So let me get this straight, you're saying I know nothing about Italy, and the way things work there and yet you're completely ignoring the fact that Italy is perhaps the most corrupt nation in the Western world?
You're correct that many members of the judiciary have been out for Berlusconi, but not all judges follow that agenda.
If Berlusconi wanted to influence judges with the amount of money he has, and with the amount of corruption in Italy, then that would be an extremely trivial task for him.
Are you even aware that a particularly significant portion of the hatred by some judges against Berlusconi is actually down to bribing judges in the first place?
If you're going to so arrogantly infer that someone is wrong, it might be a good idea to at least check your facts to ensure you're correct first, because clearly, in this case, you are not.
I think that's really the difference between Slashdot back then, and Slashdot now. Back then, stories used to get some really insightful comments even when they were just straightforward and factual. Now, it seems to require a bunch of FUD to get people interested enough to post to debunk them.
It used to be the case that you could come to Slashdot, read the story comments and actually learn something from a lot of smart people, the stories where comments offer any particularly decent insight nowadays seem few and far between.
There's also the question as to whether Slashdot should be contributing to the amount of hits InfoWorld gets by not pointing out that they're full of shit, and just regurgitating it and linking them too though, as it just gives more sites motivation to spread bullshit like that.
I believe they would need to issue a European Arrest Warrant for them to be at risk through the rest of Europe. I doubt for a second they'd be that stupid, as it would likely throw support for the EU as a whole into jeopardy- many British governments struggle to get support for the EU as is and it would just give more ammo to EU critics so I suspect even if they did make such a move it would be stamped out pretty quickly.
Whilst no European arrest warrant is issued, they shouldn't have any fear travelling through the rest of Europe at least, so it's really just an Italian affair right now thankfully.
I'm pretty sure there is, I think I've seen it before somewhere in the options, but whilst some editors are worse than others, there's no real consistency. Sometimes even the better editors post shite and every once in a while the shite editors post good stories.
Don't get me wrong, I certainly don't trust them, but that's exactly why I get annoyed- because to me, the slashvertisments and FUD articles are so blindingly obvious that it's annoying having to wade through them at all.
I do not trust The Register for the same reason, they heavily moderate and regularly don't allow publication of comments that give a counter-point to the original author on certain topics (global warming, file sharing) and certain authors don't accept comments on their articles at all (i.e. Andrew Orlowski).
When a site like that shows that level of FUD then as you say, they have to be written off as a trustworthy source for the most part.
But isn't it counter productive? How many hits do they gain with the inflammatory, in the long run, does it really do better for them than just being a damn good site? Isn't that largely how Slashdot gained it's userbase originally, by actually posting interesting, factual stories?
It strikes me as the type of idiocy the bankers pursued running upto the recession- short term gain, with large repercussions when it all came tumbling down, rather than pursuing a policy of acting reasonably. You could argue Canada did this to an extent as it did not have to bail out it's banks, and it's problems from the recession are relatively small compared to those who let their banks run rampant (the US, Britain).
I suppose the buzz of seeing the hits fly up on the charts from the web logs gives a bit more of a hardon after posting an inflammatory story, than keeping an average higher userbase by acting sensibly.
"Frankly, that's exactly what Slashdot is for. It actually is innocent in this."
Well no, last time I checked, that's what Digg was about. Slashdot was about selecting wortwhile articles, that are actually worth reading, and weren't just FUD/advertisments.
Slashdot specifically selects articles, it filters articles, and it's the quality of that selection and filtering that I am questioning.
People come to Slashdot because they do not expect to have to deal with the turd that Digg churns out. Otherwise, if there is no filtering, and as you say, it's just about publishing any old thing and saying this might or might not be of interest, then they might as well just replace the front page with firehose and not bother wasting time having editors in the first place.
"Includes an inside look at the politics of IDG and why you can never trust an IT publication that's as obsessed with page views as InfoWorld."
Or, say, Slashdot, which got InfoWorld half those hits by regurgitating it's bullshit in the first place?
Come on Slashdot editors- you can't post that quote, almost as if you're pretending that you're somehow innocent of this. You may been unwitting pawns in the InfoWorld hits game certainly, but you posted a FUD article about Android fragmentation just a day after InfoWorld had been outed as guilty of this and untrustworthy and that suggests that perhaps you enjoy leeching hits off their FUD as much as they enjoy generating them. So why pretend that Slashdot too doesn't use shock articles sometimes to try and increase hits?
Don't get me wrong, I like a lot of Slashdot articles else I wouldn't come here, but it's pretty obvious that some of them are inflammatory FUD (hell Slashdot posted the original article in question) and that others of them are Slashvertisments.
Slashdot's credibility absolutely has decreased over the years because of this, and so it may want to read the above quoted sentence and take some lessons from it itself to ensure it avoids ever heading the same way. I suspect that the editors play the biggest role in this by you know, doing some actual editing and checking the authenticity of the article they're about to post.
I would wager that this is Berlusconi's way of trying to control the web, you have to keep in mind this is a man who has a stranglehold on Italian media, and has used that to get into, and stay in power over the years. The web has been a headache for him, because it's an avenue from which people are getting news and which he does not control.
The judges may well be incompetent, or corrupt, but really they're just pawns in a bigger battle.
It's really hard to see how it can be anything else, I do not believe judges would reach the conclusion they did based on the fact that Google had done everything possible in their power, and based on the fact the people at Google in question who were targetted, are in some cases completely irrelevant and unattached to anything to do with the case.
It's likely that these people were chosen because they were high enough to make a point, but not the top dogs who really would have been able to unleash hell and fight back.
This is certainly one way in which Berlusconi could try and control the web such that it adheres to his viewpoint as much of the Italian media that he controls does, by ensuring that content providers are criminally responsible for anything put up that the government disagrees with. It's not a big deal for the Google execs, because they will likely never travel to Italy and so the case wont effect them- but picture this, you run a site in Italy critical of the Italian PM, you post photos of him carrying out an illegal deal, and, well, now you know where it will land you at least- jail. Anyone not from Italy doing the same, faces jail if they ever decide to travel to Italy after being convicted of the same.
It's almost as if Berlusconi has been taking lessons from the likes of Chavez and Ahmadinejad recently.
It's really the public sector way, I worked in public sector in the UK for a while, in local government, but I've seen it reaching to the top of British government, and even seen the same pattern from top to bottom in foreign governments.
It never ceases to amaze me how public sector beauracrats consistently manage to come up with schemes that achieve completely the opposite effect to what was intend, but that are also so obviously flawed that even the average layman in the street can tell you why said scheme wont work.
I don't know how they do it, the people who come up with these things are a special type of idiot, it's just remarkable that they can't see the so utterly glaring and obvious flaws in their plans.
You do get them in private sector too of course, but their prevalence in public sector? their ability to exist there at all levels, from the lowest paid to the highest paid? It's remarkable. You have to give them credit, I don't think for a second that I could make it to the top like they do whilst simultaneously making such stupid and flawed decisions, there's obviously a skill to it.
I like to think of Twitter's technology experiments, as high not to build and run a high performance web application. Hell, they bought us confirmation that Ruby on Rails wasn't exactly ready for prime time in terms of high performance work for example.
We have a lot to thank them for, but you're right, one of those things is not how to run a stable, secure, scalable web site, it is the opposite- how not to. I suspect before long we'll be able to see for ourselves how well, or how badly Cassandra does, measured by the increase or decrease in failwhales.
There's no real reason that can't be done in 3rd party libraries though- it's not something really essential to the core SDK, and if it really mattered, I suspect such a library would exist already if it doesn't. Personally it's not something I'm too bothered about, but perhaps that's because I've played around with developing indie games in the past, and so had to deal with unpredictable screen sizes anyway.
Regarding current fragmentation for phones, the answer is not too bad- looking at the Android SDK AVD manager there's only about 4 different resolutions, however I don't think the number matters, if you're going to want to scale, it doesn't really matter if you're scaling for 2 sizes, or 20 sizes.
A lot of people suggest this is one of the iPhones advantages, but is it really? The iPhone never used to have GPS for example, older versions have lower speed processors, and the 3GS has more RAM. I suspect Apple wont keep the screen resolution and feature set the same forever, else they'll end up getting themselves left in the dust. It's currently 320x480, in contrast, the Nexus One is 480x800- not too far off being double the resolution.
Realistically, it's a problem every developer has to face up to one day, and I suspect the theory that this is an advantage to the iPhone is unfounded in the long run. In fact, there's already the question of making sure your app works right on the iPhone and the iPad.
I do agree with you in a way, that things could be better, but then, I suspect things can always be better- I guess it's just a case of concentrating on what matters to most.
I'm not sure you really need to research into which devices support which resolutions tbh, you can just use the preset resolutions in the AVDs, or you can just write code to automatically scale- kind of like how UI's are handled in HTML, with relative positions and so forth, or how it is handled in OpenGL, where 2D is drawn on a relative, rather than fixed pixel scale.
Sorry if my original phrasing wasn't clear- I made the point that it's not the Geneva convention itself that would be applied, but that many countries implement laws which cover points highlighted in the Geneva convention over civil matters. Bringing up the mention of it being a war crime was not intended to suggest that this would be classed as a war crime, merely illustrating the historical recognised severity collective punishment can bring, and hence why quite a few nations have similar law to cover civil and criminal matters as well as their recognition of it as a war crime through being Geneva convention signatories.
There's historically been quite a few cases of laws from the likes of the Hague, and the Geneva conventions being added into national law on a more unilateral basis by individual nations- one example is that of hollow point bullets, which were banned for use in war in the Hague convention, but still used by many police forces- a few countries have also banned the use of these even by police forces to bring their laws into line with those that govern war under the point that if it's unacceptable to use against your enemy in war, then it's far more unacceptable to allow such use against your own population.
Whilst I do not believe the UK has historically had this protection, from what I understand European legislation did force member states to bring this in. In contrast, China for example has been slated for not doing enough to stop it in Tibet, even though they are not at war there and hence as they have not brought in such legislation, are not technically doing anything wrong.
Why? Android isn't designed to be used with just a single screen resolution device. It's designed to be usable for phones, PDAs, Netbooks, Tablets. It'd be stupid if it just scaled a phone sized UI to a tablet or Netbook.
I think there's some truth in what you say, this basically sounds like more FUD.
Sure Android can't guarantee you a fixed screen size, or fixed hardware availability, but it does make it easy to poll to find out what actually is available. It's probably easier to do this than on most platforms that don't retain static hardware requirements in fact.
But TFA seems to take it even further by suggesting we have a DLL hell type scenario or something, and that really is FUD.
As Infoworld is now proven as a site that spouts lies for hits, I can't help but think that this is perhaps just another case of them continuing to do that. I guess they decided to continue playing the troll, rather than trying to rebuild their devastated reputation.
"On top of that, how do you get all the big players to the table if the documentation is floating around that angers the hell out of their constituents. "If so and so goes to that summit, I'm never voting for her/him again" is what one might say."
Well that's the whole point of democracy, if the constituents don't want it, it shouldn't be implemented.
The premise of your argument relies on the idea that citizens shouldn't necessarily have a say in everything, that opposition shouldn't be party into things until they're already decided. I disagree, because that's fundamentally against democracy, and yet ironically, because of the way our democracies are set up, these laws will have to be passed through democratic systems anyway and so will still be open to opposition scrutiny and constituent complaints.
As I say, really, the only reason to keep it secret, is so they hope they can decide upon it and sneak it past everyone.
It's really the same arguments that are used to keep first past the post in here in the UK- the argument that proportional representation leads to unstable governments, that can't unilaterally pass laws- well yeah, that's the whole point. If a law doesn't have majority support, it is not fit to be passed, it's as simple as that. Whilst I may disagree with majority opinion sometimes, I still respect that it's possible that I'm not always right, and that the price to be paid for democracy, is that sometimes your viewpoint will be a minority. The problem we have here, is that the minority viewpoint is being held by government (which in the UK at least, is only elected by a minority of 35% of the voter base) and industry, so they feel they shouldn't have to accept that they're wrong and are trying to push it through anyway.
But this is the problem. We've got these top secret negotations that are clearly secret, because there will be massive opposition to them, (else there'd be no reason to keep them secret) and the hope is that they can slip these laws into each country without the populace even noticing. If even half the law makers aren't party to the negotiations they can only go by what is available.
These sorts of laws like 3-strikes really do breach the European Convention on Human Rights, and the Universal Declaration of Human Rights also specifically in terms of the right to fair trial, and the reasonable right to privacy. Further, most countries have laws derived from the Geneva convention to govern related and similar civil matters, such as to protect against collective punishment, which is a war crime under the Geneva convention- cutting off internet access to a household for the action of one clearly also breaches this.
So we've got this situation where governments are trying to pass these laws regardless, even though they are clearly in conflict with existing, more fundamental laws. In Europe, this has happened repeatedly this last decade with the likes of the British government's DNA database storing DNA of the innocent and so forth, and the end result is always the same - the law gets deemed illegal in itself by the European Court of Human Rights and change has to happen, or governments will face penalty, but in the meantime it is citizens who have to deal with all the shit.
So regardless of whether this guy is right or wrong, it doesn't really matter, he's making comments based on what he does know, and that's really key, because if at least he can make the point heard that it's about time they start thinking of the consequences and repercussions of the laws, and whether they are legal BEFORE they implement them, then that's a good thing. I don't however, hold much faith, because those passing such laws seem to do so on the hope that no one will notice said laws have been passed- but we do notice, because we're the ones they potentially effect.
Good on him for making the point regardless, they need to know that we are listening, we do know about it, and that these laws will end up just being shot down by the courts anyway.
I actually really liked ODST, in fact, it's my favourite Halo game so far (played 1, 2, 3, and Halo Wars).
Halo has always been cool because of it's coop/multiplayer support, and yet I found ODST's campaign so good when played alone, because it added so much to the 'lone marine' storyline. In fact, it was one of my favourite games of last year- I preferred it to MW2's messy, rushed, disjointed single player storyline for example. I'll admit when I played through it a second time with a friend in coop it wasn't quite so good because playing coop just took away completely from the lone marine storyline, and removed all need for tactics- dying doesn't matter in coop, you just respawn.
I didn't find the ODST campaign really any shorter than Halo 3, playing it solo on legendary it lasted as long as Halo 3 did on coop for example, in fact I'd say it lasted longer due to the tactical nature of fighting frickin' hunters and stuff as an ODST by himself for some parts of the game. It wasn't more expensive- £29.99 for ODST vs. £39.99 average price for Halo 3, and it included Halo 3's multiplayer + all the map packs and such too. It had as much content as 99% of full retail games, and yet retailed for £10 cheaper.
The only real problem I have with ODST is the fact that their survival mode had no matchmaking and required you to find 3 friends with it. Apart from that it was an excellent package IMO - fair price, great single player storyline, fun coop survival mode, Halo 3's multiplayer in full.
Yep, even those who weren't Jews such as Godel ended up in the US because he was shunned for having been associated with them. As you say, it's kind of hard not to bring the Jews into it.
The issue is that you have a narrow metric of "better".
PostgesSql may scale better, but it's not easier to manage. Ruby may allow for faster and more reliable web application development, but it does not scale as well. nginx may offer better performance and reliability, but it is not as battle hardened, and does not have the level of support Apache does. Is it still going to be supported tommorrow? We know Apache will be.
I'd rather use PHP than Ruby on a high-usage site for example, simply because we know PHP can scale with the likes of Facebook, whilst we know Ruby will struggle to, as it did with Twitter. It sounds more like you are a fan of these particular technologies and are only looking at them with rose tinted glasses, you must accept that everything has it's disadvantages as well as it's advantages, and sometimes, for some people, those disadvantages are more important factors such that they are enough to rule out a particular technology.
All that said, I do sympathise with your viewpoint because I understand that sometimes the best product isn't selected even when all factors have been taken into account, so I'm not saying you're necessarily wrong- personally I'd use PostgresSql over MySql now, but I'd sure as hell not choose Ruby over PHP - not that I'd even choose PHP if I had the choice, I'd probably go for Java personally because it's a better language and it's can REALLY scale well, I wouldn't need to worry about the underlying platform either then.
I'm skeptical of your claim. Private healthcare in places like France, or Britain are almost certainly just as good. This is particularly the case since the US has lagged in medical research over the last decade or so so doesn't even have the cutting edge advantage it once did, thanks to Bush's stem cell ban and similar. To cite a prominent recent example, there is good reason the first swine flu vaccines were developed in countries like Britain and Australia.
The idea that the US has the best healthcare in the world is probably not true whatsoever, at the high end, private, it's probably only at best equal with many European nations (Britain, France, Sweden). Non-European countries like Japan, Australia, Canada and Israel are other possible contenders for being ahead of the US in all likelihood.
I suspect you're not simply being told half truths as you suggest, but are being spun outright lies.
The same reason people don't have access to a socialised police force, fire brigade, or military.
Oh wait.
You're right, the argument against socialised healthcare in the US is utterly irrational, because the same arguments could be applied to the police force, but the idea of having to pay police insurance, fire insurance, military insurance should your house get robbed/set alight/attacked by North Koreans is obviously equally stupid. Imagine quibbling over filling in the forms for your fire insurance as your house burns down or is being robbed only to be told you're not covered after all, Fun! But still that's the reality of what those arguing against socialised healthcare would expect if they were to stop being hypocrits and applied their same arguments rationally to all public services and not just the one the talking heads on TV told them was bad because it is and they say so because it'll turn America into communist Russia.
The problem is, at least in the UK- presumably the same elsewhere, governments are getting ever more sloppy, coming up with new schemes that no one wants or gives a shit about, the schemes always over-run and end up costing more, so money has to be found and is taken from elsewhere.
So it's not that they have to make a profit, it's simply that they have to take money from the important services, to pay for their fuck-up pet projects.
So by "saving money", what they mean is that they're taking money from things people do want, to give to 0.0001% of the population some shitty little scheme that allows them to get away without having to work for a living like everyone else or something similar to that- that's the general pattern in the UK at least.
Slashdot Mirror
So let me get this straight, you're saying I know nothing about Italy, and the way things work there and yet you're completely ignoring the fact that Italy is perhaps the most corrupt nation in the Western world?
You're correct that many members of the judiciary have been out for Berlusconi, but not all judges follow that agenda.
If Berlusconi wanted to influence judges with the amount of money he has, and with the amount of corruption in Italy, then that would be an extremely trivial task for him.
Are you even aware that a particularly significant portion of the hatred by some judges against Berlusconi is actually down to bribing judges in the first place?
http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/worldnews/europe/italy/5720385/Silvio-Berlusconi-dines-with-judge-who-is-to-rule-on-immunity-law.html
http://www.independent.co.uk/news/world/europe/berlusconi-censured-by-un-over-bribes-case-597998.html
The rest just get harassed instead:
http://www.thefirstpost.co.uk/54904,people,news,anger-as-berlusconis-tv-channel-canale-5-films-judge-raimondo-mesiano-who-fined-him
If you're going to so arrogantly infer that someone is wrong, it might be a good idea to at least check your facts to ensure you're correct first, because clearly, in this case, you are not.
That's certainly a fair point.
I think that's really the difference between Slashdot back then, and Slashdot now. Back then, stories used to get some really insightful comments even when they were just straightforward and factual. Now, it seems to require a bunch of FUD to get people interested enough to post to debunk them.
It used to be the case that you could come to Slashdot, read the story comments and actually learn something from a lot of smart people, the stories where comments offer any particularly decent insight nowadays seem few and far between.
There's also the question as to whether Slashdot should be contributing to the amount of hits InfoWorld gets by not pointing out that they're full of shit, and just regurgitating it and linking them too though, as it just gives more sites motivation to spread bullshit like that.
I believe they would need to issue a European Arrest Warrant for them to be at risk through the rest of Europe. I doubt for a second they'd be that stupid, as it would likely throw support for the EU as a whole into jeopardy- many British governments struggle to get support for the EU as is and it would just give more ammo to EU critics so I suspect even if they did make such a move it would be stamped out pretty quickly.
Whilst no European arrest warrant is issued, they shouldn't have any fear travelling through the rest of Europe at least, so it's really just an Italian affair right now thankfully.
I'm pretty sure there is, I think I've seen it before somewhere in the options, but whilst some editors are worse than others, there's no real consistency. Sometimes even the better editors post shite and every once in a while the shite editors post good stories.
Don't get me wrong, I certainly don't trust them, but that's exactly why I get annoyed- because to me, the slashvertisments and FUD articles are so blindingly obvious that it's annoying having to wade through them at all.
I do not trust The Register for the same reason, they heavily moderate and regularly don't allow publication of comments that give a counter-point to the original author on certain topics (global warming, file sharing) and certain authors don't accept comments on their articles at all (i.e. Andrew Orlowski).
When a site like that shows that level of FUD then as you say, they have to be written off as a trustworthy source for the most part.
But isn't it counter productive? How many hits do they gain with the inflammatory, in the long run, does it really do better for them than just being a damn good site? Isn't that largely how Slashdot gained it's userbase originally, by actually posting interesting, factual stories?
It strikes me as the type of idiocy the bankers pursued running upto the recession- short term gain, with large repercussions when it all came tumbling down, rather than pursuing a policy of acting reasonably. You could argue Canada did this to an extent as it did not have to bail out it's banks, and it's problems from the recession are relatively small compared to those who let their banks run rampant (the US, Britain).
I suppose the buzz of seeing the hits fly up on the charts from the web logs gives a bit more of a hardon after posting an inflammatory story, than keeping an average higher userbase by acting sensibly.
"Frankly, that's exactly what Slashdot is for. It actually is innocent in this."
Well no, last time I checked, that's what Digg was about. Slashdot was about selecting wortwhile articles, that are actually worth reading, and weren't just FUD/advertisments.
Slashdot specifically selects articles, it filters articles, and it's the quality of that selection and filtering that I am questioning.
People come to Slashdot because they do not expect to have to deal with the turd that Digg churns out. Otherwise, if there is no filtering, and as you say, it's just about publishing any old thing and saying this might or might not be of interest, then they might as well just replace the front page with firehose and not bother wasting time having editors in the first place.
"Includes an inside look at the politics of IDG and why you can never trust an IT publication that's as obsessed with page views as InfoWorld."
Or, say, Slashdot, which got InfoWorld half those hits by regurgitating it's bullshit in the first place?
Come on Slashdot editors- you can't post that quote, almost as if you're pretending that you're somehow innocent of this. You may been unwitting pawns in the InfoWorld hits game certainly, but you posted a FUD article about Android fragmentation just a day after InfoWorld had been outed as guilty of this and untrustworthy and that suggests that perhaps you enjoy leeching hits off their FUD as much as they enjoy generating them. So why pretend that Slashdot too doesn't use shock articles sometimes to try and increase hits?
Don't get me wrong, I like a lot of Slashdot articles else I wouldn't come here, but it's pretty obvious that some of them are inflammatory FUD (hell Slashdot posted the original article in question) and that others of them are Slashvertisments.
Slashdot's credibility absolutely has decreased over the years because of this, and so it may want to read the above quoted sentence and take some lessons from it itself to ensure it avoids ever heading the same way. I suspect that the editors play the biggest role in this by you know, doing some actual editing and checking the authenticity of the article they're about to post.
This is political.
I would wager that this is Berlusconi's way of trying to control the web, you have to keep in mind this is a man who has a stranglehold on Italian media, and has used that to get into, and stay in power over the years. The web has been a headache for him, because it's an avenue from which people are getting news and which he does not control.
The judges may well be incompetent, or corrupt, but really they're just pawns in a bigger battle.
It's really hard to see how it can be anything else, I do not believe judges would reach the conclusion they did based on the fact that Google had done everything possible in their power, and based on the fact the people at Google in question who were targetted, are in some cases completely irrelevant and unattached to anything to do with the case.
It's likely that these people were chosen because they were high enough to make a point, but not the top dogs who really would have been able to unleash hell and fight back.
This is certainly one way in which Berlusconi could try and control the web such that it adheres to his viewpoint as much of the Italian media that he controls does, by ensuring that content providers are criminally responsible for anything put up that the government disagrees with. It's not a big deal for the Google execs, because they will likely never travel to Italy and so the case wont effect them- but picture this, you run a site in Italy critical of the Italian PM, you post photos of him carrying out an illegal deal, and, well, now you know where it will land you at least- jail. Anyone not from Italy doing the same, faces jail if they ever decide to travel to Italy after being convicted of the same.
It's almost as if Berlusconi has been taking lessons from the likes of Chavez and Ahmadinejad recently.
It's really the public sector way, I worked in public sector in the UK for a while, in local government, but I've seen it reaching to the top of British government, and even seen the same pattern from top to bottom in foreign governments.
It never ceases to amaze me how public sector beauracrats consistently manage to come up with schemes that achieve completely the opposite effect to what was intend, but that are also so obviously flawed that even the average layman in the street can tell you why said scheme wont work.
I don't know how they do it, the people who come up with these things are a special type of idiot, it's just remarkable that they can't see the so utterly glaring and obvious flaws in their plans.
You do get them in private sector too of course, but their prevalence in public sector? their ability to exist there at all levels, from the lowest paid to the highest paid? It's remarkable. You have to give them credit, I don't think for a second that I could make it to the top like they do whilst simultaneously making such stupid and flawed decisions, there's obviously a skill to it.
Which would be quite amusing, because it'd basically mean you had half the population looking for content the government doesn't want them to see.
Well that's actually why I like this news.
I like to think of Twitter's technology experiments, as high not to build and run a high performance web application. Hell, they bought us confirmation that Ruby on Rails wasn't exactly ready for prime time in terms of high performance work for example.
We have a lot to thank them for, but you're right, one of those things is not how to run a stable, secure, scalable web site, it is the opposite- how not to. I suspect before long we'll be able to see for ourselves how well, or how badly Cassandra does, measured by the increase or decrease in failwhales.
There's no real reason that can't be done in 3rd party libraries though- it's not something really essential to the core SDK, and if it really mattered, I suspect such a library would exist already if it doesn't. Personally it's not something I'm too bothered about, but perhaps that's because I've played around with developing indie games in the past, and so had to deal with unpredictable screen sizes anyway.
Regarding current fragmentation for phones, the answer is not too bad- looking at the Android SDK AVD manager there's only about 4 different resolutions, however I don't think the number matters, if you're going to want to scale, it doesn't really matter if you're scaling for 2 sizes, or 20 sizes.
A lot of people suggest this is one of the iPhones advantages, but is it really? The iPhone never used to have GPS for example, older versions have lower speed processors, and the 3GS has more RAM. I suspect Apple wont keep the screen resolution and feature set the same forever, else they'll end up getting themselves left in the dust. It's currently 320x480, in contrast, the Nexus One is 480x800- not too far off being double the resolution.
Realistically, it's a problem every developer has to face up to one day, and I suspect the theory that this is an advantage to the iPhone is unfounded in the long run. In fact, there's already the question of making sure your app works right on the iPhone and the iPad.
I do agree with you in a way, that things could be better, but then, I suspect things can always be better- I guess it's just a case of concentrating on what matters to most.
I'm not sure you really need to research into which devices support which resolutions tbh, you can just use the preset resolutions in the AVDs, or you can just write code to automatically scale- kind of like how UI's are handled in HTML, with relative positions and so forth, or how it is handled in OpenGL, where 2D is drawn on a relative, rather than fixed pixel scale.
Sorry if my original phrasing wasn't clear- I made the point that it's not the Geneva convention itself that would be applied, but that many countries implement laws which cover points highlighted in the Geneva convention over civil matters. Bringing up the mention of it being a war crime was not intended to suggest that this would be classed as a war crime, merely illustrating the historical recognised severity collective punishment can bring, and hence why quite a few nations have similar law to cover civil and criminal matters as well as their recognition of it as a war crime through being Geneva convention signatories.
There's historically been quite a few cases of laws from the likes of the Hague, and the Geneva conventions being added into national law on a more unilateral basis by individual nations- one example is that of hollow point bullets, which were banned for use in war in the Hague convention, but still used by many police forces- a few countries have also banned the use of these even by police forces to bring their laws into line with those that govern war under the point that if it's unacceptable to use against your enemy in war, then it's far more unacceptable to allow such use against your own population.
Whilst I do not believe the UK has historically had this protection, from what I understand European legislation did force member states to bring this in. In contrast, China for example has been slated for not doing enough to stop it in Tibet, even though they are not at war there and hence as they have not brought in such legislation, are not technically doing anything wrong.
Why? Android isn't designed to be used with just a single screen resolution device. It's designed to be usable for phones, PDAs, Netbooks, Tablets. It'd be stupid if it just scaled a phone sized UI to a tablet or Netbook.
I think there's some truth in what you say, this basically sounds like more FUD.
Sure Android can't guarantee you a fixed screen size, or fixed hardware availability, but it does make it easy to poll to find out what actually is available. It's probably easier to do this than on most platforms that don't retain static hardware requirements in fact.
But TFA seems to take it even further by suggesting we have a DLL hell type scenario or something, and that really is FUD.
As Infoworld is now proven as a site that spouts lies for hits, I can't help but think that this is perhaps just another case of them continuing to do that. I guess they decided to continue playing the troll, rather than trying to rebuild their devastated reputation.
Still, Slashdot falls for it.
"On top of that, how do you get all the big players to the table if the documentation is floating around that angers the hell out of their constituents. "If so and so goes to that summit, I'm never voting for her/him again" is what one might say."
Well that's the whole point of democracy, if the constituents don't want it, it shouldn't be implemented.
The premise of your argument relies on the idea that citizens shouldn't necessarily have a say in everything, that opposition shouldn't be party into things until they're already decided. I disagree, because that's fundamentally against democracy, and yet ironically, because of the way our democracies are set up, these laws will have to be passed through democratic systems anyway and so will still be open to opposition scrutiny and constituent complaints.
As I say, really, the only reason to keep it secret, is so they hope they can decide upon it and sneak it past everyone.
It's really the same arguments that are used to keep first past the post in here in the UK- the argument that proportional representation leads to unstable governments, that can't unilaterally pass laws- well yeah, that's the whole point. If a law doesn't have majority support, it is not fit to be passed, it's as simple as that. Whilst I may disagree with majority opinion sometimes, I still respect that it's possible that I'm not always right, and that the price to be paid for democracy, is that sometimes your viewpoint will be a minority. The problem we have here, is that the minority viewpoint is being held by government (which in the UK at least, is only elected by a minority of 35% of the voter base) and industry, so they feel they shouldn't have to accept that they're wrong and are trying to push it through anyway.
But this is the problem. We've got these top secret negotations that are clearly secret, because there will be massive opposition to them, (else there'd be no reason to keep them secret) and the hope is that they can slip these laws into each country without the populace even noticing. If even half the law makers aren't party to the negotiations they can only go by what is available.
These sorts of laws like 3-strikes really do breach the European Convention on Human Rights, and the Universal Declaration of Human Rights also specifically in terms of the right to fair trial, and the reasonable right to privacy. Further, most countries have laws derived from the Geneva convention to govern related and similar civil matters, such as to protect against collective punishment, which is a war crime under the Geneva convention- cutting off internet access to a household for the action of one clearly also breaches this.
So we've got this situation where governments are trying to pass these laws regardless, even though they are clearly in conflict with existing, more fundamental laws. In Europe, this has happened repeatedly this last decade with the likes of the British government's DNA database storing DNA of the innocent and so forth, and the end result is always the same - the law gets deemed illegal in itself by the European Court of Human Rights and change has to happen, or governments will face penalty, but in the meantime it is citizens who have to deal with all the shit.
So regardless of whether this guy is right or wrong, it doesn't really matter, he's making comments based on what he does know, and that's really key, because if at least he can make the point heard that it's about time they start thinking of the consequences and repercussions of the laws, and whether they are legal BEFORE they implement them, then that's a good thing. I don't however, hold much faith, because those passing such laws seem to do so on the hope that no one will notice said laws have been passed- but we do notice, because we're the ones they potentially effect.
Good on him for making the point regardless, they need to know that we are listening, we do know about it, and that these laws will end up just being shot down by the courts anyway.
I like how they're worried about the decline of European-Americans and want to restore the identity and culture of their homeland.
I wonder if they realise that those two goals completely contradict each other seeing as European-Americans are not native Americans?
I actually really liked ODST, in fact, it's my favourite Halo game so far (played 1, 2, 3, and Halo Wars).
Halo has always been cool because of it's coop/multiplayer support, and yet I found ODST's campaign so good when played alone, because it added so much to the 'lone marine' storyline. In fact, it was one of my favourite games of last year- I preferred it to MW2's messy, rushed, disjointed single player storyline for example. I'll admit when I played through it a second time with a friend in coop it wasn't quite so good because playing coop just took away completely from the lone marine storyline, and removed all need for tactics- dying doesn't matter in coop, you just respawn.
I didn't find the ODST campaign really any shorter than Halo 3, playing it solo on legendary it lasted as long as Halo 3 did on coop for example, in fact I'd say it lasted longer due to the tactical nature of fighting frickin' hunters and stuff as an ODST by himself for some parts of the game. It wasn't more expensive- £29.99 for ODST vs. £39.99 average price for Halo 3, and it included Halo 3's multiplayer + all the map packs and such too. It had as much content as 99% of full retail games, and yet retailed for £10 cheaper.
The only real problem I have with ODST is the fact that their survival mode had no matchmaking and required you to find 3 friends with it. Apart from that it was an excellent package IMO - fair price, great single player storyline, fun coop survival mode, Halo 3's multiplayer in full.
Yep, even those who weren't Jews such as Godel ended up in the US because he was shunned for having been associated with them. As you say, it's kind of hard not to bring the Jews into it.
The issue is that you have a narrow metric of "better".
PostgesSql may scale better, but it's not easier to manage. Ruby may allow for faster and more reliable web application development, but it does not scale as well. nginx may offer better performance and reliability, but it is not as battle hardened, and does not have the level of support Apache does. Is it still going to be supported tommorrow? We know Apache will be.
I'd rather use PHP than Ruby on a high-usage site for example, simply because we know PHP can scale with the likes of Facebook, whilst we know Ruby will struggle to, as it did with Twitter. It sounds more like you are a fan of these particular technologies and are only looking at them with rose tinted glasses, you must accept that everything has it's disadvantages as well as it's advantages, and sometimes, for some people, those disadvantages are more important factors such that they are enough to rule out a particular technology.
All that said, I do sympathise with your viewpoint because I understand that sometimes the best product isn't selected even when all factors have been taken into account, so I'm not saying you're necessarily wrong- personally I'd use PostgresSql over MySql now, but I'd sure as hell not choose Ruby over PHP - not that I'd even choose PHP if I had the choice, I'd probably go for Java personally because it's a better language and it's can REALLY scale well, I wouldn't need to worry about the underlying platform either then.
I'm skeptical of your claim. Private healthcare in places like France, or Britain are almost certainly just as good. This is particularly the case since the US has lagged in medical research over the last decade or so so doesn't even have the cutting edge advantage it once did, thanks to Bush's stem cell ban and similar. To cite a prominent recent example, there is good reason the first swine flu vaccines were developed in countries like Britain and Australia.
The idea that the US has the best healthcare in the world is probably not true whatsoever, at the high end, private, it's probably only at best equal with many European nations (Britain, France, Sweden). Non-European countries like Japan, Australia, Canada and Israel are other possible contenders for being ahead of the US in all likelihood.
I suspect you're not simply being told half truths as you suggest, but are being spun outright lies.
"Why don't people have a right to health care?"
The same reason people don't have access to a socialised police force, fire brigade, or military.
Oh wait.
You're right, the argument against socialised healthcare in the US is utterly irrational, because the same arguments could be applied to the police force, but the idea of having to pay police insurance, fire insurance, military insurance should your house get robbed/set alight/attacked by North Koreans is obviously equally stupid. Imagine quibbling over filling in the forms for your fire insurance as your house burns down or is being robbed only to be told you're not covered after all, Fun! But still that's the reality of what those arguing against socialised healthcare would expect if they were to stop being hypocrits and applied their same arguments rationally to all public services and not just the one the talking heads on TV told them was bad because it is and they say so because it'll turn America into communist Russia.
The problem is, at least in the UK- presumably the same elsewhere, governments are getting ever more sloppy, coming up with new schemes that no one wants or gives a shit about, the schemes always over-run and end up costing more, so money has to be found and is taken from elsewhere.
So it's not that they have to make a profit, it's simply that they have to take money from the important services, to pay for their fuck-up pet projects.
So by "saving money", what they mean is that they're taking money from things people do want, to give to 0.0001% of the population some shitty little scheme that allows them to get away without having to work for a living like everyone else or something similar to that- that's the general pattern in the UK at least.
Yeah I did, I played it for 5 years in fact, but it still wasn't UO unfortunately, and even DAoC is now deader than UO ironically.