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  • Not an expert, but in the U.S. making a copy of a broadcast for personal use is legal under fair-use. Anything that loads up on your computer screen you can make a copy and save it for personal use. So screen captures are by definition legal.

    How exactly you copy the material on your screen gets tricky under the DMCA clusterfuck. Breaking encryption to copy the material is illegal unless there is an valid exception for fair-use. What exactly those valid exceptions are is above my paygrade.

  • American pizza and Italian pizza are two different animals that share the same name. They both have good, mediocre and shitty examples. I have had all three in both countries.

    As to which one I prefer? Ehhh depends on the day.

    Other countries also have their unique take on Pizza that I have tried and enjoyed. I had some in Spain and Brazil that were amazing yet very different.

  • Large corporations rarely innovate and try new things. Most innovation comes from smaller players with limited market share taking risks.

    Large companies buy out smaller ones who create cash cows from taking large risks. The large company then milks the cash cows until they are completely dead.

    The consolidation of studios to a few megacorporations has led to this inevitable end. The solution is simple: break them up. If we have 30 or so similar sized studios competing, we will get better movies/TV again.

  • 2 Kinds

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  • After much debate over copious drinks at the bar, we finally decided to settle the argument with darts.

    0 are all crossed.

    1's are written as l

    7's are all crossed.

    And 9's... Well we got kicked out and it was never settled. How was I supposed to know the nickname Nicky sounds like the French word "Niquer" and somebody (Nicolas) got all bent out of shape over it. "Hey Nicky it's your turn!" apparently was not well received by a drunk frenchman.

  • 2 Kinds

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  • Some way to identify the person who wrote it is also helpful. Different cultures write numbers differently.

    The French person reads the top one as 1 , 2, 3.

    The American reads it as 7, 2, 3.

  • The issue with wine is quality control is dependent many factors, weather, fertilizer management, water management, disease pressure, pest pressure, harvest conditions, unpredictable fermentations and the skill of the winemaker. The more variable the conditions the more unpredictable the finished wine product is.

    A good bottle is really tough to make. A mediocre bottle is difficult to make. A poor bottle is what is usually made. I've never had an excellent bottle of wine and I think it is a myth. Pricing is mostly unrelated to the quality of the product as well.

    When you usually put out a poor product people tend to avoid it unless there is a cultural expectation of low performance. What's changing is the cultural acceptance of drinking horrible tasting stuff.

    The wine industry in needs to adapt and put out a better product or else they will go under.

  • For many religious groups it's common for teens and even young adults to not have a clue where babies come from. The biological urge to have sex is still there. So teens experiment around and figure it out but often don't understand the consequences.

    Teens are going to have sex whether you teach them anything about or not. Comprehensive sex ed reduces teen birthrates and STD transmission. It also delays the age when they initiate sex.

    https://link.springer.com/article/10.1525/srsp.2008.5.3.18

  • PhD Grads

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  • No - you missed my direction.

    The paragraph is an overly polite way of writing to avoid any semblance of disparaging the other person. As mine was clearly written as a personal anecdote there is no need to qualify your remarks as non-derogatory.

    Generally I see people develop those types of phrasing habits when they have negative experiences with misunderstanding in the past. Very common with many PhD's communicating with MBA's, sales or production teams. A little overly verbose but carefullly respectful to avoid conflict. It's a very good habit to have professionally but quite funny when out of context.

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  • First paragraph had me laughing. Somebody has spent a lot of time in private industry and has gotten burned a few times.

    As for #2 it depends on the age of the industry. Here is the life cycle of research driven industries as I see it.

    Historically in research driven industries the foundations have been started in academia. Private companies start up relying on the universities research.

    Money flows into the university systems from private companies and they start producing a lot PhD's in the field.

    Next the private companies decide they can make more money doing the research in-house. They offer large sums of money to the established professors and get fresh grads at bargain prices.

    Pretty soon most of the best and brightest are drained to private industry. The funding from private industry slows to a trickle and all that is left in academia is those with more social connections than ability.

    For the next 30 years, private industry has great talent. Then the first first wave of PhD's retire. The new PhD's grads are trained by the social connections crowd.

    That's when you start to see fun job descriptions posted like:

    PhD + 2 years of experience, Masters + 5 years experience, Bachelor's + 8 years experience.

  • PhD Grads

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  • I spent most of a decade in industry doing what is generally thought of as a PhD's job. In order to fill in some gaps, I took a ton of graduate classes on the companies dime and looked at doing a fully funded PhD. I didn't end up doing it.

    Why?

    1. The industry paid better than academia. So the brain drain was real. The informal training I had from PhD's in the company was vastly superior to the graduate level training at the university. Anyone who was any good at the applied side was not in academia. The ones left in academia were a very odd group with zero applied knowledge.
    2. Most PhD hires failed miserably in the field. 9 out of 10 of them could not make the transition to the practical application of knowledge.
    3. I saw a trend where smaller companies where hiring mostly industry experienced people for the positions (like I was).

    So for me the time and investment was not worth it.

    One of my friends made it halfway through his PhD. He then got sick of the politics and drama and noped out.

  • I am of the opinion that most "supply" issues are due to investors. Except in certain geographic areas we do not have a shortage of actual physical housing. What we have is a shortage of available housing at a mixed pricepoints for purchase.

    All housing that investors purchase for rentals removes it from the supply.

    Traditionally investors have sought out entry level housing for rent. They invest in building rental complexes. They make all cash purchases and then rent it out to people who otherwise would have been first-time homebuyers. Investors used to be the low end offer. Blatant price fixing has increased rent outrageously. Now investors are the high end offer and removing supply constantly.

    With AirB&B, the middle and even upper range market that traditionally has had less investor competition is now a major target. This has led to price wars for investment purposes on previously safe segments.

    The first solution to the housing supply is simple: taxing income from rent so that selling the property is financially more lucrative. It will have to include a prohibition against rental increases to cover the taxes as well.

    The second is to mandate zoning and new construction to match the market needs not the needs of the investors.

    Last would be to create a program where builders who focus on entry level housing receive incentives from governments (also include hefty penalty for substandard construction).

  • Not really exeptional except it is commercial grade. It's not the random stuff you get from the local brand. The local brand is whatever. Sometimes it's really good, other times it's pretty poor.

    The most common difference is in a test called "falling number". Falling number is a fast easy way to figure out if an enzyme that degrades starch has been activated (alpha-amylase). Intact starch in flour creates a matrix in solution and thickens it. When alpha-amylase is activated it degrades the starch and makes it thinner.

    For baking you want a thicker dough that holds together. It's how you get light and fluffy breads. The thicker dough traps CO2 produced by yeast or an acid/base reaction better.

  • Timeshares are written up as if they were property. Property that she shares with other people and is contractually required to pay for the upkeep. It's basically a never ending money generator for the owners. Think of it a hotel where all the rooms are rented out to people who agreed to pay for them no matter if they use it or not.

    As the owner of "property" she has a few choices. First off read the contract.

    The management company sometimes reserves the right to buy the property back. Usually a good option - the "Owner" loses money but gets out of the never-ending bills.

    She can also sell/give the timeshare to somebody else on the timeshare selling site. This transfers the ownership to somebody else who might like it.

    If the property has degraded in value because of lack of maintenance from the management she might be able to get out by civil lawsuit. This is unlikely as most timeshare companies do exactly the bare minimum to meet their contractual obligations.

  • I did a little assassin creed run this summer. Started with Unity and went to Odyssey.

    Unity by far has the best story-line. The game mechanics are also more focused on being an assassin, not a brawler. Sneak and stab, drop smoke and disappear when you get in trouble.

    Syndicate - they changed the focus to more brawling. However the mechanics were pretty bad and the storyline was predictable and stupid to say the least. You can still play the assasin for most of it if you want.

    Origins - They went all out into brawling with this one. Complicated all of the controls. Easiest way to make it through the game is as an archer. The story lines are dull and some are just plain weird. The offer you tons of different options in gear but only a few are worth keeping. Not much chance to actually assainate anyone. Lots of weird half baked stuff like the naval warfare in the story line but nowhere else.

    Odyssey - it's basically the same as origins. They spent more time fleshing out the mechanics. Added in a ton of options but you only use a few. Added in a ton more brawling combat and very little assassination. In many instances trying to play as an assassin is just not possible. The combat is often broken. Beating the bosses is all the same. Spam arrows while dodging until they weaken, get a hit in and run away- repeat. Save often because the game crashes regularly.

    Yes I played all the way through and beat the main quests and side quest on all of them.

  • Windows did a few vital things that Apple failed miserably on in the 90's.

    Mac dropped support for legacy software and hardware on every new OS in the 90's. Microsoft maintained backwards capability. It was a major reason windows was more resource intensive and had more bugs. It was a smart move because windows OS was able to handle more software and hardware than Macs. This is the top reason why windows demolished Mac in sales.

    Microsoft's business model allowed greater range of pricepoints. Most users in business or at home do not need the capabilities of the lowest priced Mac model. You don't need much to check e-mail, browse the web, and do some basic word processing. Apple did not service this largest section of the market at all.