Okay, fine.. women typically don't remove the shirt just to breastfeed, they merely need to lift one side enough... but let's play your game for a moment.
Why is it wrong for a woman to take off her shirt ?
Why is the sight of bare breast(s) such a big deal ?
Why would/should/does it attract attention or disgust ?
What's so horrible about breastfeeding that justifies feeding human babies (hyper-processed nearly toxic) cow's milk ?
It all boils down to one real question: What the hell is your problem with the female anatomy ?
It's hard to construct an argument that it's "best for the public good" to force facebook to change their rules based on wanting to post breast-feeding pictures.
The reverse is also true. It is difficult to come up with a solid argument that it's "best for the public good" to censor practitioners of breastfeeding. Who are they protecting, and why ? It's not the children, they're the ones being fed! Is it the mature consenting adults ? Oh noes! Somebody save the adults!
Those who look to be offended, usually find "offensive" things everywhere they look.
But posting pictures of yourself breastfeeding just seems like being deliberately provocative.
You have inadvertently hit the nail on the head.
Why do people find bare breasts provocative ? Why do we have a culture built around so-called "modesty" ? I'm not a nudist/naturist, I believe clothing has its purpose in life (warmth, protection), but we were all born naked and I don't get why that makes so many people uncomfortable.
There is nothing sexually provocative about breastfeeding. If you have a breastfeeding fetish, well that's your problem, but I don't and I'm perfectly fine with someone feeding their kid wherever they may be. If they can legally stick a bottle in the kid's mouth, they should be equally able to breastfeed. If you're offended by nudity, I hope you shower in a wetsuit and close your eyes while watching evening TV.
Nobody's going to have their life ruined because they saw an infant suckling on a bare beast. There are a million things worse than that, and most of them are legal.
I have to question how these survey companies get their results. Most of the people I know who use Firefox, also have IE on standby for fussy MS-centric sites (or updates). I use both because I have to test my work on IE, and because I'm tied to Outlook Webmail for certain things. Do I count as a Firefox user, an IE user or both ? Do they factor total pageviews, or do they narrow it down to "sessions" (IPs per time window) ?
If I consider just my own usage, I would count as both a Firefox and an IE user, but by pageviews it's probably 1000:1 for Firefox, as I only use IE when absolutely necessary. If I were to self-identify, I'd say I'm a Firefox user since I wouldn't touch IE at all were it not for my job.
The reality of things is these articles always quote a number from nowhere. They don't ever explain their methodology, nor their sources. The fact is, you can't really get an accurate tally because browsers don't offer you enough information to identify unique users, and more importantly your results are skewed by the nature of whichever sites' logs you're mining. Any result is, at best, a rough guess based on some convenient subset of the data.
Is it true that IE is losing out to other browsers ? Hell yes, I'm an eyewitness. Do we have tangible numbers to quantify that battle ? No, and we never will.
I was liking you in the first paragraph, but that turned around in the 2nd.
I agree government spending is completely out of control (even though I'm a socialist). However, I do not believe citizens should be policed and taxed on every little thing ever. I firmly believe that taxes should be fixed per person, regardless of whether you are rich or poor. Too poor (read: unable/unwilling to work) to afford the tax ? Move to a cheaper country! Corporate tax should also be fixed, and commensurate to the ensemble of services provided to corporations by the government.
Basically you generalize the common aspects, average out the cost and that becomes your tax. None of this percentage tax bullshit that is little more than roundabout usury.
Does it really cost 30-40% of a millionaire's "salary" to provide clean water, maintain roads and absolutely pathetic police protection ? No, it doesn't. Nor does it cost 30-40% of a blue-collar's 30k salary. Most people could hire their own part-time staff for less than that...
LEDs by nature are (nearly) omnidirectional, but they are almost always built into a lensing solid to focus the weak light into a strong point. If you take a normal (directional) LED, snip off the rounded end, you wind up with a wider angle of dispersion but weaker light.
The problem is the people selling LED lights are just taking the ready-made product, building a cheap plastic bracket/shell and adding a battery holder. They do not have the ability to control the actual LED manufacturing and assembly, else they would probably be building wide-dispersion lenses and one-piece clusters from the get go.
So really, the reason LEDs are seeing poor adoption is because the people trying to sell them as all-purpose lights are incompetent morons.
I abuse my Belkin Speedpad N52 in this manner, quite extensively. It's a "dumb" device, but for text macros or even single-key assignments it can be rather helpful. Its software recognizes which app is active and loads whichever keymap you've assigned to that app.
So I program keys for my games, and also a few handies for Photoshop, my PHP IDE, and (blasphemy) the command line. It supports 3 shift-states, so you can assign 70+ commands per profile.
I think a focal difference between Square Enix remakes and classic arcade remakes is that Square games are story-based, not action-based. You can wrap the Final Fantasy plot around a new engine and it still works, but you can't take something like Pac Man and drop him into Grand Theft Auto's world... even though the idiotic company that now calls itself "Atari" has released dozens of these atrocities.
I would welcome an FF7 remake. It looked dorky when it was released, owing to the Playstation's pathetic 3D limitations. A more photo-realistic or at least high-def anime look would give more weight to the story, instead of making it look like a bunch of Lego Minifigs acting all emo.
The only remake Master of Magic needs is a bug-free one. The game itself was great, except for the constant crashing and half-broken features. Had they released another patch that actually fixed these things, it would have stood perfectly on its own.
The Guardian Legend, despite being a pretty difficult shooter (about 2/3rd of the way through), was a rather fascinating game at the time, and one that I've emulated a number of times.
I don't think it could be faithfully remade, the concept was a bit odd and too simplistic for today's market, and I don't know what a remake could possibly add without ruining it. Updated graphics can only do so much.
Shadowgate and Deja Vu, those would be ripe for a Lucasarts remake with their 3D Scumm engine (from Grim Fandango and Escape from Monkey Island). The only problem I see with that is the fact that quite a few puzzles in these two games were rather arbitrary and nonsensical, like the bouncing tomato fiend and other weirdness.
They are assuming that this will provide a legal alternative to piracy, for cash-strapped students. What they apparently fail to acknowledge is that the pirated copy will still be cheaper than $1.15/hr, and probably be less hassle too!
All it takes is one kid with a burnt disc - be it Office 2007 or Ubuntu - to circumvent the entire system.
Why is it that the larger a nation grows (in terms of population), the more oppressive its laws become ?
Statistically speaking, more people should mean more diversity. More diversity would then imply a place for everyone and everything, without the need for some ruling dictatorship to impose draconian restrictions on the freedoms of life.
The only thing that will come out of censorship is more and better ways to circumvent it. The UK has 60 million people, you don't think one or two of them have the smarts to set up proxies ?
That's not at all how cable works. All channels are always available on cable, because it is shared with everyone in your neighborhood. A cable technician installs filters at your demarc point, which screen out the channels you are not paying for. If you were to break into that box and remove the filters, you would receive all channels.
The 2-way communication features are indeed useless to you, as I'm assuming your never consume pay-per-view programming, but they are critical for digital cable where a significant portion of the content is delivered on-demand, and access is governed not by physical filters but by software. In general, any functionality that is unique to you must be transmitted via this 2-way link, otherwise everyone else will get them too.
Streaming Media is a huge hog of bandwidth, as the ISPs in the UK are discovering with the iPlayer [wikipedia.org] and other services. The ISPs and the content providers are currently in disagreement [theregister.co.uk] as to who should pay to upgrade the network infrastructure
In the good old days, people minded their own business. If you had a hot dog stand where you sold the best hot dogs at a busy intersection, the butcher didn't come to your stand to whine and moan about how he can't produce more hot dogs unless you bribe him. He just took all the money he earned from his supply business and reinvested it to increase capacity, and you kept on selling hot dogs without worrying about anything else.
If there is more demand on ISPs to deliver bandwidth to support their customer's usage, it is their responsibility to increase capacity to meet demand. If they cannot afford to do so, then it is the business model that is flawed. If they failed to account for future upgrades and the rather obvious explosion of telecommunications, that makes them poor businesspeople. It most certainly is not the fault of the customer nor anyone else.
If history has taught us anything, it's that every attempt to suppress freedom is met with one very simple response: underground movements. People don't stop doing what they want to do, just because some smartass in a suit doesn't approve - they just "hide". Drugs, gambling, prostitution... these things haven't disappeared as a result of laws prohibiting them, nor will freedom of speech.
Bloggers will use concealed identities and secure channels to divulge the information they want to divulge. The more important (and secretive) the data, the greater the efforts to distribute it shall be. Some people call this the Streisand effect, I see it as the natural yin-yang equilibrium applied to social forces.
What could the government possibly want to hide ? Why is this information so "dangerous" ? Is it of a strategic, economic or military nature ? Either way, it is deceitful and hints at fascist motives, whether or not that is their true nature. Negative acts are always perceived with an aggravating bias. If the government is trying to suppress that information, maybe it should have done so before it reached civilian ears and minds.
I might not find any use for that pile of old Token Ring adapters, but a guy who works on IBM mainframes might
False. A guy who worked on token-ring IBM mainframes would have long since killed himself in self-pity after one-too-many nights of "find the sputtering node".
Good god, token ring was such a bastard system in hindsight. Thank god for point-to-point topology!
I agree, the service stinks, but that's pretty standard for motherboards. What most (reasonable) dealers do is handle the RMA process for you, by sending it back up the distributor chain. It often takes just as long as if you did it yourself, but is usually much cheaper since the items are shipped in batches.
In my case, I collected a week's worth of RMAs and sent them all out on the Friday. It's way cheaper to courier one big box full of crap, than 20 individual boxes. There are also some distributors that handle exchanges directly, and ship back refurbs within a week or even credit the account (depends on the item).
I know this practice isn't so common anymore, but I used to provide loaners to good clients, or a discount on a replacement purchase. That's what you're supposed to get, when you pay a little more at a local store, but dealers these days are mostly just idiots who don't offer any service whatsoever. They get beat the hell up by online stores, and that's all they deserve.
I'd love a slashdot additive that neutralizes trolls so they stop making unfounded accusations of sexism, racism or *-ism when those attacks are a projection of their own insecurities.
Slashdot Mirror
Okay, fine.. women typically don't remove the shirt just to breastfeed, they merely need to lift one side enough... but let's play your game for a moment.
Why is it wrong for a woman to take off her shirt ?
Why is the sight of bare breast(s) such a big deal ?
Why would/should/does it attract attention or disgust ?
What's so horrible about breastfeeding that justifies feeding human babies (hyper-processed nearly toxic) cow's milk ?
It all boils down to one real question: What the hell is your problem with the female anatomy ?
It's hard to construct an argument that it's "best for the public good" to force facebook to change their rules based on wanting to post breast-feeding pictures.
The reverse is also true. It is difficult to come up with a solid argument that it's "best for the public good" to censor practitioners of breastfeeding. Who are they protecting, and why ? It's not the children, they're the ones being fed! Is it the mature consenting adults ? Oh noes! Somebody save the adults!
Those who look to be offended, usually find "offensive" things everywhere they look.
But posting pictures of yourself breastfeeding just seems like being deliberately provocative.
You have inadvertently hit the nail on the head.
Why do people find bare breasts provocative ? Why do we have a culture built around so-called "modesty" ? I'm not a nudist/naturist, I believe clothing has its purpose in life (warmth, protection), but we were all born naked and I don't get why that makes so many people uncomfortable.
There is nothing sexually provocative about breastfeeding. If you have a breastfeeding fetish, well that's your problem, but I don't and I'm perfectly fine with someone feeding their kid wherever they may be. If they can legally stick a bottle in the kid's mouth, they should be equally able to breastfeed. If you're offended by nudity, I hope you shower in a wetsuit and close your eyes while watching evening TV.
Nobody's going to have their life ruined because they saw an infant suckling on a bare beast. There are a million things worse than that, and most of them are legal.
Typical American behavior.
I have to question how these survey companies get their results. Most of the people I know who use Firefox, also have IE on standby for fussy MS-centric sites (or updates). I use both because I have to test my work on IE, and because I'm tied to Outlook Webmail for certain things. Do I count as a Firefox user, an IE user or both ? Do they factor total pageviews, or do they narrow it down to "sessions" (IPs per time window) ?
If I consider just my own usage, I would count as both a Firefox and an IE user, but by pageviews it's probably 1000:1 for Firefox, as I only use IE when absolutely necessary. If I were to self-identify, I'd say I'm a Firefox user since I wouldn't touch IE at all were it not for my job.
The reality of things is these articles always quote a number from nowhere. They don't ever explain their methodology, nor their sources. The fact is, you can't really get an accurate tally because browsers don't offer you enough information to identify unique users, and more importantly your results are skewed by the nature of whichever sites' logs you're mining. Any result is, at best, a rough guess based on some convenient subset of the data.
Is it true that IE is losing out to other browsers ? Hell yes, I'm an eyewitness. Do we have tangible numbers to quantify that battle ? No, and we never will.
I was liking you in the first paragraph, but that turned around in the 2nd.
I agree government spending is completely out of control (even though I'm a socialist). However, I do not believe citizens should be policed and taxed on every little thing ever. I firmly believe that taxes should be fixed per person, regardless of whether you are rich or poor. Too poor (read: unable/unwilling to work) to afford the tax ? Move to a cheaper country! Corporate tax should also be fixed, and commensurate to the ensemble of services provided to corporations by the government.
Basically you generalize the common aspects, average out the cost and that becomes your tax. None of this percentage tax bullshit that is little more than roundabout usury.
Does it really cost 30-40% of a millionaire's "salary" to provide clean water, maintain roads and absolutely pathetic police protection ? No, it doesn't. Nor does it cost 30-40% of a blue-collar's 30k salary. Most people could hire their own part-time staff for less than that...
Office 97 spread virally the same way.
What, you mean 111-1111111 ? :P
For that kind of money, I've come to expect sexual gratification.
Any high school dropout can build a LED light out of:
1. LED(s)
2. resistor
3. battery
4. duct tape
So where does the other $149.60 go ?
If your water is cloudy, I don't want to drink it.
You've got it backwards.
LEDs by nature are (nearly) omnidirectional, but they are almost always built into a lensing solid to focus the weak light into a strong point. If you take a normal (directional) LED, snip off the rounded end, you wind up with a wider angle of dispersion but weaker light.
The problem is the people selling LED lights are just taking the ready-made product, building a cheap plastic bracket/shell and adding a battery holder. They do not have the ability to control the actual LED manufacturing and assembly, else they would probably be building wide-dispersion lenses and one-piece clusters from the get go.
So really, the reason LEDs are seeing poor adoption is because the people trying to sell them as all-purpose lights are incompetent morons.
What's the difference between that Logitech jog-dial "navigator" and a Pong spinner ? About $300.
If I can use an ergonomically-designed gaming device to work faster, thumbs up!
I abuse my Belkin Speedpad N52 in this manner, quite extensively. It's a "dumb" device, but for text macros or even single-key assignments it can be rather helpful. Its software recognizes which app is active and loads whichever keymap you've assigned to that app.
So I program keys for my games, and also a few handies for Photoshop, my PHP IDE, and (blasphemy) the command line. It supports 3 shift-states, so you can assign 70+ commands per profile.
<obvious>His initials are I.T.</obvious>, and he's trying to keep Notes/Domino alive.
The only way he could be any fuller of shit is if he became the president of the United States.
I think a focal difference between Square Enix remakes and classic arcade remakes is that Square games are story-based, not action-based. You can wrap the Final Fantasy plot around a new engine and it still works, but you can't take something like Pac Man and drop him into Grand Theft Auto's world... even though the idiotic company that now calls itself "Atari" has released dozens of these atrocities.
I would welcome an FF7 remake. It looked dorky when it was released, owing to the Playstation's pathetic 3D limitations. A more photo-realistic or at least high-def anime look would give more weight to the story, instead of making it look like a bunch of Lego Minifigs acting all emo.
The only remake Master of Magic needs is a bug-free one. The game itself was great, except for the constant crashing and half-broken features. Had they released another patch that actually fixed these things, it would have stood perfectly on its own.
The Guardian Legend, despite being a pretty difficult shooter (about 2/3rd of the way through), was a rather fascinating game at the time, and one that I've emulated a number of times.
I don't think it could be faithfully remade, the concept was a bit odd and too simplistic for today's market, and I don't know what a remake could possibly add without ruining it. Updated graphics can only do so much.
Shadowgate and Deja Vu, those would be ripe for a Lucasarts remake with their 3D Scumm engine (from Grim Fandango and Escape from Monkey Island). The only problem I see with that is the fact that quite a few puzzles in these two games were rather arbitrary and nonsensical, like the bouncing tomato fiend and other weirdness.
They are assuming that this will provide a legal alternative to piracy, for cash-strapped students. What they apparently fail to acknowledge is that the pirated copy will still be cheaper than $1.15/hr, and probably be less hassle too!
All it takes is one kid with a burnt disc - be it Office 2007 or Ubuntu - to circumvent the entire system.
Why is it that the larger a nation grows (in terms of population), the more oppressive its laws become ?
Statistically speaking, more people should mean more diversity. More diversity would then imply a place for everyone and everything, without the need for some ruling dictatorship to impose draconian restrictions on the freedoms of life.
The only thing that will come out of censorship is more and better ways to circumvent it. The UK has 60 million people, you don't think one or two of them have the smarts to set up proxies ?
That's not at all how cable works. All channels are always available on cable, because it is shared with everyone in your neighborhood. A cable technician installs filters at your demarc point, which screen out the channels you are not paying for. If you were to break into that box and remove the filters, you would receive all channels.
The 2-way communication features are indeed useless to you, as I'm assuming your never consume pay-per-view programming, but they are critical for digital cable where a significant portion of the content is delivered on-demand, and access is governed not by physical filters but by software. In general, any functionality that is unique to you must be transmitted via this 2-way link, otherwise everyone else will get them too.
Streaming Media is a huge hog of bandwidth, as the ISPs in the UK are discovering with the iPlayer [wikipedia.org] and other services. The ISPs and the content providers are currently in disagreement [theregister.co.uk] as to who should pay to upgrade the network infrastructure
In the good old days, people minded their own business. If you had a hot dog stand where you sold the best hot dogs at a busy intersection, the butcher didn't come to your stand to whine and moan about how he can't produce more hot dogs unless you bribe him. He just took all the money he earned from his supply business and reinvested it to increase capacity, and you kept on selling hot dogs without worrying about anything else.
If there is more demand on ISPs to deliver bandwidth to support their customer's usage, it is their responsibility to increase capacity to meet demand. If they cannot afford to do so, then it is the business model that is flawed. If they failed to account for future upgrades and the rather obvious explosion of telecommunications, that makes them poor businesspeople. It most certainly is not the fault of the customer nor anyone else.
If history has taught us anything, it's that every attempt to suppress freedom is met with one very simple response: underground movements. People don't stop doing what they want to do, just because some smartass in a suit doesn't approve - they just "hide". Drugs, gambling, prostitution... these things haven't disappeared as a result of laws prohibiting them, nor will freedom of speech.
Bloggers will use concealed identities and secure channels to divulge the information they want to divulge. The more important (and secretive) the data, the greater the efforts to distribute it shall be. Some people call this the Streisand effect, I see it as the natural yin-yang equilibrium applied to social forces.
What could the government possibly want to hide ? Why is this information so "dangerous" ? Is it of a strategic, economic or military nature ? Either way, it is deceitful and hints at fascist motives, whether or not that is their true nature. Negative acts are always perceived with an aggravating bias. If the government is trying to suppress that information, maybe it should have done so before it reached civilian ears and minds.
Of course, their monthly hydro bill alone could probably cover the cost of a cheap PC server that can do everything the old mainframe does.
I might not find any use for that pile of old Token Ring adapters, but a guy who works on IBM mainframes might
False. A guy who worked on token-ring IBM mainframes would have long since killed himself in self-pity after one-too-many nights of "find the sputtering node".
Good god, token ring was such a bastard system in hindsight. Thank god for point-to-point topology!
ASCII PR0N!
I dare you...
I agree, the service stinks, but that's pretty standard for motherboards. What most (reasonable) dealers do is handle the RMA process for you, by sending it back up the distributor chain. It often takes just as long as if you did it yourself, but is usually much cheaper since the items are shipped in batches.
In my case, I collected a week's worth of RMAs and sent them all out on the Friday. It's way cheaper to courier one big box full of crap, than 20 individual boxes. There are also some distributors that handle exchanges directly, and ship back refurbs within a week or even credit the account (depends on the item).
I know this practice isn't so common anymore, but I used to provide loaners to good clients, or a discount on a replacement purchase. That's what you're supposed to get, when you pay a little more at a local store, but dealers these days are mostly just idiots who don't offer any service whatsoever. They get beat the hell up by online stores, and that's all they deserve.
I'd love a slashdot additive that neutralizes trolls so they stop making unfounded accusations of sexism, racism or *-ism when those attacks are a projection of their own insecurities.