Yes, they'd been covered by sand for many thousands of years and when that was eventually washed away to the point the rock was exposed it didn't take long for the rock to be weathered away.
They weren't in open air or fully exposed to the sea for the last 800,000 years if that's what you're thinking. If they had been then given the UK's population density don't you think someone might have stumbled across them before now?
To be honest even stones are dying out in the UK. I was bought up on them but if you make use of the NHS at all then you'll be given weights in kg, and you'll be told your weight in kg. The change is working well, I don't even know what I weigh in stones now even though I used to only know that. I do know what I weigh in kg though.
As long as they don't get rid of the pint then we're all good.
Why is the bible and important book exactly? Just because it's old? It's certainly not an accurate portrayal of events that occured or any such thing. Is there a reason it deserves more respect than say, The Hobbit? or the Harry Potter books?
Just intrigued to know what you think is special about it. If it's merely age then I can think of a thousand more old books and documents that are far more interesting, far more fascinating, and from which we can learn much from.
"In mid 2000s he drove his own kid to school every day on the way to work, not too many fathers did that."
They did if they've not long found out they possibly have terminal cancer and wanted to optimise the amount of time they spend with their kid as a result.
"The so-called "tech-demo" syndrome that everybody uses to describe the latest id games."
It's not just the latest games, it started with Quake 3. Why do you think Quake 3 was the first game devoid of any proper single player? Not because they wanted a multiplayer only game, but because it was the quickest and cheapest tech demo they could build to get at the real money - their engine licensing fees.
Quake 2 was really the last game from id that was about the games, rather than about the engines, and that was 1997, not terribly far off 20 years ago now.
In the time since, this is why Unreal has come to dominate the AAA industry as the defacto industry standard engine - because they actually had real delivered products to showcase on it as opposed to just little more than tech demos.
I've always loved id, but their time is long over and Carmack hasn't really been a key figure in keeping them afloat. He's a great, smart guy who pushes the boundaries technically. But id as a company was never about just Carmack, it was about people like American McGee, Sandy Petersen, Paul Steed, and yes, even John Romero, because although John Romero couldn't go it alone, his ideas were important in shaping id's greatest games and id was the only company with the talent to implement his often far reaching ideas. Together they were formidable and no one could touch them, but apart they were just unable to find any other people with the talent to support their talent.
The problem is that by the time Quake III was released they'd lost their best modellers, their best map designers, their best audio engineers, and they were left with Carmack, a great programmer but what use is a great programmer without great ideas, great maps, great models, great sound, and a great ability for storytelling?
If only game developers had reunion tours like old split up bands do, that's something I'd like to see with id's finest.
Depends who they're getting rid of. If Michael Dell wants to give up on fantasies of competing in the tablet/phone marketplace because he knows Dell just doesn't have what it takes to compete with Apple and Samsung in that sort of area then he'll want to get rid of people related to that. As a public company though try explaining to investors who have a hard on for anything "mobile" right now that you're ditching mobile when everyone else is treating it as the only possible route a tech company could ever go down right now.
Yeah, this is probably one of the most stupid Slashdot summaries ever, but then, it's based on an article from The Register so I guess I'd be a fool to expect anything other than sensationalist propaganda.
The fact is that the alternative to Dell reinventing itself which yes, involves massive layoffs, is that all 110,000 employees lose their jobs instead. Surely it's better to lose under 15% of the workforce than end up with the whole workforce screwed?
Or even worse, the whole thing could've been asset stripped including the pension fund raided if Icahn had gotten his way.
"I am referring to the more wallet-friendly variants out there that are also bagless."
Ah, now we have an explanation for your problems.
Sorry, but the saying "You get what you pay for" is very much true. We used to have an actual Hoover bagless one and even that was shit, cost us about £100. Eventually we stumped up £350 for a good Dyson and it's one of the best investments we've made. Hoovering our house now takes literally about 1/10th the time, one pass is all it takes rather than having to roll back and forth with the hoover. Emptying it is easy and we don't get dust clouds, because you point it into the bin, open lid, pour out, close lid, shut bin lid all outside. No parts that need replacing, you're meant to wash the filter, we never have, seems to not really matter. Maybe it'll matter at some point, maybe I'll do it tonight now that you've reminded me, but it doesn't seem necessary for years.
We have a long haired border collie, so we have to deal with hoovering up his massive hairballs he leaves lying around sometimes (in fact we have a rather amusing Dyson attachment that is a dog comb so we can actually comb him and suck the loose fur straight off him as we do so which is handy too), and so maybe most people could get away with a cheaper model. But for us the Dyson was pricey, but most definitely worth it. It's as big a change as buying a tumble dryer was, not having to dick around waiting for a sunny day or having a clothes horse or ten dotted around the house to dry clothes is a similar quality of life improvement that's just worth it. It's the sort of investment that gifts you hours of your life back each month.
Agreed, Estonia is a particularly impressive nation, punching way above it's weight in so many ways.
At the end of the day the EU puts strict rules on even entering the organisation, so many of the nations with corruption problems have come a long way even before they're actually a member state. Once they are they're still bound to long term improve plants or they risk losing membership. This is one thing the EU is very good at - improving balance of wealth across the continent.
Nations like Poland have been massively transformed such that after the wave of hundreds of thousands of Polish immigrants to the UK many are now returning because they can have UK levels of comfort and prosperity back home now whilst the UK gains another nation that's got the wealth and need for it's vast services industry and so forth. It's win-win.
On the desktop? Minecraft? Azureus? IntelliJ IDEA? OpenOffice? NetBeans? SoapUI?
If you're looking for substantially more complexity than these sorts of things though then there aren't really any desktop examples that come to mind. It's all server side stuff.
Agreed, as a software developer I really can't complain about pay, I know I'm not paid investment banker salary, or that of the best of the best surgeons and so forth or CEOs, but I'm up there with lawyers, doctors, and so forth. It seems silly to bitch about "only" being in the 2nd top tier of salaries rather than the top tier when there are about 20 tiers below you. It seems 95% of people believe they're underpaid, fuck, even some bankers think they're underpaid now that they're being told they should only have a £1million bonus on a £1million salary, but it doesn't make it true. I don't even really understand why it's the case, is the ability to take a step back and compare what you're earning to those around you really so rare? Taking an objective look - comparing the skillsets against other comparably highly skilled tasks and it doesn't come out badly at all. Yes you might have a useless manager that's paid more than you, but for each one of those managers you also have a fuck load of hard working social workers and so forth dealing with shocking and disturbing societal problems who are paid an absolute fuck ton less than you.
The real problem is that STEM subjects are hard, and to do them takes a genuine passion for the topics and a lot of perseverance, no amount of money can buy interest in a topic someone finds dull and if they find it dull they'll never follow through with it.
The challenge is matching up people who would find a natural enjoyment in such subjects with those subjects. That means making sure the schooling system for each and every subject is enjoyable as it can be. That means not making students do 2 full pages of 40 questions of repetitive and dull integrations, and instead giving them example real world projects involving integration so they can understand how it works and how it's applied, and what it's relevance is. Give a girl who is interested in fashion a piss boring list of questions and she'll hate maths, take her through a statistics project involving measuring her class mates to figure out the optimal sizes to make a t-shirt that reasonably fits people in small, medium, and large sizes and calculate what proportion of each size she'd need to make to clothe the whole class with her t-shirt comfortably and you may well have engaged her enough to consider looking further into the topic.
I'm not saying Dyson is completely wrong on this, but money isn't the primary solution here. We can certainly ensure that STEM subjects are partially subsidised (£3,000 fees instead of £9,000), whilst non-subjects like David Beckham studies are completely un-subsidised (£12,000 fees) but outright paying people to do STEM subjects is a nonsense. You're basically paying people to pretend they wont be bored fucking shitless with the subject. That can never work, again, boredom just cannot be bought away.
I know someone else said that some STEM jobs are underpaid, like research postdocs, and I agree that's true. But that's not an issue with the wages granted to STEM graduates in general and is entirely an anomaly of the academic system, fed largely by underfunding of academic research work - research is woefully underfunded compared to things like welfare, local government, the NHS, and the military. The Olympics alone cost more than two years of total UK government research funding.
Personally I grew tired of doing that and nowadays I'm just blunt to management. If something is shit, I tell them it's shit, and I use the word shit. If they don't like that I can go work elsewhere where they actually want to know if something is shit so they can act on it. Nine times out of ten though, they are okay with being told the cold hard truth, providing you can justify your reasoning as to why you think it's shit and offer them a solution as to what needs to be done.
On projects where I've been in this exact situation I've pointed out that I've taken over for example, in one case, a project that was missing enough features to be 3 months behind schedule and still managed to deliver on time. I showed the directors what was missing even though the previous owner had said it was complete to that milestone and they accepted that I was right. Then when I got it all sorted, fixed the project up including all the missing components and delivered on time I got praised for delivering on time and was given max bonus.
It's only an issue if you keep quiet about it or aren't blunt. It's easy to think someone is respected but you'd be surprised, there will be people with their suspicions that something isn't right and when you bring that to the forefront they'll be happy to have their suspicions confirmed, and the golden boy can rapidly become a pariah if he's 100% talk, 0% walk and you can prove that.
Highlighting incompetence and time wasters in a convincing manner is in itself a skill that is particularly prominent for contractors to learn. You just need to provide evidence and a persuasive argument as to why something is wrong/bad.
Of course, a lot of people think something is bad just because they don't have the pre-requisite knowledge to understand what they're doing or why something is the way it is. I'm not saying this is the case here, but when that happens people seem surprised that it blows up in their face when they make a fuss and fail to justify themselves because they're wrong. You have to be pretty fucking sure you're right that it is crap, and that you're not just out of your depth with the project you've been handed.
The most amusing thing I find about it is how we had weekly, almost daily stories about China hacking this, China hacking that, how China was engaging in a cyber war and so on and so forth.
Since the Snowden revelations I don't think I've seen a single story on the issue.
The NSA has caused the US to lose all credibility in complaining about hacking from foreign nations, which doesn't mean it's not happening, but is a result of the fact that anything even China was or still is doing is small fry compared to the tapping and mining of seemingly ever major data cable spanning the globe.
It's sad really because whether China really was doing what was claimed before or not, they now have the justification to do that and even increase such efforts because they can still claim "We're only doing what the US and Britain are doing".
But it's not a constant, it's changing over time. Many of the Eastern European nations have seen healthy declines in corruption towards the Western European and Scandinavian standards which is my point. There are still problem countries i.e. Greece and Italy but the financial crisis brought those glaring exceptions to the forefront of scrutiny such that even they can no longer get away with it and are being forced to deal with it.
Income differences are continuously decreasing too as new entrants become more prosperous over time from having their cheap starting base opened up to the demands of the wealthier nations creating jobs.
It isn't going to happen overnight, but it most definitely is happening. It's not like things are stagnant, it's not as if all EU nations are in the same place they were when they joined and nothing has improved or changed, that view is very much wrong.
No, those things are nothing to do with inherent problems with Java, and everything to do with the fact Eclipse is shit.
There are Java applications that are far more complex and require far higher stability and performance than Eclipse that work just fine. Eclipse is just an exceptionally bad piece of software.
If that's the cost of bringing those nations up to Western European or even Scandinavian standards then what's the problem?
No one's under any illusion that expansion means bringing countries into the EU with problems, in fact, that's kind of the point. The goal is to sort them out and hence make Europe ever stronger.
I live in Western Europe, I always have, and I'm happy to pay that cost. It's nice to know we're living on an ever more secure and ever more prosperous continent. Far better than the alternative of having constant repeats of Yugoslavia on our borders over and over and over which cost far more again in terms of military effort to contain or defuse the problem, far higher cost in terms of lives, and far higher cost in terms of ever more desperate people emigrating West trying to escape the war not able to bring anything with them, not even an education, because even their schools had been bombed.
1) This was the summit where Russia conveniently made a fuss about the hacked CRU e-mails that were taken only a few weeks before the summit
2) Climate change has a genuine impact on national security interests, as it can change the quality of habitability of areas leading to destabilisation
Really, when Russia tried to pull the rug out from under the summit because it's entire survival post-USSR collapse has been built off burning fossil fuels by being the likely culprit behind the CRU hack the subsequent propaganda campaign I'm kinda glad the NSA is involved with that particular one. Whatever your thoughts are on the reality of climate change I wouldn't fancy the idea of Russia doing such things unchallenged and without the other heads of state getting a heads up and hence getting to dictate the climate story all by itself and unilaterally influencing such important summits to it's benefit and only it's benefit.
I suppose it depends on your definition of failed, but if nothing else it has an education system that teaches us to form proper sentences and provide well reasoned arguments, something that seems to be missing from wherever you come from.
It depends how it's used, in Lego City Undercover and for some parts of Pikmin it's use makes sense because you use it as a virtual Augmented Reality device - i.e. you hold it up to the screen to scan the buildings on screen with an X-ray or sound scanner to find someone for example. It's actually pretty cool for this, but for other games like Mario it doesn't make much sense other than for the fact you can let someone take over the TV and keep playing on the pad but that's a minor benefit.
They should just sell a version of the console without the pad and with a pro controller (which is just like the XBox 360 controller) as I say and keep the game pad as an addon.
As a citizen of a country that drives on the left I was a little disturbed that you seemed to be suggesting you were trying to move your car from the slow lane into the fast. In fact, I couldn't understand what the big deal was with you losing power in the slow lane.
Then I figured you must live in a country that drives on the right.
No it's a type of orange. We figured out in the UK that politicians are an expensive waste of space so we just place oranges on the chairs where they used to sit.
This is why the UK is currently the fastest growing economy in the G7, replacing politicians with oranges has been wildly effective.
To be fair I think Nintendo could've pulled it off fine with the Wii U, I think they still could. The games they do have on it are actually really good.
I'd argue the problem is the price point. They were charging £280 for a console underpowered enough to justify only £150 (which is what I got mine for).
I remember I used to pay £130 or so for a Nintendo console, I know inflation and all that but if they went for the £130 - £150 price point as standard I think they'd do far better.
The issue all along has been that they've entered the pricing realm of premium hardware and software (£250+ console, £40 games) with budget offerings.
Even with the Wii it was quite cheap and they made all their money on the accessories - Wii Motes, Nunchucks, Classic controllers, Balance borders - it all stacked up to make the Wii more expensive than the 360/PS3 yet people are more comfortable buying their experience a la carte because it lowers the upfront cost. If they had a bunch of games supporting two of their touchscreen gamepads and sold those separately they'd do much better selling the console for £130 and selling those separately at like £60 each or whatever.
People would far more happily pay £130 for the Wii U with a pro controller, and Super Mario Bros etc. then add up the touchscreen game pads later on and so forth for things like Pikmin and Lego City Undercover.
People weren't going to pay markedly more than a 360/PS3 for something no more powerful and with far less games, and that's where they really fucked up - their price point. They got greedy.
Slashdot Mirror
Yes, they'd been covered by sand for many thousands of years and when that was eventually washed away to the point the rock was exposed it didn't take long for the rock to be weathered away.
They weren't in open air or fully exposed to the sea for the last 800,000 years if that's what you're thinking. If they had been then given the UK's population density don't you think someone might have stumbled across them before now?
To be honest even stones are dying out in the UK. I was bought up on them but if you make use of the NHS at all then you'll be given weights in kg, and you'll be told your weight in kg. The change is working well, I don't even know what I weigh in stones now even though I used to only know that. I do know what I weigh in kg though.
As long as they don't get rid of the pint then we're all good.
Why is the bible and important book exactly? Just because it's old? It's certainly not an accurate portrayal of events that occured or any such thing. Is there a reason it deserves more respect than say, The Hobbit? or the Harry Potter books?
Just intrigued to know what you think is special about it. If it's merely age then I can think of a thousand more old books and documents that are far more interesting, far more fascinating, and from which we can learn much from.
and the 1% of Slashdot users who somehow arrived here after searching for directx12.
"In mid 2000s he drove his own kid to school every day on the way to work, not too many fathers did that."
They did if they've not long found out they possibly have terminal cancer and wanted to optimise the amount of time they spend with their kid as a result.
"The so-called "tech-demo" syndrome that everybody uses to describe the latest id games."
It's not just the latest games, it started with Quake 3. Why do you think Quake 3 was the first game devoid of any proper single player? Not because they wanted a multiplayer only game, but because it was the quickest and cheapest tech demo they could build to get at the real money - their engine licensing fees.
Quake 2 was really the last game from id that was about the games, rather than about the engines, and that was 1997, not terribly far off 20 years ago now.
In the time since, this is why Unreal has come to dominate the AAA industry as the defacto industry standard engine - because they actually had real delivered products to showcase on it as opposed to just little more than tech demos.
I've always loved id, but their time is long over and Carmack hasn't really been a key figure in keeping them afloat. He's a great, smart guy who pushes the boundaries technically. But id as a company was never about just Carmack, it was about people like American McGee, Sandy Petersen, Paul Steed, and yes, even John Romero, because although John Romero couldn't go it alone, his ideas were important in shaping id's greatest games and id was the only company with the talent to implement his often far reaching ideas. Together they were formidable and no one could touch them, but apart they were just unable to find any other people with the talent to support their talent.
The problem is that by the time Quake III was released they'd lost their best modellers, their best map designers, their best audio engineers, and they were left with Carmack, a great programmer but what use is a great programmer without great ideas, great maps, great models, great sound, and a great ability for storytelling?
If only game developers had reunion tours like old split up bands do, that's something I'd like to see with id's finest.
Out of interest, what mail/calendaring client do you prefer to Outlook?
I ask because for the first 7 years of my working life I was stuck with Outlook and I hated it too. At least, I thought I did.
Then I worked three years with Lotus Notes. Then 2 years with GMail.
Holy fucking mother of god am I glad to be at a company that uses Outlook once more.
Depends who they're getting rid of. If Michael Dell wants to give up on fantasies of competing in the tablet/phone marketplace because he knows Dell just doesn't have what it takes to compete with Apple and Samsung in that sort of area then he'll want to get rid of people related to that. As a public company though try explaining to investors who have a hard on for anything "mobile" right now that you're ditching mobile when everyone else is treating it as the only possible route a tech company could ever go down right now.
Yeah, this is probably one of the most stupid Slashdot summaries ever, but then, it's based on an article from The Register so I guess I'd be a fool to expect anything other than sensationalist propaganda.
The fact is that the alternative to Dell reinventing itself which yes, involves massive layoffs, is that all 110,000 employees lose their jobs instead. Surely it's better to lose under 15% of the workforce than end up with the whole workforce screwed?
Or even worse, the whole thing could've been asset stripped including the pension fund raided if Icahn had gotten his way.
"I am referring to the more wallet-friendly variants out there that are also bagless."
Ah, now we have an explanation for your problems.
Sorry, but the saying "You get what you pay for" is very much true. We used to have an actual Hoover bagless one and even that was shit, cost us about £100. Eventually we stumped up £350 for a good Dyson and it's one of the best investments we've made. Hoovering our house now takes literally about 1/10th the time, one pass is all it takes rather than having to roll back and forth with the hoover. Emptying it is easy and we don't get dust clouds, because you point it into the bin, open lid, pour out, close lid, shut bin lid all outside. No parts that need replacing, you're meant to wash the filter, we never have, seems to not really matter. Maybe it'll matter at some point, maybe I'll do it tonight now that you've reminded me, but it doesn't seem necessary for years.
We have a long haired border collie, so we have to deal with hoovering up his massive hairballs he leaves lying around sometimes (in fact we have a rather amusing Dyson attachment that is a dog comb so we can actually comb him and suck the loose fur straight off him as we do so which is handy too), and so maybe most people could get away with a cheaper model. But for us the Dyson was pricey, but most definitely worth it. It's as big a change as buying a tumble dryer was, not having to dick around waiting for a sunny day or having a clothes horse or ten dotted around the house to dry clothes is a similar quality of life improvement that's just worth it. It's the sort of investment that gifts you hours of your life back each month.
Agreed, Estonia is a particularly impressive nation, punching way above it's weight in so many ways.
At the end of the day the EU puts strict rules on even entering the organisation, so many of the nations with corruption problems have come a long way even before they're actually a member state. Once they are they're still bound to long term improve plants or they risk losing membership. This is one thing the EU is very good at - improving balance of wealth across the continent.
Nations like Poland have been massively transformed such that after the wave of hundreds of thousands of Polish immigrants to the UK many are now returning because they can have UK levels of comfort and prosperity back home now whilst the UK gains another nation that's got the wealth and need for it's vast services industry and so forth. It's win-win.
On the desktop? Minecraft? Azureus? IntelliJ IDEA? OpenOffice? NetBeans? SoapUI?
If you're looking for substantially more complexity than these sorts of things though then there aren't really any desktop examples that come to mind. It's all server side stuff.
Agreed, as a software developer I really can't complain about pay, I know I'm not paid investment banker salary, or that of the best of the best surgeons and so forth or CEOs, but I'm up there with lawyers, doctors, and so forth. It seems silly to bitch about "only" being in the 2nd top tier of salaries rather than the top tier when there are about 20 tiers below you. It seems 95% of people believe they're underpaid, fuck, even some bankers think they're underpaid now that they're being told they should only have a £1million bonus on a £1million salary, but it doesn't make it true. I don't even really understand why it's the case, is the ability to take a step back and compare what you're earning to those around you really so rare? Taking an objective look - comparing the skillsets against other comparably highly skilled tasks and it doesn't come out badly at all. Yes you might have a useless manager that's paid more than you, but for each one of those managers you also have a fuck load of hard working social workers and so forth dealing with shocking and disturbing societal problems who are paid an absolute fuck ton less than you.
The real problem is that STEM subjects are hard, and to do them takes a genuine passion for the topics and a lot of perseverance, no amount of money can buy interest in a topic someone finds dull and if they find it dull they'll never follow through with it.
The challenge is matching up people who would find a natural enjoyment in such subjects with those subjects. That means making sure the schooling system for each and every subject is enjoyable as it can be. That means not making students do 2 full pages of 40 questions of repetitive and dull integrations, and instead giving them example real world projects involving integration so they can understand how it works and how it's applied, and what it's relevance is. Give a girl who is interested in fashion a piss boring list of questions and she'll hate maths, take her through a statistics project involving measuring her class mates to figure out the optimal sizes to make a t-shirt that reasonably fits people in small, medium, and large sizes and calculate what proportion of each size she'd need to make to clothe the whole class with her t-shirt comfortably and you may well have engaged her enough to consider looking further into the topic.
I'm not saying Dyson is completely wrong on this, but money isn't the primary solution here. We can certainly ensure that STEM subjects are partially subsidised (£3,000 fees instead of £9,000), whilst non-subjects like David Beckham studies are completely un-subsidised (£12,000 fees) but outright paying people to do STEM subjects is a nonsense. You're basically paying people to pretend they wont be bored fucking shitless with the subject. That can never work, again, boredom just cannot be bought away.
I know someone else said that some STEM jobs are underpaid, like research postdocs, and I agree that's true. But that's not an issue with the wages granted to STEM graduates in general and is entirely an anomaly of the academic system, fed largely by underfunding of academic research work - research is woefully underfunded compared to things like welfare, local government, the NHS, and the military. The Olympics alone cost more than two years of total UK government research funding.
Depends if you just sit their quietly.
Personally I grew tired of doing that and nowadays I'm just blunt to management. If something is shit, I tell them it's shit, and I use the word shit. If they don't like that I can go work elsewhere where they actually want to know if something is shit so they can act on it. Nine times out of ten though, they are okay with being told the cold hard truth, providing you can justify your reasoning as to why you think it's shit and offer them a solution as to what needs to be done.
On projects where I've been in this exact situation I've pointed out that I've taken over for example, in one case, a project that was missing enough features to be 3 months behind schedule and still managed to deliver on time. I showed the directors what was missing even though the previous owner had said it was complete to that milestone and they accepted that I was right. Then when I got it all sorted, fixed the project up including all the missing components and delivered on time I got praised for delivering on time and was given max bonus.
It's only an issue if you keep quiet about it or aren't blunt. It's easy to think someone is respected but you'd be surprised, there will be people with their suspicions that something isn't right and when you bring that to the forefront they'll be happy to have their suspicions confirmed, and the golden boy can rapidly become a pariah if he's 100% talk, 0% walk and you can prove that.
Highlighting incompetence and time wasters in a convincing manner is in itself a skill that is particularly prominent for contractors to learn. You just need to provide evidence and a persuasive argument as to why something is wrong/bad.
Of course, a lot of people think something is bad just because they don't have the pre-requisite knowledge to understand what they're doing or why something is the way it is. I'm not saying this is the case here, but when that happens people seem surprised that it blows up in their face when they make a fuss and fail to justify themselves because they're wrong. You have to be pretty fucking sure you're right that it is crap, and that you're not just out of your depth with the project you've been handed.
He found out the company was shit and got the kick up the arse he needed to move to a better job?
What better reward is there than that?
The most amusing thing I find about it is how we had weekly, almost daily stories about China hacking this, China hacking that, how China was engaging in a cyber war and so on and so forth.
Since the Snowden revelations I don't think I've seen a single story on the issue.
The NSA has caused the US to lose all credibility in complaining about hacking from foreign nations, which doesn't mean it's not happening, but is a result of the fact that anything even China was or still is doing is small fry compared to the tapping and mining of seemingly ever major data cable spanning the globe.
It's sad really because whether China really was doing what was claimed before or not, they now have the justification to do that and even increase such efforts because they can still claim "We're only doing what the US and Britain are doing".
But it's not a constant, it's changing over time. Many of the Eastern European nations have seen healthy declines in corruption towards the Western European and Scandinavian standards which is my point. There are still problem countries i.e. Greece and Italy but the financial crisis brought those glaring exceptions to the forefront of scrutiny such that even they can no longer get away with it and are being forced to deal with it.
Income differences are continuously decreasing too as new entrants become more prosperous over time from having their cheap starting base opened up to the demands of the wealthier nations creating jobs.
It isn't going to happen overnight, but it most definitely is happening. It's not like things are stagnant, it's not as if all EU nations are in the same place they were when they joined and nothing has improved or changed, that view is very much wrong.
No, those things are nothing to do with inherent problems with Java, and everything to do with the fact Eclipse is shit.
There are Java applications that are far more complex and require far higher stability and performance than Eclipse that work just fine. Eclipse is just an exceptionally bad piece of software.
If that's the cost of bringing those nations up to Western European or even Scandinavian standards then what's the problem?
No one's under any illusion that expansion means bringing countries into the EU with problems, in fact, that's kind of the point. The goal is to sort them out and hence make Europe ever stronger.
I live in Western Europe, I always have, and I'm happy to pay that cost. It's nice to know we're living on an ever more secure and ever more prosperous continent. Far better than the alternative of having constant repeats of Yugoslavia on our borders over and over and over which cost far more again in terms of military effort to contain or defuse the problem, far higher cost in terms of lives, and far higher cost in terms of ever more desperate people emigrating West trying to escape the war not able to bring anything with them, not even an education, because even their schools had been bombed.
Even more so when you consider that:
1) This was the summit where Russia conveniently made a fuss about the hacked CRU e-mails that were taken only a few weeks before the summit
2) Climate change has a genuine impact on national security interests, as it can change the quality of habitability of areas leading to destabilisation
Really, when Russia tried to pull the rug out from under the summit because it's entire survival post-USSR collapse has been built off burning fossil fuels by being the likely culprit behind the CRU hack the subsequent propaganda campaign I'm kinda glad the NSA is involved with that particular one. Whatever your thoughts are on the reality of climate change I wouldn't fancy the idea of Russia doing such things unchallenged and without the other heads of state getting a heads up and hence getting to dictate the climate story all by itself and unilaterally influencing such important summits to it's benefit and only it's benefit.
I suppose it depends on your definition of failed, but if nothing else it has an education system that teaches us to form proper sentences and provide well reasoned arguments, something that seems to be missing from wherever you come from.
It depends how it's used, in Lego City Undercover and for some parts of Pikmin it's use makes sense because you use it as a virtual Augmented Reality device - i.e. you hold it up to the screen to scan the buildings on screen with an X-ray or sound scanner to find someone for example. It's actually pretty cool for this, but for other games like Mario it doesn't make much sense other than for the fact you can let someone take over the TV and keep playing on the pad but that's a minor benefit.
They should just sell a version of the console without the pad and with a pro controller (which is just like the XBox 360 controller) as I say and keep the game pad as an addon.
As a citizen of a country that drives on the left I was a little disturbed that you seemed to be suggesting you were trying to move your car from the slow lane into the fast. In fact, I couldn't understand what the big deal was with you losing power in the slow lane.
Then I figured you must live in a country that drives on the right.
No it's a type of orange. We figured out in the UK that politicians are an expensive waste of space so we just place oranges on the chairs where they used to sit.
This is why the UK is currently the fastest growing economy in the G7, replacing politicians with oranges has been wildly effective.
To be fair I think Nintendo could've pulled it off fine with the Wii U, I think they still could. The games they do have on it are actually really good.
I'd argue the problem is the price point. They were charging £280 for a console underpowered enough to justify only £150 (which is what I got mine for).
I remember I used to pay £130 or so for a Nintendo console, I know inflation and all that but if they went for the £130 - £150 price point as standard I think they'd do far better.
The issue all along has been that they've entered the pricing realm of premium hardware and software (£250+ console, £40 games) with budget offerings.
Even with the Wii it was quite cheap and they made all their money on the accessories - Wii Motes, Nunchucks, Classic controllers, Balance borders - it all stacked up to make the Wii more expensive than the 360/PS3 yet people are more comfortable buying their experience a la carte because it lowers the upfront cost. If they had a bunch of games supporting two of their touchscreen gamepads and sold those separately they'd do much better selling the console for £130 and selling those separately at like £60 each or whatever.
People would far more happily pay £130 for the Wii U with a pro controller, and Super Mario Bros etc. then add up the touchscreen game pads later on and so forth for things like Pikmin and Lego City Undercover.
People weren't going to pay markedly more than a 360/PS3 for something no more powerful and with far less games, and that's where they really fucked up - their price point. They got greedy.