That's because it's the same company that made the witcher and GoG. That was their first big new AAA sort of release. And thus far I think their only one.
GoG is about good old games, but why give away 30% on your own title when you sell at least some copies through your own store?
It's the same problem the eve guys had, the existing Linux emulation, translation layers and re-implementations are generally better than anything you can do on your own in a reasonable time frame, especially if, like GoG, you're talking about dozens or hundreds of games, so it's a 'we won't do it ourselves but we're not stopping you from using already working solutions' kinda thing.
I don't have the heart to tell him that he's not incredible at everything (and don't want to risk him finding out by taking a class where he doesn't get an automatic "A").
Did you read the same summary I did? He doesn't want his kid wasting time on something he's obviously going to fail at, and would rather focus that time on something they won't fail at.
I could have, and, in fact did, sleep through a large portion of my highschool science and maths, got an 87 average in the lot, got into a theoretical physics programme, and am now getting a PhD in computer science. By far my biggest problem in highschool was a mandated phys ed class, because on a good day I was a 70 student, and on a bad day I was a 50. I'm slightly heavier now than I was then, I'm just shy of 2m tall and just under 90 kilos, I'm just not very coordinated. Unfortunately to get into any of the really good universities you can't have any mark less than an 80. So what caused me no end of grief, cost me thousands in scholarship money and significantly constrained my future academic choices for a decade? My ability to run laps on gym floor or to catch what you americans call a football.
Unfortunately this guy is kinda right. At some point you have to realize that you're going to suck at certain things, and pay people to do that for you. You do need time to find out what you're good at, and being forced to wait until you're 18 or 19 to maybe discover you have a knack for psychology or (as he suggests public speaking) or whatever it is is wasting potential. We get a number of students who are 'good with computers' into a computer science course that don't have the logic or reasoning skills or the science and analysis skills to be computer scientists, maybe they should be computer techs maybe they should just be people allowed to work with computers, but not computer scientists. But we don't have CS in high school, so kids get to us, and they don't know.
This parent has obvious decided that he's seen enough of his kid failing at grade school chemistry, and it's time to move on. And you know what, I know a few economics MSc and PhD students who probably figured out the same thing when they were 15. For various reasons we have decided on certain requirements in highschools, but every country (and sometimes provinces or states) have their own ideas, and they can't all be right, so I can buy the argument that we should be looking at pushing the university model of specialization earlier. When I went to highschool we mandated grade 13, since then they ditched that and now only require grade 12. There were 2 or 3 messed up years there, but now everything has settled down and.... the province hasn't imploded because we cut one year of highschool. Who knew? Could we cut one more? 2 more? What would we lose from it? Those are legitimate sophisticated questions, and eliminating entire years is different than offering more choice and a more diverse set of options.
As the summary points out, there is an opportunity cost here - and in my high school anyway we didn't offer economics, psychology, cultural studies, computer sciences, any languages beyond french english and german, (I believe most of them offer chinese or japanese now, but not german), ours was the only school in the area that had film and drama and music all the way through, thought that was never my thing so I don't remember the details. Certainly kids who didn't happen to get districted to my highschool missed out on those opportunities though, but then our students missed out on various options too.
Now all that said, I don't know the right answer, I have a vague sense of how I would do the data analysis to figure out what is critical and what isn't, but it's not a trivial amount of work. Kids need to learn *some* chemistry, not necessarily highschool chemistry, but they need to learn some. But there's only so many hours in a day you can expect a kid to be in school, so you have to make some choices about what is important, and intelligent people who agree on the facts can probably disagree on where the optimum points to add in various choices are.
Google as a business is getting bigger but its profits are dwindling. Bigger but not better
Businesses are just giant investing services. The question for google is what is it spending all this money on, and will it have any future return that justifies the reduced income right now. Also, I'd rather own a company that acquired 10 billion dollars in assets and made one billion dollars in profit than one that made 2 billion dollars in profit - so we'll have to see just what they justify this expense on.
Moto is loosing money (the rate does seem to have slowed) on top of the 12 Bn purchase price
This would be the question of an asset. I never really saw google buying moto as a good plan unless there's a patent licencing scheme in the works.
Why in earth Google is releasing the new Nexus phone made by any one else other than Moto doesn't make any sense to me at all, apart from google not wishing to piss off other OEMs who aren't raking it either.
You answered your own question. Samsung HTC, Sony etc. all have a choice: Google, Microsoft or go their own way. Google is trying got to the top of the smartphone business by being an open platform and they don't want to fuck that up. Especially not while Microsoft is working hard to close their platform, and have surface etc. If I was samsung or HTC or Sony or the like I would find google much more tempting a partner than MS.
As for the timing. Today or tomorrow? Wouldn't the stock have taken a dive anyway? Just off the top of my head thoughts
Depends on what they spent the money on. That's the problem. The reason these things are secret is because an unfinished document without context could be factually wrong to start (as in the numbers may simply not be correct) or they may have significant information that needs to be included.
From the sounds of the *final* document google views the whole thing as overall positive, they're re-investing in growth, and have seen hugely rocketing revenue overall, which is all in all good, and they suffered a bit from the USD being high relatively. So from *their* perspective this report seemed quite positive, which might be it.
As I said, I'd rather own a company that acquired 10 billion dollars in assets and made 1 billion dollars in profit than one that made 2 billion dollars in profit and acquired no assets, and that seems to have consistently been the approach a lot of growing companies are taking.
One can make the same argument with cash rather than a computer though. I've had the same 50 dollar note in my wallet for 4 months, I am, in effect, hoarding that cash. The value is only relevant when I go to use it, since you are essentially extracting value from the computer on a moment to moment basis it is a poor comparison to 'money' which has little to no benefit by merely being in your (virtual) wallet.
Theoretically bitcoins could avoid the deflationary spiral if there was some central organization making sure there would be an adequate supply, many large organizations doing transactions in bitcoins, viable transaction records for insurance purposes to avoid fraud of various sorts, it would be easier to accept if there was some physical form of bitcoins that could be easily exchanged and so on. Someone rich enough (the waltons for example) could try and buy off enough members of the US congress or the EU parliament to force bitcoins to be considered legal tender. But of course then it would just be another currency in a sea of currencies and, like most alternate currency arrangements including bartering, it's really just a scheme to steal value and dodge tax, and these days no one wants to go along with tax dodging schemes. Including cash.
I believe you two are in agreement, spain is not a case of massive deficits causing the crisis, in fact in the current situation no such examples exist in the western world (Burma and North Korea are not relevant to the crisis in europe).
Italy and Greece are in the messes they have, and they, on the whole, were not all that bad on the eve of the crisis, because of a balance of payments problem, that would be solved either by a currency devaluation or by transfer payments from a larger federal state, since neither of those solutions is forthcoming (and inevitably this will happen to all of the eurozone states) there are relatively few options. The ECB buying bonds to keep rates down, a higher inflation target etc. might work, but if the europeans don't want to think of themselves as one people all in ensuring everyone gets the same healthcare, pensions, education and defence they ultimately will have to break apart, and that process is what is really hurting all of the PIIGS.
While agree that's why the recession wasn't as bad here initially, we're well past the shock of radical deleveraging due the mortgage crisis and onto the aftershocks that's caused in the Eurozone and their balance of payments problems, the US and their woefully misguided attempts to fix the problem by making it worse and so on, and that is into the territory of problems that could have been addressed by competent government policy.
Romney believes in a completely discredited world view on economics and the role of government. Barrack Obama is terrible at actually playing politics, so even if he knows what he should do he's usually incapable of doing it. He managed to win his previous elections by having stuck to reasonably credible policy proposals, and failing to really deliver, Romney is a compulsive liar, who is used to talking to people who drink the same intellectual kool-aid he does, so he panders to whomever is in front of him with whatever they want to hear, but nothing he says is based in reality.
Given the choice - and given the '3rd party' choices are basically in the romney camp of completely discredited or impractical world views your best bet is Obama.
And before you, or anyone else thinks that's somehow a sad statement about democracy, that is democracy, everywhere. In canada and the UK we have baby republicans Harper and Cameron, Cameron has been caught in a double dip recession precisely because he bought into the same nonsense the republicans have been spewing, while canada is saved by the price of oil. In France Sarkozy and Hollande were both looking at ways to radically cut the budget deficit, which in the first place is bad economic policy and hollande wants to do so with a 75% tax on the ultrarich, who can just move to switzerland or monaco. Angela merkel in germany is pushing for european federalism - which might be good policy- a completely untenable prospect politically in europe, and so on and so on. On the rare occasions politicians are actually capable of looking at and understanding evidence they usually don't know how translate that into actual action.
Got Cancer? Here, let's tell your insurance company.
If there is a situation where you need to rely on an insurance company for healthcare you should move.
Also, if people ask about why you're added to a group, make a group, Sir_sri's group of involuntary membership. And add people to it. Demonstration is key. There is enough 'being gay is funny' and gay as pejorative that you can always tell people your friends are assholes, or drunk, or both.
I could start mailing you flyers for the KKK, but that doesn't mean you're a member or a supporter. If you get asked about it you just say 'ya, this crazy guy I know keeps sending them to me, I asked to stop but I can't do anything about it'.
Don't get me wrong, it's a problem that you can be added to a group without your consent, but it's about on the level of being able to get unsolicited mail - because everyone else is in the same boat.
The timeline stuff becoming public thing is stranger. But then, it's facebook, don't post anything on facebook you wouldn't want to be public. The 'settings' are irrelevant. Treat it as your public blog website with your name and photo on the top.
It is political. It's a trust issue. The Europeans don't feel the US can be trusted to not just encrypt the whole damn thing for their own purposes, or fail to maintain it whatever. Relying on something you have no control over is very risky.
They could have gone the route of a droid phone maker. The problem there was that all of their suppliers were already android makers, and competing with your suppliers isn't a great strategy.
Being just another android handset maker could have been equally catastrophic (after all, nothing they've released lately is on par with the droids from Samsung), so given the huge pile of cash microsoft was offering their options were limited. They would have been better to keep toes in both though, and been a Droid maker *and* a WP7/WP8 maker.
Don't confuse strategic vision with ability to execute.
The reason he managed a list of 4 things, and god knows the list is a lot longer than that, is that MS recognizes what the strategy should be, and they've managed 'good enough' but they're constantly trying to find better. Each of their products in isolation is viable but not spectacular, and the changing vision of what the 'next big thing' should be hurts them a lot. But someone at the top at microsoft understands that their real customers for windows are developers and they've been trying to give them the tools and platform to make interested connected products. They've failed spectacularly a few times, and windows 8 seems like it's a clusterfuck before it hits store shelves, but that doesn't mean their heart is in the wrong place on connectivity, they just suck at getting it out working and on time and understandable to users.
simply because the other party has no financial sense or fiscal awareness.
So you're not in favour of evidence based decision making? Because it's republicans and the pro austerity crowd who have no idea what they're talking about. The democrats are weak, but in the right direction.
And the thing is, what would you vote for? Someone who has (your brand) of fiscal awareness but what else? If they don't have a majority they have to trade (Your brand) of fiscal awareness for something to get anything. the system reduces to two parties with pork trading.
Narrow? Sheesh, have you been following all the ridiculous number of things the federal government has claimed they're allowed to do? They're so far beyond the scope of the Constitution at this point that it's not even funny.
Good, constitutions are stupid idea. And as I said, at a very broad level governments can only tax, spend, and write laws, the laws can be rewritten by the next guy in charge before they ever take effect. So basically they tax, spend, and talk a lot. And that's it. Everything else is mucking with details on the inside.
There is no proof that implementing a European system in the US would lower costs. We have different cultures, different health issues
You mean how every other country with healthcare it works for? And no, you don't have different cultures or health issues, except for things that are health issues to be addressed.
Why not? It seems far more sensible to argue about issues on their merits rather than party line
As I said else where, you can ague about issues all you want. That arguing does not, in any system actually materialize into policy on those issues.
Reviews, in my experience in physics and computer science anyway, tend to be more about process than results. Did the work you do cite whomever the reviewer knows about in your field (usually not), is the process you used for your work valid, or importantly, is it clear that it is valid? Are your results understandable to someone who didn't do your particular experiment? Is your paper clear enough that an expert in the field but not your research can build on it? Admittedly I might be biased because I'm bad at explaining myself.
Reviewers aren't out to screw submitters for the fun of it, because they don't want to be screwed themselves and the whole point of research is to find new stuff. But internally when you're preparing a paper your supervisor, or your grad students or the like know what the fuck you're talking about, and someone on the outside can say something to the effect of 'this makes no sense'. "This makes no sense' by the way doesn't mean the work isn't valid, just that you might have done a terrible job trying to write about within whatever constraints your target journal has.
Journals are also becoming a bit overspecialized, and it makes it hard when you do something really high impact that isn't very narrow to know where to put it. My particular corner of the academic universe is broadly under the field of game development, but we really combine work in AI, computational social science, strategic studies and economics, and an AI journal may look at our work and feel (correctly) that it's not enough of an AI problem for them, the computational social science people will say the same thing and so on. The big dogs of Nature and Science publish things that can be cross disciplinary and that aren't (and shouldn't be) pigeon holed into a particular basket. The place I'm at has, or had at least, some really stellar computer vision and computer algebra researchers but odds are if you aren't specifically in those fields you couldn't care less what they do. That can be good work with few citations just because it's really really important to one very tiny problem. A journal rejecting you because you aren't doing enough pathfinding for their pathfinding edition doesn't mean you didn't do good work, it just means the work you didn't isn't as applicable to what they're doing.
I expect as time goes on we'll see more of this. New researchers aren't as biased by picking up a physical journal and reading it, they do internet and database searches (which are becoming much easier and much higher quality) and glue together concepts from multiple journals, but then their work may not really fit with what the previous ones did. It can be broadly interesting and broadly useful, but it's not the feeder disciplines.
If you want a good example take Quantum computing. The 'Quantum' mechanics side of the research fits in easily a dozen different journals (e.g. MRI, Laser spec, semiconductors etc) but very little of the work is meaningfully original, it's a new application of an old problem. The theory of computing side of things probably only belongs in one or two different theory of comp journals, but again, it's re-examining some of the fundamentals of computing theory in a different way and there's not much to do after the first guy does it. But they are, together very interesting.
- you have to form a majority coalition in the legislature to select an executive.
Uh... no, you don't. That's the *easiest* way to, but no, you don't have to. You have to be able to pass a confidence motion - the biggest being the budget- with support from a majority of the house, but it need not be in a coalition. To stay in power literally all you need to do is to survive any confidence votes, which can be done in part by having one opposing political party with no money and no obvious leadership candidate and they will vote to avoid an election.
In the US system they intentionally have a layered system of majorities - they are definitely different systems, but in the end you have to resolve the upper and lower chambers with majorities in each to pass budgets. Basically everything else that governments do is a tack on to the budget of minimal importance, or rules that can be tossed by whomever gets in power next.
If it was puerto rican independence as I said you'd be unlikely to be on the brink of war over it, even if it was a major political issue.
The 'Tea party' was essentially a right wing lunatic 3rd party, they folded into the republican party and basically took over, out with the old, in with the new, with the same name. That's very much a third party movement, the just didn't dress it up in a new set of clothes.
You mean like handing more and more power to quebec in exchange for good governance for the rest of us?
Without a doubt healthcare, which was a combined NDP-Liberal project was a big win, but if they were one party (or effectively one party, running only one candidate from either group in an area) we'd have had much more 'left wing policies'.
The problem is that the gap between liberals and NDP is pretty small, so the choice is pretty shallow, and the reform - PC was huge, but reform one, the PC's basically lost.
If I said the same of my own constitution and everyone else's would that make you feel any better about an antiquated piece of paper that doesn't actually say anything all that helpful?
Cartoons can't make people riot, and you're assuming that that is their reason. Even if it is, it's entirely their fault for deciding they should riot because of it.
Did I suggest it wasn't? Again though. Imagine the balance of power was reversed and it was the arabs with all the guns and bombs and you well, without. Their rioting, however unreasonable suddenly becomes a threat to the lives and livelyhood of every single one of you. In effect this is what *they* live with every day. Their free speech is, to put it politely, curtailed, to conform to the U.S. backed, U.S. approved party line.
As I said, you could construct a matrix of all of the different things you're for or against, and end up with hundreds of parties, but honestly, most of them don't matter, nor would it be sensible for the public, who can't figure out when *one* party is completely disregarding facts, to present them dozens of viewpoints they can't understand.
Also, it wasn't an assumption, it was an assertion. There's a difference. In the relatively narrow scope of what governments can do you don't actually have a lot of choices. That's why there are, in every democratic country basically two political camps of left and right. People who value equality more, and people who value liberty more. Local circumstances determine quite what that means, but that is the essence of government. They aren't all purely binary choices, but the choices are largely two dimensional, and the thing is, whether the US spends 700 billion dollars a year or 800 billion dollars a year or 600 billion dollars a year probably doesn't actually matter all that much. Whether or not the US has healthcare matters, a lot, but which, on the spectrum of the british - french health systems (cheap, accessible, and good enough, vs expensive and excellent) you end up with doesn't matter all that much, they're still both way better than what you have now.
And my point was that there are basically only two important parts of government and then various less important arrangements of 'other'. Wherever you sit on those spectra you're not going to get better policies out of the government by having more parties, your personal view may be better captured, but within political parties they run the spectrum as well. Unfortunately you can't have a system where people only consider one issue at a time in isolation, because they all do come down to either spending money, or not, and if so, how much.
The sad truth, if you look at literally every democratic country in the world, is that they all more or less evolve into the same basic sort of scumbag. The details are local, but they're not much different.
Honest truth, you were better off with the british system. The british were better off with the british system before devolution. Though I'll accept that rule from the commons is probably preferable to rule from the lords, there's a strong case for both.
It depends very much on what you think is the most serious problem a government should address (as a system, not policy wise). To the british system this was 'deadlock' (in the computer science sense). You are better off having a government that can make decisions, even if they aren't quite what the majority want, and aren't quite the best, some decision is better than no decision. The US with fixed election dates and two elected chambers is explicitly constructed to create deadlock. That's inefficient, and it means that in an effort to avoid deadlock you still have senseless pandering.
Probably you would be better off with a parliamentary system of being able to go to an election on an issue within 6 weeks. Fixed election dates imposes all sorts of artificial constraints.
Secondly. Cut the size of congress in half. That sounds weird when in the same breath I say the british system is better and they have 600 odd representatives. But they'd be better off with about 200. As would you. As would everyone. At some point you could replace any given democratic or republican representative with any other, and not change anything. If there's no value that each of these people bring, get rid of them. If you have a small number of them it becomes a national scandal when they're caught doing something sleezy. Right now there are so many of them I bet most people can't name more than 10 members of congress. If you don't know who they are you have no idea what they're talking about.
Third: Pay for the BBC. Or equivalent. Yes yes, BBC are a bunch of pot smoking liberal hippies. But they hold the governments feet to the fire because they generally don't fear for their jobs when they're critical of the government. Right now the most basic problem the US faces is that one political party is being completely blatantly dishonest about what their 'plans' would actually do, and yet Mitt Romney gets declared the winner of the debate, despite the fact that basically nothing he said was true. At all. There's no one who can be trusted as a media source in the US to be impartial.
Fourth: Rich people will *ALWAYS* buy themselves a say in government. This is why the UK had a house of lords. They can't buy political influence they *have* political influence. See the distinction? When ever there is a question of 'us versus them' it's quite clear who 'we' are and who 'they' are. If you must have a bicameral legislature (and there is a case for that), at least make very clear what the difference is. The upper house is for the rich, and is secondary to the commons but is also available as a reward for long term dedicated service to the country.
Lastly: Get rid of the constitution. Burn it. All of it. Remember how I mentioned that power is primarily in the hands of the commons not the lords? That happened on the day Nazi's invaded the netherlands and belgium, when Churchill was appointed rather than Lord Halifax. God knows the British cling to precedent far more than they should, but times change, and government needs to be dynamic and live in the moment. Constitutions bind you to a way of thinking about government. Even basic rights like free speech. Take these cartoons of the islamic prophet making them riot and kill people. Now imagine if the military balance of power was reversed. It sounds lovely to go down in a blaze of glory standing up for your principles, it's usually preferable to keep your fucking mouth shut and live to fight another day. One of these days, hopefully not in my lifetime, the chinese are going to stop taking the xenophobic (sometimes justified, admittedly) rhetoric from the US, and you're going to be in for a very very bad day.
TLDR: Be willing to pay for the truth, don't cling to ideas on how to run a government from when it was faster to sail a ship around cape horn than to send a guy on a horse to get a message from new york to california.
because "no taxation without representation" was once cause for a revolution
In what sense are americans, other than Puerto rico or washington DC taxed without representation? I could believe that if Puerto Rico asked for statehood (or independence) and both political parties said "NO" then sure, you could have a third party emerge, but again, that would just replace one of the other two.
This is one of the major issues preventing any real change from happening in the US federal government
I genuinely do not understand why americans, particularly the ones who frequent tech boards, think a third party would actually be helpful. Well I understand why it's on tech boards, there are the automated shills and a particular ideological attraction to a point of view, but in practical political terms it's silly. I live in canada, we've had at one point 5 parties holding federal seats, and now have 4. 60% of the population *doesn't* like the current government, but he has essentially absolute power (within the confines of parliamentary power) because he has a majority of seats. The 'extra' parties just divide the vote up, and whether you do that as a proportional representation and require pork project trading by MP's across party lines or do it at a smaller level of pouring resources into contested districts the net effect of bad federal policy (or at least inefficient policy) is the same.
Third parties, or more, simply lead to horse trading and pandering to try and bribe or coerce the smaller parties into a mainstream voting block, and in exchange they end up with something that's usually crazy or generally bad policy, but that's the price to be paid to govern at all.
Government only really can do 3 things, tax, spend and make laws. The vast majority of actual issues are either binary or on a 2 dimensional spectrum (you support the death penalty, oppose it, or you narrowly support it for certain things. You support a defence department somewhere on the spectrum of 500 billion dollars to 1 trillion dollars and no one serious is talking about anything outside that range, etc. I realize the tech community in general have latched onto some ideas about 'liberatrianism' but that is, in the US, on the slant of smaller government republicans.
The US government only spends money on a handful of things of any significance: Defence related spending ~ 900 billion. Healthcare/social security/social safety net stuff (broadly social programmes) ~1.7 trillion (not counting the healthcare spending done under defence)
That gets you to 2.6 trillion dollars. there's some interest payments on debt. that gets you to 2.8 trillion. And then there is
Coordination and support of things that effect multiple (or all) states or that are too big or variable to be left to individual states, insurance on education healthcare etc. (most of discretionary spending in the US, though I would count veterans affairs and homeland security as really defence related, the term 'discretionary' is a legal budget term, not a practical 'what is this spending supposed to be for' term). Which takes another 400 or 500 billion. Over a lot of different programmes none of which are individually very big.
And lastly, what I would call 'other'. Stuff the government has agreed to pay for that isn't under the umbrella of any specific category, but people decided they want, and a lot of stuff here would be needed to be done somehow, it's matter of how you count it. Think agriculture, NASA, Energy, EPA etc. Again, lots of little pieces of things that have some national significance.
So you've only really got 4 things. No one sane (or who can do math) is going to toss ~230 billion dollars in interest payments off a 3.6 trillion dollar budget. So what do you want?
More or less defence? Republicans vs Democrats. Social safety net stuff: More: Democrats. Less: Republicans. Pet projects or 'national significance' stuff? Everyone wants more of whatever they stand for.
Except that neither of them really do much of that when they actually get into office, and no other political party in the world is much different. Democrats don't want to be seen as soft on terrorism so they waste some money on defence for theatre, republicans don't want to alienate the crazy old man with medicare vote so they won't actually cut medicare much, and well, that's pr
Slashdot Mirror
That's because it's the same company that made the witcher and GoG. That was their first big new AAA sort of release. And thus far I think their only one.
GoG is about good old games, but why give away 30% on your own title when you sell at least some copies through your own store?
It's the same problem the eve guys had, the existing Linux emulation, translation layers and re-implementations are generally better than anything you can do on your own in a reasonable time frame, especially if, like GoG, you're talking about dozens or hundreds of games, so it's a 'we won't do it ourselves but we're not stopping you from using already working solutions' kinda thing.
I don't have the heart to tell him that he's not incredible at everything (and don't want to risk him finding out by taking a class where he doesn't get an automatic "A").
Did you read the same summary I did? He doesn't want his kid wasting time on something he's obviously going to fail at, and would rather focus that time on something they won't fail at.
I could have, and, in fact did, sleep through a large portion of my highschool science and maths, got an 87 average in the lot, got into a theoretical physics programme, and am now getting a PhD in computer science. By far my biggest problem in highschool was a mandated phys ed class, because on a good day I was a 70 student, and on a bad day I was a 50. I'm slightly heavier now than I was then, I'm just shy of 2m tall and just under 90 kilos, I'm just not very coordinated. Unfortunately to get into any of the really good universities you can't have any mark less than an 80. So what caused me no end of grief, cost me thousands in scholarship money and significantly constrained my future academic choices for a decade? My ability to run laps on gym floor or to catch what you americans call a football.
Unfortunately this guy is kinda right. At some point you have to realize that you're going to suck at certain things, and pay people to do that for you. You do need time to find out what you're good at, and being forced to wait until you're 18 or 19 to maybe discover you have a knack for psychology or (as he suggests public speaking) or whatever it is is wasting potential. We get a number of students who are 'good with computers' into a computer science course that don't have the logic or reasoning skills or the science and analysis skills to be computer scientists, maybe they should be computer techs maybe they should just be people allowed to work with computers, but not computer scientists. But we don't have CS in high school, so kids get to us, and they don't know.
This parent has obvious decided that he's seen enough of his kid failing at grade school chemistry, and it's time to move on. And you know what, I know a few economics MSc and PhD students who probably figured out the same thing when they were 15. For various reasons we have decided on certain requirements in highschools, but every country (and sometimes provinces or states) have their own ideas, and they can't all be right, so I can buy the argument that we should be looking at pushing the university model of specialization earlier. When I went to highschool we mandated grade 13, since then they ditched that and now only require grade 12. There were 2 or 3 messed up years there, but now everything has settled down and .... the province hasn't imploded because we cut one year of highschool. Who knew? Could we cut one more? 2 more? What would we lose from it? Those are legitimate sophisticated questions, and eliminating entire years is different than offering more choice and a more diverse set of options.
As the summary points out, there is an opportunity cost here - and in my high school anyway we didn't offer economics, psychology, cultural studies, computer sciences, any languages beyond french english and german, (I believe most of them offer chinese or japanese now, but not german), ours was the only school in the area that had film and drama and music all the way through, thought that was never my thing so I don't remember the details. Certainly kids who didn't happen to get districted to my highschool missed out on those opportunities though, but then our students missed out on various options too.
Now all that said, I don't know the right answer, I have a vague sense of how I would do the data analysis to figure out what is critical and what isn't, but it's not a trivial amount of work. Kids need to learn *some* chemistry, not necessarily highschool chemistry, but they need to learn some. But there's only so many hours in a day you can expect a kid to be in school, so you have to make some choices about what is important, and intelligent people who agree on the facts can probably disagree on where the optimum points to add in various choices are.
Google as a business is getting bigger but its profits are dwindling. Bigger but not better
Businesses are just giant investing services. The question for google is what is it spending all this money on, and will it have any future return that justifies the reduced income right now. Also, I'd rather own a company that acquired 10 billion dollars in assets and made one billion dollars in profit than one that made 2 billion dollars in profit - so we'll have to see just what they justify this expense on.
Moto is loosing money (the rate does seem to have slowed) on top of the 12 Bn purchase price
This would be the question of an asset. I never really saw google buying moto as a good plan unless there's a patent licencing scheme in the works.
Why in earth Google is releasing the new Nexus phone made by any one else other than Moto doesn't make any sense to me at all, apart from google not wishing to piss off other OEMs who aren't raking it either.
You answered your own question. Samsung HTC, Sony etc. all have a choice: Google, Microsoft or go their own way. Google is trying got to the top of the smartphone business by being an open platform and they don't want to fuck that up. Especially not while Microsoft is working hard to close their platform, and have surface etc. If I was samsung or HTC or Sony or the like I would find google much more tempting a partner than MS.
As for the timing. Today or tomorrow? Wouldn't the stock have taken a dive anyway? Just off the top of my head thoughts
Depends on what they spent the money on. That's the problem. The reason these things are secret is because an unfinished document without context could be factually wrong to start (as in the numbers may simply not be correct) or they may have significant information that needs to be included.
From the sounds of the *final* document google views the whole thing as overall positive, they're re-investing in growth, and have seen hugely rocketing revenue overall, which is all in all good, and they suffered a bit from the USD being high relatively. So from *their* perspective this report seemed quite positive, which might be it.
As I said, I'd rather own a company that acquired 10 billion dollars in assets and made 1 billion dollars in profit than one that made 2 billion dollars in profit and acquired no assets, and that seems to have consistently been the approach a lot of growing companies are taking.
One can make the same argument with cash rather than a computer though. I've had the same 50 dollar note in my wallet for 4 months, I am, in effect, hoarding that cash. The value is only relevant when I go to use it, since you are essentially extracting value from the computer on a moment to moment basis it is a poor comparison to 'money' which has little to no benefit by merely being in your (virtual) wallet.
Theoretically bitcoins could avoid the deflationary spiral if there was some central organization making sure there would be an adequate supply, many large organizations doing transactions in bitcoins, viable transaction records for insurance purposes to avoid fraud of various sorts, it would be easier to accept if there was some physical form of bitcoins that could be easily exchanged and so on. Someone rich enough (the waltons for example) could try and buy off enough members of the US congress or the EU parliament to force bitcoins to be considered legal tender. But of course then it would just be another currency in a sea of currencies and, like most alternate currency arrangements including bartering, it's really just a scheme to steal value and dodge tax, and these days no one wants to go along with tax dodging schemes. Including cash.
I believe you two are in agreement, spain is not a case of massive deficits causing the crisis, in fact in the current situation no such examples exist in the western world (Burma and North Korea are not relevant to the crisis in europe).
Italy and Greece are in the messes they have, and they, on the whole, were not all that bad on the eve of the crisis, because of a balance of payments problem, that would be solved either by a currency devaluation or by transfer payments from a larger federal state, since neither of those solutions is forthcoming (and inevitably this will happen to all of the eurozone states) there are relatively few options. The ECB buying bonds to keep rates down, a higher inflation target etc. might work, but if the europeans don't want to think of themselves as one people all in ensuring everyone gets the same healthcare, pensions, education and defence they ultimately will have to break apart, and that process is what is really hurting all of the PIIGS.
While agree that's why the recession wasn't as bad here initially, we're well past the shock of radical deleveraging due the mortgage crisis and onto the aftershocks that's caused in the Eurozone and their balance of payments problems, the US and their woefully misguided attempts to fix the problem by making it worse and so on, and that is into the territory of problems that could have been addressed by competent government policy.
Romney believes in a completely discredited world view on economics and the role of government. Barrack Obama is terrible at actually playing politics, so even if he knows what he should do he's usually incapable of doing it. He managed to win his previous elections by having stuck to reasonably credible policy proposals, and failing to really deliver, Romney is a compulsive liar, who is used to talking to people who drink the same intellectual kool-aid he does, so he panders to whomever is in front of him with whatever they want to hear, but nothing he says is based in reality.
Given the choice - and given the '3rd party' choices are basically in the romney camp of completely discredited or impractical world views your best bet is Obama.
And before you, or anyone else thinks that's somehow a sad statement about democracy, that is democracy, everywhere. In canada and the UK we have baby republicans Harper and Cameron, Cameron has been caught in a double dip recession precisely because he bought into the same nonsense the republicans have been spewing, while canada is saved by the price of oil. In France Sarkozy and Hollande were both looking at ways to radically cut the budget deficit, which in the first place is bad economic policy and hollande wants to do so with a 75% tax on the ultrarich, who can just move to switzerland or monaco. Angela merkel in germany is pushing for european federalism - which might be good policy- a completely untenable prospect politically in europe, and so on and so on. On the rare occasions politicians are actually capable of looking at and understanding evidence they usually don't know how translate that into actual action.
Got Cancer? Here, let's tell your insurance company.
If there is a situation where you need to rely on an insurance company for healthcare you should move.
Also, if people ask about why you're added to a group, make a group, Sir_sri's group of involuntary membership. And add people to it. Demonstration is key. There is enough 'being gay is funny' and gay as pejorative that you can always tell people your friends are assholes, or drunk, or both.
Those seem to be separate issues.
I could start mailing you flyers for the KKK, but that doesn't mean you're a member or a supporter. If you get asked about it you just say 'ya, this crazy guy I know keeps sending them to me, I asked to stop but I can't do anything about it'.
Don't get me wrong, it's a problem that you can be added to a group without your consent, but it's about on the level of being able to get unsolicited mail - because everyone else is in the same boat.
The timeline stuff becoming public thing is stranger. But then, it's facebook, don't post anything on facebook you wouldn't want to be public. The 'settings' are irrelevant. Treat it as your public blog website with your name and photo on the top.
It is political. It's a trust issue. The Europeans don't feel the US can be trusted to not just encrypt the whole damn thing for their own purposes, or fail to maintain it whatever. Relying on something you have no control over is very risky.
They could have gone the route of a droid phone maker. The problem there was that all of their suppliers were already android makers, and competing with your suppliers isn't a great strategy.
Being just another android handset maker could have been equally catastrophic (after all, nothing they've released lately is on par with the droids from Samsung), so given the huge pile of cash microsoft was offering their options were limited. They would have been better to keep toes in both though, and been a Droid maker *and* a WP7/WP8 maker.
Don't confuse strategic vision with ability to execute.
The reason he managed a list of 4 things, and god knows the list is a lot longer than that, is that MS recognizes what the strategy should be, and they've managed 'good enough' but they're constantly trying to find better. Each of their products in isolation is viable but not spectacular, and the changing vision of what the 'next big thing' should be hurts them a lot. But someone at the top at microsoft understands that their real customers for windows are developers and they've been trying to give them the tools and platform to make interested connected products. They've failed spectacularly a few times, and windows 8 seems like it's a clusterfuck before it hits store shelves, but that doesn't mean their heart is in the wrong place on connectivity, they just suck at getting it out working and on time and understandable to users.
simply because the other party has no financial sense or fiscal awareness.
So you're not in favour of evidence based decision making? Because it's republicans and the pro austerity crowd who have no idea what they're talking about. The democrats are weak, but in the right direction.
And the thing is, what would you vote for? Someone who has (your brand) of fiscal awareness but what else? If they don't have a majority they have to trade (Your brand) of fiscal awareness for something to get anything. the system reduces to two parties with pork trading.
Narrow? Sheesh, have you been following all the ridiculous number of things the federal government has claimed they're allowed to do? They're so far beyond the scope of the Constitution at this point that it's not even funny.
Good, constitutions are stupid idea. And as I said, at a very broad level governments can only tax, spend, and write laws, the laws can be rewritten by the next guy in charge before they ever take effect. So basically they tax, spend, and talk a lot. And that's it. Everything else is mucking with details on the inside.
There is no proof that implementing a European system in the US would lower costs. We have different cultures, different health issues
You mean how every other country with healthcare it works for? And no, you don't have different cultures or health issues, except for things that are health issues to be addressed.
Why not? It seems far more sensible to argue about issues on their merits rather than party line
As I said else where, you can ague about issues all you want. That arguing does not, in any system actually materialize into policy on those issues.
Reviews, in my experience in physics and computer science anyway, tend to be more about process than results. Did the work you do cite whomever the reviewer knows about in your field (usually not), is the process you used for your work valid, or importantly, is it clear that it is valid? Are your results understandable to someone who didn't do your particular experiment? Is your paper clear enough that an expert in the field but not your research can build on it? Admittedly I might be biased because I'm bad at explaining myself.
Reviewers aren't out to screw submitters for the fun of it, because they don't want to be screwed themselves and the whole point of research is to find new stuff. But internally when you're preparing a paper your supervisor, or your grad students or the like know what the fuck you're talking about, and someone on the outside can say something to the effect of 'this makes no sense'. "This makes no sense' by the way doesn't mean the work isn't valid, just that you might have done a terrible job trying to write about within whatever constraints your target journal has.
Journals are also becoming a bit overspecialized, and it makes it hard when you do something really high impact that isn't very narrow to know where to put it. My particular corner of the academic universe is broadly under the field of game development, but we really combine work in AI, computational social science, strategic studies and economics, and an AI journal may look at our work and feel (correctly) that it's not enough of an AI problem for them, the computational social science people will say the same thing and so on. The big dogs of Nature and Science publish things that can be cross disciplinary and that aren't (and shouldn't be) pigeon holed into a particular basket. The place I'm at has, or had at least, some really stellar computer vision and computer algebra researchers but odds are if you aren't specifically in those fields you couldn't care less what they do. That can be good work with few citations just because it's really really important to one very tiny problem. A journal rejecting you because you aren't doing enough pathfinding for their pathfinding edition doesn't mean you didn't do good work, it just means the work you didn't isn't as applicable to what they're doing.
I expect as time goes on we'll see more of this. New researchers aren't as biased by picking up a physical journal and reading it, they do internet and database searches (which are becoming much easier and much higher quality) and glue together concepts from multiple journals, but then their work may not really fit with what the previous ones did. It can be broadly interesting and broadly useful, but it's not the feeder disciplines.
If you want a good example take Quantum computing. The 'Quantum' mechanics side of the research fits in easily a dozen different journals (e.g. MRI, Laser spec, semiconductors etc) but very little of the work is meaningfully original, it's a new application of an old problem. The theory of computing side of things probably only belongs in one or two different theory of comp journals, but again, it's re-examining some of the fundamentals of computing theory in a different way and there's not much to do after the first guy does it. But they are, together very interesting.
- you have to form a majority coalition in the legislature to select an executive.
Uh... no, you don't. That's the *easiest* way to, but no, you don't have to. You have to be able to pass a confidence motion - the biggest being the budget- with support from a majority of the house, but it need not be in a coalition. To stay in power literally all you need to do is to survive any confidence votes, which can be done in part by having one opposing political party with no money and no obvious leadership candidate and they will vote to avoid an election.
In the US system they intentionally have a layered system of majorities - they are definitely different systems, but in the end you have to resolve the upper and lower chambers with majorities in each to pass budgets. Basically everything else that governments do is a tack on to the budget of minimal importance, or rules that can be tossed by whomever gets in power next.
Depends on the issue.
If it was puerto rican independence as I said you'd be unlikely to be on the brink of war over it, even if it was a major political issue.
The 'Tea party' was essentially a right wing lunatic 3rd party, they folded into the republican party and basically took over, out with the old, in with the new, with the same name. That's very much a third party movement, the just didn't dress it up in a new set of clothes.
You mean like handing more and more power to quebec in exchange for good governance for the rest of us?
Without a doubt healthcare, which was a combined NDP-Liberal project was a big win, but if they were one party (or effectively one party, running only one candidate from either group in an area) we'd have had much more 'left wing policies'.
The problem is that the gap between liberals and NDP is pretty small, so the choice is pretty shallow, and the reform - PC was huge, but reform one, the PC's basically lost.
That, and I mean this seriously, literally makes no sense. I'm sorry, but 'representation' clearly does not mean what you think it means.
Fuck you.
If I said the same of my own constitution and everyone else's would that make you feel any better about an antiquated piece of paper that doesn't actually say anything all that helpful?
Cartoons can't make people riot, and you're assuming that that is their reason. Even if it is, it's entirely their fault for deciding they should riot because of it.
Did I suggest it wasn't? Again though. Imagine the balance of power was reversed and it was the arabs with all the guns and bombs and you well, without. Their rioting, however unreasonable suddenly becomes a threat to the lives and livelyhood of every single one of you. In effect this is what *they* live with every day. Their free speech is, to put it politely, curtailed, to conform to the U.S. backed, U.S. approved party line.
As I said, you could construct a matrix of all of the different things you're for or against, and end up with hundreds of parties, but honestly, most of them don't matter, nor would it be sensible for the public, who can't figure out when *one* party is completely disregarding facts, to present them dozens of viewpoints they can't understand.
Also, it wasn't an assumption, it was an assertion. There's a difference. In the relatively narrow scope of what governments can do you don't actually have a lot of choices. That's why there are, in every democratic country basically two political camps of left and right. People who value equality more, and people who value liberty more. Local circumstances determine quite what that means, but that is the essence of government. They aren't all purely binary choices, but the choices are largely two dimensional, and the thing is, whether the US spends 700 billion dollars a year or 800 billion dollars a year or 600 billion dollars a year probably doesn't actually matter all that much. Whether or not the US has healthcare matters, a lot, but which, on the spectrum of the british - french health systems (cheap, accessible, and good enough, vs expensive and excellent) you end up with doesn't matter all that much, they're still both way better than what you have now.
And my point was that there are basically only two important parts of government and then various less important arrangements of 'other'. Wherever you sit on those spectra you're not going to get better policies out of the government by having more parties, your personal view may be better captured, but within political parties they run the spectrum as well. Unfortunately you can't have a system where people only consider one issue at a time in isolation, because they all do come down to either spending money, or not, and if so, how much.
The sad truth, if you look at literally every democratic country in the world, is that they all more or less evolve into the same basic sort of scumbag. The details are local, but they're not much different.
Honest truth, you were better off with the british system. The british were better off with the british system before devolution. Though I'll accept that rule from the commons is probably preferable to rule from the lords, there's a strong case for both.
It depends very much on what you think is the most serious problem a government should address (as a system, not policy wise). To the british system this was 'deadlock' (in the computer science sense). You are better off having a government that can make decisions, even if they aren't quite what the majority want, and aren't quite the best, some decision is better than no decision. The US with fixed election dates and two elected chambers is explicitly constructed to create deadlock. That's inefficient, and it means that in an effort to avoid deadlock you still have senseless pandering.
Probably you would be better off with a parliamentary system of being able to go to an election on an issue within 6 weeks. Fixed election dates imposes all sorts of artificial constraints.
Secondly. Cut the size of congress in half. That sounds weird when in the same breath I say the british system is better and they have 600 odd representatives. But they'd be better off with about 200. As would you. As would everyone. At some point you could replace any given democratic or republican representative with any other, and not change anything. If there's no value that each of these people bring, get rid of them. If you have a small number of them it becomes a national scandal when they're caught doing something sleezy. Right now there are so many of them I bet most people can't name more than 10 members of congress. If you don't know who they are you have no idea what they're talking about.
Third: Pay for the BBC. Or equivalent. Yes yes, BBC are a bunch of pot smoking liberal hippies. But they hold the governments feet to the fire because they generally don't fear for their jobs when they're critical of the government. Right now the most basic problem the US faces is that one political party is being completely blatantly dishonest about what their 'plans' would actually do, and yet Mitt Romney gets declared the winner of the debate, despite the fact that basically nothing he said was true. At all. There's no one who can be trusted as a media source in the US to be impartial.
Fourth: Rich people will *ALWAYS* buy themselves a say in government. This is why the UK had a house of lords. They can't buy political influence they *have* political influence. See the distinction? When ever there is a question of 'us versus them' it's quite clear who 'we' are and who 'they' are. If you must have a bicameral legislature (and there is a case for that), at least make very clear what the difference is. The upper house is for the rich, and is secondary to the commons but is also available as a reward for long term dedicated service to the country.
Lastly: Get rid of the constitution. Burn it. All of it. Remember how I mentioned that power is primarily in the hands of the commons not the lords? That happened on the day Nazi's invaded the netherlands and belgium, when Churchill was appointed rather than Lord Halifax. God knows the British cling to precedent far more than they should, but times change, and government needs to be dynamic and live in the moment. Constitutions bind you to a way of thinking about government. Even basic rights like free speech. Take these cartoons of the islamic prophet making them riot and kill people. Now imagine if the military balance of power was reversed. It sounds lovely to go down in a blaze of glory standing up for your principles, it's usually preferable to keep your fucking mouth shut and live to fight another day. One of these days, hopefully not in my lifetime, the chinese are going to stop taking the xenophobic (sometimes justified, admittedly) rhetoric from the US, and you're going to be in for a very very bad day.
TLDR: Be willing to pay for the truth, don't cling to ideas on how to run a government from when it was faster to sail a ship around cape horn than to send a guy on a horse to get a message from new york to california.
because "no taxation without representation" was once cause for a revolution
In what sense are americans, other than Puerto rico or washington DC taxed without representation? I could believe that if Puerto Rico asked for statehood (or independence) and both political parties said "NO" then sure, you could have a third party emerge, but again, that would just replace one of the other two.
This is one of the major issues preventing any real change from happening in the US federal government
I genuinely do not understand why americans, particularly the ones who frequent tech boards, think a third party would actually be helpful. Well I understand why it's on tech boards, there are the automated shills and a particular ideological attraction to a point of view, but in practical political terms it's silly. I live in canada, we've had at one point 5 parties holding federal seats, and now have 4. 60% of the population *doesn't* like the current government, but he has essentially absolute power (within the confines of parliamentary power) because he has a majority of seats. The 'extra' parties just divide the vote up, and whether you do that as a proportional representation and require pork project trading by MP's across party lines or do it at a smaller level of pouring resources into contested districts the net effect of bad federal policy (or at least inefficient policy) is the same.
Third parties, or more, simply lead to horse trading and pandering to try and bribe or coerce the smaller parties into a mainstream voting block, and in exchange they end up with something that's usually crazy or generally bad policy, but that's the price to be paid to govern at all.
Government only really can do 3 things, tax, spend and make laws. The vast majority of actual issues are either binary or on a 2 dimensional spectrum (you support the death penalty, oppose it, or you narrowly support it for certain things. You support a defence department somewhere on the spectrum of 500 billion dollars to 1 trillion dollars and no one serious is talking about anything outside that range, etc. I realize the tech community in general have latched onto some ideas about 'liberatrianism' but that is, in the US, on the slant of smaller government republicans.
The US government only spends money on a handful of things of any significance:
Defence related spending ~ 900 billion.
Healthcare/social security/social safety net stuff (broadly social programmes) ~1.7 trillion (not counting the healthcare spending done under defence)
That gets you to 2.6 trillion dollars. there's some interest payments on debt. that gets you to 2.8 trillion. And then there is
Coordination and support of things that effect multiple (or all) states or that are too big or variable to be left to individual states, insurance on education healthcare etc. (most of discretionary spending in the US, though I would count veterans affairs and homeland security as really defence related, the term 'discretionary' is a legal budget term, not a practical 'what is this spending supposed to be for' term).
Which takes another 400 or 500 billion. Over a lot of different programmes none of which are individually very big.
And lastly, what I would call 'other'. Stuff the government has agreed to pay for that isn't under the umbrella of any specific category, but people decided they want, and a lot of stuff here would be needed to be done somehow, it's matter of how you count it. Think agriculture, NASA, Energy, EPA etc. Again, lots of little pieces of things that have some national significance.
So you've only really got 4 things. No one sane (or who can do math) is going to toss ~230 billion dollars in interest payments off a 3.6 trillion dollar budget. So what do you want?
More or less defence? Republicans vs Democrats.
Social safety net stuff:
More: Democrats. Less: Republicans.
Pet projects or 'national significance' stuff?
Everyone wants more of whatever they stand for.
Except that neither of them really do much of that when they actually get into office, and no other political party in the world is much different. Democrats don't want to be seen as soft on terrorism so they waste some money on defence for theatre, republicans don't want to alienate the crazy old man with medicare vote so they won't actually cut medicare much, and well, that's pr