T-N-T
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.
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.
> 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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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 ?
http://nasimabc.com/sitebuilder/images/car_attack_nasim2-426...
>"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 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.
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.
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.
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.
MS doesn't provide an easy, GUI way of disabling built-in Defender by the way. If you 'disable' defender by using the control panel on windows 10, it only stops its activity temporarily and it can reactivate itself after 24 hours or something like that. You can permanently disable it through registry keys but it's not an officially supported, accepted method to edit the registry by yourself. There's a group policy for 10 Pro and other corp editions though.
For a normal home user, Defender is never fully disabled. It will deactivate itself if you install a third party antivirus, and reenable itself when you uninstall them. Bottom line, the average user is not supposed to be AV-less.
Because it's profitable.
Once upon a time, Japan was perceived the way we currently perceive China : a land where cheap, flimsy knockoffs were produced. The first camera made by Canon (which is, today, the most popular camera manufacturers in many segments of photography, such as journalism) was a 100% copy of Leica designs. There was literally no innovation whatsoever, just copy of german engineering.
But once the corporations acquired the base know how, developed better quality control and started to gain popularity in the low end, they reinvested their money into R&D, and they now are one of the best brands of the market, cornering both the low end and the high end. Almost every single western camera brand died except for Leica, which survived mostly on selling brand recognition to people who have more money than sense (this is particularly true for the people who buy the idiotic non-rangefinder Leica camera that are actually made by Panasonic which are virtually identical to other panasonic lumix models and sold at a premium because there's a Leica badge).
Most well known japanese brands started like Canon.
I believe we're already starting to see the transition from 'eh, knockoff' to companies that are reinvesting in R&D in China and this is going to eat at all the markets previously corned by silicon valley giants. Good smartphones are already a commodity. I have the Honor 8, which is made by Huawei, who build their own system-on-chips like Apple and Samsung. It's still running as fast as it was on day one and I probably won't feel the need to change for something else as long as it keeps working. The only thing they need to improve on is the camera quality and if they can manage to rival top end smartphones in terms of cameras in the future they will lay waste upon Samsung. Apple might survive because like Leica they have a heavy contingent of people with more money than sense that are loyal to status symbols/veblen goods.
Yes, with the very low weight of a bicycle that can be done at low speed. But I maintain turn by leaning is mostly an illusion because that's not how you actually turn when you're riding on the road and not doing "look ma no hands". Just the fact that your hands are on the handle bar, and that when you lean a little you will also naturally put pressure on the side of your lean, pushing away the handlebar in the direction you're leaning on, which initiate the process of countersteering. It's what people naturally do on 2 wheeled vehicles whether they were taught to or not.
> When turning right, for example, I would have to push the left side of the handlebar away from myself, and, at the same time, pull the right side of the handlebar towards myself.
The only way this could work is that the lean was already initiated by countersteering. You just haven't realized you push the handle bar and to that instinctively. You should really, really give a conscious try later. Keep your bike as straight as possible, do not lean in any way, do nothing but a gentle push on the handlebar on the side you want to turn, and try very consciously to not put any pressure toward any direction after your gentle push. You will witness your bike leaning, then the wheel wanting to go toward the direction of your lean when you're at low speed, the bike doesn't need you to move the wheel toward the direction of the turn, it does that by itself.
Simply put there's no point at which one should consciously do anything other than pushing to initiate the lean.
> have not had formal training in bicycle/motorcycle handle skill
I can somewhat accept this for people who only very rarely ride their bicycle on a week end or holiday. But if you're going on the road mixed with other vehicles, or worse, if you ride a motorcycle, you should be fully in control of your vehicle. You should be able to make a turn as fast as mechanically possible without falling and at least be conscious that one should keep a steady speed, neither braking nor accelerating, while turning, if one doesn't want to fall and crash. This isn't too noticeable at moderate speeds on a bicycle but it's absolutely necessary to understand that you should keep your speed steady while turning at higher speeds, this is how many, many accidents involving only the rider are caused. The person who doesn't realize the turn is going to be steep before they came too close to the turn and chose to turn while instinctively braking to lower their speed.. braking while turning will make you fall. Loss of speed (unsteady throttle handling) will make you fall. Too much acceleration will make you fall.
Here's a good video showing what one can do with their motorcycle when one fully consciously controls its turning, instead of purely relying on instincts and misunderstood ideas like "shifting weight" (don't do that) :
Countersteering works at low speeds too. I don't get where this misinformation comes from, even from people who actually ride 2 wheeled vehicles. Try it, ride at a low speed, don't lean your body toward any side, just give a gentle push on the handle bar on the direction you want to go. It will initiate a lean, and the only difference you will see compared to high speed is that the wheel will self adjust after the lean started, and will automatically move toward the direction of the turn, which makes it appear as if you made a "car like" turn, but that's not what happened. The wheel start turning toward the direction of your turn only after the lean from the countersteering has been initiated.
No, this is not how you're supposed to turn whether you use a motorcycle or are riding at moderately higher speeds on a bicycle and this wrong habit is how people become unable to avoid obstacles in a timely manner on the road.
Turn-by-leaning doesn't exist, it's an illusion. It works because when you lean, you are pushing a bit on the handle bar. Pushing the handle bar in the direction of your turn makes it go to the opposite direction, which makes the 2 wheeled vehicle lean, and once you stop pushing on the handle bar the momentum will keep you from falling further. You don't need to lean to turn. You only need to push the handle bar. You can in fact put your weight to the side opposite of the lean of the bike ( just be careful and keep the momentum going by pedaling at a fixed rhythm ) so long as you pushed the handlebar the bike will lean toward the direction you pushed, it doesn't matter where you shift your weight.
I am utterly amazed at the general confusion in this thread coming from both motorcycle and bicycle riders. Countersteering is how you turn no matter which speed you're at on a two wheeled vehicle. The thing about low speed is that once you initiated the turn and made the vehicle lean a little the wheel will automatically self-adjust and turn into the direction you're leaning on, while at higher speeds the wheel will stay straight after you started leaning.
Try it. Go somewhere without obstacles, ride at like 5km/h on a straight line, use only one hand, do not lean your body in any way, and with your one hand, give a gentle push on the right side, and then consciously stop putting any force whatsoever on the handlebar. After your push, the bike will lean to the right because the wheel turned to the left, and once the lean has been initiated, since it's low speed, the wheel will automatically turn to the right side without your help.