Well it was being reported prior to launch by a decent number of people with review units, and folks who had won consoles pre-release. Given that there were a widely reported bunch of failed consoles before mainstream release when the sample size was drastically smaller I'd wager this is probably above the industry standard failure rate if nothing else.
"Obviously there were things that could have been done better, but claiming that someone is at fault for not engineering the plant to handle a massive tsunami is a bit over the top."
In an area known for massive tsunamis and with a historical case of equal magnitude earthquakes? No it's not.
Just because coal plants wouldn't have survived doesn't make it okay, coal wouldn't have released the levels of radiation. What would've made sense is to either bolster them for the magnitude of Earthquakes known possible in the region (i.e. 9.0+ instead of the 8 they planned them for) build tsunami defences as large as you were told to because of the precise event that happened rather than ignore the advice you were given and only build for lower walls, or perhaps more sensibly, just don't build a nuclear reactor full stop, there are plenty of other spots they could've placed it but of course politics of jobs and cost was put above safety and now they're paying the price.
If you take a gamble, you can't expect sympathy if you lose, and they did exactly this.
Nonsense. If a magnitude 9.0 earthquake is even a possibility in an area that's geologically susceptible to earthquakes then you need to cater to that possibility, if you don't you're simply asking for it when it does happen - this very event highlights that fact. It's not like it was even unprecedented, there are records of a similar magnitude earthquake in pretty much the exact same area, so effectively they must've said, oh well, it was 1000 years ago last time so it'll never happen again. Can we add that to the list of famous last words?
I don't know what the relevance of your reference to property damage is, of course property damage is going to increase if an event hits a densely populated urbanised nation than earthquakes that have hit less densely populated or non-urbanised nations, and of course property damage is going to be higher over time, for the simple fact there's an increase in development of property. That doesn't in any way imply the event was completely unprecedented, it only tells us that the Earthquake hit an area that was more densely populated with more buildings susceptible to earthquakes than areas that have been hit in the past. This says nothing about how likely the event is, only how poorly planned the area was for the possible events that were known to be possible in the area.
They played a game of risk with something you shouldn't play risk with and lost - you can't excuse the gambler for gambling all his money away just because he won once or twice before. Fukushima was entirely avoidable.
Countries like Germany and the UK don't suffer 80ft Tsunamis and magnitude 9 earthquakes, Japan does. That alone was reason enough for them to have put a bit more effort into protecting them than the UK or Germany need to.
They ran a dangerously unsafe reactor, protected to a size of tsunami and magnitude earthquake less than is possible in the area, and then completely and utterly fucked up the aftermath.
Now following that they want to make the whole situation worse by not doing as much to reduce CO2 emissions, which don't just contribute to global warming but go hand in hand with burning of fossil fuels that have been linked to increased incidences of things like asthma and other illnesses.
I don't blame all the Japanese of course because I'm sure many as dismayed at this new decision by their leadership, but this is just a classic case of taking a bad situation, and making it even worse.
There's no escaping the fact that this whole situation exists because of complete and utter ineptitude throughout. Fukushima shouldn't have even happened if they at least had a sane policy on both ageing nuclear reactors, and the protection of them against natural disasters. Even if it happened anyway for some other reason it could've still been mitigated by better post-disaster planning.
Yes, I'm well aware that he stated that, but it doesn't mean he can't get access to the data again if he wanted to, if he doesn't actually still have it anyway.
I doubt for even an absolute second that he actually relinquished all methods of being able to access it, possibly leaving a copy with a friend, or on a server somewhere. Hell, by the sounds of it the last Wikileaks 400gb insurance dump is exactly that data so he presumably knows the key and could hence probably just as well download it if he wants to.
At worst it's likely he isn't carrying it on his person so that he had plausible deniability with the Russians and Chinese that he didn't have access to the data.
Even if he really doesn't have a copy stored somewhere I'm short a quick phonecall to Greenwald would suffice.
"While it's true that the decline button is always visible, making it appear greyed-out and away from the Accept button is not exactly clear (and possibly deceptive)."
This raises an intriguing point. What's the difference between phishing e-mails, malware attachments, or ads that used to install things like Bonsai buddy by throwing up pretend warning messages and such?
In each case the UI has been manipulated to try and make me install something I don't want and that to me is detrimental to my computing experience, and all these examples above have been deemed to be illegal. How does SF not also break the law for doing the exact same thing? just because of historic reputation? does that somehow give you a get out of jail free card?
Only to selected media outlets, and the fact they've been drip feeding is the exact point. He still has the option of an all out dump to everyone if he feels the NSA is hijacking the agenda from the select few media outlets that are only dripping very slowly.
I wouldn't say Nature 0. If you factor in every natural disaster ever, every death due to disease, and every death from poisoning by natures more dangerous fruits etc. I'd wager Nature has a pretty decent lead on us.
Right but there's still a risk to the NSA's strategy, that being that if Snowden feels the NSA has hijacked the agenda, he just dumps the whole lot and let's the press have a field day.
The press loves scandal, scandals are going to get far more press time than wishy-washy nonsense statements direct from the NSA.
So if the NSA is going to do this they're going to have to be careful they don't piss Snowden off too much by completely and utterly lying about their activities else it may backfire completely and they may see a release that was more unrestrained than it otherwise would have been.
But there aren't reduced prices, since Amazon put the likes of Borders out of business it's book prices have become much more expensive.
It's a key part the problem, because Amazon engages in excessive tax avoidance, even those business that engage minor tax avoidance are outcompeted by it and when Amazon has seized a market because it's put the other major players out of business it just ups it's prices to whatever it wants.
This is precisely why France is putting protections in place for independent book retailers, and why Apple went to the extreme of pursuing a stupidly risky tactic of forming a price fixing cartel with the publishers.
Amazon is ruthless for putting others out of business by out competing them on price, then drastically upping prices when it controls the market, something it can largely only be successful at precisely because it pays no tax. It's nonsense to think that is ever going to be anything other than a net drain. If it did the same but managed to do so whilst paying tax then it'd at least be doing something to outweigh it's destruction of competition, but destroying competition, resulting in increased prices due to decreased choice, whilst also paying no tax can't be anything other than a net negative to society.
He's just saying that if a company does not exist for the betterment of society in general, then there's no point letting it exist at all.
This policy in fact aids capitalism, because it means companies must compete on the merits of their product, rather than their ability to find loopholes in the law.
For example, Amazon in the UK basically pays no tax but it does get the benefit of UK educated works and does get to use UK roads causing wear and tear and the publicly subsidised postal network. This makes it a net drain on society (the jobs it creates and the taxes paid on those wages don't make up for it's overall cost to society) meaning it's subsidised by the public which is anti-capitalist and so at that point the public should have the right to have the company shut down if it's not willing to pay it's own way or can't compete on it's merits without this kind of indirect subsidy.
Well VS2013 gives you the option of signing up to an account when you first load it so I'm guessing you're probably right, it's probably just integration.
Add teeth to the constitution is a meaningless act if those teeth are blunted by lack of feasibility of enforcement of whatever teeth you want to add in. It's already the case that your government is breaking the law by breaching the constitution because it's not enforced either because of a corrupt politically appointed judiciary or because of effective use of weasel words and interpretations of the law that make literally zero sense (sexual relations that aren't, but actually were).
What you actually need is a citizenship with the balls to hold it's government to account, coupled with a push for electoral reform to rework your entire electoral funding laws and push for a voting system that is more proportional and then the intelligence amongst your populace to vote for something other than the red or blue team.
The constitution is an irrelevant piece of script until you alter the hierarchy of power because whatever you get put into it, or to defend it will still continue to be ignored no matter how high the penalties. For higher penalties to matter you need a judiciary entirely independent on politics to enforce it, and you need a government with the accountability to not say "We broke the law and fuck you!" each time it does so. One of the best ways of enforcing accountability is with an electoral system that encourages coalition governments, because then all it takes is the majority party to push through something unpopular and a coalition partner to pull out making the government fall apart and force a new election because of that. The common argument against this (as put forward by David Cameron in the UK when arguing against electoral reform) is that it results in backroom deals (though he then went on to form a coalition) and perhaps it does, but it's still better than a minority dictating law against a majority and people will remember the effects of those backroom deals and just not vote for the parties who engineered them next time.
Here in the UK we've got the first coalition in decades and it's far far from perfect, but it's still way better than it would've been as a purely Conservative government, and it's still far better than a purely Labour government was and would have been. Nick Clegg fucked up royally with tuition fees allowing them to be charged at £9k but that's still better than the Tories wanted (their recommendation was £12k). It also means we didn't have the IMP pushed through which both a purely Labour and purely Conservative government both said they'd do. It's pretty clear that coalitions drastically improve things and move things away from the extremes which is the fundamental problem with US politics - it's dominated by extremists.
So change the constitution or don't, it doesn't matter either way, in fact it doesn't even matter that it exists until you deal with the core problem - complete lack of accountability at the top. What you need above absolutely anything else is electoral reform on the agenda both in terms of the way votes result in politicians being selected, and the way political funding and so forth are handled. Until you have that you'll be stuck with extremists fighting extremists with both parties shitting on the constitution and ignoring any legal repercussions they should in theory face.
The problem is when do you give them the benefit of the doubt?
I've used AMD cards on and off over the years for well over a decade and the problem has always been that each time I've heard someone say what you just did and tried them it's simply not been true.
Maybe you're right this time, but given how many times I've been bitten it's hard to have any faith in such statements.
My friend uses AMD and is always whining about problems with his cards, especially when it comes to Eyefinity stuff so I'm loathe to believe what you say is true even now, especially when we've also had numerous reports and news stories of frame dropping issues also.
FWIW I first came to realise there was a general and wide ranging issue with AMD drivers back in about 2003 when I was still doing some tech support on a network of over 5000 systems with a wide ranging set of graphics cards between Intel, AMD, and nVidia. That's a pretty large sample size and AMD graphics issues were a couple of orders of magnitude more prominent than any of the others so there has definitely historically been an issue. When I've always had more issues with AMD cards at home (i.e. when laptops I've bought have come with AMD cards) I've just found it difficult to lose that perception - my personal sample sizes haven't of course been as large, so maybe me and my friends have just been insanely unlucky in picking the odd cards with bad drivers but I'm more prone to believing that it's just that AMD has never really got to grips with it's drivers, even now.
But even if they have sorted their fundamental issues with their driver development regime, it's going to take quite some time for them to regain the trust of many people like me - at least a few years without any reports of widespread driver issues.
If you have to use more than a paragraph to explain it, it's certainly not simple. So the first number is generation but how do we know what generation we're on? You say we're on generation 2 and that's fine, but there's more than 2 generations of graphics card. Is this 2nd generation card better than the 5th or whatever generation card I bought last year before the new naming scheme?
What relation does _70 have to 1080p, 60fps exactly? I get that
Why would you have full part and half part cards, what exactly is the fucking point of that? If I want something cheaper wouldn't I want a full part card albeit at a lower spec?
Simple would be something along the lines of:
AMD 2013 Edition Budget graphics card AMD 2013 Edition Standard graphics card AMD 2013 Edition High End graphics card
You know what level you're buying in at, and you know how new it is. If you want detailed specs, you can get them off the box. I go into the shop, and buy the latest edition that fits into my budget. Really not difficult. If enthusiasts still want their buzzwords they can just abbreviate to AMD '13B for budget, AMD '13S for standard, AMD '13H for high end or whatever.
The bonus part is that you don't have to keep changing your naming system every few years either (which is the reason it's stupid that my GeForce 280 was higher specced than my GeForce 7950 - why would a lower number be better, except when it's not because a 680 or whatever is better than both even though it's a lower number than one, and higher than the other)
If you still want to sell those that haven't passed quality control (presumably the binned ones you refer to then) just suffix the names with "substandard" or whatever or just make those the budget pile.
Really, graphics card naming is either a complete and utter marketing failure, or a clever ploy into tricking people into spending more money by buying the wrong thing. I'm really not sure which, but it's certainly not sensible, sane, smart, or helpful to the consumer.
PC hardware is one of the only things I have to genuinely research for quite some time to figure out what the fuck I'm buying or need to buy when I do buy it every few years. It's fine if you're constantly upgrading your PC but I grew out of that. If I'm buying a washing machine or TV I may lookup reviews, but that's about it - I certainly don't need in depth comparisons that show contradictions between even a company's own products (why is a high end last gen often better than a new low end next gen, but still cheaper? why not just make the new low end next gen the old high end last gen in the first place?).
I notice in another post btw, you said to someone else to come up with a naming convention that covers 7 cards or whatever every year but that's part the problem - they don't need 7 cards every year.
I'm sure most people could memorise all the different naming conventions - as you say it's not difficult when you've done so, but to an outsider who hasn't spent hours learning about it all the fact is most people also have better things to do with their lives.
Even here in the UK I've never seen use of the word "practise", ever.
So it's obviously a form of the word that's basically died a death. Literally everyone just uses the word "practice" in both cases.
There's no point being pedantic about a language rule that no one on Earth gives a shit about because it offers exactly zero benefit to society.
99.9999% of the population in the UK would think "LOL he's misspelt practice" rather than "Oh, look at his awesome and correct usage of practice/practise".
"Overall crime rate in UK and Germany (far better comparison to the US than Sweden) are higher than in the US."
Not true any more. This idea was based on data from over a decade ago. Nowadays the UK is far more peaceful than the US, and seems to have the lowest levels of crime it's possibly ever had in modern history. It's now one of the more peaceful nations in Europe and Europe on average does much better than the US:
Even where the UK does have high figures (i.e. sexual offences) a lot of that is historical too (i.e. offences from the 60s, 70s, 80s) only now coming to light and being reported so high figures there doesn't mean you're likely to suffer sexual assault nowadays.
So in 2011, the US had a debt to GDP ratio of 100%. It had a debt of about $14tn and it made $14tn in a year, so, if it dedicated all it's income that year to paying off debt it could've cleared it's debt in a single year.
In practice though you can't do that as you have to pay your military, police, fix roads, and so on. A debt to GDP ratio of 50% would've meant it could pay off it's debt in half a year.
A negative debt to GDP ratio means you have no debt, and you're putting whatever percentage of your income into your savings account (or whatever - probably a sovereign wealth fund or something).
So Swedish GDP is about $400bn per year IIRC, and if they're putting what, 18% I think you said of that into savings each year it means they're putting $72bn a year into their piggy bank.
In contrast at 80% debt to GDP ratio it'll take the US 8 years to pay off it's debt if it pays even 10% of it's GDP each year towards that (and spends the other 90% of it's GDP on wars, Tea Parties and Obamacares or whatever the fuck it likes to get upto nowadays).
Malware filters aren't the only type of filters. Look up content filters.
Much of the most prominent content filtering software around will block some sites of a category but not all of them.
But as I said that's not the only issue, there's still the question of whether "licensed" sites provide the same coverage of songs as the combination of non-licensed sites.
The point is simply that reducing the number of lyric sites reduces the ability of people to find a product. Licensed sites may mitigate that to some degree but they wont make it a non-issue unless they're both as complete and always fully searchable which isn't the case.
Slashdot Mirror
Well it was being reported prior to launch by a decent number of people with review units, and folks who had won consoles pre-release. Given that there were a widely reported bunch of failed consoles before mainstream release when the sample size was drastically smaller I'd wager this is probably above the industry standard failure rate if nothing else.
"Obviously there were things that could have been done better, but claiming that someone is at fault for not engineering the plant to handle a massive tsunami is a bit over the top."
In an area known for massive tsunamis and with a historical case of equal magnitude earthquakes? No it's not.
Just because coal plants wouldn't have survived doesn't make it okay, coal wouldn't have released the levels of radiation. What would've made sense is to either bolster them for the magnitude of Earthquakes known possible in the region (i.e. 9.0+ instead of the 8 they planned them for) build tsunami defences as large as you were told to because of the precise event that happened rather than ignore the advice you were given and only build for lower walls, or perhaps more sensibly, just don't build a nuclear reactor full stop, there are plenty of other spots they could've placed it but of course politics of jobs and cost was put above safety and now they're paying the price.
If you take a gamble, you can't expect sympathy if you lose, and they did exactly this.
Nonsense. If a magnitude 9.0 earthquake is even a possibility in an area that's geologically susceptible to earthquakes then you need to cater to that possibility, if you don't you're simply asking for it when it does happen - this very event highlights that fact. It's not like it was even unprecedented, there are records of a similar magnitude earthquake in pretty much the exact same area, so effectively they must've said, oh well, it was 1000 years ago last time so it'll never happen again. Can we add that to the list of famous last words?
I don't know what the relevance of your reference to property damage is, of course property damage is going to increase if an event hits a densely populated urbanised nation than earthquakes that have hit less densely populated or non-urbanised nations, and of course property damage is going to be higher over time, for the simple fact there's an increase in development of property. That doesn't in any way imply the event was completely unprecedented, it only tells us that the Earthquake hit an area that was more densely populated with more buildings susceptible to earthquakes than areas that have been hit in the past. This says nothing about how likely the event is, only how poorly planned the area was for the possible events that were known to be possible in the area.
They played a game of risk with something you shouldn't play risk with and lost - you can't excuse the gambler for gambling all his money away just because he won once or twice before. Fukushima was entirely avoidable.
Countries like Germany and the UK don't suffer 80ft Tsunamis and magnitude 9 earthquakes, Japan does. That alone was reason enough for them to have put a bit more effort into protecting them than the UK or Germany need to.
They ran a dangerously unsafe reactor, protected to a size of tsunami and magnitude earthquake less than is possible in the area, and then completely and utterly fucked up the aftermath.
Now following that they want to make the whole situation worse by not doing as much to reduce CO2 emissions, which don't just contribute to global warming but go hand in hand with burning of fossil fuels that have been linked to increased incidences of things like asthma and other illnesses.
I don't blame all the Japanese of course because I'm sure many as dismayed at this new decision by their leadership, but this is just a classic case of taking a bad situation, and making it even worse.
There's no escaping the fact that this whole situation exists because of complete and utter ineptitude throughout. Fukushima shouldn't have even happened if they at least had a sane policy on both ageing nuclear reactors, and the protection of them against natural disasters. Even if it happened anyway for some other reason it could've still been mitigated by better post-disaster planning.
Of course, pedantically everything is natural.
But in this context we're talking in the sense of human caused vs. non-human caused which isn't an uncommon use of the term natural vs. unnatural.
Yes, I'm well aware that he stated that, but it doesn't mean he can't get access to the data again if he wanted to, if he doesn't actually still have it anyway.
I doubt for even an absolute second that he actually relinquished all methods of being able to access it, possibly leaving a copy with a friend, or on a server somewhere. Hell, by the sounds of it the last Wikileaks 400gb insurance dump is exactly that data so he presumably knows the key and could hence probably just as well download it if he wants to.
At worst it's likely he isn't carrying it on his person so that he had plausible deniability with the Russians and Chinese that he didn't have access to the data.
Even if he really doesn't have a copy stored somewhere I'm short a quick phonecall to Greenwald would suffice.
"While it's true that the decline button is always visible, making it appear greyed-out and away from the Accept button is not exactly clear (and possibly deceptive)."
This raises an intriguing point. What's the difference between phishing e-mails, malware attachments, or ads that used to install things like Bonsai buddy by throwing up pretend warning messages and such?
In each case the UI has been manipulated to try and make me install something I don't want and that to me is detrimental to my computing experience, and all these examples above have been deemed to be illegal. How does SF not also break the law for doing the exact same thing? just because of historic reputation? does that somehow give you a get out of jail free card?
Only to selected media outlets, and the fact they've been drip feeding is the exact point. He still has the option of an all out dump to everyone if he feels the NSA is hijacking the agenda from the select few media outlets that are only dripping very slowly.
I wouldn't say Nature 0. If you factor in every natural disaster ever, every death due to disease, and every death from poisoning by natures more dangerous fruits etc. I'd wager Nature has a pretty decent lead on us.
Right but there's still a risk to the NSA's strategy, that being that if Snowden feels the NSA has hijacked the agenda, he just dumps the whole lot and let's the press have a field day.
The press loves scandal, scandals are going to get far more press time than wishy-washy nonsense statements direct from the NSA.
So if the NSA is going to do this they're going to have to be careful they don't piss Snowden off too much by completely and utterly lying about their activities else it may backfire completely and they may see a release that was more unrestrained than it otherwise would have been.
Fraud, damage to reputation, loss of business.
These all sound like more fruitful avenues than pursuing a trademark violation.
Yes, very often.
Which implies, not always.
Which is kind of the GP's point.
But there aren't reduced prices, since Amazon put the likes of Borders out of business it's book prices have become much more expensive.
It's a key part the problem, because Amazon engages in excessive tax avoidance, even those business that engage minor tax avoidance are outcompeted by it and when Amazon has seized a market because it's put the other major players out of business it just ups it's prices to whatever it wants.
This is precisely why France is putting protections in place for independent book retailers, and why Apple went to the extreme of pursuing a stupidly risky tactic of forming a price fixing cartel with the publishers.
Amazon is ruthless for putting others out of business by out competing them on price, then drastically upping prices when it controls the market, something it can largely only be successful at precisely because it pays no tax. It's nonsense to think that is ever going to be anything other than a net drain. If it did the same but managed to do so whilst paying tax then it'd at least be doing something to outweigh it's destruction of competition, but destroying competition, resulting in increased prices due to decreased choice, whilst also paying no tax can't be anything other than a net negative to society.
No you're not.
He's just saying that if a company does not exist for the betterment of society in general, then there's no point letting it exist at all.
This policy in fact aids capitalism, because it means companies must compete on the merits of their product, rather than their ability to find loopholes in the law.
For example, Amazon in the UK basically pays no tax but it does get the benefit of UK educated works and does get to use UK roads causing wear and tear and the publicly subsidised postal network. This makes it a net drain on society (the jobs it creates and the taxes paid on those wages don't make up for it's overall cost to society) meaning it's subsidised by the public which is anti-capitalist and so at that point the public should have the right to have the company shut down if it's not willing to pay it's own way or can't compete on it's merits without this kind of indirect subsidy.
Well in this case, apparently not.
I think that's precisely why Apple is being investigated here, what's mere avoidance in other countries sounds like it may well be evasion in Italy.
Well VS2013 gives you the option of signing up to an account when you first load it so I'm guessing you're probably right, it's probably just integration.
Add teeth to the constitution is a meaningless act if those teeth are blunted by lack of feasibility of enforcement of whatever teeth you want to add in. It's already the case that your government is breaking the law by breaching the constitution because it's not enforced either because of a corrupt politically appointed judiciary or because of effective use of weasel words and interpretations of the law that make literally zero sense (sexual relations that aren't, but actually were).
What you actually need is a citizenship with the balls to hold it's government to account, coupled with a push for electoral reform to rework your entire electoral funding laws and push for a voting system that is more proportional and then the intelligence amongst your populace to vote for something other than the red or blue team.
The constitution is an irrelevant piece of script until you alter the hierarchy of power because whatever you get put into it, or to defend it will still continue to be ignored no matter how high the penalties. For higher penalties to matter you need a judiciary entirely independent on politics to enforce it, and you need a government with the accountability to not say "We broke the law and fuck you!" each time it does so. One of the best ways of enforcing accountability is with an electoral system that encourages coalition governments, because then all it takes is the majority party to push through something unpopular and a coalition partner to pull out making the government fall apart and force a new election because of that. The common argument against this (as put forward by David Cameron in the UK when arguing against electoral reform) is that it results in backroom deals (though he then went on to form a coalition) and perhaps it does, but it's still better than a minority dictating law against a majority and people will remember the effects of those backroom deals and just not vote for the parties who engineered them next time.
Here in the UK we've got the first coalition in decades and it's far far from perfect, but it's still way better than it would've been as a purely Conservative government, and it's still far better than a purely Labour government was and would have been. Nick Clegg fucked up royally with tuition fees allowing them to be charged at £9k but that's still better than the Tories wanted (their recommendation was £12k). It also means we didn't have the IMP pushed through which both a purely Labour and purely Conservative government both said they'd do. It's pretty clear that coalitions drastically improve things and move things away from the extremes which is the fundamental problem with US politics - it's dominated by extremists.
So change the constitution or don't, it doesn't matter either way, in fact it doesn't even matter that it exists until you deal with the core problem - complete lack of accountability at the top. What you need above absolutely anything else is electoral reform on the agenda both in terms of the way votes result in politicians being selected, and the way political funding and so forth are handled. Until you have that you'll be stuck with extremists fighting extremists with both parties shitting on the constitution and ignoring any legal repercussions they should in theory face.
The problem is when do you give them the benefit of the doubt?
I've used AMD cards on and off over the years for well over a decade and the problem has always been that each time I've heard someone say what you just did and tried them it's simply not been true.
Maybe you're right this time, but given how many times I've been bitten it's hard to have any faith in such statements.
My friend uses AMD and is always whining about problems with his cards, especially when it comes to Eyefinity stuff so I'm loathe to believe what you say is true even now, especially when we've also had numerous reports and news stories of frame dropping issues also.
FWIW I first came to realise there was a general and wide ranging issue with AMD drivers back in about 2003 when I was still doing some tech support on a network of over 5000 systems with a wide ranging set of graphics cards between Intel, AMD, and nVidia. That's a pretty large sample size and AMD graphics issues were a couple of orders of magnitude more prominent than any of the others so there has definitely historically been an issue. When I've always had more issues with AMD cards at home (i.e. when laptops I've bought have come with AMD cards) I've just found it difficult to lose that perception - my personal sample sizes haven't of course been as large, so maybe me and my friends have just been insanely unlucky in picking the odd cards with bad drivers but I'm more prone to believing that it's just that AMD has never really got to grips with it's drivers, even now.
But even if they have sorted their fundamental issues with their driver development regime, it's going to take quite some time for them to regain the trust of many people like me - at least a few years without any reports of widespread driver issues.
If you have to use more than a paragraph to explain it, it's certainly not simple. So the first number is generation but how do we know what generation we're on? You say we're on generation 2 and that's fine, but there's more than 2 generations of graphics card. Is this 2nd generation card better than the 5th or whatever generation card I bought last year before the new naming scheme?
What relation does _70 have to 1080p, 60fps exactly? I get that
Why would you have full part and half part cards, what exactly is the fucking point of that? If I want something cheaper wouldn't I want a full part card albeit at a lower spec?
Simple would be something along the lines of:
AMD 2013 Edition Budget graphics card
AMD 2013 Edition Standard graphics card
AMD 2013 Edition High End graphics card
You know what level you're buying in at, and you know how new it is. If you want detailed specs, you can get them off the box. I go into the shop, and buy the latest edition that fits into my budget. Really not difficult. If enthusiasts still want their buzzwords they can just abbreviate to AMD '13B for budget, AMD '13S for standard, AMD '13H for high end or whatever.
The bonus part is that you don't have to keep changing your naming system every few years either (which is the reason it's stupid that my GeForce 280 was higher specced than my GeForce 7950 - why would a lower number be better, except when it's not because a 680 or whatever is better than both even though it's a lower number than one, and higher than the other)
If you still want to sell those that haven't passed quality control (presumably the binned ones you refer to then) just suffix the names with "substandard" or whatever or just make those the budget pile.
Really, graphics card naming is either a complete and utter marketing failure, or a clever ploy into tricking people into spending more money by buying the wrong thing. I'm really not sure which, but it's certainly not sensible, sane, smart, or helpful to the consumer.
PC hardware is one of the only things I have to genuinely research for quite some time to figure out what the fuck I'm buying or need to buy when I do buy it every few years. It's fine if you're constantly upgrading your PC but I grew out of that. If I'm buying a washing machine or TV I may lookup reviews, but that's about it - I certainly don't need in depth comparisons that show contradictions between even a company's own products (why is a high end last gen often better than a new low end next gen, but still cheaper? why not just make the new low end next gen the old high end last gen in the first place?).
I notice in another post btw, you said to someone else to come up with a naming convention that covers 7 cards or whatever every year but that's part the problem - they don't need 7 cards every year.
I'm sure most people could memorise all the different naming conventions - as you say it's not difficult when you've done so, but to an outsider who hasn't spent hours learning about it all the fact is most people also have better things to do with their lives.
Even here in the UK I've never seen use of the word "practise", ever.
So it's obviously a form of the word that's basically died a death. Literally everyone just uses the word "practice" in both cases.
There's no point being pedantic about a language rule that no one on Earth gives a shit about because it offers exactly zero benefit to society.
99.9999% of the population in the UK would think "LOL he's misspelt practice" rather than "Oh, look at his awesome and correct usage of practice/practise".
And that's okay. Because languages evolve.
Where else do you propose your drone pilots learn to fly the drones? Over some other nation's heads?
They're your drones, stick to learning to fly (and crash) them over your own territory thanks.
"Overall crime rate in UK and Germany (far better comparison to the US than Sweden) are higher than in the US."
Not true any more. This idea was based on data from over a decade ago. Nowadays the UK is far more peaceful than the US, and seems to have the lowest levels of crime it's possibly ever had in modern history. It's now one of the more peaceful nations in Europe and Europe on average does much better than the US:
http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-24566994
Even where the UK does have high figures (i.e. sexual offences) a lot of that is historical too (i.e. offences from the 60s, 70s, 80s) only now coming to light and being reported so high figures there doesn't mean you're likely to suffer sexual assault nowadays.
So in 2011, the US had a debt to GDP ratio of 100%. It had a debt of about $14tn and it made $14tn in a year, so, if it dedicated all it's income that year to paying off debt it could've cleared it's debt in a single year.
In practice though you can't do that as you have to pay your military, police, fix roads, and so on. A debt to GDP ratio of 50% would've meant it could pay off it's debt in half a year.
A negative debt to GDP ratio means you have no debt, and you're putting whatever percentage of your income into your savings account (or whatever - probably a sovereign wealth fund or something).
So Swedish GDP is about $400bn per year IIRC, and if they're putting what, 18% I think you said of that into savings each year it means they're putting $72bn a year into their piggy bank.
In contrast at 80% debt to GDP ratio it'll take the US 8 years to pay off it's debt if it pays even 10% of it's GDP each year towards that (and spends the other 90% of it's GDP on wars, Tea Parties and Obamacares or whatever the fuck it likes to get upto nowadays).
Malware filters aren't the only type of filters. Look up content filters.
Much of the most prominent content filtering software around will block some sites of a category but not all of them.
But as I said that's not the only issue, there's still the question of whether "licensed" sites provide the same coverage of songs as the combination of non-licensed sites.
The point is simply that reducing the number of lyric sites reduces the ability of people to find a product. Licensed sites may mitigate that to some degree but they wont make it a non-issue unless they're both as complete and always fully searchable which isn't the case.