I neither said that chain restaurants were good, nor that UK food specifically or generally was worse than US food.
The original writer is going to be in the country a short time, and in that interest, I was pointing out a few suggestions to make the most of it. Neither he nor I need you to lecture us on the sad state of affairs of most US restaurants and food habits; we live it, we're aware of it. I'm giving him advice as a fellow American who has spent a lot of time in London.
London is a great city for food; the experience there is characterized by an abundance of choice, not by a lack of it. World and fusion cuisine in London is some of the best in Europe, and that being the case, why not make the most of it?
Neither of us needs a Briton lecturing us that Applebees is not, in fact, the end-all be-all of cuisine, there's no argument there: I agree with you and the original writer probably does, too.
I lived in England for two years. Skip traditional "English" food, it's bland and tedious unless you have strong feelings about boiled meat. The one exception is probably pub fish and chips; it's an authentic part of the experience and you don't want to miss that.
Otherwise, stick to ethnic food; in London, you can usually eat the world within a few blocks. England was a nation that had to conquer an empire just to find a delicious meal. We'd hit Thai joints in Cambridge and London with an American Thai speaker; every time he'd open his mouth, the price would halve, and the portions and pepper heat would double. It was fantastic.
Though he makes good points in the very brief article, turning it into a $1Trillion USD figure just comes off as shock tactics, and probably comes off as more open-source ranting to anyone just reading the headlines, or to anyone with a bias against open source proselytizing.
I don't have strong opinions about the matter, myself. I've seen some open source disasters where the proprietary solution is the industry standard for very good reasons, and I've also seen open source projects that are amazing, and amazingly practical.
I used to think Silverlight was unnecessary and not useful to me. Then I found Visifire and have had to admit, whether or not Visifire could have been done in Flash isn't so much relevant to me as the fact that this is very useful software to me, and if that means installing Silverlight, so be it. I don't use it for web usage (I'm using it to create static images, not live graphs), so whether Silverlight has a future as a general web platform isn't an issue for me.
Having said that, I suspect it won't, just because Flash is such a juggernaut, for all its flaws.
It's the interface. A controller is only half the story, and usually a lot less than that.
I'm not suggesting we go back to the Atari 2600/C64 era joystick, but it does have some lessons we should learn from. Some of the best interface design comes from embracing the limitations in the format. There were many C64 era games that, if they didn't use the keyboard at all, had to be somewhat creative on the control side. Four directions, one button, make it happen. Now, the trend seems to be that we need a discrete, separate button for every function a game has, and button combinations that are completely unobvious and arbitrary are a good thing.
As the Atari 2600 was my last console, after which I got on the 8-bit computer bandwagon, I say the following without any platform bias: The Sega Genesis system had it right in the first generation: stick and three buttons. http://www.thosewerethedays.de/items/joysticks/sega_genesis/fighter_stick_md-6_asciiware.JPG is similar, but is the 6 button version. I used this on the Amiga (which only supported one button, but very few games were programmed to use three, since the Atari and Sega joysticks had compatible connectors and pin layouts). It had heft, it was accurate, it was solid. With three buttons, you had to create a control mechanism, but you couldn't go down the road of arbitrary button hell. That's what the modern console controller feels like to me: hell, and inaccurate to boot.
I never saw the site, and the article didn't mention whether or not they were making money or if it was someone's parody.
But what I am seriously suggesting is that this is still not the same thing as "cybersquatting". Cybersquatting implies that what you are really trying to sell is the domain name, and that's the reason you've registered it.
I'm pretty sure "freelegoporn.com" wasn't a master plan to trick Lego (or anyone else) into buying their domain.
Speed traps as profit centers are ridiculous, too. A speed trap almost always means your speed limit is too low.
Auto insurance is mandatory in my state. To me, that makes auto insurance a tax, too, and if the state isn't actively setting maximum rates, then it's acting as if insurance companies are its main constituents.
Here in Michigan, we also have something called the Driver Responsibility Fee ( http://www.michigan.gov/driverresponsibility )which the state issues you after a variety of offenses, some serious, and some very fairly trivial.
This is a fee you owe to the Treasury after being convicted of traffic offenses. As a Treasury fee, you cannot appeal it, and it is not considered a court fine. There is no hardship clause. Given that one of the big offenses is No Proof of Insurance, what it effectively does is add a $200 court fee, payable two years in a row for a total of $400.
Given that No Proof of Insurance is so frequently an offense committed because of financial hardship, and that the state doesn't have a hardship clause for the fee, and failure to pay the fee can result in... more fees...... it's pretty much a tax on the poor. And since these things are passed by state legislatures whose constituents aren't going to be bothered by increased court fees (or non-judicial fees such as this despicable Driver's Responsibility Fee) because after all, nobody PLANS on getting traffic or insurance violations, and that these are the sorts of things that happen to other, bad people who break laws and are dangerous to society (!!!), nobody holds their state legislatures to account for turning our court systems into a revenue center for both state government and the insurance industry.
So most Chinese think that internet censorship is necessary and good because they're told over and over that it's necessary and good.
After being lied to by our own administration about the need to invade Iraq to "prevent terrorism", 41% of Americans believed Saddam Hussein was directly involved in "planning, financing, or carrying out" the September 2001 attacks on the World Trade Center.
And this is in a society that purports to believe in the benefits of being free, and having been lied to a lot less convincingly than most Chinese are about the need for governmental internet control.
Next up, turning a scientific consensus into a "hotly contested issue". Evolution, the human effect on global warming, pick one.
As has been said elsewhere in this post, our past injustices don't justify China's current injustice.
And while I have a lot of sympathy for the Olympic athletes who resent politics getting in the way of what is intended to be an example of international athletic unity, there's more going on in any Olympics than mere sports.
If it's fair for China to vie for and then promote its Olympic bid for political reasons and to celebrate its increasing influence in the world, why is it all of a sudden off the table to use this same event to call attention to the downside of Chinese domestic and foreign policy?
The idea that the Olympics is not supposed to be about politics is appealing, but remember, the torch run was a product of the 1936 Berlin Olympics, and just like China now, was used by fascist Germany to promote its standing in the world, and the games as a whole to bolster eugenic theory by showcasing German and other "Aryan" athletes as the pinnacle of physical prowess.
Tibet has often been at the receiving end of China's racial policy of homogenization, which is pretty much just a slightly less violent way of accomplishing ethnic cleansing.
So far, nothing has succeeded in making the Tibet issue more important to the movers and shakers in the West than the temptation of the enormous Chinese market and its vast pool of lower-wage workers. The WTO, the UN, and most other important international bodies and powerful nations have either ignored the Tibet issue, or expressed their "concern" while continuing to shower China with favorable trade deals and economic ventures.
50 years of bumper stickers, far left activism, and rock concerts haven't done a thing for Tibet. So let's try a language they understand: economics and international reputation.
I remember when I was using limewire (I'm horrified that anyone still bothers), I had a "honey pot" folder with all sorts of files.
Most were either named so that they would read like "hardcore porn" titles.
The photos ended up being scenic landscapes, the videos ended up being inoffensive music videos, and the other stuff - files named bank.account.xls and cc.xls and passwords.xls - were equally useless and inoffensive.
I was amazed at how many people would download that. Eventually there were so many of those files going out that the files I actually wanted to share were queued up in a backlog.
Eventually, I got bored off it and unshared the directory. Then, my most frequent share was a file from an industrial music compilation, whose track title had the word "incest" in it.
People were probably downloading it because they were hoping it was a porn video. It's as if the network limewire was on was a distilled form of internet stupidity. I don't have the patience for the nonsense fake files and other stuff the gnutella, emule, and similar networks encourage.
Monitoring traffic on the internet is as simple as putting a road check system on the suspected tube, and inspecting the contents of that truck individually.
SenseCam is worn around the neck and automatically takes a wide-angle, low-resolution photograph every 30 seconds. Excellent! Now Grandma can take crappy photos nearly as often as drunk girls at bars do with their cellphones.
Slashdot Mirror
I neither said that chain restaurants were good, nor that UK food specifically or generally was worse than US food.
The original writer is going to be in the country a short time, and in that interest, I was pointing out a few suggestions to make the most of it. Neither he nor I need you to lecture us on the sad state of affairs of most US restaurants and food habits; we live it, we're aware of it. I'm giving him advice as a fellow American who has spent a lot of time in London.
London is a great city for food; the experience there is characterized by an abundance of choice, not by a lack of it. World and fusion cuisine in London is some of the best in Europe, and that being the case, why not make the most of it?
Neither of us needs a Briton lecturing us that Applebees is not, in fact, the end-all be-all of cuisine, there's no argument there: I agree with you and the original writer probably does, too.
...ribbed, for her pleasure.
I lived in England for two years. Skip traditional "English" food, it's bland and tedious unless you have strong feelings about boiled meat. The one exception is probably pub fish and chips; it's an authentic part of the experience and you don't want to miss that.
Otherwise, stick to ethnic food; in London, you can usually eat the world within a few blocks. England was a nation that had to conquer an empire just to find a delicious meal. We'd hit Thai joints in Cambridge and London with an American Thai speaker; every time he'd open his mouth, the price would halve, and the portions and pepper heat would double. It was fantastic.
Though he makes good points in the very brief article, turning it into a $1Trillion USD figure just comes off as shock tactics, and probably comes off as more open-source ranting to anyone just reading the headlines, or to anyone with a bias against open source proselytizing.
I don't have strong opinions about the matter, myself. I've seen some open source disasters where the proprietary solution is the industry standard for very good reasons, and I've also seen open source projects that are amazing, and amazingly practical.
I used to think Silverlight was unnecessary and not useful to me. Then I found Visifire and have had to admit, whether or not Visifire could have been done in Flash isn't so much relevant to me as the fact that this is very useful software to me, and if that means installing Silverlight, so be it. I don't use it for web usage (I'm using it to create static images, not live graphs), so whether Silverlight has a future as a general web platform isn't an issue for me.
Having said that, I suspect it won't, just because Flash is such a juggernaut, for all its flaws.
It's the interface. A controller is only half the story, and usually a lot less than that.
I'm not suggesting we go back to the Atari 2600/C64 era joystick, but it does have some lessons we should learn from. Some of the best interface design comes from embracing the limitations in the format. There were many C64 era games that, if they didn't use the keyboard at all, had to be somewhat creative on the control side. Four directions, one button, make it happen. Now, the trend seems to be that we need a discrete, separate button for every function a game has, and button combinations that are completely unobvious and arbitrary are a good thing.
As the Atari 2600 was my last console, after which I got on the 8-bit computer bandwagon, I say the following without any platform bias: The Sega Genesis system had it right in the first generation: stick and three buttons. http://www.thosewerethedays.de/items/joysticks/sega_genesis/fighter_stick_md-6_asciiware.JPG is similar, but is the 6 button version. I used this on the Amiga (which only supported one button, but very few games were programmed to use three, since the Atari and Sega joysticks had compatible connectors and pin layouts). It had heft, it was accurate, it was solid. With three buttons, you had to create a control mechanism, but you couldn't go down the road of arbitrary button hell. That's what the modern console controller feels like to me: hell, and inaccurate to boot.
I never saw the site, and the article didn't mention whether or not they were making money or if it was someone's parody.
But what I am seriously suggesting is that this is still not the same thing as "cybersquatting". Cybersquatting implies that what you are really trying to sell is the domain name, and that's the reason you've registered it.
I'm pretty sure "freelegoporn.com" wasn't a master plan to trick Lego (or anyone else) into buying their domain.
Trademark infringement should definitely be protected by fair use. Parody is fair use. The courts have not been consistent on this issue, however.
freelegoporn.com is not cybersquatting. It's parody. The difference is crucial.
Just because a rights-holder says otherwise doesn't make it so.
In this country, driving is a privilege in the same way that needing a job is a privilege.
Silly me, I think that if you work a full-time job, you should be able to afford a modest apartment and a safe car no matter who you are.
Let's just go one step further and outlaw poverty by making it a crime to be poor. Oh wait, done and done.
Seriously.
Speed traps as profit centers are ridiculous, too. A speed trap almost always means your speed limit is too low.
Auto insurance is mandatory in my state. To me, that makes auto insurance a tax, too, and if the state isn't actively setting maximum rates, then it's acting as if insurance companies are its main constituents.
Here in Michigan, we also have something called the Driver Responsibility Fee ( http://www.michigan.gov/driverresponsibility )which the state issues you after a variety of offenses, some serious, and some very fairly trivial.
This is a fee you owe to the Treasury after being convicted of traffic offenses. As a Treasury fee, you cannot appeal it, and it is not considered a court fine. There is no hardship clause. Given that one of the big offenses is No Proof of Insurance, what it effectively does is add a $200 court fee, payable two years in a row for a total of $400.
Given that No Proof of Insurance is so frequently an offense committed because of financial hardship, and that the state doesn't have a hardship clause for the fee, and failure to pay the fee can result in ... more fees ... ... it's pretty much a tax on the poor. And since these things are passed by state legislatures whose constituents aren't going to be bothered by increased court fees (or non-judicial fees such as this despicable Driver's Responsibility Fee) because after all, nobody PLANS on getting traffic or insurance violations, and that these are the sorts of things that happen to other, bad people who break laws and are dangerous to society (!!!), nobody holds their state legislatures to account for turning our court systems into a revenue center for both state government and the insurance industry.
...finally comes to an end. Welcome back to the Unio
... at least it's not cutsey.
Millennium was close to cutsey, but even that's not in the same league as Ubuntu's childish and unprofessional naming convention.
...if it's told consistently and often enough.
So most Chinese think that internet censorship is necessary and good because they're told over and over that it's necessary and good.
After being lied to by our own administration about the need to invade Iraq to "prevent terrorism", 41% of Americans believed Saddam Hussein was directly involved in "planning, financing, or carrying out" the September 2001 attacks on the World Trade Center.
And this is in a society that purports to believe in the benefits of being free, and having been lied to a lot less convincingly than most Chinese are about the need for governmental internet control.
Next up, turning a scientific consensus into a "hotly contested issue". Evolution, the human effect on global warming, pick one.
Now if only I could get rid of these handles.
I'm a little confused - how can Ubuntu be "growing up" and still suffer the most juvenile string of unprofessional release names?
I'm personally waiting for "Homoerotic Horse" to come out before I start pitching Ubuntu to professional clients. Because that's classy.
As has been said elsewhere in this post, our past injustices don't justify China's current injustice.
And while I have a lot of sympathy for the Olympic athletes who resent politics getting in the way of what is intended to be an example of international athletic unity, there's more going on in any Olympics than mere sports.
If it's fair for China to vie for and then promote its Olympic bid for political reasons and to celebrate its increasing influence in the world, why is it all of a sudden off the table to use this same event to call attention to the downside of Chinese domestic and foreign policy?
The idea that the Olympics is not supposed to be about politics is appealing, but remember, the torch run was a product of the 1936 Berlin Olympics, and just like China now, was used by fascist Germany to promote its standing in the world, and the games as a whole to bolster eugenic theory by showcasing German and other "Aryan" athletes as the pinnacle of physical prowess.
Tibet has often been at the receiving end of China's racial policy of homogenization, which is pretty much just a slightly less violent way of accomplishing ethnic cleansing.
So far, nothing has succeeded in making the Tibet issue more important to the movers and shakers in the West than the temptation of the enormous Chinese market and its vast pool of lower-wage workers. The WTO, the UN, and most other important international bodies and powerful nations have either ignored the Tibet issue, or expressed their "concern" while continuing to shower China with favorable trade deals and economic ventures.
50 years of bumper stickers, far left activism, and rock concerts haven't done a thing for Tibet. So let's try a language they understand: economics and international reputation.
Just think of it as client-side VRML.
I'm sure this one will take off just as quickly.
I remember when I was using limewire (I'm horrified that anyone still bothers), I had a "honey pot" folder with all sorts of files.
Most were either named so that they would read like "hardcore porn" titles.
The photos ended up being scenic landscapes, the videos ended up being inoffensive music videos, and the other stuff - files named bank.account.xls and cc.xls and passwords.xls - were equally useless and inoffensive.
I was amazed at how many people would download that. Eventually there were so many of those files going out that the files I actually wanted to share were queued up in a backlog.
Eventually, I got bored off it and unshared the directory. Then, my most frequent share was a file from an industrial music compilation, whose track title had the word "incest" in it.
People were probably downloading it because they were hoping it was a porn video. It's as if the network limewire was on was a distilled form of internet stupidity. I don't have the patience for the nonsense fake files and other stuff the gnutella, emule, and similar networks encourage.
And how dare anyone out there make fun of Linux on the desktop, after all it's been through!
Leave desktop linux alone!
Monitoring traffic on the internet is as simple as putting a road check system on the suspected tube, and inspecting the contents of that truck individually.
Yeah, we already know Neanderthals sound like Yahoo Answers users.
http://www.somethingawful.com/flash/shmorky/babby.swf
Way to miss the joke, guys.