It would, since it would create jobs. The problem with the plan is that it's unsustainable, and likely to be completely ineffective. Facing a serious threat of domestic insurgency though it would be perfectly reasonable, depends on how likely you are to have members of congress shot in the head when they try and meet members of the public.
There is a hardened bunker under the whitehouse. That's not exactly secret, but there are numerous others. There's a major centre in Pennsylvania, NORAD command etc.
The raven rock facility (in Pennsylvania but on the border with maryland) was revealed in 2004 as where cheney spent most of the latter bit of 2001 hiding out. Blame (sort of) time magazine for that one. I'm not sure it was actually much of a secret where the facility was.
Biden actually disclosed that there's a bunker in the vice presidents house in D.C. Which again, isn't a huge surprise. You'd have expected there to be bunkers of varying quality in official housing, and on various military bases and command and control centres.
The people generally don't need the federal government. it is symbolic but isn't necessary. The police, fire , even national guard are all funded from STATE coffers. As long as every state government doesn't collapse too it wouldn't take more than a year to completely rebuild the federal government.
Well millions of people need the federal government, to pay for social security, medicare, medicaid defence etc. But most, if not all of what the federal government does day to day is executed by civil servants and can mostly plod along on its own. Without the top echelon of federal officials you just need to replace the officials.
The federal government in the US actually outspends all the states combined by a more than 2:1 margin (http://www.usgovernmentspending.com/fed_spending_2012USrn). It roughly breaks down as 3.8 Trillion federal, 1.4 trillion state, and 1.7 trillion local.
So ignoring your implied fantasy about the role of states, you're right that eliminating a bunch of elected officials doesn't actually change much day to day in how the government operates since any decisions they make take time to implement, and are implemented by people who would presumably not be wiped out. And if all of the people who would implement government policies are gone too you have more serious problems than a line of succession.
Other countries manage elections on much shorter time scales than the US, and can pull off an election on 5 or 6 weeks notice, the US by virtue of having fixed election dates hasn't tried to to that, but you could easily have an election within 8 weeks from any arbitrary date if you were so inclined.
Ya really. Aside from cabinet officials, you then have members of both legislative houses, theoretically the courts etc. Even the military.
It's not like leadership wouldn't emerge, and if enough top level people just got killed you're mostly banking on whomever takes over to actually go ahead and still have future elections and so on, regardless of how exactly succession officially works.
If you start spending huge amounts of money protecting every member of congress, every member of the senate, every senior cabinet member every assistant cabinet secretary, the courts, and then all of their immediate families etc. etc. etc. you're starting to look at billions of spending, and you start getting into serious questions about their ability to live lives relatively normally in fear of rare events.
Sure a nuclear bomb blowing up a capital city (london paris washington etc.) would be more than a little problematic, but in that situation you can't even assume that the 2nd person in line to the throne/presidency is going to still have their mental faculties even if they are otherwise alive and physically uninjured. In that case someone will have to improvise leadership until order can be restored, assuming such a concept is even still relevant.
OEMs won't make Windows RT, or probably any ARM now
Good. It's a stupid idea anyway. Consumers will just be confused by it. It's a business product for business users to lock them out of downloading whatever random shit could infect their tablets, other than that it's a bad idea in general.
But yes, you're right the downstream OEM providers may switch to linux if they get mad enough with MS. That is the great risk MS is taking, but then no one has any loyalty to Dell or HP or toshiba or the like. They know how to use windows, they want windows games and programs to work, the name on the box doesn't matter, so if that means all of the downstream guys fade from the commercial business it won't change much, and it won't help linux marketshare any.
And I'm sure microsoft is actually contracting some hardware maker to build their demo units for them, dell and HP don't really add a lot to the process if you can go direct to the manufacturer.
As I say, I'm not even sure microsoft is seriously trying to sell surface on its own in any quantity. The nexus line is actually expected to sell, but microsoft wants just enough to force the PC vendors to not produce crap, not to be its own OEM.
Sure, but none of the manufacturers even tried to pick up on the tablet form factor.
And quite honestly, the app store does more harm than good to software. We have an app for that, it's called the web. Now I'll grant you that users may want stupefied walled gardens rather than the more chaotic open download from anywhere windows world. But that was never MS's business and they are only slowing coming around to that idea, and reluctantly at that, and rightfully so.
Competitive is an odd word in the hardware business. If you want to spend 1200 dollars on a CPU does AMD have a competitive offering? How about 500? What's the different in performance between a 500 dollar part and a 1200 dollar one?
With GPU's AMD and nVIDIA are pretty close in rendering performance, for specialized tasks (GPU computing) particular hardware may favour one guy over the other. But if 90% of the market is in GPU parts that cost less than 400 dollars, whether or not you hold the top spot at the 500 dollar price point doesn't really matter. It's more of an advertising problem than a technical one.
Some of us (myself included) have things like GTX 680's, 5970's and so on, those can be 600, 800 dollar parts. They aren't cheap, but they also aren't normal. If you wanted to buy a 350 dollar GPU from Newegg or equivalent yesterday both nVIDIA and AMD had competitive parts in that price bracket. Even at the top end, the 7970 was slower, but not much slower overall than the competitively priced nVIDIA part, and we're talking about theoretical performance anyway, experience with a specific game and driver support matters a lot to the experience.
And while yes, the graphics division of AMD is still based in Markham as time goes on we're seeing more integrated CPU-GPU products. That's not really the segment we're talking about here, but they're very much becoming an integrated outfit.
Microsofts business model for years was to build software that could run on a wide variety of hardware. They'd do some mock up non commercial things to show off concepts, and then leave it up to all of the 3rd party teams to either develop their own ideas, or to pick up on microsofts ideas and role with it.
And that's why we've all been using mTablets since 2000, because Bill Gates told us tablets were the future in 2000, with a half decent demo in 2002 of something that I think was even keyboardless (in the MS parlance that made it a slate).
Now here's the strange part. I've had tablets (convertible tablets) since 2005. Toshiba, HP. The latter has working touch on it, but the virtual keyboard input was always shitty, given that it was connected to a keyboard already that's not a huge surprise. So microsoft and partners *could* have had the iPad equivalent as early as 2003. And didn't, unless they didn't get touch working nicely until 2008. But either way, the manufacturers didn't innovate.
Surface is microsoft trying to either give their manufacturers a swift kick in the arse and shame them into doing something. Or its microsoft deciding that it can't rely on the manufacturers anymore, and it's going to do it itself (think xbox). A microsoft equivalent of the google nexus line of thinking is actually really compelling. Not so much because I'd want to buy one, but because it might make everyone else wake up and start making things worth buying.
yes, and the payout against social security is very much a risk driven process. You are guaranteed a payment, but that payment may have a shitty compared to alternatives. That's insurance.
Insurance is risk management. Collectivizing risk management at a government level is a form of insurance.
did you seriously suggest women should be denied the right to vote? brilliant.
I was making reference to Jim Crow laws that prevented blacks from voting by coming with with arbitrarily hard tests for blacks so that they couldn't possibly pass. Those were overturned in the 1960's in the US with voter's rights act and civil rights act. The 19th amendment (and, admittedly, I'm not an american so I could simply be wrong in assuming you are, was what granted women the right to vote).
Just because you have the misfortune to live in the US doesn't mean the rest of us do. The principle applies everywhere, and people are more familiar with Jim Crow laws as a concept than they are with the equivalents in the UK (in part because they simply forbid chinese/indians/etc. to vote, and there was no pretense about it).
But yes, the US political system is pretty much rotten to the core, but that's not anything new. It's particularly bad in light of citizens united, but well, it wasn't exactly good before.
Social security is a giant insurance system, as is medicare/medicaid. The government is merely the collection of the people, and they are very much things that entail certain risks based on potential unknown costs or provide guaranteed income without any knowledge of future tax receipts.
If you lose your job, and are poor, you collect medicaid. That's insurance. You also get unemployment, that's also insurance. You pay into some sort of social security or have a government old age pension that's an insurance system. You personally are guaranteed some payout, but that payout may be (and probably is) significantly less than if you could invest the money yourself. On the other hand, you can't lose everything and have 0 income. That's insurance.
The whole currency argument you're making is nonsense.
True, but either way, if a chinese guy is richer/smarter than an american guy, and the criteria you are really evaluation on is rich/smart then there's nothing wrong with taking the whichever one best fits the metric you want.
As was said in another thread earlier this week too, education costs money, a lot of it. You can't fault schools for trying to make money because it doesn't do anyone any favours if they run out of money.
True, but you shouldn't introduce artificial barriers to voting. The US for example has gotten rid of tests to qualify for voting precisely because it disenfranchised certain voters.
Besides, the electorate at large can't really make educated decisions about policy. They try, but ultimately the best you can do is set the tone for the type of politician you want to represent you, not have a perfect mesh of policy ideas.
When people are young they tend to be fixated on certain issues, pot legalization, the environment, cost of education that sort of thing. Not that those issues aren't important, but they don't exist in a vacuum, and as you get older and spend more time being aware of the broader scope of government (as an insurance system, as a source of stable investment through bonds, as a regulator of various things and so on) you realize more about how you need to vote as a broader ideological vote than a specific issue vote, and you get more worried about not the other guy, or the one who will hit 3 of the 5 things you like rather than the one who will only do 2 of the 5 kind of thing.
But in the end, the vast majority of the electorate wouldn't recognize a liquidity trap even if they were in one, and aren't capable of understanding how to vote about the issue because of that. Governments are necessarily large complex operations, and you end up trading off wacky things like individual health care mandates against military bases in swing districts or missile defence for aid against assad in syria. The public as a whole are never really going to grasp tradeoffs like that, and certainly not 4 or 5 years worth of potential future tradeoffs at a time.
You are supposing (wrongly) that there aren't enough seats for domestic students, and so a foreign student taking a seat is depriving a domestic one of a seat.
In that thinking you are completely wrong.
When I was an undergrad I had to take 1st year chem and biology. Both of which had well over 2000 students when the largest classroom was 400 at my school. By your logic this would mean 1600 people got screwed out of their degree. By university logic this meant running a total of 6 or 7 lecture sets for the same class, covering the same material. Multiple profs, a bit of a headache at test time, so they used the gym, a few minor logistical challenges. A course that big employed about 20 teaching assistants (some places this could easily be over 60 TA's per course, depends on how much else they have to do) that work for grad students since they're usually TAs and 6 or 7 lecture sets by itself would be 2 full time faculty for a year, so it works out to a couple of extra teaching jobs.
Some schools, the ones that cap enrollment, sure, a foreign student is taking a domestic seat. But those schools only want the best anyway, and it doesn't do them any favours to take a kid with a 97 average when there's one with a 98 average. They care plain and simple about maximizing talent. Those schools are also small, and even then, they can grow if they want to. But everywhere else more students is nothing but good. Where I am now could easily handle double our current enrollment, but we don't have enough applicants who are qualified (at least in useful degrees, if you want to get psych, drama, business, english, that sort of thing, they might have trouble doubling enrollment). I think we have about 35K undergrads but had over 50k for 4 years due to a change in education around here, we could reasonably bounce back up to 50k anyway.
Even in a programme like medicine or engineering where there's a hard cap on enrollment, the presumption that half or 2/3rds of graduates are going to leave (or whatever the number is, depends where you are) is baked into setting the caps. If you train 100 doctors a year but only really need 50 domestically and you have 50 foreign students you're not really depriving a local of the chance to go be a doctor in china.
In the long run the chinese aren't going to move 10 time zones for school, and by then the populations of the US and canada will grow into needing the space in universities. But right now we may as well take advantage of people willing to cough up tens of thousands of dollars a year in education fees, plus thousands more in living expenses. All these chinese students have proven to be very good for a friend of mine who works at a BMW dealership. The little emperor wants to look good when he's slumming it with us middle class types.
Apple Foxconn and Clinton are actually late to the party on this one. They didn't move in until more boring infrastructure companies (power, water) set up shop.
Even before Nixon went to china the US was selling the chinese power generators through US companies that had non US subsidiaries. There was I think, a reasonable belief that the wedge between Russia/Soviet Union and China could be taken advantage of by friendly sales of non military things even before full on recognition of (Communist) Peoples Republic of China as the government rather than the Republic of China.
But yes, you're right. The solution to poverty in africa comes from trade. What's happened is that pure aid, in the form of food or money, has devastated economies, since someone from france will give away food why would you pay a local guy to grow any? Since the government gets half of its revenue from aid why would you pay taxes etc. Those two have combined to wreck chaos on economies (they aren't complete 100% effects). Trade isn't really possible until those countries can have credible education and legal systems (so investors won't lose all their money), and there will probably need to be some infrastructure investment.
There's still a need for aid for the moment, locusts, droughts that sort of thing, aren't going to be solved overnight. But in the long run Africa needs development from trade.
And should the military be fighting crime in the first place?
Generally yes.
The US has a rather negative history with its military, so it has a series of laws written from a perspective that no longer applies. Lots of other countries are happy to use special forces and paramilitary police units in both capacities, including the UK, Germany, France, etc.
For them, the sorts of problems they faced, including major terrorist activities with a local ish population and decent funding meant that using the police became unreasonable. So they used the army, or their legal system is just different and they have quasi paramilitary units that do policing work. If you view the role of police to be catching thieves and investigating crime then you can legitimately view the role of the military as being to fight enemies of the state, whether they also fall under the realm of criminal or not.
Look at is this way, if Mexico, Spain and leftists in south america had been funding an insurgency and moving insurgents into the southern US you'd have a very different view of the role of law enforcement versus the army than the US currently does. It's not so much that the US is wrong, it's just relatively rare that it has a problem that really warrants the army, though I suppose the entire concept of SWAT teams is redundant with the army. For other countries, who've been dealing with these sorts of problems for hundreds of years (Northern Ireland, Algeria, ETA in spain etc.) they've come up with solutions that involve using the military. There's nothing particularly wrong with that, as long as the military is trained for it, and appropriately commanded. You couldn't easily have the US army operate domestically tomorrow anymore than you could ask police in the UK to do the job of the SAS tomorrow.
By going to route of contracting their own devices microsoft runs the risk of making enemies of all of their former downstream partners. If they're enemies windows is going to get smacked down even trying to enter the tablet space, and if microsoft only really makes a lead in device (like the Google nexus line) then you just don't buy the Microsoft locked down product and buy the 3rd party manufacturer one that isn't.
In the end I think there is a market for dumbed down, locked down devices. Especially because a lot of people are bewildered by their computers (watch BBC or CNN news anchors ever try and talk about technology and you realize that people have no fucking clue what's going on). Some people need to be protected from themselves, and more to the point want to be anyway. That market is basically where apple lives, and they own that market right now. I have no idea if microsoft trying to get into that market is a good idea or not, but there's probably a good case for their to be a least some windows devices consumers can buy that fit into that category.
Depends on the funding and legal model around universities.
In canada for example the government (provincial) sets tuition fees for a university to be able to accept public funds. You can charge more than that, and be accredited, but you won't get public money. The Richard Ivey School of Business at Western is an example of a programme that went that route (but only for 2/4 years of undergrad and grad school or something weird, they're somehow part of western sometimes and separate from it others, but whatever).
Now the problem is that costs to run universities are increasing. Most of them are full of old buildings, so when the cost to heat or cool things goes up, they're screwed. There's just general inflationary pressure, the fact that staff need to be paid more as time goes on. As it is the technical faculty are becoming separated from industry rates and it's a real problem. A starting faculty at 70k is what a comp sci grad can get straight out of a bachelors.
If costs go up, you need to get more money. In canada at publicly funded universities you typically pay 5-7k per year, and the government chips in another 13k or so (foreign students pay the full amount). If tuition fees go up, well then student loans need to increase to compensate. It's not like students can magically live on 6 or 700 dollars a year less this year than last.
Now rightly, universities are trying to get as much money as they can. They may not run a profit, but they can't run at a loss indefinitely.
So that's one scenario, where cost increases and government approved tuition hikes to meet cost increases drive increased student loans.
In a more european system, where tuition is even less if not zero then it's entirely the government negotiating with universities on the price per student. And then you don't really have effect 2, and least not on core educational things, you might see more expensive restaurants on campus though.
The US system is a bit messier. There are enough schools that set their own tuition rates that you could see a bit of both going on. Where loans are increased in part to keep pace with public price changes, and private schools are taking advantage of that increased capital. But then loans have to be made available for students going to the expensive US schools which means the public ones can demand more money. In canada and europe if you want to go to a school with 20k tuition that isn't med school, well that's your own damn problem. In the US if you want to even go to a school like UCLA you're looking at 12k and tuition rates seem to vary much more wildly even within a state than they do elsewhere.
Without loans a lot of people wouldn't be able to go to school, but somewhat sadly, we're at the point where we're significantly over training in some areas (english, fine arts, history, drama, psychology, etc.) and giving out loans for a lot of those grads is just going to saddle them with debt for decades.
How would that make them money? The steam for linux store is going to be about selling software, not giving it away for free. What do you need steam for at all if you're giving it away for free? They aren't in the business of running a pile of servers for charity.
idtech3 gets you basically nothing on mobile, and it's content creation tools are... uh.... well lets be polite. They're mostly for a first person or 3rd person game. Which, to be fair, is a huge swath of the gaming business, but it's certainly not all of it. Trying to do a RTS is idtech3 would be harder than unity.
A game engine is a LOT bigger than just the graphics engine, at least these days. You have AI, pathfinding (which may be a part of AI), building targets to different platforms, asset management, asset pipeline, collaborative build tools, world editing, level editing (if that's separate from the 'world'), and then support for platforms. And 7 years is an eternity in this business, so technology has plodded along. Even then, id probably used some either custom in house or purchased collaborative software management tools, which aren't really part of the 'game engine' but are the kind of thing that comes with most modern game engines. So sure, they have AI, and graphics and so on, but the whole toolchain, not as much, and not as diverse as unity.
Unity is great for students because they can build a mobile project on their own phones. When they go to a job interview you whip out your phone and say "I made this" and pass it around.
Don't get me wrong, it's nice to have idtech3 in the wild, but the tools are only really useful for solving the problem of building a first person shooter or similar, and it doesn't include support for a lot of the newer collaboration and world editing stuff that a newer engine would use.
Then obviously are just the improvements in technology over the years (ambient occlusion, volumetric shadows, etc.).
It moves a threshold. It's not that all bets are off. All of the British devolved countries inherited some sort of official censorship board, which will have gone through various stages of renaming and so on. But there will still be material that in some way offends the senses and isn't considered suitable for any agegroup. If the Aussie politicians are smart (good luck with that) they'll just adopt the PEGI system and be done with it. But I'm sure they'll find a way to waste money ensuring local sensibilities are met.
That's unlikely. Everything that is currently banned was banned because it was not deemed not appropriate for 15-18 year olds, and there was no way to have an adult rating.
Imagine trying to have 'children;s' television/books/etc. What counts as 'children's'? exactly? There is, I think, a reasonable point at which some content is not appropriate to marketed as for some ages. Even if you're not talking about sex and violence you're talking about material the child might understand (material for 8 year olds and material for 4 year olds both have no objectionable content, but they're aimed at a different level of language comprehension). That's about where australia was with games, treating them like games were only for children, and therefore had to be restricted to content that children could see and grasp.
Then some people who grew up with that stupidity got elected to australian parliament, and got real jobs and make donations to political parties. And now those poor sods down under are catching up with the rest of us.
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It would, since it would create jobs. The problem with the plan is that it's unsustainable, and likely to be completely ineffective. Facing a serious threat of domestic insurgency though it would be perfectly reasonable, depends on how likely you are to have members of congress shot in the head when they try and meet members of the public.
There is a hardened bunker under the whitehouse. That's not exactly secret, but there are numerous others. There's a major centre in Pennsylvania, NORAD command etc.
The raven rock facility (in Pennsylvania but on the border with maryland) was revealed in 2004 as where cheney spent most of the latter bit of 2001 hiding out. Blame (sort of) time magazine for that one. I'm not sure it was actually much of a secret where the facility was.
Biden actually disclosed that there's a bunker in the vice presidents house in D.C. Which again, isn't a huge surprise. You'd have expected there to be bunkers of varying quality in official housing, and on various military bases and command and control centres.
The people generally don't need the federal government. it is symbolic but isn't necessary. The police, fire , even national guard are all funded from STATE coffers. As long as every state government doesn't collapse too it wouldn't take more than a year to completely rebuild the federal government.
Well millions of people need the federal government, to pay for social security, medicare, medicaid defence etc. But most, if not all of what the federal government does day to day is executed by civil servants and can mostly plod along on its own. Without the top echelon of federal officials you just need to replace the officials.
The federal government in the US actually outspends all the states combined by a more than 2:1 margin (http://www.usgovernmentspending.com/fed_spending_2012USrn). It roughly breaks down as 3.8 Trillion federal, 1.4 trillion state, and 1.7 trillion local.
So ignoring your implied fantasy about the role of states, you're right that eliminating a bunch of elected officials doesn't actually change much day to day in how the government operates since any decisions they make take time to implement, and are implemented by people who would presumably not be wiped out. And if all of the people who would implement government policies are gone too you have more serious problems than a line of succession.
Other countries manage elections on much shorter time scales than the US, and can pull off an election on 5 or 6 weeks notice, the US by virtue of having fixed election dates hasn't tried to to that, but you could easily have an election within 8 weeks from any arbitrary date if you were so inclined.
Ya really. Aside from cabinet officials, you then have members of both legislative houses, theoretically the courts etc. Even the military.
It's not like leadership wouldn't emerge, and if enough top level people just got killed you're mostly banking on whomever takes over to actually go ahead and still have future elections and so on, regardless of how exactly succession officially works.
If you start spending huge amounts of money protecting every member of congress, every member of the senate, every senior cabinet member every assistant cabinet secretary, the courts, and then all of their immediate families etc. etc. etc. you're starting to look at billions of spending, and you start getting into serious questions about their ability to live lives relatively normally in fear of rare events.
Sure a nuclear bomb blowing up a capital city (london paris washington etc.) would be more than a little problematic, but in that situation you can't even assume that the 2nd person in line to the throne/presidency is going to still have their mental faculties even if they are otherwise alive and physically uninjured. In that case someone will have to improvise leadership until order can be restored, assuming such a concept is even still relevant.
OEMs won't make Windows RT, or probably any ARM now
Good. It's a stupid idea anyway. Consumers will just be confused by it. It's a business product for business users to lock them out of downloading whatever random shit could infect their tablets, other than that it's a bad idea in general.
But yes, you're right the downstream OEM providers may switch to linux if they get mad enough with MS. That is the great risk MS is taking, but then no one has any loyalty to Dell or HP or toshiba or the like. They know how to use windows, they want windows games and programs to work, the name on the box doesn't matter, so if that means all of the downstream guys fade from the commercial business it won't change much, and it won't help linux marketshare any.
And I'm sure microsoft is actually contracting some hardware maker to build their demo units for them, dell and HP don't really add a lot to the process if you can go direct to the manufacturer.
As I say, I'm not even sure microsoft is seriously trying to sell surface on its own in any quantity. The nexus line is actually expected to sell, but microsoft wants just enough to force the PC vendors to not produce crap, not to be its own OEM.
Sure, but none of the manufacturers even tried to pick up on the tablet form factor.
And quite honestly, the app store does more harm than good to software. We have an app for that, it's called the web. Now I'll grant you that users may want stupefied walled gardens rather than the more chaotic open download from anywhere windows world. But that was never MS's business and they are only slowing coming around to that idea, and reluctantly at that, and rightfully so.
Competitive is an odd word in the hardware business. If you want to spend 1200 dollars on a CPU does AMD have a competitive offering? How about 500? What's the different in performance between a 500 dollar part and a 1200 dollar one?
With GPU's AMD and nVIDIA are pretty close in rendering performance, for specialized tasks (GPU computing) particular hardware may favour one guy over the other. But if 90% of the market is in GPU parts that cost less than 400 dollars, whether or not you hold the top spot at the 500 dollar price point doesn't really matter. It's more of an advertising problem than a technical one.
Some of us (myself included) have things like GTX 680's, 5970's and so on, those can be 600, 800 dollar parts. They aren't cheap, but they also aren't normal. If you wanted to buy a 350 dollar GPU from Newegg or equivalent yesterday both nVIDIA and AMD had competitive parts in that price bracket. Even at the top end, the 7970 was slower, but not much slower overall than the competitively priced nVIDIA part, and we're talking about theoretical performance anyway, experience with a specific game and driver support matters a lot to the experience.
And while yes, the graphics division of AMD is still based in Markham as time goes on we're seeing more integrated CPU-GPU products. That's not really the segment we're talking about here, but they're very much becoming an integrated outfit.
That's pretty much it.
Microsofts business model for years was to build software that could run on a wide variety of hardware. They'd do some mock up non commercial things to show off concepts, and then leave it up to all of the 3rd party teams to either develop their own ideas, or to pick up on microsofts ideas and role with it.
And that's why we've all been using mTablets since 2000, because Bill Gates told us tablets were the future in 2000, with a half decent demo in 2002 of something that I think was even keyboardless (in the MS parlance that made it a slate).
Now here's the strange part. I've had tablets (convertible tablets) since 2005. Toshiba, HP. The latter has working touch on it, but the virtual keyboard input was always shitty, given that it was connected to a keyboard already that's not a huge surprise. So microsoft and partners *could* have had the iPad equivalent as early as 2003. And didn't, unless they didn't get touch working nicely until 2008. But either way, the manufacturers didn't innovate.
Surface is microsoft trying to either give their manufacturers a swift kick in the arse and shame them into doing something. Or its microsoft deciding that it can't rely on the manufacturers anymore, and it's going to do it itself (think xbox). A microsoft equivalent of the google nexus line of thinking is actually really compelling. Not so much because I'd want to buy one, but because it might make everyone else wake up and start making things worth buying.
yes, and the payout against social security is very much a risk driven process. You are guaranteed a payment, but that payment may have a shitty compared to alternatives. That's insurance.
Insurance is risk management. Collectivizing risk management at a government level is a form of insurance.
did you seriously suggest women should be denied the right to vote? brilliant.
I was making reference to Jim Crow laws that prevented blacks from voting by coming with with arbitrarily hard tests for blacks so that they couldn't possibly pass. Those were overturned in the 1960's in the US with voter's rights act and civil rights act. The 19th amendment (and, admittedly, I'm not an american so I could simply be wrong in assuming you are, was what granted women the right to vote).
Just because you have the misfortune to live in the US doesn't mean the rest of us do. The principle applies everywhere, and people are more familiar with Jim Crow laws as a concept than they are with the equivalents in the UK (in part because they simply forbid chinese/indians/etc. to vote, and there was no pretense about it).
But yes, the US political system is pretty much rotten to the core, but that's not anything new. It's particularly bad in light of citizens united, but well, it wasn't exactly good before.
Social security is a giant insurance system, as is medicare/medicaid. The government is merely the collection of the people, and they are very much things that entail certain risks based on potential unknown costs or provide guaranteed income without any knowledge of future tax receipts.
If you lose your job, and are poor, you collect medicaid. That's insurance. You also get unemployment, that's also insurance. You pay into some sort of social security or have a government old age pension that's an insurance system. You personally are guaranteed some payout, but that payout may be (and probably is) significantly less than if you could invest the money yourself. On the other hand, you can't lose everything and have 0 income. That's insurance.
The whole currency argument you're making is nonsense.
True, but either way, if a chinese guy is richer/smarter than an american guy, and the criteria you are really evaluation on is rich/smart then there's nothing wrong with taking the whichever one best fits the metric you want.
As was said in another thread earlier this week too, education costs money, a lot of it. You can't fault schools for trying to make money because it doesn't do anyone any favours if they run out of money.
True, but you shouldn't introduce artificial barriers to voting. The US for example has gotten rid of tests to qualify for voting precisely because it disenfranchised certain voters.
Besides, the electorate at large can't really make educated decisions about policy. They try, but ultimately the best you can do is set the tone for the type of politician you want to represent you, not have a perfect mesh of policy ideas.
When people are young they tend to be fixated on certain issues, pot legalization, the environment, cost of education that sort of thing. Not that those issues aren't important, but they don't exist in a vacuum, and as you get older and spend more time being aware of the broader scope of government (as an insurance system, as a source of stable investment through bonds, as a regulator of various things and so on) you realize more about how you need to vote as a broader ideological vote than a specific issue vote, and you get more worried about not the other guy, or the one who will hit 3 of the 5 things you like rather than the one who will only do 2 of the 5 kind of thing.
But in the end, the vast majority of the electorate wouldn't recognize a liquidity trap even if they were in one, and aren't capable of understanding how to vote about the issue because of that. Governments are necessarily large complex operations, and you end up trading off wacky things like individual health care mandates against military bases in swing districts or missile defence for aid against assad in syria. The public as a whole are never really going to grasp tradeoffs like that, and certainly not 4 or 5 years worth of potential future tradeoffs at a time.
You are supposing (wrongly) that there aren't enough seats for domestic students, and so a foreign student taking a seat is depriving a domestic one of a seat.
In that thinking you are completely wrong.
When I was an undergrad I had to take 1st year chem and biology. Both of which had well over 2000 students when the largest classroom was 400 at my school. By your logic this would mean 1600 people got screwed out of their degree. By university logic this meant running a total of 6 or 7 lecture sets for the same class, covering the same material. Multiple profs, a bit of a headache at test time, so they used the gym, a few minor logistical challenges. A course that big employed about 20 teaching assistants (some places this could easily be over 60 TA's per course, depends on how much else they have to do) that work for grad students since they're usually TAs and 6 or 7 lecture sets by itself would be 2 full time faculty for a year, so it works out to a couple of extra teaching jobs.
Some schools, the ones that cap enrollment, sure, a foreign student is taking a domestic seat. But those schools only want the best anyway, and it doesn't do them any favours to take a kid with a 97 average when there's one with a 98 average. They care plain and simple about maximizing talent. Those schools are also small, and even then, they can grow if they want to. But everywhere else more students is nothing but good. Where I am now could easily handle double our current enrollment, but we don't have enough applicants who are qualified (at least in useful degrees, if you want to get psych, drama, business, english, that sort of thing, they might have trouble doubling enrollment). I think we have about 35K undergrads but had over 50k for 4 years due to a change in education around here, we could reasonably bounce back up to 50k anyway.
Even in a programme like medicine or engineering where there's a hard cap on enrollment, the presumption that half or 2/3rds of graduates are going to leave (or whatever the number is, depends where you are) is baked into setting the caps. If you train 100 doctors a year but only really need 50 domestically and you have 50 foreign students you're not really depriving a local of the chance to go be a doctor in china.
In the long run the chinese aren't going to move 10 time zones for school, and by then the populations of the US and canada will grow into needing the space in universities. But right now we may as well take advantage of people willing to cough up tens of thousands of dollars a year in education fees, plus thousands more in living expenses. All these chinese students have proven to be very good for a friend of mine who works at a BMW dealership. The little emperor wants to look good when he's slumming it with us middle class types.
Apple Foxconn and Clinton are actually late to the party on this one. They didn't move in until more boring infrastructure companies (power, water) set up shop.
Even before Nixon went to china the US was selling the chinese power generators through US companies that had non US subsidiaries. There was I think, a reasonable belief that the wedge between Russia/Soviet Union and China could be taken advantage of by friendly sales of non military things even before full on recognition of (Communist) Peoples Republic of China as the government rather than the Republic of China.
But yes, you're right. The solution to poverty in africa comes from trade. What's happened is that pure aid, in the form of food or money, has devastated economies, since someone from france will give away food why would you pay a local guy to grow any? Since the government gets half of its revenue from aid why would you pay taxes etc. Those two have combined to wreck chaos on economies (they aren't complete 100% effects). Trade isn't really possible until those countries can have credible education and legal systems (so investors won't lose all their money), and there will probably need to be some infrastructure investment.
There's still a need for aid for the moment, locusts, droughts that sort of thing, aren't going to be solved overnight. But in the long run Africa needs development from trade.
And should the military be fighting crime in the first place?
Generally yes.
The US has a rather negative history with its military, so it has a series of laws written from a perspective that no longer applies. Lots of other countries are happy to use special forces and paramilitary police units in both capacities, including the UK, Germany, France, etc.
For them, the sorts of problems they faced, including major terrorist activities with a local ish population and decent funding meant that using the police became unreasonable. So they used the army, or their legal system is just different and they have quasi paramilitary units that do policing work. If you view the role of police to be catching thieves and investigating crime then you can legitimately view the role of the military as being to fight enemies of the state, whether they also fall under the realm of criminal or not.
Look at is this way, if Mexico, Spain and leftists in south america had been funding an insurgency and moving insurgents into the southern US you'd have a very different view of the role of law enforcement versus the army than the US currently does. It's not so much that the US is wrong, it's just relatively rare that it has a problem that really warrants the army, though I suppose the entire concept of SWAT teams is redundant with the army. For other countries, who've been dealing with these sorts of problems for hundreds of years (Northern Ireland, Algeria, ETA in spain etc.) they've come up with solutions that involve using the military. There's nothing particularly wrong with that, as long as the military is trained for it, and appropriately commanded. You couldn't easily have the US army operate domestically tomorrow anymore than you could ask police in the UK to do the job of the SAS tomorrow.
By going to route of contracting their own devices microsoft runs the risk of making enemies of all of their former downstream partners. If they're enemies windows is going to get smacked down even trying to enter the tablet space, and if microsoft only really makes a lead in device (like the Google nexus line) then you just don't buy the Microsoft locked down product and buy the 3rd party manufacturer one that isn't.
In the end I think there is a market for dumbed down, locked down devices. Especially because a lot of people are bewildered by their computers (watch BBC or CNN news anchors ever try and talk about technology and you realize that people have no fucking clue what's going on). Some people need to be protected from themselves, and more to the point want to be anyway. That market is basically where apple lives, and they own that market right now. I have no idea if microsoft trying to get into that market is a good idea or not, but there's probably a good case for their to be a least some windows devices consumers can buy that fit into that category.
AO is effectively banned. ESRB M and PEGI 18 are both available on the various networks.
The last tier of censorship and categorization exists as place to to dump material that doesn't appear to have any value.
Depends on the funding and legal model around universities.
In canada for example the government (provincial) sets tuition fees for a university to be able to accept public funds. You can charge more than that, and be accredited, but you won't get public money. The Richard Ivey School of Business at Western is an example of a programme that went that route (but only for 2/4 years of undergrad and grad school or something weird, they're somehow part of western sometimes and separate from it others, but whatever).
Now the problem is that costs to run universities are increasing. Most of them are full of old buildings, so when the cost to heat or cool things goes up, they're screwed. There's just general inflationary pressure, the fact that staff need to be paid more as time goes on. As it is the technical faculty are becoming separated from industry rates and it's a real problem. A starting faculty at 70k is what a comp sci grad can get straight out of a bachelors.
If costs go up, you need to get more money. In canada at publicly funded universities you typically pay 5-7k per year, and the government chips in another 13k or so (foreign students pay the full amount). If tuition fees go up, well then student loans need to increase to compensate. It's not like students can magically live on 6 or 700 dollars a year less this year than last.
Now rightly, universities are trying to get as much money as they can. They may not run a profit, but they can't run at a loss indefinitely.
So that's one scenario, where cost increases and government approved tuition hikes to meet cost increases drive increased student loans.
In a more european system, where tuition is even less if not zero then it's entirely the government negotiating with universities on the price per student. And then you don't really have effect 2, and least not on core educational things, you might see more expensive restaurants on campus though.
The US system is a bit messier. There are enough schools that set their own tuition rates that you could see a bit of both going on. Where loans are increased in part to keep pace with public price changes, and private schools are taking advantage of that increased capital. But then loans have to be made available for students going to the expensive US schools which means the public ones can demand more money. In canada and europe if you want to go to a school with 20k tuition that isn't med school, well that's your own damn problem. In the US if you want to even go to a school like UCLA you're looking at 12k and tuition rates seem to vary much more wildly even within a state than they do elsewhere.
Without loans a lot of people wouldn't be able to go to school, but somewhat sadly, we're at the point where we're significantly over training in some areas (english, fine arts, history, drama, psychology, etc.) and giving out loans for a lot of those grads is just going to saddle them with debt for decades.
How would that make them money? The steam for linux store is going to be about selling software, not giving it away for free. What do you need steam for at all if you're giving it away for free? They aren't in the business of running a pile of servers for charity.
Depends on what you're trying to do.
idtech3 gets you basically nothing on mobile, and it's content creation tools are... uh.... well lets be polite. They're mostly for a first person or 3rd person game. Which, to be fair, is a huge swath of the gaming business, but it's certainly not all of it. Trying to do a RTS is idtech3 would be harder than unity.
A game engine is a LOT bigger than just the graphics engine, at least these days. You have AI, pathfinding (which may be a part of AI), building targets to different platforms, asset management, asset pipeline, collaborative build tools, world editing, level editing (if that's separate from the 'world'), and then support for platforms. And 7 years is an eternity in this business, so technology has plodded along. Even then, id probably used some either custom in house or purchased collaborative software management tools, which aren't really part of the 'game engine' but are the kind of thing that comes with most modern game engines. So sure, they have AI, and graphics and so on, but the whole toolchain, not as much, and not as diverse as unity.
Unity is great for students because they can build a mobile project on their own phones. When they go to a job interview you whip out your phone and say "I made this" and pass it around.
Don't get me wrong, it's nice to have idtech3 in the wild, but the tools are only really useful for solving the problem of building a first person shooter or similar, and it doesn't include support for a lot of the newer collaboration and world editing stuff that a newer engine would use.
Then obviously are just the improvements in technology over the years (ambient occlusion, volumetric shadows, etc.).
It moves a threshold. It's not that all bets are off. All of the British devolved countries inherited some sort of official censorship board, which will have gone through various stages of renaming and so on. But there will still be material that in some way offends the senses and isn't considered suitable for any agegroup. If the Aussie politicians are smart (good luck with that) they'll just adopt the PEGI system and be done with it. But I'm sure they'll find a way to waste money ensuring local sensibilities are met.
That's unlikely. Everything that is currently banned was banned because it was not deemed not appropriate for 15-18 year olds, and there was no way to have an adult rating.
Imagine trying to have 'children;s' television/books/etc. What counts as 'children's'? exactly? There is, I think, a reasonable point at which some content is not appropriate to marketed as for some ages. Even if you're not talking about sex and violence you're talking about material the child might understand (material for 8 year olds and material for 4 year olds both have no objectionable content, but they're aimed at a different level of language comprehension). That's about where australia was with games, treating them like games were only for children, and therefore had to be restricted to content that children could see and grasp.
Then some people who grew up with that stupidity got elected to australian parliament, and got real jobs and make donations to political parties. And now those poor sods down under are catching up with the rest of us.