You are allowed to do exactly that, no one's stopping you, it's simply that there are consequences, this is not censorship.
Censorship is the enforced blocking of information, it's the preventing of it even being broadcast which is exactly what's being asked for here.
If this were the same as punishment for shouting fire in a crowded theatre then the judge would simply fine them for distributing false information or jail the person who posted it for libel etc. This is not what is being done though, this is outright censorship, and yes, it's bad.
When Mandelson came back with Geffen he didn't use the EU to push those laws, he used the British government to push those laws and succeded. It was the EU in fact that raised question about the legality of those rules, and it was the EU that implemented the telecommunications act that limits how bad those laws could be.
Mandelson has had really no influence in the EU in terms of copyright laws, only in the making of the UK's own national laws.
Sorry, but using Mandelson as your argument against the EU is foolish as it does the exact opposite - it's an example of the EU limiting the ability of corrupt national politicians to limit the damage they can do in terms of harm to citizen's rights.
Go away, read up on the EU, come back when you actually understand it. You wont be able to make the same rant though because you'd realise it was still completely nonsensical by then.
"Really? What the have you Europeans got yourself into?"
A representative political grouping that positively benefits member states.
"(More accurately, what have your governments got you into?)"
No, it was definitely us, we all voted for it thank you very much, because we recognised the value in it.
"Some unelected pan-government gets to write the laws, and you just have to sit there and take it up the arse?"
No, actually. You're right that the unelected commission writes the laws, but they're passed by the entirely elected European Parliament which is voted in by proportional representation making it a far more representative parliament than most other parliaments in the western world. The European Parliament which blocks/votes through laws voted in by Proportional Representation makes it a more representative view of the populace than the UK's government, America's government, Canada's government, and many others.
"The EU has made some people very rich"
It's made a lot of people very rich, but importantly it's made the EU's member states richer as a whole, it's also ensured that people across Europe have basic minimum standards in terms of rights and so forth. An employer for example cannot abusively force you to work more than 48hrs a week, and consumers are guaranteed to be allowed to get a replacement/refund/repair on goods that should last 2 years, but don't meaning that if your phone/laptop/TV/cooker/whatever breaks through no fault of your own within 2 years of purchase, you're guaranteed to be allowed to have it rectified meaning the overall standard of goods has to be higher in Europe than it does elsewhere. There are many other fine examples of the EU protecting citizens better than their own member state would by itself.
"but all this ability to legislate multiple countries is scary."
Only if you're a paranoid xenophobic nationalist kook. For everyone else it's no big deal. If it ever got to the point where it was genuinely scary then we could simply pull out, problem solved. In the meantime though, it's actually rather nice knowing there is an authority who does a better job of looking after my rights than even my own government would by itself because it's more easily influenced by vested interests and lobbyists.
Except the EU has for the most part produced and enforced laws that are actually better for the average citizen than the laws wanted by their constituent nations. That's certainly true for the UK - I can't legally be forced to work more than 48hrs a week through threat of punishment or even losing my job by an abusive employer thanks to the EU, but the Tories and Labour would both like it if I could be forced to work 100hrs with no recourse.
The reason the EU often does a better job than national governments is that the European Parliament that votes on these things:
1) Is elected proportionally, and hence directly reflects the interests of the people in equal proportion
2) Consists of representatives representing many different cultures and areas of society meaning that lobbyists struggle to gain a foothold as they can't just go after one party and pay them off to get a law in their favour, but must lobby half of the representatives in Europe, which is prohibitively costly for almost all companies in the world
3) Similarly to the point above, representatives exist in multiple jurisdictions such that the media also can't unduly influence things because no company has full media monopoly across Europe. Murdoch largely controls the mindset of many of the drones who vote British elections for example, but has pretty much zero influence in much of the rest of Europe. This is why Murdoch and his empire have invested so much in defaming Europe and pushing the idea suggesting the UK needs a referendum - because it's a threat to his control over our country.
It's not perfect, the European Commission doesn't have at least the first two protections, meaning it is trivially lobbyable and controllable, but it still needs the support of the European parliament to succeed.
Honestly, if there's one political institution in Europe that IS accountable to voters, it's the European Parliament precisely because there is little room for lobbyists to fiddle things or media to unduly influence the overall makeup of the parliament - it can corrupt small fractions of it, but that's not enough to change things.
They can still leave the EU at any time they want and then not be bound by it too. They can even say we're leaving unless we get renegotiation on this issue if they want to try and change something desperately also.
As you say they're only bound by it so much and so long as they agree to be bound by it, no more, no less.
Because Estonia and Finland are cold as fuck, France has HADOPI which makes any such defined human right there irrelevant, because obviously it's not, and Greece and Spain are fucked.
"left/liberal/egalitarian society"...and borderline far right governments.
How exactly does that happen? why are two such liberal left leaning countries currently sat with governments that lean so far to the right?
I never really got why over the last decades the people of both Canada and Australia have seemingly had governments that are at such odds to their national mindset.
I have a theory, judging by Canada's experience at least, that it's because the government that represented them got so complacent that it became corrupt and so there ended up no choice but to vote for the guys on the right. Is that the case in Australia too?
So I live in the UK, the US dollar is trading at 2 USD to 1 GBP, and I buy £1million worth giving me $2million. The recession happens and the value of the pound drops to 1.4 USD to 1 GBP and I buy back pounds with my US dollars. I then end up with ~£1.4mill.
There are any number of ways to grow a pile of money without actually investing it into anything of value. Even in the investment market itself there are any number of schemes to grow income without the invested money actually acting as a usable loan as opposed to a way to fleece other people of their money.
Oftentimes the growth of said cash pile actually acts at the expense of taking money from others. You can claim it's their own fault for being stupid, but it doesn't change the fact that it's of zero benefit to society.
Maybe he's referring to the fact that Apple's mapping system is innovative in that it places things where they actually are not, so that you have to explore and learn more about the area?
It's not really my sort of thing, personally I prefer mapping tools that tell me where things actually are, like Google Maps, but either way he's right about one thing, Apple maps is definitely innovative. Just not in a good way.
"You cannot expect any company to ignore patent violations, and you cannot fault any company for refusing to ignore them."
Well that's exactly how the mobile phone market worked for the two decades before Apple rolled in. Why do you think it can't exist this way when it already did? The only reason it doesn't now is because Apple refused to license the same patents from Nokia that everyone else was willing to license fairly, and for the same fee Nokia was licensing them to everyone else at. It all exploded from there and Apple started suing everyone else for other things left and right.
Honestly, for most of it's existence the mobile phone market has been based off mutual respect and reasonable cross-licensing agreements. It's only Apple's entry into the market and it's refusal to play ball with everyone else that changed that and gave us the trainwreck of a situation we have now.
I think 17% marketshare for Apple vs. 4 times that for Android (68%) runs a steamroller over your argument that "most people" and "the public" believe what you think they believe.
Honestly. If you don't know the figures then stop perpetuating the myth that Apple is somehow the most popular mobile phone manufacturer/OS provider around. It's not, it's not even close.
Apple makes the most profit from smartphones and that's it, they certainly don't have the most support from the public or any such thing. Most people avoid them. Even if you discount the budget end of the Android market and focus on high end flagship products like Samsung's Galaxy Sx series, HTC One X, etc. and the equivalents for all the other manufacturers then even at the high end, that is, the expensive end, far more people are still buying Android and avoiding Apple so it's not even simply Android's budget phones that are driving Android's sales figures vs. Apples, most people just prefer Android devices, most people choose not to buy Apple, it's really that simple.
If the rich are spending money on things then that's good, it's productive money, going back into the economy, creating jobs, being passed onto others as wages and so forth. Bill Gates buys a $10bn mega-yacht with built on runway and plane included and that's thousands of staff who will be employed producing that yacht. Those people get a few years of well paid employment, Bill gets a mega-yacht at the end of it. It's win-win.
The problem isn't this sort of rich person, it's the hoarders who are the issue. They literally have hundreds of millions, sometimes even billions doing absolutely nothing other than generating more money for themselves. It's not productive, it doesn't create jobs, it makes society poorer - it literally drains money out of society and turns it into an arbitrary number with which said hoarder makes up for his small penis or whatever traumatic issue that made him that way does - that's the problem that needs to be dealt with.
Imagine you have a set of people living around a lake, living off of it for food and water. That's great, until one day one guy thinks you know what? I'm going to drain the lake and store it in my back garden in a massive sealed area no one can get to. That's great, he's taken all the water himself, well done, he wins, but everyone around him is then desperate for water, so their only option is to break in to his compound - commit crime, to get what they need to live. The point is the guy may have got an ego boost at having the most water around, but society itself has suffered greatly as a result.
Yes, in the UK shows like Horizon, the Royal Society lectures or just about anything presented by Brian Cox, or Marcus du Sautoy would clearly qualify.
Wikipedia has a decent list of their shows and similarly for Horizon.
If you're interested in things like geology, biology, anthropology, paleontology, or other natural sciences then there are even more candidates again. Things like Attenboroughs documentaries such as Life, Planet Earth, Frozen Planet, and also stuff like Human Planet etc.
They're still not common enough for my liking though, personally. If I had my way we'd have at least 2 BBC HD channels dedicated to those sorts of shows and they'd consume most of the BBC's budget rather than shit like The Voice, Strictly Come Bollocks, and Eastenders because it's the one thing the BBC genuinely leads in globally and seems to do better than anyone else by quite a margin.
We've had an iPad 2 for a bit over a year now, and it keeps dropping it's Wifi connection (since iOS4) and you have to go into the iPad's settings to reconnect to it, it's really fucking annoying.
Every other Wifi device works in the house, phones (though we don't have any Apple phones), laptops, TV, console, etc. and I even get to troll my girlfriend about it (it's her iPad) because my Nexus 7 works fine all the time, but if these are the Wifi issues people have raised I'd wager they're not new, the iPad always seems to have had problems connecting to and maintaining a connection to Wifi, which is a bit annoying, seeing as it's not a 3G one. Sadly, iOS5 didn't fix it. Dare I see if iOS6 does, or will it make it worse?
"If you think a run of the mill Toyota or Ford offers anything comparable to a BMW or Mercedes then you aren't going to like expensive clothing."
Well exactly, that's precisely the point.
"Just look at the seat adjustment features on the Mercedes and tell me where you can find that on your Toyota."
Most of it really makes no difference though, much of it breaks over time.
"The standard mercedes does 0-60 in 4.5 seconds your Toyota doesn't."
I can't say I've ever been in a situation where a rate of accelleration to 60mph that took even half that time would've matter. They tend to have higher top speeds too, but when you're never going to pass a speed which both the cheap and the expensive can hit reliably who cares? The number of people who actually race their cars is pretty much zero.
"The automatic transmission is 7 speed, not 4 like your lower end cars."
Why would you buy a higher performance car and then go automatic and lose all worthwhile control over that power? Perhaps this is why you feel the 0-60 stat matters, because you rely on the car to handle control of rate of acceleration for you.
This is really the fundamental problem though, all the benefits of these "prestige" cars is merely perceived, stuff that has little to no real worth in practice. The downside is you're then stuck with vehicles that fall to pieces much more quickly, and cost more to repair, because "German engineering" being a term to define quality is a joke when it comes to cars:
Between the reliability and time off road you'll be lucky if you're even driving a Mercedes and not just sitting waiting for it to come out the garage half the time. It doesn't bode well for what is supposedly a quality product, but that's because it's not:
Because it's a major profit centre for their business? Selling $1 Chinese made t-shirts for $200 is insanely profitable when there are gullable fashion victims all over the world, which is precisely the point - that portion, the bulk of their business, is based entirely on marketing and is immensly profitable. It's most of what they do and quality of product has absolutely nothing to do with the price tag, it's all, entirely, 100% about marketing.
The problem I always found with Torque is that they'd promise features in x number of months, and they'd simply never arrive. Some engines such as Torque X they gave up on completely without the slightest hint of a refund to customers whom they'd promised all sorts of things to.
I never really thought Torque was particularly friendly too, it seemed like a poorly designed mess and TorqueScript was horrible. In terms of ease of understanding of the engine I always found the likes of the C4 engine better, it was worlds apart from Torque in terms of ease of use, quality of design, code, and tools.
I dunno, I just always found with GarageGames that you lost a lot of time waiting on promises that were eventually broken or trying to fix the engine to do something you'd been promised by the devs yourself such that ultimately it was better to just go with one of the competitors, or if you were targetting something like XNA, then to just start from scratch.
GarageGame's goals were noble, but their implementation was morally bankrupt, they fucked a lot of customers over with a lot of products, all the way back to the RTS kit, through to TGA getting effectively ditched and promises broken, to u-turns on promised features for T3D after people had already paid, to TorqueX just outright getting abandoned before it became usable - again, with no refund.
It's good to see they've done this, but if they're hoping to use it as a gateway to selling more of their still commercial products like content packs etc. I'd urge people to heed a buyer beware warning - what they say you'll get, and what you actually get may be very different things, and don't expect any kind of refund if you find you actually got screwed.
Yes, yes, we've all bought cheap crap, that is cheap crap, but that's not what I'm talking about. There's a difference between buying from a fly-by-night firm vs. a reliable firm, and buying from a reliable firm vs. a designer firm. Cars are a prime example - sure if you buy a cheap crappy Fiat, it isn't going to last as long as a high end Ferrari, but you're an idiot if you fall for the supposed prestige of Jaguar, BMW, Audi, or Mercedes - because all these vehicles have much lower reliability and much higher quality control issues than just buying a run of the mill Ford. The only thing the Jaguar, BMW, Audi, or Mercedes gives you is gloating rights about how you've bought a "designer" brand, you've still ended up with less relative to money spent though because it will break down more, cost more to repair, and depreciate at a faster rate. What's more said Ford, Toyota or whatever will often come with much more features etc.
But I'm mostly talking about companies like Armani, whose jeans and t-shirts are made with identical materials in identical sweatshops to those supplied by cheap budget companies like Primark in the UK. Absolutely the only thing separating the Armani product from the Primark product much of the time is branding/marketing and absolutely nothing more.
Suits are a different issue, you pay more to get a tailored suit which is a custom product. If you're paying more for a non-tailored suit though then you're still a complete fool for doing so.
I'm amazed you actually think you're getting something more for your money when it comes to designer brands, you've basically just admitted to being a fashion victim - exactly the type of fool these companies prey on. What do you think they do specially exactly? rather than a Chinese sweatshop using cotton to produce your t-shirts do you think they have high paid financial services executives sewing them using gold plated silk or something? It's the same shit, from the same place, with a different name and marketing campaign behind it and nothing more.
I agree that to a point you get what you pay for, but beyond that point you're just being taken for a fool - suckered in by marketing and absolutely nothing more and many companies base their entire existence on exactly this - feeding off of the fools, the only people who don't realise it are the gullable fools themselves.
Cheers, yeah I understand it's not a metro app specifically but was concerned that this is the new "style" that Metro era stuff is expected to bring. My fault for misusing terminology I guess! Glad to hear this isn't what Metro in general will be like at least!
I'm amazed VS2012 was released looking like this. Was there really enough positive feedback to justify it? was there a lack of negative feedback?
People of course always hate change, but this is one of those few times where I think distaste is justified. Simply changing all the commonly understood and recognised icons for a set that all use thick black lines just seems nonsensical.
Maybe given time I'll get a bit more used to it, but I always figured good user interface design means that I shouldn't have to - it should just feel right from the outset!
Is the capital letters thing part of Office 2013 too, or is it just VS that's like this? Who thought this was ever going to be a good idea, and why would it need changing after what, 20, going on maybe even 30 years now for this sort of menu?
Is there any possibility we can have a poll on whether the person behind this vandalisation of the interface can be taken out the back of your offices and shot too?
Why do you find it strange? This is almost entirely the premise behind the success of just about every designer goods company to have ever existed.
Many of the designer companies use the same materials and sweat shops as your budget chains who produce competing products, so it's certainly never been about quality.
I think you underestimate how important marketing can be - it is the entire existence of much of the designer market. This isn't to say Apple is the same, but your implication that marketing isn't enough to prop up a company and make it rich is completely false, there's a whole industry built around exactly that.
One might argue that both Microsoft (Outlook) and Google's calendar and contacts apps do exactly that, and are both much more widely used than Apple's.
Agreed. I've not really played with Windows 8 much yet but I installed Visual Studio the other day and my first question was, why the flying fuck are the menus shouting at me in capital letters? Who ever thought that was a good idea and looked good or somehow improved the user experience?
The icons etc. look awful, the solution explorer which previously had nice familiar icons that you could often pick out from the hints of colour on them are now bold black lined pieces of fairly nonsensical shit.
It's like such a step back, it's like an interface from the 80s. It's fucking horrible, if Windows 8 makes the whole damn OS look like this, then no fucking thank you.
Slashdot Mirror
Yet their citizens determine the government, and hence whether they are bound by it...
You are allowed to do exactly that, no one's stopping you, it's simply that there are consequences, this is not censorship.
Censorship is the enforced blocking of information, it's the preventing of it even being broadcast which is exactly what's being asked for here.
If this were the same as punishment for shouting fire in a crowded theatre then the judge would simply fine them for distributing false information or jail the person who posted it for libel etc. This is not what is being done though, this is outright censorship, and yes, it's bad.
Erm, you've got that completely backwards.
When Mandelson came back with Geffen he didn't use the EU to push those laws, he used the British government to push those laws and succeded. It was the EU in fact that raised question about the legality of those rules, and it was the EU that implemented the telecommunications act that limits how bad those laws could be.
Mandelson has had really no influence in the EU in terms of copyright laws, only in the making of the UK's own national laws.
Sorry, but using Mandelson as your argument against the EU is foolish as it does the exact opposite - it's an example of the EU limiting the ability of corrupt national politicians to limit the damage they can do in terms of harm to citizen's rights.
Go away, read up on the EU, come back when you actually understand it. You wont be able to make the same rant though because you'd realise it was still completely nonsensical by then.
"Really? What the have you Europeans got yourself into?"
A representative political grouping that positively benefits member states.
"(More accurately, what have your governments got you into?)"
No, it was definitely us, we all voted for it thank you very much, because we recognised the value in it.
"Some unelected pan-government gets to write the laws, and you just have to sit there and take it up the arse?"
No, actually. You're right that the unelected commission writes the laws, but they're passed by the entirely elected European Parliament which is voted in by proportional representation making it a far more representative parliament than most other parliaments in the western world. The European Parliament which blocks/votes through laws voted in by Proportional Representation makes it a more representative view of the populace than the UK's government, America's government, Canada's government, and many others.
"The EU has made some people very rich"
It's made a lot of people very rich, but importantly it's made the EU's member states richer as a whole, it's also ensured that people across Europe have basic minimum standards in terms of rights and so forth. An employer for example cannot abusively force you to work more than 48hrs a week, and consumers are guaranteed to be allowed to get a replacement/refund/repair on goods that should last 2 years, but don't meaning that if your phone/laptop/TV/cooker/whatever breaks through no fault of your own within 2 years of purchase, you're guaranteed to be allowed to have it rectified meaning the overall standard of goods has to be higher in Europe than it does elsewhere. There are many other fine examples of the EU protecting citizens better than their own member state would by itself.
"but all this ability to legislate multiple countries is scary."
Only if you're a paranoid xenophobic nationalist kook. For everyone else it's no big deal. If it ever got to the point where it was genuinely scary then we could simply pull out, problem solved. In the meantime though, it's actually rather nice knowing there is an authority who does a better job of looking after my rights than even my own government would by itself because it's more easily influenced by vested interests and lobbyists.
Except the EU has for the most part produced and enforced laws that are actually better for the average citizen than the laws wanted by their constituent nations. That's certainly true for the UK - I can't legally be forced to work more than 48hrs a week through threat of punishment or even losing my job by an abusive employer thanks to the EU, but the Tories and Labour would both like it if I could be forced to work 100hrs with no recourse.
The reason the EU often does a better job than national governments is that the European Parliament that votes on these things:
1) Is elected proportionally, and hence directly reflects the interests of the people in equal proportion
2) Consists of representatives representing many different cultures and areas of society meaning that lobbyists struggle to gain a foothold as they can't just go after one party and pay them off to get a law in their favour, but must lobby half of the representatives in Europe, which is prohibitively costly for almost all companies in the world
3) Similarly to the point above, representatives exist in multiple jurisdictions such that the media also can't unduly influence things because no company has full media monopoly across Europe. Murdoch largely controls the mindset of many of the drones who vote British elections for example, but has pretty much zero influence in much of the rest of Europe. This is why Murdoch and his empire have invested so much in defaming Europe and pushing the idea suggesting the UK needs a referendum - because it's a threat to his control over our country.
It's not perfect, the European Commission doesn't have at least the first two protections, meaning it is trivially lobbyable and controllable, but it still needs the support of the European parliament to succeed.
Honestly, if there's one political institution in Europe that IS accountable to voters, it's the European Parliament precisely because there is little room for lobbyists to fiddle things or media to unduly influence the overall makeup of the parliament - it can corrupt small fractions of it, but that's not enough to change things.
"and are now bound by it."
They can still leave the EU at any time they want and then not be bound by it too. They can even say we're leaving unless we get renegotiation on this issue if they want to try and change something desperately also.
As you say they're only bound by it so much and so long as they agree to be bound by it, no more, no less.
Because Estonia and Finland are cold as fuck, France has HADOPI which makes any such defined human right there irrelevant, because obviously it's not, and Greece and Spain are fucked.
"left/liberal/egalitarian society" ...and borderline far right governments.
How exactly does that happen? why are two such liberal left leaning countries currently sat with governments that lean so far to the right?
I never really got why over the last decades the people of both Canada and Australia have seemingly had governments that are at such odds to their national mindset.
I have a theory, judging by Canada's experience at least, that it's because the government that represented them got so complacent that it became corrupt and so there ended up no choice but to vote for the guys on the right. Is that the case in Australia too?
Which documentaries are you referring to?
I'm not so keen on their history stuff, but certainly their scientific stuff like Horizon, and Cox and Sautoy's stuff have all been brilliant.
So I live in the UK, the US dollar is trading at 2 USD to 1 GBP, and I buy £1million worth giving me $2million. The recession happens and the value of the pound drops to 1.4 USD to 1 GBP and I buy back pounds with my US dollars. I then end up with ~£1.4mill.
There are any number of ways to grow a pile of money without actually investing it into anything of value. Even in the investment market itself there are any number of schemes to grow income without the invested money actually acting as a usable loan as opposed to a way to fleece other people of their money.
Oftentimes the growth of said cash pile actually acts at the expense of taking money from others. You can claim it's their own fault for being stupid, but it doesn't change the fact that it's of zero benefit to society.
"Yet another object mapping system. So what?"
Maybe he's referring to the fact that Apple's mapping system is innovative in that it places things where they actually are not, so that you have to explore and learn more about the area?
It's not really my sort of thing, personally I prefer mapping tools that tell me where things actually are, like Google Maps, but either way he's right about one thing, Apple maps is definitely innovative. Just not in a good way.
I actually agree with most of what you say:
"You cannot expect any company to ignore patent violations, and you cannot fault any company for refusing to ignore them."
Well that's exactly how the mobile phone market worked for the two decades before Apple rolled in. Why do you think it can't exist this way when it already did? The only reason it doesn't now is because Apple refused to license the same patents from Nokia that everyone else was willing to license fairly, and for the same fee Nokia was licensing them to everyone else at. It all exploded from there and Apple started suing everyone else for other things left and right.
Honestly, for most of it's existence the mobile phone market has been based off mutual respect and reasonable cross-licensing agreements. It's only Apple's entry into the market and it's refusal to play ball with everyone else that changed that and gave us the trainwreck of a situation we have now.
I think 17% marketshare for Apple vs. 4 times that for Android (68%) runs a steamroller over your argument that "most people" and "the public" believe what you think they believe.
Honestly. If you don't know the figures then stop perpetuating the myth that Apple is somehow the most popular mobile phone manufacturer/OS provider around. It's not, it's not even close.
Apple makes the most profit from smartphones and that's it, they certainly don't have the most support from the public or any such thing. Most people avoid them. Even if you discount the budget end of the Android market and focus on high end flagship products like Samsung's Galaxy Sx series, HTC One X, etc. and the equivalents for all the other manufacturers then even at the high end, that is, the expensive end, far more people are still buying Android and avoiding Apple so it's not even simply Android's budget phones that are driving Android's sales figures vs. Apples, most people just prefer Android devices, most people choose not to buy Apple, it's really that simple.
Why include possessions at all?
If the rich are spending money on things then that's good, it's productive money, going back into the economy, creating jobs, being passed onto others as wages and so forth. Bill Gates buys a $10bn mega-yacht with built on runway and plane included and that's thousands of staff who will be employed producing that yacht. Those people get a few years of well paid employment, Bill gets a mega-yacht at the end of it. It's win-win.
The problem isn't this sort of rich person, it's the hoarders who are the issue. They literally have hundreds of millions, sometimes even billions doing absolutely nothing other than generating more money for themselves. It's not productive, it doesn't create jobs, it makes society poorer - it literally drains money out of society and turns it into an arbitrary number with which said hoarder makes up for his small penis or whatever traumatic issue that made him that way does - that's the problem that needs to be dealt with.
Imagine you have a set of people living around a lake, living off of it for food and water. That's great, until one day one guy thinks you know what? I'm going to drain the lake and store it in my back garden in a massive sealed area no one can get to. That's great, he's taken all the water himself, well done, he wins, but everyone around him is then desperate for water, so their only option is to break in to his compound - commit crime, to get what they need to live. The point is the guy may have got an ego boost at having the most water around, but society itself has suffered greatly as a result.
Yes, in the UK shows like Horizon, the Royal Society lectures or just about anything presented by Brian Cox, or Marcus du Sautoy would clearly qualify.
Wikipedia has a decent list of their shows and similarly for Horizon.
If you're interested in things like geology, biology, anthropology, paleontology, or other natural sciences then there are even more candidates again. Things like Attenboroughs documentaries such as Life, Planet Earth, Frozen Planet, and also stuff like Human Planet etc.
They're still not common enough for my liking though, personally. If I had my way we'd have at least 2 BBC HD channels dedicated to those sorts of shows and they'd consume most of the BBC's budget rather than shit like The Voice, Strictly Come Bollocks, and Eastenders because it's the one thing the BBC genuinely leads in globally and seems to do better than anyone else by quite a margin.
What are the Wifi problems?
We've had an iPad 2 for a bit over a year now, and it keeps dropping it's Wifi connection (since iOS4) and you have to go into the iPad's settings to reconnect to it, it's really fucking annoying.
Every other Wifi device works in the house, phones (though we don't have any Apple phones), laptops, TV, console, etc. and I even get to troll my girlfriend about it (it's her iPad) because my Nexus 7 works fine all the time, but if these are the Wifi issues people have raised I'd wager they're not new, the iPad always seems to have had problems connecting to and maintaining a connection to Wifi, which is a bit annoying, seeing as it's not a 3G one. Sadly, iOS5 didn't fix it. Dare I see if iOS6 does, or will it make it worse?
"If you think a run of the mill Toyota or Ford offers anything comparable to a BMW or Mercedes then you aren't going to like expensive clothing."
Well exactly, that's precisely the point.
"Just look at the seat adjustment features on the Mercedes and tell me where you can find that on your Toyota."
Most of it really makes no difference though, much of it breaks over time.
"The standard mercedes does 0-60 in 4.5 seconds your Toyota doesn't."
I can't say I've ever been in a situation where a rate of accelleration to 60mph that took even half that time would've matter. They tend to have higher top speeds too, but when you're never going to pass a speed which both the cheap and the expensive can hit reliably who cares? The number of people who actually race their cars is pretty much zero.
"The automatic transmission is 7 speed, not 4 like your lower end cars."
Why would you buy a higher performance car and then go automatic and lose all worthwhile control over that power? Perhaps this is why you feel the 0-60 stat matters, because you rely on the car to handle control of rate of acceleration for you.
This is really the fundamental problem though, all the benefits of these "prestige" cars is merely perceived, stuff that has little to no real worth in practice. The downside is you're then stuck with vehicles that fall to pieces much more quickly, and cost more to repair, because "German engineering" being a term to define quality is a joke when it comes to cars:
http://www.reliabilityindex.com/manufacturer
Between the reliability and time off road you'll be lucky if you're even driving a Mercedes and not just sitting waiting for it to come out the garage half the time. It doesn't bode well for what is supposedly a quality product, but that's because it's not:
http://www.reliabilityindex.com/manufacturer/AvgLabour
"I'm not even sure why they sell them."
Because it's a major profit centre for their business? Selling $1 Chinese made t-shirts for $200 is insanely profitable when there are gullable fashion victims all over the world, which is precisely the point - that portion, the bulk of their business, is based entirely on marketing and is immensly profitable. It's most of what they do and quality of product has absolutely nothing to do with the price tag, it's all, entirely, 100% about marketing.
The problem I always found with Torque is that they'd promise features in x number of months, and they'd simply never arrive. Some engines such as Torque X they gave up on completely without the slightest hint of a refund to customers whom they'd promised all sorts of things to.
I never really thought Torque was particularly friendly too, it seemed like a poorly designed mess and TorqueScript was horrible. In terms of ease of understanding of the engine I always found the likes of the C4 engine better, it was worlds apart from Torque in terms of ease of use, quality of design, code, and tools.
I dunno, I just always found with GarageGames that you lost a lot of time waiting on promises that were eventually broken or trying to fix the engine to do something you'd been promised by the devs yourself such that ultimately it was better to just go with one of the competitors, or if you were targetting something like XNA, then to just start from scratch.
GarageGame's goals were noble, but their implementation was morally bankrupt, they fucked a lot of customers over with a lot of products, all the way back to the RTS kit, through to TGA getting effectively ditched and promises broken, to u-turns on promised features for T3D after people had already paid, to TorqueX just outright getting abandoned before it became usable - again, with no refund.
It's good to see they've done this, but if they're hoping to use it as a gateway to selling more of their still commercial products like content packs etc. I'd urge people to heed a buyer beware warning - what they say you'll get, and what you actually get may be very different things, and don't expect any kind of refund if you find you actually got screwed.
Yes, yes, we've all bought cheap crap, that is cheap crap, but that's not what I'm talking about. There's a difference between buying from a fly-by-night firm vs. a reliable firm, and buying from a reliable firm vs. a designer firm. Cars are a prime example - sure if you buy a cheap crappy Fiat, it isn't going to last as long as a high end Ferrari, but you're an idiot if you fall for the supposed prestige of Jaguar, BMW, Audi, or Mercedes - because all these vehicles have much lower reliability and much higher quality control issues than just buying a run of the mill Ford. The only thing the Jaguar, BMW, Audi, or Mercedes gives you is gloating rights about how you've bought a "designer" brand, you've still ended up with less relative to money spent though because it will break down more, cost more to repair, and depreciate at a faster rate. What's more said Ford, Toyota or whatever will often come with much more features etc.
But I'm mostly talking about companies like Armani, whose jeans and t-shirts are made with identical materials in identical sweatshops to those supplied by cheap budget companies like Primark in the UK. Absolutely the only thing separating the Armani product from the Primark product much of the time is branding/marketing and absolutely nothing more.
Suits are a different issue, you pay more to get a tailored suit which is a custom product. If you're paying more for a non-tailored suit though then you're still a complete fool for doing so.
I'm amazed you actually think you're getting something more for your money when it comes to designer brands, you've basically just admitted to being a fashion victim - exactly the type of fool these companies prey on. What do you think they do specially exactly? rather than a Chinese sweatshop using cotton to produce your t-shirts do you think they have high paid financial services executives sewing them using gold plated silk or something? It's the same shit, from the same place, with a different name and marketing campaign behind it and nothing more.
I agree that to a point you get what you pay for, but beyond that point you're just being taken for a fool - suckered in by marketing and absolutely nothing more and many companies base their entire existence on exactly this - feeding off of the fools, the only people who don't realise it are the gullable fools themselves.
Yes, effectively if they could get close enough to your phone, they might as well just outright steal it.
Cheers, yeah I understand it's not a metro app specifically but was concerned that this is the new "style" that Metro era stuff is expected to bring. My fault for misusing terminology I guess! Glad to hear this isn't what Metro in general will be like at least!
I'm amazed VS2012 was released looking like this. Was there really enough positive feedback to justify it? was there a lack of negative feedback?
People of course always hate change, but this is one of those few times where I think distaste is justified. Simply changing all the commonly understood and recognised icons for a set that all use thick black lines just seems nonsensical.
Maybe given time I'll get a bit more used to it, but I always figured good user interface design means that I shouldn't have to - it should just feel right from the outset!
Is the capital letters thing part of Office 2013 too, or is it just VS that's like this? Who thought this was ever going to be a good idea, and why would it need changing after what, 20, going on maybe even 30 years now for this sort of menu?
Is there any possibility we can have a poll on whether the person behind this vandalisation of the interface can be taken out the back of your offices and shot too?
Why do you find it strange? This is almost entirely the premise behind the success of just about every designer goods company to have ever existed.
Many of the designer companies use the same materials and sweat shops as your budget chains who produce competing products, so it's certainly never been about quality.
I think you underestimate how important marketing can be - it is the entire existence of much of the designer market. This isn't to say Apple is the same, but your implication that marketing isn't enough to prop up a company and make it rich is completely false, there's a whole industry built around exactly that.
I was one of those people until I was forced to use Lotus Notes when I changed job and then corporate GMail when I changed jobs again.
Outlook is shit, until you're forced to use the alternatives.
One might argue that both Microsoft (Outlook) and Google's calendar and contacts apps do exactly that, and are both much more widely used than Apple's.
Agreed. I've not really played with Windows 8 much yet but I installed Visual Studio the other day and my first question was, why the flying fuck are the menus shouting at me in capital letters? Who ever thought that was a good idea and looked good or somehow improved the user experience?
The icons etc. look awful, the solution explorer which previously had nice familiar icons that you could often pick out from the hints of colour on them are now bold black lined pieces of fairly nonsensical shit.
It's like such a step back, it's like an interface from the 80s. It's fucking horrible, if Windows 8 makes the whole damn OS look like this, then no fucking thank you.