The only other issue I am aware of that does bother me is the stories of people having their entire account locked because they reversed the charge for a game that turned out to not work or was falsely advertised.
This is very dubious. I think a good test here would be whether you could get a refund from a retailer under the same conditions. If not, and you do an end run around the retailer to the credit card company then that seems to be a bit strange, even if you can do it legally. Doing an end run around either a store or an online distributer in this case is a bit weird so no wonder Valve just treat all chargebacks as a stolen card.
I ducked out of a STEM degree myself exactly because it was too much work and because science classes turned out to be a huge drag on my grades. However, this wasn't because the content itself was "hard," it was because at the university level all the math and science classes I took were graded competitively on a curve, and this system gave a tremendous advantage to all the students from Korea and China who were brought up spending every waking hour in study.
Ultimately, I changed to a liberal arts degree. This wasn't the only reason I switched away from STEM, but it certainly made my decision easier.
So you gave up because you couldn't be bothered to work as hard as people from China and Korea living in the US? If that is true that is pretty pathetic on your part and may explain much of why the US needs so many H-1B visas.
I still remember in one signals class, the guy next to me asked how I did for one of the homework questions, and I told him I didn't do it because it looked awful. He told me it took him several hours to solve.
"[First name], it's worth 1/2 of 1%."
"... you son of a bitch."
But hey, what do I know, I've just got an engineering degree on my wall here next to my PE certificate.
Of course you are right, that is how you pass exams. I was actually quite good at by the end as I would make several passes through the paper going for the stuff I found harder and harder on each pass. The first pass would really just be a skim read and quick answer of the stuff I found easy, the last pass would probably be just going for one question that bugged the hell out of me.
I also never made any secret of this as my answer books generally had all the questions in the order I answered them (eg, 5,2,1,8,etc) so it kept the lecturers on their toes. This was perfectly allowed so why bother trying to leave space to answer questions you are skipping on that pass when you don't need to, however easy it would be.
The thing is though techniques like this are always a bit of a cop out. Persisting with something you find incredibly hard to the bitter end gives a real sense of satisfaction when you get it right, even if it is only worth half a percent. This is what university should be about: Satisfaction and learning for learning's sake.
On the flip side, I had professors who would teach material so badly that the class average was 28% or 35%.
That is not always the teachers fault.
When I went to Uni to study Physics one of our Maths modules had a similar average. The lecturer we has not great, but the real problem is that all the fundamental principles of higher maths had been disappearing from the A-Level (the level before university) Maths syllabus in the years before that.
When I was studying for my A-Levels I had to struggle through things like complex integration and differentiation, finding the roots of quadratic equations and tons more stuff I saw no relevance to. This has now all been removed from the A-Level syllabus to try and encourage more students to take Maths at A-Level and to improve the pass rate. It was actually removed the year I finished so by the time I came to Uni after a gap year I was in a uni class with people who had no experience of this stuff but were still trying to do a Physics degree. Maybe this is only happening here in the UK where I live but I reckon it is similar in the US too.
Then there is the other problem, students always bitch about the teachers and blame them when things go wrong. It has been going on for decades, especially at degree level as before then you are very much being spoon fed the stuff you need to learn but they need to start weaning you off this so you start doing more of the the learning you need to do in a self directed manner. That means that your lecturers have to be there for you to ask questions of occasionally, but for the most part you have to get used to teaching yourself anything you need to pass your course. Some students really struggle with this transition, especially if the lack a real passion for what they chose to study.
This is not to say that bad lecturers do not exist, like anything there will be teachers and lecturers who are good at it and some that suck. It is just worth remembering that however crap the teacher is it is still down to the student to drive their own learning by the time they get to university. What really differentiates between good and bad lecturers is the ability to foster a passion for learning a subject in their students.
This is why I have no movies. I cant find one where I actually own the content, I can only license it.
If you want to actually own the content, you need to make your own goddamn movie, with black jack and hookers.
But seriously, even when you buy a BluRay that only gives you a licence to use the content. Otherwise Netflix could buy a single BluRay disk then stream it all over the world. There will always be restrictions on anything you buy in in the form of a licence that restricts copying. You might be arguing for better licencing terms like being able to make copies for personal use and to transfer them around different devices but even in that case there would be a licence preventing non-personal use. Owning the content would mean
Going back to the 80's long before DRM video shops had to buy special copies of films on video that were licensed such that they could rent them out. These special copies were more expensive (about $50 - $100 by memory). If you could spend $20 for a bluray disk then do whatever you liked with the content, including non personal use, then Holywood would be bankrupt in days.
All that said, DRM still won: it lost in the audio realm, but won in general computing, mobile computing and video. Steam is really a much better example of this than iCloud.
Steam is a good example of DRM.
It is fairly obvious though that it won simply because it works and the only restriction it places on you is not being able to sell games you bought second hand (which you agreed to when you bought the game from them anyway). It does however let you install games on loads of different machines, even at the same time unlike most DRM systems. They also release games on steam at the same time all over the world to my knowledge which is another reason why people pirate, to obtain something that is not yet available by legal means in the their country.
When DRM is invisible in this way to most users then they simply don't care about it. I am sure there are some people who refuse to buy all steam titles as part of some crusade to get them to drop the restriction on second hand sales, but they are so few in number that Valve just ignores them as acceptable losses.
This is probably made even easier by the same people piping up how bad Steam is on forums and saying they boycott it for restricting second hand sales through DRM while also having obviously played games only available on steam with this restriction. This means they played the game illegally anyway without paying so it is very easy for Valve to dismiss them as people who just want to play games without paying for them. If you are actually trying to boycott something effectively, you have to really boycott it or it dilutes the message you are trying to put across.
Sorry to disappoint you that this is not a troll, I just think that if I pay for every game I play then you damn well should too or do without playing it. I know that this might not result in any lost sales to the publisher, but if I pay for something and you don't that is not fair.
Are you saying that content owners are charging more per unit in the non-English territories? I'm not aware of that being the case (though I'm on the B2B end of the business, so I'm not intimately familiar with consumer prices), other than cases where there is a supply and demand difference.
I live in the UK and we are generally charged more for things than you guys in the US. I know we have 20% sales tax on everything but the last time I checked DVD's were generally 50% cheaper in the US, that is not all sales tax.
I would argue that the harm is mostly non-existant in that lower sales of language specific versions are offset by sales of the original language version.
There is an issue though that the original version distribution rights are probably US or English Language only and a different company owns the rights to the subtitled version sold abroad. These might just be front companies for the same global corporation with a controlling share in both but they probably also have local shareholders that did lose out somewhere.
Of course it is pretty obvious though that the real reason they did this is that they viewed this site as being a tool for creating pirate copies of english language films with local subtitles before they are released. It doesn't matter if it actually is or not, just that some executive somewhere thinks it might be.
Woah there... Who said anything about pirating? If you wanted to watch a movie you bought that was not in a language you can understand, wouldn't you want subtitles?
Yes, but in many cases it is cheaper to buy an english only version of a movie than one with local subtitles. The MPAA want to preserve this charging of countries other than the US more money for the same crap.
Just because this makes sense does not really make it right though. I think they missed the point here as in many cases the user contributed subtitles are better than the original subtitles they provide as they often contain local slang that only someone who can swear well in both languages can make. They should have let this stand as all it had was text which without a copy of the video and sound would be pretty useless.
It is still running to a bunch of lawyers though to settle what should be a technical issue.
He is worried about the damage to his wonderful players reputation be secunia filing a few bug reports? It works both ways, if they have filed bug based on security issues that do not exist that damages their reputation. Surely it makes more sense to have a discussion between two techies regarding the expected behaviour of the application. I don't see what a bunch of lawyers can contribute to that.
Oh, apart from burning them to keep the techies warm:)
People responsible for crafting laws should be penalized for poor and vague wording.
Even if it was unintentionally vague (I suspect it is frequently intentional, too).
Often laws under a jury system are designed to be vague catchalls. This is because the jury is there to act as the final check on whether the law should actually apply in each individual case. Juries do not just decide whether the person did something, they also decide on guilt as well and that is more complicated and includes an element of whether the actions of the defendant should actually be a crime.
The best examples of wide reaching vague laws are usually found in the laws pertaining to military secrets and espionage.
I personally think Grammar schools are a good idea. It makes much more sense to stream pupils by ability.
Pity it's mathematically impossible to do that within one school, and on a per-subject basis.
One perfectly valid reason for grammar schools is that kids from council houses are thieving little oiks with nits. I'm rather surprised you didn't mention it.
P.S. If you sincerely believe selection was/is based purely on ability I have several bridges you might be interested in buying.
Lol, I actually failed the selection exam (the 11 plus) to get in to Grammar school so does that answer your question regarding ability:)
To be honest though, I didn't see much point in it at the time as I lived in a borough that had grammar and comprehensive schools but actually went to school somewhere that only had secondary moderns that did not place any stock in the 11 plus exam. I only did the exam because of where I lived, not because of where I actually went to school so it did not matter if I passed or failed, I was always going to go to the same school afterwards.
And by the way, I was one of the thieving kids from the council houses who had nits:)
My point was really that grammar schools offered the possibility for the select few of us poor folk who got in to be schooled in a similar environment to that of a private school. Whether this is a good idea or not is irrelevant, what is important is that some people who make decisions (oxbridge admissions professors for example) later on in the childs life think it is.
There was a very interesting documentary about this recently on UK TV where they interviewed a bunch of people who had come through the grammar school system. I know it had been criticised since but the reality is that it did have a valid point in that however unfair it is to stream kids at 11, it gives the opportunity to those who do well to break into the sort of jobs that are normally restricted to those coming from public school. By removing grammar schools we have diminished the number of state school kids who get in to oxbridge.
Being that under the old system a great many people I know did well based purely on hard work even though they went to comprehensives being disadvantaged at that age did not really make much difference in the long run even though it might have stopped us going to oxbridge.
Those who are opposed to forcing kids though an exam in principle though will often never take the pragmatic view of grammar schools I do though and I understand that, its just that the private school system does exist and there is no getting away from that. Most private schools have an entry exam at 11 so having something similar in the state system just seems to make sense to counter this.
I am actually considering saving money for my kids now (just before the first one is born) in order to maybe give them an opportunity to go to a private school later on. Of course in 18 years though I will probably need every last penny just to help her get to any university.
And the Wikipedia page you link to clarifies that this "cry baby", "I'm a victim!" attitude of hers is not new. Apparently she didn't fit into formal education, either, because "questioning professors' answers was frowned upon". Now it's happened again. It's "their fault! Nothing to do with me at all." Give me a break. She should just grow up and accept that she's not as special as she thinks she is.
Actually she might be very special, but that is utterly irrelevant when you work as part of a team.
It sounds like she was easily able to drive her own team, and manage those beneath her. But those are the easy part of management, the hard bit is called managing up (In this case it is probably more like managing across).
What she needed to do was go round every different person in the company she could and get their buy in and input into what her project should do and most importantly why it was a good idea. This probably seemed very strange to her as the boss had given her a task and she wanted to do it. She was probably expected to recruit other people from within the company who liked her idea to spend a bit of time on it. This is why they kept her department under resourced. That means long hours learning what everyone else does, forcing yourself into the existing social scene within the company, talking to people to find people who might be able to help you even though they are not strictly part of your team.
It sounds what she actually tried to do was hire a microcosm to work for her and just drop in a hierarchical department within a company that has no hierarchy. That was obviously never going to work and the company was never going to allow it to flourish.
It seems like her biggest problem is that the masses at Valve simply did not get behind her idea, that is why she was allowed to keep her product as they did not hold it in high enough esteem. Maybe they were right, maybe she was, only time will tell.
yep thats the end game for Gove the reintroduction of grammar schools kids and dumping of working class kids in dead end secondary moderns - not going to be popular when Tory voters when there average kids don't make the cut though - which is one of the reasons the Tories introduced comprehensives in the firstplace.
Ok, I'll bite.
I personally think Grammar schools are a good idea. It makes much more sense to stream pupils by ability.
When some children arrive at school they have been given a massive head start by their parents who have spent a great deal of time teaching them to read before they even get to school. Other children have parents who do not put this same effort in (probably because they are too busy at work trying to keep a roof over their head)
That advantage gets more and more pronounced as the children get older as one set of children grow up in a home where they are constantly pushed to learn and another set are constantly dumped in front of the TV. These two groups of children have the potential to massively diverge so why hold the brightest back just because it makes the kids who can't keep up jealous?
You can say that comprehensive education helps bring the slowest children up slightly, but that is not really worth sacrificing the growth of those academically strongest for. If you do you just gift all the places at the best universities to the parents who send their kids to private schools.
Who among the Founding Fathers would have argued that the King has the right to read everyone's correspondence?
The founding fathers were also very specific about not raising taxes to keep a standing army but that shit went out the window. I mention this because it is entirely related. The US has forward bases all over the world in countries where a large percentage of the population consider them to be a hostile occupying force not too dissimilar to the way the british empire was when the founding fathers wanted shot of it.
If the US did not have the level of armed forces that was so active overseas then there would be far less need to worry about terrorism at home. Especially if they resolved to the army being truly made up of an armed citizenry that had to take time out of work for a few days a month to keep up firearms training and civic duty stuff.
What the US currently has is a strange sort of halfway house between what the founding fathers wanted and what the US armaments industry wants. The armed forces don't really trust the US population enough to let them have the easy access to weapons they do have but they can't get away with restricting access to them so instead they try and eavesdrop on everything the population says privately in order to catch any wrongdoing.
In this case they clearly want to be able to track the geographical location that every single item of mail came from in order to try and track back if someone gets a bomb or chemical agent through the system undetected. This can be combined with things like cell phone movement tracking, automated licence plate recognition, credit card tracking and keeping a large list of suspicious targets to try figure out who did it. Its not perfect but it's the best they can do.
Do i really need to explain how the 4th should be preventing the USPS from turning over logging records EN MASSE to law enforcement?
So the 4th Amendment, which is about Search and Seizure and is derived from English law about an englishmans home being his castle should stop government taking a photo of the outside of an envelope that has been put in a post box in a public place. I know that the 4th has been extended to cover bugging a phone box where someone had a reasonable expectation of privacy, but since the outside of the envelope needs to be public in order for the letter to be delivered correctly I am not sure this would apply. Obviously the contents of the envelope are a completely different matter entirely.
Until the casing, bullet, and primer can be made from non-metalic substances, getting the gun past detectors might be easy but getting the ammo in to make use of it substantially harder. Right now, they'd be better off 3d printing knives because an empty gun is just a way to get yourself killed.
But ammo is small. Has anyone here not seen that crap Clint Eastwood film in the line of fire. Most of it is utter tosh but it is worth it see how he smuggles 2 rounds past all the security using a furry keyfob to hide them inside. My shoes also set off metal detectors so you can probably get a few rounds in their as well. All you need to do is make sure the object they are in is opaque to the x-ray device all your stuff goes though so they can't see the outline of a bullet.
If every security check point suddenly has to investigate every item that is big enough to hide a bullet in but opaque to the scanner then expect checking in to the average plane to take 5 times as long in future. The average laptop has loads of bits that are opaque to the scanners, it looks like from now on they might have to go in the hold.
Yes, yes! And every time we use the Moon to slingshot spacecrafts, we cause an orbit decay that will ultimately result in a collision with the Earth!
Of course you are modded funny but this is 100% true. Each slingshot transfer we do brings the day the moon crashes into us a fraction closer.
When I was a physics student a decade ago we once calculated the time the moon had left (it slows down slowly anyway as it hits bits of the earths atmosphere boil into space then get in its way) and whether the sun would have run out of fuel before then. I seem to remember both events being somewhat far off so not really worth worrying about, we are more likely to have been taken out by an asteroid or comet before then anyway:)
The central power station is not making its emissions a few feet from the sidewalk. Its pollution controls aren't restricted by weight or the need for portability.
It's also way more efficient.
The power plant might be way more efficient but I reckon you instantly lose that efficiency gain by using horribly inefficient overheard lines to transmit the power miles across the country from where it was generated to where it is needed. Then you lose even more by using the electricity to charge a battery which starts leaking its charge as soon as it is full.
Electric cars are able to solve one problem only: the fact that we are running out of oil. Solving the environmental impact problem of cars can only only be solved by using mass transit wherever possible and making less journeys in the first place.
The idea of every person getting their own huge metal box that could fit 4 or 5 people but is actually only used for 1 most of the time is the biggest problem. If you ignored this and just moved to electric cars then you would end up with a power plant for every 1000 people or something silly.
I think the unfortunate truth for you guys in the states is that your cities (New York excepted) have evolved around private car use and cheap oil. When it runs out you are going to be screwed unless telecommuting takes off. Here in the UK we kept a public transportation system so we have slightly more options in terms of what to do to get people to work without using cars.
There are plenty of things that you still need some form of private transportation like a car for but we have a slight benefit that in cities like London where I live the vast majority of us don't rely on cars to get to work even if there are a tons of other things we do need cars or trucks for (like delivering everything we need to live). It might be more of a PITA on an individual level to use public transportation, but as a country it will give us an economic advantage as oil becomes more and more scarce.
I work for Accenture, my counterparts in India cost 1/5 of my wage and in many ways equal my quality. I'm not going to stick my fingers in my ears and him loudly, it is the facts.
So in the name of helping the american economy you should clearly accept an 80% pay cut to make yourself competitive with someone from India:)
(PS - This is a joke, in my experience offshoring to India is an utter disaster as your average indian outsourced development company will never give you an honest assessment of time involved in a project or actually admit when they are going to overrun the deadline before they do, causing any sort of confrontation is just too alien to the local culture even when it is better in the long run)
If you want to have fewer problems buy the most expensive manufacturer of a given gpu, not the cheapest. I generally try and stick with gigabyte or evga.
EVGA is crap, I had one only a few months old blow out a cap every week or two until the third time it stopped working. Sounded like gun fire every time. That was five years ago. The same Seasonic 80+ supply is going strong today powering a PNY Nvidia card.
Once it blew the first one you should have sent it back.
The only thing I have noticed though is that their stuff seems a little fussy about wanting a decent PSU.
And I've had the reverse experience. I've had an Nvidia (XFX?) board, not even an expensive one, blow its capacitors...something of a first for me with regards to video cards. Drivers have been...well, drivers...nothing to phone home about, they work...but the hardware has kind of left me wanting more.
Xfx are cheap crap.
If you want to have fewer problems buy the most expensive manufacturer of a given gpu, not the cheapest. I generally try and stick with gigabyte or evga.
Notice your screenshot is trimmed down to hide the word "Ads" from the top right. You might say it us not prevalent enough and have a point but by photoshopping your screenshot you also edited away your credibility.
Slashdot Mirror
The only other issue I am aware of that does bother me is the stories of people having their entire account locked because they reversed the charge for a game that turned out to not work or was falsely advertised.
This is very dubious. I think a good test here would be whether you could get a refund from a retailer under the same conditions. If not, and you do an end run around the retailer to the credit card company then that seems to be a bit strange, even if you can do it legally. Doing an end run around either a store or an online distributer in this case is a bit weird so no wonder Valve just treat all chargebacks as a stolen card.
I ducked out of a STEM degree myself exactly because it was too much work and because science classes turned out to be a huge drag on my grades. However, this wasn't because the content itself was "hard," it was because at the university level all the math and science classes I took were graded competitively on a curve, and this system gave a tremendous advantage to all the students from Korea and China who were brought up spending every waking hour in study.
Ultimately, I changed to a liberal arts degree. This wasn't the only reason I switched away from STEM, but it certainly made my decision easier.
So you gave up because you couldn't be bothered to work as hard as people from China and Korea living in the US? If that is true that is pretty pathetic on your part and may explain much of why the US needs so many H-1B visas.
There are other possible reasons though why chinese and korean students do better at Maths. I remember reading this a few years ago in Outliers by Malcom Gladwell: http://www.gladwell.com/outliers/outliers_excerpt3.html
Its a good book and I would recommend reading it if you can be bothered.
I still remember in one signals class, the guy next to me asked how I did for one of the homework questions, and I told him I didn't do it because it looked awful. He told me it took him several hours to solve.
"[First name], it's worth 1/2 of 1%."
"... you son of a bitch."
But hey, what do I know, I've just got an engineering degree on my wall here next to my PE certificate.
Of course you are right, that is how you pass exams. I was actually quite good at by the end as I would make several passes through the paper going for the stuff I found harder and harder on each pass. The first pass would really just be a skim read and quick answer of the stuff I found easy, the last pass would probably be just going for one question that bugged the hell out of me.
I also never made any secret of this as my answer books generally had all the questions in the order I answered them (eg, 5,2,1,8,etc) so it kept the lecturers on their toes. This was perfectly allowed so why bother trying to leave space to answer questions you are skipping on that pass when you don't need to, however easy it would be.
The thing is though techniques like this are always a bit of a cop out. Persisting with something you find incredibly hard to the bitter end gives a real sense of satisfaction when you get it right, even if it is only worth half a percent. This is what university should be about: Satisfaction and learning for learning's sake.
On the flip side, I had professors who would teach material so badly that the class average was 28% or 35%.
That is not always the teachers fault.
When I went to Uni to study Physics one of our Maths modules had a similar average. The lecturer we has not great, but the real problem is that all the fundamental principles of higher maths had been disappearing from the A-Level (the level before university) Maths syllabus in the years before that.
When I was studying for my A-Levels I had to struggle through things like complex integration and differentiation, finding the roots of quadratic equations and tons more stuff I saw no relevance to. This has now all been removed from the A-Level syllabus to try and encourage more students to take Maths at A-Level and to improve the pass rate. It was actually removed the year I finished so by the time I came to Uni after a gap year I was in a uni class with people who had no experience of this stuff but were still trying to do a Physics degree. Maybe this is only happening here in the UK where I live but I reckon it is similar in the US too.
Then there is the other problem, students always bitch about the teachers and blame them when things go wrong. It has been going on for decades, especially at degree level as before then you are very much being spoon fed the stuff you need to learn but they need to start weaning you off this so you start doing more of the the learning you need to do in a self directed manner. That means that your lecturers have to be there for you to ask questions of occasionally, but for the most part you have to get used to teaching yourself anything you need to pass your course. Some students really struggle with this transition, especially if the lack a real passion for what they chose to study.
This is not to say that bad lecturers do not exist, like anything there will be teachers and lecturers who are good at it and some that suck. It is just worth remembering that however crap the teacher is it is still down to the student to drive their own learning by the time they get to university. What really differentiates between good and bad lecturers is the ability to foster a passion for learning a subject in their students.
Owning the content would mean..
Pesky boss coming back from lunch while I was typing :)
I was going to say that owning the content would mean truly owning the copyright on it.
we buy what we want to watch.
Me too.
This is why I have no movies. I cant find one where I actually own the content, I can only license it.
If you want to actually own the content, you need to make your own goddamn movie, with black jack and hookers.
But seriously, even when you buy a BluRay that only gives you a licence to use the content. Otherwise Netflix could buy a single BluRay disk then stream it all over the world. There will always be restrictions on anything you buy in in the form of a licence that restricts copying. You might be arguing for better licencing terms like being able to make copies for personal use and to transfer them around different devices but even in that case there would be a licence preventing non-personal use. Owning the content would mean
Going back to the 80's long before DRM video shops had to buy special copies of films on video that were licensed such that they could rent them out. These special copies were more expensive (about $50 - $100 by memory). If you could spend $20 for a bluray disk then do whatever you liked with the content, including non personal use, then Holywood would be bankrupt in days.
All that said, DRM still won: it lost in the audio realm, but won in general computing, mobile computing and video. Steam is really a much better example of this than iCloud.
Steam is a good example of DRM.
It is fairly obvious though that it won simply because it works and the only restriction it places on you is not being able to sell games you bought second hand (which you agreed to when you bought the game from them anyway). It does however let you install games on loads of different machines, even at the same time unlike most DRM systems. They also release games on steam at the same time all over the world to my knowledge which is another reason why people pirate, to obtain something that is not yet available by legal means in the their country.
When DRM is invisible in this way to most users then they simply don't care about it. I am sure there are some people who refuse to buy all steam titles as part of some crusade to get them to drop the restriction on second hand sales, but they are so few in number that Valve just ignores them as acceptable losses.
This is probably made even easier by the same people piping up how bad Steam is on forums and saying they boycott it for restricting second hand sales through DRM while also having obviously played games only available on steam with this restriction. This means they played the game illegally anyway without paying so it is very easy for Valve to dismiss them as people who just want to play games without paying for them. If you are actually trying to boycott something effectively, you have to really boycott it or it dilutes the message you are trying to put across.
Sorry to disappoint you that this is not a troll, I just think that if I pay for every game I play then you damn well should too or do without playing it. I know that this might not result in any lost sales to the publisher, but if I pay for something and you don't that is not fair.
Are you saying that content owners are charging more per unit in the non-English territories? I'm not aware of that being the case (though I'm on the B2B end of the business, so I'm not intimately familiar with consumer prices), other than cases where there is a supply and demand difference.
I live in the UK and we are generally charged more for things than you guys in the US. I know we have 20% sales tax on everything but the last time I checked DVD's were generally 50% cheaper in the US, that is not all sales tax.
I would argue that the harm is mostly non-existant in that lower sales of language specific versions are offset by sales of the original language version.
There is an issue though that the original version distribution rights are probably US or English Language only and a different company owns the rights to the subtitled version sold abroad. These might just be front companies for the same global corporation with a controlling share in both but they probably also have local shareholders that did lose out somewhere.
Of course it is pretty obvious though that the real reason they did this is that they viewed this site as being a tool for creating pirate copies of english language films with local subtitles before they are released. It doesn't matter if it actually is or not, just that some executive somewhere thinks it might be.
Woah there... Who said anything about pirating? If you wanted to watch a movie you bought that was not in a language you can understand, wouldn't you want subtitles?
Yes, but in many cases it is cheaper to buy an english only version of a movie than one with local subtitles. The MPAA want to preserve this charging of countries other than the US more money for the same crap.
Just because this makes sense does not really make it right though. I think they missed the point here as in many cases the user contributed subtitles are better than the original subtitles they provide as they often contain local slang that only someone who can swear well in both languages can make. They should have let this stand as all it had was text which without a copy of the video and sound would be pretty useless.
protip: patent infringement != libel/slander ;)
It is still running to a bunch of lawyers though to settle what should be a technical issue.
He is worried about the damage to his wonderful players reputation be secunia filing a few bug reports? It works both ways, if they have filed bug based on security issues that do not exist that damages their reputation. Surely it makes more sense to have a discussion between two techies regarding the expected behaviour of the application. I don't see what a bunch of lawyers can contribute to that.
Oh, apart from burning them to keep the techies warm :)
People responsible for crafting laws should be penalized for poor and vague wording.
Even if it was unintentionally vague (I suspect it is frequently intentional, too).
Often laws under a jury system are designed to be vague catchalls. This is because the jury is there to act as the final check on whether the law should actually apply in each individual case. Juries do not just decide whether the person did something, they also decide on guilt as well and that is more complicated and includes an element of whether the actions of the defendant should actually be a crime.
The best examples of wide reaching vague laws are usually found in the laws pertaining to military secrets and espionage.
Pity it's mathematically impossible to do that within one school, and on a per-subject basis.
One perfectly valid reason for grammar schools is that kids from council houses are thieving little oiks with nits. I'm rather surprised you didn't mention it.
P.S. If you sincerely believe selection was/is based purely on ability I have several bridges you might be interested in buying.
Lol, I actually failed the selection exam (the 11 plus) to get in to Grammar school so does that answer your question regarding ability :)
To be honest though, I didn't see much point in it at the time as I lived in a borough that had grammar and comprehensive schools but actually went to school somewhere that only had secondary moderns that did not place any stock in the 11 plus exam. I only did the exam because of where I lived, not because of where I actually went to school so it did not matter if I passed or failed, I was always going to go to the same school afterwards.
And by the way, I was one of the thieving kids from the council houses who had nits :)
My point was really that grammar schools offered the possibility for the select few of us poor folk who got in to be schooled in a similar environment to that of a private school. Whether this is a good idea or not is irrelevant, what is important is that some people who make decisions (oxbridge admissions professors for example) later on in the childs life think it is.
There was a very interesting documentary about this recently on UK TV where they interviewed a bunch of people who had come through the grammar school system. I know it had been criticised since but the reality is that it did have a valid point in that however unfair it is to stream kids at 11, it gives the opportunity to those who do well to break into the sort of jobs that are normally restricted to those coming from public school. By removing grammar schools we have diminished the number of state school kids who get in to oxbridge.
Being that under the old system a great many people I know did well based purely on hard work even though they went to comprehensives being disadvantaged at that age did not really make much difference in the long run even though it might have stopped us going to oxbridge.
Those who are opposed to forcing kids though an exam in principle though will often never take the pragmatic view of grammar schools I do though and I understand that, its just that the private school system does exist and there is no getting away from that. Most private schools have an entry exam at 11 so having something similar in the state system just seems to make sense to counter this.
I am actually considering saving money for my kids now (just before the first one is born) in order to maybe give them an opportunity to go to a private school later on. Of course in 18 years though I will probably need every last penny just to help her get to any university.
And the Wikipedia page you link to clarifies that this "cry baby", "I'm a victim!" attitude of hers is not new. Apparently she didn't fit into formal education, either, because "questioning professors' answers was frowned upon". Now it's happened again. It's "their fault! Nothing to do with me at all." Give me a break. She should just grow up and accept that she's not as special as she thinks she is.
Actually she might be very special, but that is utterly irrelevant when you work as part of a team.
It sounds like she was easily able to drive her own team, and manage those beneath her. But those are the easy part of management, the hard bit is called managing up (In this case it is probably more like managing across).
What she needed to do was go round every different person in the company she could and get their buy in and input into what her project should do and most importantly why it was a good idea. This probably seemed very strange to her as the boss had given her a task and she wanted to do it. She was probably expected to recruit other people from within the company who liked her idea to spend a bit of time on it. This is why they kept her department under resourced. That means long hours learning what everyone else does, forcing yourself into the existing social scene within the company, talking to people to find people who might be able to help you even though they are not strictly part of your team.
It sounds what she actually tried to do was hire a microcosm to work for her and just drop in a hierarchical department within a company that has no hierarchy. That was obviously never going to work and the company was never going to allow it to flourish.
It seems like her biggest problem is that the masses at Valve simply did not get behind her idea, that is why she was allowed to keep her product as they did not hold it in high enough esteem. Maybe they were right, maybe she was, only time will tell.
yep thats the end game for Gove the reintroduction of grammar schools kids and dumping of working class kids in dead end secondary moderns - not going to be popular when Tory voters when there average kids don't make the cut though - which is one of the reasons the Tories introduced comprehensives in the firstplace.
Ok, I'll bite.
I personally think Grammar schools are a good idea. It makes much more sense to stream pupils by ability.
When some children arrive at school they have been given a massive head start by their parents who have spent a great deal of time teaching them to read before they even get to school. Other children have parents who do not put this same effort in (probably because they are too busy at work trying to keep a roof over their head)
That advantage gets more and more pronounced as the children get older as one set of children grow up in a home where they are constantly pushed to learn and another set are constantly dumped in front of the TV. These two groups of children have the potential to massively diverge so why hold the brightest back just because it makes the kids who can't keep up jealous?
You can say that comprehensive education helps bring the slowest children up slightly, but that is not really worth sacrificing the growth of those academically strongest for. If you do you just gift all the places at the best universities to the parents who send their kids to private schools.
Who among the Founding Fathers would have argued that the King has the right to read everyone's correspondence?
The founding fathers were also very specific about not raising taxes to keep a standing army but that shit went out the window. I mention this because it is entirely related. The US has forward bases all over the world in countries where a large percentage of the population consider them to be a hostile occupying force not too dissimilar to the way the british empire was when the founding fathers wanted shot of it.
If the US did not have the level of armed forces that was so active overseas then there would be far less need to worry about terrorism at home. Especially if they resolved to the army being truly made up of an armed citizenry that had to take time out of work for a few days a month to keep up firearms training and civic duty stuff.
What the US currently has is a strange sort of halfway house between what the founding fathers wanted and what the US armaments industry wants. The armed forces don't really trust the US population enough to let them have the easy access to weapons they do have but they can't get away with restricting access to them so instead they try and eavesdrop on everything the population says privately in order to catch any wrongdoing.
In this case they clearly want to be able to track the geographical location that every single item of mail came from in order to try and track back if someone gets a bomb or chemical agent through the system undetected. This can be combined with things like cell phone movement tracking, automated licence plate recognition, credit card tracking and keeping a large list of suspicious targets to try figure out who did it. Its not perfect but it's the best they can do.
Do i really need to explain how the 4th should be preventing the USPS from turning over logging records EN MASSE to law enforcement?
So the 4th Amendment, which is about Search and Seizure and is derived from English law about an englishmans home being his castle should stop government taking a photo of the outside of an envelope that has been put in a post box in a public place. I know that the 4th has been extended to cover bugging a phone box where someone had a reasonable expectation of privacy, but since the outside of the envelope needs to be public in order for the letter to be delivered correctly I am not sure this would apply. Obviously the contents of the envelope are a completely different matter entirely.
Until the casing, bullet, and primer can be made from non-metalic substances, getting the gun past detectors might be easy but getting the ammo in to make use of it substantially harder. Right now, they'd be better off 3d printing knives because an empty gun is just a way to get yourself killed.
But ammo is small. Has anyone here not seen that crap Clint Eastwood film in the line of fire. Most of it is utter tosh but it is worth it see how he smuggles 2 rounds past all the security using a furry keyfob to hide them inside. My shoes also set off metal detectors so you can probably get a few rounds in their as well. All you need to do is make sure the object they are in is opaque to the x-ray device all your stuff goes though so they can't see the outline of a bullet.
If every security check point suddenly has to investigate every item that is big enough to hide a bullet in but opaque to the scanner then expect checking in to the average plane to take 5 times as long in future. The average laptop has loads of bits that are opaque to the scanners, it looks like from now on they might have to go in the hold.
That 1GW plant could charge about 34,000 vehicles overnight.
So how many extra plants does the US have to build to cover every person driving an electric car?
Yes, yes! And every time we use the Moon to slingshot spacecrafts, we cause an orbit decay that will ultimately result in a collision with the Earth!
Of course you are modded funny but this is 100% true. Each slingshot transfer we do brings the day the moon crashes into us a fraction closer.
When I was a physics student a decade ago we once calculated the time the moon had left (it slows down slowly anyway as it hits bits of the earths atmosphere boil into space then get in its way) and whether the sun would have run out of fuel before then. I seem to remember both events being somewhat far off so not really worth worrying about, we are more likely to have been taken out by an asteroid or comet before then anyway :)
The central power station is not making its emissions a few feet from the sidewalk. Its pollution controls aren't restricted by weight or the need for portability.
It's also way more efficient.
The power plant might be way more efficient but I reckon you instantly lose that efficiency gain by using horribly inefficient overheard lines to transmit the power miles across the country from where it was generated to where it is needed. Then you lose even more by using the electricity to charge a battery which starts leaking its charge as soon as it is full.
Electric cars are able to solve one problem only: the fact that we are running out of oil. Solving the environmental impact problem of cars can only only be solved by using mass transit wherever possible and making less journeys in the first place.
The idea of every person getting their own huge metal box that could fit 4 or 5 people but is actually only used for 1 most of the time is the biggest problem. If you ignored this and just moved to electric cars then you would end up with a power plant for every 1000 people or something silly.
I think the unfortunate truth for you guys in the states is that your cities (New York excepted) have evolved around private car use and cheap oil. When it runs out you are going to be screwed unless telecommuting takes off. Here in the UK we kept a public transportation system so we have slightly more options in terms of what to do to get people to work without using cars.
There are plenty of things that you still need some form of private transportation like a car for but we have a slight benefit that in cities like London where I live the vast majority of us don't rely on cars to get to work even if there are a tons of other things we do need cars or trucks for (like delivering everything we need to live). It might be more of a PITA on an individual level to use public transportation, but as a country it will give us an economic advantage as oil becomes more and more scarce.
I work for Accenture, my counterparts in India cost 1/5 of my wage and in many ways equal my quality. I'm not going to stick my fingers in my ears and him loudly, it is the facts.
So in the name of helping the american economy you should clearly accept an 80% pay cut to make yourself competitive with someone from India :)
(PS - This is a joke, in my experience offshoring to India is an utter disaster as your average indian outsourced development company will never give you an honest assessment of time involved in a project or actually admit when they are going to overrun the deadline before they do, causing any sort of confrontation is just too alien to the local culture even when it is better in the long run)
If you want to have fewer problems buy the most expensive manufacturer of a given gpu, not the cheapest. I generally try and stick with gigabyte or evga.
EVGA is crap, I had one only a few months old blow out a cap every week or two until the third time it stopped working. Sounded like gun fire every time. That was five years ago. The same Seasonic 80+ supply is going strong today powering a PNY Nvidia card.
Once it blew the first one you should have sent it back.
The only thing I have noticed though is that their stuff seems a little fussy about wanting a decent PSU.
And I've had the reverse experience. I've had an Nvidia (XFX?) board, not even an expensive one, blow its capacitors...something of a first for me with regards to video cards. Drivers have been...well, drivers...nothing to phone home about, they work...but the hardware has kind of left me wanting more.
Xfx are cheap crap.
If you want to have fewer problems buy the most expensive manufacturer of a given gpu, not the cheapest. I generally try and stick with gigabyte or evga.
Are you paid to post crap about Google?
Notice your screenshot is trimmed down to hide the word "Ads" from the top right. You might say it us not prevalent enough and have a point but by photoshopping your screenshot you also edited away your credibility.