I am dutch, in Amsterdam the Bijlmer is a high-rise area that used to be thought of as the way of the future, relatively large high-rise apartments with lots of greenery, a subway and train station... it failed and became an area where... well there is no nice way to say it, the blacks live.
Not to long ago during a police raid on an apartment some jumped down and died. The claim? The police should in future call ahead that they were going to come for a raid so that the criminals they had come to arrest wouldn't feel the need to jump down to flee... and people wonder why the majority in Holland is fed up with the bleeding heart approach of Job Cohen, a man under whose wise rule as mayor of Amsterdam saw racial tensions increase, race riots, the rise of the right, Muslims attacks on gays, the failure of costly new projects to try to house the layers of society together (IJburg where it was tried to get mixed incomes in the same apartment blocks). Also the guy managed to get mushrooms banned which are a drug with ZERO bad effects on society (no crime, no drug addicts, no health effects).
Holland is smaller and you can't compare the Bijlmer with possibly Harlem of the past but what is ALSO lacking is things like the guardian angels where the locals cleared up their own mess.
Holland tried one approach and failed at it. See the current "uproar" about the website for reporting trouble caused by polish people in Holland. This is scary as hell, especially in how the left reaction just fuels the growing hatred. Godwin be damned, but just as MS didn't win so much because it was so good but won because everyone else sucked even worse. Hitler didn't get to power because he was so brilliant, he got to power because the opposition was so ineffective.
that is why the US has such though anti-drugs measures, because the pro-people are completely unable to form an effective opposition. See the distancing of medical drug users from the abusers. 4/20 is supposed to be a celebration of responsible recreational and medical drug users, not get high as a skunk day.
The best way to loose your battle is to choose representatives that rub everyone else the wrong way. I am personally not that intrested in drugs one way or another, but talk to one doper for a minute and I start think that shooting all of them would not be a bad idea at all.
See this very story, AND the other story about some idiot getting caught with weed. Cosh, I wonder how many who want the police to burst in on the evidence of an app, ALSO protest the police searching a car in which drugs were found on the evidence of a trained dog... Want to make me believe in your cause? Try to at least be consitent with in the same paragraph.
Anyway, Holland is no paradise. The left forgot that a social society has to be supported by the middle class and thought that all the justification needed was "because we say so". Then the right marched in with scare stories and the left totally forgot how to win a debate with strong factual arguments. Every single debate between Wilders and Cohen was a bloodbath with Cohen totally unable to counter the rabid hatred of Wilders. I fear Hitler less then I fear the likes of Chamberlain.
See the current Republican candidates in the US. They make Bush look sane, even reasonable. You would almost hope that it was a plot to ensure Obama wins the next elections by creating a opposing candidate nobody would vote for... but people are voting for these rabid loonies. This time, it is not even a clear win for the least loony.
Prepare for a LOT more crazy stuff, both in Holland and the US. Good times are not coming.
Last time I checked none of the candidates who even stood a change of getting a single vote were pro-cannabis or even just anti-drug war. So who are these people with their wishes and why don't they show up as voters?
If it REALLY was against the will of the people, the people could create a new party and vote for that party and get their wishes granted. Either weed makes you a a lazy bitch or unable to count.
Democratie is the dictatorship of the majority, you can call it unfair all you want but you look pretty damn stupid claiming all people are pro-drugs when only anti-drugs people are voted for.
That is what driving instructors are for. Mind you, what are the mandatory practice hours for? If you can pass the test, you can pass the test. Seems the US is doing things the akward way again.
Don't mention Angry Birds, it might sell for a lot less but if people were capable of rational thought they would see that these types of games were once available for free if coded in flash. AB is as overpriced as selling a BASIC (The programming language) snakes game for the windows platform for a dime (code used to come free with Windows).
A 1 euro McD burger might be cheaper then a 10 euro three star dinner but one of them is overpriced and the other isn't.
What do you GET for that 60 dollar? A FPS with predictable story line that can be finished in a couple of hours, or weeks of playing time in a sprawling universe where there is always more to discover?
In MMO's a lot of kiddies (safe to assume the same who get phone subscriptions that end up bankrupting them because they don't understand math) clamor for free to play, then you do the math and notice that F2P really means, PAY LOTS AND LOTS MORE but hide it in small segments so people never quite notice just how much you spent and oops your account always has unspent points left over at the end because the concept of spare change has gone from the world so you now buy the game NOT for exactly 60 dollars but for 120 dollars and you pay with 2 100 dollar notes but the company keeps the change.
But you never buy in the shop?
Then you basically want other gamers to pay for your game or think that games are free to develop and run, you are silly, go and play in traffic. It is FREE!
The biggest problem with the console market is that to many game developers are fishing in the same shallow and money deprived pool. I am an old gamer, I got money to burn but fewer and fewer titles are aimed at me. It has been remarked many times before but just how many military FPS can there be before they start to cannibalize each others sales? This is what hurt the Wii, it didn't have any FPS but instead it aimed it at one segment of the market and aimed a LOT of games at this segment who buy only 1 game with their console and play it casually for the lifetime of the console. Oops! It is like trying to make your money with a hamburger joint where you get the first free and make the money on the 2nd with the lucrative anorexic market.
The game industry is incredibly immature. If game producers make cars, there would be one type of car and it would be a ricer. And fuck everyone else. And kiddies would shout that cars need to be free and car makers should make their money from parts they wouldn't buy.
The game industry in incredible immature but that is okay because so are the majority of their audience.
Can you go from 100% of the pie to 10% and STILL end up with more pie? Yes, you can! Simply increase the size of the pie. Granted, for that scenario, you need to increase the pie a lot but that is what has been happening in computer gaming.
The earliest computer games were the domain of people who had access to mainframes, this was only a small subsection of the population. Arcade games made them more available but the nature of arcade games restricted it to children. Home computers (Atari, Commodore, Sinclair) changed this again but the machines were very expensive and frankly the games just weren't that accessible. You might have fond memories of text adventures, but you are a freak.
Home arcade machines where cheaper and easier but playing pong can only attract so many people for so long. The early machines showed a promising future but the present was graphics where you needed a manual to tell you what you were looking at.
But slowly, this changed, computers became smaller and cheaper while the games got better and better. And so, more and more people buy gaming hardware and play games.
Flash games haven't replaced traditional PC games, they added to the number of people playing games on a PC. Tablets haven't taken away from other platforms, they added gamers. IF there is a slowdown in either the PC or big console market then it has far more to do with those markets on their own. Gosh, do we REALLY need another 12yr old FPS with angry rapper soundtrack?
Women gamers might not be that intrested in games so obviously aimed at 12 year olds. Are there many female gamers? Google for The Sims 3 MODS... this is females not just PLAYING a game, but MODDING it with no official support, just command line tools. FEMALES! Modding!?! But where are these females catered for on the consoles? Barbie playhouse? Where is the mature rated female game? (As in subjects that attract adult females, not 12 yr old boys, as amazing as it seems, for some weird reason most women are not terribly excited by seeing polygon boobies with full jiggle animation. Probably because the spoiled women can play with a real set whenever they want. INEQUALIY! Demand fair distrubution of boobie playtime NOW!) Anyway... I didn't believe that women really played PC games until I found myself in a lotro raid of my guild and I was the only male. And that was a 12 man... 11 woman, 1 man raid.
But you shouldn't take this the wrong way, just because a lot of women game as well, does NOT mean ALL games have to be women friendly. Different games, for different markets. It ain't so hard to understand. Just because hamburger restaurants sell a lot of hamburgers doesn't mean every single restaurant in the world has to be a hamburger joint. In fact, you might find that if you did this, the revenue for restaurants would fall. Angry birds is a top selling game but if that was the only thing on offer, the market would quickly collapse. Yet, that is exactly what has been happening in the big console market. The market is completely dominated with Call of Honor Gears Halo 56. MS knew this and desperately tried to attract japanese developers so they would at least get some JRPG action on the original xbox. It failed and the original xbox was a dismal failure in Japan. It was a far bigger success in the west... with in the segment of the population the games catered for.
I don't even think tablets will kill the Vita and DS. Those handholds are doing their own killing. Look at the line-up for the Vita? What is there? The majority of games are extremely expensive versions of games you can buy for a buck on a tablet or even try for free. Yes yes, wipeout might be some kind of classic (read milked) title but its appeal is rather limited in terms of segment of the population. It also frankly ain't suited for mobile gaming where perfect control, perfect vision, long load up times etc etc are just not on.
Neither are dark games, 99% in the sun it means you don't see shit. Where are the light deep story games that don't mind if they are
wouldn't that imply they would learn not to make the same mistake again and again?
I personally think that Bob, 95/98 smart floppy, ME, Vista are MS constantly trying to make one desktop that suits all BEFORE the user carefully configures a bland default desktop to their needs.
If you go to a fine restaurant, you eat whatever you are served. It sounds odd but a 3 star chef is presumed to know better then you what tastes good. At Burger King, you decide, since it is presumed the people at BK have NO idea what tastes good.
Take my android tablet, it is has a image slideshow widget. Nice enough but it is so designed that I have to select each image by hand. My collection I wouldn't mind to much if my mum would see (she knew I was a sick twisted little twerp) is several thousand images... why can't I select an entire folder with all sub folders? There are of course other alternatives but some miss the simple option to exclude images that don't fit in the current screen orientation, or can't handle it if the extension is in all caps or jpeg instead of jpg.
It sounds so simple but it is god damn fucking hard to give the user simple yet fully functional apps that work well together on a single screen. How many cores does your CPU widget support? Soon we will have over a dozen... you basic dial widget will get rather crowded.
Standard windows gave you the basics and if you wanted more, you went out and got it. That these companies that supply for instance window blinds are not giants, shows that most never went out. Maybe they didn't want it?
Google activates an ungodly amount of Android phones each day... FIND the ONE app in the android store, free or otherwise, that has been downloaded by MORE then HALF the activations of a single day... You might be able to find one but my point is that a lot of people don't seem to download very much. Maybe the basic phone is good enough? Maybe people are not that interested in doing more?
Windows 8, metro is active desktop and widgets all over again. If it failed the first time, why should it succeed now? How many here have customized their google custom page? Or their ISP portal page?
I think 8 will be another Vista if MS and the world is unlucky (because it means IE will remain a block for the web) and a ME or even a Bob if MS is unlucky.
The only people I have seen excited about Windows 8 are MS Phone users... and we all know how well that has been selling. If new coke was being advertised by piss drinkers, it wouldn't make me to happy about the future of new coke.
The most simple thing might be that computers right now work well enough. Even if Metro isn't a disaster, why should I upgrade?
Routinely, very violent crimes are discovered of mass murderers who have been killing people for years and managed to hide this. Are you so naive to think that when these cases are discovered IF they ever are, that the statistics for the years the killings happened in are revised? Silly boy, of course they are not. All a drop shows is that less crimes have been reported and solved. And it is not like the system has never been caught out trying to hide crimes to make themselves look good. Bike thefts in Holland for instance are handled with just a piece of paper so who bothers to report them anymore. HEY! Crime has dropped.
Tell that to the mexicans, all those drug related murders are for the sake of the American drug consumption. But hey, the US successfully outsourced the crime so they can make their statistics look better.
You can make statistics show anything you want, count a little bit of this, a little more of that. Don't qualify drunk driving deaths as murder anymore, if medics manage now to save more people, that shows less people died from gun wounds so clearly the number of people that got shot have gone down.
I have heard for decades that crime has been going down in Holland. In such a small country, that should have resulted in zero murders by now. Odd that this isn't the case.
The dutch labour party (ex-socialists, now more commonly thought of as bleeding hearts) lost its leader who was the Mayor of Amsterdam during massive budget overruns, a political murder by a Muslim on a critic of Islam, increasing racial tension, race related riots, failure of expensive projects to get the races to live to gether (IJburg) and increased attacks on Homo sexuals by Muslims. Name: Job Cohen... the guy then became leader of labour and was not nearly as successful as a politician in the opositions as you might have thought.
So, they currently have a leadership election and one of the leaders prides himself on having been a street coach for troubled youths... He claims though sentencing is not the answer. What then is the answer is not answered but he claims though sentencing does not stop re-offending. It tells you a lot a because anyone with a working brain cell will realize that the toughest sentence if that of death and dead people seldom re-offend.
Mind you, he has a point. There are a lot of countries in the world and over history an almost infinite variety of methods have been used to deter crime. And not a single one of them really works, no not even the bullet to the head. The Chinese are current masters in it and their crime rate is on in increase. They show weekly interviews with the condemned and in China if you are from a bad area, you don't have a longer life expectenancy on deathrow then you got in your own home, 1 week and you are dead. And as said, the crime rate is on the rise. The US has though sentences and a high crime rate.
Holland has a liberal system AND a high crime rate. Oh, the statistics vary but if you then put them into context such as that the dutch legal system is extremely bad at getting convictions, you have to wonder what the real crime rate.
As for re-offending, almost any system claims something between 70-80% FAILURE RATE and that is ONLY counting those criminals who are successfully tracked at going through the entire legal procedure again leading to a served jailed sentence AGAIN. Oh, if a criminal re-offends but gets killed by the police in full view of a million witnesses who swear he was committing the crime, IT STILL DOES NOT COUNT AS RE-OFFENDING.
Plea bargains, parole, suspended sentences, time served etc etc they are all just patches to make a system that barely works not collapse completely. And we need the system to work because there are areas of the world where the system HAS collapsed and they are not nice places to be. Prove me wrong and move to Somalia or even just Mexico.
And you want to overload this barely functioning machine? If you are in America, you are just living thanks to the believe by Mexicans and blacks that the system will prevent them from just taking what they want. If that ever crumbles, every rich spoiled white/. nerd is going to get it is so bad that they will pray for a jock to pants them one last time before they die. It is lucky the blacks of LA are so dumb they rioted by attacking each other instead of descending enmass on Hollywood and taking out every rich white person thinking that black and hispanic cops are going to risk their lives for their rich asses and you better hope the system keeps that believe in tact.
The system ain't perfect but so far it works. If you want to improve it think real hard whether you are going to survive its destruction. It might be nice to watch an old crappy building being blown up to make space for something new, BUT NOT WHEN YOU ARE STANDING ON TOP OF IT.
Fight the man! It is not a battle cry the man should be using. And unless you suck as a nerd, you are the 1%.
You should see the number of people who boycott Sony for its activities... they buy an Xbox instead...........
People like to take a moral stand but they also like their shiny so they make a stand and then ignore any evidence their new stance is even more insane.
Don't like MS? Go for Apple and claim it is so much more open and less evil... no matter what Apple pulls because else you have to not just give up your shiny but admit you have no morals either.
And I suppose the stories about Saudi princes beating said immigrants is just the same as immigrants not being all that well like in the west. Except it isn't.
What about Kuwait? Liberated by the west, it ranks very high in GDP per person, that is because in Kuwait, only the natives are counted. Immigrants are not. Even legal immigrants who are needed to actually do the work that makes the country so rich. Palestinians? Kuwait has a lot of them but of course the Palestinians choose wrong with supporting Saddam and they are now treated by their fellow Muslims as scum...
But you are right, migration is not just to the west. A lot of Africans go to South Africa for jobs... where they are totally not hated by the South Africans (black) with regularly exploding violence on a scale and brutality not seen for not nearly long enough in the west.
In many ways, you add to my point. Yes, there are migration patterns to other parts of the world and ALL of them end up with worse results for the migrant then in the west. We WIN again, even if it is just because we suck less (which is not a way to win at all).
The world isn't about right and wrong and anyway, what you consider right and wrong is considered rather silly by 6 billion people. It is about trying to ensure that tomorrow won't be a hell of a lot worse then today. And a Muslim run world would be a hell of a lot worse? Want to proof me wrong? Reverse the migration streams. As bad as some claim the west is, a lot of people would risk a dangerous crossing in tiny boats for a living as toilet cleaners rather then be anywhere else.
What does migration have got to do with it? Libya used to help Europe in stemming the tide of immigrants from further south. Further uproar in that area will not help stem further migration, it was one of the reasons actions against Libya were opposed in the west by a lot of people (because they were for peace you thought? How silly).
Iran is a lynch pin in a very complex scenario where all the actors and their lines are unknown and performed in the dark for a blind audience. You could say it is playing a game but what game? With what rules and with which cards? The west has learned the hard way that enforcing its values on another culture doesn't work, Iraq and Afghanistan are disaster areas. Libya is too early to tell so going into Iran is unlikely be a quick easy win. But as long as Iran remains, Syria remains. Sudan remains, Northern Nigeria remains... gutting Iran would send a strong message but is also unacceptable... so what to do?
Nothing? Then you keep having to react to whatever it pulls next... Iran not hostile? Yeah, the mass murdering in Sudan and Nigeria are just for laughs. Iran knows Muslims soldiers have the military value of they regimental donkey so they fight their wars by proxy.
What do YOU propose is done in Syria? Nothing? Deny anything is wrong? Somehow blame it all on Israel? Well nothing you can do it about it without upsetting Iran. So thousands of Muslims die at the hand of Muslims and you do nothing? Speak up when you say that... no, that is not acceptable either.
Politicians are often said to think as this, "people say something must done, this is something, so it must be done". That is true enough... but people keep shouting "something must be done". YOU come up with something better.
Ideally, war should be the last answer, it often is. The pity is that it often also is the only answer. Will Iran be attacked by the end of the year? No idea. To many interest, not always as you expect, many conflicting and a lot of actors who are pulling unseen strings. It is not just about testing the west by proxy, those pulling those strings would also not want to be seen to fail again, so they might force their puppet to relax. (If Iran backed by China fails and the Chinese economy suffers are the oil now moves west again without China buying it cheap thanks to the Iran embargo limitting competition for it would the Chinese people realize they can rebel as well) Overly complex but that is how it is all connected.
War happens when those pulling the wires loose control of them. It has been happenig quite a lot really and by definition of loosing control, you can't predict it.
Recent dutch new story, some kids taped a pet mouse to a firework rocket. Why was this news? Because reporting each and every day the billions of pets NOT mistreated would make the news run a bit long.
News is something that is exceptional, not the norm. Today the sun came up, is NOT news. Today the sun didn't come up, that is news.
The Bill Gates/MS icon on Slashdot (is/was) that of a borg version of the Dorky One... the idea being that MS wanted to assimilate you into the collective. Turns out it was a hippy collective indeed with about as many rules as Fight Club with no enforcement.
It has often been remarked that MS dominance was obtained not so much through the success of MS but through the failure of everyone else. Read Apple, IBM and the various home computer makers whose names are lost in the mists of time only remembered by the senile elders.
And through their failure, we gained the Wintel platform which now turns out to have been insanely open. Imagine MS telling Windows developers how to collect payment, if at all. Does MS tell Blizzard how to collect its pound of flesh of the enslaved? How shareware should be payed for?
Does MS dictate which version of MS you should run on Dell hardware? Does Dell stop you from upgrading the OS?
It is not as if MS never tried but it failed so often nobody took them to serious and so the evil that might have happened, never happened. It is like a brutal dictator whose brutality ends up as a kind of cute outburst with throwing chairs instead of the millions dead with efficient dictators. A dictator who fails at being terrible sounds a lot better then a dictator who succeeds... and Apple and Google are certainly trying hard enough.
It is kinda sad that companies keep trying to get total control when the PC did so well without it.
The moment those artists stop preaching and performing for dictators for million dollar payments. The moment those artists stop using tax shelters the moment their subsidized careers start to generate a profit.
In Holland a recent cost cutting measure was to increase the vat from 6% to 19% for "art" (tickets). The art industry thought they could use the publics sympathy to protest this... the public protested alright... but NOT in favor of the art industry. Artists have lost a lot of sympathy with the common man.
I used to be a baker until the world changed and people started shopping in super markets and super markets use bakers products as a loss leader making it near impossible to compete especially with banks unwilling to grant a loan that won't be payed back until years and years later with only the tiniest margins.
Do I get special laws to protect me? No? Then SCREW the fucking artists.
Your memory is fine, it is just your math skills that have rusted with age?
Mind you, I know what you mean. It is even worse when you talk about a date like this and some kid pipes up that he was born that year. It REALLY gets bad if they claim they hadn't been born yet. Mind you, they got it easy, after mentioning that, they will NEVER have to worry about being as old as I am now. Not if they get within reach of my cane.
Okay, you enjoy coding for coding sakes? Write 1 million goto lines. Enjoy. You don't? You want to achieve something? have something to show for it at the end even if it is just demo or a thing that has been done a million times but the first time for you? Then you are doing it for something.
It is amazing how many idiots there are on slashdot. This is not new. People do things for the reward, remove the reward (by cutting into the brain) and people stop doing it. Deny this and you deny biology and are just one small step away from Creationism.
No. That is like asking if there are kids who want to weld for welding sake. Or fuck for fuck sake. We don't fuck for fuck sake, we fuck for the climax. Without the climax, fucking would be fucking boring.
Most people code because they want to get something done. Those who don't work in government. Kids want to code a game, the kids that want to code a database or search algorithm tend to be watched by the FBI, from a safe distance, through a snipers scope.
It is the same as with a spoken language. Nobody wants to learn French for the sake of the language, they want to impress chicks. Japanese is only studied by people with a fantasy of picking up school girls, desu. Latin for those who wished to be picked up by Catholic priests.
The easiest way to keep kids interested is to make sure things beep and whistle and spin. It does't matter that much if it is text graphics, direct 3d or leds on a Arduino board, or a programming robot game. What matters is that the concepts have clear examples with easy to understand results.
It is the reason PHP is so popular, its examples are extremely clear and light on the jargon. It is the reason Lego is such a success, nobody has to spend time learning the building blocks of Lego, they are clear... then you can spend all your energy on creating.
Kids haven't really changed but nerdy pursuits have always been the domain of the select few... the few selected by girls not to be dated.
I predict it will have the same resounding success as the war on drugs, hunger, terror and of course REAL piracy. If after hundreds of years, we still can't get rid of real pirates when men in little boats are faced with gunships and destroyers... what the fuck hell chance does the music industry stand?
How long has to war on drugs lasted now? And the price of drugs is lower then ever, the supply richer and more varied then ever and the quality sky high. And this is a physical good that has to be moved around.
The internet and digital media ignore border controls, are near impossible to inspect and where as the means for transporting drugs haven't really changed, the speed for distribiting digital content will sky rocket, the costs will continue to plummet and the availability to the world population will explode. If the same happened to drugs runners drugs runner would be hauling cargo's in the thousands of tons at light speed to any point on the planet in the same instance.
And you want to stop this?
Good fucking luck. Copyright law doesn't need reform because it is immoral. It needs reform because the world has changed. These people are trying to implement laws to curb horses in the streets in the age of the transporter.
Gosh, where ae all the rail fans?
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Everytime a PHP story is posted, the rail fans rant about PHP's insecurity... yet here a massive flaw in rails basic design has rendered every single rails project out there vulnerable... wonder if the rail fans will acknowledge this massive failure AND the rail team slow response to this in the future. Doubt it.
But don't worry. I will remind them;)
The lesson here? Never claim your project is more secure because someone somewhere is browsing your root directory right now.
Right now, the topic in Holland is the costs of the Euro vs the Guilder. A politician has commisioned a report to examine the costs of switching back. 51 miljard is the worst case cost (this second part is rarely mentioned by the media, against a cost of 71 to stay with the Euro.
To give an idea of the amount, the current deficitit is 24 miljard. So we ain't talking peanuts.
But who do you believe? The corrupt officials who didn't see the crisis coming or a politician with a long track history of grandstanding, who is an ex party member of the current ruling party and as such a collegue of Zalm, one of the liars about the Euro?
Any individual cannot possibly do his own research, it would take to much time, so it all comes down who you believe. The lying incompetent or the incompetent liar.
What do you care about Obama? Your poor English skills make it abundantly clear you are not allowed to vote for him OR fall in the discussed category of people who are to stupid to vote.
I wonder what the 17th Amendment is. English requirement for neutralization?
Slashdot Mirror
I am dutch, in Amsterdam the Bijlmer is a high-rise area that used to be thought of as the way of the future, relatively large high-rise apartments with lots of greenery, a subway and train station... it failed and became an area where... well there is no nice way to say it, the blacks live.
Not to long ago during a police raid on an apartment some jumped down and died. The claim? The police should in future call ahead that they were going to come for a raid so that the criminals they had come to arrest wouldn't feel the need to jump down to flee... and people wonder why the majority in Holland is fed up with the bleeding heart approach of Job Cohen, a man under whose wise rule as mayor of Amsterdam saw racial tensions increase, race riots, the rise of the right, Muslims attacks on gays, the failure of costly new projects to try to house the layers of society together (IJburg where it was tried to get mixed incomes in the same apartment blocks). Also the guy managed to get mushrooms banned which are a drug with ZERO bad effects on society (no crime, no drug addicts, no health effects).
Holland is smaller and you can't compare the Bijlmer with possibly Harlem of the past but what is ALSO lacking is things like the guardian angels where the locals cleared up their own mess.
Holland tried one approach and failed at it. See the current "uproar" about the website for reporting trouble caused by polish people in Holland. This is scary as hell, especially in how the left reaction just fuels the growing hatred. Godwin be damned, but just as MS didn't win so much because it was so good but won because everyone else sucked even worse. Hitler didn't get to power because he was so brilliant, he got to power because the opposition was so ineffective.
that is why the US has such though anti-drugs measures, because the pro-people are completely unable to form an effective opposition. See the distancing of medical drug users from the abusers. 4/20 is supposed to be a celebration of responsible recreational and medical drug users, not get high as a skunk day.
The best way to loose your battle is to choose representatives that rub everyone else the wrong way. I am personally not that intrested in drugs one way or another, but talk to one doper for a minute and I start think that shooting all of them would not be a bad idea at all.
See this very story, AND the other story about some idiot getting caught with weed. Cosh, I wonder how many who want the police to burst in on the evidence of an app, ALSO protest the police searching a car in which drugs were found on the evidence of a trained dog... Want to make me believe in your cause? Try to at least be consitent with in the same paragraph.
Anyway, Holland is no paradise. The left forgot that a social society has to be supported by the middle class and thought that all the justification needed was "because we say so". Then the right marched in with scare stories and the left totally forgot how to win a debate with strong factual arguments. Every single debate between Wilders and Cohen was a bloodbath with Cohen totally unable to counter the rabid hatred of Wilders. I fear Hitler less then I fear the likes of Chamberlain.
See the current Republican candidates in the US. They make Bush look sane, even reasonable. You would almost hope that it was a plot to ensure Obama wins the next elections by creating a opposing candidate nobody would vote for... but people are voting for these rabid loonies. This time, it is not even a clear win for the least loony.
Prepare for a LOT more crazy stuff, both in Holland and the US. Good times are not coming.
Last time I checked none of the candidates who even stood a change of getting a single vote were pro-cannabis or even just anti-drug war. So who are these people with their wishes and why don't they show up as voters?
If it REALLY was against the will of the people, the people could create a new party and vote for that party and get their wishes granted. Either weed makes you a a lazy bitch or unable to count.
Democratie is the dictatorship of the majority, you can call it unfair all you want but you look pretty damn stupid claiming all people are pro-drugs when only anti-drugs people are voted for.
That is what driving instructors are for. Mind you, what are the mandatory practice hours for? If you can pass the test, you can pass the test. Seems the US is doing things the akward way again.
"Hey, I am hopping here!"? Then it croaks as it is flattened under a taxi?
Swims in the river and sings "it ain't easy glowing green?"
Don't mention Angry Birds, it might sell for a lot less but if people were capable of rational thought they would see that these types of games were once available for free if coded in flash. AB is as overpriced as selling a BASIC (The programming language) snakes game for the windows platform for a dime (code used to come free with Windows).
A 1 euro McD burger might be cheaper then a 10 euro three star dinner but one of them is overpriced and the other isn't.
What do you GET for that 60 dollar? A FPS with predictable story line that can be finished in a couple of hours, or weeks of playing time in a sprawling universe where there is always more to discover?
In MMO's a lot of kiddies (safe to assume the same who get phone subscriptions that end up bankrupting them because they don't understand math) clamor for free to play, then you do the math and notice that F2P really means, PAY LOTS AND LOTS MORE but hide it in small segments so people never quite notice just how much you spent and oops your account always has unspent points left over at the end because the concept of spare change has gone from the world so you now buy the game NOT for exactly 60 dollars but for 120 dollars and you pay with 2 100 dollar notes but the company keeps the change.
But you never buy in the shop?
Then you basically want other gamers to pay for your game or think that games are free to develop and run, you are silly, go and play in traffic. It is FREE!
The biggest problem with the console market is that to many game developers are fishing in the same shallow and money deprived pool. I am an old gamer, I got money to burn but fewer and fewer titles are aimed at me. It has been remarked many times before but just how many military FPS can there be before they start to cannibalize each others sales? This is what hurt the Wii, it didn't have any FPS but instead it aimed it at one segment of the market and aimed a LOT of games at this segment who buy only 1 game with their console and play it casually for the lifetime of the console. Oops! It is like trying to make your money with a hamburger joint where you get the first free and make the money on the 2nd with the lucrative anorexic market.
The game industry is incredibly immature. If game producers make cars, there would be one type of car and it would be a ricer. And fuck everyone else. And kiddies would shout that cars need to be free and car makers should make their money from parts they wouldn't buy.
The game industry in incredible immature but that is okay because so are the majority of their audience.
Can you go from 100% of the pie to 10% and STILL end up with more pie? Yes, you can! Simply increase the size of the pie. Granted, for that scenario, you need to increase the pie a lot but that is what has been happening in computer gaming.
The earliest computer games were the domain of people who had access to mainframes, this was only a small subsection of the population. Arcade games made them more available but the nature of arcade games restricted it to children. Home computers (Atari, Commodore, Sinclair) changed this again but the machines were very expensive and frankly the games just weren't that accessible. You might have fond memories of text adventures, but you are a freak.
Home arcade machines where cheaper and easier but playing pong can only attract so many people for so long. The early machines showed a promising future but the present was graphics where you needed a manual to tell you what you were looking at.
But slowly, this changed, computers became smaller and cheaper while the games got better and better. And so, more and more people buy gaming hardware and play games.
Flash games haven't replaced traditional PC games, they added to the number of people playing games on a PC. Tablets haven't taken away from other platforms, they added gamers. IF there is a slowdown in either the PC or big console market then it has far more to do with those markets on their own. Gosh, do we REALLY need another 12yr old FPS with angry rapper soundtrack?
Women gamers might not be that intrested in games so obviously aimed at 12 year olds. Are there many female gamers? Google for The Sims 3 MODS... this is females not just PLAYING a game, but MODDING it with no official support, just command line tools. FEMALES! Modding!?! But where are these females catered for on the consoles? Barbie playhouse? Where is the mature rated female game? (As in subjects that attract adult females, not 12 yr old boys, as amazing as it seems, for some weird reason most women are not terribly excited by seeing polygon boobies with full jiggle animation. Probably because the spoiled women can play with a real set whenever they want. INEQUALIY! Demand fair distrubution of boobie playtime NOW!) Anyway... I didn't believe that women really played PC games until I found myself in a lotro raid of my guild and I was the only male. And that was a 12 man... 11 woman, 1 man raid.
But you shouldn't take this the wrong way, just because a lot of women game as well, does NOT mean ALL games have to be women friendly. Different games, for different markets. It ain't so hard to understand. Just because hamburger restaurants sell a lot of hamburgers doesn't mean every single restaurant in the world has to be a hamburger joint. In fact, you might find that if you did this, the revenue for restaurants would fall. Angry birds is a top selling game but if that was the only thing on offer, the market would quickly collapse. Yet, that is exactly what has been happening in the big console market. The market is completely dominated with Call of Honor Gears Halo 56. MS knew this and desperately tried to attract japanese developers so they would at least get some JRPG action on the original xbox. It failed and the original xbox was a dismal failure in Japan. It was a far bigger success in the west... with in the segment of the population the games catered for.
I don't even think tablets will kill the Vita and DS. Those handholds are doing their own killing. Look at the line-up for the Vita? What is there? The majority of games are extremely expensive versions of games you can buy for a buck on a tablet or even try for free. Yes yes, wipeout might be some kind of classic (read milked) title but its appeal is rather limited in terms of segment of the population. It also frankly ain't suited for mobile gaming where perfect control, perfect vision, long load up times etc etc are just not on.
Neither are dark games, 99% in the sun it means you don't see shit. Where are the light deep story games that don't mind if they are
wouldn't that imply they would learn not to make the same mistake again and again?
I personally think that Bob, 95/98 smart floppy, ME, Vista are MS constantly trying to make one desktop that suits all BEFORE the user carefully configures a bland default desktop to their needs.
If you go to a fine restaurant, you eat whatever you are served. It sounds odd but a 3 star chef is presumed to know better then you what tastes good. At Burger King, you decide, since it is presumed the people at BK have NO idea what tastes good.
Take my android tablet, it is has a image slideshow widget. Nice enough but it is so designed that I have to select each image by hand. My collection I wouldn't mind to much if my mum would see (she knew I was a sick twisted little twerp) is several thousand images... why can't I select an entire folder with all sub folders? There are of course other alternatives but some miss the simple option to exclude images that don't fit in the current screen orientation, or can't handle it if the extension is in all caps or jpeg instead of jpg.
It sounds so simple but it is god damn fucking hard to give the user simple yet fully functional apps that work well together on a single screen. How many cores does your CPU widget support? Soon we will have over a dozen... you basic dial widget will get rather crowded.
Standard windows gave you the basics and if you wanted more, you went out and got it. That these companies that supply for instance window blinds are not giants, shows that most never went out. Maybe they didn't want it?
Google activates an ungodly amount of Android phones each day... FIND the ONE app in the android store, free or otherwise, that has been downloaded by MORE then HALF the activations of a single day... You might be able to find one but my point is that a lot of people don't seem to download very much. Maybe the basic phone is good enough? Maybe people are not that interested in doing more?
Windows 8, metro is active desktop and widgets all over again. If it failed the first time, why should it succeed now? How many here have customized their google custom page? Or their ISP portal page?
I think 8 will be another Vista if MS and the world is unlucky (because it means IE will remain a block for the web) and a ME or even a Bob if MS is unlucky.
The only people I have seen excited about Windows 8 are MS Phone users... and we all know how well that has been selling. If new coke was being advertised by piss drinkers, it wouldn't make me to happy about the future of new coke.
The most simple thing might be that computers right now work well enough. Even if Metro isn't a disaster, why should I upgrade?
Routinely, very violent crimes are discovered of mass murderers who have been killing people for years and managed to hide this. Are you so naive to think that when these cases are discovered IF they ever are, that the statistics for the years the killings happened in are revised? Silly boy, of course they are not. All a drop shows is that less crimes have been reported and solved. And it is not like the system has never been caught out trying to hide crimes to make themselves look good. Bike thefts in Holland for instance are handled with just a piece of paper so who bothers to report them anymore. HEY! Crime has dropped.
Wake up and smell the coffee kid.
Tell that to the mexicans, all those drug related murders are for the sake of the American drug consumption. But hey, the US successfully outsourced the crime so they can make their statistics look better.
You can make statistics show anything you want, count a little bit of this, a little more of that. Don't qualify drunk driving deaths as murder anymore, if medics manage now to save more people, that shows less people died from gun wounds so clearly the number of people that got shot have gone down.
I have heard for decades that crime has been going down in Holland. In such a small country, that should have resulted in zero murders by now. Odd that this isn't the case.
The dutch labour party (ex-socialists, now more commonly thought of as bleeding hearts) lost its leader who was the Mayor of Amsterdam during massive budget overruns, a political murder by a Muslim on a critic of Islam, increasing racial tension, race related riots, failure of expensive projects to get the races to live to gether (IJburg) and increased attacks on Homo sexuals by Muslims. Name: Job Cohen... the guy then became leader of labour and was not nearly as successful as a politician in the opositions as you might have thought.
So, they currently have a leadership election and one of the leaders prides himself on having been a street coach for troubled youths... He claims though sentencing is not the answer. What then is the answer is not answered but he claims though sentencing does not stop re-offending. It tells you a lot a because anyone with a working brain cell will realize that the toughest sentence if that of death and dead people seldom re-offend.
Mind you, he has a point. There are a lot of countries in the world and over history an almost infinite variety of methods have been used to deter crime. And not a single one of them really works, no not even the bullet to the head. The Chinese are current masters in it and their crime rate is on in increase. They show weekly interviews with the condemned and in China if you are from a bad area, you don't have a longer life expectenancy on deathrow then you got in your own home, 1 week and you are dead. And as said, the crime rate is on the rise. The US has though sentences and a high crime rate.
Holland has a liberal system AND a high crime rate. Oh, the statistics vary but if you then put them into context such as that the dutch legal system is extremely bad at getting convictions, you have to wonder what the real crime rate.
As for re-offending, almost any system claims something between 70-80% FAILURE RATE and that is ONLY counting those criminals who are successfully tracked at going through the entire legal procedure again leading to a served jailed sentence AGAIN. Oh, if a criminal re-offends but gets killed by the police in full view of a million witnesses who swear he was committing the crime, IT STILL DOES NOT COUNT AS RE-OFFENDING.
Plea bargains, parole, suspended sentences, time served etc etc they are all just patches to make a system that barely works not collapse completely. And we need the system to work because there are areas of the world where the system HAS collapsed and they are not nice places to be. Prove me wrong and move to Somalia or even just Mexico.
And you want to overload this barely functioning machine? If you are in America, you are just living thanks to the believe by Mexicans and blacks that the system will prevent them from just taking what they want. If that ever crumbles, every rich spoiled white /. nerd is going to get it is so bad that they will pray for a jock to pants them one last time before they die. It is lucky the blacks of LA are so dumb they rioted by attacking each other instead of descending enmass on Hollywood and taking out every rich white person thinking that black and hispanic cops are going to risk their lives for their rich asses and you better hope the system keeps that believe in tact.
The system ain't perfect but so far it works. If you want to improve it think real hard whether you are going to survive its destruction. It might be nice to watch an old crappy building being blown up to make space for something new, BUT NOT WHEN YOU ARE STANDING ON TOP OF IT.
Fight the man! It is not a battle cry the man should be using. And unless you suck as a nerd, you are the 1%.
The Vita has a far smaller screen with a fraction of the pixels, that skews it even further. Then again, the Vita has to process more inputs.
You should see the number of people who boycott Sony for its activities... they buy an Xbox instead...........
People like to take a moral stand but they also like their shiny so they make a stand and then ignore any evidence their new stance is even more insane.
Don't like MS? Go for Apple and claim it is so much more open and less evil... no matter what Apple pulls because else you have to not just give up your shiny but admit you have no morals either.
It is very human.
And I suppose the stories about Saudi princes beating said immigrants is just the same as immigrants not being all that well like in the west. Except it isn't.
What about Kuwait? Liberated by the west, it ranks very high in GDP per person, that is because in Kuwait, only the natives are counted. Immigrants are not. Even legal immigrants who are needed to actually do the work that makes the country so rich. Palestinians? Kuwait has a lot of them but of course the Palestinians choose wrong with supporting Saddam and they are now treated by their fellow Muslims as scum...
But you are right, migration is not just to the west. A lot of Africans go to South Africa for jobs... where they are totally not hated by the South Africans (black) with regularly exploding violence on a scale and brutality not seen for not nearly long enough in the west.
In many ways, you add to my point. Yes, there are migration patterns to other parts of the world and ALL of them end up with worse results for the migrant then in the west. We WIN again, even if it is just because we suck less (which is not a way to win at all).
Eh... it could go either way (waggling hand).
The world isn't about right and wrong and anyway, what you consider right and wrong is considered rather silly by 6 billion people. It is about trying to ensure that tomorrow won't be a hell of a lot worse then today. And a Muslim run world would be a hell of a lot worse? Want to proof me wrong? Reverse the migration streams. As bad as some claim the west is, a lot of people would risk a dangerous crossing in tiny boats for a living as toilet cleaners rather then be anywhere else.
What does migration have got to do with it? Libya used to help Europe in stemming the tide of immigrants from further south. Further uproar in that area will not help stem further migration, it was one of the reasons actions against Libya were opposed in the west by a lot of people (because they were for peace you thought? How silly).
Iran is a lynch pin in a very complex scenario where all the actors and their lines are unknown and performed in the dark for a blind audience. You could say it is playing a game but what game? With what rules and with which cards? The west has learned the hard way that enforcing its values on another culture doesn't work, Iraq and Afghanistan are disaster areas. Libya is too early to tell so going into Iran is unlikely be a quick easy win. But as long as Iran remains, Syria remains. Sudan remains, Northern Nigeria remains... gutting Iran would send a strong message but is also unacceptable... so what to do?
Nothing? Then you keep having to react to whatever it pulls next... Iran not hostile? Yeah, the mass murdering in Sudan and Nigeria are just for laughs. Iran knows Muslims soldiers have the military value of they regimental donkey so they fight their wars by proxy.
What do YOU propose is done in Syria? Nothing? Deny anything is wrong? Somehow blame it all on Israel? Well nothing you can do it about it without upsetting Iran. So thousands of Muslims die at the hand of Muslims and you do nothing? Speak up when you say that... no, that is not acceptable either.
Politicians are often said to think as this, "people say something must done, this is something, so it must be done". That is true enough... but people keep shouting "something must be done". YOU come up with something better.
Ideally, war should be the last answer, it often is. The pity is that it often also is the only answer. Will Iran be attacked by the end of the year? No idea. To many interest, not always as you expect, many conflicting and a lot of actors who are pulling unseen strings. It is not just about testing the west by proxy, those pulling those strings would also not want to be seen to fail again, so they might force their puppet to relax. (If Iran backed by China fails and the Chinese economy suffers are the oil now moves west again without China buying it cheap thanks to the Iran embargo limitting competition for it would the Chinese people realize they can rebel as well) Overly complex but that is how it is all connected.
War happens when those pulling the wires loose control of them. It has been happenig quite a lot really and by definition of loosing control, you can't predict it.
Recent dutch new story, some kids taped a pet mouse to a firework rocket. Why was this news? Because reporting each and every day the billions of pets NOT mistreated would make the news run a bit long.
News is something that is exceptional, not the norm. Today the sun came up, is NOT news. Today the sun didn't come up, that is news.
No need to dig deeper.
The Bill Gates/MS icon on Slashdot (is/was) that of a borg version of the Dorky One... the idea being that MS wanted to assimilate you into the collective. Turns out it was a hippy collective indeed with about as many rules as Fight Club with no enforcement.
It has often been remarked that MS dominance was obtained not so much through the success of MS but through the failure of everyone else. Read Apple, IBM and the various home computer makers whose names are lost in the mists of time only remembered by the senile elders.
And through their failure, we gained the Wintel platform which now turns out to have been insanely open. Imagine MS telling Windows developers how to collect payment, if at all. Does MS tell Blizzard how to collect its pound of flesh of the enslaved? How shareware should be payed for?
Does MS dictate which version of MS you should run on Dell hardware? Does Dell stop you from upgrading the OS?
It is not as if MS never tried but it failed so often nobody took them to serious and so the evil that might have happened, never happened. It is like a brutal dictator whose brutality ends up as a kind of cute outburst with throwing chairs instead of the millions dead with efficient dictators. A dictator who fails at being terrible sounds a lot better then a dictator who succeeds... and Apple and Google are certainly trying hard enough.
It is kinda sad that companies keep trying to get total control when the PC did so well without it.
The moment those artists stop preaching and performing for dictators for million dollar payments. The moment those artists stop using tax shelters the moment their subsidized careers start to generate a profit.
In Holland a recent cost cutting measure was to increase the vat from 6% to 19% for "art" (tickets). The art industry thought they could use the publics sympathy to protest this... the public protested alright... but NOT in favor of the art industry. Artists have lost a lot of sympathy with the common man.
I used to be a baker until the world changed and people started shopping in super markets and super markets use bakers products as a loss leader making it near impossible to compete especially with banks unwilling to grant a loan that won't be payed back until years and years later with only the tiniest margins.
Do I get special laws to protect me? No? Then SCREW the fucking artists.
Your memory is fine, it is just your math skills that have rusted with age?
Mind you, I know what you mean. It is even worse when you talk about a date like this and some kid pipes up that he was born that year. It REALLY gets bad if they claim they hadn't been born yet. Mind you, they got it easy, after mentioning that, they will NEVER have to worry about being as old as I am now. Not if they get within reach of my cane.
Okay, you enjoy coding for coding sakes? Write 1 million goto lines. Enjoy. You don't? You want to achieve something? have something to show for it at the end even if it is just demo or a thing that has been done a million times but the first time for you? Then you are doing it for something.
It is amazing how many idiots there are on slashdot. This is not new. People do things for the reward, remove the reward (by cutting into the brain) and people stop doing it. Deny this and you deny biology and are just one small step away from Creationism.
Playing with lego's building something is NOT the same as just stacking endless bricks together.
Do you REALLY enjoy coding just for coding sake? Write endless meaningless and useless code that does nothing except compile? Poor you.
No. That is like asking if there are kids who want to weld for welding sake. Or fuck for fuck sake. We don't fuck for fuck sake, we fuck for the climax. Without the climax, fucking would be fucking boring.
Most people code because they want to get something done. Those who don't work in government. Kids want to code a game, the kids that want to code a database or search algorithm tend to be watched by the FBI, from a safe distance, through a snipers scope.
It is the same as with a spoken language. Nobody wants to learn French for the sake of the language, they want to impress chicks. Japanese is only studied by people with a fantasy of picking up school girls, desu. Latin for those who wished to be picked up by Catholic priests.
The easiest way to keep kids interested is to make sure things beep and whistle and spin. It does't matter that much if it is text graphics, direct 3d or leds on a Arduino board, or a programming robot game. What matters is that the concepts have clear examples with easy to understand results.
It is the reason PHP is so popular, its examples are extremely clear and light on the jargon. It is the reason Lego is such a success, nobody has to spend time learning the building blocks of Lego, they are clear... then you can spend all your energy on creating.
Kids haven't really changed but nerdy pursuits have always been the domain of the select few... the few selected by girls not to be dated.
I predict it will have the same resounding success as the war on drugs, hunger, terror and of course REAL piracy. If after hundreds of years, we still can't get rid of real pirates when men in little boats are faced with gunships and destroyers... what the fuck hell chance does the music industry stand?
How long has to war on drugs lasted now? And the price of drugs is lower then ever, the supply richer and more varied then ever and the quality sky high. And this is a physical good that has to be moved around.
The internet and digital media ignore border controls, are near impossible to inspect and where as the means for transporting drugs haven't really changed, the speed for distribiting digital content will sky rocket, the costs will continue to plummet and the availability to the world population will explode. If the same happened to drugs runners drugs runner would be hauling cargo's in the thousands of tons at light speed to any point on the planet in the same instance.
And you want to stop this?
Good fucking luck. Copyright law doesn't need reform because it is immoral. It needs reform because the world has changed. These people are trying to implement laws to curb horses in the streets in the age of the transporter.
Everytime a PHP story is posted, the rail fans rant about PHP's insecurity... yet here a massive flaw in rails basic design has rendered every single rails project out there vulnerable... wonder if the rail fans will acknowledge this massive failure AND the rail team slow response to this in the future. Doubt it.
But don't worry. I will remind them ;)
The lesson here? Never claim your project is more secure because someone somewhere is browsing your root directory right now.
Right now, the topic in Holland is the costs of the Euro vs the Guilder. A politician has commisioned a report to examine the costs of switching back. 51 miljard is the worst case cost (this second part is rarely mentioned by the media, against a cost of 71 to stay with the Euro.
To give an idea of the amount, the current deficitit is 24 miljard. So we ain't talking peanuts.
But who do you believe? The corrupt officials who didn't see the crisis coming or a politician with a long track history of grandstanding, who is an ex party member of the current ruling party and as such a collegue of Zalm, one of the liars about the Euro?
Any individual cannot possibly do his own research, it would take to much time, so it all comes down who you believe. The lying incompetent or the incompetent liar.
What do you care about Obama? Your poor English skills make it abundantly clear you are not allowed to vote for him OR fall in the discussed category of people who are to stupid to vote.
I wonder what the 17th Amendment is. English requirement for neutralization?