I tried Win 8 last week and as a loyal Windows\MSDOS user and developer since forever, I thought MS were playing some kind of obscure joke. I think they should have released it on April 1st. It's awful! The mess of Desktop mode which seems to combine with Metro in some god-awful juxtaposition of paradigms is painful to experience.
As for people talking about the Start menu, yes, it's jarring not to have it. I don't use it all that much for obvious reasons, but it's an extremely useful feature. I've yet to meet anyone at work who has tried 8 and liked it. Totally the opposite experience of 7, which everyone seems to like.
Note that I've got an iPad and iPhone, and I'm quite happy with those interfaces. The thing is, I'm not likely to have 4 copies of Visual Studio 2010, 2 Word documents, a note-pad, an email client and God only knows what else all running at the same time there. In fact they're toys; I don't work with them. I honestly don't think Metro is going to be satisfactory for the average corporate user or developer. It's going to hurt.
The rhesus macaque is a contemporary, yes, but what people generally mean when they make statements like that is that the most recent common ancestor is more likely to have looked, behaved and lived like a macaque than a Human or Chimpanzee.
My first thought was C# and SlimDX, but you said cross-platform, so I'm thinking Qt and OpenGL. The 2D interface side of things are pretty well taken care of (you mention boxes within boxes, but that is pretty much the fundamental construct in a 2D GUI - you create your custom widget on a canvass). For 3D you could choose an existing library like Ogre, or write your own. But you say you're not a developer, which makes me think that you should stick with what you know because the learning curves on coding in a different language will be difficult for you.
In the case of getting robots to do everything, I personally don't see the problem. We can dedicate our lives to art, music, literature and exploring space (:p). The robots can do everything else.
I'm with LoveFilm at the moment. It's a pretty good service. I usually get a new BlueRay around 3 days after mailing the previous one back. The trouble with LoveFilm is their streaming content is rubbish. There are no decent films or series on there. Well OK, there are but they're all ancient. I was hoping that NetFlix would arrive so I could check out their streaming service. Hopefully BT Infinity will arrive in my area at around the same time (no cable here unfortunately).
Yes. If you look at the actual ice data, you'll see it's not as low as 2007, but is recovering my quickly (as it does annually). I suspect people are just putting more and more ships through, and that is having an effect on where the ice goes.
Listen you fucking moron, calling me stupid may make you feel like a big man, but as far as I can see your entire point is one based on spite and jealousy. Your entire argument is concerned with income disparity, not actual tax paid. Warren Buffet, for example, pays millions of pounds in tax on capital gains. Well, poor people don't pay capital gains. His income tax bill is neither here nor there, because most of his income doesn't come in that form.
Again I reiterate the point, not that you'll take it in: the wealthy put more into the pot than the poor. Marginal rates can be up to 60% in the UK on people earning over £150K. Yes, that's right, the government takes 60% of income above that threshold. It's wholesale theft of an individuals hard work and resourcefulness. It's 40% for people who aren't even "rich", with such a low threshold coming in at around £43K. 40%! The "poor" pay very little indeed of the total take. Add to this the fact that middle and high income earners pay most of the VAT bill as well, and the argument that those who are better off don't pay their "fair share" is unmitigated bollocks. If anything they pay too much.
The problem here is that the government spends too much, not taxes too little.
The problem I'm highlighting is that people are talking about "fairness" when it comes to taxation. But the taxation system is already fair, because it applies a percentage to your income. In many ways it is unfair that this percentage increases (in bands) the more you earn. A percentage is a percentage, it already increases when you earn more! So what these people really mean isn't that the taxation system is unfair, it's that the income distribution is unfair. Well, there are two schools of thought here: (1) you are the owner of your money, and you give the government some of it for the greater good, (2) the State owns all of your money, and it gives some of it back to you as a benevolent gesture. I hold to the first view, because I'm a Libertarian but most socialists hold to the second.
It's also important to remember that when wealthy people get wealthy, they don't store all of their cash on palettes inside a giant warehouse. Their money is out in the world constantly circulating, investing, optimising. So to argue that it's wrong to ever accumulate it at one point of control (the investor) as this somehow deprives the rest of us of it, is also wrong. Either the government is making decisions as to how to spend or invest it, or the individual investor is (again, socialism prefers the former, capitalism the latter), We have quite some bitter experience of government being hopeless at optimising value, as they tend to spend it on cake and circuses for the masses (or voters), and that is precisely how we end up in the situation we are in today.
Now, I'm not suggesting in any way that the system is perfect. It plainly isn't. There are a lot of people card counting in the financial markets and casinos of the world. What we need is proper regulation of it. What we don't need is punitive taxation as that is almost guaranteed to do more harm than good.
I'm not really sure what your slobbering point actually is, because as far as I can see it is simply that you do not understand the concept of a percentage.
There's an easy way to prevent your retirement savings being destroyed: put them under your mattress, or in a low interest account. The fact of the matter is that if you want the highest return, you must take the highest risk. But it seems to me that what you are advocating here is a high return with a very low risk. I have absolutely no idea how this is to be achieved. If people weren't so greedy as to give all of their money to AIG for the 1% extra it guaranteed, and then see it all lost when the system collapses, then they would still have their retirement savings safe and sound. You cannot blame it all on the finance companies. At some point you, personally, have a responsibility to understand the risks when you are investing.
The only sound argument you can make is that these companies lied, with their AAA ratings and so on. This is almost certainly true, but I suppose this goes to the core of the concept of marketing products: how much of the bullshit the droids come out with is really true? Is this face cream really going to make me look younger? Will these vitamin pills really improve the functioning of my immune system? We are surrounded by bollocks. It isn't just the big corporations that engage in it. Even the guy at the market selling potatoes from the back of his van does it. We should always be on our guard to see through it. We should teach our children to see through it. Maybe if we did, we these things wouldn't happen quite so often.
There are only so many art history graduates the economy can absorb. At my workplace the average age of electronics engineers is very high indeed simply because their aren't enough of them around. Students these days don't want to study something "hard" like that. They'd much rather study something "interesting", but totally useless in the real world. This is why I think making them actually pay for their education is a good idea. It concentrates the mind.
They want everything for free, including their Art History degrees. They are not prepared, personally, to put a value on anything, even their education. And they want this abstract entity called "government" to pay for it. And if the government cannot afford to pay for it, they want the government to steal money from the people, by vastly increasing taxation on those who have been most successful, even though on the whole these people already pay more than their fair share. I have no doubt most of the people demonstrating haven't themselves paid a single penny in tax, for various reasons including unemployment and the fact that their parents are the ones paying for their college education. It's such unbelievable hypocrisy.
The occupy crowd is not right. They are touting economic models that have failed in every single country they have been tried (communism, Marxism, socialism). It may be the case that the economic prosperity of the last ten years was illusory. But then even so, the economic model that brought us to this position (Capitalism) has resulted in our current prosperity, which you cannot deny is an order of magnitude greater than comparable regimes managed in the same time. So it is completely wrong to say that Capitalism has failed, and that these "usual suspects" of Trotskyists, anti-Americans and anti-Capitalists have a point. The fact of the matter is that in the UK at least, the top 10% of earners pay 50% of all income tax. The bottom 10% of earners pay 0.6% of all income tax, and the problem with government spending is not that it taxes too little, but that it spends too much.
No, the world's climate scientists aren't suggesting anything of the sort. Nobody in climate science is putting out the line that a change of a few tens of parts per million in CO2 can cause major shifts in climate, such as LIA, nobody, except crackpots who want to make political statements, rather than scientific ones. Even the IPCC think that doubling CO2 will cause only a 1.4K increase. This is almost certainly an over-estimate; the IPCC is a political organisation, not a scientific one. It's interest is in continuing this fraud. But thereafter such a small increase in temperature, we factor in all of the outputs of the climate models. These are conceptual representations that so far have utterly failed to show any predictive power whatsoever.
The problem here is that you assume something is "scientific" if a scientist says it is. I, on the other hand, tend to prefer the idea that the method and the facts are more important than the authority figure proposing them.
No it isn't. It's around 6ppm. That is not enough to account for anything, unless the climate is a few orders of magnitude more sensitive to carbon than we think it is, which it is demonstrably not.
It doesn't have to be living tissue to contain carbon. The carbon doesn't magically disappear until the tree itself dies. So your claim to authority on this matter is somewhat tarnished by making such a silly comment. Perhaps you should take more interest in your half a million trees.
It doesn't matter. It's ridiculous and a very good example of the unbelievably stupidity masquerading as "science" put out by the so-called consensus on AGW. It amounts to around 6ppm CO2 in the atmosphere if it's correct. Are you seriously entertaining the suggestion that the climate is that sensitive to CO2? All current research points to doubling being around 1C, some think less, some more.
Well said. Yes, I suffer from a kind-of social anxiety disorder (it used to be called "shyness"), but I have developed strategies for dealing with it. I think the key is to make a study of other people who are very good at it and emulate them. I think a robot would be avoiding the issue - a kind-of displacement activity. But, I can imagine situations where it would be preferable for some people.
Because there weren't any "crowds of tens of thousands chanting down with the regime". The media angle is simply the fact that the vast majority of people in this country found the `riots' abhorrent.
What are you talking about? "London Youths revolution"? What complete rubbish. It was no such thing. It was kids throwing bricks through shop windows and stealing trainers. It started because a violent drug dealer, thought to be armed, was shot by police. Is that the kind of "working class hero" the "yoof" are looking up to these days? By all means have a riot over living conditions, or social justice, or anything like that, but to have one because a criminal who had himself spent a lifetime causing misery was killed is a completely empty cause. If he'd been killed by one of his fellow criminals, nobody would have batted an eyelid. You disgust me.
Implicit support of fascist dictators by giving them military aid, as compared to implicit support of them on the Left by being against their forced removal. Such hypocrisy from you.
And as for DDT, what are you arguing here? "there's no point in using anti-biotics because microbes evolve to tolerate them"? Is that your idea of a useful debating point?
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I tried Win 8 last week and as a loyal Windows\MSDOS user and developer since forever, I thought MS were playing some kind of obscure joke. I think they should have released it on April 1st. It's awful! The mess of Desktop mode which seems to combine with Metro in some god-awful juxtaposition of paradigms is painful to experience.
As for people talking about the Start menu, yes, it's jarring not to have it. I don't use it all that much for obvious reasons, but it's an extremely useful feature. I've yet to meet anyone at work who has tried 8 and liked it. Totally the opposite experience of 7, which everyone seems to like.
Note that I've got an iPad and iPhone, and I'm quite happy with those interfaces. The thing is, I'm not likely to have 4 copies of Visual Studio 2010, 2 Word documents, a note-pad, an email client and God only knows what else all running at the same time there. In fact they're toys; I don't work with them. I honestly don't think Metro is going to be satisfactory for the average corporate user or developer. It's going to hurt.
And neither does the one supporting the most developers, VC.
Yes. There's no atomic in VC and variadic templates are absent too. These are things that I could really use in my project right now.
The rhesus macaque is a contemporary, yes, but what people generally mean when they make statements like that is that the most recent common ancestor is more likely to have looked, behaved and lived like a macaque than a Human or Chimpanzee.
I've been at -1 since I voiced support for sceptics of catastrophic anthropogenic global warming. It's not really much of a surprise.
Yes, you'll get marked down to -1 for stating the obvious here, unfortunately.
My first thought was C# and SlimDX, but you said cross-platform, so I'm thinking Qt and OpenGL. The 2D interface side of things are pretty well taken care of (you mention boxes within boxes, but that is pretty much the fundamental construct in a 2D GUI - you create your custom widget on a canvass). For 3D you could choose an existing library like Ogre, or write your own. But you say you're not a developer, which makes me think that you should stick with what you know because the learning curves on coding in a different language will be difficult for you.
In the case of getting robots to do everything, I personally don't see the problem. We can dedicate our lives to art, music, literature and exploring space (:p). The robots can do everything else.
I'm with LoveFilm at the moment. It's a pretty good service. I usually get a new BlueRay around 3 days after mailing the previous one back. The trouble with LoveFilm is their streaming content is rubbish. There are no decent films or series on there. Well OK, there are but they're all ancient. I was hoping that NetFlix would arrive so I could check out their streaming service. Hopefully BT Infinity will arrive in my area at around the same time (no cable here unfortunately).
Yes. If you look at the actual ice data, you'll see it's not as low as 2007, but is recovering my quickly (as it does annually). I suspect people are just putting more and more ships through, and that is having an effect on where the ice goes.
Listen you fucking moron, calling me stupid may make you feel like a big man, but as far as I can see your entire point is one based on spite and jealousy. Your entire argument is concerned with income disparity, not actual tax paid. Warren Buffet, for example, pays millions of pounds in tax on capital gains. Well, poor people don't pay capital gains. His income tax bill is neither here nor there, because most of his income doesn't come in that form.
Again I reiterate the point, not that you'll take it in: the wealthy put more into the pot than the poor. Marginal rates can be up to 60% in the UK on people earning over £150K. Yes, that's right, the government takes 60% of income above that threshold. It's wholesale theft of an individuals hard work and resourcefulness. It's 40% for people who aren't even "rich", with such a low threshold coming in at around £43K. 40%! The "poor" pay very little indeed of the total take. Add to this the fact that middle and high income earners pay most of the VAT bill as well, and the argument that those who are better off don't pay their "fair share" is unmitigated bollocks. If anything they pay too much.
The problem here is that the government spends too much, not taxes too little.
The problem I'm highlighting is that people are talking about "fairness" when it comes to taxation. But the taxation system is already fair, because it applies a percentage to your income. In many ways it is unfair that this percentage increases (in bands) the more you earn. A percentage is a percentage, it already increases when you earn more! So what these people really mean isn't that the taxation system is unfair, it's that the income distribution is unfair. Well, there are two schools of thought here: (1) you are the owner of your money, and you give the government some of it for the greater good, (2) the State owns all of your money, and it gives some of it back to you as a benevolent gesture. I hold to the first view, because I'm a Libertarian but most socialists hold to the second.
It's also important to remember that when wealthy people get wealthy, they don't store all of their cash on palettes inside a giant warehouse. Their money is out in the world constantly circulating, investing, optimising. So to argue that it's wrong to ever accumulate it at one point of control (the investor) as this somehow deprives the rest of us of it, is also wrong. Either the government is making decisions as to how to spend or invest it, or the individual investor is (again, socialism prefers the former, capitalism the latter), We have quite some bitter experience of government being hopeless at optimising value, as they tend to spend it on cake and circuses for the masses (or voters), and that is precisely how we end up in the situation we are in today.
Now, I'm not suggesting in any way that the system is perfect. It plainly isn't. There are a lot of people card counting in the financial markets and casinos of the world. What we need is proper regulation of it. What we don't need is punitive taxation as that is almost guaranteed to do more harm than good.
I'm not really sure what your slobbering point actually is, because as far as I can see it is simply that you do not understand the concept of a percentage.
There's an easy way to prevent your retirement savings being destroyed: put them under your mattress, or in a low interest account. The fact of the matter is that if you want the highest return, you must take the highest risk. But it seems to me that what you are advocating here is a high return with a very low risk. I have absolutely no idea how this is to be achieved. If people weren't so greedy as to give all of their money to AIG for the 1% extra it guaranteed, and then see it all lost when the system collapses, then they would still have their retirement savings safe and sound. You cannot blame it all on the finance companies. At some point you, personally, have a responsibility to understand the risks when you are investing.
The only sound argument you can make is that these companies lied, with their AAA ratings and so on. This is almost certainly true, but I suppose this goes to the core of the concept of marketing products: how much of the bullshit the droids come out with is really true? Is this face cream really going to make me look younger? Will these vitamin pills really improve the functioning of my immune system? We are surrounded by bollocks. It isn't just the big corporations that engage in it. Even the guy at the market selling potatoes from the back of his van does it. We should always be on our guard to see through it. We should teach our children to see through it. Maybe if we did, we these things wouldn't happen quite so often.
There are only so many art history graduates the economy can absorb. At my workplace the average age of electronics engineers is very high indeed simply because their aren't enough of them around. Students these days don't want to study something "hard" like that. They'd much rather study something "interesting", but totally useless in the real world. This is why I think making them actually pay for their education is a good idea. It concentrates the mind.
They want everything for free, including their Art History degrees. They are not prepared, personally, to put a value on anything, even their education. And they want this abstract entity called "government" to pay for it. And if the government cannot afford to pay for it, they want the government to steal money from the people, by vastly increasing taxation on those who have been most successful, even though on the whole these people already pay more than their fair share. I have no doubt most of the people demonstrating haven't themselves paid a single penny in tax, for various reasons including unemployment and the fact that their parents are the ones paying for their college education. It's such unbelievable hypocrisy.
The occupy crowd is not right. They are touting economic models that have failed in every single country they have been tried (communism, Marxism, socialism). It may be the case that the economic prosperity of the last ten years was illusory. But then even so, the economic model that brought us to this position (Capitalism) has resulted in our current prosperity, which you cannot deny is an order of magnitude greater than comparable regimes managed in the same time. So it is completely wrong to say that Capitalism has failed, and that these "usual suspects" of Trotskyists, anti-Americans and anti-Capitalists have a point. The fact of the matter is that in the UK at least, the top 10% of earners pay 50% of all income tax. The bottom 10% of earners pay 0.6% of all income tax, and the problem with government spending is not that it taxes too little, but that it spends too much.
No, the world's climate scientists aren't suggesting anything of the sort. Nobody in climate science is putting out the line that a change of a few tens of parts per million in CO2 can cause major shifts in climate, such as LIA, nobody, except crackpots who want to make political statements, rather than scientific ones. Even the IPCC think that doubling CO2 will cause only a 1.4K increase. This is almost certainly an over-estimate; the IPCC is a political organisation, not a scientific one. It's interest is in continuing this fraud. But thereafter such a small increase in temperature, we factor in all of the outputs of the climate models. These are conceptual representations that so far have utterly failed to show any predictive power whatsoever.
The problem here is that you assume something is "scientific" if a scientist says it is. I, on the other hand, tend to prefer the idea that the method and the facts are more important than the authority figure proposing them.
No it isn't. It's around 6ppm. That is not enough to account for anything, unless the climate is a few orders of magnitude more sensitive to carbon than we think it is, which it is demonstrably not.
It doesn't have to be living tissue to contain carbon. The carbon doesn't magically disappear until the tree itself dies. So your claim to authority on this matter is somewhat tarnished by making such a silly comment. Perhaps you should take more interest in your half a million trees.
It doesn't matter. It's ridiculous and a very good example of the unbelievably stupidity masquerading as "science" put out by the so-called consensus on AGW. It amounts to around 6ppm CO2 in the atmosphere if it's correct. Are you seriously entertaining the suggestion that the climate is that sensitive to CO2? All current research points to doubling being around 1C, some think less, some more.
Well said. Yes, I suffer from a kind-of social anxiety disorder (it used to be called "shyness"), but I have developed strategies for dealing with it. I think the key is to make a study of other people who are very good at it and emulate them. I think a robot would be avoiding the issue - a kind-of displacement activity. But, I can imagine situations where it would be preferable for some people.
Because there weren't any "crowds of tens of thousands chanting down with the regime". The media angle is simply the fact that the vast majority of people in this country found the `riots' abhorrent.
What are you talking about? "London Youths revolution"? What complete rubbish. It was no such thing. It was kids throwing bricks through shop windows and stealing trainers. It started because a violent drug dealer, thought to be armed, was shot by police. Is that the kind of "working class hero" the "yoof" are looking up to these days? By all means have a riot over living conditions, or social justice, or anything like that, but to have one because a criminal who had himself spent a lifetime causing misery was killed is a completely empty cause. If he'd been killed by one of his fellow criminals, nobody would have batted an eyelid. You disgust me.
Implicit support of fascist dictators by giving them military aid, as compared to implicit support of them on the Left by being against their forced removal. Such hypocrisy from you.
And as for DDT, what are you arguing here? "there's no point in using anti-biotics because microbes evolve to tolerate them"? Is that your idea of a useful debating point?