"Everything, from evolution to the origins of climate change, is mistakenly up for grabs again"
And here I was under the impression that everything in science was always up for grabs. This is just the mag trying to silence dissent. I happen to agree with evolution but I have no problem debating it with people who do not. Nor do I believe evolution is settled science, we continue to learn a great deal and there is always a possibility of some groundbreaking new development to come along and rock the whole foundation.
That may be the case in most circumstances. But the reality is that the garden-variety commentard will not be able to communicate any flaws he identified in what has become an accepted scientific theory. Which won't stop them to fart their basic misunderstanding of the scientific method(s) or the meaning of the word "theory" out into the world.
Frankly, if they got rid of the comment section then nothing of value was lost.
Right after release Demon Hunters could achieve nearly permanent invulnerability. The rest cheesed on loot goblins, vases and golden chests.
If you didn't insist on killing everything and only tried to make it to the orchestrated boss fights then you were done. By contrast all other boss packs had random combinations of abilities. Including invulnerability, being super-fast and other assorted nastiness. That made them potentially harder than a 20 minutes Diablo bossfight. So all you had to do was to skip everything remotely nasty(potentially biting the dust a couple of times) and then take on the bosses where you only had to dodge and to cheese for a couple of minutes.
I haven't really seen Blizzard make any good decisions regarding any of their games lately. They listen to their criticism but often it's the wrong criticism to be listening to. Feels like the wrong people are running the show right now or something. They need a serious mix-up or just to remove some of the "yes" men from their midst.
Yep. If you head to the Blizz forums and read what kind of suggestions the community gives then you will have to wonder why they listen at all. The game has a couple of problems at the core of the game mechanics. Yet in the Blizz forums you rarely get anything insightful. Only stuff that deals with teh symptoms.
There is also the issue with the difficulty/frustration level at launch. Very loud forum warriors had said they wanted a challenge. As it turned out they were a minority that didn't represent a substantial portion of the people who bought the 6 million copies. The majority seems to have bought it because they expected a similar game as D2. And in D2 you set your own challenges with weird character builds or reaching elusive itemization goals or even reaching level 99.
Inferno wasn't broken. It was intentionally made impossible unless you bought RMAH gear.
With the removal of RMAH, I assume Inferno difficulty will be adjusted as well.
It was meant to take months to clear inferno, regardless of how you received the gear. You don't see end-game dungeons in MMOs being cleared within a few weeks of a game being launched.
Problem was Diablo players are used to mindless fun, not excruciating difficulty. The other problem was some classes were based on avoidance, while others mitigation. Better mitigation comes from better gear, meaning these players were behind the curve. Players who played the avoidance classes well were able to clear Inferno very quickly. A game that can be completed solo should not favor one type of class over another.
That would have been ok if the loot hadn't been so random. How many months would it have taken anybody to completely clear inferno? Nobody could honstly tell since getting only one good drop was like hitting jackpot in a lottery. And you needed that for all slots. Potentially you had to rinse and repeat for every act.
Also back in the day when I was still playing WoW dungeons were cleared in the same week they were made abailable. The really hard ones took a week longer. If the servers held.
But you are correct. They dropped the ball when they targeted this game to a very small, very loud band of self-professed hard-core forum warriors who wanted this to be hard. It wasn't hard. It just was very, very random. And with garden-variety monsters doing 200k unmitigated damage to your 30-50k health pool avoidance based classes were an exceptionally bad idea. They simply couldn't quite fit the various components of the game to match each other. It was like the monster designers didn't talk to the gear designers who didn't talk to the class designers. In which case putting the blame to the person who was responsible to coordinate them is absolutely valid. The ball got dropped so hard that Mike Morhaime himself had to step in. If that isn't an embarrassment then I don't know what is.
The server issues early in the game were to be expected. That was something I had expected and I was fully prepared to wait it out. But the moronic design of the game has been waited out for over a year and we are still waiting.
Or they're sandboxed to an "open" Battle.Net. Like Diablo 2.
People forgot that there were two online modes in D2. In Open BNet all your stuff was stored client-side. Which meant that you could hack your safegames at heart's content and play with others who did likewise. Me, I used offline mode only to try out wild and weird ideas before I comitted myself to months of trading until I made that real on closed BNet.
Diablo 3 doesn't allow for that sort of experimentation.
Also in D2 most people gear with the known. Unique items/rune words that had very predictable properties. D3 mostly has items that can have up to 6 attributes(how many you get on a drop is randomly chosen) out of 30 or so defined attributes(which are randomly chosen) at a couple of magnitudes(which are randomly chosen). If that sounds like a bit of a lottery then you are bang on. To be able to compete on a moderate monster level you will need to be fully decked out in items that have at least 4-5 decent rolls. That's stuff you rarely find yourself. Items that have 6 rolls of the right attributes at a high or even the highest magnitude will go for ludicrous amounts of gold. Those figures are so high you need to count the digits.
I'm sorry but a lottery gives better odds with a much higher payout. Even the things with somewhat set properties have such a high variance that even the good ones range from useless to astonishing.
When everything is basically down to chance then you can predict when you will achieve a goal that you set for yourself. And that is an exercise in frustration. If you add survivability being entirely gear dependent then you will see why the game tanked so early on.
I remember being stuck in Act 1/Inferno on my Demon Hunter. The odds were pretty bad that even items of the potentially highest tier level actually dropped for me after long and gruelling fights. Then the odds were against me that the few high tier level items actually had more than 4 attributes. Then the odds were against me that the rolled attributes made some sense. Then the odds were against me that the attributes had a good strength. It was like gambling while repeatedly being struck on the head with a mallet.
Then they changed the system so you got guaranteed drops. Then they increased the likelyhood of high level drops. Which in turn lead to your inventory filling up slowly with utter BS. But you still had to take a look at your loot in case you had struck gold. And you couldn't simply throw it back into the wilderness because you still had to sell it for repair costs or to turn them into crafting materials. So basically if you weren't running away you sifted through the crap you were showered with until you had enough gold to spend most of your time in the auction house. And the best source for gold was buying low and selling high on the auction house which everybody did.
They dropped the ball on every level with this game. Don't get me started on idiotic resource systems, every ability having a cooldown, monster design, cutscenes you had to manually skip, inability to move through all acts at will, clueless design of set items/legendaries, the totally random and overpriced crafting system...
They sold a lot of copies riding on the coat-tails of better designers. Fuck them.
No need for brilliance here.
Snowden had sysadmin access to everything. His only challenge was to find out what was interesting and what wasn't.
Calling him out on his brilliant hacking skills would be like calling the little old lady who swept the floor behind the cash register a brilliant catburglar after she stuffed her pockets with cash.
He propably is a very intelligent and talented young man. But getting hold of the data propably wasn't that big of a challenge. He also didn't need to be particularly smart to see that what was going on was against everything he believed in. Even I understand that although I doubt I would have had the guts to act as he did.
God gave Satan permission to have his merry way with Job just to prove a point. In my book that makes him a power-tripping asshole who simply shouldn't be entrusted with any responsibility whatsoever.
He propably owns so much stock that his departure and the inevitable rise will make him richer than anything he is bound to achieve. No kind of severance golden parachute pension for a life time that MS is able to pay will match that effect.
This is bad news, having Ballmer in charge of MS is a good thing as he was slowly mismanaging the company into the ground. A successor could be more competent.
Listening to financial and investment analysts this morning, not one has a kind word for Steve. He has missed every big thing while pushing Zune, Windows Vista and then Windows 8, the XBox (games are working well for Atari, right?) Metro (which may be very cool to 10% of users) the RT tablet fiasco, honestly, why does this man actually receive bonuses? He's had the company coasting along on markets it was strong in, without creating new markets. Hardly visionary.
He is still with us for the next 12 months.
Who knows? He might even get ousted after a huge sex scandal that shades what you listed. Think about it.
Even if this were possible, why should that new life be forced to play guitar for this nutcase? Maybe clone Lennon has other ambitions. Maybe work for 3 years on the moon... Clone rights people!
Amen, brother!
If he wanted gently weeping guitars he'd need George Harrison.
Even though identical twins spend the first several years of their lives in much the same environment, the difference between being "the one who sleeps by the window" vs. "the one who sleeps by the door", or "the one who got nipped by the dog" vs. "the one who didn't" can lead to all sorts of personality differences.
There are even much more extreme differences caused by one single event. Take for instance Arnold Rimmer versus Ace Rimmer. One is a failed chicken soup vending machine repairman(deceased) and the other is permanently lubricated.
Where the BSI takes issue with their reporting.
Of course, with the extent now clear of the US government's use of US IT companies to maintain American political and economic advantages, if you were running a non-US-based company or a non-US-governmental organization, you'd want to do as much critical business with non-American hardware, software and services as possible.
I wouldn't take technological advice from Die Zeit. They still think steam engines will never replace the Spinning Jenny.
Also... the BSI... bruahahaha.
*snort*
Whatever backdoor MS has planted for whoever asked them will propably have made its way into any older Windows version via their automatic update.
Don't use sarcasm or irony on the internet.
Irony is a very dangerous thing if it isn't backed up by facial expression. There is a reason why professional journalists don't use it outside of polemic opinion pieces. If you want to avoid any misunderstanding you will have to say what you mean.
The same obviously goes for ironic sarcasm.
Humor itsself lives by its context. You will need to make sure everybody has the same context or you will also cause misunderstandings. You'll also have to keep in mind that context might be a cultural one. On the internet you will meet a lot of people in all walks of life, of any creed, of any nationality an presumably a couple of dogs. Don't expect to be funny to everybody no matter how hilarious you are. One person's humor is another person's troll.
And another earth-shattering revelation from the GCHQ:
They don't only employ eggheads! They also have jobs for powertripping knuckle-draggers, too! A proper equal opportunity employer.
The problem also is that a lot of "fans" do not even know how to deal with a flaw in game mechanics and would happily tinker with the symptoms instead of dealing with a root cause. And also a lot of them do not understand how ugly it is to implement, test and roll out changes to a multi-million audience on a budget of propably nil after the game has been released. And dicontent usually is contagious with a nice mob forming behind ringleaders.
That being said a lot of devs actually deserve the stink they get. I still remember marveling at the degree to which they got Diablo 3 thing wrong. And I'm not talking about the shallow arguments like always-on and too colourful graphics. That game was unintuitive, bland and mechanically unsound from day one.
It's Romeo and juliet that is absolutely overrated. You will also need to put the plays into the historical context. Friedrich Schiller for instance had read and watched(IIRC even translated) a lot of Shakespeare. So he benefitted from another lifetime of experience. Both of them were showmen and also needed to get bums on seats. Both of them wrote stuff which was mainly entertaining but nevertheless noteworthy.
Just leave the theatre after Mercutio has died. It improves the play.
I don't understand. Reading Shakespeare is enjoyable.
What is wrong with those kids?
The language is now a bit dated. Also the plays are always hard to read if you have no imagination. They were meant to be performed. In many ways this patent describes the job of a director. In which case I would have to decline. Politely.
In most other cases it is a prosthetic for imagination and thought processes.
At this point I would have mandatory philosophy classes just to get the kids back on track. Just the basics. Logic, the nature of knowledge, the old Aristotle vs. Plato argument, Munchhausen trilemma. No complex post-Renaissance/modern stuff. Just a kickstart for the old noggin. Then MAYBE they will learn to read and understand texts, the spirit they were written in and their context.
I'll second the messenger bag. You are trying to conceal something flat and angular(with rounded corners) on your body which propably isn't. You are bound to look ridiculous.
Messenger bags can also come in leather and look a lot manlier even if they are basically manbags. Also you can put a lot of extra shit into these. Like extra batteries for your phone, a shit tonne of USB cables, wall warts, battery recharger pack, headphones and other life-important essentials. My messenger bag makes myself self-sufficient for 24h. Electronics-wise.
Annnnd the fact that every time this sort of article gets posted there is this fundamental and extremely naive assumption that you are still in control of your government, it is still supposed to work for the people and that the politicians (and their masters) are not fully aware of what they are doing.
Remove that and this faux surprise and outrage goes away and the real work can begin...fixing the ACTUAL problem...
In this case I actually buy the explanation that they can't get the IT side of things done in time.
While I have no insight into this here are my assumptions based on 15 years of dealing with this BS professionally. I expect:
A hairball of a mess of interconnected subsytems that were developed independently. Compatibility propably wasn't high on the requirements list.
Subsystems that got adapted for each and every policy change since the 1980ies. Even the subsystems propably aren't consistent anymore.
Loads of self-implemented Excel spreadsheets on network shares sprinkled with the occasional Access "application" for sub-problems that weren't covered in the main systems.
The remnants of failed 1000+ developer projects that were "salvaged" and incorporated into the system.
Unclear and inconcise business requirements for the changes.
They are compiling track lists at FinalGear. You might want to lend a hand since at times they are a bit stumped.
Would really be easier if they listed their music. Could be a long list per episode, mind.
It feels like it's being used to trigger a killswitch in the human mind
Not here in Germany. It just triggers the "Warning: Nazi" switch.
I guess it takes at least 0.8 Hitlers to do that.
(I'm sorry. With us Germans, Occam's razor is always just around the corner.;)
Agreed. A flag is what you break out when there is a football(the proper one that's played with your feet and an actual ball) championship on. Interestingly most windows show a couple of flags.
Fighting for patriotic reasons is a foreign thing here. They tried to sell us the Afghanistan war by calling it "defending Germany at the Hindukush". We told them to pull the other one because it's got bells on. Begrudgingly it went through parliament when they showed that our troops would help rebuild civilisation.
Flag-waving, unquestioning patriotism is for people who slept through history class. It's like a dullards clit: rub it enough and they shout in extasy.
PATRIOTISM, n.
Combustible rubbish ready to the torch of any one ambitious to illuminate his name.
In Dr. Johnson's famous dictionary patriotism is defined as the last resort of a scoundrel. With all due respect to an enlightened but inferior lexicographer I beg to submit that it is the first.
Be wary when the word "patriotism" is being used. Whatever precedes or follows usually clocks in very high on the bullshit scale. It feels like it's being used to trigger a killswitch in the human mind.
Well, if they don't play ball but the pirates do they shouldn't complain they lost a million to nil.
Does this deal only apply to the BBC? It seems to be quite sensible so I would assume it is at least 60 years old.
Slashdot Mirror
"Everything, from evolution to the origins of climate change, is mistakenly up for grabs again"
And here I was under the impression that everything in science was always up for grabs. This is just the mag trying to silence dissent. I happen to agree with evolution but I have no problem debating it with people who do not. Nor do I believe evolution is settled science, we continue to learn a great deal and there is always a possibility of some groundbreaking new development to come along and rock the whole foundation.
That may be the case in most circumstances. But the reality is that the garden-variety commentard will not be able to communicate any flaws he identified in what has become an accepted scientific theory. Which won't stop them to fart their basic misunderstanding of the scientific method(s) or the meaning of the word "theory" out into the world.
Frankly, if they got rid of the comment section then nothing of value was lost.
Right after release Demon Hunters could achieve nearly permanent invulnerability. The rest cheesed on loot goblins, vases and golden chests.
If you didn't insist on killing everything and only tried to make it to the orchestrated boss fights then you were done. By contrast all other boss packs had random combinations of abilities. Including invulnerability, being super-fast and other assorted nastiness. That made them potentially harder than a 20 minutes Diablo bossfight. So all you had to do was to skip everything remotely nasty(potentially biting the dust a couple of times) and then take on the bosses where you only had to dodge and to cheese for a couple of minutes.
I haven't really seen Blizzard make any good decisions regarding any of their games lately. They listen to their criticism but often it's the wrong criticism to be listening to. Feels like the wrong people are running the show right now or something. They need a serious mix-up or just to remove some of the "yes" men from their midst.
Yep. If you head to the Blizz forums and read what kind of suggestions the community gives then you will have to wonder why they listen at all. The game has a couple of problems at the core of the game mechanics. Yet in the Blizz forums you rarely get anything insightful. Only stuff that deals with teh symptoms.
There is also the issue with the difficulty/frustration level at launch. Very loud forum warriors had said they wanted a challenge. As it turned out they were a minority that didn't represent a substantial portion of the people who bought the 6 million copies. The majority seems to have bought it because they expected a similar game as D2. And in D2 you set your own challenges with weird character builds or reaching elusive itemization goals or even reaching level 99.
Inferno wasn't broken. It was intentionally made impossible unless you bought RMAH gear. With the removal of RMAH, I assume Inferno difficulty will be adjusted as well.
It was meant to take months to clear inferno, regardless of how you received the gear. You don't see end-game dungeons in MMOs being cleared within a few weeks of a game being launched.
Problem was Diablo players are used to mindless fun, not excruciating difficulty. The other problem was some classes were based on avoidance, while others mitigation. Better mitigation comes from better gear, meaning these players were behind the curve. Players who played the avoidance classes well were able to clear Inferno very quickly. A game that can be completed solo should not favor one type of class over another.
That would have been ok if the loot hadn't been so random. How many months would it have taken anybody to completely clear inferno? Nobody could honstly tell since getting only one good drop was like hitting jackpot in a lottery. And you needed that for all slots. Potentially you had to rinse and repeat for every act.
Also back in the day when I was still playing WoW dungeons were cleared in the same week they were made abailable. The really hard ones took a week longer. If the servers held.
But you are correct. They dropped the ball when they targeted this game to a very small, very loud band of self-professed hard-core forum warriors who wanted this to be hard. It wasn't hard. It just was very, very random. And with garden-variety monsters doing 200k unmitigated damage to your 30-50k health pool avoidance based classes were an exceptionally bad idea. They simply couldn't quite fit the various components of the game to match each other. It was like the monster designers didn't talk to the gear designers who didn't talk to the class designers. In which case putting the blame to the person who was responsible to coordinate them is absolutely valid. The ball got dropped so hard that Mike Morhaime himself had to step in. If that isn't an embarrassment then I don't know what is.
The server issues early in the game were to be expected. That was something I had expected and I was fully prepared to wait it out. But the moronic design of the game has been waited out for over a year and we are still waiting.
Or they're sandboxed to an "open" Battle.Net. Like Diablo 2.
People forgot that there were two online modes in D2. In Open BNet all your stuff was stored client-side. Which meant that you could hack your safegames at heart's content and play with others who did likewise. Me, I used offline mode only to try out wild and weird ideas before I comitted myself to months of trading until I made that real on closed BNet.
Diablo 3 doesn't allow for that sort of experimentation.
Also in D2 most people gear with the known. Unique items/rune words that had very predictable properties. D3 mostly has items that can have up to 6 attributes(how many you get on a drop is randomly chosen) out of 30 or so defined attributes(which are randomly chosen) at a couple of magnitudes(which are randomly chosen). If that sounds like a bit of a lottery then you are bang on. To be able to compete on a moderate monster level you will need to be fully decked out in items that have at least 4-5 decent rolls. That's stuff you rarely find yourself. Items that have 6 rolls of the right attributes at a high or even the highest magnitude will go for ludicrous amounts of gold. Those figures are so high you need to count the digits.
I'm sorry but a lottery gives better odds with a much higher payout. Even the things with somewhat set properties have such a high variance that even the good ones range from useless to astonishing.
When everything is basically down to chance then you can predict when you will achieve a goal that you set for yourself. And that is an exercise in frustration. If you add survivability being entirely gear dependent then you will see why the game tanked so early on.
I remember being stuck in Act 1/Inferno on my Demon Hunter. The odds were pretty bad that even items of the potentially highest tier level actually dropped for me after long and gruelling fights. Then the odds were against me that the few high tier level items actually had more than 4 attributes. Then the odds were against me that the rolled attributes made some sense. Then the odds were against me that the attributes had a good strength. It was like gambling while repeatedly being struck on the head with a mallet.
Then they changed the system so you got guaranteed drops. Then they increased the likelyhood of high level drops. Which in turn lead to your inventory filling up slowly with utter BS. But you still had to take a look at your loot in case you had struck gold. And you couldn't simply throw it back into the wilderness because you still had to sell it for repair costs or to turn them into crafting materials. So basically if you weren't running away you sifted through the crap you were showered with until you had enough gold to spend most of your time in the auction house. And the best source for gold was buying low and selling high on the auction house which everybody did.
They dropped the ball on every level with this game. Don't get me started on idiotic resource systems, every ability having a cooldown, monster design, cutscenes you had to manually skip, inability to move through all acts at will, clueless design of set items/legendaries, the totally random and overpriced crafting system...
They sold a lot of copies riding on the coat-tails of better designers. Fuck them.
No need for brilliance here.
Snowden had sysadmin access to everything. His only challenge was to find out what was interesting and what wasn't.
Calling him out on his brilliant hacking skills would be like calling the little old lady who swept the floor behind the cash register a brilliant catburglar after she stuffed her pockets with cash.
He propably is a very intelligent and talented young man. But getting hold of the data propably wasn't that big of a challenge. He also didn't need to be particularly smart to see that what was going on was against everything he believed in. Even I understand that although I doubt I would have had the guts to act as he did.
God gave Satan permission to have his merry way with Job just to prove a point. In my book that makes him a power-tripping asshole who simply shouldn't be entrusted with any responsibility whatsoever.
He propably owns so much stock that his departure and the inevitable rise will make him richer than anything he is bound to achieve. No kind of severance golden parachute pension for a life time that MS is able to pay will match that effect.
This is bad news, having Ballmer in charge of MS is a good thing as he was slowly mismanaging the company into the ground. A successor could be more competent.
Listening to financial and investment analysts this morning, not one has a kind word for Steve. He has missed every big thing while pushing Zune, Windows Vista and then Windows 8, the XBox (games are working well for Atari, right?) Metro (which may be very cool to 10% of users) the RT tablet fiasco, honestly, why does this man actually receive bonuses? He's had the company coasting along on markets it was strong in, without creating new markets. Hardly visionary.
He is still with us for the next 12 months.
Who knows? He might even get ousted after a huge sex scandal that shades what you listed. Think about it.
Even if this were possible, why should that new life be forced to play guitar for this nutcase? Maybe clone Lennon has other ambitions. Maybe work for 3 years on the moon... Clone rights people!
Amen, brother!
If he wanted gently weeping guitars he'd need George Harrison.
C'mon! Focus, people!
Even though identical twins spend the first several years of their lives in much the same environment, the difference between being "the one who sleeps by the window" vs. "the one who sleeps by the door", or "the one who got nipped by the dog" vs. "the one who didn't" can lead to all sorts of personality differences.
There are even much more extreme differences caused by one single event. Take for instance Arnold Rimmer versus Ace Rimmer. One is a failed chicken soup vending machine repairman(deceased) and the other is permanently lubricated.
Where the BSI takes issue with their reporting. Of course, with the extent now clear of the US government's use of US IT companies to maintain American political and economic advantages, if you were running a non-US-based company or a non-US-governmental organization, you'd want to do as much critical business with non-American hardware, software and services as possible.
I wouldn't take technological advice from Die Zeit. They still think steam engines will never replace the Spinning Jenny. ... the BSI ... bruahahaha.
Also
*snort*
Whatever backdoor MS has planted for whoever asked them will propably have made its way into any older Windows version via their automatic update.
Don't use sarcasm or irony on the internet.
Irony is a very dangerous thing if it isn't backed up by facial expression. There is a reason why professional journalists don't use it outside of polemic opinion pieces. If you want to avoid any misunderstanding you will have to say what you mean.
The same obviously goes for ironic sarcasm.
Humor itsself lives by its context. You will need to make sure everybody has the same context or you will also cause misunderstandings. You'll also have to keep in mind that context might be a cultural one. On the internet you will meet a lot of people in all walks of life, of any creed, of any nationality an presumably a couple of dogs. Don't expect to be funny to everybody no matter how hilarious you are. One person's humor is another person's troll.
And another earth-shattering revelation from the GCHQ:
They don't only employ eggheads! They also have jobs for powertripping knuckle-draggers, too! A proper equal opportunity employer.
The problem also is that a lot of "fans" do not even know how to deal with a flaw in game mechanics and would happily tinker with the symptoms instead of dealing with a root cause. And also a lot of them do not understand how ugly it is to implement, test and roll out changes to a multi-million audience on a budget of propably nil after the game has been released. And dicontent usually is contagious with a nice mob forming behind ringleaders.
That being said a lot of devs actually deserve the stink they get. I still remember marveling at the degree to which they got Diablo 3 thing wrong. And I'm not talking about the shallow arguments like always-on and too colourful graphics. That game was unintuitive, bland and mechanically unsound from day one.
It's Romeo and juliet that is absolutely overrated. You will also need to put the plays into the historical context. Friedrich Schiller for instance had read and watched(IIRC even translated) a lot of Shakespeare. So he benefitted from another lifetime of experience. Both of them were showmen and also needed to get bums on seats. Both of them wrote stuff which was mainly entertaining but nevertheless noteworthy.
Just leave the theatre after Mercutio has died. It improves the play.
Yet Romeo + Juliet was perfectly fine to the modern viewer.
Rome and Juliet is boring pap after Mercutio's death. He is the only likeable character in the whole play. BTW, I liked the movie.
I don't understand. Reading Shakespeare is enjoyable. What is wrong with those kids?
The language is now a bit dated. Also the plays are always hard to read if you have no imagination. They were meant to be performed. In many ways this patent describes the job of a director. In which case I would have to decline. Politely.
In most other cases it is a prosthetic for imagination and thought processes.
At this point I would have mandatory philosophy classes just to get the kids back on track. Just the basics. Logic, the nature of knowledge, the old Aristotle vs. Plato argument, Munchhausen trilemma. No complex post-Renaissance/modern stuff. Just a kickstart for the old noggin. Then MAYBE they will learn to read and understand texts, the spirit they were written in and their context.
I'll second the messenger bag. You are trying to conceal something flat and angular(with rounded corners) on your body which propably isn't. You are bound to look ridiculous.
Messenger bags can also come in leather and look a lot manlier even if they are basically manbags. Also you can put a lot of extra shit into these. Like extra batteries for your phone, a shit tonne of USB cables, wall warts, battery recharger pack, headphones and other life-important essentials. My messenger bag makes myself self-sufficient for 24h. Electronics-wise.
Annnnd the fact that every time this sort of article gets posted there is this fundamental and extremely naive assumption that you are still in control of your government, it is still supposed to work for the people and that the politicians (and their masters) are not fully aware of what they are doing.
Remove that and this faux surprise and outrage goes away and the real work can begin...fixing the ACTUAL problem...
In this case I actually buy the explanation that they can't get the IT side of things done in time.
While I have no insight into this here are my assumptions based on 15 years of dealing with this BS professionally. I expect:
A hairball of a mess of interconnected subsytems that were developed independently. Compatibility propably wasn't high on the requirements list.
Subsystems that got adapted for each and every policy change since the 1980ies. Even the subsystems propably aren't consistent anymore.
Loads of self-implemented Excel spreadsheets on network shares sprinkled with the occasional Access "application" for sub-problems that weren't covered in the main systems.
The remnants of failed 1000+ developer projects that were "salvaged" and incorporated into the system.
Unclear and inconcise business requirements for the changes.
What kind of metric does one use to determine ones patriotism? At times decibel seems to be adequate.
They are compiling track lists at FinalGear. You might want to lend a hand since at times they are a bit stumped.
Would really be easier if they listed their music. Could be a long list per episode, mind.
Not here in Germany. It just triggers the "Warning: Nazi" switch.
I guess it takes at least 0.8 Hitlers to do that.
(I'm sorry. With us Germans, Occam's razor is always just around the corner. ;)
Agreed. A flag is what you break out when there is a football(the proper one that's played with your feet and an actual ball) championship on. Interestingly most windows show a couple of flags.
Fighting for patriotic reasons is a foreign thing here. They tried to sell us the Afghanistan war by calling it "defending Germany at the Hindukush". We told them to pull the other one because it's got bells on. Begrudgingly it went through parliament when they showed that our troops would help rebuild civilisation.
Flag-waving, unquestioning patriotism is for people who slept through history class. It's like a dullards clit: rub it enough and they shout in extasy.
PATRIOTISM, n.
Combustible rubbish ready to the torch of any one ambitious to illuminate his name.
In Dr. Johnson's famous dictionary patriotism is defined as the last resort of a scoundrel. With all due respect to an enlightened but inferior lexicographer I beg to submit that it is the first.
Be wary when the word "patriotism" is being used. Whatever precedes or follows usually clocks in very high on the bullshit scale. It feels like it's being used to trigger a killswitch in the human mind.
Well, if they don't play ball but the pirates do they shouldn't complain they lost a million to nil.
Does this deal only apply to the BBC? It seems to be quite sensible so I would assume it is at least 60 years old.