I'm the son of a protestant clergyman, I've also grown up around many other children of protestant clergymen. These are guys belonging to the evangelical, puritan, fundamentalist school. I mean that as the original definition, opposition to ritual, dogma and entrenchment, rigorously debating and studying what the bible means then following it whether it is popular (or makes sense) or not; I do not mean the whole pro-war, kill gays, send threatening letters, keep your kids out of state schools thing it is often taken to mean.
Anyway, the families were big (as you would expect), most families of ministers had three to six children, but radicalism amongst children of clergy is much lower than what you see by and large in the congregation, in my generation of four, we have one staunch atheist who refuses to go to church on even Christmas, we have a passionate Christian and two lazy kind of disinterested people who pray sometimes but only go to church when someone tells us to. This is quite common.
What you forget about clergy is that they are some of the most educated people in the world, most bible colleges and seminaries do not accept someone without at least an associate's degree, then subject them to three years of ancient languages, history and text analysis training. My father is almost finished his fourth degree (PhD, Ancient/Medieval History) at a large, secular university and many of his colleagues already have attained PhDs and/or research masters. If he was a (celibate) Jesuit brother at his age it would be considered disgraceful that he has not finished his PhD and can only read French, German, Hebrew, Greek and Latin and not speak any of them fluently. Until mid 20th century, the clergyman was _the_ educated man in the town who knew a bit about mathematics, astronomy and history. My father has a copy of Origin of Species and Decent of Man on his shelf and describe how natural selection works and about how dominant and recessive alleles were discovered by Mendel (a man of the cloth and a serious God fanatic) and how mutations can occur in gene sequences and be passed down or eliminated, he came first in the state in science at highschool so his biology knowledge is not shabby. He thinks evolution is not a direct contradiction to the bible and completely compatible with Christian faith, however still gets extremely pissy when someone calls it a fact, not a theory (I must be honest and say I don't quite understand that one).
But it's not just one guy, from my experience they all seem to be like that, major Jesus nerds, guys who were already addicted to meticulously pouring over details (be it science and legal textbooks in my fathers case or literature, computers, engineering, economics in the case of his various colleagues) but decide that they like God so spend the rest of their life reading the bible in source languages, examining doctrines, debating viewpoints, reading and writing commentaries and most importantly, getting up the front every Sunday and saying as much as they can about God.
They also make great fathers (or mothers in the case of more liberal sects) because of their attention to raising kids properly, large family size giving children more room to socialize and gain life skills, frugal, austere upbringing (due to large family + small income) and huge emphasis on education (father's pissed off that I am off making big money in China, not doing a PhD on a meager scholarship like I "should"). Also, we tend to have had a steady and balanced introduction to the bible and realize by the time that we are old enough to do anything dangerous that although there is a whole lot of stuff God doesn't want people to do and people do anyway, it is not mankind's job to use anything but love and gentle persuasion to stop anything that does not put innocents into danger.
I do know Fred Phelps' kids at Westboro Baptist are also completely insane, it strikes me as sad exception.
And yet Carmack still said that NGP is BETTER than his beloved apple product, despite it being made by the people who brought you the hated PS3 in all its terribleness. For a fanboy, he sure is even handed.
I think ARM is a great choice for mobile gaming, they do computing performance/watt quite well and apparently such things exist as 4 core ARM chips with the memory controller attached to each core, meaning you can write a standard multi-threaded app and it just works, unlike that SPU DMA->register file mapping nonsense that pissed everyone off when writing PS3 software. I have no idea why they didn't just solder two of these things into the PS3 and make everyone's life easier (I guess that was is a while ago). I am not surprised Carmack likes it so much.
Jane MgGonigal makes games? According to Wikipedia she has a PhD in Performance studies and has made some cute fake websites meant to promote Halo 2. Seems she has taken an interest in computer games after her Halo advertising, has taught game design and believes she knows best the direction of the industry. Looks harmless enough, no more of a crank than most academics in the humanities. I would start worrying if she was given some form of creative control over something I am working on, she seems to have a lot of grand vision but no idea about the care, effort and endless iteration required to making a fun and playable game.
The rest just wing it; never mind that not every CS degree makes you a programmer. Some untrained people are good, but from the rest we have buggy code like these alarms; nobody tests their products well because updates are "easy."
This is the alarm clock program that ships with the iPhone. Apple does not hire untrained programmers to write the iPhone's core apps, nor does it hire bottom of the range code monkeys. It hires qualified and experienced people who somehow still make mistakes like this. The difference between a good and a bad programmer is that a bad programmer will write a thousand line solution to a problem like this over the course of a week, it will have hundreds of edge cases because of its needless complexity and will fail in some cases. A great programmer will write a ten line solution in an hour that is elegant and captures the essence of the problem and the patterns within, but it will still fail, because the great programmer only spent an hour thinking about it and nobody can think through everything in an hour. This is why we have testing.
...about some Italian detective/cop, and suddenly the young daughter walks into the room, topless, and sits there for five minutes. Nobody reacted.
Now, I am not reacting to say that this is harmful or degrading or whatever. But seriously, that is tacky, just plain tacky. They know that that scene was not gripping, so they put in a contrived pair of tits to keep the average punters interested. Honestly, in European films I have seen, particularly Italian, gratuitous nudity does coincide with a lull in the pacing that needed something to fill it, where Michael Bay would make a helicopter explode. Nice side effect of censorship is that it forces film-makers to try something new, rather than the tried and true chestnuts of violence, sex and obscenity that always work if you just use a little more than last time. Not that a bit of violence, sex and obscenity isn't good, but it is good to create legal and social forces to encourage other, more difficult things to be tried.
Interestingly enough "bi" (sounds like "bee") is Mandarin Chinese for a particular part of female reproductive anatomy, which is frequently used as a pejorative. In fact, following an adjective like "sha" (stupid), "zhuang" (pretentious) or "ma" (mother's) it is the bread and butter the Chinese swearing vocabulary. “Qiang Bi" would translate to “tough c---", which would be an asset in prison.
Darwinian evolution does not reward the most populous species, but the one that is best adapted to its environment. In Facebook terms, this would mean that the funnest game would be the best promoted.
Well, on earth, how many more ticks and roundworms are there in this earth than eagles and antelope? Many have renounced creationism for darwinism because of guinea worms, smallpox and a host of other organisms that they cannot picture a loving god creating. It is disingenuous to claim evolution promotes the good, it simply promotes those who exploit their environment the best. Was the haast eagle not powerful and glorious? Is the Black Rhino not an awe inspiring beast? Yet the world is full of cockroaches, rats, ants and plankton. Extinction comes to the megafauna of this world, while those who can breed easily and care little about their litter will so often burgeon.
Think of it this way, a triple A title is a brachiosaurus, a huge beast that takes years and huge amounts of food to grow, complex, powerful and can eat the leaves high above the ground where nobody else can. Zynga is like cholera or syphilis, just a tiny little bacterium that lives inside of a host. It does not create complex life, it takes nourishment from where it is infecting, reproduction is trivial (just mitosis, i.e. cloning), meaning it can focus souly on its transmission vector. It is the braciosaurus that is extinct though.
Anyway, Zynga is the only American studio who I have ever heard of cloning a game (Farmville) from a Chinese game (Happy Farm) then having the concentrated and distilled gall to move its development offshore back to Beijing. Now they are bragging about having a more "valuable" company than EA after their two years of opportunism, harking back to the fun of 1999's delusions.
Well, they must be getting their energy from somewhere, unless France is blacked out. I have been to coal plants, wind farms and hydro plants and I have seen turbines being serviced at each of them, it is just a reality of power generation that a boiler or a cooling tower needs to be cleaned or a turbine or dynamo needs to be repaired from time to time. Unless France has been secretly building coal or hydro stations over the last few years or has been buying an inordinate amount of foreign power, I suspect the slack is being taken up by other nuclear plants.
A friend from Hong Kong told me that "guailo" has not been racist since whites started using it about themselves. Just like "nigger" used to be racist, but then black people started to use it....
Anyway, given what it literally means, it is an extraordinary racist word, but when it is used by HK people it is fairly neutrally referring to the race without much positive or negative spin. I think we can pretty much consider its etymology to be linguistic colour.
Hell, how many English-speaking people even realize that there isn't A language called "Chinese"?
From what I can tell, the group of people who consider there to be no "Chinese" language is dominated by English speakers. The almost 1 billion Chinese who's home dialect is mutually intelligible with standard Mandarin certainly consider there to be a standard Chinese language with much more conviction and certainty than any outsider. Those who speak another dialect at home are sometimes not so sure if they are really the same language, the topic is highly political but popular belief in China as well as the official government policy is that there is a Chinese language.
Secondly, in the written form, even an individual who insists on referring to "Sinitic languages" will acknowledge the existence of a standard written form, "vernacular Chinese" or just "Chinese" which is the successor to the old universal written form (Classical Chinese) but is partly influenced by Mandarin grammar.
Nope, it isn't, I realised that soon after hitting Submit. Oh well, I still believe that taxpayers are not being sucked dry by welfare.
Can I ask which country you're talking about?
Australia, though it's getting a lot of bad press on Slashdot at the moment over its medieval ratings system, it's generally not a total hell-hole. Australians are very vocal about their own countries foibles (as well as those of every other state on earth if you ask them) but generally it is just another medium sized country stumbling through history as best it can. It does have welfare and reasonably low unemployment though, so it makes a good example.
I live in a country that has a livable unemployment benefits. The unemployment rate is at 5.2% and many other countries with similar benefits have rates as low or lower (whereas US is ~10 IIRC). Basically, unemployment benefits cover food, clothes medicine, vocational training and maybe a TV or PC to drown your boredom, but it is a frugal, tight kind of life without flavour, luxury and excitement, plus it is humiliating and tedious to collect government handouts, being a worker is a far easier and happier life. I have never collected those benefits, but I do not object to them, it keeps the poor off the street, it drives up wages for the working class and it provides a sense of security and calm when times are tough. It's not that expensive, because at 5% there are 19 people contributing to each unemployed person and the handouts are about 1/4 that of a worker's before tax salary, meaning I spend 1/80th of my money to clear away beggers to the outer suburbs and give myself and my family something to fall back on in hard times, this is OK I think.
You post a news item about the youngest female chess champion and spend half the summary wondering about why the best female players are not typically as good at chess as the best men.
Given that she neither played the world's best male player nor the person believed to be the best female player (but who only plays against men), it is relevant to speculate where this player fits in with the rest of the population.
but today someone producing a lifelike portrait will not be values as much as someone slapping their name on an unmade bed!
Then you have to debate whether having two half naked Chinese men jumping on this bed makes it more art, less art or a separate work of art.
Ah, conceptual art, where concept comes before aesthetics leaving the artist free to explore deep ideas, such as yet again asking "what is art?" by being the fourteenth person to put a single household item behind a velvet rope.
Well, the A in ASCII does stand for American, so I don't think anybody is worried about the Vikings.
Well, Europe was always free to standardise on its own default 7 bit encoding. But aren't we all glad they didn't? It would have made dealing with foreign keyboards and computers so much more difficult for us all and really slowed development down. I am sure that the guys who made ASCII were not doing it out of nationalism, but simply because it never really entered in their head that some people needed it.
it's the perfect interface for Angry Birds, or Slitherlink, or Small World.
I've got a 3gs, it runs Carmack's Rage rail shooter quite well, but Angry Birds really seems to have a problem with responsiveness and smoothness. In general, you can get a lot of graphical punch from the same resources used to cover inefficient coding. Seems like the Angry Birds developer need more computational grunt much more than JC does.
As a 49 yo grandmother, feminist and programmer of 20 years (assembly, C) I find this offensive.
Welcome to the Internet, where October 2007 was "years ago" and being over 40 and able to program assembly makes you a "greybeard". I am sure those guys at Mozilla are referring to their own grandmother's generation, however, the distinction would be subtle to them.
iPhones in the US are sold locked to AT&T. It means that iPhone/AT&T users in the US have generally chosen the phone, not a network. Thus, you will have on that network, iPhone users who personally like AT&T and also iPhone users who do not, but are forced to use that network or change phones, which is always going to be worse than a customer base made up wholly of those who have chosen that service. The argument "if you don't like it then leave" is not as valid with an expensive handset in the picture, so a greater number of people will suffer and complain, leaving distorted figures.
Anyway, US iPhone users cannot complain too loudly, thanks to AT&T, it is roughly half the cost of the same model bought unlocked elsewhere, mine was bought in Hong Kong, cheapest outside North America and it cost me like US$620. Given you can just buy one of your cheap locked phones and hack it anyway, that's the best of both worlds really.
This is just the number of times it has been updated, not an arbitrary internal version numbering system, any comparison to arbitrary scales is invalid. This sort of development is hardly publicized, the official major, minor, patch and build numbers, if they exist at all are not publicly known. External security researchers can just say that the first version they see is version 1, the second is version 2, all the way up to the seventh iteration which is version 7. This is not Java or Winamp.
If a product requires an idea and an implementation, then they are both necessary. If someone can do one, but not the other, they should value those able to do the specialist work that they themselves could not do. If some deluded entrepreneur comes up with a semi-coherent or unoriginal idea that a programmer could have thought up, but the product is successful because of the solid implementation, then credit should completely go to the programmer. If the programmer churns out some uninspired spaghetti that could have been done by anyone with six months of training, that despite it's bugs, idiosyncrasies, incompatibilities and terrible interface becomes a success because of its original concept, then the programmer deserves none of the credit whatsoever.
The other important thing is separating "design" from idea and implementation as a skill. Design is hard, it involves thinking through the user's expectations, requirements and workflow in a product that isn't being used yet and nobody has seen. The interesting thing about programmers however, is that the very best programmers tend to amass experience in software design as well as implementation and in many cases become proficient at it, simply through exposure to what users ask them to change and what they enjoy. If what the "ideas man" has produced is suitable as a requirements spec that can be shipped to the lowest bidder in India, China or domestically and implemented to the letter, then "just a programmer" will suffice. If not then what is needed is a designer as well as an implementer, though they will often be the same person. Most ideas need to be shaped into a product by prototyping, testing, observation and deep contemplation. An excellent developer can do that, but an average one cannot. What anyone must ask themselves is "do I have a design, or do I just have an idea". If you have a design, then ship it away to be built by tradesmen and take the blame if what they built meets the letter of the spec, but isn't any good. If you just have an idea, then the creative and inspired work is not done yet and you need to find someone talented, inspired and committed to carry that load.
PETA holds these truths to be self-evident, that all creatures are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness.
That's one thing I've never understood. What exactly is wrong with an animal having a caring owner, someone to trust to, a warm home, no need to be afraid of predators, and not having to get cold and sometimes go days without food?
I don't want to sound like I support PETA, but that was a key argument for slavery. The idea being that most (though not all) slave owners treated their slaves fairly well and that an uneducated slave would have trouble finding a living in the open market as well as finding a home, food and safety. It was true in some respects, especially during the early years of US emancipation, but utterly did not justify slavery in any way shape or form, since a human should be free, nomatter what the cost. Anyway, PETA's problem is that they apply the wrong moral axioms to animals, not because they have simply failed to consider the implications.
Why does Beyond Good and Evil come up every time people are bitching about video games? That game had framerate issues, game killing bugs, mediocre combat and poorly thought out puzzles. I was sold ads with a lone girl in a dimly lit dystopia uncovering conspiracies with her camera. What I got was some anthropomorphic creatures, "wacky" comic relief and half-rate staff fights. The only saving grace is that it didn't sell well, meaning that not many people had to endure that.
I work on the equivalent of an H1-B in China. Honestly, I think this type of visa is good, it allows white collar professionals to travel, get broader experiences and allows companies to hire a wider range of people with different skills and mindsets. I've never worked for a company where everyone is the same nationality and I never intend to. You rag on the Indians, but I've worked with Indians before and they fill gaps in the company's culture and workflow that other nationalities are unwilling to fill.
It's a good thing, the game is DRM free, but you shouldn't be pirating it anyway so demanding a settlement is probably reasonable. Seriously, even if they don't sue you, you still should be ashamed.
However, if you are in a geographical region where you can pirate with impunity, then torrenting still has the value of thumbing your nose to a threat. However, I suggest you purchase the game before you torrent it so you can get self righteous about it. Nothing I hate more about a pirate getting self-righteous about DRM, since they are the primary reason that DRM is implemented.
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I'm the son of a protestant clergyman, I've also grown up around many other children of protestant clergymen. These are guys belonging to the evangelical, puritan, fundamentalist school. I mean that as the original definition, opposition to ritual, dogma and entrenchment, rigorously debating and studying what the bible means then following it whether it is popular (or makes sense) or not; I do not mean the whole pro-war, kill gays, send threatening letters, keep your kids out of state schools thing it is often taken to mean.
Anyway, the families were big (as you would expect), most families of ministers had three to six children, but radicalism amongst children of clergy is much lower than what you see by and large in the congregation, in my generation of four, we have one staunch atheist who refuses to go to church on even Christmas, we have a passionate Christian and two lazy kind of disinterested people who pray sometimes but only go to church when someone tells us to. This is quite common.
What you forget about clergy is that they are some of the most educated people in the world, most bible colleges and seminaries do not accept someone without at least an associate's degree, then subject them to three years of ancient languages, history and text analysis training. My father is almost finished his fourth degree (PhD, Ancient/Medieval History) at a large, secular university and many of his colleagues already have attained PhDs and/or research masters. If he was a (celibate) Jesuit brother at his age it would be considered disgraceful that he has not finished his PhD and can only read French, German, Hebrew, Greek and Latin and not speak any of them fluently. Until mid 20th century, the clergyman was _the_ educated man in the town who knew a bit about mathematics, astronomy and history. My father has a copy of Origin of Species and Decent of Man on his shelf and describe how natural selection works and about how dominant and recessive alleles were discovered by Mendel (a man of the cloth and a serious God fanatic) and how mutations can occur in gene sequences and be passed down or eliminated, he came first in the state in science at highschool so his biology knowledge is not shabby. He thinks evolution is not a direct contradiction to the bible and completely compatible with Christian faith, however still gets extremely pissy when someone calls it a fact, not a theory (I must be honest and say I don't quite understand that one).
But it's not just one guy, from my experience they all seem to be like that, major Jesus nerds, guys who were already addicted to meticulously pouring over details (be it science and legal textbooks in my fathers case or literature, computers, engineering, economics in the case of his various colleagues) but decide that they like God so spend the rest of their life reading the bible in source languages, examining doctrines, debating viewpoints, reading and writing commentaries and most importantly, getting up the front every Sunday and saying as much as they can about God.
They also make great fathers (or mothers in the case of more liberal sects) because of their attention to raising kids properly, large family size giving children more room to socialize and gain life skills, frugal, austere upbringing (due to large family + small income) and huge emphasis on education (father's pissed off that I am off making big money in China, not doing a PhD on a meager scholarship like I "should"). Also, we tend to have had a steady and balanced introduction to the bible and realize by the time that we are old enough to do anything dangerous that although there is a whole lot of stuff God doesn't want people to do and people do anyway, it is not mankind's job to use anything but love and gentle persuasion to stop anything that does not put innocents into danger.
I do know Fred Phelps' kids at Westboro Baptist are also completely insane, it strikes me as sad exception.
And yet Carmack still said that NGP is BETTER than his beloved apple product, despite it being made by the people who brought you the hated PS3 in all its terribleness. For a fanboy, he sure is even handed.
I think ARM is a great choice for mobile gaming, they do computing performance/watt quite well and apparently such things exist as 4 core ARM chips with the memory controller attached to each core, meaning you can write a standard multi-threaded app and it just works, unlike that SPU DMA->register file mapping nonsense that pissed everyone off when writing PS3 software. I have no idea why they didn't just solder two of these things into the PS3 and make everyone's life easier (I guess that was is a while ago). I am not surprised Carmack likes it so much.
Jane MgGonigal makes games? According to Wikipedia she has a PhD in Performance studies and has made some cute fake websites meant to promote Halo 2. Seems she has taken an interest in computer games after her Halo advertising, has taught game design and believes she knows best the direction of the industry. Looks harmless enough, no more of a crank than most academics in the humanities. I would start worrying if she was given some form of creative control over something I am working on, she seems to have a lot of grand vision but no idea about the care, effort and endless iteration required to making a fun and playable game.
The rest just wing it; never mind that not every CS degree makes you a programmer. Some untrained people are good, but from the rest we have buggy code like these alarms; nobody tests their products well because updates are "easy."
This is the alarm clock program that ships with the iPhone. Apple does not hire untrained programmers to write the iPhone's core apps, nor does it hire bottom of the range code monkeys. It hires qualified and experienced people who somehow still make mistakes like this. The difference between a good and a bad programmer is that a bad programmer will write a thousand line solution to a problem like this over the course of a week, it will have hundreds of edge cases because of its needless complexity and will fail in some cases. A great programmer will write a ten line solution in an hour that is elegant and captures the essence of the problem and the patterns within, but it will still fail, because the great programmer only spent an hour thinking about it and nobody can think through everything in an hour. This is why we have testing.
...about some Italian detective/cop, and suddenly the young daughter walks into the room, topless, and sits there for five minutes. Nobody reacted.
Now, I am not reacting to say that this is harmful or degrading or whatever. But seriously, that is tacky, just plain tacky. They know that that scene was not gripping, so they put in a contrived pair of tits to keep the average punters interested. Honestly, in European films I have seen, particularly Italian, gratuitous nudity does coincide with a lull in the pacing that needed something to fill it, where Michael Bay would make a helicopter explode. Nice side effect of censorship is that it forces film-makers to try something new, rather than the tried and true chestnuts of violence, sex and obscenity that always work if you just use a little more than last time. Not that a bit of violence, sex and obscenity isn't good, but it is good to create legal and social forces to encourage other, more difficult things to be tried.
Interestingly enough "bi" (sounds like "bee") is Mandarin Chinese for a particular part of female reproductive anatomy, which is frequently used as a pejorative. In fact, following an adjective like "sha" (stupid), "zhuang" (pretentious) or "ma" (mother's) it is the bread and butter the Chinese swearing vocabulary. “Qiang Bi" would translate to “tough c---", which would be an asset in prison.
Darwinian evolution does not reward the most populous species, but the one that is best adapted to its environment. In Facebook terms, this would mean that the funnest game would be the best promoted.
Well, on earth, how many more ticks and roundworms are there in this earth than eagles and antelope? Many have renounced creationism for darwinism because of guinea worms, smallpox and a host of other organisms that they cannot picture a loving god creating. It is disingenuous to claim evolution promotes the good, it simply promotes those who exploit their environment the best. Was the haast eagle not powerful and glorious? Is the Black Rhino not an awe inspiring beast? Yet the world is full of cockroaches, rats, ants and plankton. Extinction comes to the megafauna of this world, while those who can breed easily and care little about their litter will so often burgeon.
Think of it this way, a triple A title is a brachiosaurus, a huge beast that takes years and huge amounts of food to grow, complex, powerful and can eat the leaves high above the ground where nobody else can. Zynga is like cholera or syphilis, just a tiny little bacterium that lives inside of a host. It does not create complex life, it takes nourishment from where it is infecting, reproduction is trivial (just mitosis, i.e. cloning), meaning it can focus souly on its transmission vector. It is the braciosaurus that is extinct though.
Anyway, Zynga is the only American studio who I have ever heard of cloning a game (Farmville) from a Chinese game (Happy Farm) then having the concentrated and distilled gall to move its development offshore back to Beijing. Now they are bragging about having a more "valuable" company than EA after their two years of opportunism, harking back to the fun of 1999's delusions.
Well, they must be getting their energy from somewhere, unless France is blacked out. I have been to coal plants, wind farms and hydro plants and I have seen turbines being serviced at each of them, it is just a reality of power generation that a boiler or a cooling tower needs to be cleaned or a turbine or dynamo needs to be repaired from time to time. Unless France has been secretly building coal or hydro stations over the last few years or has been buying an inordinate amount of foreign power, I suspect the slack is being taken up by other nuclear plants.
A friend from Hong Kong told me that "guailo" has not been racist since whites started using it about themselves. Just like "nigger" used to be racist, but then black people started to use it....
Anyway, given what it literally means, it is an extraordinary racist word, but when it is used by HK people it is fairly neutrally referring to the race without much positive or negative spin. I think we can pretty much consider its etymology to be linguistic colour.
Hell, how many English-speaking people even realize that there isn't A language called "Chinese"?
From what I can tell, the group of people who consider there to be no "Chinese" language is dominated by English speakers. The almost 1 billion Chinese who's home dialect is mutually intelligible with standard Mandarin certainly consider there to be a standard Chinese language with much more conviction and certainty than any outsider. Those who speak another dialect at home are sometimes not so sure if they are really the same language, the topic is highly political but popular belief in China as well as the official government policy is that there is a Chinese language.
Secondly, in the written form, even an individual who insists on referring to "Sinitic languages" will acknowledge the existence of a standard written form, "vernacular Chinese" or just "Chinese" which is the successor to the old universal written form (Classical Chinese) but is partly influenced by Mandarin grammar.
Your calculation isn't quite right
Nope, it isn't, I realised that soon after hitting Submit. Oh well, I still believe that taxpayers are not being sucked dry by welfare.
Can I ask which country you're talking about?
Australia, though it's getting a lot of bad press on Slashdot at the moment over its medieval ratings system, it's generally not a total hell-hole. Australians are very vocal about their own countries foibles (as well as those of every other state on earth if you ask them) but generally it is just another medium sized country stumbling through history as best it can. It does have welfare and reasonably low unemployment though, so it makes a good example.
I live in a country that has a livable unemployment benefits. The unemployment rate is at 5.2% and many other countries with similar benefits have rates as low or lower (whereas US is ~10 IIRC). Basically, unemployment benefits cover food, clothes medicine, vocational training and maybe a TV or PC to drown your boredom, but it is a frugal, tight kind of life without flavour, luxury and excitement, plus it is humiliating and tedious to collect government handouts, being a worker is a far easier and happier life. I have never collected those benefits, but I do not object to them, it keeps the poor off the street, it drives up wages for the working class and it provides a sense of security and calm when times are tough. It's not that expensive, because at 5% there are 19 people contributing to each unemployed person and the handouts are about 1/4 that of a worker's before tax salary, meaning I spend 1/80th of my money to clear away beggers to the outer suburbs and give myself and my family something to fall back on in hard times, this is OK I think.
You post a news item about the youngest female chess champion and spend half the summary wondering about why the best female players are not typically as good at chess as the best men.
Given that she neither played the world's best male player nor the person believed to be the best female player (but who only plays against men), it is relevant to speculate where this player fits in with the rest of the population.
but today someone producing a lifelike portrait will not be values as much as someone slapping their name on an unmade bed!
Then you have to debate whether having two half naked Chinese men jumping on this bed makes it more art, less art or a separate work of art.
Ah, conceptual art, where concept comes before aesthetics leaving the artist free to explore deep ideas, such as yet again asking "what is art?" by being the fourteenth person to put a single household item behind a velvet rope.
Well, the A in ASCII does stand for American, so I don't think anybody is worried about the Vikings.
Well, Europe was always free to standardise on its own default 7 bit encoding. But aren't we all glad they didn't? It would have made dealing with foreign keyboards and computers so much more difficult for us all and really slowed development down. I am sure that the guys who made ASCII were not doing it out of nationalism, but simply because it never really entered in their head that some people needed it.
it's the perfect interface for Angry Birds, or Slitherlink, or Small World.
I've got a 3gs, it runs Carmack's Rage rail shooter quite well, but Angry Birds really seems to have a problem with responsiveness and smoothness. In general, you can get a lot of graphical punch from the same resources used to cover inefficient coding. Seems like the Angry Birds developer need more computational grunt much more than JC does.
Welcome to the Internet, where October 2007 was "years ago" and being over 40 and able to program assembly makes you a "greybeard". I am sure those guys at Mozilla are referring to their own grandmother's generation, however, the distinction would be subtle to them.
iPhones in the US are sold locked to AT&T. It means that iPhone/AT&T users in the US have generally chosen the phone, not a network. Thus, you will have on that network, iPhone users who personally like AT&T and also iPhone users who do not, but are forced to use that network or change phones, which is always going to be worse than a customer base made up wholly of those who have chosen that service. The argument "if you don't like it then leave" is not as valid with an expensive handset in the picture, so a greater number of people will suffer and complain, leaving distorted figures.
Anyway, US iPhone users cannot complain too loudly, thanks to AT&T, it is roughly half the cost of the same model bought unlocked elsewhere, mine was bought in Hong Kong, cheapest outside North America and it cost me like US$620. Given you can just buy one of your cheap locked phones and hack it anyway, that's the best of both worlds really.
This is just the number of times it has been updated, not an arbitrary internal version numbering system, any comparison to arbitrary scales is invalid. This sort of development is hardly publicized, the official major, minor, patch and build numbers, if they exist at all are not publicly known. External security researchers can just say that the first version they see is version 1, the second is version 2, all the way up to the seventh iteration which is version 7. This is not Java or Winamp.
If a product requires an idea and an implementation, then they are both necessary. If someone can do one, but not the other, they should value those able to do the specialist work that they themselves could not do. If some deluded entrepreneur comes up with a semi-coherent or unoriginal idea that a programmer could have thought up, but the product is successful because of the solid implementation, then credit should completely go to the programmer. If the programmer churns out some uninspired spaghetti that could have been done by anyone with six months of training, that despite it's bugs, idiosyncrasies, incompatibilities and terrible interface becomes a success because of its original concept, then the programmer deserves none of the credit whatsoever.
The other important thing is separating "design" from idea and implementation as a skill. Design is hard, it involves thinking through the user's expectations, requirements and workflow in a product that isn't being used yet and nobody has seen. The interesting thing about programmers however, is that the very best programmers tend to amass experience in software design as well as implementation and in many cases become proficient at it, simply through exposure to what users ask them to change and what they enjoy. If what the "ideas man" has produced is suitable as a requirements spec that can be shipped to the lowest bidder in India, China or domestically and implemented to the letter, then "just a programmer" will suffice. If not then what is needed is a designer as well as an implementer, though they will often be the same person. Most ideas need to be shaped into a product by prototyping, testing, observation and deep contemplation. An excellent developer can do that, but an average one cannot. What anyone must ask themselves is "do I have a design, or do I just have an idea". If you have a design, then ship it away to be built by tradesmen and take the blame if what they built meets the letter of the spec, but isn't any good. If you just have an idea, then the creative and inspired work is not done yet and you need to find someone talented, inspired and committed to carry that load.
PETA holds these truths to be self-evident, that all creatures are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness.
I don't want to sound like I support PETA, but that was a key argument for slavery. The idea being that most (though not all) slave owners treated their slaves fairly well and that an uneducated slave would have trouble finding a living in the open market as well as finding a home, food and safety. It was true in some respects, especially during the early years of US emancipation, but utterly did not justify slavery in any way shape or form, since a human should be free, nomatter what the cost. Anyway, PETA's problem is that they apply the wrong moral axioms to animals, not because they have simply failed to consider the implications.
Why does Beyond Good and Evil come up every time people are bitching about video games? That game had framerate issues, game killing bugs, mediocre combat and poorly thought out puzzles. I was sold ads with a lone girl in a dimly lit dystopia uncovering conspiracies with her camera. What I got was some anthropomorphic creatures, "wacky" comic relief and half-rate staff fights. The only saving grace is that it didn't sell well, meaning that not many people had to endure that.
I work on the equivalent of an H1-B in China. Honestly, I think this type of visa is good, it allows white collar professionals to travel, get broader experiences and allows companies to hire a wider range of people with different skills and mindsets. I've never worked for a company where everyone is the same nationality and I never intend to. You rag on the Indians, but I've worked with Indians before and they fill gaps in the company's culture and workflow that other nationalities are unwilling to fill.
It's a good thing, the game is DRM free, but you shouldn't be pirating it anyway so demanding a settlement is probably reasonable. Seriously, even if they don't sue you, you still should be ashamed.
However, if you are in a geographical region where you can pirate with impunity, then torrenting still has the value of thumbing your nose to a threat. However, I suggest you purchase the game before you torrent it so you can get self righteous about it. Nothing I hate more about a pirate getting self-righteous about DRM, since they are the primary reason that DRM is implemented.