I'm curious to know how most designers take this. On the one hand they're wholly dependent on Adobe and many use Flash extensively. On the other hand, the vast majority of them are die-hard Apple fanatics. My impression is that they generally don't give it much thought but will always side with Apple.
I personally don't much care for Adobe and am resentful of how they control the industry. But they don't do anything unusual for a software company. They still have the best software, by far, for design and more importantly, everyone in the industry uses it. It's extremely impractical to try to be the black sheep and go with something by some other company. In the print and publishing world they don't even take files created in anything other than Adobe applications.
The only way Flash is going away is if someone develops an authoring tool for HTML5 or any other language that is as robust and relatively straightforward to use as Flash. Flash, by and large, is targeted designers. And designers are not programmers. They aren't going to pick up HTML5.
The problem is that many programmers I've worked with are snobs when it comes to Flash. They don't see it as their responsibility to learn Actionscript, deeming Flash to be a designer's tool. This, despite the fact that AS2 and especially AS3 are very robust languages. AS3 actually changes things fairly dramatically, making for a more properly structured and cleaner language. It basically forces people to code the right way, but it also has alienated a lot of designers who have decided to stick with AS2. I've been seeing HTML5 demos showcasing things Actionscript has been capable of for years and, more importantly, with much better performance.
And compounding the problem is that the majority of design companies don't get enough Flash work to justify hiring a full-time Flash developer, and it's hard finding such a developer even if they needed one. I wont bother getting into the difficulty getting a programmer to even implement a design properly. It's especially problematic when the programmer produces sloppy work and tries arguing it's good enough in an attempt to avoid hard work. And regardless, the perception persists that it's a designer's tool. So designers are stuck doing a lot of Flash development. But it's feasible because Flash makes it relatively easy to do so.
Put a designer in front of a text editor and good luck having him build an interactive site in HTML5.
I'll concede that there may be legitimate issues with getting Flash on the iPhone or iPad. But let's face the facts, the real reason is competition. Get Flash on those devices and suddenly there's another source for gaming and apps.
By essentially rejecting self-determination they are asking for an increasingly oppressive government. This is the consequence of an entitlement culture which apparently is unwilling to deal with life's responsibilities and instead turns to the government to alleviate the difficulties of life. The government regulating what we can do is a logical extension of this. If they're going to be providing more and more services it's only logical they start resorting to these measures from both economic and social standpoints. Politicians have grown increasingly arrogant, seeing themselves as society's caretakers.
There's a child molester in every chat room. There's a terrorist in every van. Smoking a joint leads to crime, violence, and insanity. Copying a music file cripples our economy.
Oh, and drinking alcohol doesn't hurt you. Eating cheap processed chemicals doesn't hurt you. Polluting our air and water is worth it. Our climate is fine.
What do all these statements have in common? They are making some entrenched interest a lot of money.
I could argue very easily that many of the people making the opposite arguments also have strong financial and political interests.
It looks like the author was basically trying to confirm a story that was already reasonably well-known. The end result is that he came back with nothing new because nobody at Nintendo either knew about or was willing to acknowledge the connection to this real estate developer. The man in question, the actual Mario, is claimed to be reclusive. I suspect he's reclusive because he's trying to avoid being pestered by gamers and those in the gaming press.
A better discussion would be what is Blippy really good for? I can see why I might like to browse other people's purchases once in a while, but why would I want to broadcast mine?
I know someone working at a company developing something very similar to this. To this day I'm having trouble figuring out where the value in this is. Why would people want to share what they're buying? And why would anyone else care?
I suppose there's value in this when shopping for deals or encouraging someone to get something. But that can already be accomplished a million other ways, the most basic being personally talking to the individual and actually showing them the product in question. As for shopping for deals, that's a very fluid thing and something I can better accomplish by just going on Amazon or Google and finding the deals for myself.
I personally think we're seeing the beginnings of another dot.com bubble. The prospect of making a lot of money for minimal up front investment is just too appealing. The big difference is that this time around the development is usually outsourced and often managed by people who don't really understand the technology. So it's not surprising that the people running Blippy would not have noticed such a glaring problem.
We can't trust them to regulate Wall Street. And if they were around when things were starting to collapse then logic would dictate that they were indeed around when Bush was president. This his nothing to do with the president, any president. This has to do with the ineptitude of an agency directly responsible for watching Wall Street. What good are the regulations if the government isn't even doing it's job?
And let's face facts, Obama is just paying us lip service. He's not seriously going to do anything to deal with Wall Street. Goldman Sachs contributed heavily to his campaign and he visited by the CEO several times during the SEC investigation. I think that tells you everything you need to know.
I'm pretty sure these aren't the kinds of positions that get replaced every election. I'm sure they get to keep their jobs for life, if they were so inclined.
I've always been a fan of nicely designed manuals. But the last time I've seen a good one was back in the 80s. Everything since then has been halfhearted, poorly designed junk. Few people seem to read them. I'll flip through them once myself and never refer to them again. Might as well get rid of them and include instructions in the game. I don't mean annoying tutorials that get in the way of me just playing the game. I mean a separate set of instructions I can read through at my leisure.
I have Brain Age and I always felt like Sudoku was more stimulating than the core game. Although the math game, where I had to do basic computations as quickly as possible did have practical applications. I found myself doing basic math more quickly and relying on the calculator less.
But otherwise, it was relatively easy to peak at the games and sustain that level if I was playing on a regular basis. It's really no different than playing any other game except that Brain Age offered even less room for improvement. The overall package was rather obnoxious, with that professor getting in the way of me just getting to what I wanted to do. And the algorithm for gauging progress seemed rather simplistic.
I'm convinced Apple refuses to support Flash because it would essentially undermine the App Store. I don't doubt that there may be other considerations, like security and control, but I'm convinced that's one of the bigger ones. Although, I will acknowledge that in the greater scheme of things it's somewhat irrelevant. On the other hand, I'm sure the advent of the iPad has brought the issue to the forefront what with many consumer likely expecting a user experience more comparable to a laptop, not the iPhone.
I do find it amusing that my antiquated, 5+ year old Sony tablet can view websites flawlessly where the amazing new iPad can't.
I'm convinced that the only way to reduce crime and foster a positive relationship between the police and citizens is to have cops on the beat, walking the streets. This way they're forced to interact with people. Having them speed by in patrol cars, and even worse sit back at headquarters while cameras do the work only increases antagonism amongst the people and make it easier to the police to be abusive. You're not going to have a vested interest in someone if there's no personal interaction.
Couple this with governments harboring some authoritarian tendencies and you're looking at real problems. Although I'm sure some will strongly disagree I'm convinced this is the general tendency for socialist governments. I'm not talking about socialism in principle, I'm talking about the tendencies more socialist nations have. Inevitably this attitude arises in government where they're convinced they're the caretakers of the people. They know better than their citizens and need to protect them. This tendency is exhibited in everything from protecting us from terrorists to reducing salt in our diets for our own good. And too often it's too far reaching and misguided. But it frequently it even becomes a necessity. Take government healthcare, if it becomes expensive treating people for a particular preventable condition you can guarantee that the action that causes the problem will be banned.
So I'm not surprised by these totalitarian tendencies. And, especially in this case, it's hard to argue that the UK shouldn't be doing this. It's for our safety that we shouldn't be allowed to speed, isn't it? Of course, when there's a chance for the state to increase revenue, especially with minimal effort on their part, you can't seriously expect them to not jump at the chance.
We have an article on two books 220 years late, references to late fees, but no estimate on what George Washington would owe. Without that figure this is like a joke without the punchline.
Morals are a system of rules that exist to ensure that humans thrive. I can't think of a simpler way to put it. It's basically a social construct that guides everything from the value of an individual all the way up to ensuring the success of society. It's not something people just made up for the fun of it or for the sake of control. It's probably something that evolved out of necessity as human moved beyond basic animal instincts.
Religions have simply taken those morals and have codified them. Morals didn't grow out of religion. Humans, of course, are very creative in finding ways to exploit anything they create for their own enrichment and the oppression of others.
Certainly, there's a lot of grey area with morality. There's a lot people can get away with within smaller groups that doesn't affect society as a whole. But if everyone, or at least a very large majority, were to engage in that particular activity it does become a problem. And that's where a lot of the conflict comes in. Those on one side are too heavy-handed in dictating morality. On the other hand, those engaging in the activities are too self-centered, if that's the right term, to understand that what works for them might not necessarily work for society at large. And for all the talk of moral relativity I think there are some basic absolutes persistent throughout humanity. And of course, as humanity progresses and different pressures are placed on us the need or importance of certain morals changes.
But ultimately, my point is, even if we were 100% atheist, if we knew for a fact there was no god, we'd still have a system of morals.
Legally, Google probably couldn't guarantee privacy if it wanted to.
I think the real irony is that there are many people out there who claim to value privacy but openly embrace social and national defense programs that gives our government direct access to personal information and enables them to control our lives more thoroughly.
"Previously opened e-mail is not in electronic storage."
I'm still trying to wrap my head around this. If these emails can be accessed at a later date they're obviously being stored somewhere. Now I lose my right to privacy because I've opened an email?
What exactly is the problem with just getting a search warrant?
The very important detail here is that Apple has had a massive impact on the psyche of the American consumer. All you hear is iPhone this and iPad that. The Apple fanatics feed into the company's aura and the ignorant masses eat it up.
Why is this important? Because companies everywhere are rushing to accommodate Apple and support their products so that they can jump on the bandwagon. These are the seeds of a monopoly.
Coupled with that is Apple's business practice of completely locking down their products. A closed app store, refusal to support anything that might be deemed competitive and practices that are tantamount to planned obsolescence.
At the height of Microsoft's so-called monopoly there were many alternatives within the PC world. There were countless alternatives to MS's many applications. Even when you consider hardware, nobody was chained to Intel/MS. There was Cyrix and AMD.
I'm not saying that Microsoft didn't engage in anti-competitive activities. What I am saying is that even when they were doing so there were many other options. Good luck finding the same with Apple and it's much worse now with the app store.
Considering the consumer's tendency to gravitate towards whatever is perceived as popular Apple's practices may turn out to be a big problem.
How about we sell cigs that don't contain so much bullshit? I mean honestly...is all that crap really necessary?
If that were so easy don't you think the tobacco companies would already be offering such a product? The simple fact is that you're setting fire to something and sucking in the fumes; it's inevitable you're inhaling something harmful.
This is the result of consumers being unwilling to pay more for products. Everyone wants everything cheap which means it can't be manufactured domestically. Although, what I find really infuriating are the companies charging a huge premium for their products but still manufacturing them under these conditions, Nike, Coach and the like come to mind.
That said, a living wage is very different in China and the developing world than it is in developed nations. And I guarantee you those workers don't necessarily have a problem with the conditions. Although, admittedly they don't have much to compare it to considering most factories in China are like this. And while foreign companies are taking advantage of the low cost these kinds of conditions afford them they're not the cause. Chinese companies would be doing this regardless of whether or not they were manufacturing foreign goods. In fact, chances are good that the conditions and pay are better at companies making foreign products. Most importantly, what would be the alternative? Most of these people, especially those outside of major cities wouldn't even have a job if it weren't for these factories. Anywhere new factories open people flock to the region for work. And as factories close down and move there are big migrations of people.
I also find some of those claims made in the store misleading. They show photos of workers taking a nap implying that they're utterly exhausted and will take any chance they can to sleep. Having been in Asia I can assure you that employees at all levels routinely take naps at work, especially during the lunch break. This goes for factory and office workers. In some offices they'll even facilitate that by turning down the lights. As for claims of sexual harassment, I believe it happens, but it certainly isn't unique to factories by any stretch of the imagination.
I'm not making excuses here and it does bother me immensely the extent to which American companies have outsourced. But there are a lot of factories responsible for this. It was unquestioningly gotten more expensive to run a business in the US. There are taxes, insurance and countless other expenses. Workers keep demanding more and more. Consumers are unwilling to pay more for products.
And too many American companies haven't responded properly to the changing economy. They continue trying to compete on price which is a guaranteed road to failure because someone else can always do it more cheaply. They ruin their reputations with crap products. The nations currently manufacturing those goods are ambitious and will eventually use the expertise they've gained to make their own products. Hell, they're even outsourcing R&D nowadays. Unfortunately, it seems to be a race to the bottom. But again, ultimately, it's just as much the fault of consumers and the government as it is of the corporations.
I can't help but think that "bias" is an inappropriate, or at the very least an overly harsh, term. My daughter is clearly more comfortable around Asians, especially if she hears them speaking Chinese. Why? Because my wife is Taiwanese and speaks Chinese to her. It also helps that she was in Taiwan for a few months when her language abilities expanded dramatically. However, she can openly interact with people of any race. It's just that she's immediately comfortable with Chinese people and it takes her a while to get comfortable with other people.
I'd say it's simply a matter of comfort in being surrounded by what seems familiar. What the hell does she know about bias? How could she possibly have formed any opinion at all with people of other races? I'm not Asian but she doesn't necessarily feel comfortable around Caucasians either.
I, myself, went to what a lot of people would consider an inner city school. I was always surrounded by classmates of all races. I never gave it any thought. They were just kids. Certainly race wasn't a factor in me deciding who were my friends.
I think there's a natural tendency to favor that which is most familiar to an individual. It's a security and support mechanism. There's an expectation that people more like you share your interests and face similar challenges. There's a chance for a network there that can be exploited. The same thing happens in the reverse. It's a basic defense mechanism also very prevalent in nature. If notice that thugs tend to walk around dressed in baggy pants and displaying a bad attitude, for example, you're going to associate that look with trouble. Obviously, they're not all troublemakers but inevitably these stereotypes are formed. It's not different than a gazelle realizing that a lion means trouble.
Now, it's the responsibility of a rational adult to understand this and reason that stereotypes aren't necessarily true. And it's their responsibility to understand that it isn't a good thing to limit to yourself to a particular group. And without question, none of this is a justification to subjugate or segregate anyone else.
But it does rub me the wrong way that there seems to be this inclination to look for racism and bigotry everywhere. As I've mentioned previous, it seems to me that children with this disorder are more comfortable with other races simply because they don't feel that need for comfort in the familiar. There's no anxiety in seeking out someone more like themselves, someone it might be easier to make a connection with.
If they think tweets are worthy of being archived why not just archive every blog and comment in existence? Many of those offer far more worthwhile insight than 99% of tweets.
I remember in school students and sometimes teachers occasionally mocking the customs of past cultures. There was always that subtle arrogance that we're somehow more enlightened than people were 500, 1000 or 2000 years ago. The problem is that people confuse technological advancements for intellectual and philosophical advancement. I'd argue that socially and philosophically humans have progressed little over the last few thousand years. Certainly there have been some cultural shifts, but I'm hard-pressed to see any fundamental shifts. I do think we may be close to one, but judging from what I see on Twitter and Facebook I'm not particularly optimistic.
With the massive proliferation of every last inane comment preserved for posterity I can only imagine how utterly stupid we are going to look to people of the future.
I doubt they thought that hard about. They wanted a game full of fist-bumping machismo. Hence the characters. The environments are there to impress us with their graphical wizardry. So that inevitably means all kinds of flourishes and intricate detail, something difficult to accomplish with more modern minimalist designs.
You know, of all the things to base a movie on superhero comics bother me the least. From a standpoint of Hollywood sucking the life out of everything I might have a problem, but beyond that I'm not really bothered by whatever ends up being produced.
And the reason for this is that comic book superheros are ridiculous to begin with. Their characters are often goofy and their plots corny. I mean, they were really grasping at straws with a lot of those superheros and villains. I was a fairly avid reader of comic books growing up, but even as a kid I thought a lot of what I was reading was lame. Entertaining, but lame. Comics also have had countless interpretations by different artists and writers and canon is constantly being so many more liberties can be taken with the material. And then when you consider that Marvel, DC and the rest were nothing but machines churning out disposable entertainment, much like Hollywood, then there's not much to get upset about.
It's a bit different when you're looking at movie adaptations of novels. The quality of writing in novels is often, but not always, better than what you'll find in most movies and comics. And I believe that because a book requires more imagination on the part of the reader there's a stronger personal attachment. Then there's the added burden of trying to condense a novel into a 2 hour movie. So there's a lot more to get wrong and a greater likelihood people will be disappointed.
These guys are management, not guys down in the trenches doing the dirty work. They're not all that different from those above them and it's safe to say they were earning a pretty penny for their work. They may have had legitimate problems with Activation, but it's safe to say that their real motivation was money. EA was offering them more. They were likely bound by all kinds of contracts so there was no pretty way to break free and go work for a competitor.
And I bet you they're going to continue churning out the same old derivative FPS. Like everything that went into Modern Warfare was solely thanks to these two. Of course, now EA can promote future games as being developed by the creators of Modern Warfare and gamers will probably lap that up. I've been noticing this obnoxious trend in gaming where project directors have become minor celebrities. And it's really all the fault of the gaming media and gamers themselves. So I'm not surprised at all that these guys would be full of themselves.
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I'm curious to know how most designers take this. On the one hand they're wholly dependent on Adobe and many use Flash extensively. On the other hand, the vast majority of them are die-hard Apple fanatics. My impression is that they generally don't give it much thought but will always side with Apple.
I personally don't much care for Adobe and am resentful of how they control the industry. But they don't do anything unusual for a software company. They still have the best software, by far, for design and more importantly, everyone in the industry uses it. It's extremely impractical to try to be the black sheep and go with something by some other company. In the print and publishing world they don't even take files created in anything other than Adobe applications.
The only way Flash is going away is if someone develops an authoring tool for HTML5 or any other language that is as robust and relatively straightforward to use as Flash. Flash, by and large, is targeted designers. And designers are not programmers. They aren't going to pick up HTML5.
The problem is that many programmers I've worked with are snobs when it comes to Flash. They don't see it as their responsibility to learn Actionscript, deeming Flash to be a designer's tool. This, despite the fact that AS2 and especially AS3 are very robust languages. AS3 actually changes things fairly dramatically, making for a more properly structured and cleaner language. It basically forces people to code the right way, but it also has alienated a lot of designers who have decided to stick with AS2. I've been seeing HTML5 demos showcasing things Actionscript has been capable of for years and, more importantly, with much better performance.
And compounding the problem is that the majority of design companies don't get enough Flash work to justify hiring a full-time Flash developer, and it's hard finding such a developer even if they needed one. I wont bother getting into the difficulty getting a programmer to even implement a design properly. It's especially problematic when the programmer produces sloppy work and tries arguing it's good enough in an attempt to avoid hard work. And regardless, the perception persists that it's a designer's tool. So designers are stuck doing a lot of Flash development. But it's feasible because Flash makes it relatively easy to do so.
Put a designer in front of a text editor and good luck having him build an interactive site in HTML5.
I'll concede that there may be legitimate issues with getting Flash on the iPhone or iPad. But let's face the facts, the real reason is competition. Get Flash on those devices and suddenly there's another source for gaming and apps.
By essentially rejecting self-determination they are asking for an increasingly oppressive government. This is the consequence of an entitlement culture which apparently is unwilling to deal with life's responsibilities and instead turns to the government to alleviate the difficulties of life. The government regulating what we can do is a logical extension of this. If they're going to be providing more and more services it's only logical they start resorting to these measures from both economic and social standpoints. Politicians have grown increasingly arrogant, seeing themselves as society's caretakers.
Do you mean the debt GM paid off with TARP funds? They paid the government back with it's own money.
That doesn't mean the voters don't have their sense of priorities completely screwed up.
*bullshit*
Citation needed.
There's a child molester in every chat room.
There's a terrorist in every van.
Smoking a joint leads to crime, violence, and insanity.
Copying a music file cripples our economy.
Oh, and drinking alcohol doesn't hurt you.
Eating cheap processed chemicals doesn't hurt you.
Polluting our air and water is worth it.
Our climate is fine.
What do all these statements have in common?
They are making some entrenched interest a lot of money.
I could argue very easily that many of the people making the opposite arguments also have strong financial and political interests.
It looks like the author was basically trying to confirm a story that was already reasonably well-known. The end result is that he came back with nothing new because nobody at Nintendo either knew about or was willing to acknowledge the connection to this real estate developer. The man in question, the actual Mario, is claimed to be reclusive. I suspect he's reclusive because he's trying to avoid being pestered by gamers and those in the gaming press.
I know someone working at a company developing something very similar to this. To this day I'm having trouble figuring out where the value in this is. Why would people want to share what they're buying? And why would anyone else care?
I suppose there's value in this when shopping for deals or encouraging someone to get something. But that can already be accomplished a million other ways, the most basic being personally talking to the individual and actually showing them the product in question. As for shopping for deals, that's a very fluid thing and something I can better accomplish by just going on Amazon or Google and finding the deals for myself.
I personally think we're seeing the beginnings of another dot.com bubble. The prospect of making a lot of money for minimal up front investment is just too appealing. The big difference is that this time around the development is usually outsourced and often managed by people who don't really understand the technology. So it's not surprising that the people running Blippy would not have noticed such a glaring problem.
We can't trust them to regulate Wall Street. And if they were around when things were starting to collapse then logic would dictate that they were indeed around when Bush was president. This his nothing to do with the president, any president. This has to do with the ineptitude of an agency directly responsible for watching Wall Street. What good are the regulations if the government isn't even doing it's job?
And let's face facts, Obama is just paying us lip service. He's not seriously going to do anything to deal with Wall Street. Goldman Sachs contributed heavily to his campaign and he visited by the CEO several times during the SEC investigation. I think that tells you everything you need to know.
I'm pretty sure these aren't the kinds of positions that get replaced every election. I'm sure they get to keep their jobs for life, if they were so inclined.
I've always been a fan of nicely designed manuals. But the last time I've seen a good one was back in the 80s. Everything since then has been halfhearted, poorly designed junk. Few people seem to read them. I'll flip through them once myself and never refer to them again. Might as well get rid of them and include instructions in the game. I don't mean annoying tutorials that get in the way of me just playing the game. I mean a separate set of instructions I can read through at my leisure.
I have Brain Age and I always felt like Sudoku was more stimulating than the core game. Although the math game, where I had to do basic computations as quickly as possible did have practical applications. I found myself doing basic math more quickly and relying on the calculator less.
But otherwise, it was relatively easy to peak at the games and sustain that level if I was playing on a regular basis. It's really no different than playing any other game except that Brain Age offered even less room for improvement. The overall package was rather obnoxious, with that professor getting in the way of me just getting to what I wanted to do. And the algorithm for gauging progress seemed rather simplistic.
I'm convinced Apple refuses to support Flash because it would essentially undermine the App Store. I don't doubt that there may be other considerations, like security and control, but I'm convinced that's one of the bigger ones. Although, I will acknowledge that in the greater scheme of things it's somewhat irrelevant. On the other hand, I'm sure the advent of the iPad has brought the issue to the forefront what with many consumer likely expecting a user experience more comparable to a laptop, not the iPhone.
I do find it amusing that my antiquated, 5+ year old Sony tablet can view websites flawlessly where the amazing new iPad can't.
I'm convinced that the only way to reduce crime and foster a positive relationship between the police and citizens is to have cops on the beat, walking the streets. This way they're forced to interact with people. Having them speed by in patrol cars, and even worse sit back at headquarters while cameras do the work only increases antagonism amongst the people and make it easier to the police to be abusive. You're not going to have a vested interest in someone if there's no personal interaction.
Couple this with governments harboring some authoritarian tendencies and you're looking at real problems. Although I'm sure some will strongly disagree I'm convinced this is the general tendency for socialist governments. I'm not talking about socialism in principle, I'm talking about the tendencies more socialist nations have. Inevitably this attitude arises in government where they're convinced they're the caretakers of the people. They know better than their citizens and need to protect them. This tendency is exhibited in everything from protecting us from terrorists to reducing salt in our diets for our own good. And too often it's too far reaching and misguided. But it frequently it even becomes a necessity. Take government healthcare, if it becomes expensive treating people for a particular preventable condition you can guarantee that the action that causes the problem will be banned.
So I'm not surprised by these totalitarian tendencies. And, especially in this case, it's hard to argue that the UK shouldn't be doing this. It's for our safety that we shouldn't be allowed to speed, isn't it? Of course, when there's a chance for the state to increase revenue, especially with minimal effort on their part, you can't seriously expect them to not jump at the chance.
We have an article on two books 220 years late, references to late fees, but no estimate on what George Washington would owe. Without that figure this is like a joke without the punchline.
Morals are a system of rules that exist to ensure that humans thrive. I can't think of a simpler way to put it. It's basically a social construct that guides everything from the value of an individual all the way up to ensuring the success of society. It's not something people just made up for the fun of it or for the sake of control. It's probably something that evolved out of necessity as human moved beyond basic animal instincts.
Religions have simply taken those morals and have codified them. Morals didn't grow out of religion. Humans, of course, are very creative in finding ways to exploit anything they create for their own enrichment and the oppression of others.
Certainly, there's a lot of grey area with morality. There's a lot people can get away with within smaller groups that doesn't affect society as a whole. But if everyone, or at least a very large majority, were to engage in that particular activity it does become a problem. And that's where a lot of the conflict comes in. Those on one side are too heavy-handed in dictating morality. On the other hand, those engaging in the activities are too self-centered, if that's the right term, to understand that what works for them might not necessarily work for society at large. And for all the talk of moral relativity I think there are some basic absolutes persistent throughout humanity. And of course, as humanity progresses and different pressures are placed on us the need or importance of certain morals changes.
But ultimately, my point is, even if we were 100% atheist, if we knew for a fact there was no god, we'd still have a system of morals.
Legally, Google probably couldn't guarantee privacy if it wanted to.
I think the real irony is that there are many people out there who claim to value privacy but openly embrace social and national defense programs that gives our government direct access to personal information and enables them to control our lives more thoroughly.
I'm still trying to wrap my head around this. If these emails can be accessed at a later date they're obviously being stored somewhere. Now I lose my right to privacy because I've opened an email?
What exactly is the problem with just getting a search warrant?
The very important detail here is that Apple has had a massive impact on the psyche of the American consumer. All you hear is iPhone this and iPad that. The Apple fanatics feed into the company's aura and the ignorant masses eat it up.
Why is this important? Because companies everywhere are rushing to accommodate Apple and support their products so that they can jump on the bandwagon. These are the seeds of a monopoly.
Coupled with that is Apple's business practice of completely locking down their products. A closed app store, refusal to support anything that might be deemed competitive and practices that are tantamount to planned obsolescence.
At the height of Microsoft's so-called monopoly there were many alternatives within the PC world. There were countless alternatives to MS's many applications. Even when you consider hardware, nobody was chained to Intel/MS. There was Cyrix and AMD.
I'm not saying that Microsoft didn't engage in anti-competitive activities. What I am saying is that even when they were doing so there were many other options. Good luck finding the same with Apple and it's much worse now with the app store.
Considering the consumer's tendency to gravitate towards whatever is perceived as popular Apple's practices may turn out to be a big problem.
How about we sell cigs that don't contain so much bullshit? I mean honestly...is all that crap really necessary?
If that were so easy don't you think the tobacco companies would already be offering such a product? The simple fact is that you're setting fire to something and sucking in the fumes; it's inevitable you're inhaling something harmful.
This is the result of consumers being unwilling to pay more for products. Everyone wants everything cheap which means it can't be manufactured domestically. Although, what I find really infuriating are the companies charging a huge premium for their products but still manufacturing them under these conditions, Nike, Coach and the like come to mind.
That said, a living wage is very different in China and the developing world than it is in developed nations. And I guarantee you those workers don't necessarily have a problem with the conditions. Although, admittedly they don't have much to compare it to considering most factories in China are like this. And while foreign companies are taking advantage of the low cost these kinds of conditions afford them they're not the cause. Chinese companies would be doing this regardless of whether or not they were manufacturing foreign goods. In fact, chances are good that the conditions and pay are better at companies making foreign products. Most importantly, what would be the alternative? Most of these people, especially those outside of major cities wouldn't even have a job if it weren't for these factories. Anywhere new factories open people flock to the region for work. And as factories close down and move there are big migrations of people.
I also find some of those claims made in the store misleading. They show photos of workers taking a nap implying that they're utterly exhausted and will take any chance they can to sleep. Having been in Asia I can assure you that employees at all levels routinely take naps at work, especially during the lunch break. This goes for factory and office workers. In some offices they'll even facilitate that by turning down the lights. As for claims of sexual harassment, I believe it happens, but it certainly isn't unique to factories by any stretch of the imagination.
I'm not making excuses here and it does bother me immensely the extent to which American companies have outsourced. But there are a lot of factories responsible for this. It was unquestioningly gotten more expensive to run a business in the US. There are taxes, insurance and countless other expenses. Workers keep demanding more and more. Consumers are unwilling to pay more for products.
And too many American companies haven't responded properly to the changing economy. They continue trying to compete on price which is a guaranteed road to failure because someone else can always do it more cheaply. They ruin their reputations with crap products. The nations currently manufacturing those goods are ambitious and will eventually use the expertise they've gained to make their own products. Hell, they're even outsourcing R&D nowadays. Unfortunately, it seems to be a race to the bottom. But again, ultimately, it's just as much the fault of consumers and the government as it is of the corporations.
I can't help but think that "bias" is an inappropriate, or at the very least an overly harsh, term. My daughter is clearly more comfortable around Asians, especially if she hears them speaking Chinese. Why? Because my wife is Taiwanese and speaks Chinese to her. It also helps that she was in Taiwan for a few months when her language abilities expanded dramatically. However, she can openly interact with people of any race. It's just that she's immediately comfortable with Chinese people and it takes her a while to get comfortable with other people.
I'd say it's simply a matter of comfort in being surrounded by what seems familiar. What the hell does she know about bias? How could she possibly have formed any opinion at all with people of other races? I'm not Asian but she doesn't necessarily feel comfortable around Caucasians either.
I, myself, went to what a lot of people would consider an inner city school. I was always surrounded by classmates of all races. I never gave it any thought. They were just kids. Certainly race wasn't a factor in me deciding who were my friends.
I think there's a natural tendency to favor that which is most familiar to an individual. It's a security and support mechanism. There's an expectation that people more like you share your interests and face similar challenges. There's a chance for a network there that can be exploited. The same thing happens in the reverse. It's a basic defense mechanism also very prevalent in nature. If notice that thugs tend to walk around dressed in baggy pants and displaying a bad attitude, for example, you're going to associate that look with trouble. Obviously, they're not all troublemakers but inevitably these stereotypes are formed. It's not different than a gazelle realizing that a lion means trouble.
Now, it's the responsibility of a rational adult to understand this and reason that stereotypes aren't necessarily true. And it's their responsibility to understand that it isn't a good thing to limit to yourself to a particular group. And without question, none of this is a justification to subjugate or segregate anyone else.
But it does rub me the wrong way that there seems to be this inclination to look for racism and bigotry everywhere. As I've mentioned previous, it seems to me that children with this disorder are more comfortable with other races simply because they don't feel that need for comfort in the familiar. There's no anxiety in seeking out someone more like themselves, someone it might be easier to make a connection with.
If they think tweets are worthy of being archived why not just archive every blog and comment in existence? Many of those offer far more worthwhile insight than 99% of tweets.
I remember in school students and sometimes teachers occasionally mocking the customs of past cultures. There was always that subtle arrogance that we're somehow more enlightened than people were 500, 1000 or 2000 years ago. The problem is that people confuse technological advancements for intellectual and philosophical advancement. I'd argue that socially and philosophically humans have progressed little over the last few thousand years. Certainly there have been some cultural shifts, but I'm hard-pressed to see any fundamental shifts. I do think we may be close to one, but judging from what I see on Twitter and Facebook I'm not particularly optimistic.
With the massive proliferation of every last inane comment preserved for posterity I can only imagine how utterly stupid we are going to look to people of the future.
I doubt they thought that hard about. They wanted a game full of fist-bumping machismo. Hence the characters. The environments are there to impress us with their graphical wizardry. So that inevitably means all kinds of flourishes and intricate detail, something difficult to accomplish with more modern minimalist designs.
You know, of all the things to base a movie on superhero comics bother me the least. From a standpoint of Hollywood sucking the life out of everything I might have a problem, but beyond that I'm not really bothered by whatever ends up being produced.
And the reason for this is that comic book superheros are ridiculous to begin with. Their characters are often goofy and their plots corny. I mean, they were really grasping at straws with a lot of those superheros and villains. I was a fairly avid reader of comic books growing up, but even as a kid I thought a lot of what I was reading was lame. Entertaining, but lame. Comics also have had countless interpretations by different artists and writers and canon is constantly being so many more liberties can be taken with the material. And then when you consider that Marvel, DC and the rest were nothing but machines churning out disposable entertainment, much like Hollywood, then there's not much to get upset about.
It's a bit different when you're looking at movie adaptations of novels. The quality of writing in novels is often, but not always, better than what you'll find in most movies and comics. And I believe that because a book requires more imagination on the part of the reader there's a stronger personal attachment. Then there's the added burden of trying to condense a novel into a 2 hour movie. So there's a lot more to get wrong and a greater likelihood people will be disappointed.
These guys are management, not guys down in the trenches doing the dirty work. They're not all that different from those above them and it's safe to say they were earning a pretty penny for their work. They may have had legitimate problems with Activation, but it's safe to say that their real motivation was money. EA was offering them more. They were likely bound by all kinds of contracts so there was no pretty way to break free and go work for a competitor.
And I bet you they're going to continue churning out the same old derivative FPS. Like everything that went into Modern Warfare was solely thanks to these two. Of course, now EA can promote future games as being developed by the creators of Modern Warfare and gamers will probably lap that up. I've been noticing this obnoxious trend in gaming where project directors have become minor celebrities. And it's really all the fault of the gaming media and gamers themselves. So I'm not surprised at all that these guys would be full of themselves.