Only 1 - Once you've hit Pyongyang's annual military parade with it you've destroyed the entire North Korean leadership and 90% of their military capabilities all in one shot.
FWIW a lot of people are using hacks/adapters to use mouse and keyboard on consoles anyway.
You're right it does create a massive advantage but it's not quite as severe as you say. I don't bother because I can't be arsed to spend £130 to cheat on a video game so when I come up against them it's a mixed bag, some still suck, because no amount of money can stop a stupid player from sucking, but others have a clear advantage.
So yeah it would completely break game balance in competitive FPS games, but I'd argue that's not the be all and end all - Microsoft is sensibly doing cross-play with Minecraft because it's the sort of game that works well with everyone working together. If companies wanted to create cross play in games like Civ, The Sims, and that sort of game then I don't really see the problem. Even some MMOs would probably be okay.
But even with competitive FPS then it's probably just a case of flagging whether you want to play with mouse/keyboard players or controller players or not really I guess.
For me, collaboration and an open office is great when planning, but terrible when working on hard programming problems. I typically prefer office time at the start of a project, and work from home time when it's underway and I'm actually working on it. If I have some complex R&D work to get through you wont see me in the office for a few days. If we're planning out a new project you'll see me every single day.
The idea that because I'm under 40 I want an open plan office is complete and utter drivel. It's entirely down to individual ways of working and age has shit all to do with it. We have a couple of hundred developers here and there's a fairly even split between those who like the open plan style and those who want more quiet space.
I think it goes further than that, and I made this point to the author of the original article, which he agreed with me on. I think he perhaps unintentionally sandwiched polymaths into only being useful as ambassadors between experts and the general public in his original article, but in his response he was clear to me that wasn't his intention. His fundamental point was that to make an advancement in the classic subjects as divied up in academia now you typically needed to be a single subject expert - i.e. Physics, Chemistry, Literature, Philosophy et. al.
The point I made to him is that I actually think polymaths are fundamentally important to modern discoveries, we have entire fields that necessitate polymath type skills - bioinformatics typically requires you to understand biology, statistics, and computer science for example. Artificial intelligence research needs knowledge computer science, mathematics, neuroscience, psychology, and the natural world.
I made the point that without polymaths things like the LHC just wouldn't be possible - were it not for people with knowledge of physics and electrical engineering, computer science, and so forth, then you'd never have been able to build the LHC or the high performance computer and storage systems needed to make it work and get data out of it.
So I think the real question is not whether the world needs polymaths, of course it does, it's about what place polymaths have in academia, and if academia is in danger of falling behind industry if it's too directed on single focus stuff when many discoveries nowadays are a result of multi-disciplinary knowledge. If nothing else it's clear that computer science is a skill most scientists should also learn (and in fact do - most undergrad physics programs teach C++ or similar now) alongside their primary topic. There's a risk that no matter how much you know about physics if you can't use computers to test your theories or are reliant on someone else to do so then it may well hold your research back.
Of course it's fair to argue someone with only two areas of knowledge - i.e. physics and computing, isn't necessarily a polymath. But fundamentally I think anyone who has at least more than one skillset is at an inherent advantage nowadays over those with only one, no matter how deep knowledge in that single skillset goes.
I hope that's the case, but if you look at even things like Lego, a vast amount of Lego's IP (a majority?) is now Disney licensed stuff, I wouldn't be surprised to see Disney just buy up Lego at some point.
So the risk is it's not just about video content, they could tie up the vast majority of the kids toy market too.
Certainly there are growing challengers as you say - Netflix, HBO etc. but even if Disney aren't gaining any real ground now in terms of video content because of them I think they still hold way too big a share and are certainly expanding on other market segments. I guess it's a question of how much money Disney is taking from the market as much as anything, i.e. whilst you're right that most Marvel movies are now incredibly boring, are they still pulling in a lot of money? If so then that's still a substantial amount of money that's not being spent on other providers.
Don't get me wrong, I hope you're right, I hope Disney loses marketshare, and becomes a shadow of it's former self, but I fear that as soon as that starts to happen it'll merely just buy Netflix, or buy HBO, or buy whoever else and it's uninhibited from doing so because for whatever reason competition laws don't seem to get applied to businesses like Disney.
I'm finding Netflix's content less and less appealing, I felt like some class Vietnam war action the other day, but all they had was Hamburger Hill, it seems silly that classics like Platoon and Apocalypse now weren't even available (at least in the UK).
With them cancelling shows like Sens8 just as it's actually getting good it does feel like they're losing direction. It feels like an awful lot of the content they have is just space filling drivel now, though in part I suspect this is because they no longer have competition - Amazon appears to have given up as they don't seem to ever post anything worthwhile anymore, Amazon Instant Video is basically dead at this point. I miss the time when Amazon was releasing loads of good new content, and Netflix was desperately trying to compete - Amazon seemed to give up, and Netflix one, and now Netflix has largely given up too.
I don't like Disney, but the problem is they're hijacked so much culture now that it's hard to avoid them. This is precisely why Disney shouldn't be allowed to keep buying IPs - they're just too big.
They started out and grew by taking popular public domain stories, wrapping their own designs around them, then claiming them as their own, even suing people who then dare to try and make their own adaptations of the public domain content in some cases, thus effectively engaging in cultural theft.
But then they bought things like Pixar, Marvel, and Star Wars with their ill gotten gains, so other major IPs are now controlled by them.
Any other purchase of media companies by Disney should be blocked as anti-competitive in any sane market. You can argue this would go against the free market, but Disney's whole existence has been about manipulating the market to their own advantage with frivolous lawsuits and IP law lobbying to bend the free market away from being free in the first place. In a free market free of IP law manipulation by the likes of Disney, 90% of Disney's IP would now be just as free for making derivative works of as the stories Disney created most their IP from in the first place.
Unfortunately even some of Netflix's originals are based on Disney IP, so Disney pulling out puts some of their best original content at risk. Disney is the too big to fail equivalent of the entertainment world, and if something is too big to fail it needs to be broken up until it's not.
To be fair last time we had a hardline fundamentalist Christian like Theresa May able to do shit like this called Jacqui Smith it was her husband's porn habits that got leaked.
It was quite funny watching her fall to her husband's secret porn viewing habits which he paid for using her parliamentary expenses as she waged a crusade against porn.
If she had any sense she'd have claimed it as research into ease of access, but thankfully like most hardline religious zealots she was astoundingly dumb, though for whatever reason the BBC seems to randomly help her with her crusade by giving her air time about the topic now and then.
But really this is the type of shit we're going to get more of thanks to Brexit - many leading Brexiteers are also hardline fundamentalist Christians like May, and without the European Courts to protect us against their particularly vile brand of fascism it'll be a free ride for them on issues like this. That's why the Rees-Moggs of the world and such are so desperate to prevent May falling and to avoid any kind of compromise.
Visual Studio is the obvious one, but most modern IDEs are more than capable of making this a non-issue and letting you write code with minimal keypresses.
The problems seem to sit almost entirely with legacy *nix tools which haven't been updated because the most vocal community members can't cope with change.
I get the impression that the spaces vs. tabs thing is largely a *nix problem and stems from the fact there are simply so many shit open source tools out there on those platforms with terrible usability and are that way because that's how it's always been and fuck change.
Whilst *nix dev still seem to be at war over tabs vs. spaces, developers of other platforms seem to have completely gotten over it people on other platforms are happily tabbing away and developing code far more efficiently with far less keypresses.
Yes, in some IDEs they're just smartly autoconverting to spaces, and that's fine - the point is this argument shouldn't even exist in this day and age if it weren't for the fact people are just using really shit tools still on *nix platforms whilst the rest of the world has long moved on to things that actually matter.
Most devs tend towards tabs, if the IDE converts fine, but devs are inherently lazy, and the last thing they want is to piss about hammering space repeatedly and getting the number of spaces right - they'll always revert to just hitting tab once or twice over hitting space 4 or 8 times or whatever if they have the option, it's only terrible tooling preventing that and if spaces are being used under the hood fine - as long as it doesn't impact productivity by people having to manually press and align a million spaces in every fucking code file.
Until you unknowingly try to pay with a fake note that you've been handed without realising sometime in the past month with absolutely no way of tracing back which shop gave it to you.
Though in the UK you would never get arrested for a card decline unless you were actually committing fraud. You might however get arrested for unwittingly trying to pay with a fake note however. Similarly if you pay a tradesman in cash and it turns out they've been committing tax evasion then you can get arrested for that too whilst they ascertain if you knowingly aided evasion in the hope of getting a discount.
As others have said there are places now that don't take cash too because of the risk of theft.
So yes cash can and does fail to complete a transaction, and yes there are actually more ways and reason why you can get arrested paying with cash than with card.
NATO made overtures to let Russia also join NATO at the same time other ex-Warsaw Pact members were joining in large part to try and avoid precisely the sort of thing that happened in Ukraine and to try and achieve a sweeping military stabilisation stretching across the entire Northern Hemisphere.
The problem is a majority of Russians have a dictatorship mentality - they don't do things by mutual agreement, they believe in a strong leadership, which is why they're constantly led by defacto dictators. This unfortunately extends into their geopolitical world view too, in that they could never join NATO because the concept of being in an organisation as an equal is alien to them - to them they should be the grand dictator of the organisation This is also why Putin so hates the EU - he'd join it, if he could be wholly in charge of it, but whilst he sees mutual cooperation between 28 of his closest neighbours, he sees that as an affront to everything the Russian mindset stands for, he sees that as weakness, and so when it works, when the EU becomes the largest single economic area in the world right on his doorstep he despises that and will stop at nothing to try and destroy it and impose his idea of a Russian led Eurasian Economic Union instead.
This is why he poses for what seem like ridiculous photos to us - to the Russian psyche it's exactly what a leader should be, not just to his own country, but to the whole world. Whilst the rest of Europe grew up, Russia fenced itself off behind a wall and kept itself stuck inside the 15th - 19th century European Empire mindset. Probably the only real solution to the Russian problem is to allow them to go bankrupt again with sanctions and so forth, but this time, don't let them get back up - make sure the territory fractures. More modern forward thinking areas like St Petersburg would likely become pro-EU independent territories, whilst the backward areas could be left to fester. Unfortunately, there's then the nuclear question, but it's clear you can't work with Russia as an equal until Russia has it's own enlightenment, because it's just not in their national psyche.
That was really just the point that people woke up to Russia's aggression and the fact it had never really let the Cold War die off.
In 1999 when he was inaugrated he declared the collapse of the Soviet Union as the biggest tragedy of the 20th Century (bigger than Nazi death camps), by 2004 he'd already ordered the poisoning of Viktor Yanukovych's closest opponent Viktor Yushchenko during the election campaign to try and hand Ukraine to Yanukovych way back then. It backfired and Yanukovych still lost until with further Russian meddling he succeeded in 2010 before fleeing in the 2014 revolution against Russian meddling. In 2006 he also poisoned Alexander Litvinenko in London.
But Russia also never left places like Moldova, Georgia's disputed territories, and Armenia, and they invaded Georgia proper in 2008 to try and enforce Russian control. They kept military bases in other places, but unlike in the aforementioned states, not so much as to control the nation politically but much more in the same way the US has bases in places like Germany, and Japan - i.e. merely as relatively benign forward stations.
For Russia the Cold War never really ended, it merely took a brief hiatus under Yeltsin. The whole invasion and annexation of Crimea and invasion of South Eastern Ukraine and subsequent downing of MH17 was really just the first time most average people in the West woke up to the fact that the Russians have still been fighting the war for the last 20 years whilst we've been asleep oblivious to it - even now some people think the whole Russian support for Trump thing is a conspiracy theory and all about partisan politics, when it goes much farther and much deeper - Putin's support extends to UKIP and Brexit (via Arron Banks), support for Le Penn, support for AfD, Golden Dawn, Jobbik and many other far right parties across Europe. Thankfully mainland Europe has managed to stem the tide, whilst Britain and America are still too busy playing party politics to realise the real enemy has seriously fucked them.
Even if you support Trump, even if you support Brexit, the reality is that Russia has still acted to neuter Britain and the US on the world stage with some success. If we still want these things when Russian propaganda isn't spinning us a lie through companies like Cambridge Analytica, then fine. But what's clear is that we've made political choices that have damaged us economically and/or politically because of money and influence from a nation that wants to see us fall - no one can deny Brexit is costing Britain dear with wages and productivity down, and our currency in tatters whilst we remain a net importer costing us dear. No one can deny that America is diminished on the world stage as Trump is sidelined into irrelevance over things like the Paris agreement. This is exactly what Putin has wanted to achieve since the moment he took power, and we walked blindly into it.
Saudi Arabia and a number of the small gulf states have been liberalising their economies for exactly this reason, and that means easing up the laws restricting women, creating education and entrepreneurial funds with their oil money, and so on and so forth.
There's a realisation for example in Saudi that whilst it'll be slow and hard due to religious resistance that when the oil stops flowing, they can't afford to have 50% (women) of their potential workforce not being productive by being forced not to work. Saudi Arabia's advisory council which helps guide the creation of all of Saudi's laws is now 50% female for example - change will and is happening, but it wont be a quick process, which is why they're starting now, and not in 2040. Those that adapt and change vs. those that don't will define the power brokers in the middle east for the next century, so any smart nations are getting on board now.
So I think the answer is that all those backwards nations will become forward progressive modern nations - i.e. a good thing, rather than the blood bath many assume. It is precisely the fact that these countries can afford to do stupid things and continue to exist in the first place that enables the doing of stupid things.
The numbers don't lie, and the fact is that each generation is wealthier than the last in just about every Western country. In the UK it's now come to a head where millennials (I'm not a millenial fwiw, I'm gen X) are now the first generation that does less well than the generation before them.
We have this problem for example in the UK of a housing shortage such that younger people are having to increasingly rent, rather than buy, and the problem is then exacerbated because the only generation with the wealth to buy are the baby boomers, who then buy to rent, increasing their wealth, allowing them to buy more to rent, and then reducing the housing stock even more.
So you can say I'm conditioned to believe fantasies and spewing garbage sure, but the problem is, that reality backs up my point, regardless of how inconvenient you may wish to find it. There's simply no dispute that in the vast majority of Western countries each successive elderly generation has gotten wealthier and wealthier, but that because of the financial crisis there are now also in many countries generations that are now going to be the first to not enjoy that same benefit because the debt accumulated by the older generations who have not paid for what they've voted to give themselves simply wasn't paid for by themselves.
"Aha! You assume that missing money implies that something wasn't paid for. How cute. I am guessing you have never heard of fraud or theft or any of that."
Again, you've come up with something that sounds like a good argument in your head, but it's not backed up by reality because fraud and corruption have been decreasing in most Western nations.
So great, you've convinced yourself that it's fine to screw the younger generations, but nothing you've said actually proves that it's okay in the way you're arguing it is, and it can't, because there's nothing to disprove in what I said as everything I said is backed up by the stats. Effectively, what you've said in an awful lot of words is "I'm part of the problem and I don't care.".
The only reason it's even a problem is because most Western economies are built on the next generation funding the increasingly extravagant lifestyles of the last.
So when problems like this attempt to be tackled, by say, cutting the amount of free shit old people get (i.e. by removing free bus passes, and TV licenses as well as a couple of hundred quid free money for heating from millionaire pensioners) we get absurd arguments like "I paid for it", but given that there's no money to fund it that's evidence enough that they have not in fact paid for it.
Reduction in population is probably a good thing overall, it reduces pressure on the planet's resources, it reduces competition for wealth and resources reducing conflict, and it it generally just creates greater sustainability - we don't need to build as much, we don't need to harvest as much, and in an increasingly roboticised nation like Japan the loss of labour needn't be a problem.
But economies have to change to cater to shrinking populations, and that means older generations getting what they actually paid for, rather than expecting the next generation to pay for what they think the world owes them, which is politically difficult given that those generations are typically most likely to vote because when you're sat around with nothing to do all day you have ample time to do so.
"Because the populace already had enough guns to pull it off"
No they didn't.
"and parts of the government defected and gave the populace guns."
That depends.
The whole point in these examples is that they cover ALL aspects of the spectrum - from Ukraine which was largely successful because of political maneuvering, to Egypt, which was succesful because of military support, to Libya which was succesful with barely any meaningful military support, to Syria which had a succesful uprising with near zero military support, but is now in a prolonged stalemate.
So yes, there are examples where people rose up simply with strength of numbers - this is exactly what happened in Homs in Syria, the people simply overwhelmed the bases with numbers and took the guns that way. In Egypt it was largely peaceful and political and the military eventually sided with the populace, in Libya there was next to no meaningful military support from the start, defections occurred long after the uprising when people had similarly acquired guns by breaching military bases. In large part soldiers just weren't willing to shoot civilians, their own friends and family, and so they just gave in and let the civilian hoardes in to the bases. In cases where they did shoot, they were rapidly overwhelmed simply by strength of numbers where shooting positions were quickly taken down by mundane devices like petrol bombs. Bases that held out, i.e. in cities like Damascus in Syria did so simply because there wasn't enough civilian support to oust them, and if you don't have civilian support in an area then you're not a freedom fighter anyway, you're a terrorist, so you'll have to excuse me if oppressing the majority with terrorism isn't a good reason to allow widespread unchecked gun ownership.
Which is precisely the point - no one knows what an authoritarian take over of the US would look like, and no one knows what a form a fight back against that would take, but what we do know is that gun registration and lack of gun ownership has never been a barrier to a motivated populace fighting back against heavily armed militaries. So unless you're saying that people in the US are less intelligent, less willing, and less capable, than people in 3rd world countries like Libya, and hence unable to fight back in the way they could, then these cases provide ample counter-points against the clearly false argument that gun registration and restrictions on gun ownership would prevent any kind of fight back against an oppressive regime. Surely you don't really believe that Americans are so dumb that they couldn't figure out how to fight back even if unarmed like people in Syria, Libya, Tunisia, Egypt, and Ukraine did?
If I had to guess, I would wager a fight back against an authoritarian regime in the US would probably look a lot more like that in Ukraine/Egypt than Libya/Syria where the military simply backs the populace and forces a stepping down of an authoritarian civilian government as I think the US is sufficiently driven by the Western life style that you'd never get enough people in the US military to give that up in favour of oppressing and killing their own friends and family. People in the US have too good a lifestyle to want to lose it to such things.
The reality is that gun ownership is entirely moot in this context, what really matters is what the US military opts to do and I have a hard time believing it would ever turn on the people on a national scale, but that even if it did there are 1.4million US military personnel against 320million other Americans - it doesn't matter if they've only got sticks and stones, that ain't a fight any military can win.
Now what you could legitimately argue is that gun ownership may reduce the initial bloodshed - possibly true, but the price of that is widespread day to day bloodshed from gun crime, gun misuse and so forth in the US instead. Whether you think that's a price worth paying is entirely a personal choice, but personally I don't think having 35,000 deaths and 75,0
"That being said it seems like the government knowing who and where all the guns are would defeat the idea behind the amendment, but even otherwise the whole round em' up scenario is no longer a hypothetical situation as we've seen gun confiscating campaigns in California and New York already. Speaking of hypothetical situations there is also a famous scene in the movie Red Dawn, whose producers were opposed to the then new FFL system, where a soviet commandant in the invading force orders a subordinate to raid all the gun stores in occupied territory to collect all the Form 4473's so they can systematically quell any opposition in the bud before the citizenry can form a militia."
Right, and that's great in Red Dawn fantasy land, but it's become pretty clear given the mass and serious erosion of rights, coupled with the deterioration of freedoms and civil liberties, and increase of the oligarchies with billionaires now running the country having consolidated their power even more that no one is actually ever going to use their 2nd amendment rights anyway because people just don't give that much of a shit.
I can give you a counter-example to your Red Dawn theoretical scenario from the real world - Syria, Libya, Ukraine, and Tunisia. In all these countries weapons were massively restricted by existing authoritarian police states, and in all cases the populace were able to rise up, capture arms, and fight against the government regardless of the level of authoritarianism.
So yes, whilst your theoreticals on the right to bear arms are great, it's all entirely meaningless in reality where Americans are both too lazy to fight for their rights, and where it's been shown that no matter how authoritarian and controlling a government is, or becomes, a population uprising is still going to result in them successfully being able to fight the government with varying levels of violence required depending on the external support the authoritarian leadership has regardless. Therefore no, your theoretical arguments aren't real actual pragmatic arguments against gun control as they hold no resemblance to reality.
I'm sure you'll try and misdirect the argument now by saying "Yeah but look how much of a mess Syria is!" - it doesn't matter, if Trump became grand dictator of the US with increasing authoritarianism it doesn't matter if you have arms to start with or not if he not only maintains control of the military and gets military backing from Russia and Iran too as has happened in Syria then your country would just as much end up in a shitshow of blood bath, constitution be damned. The right to bear arms offers no real practical benefit, it's merely just another religious belief from a religious document by any other name.
Why for one moment would you assume that a warship system even has a USB drive? you realise they don't just go down to their local PC World/Best Buy and just pick up a Packard Bell and plug it in in some corner of the warship and install "Tomahawk Launch Command for Windows 3.0" that they download from cnet right?
This is precisely the problem with Slashdot couch commentary, it's so unbelievably naive about things that it results in the most absurdly stupid and nonsensical comments such as those you made here. You have no idea about the design of warship computer systems yet here you are pretending to be a guru, it's farcical.
They don't just take an off the shelf copy of Windows XP and install it on the ship, companies like BAE systems have agreements with Microsoft over source code access and provide hardened versions to their customers.
Thus, the unsupported and proprietary elements of consumer Windows XP are entirely irrelevant - they both pay for bespoke extended support from Microsoft, and they have source code access themselves.
Whilst there are legitimate questions about using Windows XP for a brand new ship, it's not quite as bad as "OMG they use Windows XP lol" type headlines and comments make out. The reality is that they have support for and source code access to perhaps the single most tried and tested OS in the world. Lines of communication and inputs into the systems are both limited and restricted, and thus any vulnerability discovered against XP in the real world will likely be fixed and patched on a ship well before anyone can find a way of getting the exploit onto the ship's systems.
I think that's the real problem though, the idea the movies even need multi-million dollar budgets.
Most of those budgets are only so large because of the absurd artificially inflated actors wages. Contrary to popular belief music and acting talent is quite common, what's not is the amount of actors and musicians that get a brand built around them by a large corporation and turned into a billion dollar product of which they get a fraction of the cut.
In almost every bar across the world you get a few indie bands a week playing, a proportion of which are just as good as the big corporate brands. The Susan Boyles of the world are two a penny, she was just a run of the mill church singer of which there are thousands in the UK alone.
I had the misfortune of watching War Machine the other day, where Brad Pitt basically spends 2 hours making a really stupid face whilst pretending that's classed as acting. Quite why you would pay anyone that inept many millions of pounds to do such a shoddy job, when you could get a better actor from your local amateur dramatics society I've no fucking idea.
So the real barrier isn't currently technological, it's to do with the concentration of wealth in the industry caused by music and movie cartels fixing prices, and artificially inflating salaries of what is otherwise be common talent. The cost of movie making will come down when unions and cartels are forced stop artificially inflating salaries of a select few through the inevitable march of market forces.
You only have to look at what's happened with the newest Star Wars films- they've just picked up a bunch of fresh out of drama school nobodies and proven that they're just as capable as any of the big name multi-million dollar salary actors. The films have been just as successful, but they didn't need any expensive unionised big name Hollywood actors - for many, having fresh faces added to the film, because the problem with having the big names is that they all typically have fairly fixed styles that have been defined and that they stick to as part of their corporate branding, and that style can distract and hence detract from the film itself. The big name actors they did have in the newest Star Wars films were ironically those who were typecast as Star Wars actors because they were themselves picked up as nobodies for the original trilogy back in the 70s. If you'd put someone like Brad Pitt into any of these films he would've absolutely wrecked them because there's no place in films like that for the dunce jock past-it ex-toyboy image.
The biggest barrier remaining is actually organising a film - there need to be better sites for finding a crew, for finding talent for building sets, for competent producers to find what they need and get the necessary people involved, and to find musicians and people capable of doing special effects. If someone builds a site for this, then there's no reason Hollywood quality films couldn't be done on a fraction of the budget by people working on the projects out of passion for the idea rather than a need to drive profits for shareholders by creating human brands, rather than good films. This isn't massively different to the age old difficulty in putting together a good mod team for a video game mod - I remember back in the 90s it was a nightmare finding people good at 3D modelling and animation for a mod - the barrier to making a good mod was never money, it was about connecting the right people to form great teams.
Wow, is this what Slashdot has come to? People this dumb, making arguments this dumb?
Really? So because the police used a gun to stop a shooter then guns are good? You do realise if neither had a gun then there wouldn't be any injuries, or any lives lost right? That's how it works in most civilised nations. This isn't productive by any measure, no one benefits when people start shooting each other.
The fact you think that there are only 35,000 gun deaths a year is okay because it's the same as car death is well, sad. You really think it's okay that 35,000 people die a year from something that's entirely unnecessary for people to be able to keep in their house? You realise that's like 11 9/11s happening every fucking year right, or nearly a 9/11 equivalent of deaths every single month? You really don't see how astoundingly dumb and ill founded that argument is? You invaded two foreign nations and got yourself in to what appear to be two 20 year wars when all is done and dusted over much less. If you think any of this fits any measure of productivity then you probably need to return to pre-school and have a go at doing the whole education system thing again, hopefully it'll work this time around because it obviously failed for you the first time. Maybe you could try doing it in a country where kids don't have to be patted down, walk through metal detectors, or learn under the 1984-esque watchful eye of armed guards just to do something as basic and fundamental as going to school.
You've become one of the least free, most violent, least safe, most surveilled, countries in the Western world, the ideals on which your nation is founded are crumbling before your eyes, and your guns aren't doing one tiny bit to save you. You tell yourself it's all okay though because if you say guns will save us enough they will, even though they're very clearly not, your constitution is still being eroded, terrorists are still attacking you, violent criminals are still murdering people many times a day, the NSA is still monitoring everything you do, and a foreign leader has installed his espionage efforts right into the heart of your government. The idea that everyone needs guns to protect the constitution is well and truly shattered at this point because the constitution has been ripped to shreds left and right. You've lost the argument but you still refuse to concede that because you believe if you can just pretend to yourself that that's not the case then maybe, somehow, you'll be able to just continue denying reality indefinitely.
If you want to keep guns because they're fun to shoot then fine, I agree, they are, but that doesn't mean there's any rational reason for everyone to need to carry them around everywhere they go, and it definitely doesn't make it okay that 35,000 people die a year to them, and it definitely doesn't mean there's any degree of productivity in people shooting each other dead.
I think this used to work well, but there's been a divergence in recent years, such that the languages are evolving very much separately to the framework. It used to be that a new.NET version would typically come out with a new C# feature, but now the C# language versions and hence features are evolving very much separately from the framework, and in fact, we even have multiple frameworks with.NET Core and so forth.
As such it's becoming a little more dangerous to link the two I tend to feel, and ever more important to make sure we talk about the language and the framework separately and explicitly.
Slashdot Mirror
Only 1 - Once you've hit Pyongyang's annual military parade with it you've destroyed the entire North Korean leadership and 90% of their military capabilities all in one shot.
FWIW a lot of people are using hacks/adapters to use mouse and keyboard on consoles anyway.
You're right it does create a massive advantage but it's not quite as severe as you say. I don't bother because I can't be arsed to spend £130 to cheat on a video game so when I come up against them it's a mixed bag, some still suck, because no amount of money can stop a stupid player from sucking, but others have a clear advantage.
So yeah it would completely break game balance in competitive FPS games, but I'd argue that's not the be all and end all - Microsoft is sensibly doing cross-play with Minecraft because it's the sort of game that works well with everyone working together. If companies wanted to create cross play in games like Civ, The Sims, and that sort of game then I don't really see the problem. Even some MMOs would probably be okay.
But even with competitive FPS then it's probably just a case of flagging whether you want to play with mouse/keyboard players or controller players or not really I guess.
It's got nothing to do with age.
For me, collaboration and an open office is great when planning, but terrible when working on hard programming problems. I typically prefer office time at the start of a project, and work from home time when it's underway and I'm actually working on it. If I have some complex R&D work to get through you wont see me in the office for a few days. If we're planning out a new project you'll see me every single day.
The idea that because I'm under 40 I want an open plan office is complete and utter drivel. It's entirely down to individual ways of working and age has shit all to do with it. We have a couple of hundred developers here and there's a fairly even split between those who like the open plan style and those who want more quiet space.
I think it goes further than that, and I made this point to the author of the original article, which he agreed with me on. I think he perhaps unintentionally sandwiched polymaths into only being useful as ambassadors between experts and the general public in his original article, but in his response he was clear to me that wasn't his intention. His fundamental point was that to make an advancement in the classic subjects as divied up in academia now you typically needed to be a single subject expert - i.e. Physics, Chemistry, Literature, Philosophy et. al.
The point I made to him is that I actually think polymaths are fundamentally important to modern discoveries, we have entire fields that necessitate polymath type skills - bioinformatics typically requires you to understand biology, statistics, and computer science for example. Artificial intelligence research needs knowledge computer science, mathematics, neuroscience, psychology, and the natural world.
I made the point that without polymaths things like the LHC just wouldn't be possible - were it not for people with knowledge of physics and electrical engineering, computer science, and so forth, then you'd never have been able to build the LHC or the high performance computer and storage systems needed to make it work and get data out of it.
So I think the real question is not whether the world needs polymaths, of course it does, it's about what place polymaths have in academia, and if academia is in danger of falling behind industry if it's too directed on single focus stuff when many discoveries nowadays are a result of multi-disciplinary knowledge. If nothing else it's clear that computer science is a skill most scientists should also learn (and in fact do - most undergrad physics programs teach C++ or similar now) alongside their primary topic. There's a risk that no matter how much you know about physics if you can't use computers to test your theories or are reliant on someone else to do so then it may well hold your research back.
Of course it's fair to argue someone with only two areas of knowledge - i.e. physics and computing, isn't necessarily a polymath. But fundamentally I think anyone who has at least more than one skillset is at an inherent advantage nowadays over those with only one, no matter how deep knowledge in that single skillset goes.
You could buy a reasonably sized tech startup from California and just move it to Wisconsin for this price.
I hope that's the case, but if you look at even things like Lego, a vast amount of Lego's IP (a majority?) is now Disney licensed stuff, I wouldn't be surprised to see Disney just buy up Lego at some point.
So the risk is it's not just about video content, they could tie up the vast majority of the kids toy market too.
Certainly there are growing challengers as you say - Netflix, HBO etc. but even if Disney aren't gaining any real ground now in terms of video content because of them I think they still hold way too big a share and are certainly expanding on other market segments. I guess it's a question of how much money Disney is taking from the market as much as anything, i.e. whilst you're right that most Marvel movies are now incredibly boring, are they still pulling in a lot of money? If so then that's still a substantial amount of money that's not being spent on other providers.
Don't get me wrong, I hope you're right, I hope Disney loses marketshare, and becomes a shadow of it's former self, but I fear that as soon as that starts to happen it'll merely just buy Netflix, or buy HBO, or buy whoever else and it's uninhibited from doing so because for whatever reason competition laws don't seem to get applied to businesses like Disney.
I'm finding Netflix's content less and less appealing, I felt like some class Vietnam war action the other day, but all they had was Hamburger Hill, it seems silly that classics like Platoon and Apocalypse now weren't even available (at least in the UK).
With them cancelling shows like Sens8 just as it's actually getting good it does feel like they're losing direction. It feels like an awful lot of the content they have is just space filling drivel now, though in part I suspect this is because they no longer have competition - Amazon appears to have given up as they don't seem to ever post anything worthwhile anymore, Amazon Instant Video is basically dead at this point. I miss the time when Amazon was releasing loads of good new content, and Netflix was desperately trying to compete - Amazon seemed to give up, and Netflix one, and now Netflix has largely given up too.
I don't like Disney, but the problem is they're hijacked so much culture now that it's hard to avoid them. This is precisely why Disney shouldn't be allowed to keep buying IPs - they're just too big.
They started out and grew by taking popular public domain stories, wrapping their own designs around them, then claiming them as their own, even suing people who then dare to try and make their own adaptations of the public domain content in some cases, thus effectively engaging in cultural theft.
But then they bought things like Pixar, Marvel, and Star Wars with their ill gotten gains, so other major IPs are now controlled by them.
Any other purchase of media companies by Disney should be blocked as anti-competitive in any sane market. You can argue this would go against the free market, but Disney's whole existence has been about manipulating the market to their own advantage with frivolous lawsuits and IP law lobbying to bend the free market away from being free in the first place. In a free market free of IP law manipulation by the likes of Disney, 90% of Disney's IP would now be just as free for making derivative works of as the stories Disney created most their IP from in the first place.
Unfortunately even some of Netflix's originals are based on Disney IP, so Disney pulling out puts some of their best original content at risk. Disney is the too big to fail equivalent of the entertainment world, and if something is too big to fail it needs to be broken up until it's not.
To be fair last time we had a hardline fundamentalist Christian like Theresa May able to do shit like this called Jacqui Smith it was her husband's porn habits that got leaked.
It was quite funny watching her fall to her husband's secret porn viewing habits which he paid for using her parliamentary expenses as she waged a crusade against porn.
If she had any sense she'd have claimed it as research into ease of access, but thankfully like most hardline religious zealots she was astoundingly dumb, though for whatever reason the BBC seems to randomly help her with her crusade by giving her air time about the topic now and then.
But really this is the type of shit we're going to get more of thanks to Brexit - many leading Brexiteers are also hardline fundamentalist Christians like May, and without the European Courts to protect us against their particularly vile brand of fascism it'll be a free ride for them on issues like this. That's why the Rees-Moggs of the world and such are so desperate to prevent May falling and to avoid any kind of compromise.
Visual Studio is the obvious one, but most modern IDEs are more than capable of making this a non-issue and letting you write code with minimal keypresses.
The problems seem to sit almost entirely with legacy *nix tools which haven't been updated because the most vocal community members can't cope with change.
I get the impression that the spaces vs. tabs thing is largely a *nix problem and stems from the fact there are simply so many shit open source tools out there on those platforms with terrible usability and are that way because that's how it's always been and fuck change.
Whilst *nix dev still seem to be at war over tabs vs. spaces, developers of other platforms seem to have completely gotten over it people on other platforms are happily tabbing away and developing code far more efficiently with far less keypresses.
Yes, in some IDEs they're just smartly autoconverting to spaces, and that's fine - the point is this argument shouldn't even exist in this day and age if it weren't for the fact people are just using really shit tools still on *nix platforms whilst the rest of the world has long moved on to things that actually matter.
Most devs tend towards tabs, if the IDE converts fine, but devs are inherently lazy, and the last thing they want is to piss about hammering space repeatedly and getting the number of spaces right - they'll always revert to just hitting tab once or twice over hitting space 4 or 8 times or whatever if they have the option, it's only terrible tooling preventing that and if spaces are being used under the hood fine - as long as it doesn't impact productivity by people having to manually press and align a million spaces in every fucking code file.
Until you unknowingly try to pay with a fake note that you've been handed without realising sometime in the past month with absolutely no way of tracing back which shop gave it to you.
Though in the UK you would never get arrested for a card decline unless you were actually committing fraud. You might however get arrested for unwittingly trying to pay with a fake note however. Similarly if you pay a tradesman in cash and it turns out they've been committing tax evasion then you can get arrested for that too whilst they ascertain if you knowingly aided evasion in the hope of getting a discount.
As others have said there are places now that don't take cash too because of the risk of theft.
So yes cash can and does fail to complete a transaction, and yes there are actually more ways and reason why you can get arrested paying with cash than with card.
NATO made overtures to let Russia also join NATO at the same time other ex-Warsaw Pact members were joining in large part to try and avoid precisely the sort of thing that happened in Ukraine and to try and achieve a sweeping military stabilisation stretching across the entire Northern Hemisphere.
The problem is a majority of Russians have a dictatorship mentality - they don't do things by mutual agreement, they believe in a strong leadership, which is why they're constantly led by defacto dictators. This unfortunately extends into their geopolitical world view too, in that they could never join NATO because the concept of being in an organisation as an equal is alien to them - to them they should be the grand dictator of the organisation This is also why Putin so hates the EU - he'd join it, if he could be wholly in charge of it, but whilst he sees mutual cooperation between 28 of his closest neighbours, he sees that as an affront to everything the Russian mindset stands for, he sees that as weakness, and so when it works, when the EU becomes the largest single economic area in the world right on his doorstep he despises that and will stop at nothing to try and destroy it and impose his idea of a Russian led Eurasian Economic Union instead.
This is why he poses for what seem like ridiculous photos to us - to the Russian psyche it's exactly what a leader should be, not just to his own country, but to the whole world. Whilst the rest of Europe grew up, Russia fenced itself off behind a wall and kept itself stuck inside the 15th - 19th century European Empire mindset. Probably the only real solution to the Russian problem is to allow them to go bankrupt again with sanctions and so forth, but this time, don't let them get back up - make sure the territory fractures. More modern forward thinking areas like St Petersburg would likely become pro-EU independent territories, whilst the backward areas could be left to fester. Unfortunately, there's then the nuclear question, but it's clear you can't work with Russia as an equal until Russia has it's own enlightenment, because it's just not in their national psyche.
That was really just the point that people woke up to Russia's aggression and the fact it had never really let the Cold War die off.
In 1999 when he was inaugrated he declared the collapse of the Soviet Union as the biggest tragedy of the 20th Century (bigger than Nazi death camps), by 2004 he'd already ordered the poisoning of Viktor Yanukovych's closest opponent Viktor Yushchenko during the election campaign to try and hand Ukraine to Yanukovych way back then. It backfired and Yanukovych still lost until with further Russian meddling he succeeded in 2010 before fleeing in the 2014 revolution against Russian meddling. In 2006 he also poisoned Alexander Litvinenko in London.
But Russia also never left places like Moldova, Georgia's disputed territories, and Armenia, and they invaded Georgia proper in 2008 to try and enforce Russian control. They kept military bases in other places, but unlike in the aforementioned states, not so much as to control the nation politically but much more in the same way the US has bases in places like Germany, and Japan - i.e. merely as relatively benign forward stations.
For Russia the Cold War never really ended, it merely took a brief hiatus under Yeltsin. The whole invasion and annexation of Crimea and invasion of South Eastern Ukraine and subsequent downing of MH17 was really just the first time most average people in the West woke up to the fact that the Russians have still been fighting the war for the last 20 years whilst we've been asleep oblivious to it - even now some people think the whole Russian support for Trump thing is a conspiracy theory and all about partisan politics, when it goes much farther and much deeper - Putin's support extends to UKIP and Brexit (via Arron Banks), support for Le Penn, support for AfD, Golden Dawn, Jobbik and many other far right parties across Europe. Thankfully mainland Europe has managed to stem the tide, whilst Britain and America are still too busy playing party politics to realise the real enemy has seriously fucked them.
Even if you support Trump, even if you support Brexit, the reality is that Russia has still acted to neuter Britain and the US on the world stage with some success. If we still want these things when Russian propaganda isn't spinning us a lie through companies like Cambridge Analytica, then fine. But what's clear is that we've made political choices that have damaged us economically and/or politically because of money and influence from a nation that wants to see us fall - no one can deny Brexit is costing Britain dear with wages and productivity down, and our currency in tatters whilst we remain a net importer costing us dear. No one can deny that America is diminished on the world stage as Trump is sidelined into irrelevance over things like the Paris agreement. This is exactly what Putin has wanted to achieve since the moment he took power, and we walked blindly into it.
You can disable online orders altogether with Alexa, or stick a spoken PIN requirement on all orders. Not sure about Google Home.
Saudi Arabia and a number of the small gulf states have been liberalising their economies for exactly this reason, and that means easing up the laws restricting women, creating education and entrepreneurial funds with their oil money, and so on and so forth.
There's a realisation for example in Saudi that whilst it'll be slow and hard due to religious resistance that when the oil stops flowing, they can't afford to have 50% (women) of their potential workforce not being productive by being forced not to work. Saudi Arabia's advisory council which helps guide the creation of all of Saudi's laws is now 50% female for example - change will and is happening, but it wont be a quick process, which is why they're starting now, and not in 2040. Those that adapt and change vs. those that don't will define the power brokers in the middle east for the next century, so any smart nations are getting on board now.
So I think the answer is that all those backwards nations will become forward progressive modern nations - i.e. a good thing, rather than the blood bath many assume. It is precisely the fact that these countries can afford to do stupid things and continue to exist in the first place that enables the doing of stupid things.
The numbers don't lie, and the fact is that each generation is wealthier than the last in just about every Western country. In the UK it's now come to a head where millennials (I'm not a millenial fwiw, I'm gen X) are now the first generation that does less well than the generation before them.
We have this problem for example in the UK of a housing shortage such that younger people are having to increasingly rent, rather than buy, and the problem is then exacerbated because the only generation with the wealth to buy are the baby boomers, who then buy to rent, increasing their wealth, allowing them to buy more to rent, and then reducing the housing stock even more.
So you can say I'm conditioned to believe fantasies and spewing garbage sure, but the problem is, that reality backs up my point, regardless of how inconvenient you may wish to find it. There's simply no dispute that in the vast majority of Western countries each successive elderly generation has gotten wealthier and wealthier, but that because of the financial crisis there are now also in many countries generations that are now going to be the first to not enjoy that same benefit because the debt accumulated by the older generations who have not paid for what they've voted to give themselves simply wasn't paid for by themselves.
"Aha! You assume that missing money implies that something wasn't paid for. How cute. I am guessing you have never heard of fraud or theft or any of that."
Again, you've come up with something that sounds like a good argument in your head, but it's not backed up by reality because fraud and corruption have been decreasing in most Western nations.
So great, you've convinced yourself that it's fine to screw the younger generations, but nothing you've said actually proves that it's okay in the way you're arguing it is, and it can't, because there's nothing to disprove in what I said as everything I said is backed up by the stats. Effectively, what you've said in an awful lot of words is "I'm part of the problem and I don't care.".
The only reason it's even a problem is because most Western economies are built on the next generation funding the increasingly extravagant lifestyles of the last.
So when problems like this attempt to be tackled, by say, cutting the amount of free shit old people get (i.e. by removing free bus passes, and TV licenses as well as a couple of hundred quid free money for heating from millionaire pensioners) we get absurd arguments like "I paid for it", but given that there's no money to fund it that's evidence enough that they have not in fact paid for it.
Reduction in population is probably a good thing overall, it reduces pressure on the planet's resources, it reduces competition for wealth and resources reducing conflict, and it it generally just creates greater sustainability - we don't need to build as much, we don't need to harvest as much, and in an increasingly roboticised nation like Japan the loss of labour needn't be a problem.
But economies have to change to cater to shrinking populations, and that means older generations getting what they actually paid for, rather than expecting the next generation to pay for what they think the world owes them, which is politically difficult given that those generations are typically most likely to vote because when you're sat around with nothing to do all day you have ample time to do so.
"Because the populace already had enough guns to pull it off"
No they didn't.
"and parts of the government defected and gave the populace guns."
That depends.
The whole point in these examples is that they cover ALL aspects of the spectrum - from Ukraine which was largely successful because of political maneuvering, to Egypt, which was succesful because of military support, to Libya which was succesful with barely any meaningful military support, to Syria which had a succesful uprising with near zero military support, but is now in a prolonged stalemate.
So yes, there are examples where people rose up simply with strength of numbers - this is exactly what happened in Homs in Syria, the people simply overwhelmed the bases with numbers and took the guns that way. In Egypt it was largely peaceful and political and the military eventually sided with the populace, in Libya there was next to no meaningful military support from the start, defections occurred long after the uprising when people had similarly acquired guns by breaching military bases. In large part soldiers just weren't willing to shoot civilians, their own friends and family, and so they just gave in and let the civilian hoardes in to the bases. In cases where they did shoot, they were rapidly overwhelmed simply by strength of numbers where shooting positions were quickly taken down by mundane devices like petrol bombs. Bases that held out, i.e. in cities like Damascus in Syria did so simply because there wasn't enough civilian support to oust them, and if you don't have civilian support in an area then you're not a freedom fighter anyway, you're a terrorist, so you'll have to excuse me if oppressing the majority with terrorism isn't a good reason to allow widespread unchecked gun ownership.
Which is precisely the point - no one knows what an authoritarian take over of the US would look like, and no one knows what a form a fight back against that would take, but what we do know is that gun registration and lack of gun ownership has never been a barrier to a motivated populace fighting back against heavily armed militaries. So unless you're saying that people in the US are less intelligent, less willing, and less capable, than people in 3rd world countries like Libya, and hence unable to fight back in the way they could, then these cases provide ample counter-points against the clearly false argument that gun registration and restrictions on gun ownership would prevent any kind of fight back against an oppressive regime. Surely you don't really believe that Americans are so dumb that they couldn't figure out how to fight back even if unarmed like people in Syria, Libya, Tunisia, Egypt, and Ukraine did?
If I had to guess, I would wager a fight back against an authoritarian regime in the US would probably look a lot more like that in Ukraine/Egypt than Libya/Syria where the military simply backs the populace and forces a stepping down of an authoritarian civilian government as I think the US is sufficiently driven by the Western life style that you'd never get enough people in the US military to give that up in favour of oppressing and killing their own friends and family. People in the US have too good a lifestyle to want to lose it to such things.
The reality is that gun ownership is entirely moot in this context, what really matters is what the US military opts to do and I have a hard time believing it would ever turn on the people on a national scale, but that even if it did there are 1.4million US military personnel against 320million other Americans - it doesn't matter if they've only got sticks and stones, that ain't a fight any military can win.
Now what you could legitimately argue is that gun ownership may reduce the initial bloodshed - possibly true, but the price of that is widespread day to day bloodshed from gun crime, gun misuse and so forth in the US instead. Whether you think that's a price worth paying is entirely a personal choice, but personally I don't think having 35,000 deaths and 75,0
"That being said it seems like the government knowing who and where all the guns are would defeat the idea behind the amendment, but even otherwise the whole round em' up scenario is no longer a hypothetical situation as we've seen gun confiscating campaigns in California and New York already. Speaking of hypothetical situations there is also a famous scene in the movie Red Dawn, whose producers were opposed to the then new FFL system, where a soviet commandant in the invading force orders a subordinate to raid all the gun stores in occupied territory to collect all the Form 4473's so they can systematically quell any opposition in the bud before the citizenry can form a militia."
Right, and that's great in Red Dawn fantasy land, but it's become pretty clear given the mass and serious erosion of rights, coupled with the deterioration of freedoms and civil liberties, and increase of the oligarchies with billionaires now running the country having consolidated their power even more that no one is actually ever going to use their 2nd amendment rights anyway because people just don't give that much of a shit.
I can give you a counter-example to your Red Dawn theoretical scenario from the real world - Syria, Libya, Ukraine, and Tunisia. In all these countries weapons were massively restricted by existing authoritarian police states, and in all cases the populace were able to rise up, capture arms, and fight against the government regardless of the level of authoritarianism.
So yes, whilst your theoreticals on the right to bear arms are great, it's all entirely meaningless in reality where Americans are both too lazy to fight for their rights, and where it's been shown that no matter how authoritarian and controlling a government is, or becomes, a population uprising is still going to result in them successfully being able to fight the government with varying levels of violence required depending on the external support the authoritarian leadership has regardless. Therefore no, your theoretical arguments aren't real actual pragmatic arguments against gun control as they hold no resemblance to reality.
I'm sure you'll try and misdirect the argument now by saying "Yeah but look how much of a mess Syria is!" - it doesn't matter, if Trump became grand dictator of the US with increasing authoritarianism it doesn't matter if you have arms to start with or not if he not only maintains control of the military and gets military backing from Russia and Iran too as has happened in Syria then your country would just as much end up in a shitshow of blood bath, constitution be damned. The right to bear arms offers no real practical benefit, it's merely just another religious belief from a religious document by any other name.
Why for one moment would you assume that a warship system even has a USB drive? you realise they don't just go down to their local PC World/Best Buy and just pick up a Packard Bell and plug it in in some corner of the warship and install "Tomahawk Launch Command for Windows 3.0" that they download from cnet right?
This is precisely the problem with Slashdot couch commentary, it's so unbelievably naive about things that it results in the most absurdly stupid and nonsensical comments such as those you made here. You have no idea about the design of warship computer systems yet here you are pretending to be a guru, it's farcical.
They don't just take an off the shelf copy of Windows XP and install it on the ship, companies like BAE systems have agreements with Microsoft over source code access and provide hardened versions to their customers.
Thus, the unsupported and proprietary elements of consumer Windows XP are entirely irrelevant - they both pay for bespoke extended support from Microsoft, and they have source code access themselves.
Whilst there are legitimate questions about using Windows XP for a brand new ship, it's not quite as bad as "OMG they use Windows XP lol" type headlines and comments make out. The reality is that they have support for and source code access to perhaps the single most tried and tested OS in the world. Lines of communication and inputs into the systems are both limited and restricted, and thus any vulnerability discovered against XP in the real world will likely be fixed and patched on a ship well before anyone can find a way of getting the exploit onto the ship's systems.
I think that's the real problem though, the idea the movies even need multi-million dollar budgets.
Most of those budgets are only so large because of the absurd artificially inflated actors wages. Contrary to popular belief music and acting talent is quite common, what's not is the amount of actors and musicians that get a brand built around them by a large corporation and turned into a billion dollar product of which they get a fraction of the cut.
In almost every bar across the world you get a few indie bands a week playing, a proportion of which are just as good as the big corporate brands. The Susan Boyles of the world are two a penny, she was just a run of the mill church singer of which there are thousands in the UK alone.
I had the misfortune of watching War Machine the other day, where Brad Pitt basically spends 2 hours making a really stupid face whilst pretending that's classed as acting. Quite why you would pay anyone that inept many millions of pounds to do such a shoddy job, when you could get a better actor from your local amateur dramatics society I've no fucking idea.
So the real barrier isn't currently technological, it's to do with the concentration of wealth in the industry caused by music and movie cartels fixing prices, and artificially inflating salaries of what is otherwise be common talent. The cost of movie making will come down when unions and cartels are forced stop artificially inflating salaries of a select few through the inevitable march of market forces.
You only have to look at what's happened with the newest Star Wars films- they've just picked up a bunch of fresh out of drama school nobodies and proven that they're just as capable as any of the big name multi-million dollar salary actors. The films have been just as successful, but they didn't need any expensive unionised big name Hollywood actors - for many, having fresh faces added to the film, because the problem with having the big names is that they all typically have fairly fixed styles that have been defined and that they stick to as part of their corporate branding, and that style can distract and hence detract from the film itself. The big name actors they did have in the newest Star Wars films were ironically those who were typecast as Star Wars actors because they were themselves picked up as nobodies for the original trilogy back in the 70s. If you'd put someone like Brad Pitt into any of these films he would've absolutely wrecked them because there's no place in films like that for the dunce jock past-it ex-toyboy image.
The biggest barrier remaining is actually organising a film - there need to be better sites for finding a crew, for finding talent for building sets, for competent producers to find what they need and get the necessary people involved, and to find musicians and people capable of doing special effects. If someone builds a site for this, then there's no reason Hollywood quality films couldn't be done on a fraction of the budget by people working on the projects out of passion for the idea rather than a need to drive profits for shareholders by creating human brands, rather than good films. This isn't massively different to the age old difficulty in putting together a good mod team for a video game mod - I remember back in the 90s it was a nightmare finding people good at 3D modelling and animation for a mod - the barrier to making a good mod was never money, it was about connecting the right people to form great teams.
Wow, is this what Slashdot has come to? People this dumb, making arguments this dumb?
Really? So because the police used a gun to stop a shooter then guns are good? You do realise if neither had a gun then there wouldn't be any injuries, or any lives lost right? That's how it works in most civilised nations. This isn't productive by any measure, no one benefits when people start shooting each other.
The fact you think that there are only 35,000 gun deaths a year is okay because it's the same as car death is well, sad. You really think it's okay that 35,000 people die a year from something that's entirely unnecessary for people to be able to keep in their house? You realise that's like 11 9/11s happening every fucking year right, or nearly a 9/11 equivalent of deaths every single month? You really don't see how astoundingly dumb and ill founded that argument is? You invaded two foreign nations and got yourself in to what appear to be two 20 year wars when all is done and dusted over much less. If you think any of this fits any measure of productivity then you probably need to return to pre-school and have a go at doing the whole education system thing again, hopefully it'll work this time around because it obviously failed for you the first time. Maybe you could try doing it in a country where kids don't have to be patted down, walk through metal detectors, or learn under the 1984-esque watchful eye of armed guards just to do something as basic and fundamental as going to school.
You've become one of the least free, most violent, least safe, most surveilled, countries in the Western world, the ideals on which your nation is founded are crumbling before your eyes, and your guns aren't doing one tiny bit to save you. You tell yourself it's all okay though because if you say guns will save us enough they will, even though they're very clearly not, your constitution is still being eroded, terrorists are still attacking you, violent criminals are still murdering people many times a day, the NSA is still monitoring everything you do, and a foreign leader has installed his espionage efforts right into the heart of your government. The idea that everyone needs guns to protect the constitution is well and truly shattered at this point because the constitution has been ripped to shreds left and right. You've lost the argument but you still refuse to concede that because you believe if you can just pretend to yourself that that's not the case then maybe, somehow, you'll be able to just continue denying reality indefinitely.
If you want to keep guns because they're fun to shoot then fine, I agree, they are, but that doesn't mean there's any rational reason for everyone to need to carry them around everywhere they go, and it definitely doesn't make it okay that 35,000 people die a year to them, and it definitely doesn't mean there's any degree of productivity in people shooting each other dead.
I think this used to work well, but there's been a divergence in recent years, such that the languages are evolving very much separately to the framework. It used to be that a new .NET version would typically come out with a new C# feature, but now the C# language versions and hence features are evolving very much separately from the framework, and in fact, we even have multiple frameworks with .NET Core and so forth.
As such it's becoming a little more dangerous to link the two I tend to feel, and ever more important to make sure we talk about the language and the framework separately and explicitly.