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Comment Re:Why Steam? Why? (Score 0) 160

Sometimes I wonder why companies, especially companies selling digital goods, don't just set the price in one particular currency then let it somewhat auto-fluctuate in the other currencies according to the market. Wouldn't that be simpler for them?

Sorry, that's illegal in many countries with fucked currencies.

Most seller of luxury goods in Russia aren't selling at all. The ruble is toilet paper now, and you can't legally sell in dollars (though there's a very long tradition of doing so anyhow). You'll get 2x as many rubles for a dollar on the street as the official exchange rate, as people with limited access to the international market are paying a premium to GTFO. The only other choice Steam has is to stop selling to Russia at all.

Google's market cap is higher that then Russian stock market right now.

Politically speaking, Russia's currency lost value because they invaded a nearby nation and they are under sanctions.

Not at all. Not eve a little. I doubt sanctions have ever accomplished anything. This is entirely OPEC: Saudi Arabia is destroying Iran. Iran can't survive at these oil prices, and the Saudi rulers want the current Iranian leadership gone. It's not quite so simple as an extension of the Shia-Sunni conflict, but that's the heart of it. Had this happened 5 years ago, it's likely ISIS wouldn't have happened, but sadly they can survive now without Iranian funding.

Comment Re:Amazon (Score 1) 217

. I hear Amazon basically data mines business partners who sell on their site to undercut prices on everything except for certain narrowly agreed products.

To be fair, most sellers on Amazon Markets do the same, and price their stuff just under or at Amazon's price, and Amazon seems OK with that. Wasn't there a bug in the past where the software that people use to undercut Amazon had a big and was pricing stuff at 1 cent, and Amazon stepped in to help out with that?

They're definitely playing the long game. But it's not a good move for their partners.

So far it's worked very well for their customers, and has for many years. It's starting to seem pretty far-fetch that this is some elaborate scheme to do anything except lower prices to keep customers buying.

Comment Re:They couldn't wreck the movement from the outsi (Score 1) 217

How do you know that MS is not abetting the systemd bandwagon? What a perfect leadup to the Extend and Extinguish steps.

That would be a work of genius, and frankly I don't think MS is that smart any more. Still, if it turns out Pottering has been on the MS payroll all along, I might actually die laughing.

Comment Re: 11 Trillion Gallons of Water Needed to Water R (Score 1) 330

one acre is about 4000 m^2, a foot is about 0.3 m, so about 1200 m^3
You have 264 gallons per cubic meter, lets say 250 since the acre-foot estimate is about as accurate as Russian maps along the Ukrainian border anyway.
That gives us about 1200/4 * 1000 = 300000 gallons.

An acre is a rectangle bounded by a furlong and a chain (things you learn from rock music videos), or 22 * 220 square yards, so an acre-foot is 43560 cubit feet ~= 325850 gallons.

Comment Re: 11 Trillion Gallons of Water Needed to Water R (Score 1) 330

The typical family uses an acre-inch of water a month, or an acre-foot per year, whatever that is in gallons.

But residential use is trivial over all - most water use is in power generation, and most of the rest is agricultural. California is one of the few states that actually uses saltwater for power generation, but still: mostly farms.

Comment Re:Move to a gated community (Score 1) 611

Most other city business does not need to be done in a city centre any more. chucking more free ways at is does not solve the problem.

You might be a liberal if your solution to an engineering problem is "everyone else just needs to change how they behave and the problem goes away!"

reality outside those few hours a day they have a 5%(or whatever) usage.

In California (which started this discussion), "peak usage" is the majority of the day. Rush hour is from 6am to 9pm. That's what happens when you won't build enough roads.

Comment Re:Tired of this shit (Score 5, Interesting) 448

Sure, I had it great growing up in a trailer in the Appellations, single mother, etc. Leave me out of your privilege claims and stop fucking stereotyping me based on the color of my skin, you damn racist bigot.

I certainly understand that the mostly upper-middle-class-good-college Social Justice Warriors who have never done anything use with their life feel like they have unearned privilege. Yup, you do. That has little to do with race. Stop assuming that other people who look like you have a similar background. Stop assuming that there aren't people who look nothing like you but have the same background. That's exactly the sort of offensive stereotyping we're trying to stamp out!

Comment Re:Implementation not the technology. (Score 1) 153

Agile Project management methodology has a lot of good features.
Cloud based processing can help the organization.
You can get a lot of useful information from Big Data (Previously Business Intelligence, Previously Decision Support System)

Heck, none of these are very new, other than perhaps the scale of Bug Data. Agile was new around 2000. "Cloud" was all the hype around 2007. These are proven ideas now, though as you say you have to understand them, you can't just move your systems and hope fore the best.

Hosting your email on gmail isn't going to the cloud. Or even just remotely hosting you stuff on cloud systems, isn't embracing the cloud it is just offshoring your data.

A lot of people don't get this yet, though moving all your back-end systems to be cloud-hosted is as good as you can often get with legacy systems. Though the DB servers are often the sticking point (even if you can get cloud-hosted servers that work with your software, which is wonderful when you can, you still need to get the data there, and otherwise you have to be very careful what cloud servers you try to run your own DB servers on - sometimes there's no way).

Obviously, that's a lot of work, to think through security, availability, supportability, and so on, because the solutions to each are different in the cloud. They may be easier once you're done, but it can be quite difficult indeed for admins to abandon their tried-and-true bag of tricks for an environment where they need a new bag!

Comment Re:No one gets the oil! (Score 1) 191

People don't encounter evolution in their daily lives either, excepting the Flu, but I find it rather important to teach (more stuff in that 100-150 window).

Relativity and QM are easy enough to teach qualitatively (and the math for SR for many examples is simple algebra). There's a host of people who don't believe either, who think modern physics is a hoax, because it contradicts the physics they were taught in school. We should really be teaching "an electron is not like a particle, nor like a wave, but behaves in it's own inimical way" in high school, along with the basics of relativity, so that people get the sense that physics is real, that all this crazy stuff came from explaining experiments, that's it's not storytelling looking for proof!

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