I'd give my left leg to have Firefox or Safari behave that well on my machines.... Currently Safari is up to 414MB RSIZE / 1.63GB vsize and Firefox "only" 200MB rsize / 1.22GB vsize, but that's because I have hardly used it today. I use both at the same time mainly because it halves the pain when I have to restart one of them to reclaim memory.
I see the same on multiple machines with both OS X and Linux, and have for a long time.
It's so bad that I have Activity Monitor permanently open in OS X to keep an eye on when it's time to kill the browser (before they make everything too unresponsive for me to be able to quickly kill them)
Exactly... Lack of process isolation is my biggest gripe with both Safari and Firefox. I STILL frequently have to kill either one of them because "something" cause them to eat lots of RAM and/or CPU, and I absolutely hate having to take down 50+ tabs because of it. Even doubling or tripling "normal" memory usage would still give me a far better typical browsing experience.
Climatologists are now working with reasonable proxy data for the last 1300 years, not just "a few hundred point sources". These proxies are things we can measure today but that reflect past temperatures, such as sediments, growth rate of coral etc.
Bzzzt, wrong. You assume the margin of error would all lead to BSE infected cows being shown to be "safe" by the test. You are also assuming a 100% incidence rate of vCJD from eating BSE infected cows, when that is blatantly false. During the worst BSE scare in the UK, more than 183000 cases of BSE were identified. Only 129 people got vCJD in the following years.
You are also assuming that a single identified BSE case would only lead to that cow being pulled from the marked, AND a uniform distribution of the disease.
In reality, the distribution is not uniform (an infected cow is likely to pass on the infection within the same herd), and if a single cow is suspected to have BSE, meat from the entire herd would be held back, and depending on further tests the entire herd might be culled.
So in reality, with a margin of error of 0.17%, the risk of a single vCJD case in humans is orders of magnitude less. CJD from other causes is several magnitudes more likely (CJD has an incidence rate of about 1 in 1 million in the population as a whole - vCJD accounts for a tiny fraction of that)
Quick, tell me, how many people have died from vCJD as a result of eating US beef?
Now, how many people die of food poisoning every year?
Take a look at this. That paper estimates 5000 deaths from food poisoning in the US every year.
WHO claims 1 vCJD case in the US in the period 1996 to 2002 when the BSE scare was at it's worst.
Furthermore, there are other suspected vectors for vCJD than cattle (brains and offal from other animals, for example).
How come there's no similar outcry for massive increases in precautions against Toxoplasma, Listeria and Salmonella, the three of which alone account for 1500 deaths in the US?
The focus on vCJD is causing people to worry about the wrong things, and that is a much greater health concern than vCJD is.
If they were proposing, and able to, sell a steak that was guaranteed free from BSE there would be some argument for allowing them to. But they can't, and they aren't. The concern is in part that the test would NOT prove that the steaks are free from BSE, but that is likely the perception a claim of having tested 100% of the cows would give.
People would be tricked into spending more money for practically no added safety, and for a disease that is so rare it's hardly worth thinking about to start with.
All probably under the assumption that the prevalence of the disease is uniformly distributed among the cattle you test. More likely, it comes in batches of cattle from the same farms or areas.
Experience shows that it DOES, but that doesn't invalidate the argument. On the contrary, that means there's even less of a reason to increase testing, as if you find traces of BSE in even a single cow you would stop shipping from that herd and test the rest from that farm and nearby farms.
The less uniform the distribution is, the less testing you need to prevent the disease from slipping past.
According to the WHO, between 1996 and 2002 when the BSE scare was at it's worst, there was ONE vCJD victim in the US.
If this company cared about the health of it's customers as opposed to capitalizing on it's customers being uninformed, it'd do more good if it gave a fraction of what increased testing would cost to a medical charity set up to benefit it's customers. They'd be far more likely to save a life that way.
The problem with Mad Cow disease is that it is extremely rare. If you slaughter 35 million cows annually, and only 1 in 10,000,000 cows have the disease, then a 1% testing regime is essentially guaranteed to never find the problem.
If the problem is so rare, then why worry about it in the first place? During the BSE scare in the UK, there were more than 1000 BSE cases per diagnosed vCJD victim. It would take a high BSE rate before it becomes a significant health issue.
The money it would cost to increase testing would save far more lives if spent on more common health problems.
Consider this: If BSE is found in a herd, you would stop shipping from that herd completely. You only need to find it in a single cow before massive precautions would be taken.
This is part of the reason why testing a small percentage is acceptable: This is not about a single cow. If you find it, you stop shipping and test the rest and possible destroy the entire herd.
Also consider this: Of 183000 or so cases of BSE in the UK, "only" 129 cases of vCJD were the result. Less than one in thousand. The odds of a single vCJD case arising in the human population unless there's a large BSE epidemic that goes unnoticed is extremely small.
In other words, the occasional single cow falling through the cracks in terms of testing is unlikely to be a problem.
There's so many other things that may cause people to die of their food that panicking over vCJD is a waste of time and money that could be better used to make people safe from other things beyond the relatively low level of testing that's currently done to prevent the chance of another round of major outbreaks of BSE.
There are several forms of CJD. Only one (variant CJD, or vCJD) is so far linked with any certainty to BSE. The other forms of CJD make up by far the largest portion of CJD sufferers. But even with vCJD other animals are also suspected (there's for example been cases where the suspected source was that the victims all liked to eat squirrel brains)
So in other words, chances are - especially if they were older - that is was just plain "old" CJD and not vCJD, but if it was vCJD it's certainly not impossible that other animal sources were to blame.
But that is highly unlikely to account for the majority, or even a significant percentage, of the vCJD cases worldwide. Most have been in the UK where they did coincide with the massive BSE epidemic in cattle, and it's not like there was some massive increase in people "going back to nature" at the same time.
I live in London. I'm several times more likely to die in the London Underground system (50 or so people a year, though a good chunk of that is "passenger action" - London Underground's euphemism for suicide jumpers) than from vCJD. It's hysteria.
But while vCJD is rare, BSE was not rare during the period vCJD was a problem in the UK - about 182000 cases of BSE has been reported in the UK since 1986, most of them in the initial few years until more drastic measures were put in place. 182000 cases of BSE vs. 129 cases of vCJD up until 2002.
It would seem likely any new large BSE outbreak would be noticeable before it is likely to become a problem.
Given the number of other nasty things you can contract from meat or almost any food that's not been treated correctly I'd be very surprised if vCJD make up more than a small percentage of people dying from food borne diseases.
BUT, you must always, always have an opinion about the wedding arrangement. Saying "whatever you want" when she asks will put you at risk of many sexless nights... It just has to be her opinion
I don't know where you live, but here in the UK the typical wedding cost is about 17k GBP, or about 31k USD at todays rates.
My wedding was about 20k GBP because my wifes family is insanely large (what you get for marrying a catholic - be warned), and just the dress cost well about your $1200 estimate. Heck, my suit was well above the $1200 estimate, even before adding shirt, belt, shoes, cufflinks etc.
I'm sure you can have a nice wedding for $1200 too, but that's not what most people do.
To be fair, move equally far out of Oslo that most people happily commute other places and you'd find a lot of cheaper options.
I live in one of the most densely packed boroughs of London, and still have a 50 minute commute in to the centre. That's a pretty normal commute in a lot of larger European cities - since I moved here my commute has varied from 30 minutes to 70 minutes. At the time I had a 30 minute commute I was paying through the nose for a single room in a flatshare, but I was in the dead centre of town, more or less (Marble Arch, as in the arch was literally a stone's throw from our livingroom window)
I now pay the equivalent of 1200 Euro/month on a 235k Euro mortgage for a 3 bedroom house + garden. Even making room for higher interest payments, 400 Euro/month could finance a 600k Norwegian kroner mortgage pretty easily.
My brother has a decent sized 2 bedroom flat priced at around 900k about 30 minutes drive out from the centre of Oslo, so finding somewhere decent to live within a commutable distance for 600k doesn't sound so hard, though admittedly it's been a few years since the last time I had to look for a place in Oslo.
The centre of Oslo is ridiculously expensive even by Norwegian standards, but the great thing is that Oslo is so small that a short commute can still bring you to reasonably priced areas. No such luck in London...
You may be right, but I've never seen anywhere where the mandatory vacation includes the public holidays.
In fact, even very low paid retail jobs don't generally do that. Large retail outfits like Marks and Spencers even have significantly more generous vacations than the norm. Not long ago their vacation days topped out at 35 days a year for long serving employees, but even after a year or two you'd be at 27. Don't know if that's changed recently.
For my part, I'd NEVER even remotely consider signing a contract saying I will work any and all hours required. Even if I did, though, luckily where I live and work such a contract can not be enforced and would in all likelihood be illegal.
The reason I would never sign a contract like that is that I'm not cheap and expendable. I know my value, and it's high enough that I can afford to refuse stupid contract terms like that. If more people actually stood up and negotiated their terms instead of accepting whatever is put in front of them, most people would have far better terms.
Here's a hint: Almost all offers are negotiable. In fact, I've never been given an offer of employment where the salary, equity and contract terms weren't all up for negotiation. I usually negotiate offers up anywhere from 10-50%, and if I see contract terms I don't agree with, I strike them out and tell them to fix it. So far every single potential employer have come back with a significantly improved offer and contract.
Hence the GP's comment about you being either expendable or corporate sheeple.
If you're not easily expendable and you dare stand up for yourself in negotiations you won't have crap like that in your contracts.
Well, "we" (as in mankind as a whole) clearly are amazingly superstitious.
More importantly, though, it's a text that has a reasonable chance of surviving and being updated to remain understandable. Even if religion should start declining rapidly, it's played such a significant role in history and the text has been spread so widely that it's one of very few works I'd be willing to bet will exist in a "modern" translation 2000 years from now - a work that is currently considered a sacred text by more than half of the worlds population (both christians, muslims and jews) has a good shot at longevity.
What other texts do we have that has a similar chance of surviving? There are a lot of texts that are revered to some extent, but few or none that so many people have copies of, and even fewer currently widespread works that the next generation or the one after that will still have many copies of.
There's nothing stopping restrictions that essentially make it legal only to publish the name in official proceedings, and make people jump to a tiny extra hoop to get at them. It doesn't need to be impossible to get at - you just need to prevent it from being shoved in peoples places.
If I have to go to the courts website and dig around a little to find the court papers and download a document to see the name, you've effectively cut off 99.999% or whatever of the population from ever bothering. Why? Because most people don't care about the identity unless it happens to be a crime that happened in your local neighborhood.
That still allows organizations and individuals to keep track of what the government does, but it cuts of a lot of the sensationalism that teaches people who otherwise couldn't give a shit to connect peoples names and faces with crimes before there's even been a trial.
The problem is that publishing an equally large headline saying they've been acquitted will NOT equate to reversing the damage done by the original headlines. Show humans a horrible accusation and then immediately show them a claim that the original accusations aren't true and a fair share of us will STILL believe the original accusation, or remember the original accusation but not the retraction later on, or remember both but still be thinking "what if" and treat the person accused as if the accusations were true. And that is even assuming all the same people ready it. In fact, given how humans think, a fair number of people who did NOT read the names in the original accusations might believe the original accusations once they see the retractions.
I don't know what the right answer is, but I do think media does have a responsibility to thread carefully. They can't hide behind the "but people have a right to know" when they know there is a good chance they will be ruining someones life forever even if what they report is written in ways that are factually true - they don't live in a vaccum, and even if they are legally on solid ground, there are ethical and moral issues to take into account.
Often, I question what their motives even are with publishing the names. If the person in question is being kept in custody during the trial there is no compelling public interest in making the name and picture public unless the police is still looking for more information, for example. If the person is free, I can see some interest particularly in the local area, but that wouldn't justify a national newspaper plastering it over the front page for example.
The name will mean nothing to most people until it's been hammered into their heads by the media. But afterwards that person is effectively screwed whether or not they're found guilty.
Introduce NPCs as "reinforcements" to the losing side to make it progressively harder. Introduce some keeps etc. that are next to impossible to take, to allow the weak side to prevent being wiped out. Introduce areas that are good for hiding and guerilla warfare. Introduce quests to take on some monster protecting a magical item that gives great power to whoever holds it and as it so happens the monster shows up in an area held by the losing side.
Make it hard to efficiently occupy enemy territory by requiring supplies to be farmed, mined etc. and brought to the front, and distribute players evenly between the factions so that the more territory a faction takes the harder it will be for them to both produce enough supplies AND bring the supplies all the way to the front lines, so that it gets progressively harder to maintain a push into enemy territory.
Use NPCs that stay behind and carry out important functions, but that take a long time to change allegiances and that get less effective when under occupation by enemy forces.
Use NPCs to stay behind and carry out "guerrilla attacks" (you can give normal players quests to do this as well of course, but with NPCs you can introduce more of them and give them more power to rebalance the situation dynamically - the further you get into enemy territory the more and more vicious guerrilla attacks you'd get subjected to)
There are so many ways of automatically manipulating the balance to make an outright victory next to impossible and to make it very hard to maintain a dramatic chokehold over the other factions and make the game cycle back and forth (or in more complex way by introducing more factionsO.
In the case of getting near an outright victory there's always the possibility for the game makers to introduce specific scripted content to dramatically upset it (suddenly a huge mysterious army arrives from a far away land and attacks the dominant faction from the rear, and players are allowed to sign up for the new faction as well, and whoops you now have an extra front; suddenly a volcano just happens to erupt and engulfs the largest stronghold of the dominant faction in lava; an ancient scroll gives a spell that awakens an insanely powerful protector of the losing side that proceeds to cause an epic battle that will near wipe out the enemy forces near the front). A lot of these elements could exist continuously through the game, but the game could alter the probabilities of them happening, through simple measures such as simply based on percent of the world controlled by each faction.
I've long fantasized about creating a game where the long term trends were set almost in stone, and where the game would dynamically create events making it impossible for players to prevent the long term trends by gradually upping the games support for the preferred direction of specific factors (such as which faction holds which part of the game world) until the required state is achieved, but where the players CAN always affect the game world. It would be tricky to make it always look plausible, and so you don't want to wait until, say, the losing faction has only a single town left. You want the game to make it progressively harder for the dominant faction from the moment they have the upper hand. You need to find a balance so that power can surge back and forth, and that players on both sides get a challenge, but don't get overwhelmed.
I used to play civilization and it's variations a lot, and one thing I noticed: If it got to the point where my loss was inevitable, I'd get bored and stop playing. If it got to the point where I dominated the game and would inevitably win, I'd get bored and stop playing. You want the game to make it near impossible for either side to crush all opposition, while at the same time you want to ensure all sides get to experience both being under pressure and surging back. Ideally players will ensure the balance, but when they fail the game world can easily have plenty of mechanisms to take up the slack.
Instead of making the quest "chop down the tree on the hill" you make the quest "chop down the tree at location [foo]" and the location and the tree is dynamically generated determined for each player. Assuming you populate the world with enough trees, and/or eventually slowly replace the trees, the world will appear persistent and the amount of extra work is very limited.
The same principle can be applied to most things: Put N evil kings in the game world, and M princesses and other desirable hostages, and let the N evil kings constantly pick from a list of X plots involving kidnapping princesses or others, assassinating people (including players who have been given quests to fight them or to carry out quests for other kings) etc., and then hand out quests to aid or prevent those plots. Add a handful of twists and turns and wary the number and level of players given each quest and you'll have endless variations. Once a princess is kidnapped, you have the reverse quest of freeing her. Once she's free she'll eventually be targeted for kidnapping again, probably by another king, via another method with other players involved in the kidnapping and in protecting/saving her.
So yes, as you say you make things flip-flop. But you can introduce variations, delays etc.. You can keep a torn down castle in ruins for a while, before an upstart king decides to make it his stronghold and hires players to rebuild it again, possibly in a completely different style, and quite possibly his alliances will be different, so the conflicts he's involving players in and the plots he hatches are different.
Keep in mind that the real world flip-flops like that a lot: Countries have taken and lost land many times throughout history. Castles have been taken and retaken, burned down and rebuilt. Royal families have been ousted and retaken power.
Just don't make things go back to exactly the same it was, and don't make it happen immediately.
You're assuming the same players would be involved in each loop. Player B gets rid of player A and has taken the village. Then he moves on to bigger and better things after having built his reputation. He gets a quest that leads him away. New bandits move in on the village, and player C gets the quest of defending the village and player D helps the bandits etc.
Some players might stick around in the same place for a while, but the gameplay will still be different because different people will use different tactics, and the game can dynamically alter the number of NPCs involved on each side, natural elements that affect the situation, number of players given the chance to help out on each side etc., or for that matter have entirely different things happen to the same village.
It gets harder, but you can "force" the story to follow roughly a mapped out line by being creative. A story element is predicated on a specific town being under control of a specific side? Introduce a story element that sees a massive amount of NPC's for that side help out in the defense or attack of that town in the time leading up to it depending on who is holding it. Essentially you stack the game heavily in favor of the state you want/need.
You might need to invent story elements to explain it, but there are tons of easy explanations to that kind of thing ("allies from far away have sent forces to help you in this time of need, blah blah") and you can even try to avoid the NPC's by having the game dynamically create quests for users to drive normal players where you need them to be to make your planned outcomes more likely to happen naturally.
Or you dynamically adjust the stats of the players involved in a battle to increase the chances of the outcome out want.
The methods of subtly (and not so subtly) influence the world in the direction that fits best are endless.
Even if you don't take it "all out" it can still be useful in keeping thing interesting by preventing one faction from dominating too long - introduce unpredictable elements that upsets the balance, and create story around it even if you allow the players the opportunity to overcome the obstacles and modify your planned story.
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I see the same on multiple machines with both OS X and Linux, and have for a long time.
It's so bad that I have Activity Monitor permanently open in OS X to keep an eye on when it's time to kill the browser (before they make everything too unresponsive for me to be able to quickly kill them)
Exactly... Lack of process isolation is my biggest gripe with both Safari and Firefox. I STILL frequently have to kill either one of them because "something" cause them to eat lots of RAM and/or CPU, and I absolutely hate having to take down 50+ tabs because of it. Even doubling or tripling "normal" memory usage would still give me a far better typical browsing experience.
Climatologists are now working with reasonable proxy data for the last 1300 years, not just "a few hundred point sources". These proxies are things we can measure today but that reflect past temperatures, such as sediments, growth rate of coral etc.
You are also assuming that a single identified BSE case would only lead to that cow being pulled from the marked, AND a uniform distribution of the disease.
In reality, the distribution is not uniform (an infected cow is likely to pass on the infection within the same herd), and if a single cow is suspected to have BSE, meat from the entire herd would be held back, and depending on further tests the entire herd might be culled.
So in reality, with a margin of error of 0.17%, the risk of a single vCJD case in humans is orders of magnitude less. CJD from other causes is several magnitudes more likely (CJD has an incidence rate of about 1 in 1 million in the population as a whole - vCJD accounts for a tiny fraction of that)
Now, how many people die of food poisoning every year?
Take a look at this. That paper estimates 5000 deaths from food poisoning in the US every year.
WHO claims 1 vCJD case in the US in the period 1996 to 2002 when the BSE scare was at it's worst.
Furthermore, there are other suspected vectors for vCJD than cattle (brains and offal from other animals, for example).
How come there's no similar outcry for massive increases in precautions against Toxoplasma, Listeria and Salmonella, the three of which alone account for 1500 deaths in the US?
The focus on vCJD is causing people to worry about the wrong things, and that is a much greater health concern than vCJD is.
People would be tricked into spending more money for practically no added safety, and for a disease that is so rare it's hardly worth thinking about to start with.
All probably under the assumption that the prevalence of the disease is uniformly distributed among the cattle you test. More likely, it comes in batches of cattle from the same farms or areas.
Experience shows that it DOES, but that doesn't invalidate the argument. On the contrary, that means there's even less of a reason to increase testing, as if you find traces of BSE in even a single cow you would stop shipping from that herd and test the rest from that farm and nearby farms.
The less uniform the distribution is, the less testing you need to prevent the disease from slipping past.
If this company cared about the health of it's customers as opposed to capitalizing on it's customers being uninformed, it'd do more good if it gave a fraction of what increased testing would cost to a medical charity set up to benefit it's customers. They'd be far more likely to save a life that way.
The problem with Mad Cow disease is that it is extremely rare. If you slaughter 35 million cows annually, and only 1 in 10,000,000 cows have the disease, then a 1% testing regime is essentially guaranteed to never find the problem.
If the problem is so rare, then why worry about it in the first place? During the BSE scare in the UK, there were more than 1000 BSE cases per diagnosed vCJD victim. It would take a high BSE rate before it becomes a significant health issue.
The money it would cost to increase testing would save far more lives if spent on more common health problems.
This is part of the reason why testing a small percentage is acceptable: This is not about a single cow. If you find it, you stop shipping and test the rest and possible destroy the entire herd.
Also consider this: Of 183000 or so cases of BSE in the UK, "only" 129 cases of vCJD were the result. Less than one in thousand. The odds of a single vCJD case arising in the human population unless there's a large BSE epidemic that goes unnoticed is extremely small.
In other words, the occasional single cow falling through the cracks in terms of testing is unlikely to be a problem.
There's so many other things that may cause people to die of their food that panicking over vCJD is a waste of time and money that could be better used to make people safe from other things beyond the relatively low level of testing that's currently done to prevent the chance of another round of major outbreaks of BSE.
So in other words, chances are - especially if they were older - that is was just plain "old" CJD and not vCJD, but if it was vCJD it's certainly not impossible that other animal sources were to blame.
But that is highly unlikely to account for the majority, or even a significant percentage, of the vCJD cases worldwide. Most have been in the UK where they did coincide with the massive BSE epidemic in cattle, and it's not like there was some massive increase in people "going back to nature" at the same time.
But while vCJD is rare, BSE was not rare during the period vCJD was a problem in the UK - about 182000 cases of BSE has been reported in the UK since 1986, most of them in the initial few years until more drastic measures were put in place. 182000 cases of BSE vs. 129 cases of vCJD up until 2002.
It would seem likely any new large BSE outbreak would be noticeable before it is likely to become a problem.
Given the number of other nasty things you can contract from meat or almost any food that's not been treated correctly I'd be very surprised if vCJD make up more than a small percentage of people dying from food borne diseases.
BUT, you must always, always have an opinion about the wedding arrangement. Saying "whatever you want" when she asks will put you at risk of many sexless nights... It just has to be her opinion
My wedding was about 20k GBP because my wifes family is insanely large (what you get for marrying a catholic - be warned), and just the dress cost well about your $1200 estimate. Heck, my suit was well above the $1200 estimate, even before adding shirt, belt, shoes, cufflinks etc.
I'm sure you can have a nice wedding for $1200 too, but that's not what most people do.
I live in one of the most densely packed boroughs of London, and still have a 50 minute commute in to the centre. That's a pretty normal commute in a lot of larger European cities - since I moved here my commute has varied from 30 minutes to 70 minutes. At the time I had a 30 minute commute I was paying through the nose for a single room in a flatshare, but I was in the dead centre of town, more or less (Marble Arch, as in the arch was literally a stone's throw from our livingroom window)
I now pay the equivalent of 1200 Euro/month on a 235k Euro mortgage for a 3 bedroom house + garden. Even making room for higher interest payments, 400 Euro/month could finance a 600k Norwegian kroner mortgage pretty easily.
My brother has a decent sized 2 bedroom flat priced at around 900k about 30 minutes drive out from the centre of Oslo, so finding somewhere decent to live within a commutable distance for 600k doesn't sound so hard, though admittedly it's been a few years since the last time I had to look for a place in Oslo.
The centre of Oslo is ridiculously expensive even by Norwegian standards, but the great thing is that Oslo is so small that a short commute can still bring you to reasonably priced areas. No such luck in London...
In fact, even very low paid retail jobs don't generally do that. Large retail outfits like Marks and Spencers even have significantly more generous vacations than the norm. Not long ago their vacation days topped out at 35 days a year for long serving employees, but even after a year or two you'd be at 27. Don't know if that's changed recently.
The reason I would never sign a contract like that is that I'm not cheap and expendable. I know my value, and it's high enough that I can afford to refuse stupid contract terms like that. If more people actually stood up and negotiated their terms instead of accepting whatever is put in front of them, most people would have far better terms.
Here's a hint: Almost all offers are negotiable. In fact, I've never been given an offer of employment where the salary, equity and contract terms weren't all up for negotiation. I usually negotiate offers up anywhere from 10-50%, and if I see contract terms I don't agree with, I strike them out and tell them to fix it. So far every single potential employer have come back with a significantly improved offer and contract.
Hence the GP's comment about you being either expendable or corporate sheeple.
If you're not easily expendable and you dare stand up for yourself in negotiations you won't have crap like that in your contracts.
More importantly, though, it's a text that has a reasonable chance of surviving and being updated to remain understandable. Even if religion should start declining rapidly, it's played such a significant role in history and the text has been spread so widely that it's one of very few works I'd be willing to bet will exist in a "modern" translation 2000 years from now - a work that is currently considered a sacred text by more than half of the worlds population (both christians, muslims and jews) has a good shot at longevity.
What other texts do we have that has a similar chance of surviving? There are a lot of texts that are revered to some extent, but few or none that so many people have copies of, and even fewer currently widespread works that the next generation or the one after that will still have many copies of.
If I have to go to the courts website and dig around a little to find the court papers and download a document to see the name, you've effectively cut off 99.999% or whatever of the population from ever bothering. Why? Because most people don't care about the identity unless it happens to be a crime that happened in your local neighborhood.
That still allows organizations and individuals to keep track of what the government does, but it cuts of a lot of the sensationalism that teaches people who otherwise couldn't give a shit to connect peoples names and faces with crimes before there's even been a trial.
I don't know what the right answer is, but I do think media does have a responsibility to thread carefully. They can't hide behind the "but people have a right to know" when they know there is a good chance they will be ruining someones life forever even if what they report is written in ways that are factually true - they don't live in a vaccum, and even if they are legally on solid ground, there are ethical and moral issues to take into account.
Often, I question what their motives even are with publishing the names. If the person in question is being kept in custody during the trial there is no compelling public interest in making the name and picture public unless the police is still looking for more information, for example. If the person is free, I can see some interest particularly in the local area, but that wouldn't justify a national newspaper plastering it over the front page for example.
The name will mean nothing to most people until it's been hammered into their heads by the media. But afterwards that person is effectively screwed whether or not they're found guilty.
Thats what prelinking or position independent code is for. Modern Linux distros have supported prelinking for a long time.
Make it hard to efficiently occupy enemy territory by requiring supplies to be farmed, mined etc. and brought to the front, and distribute players evenly between the factions so that the more territory a faction takes the harder it will be for them to both produce enough supplies AND bring the supplies all the way to the front lines, so that it gets progressively harder to maintain a push into enemy territory.
Use NPCs that stay behind and carry out important functions, but that take a long time to change allegiances and that get less effective when under occupation by enemy forces.
Use NPCs to stay behind and carry out "guerrilla attacks" (you can give normal players quests to do this as well of course, but with NPCs you can introduce more of them and give them more power to rebalance the situation dynamically - the further you get into enemy territory the more and more vicious guerrilla attacks you'd get subjected to)
There are so many ways of automatically manipulating the balance to make an outright victory next to impossible and to make it very hard to maintain a dramatic chokehold over the other factions and make the game cycle back and forth (or in more complex way by introducing more factionsO.
In the case of getting near an outright victory there's always the possibility for the game makers to introduce specific scripted content to dramatically upset it (suddenly a huge mysterious army arrives from a far away land and attacks the dominant faction from the rear, and players are allowed to sign up for the new faction as well, and whoops you now have an extra front; suddenly a volcano just happens to erupt and engulfs the largest stronghold of the dominant faction in lava; an ancient scroll gives a spell that awakens an insanely powerful protector of the losing side that proceeds to cause an epic battle that will near wipe out the enemy forces near the front). A lot of these elements could exist continuously through the game, but the game could alter the probabilities of them happening, through simple measures such as simply based on percent of the world controlled by each faction.
I've long fantasized about creating a game where the long term trends were set almost in stone, and where the game would dynamically create events making it impossible for players to prevent the long term trends by gradually upping the games support for the preferred direction of specific factors (such as which faction holds which part of the game world) until the required state is achieved, but where the players CAN always affect the game world. It would be tricky to make it always look plausible, and so you don't want to wait until, say, the losing faction has only a single town left. You want the game to make it progressively harder for the dominant faction from the moment they have the upper hand. You need to find a balance so that power can surge back and forth, and that players on both sides get a challenge, but don't get overwhelmed.
I used to play civilization and it's variations a lot, and one thing I noticed: If it got to the point where my loss was inevitable, I'd get bored and stop playing. If it got to the point where I dominated the game and would inevitably win, I'd get bored and stop playing. You want the game to make it near impossible for either side to crush all opposition, while at the same time you want to ensure all sides get to experience both being under pressure and surging back. Ideally players will ensure the balance, but when they fail the game world can easily have plenty of mechanisms to take up the slack.
The same principle can be applied to most things: Put N evil kings in the game world, and M princesses and other desirable hostages, and let the N evil kings constantly pick from a list of X plots involving kidnapping princesses or others, assassinating people (including players who have been given quests to fight them or to carry out quests for other kings) etc., and then hand out quests to aid or prevent those plots. Add a handful of twists and turns and wary the number and level of players given each quest and you'll have endless variations. Once a princess is kidnapped, you have the reverse quest of freeing her. Once she's free she'll eventually be targeted for kidnapping again, probably by another king, via another method with other players involved in the kidnapping and in protecting/saving her.
So yes, as you say you make things flip-flop. But you can introduce variations, delays etc.. You can keep a torn down castle in ruins for a while, before an upstart king decides to make it his stronghold and hires players to rebuild it again, possibly in a completely different style, and quite possibly his alliances will be different, so the conflicts he's involving players in and the plots he hatches are different.
Keep in mind that the real world flip-flops like that a lot: Countries have taken and lost land many times throughout history. Castles have been taken and retaken, burned down and rebuilt. Royal families have been ousted and retaken power.
Just don't make things go back to exactly the same it was, and don't make it happen immediately.
Some players might stick around in the same place for a while, but the gameplay will still be different because different people will use different tactics, and the game can dynamically alter the number of NPCs involved on each side, natural elements that affect the situation, number of players given the chance to help out on each side etc., or for that matter have entirely different things happen to the same village.
You might need to invent story elements to explain it, but there are tons of easy explanations to that kind of thing ("allies from far away have sent forces to help you in this time of need, blah blah") and you can even try to avoid the NPC's by having the game dynamically create quests for users to drive normal players where you need them to be to make your planned outcomes more likely to happen naturally.
Or you dynamically adjust the stats of the players involved in a battle to increase the chances of the outcome out want.
The methods of subtly (and not so subtly) influence the world in the direction that fits best are endless.
Even if you don't take it "all out" it can still be useful in keeping thing interesting by preventing one faction from dominating too long - introduce unpredictable elements that upsets the balance, and create story around it even if you allow the players the opportunity to overcome the obstacles and modify your planned story.