I hadn't tried but that was because I was at work and was browsing Slashdot while waiting for Visual Studio to finish installing. I saw someone mention something interesting and asked for further information so I could read up on it later. No time for research right then but that doesn't mean I'd pass up an interesting read if someone could offer me one.
Does Windows apply compatibility settings automatically every time the program is launched or does it create a shrtcut that applies the settings? I seem to remember that at least older versions of Windows created a shortcut, which is completely useless for Steam games where the.exe is in a known location and is called directly by Steam.
Still, UHD is awesome for gaming if your GPU can hack it. I just dropped 650 bucks on a 27" UHD monitor with FreeSync and the quality increase is worth the money. Just being able to run the game at a resolution where you have built-in AA because some of the jaggies are too small to make out with the human eye is very nice. (Of course it helps that the old one has much worse dynamic contrast and no FreeSync. Still, the resolution makes a difference.)
Unfortunately, Windows doesn't support UHD very well. You can use display scaling but it completely hoses windowed fullscreen mode in games because Windows cheerfully applies its scaling to those as well, telling them that your desktop resolution is something like 1706x960. Also, some programs simply won't scale. In some cases the programs scale but certain dialogs won't. Or the text scales but the button icons won't. It's a mess. You'd think that Windows would just report a different resolution to those programs and then upscale with a shader but apparently that didn't work out very well because Redmond obviously took a different approach.
I think Japan's point is that they built a bunch of factories and local headquarters in the UK specifically to deal with the European market. That was the big selling point. With the UK no longer being part of the European market Japan is understandably unhappy. So they give the UK two options:
1. The UK makes sure that Japan doesn't lose much by staying there. That means trade with the EU must work as if the UK were still a member. That means a huge free trade agreement needs to be secured ASAP.
2. A lot of Japanese companies will abandon their UK factories and headquarters and build new ones on the continent because staying in the UK is no longer financially sound. The UK loses a whole bunch of jobs and tax income and the Japanese companies lose a whole bunch of sunk money. Nobody wants this scenario.
Of course scenario 1 is hindered by the fact that the EU isn't keen on making trade agreements with a leaving member before the member has even left. So they're pushing for the UK to just invoke Article 50 already so things can get started.
tl;dr: Yes, the door is open - for Japanese companies to leave the UK. If you want to avoid that you'll have to convince them that trade with the EU won't be impacted by Brexit.
Note that Ingress players haven't been able to add portals for the last year because Niantic couldn't keep up and hasn't been able to come up with an automated system. Since PG relies in Ingress location data that leaves that game outdated as well, referencing locations that no longer exist and missing new POIs.
If that is "all their effort" then Niantic obviously does not have the resources to pull off something on the scale of PG successfully. They can barely keep the much smaller Ingress going!
Well, this how Pokemon games have been since back on Gameboy. It's the same thing, over and over.. You go to a town, you battle some people, you find some stuff, you leave town and you catch some Pokemon and you battle some people and then you find some stuff. It's not all that different, it's just that fad players are getting bored with it because they never played all the other games.
Only in the same sense that Heavy Rain boils down to "you watch a cutscene, then you do a quicktime event and watch more cutscenes followed by more QTEs". Technically it's true on a certain level but it misrepresents the game and its appeal.
Your typical Pokemon game is focused on growth; you have to carefully build a team that can take on your opponents and you can't do that by constantly tossing out your 'mons. Training a 'mon up requires some time investment, thus you actually need to plan ahead instead of just going with whatever. Also, the various attacks actually make a difference and make the fights more complex than just "keep attacking until someone faints".
PG, on the other hand, has none of those elements. It barely even has fights and those fights don't really amount to anything. The meat of the game is literally to catch 'mons which become utterly useless shortly after when your level allows you to catch superior 'mons. There is nothing to achieve, no growth of any kind, no strategy or tactics. It's Pokemon without everything that made it interesting.
(And this comes from someone who was never a particularly big Pokemon fan and only played one of the first generation games. Even I can tell just how much PG is missing compared to the main series.)
Depends on where you are. Back when I played I threw away pokeballs by the dozen because for every 'mon I ran into I passed by at least two pokestops. And that's true for every city with a five- or six-digit population I've been to (where I bothered playing). In rural areas this changes dramatically, though.
That's the problem: PG isn't very fun. The novelty of throwing virtual spheres at virtual animals quickly wears off and there's pretty much no other content. You catch Pokemon, then you level up and catch slightly stronger Pokemon. Gyms only exist so you can increase the meaningless CP stat on your 'mons even further, still for no actual gain other than making future gym battles easier. Oh, and training at a gym only works well if you're already stronger than the strongest Pokemon in there, making it extra pointless.
PG has everything it needed to make a big splash upon arrival - but very little staying power courtesy of its extremely simple and sparse gameplay. To compare it with another massively hyped mobile game, Neko Atsume: NA also has very sparse gameplay with extremely low stakes and limited interaction. But still unexpected things happen in that game, there is an antagonist of sorts (TUBBS! *shakes fist*) and it isn't an offshoot of an RPG series built around its deep combat system and strategic teambuilding. NA says "let's get some cats into your backyard so you can take cute pictures of them!" and delivers just that while PG, by virtue of its heritage, has people expecting exciting battles, teambuilding and carefully training of 'mons - all of which are not present.
In its current state PG is more of a tech demo than an actual game.
Not everyone lives on the cutting edge. My phone is expected to last me for another three years at least - my needs simply won't exceed what's possible with today's technology before then. While they are growing they are't growing that fast: My current phone already fits my entire music collection plus a few episodes of whichever show I want to watch and is plenty fast enough to play it al. VR/AR was cute for a while but hasn't yet produced a killer app that would keep my attention for more than a few minutes (and besides, sufficiently good realtime positioning for AR would probably require an upgrade of the GPS satellite network first). I'm essentially doing nothing the original iPhone couldn't do except with a bigger screen and more cycles to spare.
There is no sufficiently disruptive technology on the horizon to warrant a new phone soon; next year's models will pretty much just have a faster CPU, more RAM and more storage than today's - and I'm starved for none of the three.
Especially since they haven't finished releasing Redstone 1 yet (error 0xa0000400 etc.). Lots of people can't install the upgrade and the current feedback from Microsoft is a vague "we're working on it" and to work around the error by downloading a Win 10 ISO, wiping the HDD and doing a clean install. Because apparently updating their own operating system is a task Microsoft hasn't faced before.
One problem is that it's impossible to build up a strategic reserve of foreign workers. If foreign foreign skilled workers displace local skilled workers effectively enough they might become indispensable. If the supply dries up this would be a big problem.
A hypothetical possible scenario: The American tech sector succssfully pushes for effectively unlimited H1-B visas. American students find they can no longer compete with the much cheaper foreign talent once they have their degrees, at least not at a wage level where they are able to pay back their student loans. As a result, the number of college students drops significantly as American students either settle into affordable low-skill jobs or study abroad (which has a fair chance of leading to employment abroad). After a while the main source of foreign tech workers (let's say India) sees its own tech sector get important enough that few tech workers still want to work in America. The supply of Indian tech workers decreases sharply. America is left without foreign workers but also doesn't have a lot of good local talent either, leading to bad times for the tech sector.
Now, this is entirely hypothetical but it is something to consider - being dependent on a foreign resource is never risk-free and if local workers can't compete on a wage level they will be displaced to a large degree (because most companies consider all workers to be fungible). Of course one solution would be to make American tech workers wage-competitive but I doubt that goal can be reached without buying off both major parties at once.
I dunno. Putting a laser on an aerospace fighter? First off, we don't have terribly great lasers and they're talking about pulsed operation so we're talking about an IS SPL or MPL at best. And given that (IIRC) vees and aeros need insulation to use energy weapons it's probably a single one. That's six damage with a six hex range on a very expensive aero. Even if we get two that's twelve damage at six hexes. Compared to that the F-16 can mount something like six OS Thunderbolt 10s in addition to a machine gun as a fallback weapon. Thats sixty alpha damage from twelve hexes out.
Sure, the F-16 mounting the MPL can fight longer in theory - but given the abysmal armor coverage on those things it's going to go down the first time someone hits it with an AC-10. And that AC-10 has superior range so to-hit bonus be damned, my money is on the AC-carrying ground unit.
In my opinion it'd be a smarter move to work on getting LRMs or HVACs on those aeros instead of trying to put a short-ranged weapon on an inherently fragile unit before you've even had significant experience using it on the ground.
I doubt that. Sure, the TLAs can read your emails and can tap into your cellphone conversations. The Stasi, on the other hand, had personally present spies everywhere so you couldn't speak up even in private because no matter where you were, there was a good chance that someone was listening. If there was any kind of organized event or trip there was pretty much a 100% chance that a Stasi spy was present.
So no, I don't think that modern day America is that bad. It's still appalling and undignified, though, and Uber/Lyft were definitely the good guys here.
Gmail and Dropbox have web UIs? I use Gmail over IMAP/SMTP and Dropbox over its native service. Hell, even my Google Docs use is pretty much entirely by means of the Android app. Web UIs are for when a native implementation is not feasible, such as when you want to access you mail from a computer you don't control. Otherwise they're usually so inferior that they don't compare.
I understand the title not as a reflection on how heroic the story is but rather on the hubris of the builders. Honor and glory was what they were after, not what anyone got.
Of course I could be wrong and it could still be a completely inappropriate game. Time will tell.
"All presumptive evidence of felony should be admitted cautiously; for the law holds it better that ten guilty persons escape, than that one innocent party suffer." - William Blackstone
People like Benjamin Franklin and John Adams put their own spin on this but Blackstone said it first: Justice works better when we err on the side of caution. "This might possibly be misused so we must forbid it" is a terrible policy. In fact, this exact stance applied to encryption is what we like to ridicule the NSA for.
And no, RTBF claims are not destroying our historical record for all future generations to come. Your blog is not the sole source of historical information and in the grand scheme of things the important bits will be preserved throught things like court records. Sure, it might be interesting for future generations to do statistical analysis on blog posts - but then again I don't think that most blogs will be preserved in any form whatsoever for the next hundred years. A website dies, the information goes away. Perhaps the Internet Archive has a copy but plenty of times it doesn't. This is not a tragedy.
You can't sue every company that doesn't hire you because you suspect they might possible not have done sufficiently accurate fact-checking.
When a company sees an applicant like that they go to the bottom of the stack. If someone else is hired the company doesn't tell the alleged rapist "sorry, we didn't hire you because Google says you're a rapist", they simply tell them that someone else got the job. But that someone else could've gotten the job because of superior hard or soft skills or because they simply clicked with the team.
Also note that less reputable media outlets are quick to condemn people but very rarely retract anything. If $TABLOID puts your picture online accompanied by a text like "Is this the tattooed monster who raped and killed the little Jenny (9)?" and someone uses that picture and Facebook to identify you - do you think you will ever see $TABLOID or a blogger post "Sorry guys, fustakrakich is innocent" even if you are? If you're innocent you are simply not mentioned anymore while they focus on the real culprit - but the posts linking you to child rape remain online forever.
Of course all of this ties in with how various people see justice. American criminal justice revolves around punishing the culprit, which leads to PMITA prisons and the like. European crominal justice is usually built around making the culprit into a productive member society again, which leads to things like Norwegian luxury prisons. Of course Europe would come up with a way of scrubbing your permanent record of your past sins; not doing so would make it harder for you to live a normal life.
Slashdot Mirror
I hadn't tried but that was because I was at work and was browsing Slashdot while waiting for Visual Studio to finish installing. I saw someone mention something interesting and asked for further information so I could read up on it later. No time for research right then but that doesn't mean I'd pass up an interesting read if someone could offer me one.
I'm always interested in stories like that. Please provide links or keywords I could google.
Does Windows apply compatibility settings automatically every time the program is launched or does it create a shrtcut that applies the settings? I seem to remember that at least older versions of Windows created a shortcut, which is completely useless for Steam games where the .exe is in a known location and is called directly by Steam.
Still, UHD is awesome for gaming if your GPU can hack it. I just dropped 650 bucks on a 27" UHD monitor with FreeSync and the quality increase is worth the money. Just being able to run the game at a resolution where you have built-in AA because some of the jaggies are too small to make out with the human eye is very nice. (Of course it helps that the old one has much worse dynamic contrast and no FreeSync. Still, the resolution makes a difference.)
Unfortunately, Windows doesn't support UHD very well. You can use display scaling but it completely hoses windowed fullscreen mode in games because Windows cheerfully applies its scaling to those as well, telling them that your desktop resolution is something like 1706x960. Also, some programs simply won't scale. In some cases the programs scale but certain dialogs won't. Or the text scales but the button icons won't. It's a mess. You'd think that Windows would just report a different resolution to those programs and then upscale with a shader but apparently that didn't work out very well because Redmond obviously took a different approach.
I think they were going for a deliberately alien dance to show just how different the future is.
I think Japan's point is that they built a bunch of factories and local headquarters in the UK specifically to deal with the European market. That was the big selling point. With the UK no longer being part of the European market Japan is understandably unhappy. So they give the UK two options:
1. The UK makes sure that Japan doesn't lose much by staying there. That means trade with the EU must work as if the UK were still a member. That means a huge free trade agreement needs to be secured ASAP.
2. A lot of Japanese companies will abandon their UK factories and headquarters and build new ones on the continent because staying in the UK is no longer financially sound. The UK loses a whole bunch of jobs and tax income and the Japanese companies lose a whole bunch of sunk money. Nobody wants this scenario.
Of course scenario 1 is hindered by the fact that the EU isn't keen on making trade agreements with a leaving member before the member has even left. So they're pushing for the UK to just invoke Article 50 already so things can get started.
tl;dr: Yes, the door is open - for Japanese companies to leave the UK. If you want to avoid that you'll have to convince them that trade with the EU won't be impacted by Brexit.
TBH, when I played I chucked away balls by the dozen. Way more pokestops than 'mons to catch where I live.
Note that Ingress players haven't been able to add portals for the last year because Niantic couldn't keep up and hasn't been able to come up with an automated system. Since PG relies in Ingress location data that leaves that game outdated as well, referencing locations that no longer exist and missing new POIs.
If that is "all their effort" then Niantic obviously does not have the resources to pull off something on the scale of PG successfully. They can barely keep the much smaller Ingress going!
Well, this how Pokemon games have been since back on Gameboy. It's the same thing, over and over.. You go to a town, you battle some people, you find some stuff, you leave town and you catch some Pokemon and you battle some people and then you find some stuff. It's not all that different, it's just that fad players are getting bored with it because they never played all the other games.
Only in the same sense that Heavy Rain boils down to "you watch a cutscene, then you do a quicktime event and watch more cutscenes followed by more QTEs". Technically it's true on a certain level but it misrepresents the game and its appeal.
Your typical Pokemon game is focused on growth; you have to carefully build a team that can take on your opponents and you can't do that by constantly tossing out your 'mons. Training a 'mon up requires some time investment, thus you actually need to plan ahead instead of just going with whatever. Also, the various attacks actually make a difference and make the fights more complex than just "keep attacking until someone faints".
PG, on the other hand, has none of those elements. It barely even has fights and those fights don't really amount to anything. The meat of the game is literally to catch 'mons which become utterly useless shortly after when your level allows you to catch superior 'mons. There is nothing to achieve, no growth of any kind, no strategy or tactics. It's Pokemon without everything that made it interesting.
(And this comes from someone who was never a particularly big Pokemon fan and only played one of the first generation games. Even I can tell just how much PG is missing compared to the main series.)
Depends on where you are. Back when I played I threw away pokeballs by the dozen because for every 'mon I ran into I passed by at least two pokestops. And that's true for every city with a five- or six-digit population I've been to (where I bothered playing). In rural areas this changes dramatically, though.
That's the problem: PG isn't very fun. The novelty of throwing virtual spheres at virtual animals quickly wears off and there's pretty much no other content. You catch Pokemon, then you level up and catch slightly stronger Pokemon. Gyms only exist so you can increase the meaningless CP stat on your 'mons even further, still for no actual gain other than making future gym battles easier. Oh, and training at a gym only works well if you're already stronger than the strongest Pokemon in there, making it extra pointless.
PG has everything it needed to make a big splash upon arrival - but very little staying power courtesy of its extremely simple and sparse gameplay. To compare it with another massively hyped mobile game, Neko Atsume: NA also has very sparse gameplay with extremely low stakes and limited interaction. But still unexpected things happen in that game, there is an antagonist of sorts (TUBBS! *shakes fist*) and it isn't an offshoot of an RPG series built around its deep combat system and strategic teambuilding. NA says "let's get some cats into your backyard so you can take cute pictures of them!" and delivers just that while PG, by virtue of its heritage, has people expecting exciting battles, teambuilding and carefully training of 'mons - all of which are not present.
In its current state PG is more of a tech demo than an actual game.
Not everyone lives on the cutting edge. My phone is expected to last me for another three years at least - my needs simply won't exceed what's possible with today's technology before then. While they are growing they are't growing that fast: My current phone already fits my entire music collection plus a few episodes of whichever show I want to watch and is plenty fast enough to play it al. VR/AR was cute for a while but hasn't yet produced a killer app that would keep my attention for more than a few minutes (and besides, sufficiently good realtime positioning for AR would probably require an upgrade of the GPS satellite network first). I'm essentially doing nothing the original iPhone couldn't do except with a bigger screen and more cycles to spare.
There is no sufficiently disruptive technology on the horizon to warrant a new phone soon; next year's models will pretty much just have a faster CPU, more RAM and more storage than today's - and I'm starved for none of the three.
Germany uses day-fines, which are clamped between 1 and 30,000 EUR. That works fairly well AFAICT.
Well, there was a few years ago: Minecraft. Dunno what Minecraft runs on these days but back then is was a bog-standard Java app.
Gridcoin already exists.
Nope, only a few online discussions that point towards Win 10 Education being most commonly affected.
Especially since they haven't finished releasing Redstone 1 yet (error 0xa0000400 etc.). Lots of people can't install the upgrade and the current feedback from Microsoft is a vague "we're working on it" and to work around the error by downloading a Win 10 ISO, wiping the HDD and doing a clean install. Because apparently updating their own operating system is a task Microsoft hasn't faced before.
One problem is that it's impossible to build up a strategic reserve of foreign workers. If foreign foreign skilled workers displace local skilled workers effectively enough they might become indispensable. If the supply dries up this would be a big problem.
A hypothetical possible scenario: The American tech sector succssfully pushes for effectively unlimited H1-B visas. American students find they can no longer compete with the much cheaper foreign talent once they have their degrees, at least not at a wage level where they are able to pay back their student loans. As a result, the number of college students drops significantly as American students either settle into affordable low-skill jobs or study abroad (which has a fair chance of leading to employment abroad). After a while the main source of foreign tech workers (let's say India) sees its own tech sector get important enough that few tech workers still want to work in America. The supply of Indian tech workers decreases sharply. America is left without foreign workers but also doesn't have a lot of good local talent either, leading to bad times for the tech sector.
Now, this is entirely hypothetical but it is something to consider - being dependent on a foreign resource is never risk-free and if local workers can't compete on a wage level they will be displaced to a large degree (because most companies consider all workers to be fungible). Of course one solution would be to make American tech workers wage-competitive but I doubt that goal can be reached without buying off both major parties at once.
Microsoft is open-sourcing their stuff now too. Use Windows 7 and disable updates if you want to be safe.
I dunno. Putting a laser on an aerospace fighter? First off, we don't have terribly great lasers and they're talking about pulsed operation so we're talking about an IS SPL or MPL at best. And given that (IIRC) vees and aeros need insulation to use energy weapons it's probably a single one. That's six damage with a six hex range on a very expensive aero. Even if we get two that's twelve damage at six hexes. Compared to that the F-16 can mount something like six OS Thunderbolt 10s in addition to a machine gun as a fallback weapon. Thats sixty alpha damage from twelve hexes out.
Sure, the F-16 mounting the MPL can fight longer in theory - but given the abysmal armor coverage on those things it's going to go down the first time someone hits it with an AC-10. And that AC-10 has superior range so to-hit bonus be damned, my money is on the AC-carrying ground unit.
In my opinion it'd be a smarter move to work on getting LRMs or HVACs on those aeros instead of trying to put a short-ranged weapon on an inherently fragile unit before you've even had significant experience using it on the ground.
I doubt that. Sure, the TLAs can read your emails and can tap into your cellphone conversations. The Stasi, on the other hand, had personally present spies everywhere so you couldn't speak up even in private because no matter where you were, there was a good chance that someone was listening. If there was any kind of organized event or trip there was pretty much a 100% chance that a Stasi spy was present.
So no, I don't think that modern day America is that bad. It's still appalling and undignified, though, and Uber/Lyft were definitely the good guys here.
Gmail and Dropbox have web UIs? I use Gmail over IMAP/SMTP and Dropbox over its native service. Hell, even my Google Docs use is pretty much entirely by means of the Android app. Web UIs are for when a native implementation is not feasible, such as when you want to access you mail from a computer you don't control. Otherwise they're usually so inferior that they don't compare.
I understand the title not as a reflection on how heroic the story is but rather on the hubris of the builders. Honor and glory was what they were after, not what anyone got.
Of course I could be wrong and it could still be a completely inappropriate game. Time will tell.
"All presumptive evidence of felony should be admitted cautiously; for the law holds it better that ten guilty persons escape, than that one innocent party suffer." - William Blackstone
People like Benjamin Franklin and John Adams put their own spin on this but Blackstone said it first: Justice works better when we err on the side of caution. "This might possibly be misused so we must forbid it" is a terrible policy. In fact, this exact stance applied to encryption is what we like to ridicule the NSA for.
And no, RTBF claims are not destroying our historical record for all future generations to come. Your blog is not the sole source of historical information and in the grand scheme of things the important bits will be preserved throught things like court records. Sure, it might be interesting for future generations to do statistical analysis on blog posts - but then again I don't think that most blogs will be preserved in any form whatsoever for the next hundred years. A website dies, the information goes away. Perhaps the Internet Archive has a copy but plenty of times it doesn't. This is not a tragedy.
You can't sue every company that doesn't hire you because you suspect they might possible not have done sufficiently accurate fact-checking.
When a company sees an applicant like that they go to the bottom of the stack. If someone else is hired the company doesn't tell the alleged rapist "sorry, we didn't hire you because Google says you're a rapist", they simply tell them that someone else got the job. But that someone else could've gotten the job because of superior hard or soft skills or because they simply clicked with the team.
Also note that less reputable media outlets are quick to condemn people but very rarely retract anything. If $TABLOID puts your picture online accompanied by a text like "Is this the tattooed monster who raped and killed the little Jenny (9)?" and someone uses that picture and Facebook to identify you - do you think you will ever see $TABLOID or a blogger post "Sorry guys, fustakrakich is innocent" even if you are? If you're innocent you are simply not mentioned anymore while they focus on the real culprit - but the posts linking you to child rape remain online forever.
Of course all of this ties in with how various people see justice. American criminal justice revolves around punishing the culprit, which leads to PMITA prisons and the like. European crominal justice is usually built around making the culprit into a productive member society again, which leads to things like Norwegian luxury prisons. Of course Europe would come up with a way of scrubbing your permanent record of your past sins; not doing so would make it harder for you to live a normal life.