Are you including the time it takes to get to a *working* desktop? That's one thing people often forget; you have to log in, and even when the desktop appears, it's not actually ready.
This is bloody annoying, and I wish they'd actually show a progress bar (or whatever) until it was ready... but people see the desktop appear and think "Look how quickly Windows starts!", and I guess that was the intention.
Fuck the Children. Erm..... you may wish to rephrase that, unless you were actually advocating paedophilia:-O
Anyone with anecdotal evidence of some random teenager's life being "consumed" by porn Teenager's lives *are* consumed by porn; heck, if you ban it like those f****d-up Wahabi tossers, 14-year-olds will still jerk off twenty times a day to two goats at it in the yard.
That doesn't surprise me; I know that there's still a dollar note, and there's really no need for them to exchange large amounts of money in granularities finer than that...
Dude, you're reading way too much into this. Do you honestly think "SuperKendall" would really thank the person? No, which is why I stated in my original reply that "I doubt that you were serious about thanking the guy".
Do you think he *really* thinks the criminal involved is a good person and is doing a good thing and should be commended? No; what I really think is that he's so bound up in his anti-MS zealotry that he only sees (and cares about) what will- in reality- likely be a very minor individual blow against MS, and disregards everything else.
Where, at all, did I say you were defending MS or their products? Where? Please, post it, make me look like a moron. You stated here that
Windows has had serious architectural and procedural flaws for over a decade now, which Microsoft is fully aware of, yet has done very little to address, and it's "fucked up zealotry, morality and ideology" to hope that people will wise up and switch? when my criticism was of SuperKendall's moral priorities, and had nothing to do with this. SuperKendall accused me here of being an apologist for MS, which is about as bad a misrepresentation and downright blatant fabrication of my position as you could get.
I appreciate that you didn't go this far (if your reply was not intended as an endorsement of SK's similar but more extreme position, please accept my apologies). Nevertheless you completely got the wrong end of the stick when you implied that the focus of (or indeed *anything* in) my argument could be construed as a counter-attack against criticism of MS's lousy security.
I am endorsing SK's position SK's stated position was that he would like to thank the thief. I know that what he was *thinking* was "Yay! Another blow against the evil M$", because he sure as hell didn't think (or care) about any of the other aspects of the situation. Hence, blinkered zealotry.
I'm sure that wasn't the impression he intended to convey, but it revealed his mindset perfectly.
The way it was expressed, it seemed like more of that "fucked up zealotry, morality and ideology" whereby anyone with the misfortune to get stung by the fact that MS is so damned insecure has clearly comitted a crime against human intellect and deserved what they got. It was more than just that; it was that SuperKendall actually supported the actions of the thieves and wanted to thank them. It's not just messed-up morally, it's downright blinkered and stupid to think the thief's choice of behaviour had anything to do with an anti-MS agenda. Or, for that matter, to disregard the fact that most of the thief's scams will have nothing to do with Windows, but just as likely stealing from vulnerable old people and the like.
Real-life thieves and conmen aren't like those in "Hustle", the majority are morally bankrupt vermin who don't give a toss about anyone else. SuperKendall would like to "thank" them.
The unacceptable face of Linux zealotry.... these sorts of views make all of us Linux users look bad, unfortunately.
node 3: Who said that? His point was, as I read it, that it's things like this which highlight the security issues of Windows. His point was that he'd like to thank the thief- and I quote:-
SuperKendall: The next time I see a "FreeWiFi" I'll jump on and thank them hardily for moving yet another Windows user even closer to an alternate choice. He thanks the thief and endorses his behaviour because it might give MS some bad publicity.
Handily (and/or stupidly) disregarding the fact that the thief's behaviour/motives had nothing to do with this, happily disregarding the consequences of the theft on the victim and happily disregarding the fact that he has endorsed (if giving thanks isn't endorsement I don't know what is)- and by his previous actions and omissions glamorised- the behaviour of a petty lowlife thief.
Certainly, nothing wrong with criticizing SuperKendall's choice of wording, but I was responding to the attack, "your fucked up zealotry, morality and ideology". Dogtanian seriously jumped the gun on that one. Jumped the gun? There was no gun to jump. SuperKendall said what he said; it was wrapped up in one stupid, narrow-minded sentence, but everything I said was fairly drawn from it.
I stand by what I said. SuperKendall didn't; in fact he avoided mentioning what he had said originally (and blatantly misrepresent what *I* said), and tried to re-paint the exchange as a discussion about MS's lousy security.
Either that or he was too stupid and obsessed with this issue to see that it transparently wasn't the point of my criticism; which is probably true- it would explain the messed-up ethics in his original comment.
They didn't glamorize the thief. They were just happy that Windows users were getting screwed. And that sums it up; did not give a toss about anything else other than that Windows users were getting screwed. Zealot; enough said.
The problem is that if the whole system (including the judiciary) is stupid or incompetent, it's all to easy to get caught up in it.
And even if you're eventually proved innocent, who wants all that hassle just to carry out some smart (but stupid and ill-advised) "stick-it-to-the-thief" stunt?
See this reply where I address the issues in more depth. I'm not repeating everything I said there.
Windows has had serious architectural and procedural flaws for over a decade now, which Microsoft is fully aware of, yet has done very little to address, and it's "fucked up zealotry, morality and ideology" to hope that people will wise up and switch? No, it's "fucked up zealotry, morality and ideology" that when someone is going around attempting to steal from and con people, "SuperKendall" wants to thank them (for ****'s sake!) simply because a minor aspect of their behaviour is that it *might* strike a small blow against Microsoft.
Ignoring the fact that this was never their intention, merely a side-effect. Ignoring the other consequences of the theft, and the fact that the thief will be free to offend again, possibly not conning/stealing info via Windows insecurities next time. (Oh NOES!!!!!! Is conning some old lady out of her life savings still acceptable if it doesn't involve striking a blow against MS).
That's what my original criticism was about, and I was very clear. You're an idiot if you think that it was a defence of MS or their products. So, are you really endorsing SuperKendall's position, or are you just stupid?
What I feel is really poor is your apologetic stance, Your whole reply is so messed up, I don't know where to begin. I'll start here though, because it's one *hell* of an obnoxious strawman if I ever saw one.
basically playing whack-a-mole with security issues [etc, snip] At no stage did I even mention MS's security holes, let alone attempt to justify them. I didn't even mention security issues at all. It must take a hell of a lot of chutzpah to claim otherwise (and to try to shift the ground of the argument to distract attention from what you originally said).
Your original message, spoke of your desire to "thank [the thief] hardily for moving yet another Windows user even closer to an alternate choice".
I criticised you (and your zealotry and screwed-up moral priorities) for glamourising a lowlife conman and applauding his (totally incidental and minor) blow against MS, disregarding the more serious aspects of the crime. That's it.
MS's security model may be broken, it may be inexcusable, but this absolutely does *not* justify your highly dubious glamourisation of a thief simply because they make MS look bad.
As noted, reporting to the police would be ineffectual. As I acknowledged when I said "if I felt they'd do anything worthwhile".
I think you need to reexamine what is zealotry and what is a healing approach for the industry as a whole. Either your misrepresentations (both of the basis of the argument of and what I said) were quite deliberate, or you need to stop your quite incredible kneejerk assumptions about the other person thinks.
Since you bring the issue up, I'll give you my true opinion. I'm a Linux user (and would appreciate more people moving to Linux, as I implied in my original message). I also dislike the amount of security holes in Windows XP, and (as I said) if this moves people to more secure OSs, reducing the monoculture and forcing MS to clean up its act, that's good.
However, it doesn't excuse, let alone justify the thief's behaviour.
I do at least recognize that some good can come from even criminal activity such as this. As I already said myself... the difference being that whether or not something good came out of it, it wasn't thanks to the intentions of the thief; and I didn't imply that (on-balance) this was a good thing. You did just that when said you wanted to thank the thief, and when you omitted any consideration of the negative aspects of his actions whatoever.
So I feel empathetic, but not sympathetic, towards people affected by things like this - and while I don't condone the actions of those engaging in this behavior. (My emphasis above). Your original quote: "The next time I see a "FreeWiFi" I'll jump on and thank them hardily for moving yet another Windows user even closer to an alternate choice." That sounds like condoning it to me.
You're backpedalling now. You blatantly lied about what I'd said, and you're trying to distract attention from what *you* originally said. Go to hell.
Right. Call me cynical, but I don't think that the police would be interested or even capable of doing anything. Which was precisely why I said "if I felt they'd do anything worthwhile". And either way, it still doesn't excuse "Super Kendall" treating low-life thieves/conmen (who'll probably be stealing from someone's granny next week- sans laptop) as some sort of open-source heroes...
Help other folks out. Set yourself up as a proxy, advertise yourself as "Free Wi-Fi" too, and let everyone else (at least, everyone who connects through you) safely use the scumbag's paid wi-fi connection for free. That's the kind of geeky too-clever-for-your-own-good thing that will get you into trouble if the real criminal ever gets caught... or even if he doesn't. Suppose the police (or whoever) at the airport know about this scam and are investigating, and pick up *your* connection. Now you're messed up with this thing; you might know that you're innocent, but they don't, and explanations like "But... but... I was just having some fun at the guy's expense and making it safe for everyone" won't go down well.
How sure are you that you can prove that you're not involved, especially when you've been arrested and subject to police questioning? Under ideal circumstances If you were in control of things, you could probably put together a good case, but fancy playing against a prosecutor and police who genuinely believe that you were involved and want to make you look bad?
And (so the police will want to know) since you obviously knew this guy was up to no good, why didn't you report it?
The next time I see a "FreeWiFi" I'll jump on and thank them hardily for moving yet another Windows user even closer to an alternate choice. And people wonder why some Linux and Apple supporters have a bad reputation for being fanatical.
Personally, I'd try to gather evidence and report it to the police if I felt they'd do anything worthwhile. The fact that this person's behaviour happens to be driving people towards my OSs of choice is purely incidental. You probably realise this, and I doubt that you were serious about thanking the guy, but I bet that your f****d up zealotry, morality and ideology are genuine; you really would place a microscopic (and questionable) "blow" against Microsoft over thieving scum like this escaping justice. You really think that MS-enabled crime (let alone this particular scam) is the only crime they're going to commit?
Well, my mistake was in misparsing the implication in "it doesn't even have to be a long term item". I took this to imply that he'd want to phase out the 1-cent coin quite soon anyway; hence I wondered why they didn't just withdraw it now. On re-reading, it's clear he just meant that it didn't matter if the coins didn't last. I don't think that's a great idea either though, it just increases the replacement costs- and all this assumes that a 1-cent-valued coin (whatever its make-up) is worth dealing with anyway.
Nice to know we American's aren't the only dimwitted people. Of course; although were I dimwitted enough to not understand the concept of inflation devaluing a currency such that the coin's face-value was less than the cost of its constituent materials, I doubt your pointless analogy would have helped.
According to Wikipedia, under Scottish law, creditors are required to accept any "reasonable" settlement of the debt (even if the payment was not strictly "legal tender"). I'd guess this was the basis of the case you described. This is fortunate, because apparently English banknotes of 5 pounds and above (i.e. *all* of them these days) are not legal tender in Scotland...
I don't know where the exchanges get their money.However, if it was a US government source (or even if they had their eyes on the transactions), I suspect they'd get suspicious when exchanges started requesting large quantities of pennies. Possibly they could cut off the bureau's supply of money(?)
If it were all kosher, after all, wouldn't the bureaus be doing this themselves?
Also, I'd be surprised if the bureaus bothered keeping foreign coins below a certain value anyway...
Just make them out of something worth less than 1c, hell it doesn't even have to be a long term item... plastics should work fine. I would go ceramics but I bet they would break too easily. I don't get your logic. Are you seriously saying that the existing coins should be withdrawn and new ones introduced, with all the hassle that would entail, even though most of the problems would be in withdrawing/replacing coins anyway? Actually, I'd assume that even simply withdrawing the 1 cent value altogether would be easier from that perspective, as no machines would have to be updated unless you wanted them to reject the penny.
I'm not American, and I've no intention of telling the U.S. what coins they should and shouldn't have; it doesn't affect me one bit (well, not unless you go to war with China over the metal needed for trillions of 1/64 cent coins;-) )
However, I'm surprised they haven't ditched the penny already; 5 cents is a small enough (and nice-sounding) increment, 1 cent is.... worth just over 1/2p, and I don't even find the UK 1p coin to be useful. (We're stuck though, because 5p (approx 9 cents) is too large an increment and having 2p as the minimum sounds odd, even though the 1p is worth less than the 1/2p was when that was ditched 20+ years ago).
Last time I mentioned this, someone said that you could make a nice living if your job was to pick up or collect and sort other people's small value coins. That's not the point; the issue is whether (on balance) the benefit/flexibility of having such small-value coins outweighs the time involved in dealing with and sorting them, rather than just having a coarser price increment.
Price should me rounded to the nearest possible value so in your case you would pay $1.95 instead of $1.96. At least this is how equivalent problem was solved in Czech Republic (Europe) few years ago. That's the most common-sense approach; if shops still wanted to sell items to the nearest cent, they should be obliged to perform any rounding up (or down) only on the final total.
Not that I see that being an issue; when the 1/2p coin was phased out in the UK, shop prices just went to the 1p increments (a la your example). Shares are still priced to the nearest 1/2p, but I assume they are rounded on the total. (OMG!!!!!! I lost 1/2p on my £50,000 transaction!)
My suspicion is that the UK bureau de change would be both unable (without prior notice at least) and unwilling (without a very good reason) to change your money this way. IANAL, but I don't see that they have a statutory legal obligation to even change your money (*), let alone give it in a specific form (**).
(*) Of course, they might have already agreed to re-exchange the money you had left over after your holiday.
(**) UK law (IIRC) states that small-value coins are only legal tender (i.e. that which must be accepted in settlement of a debt) up to a certain value; i.e. the trick of getting back at a bank by "forcing" them to accept settlement of your £30,000 debt in 1p coins isn't legal. But perhaps this isn't relevant; you are asking for (not being forced to accept) small-value coins instead of higher-value ones, and U.S. coins at that.
Despite the veneer of amiability about this project, I find it faintly disturbing. Why?
I think it's the attempt to work the job and group mindset into every part of an employee's day and life. The insinuation (by default) that an employee will want (not just be expected to) to contribute to the company in this way; even in rare "private time" like this (*).
I think what really bothered me (in this context) was the group-oriented friendliness. It took me a while to figure out why, then I realised that it was faintly reminiscent of a cult. Not the mass-suicide, Waco types (or at least, not at that stage), but the friendly pressure "we're your friends and we want to help you" newcomer stage- often with good intentions by those taking part (**)- where the group slowly enters every aspect of the newcomer's life.
Okay, I'm reading too much into this now; just bear in mind that Google's uber-friendly, everything-you-want-here campuses and the like have the advantage of keeping their employees happy, productive and within the Google sphere of influence. Sinister or not?
(*) Please *don't* start a discussion about how, as the employee is being paid during work hours, this is reasonable. Besides which, the employee- of their own volition- would probably be thinking about their work while they were on the toilet anyway. Plus, it's often more productive to give the mind a rest or let it wander every so often. Isn't it normal and healthy for employees to think about something else (e.g. outside interests) every so often?
(**) Yes, I did notice that this project was started by volunteers. Draw your own conclusions.
Additional: I misparsed this slightly. The phrase
whenever there is conflict between their relocation policy and the offer, their internal relocation policy supersedes isn't necessarily a formal policy *itself*. But the use of "whenever" strongly hints that it has happened on more than one occasion and could still be seen as an informal and/or unwritten policy.
Even though the BDA association isn't technically against porn, they sure are making it hard for any porn to get produced on Blu-ray
That's kind of ironic, considering "Blu Ray" sounds like a gay porn flick. I remember when Americans used to laugh at the name of the British TV show, "Blue Peter".:-/
Even more ironic that HD-DVD stands to reap the pornographic windfall, since "HDD VD" sounds like a rather nasty sexual infection that wipes all your data...
Slashdot Mirror
Are you including the time it takes to get to a *working* desktop? That's one thing people often forget; you have to log in, and even when the desktop appears, it's not actually ready.
This is bloody annoying, and I wish they'd actually show a progress bar (or whatever) until it was ready... but people see the desktop appear and think "Look how quickly Windows starts!", and I guess that was the intention.
The implication was that this question would be asked in court, and could make you look bad (if not downright suspicious) for not reporting it.
That doesn't surprise me; I know that there's still a dollar note, and there's really no need for them to exchange large amounts of money in granularities finer than that...
I appreciate that you didn't go this far (if your reply was not intended as an endorsement of SK's similar but more extreme position, please accept my apologies). Nevertheless you completely got the wrong end of the stick when you implied that the focus of (or indeed *anything* in) my argument could be construed as a counter-attack against criticism of MS's lousy security. I am endorsing SK's position SK's stated position was that he would like to thank the thief. I know that what he was *thinking* was "Yay! Another blow against the evil M$", because he sure as hell didn't think (or care) about any of the other aspects of the situation. Hence, blinkered zealotry.
I'm sure that wasn't the impression he intended to convey, but it revealed his mindset perfectly.
Real-life thieves and conmen aren't like those in "Hustle", the majority are morally bankrupt vermin who don't give a toss about anyone else. SuperKendall would like to "thank" them.
The unacceptable face of Linux zealotry.... these sorts of views make all of us Linux users look bad, unfortunately.
True; it doesn't change the fact that Windows XP has some serious issues with security, however...
Handily (and/or stupidly) disregarding the fact that the thief's behaviour/motives had nothing to do with this, happily disregarding the consequences of the theft on the victim and happily disregarding the fact that he has endorsed (if giving thanks isn't endorsement I don't know what is)- and by his previous actions and omissions glamorised- the behaviour of a petty lowlife thief. Certainly, nothing wrong with criticizing SuperKendall's choice of wording, but I was responding to the attack, "your fucked up zealotry, morality and ideology". Dogtanian seriously jumped the gun on that one. Jumped the gun? There was no gun to jump. SuperKendall said what he said; it was wrapped up in one stupid, narrow-minded sentence, but everything I said was fairly drawn from it.
I stand by what I said. SuperKendall didn't; in fact he avoided mentioning what he had said originally (and blatantly misrepresent what *I* said), and tried to re-paint the exchange as a discussion about MS's lousy security.
Either that or he was too stupid and obsessed with this issue to see that it transparently wasn't the point of my criticism; which is probably true- it would explain the messed-up ethics in his original comment.
The problem is that if the whole system (including the judiciary) is stupid or incompetent, it's all to easy to get caught up in it.
And even if you're eventually proved innocent, who wants all that hassle just to carry out some smart (but stupid and ill-advised) "stick-it-to-the-thief" stunt?
Ignoring the fact that this was never their intention, merely a side-effect. Ignoring the other consequences of the theft, and the fact that the thief will be free to offend again, possibly not conning/stealing info via Windows insecurities next time. (Oh NOES!!!!!! Is conning some old lady out of her life savings still acceptable if it doesn't involve striking a blow against MS).
That's what my original criticism was about, and I was very clear. You're an idiot if you think that it was a defence of MS or their products. So, are you really endorsing SuperKendall's position, or are you just stupid?
Your original message, spoke of your desire to "thank [the thief] hardily for moving yet another Windows user even closer to an alternate choice".
I criticised you (and your zealotry and screwed-up moral priorities) for glamourising a lowlife conman and applauding his (totally incidental and minor) blow against MS, disregarding the more serious aspects of the crime. That's it.
MS's security model may be broken, it may be inexcusable, but this absolutely does *not* justify your highly dubious glamourisation of a thief simply because they make MS look bad. As noted, reporting to the police would be ineffectual. As I acknowledged when I said "if I felt they'd do anything worthwhile".
I think you need to reexamine what is zealotry and what is a healing approach for the industry as a whole. Either your misrepresentations (both of the basis of the argument of and what I said) were quite deliberate, or you need to stop your quite incredible kneejerk assumptions about the other person thinks.
Since you bring the issue up, I'll give you my true opinion. I'm a Linux user (and would appreciate more people moving to Linux, as I implied in my original message). I also dislike the amount of security holes in Windows XP, and (as I said) if this moves people to more secure OSs, reducing the monoculture and forcing MS to clean up its act, that's good.
However, it doesn't excuse, let alone justify the thief's behaviour.
I do at least recognize that some good can come from even criminal activity such as this. As I already said myself... the difference being that whether or not something good came out of it, it wasn't thanks to the intentions of the thief; and I didn't imply that (on-balance) this was a good thing. You did just that when said you wanted to thank the thief, and when you omitted any consideration of the negative aspects of his actions whatoever. So I feel empathetic, but not sympathetic, towards people affected by things like this - and while I don't condone the actions of those engaging in this behavior. (My emphasis above). Your original quote: "The next time I see a "FreeWiFi" I'll jump on and thank them hardily for moving yet another Windows user even closer to an alternate choice." That sounds like condoning it to me.
You're backpedalling now. You blatantly lied about what I'd said, and you're trying to distract attention from what *you* originally said. Go to hell.
How sure are you that you can prove that you're not involved, especially when you've been arrested and subject to police questioning? Under ideal circumstances If you were in control of things, you could probably put together a good case, but fancy playing against a prosecutor and police who genuinely believe that you were involved and want to make you look bad?
And (so the police will want to know) since you obviously knew this guy was up to no good, why didn't you report it?
Doesn't sound such a good idea now.
Personally, I'd try to gather evidence and report it to the police if I felt they'd do anything worthwhile. The fact that this person's behaviour happens to be driving people towards my OSs of choice is purely incidental. You probably realise this, and I doubt that you were serious about thanking the guy, but I bet that your f****d up zealotry, morality and ideology are genuine; you really would place a microscopic (and questionable) "blow" against Microsoft over thieving scum like this escaping justice. You really think that MS-enabled crime (let alone this particular scam) is the only crime they're going to commit?
Just to confirm what the other reply said; "1p" was meant to symbolise UK£0.01 (i.e. one decimal British penny), not US$0.01.
I always thought that the symbol for "US cent" was a stroked "c", not a "p"...
Yeah, I know all that; I live in Scotland :-)
According to Wikipedia, under Scottish law, creditors are required to accept any "reasonable" settlement of the debt (even if the payment was not strictly "legal tender"). I'd guess this was the basis of the case you described. This is fortunate, because apparently English banknotes of 5 pounds and above (i.e. *all* of them these days) are not legal tender in Scotland...
I don't know where the exchanges get their money.However, if it was a US government source (or even if they had their eyes on the transactions), I suspect they'd get suspicious when exchanges started requesting large quantities of pennies. Possibly they could cut off the bureau's supply of money(?)
If it were all kosher, after all, wouldn't the bureaus be doing this themselves?
Also, I'd be surprised if the bureaus bothered keeping foreign coins below a certain value anyway...
I'm not American, and I've no intention of telling the U.S. what coins they should and shouldn't have; it doesn't affect me one bit (well, not unless you go to war with China over the metal needed for trillions of 1/64 cent coins
However, I'm surprised they haven't ditched the penny already; 5 cents is a small enough (and nice-sounding) increment, 1 cent is.... worth just over 1/2p, and I don't even find the UK 1p coin to be useful. (We're stuck though, because 5p (approx 9 cents) is too large an increment and having 2p as the minimum sounds odd, even though the 1p is worth less than the 1/2p was when that was ditched 20+ years ago).
Last time I mentioned this, someone said that you could make a nice living if your job was to pick up or collect and sort other people's small value coins. That's not the point; the issue is whether (on balance) the benefit/flexibility of having such small-value coins outweighs the time involved in dealing with and sorting them, rather than just having a coarser price increment.
Not that I see that being an issue; when the 1/2p coin was phased out in the UK, shop prices just went to the 1p increments (a la your example). Shares are still priced to the nearest 1/2p, but I assume they are rounded on the total. (OMG!!!!!! I lost 1/2p on my £50,000 transaction!)
My suspicion is that the UK bureau de change would be both unable (without prior notice at least) and unwilling (without a very good reason) to change your money this way. IANAL, but I don't see that they have a statutory legal obligation to even change your money (*), let alone give it in a specific form (**).
(*) Of course, they might have already agreed to re-exchange the money you had left over after your holiday.
(**) UK law (IIRC) states that small-value coins are only legal tender (i.e. that which must be accepted in settlement of a debt) up to a certain value; i.e. the trick of getting back at a bank by "forcing" them to accept settlement of your £30,000 debt in 1p coins isn't legal. But perhaps this isn't relevant; you are asking for (not being forced to accept) small-value coins instead of higher-value ones, and U.S. coins at that.
Despite the veneer of amiability about this project, I find it faintly disturbing. Why?
I think it's the attempt to work the job and group mindset into every part of an employee's day and life. The insinuation (by default) that an employee will want (not just be expected to) to contribute to the company in this way; even in rare "private time" like this (*).
I think what really bothered me (in this context) was the group-oriented friendliness. It took me a while to figure out why, then I realised that it was faintly reminiscent of a cult. Not the mass-suicide, Waco types (or at least, not at that stage), but the friendly pressure "we're your friends and we want to help you" newcomer stage- often with good intentions by those taking part (**)- where the group slowly enters every aspect of the newcomer's life.
Okay, I'm reading too much into this now; just bear in mind that Google's uber-friendly, everything-you-want-here campuses and the like have the advantage of keeping their employees happy, productive and within the Google sphere of influence. Sinister or not?
(*) Please *don't* start a discussion about how, as the employee is being paid during work hours, this is reasonable. Besides which, the employee- of their own volition- would probably be thinking about their work while they were on the toilet anyway. Plus, it's often more productive to give the mind a rest or let it wander every so often. Isn't it normal and healthy for employees to think about something else (e.g. outside interests) every so often?
(**) Yes, I did notice that this project was started by volunteers. Draw your own conclusions.
Even though the BDA association isn't technically against porn, they sure are making it hard for any porn to get produced on Blu-ray
:-/
That's kind of ironic, considering "Blu Ray" sounds like a gay porn flick. I remember when Americans used to laugh at the name of the British TV show, "Blue Peter".
Even more ironic that HD-DVD stands to reap the pornographic windfall, since "HDD VD" sounds like a rather nasty sexual infection that wipes all your data...