It's also because it gives some people the opportunity to blame something else for their condition rather than accepting that it's their own problem to deal with.
No, that's not the case with *ALL* medical conditions but I myself am about 3 stone overweight not because I'm "big boned" or have a glandular problem, but because I shove too much food in my mouth and don't exercise enough.
Sorry, but when I was a kid about 40 years ago, you ate what was cooked by your mother and put on a plate in front of you, end of story. I had great parents, never wanted for anything and was fed a balanced diet - but the fact was there wasn't the disposable income about then that there is now, I had proper discipline and morals instilled into me, and my father and mother were happy enough being good, loving parents to me, not trying to be my "friend" like so many modern parents do.
There's two different things here - "think of the children" and "think of your children".
As a responsible, law-abiding, non-pedophile adult like the 99.9999999999999999999999999% of other adults out there, if I've ever come across a kid in genuine distress then I've done my best to get the kid back to the safety of its parents as quickly as possible - and will continue to do that if it happens again. That, to me, is thinking of the children.
However, simultaneously, I would also be thinking about the type of parents that allow that kid to get into that situation in the first place - for example, the young girl I helped out about 10 years ago when she fell off her bike in slow moving traffic trying to squeeze between the narrow gap between my car and the kerb. She scratched my car but I didn't make an issue of it - I stopped, helped her out, made sure she wasn't injured too badly and let her get on her way after she declined a lift home from me. But I did wonder about her parents who were letting her out on a bike on a busy road when she clearly was lacking in some road sense...
Why is the Internet any different? If your kid isn't knowledgeable enough to move in a world where there are adults, then SUPERVISE it! Or exercise your parental control over it. And if you can't do that then don't have kids in the first place!
I really get offended by people who bandy about the "pedophile" word like there's hordes of them out there salivating at the mouth at the thought of getting at your kid - it's utter nonsense, and used as FUD by governments who want to put fear into people so that they can pass laws to control free speech on the Internet easier. Yes, they exist in the same way that drunk drivers exist but the fact is your kid is more likely to be injured or killed by as a result of bullying by a peer (again as a result of lack of parental control) than a pedophile.
Stop with the utopian society nonsense also. Every single one of us is at risk of death or injury 24-7 and surviving in society comes from being clever enough to understand the risks of that happening and how to avoid it happening - and that's your responsibility to make your kids understand that, my role as a responsible citizen is to not make it any more difficult for you or your kid to live in society.
Our UK government comes in for a lot of flak but this article from about a year ago seemed to be a move in the right direction.
There was also a recent statement somewhere saying that government-published documents would be made available only in open formats - we'll see what happens but hopefully the new government hasn't forgotten about the hideous waste of public money that happened as a result of aborted IT projects in the Health Service due to the incompetence of private contractors.
I've been a techie in the telecoms industry for about three decades now, these days I'm a technical consultant on mainly Linux-based telecoms servers.
In my experience, there's a lot of demand for my internal colleagues and customers for people who can program stuff to do automation of tasks which has, in turn, allowed me to hone my shell-scripting and PERL skills over the past few years.
So what you say is right - it's less about new and complex desktop applications and more about making what you already have work better for you.
That sounds like a Microsoft excuse to me - more like "We cannot be bothered to train our personnel people properly in proper inter-personal communications skills." There is simply no excuse for plain rudeness at someone who is showing a genuine interest...
I'm a middle-aged Brit working for a US telecoms company in the UK and my advice is just ignore the whole "internal culture" bollocks in the first place.
Just believe in doing a "good day's work for a good day's pay" and trying your best to do the job right first time because nobody wants people shouting and cursing at them a few weeks down the line.
I'm also a person who believes that if you are big enough and bad enough to say something in the first place, then you're big enough and bad enough to listen to responses to what you've said. It never ceases to amaze me within the walls of American corporate culture how many senior managers and CEOs are genuinely shocked when someone like me responds to strategic announcements, often telling them why I think they've made a bad decision - many seem to believe that what they say is beyond question...
At the same time, I know I'm good at what I do and have done well in my chosen career even though I question anyone who I genuinely believe is wrong - I believe the trick is to do so politely and concisely, and never be too arrogant to say "Thanks for explaining it better, I now understand and accept your reasoning."
I can't claim to be a PDP-11 hero, I did a bit of programming and hardware faulting on them in the late 1980s in line with my jobs in telecoms and call centres, but the scary thing for me is realising the orders of magnitude of increased processing power that exists in a modern netbook than was in the DEC kit.
Just because you haven't heard of it doesn't mean that the story is uninteresting.
Anyway, by the way you write, you sound like a teenager so you're probably too young to remember Men At Work's major hit "Down Under".
I can't say I'm even a fan of the band myself but the fact is this article is more about the music industry and licensing than it is about the band themselves - so go sit quietly in a corner and contribute when you have something interesting to say.
The article sounds like an "industry sponsored report" designed to sell more SSDs because, presumably, the manufacturers are not selling as many as they would like to.
Personally, I don't see what value SSDs bring based on how expensive they are currently:
1. Reliability? - A responsible computer user will still need to maintain backups of SSDs in the same way that they currently do for hard disks. Sure, the failure rate of SSDs may be lower but, ultimately, every SSD will eventually fail - and because it's a new technology, people do need to be extra vigilant for previously unforeseen problems that may only appear after millions of them have been sold. The price of three hard disks (a mirrored pair and a backup disk) is still far cheaper than one SSD.
2. Battery life? - I cannot argue with this one except to say it's still cheaper to buy a couple of spare laptop/netbook batteries than it is to buy an SSD.
3 - Bootup/operational speed - I'd certainly be impatient waiting 5 or 6 minutes for a computer to boot up but I'm not sure my life is that busy that waiting 30 seconds for a hard disk as opposed to 3 seconds for an SSD matters that much to me. In my 30 years computing experience, machine speed comes from avoiding bottlenecks and good OS optimisations - yes, a faster SSD helps with the hard disk speed bottleneck but that still leaves things like the amount of memory, CPU power, OS bloat and fragmentation to consider.
I'm certainly not dissing SSD, it's a logical progression to the hard disk, but for the current prices of them, there's not enough benefit to me that justifies replacing my hard disks with them.
I may be getting the wrong end of the stick here but why is this relevant?
I thought the purpose of a pressurised airliner cabin was to maintain oxygen and pressure at levels that are comfortable for human beings - yes, I fly quite a bit but don't plan to do much of it in an F-16!
If you have to use your real name on Blizzard's forums then it can only be because it makes your identity more easily trackable for the purposes of targeted advertising - I suspect some Blizzard execs are getting some serious back-handers from ad companies as a result.
Fortunately, in my particular case, I tried WoW for about a month and it just didn't appeal to me. I do like original Starcraft but I won't compromise the control over my personal identity and information for any company, least of all for one that ultimately *just makes computer games".
Yes, call me old fashioned, but developing is about the creation of solution to software problems using tools that are best for the job - if you want "young and hip" then go join a rock band or something...
There are two major problems with the younger generation today:
1. Everything has to be fashionable in order to impress one's peers, and
2. Everything has to be "interactive" - what the f*** is so wrong with just sitting down and ***LISTENING*** to a piece of music without having to mess about with it?
To be honest, the PC games companies have been victims of their own greed.
For years they've been taking back-handers from hardware manufacturers by forcing PC gamers to constantly upgrade their machines in order to play the latest games. This in turn has meant that OSes like Windows have had to become far more complicated in order to try and support the vast ranges of hardware out there, ultimately leading to, on occasions, buggy driver and security issues. Ultimately, this had made PCs far too complicated for Joe Public, resulting in many people saying "enough is enough" and moving over to console gaming.
This meant less people buying PC games, meaning that piracy became more important to games companies, which ultimately led to them using DRM to protect their profits - which in turned served only to piss off PC gamers even more.
Alongside all of this, many of those people that have stayed on the PC are getting their gaming fixes differently these days - many are happy to just play the games on Facebook whilst people like me are digging out older games again because of countless Internet mods for them, being able to play them easier in WINE on Linux than on modern Windows OSes, and because the overall quality of new PC games has dropped because of games companies having lower PC games sales and sticking with "safe" titles and sequels.
I really do not see how this situation can be reversed.
I would go a stage further and say that for PC gaming, DRM has been used as a mechanism to drive gamers away from the PC onto consoles, where games publishers have a lot more control.
Think about it - consoles are closed platforms, so there's no installing third-party games or mods on them which ultimately ends up with fewer games being bought.
I also agree about Windows networking issues - I've used Windows (up to XP anyway) for years, but I've never fully understood the whole domain & NetBIOS naming thing... in Linux, you just ping the IP address and it answers if it's there and doesn't if it's not! But having said that, WINE in Linux is getting very good now & I'm playing a lot of my old Windows games favourites in WINE, these days it's easier to play them there than trying to tweak XP to run them.
I have bought a few indie games (Plants vs Zombies, World Of Goo) and they definitely fill a niche & are worth the expense - but they don't fill the need I have for complicated games sometimes and you'll never see a game like Fallout 3 being released by an indie developer, just because of the development resource & up-front budget needed.
I agree with you - which is why they are so keen to push gaming onto the Internet, where every player needs their own copy of a game.
I still mourn the passing of LAN gaming where, with at most a few dodgy CD keys and no CD cracks at most, it was possible to buy one copy of a game and have a few friends round with beers for a LAN party.
Added to that, as friends of a similar age, we were all about the same skill level which made it challenging and fun to play, rather than going onto Internet servers nowadays where there are invariably at least 2 or 3 people who do nothing but play the same game 24-7 and are impossible to beat.
From the outset, let me say that I don't begrudge console gamers enjoying their gaming although with my being a middle-aged gamer, I don't see the appeal of the majority of modern games these days.
However, in my own experience, the PC is now the refuge of older gamers who probably buy 2 or 3 new games a year at the most - this doesn't strike me as a market that the big games companies would move back to.
In my particular case, I've been a "mostly Linux" user for years and am now down to one Windows (XP) installation that I keep about just for gaming purposes. Otherwise, I'm now finding that the many older titles I own now work better under Wine or DOSBOX in Linux than they do in XP, where invariably you need to do a lot of tweaking to get older games to run, if they will run at all.
For new games, I really only look forward to releases from Valve, Stardock (Galactic Civilizations & Sins Of A Solar Empire) and any new Fallout games - I don't feel any other new PC games are going to deliver anything new to me apart from better graphics.
According to the story on BBC News, the only thing Apple are correcting is the algorithm that displays the bars for the signal strength, they are not fixing the reception problem.
I have a HP 6735s notebook that is just for general use and I got as a staff discount because my missus works there.
The moment I got it I erased Windows and stuck 64-bit Gentoo Linux on it but it occasionally has a problem where the BIOS simply does not detect the wireless card on boot so Linux boots without it being active. I went onto HP's forums, it's a known problem but they have done nothing about it in about 18 months.
There is a workaround that usually works - either remove the power and battery completely for a few seconds, or there's something you can "echo" into/proc in Linux that also fixes it sometimes.
Okay, I guess I'm missing something here because if you need to analyse captures from remote sources then what's stopping you installing Wireshark locally and feeding the capture file into that to filter it, etc.
It's not as though there are any licensing costs around it, you can install it wherever and as many times as you like...
I don't see why this would be particularly useful from an iPad perspective.
Wireshark is a network protocol analyser and therefore needs to be physically on the network requiring the analysis - so presumably you still need to deploy an instance of Wireshark on that network but then drive it from a web interface from an iPad or other device located somewhere else.
However, the only reason I could think of why this would be useful would be if the Wireshark box has no GUI on it - but then why not just SSH into the Wireshark box and run it from the command line?
Sure, jQuery might be useful for other types of apps but it seems pointless for Wireshark.
If people choose to get tattoos then that's their choice - but I have never personally seen the appeal of them and never had the inclination to have any done. But that does *NOT* mean I am a boring person, it means I just don't have any statements that I need to display to the rest of the human race in the form of a tattoo.
Likewise, I try very hard not to judge anyone on first appearances, and many of my closest friends have tattoos - but the fact is, and yes, call it old-fashioned, if I don't know you and you walk up to me in the street, if you've got one or more tattoos showing that's going to immediately put you at a disadvantage in my eyes.
I'm not actually a football fan and in my 48 years I've never once been to a professional football match, nor have I supported any football teams since I was about 12 years old and at school - the closest I get to being a sports fan is watching the occasional rugby match.
However, given the choice of seeing my taxes sunk into the pockets of fat American games company CEOs or seeing it used for getting kids playing sport so that we can hopefully have some excellent sportsmen and women (not the primadonna celebrities we have currently), I choose the latter.
If anything, its the power of corporations like banks and outsourcing technology companies that have caused this crisis in the first place, so I'm buggered if I want to see more of my taxes being used to bail out those greedy bastards.
Slashdot Mirror
It's also because it gives some people the opportunity to blame something else for their condition rather than accepting that it's their own problem to deal with.
No, that's not the case with *ALL* medical conditions but I myself am about 3 stone overweight not because I'm "big boned" or have a glandular problem, but because I shove too much food in my mouth and don't exercise enough.
Sorry, but when I was a kid about 40 years ago, you ate what was cooked by your mother and put on a plate in front of you, end of story. I had great parents, never wanted for anything and was fed a balanced diet - but the fact was there wasn't the disposable income about then that there is now, I had proper discipline and morals instilled into me, and my father and mother were happy enough being good, loving parents to me, not trying to be my "friend" like so many modern parents do.
There's two different things here - "think of the children" and "think of your children".
As a responsible, law-abiding, non-pedophile adult like the 99.9999999999999999999999999% of other adults out there, if I've ever come across a kid in genuine distress then I've done my best to get the kid back to the safety of its parents as quickly as possible - and will continue to do that if it happens again. That, to me, is thinking of the children.
However, simultaneously, I would also be thinking about the type of parents that allow that kid to get into that situation in the first place - for example, the young girl I helped out about 10 years ago when she fell off her bike in slow moving traffic trying to squeeze between the narrow gap between my car and the kerb. She scratched my car but I didn't make an issue of it - I stopped, helped her out, made sure she wasn't injured too badly and let her get on her way after she declined a lift home from me. But I did wonder about her parents who were letting her out on a bike on a busy road when she clearly was lacking in some road sense...
Why is the Internet any different? If your kid isn't knowledgeable enough to move in a world where there are adults, then SUPERVISE it! Or exercise your parental control over it. And if you can't do that then don't have kids in the first place!
I really get offended by people who bandy about the "pedophile" word like there's hordes of them out there salivating at the mouth at the thought of getting at your kid - it's utter nonsense, and used as FUD by governments who want to put fear into people so that they can pass laws to control free speech on the Internet easier. Yes, they exist in the same way that drunk drivers exist but the fact is your kid is more likely to be injured or killed by as a result of bullying by a peer (again as a result of lack of parental control) than a pedophile.
Stop with the utopian society nonsense also. Every single one of us is at risk of death or injury 24-7 and surviving in society comes from being clever enough to understand the risks of that happening and how to avoid it happening - and that's your responsibility to make your kids understand that, my role as a responsible citizen is to not make it any more difficult for you or your kid to live in society.
Our UK government comes in for a lot of flak but this article from about a year ago seemed to be a move in the right direction.
There was also a recent statement somewhere saying that government-published documents would be made available only in open formats - we'll see what happens but hopefully the new government hasn't forgotten about the hideous waste of public money that happened as a result of aborted IT projects in the Health Service due to the incompetence of private contractors.
Well, I'm sure if you and the other two Mac users shout loud enough, you may get something...
I've been a techie in the telecoms industry for about three decades now, these days I'm a technical consultant on mainly Linux-based telecoms servers.
In my experience, there's a lot of demand for my internal colleagues and customers for people who can program stuff to do automation of tasks which has, in turn, allowed me to hone my shell-scripting and PERL skills over the past few years.
So what you say is right - it's less about new and complex desktop applications and more about making what you already have work better for you.
That sounds like a Microsoft excuse to me - more like "We cannot be bothered to train our personnel people properly in proper inter-personal communications skills." There is simply no excuse for plain rudeness at someone who is showing a genuine interest...
I'm a middle-aged Brit working for a US telecoms company in the UK and my advice is just ignore the whole "internal culture" bollocks in the first place.
Just believe in doing a "good day's work for a good day's pay" and trying your best to do the job right first time because nobody wants people shouting and cursing at them a few weeks down the line.
I'm also a person who believes that if you are big enough and bad enough to say something in the first place, then you're big enough and bad enough to listen to responses to what you've said. It never ceases to amaze me within the walls of American corporate culture how many senior managers and CEOs are genuinely shocked when someone like me responds to strategic announcements, often telling them why I think they've made a bad decision - many seem to believe that what they say is beyond question...
At the same time, I know I'm good at what I do and have done well in my chosen career even though I question anyone who I genuinely believe is wrong - I believe the trick is to do so politely and concisely, and never be too arrogant to say "Thanks for explaining it better, I now understand and accept your reasoning."
I can't claim to be a PDP-11 hero, I did a bit of programming and hardware faulting on them in the late 1980s in line with my jobs in telecoms and call centres, but the scary thing for me is realising the orders of magnitude of increased processing power that exists in a modern netbook than was in the DEC kit.
Just because you haven't heard of it doesn't mean that the story is uninteresting.
Anyway, by the way you write, you sound like a teenager so you're probably too young to remember Men At Work's major hit "Down Under".
I can't say I'm even a fan of the band myself but the fact is this article is more about the music industry and licensing than it is about the band themselves - so go sit quietly in a corner and contribute when you have something interesting to say.
The article sounds like an "industry sponsored report" designed to sell more SSDs because, presumably, the manufacturers are not selling as many as they would like to.
Personally, I don't see what value SSDs bring based on how expensive they are currently:
1. Reliability? - A responsible computer user will still need to maintain backups of SSDs in the same way that they currently do for hard disks. Sure, the failure rate of SSDs may be lower but, ultimately, every SSD will eventually fail - and because it's a new technology, people do need to be extra vigilant for previously unforeseen problems that may only appear after millions of them have been sold. The price of three hard disks (a mirrored pair and a backup disk) is still far cheaper than one SSD.
2. Battery life? - I cannot argue with this one except to say it's still cheaper to buy a couple of spare laptop/netbook batteries than it is to buy an SSD.
3 - Bootup/operational speed - I'd certainly be impatient waiting 5 or 6 minutes for a computer to boot up but I'm not sure my life is that busy that waiting 30 seconds for a hard disk as opposed to 3 seconds for an SSD matters that much to me. In my 30 years computing experience, machine speed comes from avoiding bottlenecks and good OS optimisations - yes, a faster SSD helps with the hard disk speed bottleneck but that still leaves things like the amount of memory, CPU power, OS bloat and fragmentation to consider.
I'm certainly not dissing SSD, it's a logical progression to the hard disk, but for the current prices of them, there's not enough benefit to me that justifies replacing my hard disks with them.
I may be getting the wrong end of the stick here but why is this relevant?
I thought the purpose of a pressurised airliner cabin was to maintain oxygen and pressure at levels that are comfortable for human beings - yes, I fly quite a bit but don't plan to do much of it in an F-16!
If you have to use your real name on Blizzard's forums then it can only be because it makes your identity more easily trackable for the purposes of targeted advertising - I suspect some Blizzard execs are getting some serious back-handers from ad companies as a result.
Fortunately, in my particular case, I tried WoW for about a month and it just didn't appeal to me. I do like original Starcraft but I won't compromise the control over my personal identity and information for any company, least of all for one that ultimately *just makes computer games".
...and, as if by magic, a WoW junkie appears.
Yes, call me old fashioned, but developing is about the creation of solution to software problems using tools that are best for the job - if you want "young and hip" then go join a rock band or something...
There are two major problems with the younger generation today:
1. Everything has to be fashionable in order to impress one's peers, and
2. Everything has to be "interactive" - what the f*** is so wrong with just sitting down and ***LISTENING*** to a piece of music without having to mess about with it?
To be honest, the PC games companies have been victims of their own greed.
For years they've been taking back-handers from hardware manufacturers by forcing PC gamers to constantly upgrade their machines in order to play the latest games. This in turn has meant that OSes like Windows have had to become far more complicated in order to try and support the vast ranges of hardware out there, ultimately leading to, on occasions, buggy driver and security issues. Ultimately, this had made PCs far too complicated for Joe Public, resulting in many people saying "enough is enough" and moving over to console gaming.
This meant less people buying PC games, meaning that piracy became more important to games companies, which ultimately led to them using DRM to protect their profits - which in turned served only to piss off PC gamers even more.
Alongside all of this, many of those people that have stayed on the PC are getting their gaming fixes differently these days - many are happy to just play the games on Facebook whilst people like me are digging out older games again because of countless Internet mods for them, being able to play them easier in WINE on Linux than on modern Windows OSes, and because the overall quality of new PC games has dropped because of games companies having lower PC games sales and sticking with "safe" titles and sequels.
I really do not see how this situation can be reversed.
I would go a stage further and say that for PC gaming, DRM has been used as a mechanism to drive gamers away from the PC onto consoles, where games publishers have a lot more control.
Think about it - consoles are closed platforms, so there's no installing third-party games or mods on them which ultimately ends up with fewer games being bought.
I also agree about Windows networking issues - I've used Windows (up to XP anyway) for years, but I've never fully understood the whole domain & NetBIOS naming thing... in Linux, you just ping the IP address and it answers if it's there and doesn't if it's not! But having said that, WINE in Linux is getting very good now & I'm playing a lot of my old Windows games favourites in WINE, these days it's easier to play them there than trying to tweak XP to run them.
I have bought a few indie games (Plants vs Zombies, World Of Goo) and they definitely fill a niche & are worth the expense - but they don't fill the need I have for complicated games sometimes and you'll never see a game like Fallout 3 being released by an indie developer, just because of the development resource & up-front budget needed.
I agree with you - which is why they are so keen to push gaming onto the Internet, where every player needs their own copy of a game.
I still mourn the passing of LAN gaming where, with at most a few dodgy CD keys and no CD cracks at most, it was possible to buy one copy of a game and have a few friends round with beers for a LAN party.
Added to that, as friends of a similar age, we were all about the same skill level which made it challenging and fun to play, rather than going onto Internet servers nowadays where there are invariably at least 2 or 3 people who do nothing but play the same game 24-7 and are impossible to beat.
From the outset, let me say that I don't begrudge console gamers enjoying their gaming although with my being a middle-aged gamer, I don't see the appeal of the majority of modern games these days.
However, in my own experience, the PC is now the refuge of older gamers who probably buy 2 or 3 new games a year at the most - this doesn't strike me as a market that the big games companies would move back to.
In my particular case, I've been a "mostly Linux" user for years and am now down to one Windows (XP) installation that I keep about just for gaming purposes. Otherwise, I'm now finding that the many older titles I own now work better under Wine or DOSBOX in Linux than they do in XP, where invariably you need to do a lot of tweaking to get older games to run, if they will run at all.
For new games, I really only look forward to releases from Valve, Stardock (Galactic Civilizations & Sins Of A Solar Empire) and any new Fallout games - I don't feel any other new PC games are going to deliver anything new to me apart from better graphics.
According to the story on BBC News, the only thing Apple are correcting is the algorithm that displays the bars for the signal strength, they are not fixing the reception problem.
I have a HP 6735s notebook that is just for general use and I got as a staff discount because my missus works there.
The moment I got it I erased Windows and stuck 64-bit Gentoo Linux on it but it occasionally has a problem where the BIOS simply does not detect the wireless card on boot so Linux boots without it being active. I went onto HP's forums, it's a known problem but they have done nothing about it in about 18 months.
There is a workaround that usually works - either remove the power and battery completely for a few seconds, or there's something you can "echo" into /proc in Linux that also fixes it sometimes.
But it's disgusting that they won't fix it.
...that someone who is too stupid to put a battery in the correct way round probably shouldn't be using an electronic device in the first place?
Okay, I guess I'm missing something here because if you need to analyse captures from remote sources then what's stopping you installing Wireshark locally and feeding the capture file into that to filter it, etc.
It's not as though there are any licensing costs around it, you can install it wherever and as many times as you like...
It's perfectly relevant.
What about emulation apps that an iPad owner can run on his PC but will never be approved to run on his/her iPad?
Also other tools, like those that fall into the "security" or "adult" categories that, again, Steve will never say yes to.
I don't see why this would be particularly useful from an iPad perspective.
Wireshark is a network protocol analyser and therefore needs to be physically on the network requiring the analysis - so presumably you still need to deploy an instance of Wireshark on that network but then drive it from a web interface from an iPad or other device located somewhere else.
However, the only reason I could think of why this would be useful would be if the Wireshark box has no GUI on it - but then why not just SSH into the Wireshark box and run it from the command line?
Sure, jQuery might be useful for other types of apps but it seems pointless for Wireshark.
Whoa there one second!!!
If people choose to get tattoos then that's their choice - but I have never personally seen the appeal of them and never had the inclination to have any done. But that does *NOT* mean I am a boring person, it means I just don't have any statements that I need to display to the rest of the human race in the form of a tattoo.
Likewise, I try very hard not to judge anyone on first appearances, and many of my closest friends have tattoos - but the fact is, and yes, call it old-fashioned, if I don't know you and you walk up to me in the street, if you've got one or more tattoos showing that's going to immediately put you at a disadvantage in my eyes.
I'm not actually a football fan and in my 48 years I've never once been to a professional football match, nor have I supported any football teams since I was about 12 years old and at school - the closest I get to being a sports fan is watching the occasional rugby match.
However, given the choice of seeing my taxes sunk into the pockets of fat American games company CEOs or seeing it used for getting kids playing sport so that we can hopefully have some excellent sportsmen and women (not the primadonna celebrities we have currently), I choose the latter.
If anything, its the power of corporations like banks and outsourcing technology companies that have caused this crisis in the first place, so I'm buggered if I want to see more of my taxes being used to bail out those greedy bastards.