I mean I've never been to a big convention like E3, but I'm thinking of something like cute waitresses at a restaurant. You don't order more from a cute waitress because she somehow sold more to you, and I've never noticed restaurants with cute waitresses charging more than others. They just make the environment more pleasant.
And believe it or not a more pleasant environment makes a customer more likely to return to that restaurant, makes him stay there longer and order more.
Perhaps this a dumb question by why not simply develop the parts of the game that aren't likely to change much during development, like data storage / retrieval, mechanics, and the like while saving things like graphics and sound until the game is in the final 6-12 months? In theory it should be possible to have the skeleton of the game pretty much templated out and ready to go for building out the mechanics and then working in the graphics and sound. Why do the window dressings take so much time in a game relative to the frame of the building and the wiring? Are they just doing it wrong?
that's exactly what they are doing - first they put a very small team on the project to develop the engine, backend technology, dev tools,... while the game designers do their magic. then they ramp up the team size massively and start to develop actual art assets, start to write content, design levels,... (which takes much longer than 6-12 months).
My understanding is that in this case Blizzard had already started production when they decided that they need to go back to phase 1 and rework the game design and the technical underpinnings. So they scaled the team back down (no point wasting money on creating e.g. art assets which later have to be laboriously ported to the rewritten engine, or creating dungeons that will have to be trashed because core game mechanics were rethought in the meantime,...).
Except obesity also reduces life expectancy by 6-7 years. link
Therefore, you get 6-7 years of productivity from healthy people, which is worth far more than$31k.
Or you get 6-7 years of super expensive cancer treatments from "healthy" people whereas the obese patient just dies cost-efficiently of his heart condition.
Doctors should diagnose based on full spectrum data collection. Not simply based on what they see and think at first glance.
I had this discussion a dozen times with my brother who is a medical student and the tl;dr is "nobody has the time or money for that".
A doctor will always assume the most likely cause for any given combination of symptoms (even if they don't match 100%) and only start thinking about less likely alternatives if his treatment doesn't lead to improvements. Yes, sucks to be someone with a rare disease (that will only be diagnosed correctly very late if at all) but symptoms are often so unspecific and a thorough examination would be so expensive (let's do a blood screen every time you catch a cold because you might have some ultra-rare disease?) that this is the only practicable way.
Hormonal causes for obesity are possible but pretty rare - a much larger share of obese patients claims to suffer from e.g. thyroid issues than statistically possible. "Just eat less" is the right answer for the vast majority of obese patients and as they will lie to you about their food intake and exercise (admittedly often unconsciously, but then they don't tend to cooperate well when you ask them to keep a diary of every single thing they eat to make the more self-conscious) you never know if your original attempt at treatment did work or not. The share of patients who will lie into your face about having tried everything is probably still much larger than the share of patients who have actually followed your advice and it didn't help because they have some underlying physical issue.
The standard medical procedure of most likely diagnosis -> treatment -> in-depth examination if treatment doesn't show results just breaks down as the doctor has no way of knowing whether the treatment ever took place or not.
No, the public record is clear. It's not a "switch room", it's a splitter. And yes, the technical and expense implications of that have been debated and re-debated, re-hashed and triple-warmed-over.
But how do you know that they actually record everything (as you claim they do) rather than analyzing everything, discarding all the uninteresting stuff and only recording a subset of the traffic they've analyzed?
For most of the content in EVE, you simply need to be there, on site, to experience it to its fullest.
I disagree completely. You bring up Asakai as an example so let's run with that: Pressing F1 on whatever square bracket your FC tells you to while everything feels like you're moving through syrup (10% TiDi doesn't make a submarine sim any better) is not a fun or "full" experience. Dealing with lag, desync, bugs (drone control, argh), the terrible EVE UI,.... is not fun in any way. The only reason you undergo that ordeal at all is because it is embedded in a somewhat interesting metagame (which takes place OOG).
To experience EVE to its fullest you need access to jabber, IRC and forums. Having an EVE subscription and logging in every now and then is strictly optional (*someone* has to log in because there's no metagame without a game but that someone emphatically doesn't have to be you). As I write this I have a person in mind who cancelled all his accounts almost a year ago but is still a very active EVE player by staying super involved on kugu. He doesn't have to deal with "EVE Online: A Bad Game" in order to experience EVE. He probably has a much fuller EVE experience than those 80% of players who have never looked beyond shooting red crosses and white square boxes.
Being on site only makes you realize how flawed EVE is as a game. The core EVE experience - the politics, the scheming, the socializing,... - takes place entirely out of game.
From wiki: "Hastati (singular: Hastatus) were a class of infantry in the armies of the early Roman Republic who originally fought as spearmen, and later as swordsmen."
PRINCPES seems to be a misspelling of principes which were the early republic's heavy infantry.
The point is that if the NYT had received a mass of cables, they would have picked through them to identify the ones which actually had newsworthy material.
So we would have never learned how close an influential (far-left, anti-imperialist, pacifist) politician in my country is with the local US ambassador - to whom he openly admitted that some of his public positions are populist drivel.
The NYT's verdict for this and many dozen similar cases would invariably have been "not newsworthy enough to harm US interests" - despite the demasking of many politicians (who did in secret collaborate with the US while lambasting them in public) being extremely newsworthy in their respective counries.
It isn't - which is why TV stations started to display ads as overlays during the regular programming and do "just 30 seconds" ad blocks that are too short for you to change the channel.
No, not according to the more pro-active EU competition/monopoly laws or similar US laws. Apple's market share is too small to fall under "monopoly" in any or all European countries, where the distribution is quite varied from nation to nation. Scandinavia is not at all representative of the European handset market as a whole, my dear neighbor.
Monopoly questions tend depend mostly on the definition of "the market" - you are talking of the "handset market" which is the view someone who would not like Apple to be a monopolist would naturally choose, others would prefer to talk about "the smartphone market" or (even better) "the tablet market".
With some effort you will always find a market that is narrow enough to rationalize regulation on grounds of a monopoly- the question is whether you want to, and that's a political question first and foremost.
(Under US regulations this is a bit harder as there monopolies in themselves are legal and you have to show that the monopolist abuses his position to the detriment of the customers or competitors.)
Rei Kagetsuki tried to get kickstarter funding for his Scroll Ninja game just a few months ago - the Scroll Ninja kickstarter failed to meet its minimum goal and was closed in mid January. Now Kegtsuki seems to be using this Emoji project as a means to raise funding so he can continue Scroll Ninja development anyways.
We're calculating work time at roughly $20 per work hour for Tohyama, which is lower than what we usually bill him at. Even then half of that rate will go to paying Scroll Ninja lead developer Iwakawa so he can continue working on Scroll Ninja... since we didn't get funded but want to continue anyway.
"I just need marketing" is the same type of (flawed) sentiment that is displayed by someone who claims he has a great idea for the next facebook/myspace/... and "just" needs a programmer.
Marketing is not only advertising and sales work that you can tack on after the development process has been finished - the first goal of marketing is to ensure that you develop a marketable product and as such it is a process that starts with the way you set up your organization and which accompanies product development for its whole duration (how do you make sure your potential customers needs and wishes get communicated to the engineers? which (clearly defined) market(s) do you want to focus on? who are your competitors and how can you offer a better/cheaper/... product than them?...).
"We developed this product because we think it is cool but we have no idea who else be interested in it - now please do your "marketing" magic and make sure it's a commercial success" is a pitch that will only attract snakeoil salesmen and make competent marketing experts run screaming. Marketing is 80% about making sure that your engineers design a product to the market (rather than for themselves) and 20% about raising awareness/creating shiny ads/...
You act like everyone is really sick. Facts are there are morons who abuse the system because they don't want to go to work, and as a result everyone is punished for it. Those people force businesses to write Draconian sick day policies.
In Germany the employee has to provide his employer with a medical certification (confirming his illness) if he is on sick leave for more than three days.
However, the employer has the right to demand the certification earlier if he desires to do so and if the employment contract doesn't say otherwise (he can apply this right in a discriminatory fashion - e.g. demanding a medical certification on the first day only from employees whom he suspects of faking illness - as the Federal Labor Court recently found).
If the employer suspects that the medical certification provided by the employee is unreliable (maybe the doctor is very quick to certify illness without considering the possibility of a malingerer) he can demand a certification issued from a doctor appointed by the MDK (medical service of the health insurance, an official state-level institution that provides medical consulting to all health insurance companies) - these doctors have a strong reputation for not being deceived easily.
If the illness might impact the ways in which the employee can be used after his return to work the company physician has to issue a medical certificate.
All being said and done the average German employee still took 9.5 days of sick leave last year.
Somehow companies like Mathworks have been managing this happily for well over a decade without making up weird claims about standardisation. Oh and hey, I've done it too. It's easy.
Maybe MathWorks is doing a good job but you wouldn't believe the troubles I had trying to get Maple 7 to run on a current Linux distro in 2005 (4 years after its release). Maple required old versions of glibc and libstdc++, didn't work with the compatibility versions of these libraries supplied by the distro,... all in all a huge mess, many wasted hours and when I finally got the software to run the color scheme used by the Motif interface was messed up in the most hilarious ways. At that point I just gave up and booted into Windows.
So from personal experience I don't agree with your claim taht everything is fine in the world of scientific computing on Linux.
An all-free no advertising internet might be a good thing. Kinda like a world with only FOSS computers, no Apple or Windows. Sure, the general public would miss their Twitter and Facebook but computer geeks would rejoice.
The computer geeks are the big winners of the present model - they get to use the ad-supported services that are paid for with the eye-balls of millions non-geeks while running an adblocker themselves. They only thing they (we) have to worry about is too widespread usage of adblockers.
In Old High German "gift" meant "that which has been given", very similar but slightly more neutral to the English gift; in modern German you can still see traces of that in "Mitgift" = dowry.
The modern meaning goes back to the word being used as an euphemism for poison ("the deathly gift") and that meaning becoming dominant over time. As the meaning changed the word also changed its genus from female "die Gift" (still "die Mitgift") over male to the neuter ("das Gift"). "Die Gift" = donation/present was still used (albeit archaic) when "das Gift" = poison was already established.
t. Unless your idea of "most of Europe" is one that doesn't include, France, Germany, Greece, the U.K., Italy, and I'm sure others that I don't feel like chasing down
How about you check your facts because gloating over others not checking theirs?
There is no same-sex marriage in Germany. Gay couples can enter a registered domestic partnership which is treated the same as marriage with regard to some issues (inheritance, social issues, pensions,...) but is not equal to marriage.
Most notably registered domestic partnerships are not intended to receive the same tax benefits as married couples (a couple of court judgements turned this over last year but the current government is already working to revise relevant law to circumvent the criticism) and cannot adopt children as a couple (one of them can of course adopt the child as an individual but in that case his/her partner is not legally considered a parent).
Registered partnerships are also not explicitly protected by the Grundgesetz (German constitution) the way marriage is (6.1 "Marriage and the family shall enjoy the special protection of the state.").
Some Chinese technical professionals can bypass it with a variety of methods and/or tools.
I've met quite a few Chinese in online games and what they tell is that circumventing the firewall is as easy as using a proxy or VPN, is basically risk-free (to the end-user) and is really nothing special amongst their peer-group (age 15-30, educated, typically upper middle class). Every now and then their preferred proxy or VPN provider gets blocked and they have to look for a new one but that's a minor hassle and not a deal-breaker.
So the emphasis when reading the summary should definetely be on the variety of tools that are available to sidestep the firewall, not on the level of technical competence that is required to do so.
There are bits of Chinese medicine that might potentially be real, if they could be standardized, purified and most of all validated. Homeopathy on the other hand, relies purely on the placebo effect. You don't need expensive water for that.
inexpensive water would not be a credible placebo - everybody knows that medicine is expensive.
Immunology is a science. If you are anti-vaccine, you have to discount all of immunology as a science. Disclaiming the fact that vaccines work is as bad as disclaiming gravity.
Anti-vaccine, at its core, is anti-science. It is not ad-hominem.
You seem especially butthurt about this.
--
BMO
Despite what you might believe (parts of) Economics are a science, too - and the equation is pretty easy:
Vaccinations have a cost to the individual being vaccinated (such as health risks, effort,...), a benefit to the individual being vaccinated and a benefit to everyone around the individual being vaccinated. The last part is important - in a world where everyone but one person is vaccinated the benefit of that person receiving a vaccination, too, would be absolutely negligible (as the disease would - in the absence of other carriers such as animals - be extinct) and for that individual the cost of getting a vaccination would almost certainly outweigh the benefits.
In a society where the vast majority of the population is vaccinated each individual would be better off getting no vaccination (as the risk of contracting the disease becomes much lower than the risk of side-effects from the vaccination). The anti-vaccine crowd is just doing what is individually rational for them.
The problem is of course that if more than a handful of people do what is rational for them, the majority of the population will soon no longer be vaccinated and the risk of disease will soon start to eclipse the risk of side-effects (making vaccination the individually rational choice).
Maybe you don't like this fluctuation, maybe you would like to extinguish the disease altogether (which would require you to maintain very high vaccination rates for a long time) - in that case the government has to step in and make vaccinations compulsory (with the knowledge that this solution may be for the greater good but is not pareto optimal as some will be affected by unnecessary side effects).
Last I checked (admittedly, over a year ago), EVE ran great in Wine. They actually had a Linux client for a while, and eventually discontinued it because it was easier to just provide people info on how to run it in Wine, and the end result was better performance and graphics.
EVE via WINE is an acceptable option if you can live with EVE being broken for a few days after major updates, without having reliable test server access and with significantly reduced performance compared to the Windows version (I regularly run 3-4 clients on Windows I got barely 2 to run on Linux at acceptable framerates and that was with heavily reduced settings).
The ecosystem of 3rd party apps for EVE has become slightly more cross-platform friendly during the past few years (more.NET, Java and Python, less native apps) but there are still many applications that won't run on Linux. You can get around that using virtual machines of course.
Most alliances use Mumble or TS3 nowadays but some smaller corporations still use Ventrilo (which doesn't have an official Linux client).
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I mean I've never been to a big convention like E3, but I'm thinking of something like cute waitresses at a restaurant. You don't order more from a cute waitress because she somehow sold more to you, and I've never noticed restaurants with cute waitresses charging more than others. They just make the environment more pleasant.
And believe it or not a more pleasant environment makes a customer more likely to return to that restaurant, makes him stay there longer and order more.
You know what I've noticed? In the past decade or so, people have been less likely to make '1984' references the more Orwellian things get.
Maybe that's because history has proven Orwell wrong (and Huxley right)?
Perhaps this a dumb question by why not simply develop the parts of the game that aren't likely to change much during development, like data storage / retrieval, mechanics, and the like while saving things like graphics and sound until the game is in the final 6-12 months? In theory it should be possible to have the skeleton of the game pretty much templated out and ready to go for building out the mechanics and then working in the graphics and sound. Why do the window dressings take so much time in a game relative to the frame of the building and the wiring? Are they just doing it wrong?
that's exactly what they are doing - first they put a very small team on the project to develop the engine, backend technology, dev tools, ... while the game designers do their magic. then they ramp up the team size massively and start to develop actual art assets, start to write content, design levels, ... (which takes much longer than 6-12 months).
My understanding is that in this case Blizzard had already started production when they decided that they need to go back to phase 1 and rework the game design and the technical underpinnings. So they scaled the team back down (no point wasting money on creating e.g. art assets which later have to be laboriously ported to the rewritten engine, or creating dungeons that will have to be trashed because core game mechanics were rethought in the meantime, ...).
Except obesity also reduces life expectancy by 6-7 years. link
Therefore, you get 6-7 years of productivity from healthy people, which is worth far more than$31k.
Or you get 6-7 years of super expensive cancer treatments from "healthy" people whereas the obese patient just dies cost-efficiently of his heart condition.
Doctors should diagnose based on full spectrum data collection. Not simply based on what they see and think at first glance.
I had this discussion a dozen times with my brother who is a medical student and the tl;dr is "nobody has the time or money for that".
A doctor will always assume the most likely cause for any given combination of symptoms (even if they don't match 100%) and only start thinking about less likely alternatives if his treatment doesn't lead to improvements. Yes, sucks to be someone with a rare disease (that will only be diagnosed correctly very late if at all) but symptoms are often so unspecific and a thorough examination would be so expensive (let's do a blood screen every time you catch a cold because you might have some ultra-rare disease?) that this is the only practicable way.
Hormonal causes for obesity are possible but pretty rare - a much larger share of obese patients claims to suffer from e.g. thyroid issues than statistically possible. "Just eat less" is the right answer for the vast majority of obese patients and as they will lie to you about their food intake and exercise (admittedly often unconsciously, but then they don't tend to cooperate well when you ask them to keep a diary of every single thing they eat to make the more self-conscious) you never know if your original attempt at treatment did work or not. The share of patients who will lie into your face about having tried everything is probably still much larger than the share of patients who have actually followed your advice and it didn't help because they have some underlying physical issue.
The standard medical procedure of most likely diagnosis -> treatment -> in-depth examination if treatment doesn't show results just breaks down as the doctor has no way of knowing whether the treatment ever took place or not.
No, the public record is clear. It's not a "switch room", it's a splitter. And yes, the technical and expense implications of that have been debated and re-debated, re-hashed and triple-warmed-over.
But how do you know that they actually record everything (as you claim they do) rather than analyzing everything, discarding all the uninteresting stuff and only recording a subset of the traffic they've analyzed?
For most of the content in EVE, you simply need to be there, on site, to experience it to its fullest.
I disagree completely. You bring up Asakai as an example so let's run with that: Pressing F1 on whatever square bracket your FC tells you to while everything feels like you're moving through syrup (10% TiDi doesn't make a submarine sim any better) is not a fun or "full" experience. Dealing with lag, desync, bugs (drone control, argh), the terrible EVE UI, .... is not fun in any way. The only reason you undergo that ordeal at all is because it is embedded in a somewhat interesting metagame (which takes place OOG).
To experience EVE to its fullest you need access to jabber, IRC and forums. Having an EVE subscription and logging in every now and then is strictly optional (*someone* has to log in because there's no metagame without a game but that someone emphatically doesn't have to be you).
As I write this I have a person in mind who cancelled all his accounts almost a year ago but is still a very active EVE player by staying super involved on kugu. He doesn't have to deal with "EVE Online: A Bad Game" in order to experience EVE. He probably has a much fuller EVE experience than those 80% of players who have never looked beyond shooting red crosses and white square boxes.
Being on site only makes you realize how flawed EVE is as a game. The core EVE experience - the politics, the scheming, the socializing, ... - takes place entirely out of game.
From wiki: "Hastati (singular: Hastatus) were a class of infantry in the armies of the early Roman Republic who originally fought as spearmen, and later as swordsmen."
PRINCPES seems to be a misspelling of principes which were the early republic's heavy infantry.
The point is that if the NYT had received a mass of cables, they would have picked through them to identify the ones which actually had newsworthy material.
So we would have never learned how close an influential (far-left, anti-imperialist, pacifist) politician in my country is with the local US ambassador - to whom he openly admitted that some of his public positions are populist drivel.
The NYT's verdict for this and many dozen similar cases would invariably have been "not newsworthy enough to harm US interests" - despite the demasking of many politicians (who did in secret collaborate with the US while lambasting them in public) being extremely newsworthy in their respective counries.
What is so different?
It isn't - which is why TV stations started to display ads as overlays during the regular programming and do "just 30 seconds" ad blocks that are too short for you to change the channel.
No, not according to the more pro-active EU competition/monopoly laws or similar US laws. Apple's market share is too small to fall under "monopoly" in any or all European countries, where the distribution is quite varied from nation to nation. Scandinavia is not at all representative of the European handset market as a whole, my dear neighbor.
Monopoly questions tend depend mostly on the definition of "the market" - you are talking of the "handset market" which is the view someone who would not like Apple to be a monopolist would naturally choose, others would prefer to talk about "the smartphone market" or (even better) "the tablet market".
With some effort you will always find a market that is narrow enough to rationalize regulation on grounds of a monopoly- the question is whether you want to, and that's a political question first and foremost.
(Under US regulations this is a bit harder as there monopolies in themselves are legal and you have to show that the monopolist abuses his position to the detriment of the customers or competitors.)
Now Kegtsuki seems to be using this Emoji project as a means to raise funding so he can continue Scroll Ninja development anyways.
We're calculating work time at roughly $20 per work hour for Tohyama, which is lower than what we usually bill him at. Even then half of that rate will go to paying Scroll Ninja lead developer Iwakawa so he can continue working on Scroll Ninja... since we didn't get funded but want to continue anyway.
"I just need marketing" is the same type of (flawed) sentiment that is displayed by someone who claims he has a great idea for the next facebook/myspace/... and "just" needs a programmer.
Marketing is not only advertising and sales work that you can tack on after the development process has been finished - the first goal of marketing is to ensure that you develop a marketable product and as such it is a process that starts with the way you set up your organization and which accompanies product development for its whole duration (how do you make sure your potential customers needs and wishes get communicated to the engineers? which (clearly defined) market(s) do you want to focus on? who are your competitors and how can you offer a better/cheaper/... product than them? ...).
"We developed this product because we think it is cool but we have no idea who else be interested in it - now please do your "marketing" magic and make sure it's a commercial success" is a pitch that will only attract snakeoil salesmen and make competent marketing experts run screaming. Marketing is 80% about making sure that your engineers design a product to the market (rather than for themselves) and 20% about raising awareness/creating shiny ads/...
You act like everyone is really sick. Facts are there are morons who abuse the system because they don't want to go to work, and as a result everyone is punished for it. Those people force businesses to write Draconian sick day policies.
In Germany the employee has to provide his employer with a medical certification (confirming his illness) if he is on sick leave for more than three days.
However, the employer has the right to demand the certification earlier if he desires to do so and if the employment contract doesn't say otherwise (he can apply this right in a discriminatory fashion - e.g. demanding a medical certification on the first day only from employees whom he suspects of faking illness - as the Federal Labor Court recently found).
If the employer suspects that the medical certification provided by the employee is unreliable (maybe the doctor is very quick to certify illness without considering the possibility of a malingerer) he can demand a certification issued from a doctor appointed by the MDK (medical service of the health insurance, an official state-level institution that provides medical consulting to all health insurance companies) - these doctors have a strong reputation for not being deceived easily.
If the illness might impact the ways in which the employee can be used after his return to work the company physician has to issue a medical certificate.
All being said and done the average German employee still took 9.5 days of sick leave last year.
Somehow companies like Mathworks have been managing this happily for well over a decade without making up weird claims about standardisation. Oh and hey, I've done it too. It's easy.
Maybe MathWorks is doing a good job but you wouldn't believe the troubles I had trying to get Maple 7 to run on a current Linux distro in 2005 (4 years after its release). Maple required old versions of glibc and libstdc++, didn't work with the compatibility versions of these libraries supplied by the distro, ... all in all a huge mess, many wasted hours and when I finally got the software to run the color scheme used by the Motif interface was messed up in the most hilarious ways. At that point I just gave up and booted into Windows.
So from personal experience I don't agree with your claim taht everything is fine in the world of scientific computing on Linux.
An all-free no advertising internet might be a good thing. Kinda like a world with only FOSS computers, no Apple or Windows. Sure, the general public would miss their Twitter and Facebook but computer geeks would rejoice.
The computer geeks are the big winners of the present model - they get to use the ad-supported services that are paid for with the eye-balls of millions non-geeks while running an adblocker themselves. They only thing they (we) have to worry about is too widespread usage of adblockers.
So far the record in NATO member countries for the military obeying the dictates of the elected government has been exemplary.
if you want to call four military coups in Turkey since they joined NATO exemplary... ^^
In Old High German "gift" meant "that which has been given", very similar but slightly more neutral to the English gift; in modern German you can still see traces of that in "Mitgift" = dowry.
The modern meaning goes back to the word being used as an euphemism for poison ("the deathly gift") and that meaning becoming dominant over time. As the meaning changed the word also changed its genus from female "die Gift" (still "die Mitgift") over male to the neuter ("das Gift").
"Die Gift" = donation/present was still used (albeit archaic) when "das Gift" = poison was already established.
t. Unless your idea of "most of Europe" is one that doesn't include, France, Germany, Greece, the U.K., Italy, and I'm sure others that I don't feel like chasing down
Sadly, you're wrong. France? Check. Germany? Check.
How about you check your facts because gloating over others not checking theirs?
There is no same-sex marriage in Germany. Gay couples can enter a registered domestic partnership which is treated the same as marriage with regard to some issues (inheritance, social issues, pensions, ...) but is not equal to marriage.
Most notably registered domestic partnerships are not intended to receive the same tax benefits as married couples (a couple of court judgements turned this over last year but the current government is already working to revise relevant law to circumvent the criticism) and cannot adopt children as a couple (one of them can of course adopt the child as an individual but in that case his/her partner is not legally considered a parent).
Registered partnerships are also not explicitly protected by the Grundgesetz (German constitution) the way marriage is (6.1 "Marriage and the family shall enjoy the special protection of the state.").
Some Chinese technical professionals can bypass it with a variety of methods and/or tools.
I've met quite a few Chinese in online games and what they tell is that circumventing the firewall is as easy as using a proxy or VPN, is basically risk-free (to the end-user) and is really nothing special amongst their peer-group (age 15-30, educated, typically upper middle class). Every now and then their preferred proxy or VPN provider gets blocked and they have to look for a new one but that's a minor hassle and not a deal-breaker.
So the emphasis when reading the summary should definetely be on the variety of tools that are available to sidestep the firewall, not on the level of technical competence that is required to do so.
There are bits of Chinese medicine that might potentially be real, if they could be standardized, purified and most of all validated. Homeopathy on the other hand, relies purely on the placebo effect. You don't need expensive water for that.
inexpensive water would not be a credible placebo - everybody knows that medicine is expensive.
>Anti-vaccine is not anti-science,
Immunology is a science. If you are anti-vaccine, you have to discount all of immunology as a science. Disclaiming the fact that vaccines work is as bad as disclaiming gravity.
Anti-vaccine, at its core, is anti-science. It is not ad-hominem.
You seem especially butthurt about this.
-- BMO
Despite what you might believe (parts of) Economics are a science, too - and the equation is pretty easy:
...), a benefit to the individual being vaccinated and a benefit to everyone around the individual being vaccinated.
Vaccinations have a cost to the individual being vaccinated (such as health risks, effort,
The last part is important - in a world where everyone but one person is vaccinated the benefit of that person receiving a vaccination, too, would be absolutely negligible (as the disease would - in the absence of other carriers such as animals - be extinct) and for that individual the cost of getting a vaccination would almost certainly outweigh the benefits.
In a society where the vast majority of the population is vaccinated each individual would be better off getting no vaccination (as the risk of contracting the disease becomes much lower than the risk of side-effects from the vaccination). The anti-vaccine crowd is just doing what is individually rational for them.
The problem is of course that if more than a handful of people do what is rational for them, the majority of the population will soon no longer be vaccinated and the risk of disease will soon start to eclipse the risk of side-effects (making vaccination the individually rational choice).
Maybe you don't like this fluctuation, maybe you would like to extinguish the disease altogether (which would require you to maintain very high vaccination rates for a long time) - in that case the government has to step in and make vaccinations compulsory (with the knowledge that this solution may be for the greater good but is not pareto optimal as some will be affected by unnecessary side effects).
(should maybe add that the "official" Mac client is not any better than the Linux client in those regards - neither would be an option for me)
Last I checked (admittedly, over a year ago), EVE ran great in Wine. They actually had a Linux client for a while, and eventually discontinued it because it was easier to just provide people info on how to run it in Wine, and the end result was better performance and graphics.
EVE via WINE is an acceptable option if you can live with EVE being broken for a few days after major updates, without having reliable test server access and with significantly reduced performance compared to the Windows version (I regularly run 3-4 clients on Windows I got barely 2 to run on Linux at acceptable framerates and that was with heavily reduced settings).
.NET, Java and Python, less native apps) but there are still many applications that won't run on Linux. You can get around that using virtual machines of course.
The ecosystem of 3rd party apps for EVE has become slightly more cross-platform friendly during the past few years (more
Most alliances use Mumble or TS3 nowadays but some smaller corporations still use Ventrilo (which doesn't have an official Linux client).
maybe to clarify my view:
Does Israel have the right to self-defense in this situation? Absolutely.
Is Israel's current reaction within the boundaries established by the right to self-defense? As far as I can tell, yes.
Is the right to self-defense against Palestinian terrorists the prime motivation for Israel's reaction? imho no.