The gaming thing is very deliberately a separate device designed to be a simplified streamlined experience. I'm sort of surprised they aren't doing a 'Windows Xbox' that's actually a fixed spec 86 PC that will then be guaranteed to play particular games.
The ARM thing doesn't seem to make any sense other than to try and coax Intel into believing there is some serious competition from a different direction than AMD, and hoping they'll innovate (or at least use their fabs to overpower ARM).
Ya definitely. As I say, it's not that the data itself is bad, Jim may not have known he was using so much power, or may know he's using a lot and is happy to look for ways to cut down (where the data becomes helpful), but using that data to publicly shame him would be a privacy problem.
Sure, I wasn't suggesting that these aren't things you can get around if you know it's happening. My point was more about the fact that the data could be exploited.
It takes tremendous insight and a bit of luck to know that right now is absolutely the right time to be in this business and that even waiting a couple more years to finish your degree is waiting too long.
Now the thing is, if you guess wrong, you can always go back and finish assuming you haven't completely wiped out any hope you ever had of having any access to money (parents, loans, etc). So I'm sure there are a lot more people who drop out of school to start a business and then end up back at school trying to finish their degrees a few years later than there are people who have a meteoric rise to success.
If that isn't an invasion of privacy, I don't know what is.
Data by itself isn't an invasion of privacy. What you can use that information for can be (isn't necessarily, but can be). The phone company can know whenever your phone is in use, and to whom. Presumably they can't resell that information some places, because that very much could be an invasion of privacy.
Did you take a day off sick? How much time did you spend on high power consumption activities (can you correlate that to specific devices, like computers or the like) where you then using a computer for 8 hours when you could have been at work? Can the power company sell that data to your employer? (or anyone else?).
Could you use this data to track when someone is home, and break into their house? (how real time is it for example?) Unlike the phone system which has a lot of dead time your power never has dead time.
There is, I think, a legitimate demand for data about power consumption, both for the power providers and because there's a public interest in everyone reducing their power consumption. If you tell people how much power they use, when, and how much it cost you can empower people quite a lot. But could you use this data to demand people turn certain devices off when they aren't home? Could high power consumption indicate that you're running a web business from your basement? Do you have a licence for that? Is that something you want the government or anyone else able to look up easily?
Hell, it may occur that Steam gets more subscribers
What exactly is a steam subscriber? Steam sells games on its service. The number of people who use the service is secondary to the number to games they sell. they don't make money from people having steam accounts, they make money from selling games. And, somewhat importantly, most developers have no desire to see their games sold used, that's why we all fled gamestop brick and mortar stores to steam in the first place.
as games are gifted to people who aren't currently subscribed. Licenses held in escrow until someone creates an account to redeem them? PayPal does that with money already.
You just send an activation to an e-mail address, you don't have to send it to someone on steam directly. I'm not sure if there's a limit on how long steam will wait to let you redeem the code, but I would think it's indefinite, as the activation code as no reason to be deactivated.
Don't get me wrong, getting more eyes on steam and more people using it to buy games is good for valve. But most game developers are not interested in supporting used games and have no desire to go along with it, Valve is more likely to be successful saying it's not obliged to follow this EU ruling as an american company and then it can let the european services stop getting new games. That should be given the caveat that I mean with the current business model, selling actual game subscriptions, or some other monetization strategy (in game item sales maybe?) might toss the problems with used game sales out pretty quickly.
Consoles are aiming to head towards being steam on fixed hardware.
Within this steam and the other PC game stores are going to have an interesting time of it. You can't resell a game you bought on steam to a non steam user (reselling a game within the steam service is an easy problem to solve). That's a very messy problem to solve in general because it would mean legislation to standardize the sale of used games across services, but would only apply to the PC, and the vendors themselves have no incentive to actually follow through. Valve, being a US company may take the opinion that using steam is akin to buying from the US and they have no obligation to support interacting with european services (gamersgate for example), you could end up with a very fractured marketplace.
The way things are going every game is going to end up as some sort of subscription model, that's already started to shift with serious productivity software and most major games are becoming more about whatever online features you can add to it.
Perhaps a better question is how many are capable of doing so and who's definition of a a 'country' do you want to use. Microsoft not making available a store to a country that doesn't exist according to the US or that partially exist through another country (like some of the small pacific island states) isn't an easy comparison.
The Windows phone website lists the Macau special administrative region of china specifically, but to me that's really just part of the Peoples Republic of China, so is that really 179 countries, and the moment you start asking questions like that you start realizing that the number of 'countries' in the world is actually hard to count.
Then of course you have the practical realities to deal with. Not on the list for windows phone are north korea, syria or Iran (although it only lists "Korea" that's the local form both entities would used to describe themselves as they are both the government of the entirety of Korea). That's not microsoft excluding them, that's the US government excluding them and MS being caught up in it as a US corporation, and any US linux vendor would have the same problem.
At 180 countries you're pretty much hitting everyone with internet that isn't under sanctions and the differences between lists of 'countries' start to depend very much on what you care to count as a 'country'. Technically England and Scotland are separate countries, but both are part of the country of the United Kingdom of Great Britain (along with wales northern ireland and the crown dependencies etc.).
Another example. The first alphabetical difference on the list of WP8 countries and the list of countries on http://www.listofcountriesoftheworld.com/ is Akrotiri, any area on the island of cyprus that is legally part of the Sovereign Base Areas of Akrotiri and Dhekelia, which as a single entity form a British Overseas Territory of the United Kingdom. Confused yet?
Technically Canonical is based in the UK I think (according to their legal page), so they will be bound by UK (and therefore EU) rules presumably on who they can and can't do business with or even give technology away to. If there is a total embargo on syria for example, well guess what, no new ubuntu downloads for syria.
Remember sourceforge has had to block Iran Sryia, north korea sudan and cuba (and I think some others).
For MS to have 180 countries seems like they've hit basically everyone in the world they reasonably can accounting for sanctions, unless there are some african quasi states, pacific micro states, or disputed areas that are not being counted nicely.
No, I'm not an american. That was at the university of guelph. Though it wouldn't surprise me if the instructor herself was american. Unfortunately I can't remember her name or what she looked like enough to know 10 years on if she's one of the people listed on the history department faculty page.
So you can learn how to implement engine components on top of an existing engine that you didn't write. You can do that with unreal as well, but it's done differently, each has its place.
So that you can do something where you had anyone who wants it the entire source code if you're trying to demonstrate a new idea (e.g. a new bot AI).
In the case of panama it's control of the panama canal zone, which while by itself isn't a natural economic resource, but it saves a crap load of them in reduced shipping costs.
Though true, wars are generally fought for gold glory and god as one of my past history teachers used to say. I think what she meant is that wars are *started* for gold glory or god. Afghanistan was very much god and glory (for Al Qaeda and the Taliban at least), and it was for them in part about natural resources and control, benefit and possession of the islamic caliphates (yes, that's doesn't actually exist, but that's the kind of level they were thinking at) resources.
The invasion of Grenada is more tricky. By itself Grenada isn't anything, but a major military airfield in Grenada could cover all of the oil export ports from Venezuela, and there was the matter of US prestige on the issue.
By only providing the binaries to donors, it looks like you are only charging nontechnical users, while more technically inclined users get it for free.
which is in practice essentially the entire software industry + the pirate bay.
Admittedly there is a certain element of risk associated with using the pirate bay, but that doesn't seem to have acted as much of a deterrent, and the technical barriers between being able to build something from source and being able to download from TPB are quite a bit different, but now you're shifting tolerances around
The error with this reasoning is that the Fukishima builders knew of the risks but largely chose to ignore it.
And? That's not even factored into my reasoning. The chinese are definitely expecting contractors to ignore risks, whatever the problem that caused the fukushima reactor to not be up to the task, no one wants to cope with the aftermath of that error.
A river can flood, yes, but with nowhere near the same magnitude of flooding that is known to occur on Japan's geography and topgraphy
That's just simply not true. It depends on the river, and what happens. The sichuan earthquake had landslides causing mini lakes, some rivers can over flood by 10 metres, and again, building a safe location away from a dam is all well and good if you actually do it. But if you can bribe your way into a different safe distance calculation what happens?
With fukushima you can't necessarily blame tepco, they might have known that something on the scale that happened there was something to design for, or they might not have. But whatever that problem was, the reactor wasn't able to handle it, and now it's a matter of figuring out what to do with a reactor that's a wreck. In the case of china they're figuring (probably correctly) that even if the reactor builders know risks they're likely to not be up to the task. And then what?
You are conflating the medium of exchange with the economy. They are not the same, and really aren't all that tightly tied in the grand scheme of things. If my country's economy produces 10 bushels of wheat/year and the same 10 bushels sell at 100 USD this year and 200 USD the next and 20 USD the 3rd year the economy hasn't changed... the USD has.
I'm not conflating them. They are different things. But one is tied to the other. If I can buy 1 hour of UK labour for 10 pounds, and I'm paid from 10 pounds worth of US dollars , and due to inflation next year that requires 11 pounds, but I now collect 12 US dollars because I'm more competitive I'm better off.
If you can make money flow faster in the economy that increases wealth. If you can make sure currency supply can keep up with increases in productivity and population you can maximize the effectiveness of that population (otherwise the population has to idle waiting for it's slice of the limited currency supply). If you have significant debt inflation devalues the debt and increases net worth.
You also seem to be advocating for the Greeks (or anyone else) to just inflate their way out of debt. This has been done many times throughout history to effect a virtual 'bankruptcy without a bankruptcy.' The examples - Argentina, Zimbabwe, Germany, and dozens of others - have not been kind to the affected populace.
And it has worked (and continues to work) for Germany, The USA, Canada, the UK, France, Japan, etc. Those countries who had hyperinflation did so because they were facing engineered economic crises with no way out. If you create some particularly bad economic environments intentionally (say by switching to the gold standard and eliminating liquidity or by declaring war on someone, or by having war declared on you, or by economic sanctions or the like) then particularly bad things will happen to the economy.
I appreciate that reading is hard. But I specifically addressed hyperinflation, which is not inflation. Weimar germany had debts in francs and gold that it couldn't pay. That was an artificial constraint on their economy. Zimbabwe and argentina had intentionally reckless behaviour (military coups and wars), as were my examples of other instances of hyper inflation. Hyper inflation which is what you're thinking of, is a symptom of another problem, and ultimately that root cause even if it's partially addressed by inflation remains.
An inflation target of 4% would not obliterate savings (and debt) overnight. But the greek economy isn't competitive. They need to ease the debt burden and make themselves more competitive (within the EU). To make yourself more competitive you need to cut your labour costs, and to ease debt you need to either increase labour output in absolute terms relative to the debt (e.g. double the population of greece with immigration) or declare bankruptcy and not pay some of the debt. Mild to moderate inflation hits both of those problems at the same time. Cutting salaries just decreases the size of the economy but doesn't help with the debt, which is why the greek economy keeps contracting.
Consider the cases of Germany and the UK after WW1. Both had massive debts. Massive inflation in germany wiped out their domestic debts and destroyed their ability to have a functioning internal economy at all. Inflation in the UK on the other hand worked reasonably well until they went on the gold standard in 1925 because some idiots believed only gold was real money (despite spending 11 years not on the gold standard in practice), which was completely untenable, and they went off it again by 1931, which actually put them on the road to recovery. Had they not gone on the gold standard at all they could have avoided quite a lot of trouble. In the end gradual inflation in the UK in a fiat money system allowed them to borrow into WW2 and pay down the debt after. Hyperinflation in germany got them out of the debt, but not the problem deb
The U.S. was bankrupting itself because it was spending more money than it actually had. So instead of actually having to repay debts with sound money (gold), Nixon (Yea, Nixon, you think we should follow this mans lead?) said to hell with it, we'll just go full fiat currency to finance our wars and over spending. Thus the situation we are in today with $15 trillion in debt. The devaluation of currency has been used to finance wars throughout history and the end of Bretton Woods was no different.
And that applies to all wars the US fought. The revolutionary revolt, the civil war, the second world war, the UK was in the boat due to WW1 and 2. The US didn't have enough gold to meet it's debts, had no way to get enough gold and everyone knew that was never going to be realistically possible because gold isn't money. It's just a metal.
Why would countries hoard gold? It doesn't make any sense. If there are investments to be made in other countries, then they will be made, regardless of the type of money used.
To fuck you. Seriously. In the same way greece is getting fucked by the Euro right now. In the same way the chinese used their fiat currency to take your jobs. They have stuff people want, you don't. They could keep gold away from you to destroy your economy.
Nominal value of currency does not equal real wealth. Real wealth is measured in real goods. With a non-inflationary currency such as gold, the price of real goods drops as technology and investments increase, meaning less amounts of money can buy more real wealth.
No, the PPP value of currency is as close as you get to wealth. Gold is an inflationary currency. Gold is also a disaster on debt.
Savings is what allows people to invest in the first place. Again, its not as if people would just roll around in piles of gold, knowing full well they could invest it. If you don't have a solid base of savings, investing is a huge risk. A country with a high savings rate is an economically sound country. Fiat currency destroys savings and robs the middle class, plain and simple.
Fiat currency destroys debt. I think you're living in an alternate reality. Gold is subject to inflationary pressure outside your own control (because you, and I don't care who you are, you don't control the gold supply, gold is produced worldwide with most of it produced by somewhere other than you). That inflationary (and deflationary) pressure from gold can be disastrous.
One persons saving is anothers debt. If you can't factor debt into this you're out of touch with reality (which obviously you are).
Greece is facing a huge reality check and a lesson in economics 101. You can't spend more than you have and expect things to be good forever. Fiat currency won't save you from reality, only stall it by robbing average citizens. Keep in mind this whole print money all you want with no consequences business has only been around since the early 20th century. Many people believe it is soon to be a failed experiment with disastrous results.
Sure. The thing is, if they could devalue their currency they'd actually be better off.
Printing money has consequences, to think people aren't fully aware of that is foolish. Gold has the same problems, you just don't control them with a central bank, you control them by finding gold in alaska or california or wherever, and have to cope with whatever inflationary pressure that creates or whatever deflationary pressure is created as the supply of gold can (or can't ) change relative to the productive value of labour.
The people who think fiat money is a new idea are deluding themselves and the ones who think it's a failed experiment are living in alternate reality. Gold was a trainwreck, even bimetal standards were trainwrecks. Governments had to try and control the supply of gold in the same way they have to manage fiat money, but gold, being a physical tangible thing is inherently outside the control of government, it's in the hands of wherever you happen to find it, and however much you can mine of it.
So while it is annoying from a personal standpoint (because you weren't the one who decided to incur the government debt),
I think that's the root of the disconnect. People who think borrowing money must always be bad don't really want to be liable for debt they would have voted against. Unfortunately for them debt has its advantages, and is a practical necessity to some degree.
It has been abused when $10 Trillion or so was created and handed out to the banks and foreign governments to prop them up.
And what did that do the the value of your currency? Nothing. So either 10 trillion dollars wasn't actually created, thereby deflating your currency, or the economic benefit of that creation of 10 trillion dollars offset its cost.
Is your government doing you a favor by stealing the value of your money in order to make you poorer thereby making your exports cheaper?
You must be an american. The resounding answer to this question is yes. If you could devalue your currency relative to china it would cease being cost effective to move jobs there, thereby expanding prosperity in the US.
The problem the world is in right now is that no one is doing well, and you and I can't both devalue against each other.
In fact if you want a great example of where this worked remarkably well until they stopped devaluing is canada, and where it still works relatively well is germany. The devalued yuan is what has made china the second largest economy in the world and given them a growth rate of ~10% a year. Without that competitive edge why on earth would you employ a million illiterate workers 10 time zones away from where the production is consumed?
Take it to extremes. Would you rather have the money in your bank account be worth 10% of what it's worth now or 1000%? If it's worth 10% you would have to work harder for less money and you could export more. If it's worth 1000% you wouldn't be able to export because you would be able to buy what you need and it would take a bunch of money to entice you to work.
What if, like the vast majority of the population my net bank account is less than 0? Between the debt I owe through the government of ontario, the government of canada, my mortgage, I fortunately don't have student loans but most people in my age/education level do, and the token outstanding debt I have from my monthly spending on the credit card that will be paid off at the end of the month and so on. How are you going to increase the value of my bank account but not the value of my debt by 1000%? Oh right, inflation, in a fiat currency. If you shrunk the buying power of my total cash assets by 90%, but increased my absolute dollar value income by a factor of 2 I would be better off within 3 months.
And yes, I would have less buying power of foreign made products (like those from china and the US) but then I would be able to do less work for more foreign money, or the same amount of work for more foreign money which would gradually increase the value of my earnings.
Inflation is a mechanism to eliminate debt denominated in that currency. That counts for any debt in that currency. If you're an aristocrat and own land inflation doesn't hurt you relatively much, you simply raise rents in pace with inflation while your debt melts away. If you're a capitalist and have vast cash holdings you want to spend them before inflation devalues it, which boosts the economy by increasing demand boosts as you spend, and if you have debts it slowly reduces their relative value.
Take the situation greece is in. Either you cut salaries across the country, which is what the germans have required and has been working out so well that their economy is contracting at a soul crushing pace, or you increase inflation and decrease the relative debt. Greece of course, because it can't control its own inflation is effectively trapped on a gold standard, which the 'gold' or 'euro' controlled by the Eurozone.
Really? You think a river has the same random shit happening? How many tsunamis have wiped out inland rivers? I'm sure you could find *an* example, but it is hardly representative.
Please don't confuse net effect with specific effect. A tsunami that happened to a specific location which combined with some particularly bad luck on creating a doubly tall wave etc was a disaster for fukushima. And that was the first time a wave that big hit that part of japan in at least several hundred years. But a river can have weird shit happen too. A burst damn could cut off or flood something. Major rivers do flood occasionally, sometimes quite catastrophically.
In 2010 http://news.discovery.com/earth/china-flooding-three-gorges-dam-photo.html is a bad, but not extremely bad example of flooding which pushed the 3 gorges dam close to its limit. If that dam fails a situation like the tsunami in fukushima would not be unheard of. Naturally a similar effect can happen on a smaller scale with any dam. Or just flooding. It happens.
Your entire "argument" is that everything the Chinese build is crap. Entirely worthless crap. They couldn't possibly be responsible for constructing and assembling large swaths of infrastructure in the USA, because
the chinese are probably doing a shitty job of actually building the reactors
No. That isn't. My argument is that the risk of reactor builders cutting corners in china outweighs their benefits when there is something inherently much more safe available that will be much less likely to fail, even with contractors cutting corners. The US has terrible infrastructure because they've deliberately chosen to do a bad job of re-investing in it. Whether china is the same way or not is irrelevant, because the scale of damage caused by any individual failure of generic 'infrastructure' is relatively little. It's not like China is the only place in the world with these problems either (http://www.history.com/this-day-in-history/seoul-department-store-collapses for example). Or relatively near where I am (http://news.nationalpost.com/2012/06/29/dalton-mcguinty-calls-for-public-inquiry-into-elliot-lake-mall-collapse/). Corruption and intentionally being reckless isn't monopolized by anyone.
If the chinese were (re) building the infrastructure in the US and it had a 1% higher failure rate that would still be problematic, but it depends how much less money it costs and what the risks are. In china though, a reactor that's built badly would be a tremendous disaster. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2008_Sichuan_earthquake Killed 68000 people. 68 000. There are a lot of people in china, so when stuff breaks a lot of people can die. If that earthquake cracked a nuclear reactor because someone had cut corners in building it you'd have a huge area rendered uninhabitable etc.
Suggesting everything made in china is crap is wrong. Everything made in china should be viewed as suspect. You have to weigh the risk of someone lying about the work they did with the costs and ability to verify. Within any country with corruption like there is in china the hardest part is enforcement. If foxconn ships me something that's not up to my spec, I ship it back. If some state owned power plant construction company is embezzling money off the top the only way you're going to find out is the hard way (and then what do you do about it in something like a nuclear reactor that is supposed to last 30 or 40 years).
And credit where credit is due to the leadership in china. They aren't fond of putting up with this. They recognize people have been corrupt and they're trying to do something about it. But when you set government policy you have to cope with the realities you have, not the ones you want. If this was the US I'd expect the project to be approved at one price, and actually cost 50%-100% more. If this was canada I would expect the government to lie about the projected c
By hard work and spending a lot of money on research?
And you think the knowledge required to perform that research came out of nowhere? It was based on a knowledge-base built and shared through thousands of years by all matter of possible nationalities, ethnicities, creeds, etc.
Built on, but wasn't. I'm a professional scientist. My job is to do something new on top of what other people did. Quite a lot of what other people did has to be paid for. In many cases that work was paid for by governments so it could be public (including my work) but there are huge volumes of knowledge owned by and produced in the private sector.
Not really. It belongs more to the people who put in the effort and money to acquire it than to those who didn't. Otherwise it is foolish to do your own research and smart to copy others' research.
"Copying" other peoples research is the very definition of how science progresses, "standing on the shoulders of giants" and whatnot. Or are you proposing that Westinghouse developed all the knowledge required to build nuclear reactors?
No, it isn't. Science progresses by adding to previous work. It isn't just collecting other peoples ideas, it's adding a new idea that adds something new or novel that no one else did before. You have to acknowledge what other people did so as to not imply their work was yours.
Obviously his 'socialism is slavery' thing is nonsense. I agree with you on that one.
I think this is probably it. If you are in a conference call you interacted with it. If you disagreed with whatever was decided at the conference call, and then never participated again you could make the argument that 'he offered me drugs, I said no' sort of interaction applies, but if you stuck around you're probably screwed.
Knowledge costs money to produce. Hence we have IP laws. If you design nuclear reactors for a living giving away your work with no ownership protection will put you out of a job very quickly. Westinghouse has (correctly) figured that the reactor business is go no where in the US, so they're basically willing to cannibalize any future business they could have had to get money now from the chinese, and then it becomes chinas problem if no one will buy the reactors. All those Westinghouse workers should expect to be out of a job within the decade.
Quite a lot of people have fought, bribed and died over the borders of countries, they mean quite a lot to a lot of people. Even the company that pays me is important in that I don't have any money if they don't pay me.
Slashdot Mirror
The gaming thing is very deliberately a separate device designed to be a simplified streamlined experience. I'm sort of surprised they aren't doing a 'Windows Xbox' that's actually a fixed spec 86 PC that will then be guaranteed to play particular games.
The ARM thing doesn't seem to make any sense other than to try and coax Intel into believing there is some serious competition from a different direction than AMD, and hoping they'll innovate (or at least use their fabs to overpower ARM).
Ya definitely. As I say, it's not that the data itself is bad, Jim may not have known he was using so much power, or may know he's using a lot and is happy to look for ways to cut down (where the data becomes helpful), but using that data to publicly shame him would be a privacy problem.
Sure, I wasn't suggesting that these aren't things you can get around if you know it's happening. My point was more about the fact that the data could be exploited.
It takes tremendous insight and a bit of luck to know that right now is absolutely the right time to be in this business and that even waiting a couple more years to finish your degree is waiting too long.
Now the thing is, if you guess wrong, you can always go back and finish assuming you haven't completely wiped out any hope you ever had of having any access to money (parents, loans, etc). So I'm sure there are a lot more people who drop out of school to start a business and then end up back at school trying to finish their degrees a few years later than there are people who have a meteoric rise to success.
any retard can do that
well in his defence, any retard can run a company into the ground. Running a company well is hard, putting the CEO title on your door is easy.
If that isn't an invasion of privacy, I don't know what is.
Data by itself isn't an invasion of privacy. What you can use that information for can be (isn't necessarily, but can be). The phone company can know whenever your phone is in use, and to whom. Presumably they can't resell that information some places, because that very much could be an invasion of privacy.
Did you take a day off sick? How much time did you spend on high power consumption activities (can you correlate that to specific devices, like computers or the like) where you then using a computer for 8 hours when you could have been at work? Can the power company sell that data to your employer? (or anyone else?).
Could you use this data to track when someone is home, and break into their house? (how real time is it for example?) Unlike the phone system which has a lot of dead time your power never has dead time.
There is, I think, a legitimate demand for data about power consumption, both for the power providers and because there's a public interest in everyone reducing their power consumption. If you tell people how much power they use, when, and how much it cost you can empower people quite a lot. But could you use this data to demand people turn certain devices off when they aren't home? Could high power consumption indicate that you're running a web business from your basement? Do you have a licence for that? Is that something you want the government or anyone else able to look up easily?
Hell, it may occur that Steam gets more subscribers
What exactly is a steam subscriber? Steam sells games on its service. The number of people who use the service is secondary to the number to games they sell. they don't make money from people having steam accounts, they make money from selling games. And, somewhat importantly, most developers have no desire to see their games sold used, that's why we all fled gamestop brick and mortar stores to steam in the first place.
as games are gifted to people who aren't currently subscribed. Licenses held in escrow until someone creates an account to redeem them? PayPal does that with money already.
You just send an activation to an e-mail address, you don't have to send it to someone on steam directly. I'm not sure if there's a limit on how long steam will wait to let you redeem the code, but I would think it's indefinite, as the activation code as no reason to be deactivated.
Don't get me wrong, getting more eyes on steam and more people using it to buy games is good for valve. But most game developers are not interested in supporting used games and have no desire to go along with it, Valve is more likely to be successful saying it's not obliged to follow this EU ruling as an american company and then it can let the european services stop getting new games. That should be given the caveat that I mean with the current business model, selling actual game subscriptions, or some other monetization strategy (in game item sales maybe?) might toss the problems with used game sales out pretty quickly.
Consoles are aiming to head towards being steam on fixed hardware.
Within this steam and the other PC game stores are going to have an interesting time of it. You can't resell a game you bought on steam to a non steam user (reselling a game within the steam service is an easy problem to solve). That's a very messy problem to solve in general because it would mean legislation to standardize the sale of used games across services, but would only apply to the PC, and the vendors themselves have no incentive to actually follow through. Valve, being a US company may take the opinion that using steam is akin to buying from the US and they have no obligation to support interacting with european services (gamersgate for example), you could end up with a very fractured marketplace.
The way things are going every game is going to end up as some sort of subscription model, that's already started to shift with serious productivity software and most major games are becoming more about whatever online features you can add to it.
http://serverfault.com/questions/403732/anyone-else-experiencing-high-rates-of-linux-server-crashes-during-a-leap-second
Seems like this problem didn't do any favours for several linux installs either.
http://arstechnica.com/business/2012/07/one-day-later-the-leap-second-v-the-internet-scorecard/
That can be hard for some people.
Perhaps a better question is how many are capable of doing so and who's definition of a a 'country' do you want to use. Microsoft not making available a store to a country that doesn't exist according to the US or that partially exist through another country (like some of the small pacific island states) isn't an easy comparison.
The Windows phone website lists the Macau special administrative region of china specifically, but to me that's really just part of the Peoples Republic of China, so is that really 179 countries, and the moment you start asking questions like that you start realizing that the number of 'countries' in the world is actually hard to count.
Then of course you have the practical realities to deal with. Not on the list for windows phone are north korea, syria or Iran (although it only lists "Korea" that's the local form both entities would used to describe themselves as they are both the government of the entirety of Korea). That's not microsoft excluding them, that's the US government excluding them and MS being caught up in it as a US corporation, and any US linux vendor would have the same problem.
At 180 countries you're pretty much hitting everyone with internet that isn't under sanctions and the differences between lists of 'countries' start to depend very much on what you care to count as a 'country'. Technically England and Scotland are separate countries, but both are part of the country of the United Kingdom of Great Britain (along with wales northern ireland and the crown dependencies etc.).
Another example. The first alphabetical difference on the list of WP8 countries and the list of countries on http://www.listofcountriesoftheworld.com/ is
Akrotiri, any area on the island of cyprus that is legally part of the Sovereign Base Areas of Akrotiri and Dhekelia, which as a single entity form a British Overseas Territory of the United Kingdom. Confused yet?
Technically Canonical is based in the UK I think (according to their legal page), so they will be bound by UK (and therefore EU) rules presumably on who they can and can't do business with or even give technology away to. If there is a total embargo on syria for example, well guess what, no new ubuntu downloads for syria.
Remember sourceforge has had to block Iran Sryia, north korea sudan and cuba (and I think some others).
For MS to have 180 countries seems like they've hit basically everyone in the world they reasonably can accounting for sanctions, unless there are some african quasi states, pacific micro states, or disputed areas that are not being counted nicely.
No, I'm not an american. That was at the university of guelph. Though it wouldn't surprise me if the instructor herself was american. Unfortunately I can't remember her name or what she looked like enough to know 10 years on if she's one of the people listed on the history department faculty page.
So you can learn how to implement engine components on top of an existing engine that you didn't write. You can do that with unreal as well, but it's done differently, each has its place.
So that you can do something where you had anyone who wants it the entire source code if you're trying to demonstrate a new idea (e.g. a new bot AI).
In the case of panama it's control of the panama canal zone, which while by itself isn't a natural economic resource, but it saves a crap load of them in reduced shipping costs.
Though true, wars are generally fought for gold glory and god as one of my past history teachers used to say. I think what she meant is that wars are *started* for gold glory or god. Afghanistan was very much god and glory (for Al Qaeda and the Taliban at least), and it was for them in part about natural resources and control, benefit and possession of the islamic caliphates (yes, that's doesn't actually exist, but that's the kind of level they were thinking at) resources.
The invasion of Grenada is more tricky. By itself Grenada isn't anything, but a major military airfield in Grenada could cover all of the oil export ports from Venezuela, and there was the matter of US prestige on the issue.
By only providing the binaries to donors, it looks like you are only charging nontechnical users, while more technically inclined users get it for free.
which is in practice essentially the entire software industry + the pirate bay.
Admittedly there is a certain element of risk associated with using the pirate bay, but that doesn't seem to have acted as much of a deterrent, and the technical barriers between being able to build something from source and being able to download from TPB are quite a bit different, but now you're shifting tolerances around
The error with this reasoning is that the Fukishima builders knew of the risks but largely chose to ignore it.
And? That's not even factored into my reasoning. The chinese are definitely expecting contractors to ignore risks, whatever the problem that caused the fukushima reactor to not be up to the task, no one wants to cope with the aftermath of that error.
A river can flood, yes, but with nowhere near the same magnitude of flooding that is known to occur on Japan's geography and topgraphy
That's just simply not true. It depends on the river, and what happens. The sichuan earthquake had landslides causing mini lakes, some rivers can over flood by 10 metres, and again, building a safe location away from a dam is all well and good if you actually do it. But if you can bribe your way into a different safe distance calculation what happens?
With fukushima you can't necessarily blame tepco, they might have known that something on the scale that happened there was something to design for, or they might not have. But whatever that problem was, the reactor wasn't able to handle it, and now it's a matter of figuring out what to do with a reactor that's a wreck. In the case of china they're figuring (probably correctly) that even if the reactor builders know risks they're likely to not be up to the task. And then what?
You are conflating the medium of exchange with the economy. They are not the same, and really aren't all that tightly tied in the grand scheme of things. If my country's economy produces 10 bushels of wheat/year and the same 10 bushels sell at 100 USD this year and 200 USD the next and 20 USD the 3rd year the economy hasn't changed... the USD has.
I'm not conflating them. They are different things. But one is tied to the other. If I can buy 1 hour of UK labour for 10 pounds, and I'm paid from 10 pounds worth of US dollars , and due to inflation next year that requires 11 pounds, but I now collect 12 US dollars because I'm more competitive I'm better off.
If you can make money flow faster in the economy that increases wealth. If you can make sure currency supply can keep up with increases in productivity and population you can maximize the effectiveness of that population (otherwise the population has to idle waiting for it's slice of the limited currency supply). If you have significant debt inflation devalues the debt and increases net worth.
You also seem to be advocating for the Greeks (or anyone else) to just inflate their way out of debt. This has been done many times throughout history to effect a virtual 'bankruptcy without a bankruptcy.' The examples - Argentina, Zimbabwe, Germany, and dozens of others - have not been kind to the affected populace.
And it has worked (and continues to work) for Germany, The USA, Canada, the UK, France, Japan, etc. Those countries who had hyperinflation did so because they were facing engineered economic crises with no way out. If you create some particularly bad economic environments intentionally (say by switching to the gold standard and eliminating liquidity or by declaring war on someone, or by having war declared on you, or by economic sanctions or the like) then particularly bad things will happen to the economy.
I appreciate that reading is hard. But I specifically addressed hyperinflation, which is not inflation. Weimar germany had debts in francs and gold that it couldn't pay. That was an artificial constraint on their economy. Zimbabwe and argentina had intentionally reckless behaviour (military coups and wars), as were my examples of other instances of hyper inflation. Hyper inflation which is what you're thinking of, is a symptom of another problem, and ultimately that root cause even if it's partially addressed by inflation remains.
An inflation target of 4% would not obliterate savings (and debt) overnight. But the greek economy isn't competitive. They need to ease the debt burden and make themselves more competitive (within the EU). To make yourself more competitive you need to cut your labour costs, and to ease debt you need to either increase labour output in absolute terms relative to the debt (e.g. double the population of greece with immigration) or declare bankruptcy and not pay some of the debt. Mild to moderate inflation hits both of those problems at the same time. Cutting salaries just decreases the size of the economy but doesn't help with the debt, which is why the greek economy keeps contracting.
Consider the cases of Germany and the UK after WW1. Both had massive debts. Massive inflation in germany wiped out their domestic debts and destroyed their ability to have a functioning internal economy at all. Inflation in the UK on the other hand worked reasonably well until they went on the gold standard in 1925 because some idiots believed only gold was real money (despite spending 11 years not on the gold standard in practice), which was completely untenable, and they went off it again by 1931, which actually put them on the road to recovery. Had they not gone on the gold standard at all they could have avoided quite a lot of trouble. In the end gradual inflation in the UK in a fiat money system allowed them to borrow into WW2 and pay down the debt after. Hyperinflation in germany got them out of the debt, but not the problem deb
The U.S. was bankrupting itself because it was spending more money than it actually had. So instead of actually having to repay debts with sound money (gold), Nixon (Yea, Nixon, you think we should follow this mans lead?) said to hell with it, we'll just go full fiat currency to finance our wars and over spending. Thus the situation we are in today with $15 trillion in debt. The devaluation of currency has been used to finance wars throughout history and the end of Bretton Woods was no different.
And that applies to all wars the US fought. The revolutionary revolt, the civil war, the second world war, the UK was in the boat due to WW1 and 2. The US didn't have enough gold to meet it's debts, had no way to get enough gold and everyone knew that was never going to be realistically possible because gold isn't money. It's just a metal.
Why would countries hoard gold? It doesn't make any sense. If there are investments to be made in other countries, then they will be made, regardless of the type of money used.
To fuck you. Seriously. In the same way greece is getting fucked by the Euro right now. In the same way the chinese used their fiat currency to take your jobs. They have stuff people want, you don't. They could keep gold away from you to destroy your economy.
Nominal value of currency does not equal real wealth. Real wealth is measured in real goods. With a non-inflationary currency such as gold, the price of real goods drops as technology and investments increase, meaning less amounts of money can buy more real wealth.
No, the PPP value of currency is as close as you get to wealth. Gold is an inflationary currency. Gold is also a disaster on debt.
Savings is what allows people to invest in the first place. Again, its not as if people would just roll around in piles of gold, knowing full well they could invest it. If you don't have a solid base of savings, investing is a huge risk. A country with a high savings rate is an economically sound country. Fiat currency destroys savings and robs the middle class, plain and simple.
Fiat currency destroys debt. I think you're living in an alternate reality. Gold is subject to inflationary pressure outside your own control (because you, and I don't care who you are, you don't control the gold supply, gold is produced worldwide with most of it produced by somewhere other than you). That inflationary (and deflationary) pressure from gold can be disastrous.
One persons saving is anothers debt. If you can't factor debt into this you're out of touch with reality (which obviously you are).
Greece is facing a huge reality check and a lesson in economics 101. You can't spend more than you have and expect things to be good forever. Fiat currency won't save you from reality, only stall it by robbing average citizens. Keep in mind this whole print money all you want with no consequences business has only been around since the early 20th century. Many people believe it is soon to be a failed experiment with disastrous results.
Sure. The thing is, if they could devalue their currency they'd actually be better off.
Printing money has consequences, to think people aren't fully aware of that is foolish. Gold has the same problems, you just don't control them with a central bank, you control them by finding gold in alaska or california or wherever, and have to cope with whatever inflationary pressure that creates or whatever deflationary pressure is created as the supply of gold can (or can't ) change relative to the productive value of labour.
The people who think fiat money is a new idea are deluding themselves and the ones who think it's a failed experiment are living in alternate reality. Gold was a trainwreck, even bimetal standards were trainwrecks. Governments had to try and control the supply of gold in the same way they have to manage fiat money, but gold, being a physical tangible thing is inherently outside the control of government, it's in the hands of wherever you happen to find it, and however much you can mine of it.
So while it is annoying from a personal standpoint (because you weren't the one who decided to incur the government debt),
I think that's the root of the disconnect. People who think borrowing money must always be bad don't really want to be liable for debt they would have voted against. Unfortunately for them debt has its advantages, and is a practical necessity to some degree.
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It has been abused when $10 Trillion or so was created and handed out to the banks and foreign governments to prop them up.
And what did that do the the value of your currency? Nothing. So either 10 trillion dollars wasn't actually created, thereby deflating your currency, or the economic benefit of that creation of 10 trillion dollars offset its cost.
Is your government doing you a favor by stealing the value of your money in order to make you poorer thereby making your exports cheaper?
You must be an american. The resounding answer to this question is yes. If you could devalue your currency relative to china it would cease being cost effective to move jobs there, thereby expanding prosperity in the US.
The problem the world is in right now is that no one is doing well, and you and I can't both devalue against each other.
In fact if you want a great example of where this worked remarkably well until they stopped devaluing is canada, and where it still works relatively well is germany. The devalued yuan is what has made china the second largest economy in the world and given them a growth rate of ~10% a year. Without that competitive edge why on earth would you employ a million illiterate workers 10 time zones away from where the production is consumed?
Take it to extremes. Would you rather have the money in your bank account be worth 10% of what it's worth now or 1000%? If it's worth 10% you would have to work harder for less money and you could export more. If it's worth 1000% you wouldn't be able to export because you would be able to buy what you need and it would take a bunch of money to entice you to work.
What if, like the vast majority of the population my net bank account is less than 0? Between the debt I owe through the government of ontario, the government of canada, my mortgage, I fortunately don't have student loans but most people in my age/education level do, and the token outstanding debt I have from my monthly spending on the credit card that will be paid off at the end of the month and so on. How are you going to increase the value of my bank account but not the value of my debt by 1000%? Oh right, inflation, in a fiat currency. If you shrunk the buying power of my total cash assets by 90%, but increased my absolute dollar value income by a factor of 2 I would be better off within 3 months.
And yes, I would have less buying power of foreign made products (like those from china and the US) but then I would be able to do less work for more foreign money, or the same amount of work for more foreign money which would gradually increase the value of my earnings.
Inflation is a mechanism to eliminate debt denominated in that currency. That counts for any debt in that currency. If you're an aristocrat and own land inflation doesn't hurt you relatively much, you simply raise rents in pace with inflation while your debt melts away. If you're a capitalist and have vast cash holdings you want to spend them before inflation devalues it, which boosts the economy by increasing demand boosts as you spend, and if you have debts it slowly reduces their relative value.
Take the situation greece is in. Either you cut salaries across the country, which is what the germans have required and has been working out so well that their economy is contracting at a soul crushing pace, or you increase inflation and decrease the relative debt. Greece of course, because it can't control its own inflation is effectively trapped on a gold standard, which the 'gold' or 'euro' controlled by the Eurozone.
Really? You think a river has the same random shit happening? How many tsunamis have wiped out inland rivers? I'm sure you could find *an* example, but it is hardly representative.
Please don't confuse net effect with specific effect. A tsunami that happened to a specific location which combined with some particularly bad luck on creating a doubly tall wave etc was a disaster for fukushima. And that was the first time a wave that big hit that part of japan in at least several hundred years. But a river can have weird shit happen too. A burst damn could cut off or flood something. Major rivers do flood occasionally, sometimes quite catastrophically.
In 2010 http://news.discovery.com/earth/china-flooding-three-gorges-dam-photo.html is a bad, but not extremely bad example of flooding which pushed the 3 gorges dam close to its limit. If that dam fails a situation like the tsunami in fukushima would not be unheard of. Naturally a similar effect can happen on a smaller scale with any dam. Or just flooding. It happens.
Your entire "argument" is that everything the Chinese build is crap. Entirely worthless crap. They couldn't possibly be responsible for constructing and assembling large swaths of infrastructure in the USA, because
No. That isn't. My argument is that the risk of reactor builders cutting corners in china outweighs their benefits when there is something inherently much more safe available that will be much less likely to fail, even with contractors cutting corners. The US has terrible infrastructure because they've deliberately chosen to do a bad job of re-investing in it. Whether china is the same way or not is irrelevant, because the scale of damage caused by any individual failure of generic 'infrastructure' is relatively little. It's not like China is the only place in the world with these problems either (http://www.history.com/this-day-in-history/seoul-department-store-collapses for example). Or relatively near where I am (http://news.nationalpost.com/2012/06/29/dalton-mcguinty-calls-for-public-inquiry-into-elliot-lake-mall-collapse/). Corruption and intentionally being reckless isn't monopolized by anyone.
If the chinese were (re) building the infrastructure in the US and it had a 1% higher failure rate that would still be problematic, but it depends how much less money it costs and what the risks are. In china though, a reactor that's built badly would be a tremendous disaster. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2008_Sichuan_earthquake Killed 68000 people. 68 000. There are a lot of people in china, so when stuff breaks a lot of people can die. If that earthquake cracked a nuclear reactor because someone had cut corners in building it you'd have a huge area rendered uninhabitable etc.
Suggesting everything made in china is crap is wrong. Everything made in china should be viewed as suspect. You have to weigh the risk of someone lying about the work they did with the costs and ability to verify. Within any country with corruption like there is in china the hardest part is enforcement. If foxconn ships me something that's not up to my spec, I ship it back. If some state owned power plant construction company is embezzling money off the top the only way you're going to find out is the hard way (and then what do you do about it in something like a nuclear reactor that is supposed to last 30 or 40 years).
And credit where credit is due to the leadership in china. They aren't fond of putting up with this. They recognize people have been corrupt and they're trying to do something about it. But when you set government policy you have to cope with the realities you have, not the ones you want. If this was the US I'd expect the project to be approved at one price, and actually cost 50%-100% more. If this was canada I would expect the government to lie about the projected c
By hard work and spending a lot of money on research?
And you think the knowledge required to perform that research came out of nowhere? It was based on a knowledge-base built and shared through thousands of years by all matter of possible nationalities, ethnicities, creeds, etc.
Built on, but wasn't. I'm a professional scientist. My job is to do something new on top of what other people did. Quite a lot of what other people did has to be paid for. In many cases that work was paid for by governments so it could be public (including my work) but there are huge volumes of knowledge owned by and produced in the private sector.
Not really. It belongs more to the people who put in the effort and money to acquire it than to those who didn't. Otherwise it is foolish to do your own research and smart to copy others' research.
"Copying" other peoples research is the very definition of how science progresses, "standing on the shoulders of giants" and whatnot. Or are you proposing that Westinghouse developed all the knowledge required to build nuclear reactors?
No, it isn't. Science progresses by adding to previous work. It isn't just collecting other peoples ideas, it's adding a new idea that adds something new or novel that no one else did before. You have to acknowledge what other people did so as to not imply their work was yours.
Obviously his 'socialism is slavery' thing is nonsense. I agree with you on that one.
Yep. It's their knowledge to sell if they want.
I think this is probably it. If you are in a conference call you interacted with it. If you disagreed with whatever was decided at the conference call, and then never participated again you could make the argument that 'he offered me drugs, I said no' sort of interaction applies, but if you stuck around you're probably screwed.
Knowledge costs money to produce. Hence we have IP laws. If you design nuclear reactors for a living giving away your work with no ownership protection will put you out of a job very quickly. Westinghouse has (correctly) figured that the reactor business is go no where in the US, so they're basically willing to cannibalize any future business they could have had to get money now from the chinese, and then it becomes chinas problem if no one will buy the reactors. All those Westinghouse workers should expect to be out of a job within the decade.
Quite a lot of people have fought, bribed and died over the borders of countries, they mean quite a lot to a lot of people. Even the company that pays me is important in that I don't have any money if they don't pay me.