And in Europe we really need smart Smart drivers. Having lived in a few European countries -- especially in Switzerland and Germany where the Smart is popular -- one thing is noticeable about most drivers of the Smart... they are all psychotic!
I can only assume that the extremely small size of the Smart leads to an attempt to overcompensate. Most Smarts are driven as fast as the can go, whenever possible (which isn't very fast, but far faster than safe for the size of car). They will cut you up at junctions, they will race you, they park in a manner that is often extremely selfish.
It seems that in Europe, only total dicks buy the Smart.
Why? 1) I was curious, and 2) I thought that maybe I could use it for those very rare pages I visit that don't work well with Firefox, rather than use IE. Although, I have to have a very good reason to visit pages that don't work with Firefox -- usually I just boycott that site, probably forever...
Honestly, I probably would use Safari more, because it is faster, were it not for one simple fact:
No Flashblock. No Adblock. No Use.
Just that simple. You will have to pull these extensions from my cold dead mouse hand. (And yes, being also a Mac user I do know you can get add-ons for Safari, but they do not work well, not at all).
no, you are right, technically it's not a monopoly.
It's a cartel. 5 operators that conspire together to maximize their profits. To the end user this has a similar effect as a monopoly, so the parent is, in essence, correct.
Now why would you call native people yayhoos? This is not a story of some hayseeds out for a good time. This whale was harvested by a group of people that are monitored by the IWC and practice whaling as part of their indigenous culture.
No. You're wrong, sorry. Or to be fair, perhaps just naive...
Whaling is supposed to permitted by the IWC for traditional hunts by certain indigenous peoples. Perhaps you'd like to tell us what part of using a sophisticated modern projectile weapon is traditional?
The tragedy and travesty is that most of these so-called "traditional" hunts are bogus. Rather than using traditional means and rituals these "natives" are using modern weapons, sonar and a variety of other means to find and kill whales. The catch being often turned over to the Japanese for profit.
There is as much "tradition" in this type of whaling as there is "science" in Japanese scientific whaling. It's all a smokescreen for profit.
So, I agree with the original poster, although "yayhoos" is a very generous word.
This is not what it seems. I read this article on the BBC earlier today and it annoyed me then.
Their use of the word "angry" in the headline is preposterous. This is shamefully hyperbolic sensationalist tabloid journalism -- something the BBC is pandering to more and more -- they really need to fire some editors. Also, it seems to me that someone in the Richmond offices of eBay has the ear of someone in the BBC, eBay gets an astonishingly high amount of free publicity from the BBC (The BBC does not allow advertising -- um, yeah, sure...). Again, they really need to fire some editors, I'd be astonished if at least some of them were not taking backhanders every now and again -- it certainly looks that way.
Why would a medium sized corporation be "angry". And particularly in this case, although eBay is the largest user of Adwords, eBay is still a very small company compared to Google. eBay has no alternative to Adwords. It's use them, or fail trying something else.
While I'm personally convinced that eBay's management are far from the sharpest executives out there, they are at least smart enough to realize that they need Google much more than Google needs them. Sure, there's some Corporate game playing around checkout etc, and perhaps this move is simply a reflection of that. eBay, like any firm, needs to try to assert themselves occasionally to negotiate better deals. This is business. This is not news.
If Google was planning their own negative party then perhaps it would be good for someone to examine their mission statement -- while not exactly evil, that action isn't something that would give any company the moral high ground.
This is all a storm in a teacup. The whole thing reeks of publicity stunt. Publicity stunts are things the BBC falls for regularly -- especially where eBay are concerned.
Ok, so now that I read your reply..I get it. Survelliance for non-commercial purposes GOOD, if you try to make a buck off it BAD.
While that, and this article, all sound very plausible there's one huge gaping hole in the logic of this...
The UK has one of the most virulent and productive paparazzi in existence. They make a fortune off of candid pictures taken without the consent of the subjects. They do this all over Europe. They have been doing this for a number of years.
Quite simply, this article is wrong. It is legal to take pictures of someone in any public place, and it is legal to make money off them. Consent or not. Period.
Dunno about you, but I was around on the Internet1 before the 'commercial interests' took hold.
IIRC, the rise of spam and commercial interests were pretty much concurrent. But yes, pr0n and and hax0rs were there way way way before the suits got involved.
There's probably a way of charting the rise of spam/commercial interests inversely against the IQ of the average Internet 1 user.
Sadly, however, having ruined Internet 1 for many of us, the commercially interested are already foaming at the mouth in anticipation of Internet 2.
While a minute and a half is pretty cool, and this development is a step in the right direction, can someone maybe point out to the organization behind this, and especially to their marketing droids that they need a name change.
Please, no matter how interesting some piece of news is, unless it's posted on a site that everyone can access, don't link to it. It just annoys the hell out of most people, and gives the website in question undeserved registrations. If they don't want to show the information to everyone equally, I'm not interested.
I wholly second this motion.
Oh the irony! While we are talking about one industry where the deadness goes up to eleven, this article is posted on the site of another industry that is beginning to pine for the fjords.
This log-in business for newspaper sites is an example of how they do not understand their new customers, nor how their business has changed. If you listen really closely when you are on the LA Times site you can hear the slow heavy footfalls of the grim reaper approaching.
Anyway, I vote we change the expression "deader than vaudeville" to "deader than the RIAA". You must, surely, realize your business is in trouble when an wholly unrelated one like Starbucks is wiping the floor with your tried and tested artists. Especially since Starbucks is also a big corporation and likely just as bureaucratic as any RIAA dinosaur, I woud guess the business processes to launch a new idea in Starbucks is comparable to that in any record company.
As the parent indicates, the trust issues with Wikipedia are many and varied. The most worrying, and seemingly increasingly prevalent, is the strength of cabals.
As well as the example in the parent, Scientology and Ayn Rand examples could also be quoted here among many many other possibles. In fact if you are a political organization, pressure group, NGO, or a sinister cult, and you don't have your own wiki-cabal, you are failing in your mission.
There's simply no way to put reality into wikiality in many articles on wikipedia, they are too zealously defended by cabals. Imagine for a moment if Wikipedia could have existed in the past. Galileo, Martin Luther King, Darwin, or many others putting forth their views, would have classed as vandals and have their IP's blocked by mindless brutes not interested in The Truth, only in Their Truth.
Similarly, group think on Digg, and shill bidding on eBay are example of similar behavior, though neither is as insidiously dangerous as the Wikipedia behavior.
But shill bidding shows how hard it is to prevent cabals on the online world - a phone call betweens friends across a continent does not show up as a connection online.
The simple answer, and a message that should never be forgotten -- never, ever, trust anything on Wikipedia (or Digg, or eBay for that matter).
My mother worked in HR there for a bit... did I mention she has no degree?
Isn't that a prerequisite for HR?
Yes, I think so, at least from my experience in coming into contact with people from HR depts.
While I'm sure there are college courses that exist for HR related studies, I can't help thinking that this is a terrible waste of society's time. I mean let's face it, as a child no-one dreams of working in HR. As a kid about to leave school you'd only choose to go into HR if you had no imagination and wanted a job that was safe -- one you didn't have to care about, or think about. There is no point in HR being a degree based study, as there is no option for creative or original thought in the job, nor in the people who are so employed.
If you work in HR, you will not only have no friends at work, people will actively go out of their way to hate you. All employees, at every level in the firm will hate you. At best, the operations directors will tolerate you because you are a necessary evil, but will still resent you as a cost centre.
There's a high probability you will be female somewhere in the region of 30-50. You will most likely be grossly overweight. You will power-dress like it's 1985 every year. Your arrogance, insincerity, and ability to bold-face outright lie will attempt to overcompensate for your lack of imagination and intelligence.
It's a personal view, but one I believe to be truthful. And I guess the reason why I would never work in a corporation again.
Not only that, but the product they are using is flawed as well.
And not only that - but food and product photography is as hard as it gets photographically.
It is a highly skilled niche job that most professional photographers and cinematographers do not know how to do. You need to know how to get the right colors, temperatures and lighting to make food look like food. Often it's just faked too. For example, most whisky bottle shots you see contain tea, not whisky, because real whisky photographs to look like a bottle of urine.
Does not compute philosophically. You'd think a free market idealogue would be against copyrights...
You're right. A free market would be opposed to copyright.
There's no true free market. Here's what you have:
1. an illegal cartel
2. government(s) interference to maintain that cartel, despite it being illegal.
3. government(s) interference to regulate freedom in restricting free access to ideas.
Ironically, in Russia or China, which still have more of a Command and Control Economy than the West in many areas, you see freedom from copyright restrictions because the above don't apply.
Somewhere, there has to be a happy medium (pun intended.)
Ok, so rather than facebook=myspace, it's more - Facebook with added OMG PONIES!!1!
Reading those restrictions you've listed for us, actually makes it very easy to see why Facebook is not the success that MySpace is. In fact, my first reaction to seeing that list was, OMG FASCISTS!!!1!
It seems curious that with all the hyperbole about safety, child protection, and privacy on MySpace, that Facebook's primary flaw is it's zealous determination to ensure that you will NOT be anonymous on Facebook.
Facebook clearly is not a place to have fun, or to express yourself, or explore your own interests safely. Closet gay? Closet Geek in a Sports Fan clique? Or, indeed whatever you want to explore with a different set of friends. If that's you, then Facebook is NOT for you.
I'm in no way defending MySpace - it's awful for a number of reasons. I don't have an account, and am not looking to get one. But it does look like a lot of people have fun with it, and many people have sent me links to their MySpace pages, I get them all the time, every couple of days even. But, no-one has ever sent me a Facebook one.
The fundamental problem with MySpace, and one that will be exactly the same for the New Order of Facebook, is that design is hard. It's actually very hard. People study it for years at school, but even then you actually have to have talent too. Maybe the freedom of MySpace is a good thing, maybe once people get messages saying "Oh dude, MY EYES!!1!, your page sucks", that at least some of them will take the time to learn how to design properly.
Bad design has been screwing up the Web from the very beginning. I'd be willing to bet that's not going to change in any of our lifetimes.
Old Model
1.Produce Music, by enticing and exploiting naive young artist with Faustian Contract.
2.Payola - pay, and otherwise illegally influence, radio stations to play music
3.?????
4.Profit
New Model
1.Produce Music, by enticing and exploiting naive young artist with Faustian Contract.
2.Payola - pay, and otherwise illegally influence, radio stations to play music
3.Demand, and otherwise illegally influence, money back for the same radio stations for playing the music.
4.Profit. More.
Please everyone, the time has come, the time is now. Tell your friends, tell your family, to stop buying music from record companies. These people are pure evil and must be stopped. It's good for them, it's like euthanasia, they are already committing economic suicide, let's just help them by speeding up the process.
Not sure who modded you insightful but I assume they work for a corporation. You are using the Fox News style of argument. Reduce everything to black and white / good versus bad / legal versus illegal.
Also, please stop using words like "illegal". That's also a simplification and, in many countries in the the World, wholly and utterly incorrect. You may be American (I assume you must be), but it's a big planet, your laws apply to your country alone. Please try to remember that, and remember that you are speaking to a global audience here.
The truth is that this is not a black and white subject, it is a grey one. It is not a rationalization to consider alternative economic strategies with regard to this. In fact, if software companies, the MPAA, and the RIAA, actually started doing more of that kind of thinking, then the need for piracy might be alleviated.
Keeping an open mind and exploring new directions is the only way media producers are going to win in any way that is sustainable.
My friend Ozymandias... that is not justification. That is not rationalization. That is reality.
If you wish to prove a point then using Wikipedia isn't a good place to start. If you broadened your search you might find some tangible facts. There were many people involved in the development of the light bulb. Many could be credited, Swann being one of them. But you could just as easily credit Humphrey Davy - or about 15 others.
In fact, if you consider the light bulb we have today, then the inventor was William Coolidge based on Edison's work.
With most inventions it is rare that one individual is truly "the inventor" - especially true since the middle of the 19th century. In reality one man's ideas build on the work of an other, and teams of engineers test and refine those.
For some reason the Americans think they are good at science and technology - they actually seem to be very bad at blue-sky thinking.
I am not American. However, I believe this statement to be biased, racist, and patently nonsense. Is walking on the moon blue sky enough for you? Want a few thousand more examples?
Mind you, if I had the kind of history the Americans have, I wouldn't be so keen to publicise it!
You are British. And yet you seem to know so little of British history.
Slashdot Mirror
you could also add, since the default home page of safari is to apple.com, and since this move got lots of free Apple advertising ...
/. this year.
6. To advertise Apple and increase awareness of Apple products and services in general.
Again, as you rightly state, not a fight that Apple cannot win -- in fact this task has already been achieved.
Has to be said, all in all this has to be one of the worst thought out articles on
I can only assume that the extremely small size of the Smart leads to an attempt to overcompensate. Most Smarts are driven as fast as the can go, whenever possible (which isn't very fast, but far faster than safe for the size of car). They will cut you up at junctions, they will race you, they park in a manner that is often extremely selfish.
It seems that in Europe, only total dicks buy the Smart.
I'll also will be using it only very rarely.
Why? 1) I was curious, and 2) I thought that maybe I could use it for those very rare pages I visit that don't work well with Firefox, rather than use IE. Although, I have to have a very good reason to visit pages that don't work with Firefox -- usually I just boycott that site, probably forever...
Honestly, I probably would use Safari more, because it is faster, were it not for one simple fact:
No Flashblock. No Adblock. No Use.
Just that simple. You will have to pull these extensions from my cold dead mouse hand. (And yes, being also a Mac user I do know you can get add-ons for Safari, but they do not work well, not at all).
no, you are right, technically it's not a monopoly.
It's a cartel. 5 operators that conspire together to maximize their profits. To the end user this has a similar effect as a monopoly, so the parent is, in essence, correct.
Whaling is supposed to permitted by the IWC for traditional hunts by certain indigenous peoples. Perhaps you'd like to tell us what part of using a sophisticated modern projectile weapon is traditional?
The tragedy and travesty is that most of these so-called "traditional" hunts are bogus. Rather than using traditional means and rituals these "natives" are using modern weapons, sonar and a variety of other means to find and kill whales. The catch being often turned over to the Japanese for profit.
There is as much "tradition" in this type of whaling as there is "science" in Japanese scientific whaling. It's all a smokescreen for profit.
So, I agree with the original poster, although "yayhoos" is a very generous word.
This is not what it seems. I read this article on the BBC earlier today and it annoyed me then.
Their use of the word "angry" in the headline is preposterous. This is shamefully hyperbolic sensationalist tabloid journalism -- something the BBC is pandering to more and more -- they really need to fire some editors. Also, it seems to me that someone in the Richmond offices of eBay has the ear of someone in the BBC, eBay gets an astonishingly high amount of free publicity from the BBC (The BBC does not allow advertising -- um, yeah, sure...). Again, they really need to fire some editors, I'd be astonished if at least some of them were not taking backhanders every now and again -- it certainly looks that way.
Why would a medium sized corporation be "angry". And particularly in this case, although eBay is the largest user of Adwords, eBay is still a very small company compared to Google. eBay has no alternative to Adwords. It's use them, or fail trying something else.
While I'm personally convinced that eBay's management are far from the sharpest executives out there, they are at least smart enough to realize that they need Google much more than Google needs them. Sure, there's some Corporate game playing around checkout etc, and perhaps this move is simply a reflection of that. eBay, like any firm, needs to try to assert themselves occasionally to negotiate better deals. This is business. This is not news.
If Google was planning their own negative party then perhaps it would be good for someone to examine their mission statement -- while not exactly evil, that action isn't something that would give any company the moral high ground.
This is all a storm in a teacup. The whole thing reeks of publicity stunt. Publicity stunts are things the BBC falls for regularly -- especially where eBay are concerned.
The UK has one of the most virulent and productive paparazzi in existence. They make a fortune off of candid pictures taken without the consent of the subjects. They do this all over Europe. They have been doing this for a number of years.
Quite simply, this article is wrong. It is legal to take pictures of someone in any public place, and it is legal to make money off them. Consent or not. Period.
There's probably a way of charting the rise of spam/commercial interests inversely against the IQ of the average Internet 1 user.
Sadly, however, having ruined Internet 1 for many of us, the commercially interested are already foaming at the mouth in anticipation of Internet 2.
While a minute and a half is pretty cool, and this development is a step in the right direction, can someone maybe point out to the organization behind this, and especially to their marketing droids that they need a name change.
EADS -> (D)EADS
Not the best association, much?
Oh the irony! While we are talking about one industry where the deadness goes up to eleven, this article is posted on the site of another industry that is beginning to pine for the fjords.
This log-in business for newspaper sites is an example of how they do not understand their new customers, nor how their business has changed. If you listen really closely when you are on the LA Times site you can hear the slow heavy footfalls of the grim reaper approaching.
Anyway, I vote we change the expression "deader than vaudeville" to "deader than the RIAA". You must, surely, realize your business is in trouble when an wholly unrelated one like Starbucks is wiping the floor with your tried and tested artists. Especially since Starbucks is also a big corporation and likely just as bureaucratic as any RIAA dinosaur, I woud guess the business processes to launch a new idea in Starbucks is comparable to that in any record company.
As the parent indicates, the trust issues with Wikipedia are many and varied. The most worrying, and seemingly increasingly prevalent, is the strength of cabals.
As well as the example in the parent, Scientology and Ayn Rand examples could also be quoted here among many many other possibles. In fact if you are a political organization, pressure group, NGO, or a sinister cult, and you don't have your own wiki-cabal, you are failing in your mission.
There's simply no way to put reality into wikiality in many articles on wikipedia, they are too zealously defended by cabals. Imagine for a moment if Wikipedia could have existed in the past. Galileo, Martin Luther King, Darwin, or many others putting forth their views, would have classed as vandals and have their IP's blocked by mindless brutes not interested in The Truth, only in Their Truth.
Similarly, group think on Digg, and shill bidding on eBay are example of similar behavior, though neither is as insidiously dangerous as the Wikipedia behavior.
But shill bidding shows how hard it is to prevent cabals on the online world - a phone call betweens friends across a continent does not show up as a connection online.
The simple answer, and a message that should never be forgotten -- never, ever, trust anything on Wikipedia (or Digg, or eBay for that matter).
While I'm sure there are college courses that exist for HR related studies, I can't help thinking that this is a terrible waste of society's time. I mean let's face it, as a child no-one dreams of working in HR. As a kid about to leave school you'd only choose to go into HR if you had no imagination and wanted a job that was safe -- one you didn't have to care about, or think about. There is no point in HR being a degree based study, as there is no option for creative or original thought in the job, nor in the people who are so employed.
If you work in HR, you will not only have no friends at work, people will actively go out of their way to hate you. All employees, at every level in the firm will hate you. At best, the operations directors will tolerate you because you are a necessary evil, but will still resent you as a cost centre.
There's a high probability you will be female somewhere in the region of 30-50. You will most likely be grossly overweight. You will power-dress like it's 1985 every year. Your arrogance, insincerity, and ability to bold-face outright lie will attempt to overcompensate for your lack of imagination and intelligence.
It's a personal view, but one I believe to be truthful. And I guess the reason why I would never work in a corporation again.
It is a highly skilled niche job that most professional photographers and cinematographers do not know how to do. You need to know how to get the right colors, temperatures and lighting to make food look like food. Often it's just faked too. For example, most whisky bottle shots you see contain tea, not whisky, because real whisky photographs to look like a bottle of urine.
There's no true free market. Here's what you have:
1. an illegal cartel 2. government(s) interference to maintain that cartel, despite it being illegal. 3. government(s) interference to regulate freedom in restricting free access to ideas.
Ironically, in Russia or China, which still have more of a Command and Control Economy than the West in many areas, you see freedom from copyright restrictions because the above don't apply.
Somewhere, there has to be a happy medium (pun intended.)
Ok, so rather than facebook=myspace, it's more - Facebook with added OMG PONIES!!1!
Reading those restrictions you've listed for us, actually makes it very easy to see why Facebook is not the success that MySpace is. In fact, my first reaction to seeing that list was, OMG FASCISTS!!!1!
It seems curious that with all the hyperbole about safety, child protection, and privacy on MySpace, that Facebook's primary flaw is it's zealous determination to ensure that you will NOT be anonymous on Facebook. Facebook clearly is not a place to have fun, or to express yourself, or explore your own interests safely. Closet gay? Closet Geek in a Sports Fan clique? Or, indeed whatever you want to explore with a different set of friends. If that's you, then Facebook is NOT for you.
I'm in no way defending MySpace - it's awful for a number of reasons. I don't have an account, and am not looking to get one. But it does look like a lot of people have fun with it, and many people have sent me links to their MySpace pages, I get them all the time, every couple of days even. But, no-one has ever sent me a Facebook one.
The fundamental problem with MySpace, and one that will be exactly the same for the New Order of Facebook, is that design is hard. It's actually very hard. People study it for years at school, but even then you actually have to have talent too. Maybe the freedom of MySpace is a good thing, maybe once people get messages saying "Oh dude, MY EYES!!1!, your page sucks", that at least some of them will take the time to learn how to design properly.
Bad design has been screwing up the Web from the very beginning. I'd be willing to bet that's not going to change in any of our lifetimes.
Not sure why he just doesn't move to the UK. There he can be recorded on video everywhere he goes, without any extra effort from himself.
Old Model 1.Produce Music, by enticing and exploiting naive young artist with Faustian Contract. 2.Payola - pay, and otherwise illegally influence, radio stations to play music 3.????? 4.Profit
New Model 1.Produce Music, by enticing and exploiting naive young artist with Faustian Contract. 2.Payola - pay, and otherwise illegally influence, radio stations to play music 3.Demand, and otherwise illegally influence, money back for the same radio stations for playing the music. 4.Profit. More.
Please everyone, the time has come, the time is now. Tell your friends, tell your family, to stop buying music from record companies. These people are pure evil and must be stopped. It's good for them, it's like euthanasia, they are already committing economic suicide, let's just help them by speeding up the process.
No.
Not sure who modded you insightful but I assume they work for a corporation. You are using the Fox News style of argument. Reduce everything to black and white / good versus bad / legal versus illegal.
Also, please stop using words like "illegal". That's also a simplification and, in many countries in the the World, wholly and utterly incorrect. You may be American (I assume you must be), but it's a big planet, your laws apply to your country alone. Please try to remember that, and remember that you are speaking to a global audience here.
The truth is that this is not a black and white subject, it is a grey one. It is not a rationalization to consider alternative economic strategies with regard to this. In fact, if software companies, the MPAA, and the RIAA, actually started doing more of that kind of thinking, then the need for piracy might be alleviated.
Keeping an open mind and exploring new directions is the only way media producers are going to win in any way that is sustainable.
My friend Ozymandias... that is not justification. That is not rationalization. That is reality.
What resignations?
... rather unfortunate accident?
Wasn't there a
MS now stands for Mystery Shopper!
Old people. In Korea.
If you wish to prove a point then using Wikipedia isn't a good place to start. If you broadened your search you might find some tangible facts. There were many people involved in the development of the light bulb. Many could be credited, Swann being one of them. But you could just as easily credit Humphrey Davy - or about 15 others.
In fact, if you consider the light bulb we have today, then the inventor was William Coolidge based on Edison's work.
With most inventions it is rare that one individual is truly "the inventor" - especially true since the middle of the 19th century. In reality one man's ideas build on the work of an other, and teams of engineers test and refine those.
I am not American. However, I believe this statement to be biased, racist, and patently nonsense. Is walking on the moon blue sky enough for you? Want a few thousand more examples?
You are British. And yet you seem to know so little of British history.