"You make it sound like Hamas is the only faction in the Gaza Strip, but there are actually other even more militant subgroups that Hamas does not have control over. Note how many more rockets are now flying at Israel, and how they're getting close to Tel Aviv. I don't necessarily believe Hamas was endorsing the launching of rockets during ceasefires."
It doesn't really matter, if he has the power to stop launches on demand like he claims, then he has the power to make sure there are no launches full stop. Either they're lying about what he could really actually achieve or they're admitting that the flip side of the argument is that he also allowed rocket fire to happen in the first place. It's got to be one or the other.
Also, whilst you're right, there are other militant groups there, some far more hard line, ultimately Hamas is the elected representative of the people there, and is by far the strongest armed group. As such, they could easily incapacitate these groups, or force them into their own ranks if they so chose to. In Gaza, you can only operate with Hamas' permission.
If they take the glory for this guy of being able to stop rocket fire the hard fact is that it means it's also on them when it starts. There's no getting away from that, the original post was a highly partisan one-sided peice of propaganda and nothing more.
Agreed, it has to be a two way street. He can't take responsibility for being able to broker ceasefires as and when he wants and then not also blame him when firing starts again. Either he has the power to prevent rocket fire from Gaza or he doesn't, which is it?
An alternative and equally valid reading of the situation to the GPs is hence, if Israel really wanted a long lasting ceasefire, it was clear this guy wasn't going to be the one to give it to them having allowed rocket fire to commence once again against Israel time and time again.
But meh, I don't know why I bother with discussions like this, they're far too partisan to include this kind of rational balancing of alternative theories. Taking a quote from someone on one side of a conflict, and using it as damning evidence against the other side without considering both sides of the argument, is about as stupid, partisan, and ignorant as it gets.
The thing to bear in mind though is relative cost in practice. I'd wager it's quite possible that it requires the Palestinians to sacrifice more to smuggle/produce their rockets than it does the Israelis to produce their interceptors.
To smuggle a Fajr-5 into Gaza may cost a Palestinian his life time's savings, but to build a Tamir interceptor is just a negligible dent in the military aid the US gives Israel.
"Here's the thing: If you invent something, you get to name it."
Here's the thing: Just because you invent and name something doesn't mean that that continues to be the commonly accepted pronunciation, nor does it necessarily mean you're competent enough with the language in question to be able to understand why your pronunciation is wrong.
The fact is, being the inventor of something has no more merit as the "correct" pronunciation than the theoretically correct pronunciation for the language in question or the commonly accepted pronunciation. They're all just as arbitrary and subjective in practice.
There are two reasons - lack of talent meaning they need the music industry to even be able to go anywhere in the business, and as you say, pure laziness.
The problem is also one of entitlement, musicians believe they are entitled to make a living doing what they want, they believe they're special, they believe that whether they have anything commercial viable or not is irrelevant, they believe they should not have to work a proper job and treat music as just a hobby, they believe they deserve payment for their hobby, no questions asked. They don't live in the real world, they'll ask 1 million people to give up an hours work to buy their album that only took them a tiny percentage of that same 1 million man hours to create. They'll argue that there's more than just recording involved in creating music and that there's learning to play too, but guess what? we all have to learn our trade and few of us get paid to do so on the job. Most IT contracts for example stipulate that it's upto you to keep your talents uptodate.
This is why I have little sympathy with the current status quo, though I will buy direct from artists who are a) talented, and b) hard working enough to set up their own direct distribution mechanism bypassing the big studios.
Yes, it's ancient. What's the relevance to modern Word's drawing tools though?
"Now, the best "feature" of LO is being easier to use than M$O (because of all the problems the "ribbon" creates)"
Like? I know it's different, but I'm not convinced it's worse. It's still not perfect, but having all relevant options to the current context prominently on display and irrelevant options hidden seems better than a massive mess of toolbars permanently in the way and at best greyed out. Particularly the more toolbars you need the more features you used. It just started to get too cluttered before.
"Also, LO is more object-orientated: click on something to change its properties, which is easier than some hidden menus in M$O to reach some desired setting."
This makes no sense, Microsoft Office works exactly the same.
"I assume in an LO-only workplace things will be simpler; this "M$O is the standard for external communication" reveals extreme lack of IT knowledge, since documents can be sent as pdf files to external parties. Nothing can be easier."
I think the contrary is actually the case, anyone stating this has a decent understanding of the lay of the market. The fact is that most companies still do not have PDF editing software in place, so sure you send them a PDF, then their next question to you will be how they can edit it because they don't have a PDF editor. PDFs are often used when they're intended to be read only (even though they're not) i.e. for sending digital invoices etc. but MS Office's formats are still the single most common file formats used in private and public sector alike across the globe.
"Actually, most of our problems arise from incompatibilities among versions of M$ software, thus I believe Freiburg won't have a happy life after some 3 to 5 years in the future when M$ decides their new Office won't be compatible with the previous one."
Do you know something everyone else doesn't? Even Office 2003 got a patch to support the.docx etc. file formats which means even today, almost 10 years on, it's still document compatible with current versions. Prior to.docx the standard format stemmed all the way back to Word 97, which, even Office 2013 can back-save to meaning in this respect as time goes on you'll still have optional 16 years+ of document compatibility.
"I remember when there was a lot of word processors and Word was not one of them -- and people worked quite well, thank you very much."
Meh, the likes of WordPerfect were at least as much of a ballache to work with.
A lot of what's added nowadays is to do with productivity, Microsoft figured out that people make a lot of progress style bars in Excel for example and added a feature to automate this in a few seconds when it took the best part of an hour before with macros. The preview functionality introduced with ribbons lets you preview presentation changes dynamically as you hover between them. In PowerPoint some of the most common types of graphic people put together that took 30mins to an hour to do manually also now have tools to automate the process. I agree there's not a lot new by way of actual word processing and so forth, but again, it's all about productivity and automation of more complex presentation features etc. The value of these sorts of things depends on how many of these more time consuming elements of documents you used to create I guess.
"But then, I'm biased and pro-F/OSS..."
Yes, there were one or two things that gave it away, but at least you're proud enough of your cause to admit it.
Even if true then why assume that it shines negatively on Obama?
This assumption that if someone is being taught negative things by someone that they inherently learn and follow those negative believes is a false premise to start with.
When I was young my first school was extremely religious, but it taught me the opposite, what a load of nonsense religion actually was. It told me stories from the Bible that I simply couldn't differentiate from the cartoons and so forth I'd watch on TV when I got home.
Different people take different things away from their teachers, some learn the opposite to what the teacher intended. Why assume Obama share's his pastor's views and didn't instead, from listening to them, learn how absurd they are and make him a better person as a result?
This is the problem with even bringing it up, it's meaningless, and as someone else here said if that's honestly the worst they can dig up about Obama then he must be a pretty good guy.
Agreed. Many artists only have themselves to blame for being too lazy to sort their own affairs. But I'm not surprised as the artists who are too lazy to do this also happen to be the ones that believe in perpetual copyright - i.e. those who only want to spend a few days in a recording studio actually working, and then profit off it for life. The whole situation is born entirely out of the fact that these sorts of artists are simply bone idle layabouts.
It's no different to any other industry, if you want to make the real money from your skillset you do it yourself as a contractor and sort your own tax dealings etc.
The only problem is that most musicians nowadays know full well that they wouldn't make it as a "contractor" because the flip side of being a contractor is that you have to be uniquely skilled enough that someone is willing to hire you. Most modern artists simply don't have the raw talent to make it without the music industry acting as a crutch for them.
Hopefully though, given time, those artists with both the competence and the work ethic to actually do what needs to be done to self publish will become ever more prominent, pushing the layabouts dependent on the music cartels into irrelevance.
"The AC series isn't even the pinnacle of good gaming. They knock out a title a year and the performance in the previous games wasn't even that great on the current systems."
Played every single one on the 360 and has always been smooth as silk. Never encountered a single performance issue. Perhaps this is a PS3 only problem as I've never played it on that platform? For what it's worth, I played them all in 1080p also.
"Probably because it's hard to optimise for something when you're too busy trying to knock out a game in record time. "
Except that's not how they've been developing the AC series. They have multiple teams working on the franchise in a staggered manner, and AC3 for example has been in development since AC2 was released, so 3 years, which is about standard for a AAA title. This is the same way Call of Duty is developed and released yearly albeit with distinctly different studios putting their name to it under the same Activision umbrella.
That and I think "legit" and "benefit the artist" are largely mutually exclusive most of the time.
National and international music federations like the RIAA, IFPI, etc. seem to get to decide what sites are and aren't legit, yet they're also the organisations whose sales least benefit the artist.
As someone else said, paying the artist direct where possible is the best option, but even that assumes the artist has the rights to sell directly their produce and hasn't signed over all sales rights to an organisation as described above.
What does it matter on what the decision was based? They still opted to report the scientifically backed viewpoint which suggests that the decision process was sound anyway.
Making a decision that is based on science is neither bad science nor bad journalism. It sounds like you wanted them to make a decision that went against the science and that would be bad science and bad journalism.
The creative Zen had a side scroll wheel before the iPod too which really isn't much of a jump, it's still the idea of using rotation to scroll, and click the wheel in to select.
The only thing Apple did do well was release MP3 players that actually looked pretty cool, whilst most of it's competition were defending walkman lookalikes in a post walkman era.
As you say the whole scroll wheel thing was certainly nothing new by any measure, contrary to the rewriting of history on that that fanboys have attempted.
"Surely no one denies that there is climate change, that's a matter of record. I assumed the point at issue was 'human accelerated adverse climate change'. No?"
One would hope that was the case, but I'm afraid even here on Slashdot there are a number of fucktards who deny even climate change is a real thing.
"The likes of Attenborough and Cox make assertions on their shows. As they don't generally present evidence, produce hypotheses, moderate theories and test predictability of those theories (within the program) the scientific element is limited"
They're not meant to. The point is that their shows are based on information that is founded on that solid base, and that's what matters- they distill it into a form the general public can understand.
"If a science program can be made by young earth creationists then why shouldn't it be aired."
Because that's a contradiction. Young earth creationism has no scientifc basis, that's the fundamental problem.
"the opposing camp then can make a show giving their evidence and presenting how this falsifies the others hypotheses and proves theirs."
Well, to just outright give something like young earth creationism an hour long prime time timeslot of the sort that Cox and Attenborough get is misleading because it gives it undue merit in that it will cause some people to think it has more validity in fact than it does. However, this may be the sort of thing you're looking for where the BBC does give believers of the two theories a chance to face off against each other:
The TV companies know what show they were broadcasting when and can trivially show what section a show will have been at at a given time, so all they need to do is ensure said photo is timestamped and if the photo shows the show that was on at that time then you have little argument.
I'm struggling to understand how, if there is overwhelming evidence for climate change, that you've reached the conclusion that they've suspended impartiality.
Being impartial does not mean representing invalid views just because every man and his dog wants their say, it's about being impartial and deciding what to report.
If they approached the topic impartially and decided impartially that the evidence is overwhelmingly in favour of climate change being a real actual problem, and that that's what they should report, they don't suddenly become impartial for ignoring counter arguments when those counter arguments hold no merit. If they were ignoring a legitimate counter argument based on scientific fact then you'd be right, but that's not the issue here. To date there are still no valid peer reviewed scientific studies to the contrary nor even any investigations by those against the climate change idea proving convincingly that the whole thing may be a hoax. The BBC has however given air time to these people regardless for what it's worth, you only have to listen to Jeremy Clarkson for 5 minutes for example.
What you're effectively saying is that for every David Attenbrough or Brian Cox documentary they broadcast based on scientific fact they should produce a documentary from young earth creationists denying the theory of evolution and just generally spouting bollocks.
Sorry but that's fucking stupid. Being impartial doesn't require you to broadcast outright bullshit, it has to at least have some solid backing evidence, and therein lies the problem for climate change deniers - they don't have any. The only time this doesn't hold true is for opinion peices - i.e. who is right in the Israel/Palestine conflict? but climate change isn't based merely on opinion as much as the denialists like to think so, it's science and hence based heavily on fact.
Yes, that's the difference between public sector where there is enforced transparency due to acts like the Freedom of Information act, and public sector where no such transparency is necessary.
It's a stupid proposition, the reason climate change is exposed by public sector is because public sector is not tainted by an inherent bias to profit. Despite the conspiracy theory about how scientists are bigging up the climate change thing to keep themselves in a job things are different in reality. You mention the met office for example, well, the jobs there aren't dependent on global warming being true or not true - they're full time employees there to study the climate regardless, yet they still have come to the same conclusion that climate change is a problem.
Contrast that to private sector where there's a lot of money to be lost if climate change is a real problem and you can see why private sector groups would fund so much FUD that people like you naively fall for.
But regardless, thankfully due to investigative journalism, your proposition isn't completely fruitless. Here, have some links, go educate yourself. That's if you want to of course, which I'm not sure you do, most deniers don't after all, they just prefer to deny what is right in front their face:
When people say government they're usually referring to the subset of members of parliament who are currently in power.
Technically though the civil service which are the permanent unelected staff who help run our society by advising the government in power what the protocol is when they want to arrange a meeting with a world leader and that sort of thing are also government, but if I was to refer to them I'd just call them what they are The Civil Service.
I wouldn't call the police government, I wouldn't call the NHS government, I wouldn't call the army government, I wouldn't call the judiciary government. Whilst the likes of the judiciary makes decisions with no government influence and has the power to even hold government to account I would however say that the government determines from a high level how they are run.
This is where the BBC is still different from these other organisations though, the government has absolutely no power to determine how the BBC is run. It can do nothing more than set the cost of the license fee by limiting any increases which can put the squeeze on it somewhat but that's about it.
Technically the BBC only answers to the Queen as it exists by Royal Charter, so if for some reason, say the BBC unveiled itself as a bunch of lizardmen intent on taking over the world giving the government a real actual reason to take control of it or destroy it then the most government could do is push a motion in parliament to disband it, then present that to the Queen who along with her advisors would decide what to do - i.e. whether to withdraw the charter. Even this would require a lot of legal wrangling on behalf of the Queen though and her advisors - i.e. whether there was legitimate cause to do so under law and so forth. They found it hard enough to even revoke a knighthood given to someone a couple of years back who turned out to be not quite so deserving of it after all so revoking the BBC's charter would likely be very difficult indeed.
So I suppose in theory the government could go about attempting to influence or disband the BBC via the Queen, but there are two reasons that wont happen:
1) Any government doing this would probably find it more fatal to them than the BBC such that they'd probably see so many rebellions and be kicked out of power so quickly that they wouldn't have chance to take it anywhere. Just to reiterate the point, this would be about as politically untenable as the president deciding to rip up the US constitution in the US whilst nuking a few US states for fun.
2) Whilst the BBC remains a quality organisation, the Queen would probably quite literally tell the government to go fuck itself. One of the few actual executive things she'd rightfully have the power to do in this day and age where she's really nothing more than an ornament that brings in the tourists with her estates and history.
They have to actually be able to prove you were watching live TV. They do often manage to do this though because most non-license fee payers are dumb enough to have their TV on display from the front window meaning all they have to do is walk past, take a picture from the public street of your TV displaying a live show and then nail you for it.
But if you genuinely don't want to watch live broadcast TV and just use your TV for DVDs, or your computer or whatever then there's jack shit they can do.
"And yet, this legal problem is the same across the world."
No it isn't.
"We had a story on slashdot recently where pfizer tried to game this by asking for extension and not revealing enough detailed information in Canada. They were taken to court and lost fight and the patent extension."
How is this possible? I thought you just argued the system is bent in favour of large players?
"elevated these assumptions to factual status and started to look down on everyone arguing against your "facts"."
By everyone you of course mean you. I see a distinct lack of support for your point both in terms of replies and moderation, yet the opposite seems true for mine.
Don't try and pretend everyone agrees with you and my point is some marginalised side show when it's clear that quite the opposite is true, and overwhelmingly so.
You're wrong. Just about everyone else agrees that you're wrong. Get over it.
I think those people are themselves extremists, political correctness extremists. They'll follow a PC cause so far that they lose sight of what exactly it was the cause was all about in the first place.
I imagine they're the same folk here who feel that if you criticise Iran then you're inherently saying the US is a perfect flawless nation, or that if you criticise usability in some FOSS software that you're inherently a Microsoft shill, or that if you think Romney is a douche you automatically love Obama and so on and so forth. They can't grasp that just because you criticise/praise one thing doesn't mean that you inherently love/hate it's polar opposite and so they perceive you as "the enemy".
Either way it's a little tiresome, I really hate that mindset. Some people are incapable of seeing shades of grey, they only see black or white in everything people say. They're not looking for knowledge, or informed debate, they're just looking for a fight.
But even the British system is basically two party, so even there it doesn't work.
The closest thing the UK has to a 3rd party is the Liberal Democrat party that whilst it gets a decent number of seats, even as a coalition partner for the first time in it's modern existence it's still been marginalised into irrelevance.
First past the post just isn't healthy full stop. It exists purely to allow well oranised minority interests to get majority power to the detriment of the large swathes of the population (often 65%+) that they do not represent.
Slashdot Mirror
"You make it sound like Hamas is the only faction in the Gaza Strip, but there are actually other even more militant subgroups that Hamas does not have control over. Note how many more rockets are now flying at Israel, and how they're getting close to Tel Aviv. I don't necessarily believe Hamas was endorsing the launching of rockets during ceasefires."
It doesn't really matter, if he has the power to stop launches on demand like he claims, then he has the power to make sure there are no launches full stop. Either they're lying about what he could really actually achieve or they're admitting that the flip side of the argument is that he also allowed rocket fire to happen in the first place. It's got to be one or the other.
Also, whilst you're right, there are other militant groups there, some far more hard line, ultimately Hamas is the elected representative of the people there, and is by far the strongest armed group. As such, they could easily incapacitate these groups, or force them into their own ranks if they so chose to. In Gaza, you can only operate with Hamas' permission.
If they take the glory for this guy of being able to stop rocket fire the hard fact is that it means it's also on them when it starts. There's no getting away from that, the original post was a highly partisan one-sided peice of propaganda and nothing more.
Agreed, it has to be a two way street. He can't take responsibility for being able to broker ceasefires as and when he wants and then not also blame him when firing starts again. Either he has the power to prevent rocket fire from Gaza or he doesn't, which is it?
An alternative and equally valid reading of the situation to the GPs is hence, if Israel really wanted a long lasting ceasefire, it was clear this guy wasn't going to be the one to give it to them having allowed rocket fire to commence once again against Israel time and time again.
But meh, I don't know why I bother with discussions like this, they're far too partisan to include this kind of rational balancing of alternative theories. Taking a quote from someone on one side of a conflict, and using it as damning evidence against the other side without considering both sides of the argument, is about as stupid, partisan, and ignorant as it gets.
The thing to bear in mind though is relative cost in practice. I'd wager it's quite possible that it requires the Palestinians to sacrifice more to smuggle/produce their rockets than it does the Israelis to produce their interceptors.
To smuggle a Fajr-5 into Gaza may cost a Palestinian his life time's savings, but to build a Tamir interceptor is just a negligible dent in the military aid the US gives Israel.
I don't know how effective that would be, watch it doing it's thing against exactly that:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MxwCYZ6Zhew&noredirect=1
"Here's the thing: If you invent something, you get to name it."
Here's the thing: Just because you invent and name something doesn't mean that that continues to be the commonly accepted pronunciation, nor does it necessarily mean you're competent enough with the language in question to be able to understand why your pronunciation is wrong.
The fact is, being the inventor of something has no more merit as the "correct" pronunciation than the theoretically correct pronunciation for the language in question or the commonly accepted pronunciation. They're all just as arbitrary and subjective in practice.
We've all done it at some point :)
Yes, see my post here:
http://slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=3259671&cid=42025953
There are two reasons - lack of talent meaning they need the music industry to even be able to go anywhere in the business, and as you say, pure laziness.
The problem is also one of entitlement, musicians believe they are entitled to make a living doing what they want, they believe they're special, they believe that whether they have anything commercial viable or not is irrelevant, they believe they should not have to work a proper job and treat music as just a hobby, they believe they deserve payment for their hobby, no questions asked. They don't live in the real world, they'll ask 1 million people to give up an hours work to buy their album that only took them a tiny percentage of that same 1 million man hours to create. They'll argue that there's more than just recording involved in creating music and that there's learning to play too, but guess what? we all have to learn our trade and few of us get paid to do so on the job. Most IT contracts for example stipulate that it's upto you to keep your talents uptodate.
This is why I have little sympathy with the current status quo, though I will buy direct from artists who are a) talented, and b) hard working enough to set up their own direct distribution mechanism bypassing the big studios.
Yes, that's exactly what he said in his closing sentence.
"(has anyone heard about the ancient M$ Draw?)"
Yes, it's ancient. What's the relevance to modern Word's drawing tools though?
"Now, the best "feature" of LO is being easier to use than M$O (because of all the problems the "ribbon" creates)"
Like? I know it's different, but I'm not convinced it's worse. It's still not perfect, but having all relevant options to the current context prominently on display and irrelevant options hidden seems better than a massive mess of toolbars permanently in the way and at best greyed out. Particularly the more toolbars you need the more features you used. It just started to get too cluttered before.
"Also, LO is more object-orientated: click on something to change its properties, which is easier than some hidden menus in M$O to reach some desired setting."
This makes no sense, Microsoft Office works exactly the same.
"I assume in an LO-only workplace things will be simpler; this "M$O is the standard for external communication" reveals extreme lack of IT knowledge, since documents can be sent as pdf files to external parties. Nothing can be easier."
I think the contrary is actually the case, anyone stating this has a decent understanding of the lay of the market. The fact is that most companies still do not have PDF editing software in place, so sure you send them a PDF, then their next question to you will be how they can edit it because they don't have a PDF editor. PDFs are often used when they're intended to be read only (even though they're not) i.e. for sending digital invoices etc. but MS Office's formats are still the single most common file formats used in private and public sector alike across the globe.
"Actually, most of our problems arise from incompatibilities among versions of M$ software, thus I believe Freiburg won't have a happy life after some 3 to 5 years in the future when M$ decides their new Office won't be compatible with the previous one."
Do you know something everyone else doesn't? Even Office 2003 got a patch to support the .docx etc. file formats which means even today, almost 10 years on, it's still document compatible with current versions. Prior to .docx the standard format stemmed all the way back to Word 97, which, even Office 2013 can back-save to meaning in this respect as time goes on you'll still have optional 16 years+ of document compatibility.
"I remember when there was a lot of word processors and Word was not one of them -- and people worked quite well, thank you very much."
Meh, the likes of WordPerfect were at least as much of a ballache to work with.
A lot of what's added nowadays is to do with productivity, Microsoft figured out that people make a lot of progress style bars in Excel for example and added a feature to automate this in a few seconds when it took the best part of an hour before with macros. The preview functionality introduced with ribbons lets you preview presentation changes dynamically as you hover between them. In PowerPoint some of the most common types of graphic people put together that took 30mins to an hour to do manually also now have tools to automate the process. I agree there's not a lot new by way of actual word processing and so forth, but again, it's all about productivity and automation of more complex presentation features etc. The value of these sorts of things depends on how many of these more time consuming elements of documents you used to create I guess.
"But then, I'm biased and pro-F/OSS..."
Yes, there were one or two things that gave it away, but at least you're proud enough of your cause to admit it.
Even if true then why assume that it shines negatively on Obama?
This assumption that if someone is being taught negative things by someone that they inherently learn and follow those negative believes is a false premise to start with.
When I was young my first school was extremely religious, but it taught me the opposite, what a load of nonsense religion actually was. It told me stories from the Bible that I simply couldn't differentiate from the cartoons and so forth I'd watch on TV when I got home.
Different people take different things away from their teachers, some learn the opposite to what the teacher intended. Why assume Obama share's his pastor's views and didn't instead, from listening to them, learn how absurd they are and make him a better person as a result?
This is the problem with even bringing it up, it's meaningless, and as someone else here said if that's honestly the worst they can dig up about Obama then he must be a pretty good guy.
Agreed. Many artists only have themselves to blame for being too lazy to sort their own affairs. But I'm not surprised as the artists who are too lazy to do this also happen to be the ones that believe in perpetual copyright - i.e. those who only want to spend a few days in a recording studio actually working, and then profit off it for life. The whole situation is born entirely out of the fact that these sorts of artists are simply bone idle layabouts.
It's no different to any other industry, if you want to make the real money from your skillset you do it yourself as a contractor and sort your own tax dealings etc.
The only problem is that most musicians nowadays know full well that they wouldn't make it as a "contractor" because the flip side of being a contractor is that you have to be uniquely skilled enough that someone is willing to hire you. Most modern artists simply don't have the raw talent to make it without the music industry acting as a crutch for them.
Hopefully though, given time, those artists with both the competence and the work ethic to actually do what needs to be done to self publish will become ever more prominent, pushing the layabouts dependent on the music cartels into irrelevance.
Possibly, but using probably the most succesful artist of all time as a data point doesn't really tell you much about the situation in general.
"The AC series isn't even the pinnacle of good gaming. They knock out a title a year and the performance in the previous games wasn't even that great on the current systems."
Played every single one on the 360 and has always been smooth as silk. Never encountered a single performance issue. Perhaps this is a PS3 only problem as I've never played it on that platform? For what it's worth, I played them all in 1080p also.
"Probably because it's hard to optimise for something when you're too busy trying to knock out a game in record time. "
Except that's not how they've been developing the AC series. They have multiple teams working on the franchise in a staggered manner, and AC3 for example has been in development since AC2 was released, so 3 years, which is about standard for a AAA title. This is the same way Call of Duty is developed and released yearly albeit with distinctly different studios putting their name to it under the same Activision umbrella.
That and I think "legit" and "benefit the artist" are largely mutually exclusive most of the time.
National and international music federations like the RIAA, IFPI, etc. seem to get to decide what sites are and aren't legit, yet they're also the organisations whose sales least benefit the artist.
As someone else said, paying the artist direct where possible is the best option, but even that assumes the artist has the rights to sell directly their produce and hasn't signed over all sales rights to an organisation as described above.
What does it matter on what the decision was based? They still opted to report the scientifically backed viewpoint which suggests that the decision process was sound anyway.
Making a decision that is based on science is neither bad science nor bad journalism. It sounds like you wanted them to make a decision that went against the science and that would be bad science and bad journalism.
The creative Zen had a side scroll wheel before the iPod too which really isn't much of a jump, it's still the idea of using rotation to scroll, and click the wheel in to select.
The only thing Apple did do well was release MP3 players that actually looked pretty cool, whilst most of it's competition were defending walkman lookalikes in a post walkman era.
As you say the whole scroll wheel thing was certainly nothing new by any measure, contrary to the rewriting of history on that that fanboys have attempted.
"Surely no one denies that there is climate change, that's a matter of record. I assumed the point at issue was 'human accelerated adverse climate change'. No?"
One would hope that was the case, but I'm afraid even here on Slashdot there are a number of fucktards who deny even climate change is a real thing.
"The likes of Attenborough and Cox make assertions on their shows. As they don't generally present evidence, produce hypotheses, moderate theories and test predictability of those theories (within the program) the scientific element is limited"
They're not meant to. The point is that their shows are based on information that is founded on that solid base, and that's what matters- they distill it into a form the general public can understand.
"If a science program can be made by young earth creationists then why shouldn't it be aired."
Because that's a contradiction. Young earth creationism has no scientifc basis, that's the fundamental problem.
"the opposing camp then can make a show giving their evidence and presenting how this falsifies the others hypotheses and proves theirs."
Well, to just outright give something like young earth creationism an hour long prime time timeslot of the sort that Cox and Attenborough get is misleading because it gives it undue merit in that it will cause some people to think it has more validity in fact than it does. However, this may be the sort of thing you're looking for where the BBC does give believers of the two theories a chance to face off against each other:
http://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/b01n8ls6
The TV companies know what show they were broadcasting when and can trivially show what section a show will have been at at a given time, so all they need to do is ensure said photo is timestamped and if the photo shows the show that was on at that time then you have little argument.
I'm struggling to understand how, if there is overwhelming evidence for climate change, that you've reached the conclusion that they've suspended impartiality.
Being impartial does not mean representing invalid views just because every man and his dog wants their say, it's about being impartial and deciding what to report.
If they approached the topic impartially and decided impartially that the evidence is overwhelmingly in favour of climate change being a real actual problem, and that that's what they should report, they don't suddenly become impartial for ignoring counter arguments when those counter arguments hold no merit. If they were ignoring a legitimate counter argument based on scientific fact then you'd be right, but that's not the issue here. To date there are still no valid peer reviewed scientific studies to the contrary nor even any investigations by those against the climate change idea proving convincingly that the whole thing may be a hoax. The BBC has however given air time to these people regardless for what it's worth, you only have to listen to Jeremy Clarkson for 5 minutes for example.
What you're effectively saying is that for every David Attenbrough or Brian Cox documentary they broadcast based on scientific fact they should produce a documentary from young earth creationists denying the theory of evolution and just generally spouting bollocks.
Sorry but that's fucking stupid. Being impartial doesn't require you to broadcast outright bullshit, it has to at least have some solid backing evidence, and therein lies the problem for climate change deniers - they don't have any. The only time this doesn't hold true is for opinion peices - i.e. who is right in the Israel/Palestine conflict? but climate change isn't based merely on opinion as much as the denialists like to think so, it's science and hence based heavily on fact.
Yes, that's the difference between public sector where there is enforced transparency due to acts like the Freedom of Information act, and public sector where no such transparency is necessary.
It's a stupid proposition, the reason climate change is exposed by public sector is because public sector is not tainted by an inherent bias to profit. Despite the conspiracy theory about how scientists are bigging up the climate change thing to keep themselves in a job things are different in reality. You mention the met office for example, well, the jobs there aren't dependent on global warming being true or not true - they're full time employees there to study the climate regardless, yet they still have come to the same conclusion that climate change is a problem.
Contrast that to private sector where there's a lot of money to be lost if climate change is a real problem and you can see why private sector groups would fund so much FUD that people like you naively fall for.
But regardless, thankfully due to investigative journalism, your proposition isn't completely fruitless. Here, have some links, go educate yourself. That's if you want to of course, which I'm not sure you do, most deniers don't after all, they just prefer to deny what is right in front their face:
http://www.independent.co.uk/environment/climate-change/thinktanks-take-oil-money-and-use-it-to-fund-climate-deniers-1891747.html
http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/2010/oct/24/tea-party-climate-change-deniers
http://www.guardian.co.uk/environment/blog/2012/feb/15/leaked-heartland-institute-documents-climate-scepticism
http://www.greenpeace.org/usa/en/campaigns/global-warming-and-energy/polluterwatch/koch-industries/
It can be a fairly muddy term.
When people say government they're usually referring to the subset of members of parliament who are currently in power.
Technically though the civil service which are the permanent unelected staff who help run our society by advising the government in power what the protocol is when they want to arrange a meeting with a world leader and that sort of thing are also government, but if I was to refer to them I'd just call them what they are The Civil Service.
I wouldn't call the police government, I wouldn't call the NHS government, I wouldn't call the army government, I wouldn't call the judiciary government. Whilst the likes of the judiciary makes decisions with no government influence and has the power to even hold government to account I would however say that the government determines from a high level how they are run.
This is where the BBC is still different from these other organisations though, the government has absolutely no power to determine how the BBC is run. It can do nothing more than set the cost of the license fee by limiting any increases which can put the squeeze on it somewhat but that's about it.
Technically the BBC only answers to the Queen as it exists by Royal Charter, so if for some reason, say the BBC unveiled itself as a bunch of lizardmen intent on taking over the world giving the government a real actual reason to take control of it or destroy it then the most government could do is push a motion in parliament to disband it, then present that to the Queen who along with her advisors would decide what to do - i.e. whether to withdraw the charter. Even this would require a lot of legal wrangling on behalf of the Queen though and her advisors - i.e. whether there was legitimate cause to do so under law and so forth. They found it hard enough to even revoke a knighthood given to someone a couple of years back who turned out to be not quite so deserving of it after all so revoking the BBC's charter would likely be very difficult indeed.
So I suppose in theory the government could go about attempting to influence or disband the BBC via the Queen, but there are two reasons that wont happen:
1) Any government doing this would probably find it more fatal to them than the BBC such that they'd probably see so many rebellions and be kicked out of power so quickly that they wouldn't have chance to take it anywhere. Just to reiterate the point, this would be about as politically untenable as the president deciding to rip up the US constitution in the US whilst nuking a few US states for fun.
2) Whilst the BBC remains a quality organisation, the Queen would probably quite literally tell the government to go fuck itself. One of the few actual executive things she'd rightfully have the power to do in this day and age where she's really nothing more than an ornament that brings in the tourists with her estates and history.
No they wont.
They have to actually be able to prove you were watching live TV. They do often manage to do this though because most non-license fee payers are dumb enough to have their TV on display from the front window meaning all they have to do is walk past, take a picture from the public street of your TV displaying a live show and then nail you for it.
But if you genuinely don't want to watch live broadcast TV and just use your TV for DVDs, or your computer or whatever then there's jack shit they can do.
"And yet, this legal problem is the same across the world."
No it isn't.
"We had a story on slashdot recently where pfizer tried to game this by asking for extension and not revealing enough detailed information in Canada. They were taken to court and lost fight and the patent extension."
How is this possible? I thought you just argued the system is bent in favour of large players?
"elevated these assumptions to factual status and started to look down on everyone arguing against your "facts"."
By everyone you of course mean you. I see a distinct lack of support for your point both in terms of replies and moderation, yet the opposite seems true for mine.
Don't try and pretend everyone agrees with you and my point is some marginalised side show when it's clear that quite the opposite is true, and overwhelmingly so.
You're wrong. Just about everyone else agrees that you're wrong. Get over it.
I think those people are themselves extremists, political correctness extremists. They'll follow a PC cause so far that they lose sight of what exactly it was the cause was all about in the first place.
I imagine they're the same folk here who feel that if you criticise Iran then you're inherently saying the US is a perfect flawless nation, or that if you criticise usability in some FOSS software that you're inherently a Microsoft shill, or that if you think Romney is a douche you automatically love Obama and so on and so forth. They can't grasp that just because you criticise/praise one thing doesn't mean that you inherently love/hate it's polar opposite and so they perceive you as "the enemy".
Either way it's a little tiresome, I really hate that mindset. Some people are incapable of seeing shades of grey, they only see black or white in everything people say. They're not looking for knowledge, or informed debate, they're just looking for a fight.
Or maybe I'm now just being idiotophobic.
But even the British system is basically two party, so even there it doesn't work.
The closest thing the UK has to a 3rd party is the Liberal Democrat party that whilst it gets a decent number of seats, even as a coalition partner for the first time in it's modern existence it's still been marginalised into irrelevance.
First past the post just isn't healthy full stop. It exists purely to allow well oranised minority interests to get majority power to the detriment of the large swathes of the population (often 65%+) that they do not represent.