Advertising has alway existed, but it's never existed on this scale. We're seeing a type of advertising now that dwarfs even the insane propoganda put out during rival governments during war time. You can't go anywhere, do anything without ads everywhere. In movies, buses, signs, TV, radio.
While it may be true in the US of A, there are still places where you don't get exposed to that many ads. For example, on this side of the Atlantic I don't see a single ad panel on the way to work (or back), BBC is still advertisement free (and for everything else there is MythTV commercial skipping), AdBlock+ and noScript filter out most of the crap on the web, there are so many freely available interesting podcasts or university lectures that I only tune in the radio for the news. I can't comment much on movies as I haven't set foot in a theater for the last 2 years.
To say it's always existed is like saying viruses always existed while everyone around you is dying of AIDS. At no other time in history have we been so over come with bullshit. That is the point.
Then do something simple about it... turn off the dumb box, stop consuming the mind-crushing drivel that passes as entertainment nowadays. Pick a hobby, any hobby that doesn't require you to sit for hours in front of a screen after spending your entire work day sitting in front of one.
If you really "need" to watch TV, consider watching it time-shifted using a PVR that is able to strip commercials.
Hmm, you may want to check what is the average "normal background dose" for the US. Hint, the place where I grew up naturally has 67.5 times your maximum limit... the US would stand on average at 160 times that same limit. Also 0.090 != ~1...
Hmm, I'm not that sure about your theory... I was following the news from Japanese sources and I was getting really good up to date coverage of what was happening and what were the next steps. I was also getting expert opinions and very good schematics of the reactor design, pinpointing what the potential problems were and what should be done about them.
The US news were pretty much useless, reporting 24h old stuff as breaking news or plain making up stuff on the fly. A good part of the European news channels were then picking up the US stuff and running with it (with a few exceptions).
It's entirely possible, for instance, that the 20km zone might not be usable for farming for the next 300 years.
Unlike the fields that are now perma-flooded by a mix of sea water and oil, or the ones were the topsoil got washed away and simply soaked in the same mix of sea water and oil? For what it is worth, a sizable portions of the fields in that region are going to be unusable for farming for some time. There are talks of moving a larger portion of the food production to Hokkaido as it was untouched and still has loads of unused space.
The market reaction to the election was quite fast, too. Electricity futures for Germany have climbed steeply... so did the carbon futures. If you live in Germany, expect your electricity bill to be harder to pay in 2012.
A parallel internet, running on a meshed wireless network might work. "Reseau Citoyen" in Brussels has demonstrated the technical feasibility of the concept.
Old growth trees are still cut because they are actually of far better quality for woodworking and are therefore worth more money. Fast grown wood has many problems: softer, coarser grain and less stable.
how no one could smoke within a country mile of shore it seemed like....
[sort of offtopic]
That ban was probably caused by the smokers treating the place like an ashtray... cleaning up costs money, nobody wants to be taxed for said cleanup, so they ban the act that causes the need for clean up. The last city I lived in had public ashtrays on every single public trashcan, that means an ashtray every 65ft or so in the center... the ashtrays were mostly empty and the streets were covered in cigarette butts. My last three places of employment had ashtrays in all convenient places... most smokers were still throwing their butts on the floor, through the window, on the cars in the parking lot, on the lawn, well you get the idea: anywhere but in the ashtray. The end result in all three places? Smoking ban in and around the building, one windowless room turned into a smoker room.
You want to keep the liberty of smoking where you want? Behave like a grownup and get other smokers to do the same.
They're fun at the occasional party, but gather dust much of the time.
Funnily enough, that is exactly what the xbox360s and PS3s have been doing in the shops around here. You can see the Wii stack emptying, the other stacks don't move much. Most people I know have a Wii, only a handful have a Xbox360 and they only own it for a couple of games that weren't released on the Wii.
Disclaimer: in the previous console generation I owned all three consoles, this generation I only bought a wii as I no longer have the time or the desire to be a "hardcore gamer". That matches what happened to almost every gamer I know... they grow up, get a job, get married, buy a house and have kid(s). All of a sudden, grinding a couple hours a day on a console isn't entertaining anymore.
[offtopic]My opinion is that the original story didn't say anything about earth but was probably saying "4 corners of the land" or something to that effect.[/offtopic]
Remember; there used to be science about the earth being flat ages ago.
[Citation needed]
12th Century fighting techniques manuscripts show that earth was actually already known as spherical at that point in Europe.
The Greeks had a pretty accurate idea of its shape and dimension a few centuries BCE.
The only widely circulated book talking of a flat earth that I can think of would be the bible (the bit about climbing on a mountain so high, one could see the four corners of the earth)
Sedentary lifestyle and healthy diet would probably lead to a skinny fat situation: not excessively fat looking but the fat/lean ratio too high. Also don't forget that your metabolism slows down when you age and that you automagically lose muscle mass over the year if you don't exercise enough to maintain it.
From my perspective, I can only think the EU has alterior motives in blocking the Oracle/Sun merger.
You mean like killing the constructor that supplies most of the computing infrastructure? It's no secret that most EU institutions are very big Sun customers.
"DVD's should be released much later after a film's release, and so move people to get back into the cinema"
Thats how it works now, unless its a straight to DVD film.
Are you kidding?
I can find original DVDs a couple of weeks after the movie hits the big screen... for some movies, I was even able to buy the Zone 1 DVD before the local theater release or weeks before the official DVD release. Some shops don't want to lose precious storage space by keeping DVDs off the shelf, they will put them on the shelves as soon as they have been received.
Had Sun/Oracle filed on correct time, they would probably have received the green light months ago. Instead they waited until the merger was approved in America to file in Europe, and it seems that the commission didn't like the appearance of being strong-armed into agreeing to the merger.
It gets even funnier when you consider that the Commission and the other European institutions are very large Sun/Oracle customers... both hard/soft and service wise.
My experience working in Sun Services, taking care of Gold and Platinium level customers...
The ECC fiasco with the Blackbirds and following revisions was the bookcase example of how not to treat your customers. Customers were lied to, then lied to some more, then received defective pulls as replacement after 2 errors on the same CPU, then lied some more. Until the scrubber patch got released, my average customer had 2 CPU swaps per week.
Receiving defective pulls for customers was the norm rather than the exception... sometimes the customer's own defective parts from the previous intervention, RMA box still sealed but with a "tested OK" sticker magically applied on top of the red "DEFECTIVE" sticker. This applied to disks, memory, CPUs, motherboards... all parts really. Making things worse, the standard procedure was to have the parts delivered directly at the customer... so the engineer didn't get a chance to check for DOAs beforehand.
In the end, the only trick was to order a batch of replacement parts in the hope of having a working one delivered at the customer. Said trick would of course end up damaging your score for the next evaluation... but so would an unsatisfied customer lodging a complaint for substandard support. I gave up, moved to Professional Services then to Pre-sales before leaving.
I got assaulted several times because of that, or for speaking French, or for daring to speak anything else than the local dialect. If you want, I can even ask Flemish friends to come and chime in on the "generally peaceful" Flemish people... getting punched in the face because you have the wrong accent was quite common in the 90s in Flanders... even if you were Flemish.
This never happened to me outside of Flanders and Brussels. It didn't happen to me in Japan, nor in the UK, nor in Germany, nor in France, nor in America, nor in Australia... I think you get my drift.
My last encounter with "the good people" was a couple of weeks ago, when I visited my grand-mother. I parked in a residential area, put my parking disk on, got out 5 minutes later as I had forgotten something in the car to find a parking ticket claiming I didn't have my disk on... said ticket was actually neatly placed right on top of the disk. Cars around me without disks or resident cards but with Flemish stickers had no ticket. It sucks to be outside of the "good people" clan when you are in Flanders... having German plates makes you stand out.
I personally hope that Belgium splits and the remains are given back to their original owners... that means the Netherlands for most of the country. That would actually be an interesting case to watch... what happens when you break the treaty that granted independence to the country in the first place?
The trouble is that it won't stop at independent Flanders, once you get rid of Wallonia the next logical step is to get rid of the less pure Flemish (how they will be picked is up to the politicians). You think I am kidding? My father "escaped" to Wallonia after serving there in the army... the discrimination he experienced in his native Hasselt was so bad that living as a half Flemish half Dutch was actually easier on the other side of the linguistic border. I have also experienced that first hand by being assaulted when answering in Dutch instead of Flemish while in Flanders... I was luckier than an half Dutch half English colleague who was left for dead outside a club in Antwerp a few years ago.
In the grand scheme of things, Belgium is insignificant... Flanders and Wallonia doubly so. I left the empire of fail 8 years ago.
Either Japan was trying to quietly dump their vast T-bill holdings in Switzerland because they don't trust the U.S any more
It would be hard to blame them for that. If you look at the numbers from the point of view of a lender, there's a snowball in hell chance of the US repaying its foreign held debt. Without a deus ex machina, the interest on the existing debt will be the most expensive part of the US budget in a couple of years... from that point on, the debt will increase steadily without any need for deficit spending.
Slashdot Mirror
Advertising has alway existed, but it's never existed on this scale. We're seeing a type of advertising now that dwarfs even the insane propoganda put out during rival governments during war time. You can't go anywhere, do anything without ads everywhere. In movies, buses, signs, TV, radio.
While it may be true in the US of A, there are still places where you don't get exposed to that many ads. For example, on this side of the Atlantic I don't see a single ad panel on the way to work (or back), BBC is still advertisement free (and for everything else there is MythTV commercial skipping), AdBlock+ and noScript filter out most of the crap on the web, there are so many freely available interesting podcasts or university lectures that I only tune in the radio for the news. I can't comment much on movies as I haven't set foot in a theater for the last 2 years.
To say it's always existed is like saying viruses always existed while everyone around you is dying of AIDS. At no other time in history have we been so over come with bullshit. That is the point.
Then do something simple about it... turn off the dumb box, stop consuming the mind-crushing drivel that passes as entertainment nowadays. Pick a hobby, any hobby that doesn't require you to sit for hours in front of a screen after spending your entire work day sitting in front of one.
If you really "need" to watch TV, consider watching it time-shifted using a PVR that is able to strip commercials.
Hmm, you may want to check what is the average "normal background dose" for the US. Hint, the place where I grew up naturally has 67.5 times your maximum limit... the US would stand on average at 160 times that same limit. Also 0.090 != ~1...
Hmm, I'm not that sure about your theory... I was following the news from Japanese sources and I was getting really good up to date coverage of what was happening and what were the next steps. I was also getting expert opinions and very good schematics of the reactor design, pinpointing what the potential problems were and what should be done about them.
The US news were pretty much useless, reporting 24h old stuff as breaking news or plain making up stuff on the fly. A good part of the European news channels were then picking up the US stuff and running with it (with a few exceptions).
It's entirely possible, for instance, that the 20km zone might not be usable for farming for the next 300 years.
Unlike the fields that are now perma-flooded by a mix of sea water and oil, or the ones were the topsoil got washed away and simply soaked in the same mix of sea water and oil? For what it is worth, a sizable portions of the fields in that region are going to be unusable for farming for some time. There are talks of moving a larger portion of the food production to Hokkaido as it was untouched and still has loads of unused space.
And they were released from said hospital last week already... funny that this bit wasn't mentioned in the US media.
The article isn't very clear but, having worked there, webmail would probably refer to Outlook Web Access...
The market reaction to the election was quite fast, too. Electricity futures for Germany have climbed steeply... so did the carbon futures. If you live in Germany, expect your electricity bill to be harder to pay in 2012.
A parallel internet, running on a meshed wireless network might work. "Reseau Citoyen" in Brussels has demonstrated the technical feasibility of the concept.
Old growth trees are still cut because they are actually of far better quality for woodworking and are therefore worth more money. Fast grown wood has many problems: softer, coarser grain and less stable.
How do you tell? A 19 year old japanese girl looks like she's 12.
A lot of 30-something Japanese girls still look like teenagers... and behave accordingly
how no one could smoke within a country mile of shore it seemed like....
[sort of offtopic]
That ban was probably caused by the smokers treating the place like an ashtray... cleaning up costs money, nobody wants to be taxed for said cleanup, so they ban the act that causes the need for clean up. The last city I lived in had public ashtrays on every single public trashcan, that means an ashtray every 65ft or so in the center... the ashtrays were mostly empty and the streets were covered in cigarette butts. My last three places of employment had ashtrays in all convenient places... most smokers were still throwing their butts on the floor, through the window, on the cars in the parking lot, on the lawn, well you get the idea: anywhere but in the ashtray. The end result in all three places? Smoking ban in and around the building, one windowless room turned into a smoker room.
You want to keep the liberty of smoking where you want? Behave like a grownup and get other smokers to do the same.
[/sort of offtopic]
They're fun at the occasional party, but gather dust much of the time.
Funnily enough, that is exactly what the xbox360s and PS3s have been doing in the shops around here. You can see the Wii stack emptying, the other stacks don't move much. Most people I know have a Wii, only a handful have a Xbox360 and they only own it for a couple of games that weren't released on the Wii.
Disclaimer: in the previous console generation I owned all three consoles, this generation I only bought a wii as I no longer have the time or the desire to be a "hardcore gamer". That matches what happened to almost every gamer I know... they grow up, get a job, get married, buy a house and have kid(s). All of a sudden, grinding a couple hours a day on a console isn't entertaining anymore.
[offtopic]My opinion is that the original story didn't say anything about earth but was probably saying "4 corners of the land" or something to that effect.[/offtopic]
Remember; there used to be science about the earth being flat ages ago.
[Citation needed]
12th Century fighting techniques manuscripts show that earth was actually already known as spherical at that point in Europe.
The Greeks had a pretty accurate idea of its shape and dimension a few centuries BCE.
The only widely circulated book talking of a flat earth that I can think of would be the bible (the bit about climbing on a mountain so high, one could see the four corners of the earth)
Why go through the expense of Oracle-ing MySQL when the product you describe is already in the portfolio: http://www.oracle.com/technology/products/database/xe/index.html
Sedentary lifestyle and healthy diet would probably lead to a skinny fat situation: not excessively fat looking but the fat/lean ratio too high. Also don't forget that your metabolism slows down when you age and that you automagically lose muscle mass over the year if you don't exercise enough to maintain it.
I live in Germany and didn't notice a single problem with our cards. Granted we replaced ours a couple months ago due to another issue.
From my perspective, I can only think the EU has alterior motives in blocking the Oracle/Sun merger.
You mean like killing the constructor that supplies most of the computing infrastructure? It's no secret that most EU institutions are very big Sun customers.
"DVD's should be released much later after a film's release, and so move people to get back into the cinema"
Thats how it works now, unless its a straight to DVD film.
Are you kidding?
I can find original DVDs a couple of weeks after the movie hits the big screen... for some movies, I was even able to buy the Zone 1 DVD before the local theater release or weeks before the official DVD release. Some shops don't want to lose precious storage space by keeping DVDs off the shelf, they will put them on the shelves as soon as they have been received.
Had Sun/Oracle filed on correct time, they would probably have received the green light months ago. Instead they waited until the merger was approved in America to file in Europe, and it seems that the commission didn't like the appearance of being strong-armed into agreeing to the merger.
It gets even funnier when you consider that the Commission and the other European institutions are very large Sun/Oracle customers... both hard/soft and service wise.
There is another reason for the shoddy treatment of volunteers: Sun suffers greatly from the NIH mindset, even internally.
My experience working in Sun Services, taking care of Gold and Platinium level customers...
The ECC fiasco with the Blackbirds and following revisions was the bookcase example of how not to treat your customers. Customers were lied to, then lied to some more, then received defective pulls as replacement after 2 errors on the same CPU, then lied some more. Until the scrubber patch got released, my average customer had 2 CPU swaps per week.
Receiving defective pulls for customers was the norm rather than the exception... sometimes the customer's own defective parts from the previous intervention, RMA box still sealed but with a "tested OK" sticker magically applied on top of the red "DEFECTIVE" sticker. This applied to disks, memory, CPUs, motherboards... all parts really. Making things worse, the standard procedure was to have the parts delivered directly at the customer... so the engineer didn't get a chance to check for DOAs beforehand.
In the end, the only trick was to order a batch of replacement parts in the hope of having a working one delivered at the customer. Said trick would of course end up damaging your score for the next evaluation... but so would an unsatisfied customer lodging a complaint for substandard support. I gave up, moved to Professional Services then to Pre-sales before leaving.
I got assaulted several times because of that, or for speaking French, or for daring to speak anything else than the local dialect. If you want, I can even ask Flemish friends to come and chime in on the "generally peaceful" Flemish people... getting punched in the face because you have the wrong accent was quite common in the 90s in Flanders... even if you were Flemish.
This never happened to me outside of Flanders and Brussels. It didn't happen to me in Japan, nor in the UK, nor in Germany, nor in France, nor in America, nor in Australia... I think you get my drift.
My last encounter with "the good people" was a couple of weeks ago, when I visited my grand-mother. I parked in a residential area, put my parking disk on, got out 5 minutes later as I had forgotten something in the car to find a parking ticket claiming I didn't have my disk on... said ticket was actually neatly placed right on top of the disk. Cars around me without disks or resident cards but with Flemish stickers had no ticket. It sucks to be outside of the "good people" clan when you are in Flanders... having German plates makes you stand out.
I personally hope that Belgium splits and the remains are given back to their original owners... that means the Netherlands for most of the country. That would actually be an interesting case to watch... what happens when you break the treaty that granted independence to the country in the first place?
Half flemish speaking...
The trouble is that it won't stop at independent Flanders, once you get rid of Wallonia the next logical step is to get rid of the less pure Flemish (how they will be picked is up to the politicians). You think I am kidding? My father "escaped" to Wallonia after serving there in the army... the discrimination he experienced in his native Hasselt was so bad that living as a half Flemish half Dutch was actually easier on the other side of the linguistic border. I have also experienced that first hand by being assaulted when answering in Dutch instead of Flemish while in Flanders... I was luckier than an half Dutch half English colleague who was left for dead outside a club in Antwerp a few years ago.
In the grand scheme of things, Belgium is insignificant... Flanders and Wallonia doubly so. I left the empire of fail 8 years ago.
Either Japan was trying to quietly dump their vast T-bill holdings in Switzerland because they don't trust the U.S any more
It would be hard to blame them for that. If you look at the numbers from the point of view of a lender, there's a snowball in hell chance of the US repaying its foreign held debt. Without a deus ex machina, the interest on the existing debt will be the most expensive part of the US budget in a couple of years... from that point on, the debt will increase steadily without any need for deficit spending.