Yeah, well, I failed typography three times.:) But when I said kerning, I meant it; the f and t are so close together they overlap, and it's only two letters instead of three, otherwise it would be tracking. As far as the crossbar / cross strokes thing... yeah, well, ya got me there. POINT, BLUE!
Bullshit. Postmodern twaddle. I might kill ya. But you will be awake, you will be facing me and you will be armed.[1] No, some of us have these things called morals that forbid us from even really considering mass murder and public mayhem.
For you, Denial is just a river in Egypt, huh.
Lots of people flunk out of college yet few shoot up the town. This tells me most people are rational and capable of self government.
Yeah, and lots of people drink tea yet few own a bicycle. This tells me that the sound of purple is capable of tasting lukewarm.
Or Canada, Spain, Mexico... a lot of countries offer varying degrees and types of nationalized healthcare. The United States stands alone in being the only G8 country that lacks it.
Bah. Pentagram made a Windows 8 logo. Look at the one on their own homepage by Paula Scher, their lead designer and goddess in the design world -- monochrome, baby blue, sans serif font, angled rectangles. That looked modern.
Logos are supposed to look simple, they're symbols; and should be easily recognizable and (ideally) capable of being used in black and white. Anyone who's taken a semester of graphic design classes could tell you that much.
And don't say companies don't live or die based on their logos: Brand identity is what separates Pepsi from Coke. I won't get into the research and market data that says how important this is, but it is and you're making a huge mistake to think otherwise.
Give me an alternative that works a) world-wide, b) takes credit cards and c) no setup-fees and I will move off PayPal.
They have setup-fees, you just don't see them. You have money sitting in your PayPal account right now, right? It's not earning interest, it's just a static dollar amount. And you have to maintain a positive balance to have a PayPal account. What I mean is, when you open a PayPal account, you link it to another account, and then PayPal transfers money from that account in chunks whenever you make a transaction. So let's say you have $26 in your account, and you buy something that costs $28. PayPal transfers in $25 increments, so after you buy your $28 do-dad, you have $23 in your PayPal account.
Everybody who has a PayPal account has similar, and this is how they make their money, and not a small amount either. At any point in time, PayPal only has to pay out a fraction of what it's holding in all those accounts in aggregate, just like a bank. And because it's not a bank and not subject to the rules of a bank, it can loan out the money that isn't needed to cover transactions right now for short amounts of time, earning interest and dividends on that. Banks do this too, but they're required by law to cover the entire amount of your checking/savings account, up to the FDIC maximum ($100k). What's more, if you ever make a purchase that exceeds the amount in your account, PayPal only has to cover the difference -- money will still be leftover in the account when the transaction completes. But wait, there's more. PayPal doesn't immediately release funds; It immediately gets funds from you, but the vendor isn't paid right away. That only comes hours or even days later. So PayPal has that amount of time that it can loan out the money and earn dividends on it before it has to pay it out.
As a result of all these delays and small balance accounts you have to maintain to have a PayPal, it can not only get away with not having setup-fees, but makes sure you're providing them with a considerable investment base and profits from that.
All the convenience instruments you use, credit cards, paypal, banks, etc., rely on these delays in moving your money from their account to the vendor account, to make profit. Unlike those financial instruments, however, PayPal doesn't have to follow the same federal regulations. Which means, if tomorrow it imploded, you'd lose everything in your PayPal and there's nothing you could do about it. If you read their EULA and stuff, you'll realize exactly how little rights you have to that money -- which is to say, basically none. They can simply say "We suspect you're a criminal", and then it's your job to prove your innocence to an arbitrator hired and paid for by them. There are no procedural rules, it's just a meeting with a guy in an office. And whatever he decides is legally binding.
Your convenience account has no protections whatsoever. None. If you're comfortable with that, then go ahead and use PayPal. Make them rich at your expense and that of the vendor you do business with. Of all the middlemen you could choose, they're the worst... but, in the end, it is your choice. Now if you want an alternative... there are plenty available internationally. Do your homework. Personally, I'd start with Germany or Switzerland, but pretty much anywhere you go outside North America you're going to find robust, cheap solutions, with plenty of legal guarantees.
Yeah, and let me be the first to say, I think they went backwards.
That logo belongs in the 80s. I'm saying this as a graphic designer too; The colors are flat, solid. It uses simple geometric shapes. The only thing that tells me that this isn't vintage is the kerning on the text at the end (they overlapped the crossbar on the 'f' and 't'), which wasn't terribly common in that day. And yes, I am saying this knowing the design house that created the logo (very disappointed, Pentagram... you're supposed to be the best here. Da fuq happened?).
I know it was designed to evoke feelings of openness and friendliness, but to me it just comes off as dated. But maybe I'm jaded because I know that Microsoft OS' follow the same rule as Star Trek movies: Every other one sucks. And maybe I am being harsh on Pentagram; I mean, it's hard to design a logo for something you know is going to explode on the launchpad.
But still guys, it's pretty 80s. You could have at least... I don't know... tilted the squares a little? Something. Anything. It's very boring.
Control the criminals and the mentally ill, not household cleaners, not knives, not firearms.
Small caveat: Everyone is mentally ill. I can give you a psychology test and find something wrong with you. In fact, psychologists become suspicious when there testing doesn't find anything wrong -- that usually indicates someone is manipulating the test results. What's even more damning is that the only difference I've found between people who are in-patient, and the general population, is that one is surrounded by walls and the other isn't.
People like you who segment themselves away from "the criminals" or "the mentally ill", labor under the delusion that they aren't, and/or couldn't become, part of that group. But it takes very little to become a criminal, or mentally ill. In the right circumstances, anyone can be a murderer, or become mentally ill, or any variation on the theme therein. So rather than engaging in this ego-protection, you need to admit that the problem isn't only the people, but the situations that create them.
In every violent act where a gun is used, someone's always there to say that we should ban guns to prevent it... but very few people say "We should have helped this person sooner." If you want to stop violence, understand the reasons for it, rather than just advocating bandaid solutions to it.
I guess I'm not entirely happy with the idea that any moron who would have been denied a gun permit (even in the "sure! go kill someone" gun-happy USA) could possibly get a reprap or ordbot for a few hundred dollars and go print themselves their own damn killing device.
That same "moron" can go to the supermarket and buy a dozen or so different ingredients needed to make a bomb too. Should we ban supermarkets? There's always going to be a small minority of people that, for whatever reason, become violent. Your discomfort and unhappiness with this fact notwithstanding, there is no way to prevent this. There are, however, ways to minimize the damage.
It does not bother me that someone can manufacture a plastic gun in their own home. They could own a home full of guns for all I care. They could, in fact, make their house out of nothing but guns, and carry a dozen handguns around while they do their local shopping. Guns by themselves are not the problem -- the problem comes when the guy carrying a dozen handguns is the only guy like that in a crowded place when he snaps and decides to go all murder-happy.
I have never felt safer anywhere on this earth than on a military base where people carried their weapons openly and were trained in how to use them. And I have never felt less safe than walking around on the streets after dark in poverty-striken neighborhoods, because I know there's a lot of people there who haven't had any training and think a gun is the answer to all their problems. And still, guns aren't the problem here -- it's poverty, systemic injustice, racism, etc., that all create a factory pumping out desperate people.
Nobody needs a gun, or a bomb, to kill you. With training, you could be killed by someone with their bare hands and there would be nothing you could do to stop that either. Rather than sit there like a limp dick and be helpless, why not take steps to defend yourself? Take some self defense classes. Buy a gun, or a knife, or a tazer... whatever you feel would help with this obvious insecurity you have. I am not afraid of a guy with a plastic gun, anymore than I'm afraid of a guy with a real gun -- I know the odds of dying due to violent assault, and in fact my personal risk is very much higher than yours because I'm a member of a minority group that experiences the highest rates of suicide, murder, and violent attack in this country. I do not carry a gun, a a knife, or a tazer. I have been trained enough to know what to do if anyone ever presents a weapon -- regardless of the material it is made of. I feel totally safe, not because I have a weapon, but because I am a weapon.
If everybody was trained, and was given a sidearm, like many countries where military service is compulsory, this wouldn't be a problem. Guy goes crazy in a public place, and a dozen other guys with military training fill him full of bullets. 3 people are killed or injured, and live goes on... not this "Guy goes crazy in a public place, dozens dead or injured, more killed when they storm the place to free the hostages" bullshit that happens now.
It's obvious you can't stop someone who really wants a gun from getting one: They're easy to design, make, and use. It's a very simple mechanical device. So rather than invest an inordinate amount of resources so that the general population can remain ignorant and defenseless, why not train them and give them ready access to firearms? Being trained and able to defend yourself is a far superior deterrent to crime, and as a bonus, it's also a better use of our tax dollars.
People need to stop using PayPal and other sites that allow them to freeze your funds because they are feeling contrary. Start using wire funds transfers to offshore accounts, or mailing in checks, etc. I know it may not be as convenient but these companies are happy to eat your money and give you nothing in return. And while that money is frozen, you're not getting interest on those funds either -- they are. It's in their best interests to search for reasons to freeze your funding, and people will keep throwing money at them because it's convenient to do so.
Stop supporting these companies, and for that matter, stop doing business with companies in the United States -- that includes Visa and Mastercard. Most organizations worldwide are moving off the dollar and away from US-based businesses for financial support and advice because they've become a militant government that commits acts of economic terrorism.
BitTorrent is a actually a terrible way to distribute data. It works because it decentralises the COST of the data distribution - instead of a data centre or website absorbing it, it is (largely) democratised amongst all the peers who absorb the cost by paying their ISP.
It does what it was designed to do: Namely to decentralize data distribution, which defrays costs to the point where it is affordable to all the participants. It may not be the best protocol, or best method of doing it, but it works surprisingly well for its simplicity.
From a network model is sort of sucks, because you 10 people on the same ISP downloading the same file will all download 10 copies of the the file from a variety of different sources.
Not a terribly convincing argument. Conventional web-based downloads do the same thing: How effective is caching, overall, as part of aggregate data usage for all files exceeding, say, 5 MB? You're down to single digit percentages there. You aren't really saving much bandwidth, except in very specialized circumstances like, say, windows update.
But you end up needing MORE data centres, because you have to have infrastructure at every point to cache this data as close to a large volume of end users.
It also requires the users sacrifice their privacy in the name of network optimization.
So 10 years ago we started a website to...
Your solution here is a bandaid to begin with: You're admitting there was inadequate bandwidth on the physical links, but rather than save up to upgrade them, you blame the gamers. Caching can't fix your problem, only new physical media can.
Eventually our sponsorship dried up and we resorted to ads. The ads meant we could continue providing the service FOR FREE, without having to ask users for any money. All they had to do was...
And obviously their wallets didn't come right out, because to them, the service being provided wasn't valuable enough. That's why the project was defunded. Advertising at this point was an attempt to waylay market forces which were clearly saying "This is not needed anymore."
t. The only alternative is to actually take money from the users to pay for it.
There was another alternative -- otherwise the funding wouldn't have dried up. The alternative in this case was... Australia ponied up the cash for faster transatlantic links. Whether the money comes from the government, a corporation, a collection of corporations, or private citizens, doesn't really matter. Advertising did not provide sufficient cashflow to provide a real solution, only keep a bandaid one on life support for a little longer.
The difference is they're doing it in good faith that in return for connecting you to their content (which they not only pay the bandwidth for, but the server time to service your request, the costs of having a human being put it online, and all the overhead of running the business that allows it all to happen), you will spend a fraction of time absorbing the ad that they're putting in front of you.
There are alternatives. I laid out in some detail in my previous post what an alternative might look like. You didn't come right out and say that it's a bad idea because you can't. It's how the internet used to work. Fundamentally, it's still how it works today despite decades upon decades of governments, corporations, and committees doing everything possible to control and manipulate it into being something else.
Your argument reduces to an appeal to popularity: "Everybody else does it, so it must be right." You haven't even acknowledged the notion that there might be another way to organize computational resources, either because you can't figure out how to do it and have thus concluded it can't be done (which is pretty arrogant), or you have a vested interest in maintaining the status quo. Your reference to your apparently failing project you poured sweat and tears into seems to indicate at least the latter of the two.
Not at all. I pay my ISP to get internet access. If that internet access gave me equal bandwidth both in upload and download capacity, and adhered to network neutrality, there would be no need to pay for anything else other than internet access. The internet didn't come about because of advertising, or commercial interests. It doesn't need either to sustain itself. Protocols could easily be designed to share content, just like bittorrent does now. Bittorrent doesn't need advertising, and it can move a lot of data. More than anything a typical webpage costs in bandwidth. If the concept was extended so that websites I access frequently I could sign up to cache their content and redistribute it on a network model like bittorrent, which was what the web was designed to do, albeit less efficiently, being a "version 1.0" -- then there would be little need for servers, data centers, advertising, etc.
This isn't a "something for nothing" argument, this is a "cooperation costs less than competition" argument. The internet was not designed as a client/server model: TCP/IP is a peer to peer protocol. It's the ultimate in electronic democracy... and corporations and commercial interests have been fighting it, beating on it, manipulating it, and fucking it up as much as possible to shoehorn their own outdated business models on it.
The internet not only doesn't need advertisements: It doesn't need advertising companies, servers, data centers, clouds, businesses, corporations, governments... it doesn't need any of that. We could, in fact, create a wireless global network based on internet protocols and do away with ISPs entirely, if we were so motivated.
So don't give me that "something for nothing" argument, because that's what they're doing. They're allowed to freeload on my internet connection to support their broken business model. If enough people block advertising, move away from ISPs that don't enforce network neutrality, and demand the government do something about it... we might actually get the network back that we originally designed, the network that is full of possibilities, open protocols, and universal access to all of humanities collective knowledge and experience.
Or... you can be a consumer and eat whatever they feed you.
I checked with a skinny canadian friend of mine. He said that he usually just looks at photographs of American 200 mg Advil. That keeps him going for 2-3 days.
We need that much Advil because of the severity of headaches that come from seeing what our politicians are doing with our tax dollars. It has nothing to do with our weight.
Yeah; I'm waiting for the day they abolish prices altogether and just list the cost of everything as a percentage of your income. That's the pricing model everything is moving towards anyway -- not what something is worth, but what they can get away with charging you. And if any of you asshats stand up and make an "invisible hand" argument, you're waking up tomorrow with a horse head next to you. This is not the result of free trade, but the restriction of free trade. Those corporations are shoving region coding down your throats, signing exclusive contracts and manipulating distribution channels to artificially alter the prices, and buying off government officials to make it all legal. That is not capitalism. It is not free trade. It is exploitative, and should be stopped.
Why proponents of GE are trying to stop (via outspending) those who promote informed consumer choice is beyond me.
In most countries...
Q: What are genes?
A: Basically a short series of 'how tos' for an organism to create various proteins.
Q: What is DNA?
A: A super-structure of proteins which encode genetic material, the building blocks of life.
Q: How does evolution work?
... You get the idea. Most people can provide answers that are more or less correct, or at least on the right track. They can tell you what genes and chromosomes are. And then you have America...
Q: What are genes?
A: Goddunnit.
Q: What is DNA?
A: Goddunnit.
Q: How does evolution work?
A: Goddunnit.
These people are quite right to defeat the proposition, but not because they're against consumer choice, but because they realize just how uneducated the consumer is in this country. So uneducated, in fact, that you could probably sell liquid draino in stores as long as you put a nutritional label on the back, put it in the produce section, and proudly displayed a sticker claiming it wasn't genetically modified. I'm not saying this to be funny, or sarcastic, but to underscore just how little scientific education exists in this country, and how dramatically it's been gutted. If I stopped and asked ten people to explain what genetically engineered food is, I'd get ten different answers, and the odds of any one of them being right would be pretty low.
America's educational system doesn't allow or encourage critical thinking; It simply trains children to repeat whatever they are told as true. They literally have no ability to differentiate between the truth and a clever lie; Mostly they rely on the assumption that the people in power (teachers, police, etc.) are telling them the truth, and their own emotional dispositions when faced with conflicting facts. When you have a population this badly uneducated... it's probably best not to give them choices. They're already sheep as it is... you don't give sheep a mix of dogs and wolves and tell them "Good luck!"
If you want consumer choice... start with consumer education, then let's worry about consumer choice. And while you're at it... stop all these damn greenies from screwing up the food supply with their ridiculous ideas about "sustainability". We're in the middle of one of the worst draughts in history, and as required by law 40% of the crop has to be squished and converted into a fuel additive while people starve. It's insanity...
It's also up in the air what qualifies as an apocalypse. I'm pretty sure for the people who were in Hiroshima on a certain day, the world as they knew it ended... to them that was the apocalypse. For the people in the airplane, not so much.
Women, who now have essentially the ability to get pregnant when they want to...
Wait, what? Women need someone having sex with them, unprotected sex to be specific, in order to get pregnant. It's covered in health class, right after the video on how to conduct testicular exams.
... will have to ask a man for permission to become pregnant, maybe even beg for permission to be a mother.
The man already has effective birth control: It's called a condom. Remember that demonstration with the cucumber?
Do they actually understand the shift in reproductive power that unthinking feminists have been pushing for for so long?
Women have to carry the baby for 9 months. Men just have to give it a few thrusts and a little squirt. And societal expectations haven't changed on who's responsible for junior either: A man running away from his parental responsibilities is common and tolerated. A woman who does this is shamed by her family and friends. And if both parents abandon their responsibilities, the child is usually raised by the women in the woman's family.
Think of pregnancy as revenge etc., an act of aggression.
Right... she held you down and rode your dick, then stuck you with child support. And all the other times she didn't, and you had a chance to put on a condom...?
Male contraception empowers men in a way that women may not find so "fair."
The condom empowers men too. Nobody considers it unfair.
Perhaps we are not really projecting the changes easy male contraception in pill form will bring in the future as its benefits to men become widely perceived by them.
I doubt the pill will bring about any real social change; There's already effective male birth control, it's called a condom. Men don't want to wear it. Giving them more choices in birth control won't result in a significant change; A lot of men will then not wear a condom or take the pill or get their tubes tied. Giving people options doesn't make them more responsible. Male birth control won't cause a paradigm shift. If you ask me, it'll just be more evidence of what those feminists you seem to hate so much have been saying all along: Until social expectations of men and women are the same, any observations we make on the difference in behavior between men and women will continue to reflect our own prejudices.
PDFs have been a security headache for decades now. It originally started as an evolution of PostScript, but has since morphed into a "document solution". Adobe, like so many tech businesses, can't simply create a tool and then be finished. They always have to add more features, more code, more bloat. And surprise surprise, problems arise.
When I go to work on my car, I know my ratchets will work on any bolt on it; I just need to figure out what size it is and maybe an extender and I'm in business. My tools just work; they rarely break, and they don't stop working with next year's model... or the next decade's. Or the last. My ratchets will work on 1950s model cars, and I'm sure they'll still be useful on a 2050 model car.
Linux is more like my ratcheting set. Sed, awk, bash scripts... they don't change. They were there 5 years ago. They'll be there 5 years from now. They're simple, dependable, and "just work". What the fuck is so hard about making a read-only flat document that does the job of being easily readable and printable well? Stop adding features. Make the product do one thing well, and then use the profits to make a completely different product if you need something else done well.
No lesson sticks quite as well as one hard learned onesself.
Exactly. And you, at least, have decent parenting instincts. You pick and choose your battles with kids. I'll put my foot down when one of them wants to go play kickball on a busy side street, but if they want to play in the back yard and I tell them to put on sunscreen and they tell me they don't need it... I'm okay with letting them cook a little and let them be miserable for a few days after.
You can't always expect children to do what you tell them to. Your job isn't to protect them from every bad thing in the world -- your job is to make sure they make it to adulthood without dying or getting seriously hurt. Broken bones, stubbed toes, bruises, bad haircuts, and pictures of them in absolutely horrid (but self-inflicted) clothing is not something you can prevent. All you can do is pick them back up, put them on their feet, and tell them, "Next time, don't do that."
If Americans were really ashamed of our government's actions, they'd be out in the streets protesting and being blasted by water cannons and fighting with the National Guard, just like our parents' generation was during the Vietnam War.
They have, they did. Unlike our parents, protesters who were arrested were later released from prison, and whenever they wanted to put down the picket signs, there was a job waiting for them. Times have changed. People no longer take those kinds of risks. And why should they? It didn't stop the Vietnam war. It didn't really slow down the push to arrest anyone suspected of being a communist. It didn't stop two Americans from being convicted of treason and executed publicly, only to shamefully admit years later they were innocent, they knew they were innocent, and all the proof trotted out was purely a fabrication. And even worse.. it didn't stop them from shoving their kids feet first into the meat grinder with a mandatory draft.
Yes, we have rewritten our history books to make the boomers seem like they were rebelling against all of that. That they were enlightened, that they protested. And yet, every year the songs we play around Christmas time are from their childhood -- not a single christmas song from our generation gets regular airtime. Our entire country's media is based on making sure the boomers are shown in a favorable light, even as they trash our economy, drag us into war after war, and let our infrastructure rot from the inside out. A third of our roadway's bridges are structurally deficient... our sewers and waterworks are exploding, literally, from lack of maintenance. There's an outbreak of west nile happening right now in Dallas, and nary a peep from the major news outlets, even as they move the National Guard in as a state of emergency is declared.
Our generation knows the score. And we know to WAIT. Wait until these fuckers are dead, and then pick up the pieces when it's over.
Honestly, that's almost a good argument for implementing filtering. It challenges bright people to come up with clever solutions. Then they'll grow up with an interest in computers and networking, as well as a healthy distaste for censorship.
Most people aren't bright, and for every person it fosters a love of exploration and challenge, it'll create fifty more who view it as normal and try to club the other kid over the head for trying to get them all into trouble. The best solution is not to censor at all, and to simply be open to the kids about what's okay and what's not, and why, and if they have questions to have role models they can talk to about it that won't judge them for being curious or looking. Telling a kid not to do something just makes them want it more.
My mom tried for years to get my sister to wear mittens and hats when it was cold out (this is Minnesota, where winters can and do kill people very year). She'd never let her go outside without them, and was generally overbearing on the matter. Then she went on vacation for a few weeks in January and little sister asked to go for a walk. I saw how she was dressed -- no hat, no gloves, and asked if she thought she was dressed appropriately. She said yes. I opened the door. 10 minutes into our walk, she started complaining about how cold she was. I kept walking. She whined and said she wanted to go home. I kept walking, reminding her she said she was dressed appropriately and I was going to hold her to that. Another 10 minutes goes by and now she's shivering, stuffing her fingers in her sleeves, her pockets, finally pulling her arms out of the jacket entirely so her hands could stay out of the cold. Her nose and ears were red, and she looked miserable. Another 10 minutes goes by and she's stopped whining now and limping along miserably. We get back in the house, and she doesn't take off the jacket or anything, just goes to her room, pulls the blanket over her head, and remains miserable. About 5 minutes later I came in and took her shoes and socks off (which had become wet), put dry ones on, and put an electric blanket on her feet to warm them back up. She was fine after that.
She's never left the house without a hat or gloves since. Lesson learned.
There is a lot of great content and features on Facebook, and its a great way to stay in contact with friends, but there is also a potentially dark side. Along with inappropriate content, there is a tendency to share more information than should be shared, and not everyone follows proper security and privacy guidelines. What's the best way to setup campus-wide security/privacy policies for Facebook?"
In a word, don't. Unlike adults, teenagers won't have any qualms about bypassing your filtering. They'll use proxies. Tor. Thumb drives with other operating systems on it. Mobile phones. Secret non-broadcasting wifi networks. No filtering software yet designed has survived more than a few months in a public school without leaving the server running it as little more than a smouldering carbon scorch mark on the floor.
If this were a corporate environment, you could count on the fear and paranoia of being fired. You have no such power over teenagers... and many of them would do it even if you threatened them with life in the electric chair, because teenagers do not have good judgement. Even if you ask them "Is that a good idea," and they reply, "No," they'll probably keep doing it. And if you ask them why, they'll give you about as good of an answer as randomly seeking to some point in addressable memory and reading out whatever strings may or may not be present.
My advice... turn off the internet, lock the systems down, bolt them to the tables, put epoxy in all the USB ports, remove the optical drives, put everything behind plexiglass (little fingerholes for the keyboards), load up your operating system of choice and lock it down as much as you can, and then maybe, just maybe... you have a chance.
Slashdot Mirror
Yeah, well, I failed typography three times. :) But when I said kerning, I meant it; the f and t are so close together they overlap, and it's only two letters instead of three, otherwise it would be tracking. As far as the crossbar / cross strokes thing... yeah, well, ya got me there. POINT, BLUE!
Bullshit. Postmodern twaddle. I might kill ya. But you will be awake, you will be facing me and you will be armed.[1] No, some of us have these things called morals that forbid us from even really considering mass murder and public mayhem.
For you, Denial is just a river in Egypt, huh.
Lots of people flunk out of college yet few shoot up the town. This tells me most people are rational and capable of self government.
Yeah, and lots of people drink tea yet few own a bicycle. This tells me that the sound of purple is capable of tasting lukewarm.
Have UK Citizenship
Or Canada, Spain, Mexico... a lot of countries offer varying degrees and types of nationalized healthcare. The United States stands alone in being the only G8 country that lacks it.
Bah. Pentagram made a Windows 8 logo. Look at the one on their own homepage by Paula Scher, their lead designer and goddess in the design world -- monochrome, baby blue, sans serif font, angled rectangles. That looked modern.
Logos are supposed to look simple, they're symbols; and should be easily recognizable and (ideally) capable of being used in black and white. Anyone who's taken a semester of graphic design classes could tell you that much.
And don't say companies don't live or die based on their logos: Brand identity is what separates Pepsi from Coke. I won't get into the research and market data that says how important this is, but it is and you're making a huge mistake to think otherwise.
Give me an alternative that works a) world-wide, b) takes credit cards and c) no setup-fees and I will move off PayPal.
They have setup-fees, you just don't see them. You have money sitting in your PayPal account right now, right? It's not earning interest, it's just a static dollar amount. And you have to maintain a positive balance to have a PayPal account. What I mean is, when you open a PayPal account, you link it to another account, and then PayPal transfers money from that account in chunks whenever you make a transaction. So let's say you have $26 in your account, and you buy something that costs $28. PayPal transfers in $25 increments, so after you buy your $28 do-dad, you have $23 in your PayPal account.
Everybody who has a PayPal account has similar, and this is how they make their money, and not a small amount either. At any point in time, PayPal only has to pay out a fraction of what it's holding in all those accounts in aggregate, just like a bank. And because it's not a bank and not subject to the rules of a bank, it can loan out the money that isn't needed to cover transactions right now for short amounts of time, earning interest and dividends on that. Banks do this too, but they're required by law to cover the entire amount of your checking/savings account, up to the FDIC maximum ($100k). What's more, if you ever make a purchase that exceeds the amount in your account, PayPal only has to cover the difference -- money will still be leftover in the account when the transaction completes. But wait, there's more. PayPal doesn't immediately release funds; It immediately gets funds from you, but the vendor isn't paid right away. That only comes hours or even days later. So PayPal has that amount of time that it can loan out the money and earn dividends on it before it has to pay it out.
As a result of all these delays and small balance accounts you have to maintain to have a PayPal, it can not only get away with not having setup-fees, but makes sure you're providing them with a considerable investment base and profits from that.
All the convenience instruments you use, credit cards, paypal, banks, etc., rely on these delays in moving your money from their account to the vendor account, to make profit. Unlike those financial instruments, however, PayPal doesn't have to follow the same federal regulations. Which means, if tomorrow it imploded, you'd lose everything in your PayPal and there's nothing you could do about it. If you read their EULA and stuff, you'll realize exactly how little rights you have to that money -- which is to say, basically none. They can simply say "We suspect you're a criminal", and then it's your job to prove your innocence to an arbitrator hired and paid for by them. There are no procedural rules, it's just a meeting with a guy in an office. And whatever he decides is legally binding.
Your convenience account has no protections whatsoever. None. If you're comfortable with that, then go ahead and use PayPal. Make them rich at your expense and that of the vendor you do business with. Of all the middlemen you could choose, they're the worst... but, in the end, it is your choice. Now if you want an alternative... there are plenty available internationally. Do your homework. Personally, I'd start with Germany or Switzerland, but pretty much anywhere you go outside North America you're going to find robust, cheap solutions, with plenty of legal guarantees.
Yeah, and let me be the first to say, I think they went backwards.
That logo belongs in the 80s. I'm saying this as a graphic designer too; The colors are flat, solid. It uses simple geometric shapes. The only thing that tells me that this isn't vintage is the kerning on the text at the end (they overlapped the crossbar on the 'f' and 't'), which wasn't terribly common in that day. And yes, I am saying this knowing the design house that created the logo (very disappointed, Pentagram... you're supposed to be the best here. Da fuq happened?).
I know it was designed to evoke feelings of openness and friendliness, but to me it just comes off as dated. But maybe I'm jaded because I know that Microsoft OS' follow the same rule as Star Trek movies: Every other one sucks. And maybe I am being harsh on Pentagram; I mean, it's hard to design a logo for something you know is going to explode on the launchpad.
But still guys, it's pretty 80s. You could have at least... I don't know... tilted the squares a little? Something. Anything. It's very boring.
Control the criminals and the mentally ill, not household cleaners, not knives, not firearms.
Small caveat: Everyone is mentally ill. I can give you a psychology test and find something wrong with you. In fact, psychologists become suspicious when there testing doesn't find anything wrong -- that usually indicates someone is manipulating the test results. What's even more damning is that the only difference I've found between people who are in-patient, and the general population, is that one is surrounded by walls and the other isn't.
People like you who segment themselves away from "the criminals" or "the mentally ill", labor under the delusion that they aren't, and/or couldn't become, part of that group. But it takes very little to become a criminal, or mentally ill. In the right circumstances, anyone can be a murderer, or become mentally ill, or any variation on the theme therein. So rather than engaging in this ego-protection, you need to admit that the problem isn't only the people, but the situations that create them.
In every violent act where a gun is used, someone's always there to say that we should ban guns to prevent it... but very few people say "We should have helped this person sooner." If you want to stop violence, understand the reasons for it, rather than just advocating bandaid solutions to it.
I guess I'm not entirely happy with the idea that any moron who would have been denied a gun permit (even in the "sure! go kill someone" gun-happy USA) could possibly get a reprap or ordbot for a few hundred dollars and go print themselves their own damn killing device.
That same "moron" can go to the supermarket and buy a dozen or so different ingredients needed to make a bomb too. Should we ban supermarkets? There's always going to be a small minority of people that, for whatever reason, become violent. Your discomfort and unhappiness with this fact notwithstanding, there is no way to prevent this. There are, however, ways to minimize the damage.
It does not bother me that someone can manufacture a plastic gun in their own home. They could own a home full of guns for all I care. They could, in fact, make their house out of nothing but guns, and carry a dozen handguns around while they do their local shopping. Guns by themselves are not the problem -- the problem comes when the guy carrying a dozen handguns is the only guy like that in a crowded place when he snaps and decides to go all murder-happy.
I have never felt safer anywhere on this earth than on a military base where people carried their weapons openly and were trained in how to use them. And I have never felt less safe than walking around on the streets after dark in poverty-striken neighborhoods, because I know there's a lot of people there who haven't had any training and think a gun is the answer to all their problems. And still, guns aren't the problem here -- it's poverty, systemic injustice, racism, etc., that all create a factory pumping out desperate people.
Nobody needs a gun, or a bomb, to kill you. With training, you could be killed by someone with their bare hands and there would be nothing you could do to stop that either. Rather than sit there like a limp dick and be helpless, why not take steps to defend yourself? Take some self defense classes. Buy a gun, or a knife, or a tazer... whatever you feel would help with this obvious insecurity you have. I am not afraid of a guy with a plastic gun, anymore than I'm afraid of a guy with a real gun -- I know the odds of dying due to violent assault, and in fact my personal risk is very much higher than yours because I'm a member of a minority group that experiences the highest rates of suicide, murder, and violent attack in this country. I do not carry a gun, a a knife, or a tazer. I have been trained enough to know what to do if anyone ever presents a weapon -- regardless of the material it is made of. I feel totally safe, not because I have a weapon, but because I am a weapon.
If everybody was trained, and was given a sidearm, like many countries where military service is compulsory, this wouldn't be a problem. Guy goes crazy in a public place, and a dozen other guys with military training fill him full of bullets. 3 people are killed or injured, and live goes on... not this "Guy goes crazy in a public place, dozens dead or injured, more killed when they storm the place to free the hostages" bullshit that happens now.
It's obvious you can't stop someone who really wants a gun from getting one: They're easy to design, make, and use. It's a very simple mechanical device. So rather than invest an inordinate amount of resources so that the general population can remain ignorant and defenseless, why not train them and give them ready access to firearms? Being trained and able to defend yourself is a far superior deterrent to crime, and as a bonus, it's also a better use of our tax dollars.
People need to stop using PayPal and other sites that allow them to freeze your funds because they are feeling contrary. Start using wire funds transfers to offshore accounts, or mailing in checks, etc. I know it may not be as convenient but these companies are happy to eat your money and give you nothing in return. And while that money is frozen, you're not getting interest on those funds either -- they are. It's in their best interests to search for reasons to freeze your funding, and people will keep throwing money at them because it's convenient to do so.
Stop supporting these companies, and for that matter, stop doing business with companies in the United States -- that includes Visa and Mastercard. Most organizations worldwide are moving off the dollar and away from US-based businesses for financial support and advice because they've become a militant government that commits acts of economic terrorism.
BitTorrent is a actually a terrible way to distribute data. It works because it decentralises the COST of the data distribution - instead of a data centre or website absorbing it, it is (largely) democratised amongst all the peers who absorb the cost by paying their ISP.
It does what it was designed to do: Namely to decentralize data distribution, which defrays costs to the point where it is affordable to all the participants. It may not be the best protocol, or best method of doing it, but it works surprisingly well for its simplicity.
From a network model is sort of sucks, because you 10 people on the same ISP downloading the same file will all download 10 copies of the the file from a variety of different sources.
Not a terribly convincing argument. Conventional web-based downloads do the same thing: How effective is caching, overall, as part of aggregate data usage for all files exceeding, say, 5 MB? You're down to single digit percentages there. You aren't really saving much bandwidth, except in very specialized circumstances like, say, windows update.
But you end up needing MORE data centres, because you have to have infrastructure at every point to cache this data as close to a large volume of end users.
It also requires the users sacrifice their privacy in the name of network optimization.
So 10 years ago we started a website to...
Your solution here is a bandaid to begin with: You're admitting there was inadequate bandwidth on the physical links, but rather than save up to upgrade them, you blame the gamers. Caching can't fix your problem, only new physical media can.
Eventually our sponsorship dried up and we resorted to ads. The ads meant we could continue providing the service FOR FREE, without having to ask users for any money. All they had to do was...
And obviously their wallets didn't come right out, because to them, the service being provided wasn't valuable enough. That's why the project was defunded. Advertising at this point was an attempt to waylay market forces which were clearly saying "This is not needed anymore."
t. The only alternative is to actually take money from the users to pay for it.
There was another alternative -- otherwise the funding wouldn't have dried up. The alternative in this case was... Australia ponied up the cash for faster transatlantic links. Whether the money comes from the government, a corporation, a collection of corporations, or private citizens, doesn't really matter. Advertising did not provide sufficient cashflow to provide a real solution, only keep a bandaid one on life support for a little longer.
The difference is they're doing it in good faith that in return for connecting you to their content (which they not only pay the bandwidth for, but the server time to service your request, the costs of having a human being put it online, and all the overhead of running the business that allows it all to happen), you will spend a fraction of time absorbing the ad that they're putting in front of you.
There are alternatives. I laid out in some detail in my previous post what an alternative might look like. You didn't come right out and say that it's a bad idea because you can't. It's how the internet used to work. Fundamentally, it's still how it works today despite decades upon decades of governments, corporations, and committees doing everything possible to control and manipulate it into being something else.
Your argument reduces to an appeal to popularity: "Everybody else does it, so it must be right." You haven't even acknowledged the notion that there might be another way to organize computational resources, either because you can't figure out how to do it and have thus concluded it can't be done (which is pretty arrogant), or you have a vested interest in maintaining the status quo. Your reference to your apparently failing project you poured sweat and tears into seems to indicate at least the latter of the two.
For a country that was once at the cutting edge of mobile telephony, its lack of high-speed mobile broadband was becoming a severe embarrassment.
Meanwhile, in America...
Can you [buffering] he..[buffering]ar me now[signal lost]?
But it is childish and hypocritical.
Not at all. I pay my ISP to get internet access. If that internet access gave me equal bandwidth both in upload and download capacity, and adhered to network neutrality, there would be no need to pay for anything else other than internet access. The internet didn't come about because of advertising, or commercial interests. It doesn't need either to sustain itself. Protocols could easily be designed to share content, just like bittorrent does now. Bittorrent doesn't need advertising, and it can move a lot of data. More than anything a typical webpage costs in bandwidth. If the concept was extended so that websites I access frequently I could sign up to cache their content and redistribute it on a network model like bittorrent, which was what the web was designed to do, albeit less efficiently, being a "version 1.0" -- then there would be little need for servers, data centers, advertising, etc.
This isn't a "something for nothing" argument, this is a "cooperation costs less than competition" argument. The internet was not designed as a client/server model: TCP/IP is a peer to peer protocol. It's the ultimate in electronic democracy... and corporations and commercial interests have been fighting it, beating on it, manipulating it, and fucking it up as much as possible to shoehorn their own outdated business models on it.
The internet not only doesn't need advertisements: It doesn't need advertising companies, servers, data centers, clouds, businesses, corporations, governments... it doesn't need any of that. We could, in fact, create a wireless global network based on internet protocols and do away with ISPs entirely, if we were so motivated.
So don't give me that "something for nothing" argument, because that's what they're doing. They're allowed to freeload on my internet connection to support their broken business model. If enough people block advertising, move away from ISPs that don't enforce network neutrality, and demand the government do something about it... we might actually get the network back that we originally designed, the network that is full of possibilities, open protocols, and universal access to all of humanities collective knowledge and experience.
Or... you can be a consumer and eat whatever they feed you.
I checked with a skinny canadian friend of mine. He said that he usually just looks at photographs of American 200 mg Advil. That keeps him going for 2-3 days.
We need that much Advil because of the severity of headaches that come from seeing what our politicians are doing with our tax dollars. It has nothing to do with our weight.
Just saying its not new.
And you're right. I'm concerned about it becoming a mainstream practice, not that it happens in niche markets.
Yeah; I'm waiting for the day they abolish prices altogether and just list the cost of everything as a percentage of your income. That's the pricing model everything is moving towards anyway -- not what something is worth, but what they can get away with charging you. And if any of you asshats stand up and make an "invisible hand" argument, you're waking up tomorrow with a horse head next to you. This is not the result of free trade, but the restriction of free trade. Those corporations are shoving region coding down your throats, signing exclusive contracts and manipulating distribution channels to artificially alter the prices, and buying off government officials to make it all legal. That is not capitalism. It is not free trade. It is exploitative, and should be stopped.
Why proponents of GE are trying to stop (via outspending) those who promote informed consumer choice is beyond me.
In most countries...
Q: What are genes?
A: Basically a short series of 'how tos' for an organism to create various proteins.
Q: What is DNA?
A: A super-structure of proteins which encode genetic material, the building blocks of life.
Q: How does evolution work?
... You get the idea. Most people can provide answers that are more or less correct, or at least on the right track. They can tell you what genes and chromosomes are. And then you have America...
Q: What are genes?
A: Goddunnit.
Q: What is DNA?
A: Goddunnit.
Q: How does evolution work?
A: Goddunnit.
These people are quite right to defeat the proposition, but not because they're against consumer choice, but because they realize just how uneducated the consumer is in this country. So uneducated, in fact, that you could probably sell liquid draino in stores as long as you put a nutritional label on the back, put it in the produce section, and proudly displayed a sticker claiming it wasn't genetically modified. I'm not saying this to be funny, or sarcastic, but to underscore just how little scientific education exists in this country, and how dramatically it's been gutted. If I stopped and asked ten people to explain what genetically engineered food is, I'd get ten different answers, and the odds of any one of them being right would be pretty low.
America's educational system doesn't allow or encourage critical thinking; It simply trains children to repeat whatever they are told as true. They literally have no ability to differentiate between the truth and a clever lie; Mostly they rely on the assumption that the people in power (teachers, police, etc.) are telling them the truth, and their own emotional dispositions when faced with conflicting facts. When you have a population this badly uneducated... it's probably best not to give them choices. They're already sheep as it is... you don't give sheep a mix of dogs and wolves and tell them "Good luck!"
If you want consumer choice... start with consumer education, then let's worry about consumer choice. And while you're at it... stop all these damn greenies from screwing up the food supply with their ridiculous ideas about "sustainability". We're in the middle of one of the worst draughts in history, and as required by law 40% of the crop has to be squished and converted into a fuel additive while people starve. It's insanity...
It's also up in the air what qualifies as an apocalypse. I'm pretty sure for the people who were in Hiroshima on a certain day, the world as they knew it ended... to them that was the apocalypse. For the people in the airplane, not so much.
Women, who now have essentially the ability to get pregnant when they want to...
Wait, what? Women need someone having sex with them, unprotected sex to be specific, in order to get pregnant. It's covered in health class, right after the video on how to conduct testicular exams.
... will have to ask a man for permission to become pregnant, maybe even beg for permission to be a mother.
The man already has effective birth control: It's called a condom. Remember that demonstration with the cucumber?
Do they actually understand the shift in reproductive power that unthinking feminists have been pushing for for so long?
Women have to carry the baby for 9 months. Men just have to give it a few thrusts and a little squirt. And societal expectations haven't changed on who's responsible for junior either: A man running away from his parental responsibilities is common and tolerated. A woman who does this is shamed by her family and friends. And if both parents abandon their responsibilities, the child is usually raised by the women in the woman's family.
Think of pregnancy as revenge etc., an act of aggression.
Right... she held you down and rode your dick, then stuck you with child support. And all the other times she didn't, and you had a chance to put on a condom...?
Male contraception empowers men in a way that women may not find so "fair."
The condom empowers men too. Nobody considers it unfair.
Perhaps we are not really projecting the changes easy male contraception in pill form will bring in the future as its benefits to men become widely perceived by them.
I doubt the pill will bring about any real social change; There's already effective male birth control, it's called a condom. Men don't want to wear it. Giving them more choices in birth control won't result in a significant change; A lot of men will then not wear a condom or take the pill or get their tubes tied. Giving people options doesn't make them more responsible. Male birth control won't cause a paradigm shift. If you ask me, it'll just be more evidence of what those feminists you seem to hate so much have been saying all along: Until social expectations of men and women are the same, any observations we make on the difference in behavior between men and women will continue to reflect our own prejudices.
PDFs have been a security headache for decades now. It originally started as an evolution of PostScript, but has since morphed into a "document solution". Adobe, like so many tech businesses, can't simply create a tool and then be finished. They always have to add more features, more code, more bloat. And surprise surprise, problems arise.
When I go to work on my car, I know my ratchets will work on any bolt on it; I just need to figure out what size it is and maybe an extender and I'm in business. My tools just work; they rarely break, and they don't stop working with next year's model... or the next decade's. Or the last. My ratchets will work on 1950s model cars, and I'm sure they'll still be useful on a 2050 model car.
Linux is more like my ratcheting set. Sed, awk, bash scripts... they don't change. They were there 5 years ago. They'll be there 5 years from now. They're simple, dependable, and "just work". What the fuck is so hard about making a read-only flat document that does the job of being easily readable and printable well? Stop adding features. Make the product do one thing well, and then use the profits to make a completely different product if you need something else done well.
Be like the ratchet.
No lesson sticks quite as well as one hard learned onesself.
Exactly. And you, at least, have decent parenting instincts. You pick and choose your battles with kids. I'll put my foot down when one of them wants to go play kickball on a busy side street, but if they want to play in the back yard and I tell them to put on sunscreen and they tell me they don't need it... I'm okay with letting them cook a little and let them be miserable for a few days after.
You can't always expect children to do what you tell them to. Your job isn't to protect them from every bad thing in the world -- your job is to make sure they make it to adulthood without dying or getting seriously hurt. Broken bones, stubbed toes, bruises, bad haircuts, and pictures of them in absolutely horrid (but self-inflicted) clothing is not something you can prevent. All you can do is pick them back up, put them on their feet, and tell them, "Next time, don't do that."
* all artists are starving. That's why they look good in music videos.
I thought it was because they regularly vomit in the bathroom, take a lot of laxatives, and eat adderall like it's candy...
If Americans were really ashamed of our government's actions, they'd be out in the streets protesting and being blasted by water cannons and fighting with the National Guard, just like our parents' generation was during the Vietnam War.
They have, they did. Unlike our parents, protesters who were arrested were later released from prison, and whenever they wanted to put down the picket signs, there was a job waiting for them. Times have changed. People no longer take those kinds of risks. And why should they? It didn't stop the Vietnam war. It didn't really slow down the push to arrest anyone suspected of being a communist. It didn't stop two Americans from being convicted of treason and executed publicly, only to shamefully admit years later they were innocent, they knew they were innocent, and all the proof trotted out was purely a fabrication. And even worse.. it didn't stop them from shoving their kids feet first into the meat grinder with a mandatory draft.
Yes, we have rewritten our history books to make the boomers seem like they were rebelling against all of that. That they were enlightened, that they protested. And yet, every year the songs we play around Christmas time are from their childhood -- not a single christmas song from our generation gets regular airtime. Our entire country's media is based on making sure the boomers are shown in a favorable light, even as they trash our economy, drag us into war after war, and let our infrastructure rot from the inside out. A third of our roadway's bridges are structurally deficient... our sewers and waterworks are exploding, literally, from lack of maintenance. There's an outbreak of west nile happening right now in Dallas, and nary a peep from the major news outlets, even as they move the National Guard in as a state of emergency is declared.
Our generation knows the score. And we know to WAIT. Wait until these fuckers are dead, and then pick up the pieces when it's over.
Honestly, that's almost a good argument for implementing filtering. It challenges bright people to come up with clever solutions. Then they'll grow up with an interest in computers and networking, as well as a healthy distaste for censorship.
Most people aren't bright, and for every person it fosters a love of exploration and challenge, it'll create fifty more who view it as normal and try to club the other kid over the head for trying to get them all into trouble. The best solution is not to censor at all, and to simply be open to the kids about what's okay and what's not, and why, and if they have questions to have role models they can talk to about it that won't judge them for being curious or looking. Telling a kid not to do something just makes them want it more.
My mom tried for years to get my sister to wear mittens and hats when it was cold out (this is Minnesota, where winters can and do kill people very year). She'd never let her go outside without them, and was generally overbearing on the matter. Then she went on vacation for a few weeks in January and little sister asked to go for a walk. I saw how she was dressed -- no hat, no gloves, and asked if she thought she was dressed appropriately. She said yes. I opened the door. 10 minutes into our walk, she started complaining about how cold she was. I kept walking. She whined and said she wanted to go home. I kept walking, reminding her she said she was dressed appropriately and I was going to hold her to that. Another 10 minutes goes by and now she's shivering, stuffing her fingers in her sleeves, her pockets, finally pulling her arms out of the jacket entirely so her hands could stay out of the cold. Her nose and ears were red, and she looked miserable. Another 10 minutes goes by and she's stopped whining now and limping along miserably. We get back in the house, and she doesn't take off the jacket or anything, just goes to her room, pulls the blanket over her head, and remains miserable. About 5 minutes later I came in and took her shoes and socks off (which had become wet), put dry ones on, and put an electric blanket on her feet to warm them back up. She was fine after that.
She's never left the house without a hat or gloves since. Lesson learned.
BREAKING NEWS: "Al-Qaeda is hiding a stock of WMDs in Ecuador", says a US diplomat.
Atleast it's not oil.
There is a lot of great content and features on Facebook, and its a great way to stay in contact with friends, but there is also a potentially dark side. Along with inappropriate content, there is a tendency to share more information than should be shared, and not everyone follows proper security and privacy guidelines. What's the best way to setup campus-wide security/privacy policies for Facebook?"
In a word, don't. Unlike adults, teenagers won't have any qualms about bypassing your filtering. They'll use proxies. Tor. Thumb drives with other operating systems on it. Mobile phones. Secret non-broadcasting wifi networks. No filtering software yet designed has survived more than a few months in a public school without leaving the server running it as little more than a smouldering carbon scorch mark on the floor.
If this were a corporate environment, you could count on the fear and paranoia of being fired. You have no such power over teenagers... and many of them would do it even if you threatened them with life in the electric chair, because teenagers do not have good judgement. Even if you ask them "Is that a good idea," and they reply, "No," they'll probably keep doing it. And if you ask them why, they'll give you about as good of an answer as randomly seeking to some point in addressable memory and reading out whatever strings may or may not be present.
My advice... turn off the internet, lock the systems down, bolt them to the tables, put epoxy in all the USB ports, remove the optical drives, put everything behind plexiglass (little fingerholes for the keyboards), load up your operating system of choice and lock it down as much as you can, and then maybe, just maybe... you have a chance.