But there is anti-allergen makeup you can use. It's rather expensive. Especially the eye shadow and lipstick.But it should be worth a try.
I wouldn't use it for black-face, tho. The dimes people throw at you will not help you to recoup your cost.
Both has no place in school. But you may choose to send your kid to supplementary education by your religious organisation of choice.
Teaching religions in history classes within the right context OTOH is important to understand our civilisations. For instance it would have helped me greatly if I had been tought what Cyrus the Great believed in and what his background was instead of memorizing whose ass he kicked when. Turns out he was even praised by those who he conquered for being just and tolerant. Who'd have thunk it? That bit wasn't in the curriculum.
The law doesn't deserve any respect by default. And cops enforcing stupid laws is like following bad orders. Sorry, but that's a bit of a Nuremberg Defense.
But the real fault lies with a legislative that's eager to pass laws but unwilling to scrap obsolete ones. And passing laws in direct reaction to something tragic is the most offensive thing to do. Not only do you get bad and rushed legislation which will stay with you forever. No, you get bad and rushed legislation pushed through to get some bozo reelected. All those XYZ's Laws are that.
Back to my point. If a copper enforces a stupid law and knows it is stupid then he is IMHO complicit. If you get fined/taken in as opposed to being warned off for drinking beer in the park then that particular copper is a power tripping egomaniac. Sorry, no respect for that is what they get. Kudos for behaving like a thinking human being will be given otherwise.
Oooo! The Great Library of Alexandria! Now that was a loss!
But compared to how many movies, games and books were lost because the copyright holder couldn't be arsed to keep them around and because active lobbying kept it out of the public domain may be equally catastrophic.
We are not allowed to medium-shift those works but the media become obsolete very quickly.
From: Don't copy that floppy!
To: We don't have those floppies anymore, sorry kid.
Arriving at: Daddy, what's a floppy?
Within 20 years. That's no time at all. From a cultural point of view.
Just the other day I read how a particularly trashy Turkish movie was released on DVD. The originals were lost but an enthusiast tracked down one(presumably pirated) VHS tape in Italy. The original director had thought it was long lost.
Keeping stuff out of the public domain is the same as keeping it out of our culture. Which, yeah, is a loss of knowledge equal to the loss of the Great Library. It's a catastrophy.
How many of the Shakespeare plays were saved from obscurity by pirated folios? A lot of them were crap transcripts from actual performances(think cell phone recordings of the cinema experience) but in some cases something is better than nothing at all.
Comparing current copyright law to the loss of the Great Library. That's rather clever. I'll steal it.
Their standard answer when it comes to gaps in their manifesto is:
We don't have a stance on that. But you are welcome to help us form one.
Or this gem:
I think the voters will forgive us if we don't provide an answer to that.
Proper politicians would give you an answer that would leave even Sir Humphrey Appleby stumped. "We will give it the most serious and urgent consideration, and insist on a thorough and rigorous examination of all the proposals, allied to a detailed feasibility study and budget analysis before producing a consultative document for consideration by all interested bodies and seeking comments and recommendations to be included in a brief for a series of working parties who will produce individual studies which will provide the background for a more wide-ranging document considering whether or not the proposal should be taken forward to the next stage."
People say that the Greens had a very long tradition coming from the '68 generation and the peace movement and the Pirate Party is lacking that. And that has been given as a reason why it will sail nowhere.
I think they are wrong. Until half a year ago I didn't take them seriously. They seemed to be a rag-tag lot with not much in common. No clear manifesto, nothing to identify with. Clearly a joke.
Then I read whatever manifestos they improvised or copy&pasted from other parties. Then it stroke me. They might be people who also were traumatized by the 1996 act that allowed snooping of private citizens and understood where this was going. They understood how bad patented organisms are. They understood why the current copyright law hinders instead of improving development of culture. They understood how education and religion/ideology need to be kept apart. They understood that national unity doesn't depend on wether you are born to German parents or not. They understood that the state has to offer a service but is not to interfere with informed decisions made by adults.
I guess you can't take this party manifesto and use it anywhere else but there is no party that fills this niche in Germany. Even our social democratic party had pushed a neo-liberal agenda under Gerhard Schröder and the rest tend to be real socialists or nazis. And I can't bend over backwards to vote Green again. And I disagree with our conservative parties on almost every single issue.
Your venting is understandable given that you may be in the wrong party. I know this will be pointing out a sore festering wound on a rotten corpse but I have to:
62% of the 42% who bothered to answer voted for this incredible, horrendous act that legitimized snooping on citizens. That's too many members of what's supposed to be a liberal party. The aftermath, apart from Leutheusser-Schnarrenberger resigning in tears, was a very indignified discussion who to excempt from The Big Snoop: were attorneys to be excempt? How about priests? Doctors? I do remember vividly. It was like trying to use a fig leaf to cover up an elephant's penis. And you know you are fucked when even the moral vacuum Möllemann votes the right way.
The FDP is a dead husk of a liberal party. After their descent into obscurity after 1982 they basically tried everything including leaning to the right(FPÖ also has an F in it, right?), sillyness(Project 18...with a sinister undertone) and settled on staying on the neo-liberal course Genscher and Lambsdorff had set them on.
I do admire Sabine Leutheusser-Schnarrenberger. But she is a tragic figure. She's in the wrong cabinet, in the wrong party doing the right job and will very soon be in a similar position as she was in 1996. And frankly I don't want to watch again as a good minister of justice will be let down by her own party. And she will be let down. Where are Gerhard Baum and Burkhard Hirsch today? They are on the outside, looking in, but keep on raising hell in whatever capacity they have. But not in the name of the FDP but in their own name.
The top echelons are out for the count. Rössler was saved by the bell this sunday. Brüderle wouldn't have supported him today if Kubicky had lost Kiel. Meanwhile Christian Lindner is treated as the great white hope of the FDP. I'm gonna bet you Brüderle or Kubicky will step in before he gets his shot. Although Lindner is agile enough to also pander to the neo-liberal wing so you never know which direction he will swing.
Nope, given a choice between the last 30 years of the FDP and the uncertainty where the PP will steer, I will rather take my chances.
Within 10 years the PP has either gone the way of the Schill Partei(remember those bozos?) or is fit for government. Both makes them a viable liberal party superior to what the FDP was or is.
Well, as far as I know the Swiss Konkordanz is unique worldwide.
Just to make our anglo-saxon friends heads asplode:
The government is formed by 5 parties. That's right. FIVE. There is the occasional drama(just remember when Blocher wasn't elected in 2007...it was beautiful to behold...) but nothing lasting. Or sinister.
Also the amazing thing is their take on direct democracy. A couple of weeks ago the population voted AGAINST 2 additional weeks of vacation. While some say that the mainly the pensioneers voted against it it still is a marvel. That's like a bunch of kids voting against the candy store they had been accidently locked in over night. The Swiss will vote for giving money for the east expansion of the EU as long as they don't have to join it. I never understood that one. I get the not joining the EU bit but why pledge money?
That's why Switzerland still exists. Because the Swiss conciously want it to exist.
Of course being German means I'm in love with Switzerland by default.
You are assuming they are a one-trick pony? They are not. While they think current copyright law keeps stuff out of the public domain for too long they are not against it per se.
They are a very social-liberal in their beliefs. They don't want a nanny state, but they want state services to families and the poor to stay intact. They want the rights of migrants to be strengthened(right to vote, right to stay, right to work) while they don't think the law should enforce a quota for women in corporate decision postitions. They want to keep religion out of public schools. They don't think the law should force parents to put their children into kindergarden one year before they go to school but think local youth services should point out the benefits to parents. They didn't even have to think about their stance on gay marriage.
The list goes on and on and on.
Social-liberal. Equality for all. State services for those who want or need it. There has not been a party like that in Germany since 1980 when the former Liberal Party FDP ousted their social-liberal wing so they could easily form a coalition with the conservative CDU.
Well, they sort of came from copyright positions. Which were: copyright is to be respected. But the current implementation keeps stuff out of the public domain and hinders cultural development. Not the freetards you think they are.
Apart from that they are very libertarian. They want to keep religion out of policy making. They reject GM crops on basis of the patent burden since they don't think organisms should be patenable. While they think that kindergarden is a very important thing it's up to the parents wether they want to send their kids there. They don't like the ban on smoking in restaurants since that should be a choice people make and not the law. They want to strengthen the position of migrants(right to stay, right to vote). They think that spending money on big projects should be directly voted on. They want to keep the parties out of the deciding comittees of state-held television networks. They think homosexual marriage deserves the same rights as heterosexual marriage. They think that you still should get your dole money if you turn down job offers since they don't trust job agencies to competently select job offers. They thing kids should get student loans(BAFÖG) independently from the income of their parents. They think that tickets for people on public benefits should be free bund not marked as such. They don't want lower taxes since they suspect there isn't enough budget for that(haven't done their math yet). They don't have a stance on building new big mosques but you are invited to participate to help them find one. They do not want to have Islam classes in school. Which is ok because they also don't want Chritian classes in school. Religious education has no place in schools and have to be a personal choice.
That's very social-liberal. Young people concerns who plan on being alive for the next 50 years.
Well, I remember the populistic Schill Partei/PRO. They got quite a lot of(local) votes and sort of fizzled a couple of years later.
But yes, the PP is leaving the experimental phase. Which is why I think their current teething problems are so severe and loud at the moment.
But please remember that they had to scramble in Saarland so they could participate in the election. IIRC the had to build a campaign, a party manifesto and a list of candidates within only 5 weeks. What's so astonishing is that they managed to do so within that time and carried home quite a few votes and seats. As a grassroots movement they are quite powerful.
The next few years will be quite interesting. I wonder how much of that grassroot movement carries over into the realities of politics. I don't even dare to give my opinion wether the Green party managed to maintain theirs after a couple of years in the Bundestag and the Landtage.
I can't speak for the other Pirate Parties but the German one isn't a one-trick pony.
The former head of the Green party Angelika Beer joined Die Piratenpartei. The German Greens are not a crackpot party and Angelika was a member of the German parliament for over 10 years. After that she was a member of the European parliament for 5 years. So she also is an established parliamentarian. And she left the Greens after she became disenfranchised with how housebroken they were.
The German Pirate Party has quite a lot of established politicos like her and is NOT only an organization for 20-something freetards.
You do NOT want to use that name. It sounds very much like the Partido Popular in Spain and they carry on them the stink of the Falange. I do vividly recall how they deperately tried to pin the Madrid bombings on ETA because it was election sunday. Nobody bought it. That alone made them despicable, trying to turn an election over corpses before they even were identified.
There is a reason why Francisco Ibanez uses a swooping vulture when he depicts their party emblem.
And that's only ONE People's Party for you. Not a good name.
You are quite off with your hot air remark. They do avoid this like the plague. In fact they remain silent if they don't have anything to say.
Let me give you an example how this not having a stance on everything manifests itsself.
In Germany a very popular question to ask a politician is his opinion on Israel. That's a political minefield. Anything you say will be used against you.
Some media bozo asked the new head honcho of the PP. His reply was that they didn't need to have an opinion on Israel and that the voters wouldn't punish that. Shimon Stein(former ambassador for Israel in Berlin) went on record that this is potentially the right way to start a constructive public discussion in Germany and Schlömer does deserve credits for his authentic and and honest answer instead of giving the usual knee-jerk formulaic answer any hardened politician would give. Which would have been that safety of Isreal is important as is the end to the Israel/Palestinian conflict.
This weekend was a major election weekend throughout Europe. Of course there were lots and lots of political talkshows featuring the usual talking heads. One of those had Jo Ponader from the PP in it. He spent most of his time twittering and listening. The most noteworthy thing he said was that he only had to sit there and smile since the representatives of the other parties did all his campaigning and called them a garrulous lot.
At the moment the PP gathers the votes of the disappointed and propably is a protest party. But over the past few months they have gained much substance and have the potential to become more than an experiment. At the moment they have a couple of teething problems. But the next few years will show what becomes of them.
I'm willing to vote for the experiment. Any party you vote for potentially fails you, so I willingly went with the experiment. It does help that they lean into the social-liberal direction I prefer and interestingly there is no party in Germany that fits into that political spectrum. This has a lot of potential.
It's a new party and like the Green party before it the PP will be housebroken in a few decades.
In the meantime they refreshingly don't have a stance on everything since they don't need a party line for each issue. That's what their members got their own minds for.
They do fill the hole the FDP(liberal party) left when they jettisoned their social-liberal wing and became a pure party for tax exemptions for their voters.
I've said it before and I'll say it again: if Sabine Leutheusser-Schnarrenberger gets kicked out of government for resisting implementation of EU snooping laws then I do hope she finds a home with PP. A politician with a nearly flawless track record is a very rare thing.
Being a liberal party they have their own problems how to deal with members who have a crap, neo-Nazi past. Which got blown way out of proportion by their political rivals, I may add. The past 5 years most parties had their own problems with extremist idiots.
It's still fun to shout it at fucktards in funny clothes and shaved heads flying colours nobody cares to remember. I usualy ask them why they are using a Zarist Russian colours. Which confuses them for lack of education.
It was a bestseller in its time. Which nobody read. If you tend to take it seriously just imagine Schicklgruber and Hess drinking each others urine in Landsberg while this masterpiece of fiction was conceived in showers so golden it would make Uncle Scrooge horny . One of those went on vacation in Scotland. The other went on vacation burning up in a ditch. In which case the urine would have come in handy.
Ad hominem attacks are valid when dealing with the mustachially impaired. Especially when they are dripping yellow liquid.
You don't deal with those types other than beating the snot out of them.
Even more interestingly the Greek were comparatively lousy at math. Good at geometry, tho. The Romans had a similar problem. Their number system did stink.
They already block access to individual uploads. Interestingly they block anything GEMA lays claim to. Even Universal and BMG stuff. Even more interestingly those urge GEMA to cut the crap because they are fine with the deal Google is offering.
GEMA doesn't reprepresent the interests of those abroad they send money to. They don't represent the interests of local labels. They don't represent the interest of local artists.
Their past business model was to sue boozers that didn't pay up, kindergardens and private citizens to fuel their bloated body of wasteful red tape.
Due to GEMA unwillingness to get a deal on all things online recent contracts with artists FORBID GEMA TO SPEAK ON THEIR BEHALF TO GOOGLE AND GET STUFF BLOCKED.
Idiocy, red tape, bloated, ignorance. Chauffeur driven Maybachs. For teh starving artists:(
Prince of Persia was a very novel and highly frustrating game. I remember getting all the way on PC just to fail near the end boss. I vividly remember a mirror...
The motion of the player character was so fluid it simply fascinated me back in the day. It did fit onto on floppy.
Now, a couple of sequels later(mostly pompous irrelevant wasteful and shallow money grabbing console games and as I've been told a movie on top of that) the original still stands out. It had a certain elegant charme. And very grizzly deaths. After a while I got sick of being sliced up, spiked, smashed, mauled and grieviously injured to be honest. It was very raphic.
And it did fit onto one floppy. It's nice to see one of the ol masterpieces revealed. Did he include the artwork?
They (and others looking at that page) are also CUSTOMERS.
I single this one out because there is quite a lot of things wrong with the rest of your post.
No, you are not a customer when you give money via Kickstarter. This is not a preorder. You give them money and they promise you to give you a goodie when they are done. If the project goes nowhere(as projects quite often do) or gets delayed(as projects always do) or change their feature set due to time/money running out(as projects always do) then you may be out of luck. No, BBB won't help you. This is not a preorder. This is not an investment in the common legal sense with all the strings attached. It is a donation.
Besides this obvious misconception: They do look busy. Their last update was a couple of days ago and it was a huge and detailed list. And given the crap they haven't deleted I'd assume the comments they did delete were not very helpful. They are for example struggleing with the hinges and how to run the cables through them. And in a way that's actually supported by a good manufacturing process. So a "YOU HAVE MISSED THE DEADLINE! WHERE IS MY GLASSES! I'LL SUE YOU!" post is not helpful. Pointing them to a different manufacturing process, a better way to do things or even well-wishes would be much more helpful.
This is a new company. Propably founded by engineers. Thinking like engineers. They deal with design processes, optimization, not an unruly mob that is up in arms due to 4-5 months time slippage. And given they are 1/3 year behind schedule I do hope they have other investors because if they run out of money they'll have to abandon the project. And if they need FCC clearance before they can even ship to their donors as eldavojohn had pointed out, then you can add another few years to that.
I can't see how they want to sell those glasses for $150. Full retail price may be much higher. Unless they find a way to produce and shift tens of thousands of those.
But the thing I do agree with you on is if you get funding by a crowd on Kickstarter then you can do microblog updates like "lulz, ordered screws. they sent the wrong ones. need to sort this out."
Their last post looked a lot like them trying not to wake the tiger. An unruly mob in the forums can do just that.
Yes, it is what you get when you start a hardware project with little to no experience. So like any startup it may or may not work. So far, so old common sense.
But that's not what worries me. The truly problematic stuff are the comments they get. All of those negative comments basically come from people who seem to have the misconception that they are preordering stuff. Which they are not. One fool even mentioned the BBB who might be intrigued at first but will ultimately laugh you out of the office. Most of the people who gave them money seem to have given $150 dollars which gets you a pair of glasses. So that also would back my assumption that the people who gave them money mistook it for preorder.
KICKSTARTER IS NOT THE SAME AS PREORDER!
It bears repeating that
KICKSTARTER IS NOT THE SAME AS PREORDER!
The problems Eyez guys mention in the updates seem plausible. Seems like they underestimated the nitty-gritty details you have to take into account when your thing also needs to be produced in bulk.
So far: missed deadline. Deleted a couple of especially idiotic comments. Ho-hum. Not even newsworthy.
Well, a Kickstarter project fails like any other project.
Deadlines mostly are guesstimates and no project ever can give guarantees that it will finish within budget, in the timeframe given and the featureset that was actually envisioned.
Their plan was actually ambitious. They'd need components to build that damn thing. They need to be small enough so it's not a helmet rather than a pair of glasses. They need the apps. They need a manufacturer. They need to find out how many of these things they'd sell so they can negotiate contracts with suppliers. They need to find out how to best shift those things because it obviously isn't a digital download. They need a price point. They need to market that stuff.
All of which needs money. If they used the Kickstarter bucks to build a working prototype then they still would need an investor to cover all of the above. I reckon if they want to shift it in bulk then that would be a couple of megabucks.
If you can't afford reps to handle customer relations then a techies last resort would possibly be to delete posts. The alternative would be to spend time to deal with potential customers instead of building the damn thing. Any engineer will tell you what he'd rather do. It's clumsy, it's not wise, but if you don't have the time...
A lot of projects use Kickstarter to only cover initial costs. In one case a team wanted to raise 100000 bucks so they could show their professional investors that their story actually floats. Money talks, bs walks.
...it is also quite possible those Eyez guys simply took the money and mishandled it.
Kickstarter is not about ROI. They pitch an idea and you decide if you give them money. That doesn't buy you any shares in the stakes. You don't get any guarantees. You may decide to take them to court but I wouldn't count on you getting anything out of it. It's best to write the money off right after you gave it away. You never know if you backed another Gizmondo.
Slashdot Mirror
Ah! I understand!
But there is anti-allergen makeup you can use. It's rather expensive. Especially the eye shadow and lipstick.But it should be worth a try.
I wouldn't use it for black-face, tho. The dimes people throw at you will not help you to recoup your cost.
Both has no place in school. But you may choose to send your kid to supplementary education by your religious organisation of choice.
Teaching religions in history classes within the right context OTOH is important to understand our civilisations. For instance it would have helped me greatly if I had been tought what Cyrus the Great believed in and what his background was instead of memorizing whose ass he kicked when. Turns out he was even praised by those who he conquered for being just and tolerant. Who'd have thunk it? That bit wasn't in the curriculum.
Funny. I was under the impression that they were trying to create problems for their solutions.
Don't diss Commedia dell'Arte. It's less formulaic than a Disney movie.
The law doesn't deserve any respect by default. And cops enforcing stupid laws is like following bad orders. Sorry, but that's a bit of a Nuremberg Defense.
But the real fault lies with a legislative that's eager to pass laws but unwilling to scrap obsolete ones. And passing laws in direct reaction to something tragic is the most offensive thing to do. Not only do you get bad and rushed legislation which will stay with you forever. No, you get bad and rushed legislation pushed through to get some bozo reelected. All those XYZ's Laws are that.
Back to my point. If a copper enforces a stupid law and knows it is stupid then he is IMHO complicit. If you get fined/taken in as opposed to being warned off for drinking beer in the park then that particular copper is a power tripping egomaniac. Sorry, no respect for that is what they get. Kudos for behaving like a thinking human being will be given otherwise.
Oooo! The Great Library of Alexandria! Now that was a loss!
But compared to how many movies, games and books were lost because the copyright holder couldn't be arsed to keep them around and because active lobbying kept it out of the public domain may be equally catastrophic.
We are not allowed to medium-shift those works but the media become obsolete very quickly.
From: Don't copy that floppy!
To: We don't have those floppies anymore, sorry kid.
Arriving at: Daddy, what's a floppy?
Within 20 years. That's no time at all. From a cultural point of view.
Just the other day I read how a particularly trashy Turkish movie was released on DVD. The originals were lost but an enthusiast tracked down one(presumably pirated) VHS tape in Italy. The original director had thought it was long lost.
Keeping stuff out of the public domain is the same as keeping it out of our culture. Which, yeah, is a loss of knowledge equal to the loss of the Great Library. It's a catastrophy.
How many of the Shakespeare plays were saved from obscurity by pirated folios? A lot of them were crap transcripts from actual performances(think cell phone recordings of the cinema experience) but in some cases something is better than nothing at all.
Comparing current copyright law to the loss of the Great Library. That's rather clever. I'll steal it.
There is no meat on those bones. They have a logo and a forum, nothing more!
Their standard answer when it comes to gaps in their manifesto is:
We don't have a stance on that. But you are welcome to help us form one.
Or this gem:
I think the voters will forgive us if we don't provide an answer to that.
Proper politicians would give you an answer that would leave even Sir Humphrey Appleby stumped.
"We will give it the most serious and urgent consideration, and insist on a thorough and rigorous examination of all the proposals, allied to a detailed feasibility study and budget analysis before producing a consultative document for consideration by all interested bodies and seeking comments and recommendations to be included in a brief for a series of working parties who will produce individual studies which will provide the background for a more wide-ranging document considering whether or not the proposal should be taken forward to the next stage."
People say that the Greens had a very long tradition coming from the '68 generation and the peace movement and the Pirate Party is lacking that. And that has been given as a reason why it will sail nowhere.
I think they are wrong. Until half a year ago I didn't take them seriously. They seemed to be a rag-tag lot with not much in common. No clear manifesto, nothing to identify with. Clearly a joke.
Then I read whatever manifestos they improvised or copy&pasted from other parties. Then it stroke me. They might be people who also were traumatized by the 1996 act that allowed snooping of private citizens and understood where this was going. They understood how bad patented organisms are. They understood why the current copyright law hinders instead of improving development of culture. They understood how education and religion/ideology need to be kept apart. They understood that national unity doesn't depend on wether you are born to German parents or not. They understood that the state has to offer a service but is not to interfere with informed decisions made by adults.
I guess you can't take this party manifesto and use it anywhere else but there is no party that fills this niche in Germany. Even our social democratic party had pushed a neo-liberal agenda under Gerhard Schröder and the rest tend to be real socialists or nazis. And I can't bend over backwards to vote Green again. And I disagree with our conservative parties on almost every single issue.
Your venting is understandable given that you may be in the wrong party. I know this will be pointing out a sore festering wound on a rotten corpse but I have to:
62% of the 42% who bothered to answer voted for this incredible, horrendous act that legitimized snooping on citizens. That's too many members of what's supposed to be a liberal party. The aftermath, apart from Leutheusser-Schnarrenberger resigning in tears, was a very indignified discussion who to excempt from The Big Snoop: were attorneys to be excempt? How about priests? Doctors? I do remember vividly. It was like trying to use a fig leaf to cover up an elephant's penis. And you know you are fucked when even the moral vacuum Möllemann votes the right way.
The FDP is a dead husk of a liberal party. After their descent into obscurity after 1982 they basically tried everything including leaning to the right(FPÖ also has an F in it, right?), sillyness(Project 18...with a sinister undertone) and settled on staying on the neo-liberal course Genscher and Lambsdorff had set them on.
I do admire Sabine Leutheusser-Schnarrenberger. But she is a tragic figure. She's in the wrong cabinet, in the wrong party doing the right job and will very soon be in a similar position as she was in 1996. And frankly I don't want to watch again as a good minister of justice will be let down by her own party. And she will be let down. Where are Gerhard Baum and Burkhard Hirsch today? They are on the outside, looking in, but keep on raising hell in whatever capacity they have. But not in the name of the FDP but in their own name.
The top echelons are out for the count. Rössler was saved by the bell this sunday. Brüderle wouldn't have supported him today if Kubicky had lost Kiel. Meanwhile Christian Lindner is treated as the great white hope of the FDP. I'm gonna bet you Brüderle or Kubicky will step in before he gets his shot. Although Lindner is agile enough to also pander to the neo-liberal wing so you never know which direction he will swing.
Nope, given a choice between the last 30 years of the FDP and the uncertainty where the PP will steer, I will rather take my chances.
Within 10 years the PP has either gone the way of the Schill Partei(remember those bozos?) or is fit for government. Both makes them a viable liberal party superior to what the FDP was or is.
Well, as far as I know the Swiss Konkordanz is unique worldwide.
Just to make our anglo-saxon friends heads asplode:
The government is formed by 5 parties. That's right. FIVE. There is the occasional drama(just remember when Blocher wasn't elected in 2007...it was beautiful to behold...) but nothing lasting. Or sinister.
Also the amazing thing is their take on direct democracy. A couple of weeks ago the population voted AGAINST 2 additional weeks of vacation. While some say that the mainly the pensioneers voted against it it still is a marvel. That's like a bunch of kids voting against the candy store they had been accidently locked in over night. The Swiss will vote for giving money for the east expansion of the EU as long as they don't have to join it. I never understood that one. I get the not joining the EU bit but why pledge money?
That's why Switzerland still exists. Because the Swiss conciously want it to exist.
Of course being German means I'm in love with Switzerland by default.
You are assuming they are a one-trick pony? They are not. While they think current copyright law keeps stuff out of the public domain for too long they are not against it per se.
They are a very social-liberal in their beliefs. They don't want a nanny state, but they want state services to families and the poor to stay intact. They want the rights of migrants to be strengthened(right to vote, right to stay, right to work) while they don't think the law should enforce a quota for women in corporate decision postitions. They want to keep religion out of public schools. They don't think the law should force parents to put their children into kindergarden one year before they go to school but think local youth services should point out the benefits to parents. They didn't even have to think about their stance on gay marriage.
The list goes on and on and on.
Social-liberal. Equality for all. State services for those who want or need it. There has not been a party like that in Germany since 1980 when the former Liberal Party FDP ousted their social-liberal wing so they could easily form a coalition with the conservative CDU.
Well, they sort of came from copyright positions. Which were: copyright is to be respected. But the current implementation keeps stuff out of the public domain and hinders cultural development. Not the freetards you think they are.
Apart from that they are very libertarian. They want to keep religion out of policy making. They reject GM crops on basis of the patent burden since they don't think organisms should be patenable. While they think that kindergarden is a very important thing it's up to the parents wether they want to send their kids there. They don't like the ban on smoking in restaurants since that should be a choice people make and not the law. They want to strengthen the position of migrants(right to stay, right to vote). They think that spending money on big projects should be directly voted on. They want to keep the parties out of the deciding comittees of state-held television networks. They think homosexual marriage deserves the same rights as heterosexual marriage. They think that you still should get your dole money if you turn down job offers since they don't trust job agencies to competently select job offers. They thing kids should get student loans(BAFÖG) independently from the income of their parents. They think that tickets for people on public benefits should be free bund not marked as such. They don't want lower taxes since they suspect there isn't enough budget for that(haven't done their math yet). They don't have a stance on building new big mosques but you are invited to participate to help them find one. They do not want to have Islam classes in school. Which is ok because they also don't want Chritian classes in school. Religious education has no place in schools and have to be a personal choice.
That's very social-liberal. Young people concerns who plan on being alive for the next 50 years.
Well, I remember the populistic Schill Partei/PRO. They got quite a lot of(local) votes and sort of fizzled a couple of years later.
But yes, the PP is leaving the experimental phase. Which is why I think their current teething problems are so severe and loud at the moment.
But please remember that they had to scramble in Saarland so they could participate in the election. IIRC the had to build a campaign, a party manifesto and a list of candidates within only 5 weeks. What's so astonishing is that they managed to do so within that time and carried home quite a few votes and seats. As a grassroots movement they are quite powerful.
The next few years will be quite interesting. I wonder how much of that grassroot movement carries over into the realities of politics. I don't even dare to give my opinion wether the Green party managed to maintain theirs after a couple of years in the Bundestag and the Landtage.
I can't speak for the other Pirate Parties but the German one isn't a one-trick pony.
The former head of the Green party Angelika Beer joined Die Piratenpartei. The German Greens are not a crackpot party and Angelika was a member of the German parliament for over 10 years. After that she was a member of the European parliament for 5 years. So she also is an established parliamentarian. And she left the Greens after she became disenfranchised with how housebroken they were.
The German Pirate Party has quite a lot of established politicos like her and is NOT only an organization for 20-something freetards.
You do NOT want to use that name. It sounds very much like the Partido Popular in Spain and they carry on them the stink of the Falange. I do vividly recall how they deperately tried to pin the Madrid bombings on ETA because it was election sunday. Nobody bought it. That alone made them despicable, trying to turn an election over corpses before they even were identified.
There is a reason why Francisco Ibanez uses a swooping vulture when he depicts their party emblem.
And that's only ONE People's Party for you. Not a good name.
You are quite off with your hot air remark. They do avoid this like the plague. In fact they remain silent if they don't have anything to say.
Let me give you an example how this not having a stance on everything manifests itsself.
In Germany a very popular question to ask a politician is his opinion on Israel. That's a political minefield. Anything you say will be used against you.
Some media bozo asked the new head honcho of the PP. His reply was that they didn't need to have an opinion on Israel and that the voters wouldn't punish that. Shimon Stein(former ambassador for Israel in Berlin) went on record that this is potentially the right way to start a constructive public discussion in Germany and Schlömer does deserve credits for his authentic and and honest answer instead of giving the usual knee-jerk formulaic answer any hardened politician would give. Which would have been that safety of Isreal is important as is the end to the Israel/Palestinian conflict.
Stein's original opinion piece(German): http://www.spiegel.de/politik/deutschland/0,1518,830968,00.html Honesty is a forgotten virtue in politics. It's nice if established politicians notice that. I wouldn't mind if this were common place.
This weekend was a major election weekend throughout Europe. Of course there were lots and lots of political talkshows featuring the usual talking heads. One of those had Jo Ponader from the PP in it. He spent most of his time twittering and listening. The most noteworthy thing he said was that he only had to sit there and smile since the representatives of the other parties did all his campaigning and called them a garrulous lot.
At the moment the PP gathers the votes of the disappointed and propably is a protest party. But over the past few months they have gained much substance and have the potential to become more than an experiment. At the moment they have a couple of teething problems. But the next few years will show what becomes of them.
I'm willing to vote for the experiment. Any party you vote for potentially fails you, so I willingly went with the experiment. It does help that they lean into the social-liberal direction I prefer and interestingly there is no party in Germany that fits into that political spectrum. This has a lot of potential.
It's a new party and like the Green party before it the PP will be housebroken in a few decades.
In the meantime they refreshingly don't have a stance on everything since they don't need a party line for each issue. That's what their members got their own minds for.
They do fill the hole the FDP(liberal party) left when they jettisoned their social-liberal wing and became a pure party for tax exemptions for their voters.
I've said it before and I'll say it again: if Sabine Leutheusser-Schnarrenberger gets kicked out of government for resisting implementation of EU snooping laws then I do hope she finds a home with PP. A politician with a nearly flawless track record is a very rare thing.
Being a liberal party they have their own problems how to deal with members who have a crap, neo-Nazi past. Which got blown way out of proportion by their political rivals, I may add. The past 5 years most parties had their own problems with extremist idiots.
It's still fun to shout it at fucktards in funny clothes and shaved heads flying colours nobody cares to remember. I usualy ask them why they are using a Zarist Russian colours. Which confuses them for lack of education.
It was a bestseller in its time. Which nobody read. If you tend to take it seriously just imagine Schicklgruber and Hess drinking each others urine in Landsberg while this masterpiece of fiction was conceived in showers so golden it would make Uncle Scrooge horny . One of those went on vacation in Scotland. The other went on vacation burning up in a ditch. In which case the urine would have come in handy.
Ad hominem attacks are valid when dealing with the mustachially impaired. Especially when they are dripping yellow liquid.
You don't deal with those types other than beating the snot out of them.
You don't even have to go into infinity and imaginary numbers. Even real numbers are a problem with fundtards.
Do I have to remind you that there was legislation that said that PI = 3?
I really hate that the media gives those idiots airtime in order to provide "fair and balanced reporting".
But I do support the abolishment of 0 as a concept. It makes coding so much simpler. Also the letter "c" is not necessary. We kan do without it.
Even more interestingly the Greek were comparatively lousy at math. Good at geometry, tho. The Romans had a similar problem. Their number system did stink.
They already block access to individual uploads. Interestingly they block anything GEMA lays claim to. Even Universal and BMG stuff. Even more interestingly those urge GEMA to cut the crap because they are fine with the deal Google is offering.
:(
GEMA doesn't reprepresent the interests of those abroad they send money to. They don't represent the interests of local labels. They don't represent the interest of local artists.
Their past business model was to sue boozers that didn't pay up, kindergardens and private citizens to fuel their bloated body of wasteful red tape.
Due to GEMA unwillingness to get a deal on all things online recent contracts with artists FORBID GEMA TO SPEAK ON THEIR BEHALF TO GOOGLE AND GET STUFF BLOCKED.
Idiocy, red tape, bloated, ignorance. Chauffeur driven Maybachs. For teh starving artists
Prince of Persia was a very novel and highly frustrating game. I remember getting all the way on PC just to fail near the end boss. I vividly remember a mirror...
The motion of the player character was so fluid it simply fascinated me back in the day. It did fit onto on floppy.
Now, a couple of sequels later(mostly pompous irrelevant wasteful and shallow money grabbing console games and as I've been told a movie on top of that) the original still stands out. It had a certain elegant charme. And very grizzly deaths. After a while I got sick of being sliced up, spiked, smashed, mauled and grieviously injured to be honest. It was very raphic.
And it did fit onto one floppy. It's nice to see one of the ol masterpieces revealed. Did he include the artwork?
They (and others looking at that page) are also CUSTOMERS.
I single this one out because there is quite a lot of things wrong with the rest of your post.
No, you are not a customer when you give money via Kickstarter. This is not a preorder. You give them money and they promise you to give you a goodie when they are done. If the project goes nowhere(as projects quite often do) or gets delayed(as projects always do) or change their feature set due to time/money running out(as projects always do) then you may be out of luck. No, BBB won't help you. This is not a preorder. This is not an investment in the common legal sense with all the strings attached. It is a donation.
Besides this obvious misconception: They do look busy. Their last update was a couple of days ago and it was a huge and detailed list. And given the crap they haven't deleted I'd assume the comments they did delete were not very helpful. They are for example struggleing with the hinges and how to run the cables through them. And in a way that's actually supported by a good manufacturing process. So a "YOU HAVE MISSED THE DEADLINE! WHERE IS MY GLASSES! I'LL SUE YOU!" post is not helpful. Pointing them to a different manufacturing process, a better way to do things or even well-wishes would be much more helpful.
This is a new company. Propably founded by engineers. Thinking like engineers. They deal with design processes, optimization, not an unruly mob that is up in arms due to 4-5 months time slippage. And given they are 1/3 year behind schedule I do hope they have other investors because if they run out of money they'll have to abandon the project. And if they need FCC clearance before they can even ship to their donors as eldavojohn had pointed out, then you can add another few years to that.
I can't see how they want to sell those glasses for $150. Full retail price may be much higher. Unless they find a way to produce and shift tens of thousands of those.
But the thing I do agree with you on is if you get funding by a crowd on Kickstarter then you can do microblog updates like "lulz, ordered screws. they sent the wrong ones. need to sort this out."
Their last post looked a lot like them trying not to wake the tiger. An unruly mob in the forums can do just that.
Yes, it is what you get when you start a hardware project with little to no experience. So like any startup it may or may not work. So far, so old common sense.
But that's not what worries me. The truly problematic stuff are the comments they get. All of those negative comments basically come from people who seem to have the misconception that they are preordering stuff. Which they are not. One fool even mentioned the BBB who might be intrigued at first but will ultimately laugh you out of the office. Most of the people who gave them money seem to have given $150 dollars which gets you a pair of glasses. So that also would back my assumption that the people who gave them money mistook it for preorder.
KICKSTARTER IS NOT THE SAME AS PREORDER!
It bears repeating that
KICKSTARTER IS NOT THE SAME AS PREORDER!
The problems Eyez guys mention in the updates seem plausible. Seems like they underestimated the nitty-gritty details you have to take into account when your thing also needs to be produced in bulk.
So far: missed deadline. Deleted a couple of especially idiotic comments. Ho-hum. Not even newsworthy.
Well, a Kickstarter project fails like any other project.
...it is also quite possible those Eyez guys simply took the money and mishandled it.
Deadlines mostly are guesstimates and no project ever can give guarantees that it will finish within budget, in the timeframe given and the featureset that was actually envisioned.
Their plan was actually ambitious. They'd need components to build that damn thing. They need to be small enough so it's not a helmet rather than a pair of glasses. They need the apps. They need a manufacturer. They need to find out how many of these things they'd sell so they can negotiate contracts with suppliers. They need to find out how to best shift those things because it obviously isn't a digital download. They need a price point. They need to market that stuff.
All of which needs money. If they used the Kickstarter bucks to build a working prototype then they still would need an investor to cover all of the above. I reckon if they want to shift it in bulk then that would be a couple of megabucks.
If you can't afford reps to handle customer relations then a techies last resort would possibly be to delete posts. The alternative would be to spend time to deal with potential customers instead of building the damn thing. Any engineer will tell you what he'd rather do. It's clumsy, it's not wise, but if you don't have the time...
A lot of projects use Kickstarter to only cover initial costs. In one case a team wanted to raise 100000 bucks so they could show their professional investors that their story actually floats. Money talks, bs walks.
Kickstarter is not about ROI. They pitch an idea and you decide if you give them money. That doesn't buy you any shares in the stakes. You don't get any guarantees. You may decide to take them to court but I wouldn't count on you getting anything out of it. It's best to write the money off right after you gave it away. You never know if you backed another Gizmondo.
Kickstarter still is a brilliant idea.