Vodafone finally has started to put simple clear limits on its dataplans, granted this is pure data (tablets, laptop) but at least you know what you get. Two years sees the first year for half the price, so it is in reality 75% of 47.50 with either a cheap dongle or wifi/3G modem for "free". 19% sales tax is included in the price.
Net result, roughly twice the data for the same price. But no sign of LTE so far in Holland.I suppose one way or another, you get what you pay for. In Holland the competition is rather strong with few people staying with the default subscriber. Raise the prices, loose customers. Seems Americans still give AT&T enough room to control them. Vote with your dollars.
Opera users are not shown in the graph because their superior minds instantly analyzed all the puzzles and their solution in their mind so they had no need to "play" them through a browser interface.
Meanwhile lynx users just outsourced the puzzle solving to their legion of controlled IE user bots.
There are a lot of people who like movie style conspiracies with brown envelops and shady agreements in back rooms. This is not likely to be the case. It is more a case of "us knowns us". The old boys network. Right thinking people hiring right thinking people.
The president of the dutch national bank was questioned after the crisis about this mis-handling of it all. He still referred to the people who saw the crisis coming as doom-sayers and his advisers and himself who didn't see it as the knowledable economic experts they clearly weren't. It did just not enter his mind, nor that of his political masters or the people questioning him that the crisis had proven the doomsayers were right and the experts wrong making them not experts at all but incompetent morons.
But the entire machinery is build out of the people that didn't see the crisis coming, so who would they hire? The few doom sayers? Or the people who agreed with their own vision?
This guy will have hired his underlings and will have been hired by someone who recognized a similar vision. And MS hired him because his views aligned with his. Corruption? Not the brown envelope type but rather the mono-culture kind where those who dare to think different are simply not hired. It is not quite the same thing but it is far more deadly. You run the risk the government becomes not interested in the best interests of the nation but of that of segments of it... and then if the world changes, it can't change with them. See farm interests around the world from corn and milk subsidies to the Japanese land laws making ground in Tokyo insanely expensive hindering growth to save farm land right next to it.
The US government has already been favoring copyright over invention to support the old boys network. Countries that don't have this network are coming close to out compete the US. The most advanced phones are no longer western. Not just not made in the west, not even designed in the west.
All because the old boys favor their own interests over that of the nation. Us knows us.
How a politician feeds himself? From having his pay continued. The president of Germany for instance gets payed his full salary for the rest of his live. Serve 4 years, get payed for 40 and counting. Serve a month and get payed for 40. Get thrown out and get payed.
Do you really think politicians loose their income when they loose office? You are a moron.
Keira Knightley is the actress from the Pirates of the Caribean with rather small breasts. For another role, there exists a rather famous comparison picture in which her breasts are photoshopped to be a couple of sizes bigger. It was done against her will, she agreed to some touching up but not to go from A to C.
Is she pretty? Your tastes might differ but a lot of people would say yes...
So... does this stop all the girls out there from worrying their tits are to small? Hell no. For that matter, most super models got modest chest sizes. Does that stop girls from worrying? No. So WHAT image from the media is telling girls that they need to have big tits? Not a famous movie star, not super models.
Yet the claim stands that thin fashion models influence how girls view their body but not the breast part? No, it is a load of bull.
Some people feel insecure about their image, they then find anything out there to justify themselves in feeling bad about it. For a rather extreme and dangerous example, how many black people claim they are kept down by discrimination when the most powerful man on the planet right now is black? Somehow the fact Obama got elected president of the US does not factor into the claim of racism.
Mind you, things are never black and white, there is racism and the media and society put a lot of expectations on how people should be. This isn't just looks, many a person keeps looking for the magical love where violins suddenly start playing. I have met people who really thought that when they became adults, there lifes would be like that in Friends and other sitcoms, sitting around all day drinking coffee with the occasional visit to work if it suited them. Reality? You want to be able to afford even a single coffee, you work so hard that all you want to do in the evening is sleep.
Does this matter? I don't know if the term loverboy is universally known but these are men who seduce young girls with money and a flash lifestype and then get them into prostitution. The girls affected really believe the movie lifestype. "He always got money" and "He always was ready to have a good time" never makes them question how the two combine. It doesn't matter in sitcoms so why should it in real life that a guy with no job has plenty of girls and all the free time in the world and a lot of spare cash?
People who aren't to smart use the media to justify their insecurities, neuroses and world views, and ignore the bits of media that don't match. Porn girls have big tits so big tits are the norm and all the porn with small tits, every single super model don't exist. In comedy, fat ugly women often have attractive wives... of course the BBC series Miranda doesn't count where a very tall and none to skinny rather plain woman has not one but TWO hunky guys interested in her. And gosh, she NEVER goes after men who are overweight or plain looking or, horror of horror, to short.
Media isn't realistic. Or rather it is but we tend to look only at the bits that offend us. Porn is young girls ignoring all the granny and MILF porn. Super stars have big tits except for the ones who don't.
If we start to censor the media to be realistic... then what about those of us who are naturally skinny? Who are just plain good looking? Should they be subjected to a media showing that only ugly people can be happy?
Silly? It isn't the fat chicks or plain looking ones who tend to suffer from insecurity, it is the pretty girls. After all, the fat chick might not get a lot of boys after her but the one who does is probably really interested in her, the person. Where as the pretty girl only gets the guys after her who see her as a trophy and the ordinary guys do not approach her. Being pretty is no guarantee for happiness. See the lives of many a movie actress ending in misery.
There are a lot of things wrong with ads but the biggest is that so many people take them to serious and lack the capacity to look further then their own insecurity at the real world. Believe on pretty people ca
Fat guys? Pimply guys? Guys without muscles? Guys with cheap cars? Oh, they exist in commercials alright. As points of ridicule. Ads are not a very nice representation of humanity. They try to sell us something by telling a very quick and simple story and the best way to do it is with stereo-types and pleasant pre-conceptions.
There are plenty of ads with old, fat or whatever type of woman. An ad for heating has an elderly couple in it that I saw yesterday before I zapped away. Yes, an ad for soap aimed at women will see it being used by an attractive woman AND that woman getting the attention of very unrealistic attractive males. Are we going to ban them too? Only ugly people can appear in ads? Then how will the pretty people feel about that? I have noticed more then once that it is the pretty girls who are the most insecure. A woman with some padding tends to be a lot more sure about herself and comfortable with herself then a woman who has the right weight and measurements.
That you are a delusional freak is proven by the fact that men suffer from eating disorders as well. Just that Oprah (a woman) doesn't pay attention to it. Men undergo costmetic surgery to implant muscles or have their penis extended because they are insecure because of constant jokes in the media about how size matters. Ah... yes... say that a woman with small breast is less of a woman, that is a no-no. But penis jokes are perfectly fine.
The simple fact is that the media is a lie. We can then sanitize the hell out of it but where do we go? To be truly free a media program and ad would have to include an awful lot of stuff. An Axe commercial for the fat, one for the ugly, one for the handicapped, one for gay people, one for people who abstain, one for who don't, one for addicts, one for people with skin diseases, one for the blind, one for the deaf, one for animal lovers, one for the pedo's. Anyone could get upset about themselves not being represented in the media.
For instance, I am quite upset by all the ads showing a capable housewife and a clutch of a husband. Makes me feel very insecure... who do I sue for a million bucks?
Isn't it sad that some women get an eating disorder? Sure but you can't make the entire world safe because it would never ever end. Proof? FAR more kids get injured and killed by cars driving faster then 10km/h. Since you care so much about the harm you do, you here by agree never ever to travel faster then brisk walking speed. For the children. Don't want to? Child murderer!
Their Handhelds also often have the option to play games from the previous generation. Something Sony DID enable for japanese customer of the Vita but not for American and European customers. That is even more evil, spend time developing a feature useful to customers, then deny it.
Sony is not so much evil as in love with itself and so it is determined to fuck itself over and over again.
If the UN was in control, NOTHING would get censored because NOBODY could agree on it. Just like there is no resolution against Syria because China and the USSR doesn't want it. The US could veto ANY UN censorship attempt, so could the UK and a host of other nations.
Now the US has total control and the US has shown to be far worse at it then the countries you list, none of them have tried to censor outside their own borders.
The idea that road and fuel taxes pay for the total cost of road maintenance is a persistent myth. It is totally and completely untrue. The cost of road maintenance, construction alone is far higher, add the costs for emergency services dealing with road/car related issues and it goes even higher. Add policing for safety and the costs skyrockets.
Not that we have a choice, we need roads but we ALL pay for them from our ordinary taxes. Money from fuel tax might go somewhere else but that just means money flows from somewhere else to the roads.
This is the third or fourth president not to let this area of the world explode into a war that could easily go global. Little kiddies like Icebike think the world is somekind of perfect place where perfect solutions exist. In the real world, all you can do is often to stop thing from getting a lot worse really fast.
Remember them? When your ISP still thought that you would visit their home page for anything else but to find the way to cancel the service?
Yahoo was just one of many to do this and often it meant that what you came for was completely impossible to find. MS has never lost this, its web presence is a design nightmare. There really even isn't one. Every little thing gets its own site, often barely working and then gets forgotten. It also happens to bigger things, MS pushed its own solution for selling music for music players, then it dropped it completely when it launched the Zune and then it dropped the Zune. Games for Windows has had many forms, launched and forgotten again.
But now... this approach has made it to the desktop and it ain't new at all. Active Desktop, widgets,gadgets, someone at MS seriously believes that people spend all their time looking at their desktop. Are you? Right now, how much space on the screen in front of you is taken up by the browser?
Right... where are all those Metro blocks supposed to go?
The engadget article doesn't suprise me. Did you see the monitor in the video? I didn't even know they still made them that small. The original Mac had a bigger screen for fucks sake. Now try the same interface and the scroll down for start menu on a triple 30 inch monitor setup. And I am thinking of going to 6. Apples unified menu system, Unity, Gnome 3. They ALL suck with big screens. Of course not everyone has a big screen... even more reason to use the available space for what you are working on. Where are the metro apps? Hidden... now you want something else... so you are supposed to minimize all applications, then click on the desktop and get that app running fullscreen because you need full details... that is handy?
No... this is a classic designer mistake, it looks pretty but it isn't usable. If you demo it, you have only one app running and as you make the metro desktop appear you pause and show the wealth of information available to you and how easy it is to get a detailed view open... very nice, very smooth and totally NOT how you do it when you are working.
Jagged Alliance 2 was a turnbased game that on every move, had the bottom 3rd of the screen drop out and appear again to change the display. Very pretty... once... the millionth time, you want to exterminate the designer and everyone he ever met.
I just don't see people use their PC's the way the metro app seems to think. Most people I know work with either full screen applications or have them covering the desktop and switch them the taskbar or by alt-tabbing. The desktop just never is in view. That is why Active Desktop never got anywhere, people never saw it. With the new linux desktop Enlightenment it is possible to make animated wallpapers... cute... and there is a reason nobody else has bothered with it, because you never see the damn thing. The desktop and start menu are there to get you started... from then on, you switch between applications and never ever close them. Only the most infrequent users and under powered constantly shut down their PC and start it up again. I know one person like that and she has firefox on autostart and arranges it to cover the desktop with her IM.
The Metro style is the domain of movie UI's. I remember one Sci-Fi movie with I think Robert Sellect (magnum PI) in which he goes through a morning routine with a robot. It is a common enough scene in future movies and it just doesn't happen. A: No human being can possibly care to be informed in detail about the weather outside, the news, appointments, social chat with relatives, banter with the AI before they got a cup of coffee. B: Any AI system at the moment that would display so much information would display the wrong thing at the wrong time and C: INFORMATION OVERLOAD.
I check my mail... then I read the comics... then I check the weather. Display them all at once... and WHERE ARE YOU GOING TO PUT THE ADS FOR THOSE FREE SERVICES?
I think this will be another MS Bob. Vista? To small a disast
This is not about the right to be forgotten,this is about the commercial sanitized web, where no search result may interfere with business and the business of marketing. Related to it are the religious nutters who want to censor the world of anything that might offend. The water-shed but also "Don't ask, don't tell" are symptoms of this. They might seem harmless but once you start giving into these extremists, freedom goes out the window.
It after all never ends. Take this case, at what page of image search ARE the charred corpses allowed to start appearing? Bottom of the first page? 2nd page? For what search results? There is always more sanitizing to be done.
Telly tubbies anyone? Lot of fuss because one of the characters supposedly was gay. Can't have that. Not because being gay is bad of course... it just needs to be hidden. From toddlers, from small children, from teens, from young adults, from adults... go into your ghetto and don't come out and upset right thinking people!
Search engines and the internet have allowed us to do something unheard of in previous era's, to consume any information we want regardless of other human beings. If you were to ask in a christian town in the library for a book on homo's, you might not get what you want, information is easily censored on a local level. With the internet, you can get ANY opinion on the subject, good and bad and make up your own mind. Doesn't mean everyone will, but you can. And that is a great power to have.
Censoring search results because someone doesn't like them might seem harmless in individual cases but cases set precedent and precedent is abused by those who know their individual case gets no symphaty.
I am fairly certain a certain cruise company would like NOT to have a certain accident be linked to it constantly especially now it is again in the news with another ship. How far, how soon would you censor search results? The answer? Always to far and to soon.
Freedom of speech dies fastest when you are free to speak but nobody is allowed to hear you.
So basically you want to force search engines to only list nice, clean un-objectional results that don't offend anyone... all so you won't see anything that might upset you. Nice. That is how all censorship and oppression starts. Anything from censoring nudity to homo-sexuals being banned from kissing in public. Someone might be offended so it must be hidden.
You are the enemy of any person who desires freedom. If we left things up to your kind we would life in a sanitized world were those who object to Telly Tubbies because one might be gay control all speech. And I will see you dead before that happens.
I never heard about it, until it came up in an anti-piracy story. All the stories about the piratebay have done in my own circle is get people to ask how they too can download stuff... Streisand effect times a 100.
Only geeks used usenets, then Napster came out and early adoptors used it. Then the lawsuits hit and people actually started using their new fangled cable connections for more then using email purely by searching for the name from the anti-piracy stories.
Distrubuted trackers once were only for the super paranoid, now they are common place. Meanwhile only a handful of the old methods have shut down. eMule is still around, the japanse have 3 different P2P networks just for their country. And it turns out that the reason you don't see many Chinese on western networks is that Xunlie has that market covered.
Oh, some Americans might have given up all seperation of state and corporation but frankly who cares. The rest of the world has pretty much decided that P2P is here to stay. It is like the war on drugs, the US might put millions in jail to try to stop it, the rest of world realizes that there is no stopping it if the majority wants it.
This isn't a case of what might be the ideal state of affairs in a utopian society, people can copy, they will copy. Fight it and you will find the majority against you. And this war will involve going after rich white kids whose parents can afford lawyers. Good luck getting them to accept the majority of them spending time in jail.
If people dare to take connections back under fire, then running a service in peace time is a cakewalk. And ISP's like XS4ALL have shown that some dare to put their money where their mouth is. Any ISP offering USENET binary access is probably done by a geek admin as the top bosses at the bigger ISP's wouldn't even know what it is.
The blackout already showed just how far reaching support is. Oh the commercial net wasn't that affected but just how did Poland decide to not support ACTA after all? And why aren't the other European nations leaning hard on Poland to change its mind?
Nursie is just a coward and wants to think everyone is as afraid to make a stand as he, so that his cowardness doesn't seem so bad after all.
Sorry but some dare to make a stand and gosh... so far it is actually working pretty well. If everyone was a jelly livered as Nursie, we would long have had ACTA worldwide and Sopa and Pipa and much much worse.
Real drug addicts have long since passed the high, the dream state hippies talk about, those fun animation bits from the movies.
Real drug addict take drugs not to feel high but to feel normal or at least not as bad. If you want a comparison, think pain relievers. If you ever have been in serious pain you take the drugs just to feel normal again. And granted, that can feel like a high but more because the horror that came before has been lifted.
Just as a first cigarette may calm your nerves but you need the 1000th one just to function, heroine and similar drugs quickly wear down. Add to this that most drug addicts don't exactly have happy lives and you have many shooting up just to make the world hurt a bit less. Of course after wards it will hurt even more.
Making the person immune does nothing. The reason for the drug taking hasn't gone away only now they will be in withdrawal with no way out. Methadon as described is often used to "help" heroine addicts but it is far from harmless, all it does is make the addiction cheaper. Drug addicts need drugs to function, take it away without anything else and they will just seek something else. After all, that is how they got addicted in the first place.
Non addicts can't really understand this. When you see a drug like crocodile, you know that people who haven't yet used it, saw people using it with parts of their bodies rotting away, not "this is your brain on drugs" style rotting, real "bones exposed" rotting and STILL started using it. That isn't done to get a nice 60's hippy high, that is a person cutting themselves to stop chronic pain.
It is therefor pointless to vaccinate the general population to combat this. The reason people start using drugs is often not to get high but to escape their reality. If it can't be done with heroine, then something else. How do you stop people taking drugs? If I knew that, I would be a very rich man. War on drugs or condoning it, drug use rates are remarkably similar around the world with the only increases in areas where live is miserable.
Since the crash it has now become acceptable to state that pure performance based rewards in the financial industry encouraged a culture where only the next quarter counts and damn the long term consequences. Make a sale now, you get your bonus and by the time it all falls down, you are long gone.
There are two simple problems at work here and they can be easily translated to coding. Say that as a developer your performance was rated on how well your users used your program. Everytime a user uses the CD tray as a cupholder, your performance goes down. Every time a user tries to eat the manual, you loose money.
Judging teachers on the performance of their pupils will quickly result in the dumping of everyone who has trouble learning on... well... who would willingly get payed even less then ordinary teachers while teaching the most difficult pupils?
Another part is the old story of IBM paying by the line... so... what would a coder do? Optimize or write extra lines? It would be very tempting for teachers to teach to pass the test, not teach so the pupils actually become smarter. Cramming will become the order of the day and those who can't will be off loaded to make sure the rating stays high.
It is not as if this is unknown. The financial industry again has this. Once Holland had a state bank in the Postbank, it offered "free" accounts (no interest payed) with lots of transaction options, it was the bank for the common man. When it was sold to ING, promises were made to keep it but these of course slowly eroded, more and more money is charged and constant attempts to cut services. Commercial thinking doesn't fit with marginal groups.
Would you as a physical education teacher want any teenage girls in your group? No, they are constantly down with cramps and other things so any teacher who cares about his pay, would arrange it that his class has fit students.
Think this is good for smart kids? Smart kids take extra effort to teach as they don't take well to cramming... effort == time == fewer students scoring a score to get a bonus. Why spend an hour on a A student when you can get 100 a passing grade and get a big bonus?
A lot of things in the world just don't work efficiently, doesn't mean everything always has to stay the same but trying to improve teaching requires the understanding of just what it is all about. Teaching is throwing a lot of different kids into a building and hoping that at the end, they can become useful members of society in their own way. For some that means becoming a doctor, for others that means working in the sewers. Society needs both. In fact, I take a crap a lot more then I visit the doctor.
BUT making this efficient, when performance based pay has had such bad results in other sectors, just isn't really possible.
Already teaching ain't a real career, it is something you do if making good money doesn't appeal to you. You can't advance, the pay is lousy, every year you have to teach the same thing to a new load of increasingly over privileged kids with parents that don't care. And everyone thinks they can do it better then you...
If I was a teacher, I wouldn't be. Fuck your kids, you teach them yourselves. It is a dead end job.
You might remember stories that the PS3 especially but also the 360 would only do HD playback of movies on certain output types... the output types that encrypt the entire path. So, in that case, the monitor itself receives an encrypted data stream and your computer never has it.
It never happened since not enough people have those kind of monitors. I know because my own PS3 is hooked up to a PC monitor that certainly has no such capability.
BUT that is the holy grail of DRM, encryption all the way to the end with it being made impossible to create your own "fake" monitor that could take the encrypted signal and decrypt it. That is hasn't happened is because inertia in tech is amazingly high and monitor makers have little to no desire to cater for this. What does IIyama or Fujitsu or Samsung care about DRM? Sony and MS and Apple don't sell enough screens to force the market to adopt.
Just be wary of buying DRM ready hardware. Every such unit sold makes it easier to force the rest to switch.
There is little surprising about the story, just how messed up the summary is. The woman on trial was not scammed but part of the scam. She is a criminal who in exchange for a hefty percentage of real cash (and not promised cash as in the 911 scam) uses her own account to funnel money to her criminal employers.
For that matter, there doesn't even seem to be a 911 scam going on at all. There are many other types of scams after all. Presumably since it involves cars it involves car sales where the car is never delivered.
The inventors are a handful of people at any time. The rest are consumers.
Once, if you had a computer you had to know its ins and outs. Same as people who once drove cars or flew planes. Nowadays cars just work and people barely know where to put the fuel in, cue people putting in the wrong fuel. No owner of a Spyker would ever have done that, they KNEW their car and its needs.
There will be new inventions made by old and young people but what they all have in common is that they don't just consume whatever tech is available in their time but think about and think about what is lacking or missing. The man who made lighthouses saw how his wife was cooking and made a better stove. Simple as that. Could easily have been her son as well. Or a grandpa watching his granddaughter. Inspiration comes from looking at the world and not just assume but to question. And no, kids are NOT better at it. If they were, they would be far harder to teach.
You are in the west, a westener presumably and select to have Japanese language for kick? That shouts anime fanboy (I should know) and those ads target anime fans in the west.
If you said you were a women and got targetted with ads for women, would you consider that strange too?
Oh and lolita in this context means cheery goth, lots of lace that doesn't have to be black. Granted, it is younger women that tend to dress up like this (lots of accessories and details) while older women tend to drift towards simpler outfits (Chanel black dress) but japan fans seem to go against this tendency.
Try this, ask Youtube to mail you in Klingon and see what ads you get.
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Vodafone finally has started to put simple clear limits on its dataplans, granted this is pure data (tablets, laptop) but at least you know what you get. Two years sees the first year for half the price, so it is in reality 75% of 47.50 with either a cheap dongle or wifi/3G modem for "free". 19% sales tax is included in the price.
Net result, roughly twice the data for the same price. But no sign of LTE so far in Holland.I suppose one way or another, you get what you pay for. In Holland the competition is rather strong with few people staying with the default subscriber. Raise the prices, loose customers. Seems Americans still give AT&T enough room to control them. Vote with your dollars.
Opera users are not shown in the graph because their superior minds instantly analyzed all the puzzles and their solution in their mind so they had no need to "play" them through a browser interface.
Meanwhile lynx users just outsourced the puzzle solving to their legion of controlled IE user bots.
There are a lot of people who like movie style conspiracies with brown envelops and shady agreements in back rooms. This is not likely to be the case. It is more a case of "us knowns us". The old boys network. Right thinking people hiring right thinking people.
The president of the dutch national bank was questioned after the crisis about this mis-handling of it all. He still referred to the people who saw the crisis coming as doom-sayers and his advisers and himself who didn't see it as the knowledable economic experts they clearly weren't. It did just not enter his mind, nor that of his political masters or the people questioning him that the crisis had proven the doomsayers were right and the experts wrong making them not experts at all but incompetent morons.
But the entire machinery is build out of the people that didn't see the crisis coming, so who would they hire? The few doom sayers? Or the people who agreed with their own vision?
This guy will have hired his underlings and will have been hired by someone who recognized a similar vision. And MS hired him because his views aligned with his. Corruption? Not the brown envelope type but rather the mono-culture kind where those who dare to think different are simply not hired. It is not quite the same thing but it is far more deadly. You run the risk the government becomes not interested in the best interests of the nation but of that of segments of it... and then if the world changes, it can't change with them. See farm interests around the world from corn and milk subsidies to the Japanese land laws making ground in Tokyo insanely expensive hindering growth to save farm land right next to it.
The US government has already been favoring copyright over invention to support the old boys network. Countries that don't have this network are coming close to out compete the US. The most advanced phones are no longer western. Not just not made in the west, not even designed in the west.
All because the old boys favor their own interests over that of the nation. Us knows us.
How a politician feeds himself? From having his pay continued. The president of Germany for instance gets payed his full salary for the rest of his live. Serve 4 years, get payed for 40 and counting. Serve a month and get payed for 40. Get thrown out and get payed.
Do you really think politicians loose their income when they loose office? You are a moron.
Keira Knightley is the actress from the Pirates of the Caribean with rather small breasts. For another role, there exists a rather famous comparison picture in which her breasts are photoshopped to be a couple of sizes bigger. It was done against her will, she agreed to some touching up but not to go from A to C.
Is she pretty? Your tastes might differ but a lot of people would say yes...
So... does this stop all the girls out there from worrying their tits are to small? Hell no. For that matter, most super models got modest chest sizes. Does that stop girls from worrying? No. So WHAT image from the media is telling girls that they need to have big tits? Not a famous movie star, not super models.
Yet the claim stands that thin fashion models influence how girls view their body but not the breast part? No, it is a load of bull.
Some people feel insecure about their image, they then find anything out there to justify themselves in feeling bad about it. For a rather extreme and dangerous example, how many black people claim they are kept down by discrimination when the most powerful man on the planet right now is black? Somehow the fact Obama got elected president of the US does not factor into the claim of racism.
Mind you, things are never black and white, there is racism and the media and society put a lot of expectations on how people should be. This isn't just looks, many a person keeps looking for the magical love where violins suddenly start playing. I have met people who really thought that when they became adults, there lifes would be like that in Friends and other sitcoms, sitting around all day drinking coffee with the occasional visit to work if it suited them. Reality? You want to be able to afford even a single coffee, you work so hard that all you want to do in the evening is sleep.
Does this matter? I don't know if the term loverboy is universally known but these are men who seduce young girls with money and a flash lifestype and then get them into prostitution. The girls affected really believe the movie lifestype. "He always got money" and "He always was ready to have a good time" never makes them question how the two combine. It doesn't matter in sitcoms so why should it in real life that a guy with no job has plenty of girls and all the free time in the world and a lot of spare cash?
People who aren't to smart use the media to justify their insecurities, neuroses and world views, and ignore the bits of media that don't match. Porn girls have big tits so big tits are the norm and all the porn with small tits, every single super model don't exist. In comedy, fat ugly women often have attractive wives... of course the BBC series Miranda doesn't count where a very tall and none to skinny rather plain woman has not one but TWO hunky guys interested in her. And gosh, she NEVER goes after men who are overweight or plain looking or, horror of horror, to short.
Media isn't realistic. Or rather it is but we tend to look only at the bits that offend us. Porn is young girls ignoring all the granny and MILF porn. Super stars have big tits except for the ones who don't.
If we start to censor the media to be realistic... then what about those of us who are naturally skinny? Who are just plain good looking? Should they be subjected to a media showing that only ugly people can be happy?
Silly? It isn't the fat chicks or plain looking ones who tend to suffer from insecurity, it is the pretty girls. After all, the fat chick might not get a lot of boys after her but the one who does is probably really interested in her, the person. Where as the pretty girl only gets the guys after her who see her as a trophy and the ordinary guys do not approach her. Being pretty is no guarantee for happiness. See the lives of many a movie actress ending in misery.
There are a lot of things wrong with ads but the biggest is that so many people take them to serious and lack the capacity to look further then their own insecurity at the real world. Believe on pretty people ca
Fat guys? Pimply guys? Guys without muscles? Guys with cheap cars? Oh, they exist in commercials alright. As points of ridicule. Ads are not a very nice representation of humanity. They try to sell us something by telling a very quick and simple story and the best way to do it is with stereo-types and pleasant pre-conceptions.
There are plenty of ads with old, fat or whatever type of woman. An ad for heating has an elderly couple in it that I saw yesterday before I zapped away. Yes, an ad for soap aimed at women will see it being used by an attractive woman AND that woman getting the attention of very unrealistic attractive males. Are we going to ban them too? Only ugly people can appear in ads? Then how will the pretty people feel about that? I have noticed more then once that it is the pretty girls who are the most insecure. A woman with some padding tends to be a lot more sure about herself and comfortable with herself then a woman who has the right weight and measurements.
That you are a delusional freak is proven by the fact that men suffer from eating disorders as well. Just that Oprah (a woman) doesn't pay attention to it. Men undergo costmetic surgery to implant muscles or have their penis extended because they are insecure because of constant jokes in the media about how size matters. Ah... yes... say that a woman with small breast is less of a woman, that is a no-no. But penis jokes are perfectly fine.
The simple fact is that the media is a lie. We can then sanitize the hell out of it but where do we go? To be truly free a media program and ad would have to include an awful lot of stuff. An Axe commercial for the fat, one for the ugly, one for the handicapped, one for gay people, one for people who abstain, one for who don't, one for addicts, one for people with skin diseases, one for the blind, one for the deaf, one for animal lovers, one for the pedo's. Anyone could get upset about themselves not being represented in the media.
For instance, I am quite upset by all the ads showing a capable housewife and a clutch of a husband. Makes me feel very insecure... who do I sue for a million bucks?
Isn't it sad that some women get an eating disorder? Sure but you can't make the entire world safe because it would never ever end. Proof? FAR more kids get injured and killed by cars driving faster then 10km/h. Since you care so much about the harm you do, you here by agree never ever to travel faster then brisk walking speed. For the children. Don't want to? Child murderer!
Their Handhelds also often have the option to play games from the previous generation. Something Sony DID enable for japanese customer of the Vita but not for American and European customers. That is even more evil, spend time developing a feature useful to customers, then deny it.
Sony is not so much evil as in love with itself and so it is determined to fuck itself over and over again.
If the UN was in control, NOTHING would get censored because NOBODY could agree on it. Just like there is no resolution against Syria because China and the USSR doesn't want it. The US could veto ANY UN censorship attempt, so could the UK and a host of other nations.
Now the US has total control and the US has shown to be far worse at it then the countries you list, none of them have tried to censor outside their own borders.
The idea that road and fuel taxes pay for the total cost of road maintenance is a persistent myth. It is totally and completely untrue. The cost of road maintenance, construction alone is far higher, add the costs for emergency services dealing with road/car related issues and it goes even higher. Add policing for safety and the costs skyrockets.
Not that we have a choice, we need roads but we ALL pay for them from our ordinary taxes. Money from fuel tax might go somewhere else but that just means money flows from somewhere else to the roads.
You are a liar, http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_GDP_(nominal)_per_capita shows the US at around 10 or lower. But then, you quote Reagan, I suspect facts and figures just enrage you.
This is the third or fourth president not to let this area of the world explode into a war that could easily go global. Little kiddies like Icebike think the world is somekind of perfect place where perfect solutions exist. In the real world, all you can do is often to stop thing from getting a lot worse really fast.
Remember them? When your ISP still thought that you would visit their home page for anything else but to find the way to cancel the service?
Yahoo was just one of many to do this and often it meant that what you came for was completely impossible to find. MS has never lost this, its web presence is a design nightmare. There really even isn't one. Every little thing gets its own site, often barely working and then gets forgotten. It also happens to bigger things, MS pushed its own solution for selling music for music players, then it dropped it completely when it launched the Zune and then it dropped the Zune. Games for Windows has had many forms, launched and forgotten again.
But now... this approach has made it to the desktop and it ain't new at all. Active Desktop, widgets,gadgets, someone at MS seriously believes that people spend all their time looking at their desktop. Are you? Right now, how much space on the screen in front of you is taken up by the browser?
Right... where are all those Metro blocks supposed to go?
The engadget article doesn't suprise me. Did you see the monitor in the video? I didn't even know they still made them that small. The original Mac had a bigger screen for fucks sake. Now try the same interface and the scroll down for start menu on a triple 30 inch monitor setup. And I am thinking of going to 6. Apples unified menu system, Unity, Gnome 3. They ALL suck with big screens. Of course not everyone has a big screen... even more reason to use the available space for what you are working on. Where are the metro apps? Hidden... now you want something else... so you are supposed to minimize all applications, then click on the desktop and get that app running fullscreen because you need full details... that is handy?
No... this is a classic designer mistake, it looks pretty but it isn't usable. If you demo it, you have only one app running and as you make the metro desktop appear you pause and show the wealth of information available to you and how easy it is to get a detailed view open... very nice, very smooth and totally NOT how you do it when you are working.
Jagged Alliance 2 was a turnbased game that on every move, had the bottom 3rd of the screen drop out and appear again to change the display. Very pretty... once... the millionth time, you want to exterminate the designer and everyone he ever met.
I just don't see people use their PC's the way the metro app seems to think. Most people I know work with either full screen applications or have them covering the desktop and switch them the taskbar or by alt-tabbing. The desktop just never is in view. That is why Active Desktop never got anywhere, people never saw it. With the new linux desktop Enlightenment it is possible to make animated wallpapers... cute... and there is a reason nobody else has bothered with it, because you never see the damn thing. The desktop and start menu are there to get you started... from then on, you switch between applications and never ever close them. Only the most infrequent users and under powered constantly shut down their PC and start it up again. I know one person like that and she has firefox on autostart and arranges it to cover the desktop with her IM.
The Metro style is the domain of movie UI's. I remember one Sci-Fi movie with I think Robert Sellect (magnum PI) in which he goes through a morning routine with a robot. It is a common enough scene in future movies and it just doesn't happen. A: No human being can possibly care to be informed in detail about the weather outside, the news, appointments, social chat with relatives, banter with the AI before they got a cup of coffee. B: Any AI system at the moment that would display so much information would display the wrong thing at the wrong time and C: INFORMATION OVERLOAD.
I check my mail... then I read the comics... then I check the weather. Display them all at once... and WHERE ARE YOU GOING TO PUT THE ADS FOR THOSE FREE SERVICES?
I think this will be another MS Bob. Vista? To small a disast
Kinda tempting fate eh? I can just picture the gods going "we will see about that".
This is not about the right to be forgotten,this is about the commercial sanitized web, where no search result may interfere with business and the business of marketing. Related to it are the religious nutters who want to censor the world of anything that might offend. The water-shed but also "Don't ask, don't tell" are symptoms of this. They might seem harmless but once you start giving into these extremists, freedom goes out the window.
It after all never ends. Take this case, at what page of image search ARE the charred corpses allowed to start appearing? Bottom of the first page? 2nd page? For what search results? There is always more sanitizing to be done.
Telly tubbies anyone? Lot of fuss because one of the characters supposedly was gay. Can't have that. Not because being gay is bad of course... it just needs to be hidden. From toddlers, from small children, from teens, from young adults, from adults... go into your ghetto and don't come out and upset right thinking people!
Search engines and the internet have allowed us to do something unheard of in previous era's, to consume any information we want regardless of other human beings. If you were to ask in a christian town in the library for a book on homo's, you might not get what you want, information is easily censored on a local level. With the internet, you can get ANY opinion on the subject, good and bad and make up your own mind. Doesn't mean everyone will, but you can. And that is a great power to have.
Censoring search results because someone doesn't like them might seem harmless in individual cases but cases set precedent and precedent is abused by those who know their individual case gets no symphaty.
I am fairly certain a certain cruise company would like NOT to have a certain accident be linked to it constantly especially now it is again in the news with another ship. How far, how soon would you censor search results? The answer? Always to far and to soon.
Freedom of speech dies fastest when you are free to speak but nobody is allowed to hear you.
So basically you want to force search engines to only list nice, clean un-objectional results that don't offend anyone... all so you won't see anything that might upset you. Nice. That is how all censorship and oppression starts. Anything from censoring nudity to homo-sexuals being banned from kissing in public. Someone might be offended so it must be hidden.
You are the enemy of any person who desires freedom. If we left things up to your kind we would life in a sanitized world were those who object to Telly Tubbies because one might be gay control all speech. And I will see you dead before that happens.
I never heard about it, until it came up in an anti-piracy story. All the stories about the piratebay have done in my own circle is get people to ask how they too can download stuff... Streisand effect times a 100.
Only geeks used usenets, then Napster came out and early adoptors used it. Then the lawsuits hit and people actually started using their new fangled cable connections for more then using email purely by searching for the name from the anti-piracy stories.
Distrubuted trackers once were only for the super paranoid, now they are common place. Meanwhile only a handful of the old methods have shut down. eMule is still around, the japanse have 3 different P2P networks just for their country. And it turns out that the reason you don't see many Chinese on western networks is that Xunlie has that market covered.
Oh, some Americans might have given up all seperation of state and corporation but frankly who cares. The rest of the world has pretty much decided that P2P is here to stay. It is like the war on drugs, the US might put millions in jail to try to stop it, the rest of world realizes that there is no stopping it if the majority wants it.
This isn't a case of what might be the ideal state of affairs in a utopian society, people can copy, they will copy. Fight it and you will find the majority against you. And this war will involve going after rich white kids whose parents can afford lawyers. Good luck getting them to accept the majority of them spending time in jail.
If people dare to take connections back under fire, then running a service in peace time is a cakewalk. And ISP's like XS4ALL have shown that some dare to put their money where their mouth is. Any ISP offering USENET binary access is probably done by a geek admin as the top bosses at the bigger ISP's wouldn't even know what it is.
The blackout already showed just how far reaching support is. Oh the commercial net wasn't that affected but just how did Poland decide to not support ACTA after all? And why aren't the other European nations leaning hard on Poland to change its mind?
Nursie is just a coward and wants to think everyone is as afraid to make a stand as he, so that his cowardness doesn't seem so bad after all.
Sorry but some dare to make a stand and gosh... so far it is actually working pretty well. If everyone was a jelly livered as Nursie, we would long have had ACTA worldwide and Sopa and Pipa and much much worse.
Smoking is fun, sticking needles under your nails is not.
Real drug addicts have long since passed the high, the dream state hippies talk about, those fun animation bits from the movies.
Real drug addict take drugs not to feel high but to feel normal or at least not as bad. If you want a comparison, think pain relievers. If you ever have been in serious pain you take the drugs just to feel normal again. And granted, that can feel like a high but more because the horror that came before has been lifted.
Just as a first cigarette may calm your nerves but you need the 1000th one just to function, heroine and similar drugs quickly wear down. Add to this that most drug addicts don't exactly have happy lives and you have many shooting up just to make the world hurt a bit less. Of course after wards it will hurt even more.
Making the person immune does nothing. The reason for the drug taking hasn't gone away only now they will be in withdrawal with no way out. Methadon as described is often used to "help" heroine addicts but it is far from harmless, all it does is make the addiction cheaper. Drug addicts need drugs to function, take it away without anything else and they will just seek something else. After all, that is how they got addicted in the first place.
Non addicts can't really understand this. When you see a drug like crocodile, you know that people who haven't yet used it, saw people using it with parts of their bodies rotting away, not "this is your brain on drugs" style rotting, real "bones exposed" rotting and STILL started using it. That isn't done to get a nice 60's hippy high, that is a person cutting themselves to stop chronic pain.
It is therefor pointless to vaccinate the general population to combat this. The reason people start using drugs is often not to get high but to escape their reality. If it can't be done with heroine, then something else. How do you stop people taking drugs? If I knew that, I would be a very rich man. War on drugs or condoning it, drug use rates are remarkably similar around the world with the only increases in areas where live is miserable.
Since the crash it has now become acceptable to state that pure performance based rewards in the financial industry encouraged a culture where only the next quarter counts and damn the long term consequences. Make a sale now, you get your bonus and by the time it all falls down, you are long gone.
There are two simple problems at work here and they can be easily translated to coding. Say that as a developer your performance was rated on how well your users used your program. Everytime a user uses the CD tray as a cupholder, your performance goes down. Every time a user tries to eat the manual, you loose money.
Judging teachers on the performance of their pupils will quickly result in the dumping of everyone who has trouble learning on... well... who would willingly get payed even less then ordinary teachers while teaching the most difficult pupils?
Another part is the old story of IBM paying by the line... so... what would a coder do? Optimize or write extra lines? It would be very tempting for teachers to teach to pass the test, not teach so the pupils actually become smarter. Cramming will become the order of the day and those who can't will be off loaded to make sure the rating stays high.
It is not as if this is unknown. The financial industry again has this. Once Holland had a state bank in the Postbank, it offered "free" accounts (no interest payed) with lots of transaction options, it was the bank for the common man. When it was sold to ING, promises were made to keep it but these of course slowly eroded, more and more money is charged and constant attempts to cut services. Commercial thinking doesn't fit with marginal groups.
Would you as a physical education teacher want any teenage girls in your group? No, they are constantly down with cramps and other things so any teacher who cares about his pay, would arrange it that his class has fit students.
Think this is good for smart kids? Smart kids take extra effort to teach as they don't take well to cramming... effort == time == fewer students scoring a score to get a bonus. Why spend an hour on a A student when you can get 100 a passing grade and get a big bonus?
A lot of things in the world just don't work efficiently, doesn't mean everything always has to stay the same but trying to improve teaching requires the understanding of just what it is all about. Teaching is throwing a lot of different kids into a building and hoping that at the end, they can become useful members of society in their own way. For some that means becoming a doctor, for others that means working in the sewers. Society needs both. In fact, I take a crap a lot more then I visit the doctor.
BUT making this efficient, when performance based pay has had such bad results in other sectors, just isn't really possible.
Already teaching ain't a real career, it is something you do if making good money doesn't appeal to you. You can't advance, the pay is lousy, every year you have to teach the same thing to a new load of increasingly over privileged kids with parents that don't care. And everyone thinks they can do it better then you...
If I was a teacher, I wouldn't be. Fuck your kids, you teach them yourselves. It is a dead end job.
You might remember stories that the PS3 especially but also the 360 would only do HD playback of movies on certain output types... the output types that encrypt the entire path. So, in that case, the monitor itself receives an encrypted data stream and your computer never has it.
It never happened since not enough people have those kind of monitors. I know because my own PS3 is hooked up to a PC monitor that certainly has no such capability.
BUT that is the holy grail of DRM, encryption all the way to the end with it being made impossible to create your own "fake" monitor that could take the encrypted signal and decrypt it. That is hasn't happened is because inertia in tech is amazingly high and monitor makers have little to no desire to cater for this. What does IIyama or Fujitsu or Samsung care about DRM? Sony and MS and Apple don't sell enough screens to force the market to adopt.
Just be wary of buying DRM ready hardware. Every such unit sold makes it easier to force the rest to switch.
There is little surprising about the story, just how messed up the summary is. The woman on trial was not scammed but part of the scam. She is a criminal who in exchange for a hefty percentage of real cash (and not promised cash as in the 911 scam) uses her own account to funnel money to her criminal employers.
For that matter, there doesn't even seem to be a 911 scam going on at all. There are many other types of scams after all. Presumably since it involves cars it involves car sales where the car is never delivered.
No, I don't remember the name but I did own it myself.
And I still have my GBA somewhere. But sure, I know nothing about it.
AC at their best, snivelling cowards who don't dare to stand behind their words.
The inventors are a handful of people at any time. The rest are consumers.
Once, if you had a computer you had to know its ins and outs. Same as people who once drove cars or flew planes. Nowadays cars just work and people barely know where to put the fuel in, cue people putting in the wrong fuel. No owner of a Spyker would ever have done that, they KNEW their car and its needs.
There will be new inventions made by old and young people but what they all have in common is that they don't just consume whatever tech is available in their time but think about and think about what is lacking or missing. The man who made lighthouses saw how his wife was cooking and made a better stove. Simple as that. Could easily have been her son as well. Or a grandpa watching his granddaughter. Inspiration comes from looking at the world and not just assume but to question. And no, kids are NOT better at it. If they were, they would be far harder to teach.
You are in the west, a westener presumably and select to have Japanese language for kick? That shouts anime fanboy (I should know) and those ads target anime fans in the west.
If you said you were a women and got targetted with ads for women, would you consider that strange too?
Oh and lolita in this context means cheery goth, lots of lace that doesn't have to be black. Granted, it is younger women that tend to dress up like this (lots of accessories and details) while older women tend to drift towards simpler outfits (Chanel black dress) but japan fans seem to go against this tendency.
Try this, ask Youtube to mail you in Klingon and see what ads you get.