Most of the other examples of Sony's PS4 censorship are equally absurd. It should be noted that Sony moved their headquarters to California, which is why we're getting these utterly deranged decisions.
Of course, there's a simple solution - don't buy anything from Sony.
I don't see why Shane Gaskill should be held responsible for somebody else's reckless actions. If I were to post a random address here along with "Try something" should I by changed if somebody goes to that address and kills the resident? I personally don't think so.
Classifying him as a co-conspirator also seems odd. If I'm in a hostage situation and the hostage taker asks for my address, and I give him a fake address, should I be classified as a co-conspirator if the hostage taker than goes and kills somebody at that address? Again, I don't think so.
I find it worrying that you can be charged for a serious crime just for giving out a fake address. Anyone could potentially end up in that situation, particularly young people. Surely there has to be an element of intent involved? With no intent on Gaskill's part, I don't think he should be in anyway responsible. Charging the intended victim seems very wrong, even if he did give out a fake address.
In two years they went from "easiest trade deal, we hold all the cards, germany has to sell us cars, have our cake and eat it" to "we always knew our economy would crash and we would lose jobs, we never promised a deal, we will survive just like the blitz".
Fucking idiots and grifters all of them.
It could easily have been easiest trade deal in history, since the deal we wanted was on offer. EU Council President Donald Tusk made clear in a Tweet that a Canada style deal had been on offer from the start, which is exactly what we voted for:
So, the deal we wanted was on offe, and we were already in regulatory alignment with the EU, so this should have been a simple proccess. The problem isn't the Brexiteers, but the bitter remainers, who flat out refuse to accept the results of the referendum. The key problem is most MPs are remainers, and they're doing everything in their power to prevent Brexit. The biggest saboteur has been Teresa May herself, who is a staunch remainer and who has been the biggest obstacle to us leaving the EU.
The Department for Exiting the European Union was created to negotiate a trade deal with the EU, and was headed by a leave voter David Davis. However, in parallel with those negotiations, Teresa May was engaged in a separate negotiations headed up by the unelected civil servant, and fanatical remainer, Olly Robbins (a man who has expressed his admiration for the Soviet Union, which is probably why he likes the EU so much). May and Robbins 'negotiated' their own deal with the EU, though 'negotiated' is the wrong word since all they did was to give the EU everything they asked for, keeping us permanently shacked to the declining block.
Teresa May then called the cabinet together at the Prime Ministers country residence and revealed her deal, which was substantially worse than remaining in the EU. David Davis resigned as Brexit Secretary the next day (he couldn't resign immediately because May had confiscated the phones of the cabinet members and had said anyone who disagreed would have there ministerial cars taken, leaving them stranded). Since then May has taken control of the process and has been trying to force her Ultra Remain deal through parliament. However, the terms of the deal are so bad that both leavers and remainers are united in rejecting it, leading to the biggest defeat in parliamentary history. Despite this, May is still trying to sell the country out to the EU, and still trying to force her terrible deal through parliament, bringing it back for a second vote, and then trying to bring it back for a third vote on the same deal.
Of course, it's not just May who has allowed this to happen, but most other MPs. Notably, there's Speaker of the House John Bercow, who has a "Bollocks to Brexit" sticker on his car. As speaker, he is responsible for selecting the amendments to be voted on, and he consistently selected pro-remain amendments. Then there's Chancellor of the Exchequer Philip Hammond, who has refused to unlock funds for preparations for a WTO Brexit, meaning few preparations were made.
Ultimately, it comes down to the fact that we knew what we voted for, the deal was on offer, and the remainer parliment has steadfastly refused to honour the results of the 2016 referendum and has done everything possible to prevent us from leaving. It could have been the easiest trade deal in history, but instead it's a fiasco.
So who's the problem here, the Brexiteers, who simply expect the result of the referendum to be implemented, or the remainers who are attempting to subvert democracy simply because they didn't like the result?
Why is it modern software companies are obsessed with 'improving' features that already work perfectly well? It's not just Microsoft, but Mozilla, Google and most others. They're 'improving' the life out of their software. Their 'improvements' are generally significantly inferior to the original implementation, and commercial software has been moving backwards for the last 15 years. It used to be that you could just install Windows 2000 and use it, but with Windows 10 you have to apply about 100 registry hacks, and even then it's garbage. Firefox is trash compared to version 3.0 and the UI simply doesn't work. As for Google, they couldn't produce a decent UI to save their lives.
The problem seems to be the rise of the UX designer, and while interfaces were previously created by developers, they're now made by people who believe themselves to be highly creative and innovative, and believe they can do a better job then the developers that preceded them. However, their confidence is greatly misplaced, and these UX designers have destroyed modern commercial software, rendering it completely worthless.
All of the software I use now is FOSS, not so much because I planned it that way, but because each time a company destroyed the UI of their product, I've moved to a free alternative with a functioning UI. Now I'm on all FOSS because UX designers have so thoroughly destroyed commercial software. When I see articles like this it makes me glad I bailed out.
This seems to be a problem in all news media. It used to be that you could visit a games sites and read the latest gaming news and reviews, but now most of the articles are political and the sites aren't worth reading. It used to be you could go to a gadget blog and read about the latest hardware releases, but many gadget blogs are now just political propaganda sites. Even automotive news sites can't stay on topic and end up talking about politics rather than cars.
Something has gone honorifically wrong with modern journalism, and journalists now see it as their job to push their own political agenda rather than cover the news. Things didn't used to be this way, and I can only assume the problem stems from modern journalism degrees. They're produced a generation of journalists who are astoundingly bad at their jobs.
I've had to stop reading a lot of news sites because they've become nothing more than an endless stream of political propaganda, and Slashdot is in danger of heading the same way. They need to either stay on topic or move all this trash to a politics.slashdot.org subdomain and keep it off the main site.
The green lobby is so fanatically anti-nuclear they'd prefer we continue burning coal than switch to nuclear. We could have stopped burning coal decades ago if it weren't for them standing in the way of progress.
Now they want us to switch to expensive, inconsistent, polluting renewable. I say polluting because renewable cause significant pollution during mining of the vast resources required to construct of large wind/solar farms, cause further pollution during manufacture and then yet more during disposal after their short lifespan is up.
Despite the obvious benefits of nuclear, the green lobby continue with their irrationality. A quick google search reveals an anti-nuclear article by Earthjustice, who carried out this study:
The green lobby's anti-nuclear stance has done massive damage to the environment, and for that reason alone we should ignore them. We need an adult debate based on rational decision making, not fanatical, tree-hugging hippies.
United States PIRG - 1983-2000
United States Census Bureau - 1982-2000
Demographers William Straus and Neil Howe - 1982-2004
Ernst and Young - 1981-1996
Pew Research Center - 1981-1996
SYZYGY - 1981-1998
Asia Business Unit of Corporate Directions - 1981-2000
Goldman Sachs - 1980-2000
Resolution Foundation - 1980-2000
Australia's McCrindle Research - 1980-1994
PricewaterhouseCoopers - 1980-1995
MSW Research - 1980-1996
United States Chamber of Commerce - 1980-1999
Merriam-Webster Online Dictionary - 1980-1999
MetLife - 1977-1994
Nielsen Media Research - 1977-1994
I think we can all agree that those using 1980 are wrong! Certainty, somebody born in January 1980 is most definitely not a millennial!!!
That reminds me of this video where Mahk finds out he's a millennial:
Youtube is far too responsive to media manufactured outrage. Whenever a journalist posts an an article about some edge-case scenario, Youtube always respond with massive censorship, be that in the form of demonetisation, account deletion, or going full-retard and disabling the comments.
By the time all the grievance mongers have finished with Youtube, the only remaining content will the highly sanitised videos promoting only the opinions of social justice extremists, and all reasons to visit Youtube will be gone. It'll be a lot like Twitter is now.
It's great to see Google on the receiving end of the outrage mobs they themselves encourage. It'll be interesting to see if they can run a profitable business while catering to the perpetually outraged and offended social justice extremest. My guess is they'll fail, and will have to operate at a loss or shut the service down entirely.
However, it's not a remotely valid comparison. They're comparing planes and buildings operating under normal circumstances with software being attacked by a malicious actor. Software is actually far more robust than aeroplanes and buildings when faced with a malicious attack.
An unskilled person can easily destroy an aeroplane or demolish a building. We saw this on 9/11, when a few people equipped with nothing more than pen knives were able to destroy multiple planes, bring down two buildings, kill thousands of people and do billions of dollars worth of damage. When faced with an attack by a malicious actor both the aviation engineers and the civil engineers failed utterly.
Meanwhile, an electronic voting system would stand up far better to a malicious attack. While an unskilled person can easily bring down a plane, the same unskilled person would have no clue how to circumvent an electronic voting system. With an online voting system like this Swiss one, the best an unskilled person could do is click around a bit on the website, and achieve precisely nothing. Even a skilled person would have trouble circumventing an electronic voting system, and it would likely require considerable research, extensive planning and effective execution.
So, contrary to what the xkcd comic says, aviation engineers and civil engineers are crap at their jobs, and an unskilled attacker with a pen knife can destroy their "safe" products. Meanwhile, software engineers are far better at their job, and an unskilled attacker would be powerless to circumvent their work, while even a skilled attacker will struggle.
Right, I'm glad I could get that off my chest, because that xkcd comic annoys me every time I see it.
This is just idiotic. Paper money isn't going away any time soon and neither is fiat currency. Maybe in the far future but even then I doubt it. There is simply too much utility in paper money for a lot of transactions.
I haven't carried paper money in years and do perfectly well. In the past it wasn't viable because there used to be a £5 minimum spend on card transactions, but now there's no minimum so you can pay for everything on your card. Contactless payment has made this even more convenient, and you simply flash your card to make the payment, which is far easier than fiddling around with coins and notes.
Asking everyone to either carry an expensive computer with them or carry some means to interact securely with one in order to facilitate even the most basic transaction is unrealistic.
You don't need an expensive computer, all you need is a debit/credit card. I fail to see how carrying around a thin piece of plastic is less convenient than having a pocket full of metal and paper.
Not everyone can get a credit card or afford a smartphone and even if they could it still wouldn't be practical some of the time.
Why do you assume you need a credit card? I myself don't have a credit card, and instead use a debit card for all transactions, so the money simply comes straight out my bank account. I'm genuinely confused as to why you're bringing smartphones or credit facilities into this conversation, when debit cards have existed for decades and contactless debit cards have existed for about ten years.
From your negativity, I can only assume you've been holding out on switching to going cashless, but if you try it you'll never both with cash again.
It believes the programs involved can lead to biased policing strategies that unfairly focus on ethnic minorities and lower-income communities.
Policing should be focused on high-crime sections of the community, since that's where it's needed most. It would be absurd to send the police to wealthy low-crime suburbs and have them walking around doing nothing. If the police were to ignore the crime taking place in low-income communities, the ones who suffer most of the people who live in those communities. I know that because I live in one. Where my parents live there are 25 reported crimes within a 1 mile radius in a month, while where I live there are 650 reported crimes within a one mile radius. I want the police here, tackling crime, not scared of coming here because it wouldn't be politically correct to investigate crime in a low-income area because some arseholes in an ivory tower are worried about "human rights."
People like this libertyhumanrights.org.uk are a major part of the problem, and are the reason crime is spiralling out of control. We've got police scared to investigate Muslim rape gangs because they fear being called racists, so young girls are left to be abused. We've got police scared to stop and search black people out of fear of being called racists, so children in back communities are being stabbed on their way to and from school. We've got police scared of tackling crime in low-income areas because that's apparently against the human rights of criminals, so crime is left to go out of control. Meanwhile, what police are investigating is "non-crime hate incidents" where somebody posted a nasty comment on Twitter, because the out-of-touch leaders of the country think that's the priority.
Political correctness is absolutely destroying UK society and things are becoming visibly worse on the streets. The police have become largely irrelevant in many communities, and I don't even waste my time reporting crime to them since I know from past attempts to report serious crime that they will do absolutely nothing. The other day I saw some boys with an air rifle leaned against the wall of a school, shooting it into the school. I ignored it any carried on with my day because I'm well aware that the police are more interested in political correctness and "non-crime hate incidents" than tackling crime. The crime figures here are a fraction of the actual crime rate, but most crime simply goes unreported because the police have become so ineffective it's simply not worth bothering. Sure, if there was a "non-crime hate incident" that's worth reporting as they'll have a van full of officers there in minutes, but if an actual crime is taking place then you're wasting your time.
Policing in the UK urgently needs reforming, but sadly people of influence, like this ibertyhumanrights.org.uk, are more interested in rearranging the deck chairs while the ship sinks.
I'm struggling to think of a single occasion where a petition has achieved what it set out to. In almost all cases they are simply ignored since there's absolutely no reason for anyone to pay attention to them.
There are far better means of making people listen. If you want to petition a company, you stop buying their product. If you want to petition a politician, you stop voting for them until they start paying attention. If you want to petition a politician and you're a large company or well funded non-profit organisation, you bribe them, but you call it a campaign donation to legitimise your corruption.
The only purpose of a petition is to allow people to feel good about themselves while achieving precisely nothing.
China's ministry of foreign affairs has officially clarified that no law in China requires any company to install mandatory back doors.
If they had such a law they wouldn't tell foreign governments about it as that would rather defeat the object.
Even if such a law exists, I'm far more concerned about the UK government spying on me than the Chinese. The Chinese are in no position to harm me while my own government might arrest me on some random charge of hate speech, which these days is basically anything, and after the UK signed the UN Migration packed, objecting to mass migration can now even be criminalised. Or maybe they might lock me up for extreme pornography, where you can be imprisoned for three years for possessing porn containing simulations (drawn, computer generated, acted) of rape, sexual acts with animals (furry), sexual acts with minors, sexual acts that could cause injury (bondage) and a variety of other stuff. The Chinese government aren't going to arrest me for these things, so if I'm being spied on I'll take the Chinese over the Five Eyes.
If I were living in China I'd probably choose a foreign phone over a Chinese one, for the exact same reasons, but if I'm not in China I'm more than happy to use my Xiaomi. That said, if I were running a company with an innovative product I may think twice about what I communicate with my Chinese phone, since industrial espionage does seem to be a real issue.
Not having played the game, a historical representation of "Operation Gunnerside" would have been a poor match for Battlefield. No shots fired, no Germans killed. Just patience, a bit of stealth and coming in and leaving over the mountains in wintertime.
What they should have done is to chose a different incident around which to base the campaign. Instead they chose to rewrite history and make it so a mother and daughter team completed the mission. Rewriting history in this way is not only extremely disrespectful to the Norwegian commands who risked their lives, but also highly sinister. It tends to be the most evil people who rewrite history to push an agenda, and they do it because they believe their cause is right and just. Such people tend to be very dangerous because they believe anything is acceptable if done for the right reasons. This isn't something to be taken lightly and must be called out before they start taking more radical steps. Historical revisionism is already pretty radical and it's important to call it out whenever anyone tries to use it as a tool to push their agenda.
Women being part of it is the least of the problems in a BF V representation... so why so much hate on that point?
There are a great many things wrong here:
1) When you're selling a product you determine who your customer is and tailor the product to meet the needs of that customer. What EA/DICE did was to tailor their product to meed the needs of people who aren't their customers and who aren't going to buy the game. It's like the author of a female romance novel inserting some action scenes to try to appeal more to men. Men still aren't going to buy their romance novel, and all it will achieve is to ruin the book for the women who will buy it.
2) When I play a game I want to have fun, not feel like I'm watching some heavy-handed propaganda. Yet in Battlefield V the propaganda was clearly the focus and the game took a back seat. The heavy-handed propaganda distracts massively from the game and prevents players from enjoying it.
3) Patrick Soderlund called gamers "uneducated" for objecting to their of rewriting of history. Insulting your customers tends to go down poorly, particularly when the customers were actually right.
4) At the launch event they continued to ridicule their customers, showing quotes complaining about how they were rewriting history. It's a provable fact that they rewrote the history of Operation Gunnerside, yet EA/DICE keep pointing the finger customers and telling them they're stupid. This isn't the way to sell a product and is obviously going to generate hostility.
So instead they should cater to the misogynist, historically challenged incel gamers out there?
I think you need to get a clue. Let me explain what actually happened.
EA claimed they were "telling the untold stories of WW2," but what they instead did was to rewrite history to push feminist propaganda. The game tells the story of Operation Gunnerside in which a team of Norwegian commandos destroy a Nazi heavy water production facility. However, in the game EA/DICE have written the Norwegian commandos out of history. Instead, the team who destroy the Nazi facility is a strong, empowered, educated mother and daughter team, who are not only scientists but unstoppable soldiers who can physically overpower any man. Clearly, this isn't "telling the untold stories of WW2," but rewriting history to push an agenda. There's a video here which shows the game scenario and then explains what actually happened during WW2. It's quite long, but you only need to watch the first five minutes and you'll get the point.
The whole game was a work of propaganda, designed not to appeal to gamers, but to force feminist propaganda on players. Then, despite completely rewriting history, they told gamers they were "uneducated" and said, "if you don't like it, don't buy it," which is why so few people bought the game.
But hey, don't let reality get in your way. Just keep claiming it's all the fault of "historically challenged incel gamers." Moron.
Judging from the criticisms, Summit Learning sounds far better than regular education.
"You have to teach yourself," Storman rightly complained
Being able to learn yourself is the most important skill you can have. Unfortunately, many people never acquire that skill so have to be constantly spoon fed information, are left unable to do anything if it's not explained to them, and can't work through problems themselves. If children become more capable of learning on their own, it will greatly empower them and give them far more opportunities in the future. Teaching them that they don't need a teacher to learn, and can learn on their own initiative, is a very good start.
"It's annoying to just sit there staring at one screen for so long," freshman Mitchel Storman
There's a serious problem with this instant gratification generation. You can't expect everything in life to be a computer game with flashing lights to entertain you, and where you constantly level up, even if you're bad at the game. Learning is rarely fun, but you learn in order to acquire skills that can help you in the future. If he can't sit in front of a monitor for five hours per day, then he's going to have real problems in the workplace where he'll be putting in double that time.
students in New York City schools walked out in protest
Once again, we see the problem isn't the course, but the students. We've seen the issues with millennials in the workplace, with them constantly whining, protesting, being offended and then quitting because they're bored. What seems to have been lacking in the last few decades is discipline. In the past nobody would walk out of a lesson in protest, and if they did they'd receive a damn good caning. Now, this sort of behaviour is tolerated, and even encouraged. Lunatics in government tell us we need to listen to the views of 'young people' and so policy ends up being set based on the views of 14-year-olds who lack the experience to know what's best for them. These students are being presented with a great opportunity to learn, and yet all they're doing is walking out in protest becuase they think they're above all of this learning nonsense. They need to be told to sit down, shut up, and start working.
The app comes bundled with Windows 10, so it doesn't require the Store to download or an MS account. However, if you don't have a subscription to Office 365 or a copy of Office, then the app merely acts as an advertisement for Office and does nothing at all of value. It's just another piece of adware to go with the many other trial apps and promotions that are installed by default in Windows 10.
This has nothing to do with religious puritans, and is very much the work of the social justice crowd. If you look at Tumblr's post you'll see it says, "It is our continued, humble aspiration that Tumblr be a safe place for creative expression, self-discovery, and a deep sense of community." Religious puritans tend not to go around talking about creating safe spaces/places.
There's a general view in social justice circles that porn objectifies women and is demeaning and offensive, and that's the real reason it was banned. Tumblr want to be more inclusive, saying they want to, "create a place where more people feel comfortable expressing themselves." Again, it's very much the language of social justice. The perpetually offended can't be comfortable using a fascist, Nazi site that objectifies women and isn't a safe space so any content they don't like must be purged from existence.
Of course, you know what they say, "Get woke, go broke." It'll be interesting to see were Tumblr goes from here.
The question is, "I consider my current workplace a healthy working environment," so a high percentage of true responses means the workplace is healthy. Yet the summary says:
Employees who consider their workplaces healthier work at LinkedIn, where 17.3 percent responded true, followed by Google, at 23.7 percent, and Uber, at 29.7 percent
If a low percentage of people are responding true, then, contrary to what the summary says, that means they find their workplace unhealthy.
I get "Access Denied" when I try to look at the article so it's not clear if the summary has simply been worded wrongly or if Google is the toxic shithole we all thought it was.
This also sounds like a great way to considerably reduce heating bills. I always thought it was absurd to heat a whole house just to warm the people inside it as you're likely heating an area that's hundreds of times the volume of the people in the house. It would be far better to simply heat the people, but that has traditionally been challenging and impractical as you would have to wear clothes containing heating elements and carry a power source.
If this converts energy to body heat then you could stay warm by eating, which would likely be far cheaper and more efficient than heating a whole house. That would have benefits in reducing energy consumption, which would conserve fuel resources and reduce carbon output. Plus, who wouldn't want to warm up eating lots of chocolate.
Obviously, the practicality of using this as a heating alternative depends on how much it warms you up, and that's something the boingboing.net article doesn't seem to say as it focuses on tackling obesity. The recommended daily calorie intake is 2000kcal, which converts to 8368kj of energy. 1 joule is enough to heat 1g of water by 0.24C, so 8368kj could heat 1kg of water to 2008.32C, which...er...is interesting but doesn't really tell us a lot about how much this gene therapy will warm you up through the day. This is were I quietly back away from the keyboard and wait for somebody who knows what they're talking about:)
We seem to be in an endless cycle of dumbing down:
1) The low standard in IT education means people come out of school lacking basic computer skills.
2) To meet the needs of untrained users, computer companies dumb down their product, reducing the power and sophistication.
3) Schools adopt the dumb down products and thus IT education standards decline further. Go to 2).
I considered becoming an IT teacher in the UK, which requires you to spend a few weeks before you can do the teacher training course. What I found was that every IT class revolved around drawing pretty pictures. They were designing vector logos, producing posters, making flash animations, creating a "website" in PowerPoint with lots of pretty animations, and so forth. What they weren't doing is being taught how to use a computer. The most basic computer skill is understanding the file system, which I feel is fundamental to computer literacy, and can be taught very easily since it's rather simple. Sadly, they're not being taught about computing at all.
Part of the problem, and something that is covered on The Register a lot, is that they can't attract Computer Science graduates to teaching, so most IT teachers have no background or interest in computers. This is because nobody with an interest in computing would want to teach people how to draw pretty pictures all day. As a result, out of fourteen teachers I met, I'd only say one of them had any real computer skills, and most were greatly lacking in computer skills and knowledge. Since they're not interested in computers themselves, they're more than happy to teach students about drawing pretty pictures rather than teaching them computer skills.
A common them is that schools offer the BTEC IT rather than the A Level Computer Science (for people outside the UK, BTEC and A Level are done at age 16-18, and BTEC is supposed to be vocational, but it's basically just dumbed down). The A Level Computer Science is a great course that teaches actual computing principles, while the BTEC is just yet more drawing pictures, producing animations and designing logos. I asked the head of IT why the school opted for the BTEC over the A Level and he said, "Oh, the A Level is just so boring!" So we have an IT teacher who finds computers boring. With people like that teaching IT, it's little wonder Chromebooks are being adopted. Their idea of computing likely revolves around downloading some apps from the Google Play Store.
Needless to say, I decided not to become an IT teacher, so they no doubt employed somebody with a degree in English instead. Since they're employing people without computer skills, knowledge or enthusiasm, students are simply taught to be consumers rather than computer users. They're taught to buy Google Play apps, subscribe to Google services, hand their data over to Google. To consume and never question their corporate overloads! This is the path to enlightenment!
Slashdot Mirror
Here's an example of the vile and shocking "sexually explicit content" that Sony had to censor:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nupFJPaAn9s
Most of the other examples of Sony's PS4 censorship are equally absurd. It should be noted that Sony moved their headquarters to California, which is why we're getting these utterly deranged decisions.
Of course, there's a simple solution - don't buy anything from Sony.
I don't see why Shane Gaskill should be held responsible for somebody else's reckless actions. If I were to post a random address here along with "Try something" should I by changed if somebody goes to that address and kills the resident? I personally don't think so.
Classifying him as a co-conspirator also seems odd. If I'm in a hostage situation and the hostage taker asks for my address, and I give him a fake address, should I be classified as a co-conspirator if the hostage taker than goes and kills somebody at that address? Again, I don't think so.
I find it worrying that you can be charged for a serious crime just for giving out a fake address. Anyone could potentially end up in that situation, particularly young people. Surely there has to be an element of intent involved? With no intent on Gaskill's part, I don't think he should be in anyway responsible. Charging the intended victim seems very wrong, even if he did give out a fake address.
In two years they went from "easiest trade deal, we hold all the cards, germany has to sell us cars, have our cake and eat it" to "we always knew our economy would crash and we would lose jobs, we never promised a deal, we will survive just like the blitz". Fucking idiots and grifters all of them.
It could easily have been easiest trade deal in history, since the deal we wanted was on offer. EU Council President Donald Tusk made clear in a Tweet that a Canada style deal had been on offer from the start, which is exactly what we voted for:
https://twitter.com/eucopresident/status/1047825916905357312
So, the deal we wanted was on offe, and we were already in regulatory alignment with the EU, so this should have been a simple proccess. The problem isn't the Brexiteers, but the bitter remainers, who flat out refuse to accept the results of the referendum. The key problem is most MPs are remainers, and they're doing everything in their power to prevent Brexit. The biggest saboteur has been Teresa May herself, who is a staunch remainer and who has been the biggest obstacle to us leaving the EU.
The Department for Exiting the European Union was created to negotiate a trade deal with the EU, and was headed by a leave voter David Davis. However, in parallel with those negotiations, Teresa May was engaged in a separate negotiations headed up by the unelected civil servant, and fanatical remainer, Olly Robbins (a man who has expressed his admiration for the Soviet Union, which is probably why he likes the EU so much). May and Robbins 'negotiated' their own deal with the EU, though 'negotiated' is the wrong word since all they did was to give the EU everything they asked for, keeping us permanently shacked to the declining block.
Teresa May then called the cabinet together at the Prime Ministers country residence and revealed her deal, which was substantially worse than remaining in the EU. David Davis resigned as Brexit Secretary the next day (he couldn't resign immediately because May had confiscated the phones of the cabinet members and had said anyone who disagreed would have there ministerial cars taken, leaving them stranded). Since then May has taken control of the process and has been trying to force her Ultra Remain deal through parliament. However, the terms of the deal are so bad that both leavers and remainers are united in rejecting it, leading to the biggest defeat in parliamentary history. Despite this, May is still trying to sell the country out to the EU, and still trying to force her terrible deal through parliament, bringing it back for a second vote, and then trying to bring it back for a third vote on the same deal.
Of course, it's not just May who has allowed this to happen, but most other MPs. Notably, there's Speaker of the House John Bercow, who has a "Bollocks to Brexit" sticker on his car. As speaker, he is responsible for selecting the amendments to be voted on, and he consistently selected pro-remain amendments. Then there's Chancellor of the Exchequer Philip Hammond, who has refused to unlock funds for preparations for a WTO Brexit, meaning few preparations were made.
Ultimately, it comes down to the fact that we knew what we voted for, the deal was on offer, and the remainer parliment has steadfastly refused to honour the results of the 2016 referendum and has done everything possible to prevent us from leaving. It could have been the easiest trade deal in history, but instead it's a fiasco.
So who's the problem here, the Brexiteers, who simply expect the result of the referendum to be implemented, or the remainers who are attempting to subvert democracy simply because they didn't like the result?
So he was fine with the web while it was serving establishment goals, but now things aren't going his way he thinks everything should be changed?
citing concerns about whether social networks were supporting democracy
He clearly has a strange idea of what democracy is. He obviously thinks democracy is only working when he gets the results he wants.
Why is it modern software companies are obsessed with 'improving' features that already work perfectly well? It's not just Microsoft, but Mozilla, Google and most others. They're 'improving' the life out of their software. Their 'improvements' are generally significantly inferior to the original implementation, and commercial software has been moving backwards for the last 15 years. It used to be that you could just install Windows 2000 and use it, but with Windows 10 you have to apply about 100 registry hacks, and even then it's garbage. Firefox is trash compared to version 3.0 and the UI simply doesn't work. As for Google, they couldn't produce a decent UI to save their lives.
The problem seems to be the rise of the UX designer, and while interfaces were previously created by developers, they're now made by people who believe themselves to be highly creative and innovative, and believe they can do a better job then the developers that preceded them. However, their confidence is greatly misplaced, and these UX designers have destroyed modern commercial software, rendering it completely worthless.
All of the software I use now is FOSS, not so much because I planned it that way, but because each time a company destroyed the UI of their product, I've moved to a free alternative with a functioning UI. Now I'm on all FOSS because UX designers have so thoroughly destroyed commercial software. When I see articles like this it makes me glad I bailed out.
This seems to be a problem in all news media. It used to be that you could visit a games sites and read the latest gaming news and reviews, but now most of the articles are political and the sites aren't worth reading. It used to be you could go to a gadget blog and read about the latest hardware releases, but many gadget blogs are now just political propaganda sites. Even automotive news sites can't stay on topic and end up talking about politics rather than cars.
Something has gone honorifically wrong with modern journalism, and journalists now see it as their job to push their own political agenda rather than cover the news. Things didn't used to be this way, and I can only assume the problem stems from modern journalism degrees. They're produced a generation of journalists who are astoundingly bad at their jobs.
I've had to stop reading a lot of news sites because they've become nothing more than an endless stream of political propaganda, and Slashdot is in danger of heading the same way. They need to either stay on topic or move all this trash to a politics.slashdot.org subdomain and keep it off the main site.
The green lobby is so fanatically anti-nuclear they'd prefer we continue burning coal than switch to nuclear. We could have stopped burning coal decades ago if it weren't for them standing in the way of progress.
Now they want us to switch to expensive, inconsistent, polluting renewable. I say polluting because renewable cause significant pollution during mining of the vast resources required to construct of large wind/solar farms, cause further pollution during manufacture and then yet more during disposal after their short lifespan is up.
Despite the obvious benefits of nuclear, the green lobby continue with their irrationality. A quick google search reveals an anti-nuclear article by Earthjustice, who carried out this study:
https://earthjustice.org/blog/2009-september/renewable-nuclear
The green lobby's anti-nuclear stance has done massive damage to the environment, and for that reason alone we should ignore them. We need an adult debate based on rational decision making, not fanatical, tree-hugging hippies.
Wikipedia gives these years for millennials:
United States PIRG - 1983-2000
United States Census Bureau - 1982-2000
Demographers William Straus and Neil Howe - 1982-2004
Ernst and Young - 1981-1996
Pew Research Center - 1981-1996
SYZYGY - 1981-1998
Asia Business Unit of Corporate Directions - 1981-2000
Goldman Sachs - 1980-2000
Resolution Foundation - 1980-2000
Australia's McCrindle Research - 1980-1994
PricewaterhouseCoopers - 1980-1995
MSW Research - 1980-1996
United States Chamber of Commerce - 1980-1999
Merriam-Webster Online Dictionary - 1980-1999
MetLife - 1977-1994
Nielsen Media Research - 1977-1994
I think we can all agree that those using 1980 are wrong! Certainty, somebody born in January 1980 is most definitely not a millennial!!!
That reminds me of this video where Mahk finds out he's a millennial:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=15iLHlJPp_0
Youtube is far too responsive to media manufactured outrage. Whenever a journalist posts an an article about some edge-case scenario, Youtube always respond with massive censorship, be that in the form of demonetisation, account deletion, or going full-retard and disabling the comments.
By the time all the grievance mongers have finished with Youtube, the only remaining content will the highly sanitised videos promoting only the opinions of social justice extremists, and all reasons to visit Youtube will be gone. It'll be a lot like Twitter is now.
It's great to see Google on the receiving end of the outrage mobs they themselves encourage. It'll be interesting to see if they can run a profitable business while catering to the perpetually outraged and offended social justice extremest. My guess is they'll fail, and will have to operate at a loss or shut the service down entirely.
Somebody will inevitably post this xkcd:
https://xkcd.com/2030/
However, it's not a remotely valid comparison. They're comparing planes and buildings operating under normal circumstances with software being attacked by a malicious actor. Software is actually far more robust than aeroplanes and buildings when faced with a malicious attack.
An unskilled person can easily destroy an aeroplane or demolish a building. We saw this on 9/11, when a few people equipped with nothing more than pen knives were able to destroy multiple planes, bring down two buildings, kill thousands of people and do billions of dollars worth of damage. When faced with an attack by a malicious actor both the aviation engineers and the civil engineers failed utterly.
Meanwhile, an electronic voting system would stand up far better to a malicious attack. While an unskilled person can easily bring down a plane, the same unskilled person would have no clue how to circumvent an electronic voting system. With an online voting system like this Swiss one, the best an unskilled person could do is click around a bit on the website, and achieve precisely nothing. Even a skilled person would have trouble circumventing an electronic voting system, and it would likely require considerable research, extensive planning and effective execution.
So, contrary to what the xkcd comic says, aviation engineers and civil engineers are crap at their jobs, and an unskilled attacker with a pen knife can destroy their "safe" products. Meanwhile, software engineers are far better at their job, and an unskilled attacker would be powerless to circumvent their work, while even a skilled attacker will struggle.
Right, I'm glad I could get that off my chest, because that xkcd comic annoys me every time I see it.
This is just idiotic. Paper money isn't going away any time soon and neither is fiat currency. Maybe in the far future but even then I doubt it. There is simply too much utility in paper money for a lot of transactions.
I haven't carried paper money in years and do perfectly well. In the past it wasn't viable because there used to be a £5 minimum spend on card transactions, but now there's no minimum so you can pay for everything on your card. Contactless payment has made this even more convenient, and you simply flash your card to make the payment, which is far easier than fiddling around with coins and notes.
Asking everyone to either carry an expensive computer with them or carry some means to interact securely with one in order to facilitate even the most basic transaction is unrealistic.
You don't need an expensive computer, all you need is a debit/credit card. I fail to see how carrying around a thin piece of plastic is less convenient than having a pocket full of metal and paper.
Not everyone can get a credit card or afford a smartphone and even if they could it still wouldn't be practical some of the time.
Why do you assume you need a credit card? I myself don't have a credit card, and instead use a debit card for all transactions, so the money simply comes straight out my bank account. I'm genuinely confused as to why you're bringing smartphones or credit facilities into this conversation, when debit cards have existed for decades and contactless debit cards have existed for about ten years.
From your negativity, I can only assume you've been holding out on switching to going cashless, but if you try it you'll never both with cash again.
It believes the programs involved can lead to biased policing strategies that unfairly focus on ethnic minorities and lower-income communities.
Policing should be focused on high-crime sections of the community, since that's where it's needed most. It would be absurd to send the police to wealthy low-crime suburbs and have them walking around doing nothing. If the police were to ignore the crime taking place in low-income communities, the ones who suffer most of the people who live in those communities. I know that because I live in one. Where my parents live there are 25 reported crimes within a 1 mile radius in a month, while where I live there are 650 reported crimes within a one mile radius. I want the police here, tackling crime, not scared of coming here because it wouldn't be politically correct to investigate crime in a low-income area because some arseholes in an ivory tower are worried about "human rights."
People like this libertyhumanrights.org.uk are a major part of the problem, and are the reason crime is spiralling out of control. We've got police scared to investigate Muslim rape gangs because they fear being called racists, so young girls are left to be abused. We've got police scared to stop and search black people out of fear of being called racists, so children in back communities are being stabbed on their way to and from school. We've got police scared of tackling crime in low-income areas because that's apparently against the human rights of criminals, so crime is left to go out of control. Meanwhile, what police are investigating is "non-crime hate incidents" where somebody posted a nasty comment on Twitter, because the out-of-touch leaders of the country think that's the priority.
Political correctness is absolutely destroying UK society and things are becoming visibly worse on the streets. The police have become largely irrelevant in many communities, and I don't even waste my time reporting crime to them since I know from past attempts to report serious crime that they will do absolutely nothing. The other day I saw some boys with an air rifle leaned against the wall of a school, shooting it into the school. I ignored it any carried on with my day because I'm well aware that the police are more interested in political correctness and "non-crime hate incidents" than tackling crime. The crime figures here are a fraction of the actual crime rate, but most crime simply goes unreported because the police have become so ineffective it's simply not worth bothering. Sure, if there was a "non-crime hate incident" that's worth reporting as they'll have a van full of officers there in minutes, but if an actual crime is taking place then you're wasting your time.
Policing in the UK urgently needs reforming, but sadly people of influence, like this ibertyhumanrights.org.uk, are more interested in rearranging the deck chairs while the ship sinks.
I'm struggling to think of a single occasion where a petition has achieved what it set out to. In almost all cases they are simply ignored since there's absolutely no reason for anyone to pay attention to them.
There are far better means of making people listen. If you want to petition a company, you stop buying their product. If you want to petition a politician, you stop voting for them until they start paying attention. If you want to petition a politician and you're a large company or well funded non-profit organisation, you bribe them, but you call it a campaign donation to legitimise your corruption.
The only purpose of a petition is to allow people to feel good about themselves while achieving precisely nothing.
China's ministry of foreign affairs has officially clarified that no law in China requires any company to install mandatory back doors.
If they had such a law they wouldn't tell foreign governments about it as that would rather defeat the object.
Even if such a law exists, I'm far more concerned about the UK government spying on me than the Chinese. The Chinese are in no position to harm me while my own government might arrest me on some random charge of hate speech, which these days is basically anything, and after the UK signed the UN Migration packed, objecting to mass migration can now even be criminalised. Or maybe they might lock me up for extreme pornography, where you can be imprisoned for three years for possessing porn containing simulations (drawn, computer generated, acted) of rape, sexual acts with animals (furry), sexual acts with minors, sexual acts that could cause injury (bondage) and a variety of other stuff. The Chinese government aren't going to arrest me for these things, so if I'm being spied on I'll take the Chinese over the Five Eyes.
If I were living in China I'd probably choose a foreign phone over a Chinese one, for the exact same reasons, but if I'm not in China I'm more than happy to use my Xiaomi. That said, if I were running a company with an innovative product I may think twice about what I communicate with my Chinese phone, since industrial espionage does seem to be a real issue.
Not having played the game, a historical representation of "Operation Gunnerside" would have been a poor match for Battlefield. No shots fired, no Germans killed. Just patience, a bit of stealth and coming in and leaving over the mountains in wintertime.
What they should have done is to chose a different incident around which to base the campaign. Instead they chose to rewrite history and make it so a mother and daughter team completed the mission. Rewriting history in this way is not only extremely disrespectful to the Norwegian commands who risked their lives, but also highly sinister. It tends to be the most evil people who rewrite history to push an agenda, and they do it because they believe their cause is right and just. Such people tend to be very dangerous because they believe anything is acceptable if done for the right reasons. This isn't something to be taken lightly and must be called out before they start taking more radical steps. Historical revisionism is already pretty radical and it's important to call it out whenever anyone tries to use it as a tool to push their agenda.
Women being part of it is the least of the problems in a BF V representation... so why so much hate on that point?
There are a great many things wrong here:
1) When you're selling a product you determine who your customer is and tailor the product to meet the needs of that customer. What EA/DICE did was to tailor their product to meed the needs of people who aren't their customers and who aren't going to buy the game. It's like the author of a female romance novel inserting some action scenes to try to appeal more to men. Men still aren't going to buy their romance novel, and all it will achieve is to ruin the book for the women who will buy it.
2) When I play a game I want to have fun, not feel like I'm watching some heavy-handed propaganda. Yet in Battlefield V the propaganda was clearly the focus and the game took a back seat. The heavy-handed propaganda distracts massively from the game and prevents players from enjoying it.
3) Patrick Soderlund called gamers "uneducated" for objecting to their of rewriting of history. Insulting your customers tends to go down poorly, particularly when the customers were actually right.
4) At the launch event they continued to ridicule their customers, showing quotes complaining about how they were rewriting history. It's a provable fact that they rewrote the history of Operation Gunnerside, yet EA/DICE keep pointing the finger customers and telling them they're stupid. This isn't the way to sell a product and is obviously going to generate hostility.
So instead they should cater to the misogynist, historically challenged incel gamers out there?
I think you need to get a clue. Let me explain what actually happened.
EA claimed they were "telling the untold stories of WW2," but what they instead did was to rewrite history to push feminist propaganda. The game tells the story of Operation Gunnerside in which a team of Norwegian commandos destroy a Nazi heavy water production facility. However, in the game EA/DICE have written the Norwegian commandos out of history. Instead, the team who destroy the Nazi facility is a strong, empowered, educated mother and daughter team, who are not only scientists but unstoppable soldiers who can physically overpower any man. Clearly, this isn't "telling the untold stories of WW2," but rewriting history to push an agenda. There's a video here which shows the game scenario and then explains what actually happened during WW2. It's quite long, but you only need to watch the first five minutes and you'll get the point.
The whole game was a work of propaganda, designed not to appeal to gamers, but to force feminist propaganda on players. Then, despite completely rewriting history, they told gamers they were "uneducated" and said, "if you don't like it, don't buy it," which is why so few people bought the game.
But hey, don't let reality get in your way. Just keep claiming it's all the fault of "historically challenged incel gamers." Moron.
Don't forget about me. A little sign in here, a touch of WiFi there, and I can spy on you while don't absolutely nothing of value.
If you install lots of me, I still won't be of any use, but at least it'll be mildly amusing.
Judging from the criticisms, Summit Learning sounds far better than regular education.
"You have to teach yourself," Storman rightly complained
Being able to learn yourself is the most important skill you can have. Unfortunately, many people never acquire that skill so have to be constantly spoon fed information, are left unable to do anything if it's not explained to them, and can't work through problems themselves. If children become more capable of learning on their own, it will greatly empower them and give them far more opportunities in the future. Teaching them that they don't need a teacher to learn, and can learn on their own initiative, is a very good start.
"It's annoying to just sit there staring at one screen for so long," freshman Mitchel Storman
There's a serious problem with this instant gratification generation. You can't expect everything in life to be a computer game with flashing lights to entertain you, and where you constantly level up, even if you're bad at the game. Learning is rarely fun, but you learn in order to acquire skills that can help you in the future. If he can't sit in front of a monitor for five hours per day, then he's going to have real problems in the workplace where he'll be putting in double that time.
students in New York City schools walked out in protest
Once again, we see the problem isn't the course, but the students. We've seen the issues with millennials in the workplace, with them constantly whining, protesting, being offended and then quitting because they're bored. What seems to have been lacking in the last few decades is discipline. In the past nobody would walk out of a lesson in protest, and if they did they'd receive a damn good caning. Now, this sort of behaviour is tolerated, and even encouraged. Lunatics in government tell us we need to listen to the views of 'young people' and so policy ends up being set based on the views of 14-year-olds who lack the experience to know what's best for them. These students are being presented with a great opportunity to learn, and yet all they're doing is walking out in protest becuase they think they're above all of this learning nonsense. They need to be told to sit down, shut up, and start working.
Positive proof that Microsoft is pure evil:
Learn to Program in Java from Microsoft
Introduction to Python: Absolute Beginner from Microsoft
Java?! Python?! It's one thing to engage in anticompetitive business practices, but now they're trying to distort people's minds and ruin their lives!
Don't even get me started on:
Introduction to Data Analysis using Excel from Microsoft
Analyzing and Visualizing Data with Excel from Microsoft
That's just sick!
The app comes bundled with Windows 10, so it doesn't require the Store to download or an MS account. However, if you don't have a subscription to Office 365 or a copy of Office, then the app merely acts as an advertisement for Office and does nothing at all of value. It's just another piece of adware to go with the many other trial apps and promotions that are installed by default in Windows 10.
They need to do a better job of censoring the doors. We don't need to see that filth!
This has nothing to do with religious puritans, and is very much the work of the social justice crowd. If you look at Tumblr's post you'll see it says, "It is our continued, humble aspiration that Tumblr be a safe place for creative expression, self-discovery, and a deep sense of community." Religious puritans tend not to go around talking about creating safe spaces/places.
There's a general view in social justice circles that porn objectifies women and is demeaning and offensive, and that's the real reason it was banned. Tumblr want to be more inclusive, saying they want to, "create a place where more people feel comfortable expressing themselves." Again, it's very much the language of social justice. The perpetually offended can't be comfortable using a fascist, Nazi site that objectifies women and isn't a safe space so any content they don't like must be purged from existence.
Of course, you know what they say, "Get woke, go broke." It'll be interesting to see were Tumblr goes from here.
The question is, "I consider my current workplace a healthy working environment," so a high percentage of true responses means the workplace is healthy. Yet the summary says:
Employees who consider their workplaces healthier work at LinkedIn, where 17.3 percent responded true, followed by Google, at 23.7 percent, and Uber, at 29.7 percent
If a low percentage of people are responding true, then, contrary to what the summary says, that means they find their workplace unhealthy.
I get "Access Denied" when I try to look at the article so it's not clear if the summary has simply been worded wrongly or if Google is the toxic shithole we all thought it was.
This also sounds like a great way to considerably reduce heating bills. I always thought it was absurd to heat a whole house just to warm the people inside it as you're likely heating an area that's hundreds of times the volume of the people in the house. It would be far better to simply heat the people, but that has traditionally been challenging and impractical as you would have to wear clothes containing heating elements and carry a power source.
If this converts energy to body heat then you could stay warm by eating, which would likely be far cheaper and more efficient than heating a whole house. That would have benefits in reducing energy consumption, which would conserve fuel resources and reduce carbon output. Plus, who wouldn't want to warm up eating lots of chocolate.
Obviously, the practicality of using this as a heating alternative depends on how much it warms you up, and that's something the boingboing.net article doesn't seem to say as it focuses on tackling obesity. The recommended daily calorie intake is 2000kcal, which converts to 8368kj of energy. 1 joule is enough to heat 1g of water by 0.24C, so 8368kj could heat 1kg of water to 2008.32C, which...er...is interesting but doesn't really tell us a lot about how much this gene therapy will warm you up through the day. This is were I quietly back away from the keyboard and wait for somebody who knows what they're talking about :)
We seem to be in an endless cycle of dumbing down:
I considered becoming an IT teacher in the UK, which requires you to spend a few weeks before you can do the teacher training course. What I found was that every IT class revolved around drawing pretty pictures. They were designing vector logos, producing posters, making flash animations, creating a "website" in PowerPoint with lots of pretty animations, and so forth. What they weren't doing is being taught how to use a computer. The most basic computer skill is understanding the file system, which I feel is fundamental to computer literacy, and can be taught very easily since it's rather simple. Sadly, they're not being taught about computing at all.
Part of the problem, and something that is covered on The Register a lot, is that they can't attract Computer Science graduates to teaching, so most IT teachers have no background or interest in computers. This is because nobody with an interest in computing would want to teach people how to draw pretty pictures all day. As a result, out of fourteen teachers I met, I'd only say one of them had any real computer skills, and most were greatly lacking in computer skills and knowledge. Since they're not interested in computers themselves, they're more than happy to teach students about drawing pretty pictures rather than teaching them computer skills.
A common them is that schools offer the BTEC IT rather than the A Level Computer Science (for people outside the UK, BTEC and A Level are done at age 16-18, and BTEC is supposed to be vocational, but it's basically just dumbed down). The A Level Computer Science is a great course that teaches actual computing principles, while the BTEC is just yet more drawing pictures, producing animations and designing logos. I asked the head of IT why the school opted for the BTEC over the A Level and he said, "Oh, the A Level is just so boring!" So we have an IT teacher who finds computers boring. With people like that teaching IT, it's little wonder Chromebooks are being adopted. Their idea of computing likely revolves around downloading some apps from the Google Play Store.
Needless to say, I decided not to become an IT teacher, so they no doubt employed somebody with a degree in English instead. Since they're employing people without computer skills, knowledge or enthusiasm, students are simply taught to be consumers rather than computer users. They're taught to buy Google Play apps, subscribe to Google services, hand their data over to Google. To consume and never question their corporate overloads! This is the path to enlightenment!