These guys are scam merchants of unparalleled skill.
Invite the world to post whatever they like on your site, take the massive bandwidth costs on the chin thanks to the venture capital money. Gain countless users virtually overnight due to your easy-to-use site and cavalier attitude to copyright law. Sell the site to a competitor keen to see you out of the market so they can have it to themselves, get yourself a ridiculous amount of Google shares. Days after selling the site, turn on the users that have just made you mind-bogglingly rich, and watch them desert in their millions while you laugh all the way to the bank, leaving the people that have just bought your site with a worthless asset.
Now, I don't play any MMORPGs, so excuse me if I'm talking ignorant nonsense, but aren't these games perfect for money laundering? Here I am, a small-time drug dealer (note to The Man: I AM TALKING HYPOTHETICALLY), wanting to buy a load of gear off my local kilo man. I put a load of money into the game, carry out some transaction between my character and his, he takes the money out at the other end, clean as a whistle.
Is there any reason why this wouldn't be possible ?
Erm, no, according to countless court testimonies, and the findings of investigations conducted by the church itself. It's absolutely incontrovertibly true that the Roman Catholic Church has been, and to a lesser extent still is, simply the biggest, most succesful, most enduring extortion racket the world has ever seen. It's no coincidence that countries such as Ireland, Italy and Spain have become so much more prosperous and progressive over the last few decades as they've become brave enough to stand up to, and eventually ignore, the gangsters in dog collars. It's not liberal propaganda, it's stone-cold fact, and if you're foolish enough to ignore it, well, I'm sorry for you.
The thing that's always struck me about food in America when I've visited there is that so much of it is adulterated in some way. You have mineral water with added vitamins, orange juice with added caffeine, high-fructose corn syrup or corn starch added to absolutely everything imaginable... It strikes me as a little bit stupid to process all the nutrition out of all your food in the name of production efficiency and consistency, then add it back in artificially in places where it doesn't belong.
And of course, even "natural" food like fresh fruit and vegetables ain't what it used to be - forced to grow incredibly quickly, fully of water and low in nutrients, and getting lower with every day it spends on journey to the supermarket. And as for the meat - your typical oven chicken grows to that size from a fucking egg in slightly under six weeks. Then the meat gets pumped full of water to bloat it even more.
It's no wonder that more and more people are simultaneously fat and malnourished these days. As you say, between ubiquitous fast food and big chain restaurants serving up mass-produced shit that's little better, it's actually an effort to seek out decent, nutritious food - an effort most people aren't prepared to make when cheap, filling, nutritionally empty garbage is available on every corner.
Something's gotta give besides your shirt buttons, folks. It feels like the tide's turning this side of the pond, though it's going to take time to roll back the evils visited upon us by the supermarkets and agribusiness, but it seems to me that America's really got its work cut out because of the sheer power of the people behind this.
Someone with an IQ of 100 is, in my general experience, pretty fucking thick.
50% of the population are more stupid than that.
Back to the matter at hand - I've often wondered if there was a correlation between obesity and stupidity, because it just seemed that way to me. And I've also wondered whether the chicken or the egg came first - are stupid people predisposed to getting fat, or does eating the sort of shitty diet that makes you fat also make you stupid?
They've come a long way in the last decade or so, but when it comes to matters of morality, Ireland's been lagging behind much of the rest of the Western world. It might call itself a republic, but in effect it was run like a Catholic theocracy till not too long ago, with the government taking its lead from the Church, and the Church doing pretty much whatever it pleased, until people started to see them for the bullies, racketeers and paedophiles they all-too-often were and they lost some of their grip on the public consciousness. They only legalised divorce in 1996, and abortion's still not on the cards unless there's a serious risk of the mother dying. The state-owned TV still carries the Angelus call to prayer at 6PM every night. So it doesn't really surprise me that this sort of stuffiness persists.
Sure, Acorn made it, but they made it to conform to a specification drawn up by the BBC. They were the only manufacturer who demonstrated a machine that met the spec, so they got the deal.
Actually, I find British teenagers on the whole to be better-behaved and more courteous than British adults on the whole. They get a bad press, and much of it undeserved - it tends to be just youthful exuberance blown out of proportion, rather than downright nastiness. For instance, I've never had to stop a teenager beating someone up for taking too long to buy a train ticket, which I had to do with a respectable-looking man in his late forties a few weeks ago. I've never had a teenager step out of his car in a blind rage and square up to me for the heinous crime of using a zebra crossing when he's in a hurry. And on and on. No, the people who cause the most tension in our society aren't teenagers, they're selfish, petty-minded, stressed-out, impatient adults who should know better.
Gun crime's on the increase in the UK (or so they'll have us believe, anyway), particularly in the rougher parts of the big cities. There's more illegally-held weapons in circulation these days, and what what particularly scares Joe Public, though he won't like to admit it, is that it's mostly young black people packing heat. Of course, when a mad old white man shoots a fleeing kid in the back with an illegally-held shotgun, the public clamours to have him released (go look up Tony Martin).
As well as guns and black people, this story features another thing that terrifies the masses - drugs. This part of Manchester seems to have been a bit of a battleground for rival gangs of late, and this lad's got caught in the crossfire, it would seem.
Also, the kid seems to have been murdered for absolutely nothing. You could ask what on earth he was doing playing on his bike at that time of night, but whatever the rights and wrongs of that, being in the wrong place at the wrong time resulted in a completely needless death. And the public laps stories like that up.
So, all in all, a sad commentary on the state of our society, and manna from heaven for the "this country's going to the dogs, it was never like that in my day" crowd. Except it was. It's just that in the old days, the gangsters and drug dealers were white.
Hanging around in the street isn't indicative of a lack of imagination. Many a rapper, breakdancer or graffiti artist learned their trade doing just that.
Sorry, I meant no free state education. And as for the unemployment benefit, I was just going by what people have told me. My point was that China's society is set up very differently from what most in the West think of as communism, with full employment, cradle-to-grave welfare, etc. etc.
China's not communist by any reasonable definition of the word. Their welfare state makes America's look comprehensive - no state education, no state healthcare, no unemployment benefit. You're on your own, pal. Private enterprise is common and becoming more so, and people have the right to own property. It's not communist, it's just got a very authoritarian government that calls itself communist.
I live in a small town in Surrey. It's one of the most affluent parts of the country, and consequently there's not a whole lot of crime. The most trouble I've ever seen was a guy getting his nose broken outside a pub. Three police cars turned up to deal with it, so you can tell how bored they are. Nothing ever happens, and I doubt it ever did.
And yet there's a CCTV camera outside my bedroom window.
If I lie in bed at night with my window open, I can hear the motor whirring away from time to time as it follows the occasional fox on a night-time forage. It's a pretty sinister sound. On more than one occasion I've walked home from the train station after midnight and been followed by two or three cameras as I went, swivelling to watch me walk along the road minding my own business. So somebody, somewhere, is being paid to sit and watch me do nothing of any consequence round the clock.
Despite this, a few nights ago I was woken up by a drunken fool flinging around a bin on the other side of the road - harmless, really, but enough to give a policeman cause to have a word in his ear. Thing is, he was doing this right under the camera. It never moved. It didn't see him. Great, eh?
I'd love to hear the justification for those cameras being there. It can't be crime prevention, there isn't any. When anything does happen, they miss it. They seem to be there purely to spy on people. Maybe the septuagenarian woman next door thinks they're a great thing, but personally I'm far more uneasy about the person operating the camera than I am about the odd scuffle outside a pub.
"Hello, police? Yes, there's a dead horse on the front page of Slashdot. It appears to have extensive whip injuries..."
Seriously, how many times do we need to have the corpse of boo.com et al exhumed and pissed on by some lazy journalist? And how many times do we need yet another of these dull rehashes on Slashdot?
Call me a curmudgeon, but this brings no new insight or humour to things, and I really see no justification in splashing it on here.
You don't honestly think Dell pay $100 a copy for each Windows installation they supply, do you?
If it came to it, Microsoft would give them Windows for free rather than have Linux being offered as the default OS by the world's biggest computer manufacturer.
(When I say default, I mean that when you spec up your PC, Windows would be an extra-cost option, and Linux would be free)
There's a certain peer-to-peer music filesharing client which, erm, a friend of mine uses frequently and loves dearly. They claim on their website to be all about sharing music between independent artists who've agreed to release it royalty-free, but in practice the content's all copyrighted. It's just like what Napster was in the good old days, only better. It's an absolute Aladdin's cave. What's more, if you want to jump people's download queues and get the music you're after without waiting your turn, you can pay the organisation behind the network for privileged status and ransack people's record collections left, right and centre.
I'm sure you know the network I'm talking about. My question is, given that they came down on Napster like a ton of bricks, and chase people like Kazaa and the torrent sites relentlessly, how the hell does this lot get away with it?
Not that, erm, my friend's complaining, you understand...
Like anything else, it's about doing the most good for the most people, I suppose. As you say, somebody's always going to have to miss out, but if doing it by speech rather than images makes for less spam, maybe it's a better approach on the whole.
Generating picture captchas is apparently a fairly processor-intensive job, while in the case of a speech captcha (Better file for a trademark quick, eh?) the work will be done on the local machine. And if you're choosing a string of three or four words out of a dictionary of tens of thousands, that's a whole lot of unique tests, easily generated. It certainly has its advantages, but the downside is of course that you need your users to have the appropriate speech plugin installed, and a mic connected to answer back.
Slashdot Mirror
These guys are scam merchants of unparalleled skill.
Invite the world to post whatever they like on your site, take the massive bandwidth costs on the chin thanks to the venture capital money. Gain countless users virtually overnight due to your easy-to-use site and cavalier attitude to copyright law. Sell the site to a competitor keen to see you out of the market so they can have it to themselves, get yourself a ridiculous amount of Google shares. Days after selling the site, turn on the users that have just made you mind-bogglingly rich, and watch them desert in their millions while you laugh all the way to the bank, leaving the people that have just bought your site with a worthless asset.
Google: you've been mugged.
Y'know, I studied Virgil at school, but I never realised he wrote I Am The Walrus.
Was I the only one reading that and thinking "a server powered by rodent shit?"
Now, I don't play any MMORPGs, so excuse me if I'm talking ignorant nonsense, but aren't these games perfect for money laundering? Here I am, a small-time drug dealer (note to The Man: I AM TALKING HYPOTHETICALLY), wanting to buy a load of gear off my local kilo man. I put a load of money into the game, carry out some transaction between my character and his, he takes the money out at the other end, clean as a whistle.
Is there any reason why this wouldn't be possible ?
Erm, no, according to countless court testimonies, and the findings of investigations conducted by the church itself. It's absolutely incontrovertibly true that the Roman Catholic Church has been, and to a lesser extent still is, simply the biggest, most succesful, most enduring extortion racket the world has ever seen. It's no coincidence that countries such as Ireland, Italy and Spain have become so much more prosperous and progressive over the last few decades as they've become brave enough to stand up to, and eventually ignore, the gangsters in dog collars. It's not liberal propaganda, it's stone-cold fact, and if you're foolish enough to ignore it, well, I'm sorry for you.
The thing that's always struck me about food in America when I've visited there is that so much of it is adulterated in some way. You have mineral water with added vitamins, orange juice with added caffeine, high-fructose corn syrup or corn starch added to absolutely everything imaginable... It strikes me as a little bit stupid to process all the nutrition out of all your food in the name of production efficiency and consistency, then add it back in artificially in places where it doesn't belong.
And of course, even "natural" food like fresh fruit and vegetables ain't what it used to be - forced to grow incredibly quickly, fully of water and low in nutrients, and getting lower with every day it spends on journey to the supermarket. And as for the meat - your typical oven chicken grows to that size from a fucking egg in slightly under six weeks. Then the meat gets pumped full of water to bloat it even more.
It's no wonder that more and more people are simultaneously fat and malnourished these days. As you say, between ubiquitous fast food and big chain restaurants serving up mass-produced shit that's little better, it's actually an effort to seek out decent, nutritious food - an effort most people aren't prepared to make when cheap, filling, nutritionally empty garbage is available on every corner.
Something's gotta give besides your shirt buttons, folks. It feels like the tide's turning this side of the pond, though it's going to take time to roll back the evils visited upon us by the supermarkets and agribusiness, but it seems to me that America's really got its work cut out because of the sheer power of the people behind this.
The average person has an IQ of 100.
Someone with an IQ of 100 is, in my general experience, pretty fucking thick.
50% of the population are more stupid than that.
Back to the matter at hand - I've often wondered if there was a correlation between obesity and stupidity, because it just seemed that way to me. And I've also wondered whether the chicken or the egg came first - are stupid people predisposed to getting fat, or does eating the sort of shitty diet that makes you fat also make you stupid?
Ah, but you see, that wouldn't have got a laugh.
Milla Jovovich.
They've come a long way in the last decade or so, but when it comes to matters of morality, Ireland's been lagging behind much of the rest of the Western world. It might call itself a republic, but in effect it was run like a Catholic theocracy till not too long ago, with the government taking its lead from the Church, and the Church doing pretty much whatever it pleased, until people started to see them for the bullies, racketeers and paedophiles they all-too-often were and they lost some of their grip on the public consciousness. They only legalised divorce in 1996, and abortion's still not on the cards unless there's a serious risk of the mother dying. The state-owned TV still carries the Angelus call to prayer at 6PM every night. So it doesn't really surprise me that this sort of stuffiness persists.
Sure, Acorn made it, but they made it to conform to a specification drawn up by the BBC. They were the only manufacturer who demonstrated a machine that met the spec, so they got the deal.
Actually, I find British teenagers on the whole to be better-behaved and more courteous than British adults on the whole. They get a bad press, and much of it undeserved - it tends to be just youthful exuberance blown out of proportion, rather than downright nastiness. For instance, I've never had to stop a teenager beating someone up for taking too long to buy a train ticket, which I had to do with a respectable-looking man in his late forties a few weeks ago. I've never had a teenager step out of his car in a blind rage and square up to me for the heinous crime of using a zebra crossing when he's in a hurry. And on and on. No, the people who cause the most tension in our society aren't teenagers, they're selfish, petty-minded, stressed-out, impatient adults who should know better.
A few reasons:
Gun crime's on the increase in the UK (or so they'll have us believe, anyway), particularly in the rougher parts of the big cities. There's more illegally-held weapons in circulation these days, and what what particularly scares Joe Public, though he won't like to admit it, is that it's mostly young black people packing heat. Of course, when a mad old white man shoots a fleeing kid in the back with an illegally-held shotgun, the public clamours to have him released (go look up Tony Martin).
As well as guns and black people, this story features another thing that terrifies the masses - drugs. This part of Manchester seems to have been a bit of a battleground for rival gangs of late, and this lad's got caught in the crossfire, it would seem.
Also, the kid seems to have been murdered for absolutely nothing. You could ask what on earth he was doing playing on his bike at that time of night, but whatever the rights and wrongs of that, being in the wrong place at the wrong time resulted in a completely needless death. And the public laps stories like that up.
So, all in all, a sad commentary on the state of our society, and manna from heaven for the "this country's going to the dogs, it was never like that in my day" crowd. Except it was. It's just that in the old days, the gangsters and drug dealers were white.
Or they don't have the means, or the money.
Hanging around in the street isn't indicative of a lack of imagination. Many a rapper, breakdancer or graffiti artist learned their trade doing just that.
Can it do non-rectangular windows yet? That's a fairly serious limitation for doing clever stuff with windows.
Sorry, I meant no free state education. And as for the unemployment benefit, I was just going by what people have told me. My point was that China's society is set up very differently from what most in the West think of as communism, with full employment, cradle-to-grave welfare, etc. etc.
China's not communist by any reasonable definition of the word. Their welfare state makes America's look comprehensive - no state education, no state healthcare, no unemployment benefit. You're on your own, pal. Private enterprise is common and becoming more so, and people have the right to own property. It's not communist, it's just got a very authoritarian government that calls itself communist.
I live in a small town in Surrey. It's one of the most affluent parts of the country, and consequently there's not a whole lot of crime. The most trouble I've ever seen was a guy getting his nose broken outside a pub. Three police cars turned up to deal with it, so you can tell how bored they are. Nothing ever happens, and I doubt it ever did.
And yet there's a CCTV camera outside my bedroom window.
If I lie in bed at night with my window open, I can hear the motor whirring away from time to time as it follows the occasional fox on a night-time forage. It's a pretty sinister sound. On more than one occasion I've walked home from the train station after midnight and been followed by two or three cameras as I went, swivelling to watch me walk along the road minding my own business. So somebody, somewhere, is being paid to sit and watch me do nothing of any consequence round the clock.
Despite this, a few nights ago I was woken up by a drunken fool flinging around a bin on the other side of the road - harmless, really, but enough to give a policeman cause to have a word in his ear. Thing is, he was doing this right under the camera. It never moved. It didn't see him. Great, eh?
I'd love to hear the justification for those cameras being there. It can't be crime prevention, there isn't any. When anything does happen, they miss it. They seem to be there purely to spy on people. Maybe the septuagenarian woman next door thinks they're a great thing, but personally I'm far more uneasy about the person operating the camera than I am about the odd scuffle outside a pub.
"Hello, police? Yes, there's a dead horse on the front page of Slashdot. It appears to have extensive whip injuries..."
Seriously, how many times do we need to have the corpse of boo.com et al exhumed and pissed on by some lazy journalist? And how many times do we need yet another of these dull rehashes on Slashdot?
Call me a curmudgeon, but this brings no new insight or humour to things, and I really see no justification in splashing it on here.
You don't honestly think Dell pay $100 a copy for each Windows installation they supply, do you?
If it came to it, Microsoft would give them Windows for free rather than have Linux being offered as the default OS by the world's biggest computer manufacturer.
(When I say default, I mean that when you spec up your PC, Windows would be an extra-cost option, and Linux would be free)
Well, rest assured, 99.9% of the content on there's not for sharing.
There's a certain peer-to-peer music filesharing client which, erm, a friend of mine uses frequently and loves dearly. They claim on their website to be all about sharing music between independent artists who've agreed to release it royalty-free, but in practice the content's all copyrighted. It's just like what Napster was in the good old days, only better. It's an absolute Aladdin's cave. What's more, if you want to jump people's download queues and get the music you're after without waiting your turn, you can pay the organisation behind the network for privileged status and ransack people's record collections left, right and centre.
I'm sure you know the network I'm talking about. My question is, given that they came down on Napster like a ton of bricks, and chase people like Kazaa and the torrent sites relentlessly, how the hell does this lot get away with it?
Not that, erm, my friend's complaining, you understand...
Like anything else, it's about doing the most good for the most people, I suppose. As you say, somebody's always going to have to miss out, but if doing it by speech rather than images makes for less spam, maybe it's a better approach on the whole.
Generating picture captchas is apparently a fairly processor-intensive job, while in the case of a speech captcha (Better file for a trademark quick, eh?) the work will be done on the local machine. And if you're choosing a string of three or four words out of a dictionary of tens of thousands, that's a whole lot of unique tests, easily generated. It certainly has its advantages, but the downside is of course that you need your users to have the appropriate speech plugin installed, and a mic connected to answer back.
Use a browser speech plugin to play a string of words randomly selected from a large dictionary, ask the user to repeat them.
Good for blind people, too.
Why bash when they do such a fine job of looking stupid all by themselves?
I'm struggling to remember the last time they did anything right.