Stalinism is the word you're looking for.
It's difficult to say what true communism is or should be, because Marx never really defined what should happen after class warfare in order to be successful. At least in theory practical implementations of communism range from anarchy to totalitarianism.
However I strongly suspect that Marx would have hated what those countries did in his name. All they did was to replace the old bourgeoisie with the state and turned everyone else into their proletariat. And since all the power was in fact not in the hands of the people but centralized, the end result was more akin to a monarchy than anything else.
The phrasing in the article is a set-up for jokes about the irony in it. It was the first thing that came to my mind as well when reading the first sentence and after looking into the comment section I wasn't surprised to find several other people who apparently thought the same.
It's not the fault of GP if morons mod it (up) as anything other but 'funny' or maybe 'underrated'.
Good to know.
Things worked differently here in my country. I got dismissed after a hearing test discovered something I didn't even knew. I knew that I have tinnitus on my left ear because of a gun 'accident' when I was a kid. But apparently I have some hearing loss on one of my ears. And they couldn't let me work near heavy machinery or with power tools according to them. I didn't even get to the infamous part where they fondle your balls. I suppose if I went just a year before that (some reforms happened in the mean time) they'd still taken me and let me do some desk jobs. After all I was already a trained communications engineer (just a finished apprenticeship, not university level).
Anyway, out of interest: Since a lot of people here in Germany tried to fail their tests intentionally in order to be dismissed. And apparently they had methods to find out these attempts, what do they do about those IQ tests? It seems fairly simple to cheat there. For example take longer on every question than you normally would do. Or maybe the outcome of the test isn't that important in the first place for conscription? After all we didn't have such test here in Germany. Being smart is just not a requirement for a non-officer.
For example when is the IQ test conducted? Before they are conscripted into service of before that as an evaluation of their abilities? Because you need to keep in mind that while service is compulsory in theory, in practice they do not conscript even half of the people they test.
Maybe someone from Norway or simply with more insight can shed some light onto this. Wikipedia tells me that there's about 60k people available for conscription every year. But only up to 10k is actually conscripted. Even considering changes in population groth both numbers over a period of 39 years (from 1970 to 2009) don't come close to the 730k IQ test that were conducted. Of course the source is Wikipedia which provides some links to articles on news sites.
There could still be some bias. If you also consider that you can avoid being conscripted via other means. Up until 2012 there was also the option to do alternative civilian service (Sosialtjenesten) instead of military service in Norway.
The bulk of “Dieselgate” lawsuits are being handled by prosecutors in Braunschweig where four separate sets of criminal proceedings are being conducted against current and former managers of VW, headquartered in nearby Wolfsburg. Some 39 individuals including Winterkorn are being investigated over suspected emissions fraud, with the former CEO also being probed for suspected market manipulation together with Hans Dieter Poetsch, the group’s former finance chief who is now supervisory board chairman, and Herbert Diess, now group CEO who joined the firm in July 2015 as head of the VW brand.
Then we have one of the major German newspapers noting that Winterkorn stands to lose his entire financial existence.
Source: http://www.faz.net/aktuell/wir... (you may need a translator)
Apples and oranges, really.
A major difference between decay and conventional batteries are that decay batteries run continuously. For all that we know we can't affect the rate at which nuclear decay happens. It just happens. Therefore such a device will produce those (ideal) 3.3Wh whether you need it or not. On the other hand they can't produce more than that whether you need it or not. A conventional battery may run dry pretty quickly, but it does so by providing a relatively high electrical current, which may be needed for some applications. So if you want a decay battery to do something similar you need at least some intermediate energy storage device like a capacitor or a conventional battery that stores enough energy to support a high current for a period of time. So in the end you may still need a conventional battery in addition to your nuclear decay battery.
The entire thing with calling it "psychopathic" is very questionable anyway.
The term psychopath is (actually obsolete) reserved for those people with the most severe antisocial personality disorders. Such a personality disorder requires a them to actively be antagonistic towards other people, by being manipulative, deceitful, callous, and hostile. Emphasis is on callousness, lacking empathy for those whose rights have been infringed. Feeling no remorse, guilt, or responsibility towards others. Add a good portion of sadism to that callousness, where the person actively enjoys the suffering of other people, and you've got yourself a psychopath. Think of the character Patric Bateman in American Psycho, that was a rather good portrayal of an intelligent psychopath in the media.
Maybe they should have hired some actual psychologists. They would know that you can't rely on an inkblot test alone to get a good picture of a person's mind. But I suppose that would not make good pop science.
German courts have a history of not overturning such surveillance laws. The constitutional court overturned previous data retention laws in 2010 as being unconstitutional.
But since that kind of surveillance was something the EU wanted, they sued Germany for non compliance. Then a new data retention law had been drafted by the German government, with some opposition, but eventually it went through and was reinstated in 2015. Ever since then the courts are again working on the validity of this new law, because of course there's been appeals on constitutional issues from various interests groups.
In June 2016 a Court in Munster ruled that a local ISP did not have to comply to the data retention laws because they're unlawful. More recently, in April this year, a court in Cologne ruled that telcos don't have to comply with the law. In this case it was the largest telco of Germany, the Deutsche Telekom, that sued because they apparently didn't want to store meta data. In the end it costs money for them and it hurts their business. Of course that still means ISPs can comply out of their own volition.
Currently our eyes are focused on the constitutional court that are still in the process of investigating the issue. Hopes are that they'll overturn it again.
Yes, legality was never a factor in whether they're doing it or not. *Technical possibilities are factor. I still hope that they get slammed in Karlsruhe. At least some moral integrity can be shown by a justice system that is still a separated power.
*The only two options I see here, besides of not using the internet, are encrypting everything and or additionally creating a lot of junk data. But since the internet infrastructure is already stressed hard enough here in Germany and our larger telcos give a crap about it even though they get millions of € from the government in order to fix the issues, I prefer the former.
I did my master in sensor systems technology not far from there (HsKA). It's good to hear that there are more female students there. I can only hope that they'll be role models for women that grew up in the West.
I do work in a lab of a German university. The an equal pay gap doesn't exist here, but that's probably mostly because we're state funded. I do have some insights into what kind of people come through our faculty (Engineering) and some others. Women do fine in mathematics and make almost half of all students that listen to higher mathematics 1 & 2 lectures. However there's not a lot of women in physics, engineering and computer science lectures to begin with. There might be a hand full or two in the first semester but most of them are gone after a couple of weeks, while those that stick around are usually just as capable as anyone else.
Our faculty tries hard to make the field more interesting to women. And we do have some female engineers who help with the issue. Usually we try to target the equivalent of seniors in high school, mostly by showing that the work itself does not care about your sex or gender. And of course that women do just as well as men. Some do get interested in it, some do start studying one of those things but most still quit after a short time. They are asked what made them stop, but where you may expect reasons like sexism or similar things, are that it wasn't right for them. Now I'm not sure if they're completely honest here. And the women among us engineers certainly have some survivor bias among themselves. But we're at an impasse here. Although it's certainly possible that we approach the situation from the wrong angle, we came to believe that the issues between women and fields like physics and engineering must start way before the senior grades in high school. Probably as soon as elementary or even before that. And looking at how things work in some other nations, like Qatar where there's a high number of female engineers, I have to assume that this is a cultural issue that could be changed.
Maybe I do conflate those things. I've only seen those two things used interchangeably. What's the deeper point of the 'gender pay gap' metric if we do not also take a closer look at the work that has been done? At least to me the equal pay gap seems to be the much more interesting phenomenon to focus on.
This is usually a very important criteria when it comes to assessing a gender pay gap. So did they compare what kind of games the streamers played, what kind of commentaries they made while playing?
Not all games have the same popularity among viewers. Sometimes it also counts who streamed what first. The commentary offered during streaming also seems to be an important part of this. From personal experience I know that some people have a knack for delivering entertaining commentary. I'm inclined to give them some money in exchange for their services. On the other side of the spectrum you have people who are downright annoying. If I had to give them money I'd do it to make them shut up and just play the game. But why pay them if you can close the stream instead? There's so much competition to choose from out there. At times it can't even be blamed on the individual streamer because some voices are more pleasant to listen to than others. But that's how the world of entertainment works.
All important factors that have to be considered when disproving your null hypothesis here. So if there's a large overlap in content between male and female gamers, meaning that they play the same games and offer similar commentary, all while females get considerable less donations, then we'd have a gender pay gap here and may need to look into the causes for this. Maybe they did look for this, but I'm just incapable of finding it. I'd appreciate it if someone pointed me into the right direction here. Because without this due diligence has not been done correctly and makes it look like they jumped to conclusions.
I don't know if it is a scam, but I also don't know if that line about perfection stands up to scrutiny.
Yes, I've heard this very often. "They want it to be perfect." "Would you rather test an unfinished version or a perfect one?" "Everything comes together with the next patch."
But the sad fact is that everything they release is very far from being perfect. It's riddled with bugs and has performance so far. I can accept that, because that's how software development works. Maybe this idea of perfection exists in Chris Roberts' head, where he'd like to make everything perfect, just as he claims. Unfortunately there's little empirical evidence for this. But people are still repeating that perfection mantra. So what's left is what looks an awful lot like post-purchase rationalisation. And here I have a different phrase for you: There's a sucker born every minute.
My hopes are that they'll give us private servers at some point, that we can host and modify ourselves. Modding communities are extremely crafty and can do a lot of things. And they can satisfy different groups of players because they don't have to appeal to the lowest common denominator (mods are always optional). But I have the feeling that CIG is going down the same road as Frontier Developments went with Elite: Dangerous make it an online only game despite their early promises. After all you can't sell virtual goods and other stuff to players that may as well 'cheat' everything together on their private servers.
I understand that one of the reasons is to reduce littering. Because as the summary states, plastic cutlery and straws get often thrown away into the environment.
Of course this means that this would be less of an issue when you're on a plane, since there's paid personnel that keeps the place tidy. And they don't throw out their garbage out of the window.
And there's precedent for measures like these. For example here in Germany we've had these issues with plastic bottles and beer/soda cans a lot. Then the government decided to turn these things into deposit bottles and cans increasing the price by a 0.25€ deposit. In the beginning there was resistance, of course. But in the long run it didn't hurt sales that much. As a result the littering has been reduced drastically since people tend to return their cans and bottles. In addition to that people on the lower end of the socio-economic tend to clean up the mess some other people leave behind because it's more convenient to them in the moment. Now I don't think that measures like deposits would work on cutlery, straws, and plates since those are items that you buy in larger quantities. Smaller deposits that are applied to each item individually would probably not be enough of a deterrent. For example if you buy a package of 50 plastic forks and pay a 0.25€ deposit for it, it comes down to a 0.005€ deposit per fork. How would returns be handled? Do you have to return the entire package of 50 forks? Can you return them individually? The former is impractical because those things get lost quite often. And the latter gives people not enough incentive to keep them. For 0.005€ a fork just throwing them away is convenient enough. It also doesn't make it interesting enough to pick it up and turn it in for others. If the deposit is too high it might severely hurt sales so far, that they might as well just ban them altogether.
I think that does indeed satisfy at least some. Fictional conflict in stories and video games do appear to provide a pressure relief valve for plenty of people.
But there's also a large number of people who see these forms of media as escapism.
If you want to reach them, you'd better tell them something that convinces them that the conflict will affect them as well in a profound way. Find something in the real world that could also make a strong plot in a fictional story. Find some people or even animals who are affected by it, maybe actively suffer from it, then show some of the suffering. Maybe throw some happy themes in the mix as well to show how it was before 'plot element' started and or how it could be if something is done about it. These 'victims' are practically your protagonists with whom your audience will emotionally connect. Because in the end most of us are still social animals that have this evolutionary trait of empathy. Of course there are exceptions to this rule, but most of us can put ourselves in the place of other people and imagine how they must feel.
Bad News is more prevalent because the media operates like a business. The main reason for this is simply because they are businesses. They have expenses and employees that need to be paid and of course they want to make a profit.
In the beginning things were simpler. We had news papers, which were sold for money. These generated direct some direct revenue from which you could evaluate the popularity of your news. On top of that people would pay you additional money if you let them advertise for their product in your paper. If your news paper sold well you also could ask for more money in your ad space. When new possibilities were opened through radio and TV, advertising became even more important. And since they couldn't count the number of copies sold that easily any more they had to invent new methods like Nielsen ratings to gauge the commercial value of the stories they tell. Then the internet came along. This huge platform that provides everyone and their dog with a megaphone that lets them shout so loud it can be heard almost everywhere on the planet. Due to the extremely high competition asking money for people to access your stuff has gone out of style. That is unless you provide premium services. But for conventional media outlets that's not much of an option. So they have to rely purely on ads. Fortunately for them the internet makes it pretty easy to evaluate the popularity of their stories - count clicks, shares on social media and whatever.
So what kind of stories are the best selling/most click generating ones? (An answer that I won't give you).
But I'll ask some more suggestive questions. If everything was just fine why would I watch the news? Maybe some tech or science news would interest me personally (why do you think I initially came here?) But other than that I could follow one of my other hobbies. Another question:Would you pay for a movie where the protagonists sits on his couch, munches cheetos and drinks beer all day? Or would you rather see some action movie, thriller, or drama with a lot of conflict in it?
I don't want to write an essay here, because that'd be the bare minimum to cover the topic. But I'd urge you to look into the theory or story telling if you want to understand how the media works. There are books out there that give aspiring writers a couple of pointers of what a good story needs. And if you understand that, you'll start to see parallels almost everywhere in the media. Be news about terrorists attacks, robberies, climate change, exploitation in developing countries, conspiracy theories and so forth.
I looked at their Steam page. It's a game where you either play as a SWAT member in a hostage situation involving a shooter or the shooter. It claims to use realistic settings and on the screenshots you can see school buildings, presentation halls and the likes. On the short video you can see some of the game, which rewards shooting civilians if you play the role of the shooter. As a SWAT you die pretty much instantly while as a shooter you're a bullet sponge. After listing their features they write:
Please note:
Please do not take any of this seriously. This is only meant to be the simulation and nothing else. If you feel like hurting someone or people around you, please seek help from local psychiatrists or dial 911 (or applicable). Thank you
The game itself doesn't look very original or good. Especially the shown perspective of the shooter makes it look like an easy mode with no challenge as you're killing unarmed civilians and SWATs that are more harmless than your generic Stormtrooper (of course except when killing Luke's uncle and aunt). It comes with dated graphics and nothing that isn't already out there somewhere. I guess the attention the game getting now is better exposure to potential buyers than they could ever hoped for otherwise. You can expect people who wouldn't have considered buying such a shitty game spending some bucks on it, just act in spite of those who are offended by it.
Possibly a waste of time, since the flux density of the field (electrostatic, magnetic, or electromagnetic) is inversely proportional to the square of the distance.
Remind yourself that the idea was to use these things for deep space missions, where low but consistent acceleration is needed. This is where a high specific impulse of your propulsion system becomes more important than absolute thrust. Not having to carry any propellant with you would have been a great bonus here. At this point we may as well use solar sails and some huge remote phased array lasers.
Generally, Transformer movies are not known to be of the cerebral sort of entertainment. If true*, I'd take it as a nod towards how little Hollywood cares for scientific accuracy or at least how dumb the production thought their audience would be.
*Because I only watched the first one when it came out and don't remember a lot about it other than that they had a ton of generic special effects and a hot blonde female scientists say that the alien signal encoding goes beyond their understanding and maybe they had to switch from Fourier transforms to quantum mechanics. Having had to endure Fourier transforms from every conceivable perspective for the past two semesters of analogue and digital signal processing at that point I knew that I smelled bullshit - technobabble. Although I do not expect the majority of people to pay attention to something like that.
Reminds me of that Futurama episode when the Professor turned the robot into a human through a process called reverse fossilization. Explaining that he discovered that normal fossilization was turning living flesh and bone into minerals. And after realizing that it was a simple matter reversing the process.
So after realizing E = mc it's just converting all of it back to energy, yes? It's that simple, right? Fine. But how do you actually do it?
It can make a measurable improvement according to this clinical trial conducted in the UK: www.thelancet.com/journals/lancet/article/PIIS0140-6736(17)33102-1/fulltext
I think that brocooli is awesome. At least if its fresh and you prepare it properly. I prefer to steam vegetables like that.
Depends on how important the EU market is for them. But yeah, I expect that a lot of small companies that operate outside of the EU don't have a lot of EU customers to begin with. So their decision will be to either ignore it completely or if they give a shit block the EU from their side.
Actively locking them out of EU countries is the last resort of the EU if they do not comply in any way. Although that will probably have to happen on national basis, where every country may act in a different way.
But if that happens I'm already looking forward to the inner political backlash and shitstorms caused by infuriated EU citizens.
Europe has to offer plenty of customers or plenty of juicy data if you will. With about 511 million citizens of which probably 2/3 are relevant to the market there's a lot of money to be made.
Now companies will have to decide whether it'll cost them more to lose the EU market or comply to their regulations.
As someone living in the EU I'm curious how the outcome will look like. I expect most of the big businesses to comply but possibly a lot of smaller ones resorting to geoblocking. At any rate there's still VPNs and TOR available.
Slashdot Mirror
Stalinism is the word you're looking for.
It's difficult to say what true communism is or should be, because Marx never really defined what should happen after class warfare in order to be successful. At least in theory practical implementations of communism range from anarchy to totalitarianism.
However I strongly suspect that Marx would have hated what those countries did in his name. All they did was to replace the old bourgeoisie with the state and turned everyone else into their proletariat. And since all the power was in fact not in the hands of the people but centralized, the end result was more akin to a monarchy than anything else.
The phrasing in the article is a set-up for jokes about the irony in it. It was the first thing that came to my mind as well when reading the first sentence and after looking into the comment section I wasn't surprised to find several other people who apparently thought the same.
It's not the fault of GP if morons mod it (up) as anything other but 'funny' or maybe 'underrated'.
Good to know.
Things worked differently here in my country. I got dismissed after a hearing test discovered something I didn't even knew. I knew that I have tinnitus on my left ear because of a gun 'accident' when I was a kid. But apparently I have some hearing loss on one of my ears. And they couldn't let me work near heavy machinery or with power tools according to them. I didn't even get to the infamous part where they fondle your balls. I suppose if I went just a year before that (some reforms happened in the mean time) they'd still taken me and let me do some desk jobs. After all I was already a trained communications engineer (just a finished apprenticeship, not university level).
Anyway, out of interest: Since a lot of people here in Germany tried to fail their tests intentionally in order to be dismissed. And apparently they had methods to find out these attempts, what do they do about those IQ tests? It seems fairly simple to cheat there. For example take longer on every question than you normally would do. Or maybe the outcome of the test isn't that important in the first place for conscription? After all we didn't have such test here in Germany. Being smart is just not a requirement for a non-officer.
For example when is the IQ test conducted? Before they are conscripted into service of before that as an evaluation of their abilities? Because you need to keep in mind that while service is compulsory in theory, in practice they do not conscript even half of the people they test.
Maybe someone from Norway or simply with more insight can shed some light onto this. Wikipedia tells me that there's about 60k people available for conscription every year. But only up to 10k is actually conscripted. Even considering changes in population groth both numbers over a period of 39 years (from 1970 to 2009) don't come close to the 730k IQ test that were conducted. Of course the source is Wikipedia which provides some links to articles on news sites.
There could still be some bias. If you also consider that you can avoid being conscripted via other means. Up until 2012 there was also the option to do alternative civilian service (Sosialtjenesten) instead of military service in Norway.
Their findings are interesting nonetheless.
Source: https://www.reuters.com/articl...
Then we have one of the major German newspapers noting that Winterkorn stands to lose his entire financial existence.
Source: http://www.faz.net/aktuell/wir... (you may need a translator)
Apples and oranges, really.
A major difference between decay and conventional batteries are that decay batteries run continuously. For all that we know we can't affect the rate at which nuclear decay happens. It just happens. Therefore such a device will produce those (ideal) 3.3Wh whether you need it or not. On the other hand they can't produce more than that whether you need it or not. A conventional battery may run dry pretty quickly, but it does so by providing a relatively high electrical current, which may be needed for some applications. So if you want a decay battery to do something similar you need at least some intermediate energy storage device like a capacitor or a conventional battery that stores enough energy to support a high current for a period of time. So in the end you may still need a conventional battery in addition to your nuclear decay battery.
The entire thing with calling it "psychopathic" is very questionable anyway.
The term psychopath is (actually obsolete) reserved for those people with the most severe antisocial personality disorders. Such a personality disorder requires a them to actively be antagonistic towards other people, by being manipulative, deceitful, callous, and hostile. Emphasis is on callousness, lacking empathy for those whose rights have been infringed. Feeling no remorse, guilt, or responsibility towards others. Add a good portion of sadism to that callousness, where the person actively enjoys the suffering of other people, and you've got yourself a psychopath.
Think of the character Patric Bateman in American Psycho, that was a rather good portrayal of an intelligent psychopath in the media.
Maybe they should have hired some actual psychologists. They would know that you can't rely on an inkblot test alone to get a good picture of a person's mind. But I suppose that would not make good pop science.
German courts have a history of not overturning such surveillance laws. The constitutional court overturned previous data retention laws in 2010 as being unconstitutional.
But since that kind of surveillance was something the EU wanted, they sued Germany for non compliance. Then a new data retention law had been drafted by the German government, with some opposition, but eventually it went through and was reinstated in 2015. Ever since then the courts are again working on the validity of this new law, because of course there's been appeals on constitutional issues from various interests groups.
In June 2016 a Court in Munster ruled that a local ISP did not have to comply to the data retention laws because they're unlawful. More recently, in April this year, a court in Cologne ruled that telcos don't have to comply with the law. In this case it was the largest telco of Germany, the Deutsche Telekom, that sued because they apparently didn't want to store meta data. In the end it costs money for them and it hurts their business.
Of course that still means ISPs can comply out of their own volition.
Currently our eyes are focused on the constitutional court that are still in the process of investigating the issue. Hopes are that they'll overturn it again.
Yes, legality was never a factor in whether they're doing it or not. *Technical possibilities are factor. I still hope that they get slammed in Karlsruhe. At least some moral integrity can be shown by a justice system that is still a separated power.
*The only two options I see here, besides of not using the internet, are encrypting everything and or additionally creating a lot of junk data. But since the internet infrastructure is already stressed hard enough here in Germany and our larger telcos give a crap about it even though they get millions of € from the government in order to fix the issues, I prefer the former.
I did my master in sensor systems technology not far from there (HsKA). It's good to hear that there are more female students there. I can only hope that they'll be role models for women that grew up in the West.
I do work in a lab of a German university. The an equal pay gap doesn't exist here, but that's probably mostly because we're state funded. I do have some insights into what kind of people come through our faculty (Engineering) and some others. Women do fine in mathematics and make almost half of all students that listen to higher mathematics 1 & 2 lectures. However there's not a lot of women in physics, engineering and computer science lectures to begin with. There might be a hand full or two in the first semester but most of them are gone after a couple of weeks, while those that stick around are usually just as capable as anyone else.
Our faculty tries hard to make the field more interesting to women. And we do have some female engineers who help with the issue. Usually we try to target the equivalent of seniors in high school, mostly by showing that the work itself does not care about your sex or gender. And of course that women do just as well as men. Some do get interested in it, some do start studying one of those things but most still quit after a short time. They are asked what made them stop, but where you may expect reasons like sexism or similar things, are that it wasn't right for them. Now I'm not sure if they're completely honest here. And the women among us engineers certainly have some survivor bias among themselves. But we're at an impasse here. Although it's certainly possible that we approach the situation from the wrong angle, we came to believe that the issues between women and fields like physics and engineering must start way before the senior grades in high school. Probably as soon as elementary or even before that. And looking at how things work in some other nations, like Qatar where there's a high number of female engineers, I have to assume that this is a cultural issue that could be changed.
Maybe I do conflate those things. I've only seen those two things used interchangeably. What's the deeper point of the 'gender pay gap' metric if we do not also take a closer look at the work that has been done? At least to me the equal pay gap seems to be the much more interesting phenomenon to focus on.
This is usually a very important criteria when it comes to assessing a gender pay gap. So did they compare what kind of games the streamers played, what kind of commentaries they made while playing?
Not all games have the same popularity among viewers. Sometimes it also counts who streamed what first. The commentary offered during streaming also seems to be an important part of this. From personal experience I know that some people have a knack for delivering entertaining commentary. I'm inclined to give them some money in exchange for their services. On the other side of the spectrum you have people who are downright annoying. If I had to give them money I'd do it to make them shut up and just play the game. But why pay them if you can close the stream instead? There's so much competition to choose from out there. At times it can't even be blamed on the individual streamer because some voices are more pleasant to listen to than others. But that's how the world of entertainment works.
All important factors that have to be considered when disproving your null hypothesis here. So if there's a large overlap in content between male and female gamers, meaning that they play the same games and offer similar commentary, all while females get considerable less donations, then we'd have a gender pay gap here and may need to look into the causes for this. Maybe they did look for this, but I'm just incapable of finding it. I'd appreciate it if someone pointed me into the right direction here. Because without this due diligence has not been done correctly and makes it look like they jumped to conclusions.
I don't know if it is a scam, but I also don't know if that line about perfection stands up to scrutiny.
Yes, I've heard this very often. "They want it to be perfect." "Would you rather test an unfinished version or a perfect one?" "Everything comes together with the next patch."
But the sad fact is that everything they release is very far from being perfect. It's riddled with bugs and has performance so far. I can accept that, because that's how software development works. Maybe this idea of perfection exists in Chris Roberts' head, where he'd like to make everything perfect, just as he claims. Unfortunately there's little empirical evidence for this. But people are still repeating that perfection mantra. So what's left is what looks an awful lot like post-purchase rationalisation. And here I have a different phrase for you: There's a sucker born every minute.
My hopes are that they'll give us private servers at some point, that we can host and modify ourselves. Modding communities are extremely crafty and can do a lot of things. And they can satisfy different groups of players because they don't have to appeal to the lowest common denominator (mods are always optional). But I have the feeling that CIG is going down the same road as Frontier Developments went with Elite: Dangerous make it an online only game despite their early promises. After all you can't sell virtual goods and other stuff to players that may as well 'cheat' everything together on their private servers.
I understand that one of the reasons is to reduce littering. Because as the summary states, plastic cutlery and straws get often thrown away into the environment.
Of course this means that this would be less of an issue when you're on a plane, since there's paid personnel that keeps the place tidy. And they don't throw out their garbage out of the window.
And there's precedent for measures like these. For example here in Germany we've had these issues with plastic bottles and beer/soda cans a lot. Then the government decided to turn these things into deposit bottles and cans increasing the price by a 0.25€ deposit. In the beginning there was resistance, of course. But in the long run it didn't hurt sales that much. As a result the littering has been reduced drastically since people tend to return their cans and bottles. In addition to that people on the lower end of the socio-economic tend to clean up the mess some other people leave behind because it's more convenient to them in the moment.
Now I don't think that measures like deposits would work on cutlery, straws, and plates since those are items that you buy in larger quantities. Smaller deposits that are applied to each item individually would probably not be enough of a deterrent. For example if you buy a package of 50 plastic forks and pay a 0.25€ deposit for it, it comes down to a 0.005€ deposit per fork. How would returns be handled? Do you have to return the entire package of 50 forks? Can you return them individually? The former is impractical because those things get lost quite often. And the latter gives people not enough incentive to keep them. For 0.005€ a fork just throwing them away is convenient enough. It also doesn't make it interesting enough to pick it up and turn it in for others. If the deposit is too high it might severely hurt sales so far, that they might as well just ban them altogether.
I think that does indeed satisfy at least some. Fictional conflict in stories and video games do appear to provide a pressure relief valve for plenty of people.
But there's also a large number of people who see these forms of media as escapism.
If you want to reach them, you'd better tell them something that convinces them that the conflict will affect them as well in a profound way. Find something in the real world that could also make a strong plot in a fictional story. Find some people or even animals who are affected by it, maybe actively suffer from it, then show some of the suffering. Maybe throw some happy themes in the mix as well to show how it was before 'plot element' started and or how it could be if something is done about it. These 'victims' are practically your protagonists with whom your audience will emotionally connect. Because in the end most of us are still social animals that have this evolutionary trait of empathy. Of course there are exceptions to this rule, but most of us can put ourselves in the place of other people and imagine how they must feel.
That's my hypothesis anyway.
Bad News is more prevalent because the media operates like a business. The main reason for this is simply because they are businesses. They have expenses and employees that need to be paid and of course they want to make a profit.
In the beginning things were simpler. We had news papers, which were sold for money. These generated direct some direct revenue from which you could evaluate the popularity of your news. On top of that people would pay you additional money if you let them advertise for their product in your paper. If your news paper sold well you also could ask for more money in your ad space.
When new possibilities were opened through radio and TV, advertising became even more important. And since they couldn't count the number of copies sold that easily any more they had to invent new methods like Nielsen ratings to gauge the commercial value of the stories they tell.
Then the internet came along. This huge platform that provides everyone and their dog with a megaphone that lets them shout so loud it can be heard almost everywhere on the planet. Due to the extremely high competition asking money for people to access your stuff has gone out of style. That is unless you provide premium services. But for conventional media outlets that's not much of an option. So they have to rely purely on ads. Fortunately for them the internet makes it pretty easy to evaluate the popularity of their stories - count clicks, shares on social media and whatever.
So what kind of stories are the best selling/most click generating ones? (An answer that I won't give you). But I'll ask some more suggestive questions. If everything was just fine why would I watch the news? Maybe some tech or science news would interest me personally (why do you think I initially came here?) But other than that I could follow one of my other hobbies. Another question:Would you pay for a movie where the protagonists sits on his couch, munches cheetos and drinks beer all day? Or would you rather see some action movie, thriller, or drama with a lot of conflict in it?
I don't want to write an essay here, because that'd be the bare minimum to cover the topic. But I'd urge you to look into the theory or story telling if you want to understand how the media works. There are books out there that give aspiring writers a couple of pointers of what a good story needs. And if you understand that, you'll start to see parallels almost everywhere in the media. Be news about terrorists attacks, robberies, climate change, exploitation in developing countries, conspiracy theories and so forth.
The game itself doesn't look very original or good. Especially the shown perspective of the shooter makes it look like an easy mode with no challenge as you're killing unarmed civilians and SWATs that are more harmless than your generic Stormtrooper (of course except when killing Luke's uncle and aunt). It comes with dated graphics and nothing that isn't already out there somewhere. I guess the attention the game getting now is better exposure to potential buyers than they could ever hoped for otherwise. You can expect people who wouldn't have considered buying such a shitty game spending some bucks on it, just act in spite of those who are offended by it.
Possibly a waste of time, since the flux density of the field (electrostatic, magnetic, or electromagnetic) is inversely proportional to the square of the distance.
Remind yourself that the idea was to use these things for deep space missions, where low but consistent acceleration is needed. This is where a high specific impulse of your propulsion system becomes more important than absolute thrust. Not having to carry any propellant with you would have been a great bonus here.
At this point we may as well use solar sails and some huge remote phased array lasers.
Generally, Transformer movies are not known to be of the cerebral sort of entertainment.
If true*, I'd take it as a nod towards how little Hollywood cares for scientific accuracy or at least how dumb the production thought their audience would be.
*Because I only watched the first one when it came out and don't remember a lot about it other than that they had a ton of generic special effects and a hot blonde female scientists say that the alien signal encoding goes beyond their understanding and maybe they had to switch from Fourier transforms to quantum mechanics. Having had to endure Fourier transforms from every conceivable perspective for the past two semesters of analogue and digital signal processing at that point I knew that I smelled bullshit - technobabble. Although I do not expect the majority of people to pay attention to something like that.
Indeed. It's so simple.
Reminds me of that Futurama episode when the Professor turned the robot into a human through a process called reverse fossilization. Explaining that he discovered that normal fossilization was turning living flesh and bone into minerals. And after realizing that it was a simple matter reversing the process.
So after realizing E = mc it's just converting all of it back to energy, yes? It's that simple, right? Fine. But how do you actually do it?
It can make a measurable improvement according to this clinical trial conducted in the UK: www.thelancet.com/journals/lancet/article/PIIS0140-6736(17)33102-1/fulltext
I think that brocooli is awesome. At least if its fresh and you prepare it properly. I prefer to steam vegetables like that.
Depends on how important the EU market is for them. But yeah, I expect that a lot of small companies that operate outside of the EU don't have a lot of EU customers to begin with. So their decision will be to either ignore it completely or if they give a shit block the EU from their side.
Actively locking them out of EU countries is the last resort of the EU if they do not comply in any way. Although that will probably have to happen on national basis, where every country may act in a different way.
But if that happens I'm already looking forward to the inner political backlash and shitstorms caused by infuriated EU citizens.
Europe has to offer plenty of customers or plenty of juicy data if you will. With about 511 million citizens of which probably 2/3 are relevant to the market there's a lot of money to be made.
Now companies will have to decide whether it'll cost them more to lose the EU market or comply to their regulations.
As someone living in the EU I'm curious how the outcome will look like. I expect most of the big businesses to comply but possibly a lot of smaller ones resorting to geoblocking. At any rate there's still VPNs and TOR available.