NOTE carefully how the original post talks about a few thousand American lives. Not the millions of asian lives. Americans are mostly amazingly hardcore racists and bigots. Note the similarity of scenes in Shindlers List and Apocalypse Now and the viewing by Americans of the callous killing of a young unarmed woman. One movie is obviously a drama, the other a piece of entertainment. Because in American eyes, other races... well... anyone not-American doesn't matter.
Nixon has always been filth, everyone knew this and that so many still support him just goes to show that America never really emerged from its segregation past.
Queue half a decade from now Bush being exposed the same way. And still the Republicans will continue not to be hanged for anything.
You are aware that the size difference in fish is NOT to seperate fit from unfit fish but that is a seperation on AGE of the fish?
Basically you are suggesting that the answer to a healthy fish stock for the future is to kill all the young and life the adults to swim free...
I know this is Slashdot and that with your intelligence we should all be grateful you got so little practical experience with reproduction but I think that even you might need to read up a bit on how a species survives.
Hint: It involves adults dying and being replaced by something that came out of them before they died.
You know people are to far removed from nature when people seriously suggest that killing the babies is the way to preserve a species.
During Glasnost, Russian reporters on the American election noted not just how similar the US elections were to USSR ones (pick one of two) but how much BETTER the Americans had gotten at totally muzzling the press through unseen torture methods because at no point could the Russians see any sign of the American media asking akward or difficult questions. What terrible gulags must exist to put the fright into the press to such a degree!?!
Well... the answer is of course, the gulag of exile. Ask akward or non-pre-approved questions and you don't get access anymore to special events and then have to explain to your advertisers why your network/newspaper was the one not present at a press conference. It is a marvelous system. You can ask any question you want as a member of the free press at a press conference... you just won't be there to ask them.
The KGB had to actually get out of their chair to supress the media, get their hands bloody. The white house press officer just sends one less invite. It is not just the US doing this, ask the wrong questions and they can't keep you out of the official big gatherings, you just don't get access anymore to all the "optional" stuff. It is so simple but it is where democracy dies. It is not just the ones in power that do it, Palin only does things by invite and with pre-approved lists of questions. Wilders both bans AND is himself banned (right wing dutch politician).
Mind you, the catholics show the other method doesn't really work either. In theory any kardinal can be elected pope... so how come they got the rotten luck every single elected pope turns out to be a war criminal, child molesting bigot? I mean... what are the odds... unless every single catholic is a nasty piece of work... nah... that couldn't be the case could it? Or could it be that if the milk is spoiled, that which rises to the top is not the cream? That any person who makes it into a position of being elected ruler has had to swim in the cesspool for so long, they can't help but got tainted?
That it don't matter how many are up for election, they are all part of the system because the system is what nurtured them?
Geert Wilders is a right wing dutch politician who often bitches about "The Hague" which is our capitol hill. Tiny detail, he is one of the longest serving politicians. It is the clincher for many right wingers, if someone tells you business will solve everything and government is filled with useless people who can't do anything right... and they been in government for decades and have no business experience... do you believe them?
If you are a Republican, you should listen to richest people on this planet since they by your believe system are the most right. So... what do Bill Gates and Warren Buffet have to say about politics? Mmm?
We are the cesspool and our leaders are what floated to the top.
And I AM the owner of a LOT of collectors editions of games, a LOT of anime inspired statues which all are basically about paying a 50 bucks premium price at least for bits of plastic costing at most a few dollars to produce.
I am willing to spend. What I am NOT willing to do is to be dollared to death. I know the usual phrase is "nicke and dimed" but it AIN'T knickles and dimes. My new ISP give me a media box with the option to record 4 streams and to use an on demand service. I explored it briefly. But 120 channels and NOTHING ON is all to true and the on demand stuff starts at 6 euro 49. I might be willing to pay for a single viewing of a movie that I cannot pause and watch another day. I might. BUT NOT AT WHAT USED TO BE FULL TICKET PRICES!
It is the horse armour problem. Betheseda ruined it with me forever by just charging to much. Had they charge half a dollar for it, everyone would have loved them. I use to pay 20 guilders, half the price of a full game for an X-Wing expansion and loved Lucasarts for taking my money. But that was a LOT of content. Horse armor was NOT a lot of content. Modders had done similar stuff, completely for FREE.
The internet and individual programs like napster changed the world, as much as the bicycle and the mailbox did. What did they change? With the bicycle poor people could extend their range for finding work considerably at little expensive. Charities used to donate them to women so they could find better paying jobs. Long before the car, and far cheaper then a horse, the bicycle allowed people to break themselves out of poverty and change the way they lived. No longer did you have to take any job you could find, you could look further.
The mail box freed women because now they could send letters without a chaperone, without asking a male to take them to the post office. It sounds silly in our days but it was a real liberator AND it was NOT intended to be so.
Does napster compare? Yes, I think so. It BROKE the music industries control over how we consume content. With Napster, bootleg tape sharing became trivial, getting just the one good song on an album became the norm. And with downloads, sales inflation to top the charts became a less useful because now people listened to their OWN music collections and those of others so they only listened to the songs they liked, not to the songs some DJ is payed to play.
I am not one of those persons who claims not to like the mindless drivel that is 99% of content these days. I like mindless drivel. I used to buy the TV-guide and circle the programs I wanted to watch and then plan my day around it. Lots of people did, popular show on, deserted streets. I USED to also listen to HALF of one LP, then half of the next because I had one of those LP stackers and that was the way things were and we humans wrapped our lifes around the limits of tech.
And then the Internet, digital content and piracy changed EVERYTHING.
I remember one friday evening at the office where we used napster to download old dutch songs and sing along with them. Songs that weren't on the radio anymore but we all remembered and could sing at the top of our voice. Had iTunes existed back then AND been usable in Holland (payment options still suck in iTunes even in 2013) it would have cost us 50 bucks or so... except I checked, the songs ARE NOT AVAILABLE ON ITUNES. Peter Blanker "Egeltje". Go ahead find it. eMule has it, usenet has it. Now take my money and get me a digital version of a tape MY MOTHER GOT FROM THE ARTIST HIMSELF FOR FREE BECAUSE I LIKED HIS SONGS! Still got the tape.
By now, there are services which indeed do offer some of the more obscure music. And that is great but... I have gotten so used to having to find stuff for free that going back to buying stuff with all the DRM, accounts and god knows what other hassles is like going back to using a horse for the daily commute. And I actually do ride a horse on occasion. It is lovely... but not practical.
Since I have no reason to hate you with a passion, I won't suggest you watch Twilight but aren't the males in that drivel just as much sex objects?
What really is the difference between Lara Croft and Fabian? Don't know who he is? Google it and you will find he is a model who appears on countless romance novel covers and NOT because he is a novelist.
Sex... wasn't really all that much a part of the original Tomb Raider. yes, she had big polygons, which most of the time you don't see since the camera is behind her. Meanwhile the women in Planescape: Torment had FAR bigger tits but nobody complained about that. Because part of the reason to have big tits in low-rez games was so the tits would be visible at all.
In Israel right now there is a law banning thin models. To protect the feelings of the whales. Because the only thin women are freaks who don't eat of course, not just a normal percentage of women who just happen to not overeat and have a natural slender built. To protect one groups feelings, another group is excluded. For every a-cup girl supposedly offended by doubt D Lara, there is a double D girl offended by every small titted heroine. Can't girls with big busts be heroes or are they condemned like blondes to always be stupid whores?
HERE IS THE SECRET
Every personality you see in the media, is a role. Doesn't matter whether you like said role or not. It is a role. Every actor acts a role defined by the writer. Media can NEVER show reality (which is why people who take 1984 as a prophecy as such idiots) because the writer WROTE everything as if he/she was god. A personality is self-destructive or succesful because the writer made it to be like that. In Far Cry 3 and the new Tomb Raider the "hero" goes from a snivelling coward to lean mean well adjusted killing machine because that was what the writers put in the plot. A different writer could just as easily have written a plot showing how both lapse into insanity. When backdraft was made, fire departments around the world saw an increase in volunteers and Pretty Woman has been claimed to have caused an increase in girls thinking prostitution always has an happy ending... for the girl. Mind you, the postman always ring twice didn't see more people wanting to be postman. Because the writers made on proffesion seem heroic while the other... wasn't. And many movies have shown hookers in bad light. The role an actor plays is not real.
REAL people are often WAY more complex then can be put in a 1.5 hour movie. Lara Croft breasts are often the joke of back pains... and? This is well known among women and those who live in the same world as them. Breast reduction surgery does exist and STILL women with small breasts want to be sultry big bossomed and big breasted women want to be slender and cute. And men want big cocks despite most women not particularly liking to be stretched to wide or to deep while men with actual big penisses wish that girls wouldn't run out the door when they get naked. We all want what we can't have because SURELY the grass is greener on the other side, so we all climb the fence and never wonder why so many people are climbing the other way.
BUT it is NOT the media's fault, it is our own.
Take publicity shots for say Star Wars. You can probably find some of Carry Fisher in her metal bikini and say "fan service". That is because all the pictures of Harrison Ford strutting it, don't appeal to YOU. But they ARE fanservice to a LOT of women. You drooled over Leia, they drooled over Han. Or Luke. Or Obi-Wan... women are weird or Jabba... my gf picked me after all.
You might think that a Lord of the Rings does not have much fanservice but just search the net. So... does that make the characters sex symbols? YES! Just not to you, but if SOMEONE drools over it, it is a sex symbol.
Sex sells, it always has done and both genders lap it up.
Sexism is only seeing it in one gender. Note the Israeli law on thin models ONLY applies to females. Because everyone knows bulemia
I actually have some insider knowledge and porn is dead, long live niche porn. Running a successful porn company is about finding a niche to serve where customers WANT to pay you, WANT to be part of your club. And this can be anything from the playboy logo to a porn site so niche even rule 34 doesn't apply, except it does because you are making it.
It is all about community after all it seems. Generic porn is sold for cents per gigabyte, you can easily setup your own site buying content in bulk if you so wish. And then you will be competing against the countless free sources, legal and non-legal. The "problem" porn faces is staying power, the simply fact is that the average person consuming porn for the most obvious reason, doesn't need a lot of it, nor needs it in high quality. You can jack off to a scrambled porn channel... never mind how I know.
Movie trailers work by teasing you to see the whole movie, A 3 minute porn trailer is... well three times longer then I need... eh... some guys need. I heard.
So running a successful porn site is NOT about jack off time but about time before and afterwards, getting the user to buy into your vision/salespitch/lifestyle/whatever. The simplest is the playboy logo, you may snigger about it, but Playboy sells merchandise and they can do that because some people buy into the idea that the bunny logo represents something they want to be associated with.
For playboy, the worsed customer is the one who just uses the magazine to whank. They want the customer who buys into the playboy idea. It is the reason Playboy still hangs on. Even Hustler does it, they are far more then just whank mags, that is why all these pages with words on them are between the pictures of naked women. Subscribe to Hustler and you are broadcasting to the world who you are... a whanker.
It is this idea of a community, this is part of who I am, that is hard to pirate and that people are willing to pay for. Big bucks even. Porn site subscriptions ain't cheap by any means, many cost more then HBO.
It is the sites that manage to sell an idea, that do well... of course that is still relative. Porn pays but the days you could get filthy rich for little work are over. There are just to many people fishing in the same pond. Part of the problem is the industry itself, it produces to much. ONE playboy mag per month has a certain exclusivity, but they have got a dozen versions per month. It sells but it removes the club feeling. Porn users always want something new but you should keep people hungry. The internet and the porn industry have worked together that the users are no longer hungry, there is always porn out there. Except in niches, there you still got to wait for a new release... and for that people still pay.
It is very interesting to watch because porn is a fast moving industry so what happens there, will happen elsewhere... HBO anyone? A channel only producing high quality, slowly with programs you got to wait for? And people WANT to pay for it, beg to pay for it (watch its adoption rate in Europe as it finally is becoming available).
Who knew that customers want to pay for exclusive quality... oh wait... Anyone who sells exclusive quality.
You are close but you keep getting stuck in the Hollywood idea of a super villain at the top controlling everyone. So nice isn't it that when Palpatine went down the drains, the empire just collapsed and the day was won and good triumphed? All those generals and moffs and whatnot were just under the control of this Sith and just gave up their power. All those officers, sergeants and even corporals just gave up their little empires and went for democracy and freedom because that is what people do. NOT!
In Europe it is rather easy to meet people who lived under such systems, the German re-unification makes those stories very easily accesible. And the Stazi was NOT the government, it was the people. Who betrayed Anne Frank? There are three suspects and none of them are important, they were just little petty minded people looking out for number 1.
Who does the controlling? Who throws the first stone? Who votes in the council of village elders? Nobodies controlling tiny empires nobody cares about except them and which they protect with a fierceness that no emperor has ever shown protecting his empire. Ghengis Khan knew about mercy. A grandmother throwing stones does not. It is here that oppressive regimes find power. Not in the ruthlessness of the overlord but in how well he manages to get little people to have a tiny amount of power they will not let go off. It is the commisar approach, the slave with a whip, the zulus. A commisar has no real power but he has more then those below him and he will see to it that it stays that way, no matter how miserable he is, he will make sure others stay more miserable. No beating of a slave will be more savage then that by another slave who knows the whip he is holding might well be applied to his back if he doesn't keep his position of power save. The Zulus are blacks who happily sat in between the whites in south africa and other black populations, happily helping suppress the NCA (Nelson Mandela's party) in exchange for a slightly better position in the hierachy. Brown people, like Indonesians are not well liked by white supremacists either but they made an existence in South Africa by not being as black as the blacks.
GUESS how these groups reacted to the end of apartheid, to the end of their little empires of misery?
That is why change ultimately always has to come from within. Because Afghanistan isn't just war lords, it is the grannies controlling their families because without that control... actually it doesn't matter what they WOULD lose, it matters that they prefer the world as it is over a new world and will do ANYTHING to stop it. It is no different then a manager stopping the promotion of an underling because if HE doesn't get to go up, nobody does. Remember who circumcises little girls. It ain't men in black vans, it is mothers and grandmothers whose mothers and grandmothers did it to them and damn if they are going to change things. Quite recent a woman was burned alive for "witchcraft". LOOK at the vidoes of the people. There are no overlords, no shadow governments, not one single person who could die at the end of the movie and everything will be alright. Every single person there is the evil overlord in their own little world.
You can see it in Republican senators who benefitted from government handouts and so they don't want anyone else to have the benefits they have.
Remember that research recently that showed those leaning to the right feared change? Well that fear is what creates stagnation. It has been shown time and time again that people CAN overcome, can rebel, can overcome evil governments BUT the desire to keep the status quo by the other half is far more powerful then any army a dictator can wield.
Hell, revolutions only "work" if the people in the army, from the private to the general, decides that the opportunities in a new world are better then the little power they got in the old one. You can see this quite clearly in the "arab spring". Many a general switches side but keeps his troops. Exchanging one
For those unfortunate enough not to be Dutch, the article claims Ahmadinejad is under attack from the religious leadership for hugging/comforting the wife of Chavez. In Islam, touching women is forbidden, unlike say goats. Not even the president, acting in an world with many cultures escapes this. There are of course many rules which only apply to the ruled but some dictatorships manage to suppress everyone, except those who like the suppression.
NK is rather famous for going after even Generals who don't show the right amount of grieve. There are systems where even the holiest are not immune to the system.
This is not saying these systems are nice but to understand them, you need to understand that the idea of the evil overlord at the top controlling all is best left to the movies. Most of these systems have become self perpetuting, it is the system that rules the people, not people. Of course, the system is people in the end but what I mean is that those doing the dictating are just as much dictated as the rest. That is why these systems endure for so long. Because if one leader should falter, the system simply replaces him or pulls him back in line. Dictators change, the system endures. And it isn't creepy guys meeting in secret, it is grannies who spy on their neighbors and are first in line at the stonings. That is why the west has been unable to "liberate" Iraq or Afghanistan. Because they shot the "leaders" who are just puppets of the systems and left the grannies who tell their grandsons they will go to heaven and stone their granddaughters for not obeying their grandmothers little empires, alone.
Want to fix the world? Kill the people behind the curtains watching and reporting.
They had to close the consulate in Australia once because they couldn't afford to run it anymore.
50k might be peanuts to you but it would is cold hard cash.
NK has been trying to sell IT services for a while now. You can outsource pretty much anything there, if you can stomach it.
From NK's point of view, this might NOT be about 50k, it might be about the millions/billions the RIAA claims are made by copyright infringement that they want a slice off. The UN gave one small island group the rights to hurt the US by giving them permission to violate US copyright law... NK could hardly get in more trouble for doing the same AND thinking they are going to get payed for it.
Plus their leaders are just batshit crazy, the previous guys had an unknown number of people abducted (from outside NK), including relatively famous ones because he wanted them to work for him. There is no career in NK telling the leader his idea is silly.
One of the most shocking things I saw was years ago when people were actually shopping outsourcing and when you asked where it was outsourced they said Korea, which I found odd because Korea's standard of living is rather high and they also need every tech person they can get for themselves... and then I remembered there were two korea's. I was actually sitting in a presentation with someone trying to persuade us that outsourcing flash game production to a prison camp was a good idea.
It would be like going back in time and witness a powerpoint slide by the nazi's (you can see the link) about the cheap labor to be had in their polish facilities. I have lived a sheltered life really like most western people. But that day I saw true evil. Someone bought a truckload of gold teeth and did not ask questions and someone sends emails with work instructions to NK and does not ask questions.
TPB is making a gigantic mistake. Once again, the enemy of your enemy is NOT your friend. But the friend of my enemy is most assuredly my enemy.
The US operates concentration camps, it is rather famous for it, or what do you think Indian Reservations are? They still exist and they were the inspiration (Go west for living space and damn the natives) for the German march to the east.
If you are thinking of places like Dachau, those were EXTERMINATION camps. Mind you, I can see how you are confused since the Germans weren't shy of killing people anywhere they could. But then again, the Indians weren't meant to survive on the reservations what with them being located in the worst regions the Americans could find so nature could cleanse the land.
NK is of course a very nasty regime BUT it is VERY dangerous to then allow everyone else to say "well we are not as bad as them, so we are clean". Clean by comparison perhaps but NOT clean. Just because your neighbor killed 100 babies doesn't mean you are innocent for only having killed one.
You can see this by the Dutch sheltering its war criminals (colonial actions post WW2) while trying to get German war criminals extradited protected by Germany who is trying to get Israel to answer for war crimes against the war criminal worshiping Palestinians (mufti of Jerusalem was one of the originators of the holocaust). One big vicious "he is evil for killing, we are not for doing the same".
IF this story is true, I think TPB may be taking a huge risk. It is one thing to say host a proxy in say China, "the reds have more freedom then us" but NK is a step to far. As said, all nations commit human rights abuses, or excuse them or ignore them so we are all tainted but NK isn't tainted, it is the taint. I can see the naive idealist make the case of how odd it is that oppresive regime X is more free then free regime Y but it is a completely FALSE statement. It is that French fat actor who ignores everything wrong with Russia and accepts asylum from a COMMUNIST KGB agent to seek refuge from having to pay taxes from a socialist government when his career has been funded by government subsidies to promote french movies. X 100!
The NK citizens after all are NOT more free then people in the west to share information freely. Rather the opposite, this proxy (if it exists) is ONLY accessible to the west and maybe the NK elite.
This isn't like showing how Canadians have better healthcare then the US by comparing health prices. It is like showing how NK is less racist then the US by showing they arrest fewer Afro-Americans. Which is true... and if I got to explain why it is an idiotic comparison, go and jump of a building, it is fun! All the cool kids are doing it.
NK is NOT a more free society in anyway by offering to host a proxy site. There is no irony here. Just a sick marketing ploy aimed at the extremely gullible. If you believe the argument for a second posting form your non-monitored unlimited Internet (sorry Americans, you failed) while NK people are living in the largest prison camps and those outside have to eat grass... well then you are a very sad piece of meat.
The enemy of my enemy is NOT your friend. Just because the US powers that be consider NK evil doesn't make them good. Not ALL the people killed by the Nazi's were innocent, they, like any regime still had a legal system and would have executed ordinary criminals. Same with NK, China, the US and every other nation. There are degrees of evil in which we have to exist or go mad but NK is way beyond any of that, they are NOT your ally or you make the mistake of the Irish, Palestinians and Africans who picked the Nazi side NOT because they liked the nazi's (well, the Irish did) but because they thought that the Enemy of my Enemy is my friend. They were wrong and have payed a heavy price for it. Because the friend of my enemy is most assuredly my enemy.
Indeed yes, education is about making people literate and numerate. AND THAT IS IT AND THAT IS ALL IT SHOULD DO.
Nobody can make you smart or interested in learning. THAT is something you got to do yourself. Developing a questioning mind "why is it so" is impossible to enforce.
Your parents can make you learn to ride a bicycle but only YOU can win the Tour de France.
Your father can teach you how to weld but only YOU can build the Eiffel tower.
Your mother can teach you how to read but only YOU can write the next great American novel.
Modern compulsory education is about forcing everyone to be given a chance to at least develop the basics from which maybe the individual him or herself can take off. But it is NOT designed, cannot be designed to make everyone into a scientist. THAT is what is wrong with American and Western education, the idea that we can press all kids into a school factory and produce insurance salesmen and ad-women.
Individuals themselves make this mistake too. I work in web-development PHP, which is the ass end of IT, 1st line tech support kids look down on us. But as easy as it is, you STILL can see who is not going to make it very simply. They are the ones who ask "what must I do". "What course should I take" "What book should I read".
Those who do make it just DO IT! There are two ways to complete a long march and that is by YOU yourself taking the first step, not asking someone else to tell you how to march. The basics "reading/math" you should have picked up in school. The skills, you have to master on your own AND ESPECIALLY on your OWN initiative.
If you, given the tools of reading and the internet can't learn PHP on your own, you will NEVER ever become any good at it because it is that DRIVE to learn, to examine, to explore, to experiment. If you ask, you are to lazy AND HERE IS WHY!
THE QUESTION HAS ALREADY BEEN ANSWERED: with google, you can easily find the question you are asking, that has already been answered. REMEMBER that if you want to see furthest, you should stand on the shoulders of giants. No great scientist worked in a vacuum, they STARTED by seeing the world, asking themselves a question and the finding an answer at least in PART by reading what others had written about it.
So asking on say yahoo what is a good PHP book shows that you lack even the basic skills of finding the answers to a previous question: you basically want knowledge to magically enter your brain and that just doesn't work (says a guy who has bought way to many language course books and still can't write a proper sentence because apparently you actually need to read the books not just buy them).
It is amazing we think of education as we do. Most schools in Holland teach swimming but we don't magically expect all kids to become olympic swimmers. Why do we expect all kids thought basic reading to be great writers then?
School swimming is there to make you slightly less likely to drown. The rest is up to you.
School education is there to stop you chewing the books, reading them, understanding what is inside, is up to you.
I can make you read say "Anne Frank's diary" or listen to MLK speeches but I cannot make you understand them. And frankly for all those who wish for schools to be MORE then literacy factories... do you REALLY want your school system to tell people what to think? What to understand?
Our school system might seem like a waste and horribly inefficient but I for one am more afraid of what an efficient school system would look like. Remember that in say Public Transport, if a train is filled to capacity, it is efficient. Factory farming is efficient, I do not wish to be a factory animal thank you very much.
1852 saw the first compulsory education law introduced in the US, the last US state would follow in 1917. England got its in 1870.
So... where do you get 400 years from? 2013 - 400 = 1613 that is still in the middle of the reformation.
And considering a girl recently got a bullet in her head for wanting to go to school, I would say that we have NOT been trying to educate everyone for 400 years or whatever but more that for thousands of years people have been actively trying to NOT educate all.
The danger of education is that people start to think for themselves. Disease caused by mutations in the genes? My my, what heresy is this, everyone knows it is god that cures disease if you listen to your local cleric and don't question why the pope sits on a throne of gold while millions starve, I read about Jesus Christ, I fail to see how he could ever approve of Catholicism.
And modern education is not really about creating anything but more in trying to prevent the kind of people who burn witches (last case happened very recently) or shoot girls in the face because they want to be able to read and write. It is not about making people smart, it is about making them slightly less stupid and maybe if you are lucky allowing a few bright ones to climb their way out of the cesspool that is humanity and improve all our lives. But make no mistake, school is NOT efficient or productive, it is a sausage factor that relies on random chance for a fine steak to get through at times.
And other systems have been tried. They never ever worked.
Lock kids in a building, force them to sit up right and 50% will come out a bit less stupid, 45% will remain as stupid as ever and vote Republican and 5% go on to shape the world for everyone else. Statistics pulled entire out of my ass but we don't need millions of Einsteins. It would be nice but we managed to do with just one. The rest of you? Like me? By-product. Just try not to stench the place up to much with your wasted life and let the smart people do their stuff.
I have actually got a Wii, I got it for last story. That was good... but I had to hook it up to a small display because else the graphics were just not acceptable anymore.
There is no such thing as a gamer, what one loves, the other hates but the Wii mostly seems to appeal to the extreme casual market. And that hurt the console because not many can afford to buy a console for just one game like me.
And the casual market is huge but Nintendo sells casual games for 40 bucks. The iPad sells them for a dollar or less. The iPad has high resolution graphics. The iPad has a controller with a screen that is not straight out of the 1990's. People keep calling the Wii U controller a tablet but if so, then it is a tablet from the dark ages that sold at your local chemist. LOOK at the screen spec, could they BE any cheaper? And Yes, I do know a Wii U controller is cheaper then an iPad but people, real people, don't compare costs like that. They want a iPad because they want one. They want a Wii U because of game... eh... what games? I stood in the shop, money in my pocket and there simply aren't any Wii U games I consider worth playing. And please don't come with typical twelve year old boy games, they ain't for me.
And that is really Nintendo's problem, they charge a premium for games that are no longer all that special. Once you could charge 1 buck for several minutes of playing pong but now adays, you can't. The market moved on and the Wii U hasn't. Not because its hardware is ridiciously low specced, not because its games are simplistic but because I can get casual games that Nintendo peddles for free on my phone.
And you might talk about a Zelda game not being casual but THAT is the killer right there. The gamer who wants games with a bit of meat is going to wait until there are enough games available to warrant the purchase of a console to play them. Fill the shelves with trivial casual games and you just dilude the perception of their being enough quality games for your hardware.
Nintendo went bargain basement with premium prices.
Name me the Nintendo Wii U games that won't bore a seasoned gamer to death. And if you say Zombie U, I will hit you with a slow motion cricket bat. It was the ONE title at launch gamers looked forward to and its reviews said it all. To simple, to easy, to little.
Nintendo needs to figure out what audience they want to cater for and the casual market don't pay premium prices for games. Why should they?
We should at LEAST adopt the catholic tradition that the new pope is carried over the heads of the cardinals so that they can inspect that he is well hung.
I don't care where he is born or his faith or what not but I do want to know the chief of staff has balls.
People watch curling (if I spelled that right) which is basically floor sweeping on ice. What can happen. Someone falls and hurts their bottom a bit. Yet, it is a sport that people watch. Darts? Rakes in millions of viewers. Although it suffered a setback after that Alas Smith and Jones sketch (or was it not the nine o'clock news).
Right now Nascar is in the news. Which is to racing what an empty room is to a maze. Turn left because if you turn right, you get a crash. Well MAYBE people watch for the crashes but really the people in the stands saw less of it, one video shows a guy totally unaware of a tire hurling towards him, he payed the ticket price for that?
I am NOT saying I can see the appeal it is just that I figure that if people can watch paint dry, then watching grass grow might also appeal to similar people.
Part of the appeal might be watching someone else do something better then you, or different then you. In Holland soccer is claimed to have 16 million national coaches (implying that the majority who don't give a hoot about soccer still want to be coach of something they don't care about). I can see people watching another gamer just to shout abuse at the tv screen "how could you not have seen that sniper" "they pay him for that?". There is money in this, the tabloids basically sell people they 5 minutes of righteous indignation about todays headline during their breakfast.
Remember that if you wrote down the concept of Columbo a "who-dunnit in which you know who-dunnit" before Columbo existed, people would have, and did say "this is never going to work". But it did.
There are pro-gamers and they are making a living out of showing how they play. It might make you no longer want to live on this planet but that is the reality.
Now will it be big? Who knows, a lot of people make their living catering to very small markets, let it be. There are things you are not meant to understand. Printerest for instance. In the days that Twitter is allowed to exists, the concept that someone might watch someone else watching paint dry has to be readily accepted because that is exactly what millions are doing right now.
The BBC has/had at the weekend in the morning a cooking show. Not 1 half hour show. Not 2 half hour shows back to back. Not two 1 hour special back to back. An entire morning of cooking... IN ENGLAND the country with the worst food in the world bar the USA. I would WELCOME watching someone playing pacman...
For that matter, in the Arcade days, isn't that what we all did? Watch the kid who could do it really well hoping that by standing behind him we would be as cool and attract the girls (flaw in this reasoning was that there never were any girls)?
You are basically a guy who is still arguing that reality TV is never going to take off. A noble thought but I can't help thinking of windmills and charging them for some reason. Pro gaming is here, it is sad but it is here to stay. Hopefully at the same dizzying heights as professional curling.
I don't really want to watch someone else playing games either... yet I do watch other people working, eating and even having sex. Hell, the watching other people have sex industry is gigantic. And the BBC has a watching other people eat show every 30 minutes (and to humorless moderators, that is a joke, not a statement to be taken as literal claim to the BBC programming, that would be every 15 minutes).
And even the NFL comment is wrong... people pay to watch people remove toilets from buildings in Dirty Jobs. Watch mental retards fail to find gold in the ground but find it in broadcasting deals in stead. Hell Big Brother was nothing more then people sitting in their living room watching other people sitting in theirs. And it was a massive hit.
Lets analyse OC choppers. They aren't doing anything fancy or hightech. By watching it, you are not finding out how other people live their lives. It are just a bunch of overly fat rich white guys who suck at planning (did they EVER just start building a bike on time so it was finished in plenty of time) building gay bikes. How many seasons did it run?
Compared to that, watching someone else game... well it could hardly be anymore boring could it? And really the entire sports industry has proven for decades that people are willing to pay top dollar to watch someone else be marginally better at something that doesn't matter. Why cares who put a little ball the most times in the net? Most of the planet it seems.
I agree, it is time for Humanity 2.0 lets call this run a proof of concept and get god/evolution to do a radical redesign and come up with something less couch potato who doesn't fold at the knees at the sign of a crown, oscar or MVP award.
If you follow Japanese culture as well as you can from the west, you notice a radically different approach to copyrights. Take "porn". The Disney corporation has cracked down on pornographic parodies of cultural icons it didn't even create. Meanwhile pornographic parody doujins can be sold openly and legally in Japan.
But within shows, I have noticed far less cross-over. The almost mandatory american sitcom episode where they do an old series seems to be missing from Japan. Or I simply never seen it but in Anime at least I get the feeling that in commercial production, it is not done to touch another show.
But the real reason you see little OSS from Japan in the west is the gigantic language barriers. The Japanese grasp of English is piss poor. So is the average Americans grasp of English but the Japanese are ashamed of it, so they tend online to either hide to avoid shaming themselves or seclude themselves in corners of the net and not come out.
And this is NOT limited to the Japanese. Try Europe, there are countries that are far more visible then others. England for its 60 million citizens, some of whom can speak English are not as visible on the net as say the Dutch, a far smaller country whose citizens grasp of proper English is truly shockingly bad (guess where I am from). But we are Dutch, we know we are the largest people in the world and it got nothing to do with our height or waist measurements so we hold our heads tall and don't give a shit. Don't know the difference between where and were? Fuck it, I am Dutch, have some weed and relax.
Add some country flag plugin to your bittorrent client and look at where people are connecting from. You can see that the number of users from a country have little to do with the size of said country.
But you have come accross some examples of websites from Japan that block access to your US IP? Yes... they exist... and the same in reverse BUT you would NEVER see them.
But remember, dear American, almost ALL your content sites, restrict access to foreigners. Netflix, Hulu, CNN, ABC etc etc all have popups "this content not available in your region". Who are the copyright grubbers again? But of course, an American would never ever see them. Do you know that "adult" content on ebay is restricted to the rest of the world despite the majority of the rest of the world havving less restrictive rules? Bet you didn't know if you are American because you never ran into it.
But you DO notice a Japanese seller on Ebay who refuses to ship outside Japan. But hey, I ran into sellers who refused to ship from Germany to Holland and we are right next door with the same currency.
Basically it is the old "white male never notices the existence of racism/sexism until affirmative action affects him".
Let us remember in which country centuries old folk stories are owned by a company that waited with the release of a movie so they wouldn't have to pay for the copyright but have themselves been instrumental in extending copyright into infinity and beyond. In which country parts of century old songs are copyrighted (5 golden rings) and in which singing "happy birthday" commands a royalty payment.
Copyright grubbers? I would mention something with a pot and a kettle but no doubt some Yank copyrighted it.
I wouldn't think anyone would take the half hour remark literal. I thought most people would have the social skills to see this as clearly an exaggeration. Clearly I was wrong. Might I recommend you spend some more time around people and learn to pick up on when someone is being literal and when someone is exaggerating for comic effect?
It depends... and I know that is a weasely cop out but allow me to try and explain for the purposes of (web) development, my field.
Coding is a solo task, you know what to do, you just got to come up with the code to do it. If you know how to do that, you can work alone pretty easily and the overhead of the going to the office and office life is just wasted time really.
BUT development is BEST a cooperative task. I have had to take over several projects in the past that had been done by single developers working from their home and I have formed an opinion:
Developers should be forced at gun point to go outside and interact with people and other developers. Or they go strange. Very strange. Fast. About 30 minutes seems to be the limit.
It not that the guys who worked on this projects were bad coders... but they were or had become bad developers. And I am not just talking about lack of comments or documentation or only coding for the optimal case and damn error handling.
I am talking about coming up with solutions to problems which seem to indicate that the person in question google all his answers but had google returning results in reverse order. Literally everything he did was done the least recommended way. Other examples I have seen include coming up with solutions to problems that don't exist. The weirdest data storage solutions for traffic the system would never experience in a million years.
Normally, in a healthy development team, when one developer gets a crazy idea, he has to present it to his fellow developers... and often just by speaking your idea out loud, you realize your mind has gone spongy and it is time you actually spend some time around people again, socializing. For developers, this means saying "Hi" in the morning. It might not be much but it stops your mind from playing the fairies and starting to think the NoSQL is a solution for you. And this is true because whenever you grow big enough for NoSQL to be needed/useful, your team will no longer consist of a single person thinking he talking to a commitee when he is talking to himself.
In theory, if you got a strongly compartmentalized system, you could have a coder working on it, solo at home with minimal communication. But if it is seats of your pants coding of a constantly evolving system because of customer demands where everything is closely linked, it does rather help to have everyone in the same office.
It is possible that the most socially capable and well balanced people could work from home and still be part of a team effort... but lets face it. We are talking IT here. We don't do socially capable and/or balanced. And again, I am not kidding, of co-worker developers the majority has had a medical diagnosis that in polite society would be described by flipping your index-finger across your lips. I swear that sometimes I am the only sane person in the office. Bleep.
I can see the use of sometimes working from home when you just have to punch in a lot of code but that is not where the core business is for a good developer. That is in finding out where there are shortcomings in the existing system, what the desires are of the end user and what new uses are possible that could help set your product apart.
And in bouncing ideas of each other to help weed the bad ideas from the good ones.
Invariably I have noticed that the less communication happens on a project, the worse it gets. I have worked at one office were there where never any meetings, everyone just developed on their own. Does it surprise anyone that the majority of bugs were regression bugs?
You might make it work with IM and email, I prefer to be able to walk to someone's desk and talk through an idea. As I have become older even with my stunted social skills I have learned not to fear personal contact so much anymore. Get your team to spar and discuss. Lots and often. It means everyone is keeping up-to-date. I have had to let go a number of developers who couldn't be part of the team and insisted
The difference between a Rolls Royce and a Volkswagen Beetle is in the 10% that costs 90% of the price/time. One of the reasons Apple did so well with its products is that it at least went for 5% at not to much extra. The "it just works" praise Apple often gets means a REALLY boring job for someone who doesn't get to build anything exciting and new but just has to fix small trivial bugs that only occur during a blue moon but are the difference between something working and NOT working.
Consider this: Java. No deb files just yum and rpm support.
Chrome has deb packages for ubuntu.
Opera has special deb packages for mint to.
Now which is the piece of software recommended to be removed and which is the browser that just resumes where it left off, has build in mouse support, multi-account password managment build in and works on the most number of environments?
Building so many packages is a boring task but it is the difference between a polished product and a cutting edge product.
There is a man at Rolls Royce whose only job is to hand paint a stripe on the car. Something tells me that from this you can conclude that the paint job on a rolls is better then that on an Brazilian build beetle. It takes a lot of people taking exceptional care in seemingly trivial detail to get a truly polished experience out the door.
It is one reason Americans make better entertainment movies. No European would think of putting fake scaffolding on top of a skyscraper to make it look taller. Americans do... it makes for better entertainment movies because some guy in props is spending time thinking how to make a sky scraper look even better.
Google releases a lot of stuff but they never ever really finish it because they all moved on to the next big thing. It "works". You won't see a cutting edge Rolls Royce long after other car makers have already implemented a new feature.
Go to a market, a real one. Any kind, either one that has been going for centuries or a new one whatever the latest name is that it has gotten, swapmeet, farmers market, it is all the same.
Then stay a while if it is new. I guarentee you that by the time the 3rd market has been held, the rules WILL have been written down and by the end of the year it will be a booklet. Why?
Because people SUCK at working without rules. Just watch what happens when the traffic lights fail. And for every time when the community comes together when something unexpected happens like a flood or power failure, there are a dozen riots. The blitz is fondly remembered as a time when England came together but in reality it was a golden time for criminals who steal from bomb sites even from the dead and dying. That is to say nothing about clandestine trading.
Saying the "market" will fix things is the sure sign of a complete and utter waste of a human being. What is "the market"? Because I know how real markets operate, the got a commitee that decides on the rules and makes sure they are enforced. And the commitee is elected by the market people... so... how is this different from a government?
Or do you really want Apple, MS and Google to come together and among them decide how the Internet should be run?
Republicans are basically nuts. It is no wonder so many are Christians as well, you need a special kind of mind to see the real world every day and still believe in fairy tales.
If the markets could regulate themselves, they would have done so by now. They haven't.
I have got a tablet and am REALLY in the market for one that has TRUE multi-tasking and DOES keep state and not have to constantly swap out apps to save memory.
Mind you, I am NOT that hopeful any of the tablet makers in business can supply. Take something as simple as storage space. micr-sd cards are tiny AND at the expense of the customer. A slot makes your device more capable at the cost of a few dollars at most. Yet how many devices have say a dual slot capacity? Why not a quad slot? Why not an optional back to phones where you can slot in a larger battery and a raid of SD disks?
In a crowded market, you need to set yourself apart yet we are overwhelmed with "me too" devices that are just copies of what the makers hope is trending. Learn from MMO makers, there is no market in copying the leader, if people wanted a product like the leader is providing, they would buy the leader product.
MP3 player makers are even more silly, mobile phones are getting better at playing music all the time AND are increasing (slowly) storage space. What was iRivers brilliant marketing scheme for the last few years? Release SMALLER capacity players...
Here is a hint, IF I am in the market for a specialist device like a MP3 player or a non-iPhone, I am inthe market for something SPECIAL. Enough storage for say 16 hours of music playback SOUNDS nice but I listen to music 12 hours a day... with such limitted storage, it get really repetitive fast.
Oh, of course, a large capacty music player isn't for everyone. Absolutely... and nobody wanted a walkman either and everyone knew that MP3 players before the iPhone had only a niche market and that would never ever chance and no MP3 player maker would sell millions of the same model at outrageious profits.
Markets are created by creating a new product and then selling it to customer who never knew they wanted it. Nobody wanted an iPod until they became available. Hell, nobody wanted a car, before say the 1800's you could go to any car showroom and find ZERO customers all the way back to the dawn of time. If that is no proof there is no market for the car, what is.
Most companies are far to conservative, they want a sure fire hit and don't dare to innovate. The Sony that created the walkman totally failed to create the iPhone despite being perfectly suited to do so, they had the tech AND the content, the iDevices and iTunes should have been theirs but the suits had taken over from the engineers and all we got from them is "me too" devices.
Want to know who right now sells the BIGGEST storage MP3 players? Is it iRiver with the 600 dollar AK100 with DUAL micro-sd slot? No... that with two cards goes to just 96GB. Is it Cowon? 32GB and with an sd card of 64GB you can get (if lucky) 96.
But the iPad (oh okay, it is cheating a bit because it is atablet) is now on sale with 128gb. In your average store (at least in holland) the non-iMP3 players hover at a max of 16 gb, the iPhones are readily available at 64gb. Often cheaper too then top end other brand players with far less memory.
The Galaxy Note 2 sells in holland with just 16gb memory, the 64 gb variant can only be obtained in Korea... in very limited amounts.
The iPod classic meantime comes with a 160gb HD. The only one coming close is Archos... in large near tablet sized players not its mp3 players.
Apple ripped open the MP3 player market and did what Blizzard did with WoW to the market. It showed that ALL the tiny players could have been tech giants, no THE biggest company in the WORLD for a long time... if only they had dared to simply sell to people devices that could hold a bit of music.
There is a market out there for far superior tablets... but it won't visible until someone starts selling one. I can't buy what you don't sell.
Here is another hint for mobile device makers: Men are half the population, we got big pockets and large hands, we can handle a phone that weight twice the weight and is twice as thick. Nokia could supply the brick sized n900 fast enough. Give me a device that is CAPABLE.
EVERYONE knows the original walkman was to large to sit in a shirt pocket and they STILL sold like crazy. If you make it, they will buy it. But if you don't... well... that can't.
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NOTE carefully how the original post talks about a few thousand American lives. Not the millions of asian lives. Americans are mostly amazingly hardcore racists and bigots. Note the similarity of scenes in Shindlers List and Apocalypse Now and the viewing by Americans of the callous killing of a young unarmed woman. One movie is obviously a drama, the other a piece of entertainment. Because in American eyes, other races... well... anyone not-American doesn't matter.
Nixon has always been filth, everyone knew this and that so many still support him just goes to show that America never really emerged from its segregation past.
Queue half a decade from now Bush being exposed the same way. And still the Republicans will continue not to be hanged for anything.
You are aware that the size difference in fish is NOT to seperate fit from unfit fish but that is a seperation on AGE of the fish?
Basically you are suggesting that the answer to a healthy fish stock for the future is to kill all the young and life the adults to swim free...
I know this is Slashdot and that with your intelligence we should all be grateful you got so little practical experience with reproduction but I think that even you might need to read up a bit on how a species survives.
Hint: It involves adults dying and being replaced by something that came out of them before they died.
You know people are to far removed from nature when people seriously suggest that killing the babies is the way to preserve a species.
During Glasnost, Russian reporters on the American election noted not just how similar the US elections were to USSR ones (pick one of two) but how much BETTER the Americans had gotten at totally muzzling the press through unseen torture methods because at no point could the Russians see any sign of the American media asking akward or difficult questions. What terrible gulags must exist to put the fright into the press to such a degree!?!
Well... the answer is of course, the gulag of exile. Ask akward or non-pre-approved questions and you don't get access anymore to special events and then have to explain to your advertisers why your network/newspaper was the one not present at a press conference. It is a marvelous system. You can ask any question you want as a member of the free press at a press conference... you just won't be there to ask them.
The KGB had to actually get out of their chair to supress the media, get their hands bloody. The white house press officer just sends one less invite. It is not just the US doing this, ask the wrong questions and they can't keep you out of the official big gatherings, you just don't get access anymore to all the "optional" stuff. It is so simple but it is where democracy dies. It is not just the ones in power that do it, Palin only does things by invite and with pre-approved lists of questions. Wilders both bans AND is himself banned (right wing dutch politician).
Mind you, the catholics show the other method doesn't really work either. In theory any kardinal can be elected pope... so how come they got the rotten luck every single elected pope turns out to be a war criminal, child molesting bigot? I mean... what are the odds... unless every single catholic is a nasty piece of work... nah... that couldn't be the case could it? Or could it be that if the milk is spoiled, that which rises to the top is not the cream? That any person who makes it into a position of being elected ruler has had to swim in the cesspool for so long, they can't help but got tainted?
That it don't matter how many are up for election, they are all part of the system because the system is what nurtured them?
Geert Wilders is a right wing dutch politician who often bitches about "The Hague" which is our capitol hill. Tiny detail, he is one of the longest serving politicians. It is the clincher for many right wingers, if someone tells you business will solve everything and government is filled with useless people who can't do anything right... and they been in government for decades and have no business experience... do you believe them?
If you are a Republican, you should listen to richest people on this planet since they by your believe system are the most right. So... what do Bill Gates and Warren Buffet have to say about politics? Mmm?
We are the cesspool and our leaders are what floated to the top.
And I AM the owner of a LOT of collectors editions of games, a LOT of anime inspired statues which all are basically about paying a 50 bucks premium price at least for bits of plastic costing at most a few dollars to produce.
I am willing to spend. What I am NOT willing to do is to be dollared to death. I know the usual phrase is "nicke and dimed" but it AIN'T knickles and dimes. My new ISP give me a media box with the option to record 4 streams and to use an on demand service. I explored it briefly. But 120 channels and NOTHING ON is all to true and the on demand stuff starts at 6 euro 49. I might be willing to pay for a single viewing of a movie that I cannot pause and watch another day. I might. BUT NOT AT WHAT USED TO BE FULL TICKET PRICES!
It is the horse armour problem. Betheseda ruined it with me forever by just charging to much. Had they charge half a dollar for it, everyone would have loved them. I use to pay 20 guilders, half the price of a full game for an X-Wing expansion and loved Lucasarts for taking my money. But that was a LOT of content. Horse armor was NOT a lot of content. Modders had done similar stuff, completely for FREE.
The internet and individual programs like napster changed the world, as much as the bicycle and the mailbox did. What did they change? With the bicycle poor people could extend their range for finding work considerably at little expensive. Charities used to donate them to women so they could find better paying jobs. Long before the car, and far cheaper then a horse, the bicycle allowed people to break themselves out of poverty and change the way they lived. No longer did you have to take any job you could find, you could look further.
The mail box freed women because now they could send letters without a chaperone, without asking a male to take them to the post office. It sounds silly in our days but it was a real liberator AND it was NOT intended to be so.
Does napster compare? Yes, I think so. It BROKE the music industries control over how we consume content. With Napster, bootleg tape sharing became trivial, getting just the one good song on an album became the norm. And with downloads, sales inflation to top the charts became a less useful because now people listened to their OWN music collections and those of others so they only listened to the songs they liked, not to the songs some DJ is payed to play.
I am not one of those persons who claims not to like the mindless drivel that is 99% of content these days. I like mindless drivel. I used to buy the TV-guide and circle the programs I wanted to watch and then plan my day around it. Lots of people did, popular show on, deserted streets. I USED to also listen to HALF of one LP, then half of the next because I had one of those LP stackers and that was the way things were and we humans wrapped our lifes around the limits of tech.
And then the Internet, digital content and piracy changed EVERYTHING.
I remember one friday evening at the office where we used napster to download old dutch songs and sing along with them. Songs that weren't on the radio anymore but we all remembered and could sing at the top of our voice. Had iTunes existed back then AND been usable in Holland (payment options still suck in iTunes even in 2013) it would have cost us 50 bucks or so... except I checked, the songs ARE NOT AVAILABLE ON ITUNES. Peter Blanker "Egeltje". Go ahead find it. eMule has it, usenet has it. Now take my money and get me a digital version of a tape MY MOTHER GOT FROM THE ARTIST HIMSELF FOR FREE BECAUSE I LIKED HIS SONGS! Still got the tape.
By now, there are services which indeed do offer some of the more obscure music. And that is great but... I have gotten so used to having to find stuff for free that going back to buying stuff with all the DRM, accounts and god knows what other hassles is like going back to using a horse for the daily commute. And I actually do ride a horse on occasion. It is lovely... but not practical.
Recently the BBC has started re-airing
Since I have no reason to hate you with a passion, I won't suggest you watch Twilight but aren't the males in that drivel just as much sex objects?
What really is the difference between Lara Croft and Fabian? Don't know who he is? Google it and you will find he is a model who appears on countless romance novel covers and NOT because he is a novelist.
Sex... wasn't really all that much a part of the original Tomb Raider. yes, she had big polygons, which most of the time you don't see since the camera is behind her. Meanwhile the women in Planescape: Torment had FAR bigger tits but nobody complained about that. Because part of the reason to have big tits in low-rez games was so the tits would be visible at all.
In Israel right now there is a law banning thin models. To protect the feelings of the whales. Because the only thin women are freaks who don't eat of course, not just a normal percentage of women who just happen to not overeat and have a natural slender built. To protect one groups feelings, another group is excluded. For every a-cup girl supposedly offended by doubt D Lara, there is a double D girl offended by every small titted heroine. Can't girls with big busts be heroes or are they condemned like blondes to always be stupid whores?
HERE IS THE SECRET
Every personality you see in the media, is a role. Doesn't matter whether you like said role or not. It is a role. Every actor acts a role defined by the writer. Media can NEVER show reality (which is why people who take 1984 as a prophecy as such idiots) because the writer WROTE everything as if he/she was god. A personality is self-destructive or succesful because the writer made it to be like that. In Far Cry 3 and the new Tomb Raider the "hero" goes from a snivelling coward to lean mean well adjusted killing machine because that was what the writers put in the plot. A different writer could just as easily have written a plot showing how both lapse into insanity. When backdraft was made, fire departments around the world saw an increase in volunteers and Pretty Woman has been claimed to have caused an increase in girls thinking prostitution always has an happy ending... for the girl. Mind you, the postman always ring twice didn't see more people wanting to be postman. Because the writers made on proffesion seem heroic while the other... wasn't. And many movies have shown hookers in bad light. The role an actor plays is not real.
REAL people are often WAY more complex then can be put in a 1.5 hour movie. Lara Croft breasts are often the joke of back pains... and? This is well known among women and those who live in the same world as them. Breast reduction surgery does exist and STILL women with small breasts want to be sultry big bossomed and big breasted women want to be slender and cute. And men want big cocks despite most women not particularly liking to be stretched to wide or to deep while men with actual big penisses wish that girls wouldn't run out the door when they get naked. We all want what we can't have because SURELY the grass is greener on the other side, so we all climb the fence and never wonder why so many people are climbing the other way.
BUT it is NOT the media's fault, it is our own.
Take publicity shots for say Star Wars. You can probably find some of Carry Fisher in her metal bikini and say "fan service". That is because all the pictures of Harrison Ford strutting it, don't appeal to YOU. But they ARE fanservice to a LOT of women. You drooled over Leia, they drooled over Han. Or Luke. Or Obi-Wan... women are weird or Jabba... my gf picked me after all.
You might think that a Lord of the Rings does not have much fanservice but just search the net. So... does that make the characters sex symbols? YES! Just not to you, but if SOMEONE drools over it, it is a sex symbol.
Sex sells, it always has done and both genders lap it up.
Sexism is only seeing it in one gender. Note the Israeli law on thin models ONLY applies to females. Because everyone knows bulemia
And slavery allowed western Europe to get filthy rich and build the US. So why end it?
The world changes, you want to keep an open Internet, you need to come up with a good reason why it should continue to do so.
I actually have some insider knowledge and porn is dead, long live niche porn. Running a successful porn company is about finding a niche to serve where customers WANT to pay you, WANT to be part of your club. And this can be anything from the playboy logo to a porn site so niche even rule 34 doesn't apply, except it does because you are making it.
It is all about community after all it seems. Generic porn is sold for cents per gigabyte, you can easily setup your own site buying content in bulk if you so wish. And then you will be competing against the countless free sources, legal and non-legal. The "problem" porn faces is staying power, the simply fact is that the average person consuming porn for the most obvious reason, doesn't need a lot of it, nor needs it in high quality. You can jack off to a scrambled porn channel... never mind how I know.
Movie trailers work by teasing you to see the whole movie, A 3 minute porn trailer is... well three times longer then I need... eh... some guys need. I heard.
So running a successful porn site is NOT about jack off time but about time before and afterwards, getting the user to buy into your vision/salespitch/lifestyle/whatever. The simplest is the playboy logo, you may snigger about it, but Playboy sells merchandise and they can do that because some people buy into the idea that the bunny logo represents something they want to be associated with.
For playboy, the worsed customer is the one who just uses the magazine to whank. They want the customer who buys into the playboy idea. It is the reason Playboy still hangs on. Even Hustler does it, they are far more then just whank mags, that is why all these pages with words on them are between the pictures of naked women. Subscribe to Hustler and you are broadcasting to the world who you are... a whanker.
It is this idea of a community, this is part of who I am, that is hard to pirate and that people are willing to pay for. Big bucks even. Porn site subscriptions ain't cheap by any means, many cost more then HBO.
It is the sites that manage to sell an idea, that do well... of course that is still relative. Porn pays but the days you could get filthy rich for little work are over. There are just to many people fishing in the same pond. Part of the problem is the industry itself, it produces to much. ONE playboy mag per month has a certain exclusivity, but they have got a dozen versions per month. It sells but it removes the club feeling. Porn users always want something new but you should keep people hungry. The internet and the porn industry have worked together that the users are no longer hungry, there is always porn out there. Except in niches, there you still got to wait for a new release... and for that people still pay.
It is very interesting to watch because porn is a fast moving industry so what happens there, will happen elsewhere... HBO anyone? A channel only producing high quality, slowly with programs you got to wait for? And people WANT to pay for it, beg to pay for it (watch its adoption rate in Europe as it finally is becoming available).
Who knew that customers want to pay for exclusive quality... oh wait... Anyone who sells exclusive quality.
You are close but you keep getting stuck in the Hollywood idea of a super villain at the top controlling everyone. So nice isn't it that when Palpatine went down the drains, the empire just collapsed and the day was won and good triumphed? All those generals and moffs and whatnot were just under the control of this Sith and just gave up their power. All those officers, sergeants and even corporals just gave up their little empires and went for democracy and freedom because that is what people do. NOT!
In Europe it is rather easy to meet people who lived under such systems, the German re-unification makes those stories very easily accesible. And the Stazi was NOT the government, it was the people. Who betrayed Anne Frank? There are three suspects and none of them are important, they were just little petty minded people looking out for number 1.
Who does the controlling? Who throws the first stone? Who votes in the council of village elders? Nobodies controlling tiny empires nobody cares about except them and which they protect with a fierceness that no emperor has ever shown protecting his empire. Ghengis Khan knew about mercy. A grandmother throwing stones does not. It is here that oppressive regimes find power. Not in the ruthlessness of the overlord but in how well he manages to get little people to have a tiny amount of power they will not let go off. It is the commisar approach, the slave with a whip, the zulus. A commisar has no real power but he has more then those below him and he will see to it that it stays that way, no matter how miserable he is, he will make sure others stay more miserable. No beating of a slave will be more savage then that by another slave who knows the whip he is holding might well be applied to his back if he doesn't keep his position of power save. The Zulus are blacks who happily sat in between the whites in south africa and other black populations, happily helping suppress the NCA (Nelson Mandela's party) in exchange for a slightly better position in the hierachy. Brown people, like Indonesians are not well liked by white supremacists either but they made an existence in South Africa by not being as black as the blacks.
GUESS how these groups reacted to the end of apartheid, to the end of their little empires of misery?
That is why change ultimately always has to come from within. Because Afghanistan isn't just war lords, it is the grannies controlling their families because without that control... actually it doesn't matter what they WOULD lose, it matters that they prefer the world as it is over a new world and will do ANYTHING to stop it. It is no different then a manager stopping the promotion of an underling because if HE doesn't get to go up, nobody does. Remember who circumcises little girls. It ain't men in black vans, it is mothers and grandmothers whose mothers and grandmothers did it to them and damn if they are going to change things. Quite recent a woman was burned alive for "witchcraft". LOOK at the vidoes of the people. There are no overlords, no shadow governments, not one single person who could die at the end of the movie and everything will be alright. Every single person there is the evil overlord in their own little world.
You can see it in Republican senators who benefitted from government handouts and so they don't want anyone else to have the benefits they have.
Remember that research recently that showed those leaning to the right feared change? Well that fear is what creates stagnation. It has been shown time and time again that people CAN overcome, can rebel, can overcome evil governments BUT the desire to keep the status quo by the other half is far more powerful then any army a dictator can wield.
Hell, revolutions only "work" if the people in the army, from the private to the general, decides that the opportunities in a new world are better then the little power they got in the old one. You can see this quite clearly in the "arab spring". Many a general switches side but keeps his troops. Exchanging one
http://nos.nl/artikel/483130-ahmadinejad-onder-vuur-om-knuffel.html
For those unfortunate enough not to be Dutch, the article claims Ahmadinejad is under attack from the religious leadership for hugging/comforting the wife of Chavez. In Islam, touching women is forbidden, unlike say goats. Not even the president, acting in an world with many cultures escapes this. There are of course many rules which only apply to the ruled but some dictatorships manage to suppress everyone, except those who like the suppression.
NK is rather famous for going after even Generals who don't show the right amount of grieve. There are systems where even the holiest are not immune to the system.
This is not saying these systems are nice but to understand them, you need to understand that the idea of the evil overlord at the top controlling all is best left to the movies. Most of these systems have become self perpetuting, it is the system that rules the people, not people. Of course, the system is people in the end but what I mean is that those doing the dictating are just as much dictated as the rest. That is why these systems endure for so long. Because if one leader should falter, the system simply replaces him or pulls him back in line. Dictators change, the system endures. And it isn't creepy guys meeting in secret, it is grannies who spy on their neighbors and are first in line at the stonings. That is why the west has been unable to "liberate" Iraq or Afghanistan. Because they shot the "leaders" who are just puppets of the systems and left the grannies who tell their grandsons they will go to heaven and stone their granddaughters for not obeying their grandmothers little empires, alone.
Want to fix the world? Kill the people behind the curtains watching and reporting.
They had to close the consulate in Australia once because they couldn't afford to run it anymore.
50k might be peanuts to you but it would is cold hard cash.
NK has been trying to sell IT services for a while now. You can outsource pretty much anything there, if you can stomach it.
From NK's point of view, this might NOT be about 50k, it might be about the millions/billions the RIAA claims are made by copyright infringement that they want a slice off. The UN gave one small island group the rights to hurt the US by giving them permission to violate US copyright law... NK could hardly get in more trouble for doing the same AND thinking they are going to get payed for it.
Plus their leaders are just batshit crazy, the previous guys had an unknown number of people abducted (from outside NK), including relatively famous ones because he wanted them to work for him. There is no career in NK telling the leader his idea is silly.
One of the most shocking things I saw was years ago when people were actually shopping outsourcing and when you asked where it was outsourced they said Korea, which I found odd because Korea's standard of living is rather high and they also need every tech person they can get for themselves... and then I remembered there were two korea's. I was actually sitting in a presentation with someone trying to persuade us that outsourcing flash game production to a prison camp was a good idea.
It would be like going back in time and witness a powerpoint slide by the nazi's (you can see the link) about the cheap labor to be had in their polish facilities. I have lived a sheltered life really like most western people. But that day I saw true evil. Someone bought a truckload of gold teeth and did not ask questions and someone sends emails with work instructions to NK and does not ask questions.
TPB is making a gigantic mistake. Once again, the enemy of your enemy is NOT your friend. But the friend of my enemy is most assuredly my enemy.
The US operates concentration camps, it is rather famous for it, or what do you think Indian Reservations are? They still exist and they were the inspiration (Go west for living space and damn the natives) for the German march to the east.
If you are thinking of places like Dachau, those were EXTERMINATION camps. Mind you, I can see how you are confused since the Germans weren't shy of killing people anywhere they could. But then again, the Indians weren't meant to survive on the reservations what with them being located in the worst regions the Americans could find so nature could cleanse the land.
NK is of course a very nasty regime BUT it is VERY dangerous to then allow everyone else to say "well we are not as bad as them, so we are clean". Clean by comparison perhaps but NOT clean. Just because your neighbor killed 100 babies doesn't mean you are innocent for only having killed one.
You can see this by the Dutch sheltering its war criminals (colonial actions post WW2) while trying to get German war criminals extradited protected by Germany who is trying to get Israel to answer for war crimes against the war criminal worshiping Palestinians (mufti of Jerusalem was one of the originators of the holocaust). One big vicious "he is evil for killing, we are not for doing the same".
IF this story is true, I think TPB may be taking a huge risk. It is one thing to say host a proxy in say China, "the reds have more freedom then us" but NK is a step to far. As said, all nations commit human rights abuses, or excuse them or ignore them so we are all tainted but NK isn't tainted, it is the taint. I can see the naive idealist make the case of how odd it is that oppresive regime X is more free then free regime Y but it is a completely FALSE statement. It is that French fat actor who ignores everything wrong with Russia and accepts asylum from a COMMUNIST KGB agent to seek refuge from having to pay taxes from a socialist government when his career has been funded by government subsidies to promote french movies. X 100!
The NK citizens after all are NOT more free then people in the west to share information freely. Rather the opposite, this proxy (if it exists) is ONLY accessible to the west and maybe the NK elite.
This isn't like showing how Canadians have better healthcare then the US by comparing health prices. It is like showing how NK is less racist then the US by showing they arrest fewer Afro-Americans. Which is true... and if I got to explain why it is an idiotic comparison, go and jump of a building, it is fun! All the cool kids are doing it.
NK is NOT a more free society in anyway by offering to host a proxy site. There is no irony here. Just a sick marketing ploy aimed at the extremely gullible. If you believe the argument for a second posting form your non-monitored unlimited Internet (sorry Americans, you failed) while NK people are living in the largest prison camps and those outside have to eat grass... well then you are a very sad piece of meat.
The enemy of my enemy is NOT your friend. Just because the US powers that be consider NK evil doesn't make them good. Not ALL the people killed by the Nazi's were innocent, they, like any regime still had a legal system and would have executed ordinary criminals. Same with NK, China, the US and every other nation. There are degrees of evil in which we have to exist or go mad but NK is way beyond any of that, they are NOT your ally or you make the mistake of the Irish, Palestinians and Africans who picked the Nazi side NOT because they liked the nazi's (well, the Irish did) but because they thought that the Enemy of my Enemy is my friend. They were wrong and have payed a heavy price for it. Because the friend of my enemy is most assuredly my enemy.
Indeed yes, education is about making people literate and numerate. AND THAT IS IT AND THAT IS ALL IT SHOULD DO.
Nobody can make you smart or interested in learning. THAT is something you got to do yourself. Developing a questioning mind "why is it so" is impossible to enforce.
Your parents can make you learn to ride a bicycle but only YOU can win the Tour de France.
Your father can teach you how to weld but only YOU can build the Eiffel tower.
Your mother can teach you how to read but only YOU can write the next great American novel.
Modern compulsory education is about forcing everyone to be given a chance to at least develop the basics from which maybe the individual him or herself can take off. But it is NOT designed, cannot be designed to make everyone into a scientist. THAT is what is wrong with American and Western education, the idea that we can press all kids into a school factory and produce insurance salesmen and ad-women.
Individuals themselves make this mistake too. I work in web-development PHP, which is the ass end of IT, 1st line tech support kids look down on us. But as easy as it is, you STILL can see who is not going to make it very simply. They are the ones who ask "what must I do". "What course should I take" "What book should I read".
Those who do make it just DO IT! There are two ways to complete a long march and that is by YOU yourself taking the first step, not asking someone else to tell you how to march. The basics "reading/math" you should have picked up in school. The skills, you have to master on your own AND ESPECIALLY on your OWN initiative.
If you, given the tools of reading and the internet can't learn PHP on your own, you will NEVER ever become any good at it because it is that DRIVE to learn, to examine, to explore, to experiment. If you ask, you are to lazy AND HERE IS WHY!
THE QUESTION HAS ALREADY BEEN ANSWERED: with google, you can easily find the question you are asking, that has already been answered. REMEMBER that if you want to see furthest, you should stand on the shoulders of giants. No great scientist worked in a vacuum, they STARTED by seeing the world, asking themselves a question and the finding an answer at least in PART by reading what others had written about it.
So asking on say yahoo what is a good PHP book shows that you lack even the basic skills of finding the answers to a previous question: you basically want knowledge to magically enter your brain and that just doesn't work (says a guy who has bought way to many language course books and still can't write a proper sentence because apparently you actually need to read the books not just buy them).
It is amazing we think of education as we do. Most schools in Holland teach swimming but we don't magically expect all kids to become olympic swimmers. Why do we expect all kids thought basic reading to be great writers then?
School swimming is there to make you slightly less likely to drown. The rest is up to you.
School education is there to stop you chewing the books, reading them, understanding what is inside, is up to you.
I can make you read say "Anne Frank's diary" or listen to MLK speeches but I cannot make you understand them. And frankly for all those who wish for schools to be MORE then literacy factories... do you REALLY want your school system to tell people what to think? What to understand?
Our school system might seem like a waste and horribly inefficient but I for one am more afraid of what an efficient school system would look like. Remember that in say Public Transport, if a train is filled to capacity, it is efficient. Factory farming is efficient, I do not wish to be a factory animal thank you very much.
1852 saw the first compulsory education law introduced in the US, the last US state would follow in 1917. England got its in 1870.
So... where do you get 400 years from? 2013 - 400 = 1613 that is still in the middle of the reformation.
And considering a girl recently got a bullet in her head for wanting to go to school, I would say that we have NOT been trying to educate everyone for 400 years or whatever but more that for thousands of years people have been actively trying to NOT educate all.
The danger of education is that people start to think for themselves. Disease caused by mutations in the genes? My my, what heresy is this, everyone knows it is god that cures disease if you listen to your local cleric and don't question why the pope sits on a throne of gold while millions starve, I read about Jesus Christ, I fail to see how he could ever approve of Catholicism.
And modern education is not really about creating anything but more in trying to prevent the kind of people who burn witches (last case happened very recently) or shoot girls in the face because they want to be able to read and write. It is not about making people smart, it is about making them slightly less stupid and maybe if you are lucky allowing a few bright ones to climb their way out of the cesspool that is humanity and improve all our lives. But make no mistake, school is NOT efficient or productive, it is a sausage factor that relies on random chance for a fine steak to get through at times.
And other systems have been tried. They never ever worked.
Lock kids in a building, force them to sit up right and 50% will come out a bit less stupid, 45% will remain as stupid as ever and vote Republican and 5% go on to shape the world for everyone else. Statistics pulled entire out of my ass but we don't need millions of Einsteins. It would be nice but we managed to do with just one. The rest of you? Like me? By-product. Just try not to stench the place up to much with your wasted life and let the smart people do their stuff.
I have actually got a Wii, I got it for last story. That was good... but I had to hook it up to a small display because else the graphics were just not acceptable anymore.
There is no such thing as a gamer, what one loves, the other hates but the Wii mostly seems to appeal to the extreme casual market. And that hurt the console because not many can afford to buy a console for just one game like me.
And the casual market is huge but Nintendo sells casual games for 40 bucks. The iPad sells them for a dollar or less. The iPad has high resolution graphics. The iPad has a controller with a screen that is not straight out of the 1990's. People keep calling the Wii U controller a tablet but if so, then it is a tablet from the dark ages that sold at your local chemist. LOOK at the screen spec, could they BE any cheaper? And Yes, I do know a Wii U controller is cheaper then an iPad but people, real people, don't compare costs like that. They want a iPad because they want one. They want a Wii U because of game... eh... what games? I stood in the shop, money in my pocket and there simply aren't any Wii U games I consider worth playing. And please don't come with typical twelve year old boy games, they ain't for me.
And that is really Nintendo's problem, they charge a premium for games that are no longer all that special. Once you could charge 1 buck for several minutes of playing pong but now adays, you can't. The market moved on and the Wii U hasn't. Not because its hardware is ridiciously low specced, not because its games are simplistic but because I can get casual games that Nintendo peddles for free on my phone.
And you might talk about a Zelda game not being casual but THAT is the killer right there. The gamer who wants games with a bit of meat is going to wait until there are enough games available to warrant the purchase of a console to play them. Fill the shelves with trivial casual games and you just dilude the perception of their being enough quality games for your hardware.
Nintendo went bargain basement with premium prices.
Name me the Nintendo Wii U games that won't bore a seasoned gamer to death. And if you say Zombie U, I will hit you with a slow motion cricket bat. It was the ONE title at launch gamers looked forward to and its reviews said it all. To simple, to easy, to little.
Nintendo needs to figure out what audience they want to cater for and the casual market don't pay premium prices for games. Why should they?
Oh wait, WB is just annoying but not outright killers.
How many people are forced to live under rule of the Westboro Baptist church against their will?
Oh wait, they do not get to enforce their rules on others.
So... they are the same how?
We should at LEAST adopt the catholic tradition that the new pope is carried over the heads of the cardinals so that they can inspect that he is well hung.
I don't care where he is born or his faith or what not but I do want to know the chief of staff has balls.
The engine WAS caught in the fence. It was other parts of the car that didn't including a tire but the engine did.
So why should we take any of your ideas for consideration when you clearly don't know what you are talking about?
People watch curling (if I spelled that right) which is basically floor sweeping on ice. What can happen. Someone falls and hurts their bottom a bit. Yet, it is a sport that people watch. Darts? Rakes in millions of viewers. Although it suffered a setback after that Alas Smith and Jones sketch (or was it not the nine o'clock news).
Right now Nascar is in the news. Which is to racing what an empty room is to a maze. Turn left because if you turn right, you get a crash. Well MAYBE people watch for the crashes but really the people in the stands saw less of it, one video shows a guy totally unaware of a tire hurling towards him, he payed the ticket price for that?
I am NOT saying I can see the appeal it is just that I figure that if people can watch paint dry, then watching grass grow might also appeal to similar people.
Part of the appeal might be watching someone else do something better then you, or different then you. In Holland soccer is claimed to have 16 million national coaches (implying that the majority who don't give a hoot about soccer still want to be coach of something they don't care about). I can see people watching another gamer just to shout abuse at the tv screen "how could you not have seen that sniper" "they pay him for that?". There is money in this, the tabloids basically sell people they 5 minutes of righteous indignation about todays headline during their breakfast.
Remember that if you wrote down the concept of Columbo a "who-dunnit in which you know who-dunnit" before Columbo existed, people would have, and did say "this is never going to work". But it did.
There are pro-gamers and they are making a living out of showing how they play. It might make you no longer want to live on this planet but that is the reality.
Now will it be big? Who knows, a lot of people make their living catering to very small markets, let it be. There are things you are not meant to understand. Printerest for instance. In the days that Twitter is allowed to exists, the concept that someone might watch someone else watching paint dry has to be readily accepted because that is exactly what millions are doing right now.
The BBC has/had at the weekend in the morning a cooking show. Not 1 half hour show. Not 2 half hour shows back to back. Not two 1 hour special back to back. An entire morning of cooking... IN ENGLAND the country with the worst food in the world bar the USA. I would WELCOME watching someone playing pacman...
For that matter, in the Arcade days, isn't that what we all did? Watch the kid who could do it really well hoping that by standing behind him we would be as cool and attract the girls (flaw in this reasoning was that there never were any girls)?
You are basically a guy who is still arguing that reality TV is never going to take off. A noble thought but I can't help thinking of windmills and charging them for some reason. Pro gaming is here, it is sad but it is here to stay. Hopefully at the same dizzying heights as professional curling.
I don't really want to watch someone else playing games either... yet I do watch other people working, eating and even having sex. Hell, the watching other people have sex industry is gigantic. And the BBC has a watching other people eat show every 30 minutes (and to humorless moderators, that is a joke, not a statement to be taken as literal claim to the BBC programming, that would be every 15 minutes).
And even the NFL comment is wrong... people pay to watch people remove toilets from buildings in Dirty Jobs. Watch mental retards fail to find gold in the ground but find it in broadcasting deals in stead. Hell Big Brother was nothing more then people sitting in their living room watching other people sitting in theirs. And it was a massive hit.
Lets analyse OC choppers. They aren't doing anything fancy or hightech. By watching it, you are not finding out how other people live their lives. It are just a bunch of overly fat rich white guys who suck at planning (did they EVER just start building a bike on time so it was finished in plenty of time) building gay bikes. How many seasons did it run?
Compared to that, watching someone else game... well it could hardly be anymore boring could it? And really the entire sports industry has proven for decades that people are willing to pay top dollar to watch someone else be marginally better at something that doesn't matter. Why cares who put a little ball the most times in the net? Most of the planet it seems.
I agree, it is time for Humanity 2.0 lets call this run a proof of concept and get god/evolution to do a radical redesign and come up with something less couch potato who doesn't fold at the knees at the sign of a crown, oscar or MVP award.
If you follow Japanese culture as well as you can from the west, you notice a radically different approach to copyrights. Take "porn". The Disney corporation has cracked down on pornographic parodies of cultural icons it didn't even create. Meanwhile pornographic parody doujins can be sold openly and legally in Japan.
But within shows, I have noticed far less cross-over. The almost mandatory american sitcom episode where they do an old series seems to be missing from Japan. Or I simply never seen it but in Anime at least I get the feeling that in commercial production, it is not done to touch another show.
But the real reason you see little OSS from Japan in the west is the gigantic language barriers. The Japanese grasp of English is piss poor. So is the average Americans grasp of English but the Japanese are ashamed of it, so they tend online to either hide to avoid shaming themselves or seclude themselves in corners of the net and not come out.
And this is NOT limited to the Japanese. Try Europe, there are countries that are far more visible then others. England for its 60 million citizens, some of whom can speak English are not as visible on the net as say the Dutch, a far smaller country whose citizens grasp of proper English is truly shockingly bad (guess where I am from). But we are Dutch, we know we are the largest people in the world and it got nothing to do with our height or waist measurements so we hold our heads tall and don't give a shit. Don't know the difference between where and were? Fuck it, I am Dutch, have some weed and relax.
Add some country flag plugin to your bittorrent client and look at where people are connecting from. You can see that the number of users from a country have little to do with the size of said country.
But you have come accross some examples of websites from Japan that block access to your US IP? Yes... they exist... and the same in reverse BUT you would NEVER see them.
But remember, dear American, almost ALL your content sites, restrict access to foreigners. Netflix, Hulu, CNN, ABC etc etc all have popups "this content not available in your region". Who are the copyright grubbers again? But of course, an American would never ever see them. Do you know that "adult" content on ebay is restricted to the rest of the world despite the majority of the rest of the world havving less restrictive rules? Bet you didn't know if you are American because you never ran into it.
But you DO notice a Japanese seller on Ebay who refuses to ship outside Japan. But hey, I ran into sellers who refused to ship from Germany to Holland and we are right next door with the same currency.
Basically it is the old "white male never notices the existence of racism/sexism until affirmative action affects him".
Let us remember in which country centuries old folk stories are owned by a company that waited with the release of a movie so they wouldn't have to pay for the copyright but have themselves been instrumental in extending copyright into infinity and beyond. In which country parts of century old songs are copyrighted (5 golden rings) and in which singing "happy birthday" commands a royalty payment.
Copyright grubbers? I would mention something with a pot and a kettle but no doubt some Yank copyrighted it.
I wouldn't think anyone would take the half hour remark literal. I thought most people would have the social skills to see this as clearly an exaggeration. Clearly I was wrong. Might I recommend you spend some more time around people and learn to pick up on when someone is being literal and when someone is exaggerating for comic effect?
It depends... and I know that is a weasely cop out but allow me to try and explain for the purposes of (web) development, my field.
Coding is a solo task, you know what to do, you just got to come up with the code to do it. If you know how to do that, you can work alone pretty easily and the overhead of the going to the office and office life is just wasted time really.
BUT development is BEST a cooperative task. I have had to take over several projects in the past that had been done by single developers working from their home and I have formed an opinion:
Developers should be forced at gun point to go outside and interact with people and other developers. Or they go strange. Very strange. Fast. About 30 minutes seems to be the limit.
It not that the guys who worked on this projects were bad coders... but they were or had become bad developers. And I am not just talking about lack of comments or documentation or only coding for the optimal case and damn error handling.
I am talking about coming up with solutions to problems which seem to indicate that the person in question google all his answers but had google returning results in reverse order. Literally everything he did was done the least recommended way. Other examples I have seen include coming up with solutions to problems that don't exist. The weirdest data storage solutions for traffic the system would never experience in a million years.
Normally, in a healthy development team, when one developer gets a crazy idea, he has to present it to his fellow developers... and often just by speaking your idea out loud, you realize your mind has gone spongy and it is time you actually spend some time around people again, socializing. For developers, this means saying "Hi" in the morning. It might not be much but it stops your mind from playing the fairies and starting to think the NoSQL is a solution for you. And this is true because whenever you grow big enough for NoSQL to be needed/useful, your team will no longer consist of a single person thinking he talking to a commitee when he is talking to himself.
In theory, if you got a strongly compartmentalized system, you could have a coder working on it, solo at home with minimal communication. But if it is seats of your pants coding of a constantly evolving system because of customer demands where everything is closely linked, it does rather help to have everyone in the same office.
It is possible that the most socially capable and well balanced people could work from home and still be part of a team effort... but lets face it. We are talking IT here. We don't do socially capable and/or balanced. And again, I am not kidding, of co-worker developers the majority has had a medical diagnosis that in polite society would be described by flipping your index-finger across your lips. I swear that sometimes I am the only sane person in the office. Bleep.
I can see the use of sometimes working from home when you just have to punch in a lot of code but that is not where the core business is for a good developer. That is in finding out where there are shortcomings in the existing system, what the desires are of the end user and what new uses are possible that could help set your product apart.
And in bouncing ideas of each other to help weed the bad ideas from the good ones.
Invariably I have noticed that the less communication happens on a project, the worse it gets. I have worked at one office were there where never any meetings, everyone just developed on their own. Does it surprise anyone that the majority of bugs were regression bugs?
You might make it work with IM and email, I prefer to be able to walk to someone's desk and talk through an idea. As I have become older even with my stunted social skills I have learned not to fear personal contact so much anymore. Get your team to spar and discuss. Lots and often. It means everyone is keeping up-to-date. I have had to let go a number of developers who couldn't be part of the team and insisted
The difference between a Rolls Royce and a Volkswagen Beetle is in the 10% that costs 90% of the price/time. One of the reasons Apple did so well with its products is that it at least went for 5% at not to much extra. The "it just works" praise Apple often gets means a REALLY boring job for someone who doesn't get to build anything exciting and new but just has to fix small trivial bugs that only occur during a blue moon but are the difference between something working and NOT working.
Consider this: Java. No deb files just yum and rpm support.
Chrome has deb packages for ubuntu.
Opera has special deb packages for mint to.
Now which is the piece of software recommended to be removed and which is the browser that just resumes where it left off, has build in mouse support, multi-account password managment build in and works on the most number of environments?
Building so many packages is a boring task but it is the difference between a polished product and a cutting edge product.
There is a man at Rolls Royce whose only job is to hand paint a stripe on the car. Something tells me that from this you can conclude that the paint job on a rolls is better then that on an Brazilian build beetle. It takes a lot of people taking exceptional care in seemingly trivial detail to get a truly polished experience out the door.
It is one reason Americans make better entertainment movies. No European would think of putting fake scaffolding on top of a skyscraper to make it look taller. Americans do... it makes for better entertainment movies because some guy in props is spending time thinking how to make a sky scraper look even better.
Google releases a lot of stuff but they never ever really finish it because they all moved on to the next big thing. It "works". You won't see a cutting edge Rolls Royce long after other car makers have already implemented a new feature.
Make your choice, polish or cutting edge.
Go to a market, a real one. Any kind, either one that has been going for centuries or a new one whatever the latest name is that it has gotten, swapmeet, farmers market, it is all the same.
Then stay a while if it is new. I guarentee you that by the time the 3rd market has been held, the rules WILL have been written down and by the end of the year it will be a booklet. Why?
Because people SUCK at working without rules. Just watch what happens when the traffic lights fail. And for every time when the community comes together when something unexpected happens like a flood or power failure, there are a dozen riots. The blitz is fondly remembered as a time when England came together but in reality it was a golden time for criminals who steal from bomb sites even from the dead and dying. That is to say nothing about clandestine trading.
Saying the "market" will fix things is the sure sign of a complete and utter waste of a human being. What is "the market"? Because I know how real markets operate, the got a commitee that decides on the rules and makes sure they are enforced. And the commitee is elected by the market people... so... how is this different from a government?
Or do you really want Apple, MS and Google to come together and among them decide how the Internet should be run?
Republicans are basically nuts. It is no wonder so many are Christians as well, you need a special kind of mind to see the real world every day and still believe in fairy tales.
If the markets could regulate themselves, they would have done so by now. They haven't.
I have got a tablet and am REALLY in the market for one that has TRUE multi-tasking and DOES keep state and not have to constantly swap out apps to save memory.
Mind you, I am NOT that hopeful any of the tablet makers in business can supply. Take something as simple as storage space. micr-sd cards are tiny AND at the expense of the customer. A slot makes your device more capable at the cost of a few dollars at most. Yet how many devices have say a dual slot capacity? Why not a quad slot? Why not an optional back to phones where you can slot in a larger battery and a raid of SD disks?
In a crowded market, you need to set yourself apart yet we are overwhelmed with "me too" devices that are just copies of what the makers hope is trending. Learn from MMO makers, there is no market in copying the leader, if people wanted a product like the leader is providing, they would buy the leader product.
MP3 player makers are even more silly, mobile phones are getting better at playing music all the time AND are increasing (slowly) storage space. What was iRivers brilliant marketing scheme for the last few years? Release SMALLER capacity players...
Here is a hint, IF I am in the market for a specialist device like a MP3 player or a non-iPhone, I am inthe market for something SPECIAL. Enough storage for say 16 hours of music playback SOUNDS nice but I listen to music 12 hours a day... with such limitted storage, it get really repetitive fast.
Oh, of course, a large capacty music player isn't for everyone. Absolutely... and nobody wanted a walkman either and everyone knew that MP3 players before the iPhone had only a niche market and that would never ever chance and no MP3 player maker would sell millions of the same model at outrageious profits.
Markets are created by creating a new product and then selling it to customer who never knew they wanted it. Nobody wanted an iPod until they became available. Hell, nobody wanted a car, before say the 1800's you could go to any car showroom and find ZERO customers all the way back to the dawn of time. If that is no proof there is no market for the car, what is.
Most companies are far to conservative, they want a sure fire hit and don't dare to innovate. The Sony that created the walkman totally failed to create the iPhone despite being perfectly suited to do so, they had the tech AND the content, the iDevices and iTunes should have been theirs but the suits had taken over from the engineers and all we got from them is "me too" devices.
Want to know who right now sells the BIGGEST storage MP3 players? Is it iRiver with the 600 dollar AK100 with DUAL micro-sd slot? No... that with two cards goes to just 96GB. Is it Cowon? 32GB and with an sd card of 64GB you can get (if lucky) 96.
But the iPad (oh okay, it is cheating a bit because it is atablet) is now on sale with 128gb. In your average store (at least in holland) the non-iMP3 players hover at a max of 16 gb, the iPhones are readily available at 64gb. Often cheaper too then top end other brand players with far less memory.
The Galaxy Note 2 sells in holland with just 16gb memory, the 64 gb variant can only be obtained in Korea... in very limited amounts.
The iPod classic meantime comes with a 160gb HD. The only one coming close is Archos... in large near tablet sized players not its mp3 players.
Apple ripped open the MP3 player market and did what Blizzard did with WoW to the market. It showed that ALL the tiny players could have been tech giants, no THE biggest company in the WORLD for a long time... if only they had dared to simply sell to people devices that could hold a bit of music.
There is a market out there for far superior tablets... but it won't visible until someone starts selling one. I can't buy what you don't sell.
Here is another hint for mobile device makers: Men are half the population, we got big pockets and large hands, we can handle a phone that weight twice the weight and is twice as thick. Nokia could supply the brick sized n900 fast enough. Give me a device that is CAPABLE.
EVERYONE knows the original walkman was to large to sit in a shirt pocket and they STILL sold like crazy. If you make it, they will buy it. But if you don't... well... that can't.