OK, so ambition is the #1 evil in the world and religious zealotry #2. That does not diminish the horror of killing someone who believes in a different invisible man. Stalin and Mao didn't kill to advance the cause of Atheism.

Native speakers, yes. But whether you're in China or India or Spain the most popular second language is English. Functionally you're much better off because at almost any tourist destination you'll find somebody speaking English, while Mandarin is great if you go to China and pretty much useless everywhere else. English got presence in Europe (UK + EU really), North America (USA), Asia (India), Oceania (Australia) and Africa (several former colonies). I'm not going to argue the moral side of colonialism, just say that practically it's the only language with global reach.

If you need evidence, then it isn't belief, it's research. Most people that believe in god don't claim to have any evidence, just faith.

No, as per TFS it bears load at the joints, where it's going to put more strain is on the skeletal system.

The quality of the English version is what it is. The quality of the non-English version is what it is plus all that was lost in translation, it's certainly not going to be better. The worst is when they move around on standard shortcuts, for example in MS Office all English versions has Ctrl-F as Find and Ctrl-B as Bold. In Norwegian Ctrl-F = Bold (Fet) and Ctrl-B is Find (Finn) and I absolutely hate it every time. And yet in the interest of sanity they do keep other English shortcuts like Ctrl-S = Save (Lagre), even though that makes no sense in Norwegian. Never mind that when you're working with code or databases there is no Norwegian C# nor SQL, so it all ends up rather Norwenglish when you try.

Don't get me wrong, I'm fond of my language when it comes to identity and culture. But when it comes to communication having global terminology and one way of doing it makes everything so much simpler. Yes, there's a whole lot of "English" speakers out there but any resemblance of a common tongue beats trying to use translators. It's something of a first world issue though as 16% of the world is still illiterate in their first language but I hope that in 100 years you could talk to at least half the world's population in one language.

If you are expecting them to give you the same experience as using a mouse, then they are quite rubbish. But they can be enjoyable, so long as they aren't trying to be both things. On the other hand, aside from the thorny issue of whether to mix PC and console players in multi (answer: no) it's often possible just to ratchet up the default difficulty for the PC. Halo was certainly a doddle by comparison on the PC, aside from segments driving vehicles where I found the difference to be negligible, but that didn't make it any more or less exciting (or the levels near the end any less boring.)

A console is a fine place to present a shooter that's heavy on story. And if you don't like those games, you can just avoid console shooters and spare yourself a lot of wasted time- wasting.

Either it's a HOV or it's a protected-for-protected-classes-and-fuck-the-public-interest lane.

No. There are not. We don't have safety inspections here. Just smog inspections. That's because they don't care about our safety, just looking like they're doing something about air quality.

Try not stealing one since the US government doesn't own them and I think you'll find yourself in jail. Any takers who'd like to bet otherwise? I think in practice this is resolved already, what you bring back to Earth is yours. The fun parts would be that nobody has mining rights, if you find a big gold vein there's nothing stopping another country/company dropping a mining rig right next to yours.

This must be the most clueless post about the 1000/1024 divide so far. It never had anything to do with the computer's performance, it's that when you build a digital computer a lot of things will be sizes of two because what you can address with n bytes will be 2^n. Physical memory, memory pages, caches, buffers, floppy and hard drive sectors all the "microunits" in the computer are powers of two. Hint: No actual hard drive gives you 1MB = 1000000 bytes because it's not divisible with 512, in reality they give you 1954*512 = 1000448 so they don't underdeliver. Actually make that divisible by 4096 for modern HDD drives with 4K (no, not 1000) sectors.

There is a single reason why computer scientists usurped the prefix kilo and that is because they needed to describe "one thousand and twenty four bytes" - or multiples of that - very, very often. They needed a shorter name, they never needed the unit "1000 bytes" and so "one kilobyte" became their shorthand for 1024 bytes. And unless you're really good at doing math in your head, tell me how much is seven kilobytes exactly? (And if you answer 7000 I'll slap you). We still say 512GB of RAM. Nobody wants to say 549.755813888 GB of RAM, because multiply that with a billion and you have how many bytes that is. It's not some nice, round number.

Either way you're going to run into some f*cked up conversions if you mix GiB and GB, which I'll use now for clarity. If you have 512GiB of RAM (hey, servers do) and load 512GB from disk, how much of your RAM have you used up? Now while you're calculating that, this other person who uses a GiB system says so that was like ~477 GiB so like ~35 GiB free? Or you have to say you have 549.8 (rounded) GB RAM and use exactly 512 GB. Of course in reality file sizes are probably a rather random size so you'll have two long floating point numbers. At least with base 2 you just have one, because you have exactly 512 GiB RAM.

And when you do have base 2 numbers then multiplication/division gives other nice base 2 numbers like 10 MiB / 2 KiB = 5 KiB. 10.485760 MB / 2.048 KB = how much? It's a lot uglier if you numbers are 2^n values, which again they will be a lot of the time. At least far more often than base 10 as long as you're working with the computer itself and not business data or whatever. If you for example want to make something fit in L3 cache to optimize and algorithm, the numbers will be in base 2. You can't "bugfix" your way out of that.

Well I seem to be both right and wrong, it's 42 bits from the camera but it's losslessly compressed so an actual RAW file is still around 70 MB/photo (listed under cons) so the card does hold 70,000+ photos.

So the highest MP camera I could find in a normal store is 40 Mpix (Pentax 645D) * 14 bit RAW = 70MB/picture. So good for 70,000+ photos. Or the Panasonic HC-X1000 4K/24 & UHD/60p camera just released, 150 Mbps = 7-8 hours continuous recording. But I suppose it's good for when you want to carry 10 BluRays in your phone. Whoops, wrong format not microSDXC. I guess there's a niche for this since they made it, but I kinda fail to see the target market, unless it's the "give me the biggest and best you got" crowd.

Well, if you want Kickstarter to be your go-no go decision maker then you can't wait so long you're already pot committed, as they'd say at the poker table. If you're half finished and your Kickstarter fails, what do you do? Throw away all that work and start over on something else? Try to salvage it and publish something, even if it has lackluster appeal? Not to mention then you must go it alone, if you already know you can finish it alone do you really need Kickstarter? My impression is that Kickstarter works best when your "selling points" aren't your product but your reputation and history. I donated fairly big to the Musopen project because there was quite a bit of history to show that yes, they're serious about creating free music but lacked the funds to do it. I'd be very weary of people with just photoshop and powerpoint skills.

Unemployment benefits are paid from a pool that is funded by employers.

Getting a few thousand people off Medicaid is going to save them money, but a billion dollars is a huge amount of money. Show me some math that shows they will even come close to that.

To make their billion dollars back in sales tax, they would have to generate an additional 20 billion dollars in local sales. That's $20K for each of the 100,000 workers, which is six months of the Nevada average gross wage. If the payoff is longer than ten years, then it would be a poorer investment than doing almost anything else with that money. To put it in perspective, Nevada collected less than $20 billion in total taxes in 2012. This one business would have to grow the economy of the entire state by 5% to hope to break even.

One thing they do have on their side is that most of the batteries manufactured at the plant will be sold outside Nevada, so it will surely pump money into the economy. But, I doubt it will pump enough money in to make up for the billion dollar tax break.

On a side note, Nevada has neither personal income tax nor corporate tax, so it's puzzling what the billion dollars in taxes would have been that they are exempted from.