It would be pretty cool to have an IR camera built into Google glass. Being able to see in the dark is pretty nifty. When I watch my son sleep in the crib on my tablet(using the infrared camera mounted in the room) I can see him so clearly, but when I go in there to give him his pacifier, and tuck him back in, I'm blind as a bat. Might be easier to just walk in there holding my tablet to see.
Buddy, I am ready and willing to hear out theories for how RF radiation can hurt me, but when they're so laughably vague such as this one, you make it very hard to keep an open mind.
You could take this same post to make an argument against heating devices with about the same level of effectiveness. Heat affects you in a "certain" way, and "may" cause "structures" to break by interacting with atoms and inducing chemical reactions. Studies have shown that higher levelsheat can cause people to report higher levels of "stress". It's better to live in "harmony" with the temperatures of the "natural" environment rather than "artificial" heat which can have unknown dangers associated with it. We should all take reasonable precautions to avoid heaters, stove tops, steamers, and fire.
I am open to the suggestion that it COULD be harmful, but since we're bathed in RF radiation all the time as it is, the burden of proof is shifting towards those who want to show that there IS harm.
The "appeasement" which is being referenced had taken place long before military movement. The close of WWI left behind a devastated and bankrupt nation subject which had agreed to never build up a military force and to pay out obscene amounts of restitution money to the allied forces.
Germany incrementally flouted the terms of the treaty and built up their military force while the Allied forces simply looked on and politely asked them to stop doing that. Part of why appeasement was used was because the allied forces were still incredibly war weary. Perhaps there was even a hint of guilt at the onerous terms of the peace treaty imposed on a country that had people starving in the streets. But ultimately choosing not to stop them allowed them to rebuild a powerful war economy with which to wage WWII.
Some postulate that a fairer peace treaty after WWI would allow both sides to save face and recover from the war with less desperation and bitterness on the losing side, which would be a much harder environment for someone like hitler to rally populist power. It's like 2 guys who got into a fight, one of them wins. If that winner keeps kicking the other guy in the face the other guy is more likely to want revenge. If the winner just swallows their resentment and walks away, the other guy is less likely to want revenge.
In fact, WWI was already on a path towards allied victory prior to American intervention. Some suggest that if the Americans had not joined WWI, then the Germans would have been forced to negotiate peace after their last weak attempt at an offensive. When two sides negotiate peace on equal terms, the terms will be more fair. However Americans did join the war, resulting in extremely lopsided negotiations that may have set the seeds for the rise of Hitler and WWII. Obviously this is all just postulation by historians though, nobody knows what really could have happened.
Hire a national accounting firm (which already has SALT (state and local tax) experts for each state) to write-up a treatise on sales tax for that state. Program the resulting reports into the database.
Just take in customer address, run it into database, spit out a sales tax number.
Got audited? Run a report off the transaction database. Law changed? Throw it in the auto-update.
These problems aren't impossible to solve, Turbotax has the federal income tax code pegged for 95% of the population, and they also have to fight hundreds of competitors who have also translated the federal income tax code into a database to sell. They create, update, and maintain these databases to sell this stuff to individuals for ~$30 a time (for state income tax reports based off the federal income tax report they'll handle for free)
My bet is that if state taxes on online transactions become the law for the nation, we'll have dozens of sales tax transaction layer vendors in less than a year, and have already bid each other into a market rate for sevices. I'll go further and bet that many of those vendors would come from the vendors already established above. The barrier of entry and the technical hurdles involved are low.
Government really isn't needed to provide this infrastructure. Private industry would do a better job with this. As complicated as taxes can be, once translated they can be standardized fairly easily. Look at the wealth of competition to Turbotax's product offerings. It just takes a handful of experts to examine the material once, translate into a template structure, and you have a streamlined process to offer as a product to everyone, covering every state in the country.
His parents are probably 47%ers. i.e people who get more from the gov't than they pay in each year...because they're retired and paying little if any tax besides capital gains on certain retirement investments, while receiving benefits from social programs they'd been paying through their taxes for most of their lives already.
Until recently I had no tablet because I had no need for one. But recently I bought a refurb. Nexus 7 for $162, because since having a baby, I need to be where the baby is. For the 3 months after he was born I had pretty much no access to electronics outside of work. If I want to consume some content, the phone is too small, laptop too clunky, and desktop is somewhere else in the house.
Thus the tablet is a perfect fit, it serves up the content at an ideal screen size as I walk around the house, and is held in one hand (especially important!), and serves as the video baby monitor I can take with me around the house.
Tablets had no purpose in my home...until they did.
Watches are probably going to be a harder sell. Possibly useful as a hands-free extension for smartphones, but I'm not a heavy phone user (living on a 150mb per month data cap), so it'll take a long time for me to find a use for a smart watch. But I'm sure there are plenty of people who can make use of them.
Much of the industry had already expected Ricitello to get fired months ago after it became clear that he'd directed hundreds of millions of dollars into Old Republic, and produced poor-to-lukewarm revenues from the result.
Putting that much investment into Old Republic was definitely the CEO's choice of direction. I agree with others above that SC5 was only the straw that broke the camel's back. Old Republic is what cracked it.
(It's not even that Old Republic was a bad game, it just produced really poor ROI after consuming an enormous amount of the company's investments).
Loved each iteration of this game in the series. Even the buggy turd that the first game was, it was still a ton of fun, and each successive game was even better than the last. Odd though it may seem, that insane description in the summary is just the natural progression of this franchise.
The game was already dancing around the edges of superpower fantasy blasting around the skies in VTOL jets, hoverbikes, skydiving, charging through a hail of gunfire, throwing people across the street. Now they're just going for it all out.
I like games that are innovative and push the boundaries of the medium with it's art or technological brilliance. SR3 wasn't one of them. But it was a polished game that was a TON of fun to play. There's room for me to enjoy both games that are mindless fun and games which are more introspective/groundbreaking.
Again, you're still talking about issues that have already been addressed in the existing online advertising industry. The activity is fully documented to support the summarized counter on the invoice, without that data they wouldn't have been able those send those reports in the first place. The advertiser has also been tracking their own reports activity, and when discrepancies are detected, the advertiser contacts the third party tracker in order to reconcile these discrepancies. by comparing the detail of the activity. The third-party tracker was brought in by the client in the first place because they don't want to rely on the advertiser's records alone.
In the case of the customer side of the record keeping, you just give them that activity detail. The information was already recorded, so just give them a copy if they want it. The documentation of the charges is trivial because it's already been done.
All of those are issues that are currently accounted for in the ad-tracking environment we have today. L'oreal wants ad-hits. They tell the online advertiser to get ad-impressions. Ads go up on websites, third-party tracker counts traffic, tells L'oreal and advertiser of the # of impressions that month. Then advertiser sends L'oreal a bill.
Difference here is that L'oreal(user) would just send the tracker money, tracker counts, then sends part of it to the advertiser, and reduces L'oreal's balance.
I'm not convinced that microtransacting a web browsing experience is a good idea either, but I don't believe that the implementation is the roadblock.
The implementation will likely follow after the current implementation of ad-based revenue generation via 3rd party trackers. A tracker monitors activity, accrues revenues, then just provides a monthly report by which the account gets settled/paid.
Users in this example would just fund their personal account with one-time or recurring transactions. All the of the "microtransacting" would just be debits/credits within the middleman's tracker, but there'd only be monthly wire transfers. 1 user hitting a website or 1m hitting a website, it'd still just be 1 wire transfer either way for the website, and 1 for each user.
Do you like to jack off at the dinner table too? I mean, it has no bearing on your ability to deliver product to spec on time right? It feels good and doesn't hurt anyone, so why isn't everyone doing it?
Conformity is in many situations, a winning strategy. Even if you know that there's nothing inherently wrong with your behavior, there is also a different form of intelligence that people use to evaluate the perceptions of others and adapt their behavior accordingly. If this was a business dinner, and I can tell that jacking off will make them feel uncomfortable, the smart thing to do is wait until they're gone first, so that I don't screw up a transaction that can benefit me.
For a demographic that tends to pride itself on knowledge, the decision whether or not to conform should be based on a proper understanding of the consequences of our actions and a conscious choice of whether the benefits outweigh the costs.
I don't mind wearing a dress shirt and slacks if I can get paid more for it, so I do it. Most people for better or for worse, interpret a sharply dressed co-worker as being smart and reliable. Those are perceptions I want to reinforce through my attire until they have worked with me long enough to form a judgement of me based on my performance. Besides, I don't believe that my attire, my ettiquette, and my social graces define my character and self-image. So why should I hamstring my professional dealings by imposing arbitrary "non-conformist" ideals on these meaningless things?
Further, I posit that someone making a conscious choice to conform to social norms is more thoughtful and free than someone making a knee-jerk choice to conform to a "non-conformist" subgroup with a separate set of norms (it'd still be blind obedience either way).
I'm not a fan of the other cryengine games either, but I actually did enjoy FC3. The best part of the game was circling around outposts to plan out an attack then taking it all down with your knife. Much more interesting gameplay there than just shooting them. The campaign missions were meh of course, because those took you out of the open world where you had the opportunity to plan out an attack.
But I imagine that impaired brain function leading to external manifestation of mental illness probably stems from the core functionality of 1 person's brain being damaged. I imagine that a network of minds would be comprised of independent nodes with separate internal functions. I would imagine mental issued from impaired brain function to remain localized.
If for example internal functions were also distributed, the solutions to that person's problem could also be distributed. If someone is raging because their brain function to calm down is broken, someone else's mental function could send that signal on their behalf. I don't imagine a few broken computers bringing down the internet. While viruses do propagate through the internet, anti-virus measures are also effectively propagating through the internet(though not autonomously).
Some ability is learned, some is innate, but the key thing to remember here is that the difference is not known without enough education to explore unrecognized potential.
Personally, I think programming should indeed be a part of school curriculum, even if only to a lowly introductory level. Because as the world grows increasingly complex and reliant upon the "magic" of software solutions. It becomes more and more important to have a working knowledge of how these solutions are developed, key inputs, constraints, potential applications. All programmers have to talk to a non-programmer at some point and have to explain away some of that non-programmers nonsensical expectations. They don't need to be an expert, but it helps to know what tech is capable of, and what it really takes to make a good product. Maybe they'll know that they really to think through their original project request in robust detail in terms of how they'll really use it in practical application, and put that stuff into the first plan, rather than passing down change orders that get increasingly more difficult the later they come in development. That basic background knowledge helps get everyone on the same page. I mean, I don't really need history in my day-to-day life, but it certainly wasn't a waste of my time.
A husband whose wife recently died is offered the chance to watch a record of his wife's lifetime.
I don't mind being recorded, and despite not having a very good memory, I don't record much of my life either. Not much I really NEED to remember vividly I suppose, I still remember the emotions, regret, fondness, etc. But with the birth of my son and so much to be thankful for right now, I'm thinking I will start to record more, for the day when I can't remember things I'll cherish most about my life.
For iOS, yes, non-gaming performance is just fine. Navigating and scrolling is perfectly smooth. In Android, there's still some stutter, but small enough to be merely a visual distraction rather than a performance issue.
In gaming performance, Tegra 3 is impressive, allowing graphics comparable to budget titles on today's console. The main problem with mobile games isn't being throttled by hardware, they're being throttled by their pay model. They can make a good game, but since they need to make money by constantly badgering you for money, they engineer game balance to make the experience garbage unless you're feeding it money regularly.
I'd rather just pay money up front and get a well balanced game, but that's just not the market we have today. I'm happy when I find games that don't sink to this level, but the overwhelming majority are glorified vending machines where the only way to get something out of the game is to keep feeding more money in. The kinds of games we see are still far behind the days of NES and SNES because of this pay model handicap on their design. The hardware certainly isn't holding them back in this regard.
But this pay model is dominant because that's what people want. I guess the place this would need to be fixed is in the hearts of the buyers.
HR made them do it. HR bases salaries on prior pay + % markup. So what if the person was underpaid in the prior position? What if they had built up their value so that they're worth more? HR blindly magnetizing pay to past amounts means that people end up getting paid less than their current actual value.
So if someone can only get meager increases because they're handcuffed to a low base pay, what can they do to catch up? Answer: Switch jobs more often. Since the increments are always going to be small, the answer is to get more of them.
You could've just kept the guy and avoided paying the recruiting/retraining/integration costs over and over by just paying that money to the guy you already have.
Thus, for most employees, the smart advice isn't to avoid changing jobs after less than 2 years, the smart advice is to avoid staying in a job for more than 3 years. Heck, even if you don't want to leave your current job, telling them you're about to leave (after 2-3yrs of tenure) is the only way to get them to give a real raise.
NY Times did a recent article on hiring practices, noting that many HR recruiters speak of ranking the resume sources. Referrals go to the top, HR hunt results come next, headhunting agency recommendations come next, and cold-call submissions/linkedin/monster/etc. are all at the bottom of the pile.
I think part of what made the subtle multiplayer elements of Journey successful was the anonymity and simplicity of it all.
There was very little other players could do in that game to be a complete asshole. This is important because average joes in multiplayer will often drop in an just bee-line straight for the maximum asshole threshold.
People played through Journey with strangers and bonded with them in the experience, often finding themselves surprised to find that it was with xxx420NeoYOLO420xxx. That was kinda brilliant on the part of the Journey devs, and it's tremendously harder in an FPS framework. Sweeping dramatic campaign experiences are a little tough with all of your teammates bunny-hopping like idiots, shooting off into the sky, and teabagging the fallen during an NPC's exposition.
Heck, if they even sayanything it'll break immersion for me. I like to lose myself in a story and embrace the drama as best I can (obviously easier in some games than others). But there is no chance I'm gong to be able to overlook a bratty 15-yr screaming racial slurs in his mike while drinking in one of those admittedly breathtaking vistas in the concept video.
As an adult with a young child, I actually prefer single player experiences. I think more and more gamers are following into this category as we all grow older. I don't know if this game is going to cater to my interests (and it's ok if it doesn't, I guess I'm just no longer part of the target audience).
If you have a C-Corp you've got 2 levels of taxation. The Corporation pays taxes, and then whatever the corp pays you, you pay taxes on the personal level too. Perhaps you have an S-Corp which is a pass-through for tax purposes.
Personal expenses aren't deductible. If you have dual-purpose expenses like a personal car used for business trips, you pro-rate the related expenses accordingly.
Slashdot Mirror
It would be pretty cool to have an IR camera built into Google glass. Being able to see in the dark is pretty nifty. When I watch my son sleep in the crib on my tablet(using the infrared camera mounted in the room) I can see him so clearly, but when I go in there to give him his pacifier, and tuck him back in, I'm blind as a bat. Might be easier to just walk in there holding my tablet to see.
Buddy, I am ready and willing to hear out theories for how RF radiation can hurt me, but when they're so laughably vague such as this one, you make it very hard to keep an open mind.
You could take this same post to make an argument against heating devices with about the same level of effectiveness. Heat affects you in a "certain" way, and "may" cause "structures" to break by interacting with atoms and inducing chemical reactions. Studies have shown that higher levelsheat can cause people to report higher levels of "stress". It's better to live in "harmony" with the temperatures of the "natural" environment rather than "artificial" heat which can have unknown dangers associated with it. We should all take reasonable precautions to avoid heaters, stove tops, steamers, and fire.
I am open to the suggestion that it COULD be harmful, but since we're bathed in RF radiation all the time as it is, the burden of proof is shifting towards those who want to show that there IS harm.
The "appeasement" which is being referenced had taken place long before military movement. The close of WWI left behind a devastated and bankrupt nation subject which had agreed to never build up a military force and to pay out obscene amounts of restitution money to the allied forces.
Germany incrementally flouted the terms of the treaty and built up their military force while the Allied forces simply looked on and politely asked them to stop doing that. Part of why appeasement was used was because the allied forces were still incredibly war weary. Perhaps there was even a hint of guilt at the onerous terms of the peace treaty imposed on a country that had people starving in the streets. But ultimately choosing not to stop them allowed them to rebuild a powerful war economy with which to wage WWII.
Some postulate that a fairer peace treaty after WWI would allow both sides to save face and recover from the war with less desperation and bitterness on the losing side, which would be a much harder environment for someone like hitler to rally populist power. It's like 2 guys who got into a fight, one of them wins. If that winner keeps kicking the other guy in the face the other guy is more likely to want revenge. If the winner just swallows their resentment and walks away, the other guy is less likely to want revenge.
In fact, WWI was already on a path towards allied victory prior to American intervention. Some suggest that if the Americans had not joined WWI, then the Germans would have been forced to negotiate peace after their last weak attempt at an offensive. When two sides negotiate peace on equal terms, the terms will be more fair. However Americans did join the war, resulting in extremely lopsided negotiations that may have set the seeds for the rise of Hitler and WWII. Obviously this is all just postulation by historians though, nobody knows what really could have happened.
Iraq's military was completely destroyed, and their resources exhausted back in 2003.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2003_Mission_Accomplished_speech
Dying didn't stop there though. The before/after body count is pretty lopsided.
Hire a national accounting firm (which already has SALT (state and local tax) experts for each state) to write-up a treatise on sales tax for that state. Program the resulting reports into the database.
Just take in customer address, run it into database, spit out a sales tax number.
Got audited? Run a report off the transaction database. Law changed? Throw it in the auto-update.
These problems aren't impossible to solve, Turbotax has the federal income tax code pegged for 95% of the population, and they also have to fight hundreds of competitors who have also translated the federal income tax code into a database to sell. They create, update, and maintain these databases to sell this stuff to individuals for ~$30 a time (for state income tax reports based off the federal income tax report they'll handle for free)
My bet is that if state taxes on online transactions become the law for the nation, we'll have dozens of sales tax transaction layer vendors in less than a year, and have already bid each other into a market rate for sevices. I'll go further and bet that many of those vendors would come from the vendors already established above. The barrier of entry and the technical hurdles involved are low.
Government really isn't needed to provide this infrastructure. Private industry would do a better job with this. As complicated as taxes can be, once translated they can be standardized fairly easily. Look at the wealth of competition to Turbotax's product offerings. It just takes a handful of experts to examine the material once, translate into a template structure, and you have a streamlined process to offer as a product to everyone, covering every state in the country.
This was my impression as well.
His parents are probably 47%ers. i.e people who get more from the gov't than they pay in each year...because they're retired and paying little if any tax besides capital gains on certain retirement investments, while receiving benefits from social programs they'd been paying through their taxes for most of their lives already.
Until recently I had no tablet because I had no need for one. But recently I bought a refurb. Nexus 7 for $162, because since having a baby, I need to be where the baby is. For the 3 months after he was born I had pretty much no access to electronics outside of work. If I want to consume some content, the phone is too small, laptop too clunky, and desktop is somewhere else in the house.
Thus the tablet is a perfect fit, it serves up the content at an ideal screen size as I walk around the house, and is held in one hand (especially important!), and serves as the video baby monitor I can take with me around the house.
Tablets had no purpose in my home...until they did.
Watches are probably going to be a harder sell. Possibly useful as a hands-free extension for smartphones, but I'm not a heavy phone user (living on a 150mb per month data cap), so it'll take a long time for me to find a use for a smart watch. But I'm sure there are plenty of people who can make use of them.
Much of the industry had already expected Ricitello to get fired months ago after it became clear that he'd directed hundreds of millions of dollars into Old Republic, and produced poor-to-lukewarm revenues from the result.
Putting that much investment into Old Republic was definitely the CEO's choice of direction. I agree with others above that SC5 was only the straw that broke the camel's back. Old Republic is what cracked it.
(It's not even that Old Republic was a bad game, it just produced really poor ROI after consuming an enormous amount of the company's investments).
Loved each iteration of this game in the series. Even the buggy turd that the first game was, it was still a ton of fun, and each successive game was even better than the last. Odd though it may seem, that insane description in the summary is just the natural progression of this franchise.
The game was already dancing around the edges of superpower fantasy blasting around the skies in VTOL jets, hoverbikes, skydiving, charging through a hail of gunfire, throwing people across the street. Now they're just going for it all out.
I like games that are innovative and push the boundaries of the medium with it's art or technological brilliance. SR3 wasn't one of them. But it was a polished game that was a TON of fun to play. There's room for me to enjoy both games that are mindless fun and games which are more introspective/groundbreaking.
Again, you're still talking about issues that have already been addressed in the existing online advertising industry. The activity is fully documented to support the summarized counter on the invoice, without that data they wouldn't have been able those send those reports in the first place. The advertiser has also been tracking their own reports activity, and when discrepancies are detected, the advertiser contacts the third party tracker in order to reconcile these discrepancies. by comparing the detail of the activity. The third-party tracker was brought in by the client in the first place because they don't want to rely on the advertiser's records alone.
In the case of the customer side of the record keeping, you just give them that activity detail. The information was already recorded, so just give them a copy if they want it. The documentation of the charges is trivial because it's already been done.
Medical/family/death issues are also possible. Or maybe he just wants to enjoy the fruits of his labor and roll around in his money for awhile.
All of those are issues that are currently accounted for in the ad-tracking environment we have today. L'oreal wants ad-hits. They tell the online advertiser to get ad-impressions. Ads go up on websites, third-party tracker counts traffic, tells L'oreal and advertiser of the # of impressions that month. Then advertiser sends L'oreal a bill.
Difference here is that L'oreal(user) would just send the tracker money, tracker counts, then sends part of it to the advertiser, and reduces L'oreal's balance.
I'm not convinced that microtransacting a web browsing experience is a good idea either, but I don't believe that the implementation is the roadblock.
The implementation will likely follow after the current implementation of ad-based revenue generation via 3rd party trackers. A tracker monitors activity, accrues revenues, then just provides a monthly report by which the account gets settled/paid.
Users in this example would just fund their personal account with one-time or recurring transactions. All the of the "microtransacting" would just be debits/credits within the middleman's tracker, but there'd only be monthly wire transfers. 1 user hitting a website or 1m hitting a website, it'd still just be 1 wire transfer either way for the website, and 1 for each user.
Do you like to jack off at the dinner table too? I mean, it has no bearing on your ability to deliver product to spec on time right? It feels good and doesn't hurt anyone, so why isn't everyone doing it?
Conformity is in many situations, a winning strategy. Even if you know that there's nothing inherently wrong with your behavior, there is also a different form of intelligence that people use to evaluate the perceptions of others and adapt their behavior accordingly. If this was a business dinner, and I can tell that jacking off will make them feel uncomfortable, the smart thing to do is wait until they're gone first, so that I don't screw up a transaction that can benefit me.
For a demographic that tends to pride itself on knowledge, the decision whether or not to conform should be based on a proper understanding of the consequences of our actions and a conscious choice of whether the benefits outweigh the costs.
I don't mind wearing a dress shirt and slacks if I can get paid more for it, so I do it. Most people for better or for worse, interpret a sharply dressed co-worker as being smart and reliable. Those are perceptions I want to reinforce through my attire until they have worked with me long enough to form a judgement of me based on my performance. Besides, I don't believe that my attire, my ettiquette, and my social graces define my character and self-image. So why should I hamstring my professional dealings by imposing arbitrary "non-conformist" ideals on these meaningless things?
Further, I posit that someone making a conscious choice to conform to social norms is more thoughtful and free than someone making a knee-jerk choice to conform to a "non-conformist" subgroup with a separate set of norms (it'd still be blind obedience either way).
I'm not a fan of the other cryengine games either, but I actually did enjoy FC3. The best part of the game was circling around outposts to plan out an attack then taking it all down with your knife. Much more interesting gameplay there than just shooting them. The campaign missions were meh of course, because those took you out of the open world where you had the opportunity to plan out an attack.
I am talking out of my ass here:
But I imagine that impaired brain function leading to external manifestation of mental illness probably stems from the core functionality of 1 person's brain being damaged. I imagine that a network of minds would be comprised of independent nodes with separate internal functions. I would imagine mental issued from impaired brain function to remain localized.
If for example internal functions were also distributed, the solutions to that person's problem could also be distributed. If someone is raging because their brain function to calm down is broken, someone else's mental function could send that signal on their behalf. I don't imagine a few broken computers bringing down the internet. While viruses do propagate through the internet, anti-virus measures are also effectively propagating through the internet(though not autonomously).
Some ability is learned, some is innate, but the key thing to remember here is that the difference is not known without enough education to explore unrecognized potential.
Personally, I think programming should indeed be a part of school curriculum, even if only to a lowly introductory level. Because as the world grows increasingly complex and reliant upon the "magic" of software solutions. It becomes more and more important to have a working knowledge of how these solutions are developed, key inputs, constraints, potential applications. All programmers have to talk to a non-programmer at some point and have to explain away some of that non-programmers nonsensical expectations. They don't need to be an expert, but it helps to know what tech is capable of, and what it really takes to make a good product. Maybe they'll know that they really to think through their original project request in robust detail in terms of how they'll really use it in practical application, and put that stuff into the first plan, rather than passing down change orders that get increasingly more difficult the later they come in development. That basic background knowledge helps get everyone on the same page. I mean, I don't really need history in my day-to-day life, but it certainly wasn't a waste of my time.
When I see this topic, I think of "Snow" by John Crowley:
http://www.lightspeedmagazine.com/fiction/snow/
A husband whose wife recently died is offered the chance to watch a record of his wife's lifetime.
I don't mind being recorded, and despite not having a very good memory, I don't record much of my life either. Not much I really NEED to remember vividly I suppose, I still remember the emotions, regret, fondness, etc. But with the birth of my son and so much to be thankful for right now, I'm thinking I will start to record more, for the day when I can't remember things I'll cherish most about my life.
For iOS, yes, non-gaming performance is just fine. Navigating and scrolling is perfectly smooth. In Android, there's still some stutter, but small enough to be merely a visual distraction rather than a performance issue.
In gaming performance, Tegra 3 is impressive, allowing graphics comparable to budget titles on today's console. The main problem with mobile games isn't being throttled by hardware, they're being throttled by their pay model. They can make a good game, but since they need to make money by constantly badgering you for money, they engineer game balance to make the experience garbage unless you're feeding it money regularly.
I'd rather just pay money up front and get a well balanced game, but that's just not the market we have today. I'm happy when I find games that don't sink to this level, but the overwhelming majority are glorified vending machines where the only way to get something out of the game is to keep feeding more money in. The kinds of games we see are still far behind the days of NES and SNES because of this pay model handicap on their design. The hardware certainly isn't holding them back in this regard.
But this pay model is dominant because that's what people want. I guess the place this would need to be fixed is in the hearts of the buyers.
HR made them do it. HR bases salaries on prior pay + % markup. So what if the person was underpaid in the prior position? What if they had built up their value so that they're worth more? HR blindly magnetizing pay to past amounts means that people end up getting paid less than their current actual value.
So if someone can only get meager increases because they're handcuffed to a low base pay, what can they do to catch up? Answer: Switch jobs more often. Since the increments are always going to be small, the answer is to get more of them.
You could've just kept the guy and avoided paying the recruiting/retraining/integration costs over and over by just paying that money to the guy you already have.
Thus, for most employees, the smart advice isn't to avoid changing jobs after less than 2 years, the smart advice is to avoid staying in a job for more than 3 years. Heck, even if you don't want to leave your current job, telling them you're about to leave (after 2-3yrs of tenure) is the only way to get them to give a real raise.
NY Times did a recent article on hiring practices, noting that many HR recruiters speak of ranking the resume sources. Referrals go to the top, HR hunt results come next, headhunting agency recommendations come next, and cold-call submissions/linkedin/monster/etc. are all at the bottom of the pile.
Consoles have always been proprietary PCs.
The hardware changes constantly, the difference between console and PC in gaming has always been about who has control over the environment.
I think part of what made the subtle multiplayer elements of Journey successful was the anonymity and simplicity of it all.
There was very little other players could do in that game to be a complete asshole. This is important because average joes in multiplayer will often drop in an just bee-line straight for the maximum asshole threshold.
People played through Journey with strangers and bonded with them in the experience, often finding themselves surprised to find that it was with xxx420NeoYOLO420xxx. That was kinda brilliant on the part of the Journey devs, and it's tremendously harder in an FPS framework. Sweeping dramatic campaign experiences are a little tough with all of your teammates bunny-hopping like idiots, shooting off into the sky, and teabagging the fallen during an NPC's exposition.
Heck, if they even sayanything it'll break immersion for me. I like to lose myself in a story and embrace the drama as best I can (obviously easier in some games than others). But there is no chance I'm gong to be able to overlook a bratty 15-yr screaming racial slurs in his mike while drinking in one of those admittedly breathtaking vistas in the concept video.
As an adult with a young child, I actually prefer single player experiences. I think more and more gamers are following into this category as we all grow older. I don't know if this game is going to cater to my interests (and it's ok if it doesn't, I guess I'm just no longer part of the target audience).
If you have a C-Corp you've got 2 levels of taxation. The Corporation pays taxes, and then whatever the corp pays you, you pay taxes on the personal level too. Perhaps you have an S-Corp which is a pass-through for tax purposes.
Personal expenses aren't deductible. If you have dual-purpose expenses like a personal car used for business trips, you pro-rate the related expenses accordingly.