Yeah, the 1980s finished, people made Revenge of the Nerds films and stuff, and then the internet happened.

Now it's ok if you're into chess, anime, comic books, computer games, even computers! Guess what, even girls (shock, horror!) are.

But Grandpa, you just reminisce about your glory days of punching a kid in 1985 and thinking you were tough. You're not the first to peak in high school.

To be fair, he's also the #1 ranked standard chess player in the world.

The only real difference is that where Fabiano is #2 in the world in standard, he's #10 in speed. Still, it's not like he's bad.

Blockchain does not particularly need a lot of power.

However, some of the alt-coins that are implemented using the blockchain, such as Bitcoin and Ethereum, rely on an ever increasing amount of CPU cycles (effectively) to "mine" a new coin. If they didn't, all the coins would just get mined and that'd be that (which can be fine too). This uses lots of power.

There are lots of other blockchain techs and other alt-coins that just have all coins essentially pre-mined. The biggest of these in probably Ripple / XRP.

Another alternative is someone comes up with some other proof-of-work scheme that involves some other type of work, or that takes type but isn't particularly electricity dependent. I don't know what such tech would look like though, and it may not exist :)

Good on them, glad enough at the outcome.

BUT, isn't this a collective boycott? Which is illegal in many many jurisdictions? You can strike as a worker, with rules and procedures for doing so, but you do the same as a group of businesses, and in many places it is illegal.

Exactly this.

COBOL isn't hard. Whatever, it's a language.

But if you want to take smart people away from their shiny modern languages and dev stacks, and ask them to put up with bureaucracy, then you need to pay them at least commensurate salaries to what they'd get elsewhere (if not MORE).

These are really stories about banks not wanting to pay talented devs to put up with their BS.

No, they will owe that money to the employees. In most jurisdictions, if a company can't pay their debts as and when they fall due, then they are out of money.

In some places, the Director's are personally liable if they let a company continue to trade past that point (which is bad, because a company is explicitly about limiting the liability).

So? He's still correct.

This isn't because of Walmart.

This is how Australia does it.

The PBS - Pharmaceutical Benefits Scheme - provides heavily subsidised prescription meds to any with a script from a Doctor (and super cheap for certain categories like Age Pensioners, disabled etc).

The catch is, pharmaceutical companies have to try and get their drugs on the PBS, and to do that they have to offer up evidence that their drug is better than those currently on the PBS, and quantify the extra benefit. For some drugs (like psychiatric meds), just show ANY benefit over placebo is a huge hurdle. Then quantifying the benefit to tax payers to justify what gets paid per pill.

Sometimes it limits the quick adoption of new drugs (although there are other paths for experimental treatments), but the main thing it provides is a science based monopoly buyer. The drug companies don't get to artificially court demand, and extract super high margins without showing they're worth it.

Oh, and it is illegal to advertise prescription meds in Australia. None of these ads full of older gents "Talk to your Doctor today about Cialis."

The system is very effective.

When I got my two Alexa Echo's it was primarily to easily play my own mp3 collection in some rooms, but it has a few other extra features, like radio stations etc that were good.

Fast forward to today, Amazon have announced that I will no longer be able to play my own collection through Alexa, and they'll cut me off next year.

I'm pissed at them, and hope the new generation of devices that give user choice, rather than lock-in to a subscription model, win.

I'll be perfectly happy if the innovators are Chinese. I'd rather reward their skill than their place of founding.

The Academie is one of the reasons that written French is diverging from spoken French.

I'm not sure that is a good thing either..

Schools also largely have to stick to a fairly conservative language curriculum.

Learning French is a many step process, with written forms that are essentially never spoken, and spoken forms that may be written, but largely aren't.

Yet for all this, I'm not sure what they hold on to by doing it? The French are French. They should have no fear of ever not being.

Re: forfeited stuff

Where in Europe is this the case?

It certainly doesn't appear to be EU regulations. I know of lots of regulatory "raids" (you'd be amazed at the breadth of reasons that companies get raided, often not hanging or even moral-outrage stuff) and this isn't the general case.

This is how I feel.. Have just bought two echos, uploaded 30G of mp3s to Amazon, and now this?

Damn.

If nothing else, I have a heap of albums I can't get even with a subscription, that I now just can't play.

90 day return on the echo though I think, although then I've blown the money on the 1yr storage with Amazon anyway.. fuckers.

Their biggest earner is I assume as creator of the Unreal Engine- they must be making a mint off pubg.

--Q

powerpro certainly looks like it hooks other programs.

Either way, this won't be an Epic Games thing as much as a Battleye thing (the anti cheat used by fortnite).

Wait? What?

Google is down to levels not scene since May?!

--Q