But, by definition, hipsters follow popular trends and culture, with the modern twist of also being "ironic" (except they misuse "irony" when they really just like this disingenuously). Being a hipster is not about liking things and your taste in things for the sake of those things. Being a hipster is a completely insincere act of liking things and following trends almost purely for the effect it has on your perceived social status.
You and I might like that one band because of that one awesome song they do. Hipsters like that other band, because they believe liking that other band makes them appear smarter, edgier, and unique. Taste is purely a currency, as far as they're concerned.
Have you ever tried walking in retro- early 80s or 70s low-rise boots from the vintage thrift store while wearing super-tight women's pants and sweating through your "ironic" (used to mean insincere, rather than the actual definition of the word, as is always the case with hipsters) facial hair, with a "bespoke" messenger bag crafted out of recycled tires and third-world-toilet-paper with a giant communist icon emblazoned over the face of the bag, for more than eighty feet?!
No, "in the wake of" implies that one event is the direct result of fallout from the other event, which -- no matter how shitty the game, the launch, and the DRM of SimCity are, is unrelated to those things.
Sorry, but that's bullshit. We try children as adults all the time. Remember the twelve year old boy who was tried as an adult for doing "pro"-wrestling moves from television on a two-year old, which he wound up killing? How about the thirteen year old girl tried as an adult for stabbing and killing her sister?
And you're going to tell me that a seventeen year old should be judged as having a different capacity for reasoning when it comes to rape than he would in six to twelve months, when he'll be an adult?
Except for all the times when we make exceptions -- and if we can make exceptions for twelve year old children being tried as adults, we can make exceptions for high school boys committing rape. I suppose you could argue that a twelve year old boy could be a stupid enough of a human being to not grasp that moves you see on fake wrestling on television (like a pile driver) should not be attempted on a baby, but you absolutely can not argue that a sixteen and seventeen year old boy doesn't know that it's wrong to commit rape or what common circumstances are commonly classified as rape.
Their response to one is "Well, boys will be boys!".
Their response to the other is "Oh my god, if they can webscrape publicly accessible information, the next thing these vial social outcasts will be doing is hax0ring into NORAD and launching nuclear warheads and initiating WWIII and I can't have that because I haven't finished watching Real Housewives, yet!"
According to the tech journalists over the last three years:
* Nobody under 50 uses websites anymore (they just click shit from their social networking feeds). * Nobody under 50 uses email anymore. * Nobody under 50 uses IM anymore. * Nobody under 30 uses Facebook anymore. * Nobody under 30 uses text messaging anymore. * Nobody under 20 uses twitter anymore.
The funny thing is that since I don't give a shit about Twitter, either (I barely follow anyone and I never post), instead of using twitter for my news feed and site updates like everyone is claiming is "the new thing you're supposed to do now that RSS is dead", I actually have always used RSS feeds for twitter accounts to dump updates from the few Twitter posters I give a damn about into my RSS setup.:)
I saw something this morning about Google rolling out an Evernote competitor built on Google Drive. They're going to have a hard time pushing these types of things, I think. On top of all the other concerns with such services (what do you do when they're buggy and broken?, why are the interfaces always so different across the whole suite of Google products?, etc). -- now they have to contend with the "why should I use your service when it might not be here in 12-18 months?". One big selling point of a service from a company like Google is "hey, they're massive and never going anywhere". That's a benefit they offer over "here's this little startup that may fail and you'll have to find a new start somewhere else for all your data and tools in six months". If that's no longer a certainty, then you would just go for the coolest/neatest/most useful service out there and take your chances on longevity (and Google is rarely the most useful, neatest, or coolest of the lot).
Don't forget Google Earth, Picasa, G+, Google Drive/Docs, Google Sites, Google Contacts, Google Calendar, GTalk, Google Mars, Google Moon, Google Sky, Google Books, Google Alerts, Blogger, Custom Search, Google Finance, Google Groups (their attempt to convince people that usenet is a Google service only), Google News, Google Shopping, Orkut, Patent Search, Scholar, Schemer, News Archive, Hotpot, Image Search, Web History, Google Video, Google Voice, Gmail, AdSense, AdWords, DoubleClick, Meebo, Google Web Optimizer, Google Plus, Goo.gl url shortner, Google Profile, Google Sites, Google Web Fonts, Youtube, App Engine, Dark, GO, OpenSocial, Google Code, Analytics, Public Data Explorer, Trends and Zeitgeist, Chrome, Google Toolbar, Latitude, Google Music, Google Play Store, Google Sync, Translate, turnkey enterprise search systems, Nexus cell phones, Google Glasses, Google Crisis Response, Google Fiber, Public DNS servers, Google Wallet, Google self-driving cars, Zagat/Places/etc.
. . . . and whatever else I've forgotten.
As we can see, Google is a very slim and trim company with limited but refined services. They just don't want to offer everything to everyone. Just three or four products that they do really well.:D
I complain about "free" stuff all the time, because it's usually not free. Google is charging me both my eyeballs and my personal data. Other "free" stuff online is charging me for my eyeballs and my personal data. Further, telling me "you don't have a right to complain -- or even to complain about your personal data being tracked or ads being shoved in your face, because it's free!" is bullshit, because I'd often gladly pay a buck to not be subjected to those things, if they'd give me a fucking chance. Not giving me an option and then saying "shut the fuck up, bitch, it's free", is bullshit.
Unless it's an actual free service, where they are not charging money, eyeballs (ads), or personal data.
He's right. Most people don't use RSS. The same way most people don't visit web pages other than Facebook and Twitter. It's hardly a justification for dismissing a protocol. RSS is a primary functionality of the web, now. It's offered on almost every website. It's the backbone of almost every podcast program.
The tech media and self-promoting personalities would tell us that they've long since replaced RSS with Twitter and Facebook and that's where they get all their links and news. I call bullshit on that. They seriously log into a website 24x7 and sift through all the trivial garbage their friends post for the few pieces of signal among the noise? Most of the people I know who use facebook have nothing to do with the news or industries I'm in or care about and seeing my stream full of their posts about NASCAR, network television shows, and Kim Kardashian amidsts the occasional ignorant political rant would serve me in absolutely no way.
RSS is my window to the world. I choose what sites I care about and I get their content delivered directly to me, quickly, stripped of any extraneous bullshit from their site. It's the kind of service that simply won't likely ever be replaced, because it is so simple and fulfills an important role.
As for Google Reader. Whatever. I used it for years and it was the best way they had to keep me associated with their services. Perhaps even more than my gmail account. However, I don't care that they got rid of it. Google is worth like half a trillion dollars. Just because they don't see a future in it, financially, for themselves -- that doesn't mean it isn't worth it for everyone else. Look at all the little guys out there. They don't need half a billion users for their RSS clients and infrastructures to be a success. They only need a tiny fraction of that. Google's choice to ax this is fantastic. It would be like Blizzard axing World of Warcraft -- an act that would breath fresh life into a genre that it is sucking the air out of. It would encourage others to step in and take their place and compete and innovate.
Already, we see plenty of these guys competing and offering new services and ways of interfacing with RSS. Syncing, different clients, magazine interfaces, clean stripped down interfaces. All sorts of stuff. And, hey, I bet some of them won't be utterly fucking broken the way Google was (where it would just not let you ever delete some entries in your feed, even after several years) -- and if they are, they'll probably have some form of god damn customer service so you can actually talk to a human about how their shit is broken.
PS: This move isn't going to get me to use G+ any more, either, Google. The only thing I need social networking for is work and that's what LinkedIN is for. I use G+ in the same way I use Facebook -- as a placeholder for my name so someone else can't take it and nothing more.
As bad as I've always found the internet to be, as a whole, I never realized how tame and timid it truly was until the idea of attaching shitty third-party discussion thread services all over the place started catching on. You know what I'm talking about -- Facebook comment widgets (where people actually attach their real name to some of the most vile idiocy I've ever read) and inline Disqus forums. You find these instances every time you read the comments under an article on a CBS affiliate station's website or -- predictably -- to any page on the internet that has a comment section and has been linked to by DrudgeReport. This is where you find people who have 50,000 posts to their name, commenting on every single article or thread ever found. Spewing the same moronic drivel with references to "Obozo" and "Oh, notice the libtards that have corrupted the media wont' publish the race of the criminal in this news story, because it's probably a [insert non-white skin color, here]".
Fortunately, these little honey-pots keep these idiots occupied and way from the rest of us. All you have to do is set your browser to block all facebook, disqus and other widgets and your life is much better. Let the pigs fester in their own shit.
Oh, I should have also included that whole thing at an Oakland BART station just a few years ago, where a handful of cops had an unarmed man subdued and face-down on the concrete, when one of the cops stands up, steps back, pulls out his gun, and fatally shoots the guy while the other cops are holding him down.
You can take each of these as insignificant anecdotal pieces, but when you start to compile the list, you start to realize that you are just one bad or off day away from a cop putting an end to you. Sometimes a good cop making a mistake or a bad cop losing his shit. And there are also plenty of examples of cops breaking down the wrong doors during SWAT busts, sometimes resulting in the innocent occupants inside being killed. We're not talking hoaxes, here. We're talking police fuck-ups, because they smashed down the wrong front door.
Just google "swat enters wrong home" for all those stories.
I'd need you to define "rare". Perhaps they are rare in comparison to the number of times a cop has to draw a gun, but you could probably spend the rest of the decade pouring through news stories about young black men being shot a dozen times for drawing a 3Muskateers candy bar out of their pocket. All you need to do is google phrases like "police [shoot|kill] unarmed [black|woman]". Throw in some searches for things like "police use taser on unarmed elderly woman", while you're at it.
How many times is acceptable? Shouldn't abuse be pretty much a zero-tolerance issue? Shouldn't excessive (but not abusive) force be both a rare exception and one that is dealt with much more seriously than it is? There are far more stories of "police shoot unarmed black man" and "police shoot unarmed woman" and "police tased person because he had a smart mouth or they were too lazy to overpower him despite having a dozen officers surrounding him" and 'police tase or pepper spray 84 year old woman" stories than there are stories of police being killed.
I mean, for fuck's sake, how many times did cops unload on innocent citizens in the search for that ex-military guy a few weeks ago? Wasn't it twice? And one of them actually *was* a blue van with asian women driving when the APB was for a muscular black man in a green truck? Not only that but the police SHOT ONE OF THOSE WOMEN IN THE FUCKING ****BACK****?! (source: http://latimesblogs.latimes.com/lanow/2013/02/ex-cop-manhunt-newspaper-delivery-women-shot.html ).
Nobody could seriously assert that all cops are corrupted or mentally imbalanced or anything of the sort. That's not what I'm saying. I'm saying what seems pretty obvious from our culture and the news that has covered it for decades -- cops *are* quick to shoot, often shoot without justification, often without thorough investivation, and often without proper persecution. As a whole, they should be taken as a danger to society. Yes, they exist to protect (or, at least, clean up after someone's done some evil shit too you before they got there), but it'd be insane not to treat every encounter with one as one in which you could potentially be shot.
Also, yes they face potentially dangerous situations every day. And they're trained to handle those, so that they don't shoot unarmed and/or innocent people not posing an immediate threat.
You make an interesting point. Only one potential harm of this is an over-reaction resulting in a dead innocent citizen. The other potential harm is if this gets out of hand and SWAT at some point under-reacts due to so many hoaxes, leaving some slack for something to go truly wrong when it's the real thing. Of course, my understanding is that SWAT are the best of the best (at least as far as domestic cops go) and I imagine they'd approach the 500th hoax as just as real a situation as the first hoax.
Slashdot Mirror
It's possible to be married and not turn into a total vagina, despite what this dumb app suggests.
Anyway, I wish there were more opportunity for community feedback around here, so we could have some impact on this kind of crap appearing.
But, by definition, hipsters follow popular trends and culture, with the modern twist of also being "ironic" (except they misuse "irony" when they really just like this disingenuously). Being a hipster is not about liking things and your taste in things for the sake of those things. Being a hipster is a completely insincere act of liking things and following trends almost purely for the effect it has on your perceived social status.
You and I might like that one band because of that one awesome song they do. Hipsters like that other band, because they believe liking that other band makes them appear smarter, edgier, and unique. Taste is purely a currency, as far as they're concerned.
Have you ever tried walking in retro- early 80s or 70s low-rise boots from the vintage thrift store while wearing super-tight women's pants and sweating through your "ironic" (used to mean insincere, rather than the actual definition of the word, as is always the case with hipsters) facial hair, with a "bespoke" messenger bag crafted out of recycled tires and third-world-toilet-paper with a giant communist icon emblazoned over the face of the bag, for more than eighty feet?!
Having played both Doom and Team Fortress 2, I'd have to say both were about equally as bad.
You mean, a smashing success like selling a million copies in less than two weeks?
One has nothing to do with the other.
No, "in the wake of" implies that one event is the direct result of fallout from the other event, which -- no matter how shitty the game, the launch, and the DRM of SimCity are, is unrelated to those things.
Bunch of self-indulgent, over-important, overly-commercial, self-involved hipsters.
And I'm from Portland, so that's saying something.
Sorry, but that's bullshit. We try children as adults all the time. Remember the twelve year old boy who was tried as an adult for doing "pro"-wrestling moves from television on a two-year old, which he wound up killing? How about the thirteen year old girl tried as an adult for stabbing and killing her sister?
And you're going to tell me that a seventeen year old should be judged as having a different capacity for reasoning when it comes to rape than he would in six to twelve months, when he'll be an adult?
Except for all the times when we make exceptions -- and if we can make exceptions for twelve year old children being tried as adults, we can make exceptions for high school boys committing rape. I suppose you could argue that a twelve year old boy could be a stupid enough of a human being to not grasp that moves you see on fake wrestling on television (like a pile driver) should not be attempted on a baby, but you absolutely can not argue that a sixteen and seventeen year old boy doesn't know that it's wrong to commit rape or what common circumstances are commonly classified as rape.
No, a vial is where I keep the crack that causes me to type so fast that I don't notice typos before hitting 'submit'. :)
It's simple. Society is sick.
Their response to one is "Well, boys will be boys!".
Their response to the other is "Oh my god, if they can webscrape publicly accessible information, the next thing these vial social outcasts will be doing is hax0ring into NORAD and launching nuclear warheads and initiating WWIII and I can't have that because I haven't finished watching Real Housewives, yet!"
Also, what time are you hypothetically home?
That can't possibly be true.
According to the tech journalists over the last three years:
* Nobody under 50 uses websites anymore (they just click shit from their social networking feeds).
* Nobody under 50 uses email anymore.
* Nobody under 50 uses IM anymore.
* Nobody under 30 uses Facebook anymore.
* Nobody under 30 uses text messaging anymore.
* Nobody under 20 uses twitter anymore.
The funny thing is that since I don't give a shit about Twitter, either (I barely follow anyone and I never post), instead of using twitter for my news feed and site updates like everyone is claiming is "the new thing you're supposed to do now that RSS is dead", I actually have always used RSS feeds for twitter accounts to dump updates from the few Twitter posters I give a damn about into my RSS setup. :)
I saw something this morning about Google rolling out an Evernote competitor built on Google Drive. They're going to have a hard time pushing these types of things, I think. On top of all the other concerns with such services (what do you do when they're buggy and broken?, why are the interfaces always so different across the whole suite of Google products?, etc). -- now they have to contend with the "why should I use your service when it might not be here in 12-18 months?". One big selling point of a service from a company like Google is "hey, they're massive and never going anywhere". That's a benefit they offer over "here's this little startup that may fail and you'll have to find a new start somewhere else for all your data and tools in six months". If that's no longer a certainty, then you would just go for the coolest/neatest/most useful service out there and take your chances on longevity (and Google is rarely the most useful, neatest, or coolest of the lot).
Don't forget Google Earth, Picasa, G+, Google Drive/Docs, Google Sites, Google Contacts, Google Calendar, GTalk, Google Mars, Google Moon, Google Sky, Google Books, Google Alerts, Blogger, Custom Search, Google Finance, Google Groups (their attempt to convince people that usenet is a Google service only), Google News, Google Shopping, Orkut, Patent Search, Scholar, Schemer, News Archive, Hotpot, Image Search, Web History, Google Video, Google Voice, Gmail, AdSense, AdWords, DoubleClick, Meebo, Google Web Optimizer, Google Plus, Goo.gl url shortner, Google Profile, Google Sites, Google Web Fonts, Youtube, App Engine, Dark, GO, OpenSocial, Google Code, Analytics, Public Data Explorer, Trends and Zeitgeist, Chrome, Google Toolbar, Latitude, Google Music, Google Play Store, Google Sync, Translate, turnkey enterprise search systems, Nexus cell phones, Google Glasses, Google Crisis Response, Google Fiber, Public DNS servers, Google Wallet, Google self-driving cars, Zagat/Places/etc.
. . . . and whatever else I've forgotten.
As we can see, Google is a very slim and trim company with limited but refined services. They just don't want to offer everything to everyone. Just three or four products that they do really well. :D
I mostly love how Google Apps costs money, but works worse and costs more and feels clunkier than their free option.
I was always shocked when I saw people using iGoogle. It always looked and felt so clunky and limited and anachronistic.
I complain about "free" stuff all the time, because it's usually not free. Google is charging me both my eyeballs and my personal data. Other "free" stuff online is charging me for my eyeballs and my personal data. Further, telling me "you don't have a right to complain -- or even to complain about your personal data being tracked or ads being shoved in your face, because it's free!" is bullshit, because I'd often gladly pay a buck to not be subjected to those things, if they'd give me a fucking chance. Not giving me an option and then saying "shut the fuck up, bitch, it's free", is bullshit.
Unless it's an actual free service, where they are not charging money, eyeballs (ads), or personal data.
He's right. Most people don't use RSS. The same way most people don't visit web pages other than Facebook and Twitter. It's hardly a justification for dismissing a protocol. RSS is a primary functionality of the web, now. It's offered on almost every website. It's the backbone of almost every podcast program.
The tech media and self-promoting personalities would tell us that they've long since replaced RSS with Twitter and Facebook and that's where they get all their links and news. I call bullshit on that. They seriously log into a website 24x7 and sift through all the trivial garbage their friends post for the few pieces of signal among the noise? Most of the people I know who use facebook have nothing to do with the news or industries I'm in or care about and seeing my stream full of their posts about NASCAR, network television shows, and Kim Kardashian amidsts the occasional ignorant political rant would serve me in absolutely no way.
RSS is my window to the world. I choose what sites I care about and I get their content delivered directly to me, quickly, stripped of any extraneous bullshit from their site. It's the kind of service that simply won't likely ever be replaced, because it is so simple and fulfills an important role.
As for Google Reader. Whatever. I used it for years and it was the best way they had to keep me associated with their services. Perhaps even more than my gmail account. However, I don't care that they got rid of it. Google is worth like half a trillion dollars. Just because they don't see a future in it, financially, for themselves -- that doesn't mean it isn't worth it for everyone else. Look at all the little guys out there. They don't need half a billion users for their RSS clients and infrastructures to be a success. They only need a tiny fraction of that. Google's choice to ax this is fantastic. It would be like Blizzard axing World of Warcraft -- an act that would breath fresh life into a genre that it is sucking the air out of. It would encourage others to step in and take their place and compete and innovate.
Already, we see plenty of these guys competing and offering new services and ways of interfacing with RSS. Syncing, different clients, magazine interfaces, clean stripped down interfaces. All sorts of stuff. And, hey, I bet some of them won't be utterly fucking broken the way Google was (where it would just not let you ever delete some entries in your feed, even after several years) -- and if they are, they'll probably have some form of god damn customer service so you can actually talk to a human about how their shit is broken.
PS: This move isn't going to get me to use G+ any more, either, Google. The only thing I need social networking for is work and that's what LinkedIN is for. I use G+ in the same way I use Facebook -- as a placeholder for my name so someone else can't take it and nothing more.
Sorry, I can't take a president who talked about "clean coal" as a legitimate thing, during his campaign.
"Clean coal" is about as much an actual real thing as an "honest politician".
As bad as I've always found the internet to be, as a whole, I never realized how tame and timid it truly was until the idea of attaching shitty third-party discussion thread services all over the place started catching on. You know what I'm talking about -- Facebook comment widgets (where people actually attach their real name to some of the most vile idiocy I've ever read) and inline Disqus forums. You find these instances every time you read the comments under an article on a CBS affiliate station's website or -- predictably -- to any page on the internet that has a comment section and has been linked to by DrudgeReport. This is where you find people who have 50,000 posts to their name, commenting on every single article or thread ever found. Spewing the same moronic drivel with references to "Obozo" and "Oh, notice the libtards that have corrupted the media wont' publish the race of the criminal in this news story, because it's probably a [insert non-white skin color, here]".
Fortunately, these little honey-pots keep these idiots occupied and way from the rest of us. All you have to do is set your browser to block all facebook, disqus and other widgets and your life is much better. Let the pigs fester in their own shit.
Unarmed citizens don't shoot cops.
Oh, I should have also included that whole thing at an Oakland BART station just a few years ago, where a handful of cops had an unarmed man subdued and face-down on the concrete, when one of the cops stands up, steps back, pulls out his gun, and fatally shoots the guy while the other cops are holding him down.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/BART_Police_shooting_of_Oscar_Grant
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FJGo2xfKnd0
You can take each of these as insignificant anecdotal pieces, but when you start to compile the list, you start to realize that you are just one bad or off day away from a cop putting an end to you. Sometimes a good cop making a mistake or a bad cop losing his shit. And there are also plenty of examples of cops breaking down the wrong doors during SWAT busts, sometimes resulting in the innocent occupants inside being killed. We're not talking hoaxes, here. We're talking police fuck-ups, because they smashed down the wrong front door.
Just google "swat enters wrong home" for all those stories.
I'd say these incidents are hardly "rare".
I'd need you to define "rare". Perhaps they are rare in comparison to the number of times a cop has to draw a gun, but you could probably spend the rest of the decade pouring through news stories about young black men being shot a dozen times for drawing a 3Muskateers candy bar out of their pocket. All you need to do is google phrases like "police [shoot|kill] unarmed [black|woman]". Throw in some searches for things like "police use taser on unarmed elderly woman", while you're at it.
How many times is acceptable? Shouldn't abuse be pretty much a zero-tolerance issue? Shouldn't excessive (but not abusive) force be both a rare exception and one that is dealt with much more seriously than it is? There are far more stories of "police shoot unarmed black man" and "police shoot unarmed woman" and "police tased person because he had a smart mouth or they were too lazy to overpower him despite having a dozen officers surrounding him" and 'police tase or pepper spray 84 year old woman" stories than there are stories of police being killed.
I mean, for fuck's sake, how many times did cops unload on innocent citizens in the search for that ex-military guy a few weeks ago? Wasn't it twice? And one of them actually *was* a blue van with asian women driving when the APB was for a muscular black man in a green truck? Not only that but the police SHOT ONE OF THOSE WOMEN IN THE FUCKING ****BACK****?! (source: http://latimesblogs.latimes.com/lanow/2013/02/ex-cop-manhunt-newspaper-delivery-women-shot.html ).
Nobody could seriously assert that all cops are corrupted or mentally imbalanced or anything of the sort. That's not what I'm saying. I'm saying what seems pretty obvious from our culture and the news that has covered it for decades -- cops *are* quick to shoot, often shoot without justification, often without thorough investivation, and often without proper persecution. As a whole, they should be taken as a danger to society. Yes, they exist to protect (or, at least, clean up after someone's done some evil shit too you before they got there), but it'd be insane not to treat every encounter with one as one in which you could potentially be shot.
Also, yes they face potentially dangerous situations every day. And they're trained to handle those, so that they don't shoot unarmed and/or innocent people not posing an immediate threat.
You make an interesting point. Only one potential harm of this is an over-reaction resulting in a dead innocent citizen. The other potential harm is if this gets out of hand and SWAT at some point under-reacts due to so many hoaxes, leaving some slack for something to go truly wrong when it's the real thing. Of course, my understanding is that SWAT are the best of the best (at least as far as domestic cops go) and I imagine they'd approach the 500th hoax as just as real a situation as the first hoax.