"Your game theory is technically valid, but were any of these corrupt MPs re-elected?"
It was really a mixed bag, about 100 actually stood down, some were re-elected. It was ultimately a gentleman's agreement with the state - I'll step down if you don't jail me for the fraud which I'm guilty of.
"Cashing out cryptocurrency isn't very difficult. If they did this even now it would raise suspicion and incur high taxes, but the government couldn't prove that any law was broken or that the coins came from lobbyists. The hard part is accepting the bribe anonymously, not laundering it once it's already held anonymously anywhere in the world."
But isn't that sufficient? Shouldn't it just be a case of these people proving the source of the income to the auditors? If they can't show that a £100,000 payment really did come from their grandma's will, then just flag them as having high amounts of unannounced income and hence therefore not eligible to hold office. If you want the power of office, you should be forced to accept the accountability of transparency. The problem is they want the power without the transparency or accountability that is necessary to make sure that power doesn't corrupt and that's what ultimately must be tackled. We know that power corrupts, so we must make sure we get the accountability and transparency to counter that. To be fair, the Freedom of Information act (I understand you have it in the US as well) was quite a watershed moment in this respect, and whilst it's flaunted and far from perfect, it's still ultimately a game changer in this respect, we just need more of it.
Really, there's a spectrum, from fully fledged religious extremist (i.e. you, ISIS), through to people who say "Yeah I'm Christian" in the census, but don't practice it or necessarily even believe in it, to people who identify as atheists.
People who actually identify as atheists are growing in number, all the other groups are shrinking. It doesn't really matter what the total numbers are when you were talking about dying out - the trend is still the opposite of what you're claiming, the trend is still that atheism is growing and theism is dying out.
The only places where this isn't true are backwater third world nations. It's true in the West because as people become more educated they stop believing in religious fairy tales, and the West is becoming ever more educated. Unfortunately, hold outs like you still like to pretend you prefer the 3rd world undereducated mentality and make a laughing stock of yourselves, so this is what we do, we laugh at you, because you're so wrong that it's really kind of funny - I mean, let's be clear here, you're preaching logic to a logician, whilst bastardising it and reaching false conclusions, to me that's incredibly hilarious, it's like watching a fat kid stumbling, panting and falling over repeatedly along a 100 metre sprint 2 hours after everyone else has already finished but insisting he's going to win.
The best bit is that you don't even realise you're the fat kid, I'd feel sorry for you if you weren't also such a blatant preachy dickhead that somehow believe he can spread his child-mind world view by spouting nonsense and pretending he has logic on his side.
Really? You're still crying because I pointed out that you suffer a trait of the human race that's dying off?
Again, no amount of wishful thinking on your behalf changes the fact that folks like you that still believe in fairy tales as grown ups are dying out, whilst folks like me who don't believe in the fairy tales of religion are growing in number.
Reading your posts is like watching a caught fish on the deck of a ship flapping about desperately trying to survive but ultimately knowing it's a lost cause. You know how funny it is watching your desperation to deny reality right? You know everyone is winding you up because it's kind of funny trolling the crackpot yes?
You're creating so much stress for yourself spewing bile and desperately trying to defend that which cannot be defended because it fails the basic components of logic. Go lick the bible or whatever it is you get upto for your own sake, you're not convincing anyone with your drivel, because it's precisely that, drivel. If nothing else you're going to die off from an aneurysm caused by getting so stressed trying to defend something that just does not make sense and has no worthwhile evidence backing it.
Okay, that's wonderful, you can keep saying that over and over all you want, but it wont change the reality that the downward trend in developed nations is religion, and the upward trend is atheism.
You obviously don't like this given how upset it's made you, but hey, if reality denial is your thing then that's your problem not mine, you're a dying breed in the developed world and that's an inescapable fact. You can't escape the numbers as much as you may wish to pretend to yourself otherwise.
The problem is that you view the world with a kind of binary dumb-think, you seem to believe that people have to either view the world as completely scientific, or view it in a completely fictional way. It's simply not true, level of scientific application to life sits on a scale, and many are happy to reject the completely unscientific notion of religion and yet still apply the entirely moralistic (but not inherently scientific) view that if we choose to treat each other well, and not do harm to each other, that we may also wish to consider extending that to animals who are just as capable of feeling pain and stress as we are.
The problem is the metaphysical reality you refer to isn't, there exists absolutely no proof for it whatsoever. Yes, I've seen you link to articles in other replies, but these aren't actually evidence of what you're claiming, merely evidence that you're willing to misinterpret the meaning of scientific studies to suit your (unproven) preconceived beliefs. That just tells us that you're only willing to see what you want to see, and not factor real actual scientific understanding into your belief set.
You also talk about natural selection, and do you know what's being naturally selected away nowadays in the developed world? People who believe in metaphysical ideas like those behind most religions. Sorry buddy, you're a dying breed and no amount of flapping about misinterpreting scientific papers to try and justify to yourself that you're right will change that.
The fact is belief in religion confers no benefit upon the human race, so your contribution of living a life believing in fairy tales is a dying one - it's fundamentally a meaningless waste of time because people have realised they can achieve more in life by not wasting time on fairy tales and by getting on with doing something actually productive.
"Okay. A human is a biological entity that has a soul."
Does it? Where is this soul, what does it look like, and how is it measured? To date there is absolutely no evidence whatsoever for the existence of a "soul", so you've already failed at the first hurdle in trying to define a human being because you've had to resort to including something that is based on all evidence to date purely fictional in your description.
You seem to think that people (atheists) would be disturbed at the idea of death just being some kind of end with no meaning. Personally I think disolving into the ground for the matter of which I consist to be consumed by plants and other animals quite beautiful. Certainly more so than the idea of living in an eternal cloud kingdom with lots of boring preachy people overseen by a grand dictator that is apparently incredibly judgemental, selfish, and egotistical in that he hates people for being gay and not bowing down to worship him for a few hours a week.
Really, the only reason you need religion in the first place is because you're so scared of the idea that one day your life will end and want to pretend you can continue being you forever, but really, believing in fairy tales like all religions are is on the same mental level of believing in santa claus and the easter bunny, so I wouldn't expect much sense from someone with the most childish of thought processes.
Don't you think another option is transparency though? Frankly I think if legislators are suggesting it's okay for security agencies to track us, then it makes perfect sense for the private accounts and any incoming transactions to someone taking office are made public, or at very least, audited by a truly independent body.
Even with cryptocurrency if they can't cash it then they're still screwed.
The problem as I see it now, at least here in the UK is that the disincentives are negligible, hence why the incentives are high. Even when people have been caught they've had little more than a slap on the wrist and been made to repay it, rather than seeing jail time for fraud which is what should actually be happening - when we had our MPs expenses scandal a few years back and it turned out 100s of them were taking the piss, only an absolute handful actually went to jail (2 or 3 I believe) when the number should've been closer to 50 or 60, it was pretty clear that buying a duck house worth a few thousand pounds wasn't a legitimate use of expenses and was a case of defrauding the public purse yet I think that MP was one of the ones who didn't get prosecuted where if they had done this in any other industry they would have.
The problems I described are really industry agnostic and apply to even non-copyright industries, but I believe copyright is an artifact of the freemarket - the less regulated a market, the more incentive there is for growth by doing whatever is necessary, and that includes lobbying governments to get favourable laws passed. Copyright duration will end up as a balance between how tenable it is to get elected as a politician by changing them and how well corporations do at lobbying.
Personally I believe that just as religion and politics should be kept separate, so should business and politics as far as possible, that is, lobbying should be as much a criminal offence as bribery is, because they're really just the same thing with a different face.
Yes, last time I went diving there was a t-shirt with Eat, Sleep, Dive, Repeat on it. I hope to god this guy doesn't see that t-shirt and take it literally in the belief that there's something fun about living a life under constant decompression sickness, or just outright dying from it.
Given that his job was apparently basically to be the civil liberties guy that acts to make sure things were going as they should it sounds an awful lot like he either let them pull the wool over his eyes, or he wasn't really paying much attention to his job and now he basically can't admit that he fucked up so blames Snowden instead.
Everyone makes mistakes, but even some of the most well intentioned people struggle to accept blame when the shit hits the fan. His comments sound exactly like that - that he's simply trying to avoid blame for failing to do what he was there to do.
This meme needs to die, it was a reasonable comment to a degree about 10 years ago, but financial institutions have been phasing out COBOL since before the turn of the millenium, some did so before succesfully, others had to pay a fortune to COBOL developers to get them into the 21st century okay, but recognised the need to dispatch those old systems soon after. The amount that remain are few and far between.
This isn't to say there aren't COBOL systems out there, of course there are, but most banks and other financial institutions have phased out old COBOL systems with stuff written in languages like C++, Java, and even C#.
Many of the companies that used to be depended on for mainframe support and development just don't even exist now, or don't even support mainframes any longer and so it's just not tenable for many of those systems to still be around and depended on. It's all well and good having a 40 year old system tried and tested, running well, but if it fails, and it will eventually fail, and you can no longer get parts or support then you've basically just lost your whole business. That's not a risk banks can take morally, or legally - it would be a breach of the regulatory requirements surrounding risk management placed upon banks in most countries.
Note: I replace old systems in financial institutions for a living, so actually know something about this particular topic.
That's only really part the problem, the whole Disney situation highlights a flaw in capitalism - the larger a company gets, the more it can afford to buy, and the more it can afford to buy, the more it reduces competition in the market, and the more it reduces competition in the market, the less well free market capitalism can work - it's basically a self-defeating system in this respect.
As such it can only work with legislation, we have anti-monopoly laws for this purpose, but I'd argue they don't go fair enough - it shouldn't just be a problem when you get to a single entity in a particular market, it should stop much sooner than that. A company like Disney should be recognised as a major market force, and major market forces should not be allowed to just sweep up Marvel, LucasArts, and Pixar. The reason this exclusivity deal is such a problem is because Disney has been allowed to buy so many major content producers in the first place - if Disney had been forced to stop at Marvel then this wouldn't be such a big deal as rival services could bag Pixar and LucasArts ensuring competition.
There are laws for this in some industries in some countries - i.e. some countries have laws on media plurality that make sure there are a decent number of independent newspaper or TV companies in the country and that no one person can up more than a certain percent of the market but it needs to be much broader than this and encompass all industries.
Exclusive content is a pain, but it only really becomes a serious market problem as in cases like this precisely because one company is allowed to own so many important IPs in the market in the first place.
Problem is for Prime customers it's going to cost them more anyway.
The problem is with Prime you get free returns and free delivery, so if something goes down in price after you buy it you can just return it for free and buy it at the cheaper price with free next day delivery.
I always figured Amazon did this because the alternative of having to refund the higher price, sell at the lower price AND pay for restocking, collection, and redeliver was a much worse option costing them even more.
The EUCD is a sligthly different beast though, it's not in itself even remotely as restrictive or problematic as the DMCA, and it actually infers a lot of positive rights to that the DMCA does not.
But stepping back, it's important to understand that the EUCD is exactly that, a directive. Directives are basically outlines that define the minimum things a member state of the EU must do to be compliant with them to fulfil their obligations under their agreement as an EU member. As a result, the actual national implementations may also be much more strict than the EUCD itself giving a misleading impression of what it requires. It's worth noting that the reverse is true and some countries, including the UK were reprimanded for not even being willing to be fully compliant with the EUCD.
So overall it's still a fairly mixed bag, the WIPO treaty has still only really impacted countries to the extent of the DMCA that chose to be impacted to that degree, the vast majority of the world still doesn't come close to having DMCA type laws, and the WIPO treaty hasn't had much impact beyond those few countries that were incredibly pro-copyright in the first place such as the US and it's closest allies.
Sure that's a fair point, I'm basing my view on the jobs market and what local companies are doing. There's just no sign of uptake yet whatsoever but you're absolutely right, it is early days still. Having a few high profile projects to name drop is one thing, but it's only really when the real market picks it up that it matters because then it starts being relevant to the broader set of Windows developers rather than just a negligible minority who are working on those handful of name drop projects
But developers like myself really lost interest largely because WinRT was such a failure, so I think it's hard to detach the two things. UWP is going to have to do a hell of a lot to make up ground lost by WinRT, if nothing else because one of the reasons WinRT did fail is simply that no one had any interest in learning yet another framework when the existing one worked just fine, bar an arbitrary and nonsensical dropping of support by Microsoft but not really (WPF hasn't really been touched in any meaningful way in years, but Microsoft denies it's officially dropped it).
But does it really matter at this point? I'm not seeing much will for people to put on from things like WPF, wouldn't it make sense to just ditch the failure that is WinRT and just go back to supporting WPF?
I'm just not seeing any evidence of adoption of WinRT, and I'm not really convinced there is any will to adopt it.
It always seemed to be a solution seeking a problem.
Always liked Doom, but I agree, I ended up putting far more hours into Quake for the reasons you state - the full 3D world, rocket jumps, and the bouncing of grenades and so forth meant there was much more to learn to perfect and much more skill involved.
I never really liked Quake II apart from co-op campaign, and was really disappointed by Quake III.
For what it's worth I tried the new Doom the other day, I don't know why they called it Doom, it's just Quake III really with a storyline, slightly updated graphics and not much else. The weapons are wrong, the enemies don't feel right, the sounds are too puny, and the music just isn't there. They seem to be under the impression that if they make you move fast that they've recreated Doom even though everything else is wrong.
I'm sure Quake III players will love it, the multiplayer really does just play exactly like Quake III and a lot of the weapons and powerups feel and play the same.
To be fair it's not like we're stuck in the 1980s anymore, giving download priority to the current tab whilst background buffering the background tabs with any remaining bandwidth should be a fairly straightforward way of providing the best of both worlds.
That's only really half the story though, on the flip side there are things like MFC which are still supported to this very day - that's 24 years, which for a library is a pretty good lifespan.
It really seems to depend on the department, I agree, their graphics/games APIs have been a mess over the years - you haven't even stated the half of it with DirectX / XNA as you've missed out things like GDI, GDI+, WPF (for rendering), Managed DirectX. I'm not sure deprecating things like DirectInput really mattered though, they were only ever there to make up for the fact that Windows provided otherwise awful APIs for handling input for applications like games, and that's just not true anymore, therefore it really became irrelevant and pointless. Networking was similar, except it was quickly realised that different games had such different networking requirements that it was really pointless trying to create a do everything API and just let devs use Windows Sockets which is what they were doing because DirectPlay was too specific anyway.
I completely agree that Microsoft need to get a better grip on their roadmaps for developers - I think it's a travesty that WPF, their main Windows desktop framework doesn't contain the very controls that they expect developers to use in Windows nowadays (i.e. an uptodate ribbon control), whilst WinRT it's replacement seems to be lacking uptake because it's largely crippled by everything that was wrong with Windows 8 (namely trying to fudge a tablet way of doing things onto the desktop).
I'll admit I'm also a bit concerned about where they're going with their web technologies, ASP.NET WebForms was awful but stable for a good decade, ASP.NET MVC is excellent, but they seem to be building things in a way that make a right hash up of things - in about two ASP.NET MVC versions we went through about 4 recommended frameworks/iterations of frameworks for handling authentication and authorisation, from Membership Providers, to the WebMatrix libraries, to Identity 1, to Identity 2, and in the process we seem to actually have lost a lot of things that even the basic membership providers did well (Easy Web.Config configuration based switching between Forms and AD authentication for example). Rather than changing the recommended way to do authentication/authorisation 4 times in two fucking versions it would've seemed to make sense to simply instead wait until you've actually got Identity functionally complete and then release it with the next version of ASP.NET MVC. Given how badly Identity integrates with existing MVC functionality this would've made a lot of sense.
There's also the whole.NET core thing and porting ASP.NET apps onto that with vNext, it's a great idea but again it's yet another API and platform you now have to adapt your code for. They seem to be letting some of their teams get a bit carried away with pet projects whilst forgetting that the reason they're a succesful company is that they've actually largely done a good job of providing developers good tools and relatively decent, stable APIs over the years. They're trying to bring on the script kiddies whilst neglecting the very enterprise developers that have kept them afloat all these years. My banking customer doesn't want fucking Twitter and Facebook integration, they want to be able to login and easily and authorize with domain accounts.
I can't be too critical of things like COM and OLE becoming less popular, they survived for decades and technology moves too quick to expect these sorts of things to last for 30 - 50 years or whatever you're expecting, and even now it's still supported, just not the best way of doing things.
So overall I think it's important to be a bit more reasonable here, I don't think you can criticise Microsoft for still supporting, but no longer recommending a 25 year old API and it's associated technologies whilst replacing them with something better and more modern for example. However I do agree it's reasonable to criticise them where they have made a c
WIPO has always been a mixed bag, it's not an inherently bad organisation, it's just forced to be bad by major players like the US.
To understand why WIPO isn't bad you have to look back at it's history and the creation of the WTO. WIPO was always effectively an entirely democratic organisation where each country equally gets a vote on measures. Back in about the 50s WIPO was trying to determine global laws regulating patent terms, and the US lobbied by large pharma was out-voted by the numerous poorer African and Asian countries on this - the US wanted long and crippling patent terms allowing it a monopoly on medicine, but the poorer countries wanted shorter more sensible terms with the goal of making sure that their people could still access patented medicine in a reasonable time frame without being priced out the market due to lack of competition caused by the over the top patent terms the US wanted.
In response to this, the US, not happy with WIPO being democratic, created the WTO as an alternative to it, but where it held all the real power without that pesky democracy that trounced it at WIPO. It's used the WTO to try and force countries into it with a carrot and stick approach - on one hand using the WTO to create rules that open up trade meaning if you're a member you're part of a trade agreement that makes it easier and cheaper to buy and sell with WTO members, but on the other using it to enforce increasingly strong rules on things like patent protection to people joining up.
WIPO has had to adapt to avoid becoming irrelevant, and yes, that meant passing things that are far from ideal, but it's still the better of all the organisations pushing IP laws, precisely because power isn't centred in the hands of the US and it's allies.
As an aside though, no, WIPO didn't give you the DMCA. The DMCA is a US only law, and yes it was introduced under the guise of implementing a WIPO treaty, but it goes way beyond what that WIPO treaty required. Were the WIPO treaty responsible for the DMCA then all countries would have the DMCA or an equivalent but they don't, only the US does.
Is there evidence he's hacked into anyone elses account since, or are you basing that judgement entirely on unfounded speculation?
I'm not much a fan of Zuckerberg, but I'm even less a fan of unfounded assumption. I think when it's implied that something is wrong without evidence is detracts from legitimate discussion about things that are actually wrong. If enough wrong accusations are thrown at him he can hide behind those false accusations with dismissal of them to evade legitimate concern about real actual problems, such as his willingness to flagrantly and consistently breach European Data Protection Law with his European operations.
Don't give him the excuse of being able to dismiss criticism with the claim he always has unfounded accusations thrown at him by throwing unfounded accusations at him.
Yes, because we all know that something someone does at university shapes their entire existence until the end of time.
I got really drunk and threw up in a graveyard when I was 17, but I sure as hell have never, nor will ever again do this. It's not like that one incident means I've become a serial graveyard defiler. There's a big difference between the irresponsibility of what people do when they're young and how they act as they get older.
Frankly, if you didn't engage in anything like that as a teenager then you probably missed out on a great education in technology. Morally wrong? ethically wrong? legally wrong? Probably, part of a fairly typical hormone filled growing up? Yep.
If we were all defined by what we did when we were 19, then unless you're some kind of mormon prude then we'd all be fucked.
Britain doesn't really have many of it's own cars anymore though, everything now is owned abroad and that's affected the direction.
Actually British cars are renowned for their quality and reliability, like original Land Rovers, but the name has been tarnished now by Land Rovers made with a focus less on quality and reliability, and more on profits and mass-sales to demographics who don't need the reliability but just want a big car because they're too fearful of their inability to drive well and hence high likelihood of crashing to drive anything normal. The net result is that yes, the quality and reliability of these historically British brands has suffered, but they're also not really British anymore. The reliability drop of these ones great brands coincidences precisely with foreign ownership and change of direction - it's a double edged sword, because following down the original path wasn't massively profitable, so in some ways these take overs saved the brands, but in going more mass-market yes, it absolutely killed some of the things the brands were famous for. Effectively British stubborness to maintain high quality and reliability rather than giving the markets what they wanted - low quality, cheap fluff, is what risked sending those brands bankrupt
What's left as genuinely British are things like Lotus, Aston Martin, and McClaren where quality is about as high as it gets, though reliability always suffers with high end cars when compared to your typical family car because high end cars push the limits of engineering far more, but they compare very well though to other cars in their class. It's no coincidence that the brands that manage to maintain the historical British reputation for quality are the ones that sell at a premium whilst the cost impact that had was what risked sending the lower end brands out of business.
Perhaps the country with the most undeserved reputation for quality and reliability is Germany, German engineering is a complete joke when brands like Audi, BMW, and German owned brands like Bentley fair so poorly on reliability indexes. Japan is about the only country that seems able to do a good job of fairly consistently maintaining decent quality and reliability nowadays for what it's worth. Long story short, British reputation for reliability/stability was effectively priced out of the global market and they were left with a choice - decrease quality to increase profits as the likes of BMW have done, or go bust. They got taken over by foreign owners who weren't hamstrung by the sense of British manufacturing pride that previously made them stubbornly refuse to make that change and so were in fact forced to make that change leaving them where they are now.
Everything that is still wholly British does have high quality and good reliability though, but can only do so because it's retreated to the market where paying the premium for higher quality isn't a problem for the buyers in question.
Slashdot Mirror
"Your game theory is technically valid, but were any of these corrupt MPs re-elected?"
It was really a mixed bag, about 100 actually stood down, some were re-elected. It was ultimately a gentleman's agreement with the state - I'll step down if you don't jail me for the fraud which I'm guilty of.
"Cashing out cryptocurrency isn't very difficult. If they did this even now it would raise suspicion and incur high taxes, but the government couldn't prove that any law was broken or that the coins came from lobbyists. The hard part is accepting the bribe anonymously, not laundering it once it's already held anonymously anywhere in the world."
But isn't that sufficient? Shouldn't it just be a case of these people proving the source of the income to the auditors? If they can't show that a £100,000 payment really did come from their grandma's will, then just flag them as having high amounts of unannounced income and hence therefore not eligible to hold office. If you want the power of office, you should be forced to accept the accountability of transparency. The problem is they want the power without the transparency or accountability that is necessary to make sure that power doesn't corrupt and that's what ultimately must be tackled. We know that power corrupts, so we must make sure we get the accountability and transparency to counter that. To be fair, the Freedom of Information act (I understand you have it in the US as well) was quite a watershed moment in this respect, and whilst it's flaunted and far from perfect, it's still ultimately a game changer in this respect, we just need more of it.
Really, there's a spectrum, from fully fledged religious extremist (i.e. you, ISIS), through to people who say "Yeah I'm Christian" in the census, but don't practice it or necessarily even believe in it, to people who identify as atheists.
People who actually identify as atheists are growing in number, all the other groups are shrinking. It doesn't really matter what the total numbers are when you were talking about dying out - the trend is still the opposite of what you're claiming, the trend is still that atheism is growing and theism is dying out.
The only places where this isn't true are backwater third world nations. It's true in the West because as people become more educated they stop believing in religious fairy tales, and the West is becoming ever more educated. Unfortunately, hold outs like you still like to pretend you prefer the 3rd world undereducated mentality and make a laughing stock of yourselves, so this is what we do, we laugh at you, because you're so wrong that it's really kind of funny - I mean, let's be clear here, you're preaching logic to a logician, whilst bastardising it and reaching false conclusions, to me that's incredibly hilarious, it's like watching a fat kid stumbling, panting and falling over repeatedly along a 100 metre sprint 2 hours after everyone else has already finished but insisting he's going to win.
The best bit is that you don't even realise you're the fat kid, I'd feel sorry for you if you weren't also such a blatant preachy dickhead that somehow believe he can spread his child-mind world view by spouting nonsense and pretending he has logic on his side.
You're basically failing at everything here.
Really? You're still crying because I pointed out that you suffer a trait of the human race that's dying off?
Again, no amount of wishful thinking on your behalf changes the fact that folks like you that still believe in fairy tales as grown ups are dying out, whilst folks like me who don't believe in the fairy tales of religion are growing in number.
Reading your posts is like watching a caught fish on the deck of a ship flapping about desperately trying to survive but ultimately knowing it's a lost cause. You know how funny it is watching your desperation to deny reality right? You know everyone is winding you up because it's kind of funny trolling the crackpot yes?
You're creating so much stress for yourself spewing bile and desperately trying to defend that which cannot be defended because it fails the basic components of logic. Go lick the bible or whatever it is you get upto for your own sake, you're not convincing anyone with your drivel, because it's precisely that, drivel. If nothing else you're going to die off from an aneurysm caused by getting so stressed trying to defend something that just does not make sense and has no worthwhile evidence backing it.
Okay, that's wonderful, you can keep saying that over and over all you want, but it wont change the reality that the downward trend in developed nations is religion, and the upward trend is atheism.
You obviously don't like this given how upset it's made you, but hey, if reality denial is your thing then that's your problem not mine, you're a dying breed in the developed world and that's an inescapable fact. You can't escape the numbers as much as you may wish to pretend to yourself otherwise.
The problem is that you view the world with a kind of binary dumb-think, you seem to believe that people have to either view the world as completely scientific, or view it in a completely fictional way. It's simply not true, level of scientific application to life sits on a scale, and many are happy to reject the completely unscientific notion of religion and yet still apply the entirely moralistic (but not inherently scientific) view that if we choose to treat each other well, and not do harm to each other, that we may also wish to consider extending that to animals who are just as capable of feeling pain and stress as we are.
The problem is the metaphysical reality you refer to isn't, there exists absolutely no proof for it whatsoever. Yes, I've seen you link to articles in other replies, but these aren't actually evidence of what you're claiming, merely evidence that you're willing to misinterpret the meaning of scientific studies to suit your (unproven) preconceived beliefs. That just tells us that you're only willing to see what you want to see, and not factor real actual scientific understanding into your belief set.
You also talk about natural selection, and do you know what's being naturally selected away nowadays in the developed world? People who believe in metaphysical ideas like those behind most religions. Sorry buddy, you're a dying breed and no amount of flapping about misinterpreting scientific papers to try and justify to yourself that you're right will change that.
The fact is belief in religion confers no benefit upon the human race, so your contribution of living a life believing in fairy tales is a dying one - it's fundamentally a meaningless waste of time because people have realised they can achieve more in life by not wasting time on fairy tales and by getting on with doing something actually productive.
"Okay. A human is a biological entity that has a soul."
Does it? Where is this soul, what does it look like, and how is it measured? To date there is absolutely no evidence whatsoever for the existence of a "soul", so you've already failed at the first hurdle in trying to define a human being because you've had to resort to including something that is based on all evidence to date purely fictional in your description.
You seem to think that people (atheists) would be disturbed at the idea of death just being some kind of end with no meaning. Personally I think disolving into the ground for the matter of which I consist to be consumed by plants and other animals quite beautiful. Certainly more so than the idea of living in an eternal cloud kingdom with lots of boring preachy people overseen by a grand dictator that is apparently incredibly judgemental, selfish, and egotistical in that he hates people for being gay and not bowing down to worship him for a few hours a week.
Really, the only reason you need religion in the first place is because you're so scared of the idea that one day your life will end and want to pretend you can continue being you forever, but really, believing in fairy tales like all religions are is on the same mental level of believing in santa claus and the easter bunny, so I wouldn't expect much sense from someone with the most childish of thought processes.
Don't you think another option is transparency though? Frankly I think if legislators are suggesting it's okay for security agencies to track us, then it makes perfect sense for the private accounts and any incoming transactions to someone taking office are made public, or at very least, audited by a truly independent body.
Even with cryptocurrency if they can't cash it then they're still screwed.
The problem as I see it now, at least here in the UK is that the disincentives are negligible, hence why the incentives are high. Even when people have been caught they've had little more than a slap on the wrist and been made to repay it, rather than seeing jail time for fraud which is what should actually be happening - when we had our MPs expenses scandal a few years back and it turned out 100s of them were taking the piss, only an absolute handful actually went to jail (2 or 3 I believe) when the number should've been closer to 50 or 60, it was pretty clear that buying a duck house worth a few thousand pounds wasn't a legitimate use of expenses and was a case of defrauding the public purse yet I think that MP was one of the ones who didn't get prosecuted where if they had done this in any other industry they would have.
The problems I described are really industry agnostic and apply to even non-copyright industries, but I believe copyright is an artifact of the freemarket - the less regulated a market, the more incentive there is for growth by doing whatever is necessary, and that includes lobbying governments to get favourable laws passed. Copyright duration will end up as a balance between how tenable it is to get elected as a politician by changing them and how well corporations do at lobbying.
Personally I believe that just as religion and politics should be kept separate, so should business and politics as far as possible, that is, lobbying should be as much a criminal offence as bribery is, because they're really just the same thing with a different face.
Yes, last time I went diving there was a t-shirt with Eat, Sleep, Dive, Repeat on it. I hope to god this guy doesn't see that t-shirt and take it literally in the belief that there's something fun about living a life under constant decompression sickness, or just outright dying from it.
Given that his job was apparently basically to be the civil liberties guy that acts to make sure things were going as they should it sounds an awful lot like he either let them pull the wool over his eyes, or he wasn't really paying much attention to his job and now he basically can't admit that he fucked up so blames Snowden instead.
Everyone makes mistakes, but even some of the most well intentioned people struggle to accept blame when the shit hits the fan. His comments sound exactly like that - that he's simply trying to avoid blame for failing to do what he was there to do.
This meme needs to die, it was a reasonable comment to a degree about 10 years ago, but financial institutions have been phasing out COBOL since before the turn of the millenium, some did so before succesfully, others had to pay a fortune to COBOL developers to get them into the 21st century okay, but recognised the need to dispatch those old systems soon after. The amount that remain are few and far between.
This isn't to say there aren't COBOL systems out there, of course there are, but most banks and other financial institutions have phased out old COBOL systems with stuff written in languages like C++, Java, and even C#.
Many of the companies that used to be depended on for mainframe support and development just don't even exist now, or don't even support mainframes any longer and so it's just not tenable for many of those systems to still be around and depended on. It's all well and good having a 40 year old system tried and tested, running well, but if it fails, and it will eventually fail, and you can no longer get parts or support then you've basically just lost your whole business. That's not a risk banks can take morally, or legally - it would be a breach of the regulatory requirements surrounding risk management placed upon banks in most countries.
Note: I replace old systems in financial institutions for a living, so actually know something about this particular topic.
That's only really part the problem, the whole Disney situation highlights a flaw in capitalism - the larger a company gets, the more it can afford to buy, and the more it can afford to buy, the more it reduces competition in the market, and the more it reduces competition in the market, the less well free market capitalism can work - it's basically a self-defeating system in this respect.
As such it can only work with legislation, we have anti-monopoly laws for this purpose, but I'd argue they don't go fair enough - it shouldn't just be a problem when you get to a single entity in a particular market, it should stop much sooner than that. A company like Disney should be recognised as a major market force, and major market forces should not be allowed to just sweep up Marvel, LucasArts, and Pixar. The reason this exclusivity deal is such a problem is because Disney has been allowed to buy so many major content producers in the first place - if Disney had been forced to stop at Marvel then this wouldn't be such a big deal as rival services could bag Pixar and LucasArts ensuring competition.
There are laws for this in some industries in some countries - i.e. some countries have laws on media plurality that make sure there are a decent number of independent newspaper or TV companies in the country and that no one person can up more than a certain percent of the market but it needs to be much broader than this and encompass all industries.
Exclusive content is a pain, but it only really becomes a serious market problem as in cases like this precisely because one company is allowed to own so many important IPs in the market in the first place.
Problem is for Prime customers it's going to cost them more anyway.
The problem is with Prime you get free returns and free delivery, so if something goes down in price after you buy it you can just return it for free and buy it at the cheaper price with free next day delivery.
I always figured Amazon did this because the alternative of having to refund the higher price, sell at the lower price AND pay for restocking, collection, and redeliver was a much worse option costing them even more.
Greece is still in a persistent state of paranoia with Turkey over the whole Cyprus afair, this region WILL be covered by Greek radar.
The EUCD is a sligthly different beast though, it's not in itself even remotely as restrictive or problematic as the DMCA, and it actually infers a lot of positive rights to that the DMCA does not.
But stepping back, it's important to understand that the EUCD is exactly that, a directive. Directives are basically outlines that define the minimum things a member state of the EU must do to be compliant with them to fulfil their obligations under their agreement as an EU member. As a result, the actual national implementations may also be much more strict than the EUCD itself giving a misleading impression of what it requires. It's worth noting that the reverse is true and some countries, including the UK were reprimanded for not even being willing to be fully compliant with the EUCD.
So overall it's still a fairly mixed bag, the WIPO treaty has still only really impacted countries to the extent of the DMCA that chose to be impacted to that degree, the vast majority of the world still doesn't come close to having DMCA type laws, and the WIPO treaty hasn't had much impact beyond those few countries that were incredibly pro-copyright in the first place such as the US and it's closest allies.
Sure that's a fair point, I'm basing my view on the jobs market and what local companies are doing. There's just no sign of uptake yet whatsoever but you're absolutely right, it is early days still. Having a few high profile projects to name drop is one thing, but it's only really when the real market picks it up that it matters because then it starts being relevant to the broader set of Windows developers rather than just a negligible minority who are working on those handful of name drop projects
But developers like myself really lost interest largely because WinRT was such a failure, so I think it's hard to detach the two things. UWP is going to have to do a hell of a lot to make up ground lost by WinRT, if nothing else because one of the reasons WinRT did fail is simply that no one had any interest in learning yet another framework when the existing one worked just fine, bar an arbitrary and nonsensical dropping of support by Microsoft but not really (WPF hasn't really been touched in any meaningful way in years, but Microsoft denies it's officially dropped it).
But does it really matter at this point? I'm not seeing much will for people to put on from things like WPF, wouldn't it make sense to just ditch the failure that is WinRT and just go back to supporting WPF?
I'm just not seeing any evidence of adoption of WinRT, and I'm not really convinced there is any will to adopt it.
It always seemed to be a solution seeking a problem.
Always liked Doom, but I agree, I ended up putting far more hours into Quake for the reasons you state - the full 3D world, rocket jumps, and the bouncing of grenades and so forth meant there was much more to learn to perfect and much more skill involved.
I never really liked Quake II apart from co-op campaign, and was really disappointed by Quake III.
For what it's worth I tried the new Doom the other day, I don't know why they called it Doom, it's just Quake III really with a storyline, slightly updated graphics and not much else. The weapons are wrong, the enemies don't feel right, the sounds are too puny, and the music just isn't there. They seem to be under the impression that if they make you move fast that they've recreated Doom even though everything else is wrong.
I'm sure Quake III players will love it, the multiplayer really does just play exactly like Quake III and a lot of the weapons and powerups feel and play the same.
To be fair it's not like we're stuck in the 1980s anymore, giving download priority to the current tab whilst background buffering the background tabs with any remaining bandwidth should be a fairly straightforward way of providing the best of both worlds.
That's only really half the story though, on the flip side there are things like MFC which are still supported to this very day - that's 24 years, which for a library is a pretty good lifespan.
It really seems to depend on the department, I agree, their graphics/games APIs have been a mess over the years - you haven't even stated the half of it with DirectX / XNA as you've missed out things like GDI, GDI+, WPF (for rendering), Managed DirectX. I'm not sure deprecating things like DirectInput really mattered though, they were only ever there to make up for the fact that Windows provided otherwise awful APIs for handling input for applications like games, and that's just not true anymore, therefore it really became irrelevant and pointless. Networking was similar, except it was quickly realised that different games had such different networking requirements that it was really pointless trying to create a do everything API and just let devs use Windows Sockets which is what they were doing because DirectPlay was too specific anyway.
I completely agree that Microsoft need to get a better grip on their roadmaps for developers - I think it's a travesty that WPF, their main Windows desktop framework doesn't contain the very controls that they expect developers to use in Windows nowadays (i.e. an uptodate ribbon control), whilst WinRT it's replacement seems to be lacking uptake because it's largely crippled by everything that was wrong with Windows 8 (namely trying to fudge a tablet way of doing things onto the desktop).
I'll admit I'm also a bit concerned about where they're going with their web technologies, ASP.NET WebForms was awful but stable for a good decade, ASP.NET MVC is excellent, but they seem to be building things in a way that make a right hash up of things - in about two ASP.NET MVC versions we went through about 4 recommended frameworks/iterations of frameworks for handling authentication and authorisation, from Membership Providers, to the WebMatrix libraries, to Identity 1, to Identity 2, and in the process we seem to actually have lost a lot of things that even the basic membership providers did well (Easy Web.Config configuration based switching between Forms and AD authentication for example). Rather than changing the recommended way to do authentication/authorisation 4 times in two fucking versions it would've seemed to make sense to simply instead wait until you've actually got Identity functionally complete and then release it with the next version of ASP.NET MVC. Given how badly Identity integrates with existing MVC functionality this would've made a lot of sense.
There's also the whole .NET core thing and porting ASP.NET apps onto that with vNext, it's a great idea but again it's yet another API and platform you now have to adapt your code for. They seem to be letting some of their teams get a bit carried away with pet projects whilst forgetting that the reason they're a succesful company is that they've actually largely done a good job of providing developers good tools and relatively decent, stable APIs over the years. They're trying to bring on the script kiddies whilst neglecting the very enterprise developers that have kept them afloat all these years. My banking customer doesn't want fucking Twitter and Facebook integration, they want to be able to login and easily and authorize with domain accounts.
I can't be too critical of things like COM and OLE becoming less popular, they survived for decades and technology moves too quick to expect these sorts of things to last for 30 - 50 years or whatever you're expecting, and even now it's still supported, just not the best way of doing things.
So overall I think it's important to be a bit more reasonable here, I don't think you can criticise Microsoft for still supporting, but no longer recommending a 25 year old API and it's associated technologies whilst replacing them with something better and more modern for example. However I do agree it's reasonable to criticise them where they have made a c
WIPO has always been a mixed bag, it's not an inherently bad organisation, it's just forced to be bad by major players like the US.
To understand why WIPO isn't bad you have to look back at it's history and the creation of the WTO. WIPO was always effectively an entirely democratic organisation where each country equally gets a vote on measures. Back in about the 50s WIPO was trying to determine global laws regulating patent terms, and the US lobbied by large pharma was out-voted by the numerous poorer African and Asian countries on this - the US wanted long and crippling patent terms allowing it a monopoly on medicine, but the poorer countries wanted shorter more sensible terms with the goal of making sure that their people could still access patented medicine in a reasonable time frame without being priced out the market due to lack of competition caused by the over the top patent terms the US wanted.
In response to this, the US, not happy with WIPO being democratic, created the WTO as an alternative to it, but where it held all the real power without that pesky democracy that trounced it at WIPO. It's used the WTO to try and force countries into it with a carrot and stick approach - on one hand using the WTO to create rules that open up trade meaning if you're a member you're part of a trade agreement that makes it easier and cheaper to buy and sell with WTO members, but on the other using it to enforce increasingly strong rules on things like patent protection to people joining up.
WIPO has had to adapt to avoid becoming irrelevant, and yes, that meant passing things that are far from ideal, but it's still the better of all the organisations pushing IP laws, precisely because power isn't centred in the hands of the US and it's allies.
As an aside though, no, WIPO didn't give you the DMCA. The DMCA is a US only law, and yes it was introduced under the guise of implementing a WIPO treaty, but it goes way beyond what that WIPO treaty required. Were the WIPO treaty responsible for the DMCA then all countries would have the DMCA or an equivalent but they don't, only the US does.
Is there evidence he's hacked into anyone elses account since, or are you basing that judgement entirely on unfounded speculation?
I'm not much a fan of Zuckerberg, but I'm even less a fan of unfounded assumption. I think when it's implied that something is wrong without evidence is detracts from legitimate discussion about things that are actually wrong. If enough wrong accusations are thrown at him he can hide behind those false accusations with dismissal of them to evade legitimate concern about real actual problems, such as his willingness to flagrantly and consistently breach European Data Protection Law with his European operations.
Don't give him the excuse of being able to dismiss criticism with the claim he always has unfounded accusations thrown at him by throwing unfounded accusations at him.
Yes, because we all know that something someone does at university shapes their entire existence until the end of time.
I got really drunk and threw up in a graveyard when I was 17, but I sure as hell have never, nor will ever again do this. It's not like that one incident means I've become a serial graveyard defiler. There's a big difference between the irresponsibility of what people do when they're young and how they act as they get older.
Frankly, if you didn't engage in anything like that as a teenager then you probably missed out on a great education in technology. Morally wrong? ethically wrong? legally wrong? Probably, part of a fairly typical hormone filled growing up? Yep.
If we were all defined by what we did when we were 19, then unless you're some kind of mormon prude then we'd all be fucked.
Britain doesn't really have many of it's own cars anymore though, everything now is owned abroad and that's affected the direction.
Actually British cars are renowned for their quality and reliability, like original Land Rovers, but the name has been tarnished now by Land Rovers made with a focus less on quality and reliability, and more on profits and mass-sales to demographics who don't need the reliability but just want a big car because they're too fearful of their inability to drive well and hence high likelihood of crashing to drive anything normal. The net result is that yes, the quality and reliability of these historically British brands has suffered, but they're also not really British anymore. The reliability drop of these ones great brands coincidences precisely with foreign ownership and change of direction - it's a double edged sword, because following down the original path wasn't massively profitable, so in some ways these take overs saved the brands, but in going more mass-market yes, it absolutely killed some of the things the brands were famous for. Effectively British stubborness to maintain high quality and reliability rather than giving the markets what they wanted - low quality, cheap fluff, is what risked sending those brands bankrupt
What's left as genuinely British are things like Lotus, Aston Martin, and McClaren where quality is about as high as it gets, though reliability always suffers with high end cars when compared to your typical family car because high end cars push the limits of engineering far more, but they compare very well though to other cars in their class. It's no coincidence that the brands that manage to maintain the historical British reputation for quality are the ones that sell at a premium whilst the cost impact that had was what risked sending the lower end brands out of business.
Perhaps the country with the most undeserved reputation for quality and reliability is Germany, German engineering is a complete joke when brands like Audi, BMW, and German owned brands like Bentley fair so poorly on reliability indexes. Japan is about the only country that seems able to do a good job of fairly consistently maintaining decent quality and reliability nowadays for what it's worth. Long story short, British reputation for reliability/stability was effectively priced out of the global market and they were left with a choice - decrease quality to increase profits as the likes of BMW have done, or go bust. They got taken over by foreign owners who weren't hamstrung by the sense of British manufacturing pride that previously made them stubbornly refuse to make that change and so were in fact forced to make that change leaving them where they are now.
Everything that is still wholly British does have high quality and good reliability though, but can only do so because it's retreated to the market where paying the premium for higher quality isn't a problem for the buyers in question.