I am not ignorant of what scouting is. My entire family was involved with scouting for years. Both my brothers and I were scouts, and my parents were both volunteers. BSA has become a wholly intolerant organization, and I have lost all respect for them.
I'm sure you can find some troops which do not follow the rules. They are the exception, and not the rule. Why would I want to support an organization which specifically, openly, and spitefully discriminates against me?
I don't care how many religions BSA has decided are worthy of their respect. They specifically discriminate against my lack of religious beliefs, so they can kindly fuck off.
I will do no such thing. Why would I let my children join an organization which publicly denounces his parents as being immoral to the point where I wouldn't even be allowed to volunteer?
So even if individual troops overlook these rules, they do so in direct opposition to the rules. I don't know about you, but I see no reason to support an organization that dismisses me due to its own ignorant definition of "immoral."
Eh, the difference between a CD-ROM full of 44.1k/16 bit WAVs and a CD-R with redbook audio is little more than headers on the files. The difference between physical packaging and a pdf file is that 5 years from now I will probably still have the pdf file, and it won't be shoved in a box in my closet.
I was flying out of Schiphol recently when I realized how nice it was over there. They had bag scanners at every gate. Their security people made pleasant conversation with everybody going through the line. It was like we weren't being packed onto a steel tube by anti-social cretins who couldn't pass fourth grade english.
It was nice.
Later, I flew out of Dulles. They siphon everybody going through the airport into one or two lanes. The screeners do not converse. They screech: "MOVE ALONG, SIR" "TAKE YOUR SHOES OFF!" Listen, let's not pretend that TSA isn't a complete and total clusterfuck. There's no reason to be screaming at me. The security checkpoints are just bizarre anymore. They change the rules every so often, or don't follow them consistently from one airport to the next, and then act all indignant when I don't know what they want from me before they yell. "TAKE YOUR LAPTOP OUT OF THE BAG, SIR" funny, the TSA says laptops don't have to come out of bags anymore. Maybe that's changed? Maybe you're a mongoloid?
I hate to admit it, but the USA has ballsed it all up. If overly intrusive, endlessly inconvenient searches minimize the threats of terrorism, you'd expect Amsterdam to have all of the terrorists flying through. I can't remember one hijacked flight leaving Schiphol. Not one.
I've seen some nice Moto imports, but we don't get them here. I wonder if perhaps the firmware developers overseas are more competent than the retards that make US moto products.
Yeah, I think that cell phone manufactures started catering too much to 17 year old girls as of late.
I used to want a treo back when Handspring was its own company. Then palm had to come and balls everything up. I hear that the email isn't too bad, but the BB email is pretty perfect. Anytime I've ever thought "I wish this thing did...(fill in the blank)" it turns out that it did do what I wanted, I just never knew it.
But yeah, I probably am a bit of a luddite by/. standards.
Blackberry has 11% of the global market even though 3/4 of its users are in North America. Windows Mobile has 12% of the global market and its users are fucking everywhere.
As a result, Blackberry dominates the North American smartphone market.
You may find this to be in direct conflict to your statement "Blackberry has never, and will never, dominate any smartphone market whatsoever."
Your post is a whole bunch of nonsense. Yes, Symbian has market dominance outside of North America. However, even by your own admission, "They may have some extra technical management stuff, but all of that will be in the next WM (and probably Symbian, too) release"
Have you ever considered that the cost of using Blackberry is worth it to some companies so that they can have these features right now on hardware that isn't a goddamned toy?
So please spare us your elitist bullshit. I don't give a good goddamn if you're from Europe or if you have the best smartphones over there. This doesn't make any difference if you don't have any goddamned clue what you're talking about.
Eh, Motorola products just suck. I've owned nearly every moto handset from the MicroTAC to the RAZR and they just went right to shit somewhere around the 710. I didn't learn my lesson until after the 815. Motorola can't be trusted to make a stable product anymore.
On the other hand, LG's been making great hardware for years now. They put out Verizon's first camera phone five years ago (the vx6000.)
I personally don't give a fuck about ringtones or cameras or the ability to play mp3s/videos/games on my phone. At all. My priorities, as a business-centric phone user, are in this order:
1) Phone calls 2) Email 3) Web-browser (and that's expendable, I just like to be able to google things on the road.)
Everything else is pretty much useless to me, whereas I can see where 17 year old girls want their phones to be toys more than anything else. Sure, my phone (blackberry 8830) doesn't have a camera on it, but damn if it doesn't have stable firmware which is made to do exactly what I want it to do with amazing consistency.
Fuck multimedia. All I want is something to handle my email without a hiccup.
Right now, the mainstream is defined by a pretty well calculated combination of record labels, media outlets, and record stores. That's because traditionally, the record labels were needed by the artists in order to get exposure, the major media outlets have been radio and television, and physical media were required to get quality copies of whatever was being sold.
These days, however, the record labels aren't really needed to get the word out, the major media outlets for people are quickly being replaced by the internet, and record stores really just aren't necessary anymore.
Apple has enough cash in their pocket that they could start pushing artists. That's just fact, and I wouldn't want to be the RIAA if Steve Jobs decided to do just that. Think about it. Apple could begin pushing new artists, winning over established ones, sell the tracks for cheaper than they're selling them for right now and still make a higher profit.
You're right, mainstream music is mainstream for a reason, but not the one you're thinking. Mainstream music is mainstream because it gets mass exposure. You play the same song a thousand times to everybody in the country, you're bound to find a few people who like it, no matter how great or awful it is. Apple can arrange for mass exposure. If Apple decides that nearly everybody in the country is going to hear a song a billion times, they can make sure that happens, and they can probably do it really easy. Anybody can with that much cash on hand.
The only advantage the RIAA has right now is its extensive catalog of music that it has exclusive rights to. The problem with that, however, that unless they make it available to the public in a matter the public finds acceptable, it's all just going to get copied and pirated until the RIAA loses that advantage. Since the RIAA keeps screwing the pooch with regards to how they're dealing with media distribution these days, they stand a damned good chance of losing that advantage eventually.
...and I'm kinda disappointed that the WSJ's standards have spiralled so far out of control.
When you look at the facts, Yahoo is playing catch-up, and they know it. Google came pretty much out of nowhere and released a wholly unprecedented level of quality with gmail. While most, and probably all, other free webmail providers were little more than ad spots first and email clients second, Google provided a service that was incredibly powerful that happened to run ads the same way the rest of their site did. All of this was done in a very elegant, simple yet powerful interface hosted on Google's servers. It's only a rare moment where you get errors from Google servers. It's also only a rare moment where you see something shoddily hacked together from Google's engineers. It doesn't just work, it works very well, and damned near all the time.
Did I mention it's free and nobody forces you to use it? To use the word 'arrogant' to describe the free service that set the current precedent for service and design is laughably irresponsible. How the hell do you get to use such a loaded word with negative connotation towards the parent company in responsible journalism? You don't. The fact that this hack can get paid to write this crap astounds me more than the fact that he clearly doesn't understand a single thing that he's writing about. I mean, I could spend all my days writing about crap I don't understand, but I don't think I'd get paid for it. While I admire his ability to get paid for workplace incompetence, I have to admit that I am baffled by how he manages to pull it off.
I bet he thought he was really clever with other loaded phrases such as "Not Gmail, where 'option' is a term too rarely employed, except in reference to employee compensation." Yeah, great job, ass. Way to make a thinly veiled snipe at the fact that Google happened to find a way to become fucking billionaires giving you great service at no cost.
And finally, since I seriously have to get to bed, my proof that the author has no goddamned clue what he's talking about: "I'm sure Gmail will get better and better, and will eventually adopt the new programming techniques that allow desktop-like ease of use."
This quote just proves that the author doesn't get the point at all. Google has never been one to compromise functionality with form. Just go to www.google.com if you're not sure. The whole google design philosophy almost wholly forbids gmail to ever get to the point where it will adopt these "new programming techniques," and I don't think we can realistically ever expect them to, or even want them to. If Google were to cheapen itself to the point where it were simply copying other peoples' interfaces in order to please woefully uninformed tech writers, I think we'd be much worse off than if they'd just done things the way they always had.
I'm not going to make any statements about which is better between Yahoo mail or gmail. I'm also going to point out that both are free, and you should expect nothing more than to get what you pay for both. In the event that you are pleasantly surprised by how much functionality you get out of a free service, you should be thankful. If you're into Yahoo's interface, use Yahoo. If you prefer Google's interface, use Google. Neither is going to be "far superior" to the other for all people as all people have different needs and preferences.
As for the people who keep hacks like this employed, you should be ashamed of yourselves.
i fail to see how apple's covering their own ass is really all that bad. sure, they may have been a bit heavy-handed, but they were only doing what any sane entity would do to avoid a possible legal fiasco
i've trained myself to do similar things without computers. i was enrolled in a state funded training program for 12 years, where they taught me to identify english road signs, read them, translate them into english, and understand them. i also learned how to translate the following things into english:
books written in english
product labels written in english
movie subtitles written in english
magazine articles written in english
then, after my 12 years of state funded black-ops training, i decided to continue my education in a private 4 year institution where they even taught me how to WRITE in english, a topic which wasn't quite covered well by the state-funded institution. perhaps if the government would make this type of training available to all members of our society, we wouldn't need computers to understand these cryptic road signs that nobody seems to be able to decode.
i for one know that i'm going to be making the pc to mac switch within the next couple years, first switching over my home and work machines, then my studio machines to mac. i've come to the realization that i don't really *need* an x86 for anything anymore. everything that i need to do on a daily basis can be done by a mac, and the new UI is just beautiful, and i like the hardware too.
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I am not ignorant of what scouting is. My entire family was involved with scouting for years. Both my brothers and I were scouts, and my parents were both volunteers. BSA has become a wholly intolerant organization, and I have lost all respect for them.
I'm sure you can find some troops which do not follow the rules. They are the exception, and not the rule. Why would I want to support an organization which specifically, openly, and spitefully discriminates against me?
I don't care how many religions BSA has decided are worthy of their respect. They specifically discriminate against my lack of religious beliefs, so they can kindly fuck off.
I will do no such thing. Why would I let my children join an organization which publicly denounces his parents as being immoral to the point where I wouldn't even be allowed to volunteer?
What you're failing to account for is the fact that the rules of BSA state that these people simply cannot be a part of the organization:
http://www.bsalegal.org/faqs-195.asp
So even if individual troops overlook these rules, they do so in direct opposition to the rules. I don't know about you, but I see no reason to support an organization that dismisses me due to its own ignorant definition of "immoral."
Fuck the Boy Scouts.
Until they stop being such an arrogantly discriminatory organization, they can stop asking for crap.
They don't deserve software, HUD grants, special treatment from congress, or anything else. They can fuck off.
Eh, the difference between a CD-ROM full of 44.1k/16 bit WAVs and a CD-R with redbook audio is little more than headers on the files. The difference between physical packaging and a pdf file is that 5 years from now I will probably still have the pdf file, and it won't be shoved in a box in my closet.
I was flying out of Schiphol recently when I realized how nice it was over there. They had bag scanners at every gate. Their security people made pleasant conversation with everybody going through the line. It was like we weren't being packed onto a steel tube by anti-social cretins who couldn't pass fourth grade english.
It was nice.
Later, I flew out of Dulles. They siphon everybody going through the airport into one or two lanes. The screeners do not converse. They screech: "MOVE ALONG, SIR" "TAKE YOUR SHOES OFF!"
Listen, let's not pretend that TSA isn't a complete and total clusterfuck. There's no reason to be screaming at me. The security checkpoints are just bizarre anymore. They change the rules every so often, or don't follow them consistently from one airport to the next, and then act all indignant when I don't know what they want from me before they yell. "TAKE YOUR LAPTOP OUT OF THE BAG, SIR" funny, the TSA says laptops don't have to come out of bags anymore. Maybe that's changed? Maybe you're a mongoloid?
I hate to admit it, but the USA has ballsed it all up. If overly intrusive, endlessly inconvenient searches minimize the threats of terrorism, you'd expect Amsterdam to have all of the terrorists flying through. I can't remember one hijacked flight leaving Schiphol. Not one.
Every time I see common sense like that used in your post, I grow a bit more faithful of humanity.
thanks
-c
I find HTML emails to only be an issue if they're laden with images (and therefore advertisements)
Except for those fuckers that use "stationery" in MS Outlook Express.
-c
Yes. Blackberry does dominate the North American smartphone market.
Just because you wouldn't spend the money doesn't mean that tons of companies aren't doing so right now.
-c
I've seen some nice Moto imports, but we don't get them here. I wonder if perhaps the firmware developers overseas are more competent than the retards that make US moto products.
I'd probably agree on the startac.
Yeah, I think that cell phone manufactures started catering too much to 17 year old girls as of late.
/. standards.
I used to want a treo back when Handspring was its own company. Then palm had to come and balls everything up. I hear that the email isn't too bad, but the BB email is pretty perfect. Anytime I've ever thought "I wish this thing did...(fill in the blank)" it turns out that it did do what I wanted, I just never knew it.
But yeah, I probably am a bit of a luddite by
Blackberry has 11% of the global market even though 3/4 of its users are in North America. Windows Mobile has 12% of the global market and its users are fucking everywhere.
As a result, Blackberry dominates the North American smartphone market.
You may find this to be in direct conflict to your statement "Blackberry has never, and will never, dominate any smartphone market whatsoever."
Your post is a whole bunch of nonsense. Yes, Symbian has market dominance outside of North America. However, even by your own admission, "They may have some extra technical management stuff, but all of that will be in the next WM (and probably Symbian, too) release"
Have you ever considered that the cost of using Blackberry is worth it to some companies so that they can have these features right now on hardware that isn't a goddamned toy?
So please spare us your elitist bullshit. I don't give a good goddamn if you're from Europe or if you have the best smartphones over there. This doesn't make any difference if you don't have any goddamned clue what you're talking about.
Eh, Motorola products just suck. I've owned nearly every moto handset from the MicroTAC to the RAZR and they just went right to shit somewhere around the 710. I didn't learn my lesson until after the 815. Motorola can't be trusted to make a stable product anymore.
On the other hand, LG's been making great hardware for years now. They put out Verizon's first camera phone five years ago (the vx6000.)
I personally don't give a fuck about ringtones or cameras or the ability to play mp3s/videos/games on my phone. At all. My priorities, as a business-centric phone user, are in this order:
1) Phone calls
2) Email
3) Web-browser (and that's expendable, I just like to be able to google things on the road.)
Everything else is pretty much useless to me, whereas I can see where 17 year old girls want their phones to be toys more than anything else. Sure, my phone (blackberry 8830) doesn't have a camera on it, but damn if it doesn't have stable firmware which is made to do exactly what I want it to do with amazing consistency.
Fuck multimedia. All I want is something to handle my email without a hiccup.
ATMs are typically full of cash and left completely unsupervised, frequently outdoors, 24 hours a day, 7 days a week.
Voting machines are generally used for one day a year, indoors, surrounded by people, and are not full of a delicious currency filling.
I'm not saying security shouldn't be a priority, I'm just saying that you have to plan security practically around each application.
-c
I thought Windows ME was going to turn MS into a has-been. And remember how XP was never going to be taken seriously?
It's funny how wild speculation about a company's demise always seems to be exaggerated when that company has billions of dollars to sink into R&D.
-c
This post was fucking hilarious and I'm kinda sad I couldn't mod it up.
Actually, he makes a rather good point.
Right now, the mainstream is defined by a pretty well calculated combination of record labels, media outlets, and record stores. That's because traditionally, the record labels were needed by the artists in order to get exposure, the major media outlets have been radio and television, and physical media were required to get quality copies of whatever was being sold.
These days, however, the record labels aren't really needed to get the word out, the major media outlets for people are quickly being replaced by the internet, and record stores really just aren't necessary anymore.
Apple has enough cash in their pocket that they could start pushing artists. That's just fact, and I wouldn't want to be the RIAA if Steve Jobs decided to do just that. Think about it. Apple could begin pushing new artists, winning over established ones, sell the tracks for cheaper than they're selling them for right now and still make a higher profit.
You're right, mainstream music is mainstream for a reason, but not the one you're thinking. Mainstream music is mainstream because it gets mass exposure. You play the same song a thousand times to everybody in the country, you're bound to find a few people who like it, no matter how great or awful it is. Apple can arrange for mass exposure. If Apple decides that nearly everybody in the country is going to hear a song a billion times, they can make sure that happens, and they can probably do it really easy. Anybody can with that much cash on hand.
The only advantage the RIAA has right now is its extensive catalog of music that it has exclusive rights to. The problem with that, however, that unless they make it available to the public in a matter the public finds acceptable, it's all just going to get copied and pirated until the RIAA loses that advantage. Since the RIAA keeps screwing the pooch with regards to how they're dealing with media distribution these days, they stand a damned good chance of losing that advantage eventually.
...and I'm kinda disappointed that the WSJ's standards have spiralled so far out of control.
When you look at the facts, Yahoo is playing catch-up, and they know it. Google came pretty much out of nowhere and released a wholly unprecedented level of quality with gmail. While most, and probably all, other free webmail providers were little more than ad spots first and email clients second, Google provided a service that was incredibly powerful that happened to run ads the same way the rest of their site did. All of this was done in a very elegant, simple yet powerful interface hosted on Google's servers. It's only a rare moment where you get errors from Google servers. It's also only a rare moment where you see something shoddily hacked together from Google's engineers. It doesn't just work, it works very well, and damned near all the time.
Did I mention it's free and nobody forces you to use it? To use the word 'arrogant' to describe the free service that set the current precedent for service and design is laughably irresponsible. How the hell do you get to use such a loaded word with negative connotation towards the parent company in responsible journalism? You don't. The fact that this hack can get paid to write this crap astounds me more than the fact that he clearly doesn't understand a single thing that he's writing about. I mean, I could spend all my days writing about crap I don't understand, but I don't think I'd get paid for it. While I admire his ability to get paid for workplace incompetence, I have to admit that I am baffled by how he manages to pull it off.
I bet he thought he was really clever with other loaded phrases such as "Not Gmail, where 'option' is a term too rarely employed, except in reference to employee compensation." Yeah, great job, ass. Way to make a thinly veiled snipe at the fact that Google happened to find a way to become fucking billionaires giving you great service at no cost.
And finally, since I seriously have to get to bed, my proof that the author has no goddamned clue what he's talking about: "I'm sure Gmail will get better and better, and will eventually adopt the new programming techniques that allow desktop-like ease of use."
This quote just proves that the author doesn't get the point at all. Google has never been one to compromise functionality with form. Just go to www.google.com if you're not sure. The whole google design philosophy almost wholly forbids gmail to ever get to the point where it will adopt these "new programming techniques," and I don't think we can realistically ever expect them to, or even want them to. If Google were to cheapen itself to the point where it were simply copying other peoples' interfaces in order to please woefully uninformed tech writers, I think we'd be much worse off than if they'd just done things the way they always had.
I'm not going to make any statements about which is better between Yahoo mail or gmail. I'm also going to point out that both are free, and you should expect nothing more than to get what you pay for both. In the event that you are pleasantly surprised by how much functionality you get out of a free service, you should be thankful. If you're into Yahoo's interface, use Yahoo. If you prefer Google's interface, use Google. Neither is going to be "far superior" to the other for all people as all people have different needs and preferences.
As for the people who keep hacks like this employed, you should be ashamed of yourselves.
-c
Do you think they can get actual basketball players to replace that crap-tastic team of theirs?
-c
i fail to see how apple's covering their own ass is really all that bad. sure, they may have been a bit heavy-handed, but they were only doing what any sane entity would do to avoid a possible legal fiasco
c) no matter what happens at any time during your pathetic lives, *you* will never have the opportunity to touch *those* tits
i wouldn't bet the ranch on that one.
-c
finally, somebody has come up with an explanation for why jocks and rock stars are smarter than geeks...
wait...
dammit.
-c
- books written in english
- product labels written in english
- movie subtitles written in english
- magazine articles written in english
then, after my 12 years of state funded black-ops training, i decided to continue my education in a private 4 year institution where they even taught me how to WRITE in english, a topic which wasn't quite covered well by the state-funded institution. perhaps if the government would make this type of training available to all members of our society, we wouldn't need computers to understand these cryptic road signs that nobody seems to be able to decode.-c
i for one know that i'm going to be making the pc to mac switch within the next couple years, first switching over my home and work machines, then my studio machines to mac. i've come to the realization that i don't really *need* an x86 for anything anymore. everything that i need to do on a daily basis can be done by a mac, and the new UI is just beautiful, and i like the hardware too.
-c