Forget programming. Sit down with him and make a few board and card games.

Too many game designers these days look at the technology and the graphics and the monetarization and all the other crap and forget that first and foremost, there needs to be a game.

When you limit yourself to the bare essentials, you see the game for what it is, and learn to make games by focussing on what makes a game.

Yes. But the cable doesn't connect to the street, that's just how we say it. It connects to that grey box on the corner, which means after the garden it runs underneath the street and/or sidewalk for typically a few hundred meters.

Can't say for other countries, in my country almost never.

Of course. If you disagree with someone, it must be that the someone is an idiot. It's not possible that maybe you are wrong.

There's no point having a discussion on this level. People who have arguments don't need to use personal insults.

Game construction kits:

Stuart Smith's Adventure Construction Set
Racing Destruction Set
Pinball Construction Set
Arcade Game Construction Kit
Shoot'Em-Up Construction Kit
Garry Kitchen's GameMaker

Run them on a real Commodore 64, or run them in an emulator. Images are available online for all these software titles.

See also: http://www.lemon64.com/?game_i...

Short of stationing an observer in every room of a factory floor room currently being used to manufacture Apple products, there's no way to do this short of spot checks, with the hope that the translators and government assigned handlers are not in the pay of the factory operator, and don't "phone ahead" so that these audit come out clean. Frankly, given that changing configuration between "unclean" and "clean", and then back to "unclean", would likely be prohibitively expensive, so as long as the spot checks are ongoing, the conditions are going to be the best that you can hope for, and still be in China.

I think if they were finding fingers in products during servicing or inspection (which in the U.S., for Apple, is contracted out to Solectron), there would be hell to pay, so I'll take that particular story as anecdotal/apocryphal, unless you can cite a news story to that effect.

Walking away from China manufacturing is generally not an option, when the cost per unit quality of, say, U.S. workers, prices them very much out of the range of possibility. If Apple were to wholesale drop Chinese manufacturing as an option (as you say your company has done), obviously, the COGS would go up, and with it, the cost to the consumer for the product. The factories would be relocated elsewhere to either some other Southeast Asia country, or to Eastern Europe (which is where iPhones are put through final manufacture so that it takes place in the EU and therefore avoids the non-EU product import VAT that would otherwise be charged as a protectionist measure by the EU).

Either way, if you expect those jobs to come back to the U.S. without a change in MFN status for China, and a change in international tariff structures to enforce U.S. environmental and labor policy on trading partners facilities used to manufacture goods sold in the U.S., as Steve Jobs told Obama: "Those jobs are gone; they're not coming back".

Even were they to come back under those circumstances, they would be coming back to automated factories in non-union states, so those jobs are effectively gone forever, either way.

If we suddenly froze trade relations with China, it would have the same effect: the closes you could expect those jobs to come to a U.S. worker would be the Maquiladoras, which, economically speaking, pay about 25% of a Mexican living wage for supporting a family, which is significantly less, in terms of subsistence, than the Chinese workers in Shenzhen are getting, which is a significant surplus over 200% of what it takes to support a family on a workers wages.

Find all the fingers you want, those jobs will never be U.S. jobs again.

Why what police force get involved when...

This is a basic, 50,000 foot view; it's not intended to cover all the details, and corrections gratefully accepted, but I believe this covers the gist of it...

It's pretty clear that the threats, particularly against the appearance of Anita Sarkeesian at Utah State University were, at a minimum, interstate.

When the threats cross a state line, the move from local police jurisdiction to federal police (FBI) jurisdiction, since police forces may only operate within their own jurisdictions. If the crime spans larger jurisdictions, such as adjacent cities within a county, or adjacent counties within a state, then it may be handled by an inter-agency task force. If it gets bigger than that, then the next larger jurisdiction encapsulating the jurisdictions involved takes ownership. The jurisdictions and agencies, are as follows:

Within a city: The city police force
Within a county: The county sheriff
Within a state: The CBI (California Bureau of Investigation - agency name varies by state)
Interstate: The FBI
International: Interpol

Within these classifications, inferior jurisdictions are often acted to cooperate/participate in the investigatory legwork, arrest operations, searches, evidence gathering, forensic work (autopsy, crime scene investigation, and so on).

Exceptions:

When a crime occurs on a federal lands or reservations, the FBI always has jurisdiction. For "indian reservations", investigator power lies in both the FBI and in the tribal police force (depending on the nature of the crime).

When a crime occurs on a military base, the investigatory power lies within the branch of the military; for most crimes, this is the MPs or Military Police. For more serious crime, or crimes involving military personnel not on base, or non-military and military personnel both, it goes by branch of service:

Navy, Marine, Coast Guard: NCIS - Naval Criminal Investigative Service
Army: USACIDC or CID - Criminal Investigation Division of the Army Provost's office
Air Force: AFOSI or OSI - Office of Special Investigations

Generally, anything involving a civilian, or occurring off base, ands up being a joint investigation with local authorities, which can include authorities in other countries (e.g. naval bases in Japan, air force bases in Germany, etc.).

For terrorist threats, USDHS - DHS - the Department of Homeland Security - gets involved. They are probably already involved in the Utah State University threat. At that pint, they can call on the capabilities and services of agencies such as the DOJ (Federal Marshals office), the NSA (which is allowed to operate domestically), the CIA (which is allowed to operate extranationally), the DIA (which is allowed to operate with regard to foreign military), and so on.

All in all, the more something escalates in terms of geographic reach, or in terms of threat level, the higher up the food chain you go, further and further into territories where you do not want to be. At some point in the escalation process, you get to the stratospheric regions where people simply "disappear" (otherwise known as "extraordinary rendition").

Does that answer your question?

In related news... Apple is continuing to deny responsibility for space junk launched into space by Boeing, which is known to use Apple products, and has repeatedly dodged questions about their sole responsibility for the existence of Somali pirates, who are known to have held hostage container ships containing one or more containers of Apple products, among the many thousands of containers aboard.

Oh. I'm sorry... weren't we playing the "Blame Apple for the actions of other people" game?

The cost to the company for an employee includes more than just that employee' hourly wage, and much of it is not fungible.

This is why in the U.S. we have 3 people working 40 hour weeks, instead of 4 people working 30 hour weeks. In order to reduce the work week length, we'd need to be able to make 3x40 equivalent to 4x30 for the employer. Most of the overhead that makes this losing math is associated with government, although there's also per employee equipment costs and space costs at the worksite. Everything else is pretty much unfunded government mandates per employee, so that the more employees you have, the higher your costs.

So, the NJ State Senate Majority Leader admits that New Jersey's law, which would make smart guns mandatory within three years of the first commercially-available smart gun being sold anywhere in the United States, can be reversed... if only the NRA will agree to stop obstructing the sale of smart guns within the United States, which they do specifically because of the New Jersey law?

I don't see the problem. The NRA is obstructing a law that goes against their stated interests, and New Jersey is promising to reverse that law if only the NRA will stop obstructing what that law regulates?

For the NRA's stated position, see here. Particularly:

NRA does not oppose new technological developments in firearms; however, we are opposed to government mandates that require the use of expensive, unreliable features, such as rigging a firearm so that it could not fire unless it received an electronic signal from an electronic bracelet worn by the firearm's lawful owner (as was brought up in Holder's recent testimony).

That's their stated policy, right there.

Not quite. Courts have been willing to hold businesses liable for damages due to foreseeable criminal acts, yes, but so far no court has been willing to hold businesses liable for damages due to acts of war levied by a foreign state.

That's a pretty big jump to make, incidentally.

The risk is not that the courts might hold the theater chain responsible -- the courts wouldn't, on the grounds that the theater chain isn't responsible for protecting their clientele against acts of war from a foreign nation-state. The risk is that the lawsuit would be filed and it would cost the theater $20 million or more just to get the courts to dismiss all charges.

That $20 million is probably considerably more than they would make from screening The Interview, so the logical business case is to not screen it.

It's sad, but ... the real problem is not that the courts might hold the theater liable: it's that in our current system, getting sued is, in itself, its own punishment.

The NRA does not object to smart gun technologies, and believes that people who wish to be allowed to buy them should be allowed to buy them.

The NRA objects to smart guns becoming mandatory, because the technology for smart guns is nowhere near mature.

The number one desired trait in a firearm, moreso than caliber or capacity or anything else, is reliability. The reason why Glocks are so popular isn't because of caliber, capacity, or aesthetics -- all of which other firearms do better. It's because a Glock is as reliable as gravity. If you chamber a round and pull the trigger, it goes boom. If you don't pull the trigger, it won't.

I have personally seen a Glock get thrown into a bucket of wet, goopy mud and left there for fifteen minutes just so the mud had the opportunity to permeate the whole of the firearm. At the end of the fifteen minutes the owner pulled the Glock out, shook it precisely three times to dislodge mud from the barrel, and fired one hundred seventy rounds through it in the space of about five minutes, just one magazine after another after another... just to prove the weapon was reliable.

Do you believe the current crop of smart gun technologies are equally reliable? The ones I've had the chance to play around with definitely aren't. They can't even agree on whether they need to fail safe or fail deadly.

I'll probably build one, eventually. That's much more likely than me buying one.

I don't know all the details, but basically, yes.

The Deutsche Bahn was a state-owned monopolist for long-distance rail transport (both goods and people). During the privatization craze of the 90s or so, the government decided to turn it into Deutsche Bahn AG - a private company, listed at the stock exchange.

After a short transition, the C level started to think and act like C levels do, and - with a little help of big consulting companies - decided that public transport isn't all that interesting and profitable and that they would simply use it as leverage to become a huge, global, logistics company. You can already see where it all went wrong.

In order to raise capital, the government planned to sell its shares. But to make it interesting to buyers, the company first had to become profitable. So all that I've described happened. People in small towns suddenly found out that they were not using the train enough, so train service was discontinued and the station closed. Of course, now they had to use cars more which meant more traffic, roads maintainence costs increased, more roads had to be built - as a singular entity, the government before had included all those factors and decided that train service to this town was the right decision, even if the ticket sales by themselves didn't cover costs - but if you figure in the costs of not having a train service, suddenly it does make sense. As a private company, the Deutsche Bahn AG only considered the side of the equation it owned, and that didn't show a profit.
This happened to hundreds of train lines and stations.

Total damage to the german economy - unknown. Some estimates I've read are in the billions.

Get a clue before you enter a discussion. Many of the companies that were privatized were doing as good or even better than the private companies that replace them today. That doesn't always mean they are or were profitable - for some things such as public transport or universities or garbage collection maybe the benefit to society should be the important factor and not ROI and shareholder value.

You are repeating the ignorant blabbering of typical right-wing americans who think that anything that's not cut-throat capitalism is automatically communism. The thought that a world inbetween the extremes could exist has never crossed your mind, has it?

The strange truth is that the very america that had McCarthyism was very interested in and actively promoting the social market economy model of western europe, because they realized that if they had attempted to install the no-hold-barred brutality of pure US capitalism, most of post-WW2 europe would have become communist by free choice.

That economic model was the synthesis (to use philosophy terms) between the two equally wrong extremes. It gave us all the advantages of free markets, free choice of jobs, private companies and competition while at the same time protecting those areas where pure capitalism does more harm than good, like health care, public transportation or natural monopolies.

Sadly, the two competing extremes didn't fail at the same time to the same degree, so we've now been janked towards the "winner", and all the advantages are slowly evaporating in favor of higher stock prices and an economy based on bubbles and bullshit.

I'm not in favour of communism at all - had capitalism failed first, the same would have happened in the other direction and we'd be equally bad of. But on almost every metric you choose, western Europe was in a better condition 30 years ago.