In Holland we could not care less. Outrage over a picture like this? People in Hungary should get out more often. And i don't think that sales would suddenly drop because of this. The people who are dumb enough to get offended by this usually aren't the ones that make decisions that cause companies to buy the product or not.
You've got to keep in mind that Netherland is a bit more cosmopolitan than, well, most countries in the world, in fact. Central Europe is very, very different in that regard. They've never been the kind of merchant empires that many Western European countries have been in the past 5 centuries, and more recently they also haven't had the kind of immigration we've had.
It's not so much that people there are necessarily racist, it's just that they're not nearly as used to actually meeting people with different skin colours, so I can imagine the original photo wouldn't quite work the way it was originally intended.
Even so, it's a horrible hack job. If they didn't like the original photo, they should have made a new one, rather than go for a really painfully ugly and obvious photoshop that only opens them up for accusations of racism. The guy who did this badly needs to be fired.
Sometimes there is only one solution to a problem, and sometimes that solution is violence.
If you want to get all serious about this (I preferred it when we were joking), I think violence is always the worst solution. Occasionaly it may be the only solution, however.
(Yes, that's what you said. I just like the way I said it.)
It's an astonishing success to have taken over so quickly.
I don't know of a *single* person in my circle of friends who owns one. I dont know a single person who has ever mentioned wanting them, thinking about them, or seen them. In fact, outside of slashdot, I've never really heard about the Android. Pretty popular indeed.
I know someone who has one, and I know several iPhone owners who are aching to switch to an Android phone.
The 3GS is the iPhone that it always should have been. Only now everybody has that stuff.
Even so, there's one thing the original iPhone did way better than anyone else: the user interface. I never used any of the features of my old phone, but the iPhone made everything accessible and easy to use. And while Apple worked to get their features complete, everybody else learned from Apple and started fixing their UI.
My big question is: are other UIs now just as good as the iPhone? I like the multitouch, all the apps easily availlable without searching through menus, and the wide choice of extra apps. But the iPhone is too restrictive in which apps it allows, and it comes with a crappy carrier. If the HTC Hero has a similar UI but a better carrier and more freedom in apps, I'm going to switch. If it lacks multitouch and requires me to search through menus to get what I want, I'm not going to bother.
Quite simple: the cellphone companies give no discounts for buying the phone from another supplier.
They do. A subscription + free phone often costs $20 per month, but a sim-only subscription can be as low as $3 per month. No idea if there are sim-only subscriptions with unlimited UMTS, though.
The G1 and myTouch are nice, unfortunately they're on T-Mobile, which is nice but not nice everywhere. If T-Mobile worked in my area I would certainly try them out, at least.
That's exactly why I want to get rid of my iPhone. It uses T-Mobile here, and the T-Mobile network here sucks. I was without phone connection during HAR. The HTC Hero (with Android) uses KPN which has the best network, so that's what I want.
Also, the iPhone sucks because Apple keeps denying cool apps from the app store. I think Android's openness may end up winning in the long run when more and more people discover this problem.
Do you have children? Do you live with a partner? Does s/he work?
One, yes and yes.
My wife and I each work and get home from work at around 5:30. We have dinner with our daughter around 6 or 6:30, then bath time, story time and bed time with one parent, while the other parent cleans up from dinner. Then it's an hour or so of 'us' time, before we head to bed. Where exactly in our schedule is this mythical time to do 'daily groceries by bike' in the dark pouring rain in February?
On the way home from work.
As long as you don't do a month's groceries at once, it doesn't have to take much time. There's a supermarket 5 minutes from my work, 5 minutes from my home, and another one 10 minutes from home. A minor detour on the way from work to home would bring me past a couple more supermarkets. That's what it means to live in a city.
The only problem is cheese. Supermarket cheese sucks, and my local cheese shop closes at 17:30, which is just too early for me, so we have to buy our cheese in the weekend.
It's quite likely you have several of the required tokens in your pocket now. Perhaps on your dresser. Each one has a president on it if you're American. Otherwise most likely, the queen or some figure important to your country.
If you use real money, you end up with small repositories of cash lining your streets.
Most people here seems to regard parking meters as normal and acceptable devices. Fact is that the SOIL is public. That means that the SOIL is YOURS.
The problem with parking is that the soil also belongs to millions of others, and whoever parks in a parking space, deprives others of using that space. When space is scarce, it's very reasonable to pay the community for your use.
Now would you like to be charged for living into your house? I doubt it. So why can you accept that someone is renting your land?
If he pays rent, then sure, he can rent my land. The problem with the Chicago situation is that they pay a one-time cost now, and they get to profit until all eternity (well, 75 years, but that's practically the same). Right now, city officials are of course happy with getting $1 billion, and who cares what the world looks like 10 years from now? But in 20 years, their parking spaces are still owned and controlled by a profit-driven corporation, and they're not getting anything for those exploitation rights anymore.
Managing scarce public space in order to fight congestion and ensure accessibility and usability is all fine and good, but handing that management over to a corporation who's more interested in making a buck than in congestion and accessibility of the city center is perhaps not such a great idea.
I don't understand the modern viewpoint that cars are evil, and their usage should be discouraged.
Cars clog up the city center, so their unnecessary usage in city centers should be discouraged. That keeps roads and parking spaces free for people who really need a car to go there. Parking in a completely clogged city center would a lot more frustrating than parking in a city with lousy parking meters.
Don't believe me? Well I just bought almost a month's worth of groceries. Try carrying 20 bags onto the local subway or bus or walk home.
I still have to carry those bags from the car to my home. The distance to the nearest availlable parking spot isn't all that much smaller than the distance to the nearest supermarket. I'd rather do daily groceries by bike.
Hmm. I'd say they started that way - Colour Of Magic and Light Fantastic were clearly just parodies of "high fantasy" - but the order changed over time. I think he started focussing on Humour after about the 4th book, which contained a healthy dose of misanthropically insightful philosophy (since this is the source of most of his humour.) Eventually he seemed to move on to using humour to tell us things about the world, with fantasy being just a backdrop.
It's become less satire of existing fantasy, and more insights about our own world, culture and history, but it's still fantasy. It's just not fantasy about fantasy anymore, it's now fantasy about our own world. The humour was already there in the first books. It's a less sophisticated humour, but it's definitely intentionally funny.
But even later books occasionally satirized fiction rather than reality. Many of the Witches books are about fairy tales, for example. It's just not about Fritz Leiber, Anne McCaffrey and Lovecraft anymore. But most of his modern audience has probably never heard of those names anyway.
I agree he has grown a lot over the years. I still love his earlier books (even his pre-Discworld books like Strata and Dark Side of the Sun), but some of his later books (Thud! and Going Postal are just so amazingly awesome I just can't find words for it.
I consider him the best writer of this day (but I'm sure many will disagree).
And had he said Carrot Top was who authored them, you'd have said "It makes sense. It was cheesy and retarded all in the same breath"
I wouldn't be surprised if Douglas Adams wrote the original script, and then Carrot Top started messing with it. It has a few really good points (the point-of-view gun is the primary example), but is awfully lame in other places.
Also, I preferred the Zaphod with the plastic head on his shoulder.
The Hitchhiker's Guide also has its fair share of philosophical insights, but they're smaller, given a few pages of exposure, and then forgotten again. It's some clever ideas written up in a clever way, but he doesn't explore them to their full depth in the way Pratchett does.
Vimes is definitely film noir. Every Discworld book has its own theme (in fact, many characters have their own themes) in that way. It's not big enough to be the secondary genre of the entire Discworld series, though. I'd say they're mostly Fantasy, Humour and Barely Hidden Philosophic Insights. In that order, I think.
If having Death (complete with scythe, black robe, as skeleton, etc) as one of main characters in all the series is not enough,
He's actually a really nice guy, so no, I don't think that's enough.
you have plenty (mainly in the 1st books) of events where the end of universe, the end of reality, and/or the coming of Ancient ones/cthuluish monsters/etc is about to happen. Not sure if that elements there turns Discworld into terror, but are typical of that genre.
Bel-Shamharoth and the creatures from the Dungeon Dimensions are a good point. There's definitely some Lovecraftian references in a few older books. But it's only one of the millions of themes that appear in the Discworld books.
Putting the medicine in a paste and smearing a glob of it on the cat's head is rumoured to work quite well. Just make him think you're annoying it in a different way, and it won't realise you're actually feeding it medicine.
Eoin is a perfectly standard spelling in Gaelic, we tend to use too many vowels, a friend of mine, Aoife (pronounced eefa) has great fun in other English speaking countries. Now try Aodhan,;)
How about you quit hogging all those vowels and share some with those poor Welsh?
"Oh, Dear." uttered the ghost of Douglas. The ghosts of the other authors twittered behind him. "We told you this would happen" spat Tolkien, who had assumed a rather ungainly set of almost holographic elven ears...
Now I find myself wondering what a fourth Lord Of The Rings book would look like. A servant of Sauron survives, and Frodo comes back from the west to kick his ass? A servant of Sauron somehow managed to infect those western lands across the sea, and Aragorn takes an army to conquer those lands?
I'm sure other slashdotters can think up much more painful plots for a sequel.
The creme was in the two BBC radio series, and the material was presented it its most delightful and appealing way in this format.
The books were little more than these programmes, padded with the narrative required to contextualize in written form. It's my belief that they suffered under this treatment. Certainly, they labored the humor - without the excellent timing and auditory cues, which were integral.
I disagree. Yes, the original radio play was absolutely brilliant, but the books added significant new content and humour. They're very different in places (every new version of THHGTTG needs to contradict all others, a tradition that even the recent mediocre movie continued), and stand very well on their own.
The first three books, at least. So Long And Thanks For All The Fish wasn't all that great, and quite boring and unfunny in many places. I never read Mostly Harmless.
You missed the point. Hitting any part of the Oort cloud is easy. Trying to hit any particular point in space without course corrections is unbelievably hard, unless it's a really deep and small gravity well....
Of course, but the Oort cloud is really big, and we have no idea what different parts of it look like. We have (as far as I know) no idea which parts of the Oort cloud are more interesting than other parts. So what does it matter which part of the Oort cloud we're going to hit?
Slashdot Mirror
http://img402.imageshack.us/img402/7308/microsoftlocalisation.jpg
That's a much better way to do it. Not nearly as obviously photoshopped, and looks much more natural.
I'm sure the Polish Wookie population would also appreciate this.
In Holland we could not care less. Outrage over a picture like this? People in Hungary should get out more often. And i don't think that sales would suddenly drop because of this. The people who are dumb enough to get offended by this usually aren't the ones that make decisions that cause companies to buy the product or not.
You've got to keep in mind that Netherland is a bit more cosmopolitan than, well, most countries in the world, in fact. Central Europe is very, very different in that regard. They've never been the kind of merchant empires that many Western European countries have been in the past 5 centuries, and more recently they also haven't had the kind of immigration we've had.
It's not so much that people there are necessarily racist, it's just that they're not nearly as used to actually meeting people with different skin colours, so I can imagine the original photo wouldn't quite work the way it was originally intended.
Even so, it's a horrible hack job. If they didn't like the original photo, they should have made a new one, rather than go for a really painfully ugly and obvious photoshop that only opens them up for accusations of racism. The guy who did this badly needs to be fired.
That's true. Violence is (almost) never necessary in a civilised society. But not every society is that civilised.
Sometimes there is only one solution to a problem, and sometimes that solution is violence.
If you want to get all serious about this (I preferred it when we were joking), I think violence is always the worst solution. Occasionaly it may be the only solution, however.
(Yes, that's what you said. I just like the way I said it.)
It's an astonishing success to have taken over so quickly.
I don't know of a *single* person in my circle of friends who owns one. I dont know a single person who has ever mentioned wanting them, thinking about them, or seen them. In fact, outside of slashdot, I've never really heard about the Android. Pretty popular indeed.
I know someone who has one, and I know several iPhone owners who are aching to switch to an Android phone.
The 3GS is the iPhone that it always should have been. Only now everybody has that stuff.
Even so, there's one thing the original iPhone did way better than anyone else: the user interface. I never used any of the features of my old phone, but the iPhone made everything accessible and easy to use. And while Apple worked to get their features complete, everybody else learned from Apple and started fixing their UI.
My big question is: are other UIs now just as good as the iPhone? I like the multitouch, all the apps easily availlable without searching through menus, and the wide choice of extra apps. But the iPhone is too restrictive in which apps it allows, and it comes with a crappy carrier. If the HTC Hero has a similar UI but a better carrier and more freedom in apps, I'm going to switch. If it lacks multitouch and requires me to search through menus to get what I want, I'm not going to bother.
Quite simple: the cellphone companies give no discounts for buying the phone from another supplier.
They do. A subscription + free phone often costs $20 per month, but a sim-only subscription can be as low as $3 per month. No idea if there are sim-only subscriptions with unlimited UMTS, though.
The G1 and myTouch are nice, unfortunately they're on T-Mobile, which is nice but not nice everywhere. If T-Mobile worked in my area I would certainly try them out, at least.
That's exactly why I want to get rid of my iPhone. It uses T-Mobile here, and the T-Mobile network here sucks. I was without phone connection during HAR. The HTC Hero (with Android) uses KPN which has the best network, so that's what I want.
Also, the iPhone sucks because Apple keeps denying cool apps from the app store. I think Android's openness may end up winning in the long run when more and more people discover this problem.
It's like a zombie infestation. Didn't scientific research recently prove that violence was the only solution to that?
I'd rather do daily groceries by bike.
Do you have children? Do you live with a partner? Does s/he work?
One, yes and yes.
My wife and I each work and get home from work at around 5:30. We have dinner with our daughter around 6 or 6:30, then bath time, story time and bed time with one parent, while the other parent cleans up from dinner. Then it's an hour or so of 'us' time, before we head to bed. Where exactly in our schedule is this mythical time to do 'daily groceries by bike' in the dark pouring rain in February?
On the way home from work.
As long as you don't do a month's groceries at once, it doesn't have to take much time. There's a supermarket 5 minutes from my work, 5 minutes from my home, and another one 10 minutes from home. A minor detour on the way from work to home would bring me past a couple more supermarkets. That's what it means to live in a city.
The only problem is cheese. Supermarket cheese sucks, and my local cheese shop closes at 17:30, which is just too early for me, so we have to buy our cheese in the weekend.
It's quite likely you have several of the required tokens in your pocket now. Perhaps on your dresser. Each one has a president on it if you're American. Otherwise most likely, the queen or some figure important to your country.
If you use real money, you end up with small repositories of cash lining your streets.
Most people here seems to regard parking meters as normal and acceptable devices. Fact is that the SOIL is public. That means that the SOIL is YOURS.
The problem with parking is that the soil also belongs to millions of others, and whoever parks in a parking space, deprives others of using that space. When space is scarce, it's very reasonable to pay the community for your use.
Now would you like to be charged for living into your house? I doubt it. So why can you accept that someone is renting your land?
If he pays rent, then sure, he can rent my land. The problem with the Chicago situation is that they pay a one-time cost now, and they get to profit until all eternity (well, 75 years, but that's practically the same). Right now, city officials are of course happy with getting $1 billion, and who cares what the world looks like 10 years from now? But in 20 years, their parking spaces are still owned and controlled by a profit-driven corporation, and they're not getting anything for those exploitation rights anymore.
Managing scarce public space in order to fight congestion and ensure accessibility and usability is all fine and good, but handing that management over to a corporation who's more interested in making a buck than in congestion and accessibility of the city center is perhaps not such a great idea.
I don't understand the modern viewpoint that cars are evil, and their usage should be discouraged.
Cars clog up the city center, so their unnecessary usage in city centers should be discouraged. That keeps roads and parking spaces free for people who really need a car to go there. Parking in a completely clogged city center would a lot more frustrating than parking in a city with lousy parking meters.
Don't believe me? Well I just bought almost a month's worth of groceries. Try carrying 20 bags onto the local subway or bus or walk home.
I still have to carry those bags from the car to my home. The distance to the nearest availlable parking spot isn't all that much smaller than the distance to the nearest supermarket. I'd rather do daily groceries by bike.
Monstrous Regiment wasn't my favourite either. Bits of it were really really good, but many of his other books have just that little bit extra.
Hmm. I'd say they started that way - Colour Of Magic and Light Fantastic were clearly just parodies of "high fantasy" - but the order changed over time. I think he started focussing on Humour after about the 4th book, which contained a healthy dose of misanthropically insightful philosophy (since this is the source of most of his humour.) Eventually he seemed to move on to using humour to tell us things about the world, with fantasy being just a backdrop.
It's become less satire of existing fantasy, and more insights about our own world, culture and history, but it's still fantasy. It's just not fantasy about fantasy anymore, it's now fantasy about our own world. The humour was already there in the first books. It's a less sophisticated humour, but it's definitely intentionally funny.
But even later books occasionally satirized fiction rather than reality. Many of the Witches books are about fairy tales, for example. It's just not about Fritz Leiber, Anne McCaffrey and Lovecraft anymore. But most of his modern audience has probably never heard of those names anyway.
I agree he has grown a lot over the years. I still love his earlier books (even his pre-Discworld books like Strata and Dark Side of the Sun), but some of his later books (Thud! and Going Postal are just so amazingly awesome I just can't find words for it.
I consider him the best writer of this day (but I'm sure many will disagree).
And had he said Carrot Top was who authored them, you'd have said "It makes sense. It was cheesy and retarded all in the same breath"
I wouldn't be surprised if Douglas Adams wrote the original script, and then Carrot Top started messing with it. It has a few really good points (the point-of-view gun is the primary example), but is awfully lame in other places.
Also, I preferred the Zaphod with the plastic head on his shoulder.
The Hitchhiker's Guide also has its fair share of philosophical insights, but they're smaller, given a few pages of exposure, and then forgotten again. It's some clever ideas written up in a clever way, but he doesn't explore them to their full depth in the way Pratchett does.
Vimes is definitely film noir. Every Discworld book has its own theme (in fact, many characters have their own themes) in that way. It's not big enough to be the secondary genre of the entire Discworld series, though. I'd say they're mostly Fantasy, Humour and Barely Hidden Philosophic Insights. In that order, I think.
If having Death (complete with scythe, black robe, as skeleton, etc) as one of main characters in all the series is not enough,
He's actually a really nice guy, so no, I don't think that's enough.
you have plenty (mainly in the 1st books) of events where the end of universe, the end of reality, and/or the coming of Ancient ones/cthuluish monsters/etc is about to happen. Not sure if that elements there turns Discworld into terror, but are typical of that genre.
Bel-Shamharoth and the creatures from the Dungeon Dimensions are a good point. There's definitely some Lovecraftian references in a few older books. But it's only one of the millions of themes that appear in the Discworld books.
Putting the medicine in a paste and smearing a glob of it on the cat's head is rumoured to work quite well. Just make him think you're annoying it in a different way, and it won't realise you're actually feeding it medicine.
Eoin is a perfectly standard spelling in Gaelic, we tend to use too many vowels, a friend of mine, Aoife (pronounced eefa) has great fun in other English speaking countries. Now try Aodhan, ;)
How about you quit hogging all those vowels and share some with those poor Welsh?
"Oh, Dear." uttered the ghost of Douglas. The ghosts of the other authors twittered behind him. "We told you this would happen" spat Tolkien, who had assumed a rather ungainly set of almost holographic elven ears...
Now I find myself wondering what a fourth Lord Of The Rings book would look like. A servant of Sauron survives, and Frodo comes back from the west to kick his ass? A servant of Sauron somehow managed to infect those western lands across the sea, and Aragorn takes an army to conquer those lands?
I'm sure other slashdotters can think up much more painful plots for a sequel.
The creme was in the two BBC radio series, and the material was presented it its most delightful and appealing way in this format.
The books were little more than these programmes, padded with the narrative required to contextualize in written form. It's my belief that they suffered under this treatment. Certainly, they labored the humor - without the excellent timing and auditory cues, which were integral.
I disagree. Yes, the original radio play was absolutely brilliant, but the books added significant new content and humour. They're very different in places (every new version of THHGTTG needs to contradict all others, a tradition that even the recent mediocre movie continued), and stand very well on their own.
The first three books, at least. So Long And Thanks For All The Fish wasn't all that great, and quite boring and unfunny in many places. I never read Mostly Harmless.
You missed the point. Hitting any part of the Oort cloud is easy. Trying to hit any particular point in space without course corrections is unbelievably hard, unless it's a really deep and small gravity well....
Of course, but the Oort cloud is really big, and we have no idea what different parts of it look like. We have (as far as I know) no idea which parts of the Oort cloud are more interesting than other parts. So what does it matter which part of the Oort cloud we're going to hit?
And isn't starting at the Sun and aiming for a point in the Oort cloud complicated by the N-body problem anyway?
Not really. The Oort cloud isn't exactly small. Just keep flying away from the sun and you'll get there eventually.