux or Mac, why did he base it on CryENGINE to begin with?
Because for most projects those are nonsense pipe dreams. 90% of the desktop market is windows, and a large portion of the mac and linux gamers have windows installs already. Doing a Mac/Linux port is good press and good karma, and sometimes a way to keep the linux/mac nerds on staff happy, but from a business perspective it's usually mind numbingly stupid, and throwing money away on bad ideas is a way to find yourself looking for work.
Now this is where kickstarter comes in. Developing a linux port is a fixed cost basically (it doesn't increase the more linux users there are), and on kickstarter you can have people pay 400 or 500 dollars for basically a copy of your game and some novelty junk because they really want to see it happen. And if you fuck it up and the linux port sucks... well you already have their money!
Now the thing here is they're banking on the press this gets them. I bet the 1% of desktop users who are on linux lean gamer more than the general windows population, but odds are they aren't going to sell 20% of their copies to linux. I'd be pleasantly surprised if they do, but I wouldn't count on it. On other hand, this got them free press with nerds who can afford decent computers, and it makes a nice addon to their fundraising efforts.
Also, it's not like the the game is half written in C++ and you're buying it. At this stage of the game they can probably change engines or any number of things. It's still at least 2 years away (officially). They've got a lot of stuff done, but it's not too late to change some or all of it and re-use all the art, or just port the whole engine. I'm sure CryEngine is looking at multiplatform support beyond just PC and Android (PS4 and XB3), and once you're going 3 or 4 platforms adding another is not nearly as bad as adding a second. It's not trivial, but with enough interest I'm sure they can pitch that to actual investors as worth trying. In fact I wouldn't be surprised if the CryEngine people are some of the few who actually know what the PS4 and XB3 will really be and already have deep multiplatform support working that us small time indy developers don't get to know about.
this goes to the 'only one on an island not needing to lock their door'. Windows phone is too small to matter much - it's not like MS products don't have known, exploited vulnerabilities, just in terms of the most exploited ones they aren't that bad. They seem to be reasonably on top of fixing things overall. At least relatively to Java and Flash.
The US has had fine health care for a very long time. Better in quality and quantity than most of the rest of the world.
As I said, the US is relatively honest, compared to say, north korea. If you would prefer, the US is relatively honest compared to most of the world, I'll grant you, but being the richest country in the world, and 8th per capita* means you should be able to reach goal higher than 'top half'. If I were to guess, the US i, top quarter or so, behind northern europe and a couple of other places, but well ahead of southern europe, south america and all of asia and africa. But the healthcare, wealth distribution and media are significantly worse than most of the countries with reasonably comparable GDP, and in large part that is because those countries are more functioning more honest societies.
Quit confusing insurance with the care that insurance purchases.
Depends. If you pay $1 for the same thing I get for $0.95 then you might have an argument, when you pay close to double for on average worse care, you're getting hosed. Medicare, medicaid and the US government health plans are actually pretty good I'll grant you.
What I don't understand is this insistence from so many quarters that profitable (aka successful) business should be punished
What you don't understand is that this is not what's happening, and so that's why you're confused. You've been convinced in the reality of a straw man, and now you're arguing with him. You're Clint Eastwood talking to an empty chair. But thanks for trying.
The actual argument is that everyone should have opportunity, and very successful enterprises should be willing to kick it forward and help the next guy be as successful as they were. It's also a problem that if businesses are sitting on cash and not investing that you need to create product demand (so they will invest in growth to meet demand), the reason US interest rates are through the floor is that businesses have cash and aren't investing it. It would be better for everyone if they just spent the money, but on an individual basis they won't do that, so government could tax/borrow the money away to create jobs to create demand - at which point the government would need to borrow less money but there would be less available to borrow etc. There is quite a lot of very good analytical research on this topic.
mediocre schemes guaranteed to be unable to handle the load that was formerly satisfied by the businesses that it replaced.
Well the current US healthcare system spends more money than anyone else, and doesn't cover 50 million people, and covers millions more monstrously inefficiently. You've clearly bought into the misguided belief that just because it works in Switzerland and Japan and Massachusetts that there is no reason to believe it won't work for the entire US. Because... 'merica is different! Except, it isn't. Sorry to burst your bubble, which you, presumably, will choose to patch back up with false narratives and republican talking points and then continue to live in. Reality however, is moving on without you.
*And I will point out many of the wealthier per capita counties, excepting Norway and Luxembourg and switzerland, are significantly worse places to live on average than the US. So the US should easily be top 4th or 5th in rankings like education and healthcare etc. But it isn't.
sanctions on what? on countries? sanctions are on unwashed masses of those countries who may or may not support to offficial policy, but the govt? It will always manage to feed itself, just look at NKorea.
I wasn't suggesting sanctions work or don't work, or a good idea or bad. But they exist and legal rules, and if you're trying to use bitcoins to sell rabits for food to north korean peasants you could be signing yourself up for a world of legal trouble.
And what if it's your own country that announces it's going to fuck you over and inflate 50% of your life savings overnight and there will be capital flow controls?
The same thing that doesn't stop gold from crashing overnight or facebook stock dropping 50%. If you have all of your money in 'cash' or in a single 'thing' including bitcoins you can be screwed.
On top of that, inflating 50% of your life savings, as you put it, also makes your debt 50% easier to pay off with your foreign assets, and your debt all counted, includes government debt incurred on your behalf.
You mean like the entire range of Fortune 500 companies and the associated persons?
and as I said, it undermines the basis of a functioning society. Look at how long and hard the US has had to fight for healthcare, look at wealth distribution, the constant lies told by the corporate media etc. And they are, including fortune 500 companies, on the scale of things, relatively honest. Compared to say, north korea.
Extortion, sourcing of underage material without being responsible for its production, advertising revenue from high traffic sites.
Imagine you did a data dump of all of the women in (e.g.) the netherlands on facebook. And posted it on a website, where it could be indexed, rated searched etc. You'd probably get a huge crush of traffic, and traffic = revenue.
You're thinking from the perspective of a product - you don't need to pay because someone else is monetizing you visiting their site- which is true, what they need is a way to get product, and if you're googling images of naked women, you're a product they can sell if they can just get you to click on their link rather than someone else's....
Well the central authority is built into how it was designed in the first place. You don't need a persistent authority because the core monetary rules of the currency exist from its inception and are unchangeable.
This is of course one of the two fatal flaws of bit coins - like gold - you severely limit the flexibility of the currency to cope with a crisis. And secondly, alternate currencies are essentially a mechanism to dodge tax (including barter), they have other advantages and disadvantages*, but you can use them to dodge tax, which means governments are going to clamp down on it, as it undermines the basis of a functioning society when people are legally dodging large amounts of tax.
And yes, much of this is like regulating the chips in a casino.
*Those advantages and disadvantages matter a lot of course. The primary benefit of Bitcoins is anonymity, which can be accomplished other ways with regular currency (cash..). But that could potentially be a serious drawback if it can be used to circumvent sanctions for example.
This is one of those things that will be hard to judge.
First off, there are more android installs than iOS, and a lot of them are older versions which aren't getting updates etc. I see what google et.al. are doing but that market fragmentation will eventually be a security nightmare.
Secondly, MS moves something like 250 million copies of windows a year, and yes, turnover is going down, but that means there are still a billion windows PC's in the wild. The smartphone market has much higher turnover, in part because of carrier subsidies and the noticeable performance improvements still happening, and in part because cell phones are just much more likely to physically fail than a desktop, so I would be surprised if there are 300 million iOS devices in the wild at all. Officially they've sold 400 million iOS devices (http://news.cnet.com/8301-13579_3-57511323-37/apple-by-the-numbers-84m-ipads-400m-ios-devices-350m-ipods-sold/) through june, but a LOT of those are replacements for older iOS devices at this point (it would be a bit like MS talking about how many copies of windows it has sold since 2007 versus how many are actually in use).
Lastly, a lot of mobile devices may have vulnerabilities than can be exploited but that don't put users at risk because users don't behave in a way that exposes them to much risk. If you aren't regularly grabbing new apps, or trying to click links in e-mails or the like, well, you're not a power user but you're not at a great deal of risk either. The only person on an island doesn't really gain much by locking their door sort of thing. And we all know hackers are after things worth money. Desktops are worth money, banking information is worth money, (and banking is becoming more popular on smartphones to be sure), pictures of naked women are worth money (and those are certainly on phones....), but it's hard to know if hackers, especially serious ones, are going to refocus on desktops, because now if you have a desktop you're probably a serious productivity person, which means you have something worth stealing.
8 tracks....who fucking cares?
That's silly.
The desktop is a platform, and when the rules where made and contracts signed about microsofts various breaches the desktop was *the* platform. They don't get to just ignore legally binding contracts because you don't think they apply to your business anymore.
Now I grant you the reason all a lot of these things were '10 years' rules is because in 10 years the market could change a lot, and I suspect they can get away with a lot today that they couldn't 5 years ago, but even then, if they did it 5 years ago and it was illegal 5 years ago they could still be fighting about it in court 20 years from now.
MSFT ain't got a monopoly on shit
Microsoft retains its monopoly on the desktop, whether that is relevant at all is a totally different discussion.