No they haven't. If you really think they have then you either thoroughly misunderstand what genetic modification is, or you grossly overestimate the biotechnological resources of medieval farmers.
My FB friends are mostly former co-workers and family. My G+ circles contain mostly people with similar interests.
But for the most part, the people who are on Facebook really are not on G+ at all, and the people on G+, well, they do have a FB account, but they hate it. If I want to interact with strangers with similar interests, I need to be on G+. On FB, I get swamped with friend requests from people I know in real life, but don't really share all that many interests with.
Mostly, though, G+ is a heaven for RPG fans. Many roleplayers consider it better for sharing RPG ideas than any RPG forum out there.
Facebook seems to revolve a lot around resharing vague funny images. G+ is more about real discussion. Resharing images does happen on occasion, but not to the point where it becomes tedious. In the early days of G+, there was such an image listing the most talked about person on Facebook, Twitter and Google+. They were some pop star, some other pop star, and Albert Einstein, respectively.
Call it elitist if you like, but I vastly prefer the topics of discussion on G+ over those on Facebook.
The fact that a minute downtime is big news is definitely saying something. Both about the reliability of Google's servers, and the impact of their products.
As a Google+ user, I definitely don't want Google and Facebook to capture the same market. People are definitely part of the reason why I prefer G+ over Facebook.
1. A republic is a state led by elected representatives. Elections=democracy. It's part of the definition, like I said.
The leader of a republic can be elected by a very small elite. Was the USSR a democracy in your opinion? Well, probably, since you consider Nazi Germany a democracy too. There are republics where the leadership isn't so much elected as appointed.
By contrast, a democracy is by definition "the rule of the people". Not the rule of some small elite or a bureaucracy, but the very people of the country. Admittedly at various times in the past, "people" has been interpreted rather narrowly (like male land owners, for example), but nowadays it's generally taken to mean "everybody", and those times in the past are considered lacking in basic democracy.
2. Hitler was elected thus Germany was a democracy at least at that point. After that, I don't know the history well enough to say.
It's well worth reading a bit more than that about that history. In short, Hitler seized all power, banned all parties that disagreed with him, and ruled by decree without requiring any vote by the Reichstag (the parliament).
3. Okay, we will disagree about whether a country led by a king or queen is a democracy. In my opinion that is crazytalk but I don't feel like arguing about it.
Read a bit on the power of modern monarchs. They don't have any. They don't lead their country, they represent it. It's basically a high-profile PR position.
4. Russia is a democracy, a totally fucked up democracy. I don't know anything about Belarus. Any country with a monarch isn't a democracy and many Euro states have monarchs, so again to me that means they are not democracies. If you don't elect your head of state then I can't imagine how you could call yourself a democracy.
It's not about the figurehead, it's about who rules. Does the vote of the people matter or not? It's highly gerrymandered district systems that are lacking in democracy, not constitutional monarchies where the will of the people is proportionally represented in the legislature while the monarch is only allowed to wave and smile.
Seriously, you're answers make it clear that you don't know what you're talking about. You have some vague preconceptions and jump to conclusions from there. Start by informing yourself first.
Yes, all republics are democracies. It's literally part of the definition.
No it is not. It is not part of the definition, and certainly not literally. Many, many democracies now and in the past are and have been thoroughly undemocratic.
I don't know the details of WW2 history, but yeah, Germany was a democracy. What's your point?
Mine was that Nazi Germany was not a democracy, but apparently yours is that democracy is dictatorship and black is white.
I will agree, though, that monarchies aren't democracies.
That the exact opposite of what I said. I said that many monarchies are democracies. Many modern monarchies are far more democratic than quite a lot of republics.
That's why the United Kingdom isn't a democracy (it's a theocratic monarchy),
There's certainly a lot wrong with democracy in the UK, but that's because its democracy is in a similar sorry state as that of the US.
nor are many other European countries.
Many? There's only one European country that's completely and officially not a democracy, and that's Belarus (a republic). Several others are a farce: autocracy dressing up as democracy. Russia, for example (another republic). There's a number where the way the electoral system works doesn't really do justice to the will of the people (UK, Italy, and probably quite a number of others). But all those North European monarchies are a lot more democratic than the vast majority of republics in the world. The only republics that are noticeably more democratic than those are Iceland and Switzerland.
That's a matter of personal opinion. In general wrong and illegal are the same thing, because no one will be able to decide what is wrong unless it's defined that way.
No, it's a matter of fundamental morals. If you'd lived in nazi Germany, would you have ratted on a neighbour hiding Jews? Not doing so was illegal, but also the only right thing to do.
Equating illegal with wrong means you're uncritically accepting your government as the ultimate judge in ethical matters.
That's because NOBODY will EVER vote democrat again after like 6 scandals in a row plus this bullshit and then dancing around it.
People will only stop voting Democrat if there's going to be a credible alternative. Republican isn't an alternative, and third parties aren't considered credible. That last part needs to change.
Bain's main successes were from before they decided corporate robbery was more profitable. I don't doubt their own PR focuses on their early days when they still added some value, but later on, they really did destroy companies to loot the dying corpse. And Romney was instrumental in that switch.
A currency created with energy is not the same thing as using energy as currency. In the end, everything is created by energy. Making coins and bank notes also takes energy.
Using real energy as currency would be incredibly interesting. It would need to be easily stored and carried in meaningful amounts, easy to convert to usable energy, easy to convert usable energy to this energy-currency, and all that (mostly) independent from any central infrastructure (so buying and selling energy isn't good enough; it needs to be contained in the currency itself).
If you've got that, you've basically got the ultimate form of currency, the most basic form of intrinsic value captured in currency.
Or maybe it can still lose value once energy becomes too cheap and abundant? Once we have more energy than we can use, this would become valueless.
And the other world powers that have multicultural prime ministers and presidents are... ? I feel like Obama's Peace Prize was more about transcending race and color finally among the world's super powers.
If it was about electing a black president, it should have gone to the American people.
At the time, I thought it was premature, but I also thought he'd eventually be worthy of it. Needless to say, I'm a bit disappointed.
That's exactly my consideration here. I don't mind if he's rich. But if he's going to use my money to actively campaign against basic human rights, then maybe I don't want to give him my money.
But I don't have any special feelings for Ender's Game anyway, so it's an easy movie for me to skip. If someone says he simply has to see it, I'm not going to stop him.
Thank you. Best, most concise description of Scrum ever.
"Agile" is more about setting up a consistent delivery schedule... the build train leaves the same time each week, carrying whatever passed QA testing... and no more. The build train is never delayed, only derailed by an Act of God. That's right, if some exec really thinks that something is so important that it needs to be done *right now*, you completely stop all work, scrap the current sprint and start a new sprint planning session with all of the overhead that entails.
I'm currently working at my first gig where they're actually doing Agile properly, but even here, it has happened that something needed to be included in a current sprint. And we have accepted it (if it was small enough) but dropped other stuff out of the sprint. And even then, it always cost problems. Putting it on the backlog is nearly always the best approach. Disrupting a current sprint is always messy.
There are still a lot of things we're struggling with, but even so, it's the best work environment I've ever been in. I'm convinced now: I want more Scrum.
Everybody claims to be Agile, but few really are. Often they just do a daily stand-up (or even a sit-down), don't really plan, and generally mess about.
Process is important in Agile, but it's a flexible process that you refine during retrospectives after every sprint.
I'm currently at my first gig where they're actually doing Agile properly, and it works very well. Best work environment I've ever been in.
Ah yes. Good old Java. Can't get enough of abstract generic service facade implementation
That's not an issue with the language itself, but with the overdose of architecture programmers tend to throw at it. Though Java is definitely showing its age. The simple lack of closures is unforgivable.
Stretch goals are probably the biggest pitfall. Before the campaign, you plan everything out and you're hopefully pretty sure that your plan works and you can meet your commitments, and when the kickstart campaign goes live, suddenly everything explodes, you meet your goal way too early, and people expect stretch goals from you, which you have to invent on the fly without any kind of real research.
For most projects, it'd be better if they just stuck to the initial goal. Just pocket the extra money. Or use it for some extra polish and those few extras that would fit in perfectly. But don't go overboard with your ambitions; keep it manageable.
I suspect the main result of this is going to be that nobody will want to be a sub-postmaster anymore. If you risk going to jail for other people's bugs, I doubt the risk is worth the extra revenue.
How it's even possible that someone goes to jail before a thorough investigation is another big mystery. I guess not only does the Post Office trust their buggy software too much, but the judge take the Post Office at their word.
If a politician is more worried about their job than doing the right thing, they shouldn't be a politician.
Shouldn't, from the perspective of the people. Yet it's still what the US got. For the most part, they care more about re-election than about doing good.
The problem is anyone qualified to be one, wouldn't want to be. The idea of a professional politician is the downfall of politics.
Exactly. The politicians we need are people who knowledgable, competent and "good" enough to make the right decisions on the stuff they make decisions about. But the politicians we get are the ones who've mastered the political system enough to keep getting re-elected.
Of course that also means that changing the political system could result in better politicians. No country has the perfect politicians, but some have politicians are a good deal better than those of the US.
Slashdot Mirror
No they haven't. If you really think they have then you either thoroughly misunderstand what genetic modification is, or you grossly overestimate the biotechnological resources of medieval farmers.
G+ is a ghost town,
I hear that a lot from people who don't use G+. You might want to ask the people who actually do use G+.
If I wanted intellectual discussion that can easily be found on Linkedin.
Really? Linkedin is one of the lousiest discussion platforms around. Yes, there's some discussion there, but it just doesn't compare.
Albert Einstein is too mainstream... if Google+ were really great, they'd have been talking about Tesla or someone!
You're in luck. Over the past half year or so, Tesla seems to have surpassed Einstein. There's a bunch of big Tesla fans there.
My FB friends are mostly former co-workers and family. My G+ circles contain mostly people with similar interests.
But for the most part, the people who are on Facebook really are not on G+ at all, and the people on G+, well, they do have a FB account, but they hate it. If I want to interact with strangers with similar interests, I need to be on G+. On FB, I get swamped with friend requests from people I know in real life, but don't really share all that many interests with.
Mostly, though, G+ is a heaven for RPG fans. Many roleplayers consider it better for sharing RPG ideas than any RPG forum out there.
Facebook seems to revolve a lot around resharing vague funny images. G+ is more about real discussion. Resharing images does happen on occasion, but not to the point where it becomes tedious. In the early days of G+, there was such an image listing the most talked about person on Facebook, Twitter and Google+. They were some pop star, some other pop star, and Albert Einstein, respectively.
Call it elitist if you like, but I vastly prefer the topics of discussion on G+ over those on Facebook.
The fact that a minute downtime is big news is definitely saying something. Both about the reliability of Google's servers, and the impact of their products.
As a Google+ user, I definitely don't want Google and Facebook to capture the same market. People are definitely part of the reason why I prefer G+ over Facebook.
1. A republic is a state led by elected representatives. Elections=democracy. It's part of the definition, like I said.
The leader of a republic can be elected by a very small elite. Was the USSR a democracy in your opinion? Well, probably, since you consider Nazi Germany a democracy too. There are republics where the leadership isn't so much elected as appointed.
By contrast, a democracy is by definition "the rule of the people". Not the rule of some small elite or a bureaucracy, but the very people of the country. Admittedly at various times in the past, "people" has been interpreted rather narrowly (like male land owners, for example), but nowadays it's generally taken to mean "everybody", and those times in the past are considered lacking in basic democracy.
2. Hitler was elected thus Germany was a democracy at least at that point. After that, I don't know the history well enough to say.
It's well worth reading a bit more than that about that history. In short, Hitler seized all power, banned all parties that disagreed with him, and ruled by decree without requiring any vote by the Reichstag (the parliament).
3. Okay, we will disagree about whether a country led by a king or queen is a democracy. In my opinion that is crazytalk but I don't feel like arguing about it.
Read a bit on the power of modern monarchs. They don't have any. They don't lead their country, they represent it. It's basically a high-profile PR position.
4. Russia is a democracy, a totally fucked up democracy. I don't know anything about Belarus. Any country with a monarch isn't a democracy and many Euro states have monarchs, so again to me that means they are not democracies. If you don't elect your head of state then I can't imagine how you could call yourself a democracy.
It's not about the figurehead, it's about who rules. Does the vote of the people matter or not? It's highly gerrymandered district systems that are lacking in democracy, not constitutional monarchies where the will of the people is proportionally represented in the legislature while the monarch is only allowed to wave and smile.
Seriously, you're answers make it clear that you don't know what you're talking about. You have some vague preconceptions and jump to conclusions from there. Start by informing yourself first.
Yes, all republics are democracies. It's literally part of the definition.
No it is not. It is not part of the definition, and certainly not literally. Many, many democracies now and in the past are and have been thoroughly undemocratic.
I don't know the details of WW2 history, but yeah, Germany was a democracy. What's your point?
Mine was that Nazi Germany was not a democracy, but apparently yours is that democracy is dictatorship and black is white.
I will agree, though, that monarchies aren't democracies.
That the exact opposite of what I said. I said that many monarchies are democracies. Many modern monarchies are far more democratic than quite a lot of republics.
That's why the United Kingdom isn't a democracy (it's a theocratic monarchy),
There's certainly a lot wrong with democracy in the UK, but that's because its democracy is in a similar sorry state as that of the US.
nor are many other European countries.
Many? There's only one European country that's completely and officially not a democracy, and that's Belarus (a republic). Several others are a farce: autocracy dressing up as democracy. Russia, for example (another republic). There's a number where the way the electoral system works doesn't really do justice to the will of the people (UK, Italy, and probably quite a number of others). But all those North European monarchies are a lot more democratic than the vast majority of republics in the world. The only republics that are noticeably more democratic than those are Iceland and Switzerland.
That's a matter of personal opinion. In general wrong and illegal are the same thing, because no one will be able to decide what is wrong unless it's defined that way.
No, it's a matter of fundamental morals. If you'd lived in nazi Germany, would you have ratted on a neighbour hiding Jews? Not doing so was illegal, but also the only right thing to do.
Equating illegal with wrong means you're uncritically accepting your government as the ultimate judge in ethical matters.
Why are people so obsessed with the word "purse"? I honestly don't get it. Just use whatever's practical.
That's because NOBODY will EVER vote democrat again after like 6 scandals in a row plus this bullshit and then dancing around it.
People will only stop voting Democrat if there's going to be a credible alternative. Republican isn't an alternative, and third parties aren't considered credible. That last part needs to change.
A republic is a democracy; what you said is nonsense.
Not all republics are democracies. There are some seriously autocratic and/or totalitarian republics out there. Nazi Germany was a republic.
Also, plenty of monarchies are democracies nowadays. Republic and democracy are orthogonal.
Bain's main successes were from before they decided corporate robbery was more profitable. I don't doubt their own PR focuses on their early days when they still added some value, but later on, they really did destroy companies to loot the dying corpse. And Romney was instrumental in that switch.
A currency created with energy is not the same thing as using energy as currency. In the end, everything is created by energy. Making coins and bank notes also takes energy.
Using real energy as currency would be incredibly interesting. It would need to be easily stored and carried in meaningful amounts, easy to convert to usable energy, easy to convert usable energy to this energy-currency, and all that (mostly) independent from any central infrastructure (so buying and selling energy isn't good enough; it needs to be contained in the currency itself).
If you've got that, you've basically got the ultimate form of currency, the most basic form of intrinsic value captured in currency.
Or maybe it can still lose value once energy becomes too cheap and abundant? Once we have more energy than we can use, this would become valueless.
Yeah but the US president deserves a nobel peace prize just because he's black? What an achievement!
To be fair, I think it was actually because he isn't Bush.
That assessment turned out to be somewhat incorrect.
And the other world powers that have multicultural prime ministers and presidents are ... ? I feel like Obama's Peace Prize was more about transcending race and color finally among the world's super powers.
If it was about electing a black president, it should have gone to the American people.
At the time, I thought it was premature, but I also thought he'd eventually be worthy of it. Needless to say, I'm a bit disappointed.
That's exactly my consideration here. I don't mind if he's rich. But if he's going to use my money to actively campaign against basic human rights, then maybe I don't want to give him my money.
But I don't have any special feelings for Ender's Game anyway, so it's an easy movie for me to skip. If someone says he simply has to see it, I'm not going to stop him.
Thank you. Best, most concise description of Scrum ever.
"Agile" is more about setting up a consistent delivery schedule... the build train leaves the same time each week, carrying whatever passed QA testing... and no more. The build train is never delayed, only derailed by an Act of God. That's right, if some exec really thinks that something is so important that it needs to be done *right now*, you completely stop all work, scrap the current sprint and start a new sprint planning session with all of the overhead that entails.
I'm currently working at my first gig where they're actually doing Agile properly, but even here, it has happened that something needed to be included in a current sprint. And we have accepted it (if it was small enough) but dropped other stuff out of the sprint. And even then, it always cost problems. Putting it on the backlog is nearly always the best approach. Disrupting a current sprint is always messy.
There are still a lot of things we're struggling with, but even so, it's the best work environment I've ever been in. I'm convinced now: I want more Scrum.
Everybody claims to be Agile, but few really are. Often they just do a daily stand-up (or even a sit-down), don't really plan, and generally mess about.
Process is important in Agile, but it's a flexible process that you refine during retrospectives after every sprint.
I'm currently at my first gig where they're actually doing Agile properly, and it works very well. Best work environment I've ever been in.
By not having the server take those values from the client, but from its own database, I presume.
Ah yes. Good old Java. Can't get enough of abstract generic service facade implementation
That's not an issue with the language itself, but with the overdose of architecture programmers tend to throw at it. Though Java is definitely showing its age. The simple lack of closures is unforgivable.
Stretch goals are probably the biggest pitfall. Before the campaign, you plan everything out and you're hopefully pretty sure that your plan works and you can meet your commitments, and when the kickstart campaign goes live, suddenly everything explodes, you meet your goal way too early, and people expect stretch goals from you, which you have to invent on the fly without any kind of real research.
For most projects, it'd be better if they just stuck to the initial goal. Just pocket the extra money. Or use it for some extra polish and those few extras that would fit in perfectly. But don't go overboard with your ambitions; keep it manageable.
I suspect the main result of this is going to be that nobody will want to be a sub-postmaster anymore. If you risk going to jail for other people's bugs, I doubt the risk is worth the extra revenue.
How it's even possible that someone goes to jail before a thorough investigation is another big mystery. I guess not only does the Post Office trust their buggy software too much, but the judge take the Post Office at their word.
If a politician is more worried about their job than doing the right thing, they shouldn't be a politician.
Shouldn't, from the perspective of the people. Yet it's still what the US got. For the most part, they care more about re-election than about doing good.
The problem is anyone qualified to be one, wouldn't want to be. The idea of a professional politician is the downfall of politics.
Exactly. The politicians we need are people who knowledgable, competent and "good" enough to make the right decisions on the stuff they make decisions about. But the politicians we get are the ones who've mastered the political system enough to keep getting re-elected.
Of course that also means that changing the political system could result in better politicians. No country has the perfect politicians, but some have politicians are a good deal better than those of the US.