while he is responsible for the pressure that eventually trickled down the management chain resulting in the cost-cutting measures leading to the spill, he bears no personal responsibility
The problem with your "citizen pay" is that it relies on people to spend their money wisely (since it is limited, and only enough to sustain a minimum standard of living as you say).
This is the assumption behind giving people any amount of liberty. If you don't think they can be trusted to make rational choices, vote for communism.
What would really happen would be many of the non-workers would go to the casino and spend their citizen pay, and then be broke, and their children would go hungry.
To put it bluntly, this can't be prevented no matter what you do, and if someone really does this, the children need to be taken away from them.
Obviously, many of these people simply can't be trusted to raise their own children properly, which is why it's generally better, if you're going to provide free services, to give out free medical and child care, and not just a prepaid debit card that can be spent on booze and cigarettes.
I call bullshit. Most poor people won't, in fact, use the money they receive on booze and cigarettes while their children starve. If some do, the children need to be taken away and placed into orphanages.
At 10 cm you're going to be vastly more sensitive to the detailed structure of the peach. What at 20 m looked like it could be characterized adequately by a single radial parameter is now clearly a copmlex shape that doesn't even have a very sharp boundary, being covered with fuzz and all.
But the proton is supposed to be composed of 3 quarks. How much micro-detail can it have? Unless, of course, the quarks are also composed of something (dum dum dee doo)?
By far the most likely explanation of this result is something slightly wrong with our understanding of the tails of the proton's structure function, not anything as deep as physics beyond the standard model.
To put it bluntly, we know for certain that the standard model is wrong, since it doesn't include gravity (or Dark Energy, nor Neutrino Oscillation, etc.). As such, it's hardly a great insight that we need physics beyond it to make sense of observations.
Anyway, Deep Thought was a computer and so would work in hex.
Computers can work in any number system. Most work in binary, since that is the simplest possible. Hexadecimal has the advantage of being a power of two, but actually having the computer work with sixteen different voltage levels would be very difficult.
We will fight them in the beaches! We will fight them in the moons of Neptune! We.. Will.. Keep... Our... Planets! All Nine of them! And when your silly phase of cosmological recidivism has become history, we'll still have our planet Pluto!
Having a restrictive (yet capable) standard sandbox enables a developer to focus on working within those constraints, which can allow them to exercise creative freedom.
Each and every PC sold in the past few years is more capable than the latest generation of consoles. With a PC a developer himself can decide the constraints, with the consoles he gets what he gets and works with it.
Basically, what I'm saying is that the lowest common denominator for most PC's is higher than the one for most consoles.
Look at some of the most interesting and innovative games recently -- Portal, for example. Good games don't necessarily push hardware to it's limit.
True, a good developer will make a game that conforms to the limits of the hardware, just as the original "Metal Gear" did. That doesn't mean that those limits don't exist, nor does it mean that they don't limit what kind of game can work within them.
This is not about making "good games", this is about the evolution of games. Comples simulation games, for example, have traditionally been beyond consoles, since they just don't have the memory to hold the gameworld. They also have an inferior input system for that genre, but that could be worked around.
If a crime was committed against a German citizen who was not connected with Facebook, how would German law not apply?
German laws apply everywhere Germany can and will project (military) power to. They don't apply anywhere else, such as in the United States (where Facebook is based).
Basically, it's a question of "can the court enforce it's decision"? That's what "jurisdiction" means.
That is the line sold to the people, but it's wrong. A government is an organization to consolidate and maintain power. Look at ancient Rome, it had millions of slaves, it had near constant wars, it had public torture and execution. But we regard it historically as a great civilization.
Historically, it was. The key word here is "ancient": Rome was a good place for its time. We nowadays consider Hammurabi's Law - "an eye for an eye, and a tooth for a tooth" - to be horribly barbaric; but it's actually advocating the forward-thinking, touchy-feely position that the punishment should be proportional to the crime, rather than whatever the victim's anger drives him to inflict. It's asking for people to become better, just as all those things in the Old Testament people nowadays like to quote as evidence of abrahamic religions being horrible do; and we have become better, which is why the earlier worst acceptable behaviour now seems barbaric. I can only hope that our descendants a thousand years from now will consider us to be barbaric.
The government should serve the people. Hold it to that standard, don't let it just pay lip service to it. Demand that it serve you. The government sold you a line? Okay, hold it to it, don't be satisfied with anything less. Modern governments are better than Roman dictators or Kings of Divine Right, but only because people demanded that they be better. Don't let them or us slip back, make them ever better. Keep the progress going, and maybe - just maybe - we'll someday conquer the stars.
Yes, it has been stopped, for now. But not by the gouvernment but by the constitutional court.
The court system is part of the government. Think of the constitutional court as the equivalent of superego, reining in the impulses of the less socially acceptable parts of the memetic entity that is a nation-state.
Corporations should have something similar; a legal department doesn't quite cut it.
Why should you surrender over 50% of your income to a faceless state?
Why would having a "face" matter? The money goes to upkeep roads, law, and civilization in general.
In most society there usually is a silent agreement between the state and the intelligent/smart/fortunate ones in order to allow the latter to indulge themselves. IMHO "Peitschen" Peer showed arrogant disregard which didn't do Germany any favours. Naive and full of himself.
So basically, you are accusing Peer of demanding that the self-declared aristocracy be bound by the same laws as everyone else? And you have the never of accusing him of being full if himself?
And no, in "mos societies" there is no such agreement. Corruption is generally frowned upon.
Deciding to pirate it, on the other hand, shows just how little your principles are worth to you - less than the entertainment afforded by a computer game, apparently.
I have no principle that would even remotely resemble "obey copyright law". In fact I consider copyright to be an abomination to be opposed and undermined at every opportunity.
Do not mistake your principles for universal ones.
Not being a troll here but I've read discussions between Germans where they say the reason privacy laws are above average were because certain politicians and business people wanted to keep their history about various 'associations' with certain a historical 'organisation' secret.
So basically, you are saying that the best way to guard civil liberties is to elect old Nazis?
Your goal is admirable, however every attempt at direct redistribution of wealth seems to fail.
Which is precisely why I defined the goal as ensuring a minimum standard of living, rather than redistributing wealth exactly or even approximately equally.
There are just too many who are willing to live on nothing rather than work.
I wonder if that would still be true in a world where work wasn't a necessity for survival, thought. More and more of menial labour is being done by robots; with advances in artificial intelligence we are fast approaching a point where no job has to be done by humans.
Doing nothing all day long is, in reality, pretty damn boring.
More success has been had with programs to ensure other basic needs, such as medical care, child care, etc. that allow people to improve their lives without being burdened by illnesses or family obligations.
However, in 50 years the world will be a far hungrier place - not necessarily in terms of food, but raw materials, water, energy (9+billion to share it between).
You are assuming that 50 years from now we'll have neither fusion nor an armada of solar power satellites beaming power to Earth. Any other resource can be acquired once there's enough energy.
And people wonder why Atlas Shrugged is still selling.
Atlas Shrugged is selling for the same reason superhero comics do: people like power fantasies. I'd imagine that it would sell even more in times like this, when people have their helplessness in the face of "market forces" clearly demonstrated once again.
Indeed, what kind of equality can one achieve in the first place?
Maybe we shouldn't be striving for equality, but for elevating the lowest? That is, rather than trying to make everyone equal, simply ensure that even those who are at the bottom of the pile have food, water, clothes, shelter, and generally acceptable standard of living; and, most important of all, have the means to participate in society and improve themselves, which nowadays pretty much requires an Internet connection.
IMHO the best way to do this would be to pay everyone a certain sum per month, enough to live on. One of the many problems with social security systems of today is that they are designed to prevent abuse, which results in them being tremendously complicated and pretty arbitrary. Make sure that people have a certain amount of income they can count on, and you empower them: they can make long-range plans and take whatever opportunity they happen to come by rather than worrying about losing their eligibility for SS. Also, knowing that you'll survive even if you'll become unemployed would cut down a lot on both abuses and stress of working life. Finally, getting an automatic payment with no strings attached would remove the necessity of any bureuecrat to go through your finances to decide whether you're eligible for it.
And even if it were worth dying for, would it be worth killing for?
This, actually, is a very good question, and one which I wish more people would ponder before starting their glorious revolutions for whatever goal.
I always point out to kids that Einstein didn't become famous when he came up with theory of relativity - he became famous when he wrote a paper about it and persuaded large numbers of fellow scientists to believe him.
Actually, Einstein became famous for explaining the photoelectric effect. Yeah, Einstein was the kind of guy who won a Nobel for his warm-up act:).
So even with an only 2 year old graphics card you have to reduce performance, 2 years is a way to frequent upgrade.
No, with a 2 year old graphics card you'll still get better graphics than with XBox 360, but not as good as with a new graphics card. You don't have to upgrade, you can simply drop the resolution a bit.
This is the whole damn problem, if you want to keep up with games in the PC world you have to upgrade or have the game operating at less than the designed intent.
PC games are designed for the average machine (which is also constantly getting better, BTW). The bleeding edge machines get even more eye candy (antialiasing, ultra-high resolution, etc.), but the game is perfectly playable with lower-end machines too.
Even games purchased in 2011 or 2012 will work the same on a 2005 model as it will on a 2012 model.
And are limited to 2005 tech, too.
get a gaming machine from 2007 or 2008 even and you will find you have to turn down the graphics on modern games.
Yes, but on a console, you can't turn them up from 2005's level. Not that graphics were really my point, but still...
Because I live in Scandinavia and changing tires(summer/winter) is most certainly relevant to safe driving?
Plus, Scandinavia is one of them ebul sociamolist places without poor people, so getting your tires changed is ~$100 (cost of labour only), and I'm paying 60% tax. It makes no sense for me to work two days more to afford something I could do myself in 30 minutes.
Um, what? I, too, live in Scandinavia, and it takes about $20 to change your tires in a repair shop - less than that if you use one of those temporary changing places that pop up at spring and fall.
Also, the only Scandinavian country where tax rate even goes to 60% is Denmark, and even there it tops at 62.28%, which would require you to be a top earner - according to Wikipedia, even the equivalent of $138,000 wouldn't hit even 50%, much less 60%. Which means there's no way in Hell you'd have to work for two days for a net gain of $100.
Dear government, you are (almost) always ineffective and always expensive. Please remember that and stick with doing your real job.
That is not the real problem here. What is is that using tax money to make iPhone apps is giving Apple an unfair advantage over its competitors at taxpayer's expense, making this yet another example of corporate welfare.
In this case, the point is moot. Anyone who supports an open standard platform for gaming gets my vote, greedy or not. Walled gardens, especially when they are the dominant garden in the park, are never good for consumer choice or price in the long run.
One should also remember that consoles hold back the development of games. Even something like XBox 360 has only 512 megs of memory, which severely limits how complex gameworlds it can represent; just compare with the 2 gigabytes minimum on newer PCs, and 6-8 gigs or more on high-end machines.
Keep in mind that while Avatar was unusually well-thought-out for a science fiction movie, interstellar travel is not even close to "real-life", so this doesn't really prove anything.
Avatar was ridiculous on multiple levels, and we could build interstellar craft right now if we wanted. However I suggest that we try to colonize this solar system first; Mars and Venus could probably be transformed into near-earthlike conditions, and Moon and other dead rocks too small to hold an atmosphere could support bubble-city colonies.
Slashdot Mirror
Or, better yet, the ability to automatically reject calls from anyone not on your phone's phonebook.
This, here, is the problem with capitalism.
This is the assumption behind giving people any amount of liberty. If you don't think they can be trusted to make rational choices, vote for communism.
To put it bluntly, this can't be prevented no matter what you do, and if someone really does this, the children need to be taken away from them.
I call bullshit. Most poor people won't, in fact, use the money they receive on booze and cigarettes while their children starve. If some do, the children need to be taken away and placed into orphanages.
Until another Newton or Einstein comes around.
Inelegant theories are a challenge. I think we're about to see another revolution in physics. Interesting times to be alive, these are.
Computers can work in any number system. Most work in binary, since that is the simplest possible. Hexadecimal has the advantage of being a power of two, but actually having the computer work with sixteen different voltage levels would be very difficult.
Yes, it is. Never forget!
We will fight them in the beaches! We will fight them in the moons of Neptune! We.. Will.. Keep... Our... Planets! All Nine of them! And when your silly phase of cosmological recidivism has become history, we'll still have our planet Pluto!
Each and every PC sold in the past few years is more capable than the latest generation of consoles. With a PC a developer himself can decide the constraints, with the consoles he gets what he gets and works with it.
Basically, what I'm saying is that the lowest common denominator for most PC's is higher than the one for most consoles.
True, a good developer will make a game that conforms to the limits of the hardware, just as the original "Metal Gear" did. That doesn't mean that those limits don't exist, nor does it mean that they don't limit what kind of game can work within them.
This is not about making "good games", this is about the evolution of games. Comples simulation games, for example, have traditionally been beyond consoles, since they just don't have the memory to hold the gameworld. They also have an inferior input system for that genre, but that could be worked around.
German laws apply everywhere Germany can and will project (military) power to. They don't apply anywhere else, such as in the United States (where Facebook is based).
Basically, it's a question of "can the court enforce it's decision"? That's what "jurisdiction" means.
Historically, it was. The key word here is "ancient": Rome was a good place for its time. We nowadays consider Hammurabi's Law - "an eye for an eye, and a tooth for a tooth" - to be horribly barbaric; but it's actually advocating the forward-thinking, touchy-feely position that the punishment should be proportional to the crime, rather than whatever the victim's anger drives him to inflict. It's asking for people to become better, just as all those things in the Old Testament people nowadays like to quote as evidence of abrahamic religions being horrible do; and we have become better, which is why the earlier worst acceptable behaviour now seems barbaric. I can only hope that our descendants a thousand years from now will consider us to be barbaric.
The government should serve the people. Hold it to that standard, don't let it just pay lip service to it. Demand that it serve you. The government sold you a line? Okay, hold it to it, don't be satisfied with anything less. Modern governments are better than Roman dictators or Kings of Divine Right, but only because people demanded that they be better. Don't let them or us slip back, make them ever better. Keep the progress going, and maybe - just maybe - we'll someday conquer the stars.
The court system is part of the government. Think of the constitutional court as the equivalent of superego, reining in the impulses of the less socially acceptable parts of the memetic entity that is a nation-state.
Corporations should have something similar; a legal department doesn't quite cut it.
Why would having a "face" matter? The money goes to upkeep roads, law, and civilization in general.
So basically, you are accusing Peer of demanding that the self-declared aristocracy be bound by the same laws as everyone else? And you have the never of accusing him of being full if himself?
And no, in "mos societies" there is no such agreement. Corruption is generally frowned upon.
I have no principle that would even remotely resemble "obey copyright law". In fact I consider copyright to be an abomination to be opposed and undermined at every opportunity.
Do not mistake your principles for universal ones.
So basically, you are saying that the best way to guard civil liberties is to elect old Nazis?
...The scary thing is that you're probably right.
Which is precisely why I defined the goal as ensuring a minimum standard of living, rather than redistributing wealth exactly or even approximately equally.
I wonder if that would still be true in a world where work wasn't a necessity for survival, thought. More and more of menial labour is being done by robots; with advances in artificial intelligence we are fast approaching a point where no job has to be done by humans.
Doing nothing all day long is, in reality, pretty damn boring.
That is kind of the point of "citizen pay".
You are assuming that 50 years from now we'll have neither fusion nor an armada of solar power satellites beaming power to Earth. Any other resource can be acquired once there's enough energy.
This is either a troll or epic irony.
Atlas Shrugged is selling for the same reason superhero comics do: people like power fantasies. I'd imagine that it would sell even more in times like this, when people have their helplessness in the face of "market forces" clearly demonstrated once again.
Maybe we shouldn't be striving for equality, but for elevating the lowest? That is, rather than trying to make everyone equal, simply ensure that even those who are at the bottom of the pile have food, water, clothes, shelter, and generally acceptable standard of living; and, most important of all, have the means to participate in society and improve themselves, which nowadays pretty much requires an Internet connection.
IMHO the best way to do this would be to pay everyone a certain sum per month, enough to live on. One of the many problems with social security systems of today is that they are designed to prevent abuse, which results in them being tremendously complicated and pretty arbitrary. Make sure that people have a certain amount of income they can count on, and you empower them: they can make long-range plans and take whatever opportunity they happen to come by rather than worrying about losing their eligibility for SS. Also, knowing that you'll survive even if you'll become unemployed would cut down a lot on both abuses and stress of working life. Finally, getting an automatic payment with no strings attached would remove the necessity of any bureuecrat to go through your finances to decide whether you're eligible for it.
This, actually, is a very good question, and one which I wish more people would ponder before starting their glorious revolutions for whatever goal.
Actually, Einstein became famous for explaining the photoelectric effect. Yeah, Einstein was the kind of guy who won a Nobel for his warm-up act :).
No, with a 2 year old graphics card you'll still get better graphics than with XBox 360, but not as good as with a new graphics card. You don't have to upgrade, you can simply drop the resolution a bit.
PC games are designed for the average machine (which is also constantly getting better, BTW). The bleeding edge machines get even more eye candy (antialiasing, ultra-high resolution, etc.), but the game is perfectly playable with lower-end machines too.
And are limited to 2005 tech, too.
Yes, but on a console, you can't turn them up from 2005's level. Not that graphics were really my point, but still...
Um, what? I, too, live in Scandinavia, and it takes about $20 to change your tires in a repair shop - less than that if you use one of those temporary changing places that pop up at spring and fall.
Also, the only Scandinavian country where tax rate even goes to 60% is Denmark, and even there it tops at 62.28%, which would require you to be a top earner - according to Wikipedia, even the equivalent of $138,000 wouldn't hit even 50%, much less 60%. Which means there's no way in Hell you'd have to work for two days for a net gain of $100.
Care to explain?
That is not the real problem here. What is is that using tax money to make iPhone apps is giving Apple an unfair advantage over its competitors at taxpayer's expense, making this yet another example of corporate welfare.
One should also remember that consoles hold back the development of games. Even something like XBox 360 has only 512 megs of memory, which severely limits how complex gameworlds it can represent; just compare with the 2 gigabytes minimum on newer PCs, and 6-8 gigs or more on high-end machines.
However, the book version is still far superior. But that's mainly because it gets inside the character's heads in ways the movie can't.
But the best Star Wars story is Darth Side, Darth Vader's blog. That's pure concentrated awesome in literary form.
Avatar was ridiculous on multiple levels, and we could build interstellar craft right now if we wanted. However I suggest that we try to colonize this solar system first; Mars and Venus could probably be transformed into near-earthlike conditions, and Moon and other dead rocks too small to hold an atmosphere could support bubble-city colonies.