Of course, you could just describe it as "to increase the cost of a teacher playing a DVD in a classroom for legally-permitted educational purposes" and get straight to the point...
Now we know why the dinosaurs went extinct. You can't survive in this world without a decent guard rotation.
Still, England's guard rotation is still methodical and precise, and their empire is slowly diminishing. There's no accounting for team chemistry, I suppose.
I can see many replies here that say the anecdote is obvious, and I can also see many that say it's rubbish. Both are correct, from my experience, but neither tells the full story.
"Stuart" didn't get fired because he was the nice guy. He got fired because nobody noticed how good he was at his job except the people under him. "Doug" kept his job through manipulating "Kelly": had she been doing her job properly, she would have spoken to "Stuart" as well to make a better decision about who to keep and who to fire.
The truth is that some people are simply stronger than others. It's possible to be a jerk and a coward at the same time, if you have jerks around you that are strong enough and loyal enough to protect you when you screw up. Similarly, it's possible to be a nice guy and still remain strong enough to stick up for yourself, if you want to end up sticking up for other nice guys as well. I've seen the former first-hand - actually, I've been the victim of it - but as for the latter, it might be a while before I can say how well that works.
Someone here has already posted that if the office-political nonsense is more influential than the work itself, and you're not prepared to play these sordid little games, then maybe "Stuart" and his ilk are better off to leave. I would definitely agree with this. This is the sort of situation that highlights the superficial nice guy who is really a jerk underneath, and these are the people you have to watch out for the most.
I'm in a bit of a dilemma about this again myself. I don't really want to leave my current job, but I can't stay in it unless its gets better. That, in turn, depends on a few people who are in the way, who have been in the way for months, and who don't seem to be getting out of the way. I suspect that there are some superficial nice guys at play: they seem nice, but they won't stick up for a nice guy like me because they're really jerks underneath and are in it more for themselves. It's true that it might not be the wisest move to quit, but I'm miserable here and I should at least be evaluating my options.
How much energy does it cost to keep this exercise running? Was it worth getting a webcam and keeping a computer running for something that you can check yourself in seconds?
Whenever political or social ideology gets a chance to make as enormous a mistake as this one, the playbook always contains the same steps, and they're always taken in the same order.
Firstly, decide on an ideological action. In this case, The Powers That Be don't want the internet to remain free and open, and a system is needed to control it. (Don't kid yourself that what is at stake is anything less.)
Secondly, make up an excuse that appears, at least superficially, to justify that action. It doesn't actually need to justify the action, and typically, under any degree of scrutiny, the argument will fall apart. If you need to resort to cheap appeals to "the children" and scare tactics, by all means, go for it.
Thirdly, you need to maintain that your excuse is better than anyone else's explanation to the contrary. Try not to spend too much effort replying to the experts who pick your excuse to pieces - you can't match wits with them. Don't answer their questions.
Fourthly, do whatever you wanted to do anyway. Again, ignore all the failings for now. Stick to your excuse; say it louder, if need be.
Fifthly, explain why the whole exercise has been such a success. If it has actually been a success in some way, your mistake has been justified by a successful result. However, even if it has been a terrible failure, you can still fall back on your ideological decision. For example, if your system has failed, you can campaign for the funds for a bigger and better system. Perhaps most importantly, do not acknowledge any failings significant enough to suggest that the move should be undone: leave it there at all costs, and use it as leverage as required.
I worked for an Australian government department once, and I've seen these sorts of mistakes made firsthand. I can all but guarantee that Conroy will say whatever he thinks he needs to say to keep the filter going. Everyone knows it doesn't work. The ISPs will say it doesn't work because it's broken by design. The Minister will say we just need a better one to make it work. If that's all that happens, the Minister will win.
If people don't stand up and make themselves heard, sooner rather than later, then the government is make whatever mistakes it can, using your tax dollars, and make your life worse with the consequences. Let's make them earn their keep for a change.
The so-called hydrogen economy is one of my pet peeves.
We've been hearing stories for 30 years about water-powered cars, and every single one of them has been a hoax. We get a new one every year, and the story doesn't get any more interesting. They never show you how their engine works, because, simply enough, it doesn't.
It's sad to think that so many major car manufacturers have bought into the hydrogen fuel cell nonsense. By rights, you'd think that someone, somewhere, would know enough about where the energy comes from to have put a stop to it years ago. As it stands, it's the fuel of the future - and it always will be.
I don't know whether the people really want it or not. No-one not deep into politics really knows, nor understands, the full meaning of this treaty.
You don't need to know everything about it to make an informed decision: there are big enough traps in the Treaty for anyone "not deep into politics" to distrust it completely.
Put simply, the Treaty of Lisbon, like the TCE before it, is a thinly-veiled attack on democracy. You can get a seven-minute history lesson about it here.
I think you put too much faith in your elected representatives. I don't doubt that they are, as you say, "competent people", but I have no delusion whatsoever that they really give a damn about what I think is good for the country.
I have a lot of trouble believing that this has anything to do with banking secrecy, money laundering, tax evasion or any other such ill.
I remember in the 1990s when the US government attacked the secrecy of the Swiss banks, because they had accounts containing stolen goods from the Holocaust. The point of the exercise was to put political pressure on the Swiss to be better citizens in the global economy and therefore international community. However, all of this was a political smokescreen intended to remove the Swiss franc's ties to gold. Eventually, the dishonest Swiss government caved in to the pressure, convincing the Swiss that the country should join the IMF as a token gesture, a move that required the removal of constitutional protections from the franc and therefore also required a national referendum.
I wonder what the goal is this time. Will the Swiss be forced to join the EU? Will they be forced to give up the franc entirely? Who knows? Personally, I have great difficulty trusting anyone who meddles in the affairs of another country's economy, let alone so brazenly and so directly. Besides, if the justification for the outcry is tax evasion, there are stacks of countries to talk about, not just Switzerland. Why not attack the Cayman Islands? I smell a rat.
Nobody is going to just lie down as our world falls apart. If for no other reason than there's a (huge) buck to be made in preventing that.
Don't under estimate the powers of greed and self-preservation.
... or denial, particularly denial of the laws of physics.
All these flat-Earth economists who think that we can solve the problem if we just throw enough money at it really annoy me. Put simply, there are physical problems that no amount of investment or innovation will ever solve. The purported hydrogen economy is a classic example: since hydrogen is not an energy source - and, due to the laws of thermodynamics, never will be - it's really a non-starter.
Eventually, we reach limits to all of these things. Think the Earth can support an infinite number of people? Well, we'd need infinite amounts of arable land and fresh water, and we don't have them; and, to spoil the surprise at the end, we'll never innovate our way to them, either. The final solution to this would be a massive decline in the number of human beings on Earth, and the people with the money and the power are happy enough to price themselves into that market at the expense of everyone else.
If you want a better idea of the limits to our ingenuity in the face of limits to our environment and resources, watch this short film, "Are Humans Smarter Than Yeast?".
I'm surprised at a couple of issues that don't seem to have been mentioned here.
Firstly, Skype isn't compatible with Leopard's firewall. This is a problem with the Skype software, but there's a workaround for now, until a new version comes out with that problem fixed.
Secondly, when I upgraded, it didn't upgrade XCode to 3.0. I still have 2.4.1, which crashes when I try to run it. Looks like I'll have to update that separately. (If anyone knows whether you can just install over the top or whether you have to remove the old one first, let me know - I haven't tried this yet.)
I like the interface, but I wish I were able to tweak more of it. Let me set the opacity of the menu bar. Let me set the contrast of the Dock, so I can see the application lights more clearly. Let me determine whether a Stack has an icon or not (using the contents of a Stack as the icon works for Downloads but not for Applications). Minor annoyances, really, and some of them can be fixed easily enough already.
Pretty much everything else (that I've tried) has "just worked". It's only been a day for me, and one not entirely without frustration, but I'm reasonably happy with it so far.
Your post isn't wordy enough. If you make the font smaller, you can fit in more text. Also, could you make the post fold into view on the side of a cube?
1972-3 Nixon or someone went to the Saudis and "persuaded" them somehow to remain only US dollars in return for oil. No idea what they promised, but it was big.
The supposed reasons for Saudi co-operation range from US military support for Saudi Arabia, to heavy US investment in the Saudi oil industry, to the need for the US to import oil after its domestic production peak in 1970. It's probably a combination of these factors that got the Saudis on board. Remember, too, that the USA had far more business influence on the oil industry in 1970 than it does today (being the largest producer at that time).
The problem I see with the dilemma posed by the article is that he tries to conflate these areas and to get a mental map that divides things neatly into The Right Thing(TM) and The Wrong Thing(TM).
Have you ever considered that "the problem you see" was actually the point all along?
My former employer has a "values" system, to which everyone has to subscribe in their day-to-day working lives. As long as you uphold the values, everything's fine.
One day, I was tasked with evaluating a piece of software that had been developed by a third party under agreement. It turned out that this software contained pieces of another program that we had written and that we had exclusively licensed to another party about a year earlier. Potentially, depending on the wording of the two agreements, this could have put us in breach of contract.
IANAL, but I had read a bit of contract law at uni, and I started asking legal questions about what we actually had the right to do with the software I was evaluating. Three levels of line management (who are also not lawyers) stood by and did nothing, in the hope that this was all above board and nothing to be concerned about. Nobody even asked what evidence I had about which I had been so concerned, and I never did hear a real legal opinion on the matter. It was at that point that I stopped working on the software.
With regard to the value system, it obviously presented me with a dilemma. Doing the right thing would have been to expose the negligence (not necessarily in the legal sense of the word) of people I had to work with. In other words, I had to choose one of the values at the expense of another: either expose the problem in the hope of solving it, or keep my mouth shut and hope nobody finds out.
Having already been blamed for enough of other people's problems, and therefore not wanting to draw any undue attention to myself, I kept my mouth shut. I've regretted it ever since. It was the right thing to do for one reason, but it was the wrong thing to do for another reason, and the latter reason was more important to me. On the other hand, the former reason is also exactly why everyone has gotten away with it: if it fits into one part of the value system, it's good enough for everyone, even if there is a contradictory, yet far more compelling, argument that also complies with the value system.
The point of the story, I suppose, is that it's often more important to be seen to be doing the right thing than actually to do it. People mistake this for incompetence, but in many cases, it's deliberate and insulting. I never believed in the values, because of obvious contradictions such as the one I experienced first-hand, and the subsequent tendency to abuse the values by justifying behaviour that would otherwise be unacceptable or even illegal. You may eventually get an answer to your question, but rather than satisfying you, it's only given to satisfy someone else's need to save face. They know they need to give some sort of an answer, but they don't think enough of you to make that answer credible. Feel the contempt.
(Oh, and in case anyone asks, I'm not naming them here. There are very few people who know me personally and don't know this story already. Suffice to say that my not working there any more is a matter of immense pride.)
So, while it's true that iWorks is the only real option for editing them now, it shouldn't be too hard to convert them in the future
What it doesn't do is answer the basic question of why we need another set of document formats. We've heard this story before and we've always hated it. However, I'd love to hear from Apple about why TextEdit in Leopard supports ODF and iWork does not.
It's useful to know that Apple has kept the iWork file formats well-documented so far. Given that, there's a chance that NeoOffice will eventually read and write iWork files, and there's a chance that iWork will read and write ODF. We can always hope for both, of course.
If you're happy enough to waste your time converting documents backwards and forwards, feel free to do it again. I'd rather not encourage this sort of behaviour, personally. Eventually, someone else will work around the problem for you, so that when you have to put up with this sort of nonsense, you probably won't even notice. Hey, it's happened before.
papers, please
on
Manhattan 1984
·
· Score: 5, Insightful
Oh, and if you're going to give me the "if you've got nothing to hide you've got nothing to fear" line, please don't, I've heard it many times before and it sounds dumber each time I hear it.
I would love it if someone said that to me.
If someone did say that to me - a man, in this example - then I could ask him what his wife's favourite sexual position is, or which co-worker he would turn gay for, or which one person he would kill if he could get away with it.
I don't really care what his answers would be, but that's not why I'd want to ask. I would want that person to decide for himself whether he would tell me or not. If he doesn't feel comfortable telling me, or feels offended that I'd ask, he won't answer, even if he can. That's exactly the point.
If you've got nothing to hide, you really do have nothing to fear. This is true, for as far as it goes, and I'm sure the people who say it believe it. The catch is simple: everyone has something to hide, and not everyone realises it.
This is creepy. In that documentary called China Blue, it was stated by one of the factory owners that most of it's workforce is ignorant and too stupid to think for themselves. They really regard people there as illiterate simpletons.
Wow, that's nothing like Australia, Britain or the US at all. Corporations and governments treat us not as ignorant, illiterate simpletons but as ignorant, illiterate simpletons with short memories. It's hard to believe we have it so good.
I wonder how long the chinese people will put up with this. I wonder how long the rest of the world will put up with it when it comes comes to their back yard under the guise of "Think of the Children" or "War on Terror"
Not to defend the fantasy stereo type but remember there is more than 1 way to fight. Men are best suited to hitting people with things, where as women are generally more agile and are better suited to using lighter weapons and avoiding direct confrontation.
Even this is becoming less of a stereotype and more of a cliché. The one-on-one fighting game has suffered from this almost from day one: each game needs a female character, and oh, I know, let's make her physically weak but fast and nimble.
What I think a lot of game designers and game artists don't understand is that a woman doesn't have to be physically sexual to be a sex symbol. The first example that comes to my mind is Jo Dark, who was basically a James Bond (not surprisingly, considering Perfect Dark's roots) minus the need to chat up anything that moved. Jo was rarely visible on-screen, and wasn't disproportionately curvaceous or underdressed when she was, and yet, I consider her a sex symbol. She was crafty, intelligent and uncompromising, and she had a dry British wit. What's not to like?
Personally, I think it's more than just the domination of the game audience by young single males. It takes a certain amount of laziness on the part of the developers as well: it is a character, but it seldom has character. The only thing worse than that is the excuse that every developer makes for their female avatar: that girl gamers find it empowering that they can relate to her. Most of them have no idea whatsoever what women want from video games and never bothered to ask. This is the sort of denial that turns girls away from gaming, and gives us more Dead Or Alives and fewer Dead Or Alive Extreme Beach Volleyballs.
Slashdot Mirror
Of course, you could just describe it as "to increase the cost of a teacher playing a DVD in a classroom for legally-permitted educational purposes" and get straight to the point...
Now we know why the dinosaurs went extinct. You can't survive in this world without a decent guard rotation.
Still, England's guard rotation is still methodical and precise, and their empire is slowly diminishing. There's no accounting for team chemistry, I suppose.
Have you considered dressing up as a minstrel and playing some music? Apparently, that's worked before.
I can see many replies here that say the anecdote is obvious, and I can also see many that say it's rubbish. Both are correct, from my experience, but neither tells the full story.
"Stuart" didn't get fired because he was the nice guy. He got fired because nobody noticed how good he was at his job except the people under him. "Doug" kept his job through manipulating "Kelly": had she been doing her job properly, she would have spoken to "Stuart" as well to make a better decision about who to keep and who to fire.
The truth is that some people are simply stronger than others. It's possible to be a jerk and a coward at the same time, if you have jerks around you that are strong enough and loyal enough to protect you when you screw up. Similarly, it's possible to be a nice guy and still remain strong enough to stick up for yourself, if you want to end up sticking up for other nice guys as well. I've seen the former first-hand - actually, I've been the victim of it - but as for the latter, it might be a while before I can say how well that works.
Someone here has already posted that if the office-political nonsense is more influential than the work itself, and you're not prepared to play these sordid little games, then maybe "Stuart" and his ilk are better off to leave. I would definitely agree with this. This is the sort of situation that highlights the superficial nice guy who is really a jerk underneath, and these are the people you have to watch out for the most.
I'm in a bit of a dilemma about this again myself. I don't really want to leave my current job, but I can't stay in it unless its gets better. That, in turn, depends on a few people who are in the way, who have been in the way for months, and who don't seem to be getting out of the way. I suspect that there are some superficial nice guys at play: they seem nice, but they won't stick up for a nice guy like me because they're really jerks underneath and are in it more for themselves. It's true that it might not be the wisest move to quit, but I'm miserable here and I should at least be evaluating my options.
Just a thought.
Firstly, decide on an ideological action. In this case, The Powers That Be don't want the internet to remain free and open, and a system is needed to control it. (Don't kid yourself that what is at stake is anything less.)
Secondly, make up an excuse that appears, at least superficially, to justify that action. It doesn't actually need to justify the action, and typically, under any degree of scrutiny, the argument will fall apart. If you need to resort to cheap appeals to "the children" and scare tactics, by all means, go for it.
Thirdly, you need to maintain that your excuse is better than anyone else's explanation to the contrary. Try not to spend too much effort replying to the experts who pick your excuse to pieces - you can't match wits with them. Don't answer their questions.
Fourthly, do whatever you wanted to do anyway. Again, ignore all the failings for now. Stick to your excuse; say it louder, if need be.
Fifthly, explain why the whole exercise has been such a success. If it has actually been a success in some way, your mistake has been justified by a successful result. However, even if it has been a terrible failure, you can still fall back on your ideological decision. For example, if your system has failed, you can campaign for the funds for a bigger and better system. Perhaps most importantly, do not acknowledge any failings significant enough to suggest that the move should be undone: leave it there at all costs, and use it as leverage as required.
I worked for an Australian government department once, and I've seen these sorts of mistakes made firsthand. I can all but guarantee that Conroy will say whatever he thinks he needs to say to keep the filter going. Everyone knows it doesn't work. The ISPs will say it doesn't work because it's broken by design. The Minister will say we just need a better one to make it work. If that's all that happens, the Minister will win.
If people don't stand up and make themselves heard, sooner rather than later, then the government is make whatever mistakes it can, using your tax dollars, and make your life worse with the consequences. Let's make them earn their keep for a change.
We've been hearing stories for 30 years about water-powered cars, and every single one of them has been a hoax. We get a new one every year, and the story doesn't get any more interesting. They never show you how their engine works, because, simply enough, it doesn't.
It's sad to think that so many major car manufacturers have bought into the hydrogen fuel cell nonsense. By rights, you'd think that someone, somewhere, would know enough about where the energy comes from to have put a stop to it years ago. As it stands, it's the fuel of the future - and it always will be.
I don't know whether the people really want it or not. No-one not deep into politics really knows, nor understands, the full meaning of this treaty.
You don't need to know everything about it to make an informed decision: there are big enough traps in the Treaty for anyone "not deep into politics" to distrust it completely.
Put simply, the Treaty of Lisbon, like the TCE before it, is a thinly-veiled attack on democracy. You can get a seven-minute history lesson about it here.
I think you put too much faith in your elected representatives. I don't doubt that they are, as you say, "competent people", but I have no delusion whatsoever that they really give a damn about what I think is good for the country.
I have a lot of trouble believing that this has anything to do with banking secrecy, money laundering, tax evasion or any other such ill.
I remember in the 1990s when the US government attacked the secrecy of the Swiss banks, because they had accounts containing stolen goods from the Holocaust. The point of the exercise was to put political pressure on the Swiss to be better citizens in the global economy and therefore international community. However, all of this was a political smokescreen intended to remove the Swiss franc's ties to gold. Eventually, the dishonest Swiss government caved in to the pressure, convincing the Swiss that the country should join the IMF as a token gesture, a move that required the removal of constitutional protections from the franc and therefore also required a national referendum.
I wonder what the goal is this time. Will the Swiss be forced to join the EU? Will they be forced to give up the franc entirely? Who knows? Personally, I have great difficulty trusting anyone who meddles in the affairs of another country's economy, let alone so brazenly and so directly. Besides, if the justification for the outcry is tax evasion, there are stacks of countries to talk about, not just Switzerland. Why not attack the Cayman Islands? I smell a rat.
Here you go.
... or denial, particularly denial of the laws of physics.
All these flat-Earth economists who think that we can solve the problem if we just throw enough money at it really annoy me. Put simply, there are physical problems that no amount of investment or innovation will ever solve. The purported hydrogen economy is a classic example: since hydrogen is not an energy source - and, due to the laws of thermodynamics, never will be - it's really a non-starter.
Eventually, we reach limits to all of these things. Think the Earth can support an infinite number of people? Well, we'd need infinite amounts of arable land and fresh water, and we don't have them; and, to spoil the surprise at the end, we'll never innovate our way to them, either. The final solution to this would be a massive decline in the number of human beings on Earth, and the people with the money and the power are happy enough to price themselves into that market at the expense of everyone else.
If you want a better idea of the limits to our ingenuity in the face of limits to our environment and resources, watch this short film, "Are Humans Smarter Than Yeast?".
I'm surprised at a couple of issues that don't seem to have been mentioned here.
Firstly, Skype isn't compatible with Leopard's firewall. This is a problem with the Skype software, but there's a workaround for now, until a new version comes out with that problem fixed.
Secondly, when I upgraded, it didn't upgrade XCode to 3.0. I still have 2.4.1, which crashes when I try to run it. Looks like I'll have to update that separately. (If anyone knows whether you can just install over the top or whether you have to remove the old one first, let me know - I haven't tried this yet.)
I like the interface, but I wish I were able to tweak more of it. Let me set the opacity of the menu bar. Let me set the contrast of the Dock, so I can see the application lights more clearly. Let me determine whether a Stack has an icon or not (using the contents of a Stack as the icon works for Downloads but not for Applications). Minor annoyances, really, and some of them can be fixed easily enough already.
Pretty much everything else (that I've tried) has "just worked". It's only been a day for me, and one not entirely without frustration, but I'm reasonably happy with it so far.
Your post isn't wordy enough. If you make the font smaller, you can fit in more text.
Also, could you make the post fold into view on the side of a cube?
Thanks.
"If it's any consolation, my life is great. Babes, bucks, I got it all."
The supposed reasons for Saudi co-operation range from US military support for Saudi Arabia, to heavy US investment in the Saudi oil industry, to the need for the US to import oil after its domestic production peak in 1970. It's probably a combination of these factors that got the Saudis on board. Remember, too, that the USA had far more business influence on the oil industry in 1970 than it does today (being the largest producer at that time).
Have you ever considered that "the problem you see" was actually the point all along?
My former employer has a "values" system, to which everyone has to subscribe in their day-to-day working lives. As long as you uphold the values, everything's fine.
One day, I was tasked with evaluating a piece of software that had been developed by a third party under agreement. It turned out that this software contained pieces of another program that we had written and that we had exclusively licensed to another party about a year earlier. Potentially, depending on the wording of the two agreements, this could have put us in breach of contract.
IANAL, but I had read a bit of contract law at uni, and I started asking legal questions about what we actually had the right to do with the software I was evaluating. Three levels of line management (who are also not lawyers) stood by and did nothing, in the hope that this was all above board and nothing to be concerned about. Nobody even asked what evidence I had about which I had been so concerned, and I never did hear a real legal opinion on the matter. It was at that point that I stopped working on the software.
With regard to the value system, it obviously presented me with a dilemma. Doing the right thing would have been to expose the negligence (not necessarily in the legal sense of the word) of people I had to work with. In other words, I had to choose one of the values at the expense of another: either expose the problem in the hope of solving it, or keep my mouth shut and hope nobody finds out.
Having already been blamed for enough of other people's problems, and therefore not wanting to draw any undue attention to myself, I kept my mouth shut. I've regretted it ever since. It was the right thing to do for one reason, but it was the wrong thing to do for another reason, and the latter reason was more important to me. On the other hand, the former reason is also exactly why everyone has gotten away with it: if it fits into one part of the value system, it's good enough for everyone, even if there is a contradictory, yet far more compelling, argument that also complies with the value system.
The point of the story, I suppose, is that it's often more important to be seen to be doing the right thing than actually to do it. People mistake this for incompetence, but in many cases, it's deliberate and insulting. I never believed in the values, because of obvious contradictions such as the one I experienced first-hand, and the subsequent tendency to abuse the values by justifying behaviour that would otherwise be unacceptable or even illegal. You may eventually get an answer to your question, but rather than satisfying you, it's only given to satisfy someone else's need to save face. They know they need to give some sort of an answer, but they don't think enough of you to make that answer credible. Feel the contempt.
(Oh, and in case anyone asks, I'm not naming them here. There are very few people who know me personally and don't know this story already. Suffice to say that my not working there any more is a matter of immense pride.)
What it doesn't do is answer the basic question of why we need another set of document formats. We've heard this story before and we've always hated it. However, I'd love to hear from Apple about why TextEdit in Leopard supports ODF and iWork does not.
It's useful to know that Apple has kept the iWork file formats well-documented so far. Given that, there's a chance that NeoOffice will eventually read and write iWork files, and there's a chance that iWork will read and write ODF. We can always hope for both, of course.
If you're happy enough to waste your time converting documents backwards and forwards, feel free to do it again. I'd rather not encourage this sort of behaviour, personally. Eventually, someone else will work around the problem for you, so that when you have to put up with this sort of nonsense, you probably won't even notice. Hey, it's happened before.
I would love it if someone said that to me.
If someone did say that to me - a man, in this example - then I could ask him what his wife's favourite sexual position is, or which co-worker he would turn gay for, or which one person he would kill if he could get away with it.
I don't really care what his answers would be, but that's not why I'd want to ask. I would want that person to decide for himself whether he would tell me or not. If he doesn't feel comfortable telling me, or feels offended that I'd ask, he won't answer, even if he can. That's exactly the point.
If you've got nothing to hide, you really do have nothing to fear. This is true, for as far as it goes, and I'm sure the people who say it believe it. The catch is simple: everyone has something to hide, and not everyone realises it.
Yeah, but with those two, at least you actually get what you pay for.
Wow, that's nothing like Australia, Britain or the US at all. Corporations and governments treat us not as ignorant, illiterate simpletons but as ignorant, illiterate simpletons with short memories. It's hard to believe we have it so good.
Indeed...
Does she know you're referring to her on the web as your "finance"?
I'm sure you meant "fiancée" and that it wasn't deliberate. Probably.
I are serious Islamic fundamentalist. This is serious thread.
We r plotting to take back mah bukket.
It's not a bug, it's a feature...
Even this is becoming less of a stereotype and more of a cliché. The one-on-one fighting game has suffered from this almost from day one: each game needs a female character, and oh, I know, let's make her physically weak but fast and nimble.
What I think a lot of game designers and game artists don't understand is that a woman doesn't have to be physically sexual to be a sex symbol. The first example that comes to my mind is Jo Dark, who was basically a James Bond (not surprisingly, considering Perfect Dark's roots) minus the need to chat up anything that moved. Jo was rarely visible on-screen, and wasn't disproportionately curvaceous or underdressed when she was, and yet, I consider her a sex symbol. She was crafty, intelligent and uncompromising, and she had a dry British wit. What's not to like?
Personally, I think it's more than just the domination of the game audience by young single males. It takes a certain amount of laziness on the part of the developers as well: it is a character, but it seldom has character. The only thing worse than that is the excuse that every developer makes for their female avatar: that girl gamers find it empowering that they can relate to her. Most of them have no idea whatsoever what women want from video games and never bothered to ask. This is the sort of denial that turns girls away from gaming, and gives us more Dead Or Alives and fewer Dead Or Alive Extreme Beach Volleyballs.