Are you implying that you're OK with your government massively invading MY privacy (as a UK citizen), as long as you're alright Jack? Nice to know that this isn't a moral issue of Orwellian abuse for you, but just a selfish desire to keep the thugs from your own front door.
I also hope you're OK with foreign governments returning the favour and monitoring your very move. Your definitely won't be complaining about having your rights violated if it's a British or Chinese agency reading your every email and logging your every phone call, right?
"Safer" is not the same as "safe". While a little exposure to something dangerous is better than a big exposure, it doesn't mean you haven't still been harmed by it. The science suggests that the human body can cope with exactly zero lead before suffering injury, in a way quite unlike the consumption of, say, ethanol- which is toxic only in large enough and sustained volumes.
In both cases, you can choose to vote with your wallet- you can choose to stop using the service that is being offered to you, and stop handing over money in exchange for it. For a corporation, the service is something commercial that you can stop paying for. For a government, that service is a whole country- if you want to stop using that service, you need to leave that country.
Your relationship with companies is only voluntary some of the time; frequently there is a monopoly or cartel that you cannot avoid doing business with. Where I live, I have a choice of exactly one private water company; I can only choose not to do business with them if I choose not to have running water or sewerage. Although I do have a "choice" of electricity and gas suppliers where I live, I only have the "choice" of a single electric and a single gas network, all of which is supplied by the same sources. I cannot choose, for example, not to do business with a gas fracking company- unless I want to choose not to have a supply of heat.
Of course with governments, you can also exercise your democratic rights and vote for someone who will do things "your way", or even (god forbid) run for an elected position yourself. That's an added bonus that you don't get with companies.
I'm currently typing this in Firefox 21 via Ubuntu (with Unity) on a 10" screen, and I don't see any clutter problem. The top line of my screen is taken up with the system tray, including the File, Edit etc. menus. Next row is the tabs. Next row is my URL bar and Search bar. Rest of the screen is all content. What on earth could be further reduced without breaking my experience? Get rid of the tabs? Get rid of the URL & search bars?
At some point, there is nothing to be gained from reduction, only things to be lost. For me, Firefox is now hovering right at that point.
Although I should point out that I'm not really worried; Firefox remains easy to customise to almost any extent you could want- as long as they don't cock that up, the worst they can do to me is inflict the mild annoyance of needing to spend time tweaking settings...
My "useless search bar" lets me select between Google, Wikipedia, Amazon and (if I ever wanted to use it, which alas I don't) Twitter. So I can think "I wonder how much a breadmaker costs" or "which year did Henry VIII die" and find out the answer in one click. Can't do that by mashing keywords into the URL bar (as far as I know). I'd have to navigate to the site's front page first, and I've become accustomed to my technologically enhanced laziness.
It isn't out yet (so it doesn't necessarily go against your point), but Kickstarted Dungeon Keeper clone War For The Overworld is Unity-based and intends to release on Linux. https://wftogame.com/
Seeing as your post counts as feedback on Slashdot, does that imply that he should do the exact opposite of what you advise in order to have a thriving business, and not do the opposite of advice on Slashdot? Where does that leave his decision to follow your advice?
The principal of "blowing up a large lump of mass before it hits earth" should be more or less the same regardless of whether the object is in a long period orbit or not (which is the only real difference between a comet and an asteroid with any amount of ice in its composition). The only difficulty would be in spotting your target before it's too late.
Free hosted email account with IMAP, large storage limits and decent spam/malware filtering software, that's the point. Aside from the lack of my own domain name, it's a damn-sight better than anything I could host myself for zero/near zero cost.
I actually switched to Gmail in the first place, many years ago from Hotmail, specifically because it was IMAP compatible (back when Hotmail wasn't unless you paid a hefty premium). I used the webmail interface occasionally back in it's original form, but I was principally interested in hooking up my email accounts to Thunderbird and my phone (back then a non-smart feature phone with an IMAP client). I lost interest in the webmail portion when they did their first big redesign, but that very nearly coincided with my first Android smartphone, with its very decent email client in my pocket 24/7, so I didn't really miss it.
You assume that people in the earlier days of the internet weren't getting lots of emails too, just with different content. Have you ever been on half a dozen active mailing lists at the same time?
I'm still quite happy with "everything turns up in my inbox with metadata I can filter by". That plus some auto-move rules does me just fine at work (where I'm a 100 emails a day man) and at home (pizza receipts and all).
I've actually found the last new Gmail interface such an unpleasant pain to use that I just don't use the webmail interface at all any more; I only ever interact with it through Thunderbird or my Android email client, except for in emergencies. Some people (my wife for example) seem to really like the (old) new interface, but I just can't make myself like it.
Then stop resinstalling your OS, you crazy man. Use a distro with a decent support period and get comfortable.
Windows 7 came out in 2009 and is supported (mainstream support) until 2015. Ubuntu 12.04 LTS was released in 2012 and is supported until 2017. If you're happy resintalling your OS only as often as is required for Windows, then there shouldn't be much to complain about with Linux either.
If you're desperate to always keep up with the latest shiny thing, presumably you would feel a burning drive to update to Windows 8 by now in any case (ho ho ho).
News, nerds, etc. That's why I come here for news rather than just reading Reddit/Google News/BBC News/whatever.
You might as well go on a sports website and complain that they post a news update every time a football player transfers team. Seems deadly dull to me, but then that's why I don't read those sorts of sites.
Or write a batch script to do it for you. A one line command with xcopy should do the trick.
(I hate iTunes. But I hate it because it's a buggy bloated piece of rubbish which spawns dozens of resource-hogging background tasks and also because it looks terrible. Hating on it for not having a copy-paste button seems like picking nits.)
And died out in North America 12,000 years ago. Mammoths were common in Europe 12,000 years ago, but they're not exactly a big influence in modern British culture...
Did you RTFA? (I know, I know, I remember where I am).
Microsoft's Entertainment and Devices Division (which makes and sells the Xbox, and would include all game licensing and content distribution revenue too) has made a loss of $7.8bn over the lifetime of the Xbox consoles. That division includes other bits and pieces too (such as Skype and Surface), but it's fair to assume that if Xbox has been making them "lots of money" the division's finances would look a lot healthier than that.
Sony is exactly the same. The equivalent divisions (which, again, includes game licensing and online services) has made a loss of $3bn overall since 2000. That includes those phenomenal years as market dominators with the PS2.
The fact is, nobody has made any money in consoles for a long time, with the sole exception of the Nintendo Wii. And with the WiiU, it looks like that goose isn't going to lay a second golden egg.
Violence is an interesting part of the puzzle. I would argue that it isn't the use of violence that is key to fascism (as plenty of authoritarian regimes (and democratic regimes for that matter) have resorted to violence over the years); that it's the glorification and romanticisation of violence and "masculinity" that is a key component.
In classic 20th century fascism, this can be seen in peace time in the veneration of the military and police force. In neo-fascism, you can find it both in the actions and rhetoric of organizations who insist that they're "defending" something- such as the islamophobic English Defence League in the UK. In the states, militia groups and the like fit that part of the template too.
Easy tiger. It's a complicated subject. Complicated by the fact that a) the Tea Party movement is disunited on many policy points, and b) fascism itself has always been poorly defined. But taking those two things into account, there is still much overlap.
Let's start with the easy bit. Ultra-nationalism for one. Anti-immigration for two. Those two on their own do not fascism make, but they're a start.
Foreign policy is the first tricky area. Arguably there are two camps- the Ron Paul school of thought and the Sarah Palin school of thought. The Ron Paul one is very much non-fascist- the idea that militarism is an extension of Big Government and should be resisted. The Palin one is about spreading American ideology through power projection (look up "American Exceptionalism" for a broader discussion). A fairly key part of fascism is based around the eradication of rival ideologies through force of arms in order to promote unity- the basic ideological justification for Nazi Germany's invasions.
By far the trickiest talking point is around the concept of "small government" itself. There are two basic schools of thought on this; there's free market anarchism, espoused to a greater or lesser extent by Paulite school of Tea Partyism. This, again, is definitely not fascist- fascism historically disliked that concept as being against the societal good. However the politics to come out of the likes of the Koch brothers is more akin to Corporate Syndicalism- the idea that society should be run by and for the experts in each societal sector, with only a veneer of criminal law to keep the syndicates on the party line. That was a key (arguably THE key) to 20th century fascism (especially Italian fascism).
Fascism historically defined itself as an "anti-communist" movement. Part of this also manifested as an anti-intellectual standpoint (that is, distrust of academia and the "intellectual class", as opposed to being "anti-intelligence" or anything broader), as well as a complete loathing of the trade union labour movement. All three of these are met by the Tea Party- "socialist" is still seen as something practically demonic by Tea Party critics, unions are considered anathema (this is related to the Corporate Syndicalism outlined above), and a rejection of scientific institutions (especially around climate studies) as being politicised and left-wing-biased all fit this template.
It's not a perfect fit, and you need to be selective as to what parts you're looking at (as I stated originally), but the similarities are far easier to spot there than it is in soda-cup laws or taxicab vehicle choices.
If either the Ouya or Gamestick are a success (and that's a fairly big "if"), their gamepads could easily become the defaqto standards. They even have a very similar layout as each other, with the exception of the Ouya's touchpad. Presumably they can both be made compatible with stock Android, since both systems are full and fairly unmodified Android setups.
The Wii cleaned up the last generation; not only did it outsell Xbox 360 and PS3 in all markets, but it was also sold at a profit from day one. And the Gamecube was a hardware powerhouse compared to the PS2 and Dreamcast, with no gimmicks (old-fashioned gamepad and an optical disk drive). And if by "last three" generations, you mean to include the one before that- N64 was another gimmick-free hardware powerhouse (biggest selling point being "64 bit"- a purely technical boast).
Not that I'm disagreeing with the core point- that the WiiU is a great big gimmick and not much else. But to claim that "Nintendo lost the last 3 generations making underpowered hardware with a gimmick" is just incorrect, on either charge.
I would have thought it would have been relatively easy to increase the weight of something- just thicken the hull, and keep thickening until you get the weight you're after. Added bonus that a thicker hull means more durability.
Far more difficult to reduce weight, as assuming your design includes everything you want/need in it, the only way to reduce weight is to start removing things you wanted/needed.
Note, I'm talking from a position of absolutely zero expertise, so please keep the salt handy in big heaping pinch-fulls.
It comes out of your pocket if you're a customer too. If my (privatised) water supplier cocks up and suffers a massive infrastructure failure, borrows money to fix it, and then raises my bill to pay off their loan- what am I supposed to do? Flush my toilet with Evian?
Private enterprise would not have designed a military submarine without government money. Any screw up on the project (including by the private contractor) will come out of the public pocket. The only alternative is to not have a submarine at all (arguably not a bad option).
You were the third person to use the comparison in this thread (see tmosley and NoNonAlphaCharsHere). Apparently soda-cup-size laws are an emotive topic in the states.
There's something wrong when people use the word "fascist" to refer to someone who's political ideology appears to be nannyish meddling and self-aggrandisement, while movements with genuine elements of fascism (such as the Tea Party- although it depends which part of the movement you're looking at) get passed off as "conservative" (another much abused phrase).
Fascism is about more than just authoritarian laws. Fascism is a difficult creature to define, but definitions usually involve- Corporate Syndicalism, veneration of the State (i.e. ultra-Nationalism), distrust of democracy, and a dislike of free-market capitalism. You can usually throw in eugenics and racial supremacy too, although it's debatable whether this is integral to fascism or whether it is just a function of ultra-Nationalism.
I'm not American and so not exposed to much news on the subject of Michael Bloomberg, but a quick scan of his Wikipedia entry doesn't hint at any policies that would fall into that "fascism" camp. It mostly seems like he's prone to passing "nanny state" laws, and has also been involved with some corruption allegations (something or other about gun-running). That doesn't make him a pleasant guy, but it also doesn't make him a fascist. Until he starts arguing about deporting immigrants and dissolving Wall Street, I don't think you can really put him in that philosophical bucket.
Slashdot Mirror
Are you implying that you're OK with your government massively invading MY privacy (as a UK citizen), as long as you're alright Jack? Nice to know that this isn't a moral issue of Orwellian abuse for you, but just a selfish desire to keep the thugs from your own front door.
I also hope you're OK with foreign governments returning the favour and monitoring your very move. Your definitely won't be complaining about having your rights violated if it's a British or Chinese agency reading your every email and logging your every phone call, right?
Are you claiming that the gun industry hasn't been militarized?
"Safer" is not the same as "safe". While a little exposure to something dangerous is better than a big exposure, it doesn't mean you haven't still been harmed by it. The science suggests that the human body can cope with exactly zero lead before suffering injury, in a way quite unlike the consumption of, say, ethanol- which is toxic only in large enough and sustained volumes.
In both cases, you can choose to vote with your wallet- you can choose to stop using the service that is being offered to you, and stop handing over money in exchange for it. For a corporation, the service is something commercial that you can stop paying for. For a government, that service is a whole country- if you want to stop using that service, you need to leave that country.
Your relationship with companies is only voluntary some of the time; frequently there is a monopoly or cartel that you cannot avoid doing business with. Where I live, I have a choice of exactly one private water company; I can only choose not to do business with them if I choose not to have running water or sewerage. Although I do have a "choice" of electricity and gas suppliers where I live, I only have the "choice" of a single electric and a single gas network, all of which is supplied by the same sources. I cannot choose, for example, not to do business with a gas fracking company- unless I want to choose not to have a supply of heat.
Of course with governments, you can also exercise your democratic rights and vote for someone who will do things "your way", or even (god forbid) run for an elected position yourself. That's an added bonus that you don't get with companies.
I'm currently typing this in Firefox 21 via Ubuntu (with Unity) on a 10" screen, and I don't see any clutter problem. The top line of my screen is taken up with the system tray, including the File, Edit etc. menus. Next row is the tabs. Next row is my URL bar and Search bar. Rest of the screen is all content. What on earth could be further reduced without breaking my experience? Get rid of the tabs? Get rid of the URL & search bars?
At some point, there is nothing to be gained from reduction, only things to be lost. For me, Firefox is now hovering right at that point.
Although I should point out that I'm not really worried; Firefox remains easy to customise to almost any extent you could want- as long as they don't cock that up, the worst they can do to me is inflict the mild annoyance of needing to spend time tweaking settings...
My "useless search bar" lets me select between Google, Wikipedia, Amazon and (if I ever wanted to use it, which alas I don't) Twitter. So I can think "I wonder how much a breadmaker costs" or "which year did Henry VIII die" and find out the answer in one click. Can't do that by mashing keywords into the URL bar (as far as I know). I'd have to navigate to the site's front page first, and I've become accustomed to my technologically enhanced laziness.
It isn't out yet (so it doesn't necessarily go against your point), but Kickstarted Dungeon Keeper clone War For The Overworld is Unity-based and intends to release on Linux.
https://wftogame.com/
Seeing as your post counts as feedback on Slashdot, does that imply that he should do the exact opposite of what you advise in order to have a thriving business, and not do the opposite of advice on Slashdot? Where does that leave his decision to follow your advice?
The principal of "blowing up a large lump of mass before it hits earth" should be more or less the same regardless of whether the object is in a long period orbit or not (which is the only real difference between a comet and an asteroid with any amount of ice in its composition). The only difficulty would be in spotting your target before it's too late.
Free hosted email account with IMAP, large storage limits and decent spam/malware filtering software, that's the point. Aside from the lack of my own domain name, it's a damn-sight better than anything I could host myself for zero/near zero cost.
I actually switched to Gmail in the first place, many years ago from Hotmail, specifically because it was IMAP compatible (back when Hotmail wasn't unless you paid a hefty premium). I used the webmail interface occasionally back in it's original form, but I was principally interested in hooking up my email accounts to Thunderbird and my phone (back then a non-smart feature phone with an IMAP client). I lost interest in the webmail portion when they did their first big redesign, but that very nearly coincided with my first Android smartphone, with its very decent email client in my pocket 24/7, so I didn't really miss it.
You assume that people in the earlier days of the internet weren't getting lots of emails too, just with different content. Have you ever been on half a dozen active mailing lists at the same time?
I'm still quite happy with "everything turns up in my inbox with metadata I can filter by". That plus some auto-move rules does me just fine at work (where I'm a 100 emails a day man) and at home (pizza receipts and all).
I've actually found the last new Gmail interface such an unpleasant pain to use that I just don't use the webmail interface at all any more; I only ever interact with it through Thunderbird or my Android email client, except for in emergencies. Some people (my wife for example) seem to really like the (old) new interface, but I just can't make myself like it.
Then stop resinstalling your OS, you crazy man. Use a distro with a decent support period and get comfortable.
Windows 7 came out in 2009 and is supported (mainstream support) until 2015. Ubuntu 12.04 LTS was released in 2012 and is supported until 2017. If you're happy resintalling your OS only as often as is required for Windows, then there shouldn't be much to complain about with Linux either.
If you're desperate to always keep up with the latest shiny thing, presumably you would feel a burning drive to update to Windows 8 by now in any case (ho ho ho).
News, nerds, etc. That's why I come here for news rather than just reading Reddit/Google News/BBC News/whatever.
You might as well go on a sports website and complain that they post a news update every time a football player transfers team. Seems deadly dull to me, but then that's why I don't read those sorts of sites.
Are we all too cool to copy-paste these days?
Or write a batch script to do it for you. A one line command with xcopy should do the trick.
(I hate iTunes. But I hate it because it's a buggy bloated piece of rubbish which spawns dozens of resource-hogging background tasks and also because it looks terrible. Hating on it for not having a copy-paste button seems like picking nits.)
In civilized parts of the world, we do not make any such distinction.
And died out in North America 12,000 years ago. Mammoths were common in Europe 12,000 years ago, but they're not exactly a big influence in modern British culture...
Did you RTFA? (I know, I know, I remember where I am).
Microsoft's Entertainment and Devices Division (which makes and sells the Xbox, and would include all game licensing and content distribution revenue too) has made a loss of $7.8bn over the lifetime of the Xbox consoles. That division includes other bits and pieces too (such as Skype and Surface), but it's fair to assume that if Xbox has been making them "lots of money" the division's finances would look a lot healthier than that.
Sony is exactly the same. The equivalent divisions (which, again, includes game licensing and online services) has made a loss of $3bn overall since 2000. That includes those phenomenal years as market dominators with the PS2.
The fact is, nobody has made any money in consoles for a long time, with the sole exception of the Nintendo Wii. And with the WiiU, it looks like that goose isn't going to lay a second golden egg.
Violence is an interesting part of the puzzle. I would argue that it isn't the use of violence that is key to fascism (as plenty of authoritarian regimes (and democratic regimes for that matter) have resorted to violence over the years); that it's the glorification and romanticisation of violence and "masculinity" that is a key component.
In classic 20th century fascism, this can be seen in peace time in the veneration of the military and police force. In neo-fascism, you can find it both in the actions and rhetoric of organizations who insist that they're "defending" something- such as the islamophobic English Defence League in the UK. In the states, militia groups and the like fit that part of the template too.
Easy tiger. It's a complicated subject. Complicated by the fact that a) the Tea Party movement is disunited on many policy points, and b) fascism itself has always been poorly defined. But taking those two things into account, there is still much overlap.
Let's start with the easy bit. Ultra-nationalism for one. Anti-immigration for two. Those two on their own do not fascism make, but they're a start.
Foreign policy is the first tricky area. Arguably there are two camps- the Ron Paul school of thought and the Sarah Palin school of thought. The Ron Paul one is very much non-fascist- the idea that militarism is an extension of Big Government and should be resisted. The Palin one is about spreading American ideology through power projection (look up "American Exceptionalism" for a broader discussion). A fairly key part of fascism is based around the eradication of rival ideologies through force of arms in order to promote unity- the basic ideological justification for Nazi Germany's invasions.
By far the trickiest talking point is around the concept of "small government" itself. There are two basic schools of thought on this; there's free market anarchism, espoused to a greater or lesser extent by Paulite school of Tea Partyism. This, again, is definitely not fascist- fascism historically disliked that concept as being against the societal good. However the politics to come out of the likes of the Koch brothers is more akin to Corporate Syndicalism- the idea that society should be run by and for the experts in each societal sector, with only a veneer of criminal law to keep the syndicates on the party line. That was a key (arguably THE key) to 20th century fascism (especially Italian fascism).
Fascism historically defined itself as an "anti-communist" movement. Part of this also manifested as an anti-intellectual standpoint (that is, distrust of academia and the "intellectual class", as opposed to being "anti-intelligence" or anything broader), as well as a complete loathing of the trade union labour movement. All three of these are met by the Tea Party- "socialist" is still seen as something practically demonic by Tea Party critics, unions are considered anathema (this is related to the Corporate Syndicalism outlined above), and a rejection of scientific institutions (especially around climate studies) as being politicised and left-wing-biased all fit this template.
It's not a perfect fit, and you need to be selective as to what parts you're looking at (as I stated originally), but the similarities are far easier to spot there than it is in soda-cup laws or taxicab vehicle choices.
If either the Ouya or Gamestick are a success (and that's a fairly big "if"), their gamepads could easily become the defaqto standards. They even have a very similar layout as each other, with the exception of the Ouya's touchpad. Presumably they can both be made compatible with stock Android, since both systems are full and fairly unmodified Android setups.
The Wii cleaned up the last generation; not only did it outsell Xbox 360 and PS3 in all markets, but it was also sold at a profit from day one. And the Gamecube was a hardware powerhouse compared to the PS2 and Dreamcast, with no gimmicks (old-fashioned gamepad and an optical disk drive). And if by "last three" generations, you mean to include the one before that- N64 was another gimmick-free hardware powerhouse (biggest selling point being "64 bit"- a purely technical boast).
Not that I'm disagreeing with the core point- that the WiiU is a great big gimmick and not much else. But to claim that "Nintendo lost the last 3 generations making underpowered hardware with a gimmick" is just incorrect, on either charge.
I would have thought it would have been relatively easy to increase the weight of something- just thicken the hull, and keep thickening until you get the weight you're after. Added bonus that a thicker hull means more durability.
Far more difficult to reduce weight, as assuming your design includes everything you want/need in it, the only way to reduce weight is to start removing things you wanted/needed.
Note, I'm talking from a position of absolutely zero expertise, so please keep the salt handy in big heaping pinch-fulls.
It comes out of your pocket if you're a customer too. If my (privatised) water supplier cocks up and suffers a massive infrastructure failure, borrows money to fix it, and then raises my bill to pay off their loan- what am I supposed to do? Flush my toilet with Evian?
Private enterprise would not have designed a military submarine without government money. Any screw up on the project (including by the private contractor) will come out of the public pocket. The only alternative is to not have a submarine at all (arguably not a bad option).
You were the third person to use the comparison in this thread (see tmosley and NoNonAlphaCharsHere). Apparently soda-cup-size laws are an emotive topic in the states.
There's something wrong when people use the word "fascist" to refer to someone who's political ideology appears to be nannyish meddling and self-aggrandisement, while movements with genuine elements of fascism (such as the Tea Party- although it depends which part of the movement you're looking at) get passed off as "conservative" (another much abused phrase).
Fascism is about more than just authoritarian laws. Fascism is a difficult creature to define, but definitions usually involve- Corporate Syndicalism, veneration of the State (i.e. ultra-Nationalism), distrust of democracy, and a dislike of free-market capitalism. You can usually throw in eugenics and racial supremacy too, although it's debatable whether this is integral to fascism or whether it is just a function of ultra-Nationalism.
I'm not American and so not exposed to much news on the subject of Michael Bloomberg, but a quick scan of his Wikipedia entry doesn't hint at any policies that would fall into that "fascism" camp. It mostly seems like he's prone to passing "nanny state" laws, and has also been involved with some corruption allegations (something or other about gun-running). That doesn't make him a pleasant guy, but it also doesn't make him a fascist. Until he starts arguing about deporting immigrants and dissolving Wall Street, I don't think you can really put him in that philosophical bucket.