>Just look at the USSR: they had tons of bombs, and their government was toppled, from within.
I wouldn't use the word "toppled" in the case of the fall of the USSR. Nobody actively contributed to its fall with the desire of making it fall. The factors that caused its fall aren't even comparable to anything that would affect dictatorships like NK.
In fact it is far more comparable to empires of old. Like Napoleon's empire, the roman empire and so on.
The USSR held territories which hated the guts of the people and culture that governed them, Russia.
When Gorbachev led reforms to give more freedoms to the people, that allowed the expression of nationalism throughout the occupied territories of the USSR "empire". Once all those territories started using their freedom of speech to rally around ideas like being different from Russians and needing to form their own nation, the USSR was bound to cease to exist. Russia, the main core of the USSR, is still more of a dictatorship than a democracy, by the way. It is arguable that the idea of a dictatorship was never really toppled in the mainland of the USSR. The fall of the USSR as a system of governance was merely the loss of colonized land.
North Korea doesn't have any factor of the kind. The government will only change if its rulers want it to change. It's doubtful a starving peasant revolt could do anything.
>Sorry, then why has the US been involved in a major war every ten years since WW2?
Because those countries didn't have nukes. Nukes create peace for those who own them, not those who don't. North Korea will never be invaded by the US as long as they have nukes.
Same thing for Pakistan. It will not see the same fate as Afghanistan, Iraq, Syria, Lybia.. because it has nukes.
Western Europe knows peace because its two strongest powers are nuclear powers (United Kingdom, France), while the remaining power, Germany, kept being pushed into proving it has become inoffensive such as signing a treaty prohibiting it from building nuclear weapons. There can be no war in Western Europe territory as long as the UK, France and the US don't want war.
The last nail in the coffin to prove that the European Union is a paper tiger that has nothing to do with the absence of war in the continent is the invasion of Ukraine by Russia. Nobody cared enough for Ukraine's fate to defend it and so Russia took whatever piece it wanted from it.
The EU didn't end war in Europe. Nuclear powers ended war in -WESTERN- Europe, which is not all of Europe. It would be nice to stop forgetting that there's other countries to the east of Germany and Switzerland. Considering the annexation of Crimea, the idea that there's a guaranteed peace is merely a dream, not a reality.
The biggest guarantor of Germany not invading France again is that France has nuclear bombs and no one ever invaded a country that has the nuclear bomb, which is why people are panicking at the idea of NK having it because it would be impossible to topple their dictatorship and interfere if they had the threat of the bomb.
> Some point to NATO as far more significant a guarantor of peace than the EU
NATO has never been a deterrent but was used after the fact when conflicts just had to come about. Like the Kosovo War which involved factions that didn't have the mushroom assured mutual destruction.
> I full heartedly believe this institution played a major role in retaining the piece after World War 2.
Not this canard again.
Countries that have known peace within their homeland territory post WW2 were countries that either owned nuclear weapons, or befriended a power that owned nuclear weapons.
The EU has nothing to do with peace within continental Europe. In fact it could NOT stop extremely bloody conflicts like the Kosovo War from happening. But I guess 1998 is ancient history?
The nuclear bomb is the true peace maker. It's what made the US and USSR so frightened of even the possibility of a conflict between each other.
Propaganda organs like Russia Today already have versions translated in various European languages. They would be absolutely delighted to be the last and only piece of internet news to be available on google.
Europe is shooting itself on the foot as always.
>I really hope that you guys stop indulging your blood lust by invading other countries and killing millions of innocents to make profits for your munitions industry and you as a country become less bloodthirsty
That's a sentiment a lot of us share about America though. You seem to think Americans are the only people criticizing other countries?
Stereotypes aren't born in a vacuum. Americans keep putting worse people in power, the latest of which being Trump. Indian outsourcing is troublesome to work with. And my country, France, has a problematic economy and we have a hard time keeping talent here instead of fleeing for better paying countries.
All places have their issues. You don't make issues disappear by acting like they don't exist or focusing on the minority that behaves differently.
I am french and two of my friends left for the US because very large companies I won't name made them offers that are impossible to match in Europe.
There is no lack of produced talents here, they just won't stay because they don't get paid their true market value.
> One of the differences is that it doesn't even have an option to disable updates
Even if you could disable updates it doesn't matter because Skype is a centralized client-server architecture under Microsoft and I've personally witnessed friends who wondered why they couldn't use skype anymore on their computer because they had an old version installed of the desktop client and it couldn't connect to the servers anymore. Past a certain amount of time, Microsoft invalidates old versions and render them unable to connect. Whether it's by changing the protocol or just banning their ability to pair, I don't know, it's an implementation detail, the intent remains the same : update, update, update.
From that point of view of how it works in the real world, the RT version is an improvement over the desktop client because it's able to always remain updated without having to ask for user consent. There are too many users who don't say yes to updates and then ask why the software is broken and won't work later and I bet it has been a pain for people who work in the support side of Skype. The average user does not understand why the software stops working.
American corporatism and singular definition of 'freedom of speech' as being 'the amendment' really polluted the well of any discussion of the topic on English-speaking platforms.
We, in Europe, have limited freedom of speech. You can't do things like denying the holocaust. But that doesn't mean we don't recognize the concept of freedom of speech, and that we don't have discussion platforms that feature freedom of speech -within the limits of our laws-. Censorship is still censorship, even when it's done by a corporation.
Listening to americans there can be no debate as to whether censorship even exists if it's done by a corporation because corporation are free to do anything and we shouldn't even debate what they do and whether we should boycott a place and move onto something else because corporations can do no wrong and exerting individual judgement, opinion, and sharing them, encouraging the growth of freer online platforms and the likes is heavily discouraged. No, everything has to do with the law and if the law doesn't call it bad then it's not bad and it shouldn't be judged as bad. That worship of the law and constitution as the only sacred values in human societies is disgusting.
>One may not park a car _anywhere_. There are typically laws dictating when, where, and for how long. Whether the laws are respected or enforced are a different matter.
The law is broken so often it might as well not exist AT all, at least in my country.
Vigilantes here have started to take pictures of cars that are "parked like shit" to shame the drivers publicly because the law has been insufficient, the punishments not applied often enough or not harsh enough to truly dissuade car drivers from not parking on a sidewalk, bikelane, in front of a shop or even at times directly on a part of a road...
http://www.garecommeunemerde.fr/gcum/galerie/
The website gallery isn't showing a tiny minority. I see examples of this every day as soon as I leave my home.
No you don't.
I'm French, I dropped out of school at 16 and picked up English later in life without using any formal method of learning. I started by memorizing enough vocabulary to read simpler English, after which I began reading popular fiction and watched movies with subtitles (in English) until it clicked. My understanding of the language is more based on intuition (sheer memorization of exposure to it through cultural mediums) than on memorizing the grammar rules book. The brain makes the connections as to what seems correct or not based on patterns. I don't think my skills are good enough to write literature but surely communication isn't a problem.
Duolingo didn't exist at the time, but I believe it would have helped me learn faster considering the way it introduces languages is quite similar to how I started learning and it does so in a more interactive, fun manner.
>The cynic in me suspects that data science for a game company will involve mostly marketing research, however.
Actually, there's a lot of it involved in game design. In the case of MMORPG, what to develop next as extensions or monthly content packs. In the case of single player games, feedback on building sequels. A lot of game developers these days put effort into gathering all sorts of telemetry from their games, RPG developer Bioware for example knows how many hours the average player spent on Mass Effect games, how many finished the game, how many made a customized character vs how many used the default face, how many played a female character versus male, how many imported saves from the previous games, which quests were completed and which were skipped, how much of the dialogue was skipped and many other things that are used to understand what to focus on for their next games. And it's all on a solo RPG, so they had to deliberately add some online analytics reporting functionality and are not just using stats that was lying around on an online game server log.
Guild Wars 2's developer arenanet is employing a data scientist and economist, John Smith, to manage and keep control of the virtual economy in their MMORPG. He's also head of the analytics team which is the primary decision maker on what content is going to be cut and which is going to be developed in the future.
Marketing can be a part of it but more and more, analytics is getting to contribute in game development decisions.
>that obsessing about eating healthy food is considered a mental illness.
Mental illnesses, at least in present times, are defined and diagnosed when they are an impediment to functioning in a normal manner in society. A lot of people like to say, for example, that they "have OCD" but a psychiatrist would only diagnose you as having OCD if it cripples your life, not just if you have a mild obsession like double checking if you closed your door before leaving home.
In the case of something like orthorexia, it would be a mental illness when it reaches the point where you think of it for a large % of your days, that you would argue and get angry at people for not sharing your views on food, that you would get paranoid and be unable to participate at a family dinner and many other things that add up and make a person maladjusted in society. Can you really say she was not a mentally ill person ?
>"my car attacked by anti vegan animal business supporting criminals"
Her obsessions ran deep into paranoia that people who were not vegans were out to get her. This is the true face of mental illness. Let's not downplay the realities of it. Someone "obsessed with healthy food" as you put it can be more mentally ill and dysfunctioning in society than someone who's fat and eat fast food stuff on a daily basis. It all depends on how deep your obsession runs. The fat person might still be able to not think about food much of the day and function, work, have hobbies outside of food.
Photoshop + Lightroom cost 12 euros. The CS price you mention is for all the apps in the creative cloud, not just the raster image editing bit, so that's unfair to compare $50/month to "alternative to krita or gimp".
12 euros per month is just 2 euros more than many of us here pay for lots of entertainment, such as music streaming services. It's well worth every penny spent just to not have to deal with the horror that's GIMP's UI.
It's a lot cheaper to get access to Photoshop than it used to be before the monthly licensing scheme.
> I agree that GIMP is a Linux's Photoshop, not a Linux's MS Paint
Photoshop had massive, productivity boosting features like Adjustment Layers, since the 4th release, in 1996!! simple non destructive effects were added to the list with 5.0 in 1998. That's 20 years ago. In 20 years, almost every single serious tool for image manipulation has understood that non destructive editing is at the core of productivity. Krita has it. Photoshop almost always had it. Lightroom has it. Affinity Photos has it. Pixelmator has it. The venerable shareware Paintshop Pro, one of the first popular Photoshop clone, grew that feature. Picasa, a free (as in beer, not as in freedom) photo library management and quick photo editing tool that was immensely popular on Windows before Google dropped it, had fast non destructive image editing.
Editing anything in GIMP feels like a painful process that allows no mistake and every single process, even just drawing a damn circle (one that doesn't have heavy artifacts by the way), takes more clicks or keyboard shortcut presses than it ever should. I know it's free software developed on some hobby developer's free time but that does not make it immune from criticism. Just because something is free doesn't make it good or worth considering.
As a tool for producing content, the GIMP really is more linux's MS paint than photoshop. That's because Photoshop stopped being an overgrown paint-with-layers program since the 1996 release.
I still remember how it felt to use the 5.0 release of Photoshop as if it was yesterday's. If I had no choice but to use 20 years old Photoshop vs 2018 GIMP, I'd pick the 20 years old software.
> That's a pretty obvious clone of MS Word if I ever saw it. Say what you will about patents, but this is egregious copying and I don't think it's wrong of MS to defend themselves here.
If you think this shouldn't be allowed then MS office should have never existed either. Excel is an egregious theft of VisiCalc. Microsoft Word is blasphemous copying of MacWrite. Windows's main UI concepts were entirely stolen from other OSes.
I downgraded from an iPhone 5s to an Honor 8. Best decision I could have done. My Honor 8 is still as fast and snappy as it was on day 1. It doesn't take that long for iPhones to become sluggish. Been there, experienced that with the 3g and 5s.
I had to make room on my MBP SSD to install windows through bootcamp and bashed my head against a wall on the same issue. It took me half an hour to find the reason why so much of my hard drive wasn't available despite me having deleted almost all third party apps and personal data on my macOS partition. Time Machine does 'local backups' and there is NOWHERE in the user interface that fully explains the space they occupy and how to get rid of it. To delete those local backups you need to use the terminal program tmutil.
That gave me even more vindication for my move. Also, you really don't know how fast your hardware is until you've used something other than macOS on it. From booting the system to launching software.. everything is snappier now.
I'm not the person you were answering but I subscribe to similar utilitarian views and must say, if it wasn't shunned by society to the point of risking to take a beating, I wouldn't mind wearing a skirt in summer. In fact, I already do wear some plain beige skirts at home because I find them far more comfortable than pants and the airy feeling is nice in hot climates.
It's far too dangerous to wear a skirt outside as a man so I wouldn't do it. I as a person don't care much for clothing beyond physical well being/comfort/utility but society is very judging and a times very dangerous for certain choices.
I wouldn't use the word "toppled" in the case of the fall of the USSR. Nobody actively contributed to its fall with the desire of making it fall. The factors that caused its fall aren't even comparable to anything that would affect dictatorships like NK.
In fact it is far more comparable to empires of old. Like Napoleon's empire, the roman empire and so on. The USSR held territories which hated the guts of the people and culture that governed them, Russia. When Gorbachev led reforms to give more freedoms to the people, that allowed the expression of nationalism throughout the occupied territories of the USSR "empire". Once all those territories started using their freedom of speech to rally around ideas like being different from Russians and needing to form their own nation, the USSR was bound to cease to exist. Russia, the main core of the USSR, is still more of a dictatorship than a democracy, by the way. It is arguable that the idea of a dictatorship was never really toppled in the mainland of the USSR. The fall of the USSR as a system of governance was merely the loss of colonized land.
North Korea doesn't have any factor of the kind. The government will only change if its rulers want it to change. It's doubtful a starving peasant revolt could do anything.