DoveBrown

What good things can you be doing with my stored data that you don't need to run your service?

I'm not a climatologist but as I understand it when looking at the climate over the long scale there are cycles as the climate changes that are predictable by natural processes (including effects of the Earths orbit and co2 changes). Then from the 19th century the climate has been moving off the known path as understood by these cycles. The difference has been attributed to humans. The worry is that when you put the cyclic natural of climate change together with the human caused climate change then what you may end up with is a climate which is not conducive to food productive for the human population.

And health care was a lot worse in the 1960s and before. Let's not pretend that before the 1960s were some golden age. In 1965 infant mortality was 24.7 deaths per live births, in 2016 it was 4.3.

Sources: 1965 number from: https://www.cdc.gov/nchs/data/series/sr_20/sr20_020acc.pdf 2016 number from: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_infant_an...

From your link: "These increases in greenhouse gas concentrations and their marked rate of change are largely attributable to human activities since the Industrial Revolution (1800)." and "Data for the past 2000 years show that the atmospheric concentrations of CO2, CH4, and N2O – three important long-lived greenhouse gases – have increased substantially since about 1750."

I don't think your link supports the statement "the weaking started well before the industrial revolution."

A reason to not take on your profit is that your "cost of sales" can be a pretty nebulous concept. How much of your 99M costs is licensing to entities you control in other jurisdictions?

I understand why it is fairer have it be profit, but profit in the modern accounting world seems to be a strange thing. A good accountant can make your profit be anything you like, so it doesn't make sense to tax based on the idea that company has bad accountants. Generally it is harder for accountants to change revenue figures (other than defer into different years).

The rules lawyering as to what is a legitimate cost is huge.

I really don't understand why corporations are taxed on profit. It produces weird effects such as where a company is better off paying interest on debt rather than dividends on stock.

Having the tax be payable on revenue of a corporation in that jurisdiction rather than profit would be simpler to understand, easier to administrate and avoid the current tax avoidance we have have.

> If graphics is not the biggest issue, what is then in your opinion?

Graphics is the biggest issue, but the issue isn't at the API level. It's in the driver and hardware differences below that layer.

The "tax" as you call it, comes mostly from the hardware drivers leaking through the abstraction. Part of this is AAA game developers fault since they are attempting to use all the GPU with edge-case tricks to eke out more performance.

I agree that cost is a consideration of doing the port. From my experience what renderering API is used at the bottom is a very small factor in that cost calculation.

I think where we disagree is that I don't think of the lower level API as being much of a lock in. The better graphic programmers I know have pretty extensive experience of the various flavors of DirectX and OpenGL. The general principles are the same and good programmers move between them easily.

I disagree with the characterisation that internal engines are less cross platform because of lock-in, the big publishers don't care about lock-in. It's not part of the calculus in deciding whether to support a platform or not.

A port of a game is more than changing the low-level APIs used to control the hardware. It's the hardware of the platfrom the decides the complexity of producing the port.

Linux is a special case because it's the same hardware as a the Windows. Your market is people who want to play the game but aren't dual booting. Most of the issues with producing your port are going to come down to driver incompatibilities and the fact that every Linux system is set up a little bit differently (the reason Blizzard never released their native Linux WoW client[1]). It's not a big market and there are loads of edge cases.

For big publishers and AAA development, they're not looking to break even or make a small profit. They need to see multiples of return on their money or they aren't going to do it. Using a shim is cheap and doesn't hurt sales enough to matter to them.

[1] https://www.phoronix.com/scan.php?page=news_item&px=OTA0NQ

Sure, there is effort involved, but from my point of view it's a small one (a couple of man months on a project with 50+ coders). I'm going to have to make adjustments between the platforms because the hardware is different. Even on a DirectX PC, you can often have a lot of differences between the rendering scene for Nvidia, AMD and Integrated Intel gpus.

Don't know exactly what issues Everspace had with the UE4, but you want to have a fun night go out with some Epic licensees and get them to tell you war stories of issues they have had when they tried to do something which Epic hadn't done in their games. You're paying Epic for the "battle testing" and often they didn't fight those battles.

Part of the reason I left the games industry is that once you work at studio with an internal engine it is extremely frustrating to work on AAA games without the freedom to walk over to the engine programmer and get them to move the engine closer to what you need.

It's trivial in the sense that it's low technical risk. I've not worked in the games for a while. At one company with an inhouse engine the rendering backend was initially DirectX9 written mostly by one person. He then implemented the Xbox360 backend. Another person did the backend for PS3 (OpenGL based). Don't have the exact timings it was ten years ago, but after the initial material, geometry lighting pipeline was done (and that's independent from the backend), the engine guy was never on the critical path.

They added Wii, DirectX10, iOS and Android backends while I was there. None of these were ever considered risky and none had more than one person working on it. Each console/platform has it's own quirks in how to optimise the scene for rendering but the having something rendering on screen is pretty much trivial once you have the machinery in place.

I can't speak for Epic, they are making an engine for every possible game and every possible rendering scene which is a harder problem than what we were doing. But the rendering backend isn't the hard part.

There is a value to having competition. My guess that if it works out and Nvidia and AMD have it implemented on silicon, then they will push to have those features accessible through a Vulkan interface.

I love open standards as much as the next guy but for something like this where the utility is still an open question, I'd rather than some just makes an implementation for just their technology. The alternative is that your open standard is full of half baked experiments and trimming a standard is a huge pain.

Why do providers accept a loss doing treatments for Medicare?

If it's a loss per patient, it's a loss and you'll go out of business. What is the advantage for the provider to do any Medicare work?

I'd personally prefer if we ameliorated your paid tax so that the rate applied over your entire lifetime earnings. That way you could use the same progressive rate but windfall years aren't a special case and lean years are an example of failing to optimise your taxes. You could even have the government refund tax if the windfall event was a once off.

Extra bonus you can get rid of many loophole taxes (like Capital Gains and Inheritance taxes) since these feel unfair to take on a single year basis.

If you're talking about the Irish referendum's on Lisbon, it wasn't a vote until you said yes. The Irish initially voted no for many reasons but I can tell you that my parents voted no on the first one because they felt they didn't understand why it was needed and weren't sure what the implications of it were.

After the No vote, the government made a much larger effort to explain to the public what Lisbon did and they got guarantees from the EU as to interpretation of wording.

I think you could kuschku's suggestion that you need to get the population of each state on board before progressing. The turnout for the 2nd vote on Lisbon (which was a yes) went up to 59% from 53%. Looking at the vote from outside, it definitely seemed like people were much more engaged in the second vote than they were in the first.

I don't know why repeated votes would be undemocratic. There is absolutely no suggestion that the second vote was fraudulent. You're allowed to ask the same question of the population again once more information is available.

No, the United Kingdom.

You can if they are maintained. Most dedicated bike paths around me have ripples in the surface from tree roots and have never been resurfaced since they were built. Using a road bike with skinny tires on them is bone jarring at low speed.

If you are digital services company then the only regulation you need to follow as those of your home jurisdiction. All relevant EU law is included in those regulations.

Transport services are specific exception to the single market where local jurisdiction can have different regulations and you need to follow the regulations in any jurisdiction your customers are present in.

That's not what they argued. The ECJ ruling is that the Uber is a company providing "‘a service in the field of transport’ within the meaning of EU law."

Uber claimed they weren't. They were claiming to be just an infrastructure service without any influence over the transportation part of the business. They wanted to do this since transportation services are subject to the local regulations as a specific exception to the normal Single Market rules on the provision of services (where you only required to follow your home regulations).

P.S. Your home regulations will include all the common European regulations but customer local regulations could be different.

The Treaty of Versailles specifically prohibited the German navy from having any submarines. They got around this by creating a company in the Netherlands through which the German high command ran their research and development.

After 1933, it's a different story, but it doesn't really hold as an example of restrictions increasing technological innovation.

As far as I can tell Eurocopter don't have a heavy lift helicopter. Does anyone know of any development program they were running to make one?

I'm not sure you can say that gold is used in jewellery solely because it is valuable. Gold has physical properties being nonreactive and soft enough to be worked without large scale machinery that makes it a perfect material for making shiny jewellery out by a single skilled artisan. Add in an element of rarity/scarcity and it's pretty much a virtuous circle for why gold is used in jewellery.

If the price of gold was to collapse tomorrow, it's use in jewellery would continue without pause.

The tests for where someone is a self-employed contractor vs an ("disquised") employee are Control (how much control does the person have over how they do task), Substitution (do they personally have to do the task) and Mutuality of obligation (how tied are they together).

I think the ruling makes it clear that Uber has a huge amount of control over the driver, how they do their job and how many fares they take (with penalties). Since Uber is interviewing the drivers and requiring that that driver show up for the fare, it's not clear that a driver can substitute someone else for their fare). You can argue that there is an obligation on the specific driver to complete fares for Uber and the driver depends on Uber to supply fares. The ruling makes sense that they are employees as UK law defines the term.

I don't think you can argue that an App Store developer is a disguised employee in the same way, Apple/Google have very little control over how I write my app, they don't care if I write it or I subcontract and I don't think Apple have any expectation that I will write the app.