I was interested originally as I grow tropical plants like orchids and cacti here in the UK, and getting the blue coating on some, especially seedlings grown under artificial lights through the winter was always an exercise in getting the right amount of lighting at the right wavelengths but I bought such a stock of bulbs at the time I haven't had to remember what I needed since!
Yeah, in all honesty I'm in the camp that there is still some hope for Blackberry, people still underestimate it's presence - it still has more than double the market share of Windows Phone, and it still shifts one Blackberry for every 3 or so iPhones sold which given the volumes Apple sells and the profits they make still allows Blackberry a pretty viable business model.
I just felt the guy I was originally responding too sounded a little too desperately like he was trying to pump their stock.
This said, I still think they'd be a far richer company if they focussed on producing Blackberry business integration software for Android and iOS as well as or instead of pursuing their own hardware/OS line. There's a massive amount of money in the software services industry - look at Oracle and IBM, and mobile business integration is still shit and they're best placed to offer it and tie it all up. If they became the defacto standard for business integration for mobile phones again by supporting other platforms they'd be laughing given the explosion in the size of the market in recent years.
I agree there's nothing wrong with it, but to some people learning more about the subject is in itself what they enjoy and is relaxing for them. Those people are always going to learn more and be better workers in a subject area as a result.
Countries like Greece could easily pull out of the euro but they want to stay in it because it benefits them - to say it benefits Germany/France doesn't make a lot of sense as it's mutually beneficial - it's devalued by the economically weak countries making German exports cheaper outside the EU, but increased in value by countries like France and Germany which increases their spending power. Also, the option of pulling out has always been on the ballot but pro-euro parties have always won out - the Greek people have consistently voted to keep the euro.
The problems are far deeper, an unsustainably low retirement age, high public spending, absurd levels of debt, falsified public accounts, and a tax system that is fiddled by the general public en-mass is never going to work. Blaming Germany for wanting to change that towards a more sustainable model like theirs if they stay in the euro is fucking nuts.
I can't really understand why people would bitch about the German model when it's clearly successful and when Germany has a fairly healthy, happy, populace. Most countries would absolutely love to have an economic model as healthy as Germany's, but yes, that does mean you'll have to retire after 60, you will have to pay taxes, and you will have to be able to balance your budget. How awful.
I'd love to know what was flamebait about this. Are there people in countries like Greece who honestly believe their economy was sustainable in the face of the fact that it obviously by definition wasn't given that it collapsed? Are there people who believe the German economic model doesn't work even though it does?
I was wondering what effect the light might have, but from my rudimentary knowledge, if the light emitted was in the green wavelengths I think it wouldn't matter?
From what I can remember, I believe plants are normally stimulated into vegetative growth by light in the blue wavelengths, and into flower by light in the red wavelengths (or lack of if nocturnal flowering? is that right? I can't remember). Although this differs for some species (such as those that live in water) for the most part it remains true and would for something like Arabidopsis. I was under the impression though that green wavelength light has no effect on them.
Do you know if this is the case? or could green wavelength light still potentially cause etiolation in them?
Given that both birds and reptiles come in all sorts of colours with all sorts of patterns I can't help but feel that your post has placed me firmly back where I was before I started reading it.
"So, according to your very specific situation all others are wrong. Hmm, great way to form an opinion, I guess, makes your life very simple."
AFAIK far more countries in the EU use a less democratic voting system than that used for electing the EP, so it's not exactly a vary specific situation - it's relevant to the majority of UK voters (well over 70% live in safe-seat areas) and I believe the majority of EU citizens in general.
The irony in your comment though is that Germany is one of the few countries that does have a decent, healthy democracy, so it's ironically your situation that is relatively unique. Countries like here in the UK our government isn't accountable to the electorate either for the most part, because they're usually only elected by circa 30% - 40% of the population and certainly not a majority.
"and VERY far removed from the population of the EU countries (how often do you even read anything about the parliament in your newspaper?)"
This is always going to be the case because it represents so many different countries. The chance of it hence just happening to align with any one country is pretty much nil.
"The EU is designed to achieve things that the people don't want, whether that happened on purpose or by accident I cannot tell (but it does not matter for the result)."
It was designed that way partly on purpose, because there was a will to avoid a situation whereby the population of a country like Germany ended up screwing the rest of Europe ever again. It was designed to create some kind of accountability to nations that go to far in some direction and bring them back in to line to keep Europe stable. That might suck when you have a country that's going too far in some direction, but it's actually better for everyone in general even if they don't realise it at the time. A stable Europe that protects human rights, keeps countries afloat, makes it easier to do business, makes it easier to travel, creates accountability for governments and so forth is way better than the alternative - the complete mishmash of train wrecks we had before.
You've got to realise that however painful it is for countries like Germany propping up Greece and so forth that that's still better than what we had before, where failed European states were what led to fascism and Nazism across the continent. Even with the bailouts in Greece we've seen a rise of the likes of the far right Golden Dawn party, how do you think it would look if Europe wasn't there to keep it in line and to prop it up such that it collapsed and veered even further towards far-right nationalism?
The EU keeps Europe stable, it keeps Europe strong, it keeps wars out of the continent, and is the reason why the EU economic zone is the biggest economy in the world. Perhaps when you look at the bigger picture like this you'll understand why it's far better to try and improve the EU, than to destroy it.
I think you're conflating two issues such that I think what you say is misleading.
I agree that someone who is passionate about what they do and does it in their spare time is on average going to be better than someone who just does it for a day job and then goes home and doesn't touch it. I don't think there's much room to argue that.
But the problem with you comment is with your implication that open source is the only way of doing this- that's complete bollocks. There are many things you can do that are programming related from reading CS theory to doing contract work, to just dicking around with code and not producing anything fit for public consumption that will similarly boost your experience but wont do anything for your github profile.
I'd take the person doing postgrad study in their spare time of maths/cs and has produced some rough code to do something new and unique any day over someone who has padded their github profile with a bunch of menial fixes/changes that a school dropout who hasn't even started their undergrad studies could do just as well for example.
I suspect there's nothing statistically better about publicly open source developers than non-open source developers quite frankly or if you believe there is, I'd love to see some genuine evidence of that.
"The point is, the EU is the LEAST democratic thing that Europe has come up with since WWII ended"
Technically as a British citizen I have more of a say in the EU than I do my own country due to the fact the EP uses proportional representation whilst the UK uses FPTP and I live in a safe-seat area.
This means no matter how small, my vote in the EP still has more effect and more relevance than my vote in British national elections.
"and it gets worse and worse"
It does? The Lisbon treaty and a number of others have actually decreased the powers of the unelected bodies of the EU whilst increasing the powers of the elected bodies, so how is this the case? It still has some way to go, but it's certainly not getting worse in this respect.
People are just pissy at the EU right now because they're looking at anything to blame other than themselves. Yes, I'm talking about people like the Greeks who thought it was a good idea to protest to maintain the ability to retire in their 50s, work a short working week, and have a tax system that was in effect pretty much just optional. Euroscepticism in the UK has the same problem, eurosceptics forget that EU membership was instrumental in pulling us out of the shit after our economy crashed in the 70s.
But perhaps more importantly, people also forget how bad Europe was before the EU - if you think things are bad now...
"Because you're giving up your freedom to manage your own country? Yes, you do get a small stake in where EU is going but it comes at the expense of jumping when Brussels says jump."
But you do that anyway. Because you want the trade.
"Just because 75% of Canada's exports go to the US doesn't mean that Canada wants to apply to become the 51st US state and answer to Washington DC."
Sure, but it has signed up to NAFTA etc. and fulfilled it's obligations under that which is a similar thing. Canada will still often follow the will of the US because there's far too much to lose in not doing so.
"if the EU don't want to offer us a fair deal we could always sell our oil and gas elsewhere."
Therein lies the problem with Euroscepticism, it's higher the more successful a country is, but when your oil and gas runs out? You'll be desperate to be a member of the EU. The UK has always been the same, when our economy tanked and we needed an IMF bailout most the country was behind EU membership, but now it's other EU members that are struggling the eurosceptics want out. It's horribly selfish and horribly pathetic. It's also stupidly short sighted - if we pull out of the EU in the UK and our economy goes down the pan again, do those real eurosceptics think the EU would help pull us out of the shit again? That's a rhetorical question, they've not even considered the possibility because they're too stupid and short sighted.
But on another know, who will you sell your oil and gas to exactly? China? Africa? The US? Why would any of these countries want to buy your oil and gas when you'd have to ship it via sea in limited amounts when they can just buy it from other countries that can get it to them much more cheaply via pipeline? Or do you expect EU nations to let you build a pipeline through their countries after you shunned them with selfishness?
"Another example of excessive fear is Schengen, yes it would be bad if we'd need passports to cross into Sweden but it would be horribly expensive for Sweden to build thousands of kilometers of exterior border control too, it's not like we need to beg the EU because it's in their best interest too."
As an interesting aside, your country has no border controls outside of the Shengen zone anyway in my experience.
When I flew into Narvik from the UK which isn't a Shengen country they let me just walk straight off the plane and out the airport without a passport check or anything anyway. Flying out was the same.
I figured this was possibly in part because they figure no one in their right mind would want to smuggle themselves somewhere so far north so just assume anyone that's going up there must be there legitimately. Maybe they're a bit more careful with that sort of thing in places like Oslo. That or maybe they just work on the principle that British airport security is so anal that anyone getting through there must be okay and anyone heading back there will get caught by them if there's a problem.
But compare, how successful was their previous non-German economic model? At least the German model is proven to work, so are you advocating that they should've stayed with models that collapsed and demonstrably did not work?
You see barren fields because they do not have enough fertile land because the areas that do have fertile land have been taken over by warlords and so forth to feed their armies.
There was no working agricultural market long before food aid became a thing and war has exacerbated the problem even longer.
So your solution seems to effectively be let market forces/survival of the fittest play out - i.e. let there be a situation where it's only the warlords that are left. That's okay, but don't come crying when it's AQIM or similar that blows up your marathon next time because that's the solution you're asking for - one where the armed warlords have total control.
As has been pointed out by others, if people are starving in a region there's clearly no functioning market for them to buy from in the first place. That's kind of the fucking point.
If people are starving then there's no functioning market. If there's no functioning market, then there's no market for food aid to displace.
Yes, except if African farmers were able to meet demand then there wouldn't be any famine issues would there?
That argument doesn't make sense, for there to be a competition issue there'd have to be a competitive market, the fact in parts of Africa there just isn't enough food to survive means there's no market to be displaced in the first place.
I normally tend to agree because I think FPTP is an abomination.
But this time round I think it's the most legitimate government we've had in years. It's a government that between the two parties involved actually got a majority of the popular vote. The policies that have stemmed from it are are roughly proportional split based somewhat on those proportions - for example, the Tories wanted £12,000 tuition fees, the Lib Dems wanted the status quo, The end result was £9,000.
This is a government that only really the people can take responsibility for. Most people didn't vote Lib Dem so don't have the right to complain that they didn't block tuition fee increases for because that's what most the population voted for (i.e. the 77% that didn't vote Lib Dem).
We really did get pretty much what we voted for this time.
The problem is he probably also didn't foresee that he might be in a coalition government.
The things that irk me about the tuition fee debate are:
1) At least 77% of people who bitch (seeing as everyone bitches about it and the Lib Dems only got 23% of popular vote) about the tuition fee cannot complain. The Lib Dem policy was that they would ditch tuition fees if they got power - if people wanted tuition fees ditched or at best to stay the same, they should've all voted lib dem. You cannot vote Tory/Labour/UKIP/Whoever who were clearly for an increase in fees and then bitch at the Lib Dems when they fail to stop an increase - most of the population voted for an increase at the end of the day, so the Lib Dems were outvoted by the general public on the issue. An increase in tuition fees is what about 77% of the UK's population asked for. That's how democracy works - you don't get to vote for parties that are against something you want, then bitch when that doesn't happen - you fucking voted for it. Hence, the only people with a right to bitch are people who actually voted Lib Dem.
2) The Tories wanted £12,000 tuition fees, the Lib Dems got them down to £9,000. A £3,000 drop is a roughly proportional drop in the Tory proposals relative to their share of coalition legitimacy towards their pledged goal. In other words, the Lib Dems got what they asked for relative to their democratic legitimacy. Again, blame the fucking voters who voted for increases in tuition fees.
Finally, where the Lib Dems really went wrong was in actually voting for the £9,000 increase. They did this because they naively believed that if they fulfilled their side of the bargain, that the Tories would fulfil theirs. This turned out to be naive and foolish given that they got fucked on the greater and more fundamentally important goals of electoral and Lords reform amongst other things.
The problem is for all their faults, I still do think they're the best option. Each time Ed Milliband gets on TV or in the papers he tells us he wants to restore the money for nothing state with money we don't have - just this morning he said he'd restore the highest tax band back up to 50% and use that money to give more handouts to people with kids or who don't work much. Here's a better idea - why not use that money to invest in something that will actually grow our economy in a worthwhile manner, or to shrink the deficit and hence debt? Labour has also made it clear they still desperately what ID card databases and other surveillance plans that were key in them getting kicked out last time.
Then you have the Tories, which are plagued by irrational debate on Europe based primarily on xenophobia and who are at the other end of the economic extreme and aren't willing to accept that maybe at least some of their cuts haven't been particularly well thought out, and hence refuse to backtrack or do something to fix the badly thought out ones. They're plagued by infighting between the younger more moderate Tories and the old fuckwads who hate gays, foreigners, and women with, for some reason, that vocal older minority being given too much of their own way.
Then there's the rise of the far right in suits - UKIP, I don't think much more needs to be said about them other than the fact they're racist, anti-gay bigots, whose economic plan is completely nonsensical - they actually think we could magically replace the lost of 1/3rd of our economic exports with trade elsewhere overnight if Europe opted to shun us post pull out, combined with removing the limit on working hours. Farage actually genuinely believes that by simply trading with other nations and getting the whole country to work 80 to 120 hour weeks we could write off Europe completely - he thinks productivity scales linearly with hours worked and thinks there would be no health or social problems that would arise from that.
So of the mainstream all that's left is the Lib Dem
Yep, saying Europe needs GMO crops is ridiculous when it ends up with massive surplus each year that it has literally nothing to use for other than destroy.
If anything we should be working to get those stockpiles to places that really need it like parts of Africa, then they wont need GMO crops either.
I can't speak for ATI in recent years, but certainly between 2000 and 2007 when I worked for an organisation with over 6,000 systems, ATI drivers were a consistent pain in the arse and consistently caused support headaches. Perhaps surprisingly, the only other driver issues that came close were HP printer drivers, which for some time would commonly cause Word to crash in print preview. ATI was definitely a major outlier in terms of high number of support issues caused on this pretty large sample size of systems (that were actually split pretty evenly in terms of graphics between ATI, nVidia, and Intel).
We did have nVidia issues too, but they weren't anything out of the ordinary relative to faults with Intel graphics and other hardware.
Maybe things have changed since then, but certainly in that era there seemed little question that ATI had major quality control issues with it's drivers and those issues persisted for at least the full 7 years I worked at that organisation.
Yeah, even for URLs and e-mail addresses too. They need to make it work for that sort of thing as well as it does for plain English then it'd negate the need for hardware keyboards on mobile devices altogether IMO!
Sure, this is why ability to network is more important in succeeding in the business world than any ability to produce anything useful. But hopefully we can at least stop pretending the Summly story is something it wasn't and recognise it for what it was - a kid born with a silver spoon, and no particular stand out talent, having his career set up for him very publicly by his already wealthy father.
Summly seems to have been the biggest "boy genius" swindle of the 21st century so far.
Basically, his Dad is a director at the investment arm of one of the biggest banks in the world. He got a number of well known names (Steven Fry, Ashton Kutcher, the Murdochs) to invest in the app and use their popularity (or in Murdoch's case, media wing) to publicise it.
The company itself wasn't run by the kid, it was run by a silicon valley veteran who again, his dad got on board. The complicated development (the article processing etc.) was done by a 3rd party, and the Android version was being developed by a 3rd party also. Internally, there was not much left to do apart from the iOS front end for the outsourced back end, and given that he had another veteran silicon valley dev working as a developer there (and I believe more developers on top) I'm not entirely sure whether the kid himself actually even wrote a single line of code.
His mother is a lawyer, who I understand works for, or has done some work for Yahoo too prior to the acquisition. That probably helped things along too.
So you're right, I'd say these things aren't likely to happen for most people. Unless your dad just happens to be a director at a major investment bank and just happens to know some of the most wealthy people around who also just happen to have strong media platforms to hype your product from that is.
Slashdot Mirror
I'm not sure if this will interest you, but I just dug out a tidied up version of the original post I read a few years ago:
http://www.coronacactus.com/article_bluecacti.htm
I was interested originally as I grow tropical plants like orchids and cacti here in the UK, and getting the blue coating on some, especially seedlings grown under artificial lights through the winter was always an exercise in getting the right amount of lighting at the right wavelengths but I bought such a stock of bulbs at the time I haven't had to remember what I needed since!
Yeah, in all honesty I'm in the camp that there is still some hope for Blackberry, people still underestimate it's presence - it still has more than double the market share of Windows Phone, and it still shifts one Blackberry for every 3 or so iPhones sold which given the volumes Apple sells and the profits they make still allows Blackberry a pretty viable business model.
I just felt the guy I was originally responding too sounded a little too desperately like he was trying to pump their stock.
This said, I still think they'd be a far richer company if they focussed on producing Blackberry business integration software for Android and iOS as well as or instead of pursuing their own hardware/OS line. There's a massive amount of money in the software services industry - look at Oracle and IBM, and mobile business integration is still shit and they're best placed to offer it and tie it all up. If they became the defacto standard for business integration for mobile phones again by supporting other platforms they'd be laughing given the explosion in the size of the market in recent years.
So what you're saying is "Please please please, everyone else, just please buy Blackberry shares so I can cash out"?
I agree there's nothing wrong with it, but to some people learning more about the subject is in itself what they enjoy and is relaxing for them. Those people are always going to learn more and be better workers in a subject area as a result.
I'm not sure that's true, it's not as if that's a big enough export area to justify such problems.
More likely I think Germany simply believed Greece when the Greek government told them it was all okay.
Countries like Greece could easily pull out of the euro but they want to stay in it because it benefits them - to say it benefits Germany/France doesn't make a lot of sense as it's mutually beneficial - it's devalued by the economically weak countries making German exports cheaper outside the EU, but increased in value by countries like France and Germany which increases their spending power. Also, the option of pulling out has always been on the ballot but pro-euro parties have always won out - the Greek people have consistently voted to keep the euro.
The problems are far deeper, an unsustainably low retirement age, high public spending, absurd levels of debt, falsified public accounts, and a tax system that is fiddled by the general public en-mass is never going to work. Blaming Germany for wanting to change that towards a more sustainable model like theirs if they stay in the euro is fucking nuts.
I can't really understand why people would bitch about the German model when it's clearly successful and when Germany has a fairly healthy, happy, populace. Most countries would absolutely love to have an economic model as healthy as Germany's, but yes, that does mean you'll have to retire after 60, you will have to pay taxes, and you will have to be able to balance your budget. How awful.
I'd love to know what was flamebait about this. Are there people in countries like Greece who honestly believe their economy was sustainable in the face of the fact that it obviously by definition wasn't given that it collapsed? Are there people who believe the German economic model doesn't work even though it does?
I was wondering what effect the light might have, but from my rudimentary knowledge, if the light emitted was in the green wavelengths I think it wouldn't matter?
From what I can remember, I believe plants are normally stimulated into vegetative growth by light in the blue wavelengths, and into flower by light in the red wavelengths (or lack of if nocturnal flowering? is that right? I can't remember). Although this differs for some species (such as those that live in water) for the most part it remains true and would for something like Arabidopsis. I was under the impression though that green wavelength light has no effect on them.
Do you know if this is the case? or could green wavelength light still potentially cause etiolation in them?
Given that both birds and reptiles come in all sorts of colours with all sorts of patterns I can't help but feel that your post has placed me firmly back where I was before I started reading it.
"So, according to your very specific situation all others are wrong. Hmm, great way to form an opinion, I guess, makes your life very simple."
AFAIK far more countries in the EU use a less democratic voting system than that used for electing the EP, so it's not exactly a vary specific situation - it's relevant to the majority of UK voters (well over 70% live in safe-seat areas) and I believe the majority of EU citizens in general.
The irony in your comment though is that Germany is one of the few countries that does have a decent, healthy democracy, so it's ironically your situation that is relatively unique. Countries like here in the UK our government isn't accountable to the electorate either for the most part, because they're usually only elected by circa 30% - 40% of the population and certainly not a majority.
"and VERY far removed from the population of the EU countries (how often do you even read anything about the parliament in your newspaper?)"
This is always going to be the case because it represents so many different countries. The chance of it hence just happening to align with any one country is pretty much nil.
"The EU is designed to achieve things that the people don't want, whether that happened on purpose or by accident I cannot tell (but it does not matter for the result)."
It was designed that way partly on purpose, because there was a will to avoid a situation whereby the population of a country like Germany ended up screwing the rest of Europe ever again. It was designed to create some kind of accountability to nations that go to far in some direction and bring them back in to line to keep Europe stable. That might suck when you have a country that's going too far in some direction, but it's actually better for everyone in general even if they don't realise it at the time. A stable Europe that protects human rights, keeps countries afloat, makes it easier to do business, makes it easier to travel, creates accountability for governments and so forth is way better than the alternative - the complete mishmash of train wrecks we had before.
You've got to realise that however painful it is for countries like Germany propping up Greece and so forth that that's still better than what we had before, where failed European states were what led to fascism and Nazism across the continent. Even with the bailouts in Greece we've seen a rise of the likes of the far right Golden Dawn party, how do you think it would look if Europe wasn't there to keep it in line and to prop it up such that it collapsed and veered even further towards far-right nationalism?
The EU keeps Europe stable, it keeps Europe strong, it keeps wars out of the continent, and is the reason why the EU economic zone is the biggest economy in the world. Perhaps when you look at the bigger picture like this you'll understand why it's far better to try and improve the EU, than to destroy it.
I think you're conflating two issues such that I think what you say is misleading.
I agree that someone who is passionate about what they do and does it in their spare time is on average going to be better than someone who just does it for a day job and then goes home and doesn't touch it. I don't think there's much room to argue that.
But the problem with you comment is with your implication that open source is the only way of doing this- that's complete bollocks. There are many things you can do that are programming related from reading CS theory to doing contract work, to just dicking around with code and not producing anything fit for public consumption that will similarly boost your experience but wont do anything for your github profile.
I'd take the person doing postgrad study in their spare time of maths/cs and has produced some rough code to do something new and unique any day over someone who has padded their github profile with a bunch of menial fixes/changes that a school dropout who hasn't even started their undergrad studies could do just as well for example.
I suspect there's nothing statistically better about publicly open source developers than non-open source developers quite frankly or if you believe there is, I'd love to see some genuine evidence of that.
"high-quality Hollywood entertainment."
Ho-ho-ho.
Good one.
"The point is, the EU is the LEAST democratic thing that Europe has come up with since WWII ended"
Technically as a British citizen I have more of a say in the EU than I do my own country due to the fact the EP uses proportional representation whilst the UK uses FPTP and I live in a safe-seat area.
This means no matter how small, my vote in the EP still has more effect and more relevance than my vote in British national elections.
"and it gets worse and worse"
It does? The Lisbon treaty and a number of others have actually decreased the powers of the unelected bodies of the EU whilst increasing the powers of the elected bodies, so how is this the case? It still has some way to go, but it's certainly not getting worse in this respect.
People are just pissy at the EU right now because they're looking at anything to blame other than themselves. Yes, I'm talking about people like the Greeks who thought it was a good idea to protest to maintain the ability to retire in their 50s, work a short working week, and have a tax system that was in effect pretty much just optional. Euroscepticism in the UK has the same problem, eurosceptics forget that EU membership was instrumental in pulling us out of the shit after our economy crashed in the 70s.
But perhaps more importantly, people also forget how bad Europe was before the EU - if you think things are bad now...
"Because you're giving up your freedom to manage your own country? Yes, you do get a small stake in where EU is going but it comes at the expense of jumping when Brussels says jump."
But you do that anyway. Because you want the trade.
"Just because 75% of Canada's exports go to the US doesn't mean that Canada wants to apply to become the 51st US state and answer to Washington DC."
Sure, but it has signed up to NAFTA etc. and fulfilled it's obligations under that which is a similar thing. Canada will still often follow the will of the US because there's far too much to lose in not doing so.
"if the EU don't want to offer us a fair deal we could always sell our oil and gas elsewhere."
Therein lies the problem with Euroscepticism, it's higher the more successful a country is, but when your oil and gas runs out? You'll be desperate to be a member of the EU. The UK has always been the same, when our economy tanked and we needed an IMF bailout most the country was behind EU membership, but now it's other EU members that are struggling the eurosceptics want out. It's horribly selfish and horribly pathetic. It's also stupidly short sighted - if we pull out of the EU in the UK and our economy goes down the pan again, do those real eurosceptics think the EU would help pull us out of the shit again? That's a rhetorical question, they've not even considered the possibility because they're too stupid and short sighted.
But on another know, who will you sell your oil and gas to exactly? China? Africa? The US? Why would any of these countries want to buy your oil and gas when you'd have to ship it via sea in limited amounts when they can just buy it from other countries that can get it to them much more cheaply via pipeline? Or do you expect EU nations to let you build a pipeline through their countries after you shunned them with selfishness?
"Another example of excessive fear is Schengen, yes it would be bad if we'd need passports to cross into Sweden but it would be horribly expensive for Sweden to build thousands of kilometers of exterior border control too, it's not like we need to beg the EU because it's in their best interest too."
As an interesting aside, your country has no border controls outside of the Shengen zone anyway in my experience.
When I flew into Narvik from the UK which isn't a Shengen country they let me just walk straight off the plane and out the airport without a passport check or anything anyway. Flying out was the same.
I figured this was possibly in part because they figure no one in their right mind would want to smuggle themselves somewhere so far north so just assume anyone that's going up there must be there legitimately. Maybe they're a bit more careful with that sort of thing in places like Oslo. That or maybe they just work on the principle that British airport security is so anal that anyone getting through there must be okay and anyone heading back there will get caught by them if there's a problem.
That's fine, medicine rarely is nice.
But compare, how successful was their previous non-German economic model? At least the German model is proven to work, so are you advocating that they should've stayed with models that collapsed and demonstrably did not work?
You see barren fields because they do not have enough fertile land because the areas that do have fertile land have been taken over by warlords and so forth to feed their armies.
There was no working agricultural market long before food aid became a thing and war has exacerbated the problem even longer.
So your solution seems to effectively be let market forces/survival of the fittest play out - i.e. let there be a situation where it's only the warlords that are left. That's okay, but don't come crying when it's AQIM or similar that blows up your marathon next time because that's the solution you're asking for - one where the armed warlords have total control.
As has been pointed out by others, if people are starving in a region there's clearly no functioning market for them to buy from in the first place. That's kind of the fucking point.
If people are starving then there's no functioning market. If there's no functioning market, then there's no market for food aid to displace.
Yes, except if African farmers were able to meet demand then there wouldn't be any famine issues would there?
That argument doesn't make sense, for there to be a competition issue there'd have to be a competitive market, the fact in parts of Africa there just isn't enough food to survive means there's no market to be displaced in the first place.
I normally tend to agree because I think FPTP is an abomination.
But this time round I think it's the most legitimate government we've had in years. It's a government that between the two parties involved actually got a majority of the popular vote. The policies that have stemmed from it are are roughly proportional split based somewhat on those proportions - for example, the Tories wanted £12,000 tuition fees, the Lib Dems wanted the status quo, The end result was £9,000.
This is a government that only really the people can take responsibility for. Most people didn't vote Lib Dem so don't have the right to complain that they didn't block tuition fee increases for because that's what most the population voted for (i.e. the 77% that didn't vote Lib Dem).
We really did get pretty much what we voted for this time.
Agreed, he absolutely did sign the pledge.
The problem is he probably also didn't foresee that he might be in a coalition government.
The things that irk me about the tuition fee debate are:
1) At least 77% of people who bitch (seeing as everyone bitches about it and the Lib Dems only got 23% of popular vote) about the tuition fee cannot complain. The Lib Dem policy was that they would ditch tuition fees if they got power - if people wanted tuition fees ditched or at best to stay the same, they should've all voted lib dem. You cannot vote Tory/Labour/UKIP/Whoever who were clearly for an increase in fees and then bitch at the Lib Dems when they fail to stop an increase - most of the population voted for an increase at the end of the day, so the Lib Dems were outvoted by the general public on the issue. An increase in tuition fees is what about 77% of the UK's population asked for. That's how democracy works - you don't get to vote for parties that are against something you want, then bitch when that doesn't happen - you fucking voted for it. Hence, the only people with a right to bitch are people who actually voted Lib Dem.
2) The Tories wanted £12,000 tuition fees, the Lib Dems got them down to £9,000. A £3,000 drop is a roughly proportional drop in the Tory proposals relative to their share of coalition legitimacy towards their pledged goal. In other words, the Lib Dems got what they asked for relative to their democratic legitimacy. Again, blame the fucking voters who voted for increases in tuition fees.
Finally, where the Lib Dems really went wrong was in actually voting for the £9,000 increase. They did this because they naively believed that if they fulfilled their side of the bargain, that the Tories would fulfil theirs. This turned out to be naive and foolish given that they got fucked on the greater and more fundamentally important goals of electoral and Lords reform amongst other things.
The problem is for all their faults, I still do think they're the best option. Each time Ed Milliband gets on TV or in the papers he tells us he wants to restore the money for nothing state with money we don't have - just this morning he said he'd restore the highest tax band back up to 50% and use that money to give more handouts to people with kids or who don't work much. Here's a better idea - why not use that money to invest in something that will actually grow our economy in a worthwhile manner, or to shrink the deficit and hence debt? Labour has also made it clear they still desperately what ID card databases and other surveillance plans that were key in them getting kicked out last time.
Then you have the Tories, which are plagued by irrational debate on Europe based primarily on xenophobia and who are at the other end of the economic extreme and aren't willing to accept that maybe at least some of their cuts haven't been particularly well thought out, and hence refuse to backtrack or do something to fix the badly thought out ones. They're plagued by infighting between the younger more moderate Tories and the old fuckwads who hate gays, foreigners, and women with, for some reason, that vocal older minority being given too much of their own way.
Then there's the rise of the far right in suits - UKIP, I don't think much more needs to be said about them other than the fact they're racist, anti-gay bigots, whose economic plan is completely nonsensical - they actually think we could magically replace the lost of 1/3rd of our economic exports with trade elsewhere overnight if Europe opted to shun us post pull out, combined with removing the limit on working hours. Farage actually genuinely believes that by simply trading with other nations and getting the whole country to work 80 to 120 hour weeks we could write off Europe completely - he thinks productivity scales linearly with hours worked and thinks there would be no health or social problems that would arise from that.
So of the mainstream all that's left is the Lib Dem
Yep, saying Europe needs GMO crops is ridiculous when it ends up with massive surplus each year that it has literally nothing to use for other than destroy.
If anything we should be working to get those stockpiles to places that really need it like parts of Africa, then they wont need GMO crops either.
That's a small scale personal anecdote though.
I can't speak for ATI in recent years, but certainly between 2000 and 2007 when I worked for an organisation with over 6,000 systems, ATI drivers were a consistent pain in the arse and consistently caused support headaches. Perhaps surprisingly, the only other driver issues that came close were HP printer drivers, which for some time would commonly cause Word to crash in print preview. ATI was definitely a major outlier in terms of high number of support issues caused on this pretty large sample size of systems (that were actually split pretty evenly in terms of graphics between ATI, nVidia, and Intel).
We did have nVidia issues too, but they weren't anything out of the ordinary relative to faults with Intel graphics and other hardware.
Maybe things have changed since then, but certainly in that era there seemed little question that ATI had major quality control issues with it's drivers and those issues persisted for at least the full 7 years I worked at that organisation.
"Swype totally sucks for CLI interaction."
Yeah, even for URLs and e-mail addresses too. They need to make it work for that sort of thing as well as it does for plain English then it'd negate the need for hardware keyboards on mobile devices altogether IMO!
Sure, this is why ability to network is more important in succeeding in the business world than any ability to produce anything useful. But hopefully we can at least stop pretending the Summly story is something it wasn't and recognise it for what it was - a kid born with a silver spoon, and no particular stand out talent, having his career set up for him very publicly by his already wealthy father.
Summly seems to have been the biggest "boy genius" swindle of the 21st century so far.
Basically, his Dad is a director at the investment arm of one of the biggest banks in the world. He got a number of well known names (Steven Fry, Ashton Kutcher, the Murdochs) to invest in the app and use their popularity (or in Murdoch's case, media wing) to publicise it.
The company itself wasn't run by the kid, it was run by a silicon valley veteran who again, his dad got on board. The complicated development (the article processing etc.) was done by a 3rd party, and the Android version was being developed by a 3rd party also. Internally, there was not much left to do apart from the iOS front end for the outsourced back end, and given that he had another veteran silicon valley dev working as a developer there (and I believe more developers on top) I'm not entirely sure whether the kid himself actually even wrote a single line of code.
His mother is a lawyer, who I understand works for, or has done some work for Yahoo too prior to the acquisition. That probably helped things along too.
So you're right, I'd say these things aren't likely to happen for most people. Unless your dad just happens to be a director at a major investment bank and just happens to know some of the most wealthy people around who also just happen to have strong media platforms to hype your product from that is.