Meanwhile, last week I was in a queue at Gatwick Airport. A passing airport employee happened across a bag in the middle of the concourse which appeared to be unattended. He shouted to everybody around asking whose it was. "It's mine", said a guy who was bidding farewell to his friend in the queue ten metres or so from his bag. "Well come and stand by it, then, or you'll end up causing a security alert and getting the place shut down." The guy rightly pointed out that since he'd just claimed the bag as his own, it wasn't unattended, just at a slight distance from its owner, but he may as well have been talking to the wall for all the notice Mr. Jobsworth took. He had to come away from his friend, who was clearly in tears at having to leave, and stand by his bag, for no good reason that I could discern.
They deliberately chose that band and that song to give themselves a good laugh at the general public. "Fuck you, I won't do what you tell me"? Looks like you just did.
A few months back I accidentally left a bag on the Tube. All it had in it was some incredibly sweaty gym kit - I'd just done 90 minutes of Bikram Yoga. I realised what I'd done on the way home and was terrified that I'd carelessly brought the whole London public transport system to a halt, but thankfully it looks like they didn't call in the bomb squad.
If the London Underground staff member who cautiously opened that bag, fearful of it blowing up, only to find my soaking clothes in it, is reading this, I apologise unreservedly for the appalling sight that must have greeted you.
Great Britain's the name of the island comprising England, Scotland and Wales. The UK is all that (and the surrounding smaller islands) plus Northern Ireland. The adjective used to cover all the UK is British. The island of Ireland is geographically part of the British Isles.
Sometimes they are, sometimes they're very, very bad at it. I mean, 25 years on and you still can't expand a window on OS X by anything other than the bottom right-hand corner?
How's about Twitter just stops imposing a stupid arbitrary limit on post size, and then we wouldn't need these horrible services?
The SMS message length is a red herring - when was the last time you saw a phone that couldn't handle multiple messages strung together? And I know it has the side benefit of encouraging brevity and stopping people using it like a full-blown blog, but honestly, there's no need - Facebook status messages don't have a length limit (that I've hit, anyway) and I don't see anybody knocking out War And Peace in there, because it's just not the medium for that sort of thing.
You're lucky. You're relatively prosperous. You have a very long way to fall before you really feel the pinch, by which I mean, for example, fuel costing so much relative to your income that you have to choose between heat and food. There are billions of people less fortunate than you. These people dream of being rich enough to heat or cook by natural gas or even kerosene - wood or charcoal's all they can afford (mind you, I'd rather cook on charcoal than kerosene, convenience be damned - that stuff stinks). And as for owning a car... no chance.
As cheap oil dwindles, your world (and mine) will become more and more like theirs. The only question is whether it happens gradually, through acceptance and adjustment, or suddenly, through denial and conflict.
But it absolutely is going to run out one day, nobody but a crackpot would argue otherwise. So if you buy some and stockpile it indefinitely until it does, you absolutely are going to make a fortune, unless all demand for oil suddenly and miraculously goes away. So why isn't everybody doing just that? There must be a reason.
Turns out there is, and it's really simple.
The problem with trying to do that is there's nowhere to store it. Buying billions' worth of oil and putting it away for a rainy day just isn't possible unless you're, say, the US government with (allegedly) underground caves you can fill up with the stuff. So you have to just keep buying it as it comes out of the ground.
And because we don't know exactly when the oil's going to run out, thanks in part to the sort of misinformation talked about in this article, the market price can't reflect how things are going to go in future. So people have to assume things are going to carry on as normal until they hear otherwise.
If I knew oil was going to run out to all practical intents and purposes in, say, 50 years, and could store significant quantities of it for that long, then yeah, I'd do it. But I don't know when it'll run out, and I don't know how much I can store, and for how long. So I'll carry on paying the spot price or something not too far in the future, like everybody else.
Yeah, pull up the drawbridge, we can't have poor countries catching up on us, can we? And everybody knows that all scammers are African and all Africans are scammers, right? There's no way any Westerner would try and con innocent people.
I have an Alfa Romeo, a driver's car by most people's reckoning, and it handles well, but steering feedback is nothing compared to my first car, a Mk2 Golf. Consequently, I can't hustle it like I could the Golf, even though it's much quicker and more powerful. BMWs have much better feedback than most, but drive a current 3-series, say, compared to one from 15 years ago, and you'll have to agree the old one is much more communicative.
And yes, I agree that grip is good, but older tyres had a much more progressive breakaway, so you knew you were losing traction well before it was past the point of no return, and could act accordingly to recover. Now your tyres just keep telling you everything's OK, right up to the point when it's not and you're heading for a hedge.
Modern cars, sadly, have little of the feedback of old. I'm convinced this makes them less safe, because you can't feel what the road's doing under you like you used to. This, coupled with ever-fatter tyres which grip and grip and grip and then suddenly don't grip, adds up to bad news. But people mostly manage. Feedback's great, but it doesn't seem to be necessary for most driving conditions.
Mercedes have had working prototypes of steering-wheel-less cars for a heck of a long time now, but they can't bring them to market because European safety laws require a physical connection between steering wheel and steered wheels. For obvious reasons - if your fancy fly-by-wire joystick suddenly stops working, you are in deep doo-doo.
Classic Microsoft tactic. Every single release of everything they ever do is prefaced with a couple of months of how the last release was shit and they're really sorry for letting everyone down, but hey, this time they're going to get it right, promise.
The incredible thing is that, like a battered housewife, people keep taking them back.
The Independent newspaper carried out a lovely little experiment a couple of years ago. They took a very famous violinist (can't remember who now), gave her a Stradivarius, and sent her busking under a bridge by Waterloo station in London. At one point, the reporter who was accompanying her went to ask a homeless guy sitting under the bridge what he thought. "Is that a Stradivarius?", he asked straight out. Turned out the guy was from Stradivari's home town of Cremona and would've known the sound of a Strad anywhere.
Now, just think how unlikely it is that someone will roll up and busk with a Strad, and yet this guy was sure he knew what he was hearing. So yeah, they have a distinctive sound all right.
I work in the business, and you're right, budgets for TV advertising are generally out of all proportion to the results they generate. It's one of the big frustrations of producing advertising-related websites - clients are not only stingy with the budgets, but they want chapter and verse on exactly what they're getting for their money. Whereas with TV, they'll piss millions up the wall on bloated follies just because they like the concept. If a website fails (and let's face it, most do), you'll have a hard job ever selling another one to them, whereas with TV, they just keep coming back for more.
I think the reasons for this are complex, but it's partly historical - TV ad budgets are massive because they've always been massive, and they haven't fully adjusted to the fact that their audiences have mostly vanished. We don't sit around in our tens of millions watching a couple of channels any more. We're spread across dozens of them, and that's if we're in the house at all - increased prosperity means that people can afford to go out more. And even when we are watching, we'll skip the ads if at all possible. Or just not bother with the broadcasts and buy/download stuff to watch at our leisure. The consumer is fully in control nowadays.
And yet here's the web, where the fact that the consumer is in control is its main virtue, but budgets are relatively tiny. I think that for the most part the industry's still figuring out how to consistently pull in eyeballs, and also how to charge for those eyeballs once they have them. It's just hard to persuade clients that they're getting value for money, even though in my view, if you can actually persuade a user to come and have a look around your website, that's infinitely more valuable than the televisual blunderbuss approach to getting your message out there to the passive masses who mostly just want you to go away so they can get back to watching the show.
It'll change one day. It has to. TV nowadays has much less to offer as an advertising medium than the web.
Depending on who you believe, he could well be long dead. But they don't want you to think that. Even if he's not long dead, they don't actually want to catch him, he's too useful a bogeyman.
Did you know Apache pilots train to be able to move and focus both their eyes independently, like a chameleon, so that they can look at the HUD and the view out the window at the same time? Don't ask me how they do it, but they do.
There's more than one approach to breaking down cellulose. Rabbits have a rather less sophisticated apparatus than the cow, packing a single stomach chamber and a big appendix full of helpful bacteria.
I suppose we could have developed something like this. The catch is that breaking down cellulose by this method requires two passes through the digestive tract, so we'd have to eat our own shit.
I dunno about you, but I'm happy enough doing without.
The design of our breathing/eating apparatus may be a choking hazard, but it gives us the ability to do a neat trick that no other animal can: speak.
Ever noticed how babies can feed and breathe at the same time, but you can't? This is because of the shape of their vocal tract, which is more like an animal's than yours at that point. Babies need to get a lot of food down their necks as quickly as possible, because they're busy growing. Speaking can wait.
After a few months, things start to move around - the larynx drops, the back of the throat curves round into a right-angle, and all of a sudden they have to choose between eating and breathing. But the reshaped vocal tract allows them to form configurations of the speech organs which weren't previously possible, and so they learn to speak.
Slashdot Mirror
Meanwhile, last week I was in a queue at Gatwick Airport. A passing airport employee happened across a bag in the middle of the concourse which appeared to be unattended. He shouted to everybody around asking whose it was. "It's mine", said a guy who was bidding farewell to his friend in the queue ten metres or so from his bag. "Well come and stand by it, then, or you'll end up causing a security alert and getting the place shut down." The guy rightly pointed out that since he'd just claimed the bag as his own, it wasn't unattended, just at a slight distance from its owner, but he may as well have been talking to the wall for all the notice Mr. Jobsworth took. He had to come away from his friend, who was clearly in tears at having to leave, and stand by his bag, for no good reason that I could discern.
Needless.
Every time I see one of those ads I get the urge to cross out the word "idea" and write in "fault".
Why, it's almost like they're in alphabetical order or something.
Dig a little.
The campaign set up a website.
This site is registered in the name of a Mr. Neill Ridley, founder of a little PR firm called Eject Media.
By a curious coincidence, Neill Ridley used to be an A&R man at... Sony.
Guess who he worked with there? Oh, look, it's Simon Cowell...
More here.
They deliberately chose that band and that song to give themselves a good laugh at the general public. "Fuck you, I won't do what you tell me"? Looks like you just did.
A few months back I accidentally left a bag on the Tube. All it had in it was some incredibly sweaty gym kit - I'd just done 90 minutes of Bikram Yoga. I realised what I'd done on the way home and was terrified that I'd carelessly brought the whole London public transport system to a halt, but thankfully it looks like they didn't call in the bomb squad.
If the London Underground staff member who cautiously opened that bag, fearful of it blowing up, only to find my soaking clothes in it, is reading this, I apologise unreservedly for the appalling sight that must have greeted you.
Great Britain's the name of the island comprising England, Scotland and Wales. The UK is all that (and the surrounding smaller islands) plus Northern Ireland. The adjective used to cover all the UK is British. The island of Ireland is geographically part of the British Isles.
Sometimes they are, sometimes they're very, very bad at it. I mean, 25 years on and you still can't expand a window on OS X by anything other than the bottom right-hand corner?
How's about Twitter just stops imposing a stupid arbitrary limit on post size, and then we wouldn't need these horrible services?
The SMS message length is a red herring - when was the last time you saw a phone that couldn't handle multiple messages strung together? And I know it has the side benefit of encouraging brevity and stopping people using it like a full-blown blog, but honestly, there's no need - Facebook status messages don't have a length limit (that I've hit, anyway) and I don't see anybody knocking out War And Peace in there, because it's just not the medium for that sort of thing.
You're lucky. You're relatively prosperous. You have a very long way to fall before you really feel the pinch, by which I mean, for example, fuel costing so much relative to your income that you have to choose between heat and food. There are billions of people less fortunate than you. These people dream of being rich enough to heat or cook by natural gas or even kerosene - wood or charcoal's all they can afford (mind you, I'd rather cook on charcoal than kerosene, convenience be damned - that stuff stinks). And as for owning a car... no chance.
As cheap oil dwindles, your world (and mine) will become more and more like theirs. The only question is whether it happens gradually, through acceptance and adjustment, or suddenly, through denial and conflict.
But it absolutely is going to run out one day, nobody but a crackpot would argue otherwise. So if you buy some and stockpile it indefinitely until it does, you absolutely are going to make a fortune, unless all demand for oil suddenly and miraculously goes away. So why isn't everybody doing just that? There must be a reason.
Turns out there is, and it's really simple.
The problem with trying to do that is there's nowhere to store it. Buying billions' worth of oil and putting it away for a rainy day just isn't possible unless you're, say, the US government with (allegedly) underground caves you can fill up with the stuff. So you have to just keep buying it as it comes out of the ground.
And because we don't know exactly when the oil's going to run out, thanks in part to the sort of misinformation talked about in this article, the market price can't reflect how things are going to go in future. So people have to assume things are going to carry on as normal until they hear otherwise.
If I knew oil was going to run out to all practical intents and purposes in, say, 50 years, and could store significant quantities of it for that long, then yeah, I'd do it. But I don't know when it'll run out, and I don't know how much I can store, and for how long. So I'll carry on paying the spot price or something not too far in the future, like everybody else.
Yeah, pull up the drawbridge, we can't have poor countries catching up on us, can we? And everybody knows that all scammers are African and all Africans are scammers, right? There's no way any Westerner would try and con innocent people.
I have an Alfa Romeo, a driver's car by most people's reckoning, and it handles well, but steering feedback is nothing compared to my first car, a Mk2 Golf. Consequently, I can't hustle it like I could the Golf, even though it's much quicker and more powerful. BMWs have much better feedback than most, but drive a current 3-series, say, compared to one from 15 years ago, and you'll have to agree the old one is much more communicative.
And yes, I agree that grip is good, but older tyres had a much more progressive breakaway, so you knew you were losing traction well before it was past the point of no return, and could act accordingly to recover. Now your tyres just keep telling you everything's OK, right up to the point when it's not and you're heading for a hedge.
Modern cars, sadly, have little of the feedback of old. I'm convinced this makes them less safe, because you can't feel what the road's doing under you like you used to. This, coupled with ever-fatter tyres which grip and grip and grip and then suddenly don't grip, adds up to bad news. But people mostly manage. Feedback's great, but it doesn't seem to be necessary for most driving conditions.
Mercedes have had working prototypes of steering-wheel-less cars for a heck of a long time now, but they can't bring them to market because European safety laws require a physical connection between steering wheel and steered wheels. For obvious reasons - if your fancy fly-by-wire joystick suddenly stops working, you are in deep doo-doo.
There's an old lady down my street, right...
(He used Keynote)
Classic Microsoft tactic. Every single release of everything they ever do is prefaced with a couple of months of how the last release was shit and they're really sorry for letting everyone down, but hey, this time they're going to get it right, promise.
The incredible thing is that, like a battered housewife, people keep taking them back.
The Independent newspaper carried out a lovely little experiment a couple of years ago. They took a very famous violinist (can't remember who now), gave her a Stradivarius, and sent her busking under a bridge by Waterloo station in London. At one point, the reporter who was accompanying her went to ask a homeless guy sitting under the bridge what he thought. "Is that a Stradivarius?", he asked straight out. Turned out the guy was from Stradivari's home town of Cremona and would've known the sound of a Strad anywhere.
Now, just think how unlikely it is that someone will roll up and busk with a Strad, and yet this guy was sure he knew what he was hearing. So yeah, they have a distinctive sound all right.
I work in the business, and you're right, budgets for TV advertising are generally out of all proportion to the results they generate. It's one of the big frustrations of producing advertising-related websites - clients are not only stingy with the budgets, but they want chapter and verse on exactly what they're getting for their money. Whereas with TV, they'll piss millions up the wall on bloated follies just because they like the concept. If a website fails (and let's face it, most do), you'll have a hard job ever selling another one to them, whereas with TV, they just keep coming back for more.
I think the reasons for this are complex, but it's partly historical - TV ad budgets are massive because they've always been massive, and they haven't fully adjusted to the fact that their audiences have mostly vanished. We don't sit around in our tens of millions watching a couple of channels any more. We're spread across dozens of them, and that's if we're in the house at all - increased prosperity means that people can afford to go out more. And even when we are watching, we'll skip the ads if at all possible. Or just not bother with the broadcasts and buy/download stuff to watch at our leisure. The consumer is fully in control nowadays.
And yet here's the web, where the fact that the consumer is in control is its main virtue, but budgets are relatively tiny. I think that for the most part the industry's still figuring out how to consistently pull in eyeballs, and also how to charge for those eyeballs once they have them. It's just hard to persuade clients that they're getting value for money, even though in my view, if you can actually persuade a user to come and have a look around your website, that's infinitely more valuable than the televisual blunderbuss approach to getting your message out there to the passive masses who mostly just want you to go away so they can get back to watching the show.
It'll change one day. It has to. TV nowadays has much less to offer as an advertising medium than the web.
Search is for when you know what you're looking for and don't know where to find it.
Navigation is for when you don't know what you're looking for but you know where to find it. Or at least you think you know where to find it.
Depending on who you believe, he could well be long dead. But they don't want you to think that. Even if he's not long dead, they don't actually want to catch him, he's too useful a bogeyman.
I can't say such a direct approach has ever worked out favourably for me. Well, not without the assistance of the demon drink, anyway.
Did you know Apache pilots train to be able to move and focus both their eyes independently, like a chameleon, so that they can look at the HUD and the view out the window at the same time? Don't ask me how they do it, but they do.
There's more than one approach to breaking down cellulose. Rabbits have a rather less sophisticated apparatus than the cow, packing a single stomach chamber and a big appendix full of helpful bacteria.
I suppose we could have developed something like this. The catch is that breaking down cellulose by this method requires two passes through the digestive tract, so we'd have to eat our own shit.
I dunno about you, but I'm happy enough doing without.
Ah, but...
The design of our breathing/eating apparatus may be a choking hazard, but it gives us the ability to do a neat trick that no other animal can: speak.
Ever noticed how babies can feed and breathe at the same time, but you can't? This is because of the shape of their vocal tract, which is more like an animal's than yours at that point. Babies need to get a lot of food down their necks as quickly as possible, because they're busy growing. Speaking can wait.
After a few months, things start to move around - the larynx drops, the back of the throat curves round into a right-angle, and all of a sudden they have to choose between eating and breathing. But the reshaped vocal tract allows them to form configurations of the speech organs which weren't previously possible, and so they learn to speak.