Pretty much everyone using the Microsoft stack, which is a fairly sizeable proportion of the world's developers, even those not doing.NET and using C++ such as an awful lot game developers for example quite happily avoid Java applications on the desktop because they just use Visual Studio.
What you most likely mean is that if you're doing Java development then Java development tools written in Java for the desktop are fairly common. Some other languages spin off that to some degree (i.e. Zend Studio for PHP which is based on Eclipse), but even in the development world it's not like Java development tools are anything close to ubiquitous, and developers are a tiny portion of the world's computer users.
You seem to be declaring Java dead, because Java applets are uncommon, and that Java desktop applications are uncommon. Both these things are true, but it still only tells an incredibly small picture.
Java is still massively strong on mobile, in embedded devices, and for server side applications.
There are a lot of phones, routers, ATMs, websites, and so forth still using Java rather heavily. It's a very long way from dead, it's still used at least in part to run key elements of some of the largest sites on the web - eBay, Amazon, Google for example as well as being a big deal in nearly all the world's banks and financial institutes. It does well in the academic world, and in the medical world, from doctors surgeries to big pharma.
I hate Oracle, but I'm afraid as much as I'd like to see it, they wont be going away any time soon - there's a lot of money in providing to those sorts of companies.
So what's the alternative? I don't see how having code lumped arbitrarily somewhere, with no clear indication that it's the application entry point is better either.
There needs to be some indication in a project that that's where the program starts, else what happens when you have say 3 or 4 lumps of code in separate files in the project all lumped in the global namespace, where does it start?
It also makes it explicit that there even is a starting point, as opposed to it being, say, a library with no application entry point.
I fully get what you're saying about making things easier for beginners to spew out code, but for a multi-purpose language it also needs to support maintainability too. I'm not even convinced that making it easy for new developers to get used to bad practice even helps them that much. I remember when I learnt C as my first language, I became dependent at the start on the global namespace because that's how the tutorials said it was easy to get started. It took a while to break out of that awful habit, and start writing actual good code. God only knows I've seen others fall into that trap - I had the misfortune of temporarily maintaining a massive VBA based application whilst simultaneously throwing it away to replace it with something that was actually not shit. Everything was a global variable, the list of globals went on for page after page. It was brutal.
Long story short, I'm not convinced that making it easier for beginners to fall right into bad practices is in any way superior to making them learn a bit of boiler plate to keep things structured from the outset. I agree the syntax can be cleaned up and improved a bit, but I don't agree that it's pointless, or that writing straight into the global namespace in an unstructured manner is superior.
I see this sort of mindset a lot, but it's illustrative of short sightedness.
If you can't understand the importance of namespaces and structures, then you can't have worked on anything but the most trivial and small of codebases utilising little or no external libraries. If all you know are CS101 examples then sure, having to declare namespaces, methods, and so forth might look relatively bad.
If however you work on anything that actually matters then methods, namespaces and so forth become kind of important.
I don't see how endif is superior to }. Why would I want to type more than I have to to convey the exact same meaning? Curly brackets are meant to be jarring and to stand out, they do that to tell you a block has ended.
"Ever wanted to hit a car that cut you off? Well in GTA it's perfectly ok for you to do it till your hearts content and it's out of your system. Just because I take great joy in forcing other drivers in GTA off the road doesn't mean I'll plow into the car next to me on the freeway."
Man you're tame. Normally if I get cut up in GTA, I ram them off the road as hard as possible, stab them in the back with a broken bottle as they run, shoot them in the head on the floor and then pour petrol on them and ignite it, often following up with a firefight with the police, ambulance and fire engine that rocks up.
I can also safely say though that I've never even remotely attempted this in real life.
Great. A newspaper whose assertion of a cold 2012/2013 winter is trivially disprovable by actual MET office records which show that much of the winter was spent above the already relatively warm (historically) 1982 - 2010 average:
Even on the coldest weeks it only just barely crept below 0c reaching -2c on only two occasions at worst. The UK hasn't had a truly cold winter now since 2010. All our winters have been incredibly mild since that point. This is what an actual cold UK winter looks like:
So you see, using the UK as a point to suggest cold winters in recent years is laughable. In 2013/14 we barely dropped below average for a single day.
Besides, your assertion on Australia isn't even correct. There are plenty of issues in Australia too, whilst it may not be on the scale of other places, there are issues. As such, it's still entirely plausible that neonicotinids are a major contributing factor, and the fact that Australia always has warm weather merely cushions the impact. To pretend it's not happening at all there is just an outright lie.
So maybe stick to actual science and data, rather than blogs and newspaper articles. You might stop looking so much like a Bayer loving shill then.
Yeah it's nonsense, unlike oil, the vast majority of the world's Uranium deposits sit on Western/Western allied soil. There's no energy security threat to the West when it comes to Uranium because we have access to the vast majority of it. Australia and Canada alone hold 40% of the world's reserves.
"Except that IS has a religious rather than secular ideology."
Right, in the same way that the Taliban preach strong anti-homosexual views and cite that as a reason to fight the west because it dares to offer them equality all whilst having sex with boys?
If you haven't figured out that religion is commonly used as a tool of recruitment and control then you're probably out of your depth here. Throughout pretty much the entirety of human history religion has been claimed as the ideology and purpose, whilst simultaneously being ignored by the people who are leading those groups because they know it's an effectively tool for rallying the footsoldiers whatever you do and don't believe about it. For Saddam's old guard, when you no longer have the country, and know that Iranian funding and militias are moving into your country, there was simply no better option that to rally the Sunnis against Iran's staunch Shia movements.
"Hitler, the PIRA and Pol Pot all carried out atrocities, that doesn't make them ideologically similar."
Right, but Hitler, the PIRA, and Pol Pot weren't active in Iraq in recent history either. The fact that others have carried out atrocities in history is neither here nor there, the point is that Saddam's regime is the player in the region that has the most experience deploying these sorts of atrocities and using them as effective propaganda tools. IS isn't simply carrying out atrocities for the sake of it, the high profile ones are incredibly well planned - if you think it's as simple as "An infidel, lets kill him!" then you need to explain why they've kept John Cantlie alive when others have been beheaded. IS only carry out atrocities where the propaganda value is greater than the value of keeping them alive, that is, they don't carry out high profile atrocities because they're unthinking warped psycopaths, it is entirely planned, and done entirely with a propaganda goal in mind.
This is quite distinct to what Hitler did, because in contrast the worst atrocities such as the Nazi death camps were kept entirely secret.
But the irony is, in parroting popular myth you've highlighted that there is plenty of fodder out there who aren't aware of the fuller picture, highlighting that their methods work. You think they're just a bunch of rag tag terrorists, you think there's no organisation and that they'll go on surprising you by defeating organised forces.
The worst part is, a lot of it is even quite easy to verify. It's not even much of a secret that Adnan al-Sweidawi, one of Saddam's top lieutenants is in charges of IS' military council. It's not a secret that another of Saddam's lieutenants, Fadel al-Hayali is ISIS Iraq deputy. It's not a secret that the now deceased Izzat Ibrahim al-Douri, America's King of Clubs from Saddam's regime was leading his own force that was instrumental in taking over Mosul, one Iraq's biggest cities, on behalf of ISIS. There are plenty more examples.
It's really only some elements (albeit some of the most prominent) of Western media that try to condense it all down into a ISIS = Terrorists = Unthinking bad people type simplistic world view, then act surprised when they turn out to be incredibly effective, more so than mere unthinking bad people could ever be. Unthinking bad people terrorists are folks like those who did the Glasgow airport attacks whereby they did more harm to themselves than anyone else, but it's pretty clear that the folks in Iraq/Syria are rather more competent, organised, and effective than that. That's precisely because they're led and run by experienced smart people (though still rather horrible smart people either way), not unthinking wannabe jihadists, no matter how simplistic some of the media want to try and make it.
That's the common Americanised view of how you could've made Iraq go better, but this is precisely the sort of ill conceived view that I suspect this book is trying to deal with.
The problem is that the Baath party was brutal. Like, really brutal. We're talking about the people who gassed the Kurds, who had no qualms with using human shields, and took no issue with putting power drills through the eyes of captured PoWs as a form of torture.
Given that, it'd be naive to think that that country wouldn't have collapsed into chaos at some point anyway in the exact same way that Libya, or Syria has. You would've also needed to moderate the Baath party to a level whereby it wasn't just gagging for an uprising too.
But, and this is something that review and presumably the book itself in more detail refers to and that's the fact that the Baath party didn't just vanish into non-existence.
In Western media we're constantly being given the impression that IS is a rag tag bunch of bandits. A bunch of local militants and a bunch of foreign militants that have teamed up to cause a bit of case. This begs the question, if they're so rag tag then how the hell are they managing to run a defacto state with all the institutions you'd expect from a state (even if rather warped) like courts, banks, industry, tax collection, communications, media and so on. How are they managing to stand firm against a standing army backed by the most powerful airforces in the world? How are they managing to stand firm against Iranian forces and militias? Against the Syria government with it's battle hardened soldiers and it's typically not available to rag tag militia Russian/Iranian equipment?
The answer? Because the idea that IS is just a bunch of rag tag militants is wholly false. IS is in large part the modern incarnation of the Baath party. Those atrocities they carry out? they're straight out of the Baath party's playbook from the last 40 years. That defacto state they run? It's got all the qualitities of a state because backing it are many professional judges, politicians, and business folk from Saddam era Iraq. Those battles they're fighting? those cities they're capturing? those are the cities they were born in, or served in under Saddam, these are the generals that fought powers like Iran in the 70s and 80s and won, those are the foot soldiers who comprised Saddam's Republican Guard which was one of the most effective special forces units in the region in the 80s and 90s. Every now and then, evidence of this slips through:
When you stop thinking of IS as a rag tag bunch of militants, and start understanding that much of their backbone is comprised of the remnants of Saddam's regime it makes a lot of other things clear. Those atrocities IS carries out? it's not simply because they're evil people (though they are), it's a continuation of the sort of shock and awe horror tactics that Saddam's regime was famous for. When you understand that much of IS is comprised of professional special forces and experienced generals from Saddam's era fighting in the regions they lived in and served in, it starts to be a lot more understandable as to how IS has made so much progress in Iraq. Then finally, in the context of your point on Iran, you begin to understand why IS and Iran are so interested in fighting each other, why the Kurds are willing to so vehemently fight IS even outside of their own territory helping the Yazidis in Iraq, and pushing well beyond Kobane and Kurdish Syrian regions - these are old scores that are being settled. It's the 80s Iran-Iraq war in continuation.
IS can stand up to nation state's standing armies, because it is a defacto nation state with a professional standing army of battle hardened experienced soldiers who know where the military bases are, how they're laid out, how to assault them, and where the guns are hidden, precisely because they used to be garrisoned in them. They know ho
Because even if they were just tracking data of users who sign up, contrary to popular myth, peddled mostly by people who think they know the law but apparently don't, contracts are not magical legal instruments that overrule everything ever.
In just about every jurisdiction in the world contracts have limits. They cannot overrule statutory rights, you cannot sign away your life in a contract, you cannot sign away your legal responsibility for a crime onto someone else poor and desperate enough to be willing to take it for money.
Hence, it doesn't matter what is in a contract, if that contract doesn't adhere to the laws of the country in which the agreement is made then either the whole or that portion of the contract are meaningless and irrelevant.
Facebook doesn't get to rewrite the law, so rather than blaming users for agreeing to a section of a contract that has no legal merit in the first place, you should be asking, "Why can't Facebook adhere to the laws of the countries in which it chooses to operate if it wishes to operate there?". That's the real question- you see, your question is meaningless; Europeans ARE abiding by the contract they wilfully sign because it's a meaningless contract with large portions that hold no legal merit in the first place. It's not their fault Facebook wrote a contract that tries to claim rights that it has no legal standing to claim - that's Facebook's fault, they should've drafted a contract that's wholly enforceable within the confines of the law.
Most companies manage, but it seems a number of tech companies really struggle with it, because profit.
"I will close this piece with a truth. "For all their sins, ads fuel much of the Web. Cut them out and you're strangling the diversity of online publishers â" I think users really want that."
I think this is exactly right, you are indeed strangling diversity of publishers, but the problem is, I'm not convinced it matters.
The problem as I see it, is that monetisation of information on the web via ads has simply led to a rush for psychological "you should click this and see what happens next" type bullshit, as well as incredibly inflammatory and often false headlines in a desperate rush to further increase ad revenue.
As such, whilst it may increase diversity of publishers, I do not believe it's a useful increase in diversity of publishers.
But you still have two problems there. Firstly, when the US has had cold winters, Europe has had mild winters, yet suffered the exact same problem. So your argument of a correlation of cold winters is also false - it only correlates if you take an arbitrary subset of known data.
Secondly, you argue that usage of neonicotinoids don't correlate - at best you can say they don't appear to correlate in the data you have seen, but plenty of studies show otherwise. For example, this study finds a correlation between the use of imidacloprid and cold winters, rather than varroa mite and cold winters:
One could equally argue from this, and the European experience of mild winters, actually shows that neonicotinoids are in fact the common factor in the problem.
"What doesn't are vendor specific items like IE6, and if you were developing specifically for that, well, then you made a terrible choice, especially if it affected your entire application stack."
Oh stop showing you have no idea about software development. It's not about making a terrible choice, without being psychic one cannot make a better choice than supporting the two browsers that are used by the vast majority of the market. Not planning to support it when that's the status quo, and there's no obvious sign of impending change is utterly retarded. The fact that things did change is due to the unpredictable nature of technology.
"So apparently, the only thing that needed changing in your case was the GUI. If you knew squat about web development, that would have been a relatively minor thing to change, provided that you knew what you were doing in the first place. Building to IE6 indicates otherwise however."
The fact you think this shows how utterly out of your depth you are. The fact you believe you can blanket say that the UI is a small part of any project is utterly retarded, how do you know this? how do you know what the scope and scale of the project is? Stop talking about things you blatantly do not understand and cannot know about.
"No, what I need to be able to do is take technology today, as it exists, pick the proper components, even if they are alpha/beta, and ensure that my choices are kept up to date and do what they need to do, especially in the alpha/beta area. It's called tracking your dependencies, and it's not accomplished by tying yourself to maven central."
So in other words, use an agile process. Which is exactly what you're telling everyone not to do. Right.
"Have you worked in the real world? Generally a project is envisioned, then estimated and budgeted. This happens at the beginning of a project, because generally shareholders (public companies) don't like to spend 50M on a project (promised functionality) and not receive a working model."
Yes, and that's the point of Agile. It's designed to work in the real world where the only way you can truly estimate the amount of features you can implement for a specific cost is to actually do it. Thus, rather than pick a number and set of features out of thin air as with waterfall, you just set a budget, and keep rolling until you hit that budget, and what comes out is what is possible against that budget. If early on it looks like you're not even going to get close to the features you wanted for the budget, then you stop sprinting and fail early. This is far superior to failing late as with waterfall where you've blown your whole budget and ended up with something useless. Agile caters to change. That's the whole point.
Your description of GM and agile just further highlights that you don't know anything about agile. Agile doesn't demand that there are no communications between teams and stakeholders. The whole point of the job of stakeholders is that they're getting what they need, and if they're not working with other stakeholders to make it fit then what you're actually dealing with are inept project managers, which, guess what? also make waterfall projects fail on a regular basis. Retardation isn't limited to agile, nor is agile a magic cure for it.
"I'm describing the real world, how people try Agile, and how they and Agile fails. You can keep dreaming that it works"
Okay, I'll keep "dreaming" that it works, along with everyone that uses it to succesfully deliver projects, you know, like everyone from Google, to IBM, to Microsoft, to those government folks you falsely claimed only ever use waterfall:
People deliver with agile, the fact you claim they don't is evidence that you failed to implement it, or used the wrong tool for the job. That's not a defect with agile, that's a problem with your project leadership.
No really, you should go and get those blood pressure levels checked about now, continuing being wrong, getting all upset, and filling the discussion with your tears really is not healthy.
"You know what that's a sign of? Failure to specify your requirements. (Something Agile people know so little of these days it's unsurprising they should be banned from programming)"
Sorry, but this is nothing but complete denial of reality. Things change, especially in the technology world. I worked on a project for a client a few years back that would take a number of years to complete. At the outset, the goal was for the client facing portion of the application to be web based supporting IE6 and whatever the version of Firefox was at the time on desktops. Within 18 months Chrome came to matter, IE6 was finally being ditched left and right, the iPhone and iPad turned up, and mobile became a serious thing that mattered. Within the project's lifetime the whole way in which people used and viewed websites changed completely.
If you think everything can be foreseen at project conception, then you know literally zero about the realities of software development. You would literally need someone who can see the future on your team to be able to do what you're claiming successfully and consistently.
"Again, I guess you better let all gov agencies know that all their projects involving software prior to 2005 or so failed. Guess that moon landing really was on a stage somewhere."
You can't take the set of all projects and pretend they're all the same, it's a nonsense. For some projects waterfall works incredibly well, because we've done it a million times before. For software, it's simply not as clear cut. You're right, many government projects have been highly successful under waterfall, but look at a subset of that, what about government IT projects? Government IT projects are universally known to be a complete joke, precisely because the failure rate is astoundingly high. That is in large part down to a failure of choosing the correct methodology for the task in question.
"Having been exposed to a number of Agile projects that all ran over budget, schedule and/or failed, I can truthfully say Agile itself was the cause."
Oh not this old chestnut. This doesn't even make sense, the whole point in an agile project over waterfall is that it cannot run over budget or beyond schedule. The whole point is that you keep sprinting until you've spent as much as you want to spend for the deliverable provided at the end of each sprint. If what you mean is that you had a ballpark figure and schedule in mind before you started and you missed it, then this simply states that your estimate was incorrect and that you would've had to choose either way between spending more and getting the product you wanted, or staying on budget and getting a lesser product than you incorrectly estimated would be possible in the chosen time and cost bounds. It seems a little odd that you bitch about people saying you're doing it wrong, whilst also claiming that you're following the exact guidelines, only a sentence after you've demonstrated that you haven't even got the slightest clue about the fundamentals of agile in the first place. You clearly are doing it wrong, and are not following the guidelines, because the sentence quoted above alone shows that you do not even grasp the fundamental place of agile in achieving proper cost/time/quality balance.
I am not saying agile is a silver bullet, far from it, I firmly believe it's often used when it's a poor choice, and I firmly believe it requires fundamental changes to a business that most businesses do not need to make. I believe there are better options including using a hybrid approach to suit your businesses actual needs, rather than what some buzzword monkey is telling you are your needs. But some of what you say in your zeal to defend waterfall is just complete and utter nonsense because waterfall, like agile, is not a silver bullet either.
"In other words, you aren't describing waterfall in your comment. Yes, I'm invoking the "No True Scotsman" fallacy, since that is usually what is invoked when Agile is criticized."
No, he absolutely is describing waterfall, the problem is that most developers have gotten so used to waterfall being useless for a large number of development tasks that they've fudged it with semi-agile techniques naturally to get it to even work for them at all.
If you're going to criticise agile proper, rather than accept that as per your argument that what you're calling waterfall is necessarily waterfall with a sprinkling of agile, then you have to hold waterfall to the same standards and accept it as it was formally defined in the first place. You either take the formal definition of it and argue against that, or accept that many agile techniques are incredibly useful and pop up naturally when people fudge waterfall as their general development practice choosing not to apply either strictly.
Whether you've seen agile used successfully or not doesn't really matter, it's a mere anecdote. The fact is that there are thousands of companies out there, including some of the largest and most successful that do use it successfully to deliver software.
For what it's worth, my personal opinion is that agile, like any other tool in a developers box is something that should be used when it's the best tool for the job. I don't really see much benefit in developing complex back end architectures using agile, I find waterfall is typically actually a good fit here, because the whole point in such a backend is to get the architecture right from the start and have it flexible enough to support whatever it needs to support and such a backend will typically have years of life in it. In contrast, I believe agile is absolutely necessary for good UI design- the fact is you can't document a good UI from the outset under waterfall as good UIs have to be developed with a constant cycle of user feedback. It's a manual optimisation process that requires repeated analysis of analytics and user feedback to make changes that optimise the result, the whole feedback cycle of agile fits perfectly.
Agile can and does work, and it's not a failing concept at all - it's use is still growing, and it's still being used successfully. It is not however a silver bullet, and anyone who believed it is or was is probably worth ignoring completely.
Make no mistake, agile is not something you can just wedge in overnight, it requires big procedural, cultural changes, and even toolset changes. It's not merely a cliche to argue "you're not doing agile properly", it's a common fact that many houses jump on the buzzword and get it wrong because they do not recognise the scale of actual change that's required if they really do want to go wholly down the route of strictly applying some agile process (which they probably don't unless they're doing web and/or UI work). Similarly, it's also common that people do as you have done - fudge waterfall to have some aspects of agile to make it work. If you believe waterfall is as foolproof as you suggest, I implore you to go and read about waterfall strict, and apply it strictly, because what you're describing most definitely isn't it, in much the same way as describing throwing QA out the window most definitely isn't any strict agile methodology.
I personally have no qualms when designing, say, a client-server application, with having the server developed using waterfall, and the client developed using agile. don't know why people feel they have to be so tribal about waterfall vs. agile - it's not a fucking contest.
I know you think that by throwing insults at me you think you're upsetting me as some kind of consolation to yourself that you lost the argument, but the problem is kid, I was around when DIAF was created. To offend me, I'd have to actually take offence, and you're just not capable of throwing anything at me that could do that.
So here we are, with you throwing insults, thinking that's somehow making up for the fact you lost the argument. Yet all it's really doing is telling me how you're the type of guy who has insecurity issues, that is probably depressed, that needs to seek approval in online discussions, and that hits a low when they don't get it because they posted something that wasn't correct, with the net result being that they burst out in attack to try and deflect from their insecurity and failure to seek the approval they were after.
Give it up kid, learn to accept when you're wrong and gracefully do so. You'll feel a whole lot better for it. This? this just tells me I was right, that you can't take being wrong, this attempt at upsetting me simply fails, and just acts as confirmation that you know you're wrong, but are incapable of admitting it - your attack doesn't make it suck to be me, because it confirms I was right, it tells me that it sucks to be you.
To be fair, the European neonicotinoid ban is a bit half-arsed.
They banned things like Imidacloprid, yet Thiacloprid and Acetamiprid which are both also neonicotinoids have not been banned.
Conspiracy theorists in gardening communities (yes, they get everywhere) have this idea that the ban has nothing to do with the bees and has been carried out as a result of subversive lobbying by companies like Bayer whose patents on things like Imidacloprid are near their end can prevent generic brands entering the market and force everyone onto their still patented brands instead.
But I'm not one for conspiracy theories without any evidence to back them, mostly I'd rather just assume it's typical political incompetence to only do a half assed job of temporarily banning neonicotinoids to measure the impact rather than the result of a conspiracy theory, so take what you will from that.
I think it's unhelpful only doing a half assed job, because if things improve then companies like Bayer can say "Hey look, the bees are okay even though everyone is still using neonicotinoids like Thiacloprid!" and if there is no improvement, then they'll say "Oh, no change, so it wasn't the Imidacloprid so we can start selling it again" and environmentalists can say "Well, it's because other neonicotinoids are still in widespread use".
So don't expect our ban in Europe to settle anything. It's not comprehensive enough to offer any conclusive results one way or another. At best it may throw a bit more correlation into the mix, but we have a lot of correlation, and not enough causation already.
Any idea why they're delivered there at all? I was always under the impression California has a reasonable year round climate, so what's so difficult about them just keeping the bees there all year round?
It strikes me as far cheaper and easier to just maintain colonies locally, than dick around transporting them god knows how far.
Your argument doesn't really make sense, as the same arguments you've used against neonicotinoids applies to varoa mites.
You claim that neonicotinoids can't be to blame because there are no large scale bee deaths in places where neonicotinoids are used. Well guess what? there are places in developing countries where neonicotinoids aren't used for cost reasons, the varroa mite still exists, and that also don't have the problem.
Similarly, you claim that neonicotinoids can't be to blame because they were used for 15 years before CCD. Well guess what? The varroa mite has also been widespread in countries like the US for just as long.
You're applying double standards in your logic in an attempt to absolve neonicotinoids and blame the varroa mite. Your whole argument is built on arbitrary yet contradictory application of correlation as causation to suit your preconceived belief that neonicotinoids aren't to blame.
It's quite likely that a number of factors are to blame, and that neonicotinoids weaken bee colonies enough to ensure that varroa mite infestations lead to catastrophic collapse.
Well here in the UK, that's not how things would work and it's utterly stupid to have things working that way if they actually do.
Here you can be contractually obliged to turn over medical records if it's relevant to the job and the safety of others - i.e. if you're an airline pilot. As such, if you are in such a role then you have the freedom not to turn them over, but if you don't then that's treated the same as if you're not fit to fly effectively placing you on sick leave.
Normally though, companies have their own doctors on payroll, and you would go for an examination with them, and they simply check things that are relevant to the job (so if say, you had AIDS, then they wouldn't check for that or tell your employer if you're an airline pilot because it's irrelevant) and agree to have any findings handed over to your employer, again, you can turn it down, but that's treated the same as being sick without a doctor's note.
Optional checks are as useless as no checks in such a circumstance. If someone refuses to hand over such records, that's their right, but companies should er on the side of caution for safety critical jobs, not just say "Oh well, he hasn't handed it over let him fly anyway".
There still needn't be any prying into private life - only ensuring during work hours that he passes all the checks that are relevant to the job in much the same way that soldiers have to pass regular fitness tests.
Alright no need to cry, and get all upset, it's not my fault that you have no idea what you're talking about. That $1bn includes money to develop games outright, you know, key launch exclusives like Ryse that were also released on the PC.
Which, you know, is exactly what I said earlier. Quite how you think this translates to the idea that all developers are just as happy to spend as much to develop for the PCs as consoles I don't know. I guess you're just one of those retards who says things without understanding anything they're talking about, refuses to back down when faced with someone responding that does, and explodes in a flurry of tears and insults when it all gets too much for them.
You're bored of making stuff up and pretending you know what you're on about whilst simultaneously proving that you don't because you have too much arrogance to admit as much?
Slashdot Mirror
Pretty much everyone using the Microsoft stack, which is a fairly sizeable proportion of the world's developers, even those not doing .NET and using C++ such as an awful lot game developers for example quite happily avoid Java applications on the desktop because they just use Visual Studio.
What you most likely mean is that if you're doing Java development then Java development tools written in Java for the desktop are fairly common. Some other languages spin off that to some degree (i.e. Zend Studio for PHP which is based on Eclipse), but even in the development world it's not like Java development tools are anything close to ubiquitous, and developers are a tiny portion of the world's computer users.
You seem to be declaring Java dead, because Java applets are uncommon, and that Java desktop applications are uncommon. Both these things are true, but it still only tells an incredibly small picture.
Java is still massively strong on mobile, in embedded devices, and for server side applications.
There are a lot of phones, routers, ATMs, websites, and so forth still using Java rather heavily. It's a very long way from dead, it's still used at least in part to run key elements of some of the largest sites on the web - eBay, Amazon, Google for example as well as being a big deal in nearly all the world's banks and financial institutes. It does well in the academic world, and in the medical world, from doctors surgeries to big pharma.
I hate Oracle, but I'm afraid as much as I'd like to see it, they wont be going away any time soon - there's a lot of money in providing to those sorts of companies.
So what's the alternative? I don't see how having code lumped arbitrarily somewhere, with no clear indication that it's the application entry point is better either.
There needs to be some indication in a project that that's where the program starts, else what happens when you have say 3 or 4 lumps of code in separate files in the project all lumped in the global namespace, where does it start?
It also makes it explicit that there even is a starting point, as opposed to it being, say, a library with no application entry point.
I fully get what you're saying about making things easier for beginners to spew out code, but for a multi-purpose language it also needs to support maintainability too. I'm not even convinced that making it easy for new developers to get used to bad practice even helps them that much. I remember when I learnt C as my first language, I became dependent at the start on the global namespace because that's how the tutorials said it was easy to get started. It took a while to break out of that awful habit, and start writing actual good code. God only knows I've seen others fall into that trap - I had the misfortune of temporarily maintaining a massive VBA based application whilst simultaneously throwing it away to replace it with something that was actually not shit. Everything was a global variable, the list of globals went on for page after page. It was brutal.
Long story short, I'm not convinced that making it easier for beginners to fall right into bad practices is in any way superior to making them learn a bit of boiler plate to keep things structured from the outset. I agree the syntax can be cleaned up and improved a bit, but I don't agree that it's pointless, or that writing straight into the global namespace in an unstructured manner is superior.
I see this sort of mindset a lot, but it's illustrative of short sightedness.
If you can't understand the importance of namespaces and structures, then you can't have worked on anything but the most trivial and small of codebases utilising little or no external libraries. If all you know are CS101 examples then sure, having to declare namespaces, methods, and so forth might look relatively bad.
If however you work on anything that actually matters then methods, namespaces and so forth become kind of important.
I don't see how endif is superior to }. Why would I want to type more than I have to to convey the exact same meaning? Curly brackets are meant to be jarring and to stand out, they do that to tell you a block has ended.
Maybe it's where you create an array of circular references?
"Ever wanted to hit a car that cut you off? Well in GTA it's perfectly ok for you to do it till your hearts content and it's out of your system. Just because I take great joy in forcing other drivers in GTA off the road doesn't mean I'll plow into the car next to me on the freeway."
Man you're tame. Normally if I get cut up in GTA, I ram them off the road as hard as possible, stab them in the back with a broken bottle as they run, shoot them in the head on the floor and then pour petrol on them and ignite it, often following up with a firefight with the police, ambulance and fire engine that rocks up.
I can also safely say though that I've never even remotely attempted this in real life.
Debunked by a blog post parroted by Bayer? No you're okay, I prefer peer reviewed papers thanks, you know, actual science.
"but here's the top link from google when I search: http://www.theguardian.com/env..."
Great. A newspaper whose assertion of a cold 2012/2013 winter is trivially disprovable by actual MET office records which show that much of the winter was spent above the already relatively warm (historically) 1982 - 2010 average:
http://www.metoffice.gov.uk/cl...
Even on the coldest weeks it only just barely crept below 0c reaching -2c on only two occasions at worst. The UK hasn't had a truly cold winter now since 2010. All our winters have been incredibly mild since that point. This is what an actual cold UK winter looks like:
http://www.metoffice.gov.uk/cl...
Here are the other recent winters:
http://www.metoffice.gov.uk/cl...
http://www.metoffice.gov.uk/cl...
http://www.metoffice.gov.uk/cl...
So you see, using the UK as a point to suggest cold winters in recent years is laughable. In 2013/14 we barely dropped below average for a single day.
Besides, your assertion on Australia isn't even correct. There are plenty of issues in Australia too, whilst it may not be on the scale of other places, there are issues. As such, it's still entirely plausible that neonicotinids are a major contributing factor, and the fact that Australia always has warm weather merely cushions the impact. To pretend it's not happening at all there is just an outright lie.
So maybe stick to actual science and data, rather than blogs and newspaper articles. You might stop looking so much like a Bayer loving shill then.
Yeah it's nonsense, unlike oil, the vast majority of the world's Uranium deposits sit on Western/Western allied soil. There's no energy security threat to the West when it comes to Uranium because we have access to the vast majority of it. Australia and Canada alone hold 40% of the world's reserves.
"Except that IS has a religious rather than secular ideology."
Right, in the same way that the Taliban preach strong anti-homosexual views and cite that as a reason to fight the west because it dares to offer them equality all whilst having sex with boys?
If you haven't figured out that religion is commonly used as a tool of recruitment and control then you're probably out of your depth here. Throughout pretty much the entirety of human history religion has been claimed as the ideology and purpose, whilst simultaneously being ignored by the people who are leading those groups because they know it's an effectively tool for rallying the footsoldiers whatever you do and don't believe about it. For Saddam's old guard, when you no longer have the country, and know that Iranian funding and militias are moving into your country, there was simply no better option that to rally the Sunnis against Iran's staunch Shia movements.
"Hitler, the PIRA and Pol Pot all carried out atrocities, that doesn't make them ideologically similar."
Right, but Hitler, the PIRA, and Pol Pot weren't active in Iraq in recent history either. The fact that others have carried out atrocities in history is neither here nor there, the point is that Saddam's regime is the player in the region that has the most experience deploying these sorts of atrocities and using them as effective propaganda tools. IS isn't simply carrying out atrocities for the sake of it, the high profile ones are incredibly well planned - if you think it's as simple as "An infidel, lets kill him!" then you need to explain why they've kept John Cantlie alive when others have been beheaded. IS only carry out atrocities where the propaganda value is greater than the value of keeping them alive, that is, they don't carry out high profile atrocities because they're unthinking warped psycopaths, it is entirely planned, and done entirely with a propaganda goal in mind.
This is quite distinct to what Hitler did, because in contrast the worst atrocities such as the Nazi death camps were kept entirely secret.
But the irony is, in parroting popular myth you've highlighted that there is plenty of fodder out there who aren't aware of the fuller picture, highlighting that their methods work. You think they're just a bunch of rag tag terrorists, you think there's no organisation and that they'll go on surprising you by defeating organised forces.
The worst part is, a lot of it is even quite easy to verify. It's not even much of a secret that Adnan al-Sweidawi, one of Saddam's top lieutenants is in charges of IS' military council. It's not a secret that another of Saddam's lieutenants, Fadel al-Hayali is ISIS Iraq deputy. It's not a secret that the now deceased Izzat Ibrahim al-Douri, America's King of Clubs from Saddam's regime was leading his own force that was instrumental in taking over Mosul, one Iraq's biggest cities, on behalf of ISIS. There are plenty more examples.
It's really only some elements (albeit some of the most prominent) of Western media that try to condense it all down into a ISIS = Terrorists = Unthinking bad people type simplistic world view, then act surprised when they turn out to be incredibly effective, more so than mere unthinking bad people could ever be. Unthinking bad people terrorists are folks like those who did the Glasgow airport attacks whereby they did more harm to themselves than anyone else, but it's pretty clear that the folks in Iraq/Syria are rather more competent, organised, and effective than that. That's precisely because they're led and run by experienced smart people (though still rather horrible smart people either way), not unthinking wannabe jihadists, no matter how simplistic some of the media want to try and make it.
That's the common Americanised view of how you could've made Iraq go better, but this is precisely the sort of ill conceived view that I suspect this book is trying to deal with.
The problem is that the Baath party was brutal. Like, really brutal. We're talking about the people who gassed the Kurds, who had no qualms with using human shields, and took no issue with putting power drills through the eyes of captured PoWs as a form of torture.
Given that, it'd be naive to think that that country wouldn't have collapsed into chaos at some point anyway in the exact same way that Libya, or Syria has. You would've also needed to moderate the Baath party to a level whereby it wasn't just gagging for an uprising too.
But, and this is something that review and presumably the book itself in more detail refers to and that's the fact that the Baath party didn't just vanish into non-existence.
In Western media we're constantly being given the impression that IS is a rag tag bunch of bandits. A bunch of local militants and a bunch of foreign militants that have teamed up to cause a bit of case. This begs the question, if they're so rag tag then how the hell are they managing to run a defacto state with all the institutions you'd expect from a state (even if rather warped) like courts, banks, industry, tax collection, communications, media and so on. How are they managing to stand firm against a standing army backed by the most powerful airforces in the world? How are they managing to stand firm against Iranian forces and militias? Against the Syria government with it's battle hardened soldiers and it's typically not available to rag tag militia Russian/Iranian equipment?
The answer? Because the idea that IS is just a bunch of rag tag militants is wholly false. IS is in large part the modern incarnation of the Baath party. Those atrocities they carry out? they're straight out of the Baath party's playbook from the last 40 years. That defacto state they run? It's got all the qualitities of a state because backing it are many professional judges, politicians, and business folk from Saddam era Iraq. Those battles they're fighting? those cities they're capturing? those are the cities they were born in, or served in under Saddam, these are the generals that fought powers like Iran in the 70s and 80s and won, those are the foot soldiers who comprised Saddam's Republican Guard which was one of the most effective special forces units in the region in the 80s and 90s. Every now and then, evidence of this slips through:
http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/worl...
When you stop thinking of IS as a rag tag bunch of militants, and start understanding that much of their backbone is comprised of the remnants of Saddam's regime it makes a lot of other things clear. Those atrocities IS carries out? it's not simply because they're evil people (though they are), it's a continuation of the sort of shock and awe horror tactics that Saddam's regime was famous for. When you understand that much of IS is comprised of professional special forces and experienced generals from Saddam's era fighting in the regions they lived in and served in, it starts to be a lot more understandable as to how IS has made so much progress in Iraq. Then finally, in the context of your point on Iran, you begin to understand why IS and Iran are so interested in fighting each other, why the Kurds are willing to so vehemently fight IS even outside of their own territory helping the Yazidis in Iraq, and pushing well beyond Kobane and Kurdish Syrian regions - these are old scores that are being settled. It's the 80s Iran-Iraq war in continuation.
IS can stand up to nation state's standing armies, because it is a defacto nation state with a professional standing army of battle hardened experienced soldiers who know where the military bases are, how they're laid out, how to assault them, and where the guns are hidden, precisely because they used to be garrisoned in them. They know ho
Because even if they were just tracking data of users who sign up, contrary to popular myth, peddled mostly by people who think they know the law but apparently don't, contracts are not magical legal instruments that overrule everything ever.
In just about every jurisdiction in the world contracts have limits. They cannot overrule statutory rights, you cannot sign away your life in a contract, you cannot sign away your legal responsibility for a crime onto someone else poor and desperate enough to be willing to take it for money.
Hence, it doesn't matter what is in a contract, if that contract doesn't adhere to the laws of the country in which the agreement is made then either the whole or that portion of the contract are meaningless and irrelevant.
Facebook doesn't get to rewrite the law, so rather than blaming users for agreeing to a section of a contract that has no legal merit in the first place, you should be asking, "Why can't Facebook adhere to the laws of the countries in which it chooses to operate if it wishes to operate there?". That's the real question- you see, your question is meaningless; Europeans ARE abiding by the contract they wilfully sign because it's a meaningless contract with large portions that hold no legal merit in the first place. It's not their fault Facebook wrote a contract that tries to claim rights that it has no legal standing to claim - that's Facebook's fault, they should've drafted a contract that's wholly enforceable within the confines of the law.
Most companies manage, but it seems a number of tech companies really struggle with it, because profit.
"I will close this piece with a truth. "For all their sins, ads fuel much of the Web. Cut them out and you're strangling the diversity of online publishers â" I think users really want that."
I think this is exactly right, you are indeed strangling diversity of publishers, but the problem is, I'm not convinced it matters.
The problem as I see it, is that monetisation of information on the web via ads has simply led to a rush for psychological "you should click this and see what happens next" type bullshit, as well as incredibly inflammatory and often false headlines in a desperate rush to further increase ad revenue.
As such, whilst it may increase diversity of publishers, I do not believe it's a useful increase in diversity of publishers.
But you still have two problems there. Firstly, when the US has had cold winters, Europe has had mild winters, yet suffered the exact same problem. So your argument of a correlation of cold winters is also false - it only correlates if you take an arbitrary subset of known data.
Secondly, you argue that usage of neonicotinoids don't correlate - at best you can say they don't appear to correlate in the data you have seen, but plenty of studies show otherwise. For example, this study finds a correlation between the use of imidacloprid and cold winters, rather than varroa mite and cold winters:
http://www.hsph.harvard.edu/ne...
One could equally argue from this, and the European experience of mild winters, actually shows that neonicotinoids are in fact the common factor in the problem.
"What doesn't are vendor specific items like IE6, and if you were developing specifically for that, well, then you made a terrible choice, especially if it affected your entire application stack."
Oh stop showing you have no idea about software development. It's not about making a terrible choice, without being psychic one cannot make a better choice than supporting the two browsers that are used by the vast majority of the market. Not planning to support it when that's the status quo, and there's no obvious sign of impending change is utterly retarded. The fact that things did change is due to the unpredictable nature of technology.
"So apparently, the only thing that needed changing in your case was the GUI. If you knew squat about web development, that would have been a relatively minor thing to change, provided that you knew what you were doing in the first place. Building to IE6 indicates otherwise however."
The fact you think this shows how utterly out of your depth you are. The fact you believe you can blanket say that the UI is a small part of any project is utterly retarded, how do you know this? how do you know what the scope and scale of the project is? Stop talking about things you blatantly do not understand and cannot know about.
"No, what I need to be able to do is take technology today, as it exists, pick the proper components, even if they are alpha/beta, and ensure that my choices are kept up to date and do what they need to do, especially in the alpha/beta area. It's called tracking your dependencies, and it's not accomplished by tying yourself to maven central."
So in other words, use an agile process. Which is exactly what you're telling everyone not to do. Right.
"Have you worked in the real world? Generally a project is envisioned, then estimated and budgeted. This happens at the beginning of a project, because generally shareholders (public companies) don't like to spend 50M on a project (promised functionality) and not receive a working model."
Yes, and that's the point of Agile. It's designed to work in the real world where the only way you can truly estimate the amount of features you can implement for a specific cost is to actually do it. Thus, rather than pick a number and set of features out of thin air as with waterfall, you just set a budget, and keep rolling until you hit that budget, and what comes out is what is possible against that budget. If early on it looks like you're not even going to get close to the features you wanted for the budget, then you stop sprinting and fail early. This is far superior to failing late as with waterfall where you've blown your whole budget and ended up with something useless. Agile caters to change. That's the whole point.
Your description of GM and agile just further highlights that you don't know anything about agile. Agile doesn't demand that there are no communications between teams and stakeholders. The whole point of the job of stakeholders is that they're getting what they need, and if they're not working with other stakeholders to make it fit then what you're actually dealing with are inept project managers, which, guess what? also make waterfall projects fail on a regular basis. Retardation isn't limited to agile, nor is agile a magic cure for it.
"I'm describing the real world, how people try Agile, and how they and Agile fails. You can keep dreaming that it works"
Okay, I'll keep "dreaming" that it works, along with everyone that uses it to succesfully deliver projects, you know, like everyone from Google, to IBM, to Microsoft, to those government folks you falsely claimed only ever use waterfall:
http://www.cio.com/article/239...
People deliver with agile, the fact you claim they don't is evidence that you failed to implement it, or used the wrong tool for the job. That's not a defect with agile, that's a problem with your project leadership.
That's right, let it all out.
No really, you should go and get those blood pressure levels checked about now, continuing being wrong, getting all upset, and filling the discussion with your tears really is not healthy.
"You know what that's a sign of? Failure to specify your requirements. (Something Agile people know so little of these days it's unsurprising they should be banned from programming)"
Sorry, but this is nothing but complete denial of reality. Things change, especially in the technology world. I worked on a project for a client a few years back that would take a number of years to complete. At the outset, the goal was for the client facing portion of the application to be web based supporting IE6 and whatever the version of Firefox was at the time on desktops. Within 18 months Chrome came to matter, IE6 was finally being ditched left and right, the iPhone and iPad turned up, and mobile became a serious thing that mattered. Within the project's lifetime the whole way in which people used and viewed websites changed completely.
If you think everything can be foreseen at project conception, then you know literally zero about the realities of software development. You would literally need someone who can see the future on your team to be able to do what you're claiming successfully and consistently.
"Again, I guess you better let all gov agencies know that all their projects involving software prior to 2005 or so failed. Guess that moon landing really was on a stage somewhere."
You can't take the set of all projects and pretend they're all the same, it's a nonsense. For some projects waterfall works incredibly well, because we've done it a million times before. For software, it's simply not as clear cut. You're right, many government projects have been highly successful under waterfall, but look at a subset of that, what about government IT projects? Government IT projects are universally known to be a complete joke, precisely because the failure rate is astoundingly high. That is in large part down to a failure of choosing the correct methodology for the task in question.
"Having been exposed to a number of Agile projects that all ran over budget, schedule and/or failed, I can truthfully say Agile itself was the cause."
Oh not this old chestnut. This doesn't even make sense, the whole point in an agile project over waterfall is that it cannot run over budget or beyond schedule. The whole point is that you keep sprinting until you've spent as much as you want to spend for the deliverable provided at the end of each sprint. If what you mean is that you had a ballpark figure and schedule in mind before you started and you missed it, then this simply states that your estimate was incorrect and that you would've had to choose either way between spending more and getting the product you wanted, or staying on budget and getting a lesser product than you incorrectly estimated would be possible in the chosen time and cost bounds. It seems a little odd that you bitch about people saying you're doing it wrong, whilst also claiming that you're following the exact guidelines, only a sentence after you've demonstrated that you haven't even got the slightest clue about the fundamentals of agile in the first place. You clearly are doing it wrong, and are not following the guidelines, because the sentence quoted above alone shows that you do not even grasp the fundamental place of agile in achieving proper cost/time/quality balance.
I am not saying agile is a silver bullet, far from it, I firmly believe it's often used when it's a poor choice, and I firmly believe it requires fundamental changes to a business that most businesses do not need to make. I believe there are better options including using a hybrid approach to suit your businesses actual needs, rather than what some buzzword monkey is telling you are your needs. But some of what you say in your zeal to defend waterfall is just complete and utter nonsense because waterfall, like agile, is not a silver bullet either.
"In other words, you aren't describing waterfall in your comment. Yes, I'm invoking the "No True Scotsman" fallacy, since that is usually what is invoked when Agile is criticized."
No, he absolutely is describing waterfall, the problem is that most developers have gotten so used to waterfall being useless for a large number of development tasks that they've fudged it with semi-agile techniques naturally to get it to even work for them at all.
If you're going to criticise agile proper, rather than accept that as per your argument that what you're calling waterfall is necessarily waterfall with a sprinkling of agile, then you have to hold waterfall to the same standards and accept it as it was formally defined in the first place. You either take the formal definition of it and argue against that, or accept that many agile techniques are incredibly useful and pop up naturally when people fudge waterfall as their general development practice choosing not to apply either strictly.
Whether you've seen agile used successfully or not doesn't really matter, it's a mere anecdote. The fact is that there are thousands of companies out there, including some of the largest and most successful that do use it successfully to deliver software.
For what it's worth, my personal opinion is that agile, like any other tool in a developers box is something that should be used when it's the best tool for the job. I don't really see much benefit in developing complex back end architectures using agile, I find waterfall is typically actually a good fit here, because the whole point in such a backend is to get the architecture right from the start and have it flexible enough to support whatever it needs to support and such a backend will typically have years of life in it. In contrast, I believe agile is absolutely necessary for good UI design- the fact is you can't document a good UI from the outset under waterfall as good UIs have to be developed with a constant cycle of user feedback. It's a manual optimisation process that requires repeated analysis of analytics and user feedback to make changes that optimise the result, the whole feedback cycle of agile fits perfectly.
Agile can and does work, and it's not a failing concept at all - it's use is still growing, and it's still being used successfully. It is not however a silver bullet, and anyone who believed it is or was is probably worth ignoring completely.
Make no mistake, agile is not something you can just wedge in overnight, it requires big procedural, cultural changes, and even toolset changes. It's not merely a cliche to argue "you're not doing agile properly", it's a common fact that many houses jump on the buzzword and get it wrong because they do not recognise the scale of actual change that's required if they really do want to go wholly down the route of strictly applying some agile process (which they probably don't unless they're doing web and/or UI work). Similarly, it's also common that people do as you have done - fudge waterfall to have some aspects of agile to make it work. If you believe waterfall is as foolproof as you suggest, I implore you to go and read about waterfall strict, and apply it strictly, because what you're describing most definitely isn't it, in much the same way as describing throwing QA out the window most definitely isn't any strict agile methodology.
I personally have no qualms when designing, say, a client-server application, with having the server developed using waterfall, and the client developed using agile. don't know why people feel they have to be so tribal about waterfall vs. agile - it's not a fucking contest.
I know you think that by throwing insults at me you think you're upsetting me as some kind of consolation to yourself that you lost the argument, but the problem is kid, I was around when DIAF was created. To offend me, I'd have to actually take offence, and you're just not capable of throwing anything at me that could do that.
So here we are, with you throwing insults, thinking that's somehow making up for the fact you lost the argument. Yet all it's really doing is telling me how you're the type of guy who has insecurity issues, that is probably depressed, that needs to seek approval in online discussions, and that hits a low when they don't get it because they posted something that wasn't correct, with the net result being that they burst out in attack to try and deflect from their insecurity and failure to seek the approval they were after.
Give it up kid, learn to accept when you're wrong and gracefully do so. You'll feel a whole lot better for it. This? this just tells me I was right, that you can't take being wrong, this attempt at upsetting me simply fails, and just acts as confirmation that you know you're wrong, but are incapable of admitting it - your attack doesn't make it suck to be me, because it confirms I was right, it tells me that it sucks to be you.
To be fair, the European neonicotinoid ban is a bit half-arsed.
They banned things like Imidacloprid, yet Thiacloprid and Acetamiprid which are both also neonicotinoids have not been banned.
Conspiracy theorists in gardening communities (yes, they get everywhere) have this idea that the ban has nothing to do with the bees and has been carried out as a result of subversive lobbying by companies like Bayer whose patents on things like Imidacloprid are near their end can prevent generic brands entering the market and force everyone onto their still patented brands instead.
But I'm not one for conspiracy theories without any evidence to back them, mostly I'd rather just assume it's typical political incompetence to only do a half assed job of temporarily banning neonicotinoids to measure the impact rather than the result of a conspiracy theory, so take what you will from that.
I think it's unhelpful only doing a half assed job, because if things improve then companies like Bayer can say "Hey look, the bees are okay even though everyone is still using neonicotinoids like Thiacloprid!" and if there is no improvement, then they'll say "Oh, no change, so it wasn't the Imidacloprid so we can start selling it again" and environmentalists can say "Well, it's because other neonicotinoids are still in widespread use".
So don't expect our ban in Europe to settle anything. It's not comprehensive enough to offer any conclusive results one way or another. At best it may throw a bit more correlation into the mix, but we have a lot of correlation, and not enough causation already.
Any idea why they're delivered there at all? I was always under the impression California has a reasonable year round climate, so what's so difficult about them just keeping the bees there all year round?
It strikes me as far cheaper and easier to just maintain colonies locally, than dick around transporting them god knows how far.
Your argument doesn't really make sense, as the same arguments you've used against neonicotinoids applies to varoa mites.
You claim that neonicotinoids can't be to blame because there are no large scale bee deaths in places where neonicotinoids are used. Well guess what? there are places in developing countries where neonicotinoids aren't used for cost reasons, the varroa mite still exists, and that also don't have the problem.
Similarly, you claim that neonicotinoids can't be to blame because they were used for 15 years before CCD. Well guess what? The varroa mite has also been widespread in countries like the US for just as long.
You're applying double standards in your logic in an attempt to absolve neonicotinoids and blame the varroa mite. Your whole argument is built on arbitrary yet contradictory application of correlation as causation to suit your preconceived belief that neonicotinoids aren't to blame.
It's quite likely that a number of factors are to blame, and that neonicotinoids weaken bee colonies enough to ensure that varroa mite infestations lead to catastrophic collapse.
Well here in the UK, that's not how things would work and it's utterly stupid to have things working that way if they actually do.
Here you can be contractually obliged to turn over medical records if it's relevant to the job and the safety of others - i.e. if you're an airline pilot. As such, if you are in such a role then you have the freedom not to turn them over, but if you don't then that's treated the same as if you're not fit to fly effectively placing you on sick leave.
Normally though, companies have their own doctors on payroll, and you would go for an examination with them, and they simply check things that are relevant to the job (so if say, you had AIDS, then they wouldn't check for that or tell your employer if you're an airline pilot because it's irrelevant) and agree to have any findings handed over to your employer, again, you can turn it down, but that's treated the same as being sick without a doctor's note.
Optional checks are as useless as no checks in such a circumstance. If someone refuses to hand over such records, that's their right, but companies should er on the side of caution for safety critical jobs, not just say "Oh well, he hasn't handed it over let him fly anyway".
There still needn't be any prying into private life - only ensuring during work hours that he passes all the checks that are relevant to the job in much the same way that soldiers have to pass regular fitness tests.
Alright no need to cry, and get all upset, it's not my fault that you have no idea what you're talking about. That $1bn includes money to develop games outright, you know, key launch exclusives like Ryse that were also released on the PC.
Which, you know, is exactly what I said earlier. Quite how you think this translates to the idea that all developers are just as happy to spend as much to develop for the PCs as consoles I don't know. I guess you're just one of those retards who says things without understanding anything they're talking about, refuses to back down when faced with someone responding that does, and explodes in a flurry of tears and insults when it all gets too much for them.
You're bored of making stuff up and pretending you know what you're on about whilst simultaneously proving that you don't because you have too much arrogance to admit as much?
Okay then. Have it your way.