The boundaries of the constitution were pushed way before that. I hear the country was so hard to govern, there was even a civil war.
Now, even if we wanted to keep the federal government in check, a provision that automatically triggers elections in some circumstances would not really be a federal power grab. Many countries that don't have such strict rules on when to call for elections have governments that don't last very long at all. Look at the Dutch, the Spanish, or the Greek.
Presidential overreach is not a partisan issue. W did it well enough himself. It's just the natural progression that comes from the current legislation, from the Constitution down. Barring extremely unlikely citizen action, chances are the dynamics will continue as they are until demographics topple the current political balance. Then we'll have some years of single party dominance, the losing party will change their position dramatically to bring it all back into balance, and we'll be back in square one.
Well, it doesn't have most of the characteristics that make a currency work, the main one being that it's inherently deflationary. This is a terrible thing for a currency, due to this psychological phenomenon called money illusion. This makes the monetary base shrink over time, instead of grow, turning said prospective currency into an investment vehicle. It's just natural behavior when something increases its value when you hold it. This makes most of the currency be there as a holder of value than as a method of exchange, increasing the demand of money over time.
Just pick any model of a currency that we have, and insert the parameters required to make it behave like bitcoin, and see what it does. It's not pretty.
Well, apparently the kid's current caregiver is against letting him contact the child, o Skype isn't going to work. Now, what I'd argue that in those circumstances, nothing is going to work.
It's not that difficult a job: Big enough places go as far as only distribute java updates through their own channels, which include the cacerts file.
I had to do this same hack years ago to make a Swing client be able to talk to our own servers through HTTPs, when the server was using self signed cert. We created a CA, issued a bunch of certs to the servers using that CA, and then added the CA's identity to cacerts.
More pain than we'd like, but it sure beats having to deal with verisign for every intranet server we had, or could ever build.
They are infamous for hating backwards compatibility. Buy a device and don't expect updates the minute there's another replacement. It kind of works for consoles, which don't get major hardware changes often, but look at what happened with windows mp3 players, or the windows mobile line: Every year, your hardware is obsolete, your OS can't be upgraded, and nobody makes apps for your device anymore.
Who'd buy an iPad if the hardware stopped getting new software 12 months after launch? Microsoft threw away their entire stack that often for years. Remember zune, and play for sure?
Now, they might be cleaning up their act with the surface, but they have to regain confidence. I sure would be hesitant about recommending purchasing any of their hardware to an employer, while I am pretty sure that iOS 8 and 9 will run in an iPad bought after the predicted October refresh.
MySQL got its critical mass by it's easy, tight integration built into PHP. Any random college student could build a website backed by a database pretty quickly. It was a total failure to anyone that wanted to do serious work with it, but serious work was never an issue. As those college students entered the workforce, they tried to keep the tools they learned. People worked around their tech's limitations until new versions added it in, instead of migrating to competitors.
So it was a perfect storm or filling a niche for a community that just kept growing.
You must be living in another dimension then. Steam has an extremely wide variety of games, you just have to attempt to look for them. For instance, look at the current Humble Indie Bundle, full of steam games that are mostly quite good.
Trine 2: Side scrolling puzle Mark of the Ninja: 2d stealth. Eets munches: A puzzle game. Brutal Legend: 3rd person brawler/rts FTL: Space rogue-like, top down. Fez: Half puzzle, half platformer. Rocketbirds: 2d action A virus named tom: pizzle Bastion: isometric action game Limbo: 2d adventure/puzzle
And that's by going to a single place that has huge steam deals. Their other deal is a pack of space simulation games: Imagine a far more modern Elite.Outside of the humble bundle,there's things like Oblivion, Civ V, Street Fighter, X-Com, Thomas was alone, Tropico.... I'd not call any of those FPS games.
So I recommend that you leave that side dimension you live in where steam is mostly first person shooters, because it sounds terrible
You don't need multi monitor to corrupt the mouse pointer in ATI cards, a problem very similar to what you describe happens sometimes when you play certain games in full screen windowed mode. It fixes itself after a restart, or when you open a new app that steals mouse cursors, like the Windows 7 Magnifier.
The only way is by going through a lot of environments, and a lot of coworkers. Even on the same company, the top dog in team A might be pretty average when compared to team B. This makes bell curve reviewing brutal, as it punishes having a team of really good people.
Also, skill is not linear. Maybe Bob is way better than Joe, who is way better than Bill, who is way better than Ted. The differences are so big that if you just see Joe work with Ted, and Bob work with Ted, it'll be tough to know that Bob is really that much better than Joe.
After you have a few more jobs, hopefully in different kinds of places, you'll just know.
It's more than that: Insufficient infant nutrition is highly correlated with low IQ. Just look at the numbers for children IQ in places full of poverty. Much could be done for that place if, by better nutrition, the average moved 10 points closer to that of the developed world.
So is almost anything at high enough doses. One would expect that the concentration of vitamin A in golden rice is not four times higher than that of liver.
The freedom to take arms against the government is one that is impossible to take away, but it's one where you will get shot at for exercising. Putting it in a constitution is silly. If all you mean is that it supposed to make it easier to raise against the government, then the current implementation is insufficient, as most things that would be useful against an army are illegal anyway. RPGs, mines, actual assault rifles... all illegal.
Since I do not see people rising against the government because they can't buy RPGs, my interpretation is that all this people that keep talking about the importance of the second amendment to protect themselves from the government just have no interest in defending their own rights at all.
IPV6 does not help, because the issue is network topology: If all traffic in the US passes through a very limited set of nodes, then you can still snoop all the traffic. You could ask for a different topology, with more long distance routed, but that's ridiculously expensive. It's not like 5 guys can easily set up a new fiber line between Chicago and Cleveland, and get the equipment to make it available to the open internet. To provide a semblance of security from a snooper the size of the NSA, this would have to happen tens of thousands of times to make sure that it's impossible to capture a relevant enough percentage of traffic.
And then we have the trouble of building private intercontinental lines.
If you want a semi-realistic way of avoiding snooping, look for ways to increase internet traffic. If there's enough traffic, and it's hard enough to know what the traffic is about, it becomes impossible to analyze. Bury the needle in such a huge haystack, it's impossible to sort out.
Just like Americans lengthen os at the end of a word, even though they are perfectly capable of producing the sound mid word. Mispronunciation is not limited to just sounds someone's first language doesn't use at all.
It doesn't guarantee the system will be bad, but it makes improving it drastically harder than a market system: You can always get involved in local politics, and make sure your local board of education is actually on the ball. Not every school district in the US is bad. It just happens that, at the very least, we need options in case the only choices are a bad school district and moving.
Now. I am personally not very concerned about how bad most US schools are because we are getting pretty close to a major change in how education is done. There's this thing called the internet, and I hear that it's a great way of transmitting knowledge. It might not be ideal for every subject (I don't think it's the best way of grading papers, for instance), but it seems amazing for areas where student learning speed is all over the place, like math and reading. Just check the difference in performance between a preeschooler that had access to starfall at home, and one that has no special stimulation.
In my lifetime, kids will learn at their pace, and school's main focus will be the social aspects.
I'd not call it interesting: It's mostly name calling and a bunch of strawmen.
Now, I do not think that sending a kid to a private school is in any way evil, but I'd much rather see a proper refutation, instead of just answering crap with crap. I mean, I'd understand sinking to crappy dialectic if the original point was actually difficult to refute, but why not use proper logic to refute an argument as full of holes as that one? If anything, a refutation that bad gives credence to the original article,and makes me think this guy is right in the same sense that a broken clock is right twice a day.
I've seen better refutations in the slashdot comments.
True, but the problem is that the existing pay model makes hiring entry level to be a negative value proposition. Take software developers: There's a big difference between a pro and your average graduate: For quite a while, many recent graduates are zero marginal product workers. Now, two years later, said developer is quite good, and actually produces more than he costs. But then he's easily poachable by a company that doesn't waste money on entry level workers, and thus can afford to pay more to those that are actually any good. You can hire a guy that will produce 50 over the first two years, and pay him 50, or hire a guy that produces 300 for 100. Who wouldn't go for option 2?
That's a big problem: You are better off setting up teams where the youngest dev has 10 years of professional experience, and pay them a bit over market rate, than it is to put a couple of those in charge of recent graduates, in the hope that you managed to hire a few of those that will actually be productive very early. That's the real reason the H1B is attractive to companies that aren't paying abusively low wages: Start a green card process after 2 years on the job, and he'll end up staying with you long enough to make sure that the risk on a young guy will pay off more often.
We can have a world with lots of mobility but lots of inequality and few opportunities for those that can't just do the job on day one, or one with little mobility where training on the job is expected. Its hard to have them both at once.
Free to play is not necessarily bad: It just happens that it can be done badly, just like DLC.
Look at, say, Dota 2. You get access to the full game to start. Every hero is available when you turn the game on. Paying more hours provides no gameplay advantage. Paying provides no gameplay advantage. You can pay for cosmetics and to watch pro tournaments in game. That provides plenty of money to keep the game running. It just happens that after someone sinks 1000+ hours into a game, and he's never paid a dime for it, chances are he'll find something to buy, because you might as well hand something back in exchange of so much entertainment.
There's also Plants vs Zombies 2. If you are any good at the first game, you'll be able to finish it just fine without paying a cent. You can pay to make the game easier, but chances are you won't need it.
Free to play doesn't have to be about hooking people in, or put roadblocks to stop their progress: It's a great way of getting players when there's a lot of competition. Just think of the problem of multiplayer games: Sell it for 60, quid, and if you do not get critical mass, your game is done, because there are long wait times to start a game, if ever. Make the game F2P, and you at least get your game played. If your game is played, and it is good, monetizing it without alienating your players will not be a problem.
EA has been considered a cancer for decade. Remember Ultima VII? A cult starts spreading through Britannia. At first they seem like a nice bunch, but soon we realize that they are all working for evil. And what are the three artifacts representing evil? A triangle, a circle and a cube, all three parts of the logo EA had at the time.
Companies swallowed by EA have been crying for help for years. Westwood. Origin. Maxis. The only reason they don't look so awful at times is that other companies built in their image have risen to compete in awfulness: Hello Activision!
There's plenty of real games on phones: Plants Vs Zombies 2 and Ace Patrol, for instance. Japanese companies have also been releasing adventure and rythm games for iOS with good results.
The one disadvantage is the controls. They can release Megaman games on a phone all they want, but they'll still suck without a proper d-pad and buttons
Amazon is doing well in many ways, but as a competitor to Netflix? No way. Their movie selection is downright anemic, and the TV selection. while better, isn't really all that great. I'd take HBO.Go over Prime Instant Video in a nanosecond. A pity that you need to pay for cable to get it.
Slashdot Mirror
You spout a lot of BS, but instead of wasting an hour, I'll just go against one piece:
If adding functions adds execution overhead, you are not working with a good enough compiler.
The boundaries of the constitution were pushed way before that. I hear the country was so hard to govern, there was even a civil war.
Now, even if we wanted to keep the federal government in check, a provision that automatically triggers elections in some circumstances would not really be a federal power grab. Many countries that don't have such strict rules on when to call for elections have governments that don't last very long at all. Look at the Dutch, the Spanish, or the Greek.
Presidential overreach is not a partisan issue. W did it well enough himself. It's just the natural progression that comes from the current legislation, from the Constitution down. Barring extremely unlikely citizen action, chances are the dynamics will continue as they are until demographics topple the current political balance. Then we'll have some years of single party dominance, the losing party will change their position dramatically to bring it all back into balance, and we'll be back in square one.
Well, it doesn't have most of the characteristics that make a currency work, the main one being that it's inherently deflationary. This is a terrible thing for a currency, due to this psychological phenomenon called money illusion. This makes the monetary base shrink over time, instead of grow, turning said prospective currency into an investment vehicle. It's just natural behavior when something increases its value when you hold it. This makes most of the currency be there as a holder of value than as a method of exchange, increasing the demand of money over time.
Just pick any model of a currency that we have, and insert the parameters required to make it behave like bitcoin, and see what it does. It's not pretty.
Well, apparently the kid's current caregiver is against letting him contact the child, o Skype isn't going to work. Now, what I'd argue that in those circumstances, nothing is going to work.
It's not that difficult a job: Big enough places go as far as only distribute java updates through their own channels, which include the cacerts file.
I had to do this same hack years ago to make a Swing client be able to talk to our own servers through HTTPs, when the server was using self signed cert. We created a CA, issued a bunch of certs to the servers using that CA, and then added the CA's identity to cacerts.
More pain than we'd like, but it sure beats having to deal with verisign for every intranet server we had, or could ever build.
They are infamous for hating backwards compatibility. Buy a device and don't expect updates the minute there's another replacement. It kind of works for consoles, which don't get major hardware changes often, but look at what happened with windows mp3 players, or the windows mobile line: Every year, your hardware is obsolete, your OS can't be upgraded, and nobody makes apps for your device anymore.
Who'd buy an iPad if the hardware stopped getting new software 12 months after launch? Microsoft threw away their entire stack that often for years. Remember zune, and play for sure?
Now, they might be cleaning up their act with the surface, but they have to regain confidence. I sure would be hesitant about recommending purchasing any of their hardware to an employer, while I am pretty sure that iOS 8 and 9 will run in an iPad bought after the predicted October refresh.
MySQL got its critical mass by it's easy, tight integration built into PHP. Any random college student could build a website backed by a database pretty quickly. It was a total failure to anyone that wanted to do serious work with it, but serious work was never an issue. As those college students entered the workforce, they tried to keep the tools they learned. People worked around their tech's limitations until new versions added it in, instead of migrating to competitors.
So it was a perfect storm or filling a niche for a community that just kept growing.
You must be living in another dimension then. Steam has an extremely wide variety of games, you just have to attempt to look for them.
For instance, look at the current Humble Indie Bundle, full of steam games that are mostly quite good.
Trine 2: Side scrolling puzle
Mark of the Ninja: 2d stealth.
Eets munches: A puzzle game.
Brutal Legend: 3rd person brawler/rts
FTL: Space rogue-like, top down.
Fez: Half puzzle, half platformer.
Rocketbirds: 2d action
A virus named tom: pizzle
Bastion: isometric action game
Limbo: 2d adventure/puzzle
And that's by going to a single place that has huge steam deals. Their other deal is a pack of space simulation games: Imagine a far more modern Elite.Outside of the humble bundle,there's things like Oblivion, Civ V, Street Fighter, X-Com, Thomas was alone, Tropico.... I'd not call any of those FPS games.
So I recommend that you leave that side dimension you live in where steam is mostly first person shooters, because it sounds terrible
You don't need multi monitor to corrupt the mouse pointer in ATI cards, a problem very similar to what you describe happens sometimes when you play certain games in full screen windowed mode. It fixes itself after a restart, or when you open a new app that steals mouse cursors, like the Windows 7 Magnifier.
Infinity Blade. Now, it'd be pretty hard to play it in a macbook pro.
The only way is by going through a lot of environments, and a lot of coworkers. Even on the same company, the top dog in team A might be pretty average when compared to team B. This makes bell curve reviewing brutal, as it punishes having a team of really good people.
Also, skill is not linear. Maybe Bob is way better than Joe, who is way better than Bill, who is way better than Ted. The differences are so big that if you just see Joe work with Ted, and Bob work with Ted, it'll be tough to know that Bob is really that much better than Joe.
After you have a few more jobs, hopefully in different kinds of places, you'll just know.
It's more than that: Insufficient infant nutrition is highly correlated with low IQ. Just look at the numbers for children IQ in places full of poverty. Much could be done for that place if, by better nutrition, the average moved 10 points closer to that of the developed world.
So is almost anything at high enough doses. One would expect that the concentration of vitamin A in golden rice is not four times higher than that of liver.
The freedom to take arms against the government is one that is impossible to take away, but it's one where you will get shot at for exercising. Putting it in a constitution is silly. If all you mean is that it supposed to make it easier to raise against the government, then the current implementation is insufficient, as most things that would be useful against an army are illegal anyway. RPGs, mines, actual assault rifles... all illegal.
Since I do not see people rising against the government because they can't buy RPGs, my interpretation is that all this people that keep talking about the importance of the second amendment to protect themselves from the government just have no interest in defending their own rights at all.
IPV6 does not help, because the issue is network topology: If all traffic in the US passes through a very limited set of nodes, then you can still snoop all the traffic. You could ask for a different topology, with more long distance routed, but that's ridiculously expensive. It's not like 5 guys can easily set up a new fiber line between Chicago and Cleveland, and get the equipment to make it available to the open internet. To provide a semblance of security from a snooper the size of the NSA, this would have to happen tens of thousands of times to make sure that it's impossible to capture a relevant enough percentage of traffic.
And then we have the trouble of building private intercontinental lines.
If you want a semi-realistic way of avoiding snooping, look for ways to increase internet traffic. If there's enough traffic, and it's hard enough to know what the traffic is about, it becomes impossible to analyze. Bury the needle in such a huge haystack, it's impossible to sort out.
Just like Americans lengthen os at the end of a word, even though they are perfectly capable of producing the sound mid word. Mispronunciation is not limited to just sounds someone's first language doesn't use at all.
It doesn't guarantee the system will be bad, but it makes improving it drastically harder than a market system: You can always get involved in local politics, and make sure your local board of education is actually on the ball. Not every school district in the US is bad. It just happens that, at the very least, we need options in case the only choices are a bad school district and moving.
Now. I am personally not very concerned about how bad most US schools are because we are getting pretty close to a major change in how education is done. There's this thing called the internet, and I hear that it's a great way of transmitting knowledge. It might not be ideal for every subject (I don't think it's the best way of grading papers, for instance), but it seems amazing for areas where student learning speed is all over the place, like math and reading. Just check the difference in performance between a preeschooler that had access to starfall at home, and one that has no special stimulation.
In my lifetime, kids will learn at their pace, and school's main focus will be the social aspects.
I'd not call it interesting: It's mostly name calling and a bunch of strawmen.
Now, I do not think that sending a kid to a private school is in any way evil, but I'd much rather see a proper refutation, instead of just answering crap with crap. I mean, I'd understand sinking to crappy dialectic if the original point was actually difficult to refute, but why not use proper logic to refute an argument as full of holes as that one? If anything, a refutation that bad gives credence to the original article,and makes me think this guy is right in the same sense that a broken clock is right twice a day.
I've seen better refutations in the slashdot comments.
True, but the problem is that the existing pay model makes hiring entry level to be a negative value proposition. Take software developers: There's a big difference between a pro and your average graduate: For quite a while, many recent graduates are zero marginal product workers. Now, two years later, said developer is quite good, and actually produces more than he costs. But then he's easily poachable by a company that doesn't waste money on entry level workers, and thus can afford to pay more to those that are actually any good. You can hire a guy that will produce 50 over the first two years, and pay him 50, or hire a guy that produces 300 for 100. Who wouldn't go for option 2?
That's a big problem: You are better off setting up teams where the youngest dev has 10 years of professional experience, and pay them a bit over market rate, than it is to put a couple of those in charge of recent graduates, in the hope that you managed to hire a few of those that will actually be productive very early. That's the real reason the H1B is attractive to companies that aren't paying abusively low wages: Start a green card process after 2 years on the job, and he'll end up staying with you long enough to make sure that the risk on a young guy will pay off more often.
We can have a world with lots of mobility but lots of inequality and few opportunities for those that can't just do the job on day one, or one with little mobility where training on the job is expected. Its hard to have them both at once.
Free to play is not necessarily bad: It just happens that it can be done badly, just like DLC.
Look at, say, Dota 2. You get access to the full game to start. Every hero is available when you turn the game on. Paying more hours provides no gameplay advantage. Paying provides no gameplay advantage. You can pay for cosmetics and to watch pro tournaments in game. That provides plenty of money to keep the game running. It just happens that after someone sinks 1000+ hours into a game, and he's never paid a dime for it, chances are he'll find something to buy, because you might as well hand something back in exchange of so much entertainment.
There's also Plants vs Zombies 2. If you are any good at the first game, you'll be able to finish it just fine without paying a cent. You can pay to make the game easier, but chances are you won't need it.
Free to play doesn't have to be about hooking people in, or put roadblocks to stop their progress: It's a great way of getting players when there's a lot of competition. Just think of the problem of multiplayer games: Sell it for 60, quid, and if you do not get critical mass, your game is done, because there are long wait times to start a game, if ever. Make the game F2P, and you at least get your game played. If your game is played, and it is good, monetizing it without alienating your players will not be a problem.
EA has been considered a cancer for decade. Remember Ultima VII? A cult starts spreading through Britannia. At first they seem like a nice bunch, but soon we realize that they are all working for evil. And what are the three artifacts representing evil? A triangle, a circle and a cube, all three parts of the logo EA had at the time.
Companies swallowed by EA have been crying for help for years. Westwood. Origin. Maxis. The only reason they don't look so awful at times is that other companies built in their image have risen to compete in awfulness: Hello Activision!
There's plenty of real games on phones: Plants Vs Zombies 2 and Ace Patrol, for instance. Japanese companies have also been releasing adventure and rythm games for iOS with good results.
The one disadvantage is the controls. They can release Megaman games on a phone all they want, but they'll still suck without a proper d-pad and buttons
Amazon is doing well in many ways, but as a competitor to Netflix? No way. Their movie selection is downright anemic, and the TV selection. while better, isn't really all that great. I'd take HBO.Go over Prime Instant Video in a nanosecond. A pity that you need to pay for cable to get it.
Molecular breeding helps increase the yield of wildtypes, film at 11!
Next, we'll hear that hybrid corn has better yield than straight inbreds.