I bet the guys working at the Amazon DC's make a better wage and receive better benefits than the average sad sack working at Walmart.
Plus there are lots of third party 'stores' that sell through Amazon. What would really be nice is if Amazon, along with these changes, added a "local" category where all goods are sold by merchants from your particular region. Hell, even just a "Made in U.S.A." category would be nice for people that are trying to do the right thing.
The most egregious thing in my opinion is the human interest horseshit that has been inserted into everything that even remotely resembles reality TV these days. I mean, seriously, we're starting to get to the point where nobody can be a participant or contestant on a TV show unless their parents were tortured, raped and murdered by sex-crazed donkeys, they were forced to live on the streets from the age of three like something out of fucking Oliver Twist, they survived 847 forms of cancer or some other debilitating disease or deformity...
If I ever see a serious contestant that isn't "coming out of a massive tragedy of epic proportions and beating incredible odds (c)(R)(TM)" I believe I may soil myself, and what's worse, it's causing a ridiculous arms race in who can come from the more fucked up background. Soon every contestant is going to have to be a refugee from some fucked up country run by a genocidal maniac or else they'll be considered too boring to be a contestant...
Yeah, I was talking more about pharmaceuticals, but I realize now that what I said was pretty ambiguous.
In his own words, he trusts the pot a hell of a lot more than the prescription drugs he's been on in the past, and I can't say I blame him. The side effects are a hell of a lot more tolerable then the ones he suffered when he was on the various SSRIs they kept putting him on and taking him off of and changing the doses and all that shit.
It doesn't necessarily have to be related to trauma. I have one friend who self-medicates his General Anxiety disorder with marijuana. He was never beaten or abused or anything, he just happens to have the condition, and marijuana helps keep him calm, and it doesn't require him to take psychoactive drugs.
Luckily for him he telecommutes so he doesn't need to worry about covering it up (we're not a medical marijuana state)...
I bet the list of things that can trigger psychotic episodes in mentally ill people includes pretty much everything.
The only honest to goodness negative reaction I've ever seen with marijuana use (outside of the physical effects like smoking too much and getting the spins/nauseous) is increased anxiety, and that was only a couple times, both times involving someone that probably didn't want to smoke in the first place and was just doing so to "go along with the crowd" and hadn't really gotten high before, so the effects freaked them out.
In those cases, though, I find it hard to blame the weed itself for that; nobody should consume an intoxicating substance just to "fit in", but then we've all been to high school and now how THAT goes...
I agree. This article is full of FUD and little off-hand remarks about Android being of lesser quality and implies Google doesn't care about their brand because the Android OS is on low-end devices.
I can't envision a future where I ever get out of living effectively paycheck to paycheck.
I shudder to think how much worse things are gonna be for our kids. We think it's bad now; at this rate they're going to be serfs to some neofeudalistic megacorporation that owns every facet of their existence.
I think I use less than 100 minutes a month worth of actual voice communication with my phone. Text, chat, and email have pretty much completely replaced the need to have voice conversation; the only person I actually talk to on the phone is my mother, and even she is getting on the text bandwagon, now that she has finally gotten herself a cellphone.
Some people see it as a bad thing that we're not literally talking to one another like we used to, but honestly, I don't see it as a bad thing at all. When I get a phone call, it not only interrupts me but it interrupts everyone around me while I take that call. When I get a text message I can quickly respond without stopping all the conversation happening right in front of me, without having to leave the room or find a quiet place. Honestly, I see that as much more rude than just shooting off a text.
Besides, there's another thing with tactile buttons: they collect dirt and debris and serve as an avenue for that dirt and debris to get into your device. My touchscreen smartphone is much more easily cleaned then the dumbphones of old.
but to me it looks like in the US this is happening because more people find it acceptable
This. For whatever reason, it seems like more and more people are voting against their interests, all because of the promise of some benefit to someone else. Look at the debate over taxes here in the U.S., I've had people that live in a trailer, working at Walmart for $7.15 an hour, flame the shit out of me over my opinion because "the government is taxing them to death". Really? What could the tax burden on someone living at the fucking poverty line even be? Who the fuck are they fighting for?
It's not just taxes, either; the healthcare debate is another perfect example. I had an old friend of mine, whose wife is on social security for a disability (she's "got bad wrists", which reeks of BS anyway), medicaid, and they now collect food stamps since she's pregnant and they both have minimum wage jobs, not to mention the cost of her care related to the pregnancy is completely absorbed by the state...this person ranted all over me about the nanny state and people "expecting handouts". I pointed out what a huge fucking hypocrite he was, and he told me that it was different in his situation because he works and when he makes money later he'll be forced to pay whereas all the people on it now are just lazy and don't want to work. Everyone else, just not him or his wife. Funny how that works...
I don't know when it happened, but a sizable number of people in this country have been convinced that the government they themselves elected is an evil machine hell bent on wiping them out because "that's what government does", but the multi-national corporations that answer to no one, buy off our officials, skirt the taxes the people bitch about having to pay, and all sorts of other antisocial, repugnant bullshit...they're just benevolent overlords doing God's good work.
I actually enjoyed the battle system. The mechanic of Paradigm Shifting party members into different roles on the fly took a little getting used to after being so used to just selecting from a list of commands one by one, and it definitely didn't get nearly as much use in the vanilla battles as you were traversing the different zones from point A to point B (where you typically just stuck to a RAV+RAV+COM paradigm or some variation since it was most efficient at dispatching regular mobs) but when you did the extended story stuff, with the different hunts and the long boss battles, it was a lot more action packed then it would have been if it was the standard turn-based controls of other FF games. Some of the fights required use of your entire Paradigm deck with specific combinations or else you were just fucked, and you had to be on top of shifting from an offensive paradigm to a defensive one at the drop of a hat otherwise you would just wipe. It was so frustrating losing battles 45 minutes in to have to redo them completely, but on the other hand, it obviously made eventually winning the fight that much better.
Just, like, my opinion man.
As for linearity, I didn't mind that much, either. As someone that played FFXI for six years, with the most random quests and no linearity at all, I was actually glad to play something a little more linear where I could focus on the story as opposed to figuring out where the fuck I was, where I was supposed to go, and what the hell I was supposed to do when I got there.
Exactly. When I'm sending an email to my boss, or anyone that I have a professional relationship with, I obviously try to be as grammatically correct as possible because, well, I don't want to come off like a retard. When I'm sending an informal email to a friend of mine, grammar is much less important to me, and when I text/chat with people in real time, it's even less important to me...but that's mostly because I have fat sausage fingers and have yet to find a hardware or software keyboard on a phone that I can type on quickly and accurately. In those situations I just type out my thought and hit send, misspellings and grammatical errors be damned. To date nobody has ever complained that they didn't understand the meaning behind my messages so I'm going to assume that I make myself generally understood.
I guess it just depends on your audience, or at least, your perception of your audience. I've gotten the most horribly screwed up Slanglish in emails from coworkers talking about professional matters, copied to the boss no less, and it makes me wonder if they want to come off like a moron, don't realize that they're doing so, or just don't care. I'm leaning towards just not caring.
That being said, I'm not a grammar nazi, so I'm not about to be one of those douchebags that correct someone's message and send it back to them (or call them out in a forum). I don't give a shit if comments on websites aren't properly formatted and grammatically correct because it doesn't fucking matter. Besides, who knows? The slang of today could be part of the language proper in 20 years, and the incorrect grammar we bitch about today could gradually come to be acceptable. We see it as stupid, but I bet we would seem kinda stupid to someone writing proper English 150 years ago, even without all the modern slang.
It does make me kinda sad that these fundamentals are not taught in schools anymore, though I admit that may be more because of my nostalgia at diagramming sentences and all that shit that I have never used in my post-scholastic life. Some people could definitely use a refresher on subject-verb agreement, however, and how to properly pluralize and use the correct possessive form of a given word. And, of course, the difference between there, their, and they're...
Almost none now, because most people are still not doing the bulk of their computing on their cell phones and tablets. People shrug their shoulders and say "meh" now when an app gets yanked from their device after they put it on there, or when they can't run a given application on their device at all because it's version locked or other some such shit, but that's going to change when it's something that's actually critical and not a dippy $1 game or Office app they have a PC version of to fall back on.
It's the same thing with "the cloud". Everyone thinks that's going to replace local computing and that we're going to end up with glorified terminals, but when "the cloud" goes down, like Amazon's recent problems, and they can't access their Netflix for hours or days, what are they going to do when they've dumped all their DVDs and locally stored media because "they don't need it anymore, it's in 'the cloud'!!"?
Oh, I'm sure, but on the other hand, when they're not scavenging for food and water and fighting off bandit raiders like survivors in some post-apocalyptic wasteland, they probably have some down-time and a book is a great way to pass the time...that's pretty much my go-to source of entertainment when my power goes out (although I admit I haven't had to deal with an extended power outage like that since Andrew hit back in '92, and I was just a kid then so didn't have 'adult things' to worry about.)
Thats why diablo 3 might sell 4 or 5 million copies but angry birds selling 100 million.
Because the fact that Diablo III costs $59.99 and Angry Birds goes for a whopping $0.99 has nothing to do with it...
People are coming to realise, why should I go out and spend 300 bucks on a shitty computer when I can spend 200 bucks on a google nexus 7 that will do what I want and I can carry around or just upgrade my smartphone I already have.
The $300 shitty computer can run pretty much anything you want to put on it. How many tablets and smartphones out there will even allow you to put any software you want on your device? Cheering on the post-PC era, with all the locked bootloaders and apps being pulled and features being removed after the device has already been sold via mandatory updates, seems a little short-sighted to me. I'll welcome the post-PC era when all the tablet and smartphone manufacturers aren't raping consumers for every penny they possibly can while deliberately degrading the experience of their previous devices to force users to throw their device into a drawer and buy a new one just to run the newest Angry Birds.
We're finally at that point with PC's where you don't have to run out and upgrade half the components in your build every 6-months to play new games and use new software, and you guys are eager to jump right on the platform that you can't even upgrade (nor repair, usually) and thus have to replace the entire fucking device to do so? What are y'all smoking?
Until the power goes out and they can't recharge their Kindle...then they're going to be right back to the books. Let's ask all those people living in those areas of the U.S. that have been without power for the last 3-4 days how well their eBooks are working out for them now...
I'll believe that eBooks are going to kill off paper books when the automobile succeeds in killing off the bicycle. I mean, it's only been a century or so, but I'm sure it's gonna happen eventually...
We all grew up with electricity, and those magic outlets have been ubiquitous for a century, but all it takes is one extended period without power for people to realize that they need a fucking back-up plan, and until we come up with portable cold-fusion reactors for every home, that's not likely to change.
Of course. Plus, I'm sure they would shit their pants with glee if the average person was out there replacing their computer as often as they're replacing their phone.
One can't ignore the benefit to the industry of throwaway electronics. When your PC breaks, you can take it to a shop and have someone attempt to repair it. When your phone breaks, you go to your carrier, get a replacement (either out of pocket, or via insurance, but either way they're getting paid), and the broken one gets sent back to be refurbished (and sold AGAIN at a profit) or ends up in a landfill.
Also, from a software standpoint, what's going to happen in this glorious "post-PC era" when half the devices out there are locked down to the point where they can only run "approved" software? We're going to have to hack our shit just to get back the ability to install and run whatever the fuck we want on our devices? Come on....
They can have my PC when they pry it from my cold, dead hands...
In my opinion, bullying isn't an "institution", it's a fact of evolution. All social animals "bully" each other as they're growing up; there are hierarchies, dominance and submissiveness within any pack animal's social group.
Now, we're obviously a bit more rational about it then, say, a litter of wolf pups, and we can find psychological reasons behind why Person A bullies Person B, but there will always be competition in any social group. The mother wolf will step in if the Alpha male in her litter is being too rough with his litter-mates, give him a nip of her own, and he'll knock it the fuck off.
I don't think the problems we have with bullying these days have anything to do with the kids, and everything to do with us. Zero-tolerance policies in schools, for instance, serve to punish both the aggressor and the victim equally, which is ridiculous. This was true even when I was in high school 15 years ago, pre-Columbine before the bullying hysteria started really ramping up, and it's even worse today. Parents aren't disciplining their kids effectively (which is why so many bullies come from broken homes or empty ones due to chronic absentee parents chasing that big brass ring to leave their kids raised by 4Chan), and they're not noticing the signs of this behavior when the kids are young enough that the behavior can really be corrected. Our definitions of what is 'bullying' are changing all the time, too. We've become more and more sensitive on a societal level to it, and I really do think that it's become a sort of moral panic at this point. "Did Jimmy call you a doody-head?! He's a dirty BULLY AND MUST BE STOPPED!!!!!!!!! Throw his 7-year-old ass in JAIL!!!!!!!!"
I realize that's a little insensitive, and that there is much more severe forms of bullying than that, but I've heard younger parents characterize relatively innocent shit like that as bullying in conversation. Bullying is starting to come to mean any negative interaction between two kids anymore. I had my share of adversaries in school, as did most people, and while we had our dust ups, I wouldn't call the other kids bullies. We just didn't get along. That's how life is, sometimes, and guess what? It did make me stronger. It taught me how to deal with antagonistic people like that, which is a pretty useful skill, especially these days where everything has become so polarized. I learned not to let the shit get to me when I was a kid, but if we shelter kids from that shit in the misguided idea that we're going to turn school into a utopia where nobody fights with each other, they're just going to end up unable to deal with any adversity in their lives as adults. Not only are we over-sanitizing our world to the point where kids are getting sicker than they used to due to lack of exposure to germs, but we're starting to do the same thing to them socially, as well.
What happens when they start having to deal with those people when they've never learned how to deal with them before? They feel helpless, they get despondent and depressed, and they think suicide is the only solution...because they never learned how to deal with the bullshit. Their self-esteem and confidence is shot to hell because they've never had the opportunity to rise to a challenge and deal with it on their own, so when they actually are forced to deal with a situation on their own, they're powerless.
Exactly. My name is about as common as 'John Smith' here in the U.S.; there is a major Hollywood composer that's done the soundtracks of hundreds of films over the last 30 or so years, professional athletes, a country music star, and an actor sharing my name, and that's just off the top of my head. If you were to Google me I'd bet you'd have to go 30 pages deep to find a link that is even possibly connected to me in any way, shape or form.
Hell, just within my home state there are dozens of results for my name, nationwide, there's probably thousands of people with the same first and last name as me. Unless you have a very unique name, I don't see how this is going to be effective at all...
4/ when power is back on, I shield all the windows. I have "duck taped" (foil from grocery store) one of windows to increase the reflective coefficient. It works.
I did this when I was a teenager living in Florida. My bedroom sat facing the front of the house and got direct sun all day, and to top things off it was a huge bay window with a window seat so the amount of light (and thus heat) coming in was astronomical. Bought a roll of tinfoil, covered the window, and the temperature dropped at least 10 degrees in that room within an hour or so.
The problem was my parents, who thought that we were going to get "goddamned raided under suspicion of being a grow op", plus it tended to reflect directly at the 4-way stop in front of our house which cause a few complaints. A few weeks later the Homeowners Association stuck a letter in our door about it and that was the end of my tinfoiled windows.
Highest temperature I can recall ever seeing here in my 13 years living here. There haven't been any major power outages in the region that I've heard of (the local news has been pretty much leading every broadcast talking about the heat), although a few days ago a couple thousand people lost their power for a few hours in the middle of the night. Bet that was awesome, as our overnight temperatures are hovering in the high 70's, low-mid 80's. At 10 o'clock last night it was 85 or somewhere around there, I was sweating my ass off watching our local Independence Day fireworks...
Our boxer absolutely cannot deal with this heat (he's got longish hair, looks almost like a miniature St. Bernard even though he's been genetically tested 100% boxer) so we've been minimizing his trips outside to potty breaks, although we spoil the shit out of him so I doubt he really minds being stuck inside with his humans in the A/C.
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I bet the guys working at the Amazon DC's make a better wage and receive better benefits than the average sad sack working at Walmart.
Plus there are lots of third party 'stores' that sell through Amazon. What would really be nice is if Amazon, along with these changes, added a "local" category where all goods are sold by merchants from your particular region. Hell, even just a "Made in U.S.A." category would be nice for people that are trying to do the right thing.
The most egregious thing in my opinion is the human interest horseshit that has been inserted into everything that even remotely resembles reality TV these days. I mean, seriously, we're starting to get to the point where nobody can be a participant or contestant on a TV show unless their parents were tortured, raped and murdered by sex-crazed donkeys, they were forced to live on the streets from the age of three like something out of fucking Oliver Twist, they survived 847 forms of cancer or some other debilitating disease or deformity...
If I ever see a serious contestant that isn't "coming out of a massive tragedy of epic proportions and beating incredible odds (c)(R)(TM)" I believe I may soil myself, and what's worse, it's causing a ridiculous arms race in who can come from the more fucked up background. Soon every contestant is going to have to be a refugee from some fucked up country run by a genocidal maniac or else they'll be considered too boring to be a contestant...
I don't know, Kancho has me a little disturbed...
Yeah, I was talking more about pharmaceuticals, but I realize now that what I said was pretty ambiguous.
In his own words, he trusts the pot a hell of a lot more than the prescription drugs he's been on in the past, and I can't say I blame him. The side effects are a hell of a lot more tolerable then the ones he suffered when he was on the various SSRIs they kept putting him on and taking him off of and changing the doses and all that shit.
It doesn't necessarily have to be related to trauma. I have one friend who self-medicates his General Anxiety disorder with marijuana. He was never beaten or abused or anything, he just happens to have the condition, and marijuana helps keep him calm, and it doesn't require him to take psychoactive drugs.
Luckily for him he telecommutes so he doesn't need to worry about covering it up (we're not a medical marijuana state)...
I bet the list of things that can trigger psychotic episodes in mentally ill people includes pretty much everything.
The only honest to goodness negative reaction I've ever seen with marijuana use (outside of the physical effects like smoking too much and getting the spins/nauseous) is increased anxiety, and that was only a couple times, both times involving someone that probably didn't want to smoke in the first place and was just doing so to "go along with the crowd" and hadn't really gotten high before, so the effects freaked them out.
In those cases, though, I find it hard to blame the weed itself for that; nobody should consume an intoxicating substance just to "fit in", but then we've all been to high school and now how THAT goes...
I agree. This article is full of FUD and little off-hand remarks about Android being of lesser quality and implies Google doesn't care about their brand because the Android OS is on low-end devices.
I remember a news story about it hitting 150F in some rural area of Turkey one time.
According to Wikipedia, the highest temperature ever reported on Earth was in ‘Aziziya, Libya, where the temperature hit 57.8C (136F) in 1922. However, there is some controversy over the reliability of that record.
Ignoring 'Aziziya, the next highest recorded temperature is 56.7 C (134 F), recorded in Death Valley, California, in 1913.
Hey you leftists; just because you may agree with the current administrations policies, wait until we get a conservative in office.
Yeah, they'll fuck us even more! Great message, there. Guess we'd better continue supporting the devil we know, huh?
I can't envision a future where I ever get out of living effectively paycheck to paycheck.
I shudder to think how much worse things are gonna be for our kids. We think it's bad now; at this rate they're going to be serfs to some neofeudalistic megacorporation that owns every facet of their existence.
I think I use less than 100 minutes a month worth of actual voice communication with my phone. Text, chat, and email have pretty much completely replaced the need to have voice conversation; the only person I actually talk to on the phone is my mother, and even she is getting on the text bandwagon, now that she has finally gotten herself a cellphone.
Some people see it as a bad thing that we're not literally talking to one another like we used to, but honestly, I don't see it as a bad thing at all. When I get a phone call, it not only interrupts me but it interrupts everyone around me while I take that call. When I get a text message I can quickly respond without stopping all the conversation happening right in front of me, without having to leave the room or find a quiet place. Honestly, I see that as much more rude than just shooting off a text.
Besides, there's another thing with tactile buttons: they collect dirt and debris and serve as an avenue for that dirt and debris to get into your device. My touchscreen smartphone is much more easily cleaned then the dumbphones of old.
but to me it looks like in the US this is happening because more people find it acceptable
This. For whatever reason, it seems like more and more people are voting against their interests, all because of the promise of some benefit to someone else. Look at the debate over taxes here in the U.S., I've had people that live in a trailer, working at Walmart for $7.15 an hour, flame the shit out of me over my opinion because "the government is taxing them to death". Really? What could the tax burden on someone living at the fucking poverty line even be? Who the fuck are they fighting for?
It's not just taxes, either; the healthcare debate is another perfect example. I had an old friend of mine, whose wife is on social security for a disability (she's "got bad wrists", which reeks of BS anyway), medicaid, and they now collect food stamps since she's pregnant and they both have minimum wage jobs, not to mention the cost of her care related to the pregnancy is completely absorbed by the state...this person ranted all over me about the nanny state and people "expecting handouts". I pointed out what a huge fucking hypocrite he was, and he told me that it was different in his situation because he works and when he makes money later he'll be forced to pay whereas all the people on it now are just lazy and don't want to work. Everyone else, just not him or his wife. Funny how that works...
I don't know when it happened, but a sizable number of people in this country have been convinced that the government they themselves elected is an evil machine hell bent on wiping them out because "that's what government does", but the multi-national corporations that answer to no one, buy off our officials, skirt the taxes the people bitch about having to pay, and all sorts of other antisocial, repugnant bullshit...they're just benevolent overlords doing God's good work.
I actually enjoyed the battle system. The mechanic of Paradigm Shifting party members into different roles on the fly took a little getting used to after being so used to just selecting from a list of commands one by one, and it definitely didn't get nearly as much use in the vanilla battles as you were traversing the different zones from point A to point B (where you typically just stuck to a RAV+RAV+COM paradigm or some variation since it was most efficient at dispatching regular mobs) but when you did the extended story stuff, with the different hunts and the long boss battles, it was a lot more action packed then it would have been if it was the standard turn-based controls of other FF games. Some of the fights required use of your entire Paradigm deck with specific combinations or else you were just fucked, and you had to be on top of shifting from an offensive paradigm to a defensive one at the drop of a hat otherwise you would just wipe. It was so frustrating losing battles 45 minutes in to have to redo them completely, but on the other hand, it obviously made eventually winning the fight that much better.
Just, like, my opinion man.
As for linearity, I didn't mind that much, either. As someone that played FFXI for six years, with the most random quests and no linearity at all, I was actually glad to play something a little more linear where I could focus on the story as opposed to figuring out where the fuck I was, where I was supposed to go, and what the hell I was supposed to do when I got there.
Exactly. When I'm sending an email to my boss, or anyone that I have a professional relationship with, I obviously try to be as grammatically correct as possible because, well, I don't want to come off like a retard. When I'm sending an informal email to a friend of mine, grammar is much less important to me, and when I text/chat with people in real time, it's even less important to me...but that's mostly because I have fat sausage fingers and have yet to find a hardware or software keyboard on a phone that I can type on quickly and accurately. In those situations I just type out my thought and hit send, misspellings and grammatical errors be damned. To date nobody has ever complained that they didn't understand the meaning behind my messages so I'm going to assume that I make myself generally understood.
I guess it just depends on your audience, or at least, your perception of your audience. I've gotten the most horribly screwed up Slanglish in emails from coworkers talking about professional matters, copied to the boss no less, and it makes me wonder if they want to come off like a moron, don't realize that they're doing so, or just don't care. I'm leaning towards just not caring.
That being said, I'm not a grammar nazi, so I'm not about to be one of those douchebags that correct someone's message and send it back to them (or call them out in a forum). I don't give a shit if comments on websites aren't properly formatted and grammatically correct because it doesn't fucking matter. Besides, who knows? The slang of today could be part of the language proper in 20 years, and the incorrect grammar we bitch about today could gradually come to be acceptable. We see it as stupid, but I bet we would seem kinda stupid to someone writing proper English 150 years ago, even without all the modern slang.
It does make me kinda sad that these fundamentals are not taught in schools anymore, though I admit that may be more because of my nostalgia at diagramming sentences and all that shit that I have never used in my post-scholastic life. Some people could definitely use a refresher on subject-verb agreement, however, and how to properly pluralize and use the correct possessive form of a given word. And, of course, the difference between there, their, and they're...
Almost none now, because most people are still not doing the bulk of their computing on their cell phones and tablets. People shrug their shoulders and say "meh" now when an app gets yanked from their device after they put it on there, or when they can't run a given application on their device at all because it's version locked or other some such shit, but that's going to change when it's something that's actually critical and not a dippy $1 game or Office app they have a PC version of to fall back on.
It's the same thing with "the cloud". Everyone thinks that's going to replace local computing and that we're going to end up with glorified terminals, but when "the cloud" goes down, like Amazon's recent problems, and they can't access their Netflix for hours or days, what are they going to do when they've dumped all their DVDs and locally stored media because "they don't need it anymore, it's in 'the cloud'!!"?
Oh, I'm sure, but on the other hand, when they're not scavenging for food and water and fighting off bandit raiders like survivors in some post-apocalyptic wasteland, they probably have some down-time and a book is a great way to pass the time...that's pretty much my go-to source of entertainment when my power goes out (although I admit I haven't had to deal with an extended power outage like that since Andrew hit back in '92, and I was just a kid then so didn't have 'adult things' to worry about.)
Thats why diablo 3 might sell 4 or 5 million copies but angry birds selling 100 million.
Because the fact that Diablo III costs $59.99 and Angry Birds goes for a whopping $0.99 has nothing to do with it...
People are coming to realise, why should I go out and spend 300 bucks on a shitty computer when I can spend 200 bucks on a google nexus 7 that will do what I want and I can carry around or just upgrade my smartphone I already have.
The $300 shitty computer can run pretty much anything you want to put on it. How many tablets and smartphones out there will even allow you to put any software you want on your device? Cheering on the post-PC era, with all the locked bootloaders and apps being pulled and features being removed after the device has already been sold via mandatory updates, seems a little short-sighted to me. I'll welcome the post-PC era when all the tablet and smartphone manufacturers aren't raping consumers for every penny they possibly can while deliberately degrading the experience of their previous devices to force users to throw their device into a drawer and buy a new one just to run the newest Angry Birds.
We're finally at that point with PC's where you don't have to run out and upgrade half the components in your build every 6-months to play new games and use new software, and you guys are eager to jump right on the platform that you can't even upgrade (nor repair, usually) and thus have to replace the entire fucking device to do so? What are y'all smoking?
Until the power goes out and they can't recharge their Kindle...then they're going to be right back to the books. Let's ask all those people living in those areas of the U.S. that have been without power for the last 3-4 days how well their eBooks are working out for them now...
I'll believe that eBooks are going to kill off paper books when the automobile succeeds in killing off the bicycle. I mean, it's only been a century or so, but I'm sure it's gonna happen eventually...
We all grew up with electricity, and those magic outlets have been ubiquitous for a century, but all it takes is one extended period without power for people to realize that they need a fucking back-up plan, and until we come up with portable cold-fusion reactors for every home, that's not likely to change.
Of course. Plus, I'm sure they would shit their pants with glee if the average person was out there replacing their computer as often as they're replacing their phone.
One can't ignore the benefit to the industry of throwaway electronics. When your PC breaks, you can take it to a shop and have someone attempt to repair it. When your phone breaks, you go to your carrier, get a replacement (either out of pocket, or via insurance, but either way they're getting paid), and the broken one gets sent back to be refurbished (and sold AGAIN at a profit) or ends up in a landfill.
Also, from a software standpoint, what's going to happen in this glorious "post-PC era" when half the devices out there are locked down to the point where they can only run "approved" software? We're going to have to hack our shit just to get back the ability to install and run whatever the fuck we want on our devices? Come on....
They can have my PC when they pry it from my cold, dead hands...
Actually no, but that's funny because I was thinking that someone might guess that name, based on what I said, as I was writing it.
In my opinion, bullying isn't an "institution", it's a fact of evolution. All social animals "bully" each other as they're growing up; there are hierarchies, dominance and submissiveness within any pack animal's social group.
Now, we're obviously a bit more rational about it then, say, a litter of wolf pups, and we can find psychological reasons behind why Person A bullies Person B, but there will always be competition in any social group. The mother wolf will step in if the Alpha male in her litter is being too rough with his litter-mates, give him a nip of her own, and he'll knock it the fuck off.
I don't think the problems we have with bullying these days have anything to do with the kids, and everything to do with us. Zero-tolerance policies in schools, for instance, serve to punish both the aggressor and the victim equally, which is ridiculous. This was true even when I was in high school 15 years ago, pre-Columbine before the bullying hysteria started really ramping up, and it's even worse today. Parents aren't disciplining their kids effectively (which is why so many bullies come from broken homes or empty ones due to chronic absentee parents chasing that big brass ring to leave their kids raised by 4Chan), and they're not noticing the signs of this behavior when the kids are young enough that the behavior can really be corrected. Our definitions of what is 'bullying' are changing all the time, too. We've become more and more sensitive on a societal level to it, and I really do think that it's become a sort of moral panic at this point. "Did Jimmy call you a doody-head?! He's a dirty BULLY AND MUST BE STOPPED!!!!!!!!! Throw his 7-year-old ass in JAIL!!!!!!!!"
I realize that's a little insensitive, and that there is much more severe forms of bullying than that, but I've heard younger parents characterize relatively innocent shit like that as bullying in conversation. Bullying is starting to come to mean any negative interaction between two kids anymore. I had my share of adversaries in school, as did most people, and while we had our dust ups, I wouldn't call the other kids bullies. We just didn't get along. That's how life is, sometimes, and guess what? It did make me stronger. It taught me how to deal with antagonistic people like that, which is a pretty useful skill, especially these days where everything has become so polarized. I learned not to let the shit get to me when I was a kid, but if we shelter kids from that shit in the misguided idea that we're going to turn school into a utopia where nobody fights with each other, they're just going to end up unable to deal with any adversity in their lives as adults. Not only are we over-sanitizing our world to the point where kids are getting sicker than they used to due to lack of exposure to germs, but we're starting to do the same thing to them socially, as well.
What happens when they start having to deal with those people when they've never learned how to deal with them before? They feel helpless, they get despondent and depressed, and they think suicide is the only solution...because they never learned how to deal with the bullshit. Their self-esteem and confidence is shot to hell because they've never had the opportunity to rise to a challenge and deal with it on their own, so when they actually are forced to deal with a situation on their own, they're powerless.
Exactly. My name is about as common as 'John Smith' here in the U.S.; there is a major Hollywood composer that's done the soundtracks of hundreds of films over the last 30 or so years, professional athletes, a country music star, and an actor sharing my name, and that's just off the top of my head. If you were to Google me I'd bet you'd have to go 30 pages deep to find a link that is even possibly connected to me in any way, shape or form.
Hell, just within my home state there are dozens of results for my name, nationwide, there's probably thousands of people with the same first and last name as me. Unless you have a very unique name, I don't see how this is going to be effective at all...
4/ when power is back on, I shield all the windows. I have "duck taped" (foil from grocery store) one of windows to increase the reflective coefficient. It works.
I did this when I was a teenager living in Florida. My bedroom sat facing the front of the house and got direct sun all day, and to top things off it was a huge bay window with a window seat so the amount of light (and thus heat) coming in was astronomical. Bought a roll of tinfoil, covered the window, and the temperature dropped at least 10 degrees in that room within an hour or so.
The problem was my parents, who thought that we were going to get "goddamned raided under suspicion of being a grow op", plus it tended to reflect directly at the 4-way stop in front of our house which cause a few complaints. A few weeks later the Homeowners Association stuck a letter in our door about it and that was the end of my tinfoiled windows.
Highest temperature I can recall ever seeing here in my 13 years living here. There haven't been any major power outages in the region that I've heard of (the local news has been pretty much leading every broadcast talking about the heat), although a few days ago a couple thousand people lost their power for a few hours in the middle of the night. Bet that was awesome, as our overnight temperatures are hovering in the high 70's, low-mid 80's. At 10 o'clock last night it was 85 or somewhere around there, I was sweating my ass off watching our local Independence Day fireworks...
Our boxer absolutely cannot deal with this heat (he's got longish hair, looks almost like a miniature St. Bernard even though he's been genetically tested 100% boxer) so we've been minimizing his trips outside to potty breaks, although we spoil the shit out of him so I doubt he really minds being stuck inside with his humans in the A/C.
They've basically used verbiage and obfuscation to paper up the claims and make it harder for the examiners to figure out what's going on.
Pretty much the same thing the banking industry has done with the Federal Trade Commission as of late...