You ignorant commie. The solution isn't to take cars away from people. It's to require ALL law-abiding citizens to own and carry cars. Especially teachers. Look at cities like LA, where everyone is extremely nice to each other, because everybody knows that everybody else is carrying an automobile.
Sidenote: I love the second amendment and all, but c'mon - I got a chuckle.:P
If you watch the video, everyone's practically ejaculating as the wreck begins and more cars get involved. And then, suddenly, it extends into the spectator seating and then it's the worst thing in the world. I'm sorry for those who were injured, but there's something about that which just seems really gross. "Oh, dang Jimmy Bob John Paul Ricky Dicky Junior! Look at that amazing wreck and the cars flipping around and slamming into each other! This is what we come to see! Violence and destruction and people risking their lives potentially being injured for our enjoyment!" followed by "ermagherd, a tire! who do we sue?!".
Don't misunderstand me -- the accident looked horrible, even though it wasn't clear who was injured and exactly to what extent, in the seats and I hope the spectators end up being okay and are justly compensated. It's great that the drivers were apparently okay. It's just that, as I watched the video, something about that sort of -- I don't want to call it hypocrisy, but I don't know what to call it -- which I found kind of gross.
To be fair, that's my general attitude, also. I guess it's just human nature. That's why I responded to that previous Slashdot article about the open source emoji stuff by kicking in a few bucks. Sometimes I find that is a good way to counter my initial reaction of "I AM OLD AND WHAT IS THIS NEW THING I AM SO SCARED OF YOUNG PEOPLE AND NEW IDEAS!"
Anyway, I find watching people playing games fun, because I like playing games. Same way I like watching some sports, because I used to enjoy playing them. And of all the drivel on youtube and other streaming services, people playing videogames are far more constructive and less hideous than most of the content. Good on them for doing something potentially constructive (which is weird to say about video games, in a way).
Where have you been hiding? There is a massive audience for watching people gaming. Perhaps a game that you haven't played nor will you ever. Perhaps an old game that you are unlikely to ever touch. Perhaps you're watching a very skilled person in a competitive game. Maybe someone with great commentary and an enjoyable sense of humor. I sometimes enjoy watching people game (or sometimes just have it on in the back ground) the same way I would enjoy watching people participate in any sport that I competed in, myself, at one time.
Youtube is filled with this and the successful ones have hundreds of thousands or even millions of views. The entire twitch.tv network is built on nothing but live streaming gaming.
The only real problem is the incredible copyright headache that is involved. I don't see how anyone can find doing this worthwhile, when confronted with the reality of the imbalanced and unpredictable copyright that could turn your hobby or livelihood (yes, some of these guys make a living at this, apparently) upside down overnight, just because someone decided to target your stream with a DMCA slap.
Another poster, below, already mentioned a lot of people making serious money doing this for a living. Some less than others, but there's a lot of money to be made for some of these guys simply for playing a game and recording it (or live streaming it). Why shouldn't they, if there's an audience for it? Granted, some are better than others. There are some that are built around nothing but personality (for example, that PewDiePie guy who is obnoxious and spastic and only appeals to toddlers) and some that are built around skill. Others around explaining tips or tricks or offering walkthroughs.
Seriously, there are guys streaming their gameplay on youtube that earn six figure salaries from it. It's insane.
Wait, isn't not backing Kagetsuki's kickstarter project the same as making a kickstarter to "make them go away"? This sounds like a scam for you to just make money for yourself while accomplishing the same thing not giving you (or him) money would.:P
By referring to it as ASCII text, I was just describing what they are now and that they're essentially unadorned regular text sets (and certainly not images). Maybe using ASCII was a little misleading in my comment. My understanding of emoticons, themselves, is that they're almost as old as the printing press.
As should be clear from my comment (I think), I said I was familiar with graphical faces representing the underlying emoticon, but had no idea they were called "emoji". Or that they (as I've since learned) apparently don't have much to do with emoticons at all (but unfortunately everything I've read this evening mentions them in relation to emoticons in the first sentence) and are really just lots of graphical glyphs of all kinds of things.
It'd be a bit like saying how dumb and annoying you think photos of people flat on their stomach on objects and in weird places is and then someone telling you "that's called planking" and then you responding "oh, then yeah -- playing is dumb and annoying".
I thought a thing was dumb and annoying, from my exposure to it over the last decade or more online. I found out it had a name. I then stated that the thing I've always thought was annoying is still annoying, but used the (I think) proper name for the thing which I found annoying.
And no, your emoticon doesn't annoy me, because it's an emoticon. If Slashdot had converted it into a giant animated winking smiling GIF, I would have been annoyed as fuck.
The descriptions of emoji as I've just read (in the submission and elsewhere) basically say that they're graphical emoticons ("graphical emoticon glyph"). Emoticons, as far as I understand, are a purely textual representation of faces to convey emotion in the context of writing (and date back more than a century). It sounds like referring to them as emoticons (as everything I've read just after this article -- and including it) does may be very inaccurate.
Looking at some of the examples out there, it sounds like emoji are "tiny images", period? I mean, a coffee cup or a squid don't represent emotion or anything of any sort, so . . . they seem like a thing unto themselves.
Anyway, I don't see myself ever being in a situation where I would use this, but I kicked five bucks into your project out of respect. I'm easily pessimistic and critical of things, but I'm not against helping out a tiny bit even if I don't get them.:)
Which is, of course, why this is great. Like a lot of crowd-funded projects, I think this is dumb. Most of that is probably just because I'm old and set in my ways and scared of everything new -- especially if it's something people under the age of thirty enjoy doing. It's probably evil and involves deviant sex and communism.
But as long as enough people do see enough value in it to chip in, it becomes a thing. Value for value and all that other Ayn Rand stuff. I don't see the point in this thing at all, but if enough other people dig it, there ya go. Hell, I'm going to go kick in a couple bucks right now, even though I will never use it and won't even ever check the kickstarter page about it again. Just because, well, why not? . . . (okay, I'm back -- just went and kicked in $5 as backer #29).
Ah. Okay, so this isn't simply some images that are embedded in a client or wherever you want them to be, based on an interpretation of your typing an emoticon in actual ASCII -- this is an *actual font*. So . . . it's a variant of wingdings, but aimed at chatting?
Okay, I understand that I'm old and grumpy, but . . .
The point of emoticons are that they are simple ASCII text that convey basic emotional context. Emoji are not "emoticons". They're just tiny pictures. Are you seriously telling me that a tiny picture of a whale is in any way related to an emoticon? You know how you can tell these have no relation to emoticons? Because their ultimate stretch goal in the kickstarter is to create more than 800 of the little images and I'm pretty sure there aren't 800 emotions on which to base emoticons. Let's just call them "tiny little pictures for children to use on their phones and in forum messages to be obnoxious".
I'll help fund a kickstarter that aims to eradicate every form of chat of these annoying things. I used to have forums where people would use these constantly. Since I didn't include them by default, they used these idiotic services that let them embed emoticons on any website forum, as long as you also spammed their banner while you were doing it. I quickly wrote some code to filter all of that out, too.
I think this depends on the size of your business and organizations. How do you manage to make physical proximity versus remote meaningful (or even possible) in a large scale company with large lines of business, all around the world? If you have tens of thousands of employees (or over a hundred thousand, even), it becomes unrealistic to have everyone that would need to work close together out of the same office, in which case they may as well just be remote.
I also think that this idea that only in-office can be trusted is a mix of experience with unprofessional employees (ie, poor hiring) and paranoid management (ie, old guys or control-freaks). Failures are less a function of the remote nature and more a function of the company's culture, perhaps. If you're an experienced professional with a six figure-ish salary, do you really need a boss breathing over your shoulder in meat-space to compel you to do your job? And do you really need to be in the same stinky conference room to have a meaningful meeting instead of just dialing into the same conference line?
I work with incredible people and have for over a decade, so it's hard to differentiate one group from another, but I'll tell you -- the guys who work remotely? They're the ones who are on a thing until it's done. They aren't pushing the work onto someone else at 4:55PM, because they can't wait to get home. They're the ones on for hours after work, because work still needs done and fires still need putting out and they care about their work and their clients. They're the ones checking in over night or in the middle of the weekend just to see if everything is okay. They're the ones carrying pagers and cell phones to be available 24x7, even if they're not on stand-by. And since most of these people have ten or twenty years of experience (some even more), I would expect nothing less from them.
. . . and there's no lack of sense of team or camaraderie, either. We are in constant communication with each other on everything from work issues to water-cooler discussion and personal issues that impact work, 24x7. That's what chat rooms and IM and email and video chat and all the other modern convenience technologies are for.
If you work in a professional field, I don't see the point in worrying about your employees remotely. If you can only trust them to get work done because they're twenty feet from the boss's desk, then you can't trust them to get work done, period. If you can't trust your employees to be productive without direct and constant physical oversight, then you are hiring the wrong employees.
I don't think you're old-fashioned. Maybe just "old" (and I'm no spring-chicken).
Working from home usually means performing *more* work. I've worked from home for the last fifteen years as does much or even most of my team (though some prefer to come into an office in their region and they're welcome to do so). Spread across the country (actually, the planet). Because I work from home, I have the flexibility to work the most absurd hours. The overnight hours. The weekends. The holidays. I have the flexibility to cover for sick people and have never taken time off, myself, for being sick (because even at my sickest, I've been just alive enough to get work done sitting in a chair at a desk with no commute). I work ridiculous hours. Usually 13hr shifts. And on top of that, I'm on-call for the hours I'm not actively on-shift. And I keep in touch with management and colleagues, just fine. We have this thing called instant messaging. And chat rooms where we all work together 24x7. And "impromptu meetings" are easy to accommodate everyone with a brief email that says "call into the conference line in fifteen minutes". And email. And, in our case, a sort of facebook-style internal social networking system. And email aliases for broader cross-team/organization/business-line communication.
People are more attentive, more available, more flexible, more dedicated, less likely to be unable to work because of illness, work harder, work more, and have more time available to keep up on issues and stamp out fires with the extra time they're not spending community two or three hours a day and the stress that goes with it.
There may be some unique situations where proximity is vital to a particular job. Less so in most tech fields, I suspect. However, with all the modern facilities and utilities that accommodate distance communication and collaboration on various scales (one on one to large scale teams), I am prone to blame management if they can't manage to remain as (or more) productive with remote teams in 2013.
Telecommuting is such a vital part of my productivity that it is one of the primary things I would require of any employer I would ever consider working for and it's responsible for a good chunk of loyalty to my current employer.
Teamwork is the key of most lines of business. I don't see what this has to do with "outside causes". Good teamwork means people you can rely on when you need them and people who can rely on you when you're needed. This goes into all aspects of your job -- not just a bunch of meaningless "rah rah" cheer bullshit. It goes for keeping things smooth when two of your team are sick and need someone to check on their work load and help out. Or when dealing with scheduling. Or when cooperating to work with a client. I have benefited from great coworkers and an excellent team for most of my career.
. . . But I don't see what being physically located near everyone else in the company helps. If you can't maintain team communication and teamwork between your own hosted jabber or IRC chat rooms and IM clients, email, the telephone and phone conferencing services, and video chat -- then you'll probably fail at successful team communication and teamwork in-person, too.
Yeah, why don't I just cancel my internet service? Granted, it's also my phone system. And I work full time from home, online. But hey, what kind of pussy am I if being unemployed and having no method of communication (you know, the "CALL SOMEONE" part), because it's an "inconvenience" for my prissy little baby self?
Your post wins for possibly stupidest of this entire submission.
Blacklists/blocklists are pretty useless and give a false sense of security. Chances are pretty unlikely that the RIAA is running honeypots or snooping around torrent trackers from their downtown office with the publicly known IPs.
The majority of people don't give a shit. As most people on the street how long a patent or copyright should be and they'll say "Forever! You did the work, nobody else should ever get to benefit from it!".
This law applies to the United States. What ISP are you going to be switching to? Your choices are not "this cable internet provider or that one" -- it's "the only cable company (15-30mbps, usually), or the only phone company's DSL (1mbps-ish, depending on the limited distance of your house), or whatever dial-up service still exists in your city".
Slashdot Mirror
You ignorant commie. The solution isn't to take cars away from people. It's to require ALL law-abiding citizens to own and carry cars. Especially teachers. Look at cities like LA, where everyone is extremely nice to each other, because everybody knows that everybody else is carrying an automobile.
Sidenote: I love the second amendment and all, but c'mon - I got a chuckle. :P
That doesn't seem fair. Everybody knows NASCAR fans can't afford a dollar.
. . . I'm a shitty person . . .
If you watch the video, everyone's practically ejaculating as the wreck begins and more cars get involved. And then, suddenly, it extends into the spectator seating and then it's the worst thing in the world. I'm sorry for those who were injured, but there's something about that which just seems really gross. "Oh, dang Jimmy Bob John Paul Ricky Dicky Junior! Look at that amazing wreck and the cars flipping around and slamming into each other! This is what we come to see! Violence and destruction and people risking their lives potentially being injured for our enjoyment!" followed by "ermagherd, a tire! who do we sue?!".
Don't misunderstand me -- the accident looked horrible, even though it wasn't clear who was injured and exactly to what extent, in the seats and I hope the spectators end up being okay and are justly compensated. It's great that the drivers were apparently okay. It's just that, as I watched the video, something about that sort of -- I don't want to call it hypocrisy, but I don't know what to call it -- which I found kind of gross.
To be fair, that's my general attitude, also. I guess it's just human nature. That's why I responded to that previous Slashdot article about the open source emoji stuff by kicking in a few bucks. Sometimes I find that is a good way to counter my initial reaction of "I AM OLD AND WHAT IS THIS NEW THING I AM SO SCARED OF YOUNG PEOPLE AND NEW IDEAS!"
Anyway, I find watching people playing games fun, because I like playing games. Same way I like watching some sports, because I used to enjoy playing them. And of all the drivel on youtube and other streaming services, people playing videogames are far more constructive and less hideous than most of the content. Good on them for doing something potentially constructive (which is weird to say about video games, in a way).
I . . . don't think you understand this article.
Where have you been hiding? There is a massive audience for watching people gaming. Perhaps a game that you haven't played nor will you ever. Perhaps an old game that you are unlikely to ever touch. Perhaps you're watching a very skilled person in a competitive game. Maybe someone with great commentary and an enjoyable sense of humor. I sometimes enjoy watching people game (or sometimes just have it on in the back ground) the same way I would enjoy watching people participate in any sport that I competed in, myself, at one time.
Youtube is filled with this and the successful ones have hundreds of thousands or even millions of views. The entire twitch.tv network is built on nothing but live streaming gaming.
The only real problem is the incredible copyright headache that is involved. I don't see how anyone can find doing this worthwhile, when confronted with the reality of the imbalanced and unpredictable copyright that could turn your hobby or livelihood (yes, some of these guys make a living at this, apparently) upside down overnight, just because someone decided to target your stream with a DMCA slap.
Another poster, below, already mentioned a lot of people making serious money doing this for a living. Some less than others, but there's a lot of money to be made for some of these guys simply for playing a game and recording it (or live streaming it). Why shouldn't they, if there's an audience for it? Granted, some are better than others. There are some that are built around nothing but personality (for example, that PewDiePie guy who is obnoxious and spastic and only appeals to toddlers) and some that are built around skill. Others around explaining tips or tricks or offering walkthroughs.
Seriously, there are guys streaming their gameplay on youtube that earn six figure salaries from it. It's insane.
But they're explaining that in the project, itself. So what's the scam?
Wait, isn't not backing Kagetsuki's kickstarter project the same as making a kickstarter to "make them go away"? This sounds like a scam for you to just make money for yourself while accomplishing the same thing not giving you (or him) money would. :P
By referring to it as ASCII text, I was just describing what they are now and that they're essentially unadorned regular text sets (and certainly not images). Maybe using ASCII was a little misleading in my comment. My understanding of emoticons, themselves, is that they're almost as old as the printing press.
As should be clear from my comment (I think), I said I was familiar with graphical faces representing the underlying emoticon, but had no idea they were called "emoji". Or that they (as I've since learned) apparently don't have much to do with emoticons at all (but unfortunately everything I've read this evening mentions them in relation to emoticons in the first sentence) and are really just lots of graphical glyphs of all kinds of things.
It'd be a bit like saying how dumb and annoying you think photos of people flat on their stomach on objects and in weird places is and then someone telling you "that's called planking" and then you responding "oh, then yeah -- playing is dumb and annoying".
I thought a thing was dumb and annoying, from my exposure to it over the last decade or more online. I found out it had a name. I then stated that the thing I've always thought was annoying is still annoying, but used the (I think) proper name for the thing which I found annoying.
And no, your emoticon doesn't annoy me, because it's an emoticon. If Slashdot had converted it into a giant animated winking smiling GIF, I would have been annoyed as fuck.
The descriptions of emoji as I've just read (in the submission and elsewhere) basically say that they're graphical emoticons ("graphical emoticon glyph"). Emoticons, as far as I understand, are a purely textual representation of faces to convey emotion in the context of writing (and date back more than a century). It sounds like referring to them as emoticons (as everything I've read just after this article -- and including it) does may be very inaccurate.
Looking at some of the examples out there, it sounds like emoji are "tiny images", period? I mean, a coffee cup or a squid don't represent emotion or anything of any sort, so . . . they seem like a thing unto themselves.
Anyway, I don't see myself ever being in a situation where I would use this, but I kicked five bucks into your project out of respect. I'm easily pessimistic and critical of things, but I'm not against helping out a tiny bit even if I don't get them. :)
Good luck!
Which is, of course, why this is great. Like a lot of crowd-funded projects, I think this is dumb. Most of that is probably just because I'm old and set in my ways and scared of everything new -- especially if it's something people under the age of thirty enjoy doing. It's probably evil and involves deviant sex and communism.
But as long as enough people do see enough value in it to chip in, it becomes a thing. Value for value and all that other Ayn Rand stuff. I don't see the point in this thing at all, but if enough other people dig it, there ya go. Hell, I'm going to go kick in a couple bucks right now, even though I will never use it and won't even ever check the kickstarter page about it again. Just because, well, why not? . . . (okay, I'm back -- just went and kicked in $5 as backer #29).
Ah. Okay, so this isn't simply some images that are embedded in a client or wherever you want them to be, based on an interpretation of your typing an emoticon in actual ASCII -- this is an *actual font*. So . . . it's a variant of wingdings, but aimed at chatting?
I never realized that was his name. I honestly always just thought it was some racist user handle.
Are you shitting me? Are you telling me I'm not supposed to be using :D without a license? Or :P ?
Also, there are 800 "official" emoticons?
Okay, I understand that I'm old and grumpy, but . . .
The point of emoticons are that they are simple ASCII text that convey basic emotional context. Emoji are not "emoticons". They're just tiny pictures. Are you seriously telling me that a tiny picture of a whale is in any way related to an emoticon? You know how you can tell these have no relation to emoticons? Because their ultimate stretch goal in the kickstarter is to create more than 800 of the little images and I'm pretty sure there aren't 800 emotions on which to base emoticons. Let's just call them "tiny little pictures for children to use on their phones and in forum messages to be obnoxious".
I'll help fund a kickstarter that aims to eradicate every form of chat of these annoying things. I used to have forums where people would use these constantly. Since I didn't include them by default, they used these idiotic services that let them embed emoticons on any website forum, as long as you also spammed their banner while you were doing it. I quickly wrote some code to filter all of that out, too.
If you had any sort of education, you'd understand the point that was being made.
I think this depends on the size of your business and organizations. How do you manage to make physical proximity versus remote meaningful (or even possible) in a large scale company with large lines of business, all around the world? If you have tens of thousands of employees (or over a hundred thousand, even), it becomes unrealistic to have everyone that would need to work close together out of the same office, in which case they may as well just be remote.
I also think that this idea that only in-office can be trusted is a mix of experience with unprofessional employees (ie, poor hiring) and paranoid management (ie, old guys or control-freaks). Failures are less a function of the remote nature and more a function of the company's culture, perhaps. If you're an experienced professional with a six figure-ish salary, do you really need a boss breathing over your shoulder in meat-space to compel you to do your job? And do you really need to be in the same stinky conference room to have a meaningful meeting instead of just dialing into the same conference line?
I work with incredible people and have for over a decade, so it's hard to differentiate one group from another, but I'll tell you -- the guys who work remotely? They're the ones who are on a thing until it's done. They aren't pushing the work onto someone else at 4:55PM, because they can't wait to get home. They're the ones on for hours after work, because work still needs done and fires still need putting out and they care about their work and their clients. They're the ones checking in over night or in the middle of the weekend just to see if everything is okay. They're the ones carrying pagers and cell phones to be available 24x7, even if they're not on stand-by. And since most of these people have ten or twenty years of experience (some even more), I would expect nothing less from them.
. . . and there's no lack of sense of team or camaraderie, either. We are in constant communication with each other on everything from work issues to water-cooler discussion and personal issues that impact work, 24x7. That's what chat rooms and IM and email and video chat and all the other modern convenience technologies are for.
If you work in a professional field, I don't see the point in worrying about your employees remotely. If you can only trust them to get work done because they're twenty feet from the boss's desk, then you can't trust them to get work done, period. If you can't trust your employees to be productive without direct and constant physical oversight, then you are hiring the wrong employees.
I don't think you're old-fashioned. Maybe just "old" (and I'm no spring-chicken).
Working from home usually means performing *more* work. I've worked from home for the last fifteen years as does much or even most of my team (though some prefer to come into an office in their region and they're welcome to do so). Spread across the country (actually, the planet). Because I work from home, I have the flexibility to work the most absurd hours. The overnight hours. The weekends. The holidays. I have the flexibility to cover for sick people and have never taken time off, myself, for being sick (because even at my sickest, I've been just alive enough to get work done sitting in a chair at a desk with no commute). I work ridiculous hours. Usually 13hr shifts. And on top of that, I'm on-call for the hours I'm not actively on-shift. And I keep in touch with management and colleagues, just fine. We have this thing called instant messaging. And chat rooms where we all work together 24x7. And "impromptu meetings" are easy to accommodate everyone with a brief email that says "call into the conference line in fifteen minutes". And email. And, in our case, a sort of facebook-style internal social networking system. And email aliases for broader cross-team/organization/business-line communication.
People are more attentive, more available, more flexible, more dedicated, less likely to be unable to work because of illness, work harder, work more, and have more time available to keep up on issues and stamp out fires with the extra time they're not spending community two or three hours a day and the stress that goes with it.
There may be some unique situations where proximity is vital to a particular job. Less so in most tech fields, I suspect. However, with all the modern facilities and utilities that accommodate distance communication and collaboration on various scales (one on one to large scale teams), I am prone to blame management if they can't manage to remain as (or more) productive with remote teams in 2013.
Telecommuting is such a vital part of my productivity that it is one of the primary things I would require of any employer I would ever consider working for and it's responsible for a good chunk of loyalty to my current employer.
Teamwork is the key of most lines of business. I don't see what this has to do with "outside causes". Good teamwork means people you can rely on when you need them and people who can rely on you when you're needed. This goes into all aspects of your job -- not just a bunch of meaningless "rah rah" cheer bullshit. It goes for keeping things smooth when two of your team are sick and need someone to check on their work load and help out. Or when dealing with scheduling. Or when cooperating to work with a client. I have benefited from great coworkers and an excellent team for most of my career.
. . . But I don't see what being physically located near everyone else in the company helps. If you can't maintain team communication and teamwork between your own hosted jabber or IRC chat rooms and IM clients, email, the telephone and phone conferencing services, and video chat -- then you'll probably fail at successful team communication and teamwork in-person, too.
Yeah, why don't I just cancel my internet service? Granted, it's also my phone system. And I work full time from home, online. But hey, what kind of pussy am I if being unemployed and having no method of communication (you know, the "CALL SOMEONE" part), because it's an "inconvenience" for my prissy little baby self?
Your post wins for possibly stupidest of this entire submission.
Blacklists/blocklists are pretty useless and give a false sense of security. Chances are pretty unlikely that the RIAA is running honeypots or snooping around torrent trackers from their downtown office with the publicly known IPs.
The majority of people don't give a shit. As most people on the street how long a patent or copyright should be and they'll say "Forever! You did the work, nobody else should ever get to benefit from it!".
This law applies to the United States. What ISP are you going to be switching to? Your choices are not "this cable internet provider or that one" -- it's "the only cable company (15-30mbps, usually), or the only phone company's DSL (1mbps-ish, depending on the limited distance of your house), or whatever dial-up service still exists in your city".