JDShu

for me, D2 is the better game in that it is fun and addictive to play, while D1 is much more atmospheric.

Unless I'm misunderstanding your point, I think it still works out equitably regardless of the existence of a VAT system.

According to the video, yes, in addition to online play.

> In this case, China shouldn't have had any trouble getting Hong Kong authorities to arrest and extradite this person, so it doesn't seem like the same thing.

Given the current political situation in Hong Kong, this may not be a valid assumption.

I'd be curious about Oil and Gas. I'm familiar with the other fields, but that one seems to require even less training for around the same amount of money. Or if you get into petroleum engineering - I remember in college that was known as the profession with the highest salary straight out of school.

As an aside, what happened to makr.io? The URL seems to go to something completely different.

Hah imagine taking over not just a house but the whole world!

Red Hat, by the way, deliberately obscured their kernel code in order to stop Oracle from simply providing support for Red Hat code. Probably the correct business move, but also probably against the spirit of FOSS.

http://www.h-online.com/open/news/item/Controversy-surrounds...

Well they're literally occupying Central, the financial district, aka Hong Kong's Wall Street.

Two thing come to mind as a starting point: Negotiation and focusing on building Hong Kong's economy.

Negotiation: The truth is, HK politics is very much like American politics. It consists of people blocking any progress on anything because the two sides are so deeply divided. Instead, I suggest making an honest effort to negotiate and take things step by step. For example, the central issue to the protests - the universal suffrage framework described in the Basic Law is strictly better than the current system. Accepting it while signaling that something even better is desired and will continue to be brought up would have been more productive. (Note that the whitepaper came out after the threat to occupy central).

Economy - One of the subtexts of the whole issue is Hong Kong's decreasing relevance in relation to China and indeed on the world stage. The stronger HK is, the more leverage HK has. Instead, real wages are barely increasing, rent continues to skyrocket, and there is basically no economy besides finance - and in that HK's competitive advantage shrinks every year. Instead of saying things like "we are willing to sacrifice the economy if it gives us true democracy", I think it should be accepted that destroying the economy is not likely going to get democrats what they want, and that a better economy would a) free up more people to be able to worry about politics rather than just putting food on the table, and b) make China think harder about killing the golden goose.

Occupy Wallstreet was a game of brinksmanship, but unfortunately that only works when both sides have something to lose. China has nothing to lose today.

In my opinion, that's a very good question and one that demonstrators rarely think about. Frankly, and until somebody convinces me otherwise, I think that Occupy Central was and is a strategic failure if the end goal is gain a better form of democracy in Hong Kong. China has shown time and again that it will not back down when things get physical, and in for example, the case of Tiananmen square, the government got more paranoid.

So rationally, I don't think it's a good move by the pan-democrats, as it essentially shuts down any possibilities of negotiation - the pan-democrats have very little leverage now that they've already "done their worst".

On the other hand, protests are not about strategy and rationality. People strongly believe in their ideals and they want to do something rather than sit around waiting for negotiations that may or may not happen. I can understand that which is why I'm not as quick to criticize the protesters as many in HK would.

Those really aren't examples of libertarian ideology.

I was very surprised when I found this out. It makes sense though - just like in any negotiation, you don't start with what you're willing to settle for, you start with what you want.

In general, there are always two sides to the coin. Where from an American perspective you see Chinese aggression outwards, if you flip the arrows on the map around, you might notice that from a Chinese perspective, the US is aggressively boxing China in.

As always, wikipedia is a good start.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Antitrust_law_theory

Could you elaborate on the level for programs like these? I am familiar with a kid who was writing proofs regarding tensors (this is how it was described to me, my own math skills are extremely minimal in comparison) in the 5th grade. His father is worried about his social life going forward while wanting to nurture his talent. The kid was sent to the Johns Hopkins Center for Talented Youth for a summer which he apparently found really boring. I think he is actually being tutored by a professor at a local university now, but I wonder if he'd find peers of his own age group and ability level at these programs?

No.

It's also worth mentioning that this behavior exists on OS X as well.

Gross cost is basically irrelevant when you are talking about pricing in a perfect competition. The point is that producers cannot set their price because if they set it any higher, somebody else will undercut them.

I think the correct mainstream economic interpretation is that games are highly differentiated, meaning that no game can completely undercut another game because they are never the same. This means that the perfect competition model and argument do not apply and thus MC != MR in the game industry.

HoMM is not a dead franchise - 6 was released in 2012, though perhaps not with the same kind of cultural impact as the first 3 (or 4 depending on who you ask) games since the studio change.

To take two examples, Blackboard costs at least in the hundreds of thousands (maybe a few orders of magnitude more) while an individual license of matlab is 3000, so perhaps with a group purchase it's more like 1000 per student? Schools also tend to spend a great deal on their course registration systems and perhaps hire external consultants to develop and maintain them. Those are just two examples, the list goes on for all the services the university provides.

I also want to note that often the administrators have to ok so many contracts (which they have no expertise in) and there are so many options, that inevitably the university ends up paying for stuff that nobody uses. At least in my last school, it was apparent that there were many sources of waste.

I personally think it's university administration and large recurring service contracts.

I always thought this was from George Carlin on driving?

'Have you ever noticed that anybody driving slower than you is an idiot, and anyone going faster than you is a maniac?'

Those are not (supposed to be) paid through our income taxes, that's why we get taxed medicare and social security separately. The "vast majority" description does apply if you look at non-discretionary spending.

Edit: I suppose it could be argued that money that goes to the military doesn't directly mean funding wars. We have bases all over the world after all.

Nobody said that side effects aren't useful, as Rich Hickey would be the first to remind you. Clojure has full support for side effects and mutable data structures if you need it for efficiency. The point is that in Clojure, there are easy and idiomatic ways to control complexity by minimizing side effects and use of mutability.

China is not Communist... maybe your question is can be restated as if China will adopt democratic system eventually? I personally believe the answer to that is that is has to, and yes it will probably be more stable compared to the collapse of the Soviet Union - China has that, and it's own history of revolutions, as a reference.

If you make that comparison, I would say Singapore has been a much more successful economy.

Hong Kong is stuck in it's role as a financial center, of which it's competitive advantage is getting eroded. Plus that 'competitive advantage' really boils down to knowing how to speak English and having extremely low wages for a developed economy.

On the other hand, Singapore has successfully transitioned from being a financial center to the technological capital of East Asia. Something that the Hong Kong government desperately wants to do, but continues to fail at. And I am not even going to go into the current political storm.

Hong Kong is probably the more interesting city (I'm biased of course, having lived there for years and consider it my home away from home away from home) but out of the HK-Singapore rivalry, I think Singapore has the upper hand.

/rant

RMS does not think that getting paid for what you wrote is a bad thing. His ideal makes it difficult or impractical for this to happen, but he has stressed repeatedly that being paid is not a problem.

Does that graph take into account PPP at all? It doesn't sound like it from the description in the article.

I have a similar script running and observed the same thing. Yesterday I thought that they were well on track towards making the goal, but it seems that the one day only deal heavily skewed pledges towards the first day compared to the average crowdfunded project:

http://www.kickstarter.com/blog/trends-in-pricing-and-durati...

Based on the %time vs %backing chart, the second day usually secures around the same amount of funding as the first day. However in the case of the Ubuntu Edge, it received above average percentage backing on the first day, but has already hit the trough.

Being in HK for the summer, I honestly don't get the impression that anybody here cares about this particular issue.