The air spin attack was definitely just a Mario jump sound with the pitch adjusted.
It seems to be a 1:1 copy of Mario 64/Galaxy mechanics but without any of the aesthetic charm. Inspiration's good and all, but straight up copying isn't. That's just insanely off-putting to me.
The answer to this question will always be "Not until X is available" where X is something needed by the company of the person answering your question.
By the time everyone agrees, it'll be 10 years down the road and we'll have a new framework.
Depending on the arbitrary counting methodology you want to use you could easily say this is the same amount of steps. For your physical wallet you take wallet out, you get money, you swipe, you sign. For Facebook the first time you open a chat with your friend, you click button, get wallet out, you enter information, you enter amount, you send. The subsequent times it's you opening a chat with your friend, clicking the button, entering the amount, sending.
I'm just trying to illustrate that the amount of steps required is arbitrary and doesn't really indicate security. Sure feeling uncomfortable is fine but at least this way is safer than a physical wallet simply because you can't have your cards or cash stolen and worst case your phone is stolen you can login on a computer and deauthorize the phone (plus you can use a pin).
I'm assuming I would already be in a Facebook conversation with the person, so the number of steps would be relatively low. Without that assumption, Facebook is (mildly) more difficult than a physical wallet.
I think their argument was: The characters look the same (e.g. Russian's first character and the English A) but have different meanings.
So in this example if you searched for the English word "Eat" that is also a completely legal Russian word (E, A, and T, exist in English and Russian), however it means nothing remotely similar.
I don't know if they're right or wrong. I am just saying that might be the point they were trying to make. You could make a Greco Unified unicode set and it would work fairly well, but you might wind up with some confusing edge cases where it isn't clear what language you're reading (literally).
This could be particularly problematic for automation (e.g. language detection). Since in some situations any Greco-like language could look similar to any other (in particular as the text gets shorter).
English, French, German, Italian, Spanish and several other European languages have mostly identical character sets and even large numbers of similar or identical words. Computers detect these languages just fine. I think we'll be okay.
Quite a few English and Russian Cyrillic letters unify just fine. E and A unify, and have identical lowercase forms, e and a. They don't really have different meanings, no more so than the letters E and A in English and French. T is more interesting: it has the same phonetic sound, but a different lowercase appearance: t in English, т in Russian. In this case, unification would be pretty terrible.
For simple alphabet-type languages, the basic rule should be: if the uppercase and lowercase look the same, then unify mercilessly. P (English) and Р (Russian) should unify even though they represent different consonants. But not V (English) and В (Russian): they sound the same, but have totally different graphemes. On the other hand, unifying B (English) and В (Russian) does not make sense: the lowercase forms look different: b (English) and в (Russian).
Sounds like the major problem with Unicode (and the author's complaints) was always where to draw the line. Han unification went too far and included too many characters that look different. With other languages, some common combinable characters were forced into diacritic representation rather than getting their own code points. To me, the first problem seems way more serious.
I think the real reason was to preserve round-trip compatibility (legacy char -> unicode char -> legacy char) with the existing encodings for those alphabets.
It would be impossible to do. Even back in 1991 when unicode was conceived almost all the encodings in use were ASCII-compatible.
For languages that would be affected by a greco-unification that meant the encodings that were in use before unicode had both the latin script and their "national" script.
Implementing greco-unification in unicode would mean that round-trip lossless conversion (from origin encoding to unicode back into origin encoding) would be impossible, greatly limiting unicode's adoption.
No such problem existed with han characters, in fact JIS X 0208 (the character set used for Shift-JIS) did a very similar thing to unicode's han unification.
In absence of backwards compatibility problems I would be in favor of greco-unification too.
The problem is they tend to be more isolated than other customers might be. It's hard to go viral with old people - I suppose you could try advertising on Fox News.
Imagine you have a coworker who is always on the phone quite loudly nearby you with a very identifiable voice. That's what these people seek to avoid - specific distractions that humans have adapted for thousands of years to pick up on.
Except you're sitting next to your coworkers - not your boss. Your coworkers don't want to out you - that only hurts their reputation and gives them more work.
If anything, this prevents one person from being singled out because it's difficult to get mad at one person for slacking when everyone is slacking to a similar degree.
At least, that's my experience being in a 4 person cubicle. It built trust between coworkers and against the company.
Four person cubes are not quite the open office concept, or don't represent all instances of it. In Japan, open offices include everyone. You look away from your monitor and there is your boss ("buchou" -- department head) looking back at you! If you have to leave before the buchou, you apologize, e.g. "O saki ni, shitsurei shimasu".
If the boss is not there, then it's not quite the open office; it's a slightly strawman version of the open office which doesn't quite include everyone. Even so, the boss can come out peek at the workspace at any time and tell at a glance who is there and who isn't, and who is doing what.
We have a pretty strong reliance on the estate tax for situations like these. I imagine if longevity were discovered, that would change to another kind of wealth tax within 10 years.
Does the estate tax actually work in the US? Our equivalent in Britain appears to be a joke - anyone with a reasonable amount of money can just hire accountants to find some trivial way around it.
I think it's probably the most important tax, in terms of social equity - if you can easily pass down all your wealth from one generation to another, there are no wealth taxes, and capital reliably grows faster than the general economy, that is an obvious formula for the creation of an aristocracy - but I don't know whether it's compatible with the global financial system. Or perhaps it's just British politicians are particularly lackluster on cracking down on obvious avoidance schemes.
Not really. Estate taxes on large inheritances represent a tiny fraction of the overall federal tax revenue.
There are many techniques for circumventing/minimizing the tax. Law firms and accountants whose sole purpose it is to legally minimize this tax exist in every major American city.
The rich are making huge amounts of money compared to the rest of us now, and paying little taxes. What makes you think that longevity would change that?
People make this mistake all the time. The rich are paying the vast majority of all taxes paid, whether by income or property purchases. What isn't taxed is accumulated wealth and it should not be. The US has one of the most progressive systems in the world, one that harms competitiveness of businesses as well.
The simplest solution is to move from income to taxing spending. We have had the technology for tens of years where we can send people assistance, pension, and medical payments. Hence the technology to refund a percentage below the tax threshold exists.
I am loathe to use the name Fair Tax as it has been demonized by many, but note the bulk of this resistance is through political parties sponsoring groups and "think tanks" to do so. The reason is simple, a single flat/fair/etc tax on all purchases and service buys removes a lot of power from government. It would not be easy to switch too but in the long term it would remove the biggest burden to the countries economy which is the whimsy of those in charge.
Estate taxes are just evil. You got me when I earned it, how dare you take it from family just because you decide it was no longer ours once one person dies. Hence a consumption tax replacing all these taxes would be far better.
> People make this mistake all the time. The rich are paying the vast majority of all taxes paid, whether by income or property purchases.
This is true, but when you compare the percentages of the taxes that they pay to the percentage of the income that they enjoy, you'll find that they are paying a smaller percentage of the taxes than they are enjoying the benefits of income. And that's reported income: there are plenty of legal loopholes that allow the rich to legally avoid reporting large portions of their income.
> What isn't taxed is accumulated wealth and it should not be.
I agree with this, but this is used as an excuse for not taxing investments as highly--which doesn't make sense. Income is income is income--it shouldn't matter if that income comes from work or capital gains.
> The US has one of the most progressive systems in the world, one that harms competitiveness of businesses as well.
The US is one of the least progressive systems in the developed world. Sure, we're more progressive than Somalia, but that's to be expected.
> The simplest solution is to move from income to taxing spending.
The richest spend the smallest percentage of their income and therefore would be taxed the least percentage. I'm not sure what mental gymnastics you're doing to make this make sense in your head but it doesn't make sense anywhere else.
Also, income tax doesn't dis-incentivize anything: there will always be an incentive to make more money. But a spending tax would dis-incentivize spending--which would be terrible for the economy. For someone who earlier was complaining that our tax system hurts the competitiveness of business, I'm not sure what makes you think a tax system that encourages dragon-like hoarding of wealth would hurt the competitiveness of business: it would, if anything, mean that people simply avoid doing business at all.
> We have had the technology for tens of years where we can send people assistance, pension, and medical payments. Hence the technology to refund a percentage below the tax threshold exists.
Okay, this could work, but why would we tax people just to refund them?
> The reason is simple, a single flat/fair/etc tax on all purchases and service buys removes a lot of power from government.
That's true, but it moves that power squarely into the hands of large corporations that are even less answerable to the people who their actions affect. I don't like governments any more than the next person, but I do like them more than giant corporations whose only morality is greed. At least a democratic republic has incentives to appear somewhat moral some of the time. Corporations have no such incentive.
> You got me when I earned it, how dare you take it from family just because you decide it was no longer ours once one person dies.
Ah yes, it's really important that we keep the wealth in the hands of a few people who were born into it. We wouldn't want to incentivize work, innovation, or progress, now would we!
So, there's two major things I would suggest changing:
1. Easy answers keep users from developing Google-fu. Competitors answers should be sufficient. If they aren't, make a separate doc and have it be easily Googleable from a hint. This keeps them from developing a dependency on that "Answer" button that would show up on the end.
2. The big problem with currently existing tools for this is that they haven't come up with a gameified way to give -structure- to a program. Which is a problem because for a real program structure is the very first thing you do.
