Try Windows 8 and you would take back any credit you give them for Windows 7.
What a truly moronic statement.
Just because a company produce a bad product you suddenly think a previous product is bad too by association even though you used to like it? That is not exactly a rational response.
I don't think that "open" versus "closed" really has anything to do with it.
I think the problem he has is that with Android someone can take your hot new app that you sell for $5, repackage it under a slightly different name and sell it for $4 and in the short term there is not a lot you can do.
Google might pull it eventually, but in the time that takes you have lost thousands of pounds in revenue. More annoyingly, someone else has made money using your hard work and not given you a cent.
Not to forget the Tories' attempt to privatise the NHS. Also, the railways were privatised under a Tory government. Look how well that's turned out (for non-UK/.ers: the UK railway network is overpriced, severely limited in capacity, and slowly falling apart).
I think you are confused. The only thing the railways do slowly is get you to your destination (on a good day, on a bad day they don't even do this), the falling apart bit is happening quite quickly:)
Sod the horse, there is already an invention that turns KFC directly into transport fuel. It's called a bike, and had a brief moment of popularity before the lazy fuckmobile was invented and killed all the transport infrastructure world-wide.
Actually a bike turns food into fuel. KFC is just crap in, crap out:)
Without fossil fuel, where can we get electricity?
Nuke plants that we have today (2nd to 3rd generation) produce to much radioactive wastes, and no one has built any 4th gen nuke plants yet
Eventually, when the fossil fuel runs out, all future inhabitants on this planet will have to go back to the old ways to move - like walking, or riding a horsey, or something like that
Shhh, don't tell anyone. I am looking forward to going down to Houston, Texas when the oil runs out and watching the fat people starve because they can't walk to the shop and back. If you tell them they might look at changing their ways.
Of course, I am joking but it is a serious point: How would most american cities function when the oil runs out? It takes years and lots of investment to build a mass transit system, this is the sort of project you need to start now to have it ready in 20 years time. How long do people think it will be before oil either runs out or just becomes too expensive.
It is the result of private corporations lobbying for more privatisation. "Shrink the Government" is the voter-friendly PR spin on it. We have the same in the UK...fortunately the privatised "security" company G4S has just screwed up so massively that the agenda must have been put back a year or so. Personally, I think that any and all national security functions, whether physical or cyber, shouldn't be provided by anybody whose managers I cannot vote out of office.
As a fellow Brit I have been following the G4S Olympic security blunder in the news too. I will be very surprised if it actually makes any difference in the long run to privatisation though.
We have already let G4S run several prisons as part of a pilot scheme, once the pilot is over in a year or two we will outsource more to them I'm sure. Even before this G4S had a piss poor record when it came to prisoner transport yet they were still given more contracts in a similar vein.
The simple fact is that government loves privatising stuff as it means they can push costs of large infrastructure projects down the line to the next generation. It also means they can make lots of friends in business and those friends will repay them with a nice cushy non-executive director role later on.
Yeah? 'Pretty damn unique glasses' is a valid reason to discriminate at a
public restaurant? Tell me, where did McDonald's post the nonuniqueness
requirement for glasses on that building's entrance?
Absolutely! All restaurants are private premises, and the owners/operators *always* reserve the right to ask *any* customer to leave for a variety of reasons. Nobody has a *right* to be served in any restaurant, likely anywhere in the world I'd say.
Probably, it would be enough if the employees felt that he was causing a disturbance to the other customers, or was about to do so.
Yup, but even if you are on private property they have to ask you politely to leave first. They are not allowed to lay a finger on you unless you refuse to do so or ignore them. Even then they are only allowed to use reasonable force to remove you from the premises, and that does not involve trying to take your property from you, especially if it happens to be attached to your head.
And based on my past experience, as a french citizen, of being assaulted and turning to the Police for help, I find his claims of getting no useful response completely realistic and plausible.
However, once this incident becomes more widely known in french-language blogs and media, it'll quickly attract a lot of attention and will probably elicit an official (outraged) reaction of McDonald's France, and maybe cause a few interviews of politicians trying to look like they're concerned. That's how it works here.
Actually, if he really wanted to do something about it he would find a French lawyer then let the guy pursue a no win - no fee civil case for damages against the business in question. Most of this can be done from Canada and will probably net him a few quid since because one of the morons was wearing a name badge and a uniform the business is probably liable for any damages caused.
This has the added benefit that the owner of this business will immediately fire them to desperately try and distance himself from an act that he may well have actually been party to himself.
Having just read several stories about how people were mugged in the UK and the police didn't care to investigate despite having leads in many cases, I can believe that.
Muggings happen all the time, the police have long since given up any shred of investigation since the punishment is almost non-existent providing no firearms are used or the victim does not need hospital treatment. The last time I as mugged I didn't even bother reporting it, who needs the hassle.
If you want to make sure the police investigate you need to resist and get stabbed or something. If it is just a straight mugging with no violence (just the threat) then the punishment would be a fine or community order anyway even if they investigated:
Both of these are joke punishments anyway and since we in the UK do not have a three strikes and your out law then dragging little yobs up in front of the courts or mugging is just a waste of police resources. If we wanted to change this we would need to build a shitload more prisons (and pay the resultant massive increase in taxes) since there are places like Salford (nr Manchester, where I used to live) where the entire populace would serve time before they were out of school.
Why didnt he called the police and identified those persons?
He claims he did contact the police, and they were not helpful.
Unless you speak fluent French then their police will not help you. This is the same for Spain too and probably many others, the trick is to talk to your consular representative and demand he deals with it on your behalf if you really need to report a crime for insurance purposes.
At least if you visit us in the UK you can speak to the police in English.
If you want to attack any more straw men, do it on someone else's thread. Kthxbye.
I wasn't intending to attack you, just suggest that the recession we are currently in is somewhat different to the great depression as the great depression affected everyone evenly whereas the current "financial downturn" or whatever you want to call it is only really affecting the people who are at the bottom end of the earnings scale so is not driving down prices across the board in the same way the depression did. This is especially true for luxury items like computer games.
Since you mentioned the depression I though it important to educate you that the current recession is very different. A great many of us are much better off as a result of the current climate thanks to the low interest rates helping our mortgages.
Current PC Game prices here in Australia have been in the $70-$100 range for years, yes even this year where our dollar is worth more than yours.
I'd say it's nice to see you finally playing catch-up if it weren't for the fact that it's only going to translate to $150 games here.
That is because the US dollar has fallen down the toilet, not because the aussie dollar has gained any value. It is still about the same to sterling as it was when I was a kid 30 years ago.
please STFU that game prices have not inflated equally with everything else, they have actually gotten cheaper!
Wages aren't keeping up with inflation, neither minimum wages nor typical wages. Unemployment is at levels not seen since the great depression. STFU that game prices have gotten cheaper, they are now a larger percentage of the typical disposable income.
The wages of software developers and graphic artists are not as far behind inflation as most peoples wages though. That means the cost of producing games is not getting as cheaper as you suggest.
The high unemployment levels you talk about are not making it any easier for most companies to hire decent developers. That's because the high unemployment is mainly in areas like manufacturing where people are not very skilled.
90% of convictions never go to trial and All of those that accept plea bargains are required to admit guilt AND agree to the penalty. Your contention is not based on reality.
Some of those people who accepted a plea bargain may have done it simply because their lawyer told them there was zero chance of them being found innocent based on the governments forensic evidence. This is often the case because a cheap public defenders lack the financial resources to challenge government expert witnesses with experts of their own.
It's a reasonable principle, but it may be a bit too simplistic. So you'd rather let one guilty go free than have one innocent person convicted. What if it was not just one guilty you had to let go free, but say two, would you still say it was better? How many guilty would have to go free, before it was better to let one innocent person get convicted?
You can answer that yourself: How many guilty people need to go to prison correctly in order for you to be happy for you to be the one innocent person to be sent to prison incorrectly?
How understanding would you be of your own point of view if you had just spent the past 10 years in prison getting raped every other day? You might even die in prison fighting that sort of shit off, even if you survived a 10 year stretch your life would be utterly changed by the experience.
I'll bet that would make the choice a lot less clear too.
The fact is that our prisons are so awful that it is unthinkable that an innocent person should ever end up there. They are basically utter hell holes where we throw people and forget about them. Your example of the person being murdered is not really any worse than if we sent them to prison anyway since most geeks I know would top themselves in prison anyway if they were facing more than 5 or so years.
Then there is the not insignificant fact that most prisons are like universities for criminals. You can go in and learn all sort of things. At the very least you will learn to fight with no remorse, that is a very powerful thing to learn as any soldier who has killed will tell you, but it does make fitting in to normal society much harder afterwards. You will also have the opportunity to learn how be a criminal in other ways such as how to commit extortion (you will most likely be a victim of it initially and learn that way if you are not a hardened thug already). Then there are the myriad of small things people talk about in prison too, if you listen you can learn what they did wrong and landed them in there in the first place.
You also neglect to think about the people we wrongly convict then kill via the death penalty. What is worse, the murderer going and killing someone else as he was not able to be convicted on flimsy evidence or us killing someone who was innocent just because the flimsy evidence made us suspect them?
Nope, it seems pretty clear to me that it is better for society to stick with "beyond reasonable doubt" and be as sure as possible that the people we convict are actually guilty. Otherwise you run into all sorts of problems.
"The Innocent Man" by John Grisham. It details a case in which a man was wrongfully sentenced to death on bad evidence.
I'm a good law-and-order conservative when it comes to things like this, but fair is fair. If someone is wrongfully convicted, it needs to be reviewed. In particular, the use of hair samples and other forensic evidence decades ago, before the advent of DNA testing, resulted in quite a few such wrongful convictions.
I'm in agreement with you. However, perhaps there needs to be a line drawn here, since this type of investigation (or re-investigation) comes with a significant price tag (likely to the taxpayer). Personally, unless there is someone sitting behind bars who is in disagreement with their sentence, leave the cases alone. I question benefit vs. cost in those cases.
So if a person is now about 15 or 16 and looking at going to college but cannot afford to because the government wrongly executed his father 14 years back he is crap out of luck then?
This is obviously a purely hypothetical scenario but should illustrate things are not quite as cut and dried as you seem to believe.
There's already a fair bit of divergence between what you can do in IE and what you can do in other browsers. IE (including IE9) doesn't implement as much of HTML5 as other browsers. IE's SVG support is in its infancy compared to other browsers', and completely nonexistent before IE9.
So we might end up with some jQuery functionality silently being disabled in legacy versions of IE too. Big whoop.
I found some interesting "divergence" on friday afternoon just before I left work.
I wanted to grab an element of html using jquery, then detach it from the page and then append it to the body in a new window I had just opened. I also wanted to do it in a pretty seamless way so that code that wrote text into this pre tag (it is a debug window) would all do so using the same variable. This all worked fine in firefox, but if I tried it in IE8 I got a message back saying "unknown interface" or some such crap. Then as I have the IE developer tools I got asked if I wanted to debug, well of course I did so I clicked yes. That locked my machine up, no ctrl-alt-del, no nothing, just a frozen mouse and me going for the reset switch.
I tried again after having done a slight change and got the same thing. It seems that sending a detached jquery html element between windows in IE8 is a great way to cause a complete OS lockup in XP. There is definitely something seriously wrong there!
The trick is to use 3 screens, 2 is not enough. With 3 it's fine, everything (incl HUD) lives in the center screen, screens to the left and right are just your periphery.
Two monitors doesn't work for 1st/3rd person gaming because the bezel is In The Way. Three monitors provides a VASTLY superior gaming experience to 1 screen, but the left and right screens are always in your peripheral vision, they're great for having an idea of what's going on around you, but there's no point putting any HUD detail on them because you can't concentrate on their content to any great degree without taking your eye off the action.
The problem with most setups you describe is they not always acceptable in multiplayer games. Having full 180 degree vision is often considered a hack since it gives you a massive advantage over most other players. The developers therefore simply lock the field of view to forward only then use the extra monitors for adding detail rather than increasing field of view.
I remember one of my clan mates had a 3 monitor setup but he had to keep it locked to just displaying forward view over the 3 monitors so he actually lost top to bottom field of view as a result of effectively having a single very wide monitor. This meant if you were slightly above him he simply couldn't see you at all. This was in COD:Black Ops.
If the sequel supports increasing the field of view over 3 monitors to give true side ways view I might consider a multi-monitor upgrade but I am sceptical it will as they know this will give people who spend that level of cash a massive advantage over the single monitor casual players. This might seem ok to those who can afford it but can the game studios rely on us alone to generate the revenues they want.
The other thing that may put me off investing the money would be whether I would be able to use it. In most competitions there will have to be a way of preventing people using setups like this to keep things fair. If that is the case then most servers may simply use the same method to boot people for a having a high field of view.
I suppose what it will come down to is picking an acceptable maximum, but I have a feeling that maximum will have to be something that is still just about useable on a single decent widescreen monitor. Maybe something in the realm of 100-160 degrees which is close to what our eyes see anyway, but I very much doubt the full 270 degree will be available (forward, left, right), or if it is then most servers will simply kick people for using it. Unless the admin has that particular setup of course:)
The real problem that forces a FoV limit though is the idea of a 4 monitor setup. Throw an extra monitor above the middle one then have it showing the view behind you so nobody can shoot you in the back: instant advantage.
PS - Does anyone remember that you could actually do some of this with the version of doom using the command line and a 3 pc setup?
Thanks for the informative post. Maybe things are different here in blighty though. At least all your complaints are about slow updates not just non existent ones.
I have to admit I was basing my post on personal experience as my HTC Desire HD is not getting Android 4 at all based on HTC, not the fact that my carrier T-Mobile are being slow.
The things is though that I know a few people who do not buy phones from the carriers, they just buy the unbranded phone like you had to with the Google Nexus and they still find they are not getting updated to Android 4 unless they do it themselves.
I am actually surprised that Google does not have a dedicated development team working in co-operation with an independent mod group such as Cyanogenmod.
It is fairly clear that one of the greatest problems with Android is with version fragmentation. Mobile carriers have been very sluggish or outright hostile regarding major firmware upgrades on their handsets. It would be preferable for Google to ensure that carriers are contractually obligated to support OS upgrades for at least four or five years. But until that happens, throwing resources at the issue through a back door would be a nice thing.
Every time you mention the word "carrier" in your post, I think you actually mean the company who produce the handset hardware. They are actually the people who neglect to release patches for old devices as they would much rather you went and bought a new device instead.
It would be very hard for Google to obligate anything of the carriers as they have no business relationship with them. Google do have a business relationship with HTC, Samsung, Motorola, etc though so they could obligate them to release patches for old hardware although it may irritate the handset makers enough that they would move to Windows 8 instead.
Could you be more specific? Is it because of the (optional) single-window mode in 2.8? The only reason I can stand to use GIMP now is BECAUSE of the single-window mode, but there's no reason to flame given it's still optional, and not even the default.
Whereas I think that was the best feature they added the recent version. I think the single window mode is Gimp trying to make a grab for Photoshops market.
When it comes to usability these things are very subjective, what one person thinks is an improvement another thinks is an annoyance. But then you also have some people who just whine whenever anything changes without giving the changes a chance but these people will always deny that is the case and rationalise their hatred somehow anyway.
growing fanatical religious movement that have strong power base within the country
Care to cite something that supports this statement
For me I was always supicious of the fact that a member of their own intelligence agency was too close to the assination of Yitzhak Rabin in the 90's. It was just too convenient for the Likud party in terms of the timing. If the Oslo accords had born fruit in terms of a few years of cessation of rocket attacks then the vast majority of the Israely public would have accepted a much smalled homeland in return for peace with their Arab neighbours.
Sorry about me not knowing where the Euphrates is btw, I was always crap at geography. I did follow the links you mention though and still came to the same conclusion: I cannot discount religious fantical nutters coming to power in Isreal just like have in Iran. I would not trust the vatican as a nuclear state either though just to be fair.
A really serious problem though with Iran is the same as North Korea, once Iran gets nukes, its people will never be free of its crazy tyranny, and I think that's a real motivation for the leadership.
I think you misunderstand why the Kims are still in power.
It is not because the have nukes as they were in power for decades before they had them. Nukes only stop someone else invading, using them to prevent your own population rising up and overthrowing you has certain inherent problems to do with the fact that you kill yourself in the process. The reason the Kim's are in power still is because China has spent the last 3 decades supplying them with weapons in order to have a nice comfy buffer zone between them and South Korea (ie: the US).
In the last Korean war the US basically overran the entire Korean peninsula before China felt threatened and sent its troops in to drive them back. It was a proxy war between China and the US. China then viewed North Korea in kind of the same way that Russia view most eastern block countries in the 60's in that they were scared of the US invading them in the name of fighting the evils of communism.
Let's remember that we in the west did fight an awful lot of wars in the name of driving back communists where it was our troops fighting against local people who simply did not want us to pick their leaders for them. This has left many scars in peoples minds, and made many countries scared of us even now.
As to nowadays I think the Chinese are utterly embarrassed by their southern neighbour but not quite willing to give up their buffer zone and risk the country uniting under a government more friendly to the west.
Also, he assumes that the problem is that someone wants to start a war with a nuclear-armed state, rather than the nuclear-armed state starting a war with someone else.If Iran nukes Israel, it won't be because Israel started it.
What makes you say that?
Israel has plenty of history of attacking it neighbours. It also has a growing fanatical religious movement that have strong power base within the country and happen to believe that large chunks of the land under Iran was given to the Israelites by god a few thousand years ago.
That is not say say Iran is great place to live, but just to say that both sides have religious fanatics who might start a war because they think they have gods blessing or something. Personally I would rather that neither Israel or Iran got their hands on nuclear weapons until they have acknowledged the other sides right to exist (I know Israel is widely suspected of already having them).
We in the west hear far more about the nut jobs in Iran since Israel is our ally, but make no mistake that Israel has its fair share too. I would certainly not consider one of them managing to cease power outside the realms of possibility.
Slashdot Mirror
Try Windows 8 and you would take back any credit you give them for Windows 7.
What a truly moronic statement.
Just because a company produce a bad product you suddenly think a previous product is bad too by association even though you used to like it? That is not exactly a rational response.
I don't think that "open" versus "closed" really has anything to do with it.
I think the problem he has is that with Android someone can take your hot new app that you sell for $5, repackage it under a slightly different name and sell it for $4 and in the short term there is not a lot you can do.
Google might pull it eventually, but in the time that takes you have lost thousands of pounds in revenue. More annoyingly, someone else has made money using your hard work and not given you a cent.
Not to forget the Tories' attempt to privatise the NHS. Also, the railways were privatised under a Tory government. Look how well that's turned out (for non-UK /.ers: the UK railway network is overpriced, severely limited in capacity, and slowly falling apart).
I think you are confused. The only thing the railways do slowly is get you to your destination (on a good day, on a bad day they don't even do this), the falling apart bit is happening quite quickly :)
Sod the horse, there is already an invention that turns KFC directly into transport fuel. It's called a bike, and had a brief moment of popularity before the lazy fuckmobile was invented and killed all the transport infrastructure world-wide.
Actually a bike turns food into fuel. KFC is just crap in, crap out :)
Without fossil fuel, where can we get electricity?
Nuke plants that we have today (2nd to 3rd generation) produce to much radioactive wastes, and no one has built any 4th gen nuke plants yet
Eventually, when the fossil fuel runs out, all future inhabitants on this planet will have to go back to the old ways to move - like walking, or riding a horsey, or something like that
Shhh, don't tell anyone. I am looking forward to going down to Houston, Texas when the oil runs out and watching the fat people starve because they can't walk to the shop and back. If you tell them they might look at changing their ways.
Of course, I am joking but it is a serious point: How would most american cities function when the oil runs out? It takes years and lots of investment to build a mass transit system, this is the sort of project you need to start now to have it ready in 20 years time. How long do people think it will be before oil either runs out or just becomes too expensive.
It is the result of private corporations lobbying for more privatisation. "Shrink the Government" is the voter-friendly PR spin on it. We have the same in the UK...fortunately the privatised "security" company G4S has just screwed up so massively that the agenda must have been put back a year or so. Personally, I think that any and all national security functions, whether physical or cyber, shouldn't be provided by anybody whose managers I cannot vote out of office.
As a fellow Brit I have been following the G4S Olympic security blunder in the news too. I will be very surprised if it actually makes any difference in the long run to privatisation though.
We have already let G4S run several prisons as part of a pilot scheme, once the pilot is over in a year or two we will outsource more to them I'm sure. Even before this G4S had a piss poor record when it came to prisoner transport yet they were still given more contracts in a similar vein.
The simple fact is that government loves privatising stuff as it means they can push costs of large infrastructure projects down the line to the next generation. It also means they can make lots of friends in business and those friends will repay them with a nice cushy non-executive director role later on.
Absolutely! All restaurants are private premises, and the owners/operators *always* reserve the right to ask *any* customer to leave for a variety of reasons. Nobody has a *right* to be served in any restaurant, likely anywhere in the world I'd say.
Probably, it would be enough if the employees felt that he was causing a disturbance to the other customers, or was about to do so.
Yup, but even if you are on private property they have to ask you politely to leave first. They are not allowed to lay a finger on you unless you refuse to do so or ignore them. Even then they are only allowed to use reasonable force to remove you from the premises, and that does not involve trying to take your property from you, especially if it happens to be attached to your head.
And based on my past experience, as a french citizen, of being assaulted and turning to the Police for help, I find his claims of getting no useful response completely realistic and plausible.
However, once this incident becomes more widely known in french-language blogs and media, it'll quickly attract a lot of attention and will probably elicit an official (outraged) reaction of McDonald's France, and maybe cause a few interviews of politicians trying to look like they're concerned. That's how it works here.
Actually, if he really wanted to do something about it he would find a French lawyer then let the guy pursue a no win - no fee civil case for damages against the business in question. Most of this can be done from Canada and will probably net him a few quid since because one of the morons was wearing a name badge and a uniform the business is probably liable for any damages caused.
This has the added benefit that the owner of this business will immediately fire them to desperately try and distance himself from an act that he may well have actually been party to himself.
Having just read several stories about how people were mugged in the UK and the police didn't care to investigate despite having leads in many cases, I can believe that.
Muggings happen all the time, the police have long since given up any shred of investigation since the punishment is almost non-existent providing no firearms are used or the victim does not need hospital treatment. The last time I as mugged I didn't even bother reporting it, who needs the hassle.
If you want to make sure the police investigate you need to resist and get stabbed or something. If it is just a straight mugging with no violence (just the threat) then the punishment would be a fine or community order anyway even if they investigated:
http://www.cps.gov.uk/legal/s_to_u/sentencing_manual/handling/
Both of these are joke punishments anyway and since we in the UK do not have a three strikes and your out law then dragging little yobs up in front of the courts or mugging is just a waste of police resources. If we wanted to change this we would need to build a shitload more prisons (and pay the resultant massive increase in taxes) since there are places like Salford (nr Manchester, where I used to live) where the entire populace would serve time before they were out of school.
Why didnt he called the police and identified those persons?
He claims he did contact the police, and they were not helpful.
Unless you speak fluent French then their police will not help you. This is the same for Spain too and probably many others, the trick is to talk to your consular representative and demand he deals with it on your behalf if you really need to report a crime for insurance purposes.
At least if you visit us in the UK you can speak to the police in English.
If you want to attack any more straw men, do it on someone else's thread. Kthxbye.
I wasn't intending to attack you, just suggest that the recession we are currently in is somewhat different to the great depression as the great depression affected everyone evenly whereas the current "financial downturn" or whatever you want to call it is only really affecting the people who are at the bottom end of the earnings scale so is not driving down prices across the board in the same way the depression did. This is especially true for luxury items like computer games.
Since you mentioned the depression I though it important to educate you that the current recession is very different. A great many of us are much better off as a result of the current climate thanks to the low interest rates helping our mortgages.
Current PC Game prices here in Australia have been in the $70-$100 range for years, yes even this year where our dollar is worth more than yours.
I'd say it's nice to see you finally playing catch-up if it weren't for the fact that it's only going to translate to $150 games here.
That is because the US dollar has fallen down the toilet, not because the aussie dollar has gained any value. It is still about the same to sterling as it was when I was a kid 30 years ago.
please STFU that game prices have not inflated equally with everything else, they have actually gotten cheaper!
Wages aren't keeping up with inflation, neither minimum wages nor typical wages. Unemployment is at levels not seen since the great depression. STFU that game prices have gotten cheaper, they are now a larger percentage of the typical disposable income.
The wages of software developers and graphic artists are not as far behind inflation as most peoples wages though. That means the cost of producing games is not getting as cheaper as you suggest.
The high unemployment levels you talk about are not making it any easier for most companies to hire decent developers. That's because the high unemployment is mainly in areas like manufacturing where people are not very skilled.
90% of convictions never go to trial and All of those that accept plea bargains are required to admit guilt AND agree to the penalty.
Your contention is not based on reality.
Some of those people who accepted a plea bargain may have done it simply because their lawyer told them there was zero chance of them being found innocent based on the governments forensic evidence. This is often the case because a cheap public defenders lack the financial resources to challenge government expert witnesses with experts of their own.
It's a reasonable principle, but it may be a bit too simplistic. So you'd rather let one guilty go free than have one innocent person convicted. What if it was not just one guilty you had to let go free, but say two, would you still say it was better? How many guilty would have to go free, before it was better to let one innocent person get convicted?
You can answer that yourself: How many guilty people need to go to prison correctly in order for you to be happy for you to be the one innocent person to be sent to prison incorrectly?
How understanding would you be of your own point of view if you had just spent the past 10 years in prison getting raped every other day? You might even die in prison fighting that sort of shit off, even if you survived a 10 year stretch your life would be utterly changed by the experience.
I'll bet that would make the choice a lot less clear too.
The fact is that our prisons are so awful that it is unthinkable that an innocent person should ever end up there. They are basically utter hell holes where we throw people and forget about them. Your example of the person being murdered is not really any worse than if we sent them to prison anyway since most geeks I know would top themselves in prison anyway if they were facing more than 5 or so years.
Then there is the not insignificant fact that most prisons are like universities for criminals. You can go in and learn all sort of things. At the very least you will learn to fight with no remorse, that is a very powerful thing to learn as any soldier who has killed will tell you, but it does make fitting in to normal society much harder afterwards. You will also have the opportunity to learn how be a criminal in other ways such as how to commit extortion (you will most likely be a victim of it initially and learn that way if you are not a hardened thug already). Then there are the myriad of small things people talk about in prison too, if you listen you can learn what they did wrong and landed them in there in the first place.
You also neglect to think about the people we wrongly convict then kill via the death penalty. What is worse, the murderer going and killing someone else as he was not able to be convicted on flimsy evidence or us killing someone who was innocent just because the flimsy evidence made us suspect them?
Nope, it seems pretty clear to me that it is better for society to stick with "beyond reasonable doubt" and be as sure as possible that the people we convict are actually guilty. Otherwise you run into all sorts of problems.
"The Innocent Man" by John Grisham. It details a case in which a man was wrongfully sentenced to death on bad evidence.
I'm a good law-and-order conservative when it comes to things like this, but fair is fair. If someone is wrongfully convicted, it needs to be reviewed. In particular, the use of hair samples and other forensic evidence decades ago, before the advent of DNA testing, resulted in quite a few such wrongful convictions.
I'm in agreement with you. However, perhaps there needs to be a line drawn here, since this type of investigation (or re-investigation) comes with a significant price tag (likely to the taxpayer). Personally, unless there is someone sitting behind bars who is in disagreement with their sentence, leave the cases alone. I question benefit vs. cost in those cases.
So if a person is now about 15 or 16 and looking at going to college but cannot afford to because the government wrongly executed his father 14 years back he is crap out of luck then?
This is obviously a purely hypothetical scenario but should illustrate things are not quite as cut and dried as you seem to believe.
There's already a fair bit of divergence between what you can do in IE and what you can do in other browsers. IE (including IE9) doesn't implement as much of HTML5 as other browsers. IE's SVG support is in its infancy compared to other browsers', and completely nonexistent before IE9.
So we might end up with some jQuery functionality silently being disabled in legacy versions of IE too. Big whoop.
I found some interesting "divergence" on friday afternoon just before I left work.
I wanted to grab an element of html using jquery, then detach it from the page and then append it to the body in a new window I had just opened. I also wanted to do it in a pretty seamless way so that code that wrote text into this pre tag (it is a debug window) would all do so using the same variable. This all worked fine in firefox, but if I tried it in IE8 I got a message back saying "unknown interface" or some such crap. Then as I have the IE developer tools I got asked if I wanted to debug, well of course I did so I clicked yes. That locked my machine up, no ctrl-alt-del, no nothing, just a frozen mouse and me going for the reset switch.
I tried again after having done a slight change and got the same thing. It seems that sending a detached jquery html element between windows in IE8 is a great way to cause a complete OS lockup in XP. There is definitely something seriously wrong there!
The trick is to use 3 screens, 2 is not enough. With 3 it's fine, everything (incl HUD) lives in the center screen, screens to the left and right are just your periphery.
Two monitors doesn't work for 1st/3rd person gaming because the bezel is In The Way. Three monitors provides a VASTLY superior gaming experience to 1 screen, but the left and right screens are always in your peripheral vision, they're great for having an idea of what's going on around you, but there's no point putting any HUD detail on them because you can't concentrate on their content to any great degree without taking your eye off the action.
The problem with most setups you describe is they not always acceptable in multiplayer games. Having full 180 degree vision is often considered a hack since it gives you a massive advantage over most other players. The developers therefore simply lock the field of view to forward only then use the extra monitors for adding detail rather than increasing field of view.
I remember one of my clan mates had a 3 monitor setup but he had to keep it locked to just displaying forward view over the 3 monitors so he actually lost top to bottom field of view as a result of effectively having a single very wide monitor. This meant if you were slightly above him he simply couldn't see you at all. This was in COD:Black Ops.
If the sequel supports increasing the field of view over 3 monitors to give true side ways view I might consider a multi-monitor upgrade but I am sceptical it will as they know this will give people who spend that level of cash a massive advantage over the single monitor casual players. This might seem ok to those who can afford it but can the game studios rely on us alone to generate the revenues they want.
The other thing that may put me off investing the money would be whether I would be able to use it. In most competitions there will have to be a way of preventing people using setups like this to keep things fair. If that is the case then most servers may simply use the same method to boot people for a having a high field of view.
I suppose what it will come down to is picking an acceptable maximum, but I have a feeling that maximum will have to be something that is still just about useable on a single decent widescreen monitor. Maybe something in the realm of 100-160 degrees which is close to what our eyes see anyway, but I very much doubt the full 270 degree will be available (forward, left, right), or if it is then most servers will simply kick people for using it. Unless the admin has that particular setup of course :)
The real problem that forces a FoV limit though is the idea of a 4 monitor setup. Throw an extra monitor above the middle one then have it showing the view behind you so nobody can shoot you in the back: instant advantage.
PS - Does anyone remember that you could actually do some of this with the version of doom using the command line and a 3 pc setup?
http://www.doomworld.com/pageofdoom/parameter.html
Thanks for the informative post. Maybe things are different here in blighty though. At least all your complaints are about slow updates not just non existent ones.
I have to admit I was basing my post on personal experience as my HTC Desire HD is not getting Android 4 at all based on HTC, not the fact that my carrier T-Mobile are being slow.
The things is though that I know a few people who do not buy phones from the carriers, they just buy the unbranded phone like you had to with the Google Nexus and they still find they are not getting updated to Android 4 unless they do it themselves.
I am actually surprised that Google does not have a dedicated development team working in co-operation with an independent mod group such as Cyanogenmod.
It is fairly clear that one of the greatest problems with Android is with version fragmentation. Mobile carriers have been very sluggish or outright hostile regarding major firmware upgrades on their handsets. It would be preferable for Google to ensure that carriers are contractually obligated to support OS upgrades for at least four or five years. But until that happens, throwing resources at the issue through a back door would be a nice thing.
Every time you mention the word "carrier" in your post, I think you actually mean the company who produce the handset hardware. They are actually the people who neglect to release patches for old devices as they would much rather you went and bought a new device instead.
It would be very hard for Google to obligate anything of the carriers as they have no business relationship with them. Google do have a business relationship with HTC, Samsung, Motorola, etc though so they could obligate them to release patches for old hardware although it may irritate the handset makers enough that they would move to Windows 8 instead.
Could you be more specific? Is it because of the (optional) single-window mode in 2.8? The only reason I can stand to use GIMP now is BECAUSE of the single-window mode, but there's no reason to flame given it's still optional, and not even the default.
Whereas I think that was the best feature they added the recent version. I think the single window mode is Gimp trying to make a grab for Photoshops market.
When it comes to usability these things are very subjective, what one person thinks is an improvement another thinks is an annoyance. But then you also have some people who just whine whenever anything changes without giving the changes a chance but these people will always deny that is the case and rationalise their hatred somehow anyway.
growing fanatical religious movement that have strong power base within the country
Care to cite something that supports this statement
For me I was always supicious of the fact that a member of their own intelligence agency was too close to the assination of Yitzhak Rabin in the 90's. It was just too convenient for the Likud party in terms of the timing. If the Oslo accords had born fruit in terms of a few years of cessation of rocket attacks then the vast majority of the Israely public would have accepted a much smalled homeland in return for peace with their Arab neighbours.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Avishai_Raviv
Sorry about me not knowing where the Euphrates is btw, I was always crap at geography. I did follow the links you mention though and still came to the same conclusion: I cannot discount religious fantical nutters coming to power in Isreal just like have in Iran. I would not trust the vatican as a nuclear state either though just to be fair.
China's southern neighbor? I haven't seen Chinese movies where fugitives head south of the border. Wouldn't that be the ocean?
Being that korea has water to the west, south, and east what neighbour would you suggest I call them :)
A really serious problem though with Iran is the same as North Korea, once Iran gets nukes, its people will never be free of its crazy tyranny, and I think that's a real motivation for the leadership.
I think you misunderstand why the Kims are still in power.
It is not because the have nukes as they were in power for decades before they had them. Nukes only stop someone else invading, using them to prevent your own population rising up and overthrowing you has certain inherent problems to do with the fact that you kill yourself in the process. The reason the Kim's are in power still is because China has spent the last 3 decades supplying them with weapons in order to have a nice comfy buffer zone between them and South Korea (ie: the US).
In the last Korean war the US basically overran the entire Korean peninsula before China felt threatened and sent its troops in to drive them back. It was a proxy war between China and the US. China then viewed North Korea in kind of the same way that Russia view most eastern block countries in the 60's in that they were scared of the US invading them in the name of fighting the evils of communism.
Let's remember that we in the west did fight an awful lot of wars in the name of driving back communists where it was our troops fighting against local people who simply did not want us to pick their leaders for them. This has left many scars in peoples minds, and made many countries scared of us even now.
As to nowadays I think the Chinese are utterly embarrassed by their southern neighbour but not quite willing to give up their buffer zone and risk the country uniting under a government more friendly to the west.
Also, he assumes that the problem is that someone wants to start a war with a nuclear-armed state, rather than the nuclear-armed state starting a war with someone else.If Iran nukes Israel, it won't be because Israel started it.
What makes you say that?
Israel has plenty of history of attacking it neighbours. It also has a growing fanatical religious movement that have strong power base within the country and happen to believe that large chunks of the land under Iran was given to the Israelites by god a few thousand years ago.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Greater_Israel
That is not say say Iran is great place to live, but just to say that both sides have religious fanatics who might start a war because they think they have gods blessing or something. Personally I would rather that neither Israel or Iran got their hands on nuclear weapons until they have acknowledged the other sides right to exist (I know Israel is widely suspected of already having them).
We in the west hear far more about the nut jobs in Iran since Israel is our ally, but make no mistake that Israel has its fair share too. I would certainly not consider one of them managing to cease power outside the realms of possibility.