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How a Web Design Goes Straight to Hell - The Oatmeal.

Let's get this out of the way: I have an iPhone 4, I tend to like Apple's designs, and I've scornfully referred to Samsung's phones as "the phones that Tupperware made" in the past.

This isn't changing my mind any.

Let me also say that I think that the Lumia phones, the HTC one and the Xperia Z1 compact all tickle my design bone in some way, so this isn't just some anti-Android rant.

Samsung really seems to slap together their phones from stuff that's available with no mind towards anything other than just cramming stuff in, and it turns out they're not even very good at that. Why anyone continues to buy them is honestly beyond me when there are so many good options available, even just within the Android ecosystem. This is why Apple continues to have so many fans. They at least try to have all their ducks in a row before making announcements and promises.

Hopefully more people start bailing out of the Samsung trapâ"what differentiates their phones other than 8GB of system software and a flimsy plastic body?

Dear friend, this comic was made with you in mind.

But, if they're not keeping your credit card # they can't do the one-click order thing. I do get kinda annoyed having to type my credit card in every time, but I realise that it's nothing compared to the annoyance of having it stolen.

Since the story already had the obligatory xkcd, here's an oatmeal which also describes it: http://theoatmeal.com/comics/s... . To paraphrase: if I want a shitty password and don't care if it gets stolen, why shouldn't I?

I found that people judge you by your domain.

Custom domain -- professional.

@gmail/yahoo/hotmail -- hack.

You read the Oatmeal too, don't you?

And of course they'll be sent to a different part of the country then where they're from.

Then what happened?

"Then vs than", care of theoatmeal.com

And yet the content companies act as though Netflix is Public Enemy #2 (right after pirates). They seem to think that putting their content on Netflix will kill their ability to make tons of money off of the content by selling it to customers multiple times. This might be true to an extent, but the more content they make available via Netflix (and other, similar services), the less incentive people have to pirate. Yes, there will always be people who pirate. You could offer movies in a DRM-Free format for $1 each and some people would insist on pirating it instead. My advice to the content companies would be to forget about those people. They aren't potential customers. However, the guy who wants to watch Game of Thrones online, is willing to pay money for it, but finds that piracy is the easier (or only) option is a potential customer that you lose by not making your content readily available.

Breaking Bad season 5 has not yet screened on the ABC. If you wanted to watch it while the global conversation about it was still happening, you needed Foxtel with a Showcase subscription, which will set you back $72 a month. (For comparison, the DVD box set for season 5 costs less than half that, and you get to keep it.)

There was no other way to legally watch it in Australia. Most people can't justify spending $72 a month for one or two TV shows (say, Breaking Bad and Game of Thrones), and companies like AMC and HBO provide no other way, such as a streaming web site. It's unsurprising that Australia leads the world in pirating shows like these when the distributors refuse to take Australia's money. It's like The Oatmeal's experience only worse.

Note to AMC and HBO: No, I haven't pirated your damn shows. I've only seen a couple of episodes of Breaking Bad on free-to-air, and I have not seen any of Game of Thrones. I'd rather be out of the conversation completely than give any legitimacy to your price-gouging deals with Foxtel. There are people with money who would like to give it to you in return for content that you produce. It is your stupidity and ineptitude which is preventing said people from giving you said money. Fix that, and the piracy rate will drop dramatically.

I also read a lot of research papers. I sometimes discuss them in academic groups and need to highlight parts for quick and easy reference.

I've tried a variety of eReaders (glowy ones with touch screens) and tried converting PDFs to eBooks and HTML, I've used a smartphone, I've taken my laptop with me. I've looked at what others are doing to see if they've got any good ideas.

I hate printers and agree with The Oatmeal that they were sent from hell: http://theoatmeal.com/comics/p...

What do I do now? I get my local print-shop to print them out for me. They can even turn them into neat little books with enough space around to write notes. It's not very tree friendly so I do it judiciously but good ol' fashioned paper is unbeatable in my opinion.

http://theoatmeal.com/comics/o...

seriously... it's life altering

Best explanation I've read so far :
http://theoatmeal.com/pl/worki...

Unhappy Inkmouth

http://theoatmeal.com/comics/t... I have nothing particularly smart to add, other than, if you want to make free-floating plasma balls, you can do so by lighting a match, blowing on it, and dropping it in the microwave while the carbonized part is still smoldering. Try it. It is safe (although running the microwave for more than half a minute isn't recommended).

Read a web comic about your type of business's usual web sites.

*What broadcasters are worried about is cable retransmission fees, which has nothing to do with Aereo. Viacom wants to keep your cable company paying obscene amounts of money for channels like Nickelodeon and MTV, and threaten to pull their local CBS channel if they don't agree. Broadcast television was never supposed to work that way. Aereo is breaking that model.*

Then let the model break. I'm tired of region-locking DVD or BD discs, not being able to watch something because I'm not in the US, not being able to watch something I bought from a movie company on a different computer. Heck, under current law I'm not even allowed to rip my own DVDs to watch on my iPhone. Disney has stuff from the '30s that is *STILL* copyrighted. People get their e-books removed *even* if they paid for them, the list goes on.

And they're wondering why people pirate stuff. The Oatmeal hit the nail on this one

http://theoatmeal.com/comics/game_of_thrones

For those too lazy to google it: http://theoatmeal.com/comics/game_of_thrones

http://theoatmeal.com/comics/airplane_layout

Direct link, for those of you who are lazy

So what exactly did the oatmeal get wrong?

http://theoatmeal.com/comics/tesla

This. Damn you ninja! http://theoatmeal.com/comics/who_vs_whom

This is simple convenience.

There was a time when it was easier to download something (even through "pirate" channels) than to buy it. See: I tried to watch Game of Thrones

Now Netflix makes it extremely affordable and easy (read: very convenient) to get that content. I don't have to travel to a brick and mortar. I don't have to wait for shipping from Amazon. I don't have to download a BitTorrent client and search for active torrents. It's just there and ready to go.

You focus on what customers want and suddenly you've got more business than you can handle. Sometimes the market actually rewards the correct behavior.

If my account is set to Canada, I should only see "A project to harness the power of the wind about 20 kilometers off the coast of Fukushima".

If you wish to see "A project to harness the power of the wind about 12 miles off the coast of Fukushima", which frankly is a system designed for children, Slashdot should convert it for you according to your account settings.

Isn't there a Web standard that should do all of this automatically anyway? If there isn't, why the fuck not? Discuss below.

I refer you to this chart between Max Brooks and Brad Pitt:

http://theoatmeal.com/comics/wwz

We don't "see time" just like we don't see as many colors as geckos.

Geckos? meh!

I found this link ( http://theoatmeal.com/comics/printers ) from the comments section of this ( http://www.howtogeek.com/174232/htg-explains-why-is-printer-ink-so-expensive/ ) article. Hope it helps.

Do you think people who use an antenna are also free loading scumbags?
and then there is this:
http://theoatmeal.com/comics/game_of_thrones

99 cents per episode for a tv series is outrages.

All I got out of that is that Denise Milani wants to date my testicles.

Looks like you've got some lucky testicles, pal!

Do you think people who use an antenna are also free loading scumbags?
and then there is this:
http://theoatmeal.com/comics/game_of_thrones

99 cents per episode for a tv series is outrages.

All I got out of that is that Denise Milani wants to date my testicles.

Do you think people who use an antenna are also free loading scumbags?
and then there is this:
http://theoatmeal.com/comics/game_of_thrones

99 cents per episode for a tv series is outrages.

content owners of the content you're willing to pay for will never publish on HTML5 unless they have some sort of DRM

They will if they don't want this to happen to them!

Yeah... that looks like a tall glass of NOPE!

Sounds like the same kind of hornets that Matt Inman ran into. http://theoatmeal.com/comics/running5

Piracy drops because sharing on torrent is pointless (unless you are a linux distro or some sort of big chunk of data).
In my experience most people don't WANT TO PAY! And that's why 99% of the torrents are breaking copyright rules.
Because an album costs between 15$ and $40 in countries where average salary is $250 and where is $2500 (and gives $1 to the artist). Would you pay like 10% of your montly income for an album?
I'm very sure the way of distributing music will change

So... kinda like this?

Fair enough.

People were creating artwork long before copyright was invented... All copyright has done, is encourage the greedy by allowing someone to continue getting paid for work they did long ago.

Tell me again how a lack of international copyright helped Georges Méliès create art and discouraged greedy douchebags from stealing it.

The honour system. Bittorrent users would never pirate music from independent artists, they only go after labels' output where the economics don't favour the artist or the consumer.

Stop laughing.

You laugh, but to be fair, when things are readily available digitally, piracy does drop off quite a bit.

Yes, there's always going to be cuntrags that bitch -- the whining blubbering mass of entitled manchildren that cry every time Viz shuts down another Naruto / One Piece / Bleach piracy site being the example that immediately comes to mind -- but for the most part, people pirate not because they don't want to pay, it's because they want convenience.

Relevant Oatmeal link.

or they are going to quickly start to loose business quickly.

10 Words You Need to Stop Misspelling.

Which brings us to this

http://theoatmeal.com/comics/mantis_shrimp

the big guys never loose

Loose what? A one-cheek-sneak? Seriously...

The world reacts to the crisis in Syria.

For all we know, something like this happened, the CEO or someone from management got involved and they got the results we all just saw.

Apropos: http://theoatmeal.com/comics/who_vs_whom Pronoun inflections are the only remnants of oblique cases in English. Indeed, they persist in other languages (such as French) that have dropped case as well. This has been your pedantic language lesson for the day. You may now return to commenting on /.

Check out The Oatmeal for an alternate view on Edison: http://theoatmeal.com/comics/tesla

I don't have a magnet link, but I do have an HTTP link. Perhaps someone's HTTPS Everywhere rules have fallen out of sync.

https://theoatmeal.com/comics/game_of_thrones

So Comcast; what does your filter suggest when there is no legal option. See: http://theoatmeal.com/comics/game_of_thrones

Yes, but in the US it is _illegal_ LOL... we are so weird. Naturally, we are still allowed to sell them for slaughter. Because, you know, it doesn't matter that the horse is eaten, just that it cannot be eaten HERE.

As a matter of federal law, the consumption of horse meat is legal. It's also legal to grow horses for meat consumption and to export them for slaughter (e.g. to Mexico & Canada) and then re-import the meat for consumption. It's also technically legal to slaughter them for consumption, but only if the USDA inspects the slaughtering facility for this purpose, and the USDA has not allocated any money to horse-butchering operations since a rider in budget bills explicitly banned them from doing so from 2007-2011. That pretty much killed the industry here, though some are looking to start it back.

Now, several states do ban horsemeat production and/or consumption, and much of that came about because of terrible abuses in the industry, such as the infamous Beltex plant in Texas, and concerns over the use of horse drugs not safe for human consumption commonly used in old race horses.

Personally, I'm allergic to horse hair and thus never developed an enchanted love for the beasts that so many others suffer from, which is probably why my opinion of horses and horsemeat tracks pretty well with The Oatmeal's.

Take a class in earth sciences and understand how aquifers and contaminants work. than come back and revise this post so that you don't sound like an idiot.

Why would I take a class in earth sciences when I already took a class in Philosophy and I learned how to spot an Ad Hominen attack?

Feel free to point out the flaws in my argument, but don't deflect away from the issue by saying "Unless you're a recognized scientist in the field, nothing you say has any validity. Oh, and you're an idiot."

But before you do that, you might want to have a look at this site: http://theoatmeal.com/comics/misspelling

...and "lose", not "loose" ( http://theoatmeal.com/comics/misspelling ), which is a mistake a simple spelling checker won't catch. For that you need to actually know how to spell.

And that kinda sums up the problem with this sort of technology. No technology will make a gun magically safe, for that you need to take personal responsibility for the education of gun owners (and parenting).

A bird once flew into the house through an open window - perhaps because there was another window open on the other side of the room, so it looked like there was clear way through. The cat happened to be in the room at the time, and the bird never made it to the opposite window. We couldn't react in time to prevent the poor bird from getting his neck broken as soon as the cat brought it down, nay, slammed it down on the floor.

If our cat wanted to maim us, he certainly could. If he's in a rogue mood, he'll chase and kill occasional insects that make it into the house. Mostly he's too lazy too bother, so he just observes them and sometimes uses his paws like flipper paddles in a pinball machine.

How much do cats actually kill?

A bit off-topic, but I just thought I'd put that out there. I think the GP is being way to kind/naive in calling cats "incompetent" supervillains.

Time Warner, Time Warner Cable, Warner Music Group, and AOL are separate companies, despite formerly being part of one company. Time Warner owns the Turner channels (TNT, TBS, Cartoon Network, etc.), half of The CW, and the channel that's the subject of Obligatory Oatmeal. There's a difference between TW joining and TWC joining: one is more likely to bring series made for Turner channels.