Ugh. I hate those posts which go line-by-line quoting and responding and ultimately don't say anything. That's really what I want to do here, because everything you've written here is just... terrible. I'm only going to focus on one thing though:
Obama appointed Caroline Kennedy as ambassador to Japan, who was completely outmastered in our recent Japanese treaty negotiations(*). (*) Resulting in a treaty which is beneficial to Japan, but a very bad deal for America.
I assume you're talking about the TPP and, in particular, the point that this person is trying to make about the TPP being good for the Japanese auto industry and bad for the American auto industry? If not I don't know what you're talking about, but that's the talking point which was making the rounds.
Let me quote the AC directly underneath that:
The negative impact on the US auto industry really misses the point, protectionism is almost always to the detriment of the country as a whole. Under the deal the Japanese agricultural industry suffers, but all Japanese people get cheaper food. It's a net benefit to Japan, even though it has a negative impact on that specific industry. At the same time the US agricultural industry gains from this.
Likewise: under the deal the US auto industry suffers, but all Americans get cheaper cars. Since almost all Americans drive, it's a net benefit to the US. And, at the same time, the Japanese auto industry gains from this. Exactly the same situation as above.
Disclaimer: I was that AC. Just didn't log in.
Of your points, this is one that I wanted to address because this sort of protectionism is something which really resonates with people who don't think too hard about it. It seems so simple: "Protect American jobs! The only cost is screwing some foreigners! Why haven't we been doing this all along? Our government must be corrupt or stupid or something." It's a topic which demagogues can latch onto, but the only people who protectionism really benefits are the people in control of the industry in question. Even to the peons in that industry the benefit from protectionism is questionable.
It's like those people who claim that climate change doesn't exist because it still gets cold in winter: it kinda makes sense as long as you don't think to hard about it. And that's all it takes to convince some people.
Games come on cartridges, similar to the DS but a little thicker. - This was important to me and I had to go searching to confirm this, so I thought I'd mention it.
Or... don't play online? It's a console, you have no control over it. I trust Nintendo more than I trust Microsoft or Sony, but that doesn't mean that I trust Nintendo - it should probably be assumed that if you take this thing online then it's going to be spying on you.
You can keep playing your online games on your PC (apparently that's what you were planning on doing anyway, since Sony and MS also charge to play online), and use the Switch for single player games.
These aren't all public communications that these people were monitoring. No one has to read my email except the people I send it too. (Not even them sometimes.) No one has to do this.
Who the hell is bongey, and why does he get his own editorial section? The editors are fucking trolling us here, this post is explicitly crafted to be flame bait.
It's because he's an outsider. I know people like to say that politicians are scheming, lying, egomaniacs (SLEs) (they like to say this because politicians are SLEs), but being a politician doesn't mean that you're the biggest SLE around. Think about where he comes from: real estate and reality television.
Amendments are not the same thing at all. First of all, the parent said "pass a law" and an amendment is not a law. Second, setting aside the fact that passing an amendment in our hyperpartisan political climate is effectively impossible, it isn't something that our Congressional leaders can do on their own - it must further be ratified by the three fourths of the states.
Also, an amendment which merely laid out a few ground rules for exactly what constitutes a conflict of interest would be pretty ineffectual. It would invite someone like Trump to come along and just start "pushing boundaries" again, and enforcement of this amendment wouldn't really be possible since all of the enforcement mechanisms fall under the executive branch. So for an amendment like that to work it would either need to give congress the power to influence the president, thus gutting our principle of separation of powers, or it would need to establish a regulatory body which was independent of all three of the other branches of government. Effective creating a fourth branch whose sole purpose is watching the others.
This is... possible, but it's not supposed to be necessary. The whole point of the separation of powers is that the three branches will curtail one another. What's supposed to happen, but won't, is that when Trump starts acting up like this congress threatens him with impeachment and he backs down. I can only imagine two scenarios actually playing out: first and most likely is that congress, confused and afraid, hide under their desks and try to keep anything from happening, hoping for a do-over four years from now.
The second possibility, the long shot, is that after an unextraordinary turnover of power following the midterms in two years, the majority democrats and a few republicans threaten Trump with impeachment and he says that's a rigged system, says they shouldn't be in congress anyway, demands to see their long-form birth certificates, declares that congressmen are taking all of our jobs, claims that he'll make a deal to build a congressional wall on their dime because he's a deal maker who knows how to make deals, and then the congressmen will hide under their desks and wait, hoping for a do-over... yadda yadda.
Those are the only two things that I can picture actually happening.
Our congressional leaders can't pass a law against it, it's prohibited by the constitution for the legislative branch to interfere with the executive branch in that way. That's why those boundaries were always informal ones, yet none the less respected.
The point that the parent was making was that Apple did more than just choose not to implement this feature themselves. If it were as simple as Apple making a choice about what features to include in their product then you would be right, Skype would have nothing to do with it. Apple, however, took it a step further and went out of their way to prevent Skype from implementing this feature.
I'm not going to go down the chain of events that it would have taken for this action to have made a difference in this incident. Suffice that it's pretty unlikely. None the less, Skype is not irrelevant. As a competitor to Facetime it is an important part of the case that the plaintiffs are making and the point that the parent was making as well.
Oh, you weren't trying to make a point at all. Sure, okay. I thought you were going somewhere with that.
Yes, the president is not part of the legislative branch - I said that because I wanted to be inclusive of not just the president, but I should have said something like "elected official."
It took 8 years to undo the damage caused by Bush.
This just isn't accurate. We still have the TSA, we still have prisoners held without trial at Guantanamo Bay, we still have a Patriot Act (even though it isn't called the Patriot Act any more) and carte blanche spying on US citizens, we still have massive massive debt... The damage is most certainly not undone. This is Obama's greatest failure as president - he was elected pretty much with the sole purpose of undoing what Bush had done.
He managed to reduce it in some areas - there are fewer prisoners in Guantanamo Bay, the Patriot Act is marginally less bad than it was, the Bush tax cuts are mostly not bankrupting us anymore - but one cannot simply undo eight years of terrible legislation. You're right that we will be feeling the Trump administration 100 years from now, but we will still be feeling the Obama administration, the Bush administration, etc. Every legislator makes their mark, for good or ill, and when we vote we have to do so with the recognition that the decision we make is not a reversible one.
Seriously. The current VR fad arrived a decade later than it should have? Bullshit. There was a VR fad twenty years ago and that wasn't even the first. The current fad is the third that I can think of, and no more compelling than the previous two.
Head-mounted displays just aren't a good idea. They seem like a good idea, they seem like the first step towards a hollodeck, which is the thing that everyone really wants, but they're awkward to use and any immersiveness that they may impart is fairly meaningless when you're still sitting on a couch. Your sense of immersion is still coming, as it always does, from your own ability to suspend disbelief and from the artist's ability to craft a compelling environment.
Those omni-directional treadmills are more interesting than the head-mounted displays, but it doesn't look like they work very well.
I have a little question for you, just something that I've been curious about: why do police in Dubai drive really expensive sports cars? They're Lamborghinis and such, but not all the same - high-end sports cars from a bunch of different manufacturers. How does that fit in to this mindset?
Everyone here seems to be missing the really important word in the summary: scripted. 455 scripted television series doesn't mean more TV, necessarily. It could also mean less unscripted TV (i.e.: reality television). I can only think that this is positive news. Either reality TV is in decline, or total TV is increasing - either way it should increase the small number of shows which are actually worth watching.
Er... what? There are some AAA like that, I suppose. The ones which get most of the publicity and money tend to be multiplayer focused though. If you want to insult Call of Duty I'm not going to stand in your way, but "passive" just isn't accurate.
I guess if you only play the single player campaign then maybe it's possible (I haven't played a Call of Duty in a long time), but that's really not what the game is about at this point.
No, the Radeon driver was started from scratch. As you surmise: they couldn't open their existing drivers for the same reason Nvidia doesn't - AMD doesn't have all of the rights, the drivers incorporate some proprietary bits from other companies. So they started a project where they would open up the hardware specs and... someone... I want to say Nortel, for some reason. Another company which starts with N dedicated a few full time employees to working on the driver.
There was also a competing semi-open source driver for a while. Forget what it was called, but it took advantage of some binary bits to accelerate development. Don't know if it's still around.
Slashdot Mirror
No. The Wii U is Power PC, this is ARM. This really has nothing in common with the Wii U.
Obama appointed Caroline Kennedy as ambassador to Japan, who was completely outmastered in our recent Japanese treaty negotiations(*). (*) Resulting in a treaty which is beneficial to Japan, but a very bad deal for America.
I assume you're talking about the TPP and, in particular, the point that this person is trying to make about the TPP being good for the Japanese auto industry and bad for the American auto industry? If not I don't know what you're talking about, but that's the talking point which was making the rounds.
Let me quote the AC directly underneath that:
The negative impact on the US auto industry really misses the point, protectionism is almost always to the detriment of the country as a whole. Under the deal the Japanese agricultural industry suffers, but all Japanese people get cheaper food. It's a net benefit to Japan, even though it has a negative impact on that specific industry. At the same time the US agricultural industry gains from this. Likewise: under the deal the US auto industry suffers, but all Americans get cheaper cars. Since almost all Americans drive, it's a net benefit to the US. And, at the same time, the Japanese auto industry gains from this. Exactly the same situation as above.
Disclaimer: I was that AC. Just didn't log in.
Of your points, this is one that I wanted to address because this sort of protectionism is something which really resonates with people who don't think too hard about it. It seems so simple: "Protect American jobs! The only cost is screwing some foreigners! Why haven't we been doing this all along? Our government must be corrupt or stupid or something." It's a topic which demagogues can latch onto, but the only people who protectionism really benefits are the people in control of the industry in question. Even to the peons in that industry the benefit from protectionism is questionable.
It's like those people who claim that climate change doesn't exist because it still gets cold in winter: it kinda makes sense as long as you don't think to hard about it. And that's all it takes to convince some people.
I was concerned that the Switch might be digital only, so important in a good way. This way I can actually own the games that I buy.
Games come on cartridges, similar to the DS but a little thicker. - This was important to me and I had to go searching to confirm this, so I thought I'd mention it.
Or... don't play online? It's a console, you have no control over it. I trust Nintendo more than I trust Microsoft or Sony, but that doesn't mean that I trust Nintendo - it should probably be assumed that if you take this thing online then it's going to be spying on you.
You can keep playing your online games on your PC (apparently that's what you were planning on doing anyway, since Sony and MS also charge to play online), and use the Switch for single player games.
Using a web-based email client does not mean that email is "on the web."
Of course not, only computers look at your data. Humans look at copies of your data that the computers then produce. See the difference?
These aren't all public communications that these people were monitoring. No one has to read my email except the people I send it too. (Not even them sometimes.) No one has to do this.
Intel has force bundled this so they can kill the low end graphics market
Is that really the objective? Why would Intel want to kill the low end graphics market? It competes with none of their products.
Who the hell is bongey, and why does he get his own editorial section? The editors are fucking trolling us here, this post is explicitly crafted to be flame bait.
It's because he's an outsider. I know people like to say that politicians are scheming, lying, egomaniacs (SLEs) (they like to say this because politicians are SLEs), but being a politician doesn't mean that you're the biggest SLE around. Think about where he comes from: real estate and reality television.
The D's also want to keep the poor people in their place. Why do you think the D's candidate didn't win?
What do these things have to do with one another? I'm not following you.
Amendments are not the same thing at all. First of all, the parent said "pass a law" and an amendment is not a law. Second, setting aside the fact that passing an amendment in our hyperpartisan political climate is effectively impossible, it isn't something that our Congressional leaders can do on their own - it must further be ratified by the three fourths of the states.
Also, an amendment which merely laid out a few ground rules for exactly what constitutes a conflict of interest would be pretty ineffectual. It would invite someone like Trump to come along and just start "pushing boundaries" again, and enforcement of this amendment wouldn't really be possible since all of the enforcement mechanisms fall under the executive branch. So for an amendment like that to work it would either need to give congress the power to influence the president, thus gutting our principle of separation of powers, or it would need to establish a regulatory body which was independent of all three of the other branches of government. Effective creating a fourth branch whose sole purpose is watching the others.
This is... possible, but it's not supposed to be necessary. The whole point of the separation of powers is that the three branches will curtail one another. What's supposed to happen, but won't, is that when Trump starts acting up like this congress threatens him with impeachment and he backs down. I can only imagine two scenarios actually playing out: first and most likely is that congress, confused and afraid, hide under their desks and try to keep anything from happening, hoping for a do-over four years from now. The second possibility, the long shot, is that after an unextraordinary turnover of power following the midterms in two years, the majority democrats and a few republicans threaten Trump with impeachment and he says that's a rigged system, says they shouldn't be in congress anyway, demands to see their long-form birth certificates, declares that congressmen are taking all of our jobs, claims that he'll make a deal to build a congressional wall on their dime because he's a deal maker who knows how to make deals, and then the congressmen will hide under their desks and wait, hoping for a do-over... yadda yadda.
Those are the only two things that I can picture actually happening.
Our congressional leaders can't pass a law against it, it's prohibited by the constitution for the legislative branch to interfere with the executive branch in that way. That's why those boundaries were always informal ones, yet none the less respected.
Interesting, I didn't know that. Okay, maybe Skype was a bad example.
The point that the parent was making was that Apple did more than just choose not to implement this feature themselves. If it were as simple as Apple making a choice about what features to include in their product then you would be right, Skype would have nothing to do with it. Apple, however, took it a step further and went out of their way to prevent Skype from implementing this feature.
I'm not going to go down the chain of events that it would have taken for this action to have made a difference in this incident. Suffice that it's pretty unlikely. None the less, Skype is not irrelevant. As a competitor to Facetime it is an important part of the case that the plaintiffs are making and the point that the parent was making as well.
Oh, you weren't trying to make a point at all. Sure, okay. I thought you were going somewhere with that.
Yes, the president is not part of the legislative branch - I said that because I wanted to be inclusive of not just the president, but I should have said something like "elected official."
This is a vague response. There are a lot of points that you could be trying to make here, none invalidate what I said above.
It took 8 years to undo the damage caused by Bush.
This just isn't accurate. We still have the TSA, we still have prisoners held without trial at Guantanamo Bay, we still have a Patriot Act (even though it isn't called the Patriot Act any more) and carte blanche spying on US citizens, we still have massive massive debt... The damage is most certainly not undone. This is Obama's greatest failure as president - he was elected pretty much with the sole purpose of undoing what Bush had done.
He managed to reduce it in some areas - there are fewer prisoners in Guantanamo Bay, the Patriot Act is marginally less bad than it was, the Bush tax cuts are mostly not bankrupting us anymore - but one cannot simply undo eight years of terrible legislation. You're right that we will be feeling the Trump administration 100 years from now, but we will still be feeling the Obama administration, the Bush administration, etc. Every legislator makes their mark, for good or ill, and when we vote we have to do so with the recognition that the decision we make is not a reversible one.
Aw. Okay buddy - you have permission to hate whoever you like. If there's anything Trumpmerica stands for, that's it.
Seriously. The current VR fad arrived a decade later than it should have? Bullshit. There was a VR fad twenty years ago and that wasn't even the first. The current fad is the third that I can think of, and no more compelling than the previous two.
Head-mounted displays just aren't a good idea. They seem like a good idea, they seem like the first step towards a hollodeck, which is the thing that everyone really wants, but they're awkward to use and any immersiveness that they may impart is fairly meaningless when you're still sitting on a couch. Your sense of immersion is still coming, as it always does, from your own ability to suspend disbelief and from the artist's ability to craft a compelling environment.
Those omni-directional treadmills are more interesting than the head-mounted displays, but it doesn't look like they work very well.
I have a little question for you, just something that I've been curious about: why do police in Dubai drive really expensive sports cars? They're Lamborghinis and such, but not all the same - high-end sports cars from a bunch of different manufacturers. How does that fit in to this mindset?
Everyone here seems to be missing the really important word in the summary: scripted. 455 scripted television series doesn't mean more TV, necessarily. It could also mean less unscripted TV (i.e.: reality television). I can only think that this is positive news. Either reality TV is in decline, or total TV is increasing - either way it should increase the small number of shows which are actually worth watching.
Er... what? There are some AAA like that, I suppose. The ones which get most of the publicity and money tend to be multiplayer focused though. If you want to insult Call of Duty I'm not going to stand in your way, but "passive" just isn't accurate.
I guess if you only play the single player campaign then maybe it's possible (I haven't played a Call of Duty in a long time), but that's really not what the game is about at this point.
No, the Radeon driver was started from scratch. As you surmise: they couldn't open their existing drivers for the same reason Nvidia doesn't - AMD doesn't have all of the rights, the drivers incorporate some proprietary bits from other companies. So they started a project where they would open up the hardware specs and... someone... I want to say Nortel, for some reason. Another company which starts with N dedicated a few full time employees to working on the driver.
There was also a competing semi-open source driver for a while. Forget what it was called, but it took advantage of some binary bits to accelerate development. Don't know if it's still around.