"There are certain off-work things that an employer should know about - witness the guy who intentionally flew the airliner into the mountain and killed all on board - when it can affect their on-the-clock performance."
Yeah but does solving that really require intrusion into his personal life? Isn't it something that could just as well be solved by making sure pilots have regular appointments during work time with mental health professionals to ensure they're of sound mind?
I don't see this as justification for prying into his personal life, only ensuring that people in charge of things like planes are regularly vetted to ensure they're safe to be in charge of planes. I think there's a distinct difference between mandating that your staff have their mental health checked on the clock - and if there's any doubt, suspended from the job - and prying into someone's personal life off the clock.
You can evaluate anything that might impact their time at work, when they're at work. If someone turns up drunk, you don't need the details of the night before, you just need to know that they've turned up drunk and aren't fit to work.
Okay, so what you're saying then, is that you refuse to accept reality because some conspiracy theory about MS payments? MS only pays for exclusives and when it's paid for exclusive (i.e. Titanfall, or Halo 2) it's actually paid for them to be exclusive to consoles AND the PC.
It's clear you do not have the slightest clue about what a console is, how it differs to a PC, and why they necessarily wont converge. The least you could do is stop pretending otherwise when someone explains to you the difference - it's not even controversial what I'm saying, I mean, are you seriously arguing it's just as cheap to optimise, test, and maintain patches for many thousands of combinations of hardware than it is for one fixed platform? Because if you're disagreeing with me then that's what your argument boils down to, and if it boils down to that then you don't even have the slightest grasp of how the software development industry works, let alone the games industry or the console market.
"Actually Yanukovich, even being a bandit with a previous conviction, was the lesser of two evils there. He realised that it is very difficult for Ukraine to get away from Russia's influence (it has been a part of Russia for centuries and almost 40% of the population speaks Russian as their primary language) and in many ways counterproductive because, frankly, Russia brings much more money in Ukraine's economy."
But it's a short term view, under Russian influence Ukraine would just become another Belarus- restricted to only become as powerful as Russia lets it, which is typically not very powerful. In contrast freeing from Russia allows them to forge their own economic destiny, which would allow far greater wealth than Russia would let them have, again, you only have to look at Belarus to see the evidence for this - Russia likes tight control of the regimes it has strong influence over, and it lets them be just big enough to be a pain to everyone else, but utterly dependent on Russia to exist.
Poroschenko has at least been facing up to some of the corruption, and opening up the markets. They have to do this to fulfil their aspirations of eventual EU membership - they have both the motivation and will to do it, so it's silly to pretend they can't.
The fact is, the Ukrainian people have higher aspirations than Russia was ever willing to let them achieve, and that's an unsustainable path under Russia, even if it results in shorter term stability because it means Putin wont invade you if you're happy to stay poor and corrupt with no political say forever. I don't even think the people of Belarus will accept it indefinitely, I believe there'll be a time where even they opt to break free from Russian control, but in part that's why Putin is trying to make it so painful for the Ukrainians, to put the Belarussians off.
"They really haven't. I've been in both countries several times. Everywhere you see, everything is paid with EU money. Estonia might kinda sorta survive on their own, although I doubt it, but Lithuania and Latvia have been depopulated. People flee from there to work and live abroad. The best and brightest don't see any future in their homelands."
Yes I've been there too, as I said, we have large offices in Lithuania. The fact that EU money was used to modernise their infrastructure is irrelevant, again, it's the same here in the UK - countless projects have EU funding signs on them (the train station I commute from every day does), but it's not a sign of economic dependency, merely an initial infrastructure boost to jumpstart real local economies, and these country's economies are comfortably now jumpstarted. Saying places like Lithuania and Estonia have lost their best and brightest when they're two of the most technically literate nations in Europe is laughable, regardless of whether you've been there, you clearly know nothing about the high levels of talent they have. If you want cheap, crappy outsourcing you go to India, if you want high quality outsourcing, people who know their shit and can box like the best of the West because you can't find enough high quality talent at home you go to Eastern European states like Estonia and Lithuania. This isn't even small scale stuff, some big name tech like Skype originates from Estonia.
You seem to think that the minority group of actual far-right nationalists are representative of the whole but it's not even close. There's no doubt the ferocity and zeal with which the likes of the Azov battalion fight is scary, and there's no doubt that people are rolling with them because their far right nationalism makes them a formidable fighting force. But to pretend they're somehow representative is a joke. If they were then there would've been greater electoral support for it than a pathetic 2% which is rather low compared to the far right in places like the UK and France where UKIP and the National Front poll around the 10% - 25% mark.
Here in the UK I can find UKIP voters (who, contrary to pretending otherwise most definitely are fa
Right, but there's a difference between nationalists whose nationalism tends towards wanting Ukraine to be a sovereign independent state, and neo-Nazis. Puting is claiming the latter, tarring them with the same brush, but the reality is that neo-Nazism in Ukraine is lower than levels in even much of Western Europe and the US, and far far lower than in Russia.
"Yushenko, whom you have mentioned, was raised to power basically by a paid mob. And then after one term he has received just 5.45% of votes because he sucked so much and a bandit was elected instead."
Yes exactly, the aspirations of Ukrainians was to get away from corruption and Russian influence. Yuschenko gave them the latter, but not the former, and so their break from Russia faltered as they felt they had little choice but to tend towards Yanukovych, of course, Yanukovych also continued with the corruption AND tended back towards Russia meaning it was even worse again, hence, we are where we are.
"Poland never was a soviet state"
It's really splitting hairs, regardless of whether it was formerly part of the USSR or not, it's stupid to pretend it wasn't under the exact same regime of defacto Russian control that Russia is trying to force Ukraine under. No one in the Warsaw pact did anything without Russia's say so.
"Baltic countries were deindustrialised after USSR broke up and their economy basically consists of EU payments, which is, in case of Ukraine, totally unrealistic."
Complete codswallop, both of these countries have perfectly functioning economies of their own that exist regardless of EU payments (even Britain receives EU payments but it doesn't mean we're fucking dependent on them). We have a large team of developers in Lithuania for example, whom we use for more run of the mill development.
I don't really know what your rant about Ukraine's economy is all about though, I don't think that's in debate, I think we all know the Ukrainian economy is fucked, and of course Russia isn't the source of all Ukraine's problems. Russia is however the current key factor preventing Ukraine from solving those problems though by continuing to send troops and equipment to destabilise it's industrial heartland. Russia doesn't get a free pass because Ukraine's economy would be weak without Russia - you don't get to invade a country and say "Oh well, they were fucked anyway, what's creating a civil war and backing one side of it with modern Russian equipment and troops going to hurt?"
Ukraine has it's work cut out, we all know that, but Russia is preventing it from even making a start at moving on as punishment for daring to step away from Russia to a more progressive Western economy and Russia is the one that's further courting and funding neo-Nazis and their groups across Europe, not Ukraine.
I think you fundamentally misunderstand the point of consoles.
The point of a console is to save developers from all the headaches of PC development - you don't face a combinatorial explosion of hardware, OS and driver combinations to optimise for. You have a fixed piece of hardware, that works in a fixed way. This drastically reduces the amount of testing you have to do and drastically reduces the amount of necessary optimisation - you're only optimising for one single fixed hardware target where it's safe to make assumptions.
If you expect games to be cross compatible you're saying to developers that they have to expend more effort and cost developing which means they may not even bother attempting some of the more ambitious projects out there. It's better to leave it to developers to decide if they want to port because if they're going to support the billion PC hardware combinations out there anyway then porting from console isn't much of a headache. If they're not going to support PCs though, they can chuck games out much more quickly and to a much higher standard due to less variation meaning less platform combination specific bugs.
That's before you consider that consoles closed ecosystem makes cheating harder - even if people hack the platform you can shut down their Xbox Live or PSN accounts or the associated hardware blocking them from multiplayer altogether on a hacked box.
Consoles aren't just PCs with more restrictions for no reason- there's good reason for the restrictions. The PC is a different platform that's used for different reasons.
So yes there is good reason the next XBox can't be a PC, because if it was a PC it wouldn't be a console, and if it wasn't a console then Microsoft would be dropping out of the console market, which would be stupid, because it wants to be in the console market.
Being a nationalist requires that you view yourself and people of your group to be superior to other groups, else there would be no point in it because the national identity being defended would cease to be meaningful.
This probably explains why you think the Ukrainian people are incapable of seeing other ex-soviet states like Estonia, Lithuania, Poland and so forth look west after the collapse of the USSR and see how much they've gained in terms of wealth and freedom then decide they want that for themselves. It explains why you view Ukrainians as some kind of inferior human that couldn't possibly want the things that most people want by themselves like increased wealth or greater freedom, without CIA interference.
I find it rather odd however that you describe yourself as an American nationalist whilst serving the propaganda goals of Russia and hence necessarily damaging American interests and ideals. You talk of the far right in Ukraine, but the people who have the most to fear from that viewpoint recognise what an absolute lie that idea is:
But it's not just support of course, it's the way Putin acts against minorities, using gay people as a hate target just as Hitler and King Edward I did with the Jews:
Or simply silencing anyone who hates having their territory illegally annexed resulting in concerned 3rd party nations who are typically Russian allies like India to report on the fact that Turkey is having to send in monitors to make sure it doesn't escalate further than the level of ethnic cleansing that Putin has already carried out:
Of course, I don't expect any of this to matter to you. I've seen you post here before and I know you're normally incapable of consideration of alternative viewpoints, I know that you have your CIA/Koch brothers conspiracy theories and wont believe anything else. But I've made a point here, a point of linking to news sources in Europe, Russia, India, the Middle East to show you that the things I've pointed out aren't controversial, that the only people that wont accept them are Putin and his supporters. So if you do as you normally do, and refuse to believe what is evidenced in front of you, you at very least must stop pretending you're not just parroting the pro-Putin viewpoint - because as the Moscow Times articles show, even moderate Russians themselves disagree with you - this isn't about Russians vs. non-Russians, this is about Putin apologists as you have been in this conversation so far, against reality.
So you've really a choice, you can wake up and stop parroting long discredited RT propaganda word for word, or
FWIW I live up North, and it's really not as rosie as you suggest. London has something like £127 per head of population spent on it's public transport infrastructure, here it's £12 per head so we get an incredibly raw deal.
By population for example, Leeds and Sheffield are the 3rd and 4th biggest cities in the UK, and yet the rail link connecting them takes at it's fastest 40 minutes, with most trains taking about an hour. Yet, they're only about 30 miles apart, so a 30 minute drive down the M1.
This is because the lines round here aren't even electrified yet, so whilst the government talks about HS2 the local inter-city rail infrastructure is ancient, relying on slow diesel trains on quite a lot of routes that are 40 years old, and regularly break down. The new rail tender for the North is up currently, and bidders have been told they must get rid of the old 1982 trains by 2020. The bidders answer to that? Using 1978 London underground trains. The tracks wont be electrified until the 2019 - 2024 investment period at the absolute earliest.
HS2 is coming up this way, but it's less than useless. It takes 1hr 50mins to go from Sheffield to St Pancras currently. HS2 will take 1hr 20mins, but it stops at Meadowhall (an out of town shopping centre), from there you need a connection to the centre and it'll take you 30 mins waiting for that connection and riding on it (tram, bus, train), so not only do you need to prat around finding and paying for a connection, but you get no time saving as a result either.
I understand why you have such a positive view of our rail services because they are indeed excellent in the London area. Whenever I travel to London I always go by train and leave the car at home, but up here? It's not worth the hassle for the majority of journeys - there's the odd route that works well, for example, if it happens to sit on the East Coast Mainline or similar, but you must understand that rail in much of the UK is an awful joke and whilst the government is on about spending £50bn on a new HSR line that kinda makes sense to Birmingham but seems a pointless waste of money beyond that there are other vast high traffic parts of the network between the other largest cities in the UK after Birmingham and London that are stuck using lines and trains that are technologically well over 50 years old.
That's why there's so much opposition up here to HS2 - it's hard to understand why we'd want to get from a shopping centre to London 25% faster for £50bn destroying a number of really nice nature reserves in the process, when there's no money to let us get between the two or three major cities here 50% faster for a mere couple of hundred million along existing routes whilst also leaving enough change for new trains and additional carriages to alleviate what are, currently, dangerous levels of overcrowding that leave people stuck on the platform.
I don't even really begrudge the amount that's spent on transport in London, it is our economic powerhouse, it's also a key tourism destination, and it makes sense therefore for it to have a fantastic transport system. However, if money is going to be spent up here it'd be nice if it was spent sensibly on something actually useful. As such, there is some truth in what the GP says to be fair - once you step outside of one or two key areas in the UK at least, the rail system rapidly becomes a bad joke.
I think you're confusing "oldest" with "oldest active". Those are different things, in the context of merely the oldest, oldest and first most definitely are the same thing.
Going back way before these there were plenty of professional gaming competitions for things like Mario. Fuck, this is basically the plot of the 1989 film The Wizard, whose premise isn't exactly based wholly in fiction.
Even in the FPS world, Quake 1 also had a number fairly large scale professional multiplayer leagues and that was released in 1995. Thresh (Dennis Fong, the guy that went on to found Xfire) was part of a pretty high profile event in 1997 where he won Carmack's Ferrari.
Thus, talk of CounterStrike and Quake III Arena are laughable. They're not even close to the beginning of professional competitive gaming, which is surely what eSport actually means.
Obligatory Wikipedia reference says that eSports may well go back to at least 1972:
The summary's claim of Counterstrike as the first eSport reminds me of the time some kid posted here a few years back saying he was part of anonymous and he was proud that him and his friends were part of the internet's first counter-culture as if the whole of the fucking 80s with cDc, Mitnick, LoD et. al. never happened. Even then I'm not convinced that even they were the first, but they sure as hell long pre-date anonymous!
Counterstrike as earliest E-Sport is stupid. Let me guess, whoever came up with that one also thinks George Bush was the first president, 9/11 was the first ever terrorist attack and Afghanistan was the first ever war?
I'd say get off my lawn, I'd say I must be getting old, but this is Slashdot, and I know that someone even older than me is going to come along and tell me about competitive gaming events on some ancient long forgotten computer somewhere in California in the 60s, and even older Manhattan internet counter-cultures in the 70s or something. So er, over to you grey beards:)
They wrote compilers for Windows shareware developers? Really? just Windows shareware developers?
It was the number one Microsoft platform C/C++ compiler through the 80s into the mid-90s. It had nothing to do with Windows, or Shareware through most of it's life, and the company still exists even if it is a shadow of it's former self.
I don't recall Borland C++ or Turbo C++ ever forcing use of.hpp files or similar though, I always stuck to.h. I've seen.hpp in various projects, not compiler specific. It seems to be entirely a concious choice by developers whatever the platform from what I've seen.
Let's be clear, it's not even about $39 devices from dodgy Chinese manufacturers on ancient Android 2.3.
My official Google Galaxy Nexus stopped receiving updates in less than 18 months and was a $350 device and is stuck on an old vulnerable version of 4.
When even Google themselves can't be fucked to keep their first party devices secure, using some lame excuse about an unsupported chipset (even though 3rd parties like Cyanogen have had no problem updating it) then how can they expect anyone else to?
Make no mistake, in this case, Google is the problem. When Google wont even lead on the issue with their own OS, how can anyone else with less resources, less freedom to change the OS, and less profit per handset be expected to follow?
If Google was competent on the issue and actually took the lead by guaranteeing 3 - 5 years of updates on all their first party devices, you might find everyone else pressured into doing the same simply to compete, but when Google barely even breaks 1 year no one else is likely to do any better either - 1 year is such a short time in the world of updates, that I can see why most companies just see that as the standard and equate it to "no need to do updates at all".
The fact you think you suck already means you have drastically higher potential than a large number (perhaps even a majority) of developers
Far better to think you suck and know that you can improve than to think you're awesome and stay shit forever.
Humility is the number one most important defining trait shared by the world's genuinely great developers. I've met plenty of developers who think they're great, claim they're great, but repeatedly prove their development ignorance when they start talking about the subject. In contrast, I've never met a humble programmer that isn't either awesome, or well on their way to being awesome.
Well I'm glad we have you here to arbitrarily define intelligence. It's about time, the human race has been struggling to define it precisely for hundreds of years.
Where have you been all this time of self-declared definer of terms?
But just to clarify, basically, what you're saying, is that intelligence is a form of magic that we have inside us? Where inside us does this magic exist? Where does it come from? Are you saying it's a special undetectable thing? Your comment seems to imply it disappears in adults, but we can't detect it in babies either.
We can't do any of the things you suggest because we don't have computers even remotely as powerful and capable of rapid complex processing as the human brain. I also can't teach a dog to do any of the things you suggest, so are you declaring dogs as being unintelligent? Your examples seem to suggest that intelligence is unique to human beings and nothing else has the capacity for intelligence.
It's not so much redefining STEM as redefining societal good. Much of the things they mention are certainly forms of engineering and so fit firmly under STEM, but the problem is they're a tiny subset of engineering, and similarly a tiny subset of useful engineering that the world needs.
The premise of the argument in the summary seems to be that medicine, healthcare and so forth are all in this arbitrary societal good category, but things like building houses, power grids, bridges, phones, video games, operating systems and so on and so forth are not.
So the argument seems to be that if we give disproportionate focus to certain areas of engineering application we can increase the number of female engineers. I'm not terribly sure that that helps though as it means the majority of engineering areas are still woefully underfilled, and still have a woeful lack of gender balance.
So what if we have an increase in the number of female engineers figuring out how to do large scale deployments of some new technology like low power computing devices and methods of charging them and connecting them into poor communities if we've done nothing to solve the electronic engineering shortage which is required to develop the low powered devices in the first place? Both things are necessary, but the summary seems to imply only the former does societal good even though the former necessarily depends on the latter. It's ill conceived nonsense.
So yes you could do something like that and pretend you've fixed it, but all you've really done is fix it in a very contrived and niche circumstance without addressing any of the underlying reasons for trying to fix it in the first place, like trying to fix gender imbalance across all aspects of the field, trying to fix pay imbalance, or solve the STEM shortage in general. A bunch of females doing low paid engineering work for charities in Africa, isn't going to sort out the pay or gender imbalance when back in Silicon Valley you have a male dominated engineering industry holding all the money. So they've fudged the engineering graduate numbers to look slightly more fair, great, then what? what about the actual problems we're trying to solve in doing that in the first place? Do they not matter providing we've pulled off an adequate fudging of numbers to whitewash the problem?
And so Julian's tears continue because he was wrong about something on the internet as another moment in which he fails to follow the conversation passes. Asking for things that are long irrelevant based on points already made, like a stuck cassette that just can't get past a certain very whiny point because to do so would still require the upsetting idea that he might actually have to confront his inability to consider anything outside of the comfort zone The Daily Mail provides to him.
Life goes on. Julian continues to cry because the world wouldn't conform to his minority hard right viewpoint.
The Story of Julian: A day in the life of a man-child who acts tough, but is just another failed internet tough guy.
Still, there's one upside to your latest post, you've dropped the overly dramatic cries of "leftist". I guess I'm making progress then, I guess my last point about being neither firmly left nor firmly right had an impact and forced you to realise there are in fact shades of grey between the black and white. That's enough progress for now. I wouldn't want to push you too far out of your comfort zone in case you do something drastic, like, start considering alternate viewpoints whether you agree with them or not. Maybe one day you'll get there.
"Perhaps if you had any facts or evidence to hand you might not have needed the evasions and colourful insults?"
Insults? you mean like those things that you lunged into from the very start and ran with? Oh never mind, you're one of those classic UKIP types aren't you "Wah wah wah, he hurted me, it's not far, only I'm allowed to hurt him, he can't throw anything back at me because it makes me cry to mummy and I have to play the victim". Yeah okay, if you have a problem with insults and they make you cry like your typical Daily Mail play the victim card holder you should maybe try not to use them yourself from the outset. I'm sure playing the victim makes you feel like you're somehow making me out to be the bad guy, but in reality all it does when folks like you to Farage do it is show how utterly weak your arguments are in that you can't stand by and defend them and instead cry about being bullied even though you attempt the exact same thing. You call everyone else weak, but as soon as the tables turn, your tears start flowing.
"despite there patently not being one as some of the biggest ISPs don't clearly aren't in on the big secret."
Well, you know, except the great net neutrality whitewash known as the Open Internet Code that doesn't actually protect net neutrality because it explicitly allows for ISPs to ignore it. The fact that TalkTalk's old boss became a member of government, and the fact that a number of ISPs have started blocking over and above the court order - PlusNet and Sky being the existing examples.
Of course, you ignored this because it doesn't fit your One True World View TM. It's just way too inconvenient, and it wasn't in The Daily Mail so it can't be true!
You still seem to be intent on calling me a leftist, which is quite funny given that last time I defended the right of Israelis to retaliate to military attacks on their state I was called a rightist. This only really further proves my point that wingnuts like you are lost causes, you can't see shades of grey in the middle, it's all or nothing, either you lean wholly in one direction, or wholly in the other. It can't possibly be the case that both sides have good points, and both have bad, and that the best solution is a form of centrism that selects the best of both worlds. But no, The Daily Mail has told you it must be all in hard right wingnuttery, so that's that.
Regardless, I said it doesn't really matter does it? The whole reason you replied so aggressively to my posts is because I've wound you up by pointing out that some of the blocking is not simply a limitation of the law but goes above and beyond that. The fact I got such a response from you is good, because there's nothing better than shaking wingnuts out of their comfort zone. Especially The Daily Mail crowd - you need a little slap of reality now and again, not because it does any good, no, as I pointed out, people like you are unthinking and have crystalised unchangeable views, but simply because you deserve to pay the price of that ignorance - the price of having to face reality once in a while.
I can see you don't post much with this account, so the fact that I have gained so many responses from you shows that you know full well that I've got a point, hence why you're so desperately trying to shut it down. I guess I really touched a nerve, you wouldn't have flown off the handle so easily otherwise, so, well, mission accomplished.
You're not hear to learn something, you're hear to dictate, only you have no power to dictate, and so you just get laughed at and then end up crying like a baby.
Let's be honest, even if I had a recording of a meeting between ISPs, government and the music industry all agreeing to it and admitting it you would still write it off as a fake, or "leftist propaganda" or a "liberal conspiracy".
When someone like you blasts off a reply about left, or right, or insert whatever inherent hate target you have here it says one thing, it says that that persons views cannot be fluid, it says their views are crystalised. Your outrage, your bile spewing to your chosen hate target occurs because you cannot cope with the idea that the world does not bend to your whims, you detest the idea that someone might think differently to you, you want everything to be as you want it. In short, you have the mind of a dictator, albeit thankfully without any of the power, so you're left spewing bile.
But I'll leave you with this, this isn't a scientific publication, I don't profess that everything I say is guaranteed to be 100% correct, I don't post with a warranty on the validity of it, I post ideas based on what we do know about the world. So yes, it's possible that I'm way off the mark, it's possible that I'm completely wrong, but here's the thing. It's also entirely possible that you're completely wrong too- the difference is I'm open to other views and that's how I get to avoid being a flagrant wing nut, you however, are not, and that's why you are a flagrant bile spewing wingnut with nothing useful to say.
If you would like to know why I've put forward the possibility that ISPs, government and the music industry might well have gotten a little too cosy, then I'd gladly give you some links. But frankly, for that to be even worth my time you'd have to display some semblance of rationality, and get past your wingnut bile spewing. Given your post history I'm not convinced you can do that, you appear too mentally immature to engage in rational debate.
Yeah tell me about it, as I say I was struggling at first and figured maybe it was a snobbish reference to the use of artifact rather than the British English but basically never used artefact.
It wasn't until I literally parsed it word by word taking a pause in between that I caught it. It's a rather fantastic example of inbuilt human brain automatic error detection and correction though:) Judging by the replies it caught quite a few people - I think there's a psychological study in there somewhere!
Have you ever stopped to read one of your own posts? It's just you like to cry that everyone else is crying, which means that you're basically always crying that the world apparently doesn't adhere to your Daily Mail led world view after all.
I know it must suck being lied to all your life, to find out that you've in fact been consistently fed a crock of shit when reality comes shining through, but I'm afraid that's something you'll have to get used to.
Don't worry, you can go and vote Farage soon, and when your ilk get a mere 15% at most you can pretend that you're somehow in a majority and we should do everything you say, even though the reality is you're still a pointless little squeak in the corner that no one gives the slightest shit about.
There's always someone that gets a lemon though, you can't judge an entire range with a single anecdote, you need a larger data set. To highlight the point that you can't judge the whole on one case I can simply counteract with my anecdote; I've knocked my Nexus 7 off a table directly onto a solid stone floor. I expected a smashed screen and broken innards, but it didn't even get a scratch and still works fine one year on.
My partner's iPad (also an iPad 2, though doesn't go back to 2009, I don't think they were out then) in contrast just started randomly freezing recently, though it is at least about 3 or 4 years old now I believe so I don't really feel too bad about it given it's age (and the fact she won it so didn't cost us anything anyway).
I'm not here to defend Google, god only knows they cut off support for my Galaxy Nexus after less than 15 months of it being available in the UK market which is a wholly unacceptable way to treat customers, and as such I too wouldn't buy another Google branded device. But I don't think it's fair to say the Nexus 7 is an inherently unreliable device as mine has been sturdy and reliable since I got it (I got mine in 2012, no idea where the 2013 in the summary comes from, maybe the version refresh?).
Slashdot Mirror
"There are certain off-work things that an employer should know about - witness the guy who intentionally flew the airliner into the mountain and killed all on board - when it can affect their on-the-clock performance."
Yeah but does solving that really require intrusion into his personal life? Isn't it something that could just as well be solved by making sure pilots have regular appointments during work time with mental health professionals to ensure they're of sound mind?
I don't see this as justification for prying into his personal life, only ensuring that people in charge of things like planes are regularly vetted to ensure they're safe to be in charge of planes. I think there's a distinct difference between mandating that your staff have their mental health checked on the clock - and if there's any doubt, suspended from the job - and prying into someone's personal life off the clock.
You can evaluate anything that might impact their time at work, when they're at work. If someone turns up drunk, you don't need the details of the night before, you just need to know that they've turned up drunk and aren't fit to work.
Okay, so what you're saying then, is that you refuse to accept reality because some conspiracy theory about MS payments? MS only pays for exclusives and when it's paid for exclusive (i.e. Titanfall, or Halo 2) it's actually paid for them to be exclusive to consoles AND the PC.
It's clear you do not have the slightest clue about what a console is, how it differs to a PC, and why they necessarily wont converge. The least you could do is stop pretending otherwise when someone explains to you the difference - it's not even controversial what I'm saying, I mean, are you seriously arguing it's just as cheap to optimise, test, and maintain patches for many thousands of combinations of hardware than it is for one fixed platform? Because if you're disagreeing with me then that's what your argument boils down to, and if it boils down to that then you don't even have the slightest grasp of how the software development industry works, let alone the games industry or the console market.
"Actually Yanukovich, even being a bandit with a previous conviction, was the lesser of two evils there. He realised that it is very difficult for Ukraine to get away from Russia's influence (it has been a part of Russia for centuries and almost 40% of the population speaks Russian as their primary language) and in many ways counterproductive because, frankly, Russia brings much more money in Ukraine's economy."
But it's a short term view, under Russian influence Ukraine would just become another Belarus- restricted to only become as powerful as Russia lets it, which is typically not very powerful. In contrast freeing from Russia allows them to forge their own economic destiny, which would allow far greater wealth than Russia would let them have, again, you only have to look at Belarus to see the evidence for this - Russia likes tight control of the regimes it has strong influence over, and it lets them be just big enough to be a pain to everyone else, but utterly dependent on Russia to exist.
Poroschenko has at least been facing up to some of the corruption, and opening up the markets. They have to do this to fulfil their aspirations of eventual EU membership - they have both the motivation and will to do it, so it's silly to pretend they can't.
The fact is, the Ukrainian people have higher aspirations than Russia was ever willing to let them achieve, and that's an unsustainable path under Russia, even if it results in shorter term stability because it means Putin wont invade you if you're happy to stay poor and corrupt with no political say forever. I don't even think the people of Belarus will accept it indefinitely, I believe there'll be a time where even they opt to break free from Russian control, but in part that's why Putin is trying to make it so painful for the Ukrainians, to put the Belarussians off.
"They really haven't. I've been in both countries several times. Everywhere you see, everything is paid with EU money. Estonia might kinda sorta survive on their own, although I doubt it, but Lithuania and Latvia have been depopulated. People flee from there to work and live abroad. The best and brightest don't see any future in their homelands."
Yes I've been there too, as I said, we have large offices in Lithuania. The fact that EU money was used to modernise their infrastructure is irrelevant, again, it's the same here in the UK - countless projects have EU funding signs on them (the train station I commute from every day does), but it's not a sign of economic dependency, merely an initial infrastructure boost to jumpstart real local economies, and these country's economies are comfortably now jumpstarted. Saying places like Lithuania and Estonia have lost their best and brightest when they're two of the most technically literate nations in Europe is laughable, regardless of whether you've been there, you clearly know nothing about the high levels of talent they have. If you want cheap, crappy outsourcing you go to India, if you want high quality outsourcing, people who know their shit and can box like the best of the West because you can't find enough high quality talent at home you go to Eastern European states like Estonia and Lithuania. This isn't even small scale stuff, some big name tech like Skype originates from Estonia.
You seem to think that the minority group of actual far-right nationalists are representative of the whole but it's not even close. There's no doubt the ferocity and zeal with which the likes of the Azov battalion fight is scary, and there's no doubt that people are rolling with them because their far right nationalism makes them a formidable fighting force. But to pretend they're somehow representative is a joke. If they were then there would've been greater electoral support for it than a pathetic 2% which is rather low compared to the far right in places like the UK and France where UKIP and the National Front poll around the 10% - 25% mark.
Here in the UK I can find UKIP voters (who, contrary to pretending otherwise most definitely are fa
Right, but there's a difference between nationalists whose nationalism tends towards wanting Ukraine to be a sovereign independent state, and neo-Nazis. Puting is claiming the latter, tarring them with the same brush, but the reality is that neo-Nazism in Ukraine is lower than levels in even much of Western Europe and the US, and far far lower than in Russia.
"Yushenko, whom you have mentioned, was raised to power basically by a paid mob. And then after one term he has received just 5.45% of votes because he sucked so much and a bandit was elected instead."
Yes exactly, the aspirations of Ukrainians was to get away from corruption and Russian influence. Yuschenko gave them the latter, but not the former, and so their break from Russia faltered as they felt they had little choice but to tend towards Yanukovych, of course, Yanukovych also continued with the corruption AND tended back towards Russia meaning it was even worse again, hence, we are where we are.
"Poland never was a soviet state"
It's really splitting hairs, regardless of whether it was formerly part of the USSR or not, it's stupid to pretend it wasn't under the exact same regime of defacto Russian control that Russia is trying to force Ukraine under. No one in the Warsaw pact did anything without Russia's say so.
"Baltic countries were deindustrialised after USSR broke up and their economy basically consists of EU payments, which is, in case of Ukraine, totally unrealistic."
Complete codswallop, both of these countries have perfectly functioning economies of their own that exist regardless of EU payments (even Britain receives EU payments but it doesn't mean we're fucking dependent on them). We have a large team of developers in Lithuania for example, whom we use for more run of the mill development.
I don't really know what your rant about Ukraine's economy is all about though, I don't think that's in debate, I think we all know the Ukrainian economy is fucked, and of course Russia isn't the source of all Ukraine's problems. Russia is however the current key factor preventing Ukraine from solving those problems though by continuing to send troops and equipment to destabilise it's industrial heartland. Russia doesn't get a free pass because Ukraine's economy would be weak without Russia - you don't get to invade a country and say "Oh well, they were fucked anyway, what's creating a civil war and backing one side of it with modern Russian equipment and troops going to hurt?"
Ukraine has it's work cut out, we all know that, but Russia is preventing it from even making a start at moving on as punishment for daring to step away from Russia to a more progressive Western economy and Russia is the one that's further courting and funding neo-Nazis and their groups across Europe, not Ukraine.
Because you opted into it and have no idea how to administer Windows systems? -
https://technet.microsoft.com/...
I think you fundamentally misunderstand the point of consoles.
The point of a console is to save developers from all the headaches of PC development - you don't face a combinatorial explosion of hardware, OS and driver combinations to optimise for. You have a fixed piece of hardware, that works in a fixed way. This drastically reduces the amount of testing you have to do and drastically reduces the amount of necessary optimisation - you're only optimising for one single fixed hardware target where it's safe to make assumptions.
If you expect games to be cross compatible you're saying to developers that they have to expend more effort and cost developing which means they may not even bother attempting some of the more ambitious projects out there. It's better to leave it to developers to decide if they want to port because if they're going to support the billion PC hardware combinations out there anyway then porting from console isn't much of a headache. If they're not going to support PCs though, they can chuck games out much more quickly and to a much higher standard due to less variation meaning less platform combination specific bugs.
That's before you consider that consoles closed ecosystem makes cheating harder - even if people hack the platform you can shut down their Xbox Live or PSN accounts or the associated hardware blocking them from multiplayer altogether on a hacked box.
Consoles aren't just PCs with more restrictions for no reason- there's good reason for the restrictions. The PC is a different platform that's used for different reasons.
So yes there is good reason the next XBox can't be a PC, because if it was a PC it wouldn't be a console, and if it wasn't a console then Microsoft would be dropping out of the console market, which would be stupid, because it wants to be in the console market.
Being a nationalist requires that you view yourself and people of your group to be superior to other groups, else there would be no point in it because the national identity being defended would cease to be meaningful.
This probably explains why you think the Ukrainian people are incapable of seeing other ex-soviet states like Estonia, Lithuania, Poland and so forth look west after the collapse of the USSR and see how much they've gained in terms of wealth and freedom then decide they want that for themselves. It explains why you view Ukrainians as some kind of inferior human that couldn't possibly want the things that most people want by themselves like increased wealth or greater freedom, without CIA interference.
I find it rather odd however that you describe yourself as an American nationalist whilst serving the propaganda goals of Russia and hence necessarily damaging American interests and ideals. You talk of the far right in Ukraine, but the people who have the most to fear from that viewpoint recognise what an absolute lie that idea is:
http://www.jta.org/2014/06/02/...
Meanwhile, we have Russia hosting the far right, and involving British neo-Nazis like Nick Griffin in his election whitewashing:
http://www.themoscowtimes.com/...
We have Putin pouring money into France's far right:
http://www.independent.co.uk/n...
And in fact, just supporting the far right right across Europe in general:
http://www.themoscowtimes.com/...
But it's not just support of course, it's the way Putin acts against minorities, using gay people as a hate target just as Hitler and King Edward I did with the Jews:
https://www.truthwinsout.org/p...
Or simply silencing anyone who hates having their territory illegally annexed resulting in concerned 3rd party nations who are typically Russian allies like India to report on the fact that Turkey is having to send in monitors to make sure it doesn't escalate further than the level of ethnic cleansing that Putin has already carried out:
http://zeenews.india.com/news/...
http://www.aljazeera.com/indep...
Of course, I don't expect any of this to matter to you. I've seen you post here before and I know you're normally incapable of consideration of alternative viewpoints, I know that you have your CIA/Koch brothers conspiracy theories and wont believe anything else. But I've made a point here, a point of linking to news sources in Europe, Russia, India, the Middle East to show you that the things I've pointed out aren't controversial, that the only people that wont accept them are Putin and his supporters. So if you do as you normally do, and refuse to believe what is evidenced in front of you, you at very least must stop pretending you're not just parroting the pro-Putin viewpoint - because as the Moscow Times articles show, even moderate Russians themselves disagree with you - this isn't about Russians vs. non-Russians, this is about Putin apologists as you have been in this conversation so far, against reality.
So you've really a choice, you can wake up and stop parroting long discredited RT propaganda word for word, or
FWIW I live up North, and it's really not as rosie as you suggest. London has something like £127 per head of population spent on it's public transport infrastructure, here it's £12 per head so we get an incredibly raw deal.
By population for example, Leeds and Sheffield are the 3rd and 4th biggest cities in the UK, and yet the rail link connecting them takes at it's fastest 40 minutes, with most trains taking about an hour. Yet, they're only about 30 miles apart, so a 30 minute drive down the M1.
This is because the lines round here aren't even electrified yet, so whilst the government talks about HS2 the local inter-city rail infrastructure is ancient, relying on slow diesel trains on quite a lot of routes that are 40 years old, and regularly break down. The new rail tender for the North is up currently, and bidders have been told they must get rid of the old 1982 trains by 2020. The bidders answer to that? Using 1978 London underground trains. The tracks wont be electrified until the 2019 - 2024 investment period at the absolute earliest.
HS2 is coming up this way, but it's less than useless. It takes 1hr 50mins to go from Sheffield to St Pancras currently. HS2 will take 1hr 20mins, but it stops at Meadowhall (an out of town shopping centre), from there you need a connection to the centre and it'll take you 30 mins waiting for that connection and riding on it (tram, bus, train), so not only do you need to prat around finding and paying for a connection, but you get no time saving as a result either.
I understand why you have such a positive view of our rail services because they are indeed excellent in the London area. Whenever I travel to London I always go by train and leave the car at home, but up here? It's not worth the hassle for the majority of journeys - there's the odd route that works well, for example, if it happens to sit on the East Coast Mainline or similar, but you must understand that rail in much of the UK is an awful joke and whilst the government is on about spending £50bn on a new HSR line that kinda makes sense to Birmingham but seems a pointless waste of money beyond that there are other vast high traffic parts of the network between the other largest cities in the UK after Birmingham and London that are stuck using lines and trains that are technologically well over 50 years old.
That's why there's so much opposition up here to HS2 - it's hard to understand why we'd want to get from a shopping centre to London 25% faster for £50bn destroying a number of really nice nature reserves in the process, when there's no money to let us get between the two or three major cities here 50% faster for a mere couple of hundred million along existing routes whilst also leaving enough change for new trains and additional carriages to alleviate what are, currently, dangerous levels of overcrowding that leave people stuck on the platform.
I don't even really begrudge the amount that's spent on transport in London, it is our economic powerhouse, it's also a key tourism destination, and it makes sense therefore for it to have a fantastic transport system. However, if money is going to be spent up here it'd be nice if it was spent sensibly on something actually useful. As such, there is some truth in what the GP says to be fair - once you step outside of one or two key areas in the UK at least, the rail system rapidly becomes a bad joke.
I think you're confusing "oldest" with "oldest active". Those are different things, in the context of merely the oldest, oldest and first most definitely are the same thing.
Going back way before these there were plenty of professional gaming competitions for things like Mario. Fuck, this is basically the plot of the 1989 film The Wizard, whose premise isn't exactly based wholly in fiction.
Even in the FPS world, Quake 1 also had a number fairly large scale professional multiplayer leagues and that was released in 1995. Thresh (Dennis Fong, the guy that went on to found Xfire) was part of a pretty high profile event in 1997 where he won Carmack's Ferrari.
Thus, talk of CounterStrike and Quake III Arena are laughable. They're not even close to the beginning of professional competitive gaming, which is surely what eSport actually means.
Obligatory Wikipedia reference says that eSports may well go back to at least 1972:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/E...
The summary's claim of Counterstrike as the first eSport reminds me of the time some kid posted here a few years back saying he was part of anonymous and he was proud that him and his friends were part of the internet's first counter-culture as if the whole of the fucking 80s with cDc, Mitnick, LoD et. al. never happened. Even then I'm not convinced that even they were the first, but they sure as hell long pre-date anonymous!
Counterstrike as earliest E-Sport is stupid. Let me guess, whoever came up with that one also thinks George Bush was the first president, 9/11 was the first ever terrorist attack and Afghanistan was the first ever war?
I'd say get off my lawn, I'd say I must be getting old, but this is Slashdot, and I know that someone even older than me is going to come along and tell me about competitive gaming events on some ancient long forgotten computer somewhere in California in the 60s, and even older Manhattan internet counter-cultures in the 70s or something. So er, over to you grey beards :)
What an obscure description of Borland.
They wrote compilers for Windows shareware developers? Really? just Windows shareware developers?
It was the number one Microsoft platform C/C++ compiler through the 80s into the mid-90s. It had nothing to do with Windows, or Shareware through most of it's life, and the company still exists even if it is a shadow of it's former self.
I don't recall Borland C++ or Turbo C++ ever forcing use of .hpp files or similar though, I always stuck to .h. I've seen .hpp in various projects, not compiler specific. It seems to be entirely a concious choice by developers whatever the platform from what I've seen.
Let's be clear, it's not even about $39 devices from dodgy Chinese manufacturers on ancient Android 2.3.
My official Google Galaxy Nexus stopped receiving updates in less than 18 months and was a $350 device and is stuck on an old vulnerable version of 4.
When even Google themselves can't be fucked to keep their first party devices secure, using some lame excuse about an unsupported chipset (even though 3rd parties like Cyanogen have had no problem updating it) then how can they expect anyone else to?
Make no mistake, in this case, Google is the problem. When Google wont even lead on the issue with their own OS, how can anyone else with less resources, less freedom to change the OS, and less profit per handset be expected to follow?
If Google was competent on the issue and actually took the lead by guaranteeing 3 - 5 years of updates on all their first party devices, you might find everyone else pressured into doing the same simply to compete, but when Google barely even breaks 1 year no one else is likely to do any better either - 1 year is such a short time in the world of updates, that I can see why most companies just see that as the standard and equate it to "no need to do updates at all".
The fact you think you suck already means you have drastically higher potential than a large number (perhaps even a majority) of developers
Far better to think you suck and know that you can improve than to think you're awesome and stay shit forever.
Humility is the number one most important defining trait shared by the world's genuinely great developers. I've met plenty of developers who think they're great, claim they're great, but repeatedly prove their development ignorance when they start talking about the subject. In contrast, I've never met a humble programmer that isn't either awesome, or well on their way to being awesome.
Well I'm glad we have you here to arbitrarily define intelligence. It's about time, the human race has been struggling to define it precisely for hundreds of years.
Where have you been all this time of self-declared definer of terms?
But just to clarify, basically, what you're saying, is that intelligence is a form of magic that we have inside us? Where inside us does this magic exist? Where does it come from? Are you saying it's a special undetectable thing? Your comment seems to imply it disappears in adults, but we can't detect it in babies either.
We can't do any of the things you suggest because we don't have computers even remotely as powerful and capable of rapid complex processing as the human brain. I also can't teach a dog to do any of the things you suggest, so are you declaring dogs as being unintelligent? Your examples seem to suggest that intelligence is unique to human beings and nothing else has the capacity for intelligence.
Based on launch trajectories calculated via a macro in an Excel 95 spreadsheet that is sent from personal Hotmail addresses?
Probably more worrying is the fact that much of our military are still using IE6.
That sounds like something a leftist loon would say if you ask me.
Still no facts, still no evidence that all of Sky's blocking is part of the legal ruling.
It's not so much redefining STEM as redefining societal good. Much of the things they mention are certainly forms of engineering and so fit firmly under STEM, but the problem is they're a tiny subset of engineering, and similarly a tiny subset of useful engineering that the world needs.
The premise of the argument in the summary seems to be that medicine, healthcare and so forth are all in this arbitrary societal good category, but things like building houses, power grids, bridges, phones, video games, operating systems and so on and so forth are not.
So the argument seems to be that if we give disproportionate focus to certain areas of engineering application we can increase the number of female engineers. I'm not terribly sure that that helps though as it means the majority of engineering areas are still woefully underfilled, and still have a woeful lack of gender balance.
So what if we have an increase in the number of female engineers figuring out how to do large scale deployments of some new technology like low power computing devices and methods of charging them and connecting them into poor communities if we've done nothing to solve the electronic engineering shortage which is required to develop the low powered devices in the first place? Both things are necessary, but the summary seems to imply only the former does societal good even though the former necessarily depends on the latter. It's ill conceived nonsense.
So yes you could do something like that and pretend you've fixed it, but all you've really done is fix it in a very contrived and niche circumstance without addressing any of the underlying reasons for trying to fix it in the first place, like trying to fix gender imbalance across all aspects of the field, trying to fix pay imbalance, or solve the STEM shortage in general. A bunch of females doing low paid engineering work for charities in Africa, isn't going to sort out the pay or gender imbalance when back in Silicon Valley you have a male dominated engineering industry holding all the money. So they've fudged the engineering graduate numbers to look slightly more fair, great, then what? what about the actual problems we're trying to solve in doing that in the first place? Do they not matter providing we've pulled off an adequate fudging of numbers to whitewash the problem?
And so Julian's tears continue because he was wrong about something on the internet as another moment in which he fails to follow the conversation passes. Asking for things that are long irrelevant based on points already made, like a stuck cassette that just can't get past a certain very whiny point because to do so would still require the upsetting idea that he might actually have to confront his inability to consider anything outside of the comfort zone The Daily Mail provides to him.
Life goes on. Julian continues to cry because the world wouldn't conform to his minority hard right viewpoint.
The Story of Julian: A day in the life of a man-child who acts tough, but is just another failed internet tough guy.
Still, there's one upside to your latest post, you've dropped the overly dramatic cries of "leftist". I guess I'm making progress then, I guess my last point about being neither firmly left nor firmly right had an impact and forced you to realise there are in fact shades of grey between the black and white. That's enough progress for now. I wouldn't want to push you too far out of your comfort zone in case you do something drastic, like, start considering alternate viewpoints whether you agree with them or not. Maybe one day you'll get there.
"Perhaps if you had any facts or evidence to hand you might not have needed the evasions and colourful insults?"
Insults? you mean like those things that you lunged into from the very start and ran with? Oh never mind, you're one of those classic UKIP types aren't you "Wah wah wah, he hurted me, it's not far, only I'm allowed to hurt him, he can't throw anything back at me because it makes me cry to mummy and I have to play the victim". Yeah okay, if you have a problem with insults and they make you cry like your typical Daily Mail play the victim card holder you should maybe try not to use them yourself from the outset. I'm sure playing the victim makes you feel like you're somehow making me out to be the bad guy, but in reality all it does when folks like you to Farage do it is show how utterly weak your arguments are in that you can't stand by and defend them and instead cry about being bullied even though you attempt the exact same thing. You call everyone else weak, but as soon as the tables turn, your tears start flowing.
"despite there patently not being one as some of the biggest ISPs don't clearly aren't in on the big secret."
Well, you know, except the great net neutrality whitewash known as the Open Internet Code that doesn't actually protect net neutrality because it explicitly allows for ISPs to ignore it. The fact that TalkTalk's old boss became a member of government, and the fact that a number of ISPs have started blocking over and above the court order - PlusNet and Sky being the existing examples.
Of course, you ignored this because it doesn't fit your One True World View TM. It's just way too inconvenient, and it wasn't in The Daily Mail so it can't be true!
You still seem to be intent on calling me a leftist, which is quite funny given that last time I defended the right of Israelis to retaliate to military attacks on their state I was called a rightist. This only really further proves my point that wingnuts like you are lost causes, you can't see shades of grey in the middle, it's all or nothing, either you lean wholly in one direction, or wholly in the other. It can't possibly be the case that both sides have good points, and both have bad, and that the best solution is a form of centrism that selects the best of both worlds. But no, The Daily Mail has told you it must be all in hard right wingnuttery, so that's that.
Regardless, I said it doesn't really matter does it? The whole reason you replied so aggressively to my posts is because I've wound you up by pointing out that some of the blocking is not simply a limitation of the law but goes above and beyond that. The fact I got such a response from you is good, because there's nothing better than shaking wingnuts out of their comfort zone. Especially The Daily Mail crowd - you need a little slap of reality now and again, not because it does any good, no, as I pointed out, people like you are unthinking and have crystalised unchangeable views, but simply because you deserve to pay the price of that ignorance - the price of having to face reality once in a while.
I can see you don't post much with this account, so the fact that I have gained so many responses from you shows that you know full well that I've got a point, hence why you're so desperately trying to shut it down. I guess I really touched a nerve, you wouldn't have flown off the handle so easily otherwise, so, well, mission accomplished.
You're not hear to learn something, you're hear to dictate, only you have no power to dictate, and so you just get laughed at and then end up crying like a baby.
Let's be honest, even if I had a recording of a meeting between ISPs, government and the music industry all agreeing to it and admitting it you would still write it off as a fake, or "leftist propaganda" or a "liberal conspiracy".
When someone like you blasts off a reply about left, or right, or insert whatever inherent hate target you have here it says one thing, it says that that persons views cannot be fluid, it says their views are crystalised. Your outrage, your bile spewing to your chosen hate target occurs because you cannot cope with the idea that the world does not bend to your whims, you detest the idea that someone might think differently to you, you want everything to be as you want it. In short, you have the mind of a dictator, albeit thankfully without any of the power, so you're left spewing bile.
But I'll leave you with this, this isn't a scientific publication, I don't profess that everything I say is guaranteed to be 100% correct, I don't post with a warranty on the validity of it, I post ideas based on what we do know about the world. So yes, it's possible that I'm way off the mark, it's possible that I'm completely wrong, but here's the thing. It's also entirely possible that you're completely wrong too- the difference is I'm open to other views and that's how I get to avoid being a flagrant wing nut, you however, are not, and that's why you are a flagrant bile spewing wingnut with nothing useful to say.
If you would like to know why I've put forward the possibility that ISPs, government and the music industry might well have gotten a little too cosy, then I'd gladly give you some links. But frankly, for that to be even worth my time you'd have to display some semblance of rationality, and get past your wingnut bile spewing. Given your post history I'm not convinced you can do that, you appear too mentally immature to engage in rational debate.
Yeah tell me about it, as I say I was struggling at first and figured maybe it was a snobbish reference to the use of artifact rather than the British English but basically never used artefact.
It wasn't until I literally parsed it word by word taking a pause in between that I caught it. It's a rather fantastic example of inbuilt human brain automatic error detection and correction though :) Judging by the replies it caught quite a few people - I think there's a psychological study in there somewhere!
Here is what they said, followed by what you just said they said.
they a found trove of strange artifacts
they found a trove of strange artifacts
Hopefully side by side you can more easily spot the blatant illiteracy :)
Have you ever stopped to read one of your own posts? It's just you like to cry that everyone else is crying, which means that you're basically always crying that the world apparently doesn't adhere to your Daily Mail led world view after all.
I know it must suck being lied to all your life, to find out that you've in fact been consistently fed a crock of shit when reality comes shining through, but I'm afraid that's something you'll have to get used to.
Don't worry, you can go and vote Farage soon, and when your ilk get a mere 15% at most you can pretend that you're somehow in a majority and we should do everything you say, even though the reality is you're still a pointless little squeak in the corner that no one gives the slightest shit about.
There's always someone that gets a lemon though, you can't judge an entire range with a single anecdote, you need a larger data set. To highlight the point that you can't judge the whole on one case I can simply counteract with my anecdote; I've knocked my Nexus 7 off a table directly onto a solid stone floor. I expected a smashed screen and broken innards, but it didn't even get a scratch and still works fine one year on.
My partner's iPad (also an iPad 2, though doesn't go back to 2009, I don't think they were out then) in contrast just started randomly freezing recently, though it is at least about 3 or 4 years old now I believe so I don't really feel too bad about it given it's age (and the fact she won it so didn't cost us anything anyway).
I'm not here to defend Google, god only knows they cut off support for my Galaxy Nexus after less than 15 months of it being available in the UK market which is a wholly unacceptable way to treat customers, and as such I too wouldn't buy another Google branded device. But I don't think it's fair to say the Nexus 7 is an inherently unreliable device as mine has been sturdy and reliable since I got it (I got mine in 2012, no idea where the 2013 in the summary comes from, maybe the version refresh?).