Islam is the religion of peace! Well, except for a few radicals, maybe 2 or 3 percent, which would only make about a million radicals. And, maybe except for their supporters, maybe 20 percent or so, which would make about 200 million. Other than that, it's mostly moderates, who won't actually go out and jihad, but they'll cheer the jihadists on
A lot of this is fair, but the same goes for any ideology. You could say the same for Christianity. You could say the same for Protestantism, which kept central Europe awash in blood for hundreds of years after its introduction. You could say the same for political philosophies. The Spanish Civil war, and to a large extent WWII were fought over Republicanism vs. Authoritarianism, and millions slaughtered each other in the most gruesome ways imaginable.
Yet nobody runs about decrying philosophy in general. That would be stupid. The problem is humans naturally like to think in us-vs-them terms, and like to kill "them" (chimps go to war too. It sucks, but its natural). Religion is just an excuse. Strike it down, and another will be used.
Quit crying and screaming! No, there are no monsters, and no you can't have a nite-light! That's bad for you. I read it online a week ago. Just sit there and snivel in the darkness!
Scientists... traumatizing children since the Renaissance.
Perhaps. The league minimum is about half a mil a year. Good money by any standard. However, that's only about 4x what an average math PhD can pull down in a year. Compare that with the fact that an NFL linesman career is going to be over in 10 years if you are really lucky, while a mathematician can work until either they drop or age-related dementia sets in, and it really isn't so cut-and-dried. At the absolute least, he's smart to be trying to do both so he isn't starting from base salary(/reputation) on the math thing when forced to retire from football.
"There's a rush you get when you go out on the field, lay everything on the line and physically dominate the player across from you. This is a feeling I'm (for lack of a better word) addicted to, and I'm hard-pressed to find anywhere else."
This is your indication that you are talking with an adrenaline/endorphin junkie.
I play futbol (soccer) defense, and can completely understand this. Its an otherwise thankless position. If you do it well pretty much nobody but your goalie notices, and if you mess up everyone hates on you. So why do it? Honestly, I believe I got addicted to the adrenaline/endorphin hit. I don't even feel right until I've had my first hard tackle. It is next to impossible to get that fix in real life, but a good physical confrontation will bring it right up. I once hadn't got there yet, and then a (clearly juicing) big forward knocked me to the ground while the ref wasn't looking. I got up laughing and thanking him. Not quite the reaction he was expecting.
I don't know how many here have seen Clint Eastwood's Every Which Way but Loose, but the main character Philo clearly had this as well. It was a major plot point that he had to fight, and had an unusual thing where he got better the more he was hit. Classic Endorphin/Adrenaline junkie.
I think it ought to go without saying that as a mathematician Urschel isn't going to get his body chemical "hit" in his daily life. I've certainly found that to be the case as a software engineer.
I prefer to think of C as "portable assembly language".
The problem with that is that it simply isn't. Take a look at the sources for any multiplatform project, and you'll see its chock full of platform-specific precompiler code sections. C is one of the *least* portable programming languages available.
Where it does get similar is that the language provides a lot of features that are frankly too low-level for a programming language. For example, there's the "auto" and "register" keywords. Those are supposed to be for telling the compiler when to put variables into a register. Every modern C compiler *ignores* these keywords, as no human can hope to perform this optimization properly at the C source level on a modern processor. That's just one prominent example.
So C is actually a non-portable non-assembly language.
It is built with the LLVM compiler framework included in Xcode 6, and uses the Objective-C runtime...
So... C. Ok, we're done here.
That means nothing of the sort. LLVM is a compiler framework, whose back end contains rather a lot of machine language, and whose front end depends on the language being used. Most language front ends are self-hosted (written in themselves).
Likewise, using the Objective-C runtime doesn't mean anything other than that it was a convenient runtime that already existed, and they know how to interface to it. If you can do that, your sources can be in any language you prefer.
But most importantly, C fans seem to have gotten it in their collective heads that C is somehow the root of all language, from which all other programs must have ultimately sprung. This is complete and utter hogwash, and makes having a discussion with them really difficult. If such a thing exists, it is machine language, not C. Does that mean machine language is superior? Hell no. You just need it sometimes, but mostly to help build things that are better for humans to use.
That's a good start, but there's a lot more to it than that. An experienced driver can tell when a car in the next lane wants over (even though it isn't bothering to signal), and can even guage its desperation based on how bad the "body" language is getting, and proximity to things like intersections, exits, etc. An experienced driver knows when the driver behind them in traffic is an accident waiting to happen (is that dude reading a copy of Ivanhoe or something?), and get into another lane. An experienced driver knows that the left lane across from a Starbucks is to be avoided in the morning, particularly if there are multiple late-model coupes and sedans in that lane.
You could probably put all that smarts into an AI, but I doubt its there yet.
I've read a lot of stories lately about VG and porn doing this and that to our youth. Which game will be blamed for the next school shooting?
I'm old enough to remember when television, Arcade Games, and stickers were the new moral outrages that were grotesquely warping the impressionable minds of America's youth. I also remember when it was supposedly a huge problem that telephones were killing letter writing. Now that more interactive media is killing TV, Ma Bell is dead and people are writing to each other again, you think they'd be happy. But no. Clearly its just always pretty much whatever is new that older folks don't understand.
Actually, taking a look at the congressmen that those late boomers and Gen-Xers grew into, perhaps they had a point back then....
I'd like to see Tesla make a profit without all the cronyism and end user tax credits.
Similarly, I'd like to see other automakers compete with them when they and their primary fuel source isn't supported by all the cronyism and tax credits too. For example, the direct government subsidies (eg: bailouts whenever they fail, import duties, oil exploration tax breaks. Ethanol subsidies, corn price controls, etc) and indirect subsidies (eg: Huge military (and life!) spending to protect supplies. They get to dump their waste products into the environment for free, and the rest of us have to pay the price of cleaup or non-cleaup).
In the meantime, I have to look a little askance at folks who point at the new upstart tech and loudly complain about the splinter in its eye while ignoring the log in the old one.
The $100M in funding is to develop software that can replace teachers.
The $26k is because you can't replace teachers with software.
Even that is a bit on the ridiculous side. The national average for public schools is a bit under $12K of spending per student. My state thinks even that is too much, and only spends about $9K. Either the public schools could be a lot better too with that kind of money, or the private schools are just wasting most of their money. Either way, throwing even more money at those private schools seems a criminal waste.
The thing is, what they are describing isn't what has been proven to convince women (or people) to be engineers, but rather what has been shown to motivate women who already want to be engineers. So your argument doesn't really apply to this, but then neither does theirs.
I'd argue that once a person is already an engineer, the kind of work being done most certainly does factor into job choices for both men and women. I've turned down job offers to work on software for smart bombs, and once refused an assignment for a foreign military customer who had just carried out a massacre against its own people (luckily we didn't "win" the contract). I know plenty other (male) engineers who go further than me and refuse to work on military jobs at all. And I don't doubt that there are other engineers working those kinds of jobs who consider it a high moral calling. My current company (which does mostly commercial aviation) just a couple of weeks ago had one male student at a trade show blow us off because he was much more interested in working to provide secure communications for international democracy activists.
Now its possible this effect tends to be more pronounced in women. It appears the subjects of TFA have noticed this anecdotally. Personally, I'd rather see this scientifically studied. Getting to the bottom of the gender-stilting of our industry ought to be worth devoting some actual resources to, rather than just flailing about randomly at every anecdote that comes down the pike.
Interesting that the argument being used is that "most of what engineers do does nothing for society, so
They aren't making an "argument". They are describing a phenomenon. If you have a better explanation for their data than theirs, that's legit (and I'd like to hear it). But you can't argue away the data.
That's a good point. The Beatles broke up in 1969. Thus their entire catalog will soon be more than 50. The first 2 Led Zeppelin albums were released in '69 too. (and to bring things back full-circle, 3 songs off that first album were covers of PD works. It was essentially a delta blues album with heavy rock instrumentation).
Here's a good passage from a 2009 speech about the history of copyright, and how it applies today.:
Now in the early centuries of printing, and still I believe in the 1790s, lots of readers wrote copies by hand because they couldn't afford printed copies. Nobody ever expected copyright law to be something other than an industrial regulation. It wasn't meant to stop people from writing copies, it was meant to regulate the publishers. Because of this it was easy to enforce, uncontroversial, and arguably beneficial for society.
It was easy to enforce, because it only had to be enforced against publishers. And it's easy to find the unauthorized publishers of a book—you go to a bookstore and say “where do these copies come from?”. You don't have to invade everybody's home and everybody's computer to do that.
It was uncontroversial because, as the readers were not restricted, they had nothing to complain about. Theoretically they were restricted from publishing, but not being publishers and not having printing presses, they couldn't do that anyway. In what they actually could do, they were not restricted.
It was arguably beneficial because the general public, according to the concepts of copyright law, traded away a theoretical right they were not in a position to exercise. In exchange, they got the benefits of more writing.
Now if you trade away something you have no possible use for, and you get something you can use in exchange, it's a positive trade. Whether or not you could have gotten a better deal some other way, that's a different question, but at least it's positive.
So if this were still in the age of the printing press, I don't think I'd be complaining about copyright law. But the age of the printing press is gradually giving way to the age of the computer networks—another advance in copying technology that makes copying more efficient, and once again not uniformly so.
Here's what we had in the age of the printing press: mass production very efficient, one at a time copying still just as slow as the ancient world. Digital technology gets us here: they've both benefited, but one-off copying has benefited the most.
We get to a situation much more like the ancient world, where one at a time copying is not so much worse [i.e., harder] than mass production copying. It's a little bit less efficient, a little bit less good, but it's perfectly cheap enough that hundreds of millions of people do it. Consider how many people write CDs once in a while, even in poor countries. You may not have a CD-writer yourself, so you go to a store where you can do it.
This means that copyright no longer fits in with the technology as it used to. Even if the words of copyright law had not changed, they wouldn't have the same effect. Instead of an industrial regulation on publishers controlled by authors, with the benefits set up to go to the public, it is now a restriction on the general public, controlled mainly by the publishers, in the name of the authors.
In other words, it's tyranny. It's intolerable and we can't allow it to continue this way.
As a result of this change, [copyright] is no longer easy to enforce, no longer uncontroversial, and no longer beneficial.
It's no longer easy to enforce because now the publishers want to enforce it against each and every person, and to do this requires cruel measures, draconian punishments, invasions of privacy, abolition of our basic ideas of justice. There's almost no limit to how far they will propose to go to prosecute the War on Sharing.
It's no longer uncontroversial. There are political parties in several countries whose basic platform is “freedom to share”.
It's no longer beneficial because the freedoms that we conceptually traded away (because we couldn't exercise them), we now can exercise. They're tremendously useful, and we want to exercise them.
Copyright policy issues are about which bargains benefit the public, not about what rights publishers or readers are entitled to.
The copyright system developed along with the printing press. In the age of the printing press, it was unfeasible for an ordinary reader to copy a book. Copying a book required a printing press, and ordinary readers did not have one. What's more, copying in this way was absurdly expensive unless many copies were made—which means, in effect, that only a publisher could copy a book economically.
So when the public traded to publishers the freedom to copy books, they were selling something which they could not use. Trading something you cannot use for something useful and helpful is always good deal. Therefore, copyright was uncontroversial in the age of the printing press, precisely because it did not restrict anything the reading public might commonly do.
But the age of the printing press is gradually ending. The xerox machine and the audio and video tape began the change; digital information technology brings it to fruition. These advances make it possible for ordinary people, not just publishers with specialized equipment, to copy. And they do!
Once copying is a useful and practical activity for ordinary people, they are no longer so willing to give up the freedom to do it. They want to keep this freedom and exercise it instead of trading it away. The copyright bargain that we have is no longer a good deal for the public, and it is time to revise it—time for the law to recognize the public benefit that comes from making and sharing copies.
You're missing the point. Oklahoma is a 3.2% beer state. So they actually managed to get drunk enough on 3.2 beer to get into a brawl over phone OS's. That is some serious dedication. I'm guessing the bottles were used as weapons because the whole room was full of them, so there was nothing else to grab.
Don't really see how timezone differences come out as a "cost". It would be pretty expensive to fly marketing people out to trade shows in your bigger market areas, but given than the two biggest markets are currently on different continents (one of which spans 4 timezones), everyone has that issue.
Product transport costs should only be an issue if they were also manufacturing in AU. I doubt that, but even if they were that's solvable by using the same manufacturers everyone else does.
If your whole team is in the same time zone, development should actually be cheaper in AU than in a lot of places in the US. For instance, compared to silicon valley, the cost of living is much cheaper in Canbera.
It looks to me reading TFA like they had some recruiting issues in Canbera, and shot themselves in the foot (or perhaps the head) trying to fix them.
Sources close to the situation informed us that, at one point, a move to Melbourne was being planned, in an attempt to help attract new talent to the studio. This allegedly caused many high-level members of the team to leave and that may have factored into 2K’s decision to shut down the studio
I know of at least one hoax from the 80's, invented for local political purposes, that made the local papers, got a memorial built to it, and now appears in several web pages and at least one documentary as fact, with all kinds of made-up details filled in. No Wikipedia page yet, but I'm sure that eventually will come.
And I guess most people here are too young to remember how seriously UFO's and Bigfoot used to be treated back in the 70's.
The only thing really special about hoaxes appearing on Wikipedia is that they can get thoroughly debunked when/if they get found out, and this is much more likely to happen with enough eyes on the issue. Without a user-maintained knowledge base, hoaxes used to be pretty much unkillable.
Seeing as chimps have been observed making and using tools, it would seem at least plausible that our common ancestor 4 to 6 million years ago was making and using tools too.
Chimps have been seen to make wooden tools (which obviously don't preserve very well in the fossil record), and to use stone tools. I don't know of them being observed to make stone tools, but that doesn't seem like it would be a huge leap.
So the difference between early man's use of tools and that of our co-chimpanzee ancestor was most likely just one of degree, if anything.
There are tenure-track positions in nursing? I was under the impression it was literally back-breaking work, where most employers have a use-em-and-throw-em-away attitude to employees. I didn't realize it was a cushy desk job with lifetime employment positions that men were dreaming of breaking into somehow.
Slashdot Mirror
Could some Islamic scholar chime in to describe, how such an attack (as well as...) is not in perfect conformance with Koran?
No, pointing fingers at other religions will not answer the question and will be ignored.
I'll agree with this statement the day you can't use The Bible or the Torah in your first sentence and justify the exact same attacks.
Islam is the religion of peace! Well, except for a few radicals, maybe 2 or 3 percent, which would only make about a million radicals. And, maybe except for their supporters, maybe 20 percent or so, which would make about 200 million. Other than that, it's mostly moderates, who won't actually go out and jihad, but they'll cheer the jihadists on
A lot of this is fair, but the same goes for any ideology. You could say the same for Christianity. You could say the same for Protestantism, which kept central Europe awash in blood for hundreds of years after its introduction. You could say the same for political philosophies. The Spanish Civil war, and to a large extent WWII were fought over Republicanism vs. Authoritarianism, and millions slaughtered each other in the most gruesome ways imaginable.
Yet nobody runs about decrying philosophy in general. That would be stupid. The problem is humans naturally like to think in us-vs-them terms, and like to kill "them" (chimps go to war too. It sucks, but its natural). Religion is just an excuse. Strike it down, and another will be used.
Quit crying and screaming! No, there are no monsters, and no you can't have a nite-light! That's bad for you. I read it online a week ago. Just sit there and snivel in the darkness!
Scientists ... traumatizing children since the Renaissance.
Perhaps. The league minimum is about half a mil a year. Good money by any standard. However, that's only about 4x what an average math PhD can pull down in a year. Compare that with the fact that an NFL linesman career is going to be over in 10 years if you are really lucky, while a mathematician can work until either they drop or age-related dementia sets in, and it really isn't so cut-and-dried. At the absolute least, he's smart to be trying to do both so he isn't starting from base salary(/reputation) on the math thing when forced to retire from football.
"There's a rush you get when you go out on the field, lay everything on the line and physically dominate the player across from you. This is a feeling I'm (for lack of a better word) addicted to, and I'm hard-pressed to find anywhere else."
This is your indication that you are talking with an adrenaline/endorphin junkie.
I play futbol (soccer) defense, and can completely understand this. Its an otherwise thankless position. If you do it well pretty much nobody but your goalie notices, and if you mess up everyone hates on you. So why do it? Honestly, I believe I got addicted to the adrenaline/endorphin hit. I don't even feel right until I've had my first hard tackle. It is next to impossible to get that fix in real life, but a good physical confrontation will bring it right up. I once hadn't got there yet, and then a (clearly juicing) big forward knocked me to the ground while the ref wasn't looking. I got up laughing and thanking him. Not quite the reaction he was expecting.
I don't know how many here have seen Clint Eastwood's Every Which Way but Loose, but the main character Philo clearly had this as well. It was a major plot point that he had to fight, and had an unusual thing where he got better the more he was hit. Classic Endorphin/Adrenaline junkie.
I think it ought to go without saying that as a mathematician Urschel isn't going to get his body chemical "hit" in his daily life. I've certainly found that to be the case as a software engineer.
I prefer to think of C as "portable assembly language".
The problem with that is that it simply isn't. Take a look at the sources for any multiplatform project, and you'll see its chock full of platform-specific precompiler code sections. C is one of the *least* portable programming languages available.
Where it does get similar is that the language provides a lot of features that are frankly too low-level for a programming language. For example, there's the "auto" and "register" keywords. Those are supposed to be for telling the compiler when to put variables into a register. Every modern C compiler *ignores* these keywords, as no human can hope to perform this optimization properly at the C source level on a modern processor. That's just one prominent example.
So C is actually a non-portable non-assembly language.
What is Swift written in?
It is built with the LLVM compiler framework included in Xcode 6, and uses the Objective-C runtime...
So... C. Ok, we're done here.
That means nothing of the sort. LLVM is a compiler framework, whose back end contains rather a lot of machine language, and whose front end depends on the language being used. Most language front ends are self-hosted (written in themselves).
Likewise, using the Objective-C runtime doesn't mean anything other than that it was a convenient runtime that already existed, and they know how to interface to it. If you can do that, your sources can be in any language you prefer.
But most importantly, C fans seem to have gotten it in their collective heads that C is somehow the root of all language, from which all other programs must have ultimately sprung. This is complete and utter hogwash, and makes having a discussion with them really difficult. If such a thing exists, it is machine language, not C. Does that mean machine language is superior? Hell no. You just need it sometimes, but mostly to help build things that are better for humans to use.
That's a good start, but there's a lot more to it than that. An experienced driver can tell when a car in the next lane wants over (even though it isn't bothering to signal), and can even guage its desperation based on how bad the "body" language is getting, and proximity to things like intersections, exits, etc. An experienced driver knows when the driver behind them in traffic is an accident waiting to happen (is that dude reading a copy of Ivanhoe or something?), and get into another lane. An experienced driver knows that the left lane across from a Starbucks is to be avoided in the morning, particularly if there are multiple late-model coupes and sedans in that lane.
You could probably put all that smarts into an AI, but I doubt its there yet.
I've read a lot of stories lately about VG and porn doing this and that to our youth. Which game will be blamed for the next school shooting?
I'm old enough to remember when television, Arcade Games, and stickers were the new moral outrages that were grotesquely warping the impressionable minds of America's youth. I also remember when it was supposedly a huge problem that telephones were killing letter writing. Now that more interactive media is killing TV, Ma Bell is dead and people are writing to each other again, you think they'd be happy. But no. Clearly its just always pretty much whatever is new that older folks don't understand.
Actually, taking a look at the congressmen that those late boomers and Gen-Xers grew into, perhaps they had a point back then....
Heck, even WalMart workers here unionized.
I see rampant plumbing problems in the near future for your area.
I'd like to see Tesla make a profit without all the cronyism and end user tax credits.
Similarly, I'd like to see other automakers compete with them when they and their primary fuel source isn't supported by all the cronyism and tax credits too. For example, the direct government subsidies (eg: bailouts whenever they fail, import duties, oil exploration tax breaks. Ethanol subsidies, corn price controls, etc) and indirect subsidies (eg: Huge military (and life!) spending to protect supplies. They get to dump their waste products into the environment for free, and the rest of us have to pay the price of cleaup or non-cleaup).
In the meantime, I have to look a little askance at folks who point at the new upstart tech and loudly complain about the splinter in its eye while ignoring the log in the old one.
Does it not also have endowments and grants? Most private schools do.
The $100M in funding is to develop software that can replace teachers.
The $26k is because you can't replace teachers with software.
Even that is a bit on the ridiculous side. The national average for public schools is a bit under $12K of spending per student. My state thinks even that is too much, and only spends about $9K. Either the public schools could be a lot better too with that kind of money, or the private schools are just wasting most of their money. Either way, throwing even more money at those private schools seems a criminal waste.
If the Republicans take over the White House after the next election, Ted Cruz should be put in charge of the Department of Projection.
The thing is, what they are describing isn't what has been proven to convince women (or people) to be engineers, but rather what has been shown to motivate women who already want to be engineers. So your argument doesn't really apply to this, but then neither does theirs.
I'd argue that once a person is already an engineer, the kind of work being done most certainly does factor into job choices for both men and women. I've turned down job offers to work on software for smart bombs, and once refused an assignment for a foreign military customer who had just carried out a massacre against its own people (luckily we didn't "win" the contract). I know plenty other (male) engineers who go further than me and refuse to work on military jobs at all. And I don't doubt that there are other engineers working those kinds of jobs who consider it a high moral calling. My current company (which does mostly commercial aviation) just a couple of weeks ago had one male student at a trade show blow us off because he was much more interested in working to provide secure communications for international democracy activists.
Now its possible this effect tends to be more pronounced in women. It appears the subjects of TFA have noticed this anecdotally. Personally, I'd rather see this scientifically studied. Getting to the bottom of the gender-stilting of our industry ought to be worth devoting some actual resources to, rather than just flailing about randomly at every anecdote that comes down the pike.
Interesting that the argument being used is that "most of what engineers do does nothing for society, so
They aren't making an "argument". They are describing a phenomenon. If you have a better explanation for their data than theirs, that's legit (and I'd like to hear it). But you can't argue away the data.
So now when somebody tells you to "go fuck yourself", it would actually be possible to do.
That's a good point. The Beatles broke up in 1969. Thus their entire catalog will soon be more than 50. The first 2 Led Zeppelin albums were released in '69 too. (and to bring things back full-circle, 3 songs off that first album were covers of PD works. It was essentially a delta blues album with heavy rock instrumentation).
Now in the early centuries of printing, and still I believe in the 1790s, lots of readers wrote copies by hand because they couldn't afford printed copies. Nobody ever expected copyright law to be something other than an industrial regulation. It wasn't meant to stop people from writing copies, it was meant to regulate the publishers. Because of this it was easy to enforce, uncontroversial, and arguably beneficial for society.
It was easy to enforce, because it only had to be enforced against publishers. And it's easy to find the unauthorized publishers of a book—you go to a bookstore and say “where do these copies come from?”. You don't have to invade everybody's home and everybody's computer to do that.
It was uncontroversial because, as the readers were not restricted, they had nothing to complain about. Theoretically they were restricted from publishing, but not being publishers and not having printing presses, they couldn't do that anyway. In what they actually could do, they were not restricted.
It was arguably beneficial because the general public, according to the concepts of copyright law, traded away a theoretical right they were not in a position to exercise. In exchange, they got the benefits of more writing.
Now if you trade away something you have no possible use for, and you get something you can use in exchange, it's a positive trade. Whether or not you could have gotten a better deal some other way, that's a different question, but at least it's positive.
So if this were still in the age of the printing press, I don't think I'd be complaining about copyright law. But the age of the printing press is gradually giving way to the age of the computer networks—another advance in copying technology that makes copying more efficient, and once again not uniformly so.
Here's what we had in the age of the printing press: mass production very efficient, one at a time copying still just as slow as the ancient world. Digital technology gets us here: they've both benefited, but one-off copying has benefited the most.
We get to a situation much more like the ancient world, where one at a time copying is not so much worse [i.e., harder] than mass production copying. It's a little bit less efficient, a little bit less good, but it's perfectly cheap enough that hundreds of millions of people do it. Consider how many people write CDs once in a while, even in poor countries. You may not have a CD-writer yourself, so you go to a store where you can do it.
This means that copyright no longer fits in with the technology as it used to. Even if the words of copyright law had not changed, they wouldn't have the same effect. Instead of an industrial regulation on publishers controlled by authors, with the benefits set up to go to the public, it is now a restriction on the general public, controlled mainly by the publishers, in the name of the authors.
In other words, it's tyranny. It's intolerable and we can't allow it to continue this way.
As a result of this change, [copyright] is no longer easy to enforce, no longer uncontroversial, and no longer beneficial.
It's no longer easy to enforce because now the publishers want to enforce it against each and every person, and to do this requires cruel measures, draconian punishments, invasions of privacy, abolition of our basic ideas of justice. There's almost no limit to how far they will propose to go to prosecute the War on Sharing.
It's no longer uncontroversial. There are political parties in several countries whose basic platform is “freedom to share”.
It's no longer beneficial because the freedoms that we conceptually traded away (because we couldn't exercise them), we now can exercise. They're tremendously useful, and we want to exercise them.
Copyright policy issues are about which bargains benefit the public, not about what rights publishers or readers are entitled to.
The copyright system developed along with the printing press. In the age of the printing press, it was unfeasible for an ordinary reader to copy a book. Copying a book required a printing press, and ordinary readers did not have one. What's more, copying in this way was absurdly expensive unless many copies were made—which means, in effect, that only a publisher could copy a book economically.
So when the public traded to publishers the freedom to copy books, they were selling something which they could not use. Trading something you cannot use for something useful and helpful is always good deal. Therefore, copyright was uncontroversial in the age of the printing press, precisely because it did not restrict anything the reading public might commonly do.
But the age of the printing press is gradually ending. The xerox machine and the audio and video tape began the change; digital information technology brings it to fruition. These advances make it possible for ordinary people, not just publishers with specialized equipment, to copy. And they do!
Once copying is a useful and practical activity for ordinary people, they are no longer so willing to give up the freedom to do it. They want to keep this freedom and exercise it instead of trading it away. The copyright bargain that we have is no longer a good deal for the public, and it is time to revise it—time for the law to recognize the public benefit that comes from making and sharing copies.
Drunk people fight over stupid shit.
You're missing the point. Oklahoma is a 3.2% beer state. So they actually managed to get drunk enough on 3.2 beer to get into a brawl over phone OS's. That is some serious dedication. I'm guessing the bottles were used as weapons because the whole room was full of them, so there was nothing else to grab.
Don't really see how timezone differences come out as a "cost". It would be pretty expensive to fly marketing people out to trade shows in your bigger market areas, but given than the two biggest markets are currently on different continents (one of which spans 4 timezones), everyone has that issue.
Product transport costs should only be an issue if they were also manufacturing in AU. I doubt that, but even if they were that's solvable by using the same manufacturers everyone else does.
If your whole team is in the same time zone, development should actually be cheaper in AU than in a lot of places in the US. For instance, compared to silicon valley, the cost of living is much cheaper in Canbera.
It looks to me reading TFA like they had some recruiting issues in Canbera, and shot themselves in the foot (or perhaps the head) trying to fix them.
Sources close to the situation informed us that, at one point, a move to Melbourne was being planned, in an attempt to help attract new talent to the studio. This allegedly caused many high-level members of the team to leave and that may have factored into 2K’s decision to shut down the studio
I know of at least one hoax from the 80's, invented for local political purposes, that made the local papers, got a memorial built to it, and now appears in several web pages and at least one documentary as fact, with all kinds of made-up details filled in. No Wikipedia page yet, but I'm sure that eventually will come.
And I guess most people here are too young to remember how seriously UFO's and Bigfoot used to be treated back in the 70's.
The only thing really special about hoaxes appearing on Wikipedia is that they can get thoroughly debunked when/if they get found out, and this is much more likely to happen with enough eyes on the issue. Without a user-maintained knowledge base, hoaxes used to be pretty much unkillable.
Seeing as chimps have been observed making and using tools, it would seem at least plausible that our common ancestor 4 to 6 million years ago was making and using tools too.
Chimps have been seen to make wooden tools (which obviously don't preserve very well in the fossil record), and to use stone tools. I don't know of them being observed to make stone tools, but that doesn't seem like it would be a huge leap.
So the difference between early man's use of tools and that of our co-chimpanzee ancestor was most likely just one of degree, if anything.
There are tenure-track positions in nursing? I was under the impression it was literally back-breaking work, where most employers have a use-em-and-throw-em-away attitude to employees. I didn't realize it was a cushy desk job with lifetime employment positions that men were dreaming of breaking into somehow.