Uhhh...did everybody forget those ubuntu netbooks and laptops already? Wow, short memories here. I can't say as i blame ya though as Dell has hell with Canonical, with them even having to keep their own fork because default ubuntu kept crapping on the drivers.
That said while I was all jazzed up about Steamboxes, now? Its a big meh. i mean the STARTING price is the same as the Xbone, and that is for the LOW END bottom o' the line system? Really? When you can get the octocore PS4 for $100 cheaper? I have a feeling this will go over like a lead balloon, the PC gamers already have Win 7 and DIY, the console gamers aren't gonna pay $100 more than a PS4 for an i3 unit that frankly if it weren't for the stylish case would go for $350 at Worst Buy, and the icing on the fail cake is just how little of the Steam catalog actually runs on the thing. I mean who is gonna want to pay $500 for a machine that gives you a worse catalog than just buying a $299 i3 Worst Buy special and adding an $80 HD7750?
Hmmm, the congitive dissonance has kicked in early.
The latest generation of consoles has been lack lustre at best. I'm still betting on a mobile phone OS based console taking out the low end, but I'll now bet the high end will be slaughtered by the steamboxes.
For people on a budget, a $200 console will be more appealing than a $400 PS4, for people who want to play games the variety and massive back catalogue on Steam would be the clincher. Lets not forget that PC games are cheaper then Console games (especially when a Steam sale gets involved). So despite a higher initial cost, total cost of ownership would be much less.
There's some cow in Oklahoma who shares the same last name and first initial as me, but yet manages to give MY gmail address to all of these various opt-in mailings. Consistently. Spanning years. Not sure how someone can be consistently wrong.
This. Domains are cheap, and hosting/forwarding is cheap. Plus you get some level of personalization.
Also easier to remember. bobsmith@bobsmith.com is catchy while bobsmith@gmail.com is generic and easily forgotten.
The problem is, cheap hosting is crap.
I have several domains but still use Gmail as my primary email because it's a hell of a lot more functional than the email provided by the hosting company (which has a limit of about 250 MB per mailbox). I've got a gig and a half in my Gmail account, indexed and easily searchable. If I need to find an invoice from 2-3 years ago, I can find it using the product I purchased (or even just the brand sometimes).
I used to get some misdirected email (was meant for some saffa bird) as my email address was NotMyEmail@gmail.com and her address was NotMyEmail2@gmail.com but this has seriously tapered off since she realised she wasn't getting her mail. I just ignored it as 1) it might be a phishing trap and 2) if it was legit, it's her own damn fault for giving them the wrong email address.
So OP, just ignore them and set up a rule to bin them as they come in. Simples.
My only real problem with getting signed up for things I didn't want (sometimes its hard to tell if it's proper spam or just someone fat fingering their email address). Unsubscribes normally work, otherwise its a rule to bin it, I've had was someone signing me up for corn growing tips from a US midwestern university which seem to be sent via SMS so no unsubscribe link. But I've set up rules to bin these as soon as I get them (another thing my hosting provider doesn't offer, server side rules). However using my own domain is no real defence against this.
If I ran a business, I'd pay for a proper commercial service (and these get expensive fast, sure only $5 for a mailbox but they get you on spam filtering, backups, maintenance, SLA, and all the other "options" that you end up needing down the track) but I dont and Gmail is a hell of a lot better than any cheap hosting service I've used. I haven't seen any that could get away from POP3/SMTP which makes the damned thing near unusable.
I'd go along with that, but the tech support analogy is flawed. Users (generally) aren't lying to the help desk for the same reasons that patients lie to their doctors.
Help desk lies are often efforts to avoid blame or ridicule. Doctors get some of that too, but IME it is more often that patients are lying because they believe that if they are honest, they will be blown off or misdiagnosed. Whether or not that's a justified belief is probably differs by physician.
Actually you'll find the reason is the same. Patients lie to doctors to avoid judgment, the same as they lie to helpdesk. The fear isn't from misdiagnosis, it's from the fear that the ways they've deviated from the social norm will be discovered and exposed.
People who lie to helpdesk believe their lies just as much as the ones they tell to their doctor. Cognitive dissonance is very strong especially combined the desire to avoid judgement.
We're talking human body here. Unlike pieces of paper or plastic, human bodies have metabolism that removes various toxins from the body with time.
Not all the trace chemicals are metabolized. In the case of THC it can be detected years later when it's released from body fat. Also drugs can be detected from other trace chemicals that aren't toxins and can stay in the body much longer.
MD here. They lie. They lie all the time. Usually not all that important, sometimes it is. We almost always know anyway.
This.
I'm not a doctor, but the last time I went to one I got the weirdest look after a brief examination. I asked him what the problem was and all he said was he doesn't get many patients who tell him the truth. I've worked in tech support, so I know when a user lies to me it just makes the whole thing longer and more painful for everyone. So I dont lie to people who I'd like to help me (especially when I'm in pain).
So, essentially, Dr. Haider Javed Warraichis is suggesting patients to lie, because doctors are more prone to misdiagnose if they have more information?
Erm... because doctors would never make a misdiagnosis based on wrong information.
Has Dr. Javed Warraichis been self prescribing a wee bit too much?
One of the big reasons doctors (or anyone) turns to other sources of information beyond the horses mouth is because the horse fucking lies.
Those of us who've survived their time in tech support know that what the user tells you is never to be trusted. The same is true for patents. The big difference is that doctors dont have the luxury of finding out what is actually wrong from another source. So they have to rely on their intuition, external observation and the ability to tell what someone isn't saying.
I'm willing to bet that in the case of 95%+ of all misdiagnosis the cause was the patient either didn't tell the doctor what was actually wrong or worse, lied about it.
A good manager deals with the paperwork of requisitions, financing, and getting "buy in" from "customer" departments and management.
A good manager makes sure your projects have visibility, and that their successes and ROI are broadcast through the company so your department doesn't end up downsized.
Having technical knowledge is good for a manager to understand what their team is doing and what they're saying in meetings, but "technical knowledge" is not and never has been what the manager's job is about. A good manager doesn't need to understand the details, because they're not micro-managing their staff.
This,
A non technical manager should serve as a layer of abstraction between technical staff and the business.
The best non-technical managers I've worked under have had a good understanding of the basics and the theory without becoming involved in the details. Most often these people started out in the technical area and moved to management later on.
Amazon refuse to ship to my country (Australia) so I'll have to buy it using a US credit card to a freight forwarder.
EBay, although I wont have to pay for the freight forwarder I'd still have to pay shipping and take the risk with dodgy products (or getting damaged in transit).
The bigger question Android users should ask themselves - why do Androids not come with full device encryption enabled by default? Why are Androids, by default, still vulnerable to the kind of attack that Apple fixed in 2009?
What good is encryption if Google can remotely install any software it damn well pleases on your handset without your knowledge or approval?
The same can be said for Apple and Apple devices. Apple reserve the right to screw with your device without warning or explanation. At the very least Google is open about what it does and why, Apple just says "do not question us".
Beyond this, if you wanted to you can install a non-Google AOSP ROM and you are outside Googles reach. Can you do that with IOS?
Sorry if facts dont agree with your sad sounding Google bash, carry on regardless.
Uh, yeah, I'm gonna need some proof on that. Everything I've read about US prisons have indicated that they're a barbaric hell of inhumanity and sadism. Given the current political and legal climate, that's what I'm inclined to believe until evidenced otherwise.
Most pen's will be like that, the places where they send really dangerous criminals like drug users to be educated by thugs, gang bangers and other people convicted of crimes slightly less serious than using drugs, like aggravated assault, assault with a deadly weapon and armed robbery.
But we're talking about a minimum security prison, this is where they send the white collar criminals who's only infraction was ripping millions off unsuspecting people or violating safety codes that resulted in several deaths. Clearly nowhere near as dangerous as smoking a bong. Here the white collar criminals are looked after and afforded the dignity they deserve. There probably isn't even a lock on the gate as we all know white collar criminals are trustworthy, forthright and honest souls who'd never think of abusing the trust we place in them like uncaring sociopaths.
Teenagers want and need to find a place of their own, to form their own subculture.
Back in the day, subcultures formed around actual cultural items and ideas, like music, games, movies, TV and books. Music was always a big one, you had the mods and the rockers of the 60's, disco in the 70's, pop and metal in the 80's, grunge in the 90's and many more. But I guess they cant do that with Nikki Minaj, Lady Gaga and Kanye having no culture beyond the a possible yeast infection. TV?, well Honey Boo Boo and other reality junk so they youth of today have nothing there. Books and movies? Erm, the Hunger Games so again not really much to base a subculture around.
So understandably I can see why the subculture has evolved not to include any actual culture.
A clean, intuitive interface would do wonders for both services.
Be careful when asking for "clean".
The newer generation of "UI designers" (and I use that phrase lightly) thinks that clean means adding more whitespace and blowing everything up full screen.
You can blame the pseudoscience of User Experience (UX) for that one.
UX has almost nothing to do with the actual sciences of HMI or HCI (Human Machine Interface and Human Computer Interaction). It was created by Apple to fool people into believing their bad interfaces were somehow good or useful despite being the opposite of good HCI. Well it worked fantastically and we're all suffering for it.
And trust me, it's not because it's "uncool", its because the little shits are afraid of getting caught.
This.
They added their mothers, teachers and bosses to Facebook and now are scared of getting caught. There are good reasons I keep my Facebook friend list short, it doesn't include family or employers for very good reasons.
But what do you then pay for shipping to Australia? I know to ship a book (1 lb) from the US to the UK generally costs about $50 each way.
Sorry but you seem to be getting ripped on shipping. To ship 1 KG from the US to Australia via the slow post is about A$20. Shipping is cheap compared to buying locally here in Australia. I regularly get books shipped from the Book Depository (UK) for half the price of buying them here in Oz. It costs me about A$10 per book from the UK compared to buying it here online for A$20. Shipping included as buying the same book from a brick and mortar store is A$25.
Express post from the US costs a bit though. But for 100 grams (about 1/5 for those archaic pounds) is still $20.
It is typical practice in many cheese factories (and all of those in which I've worked) to keep and re-use brine (sometimes for decades), with routine and simple maintenance such as topping up salt levels, adjustment of pH, filtration to remove solids and occasional pasteurisation if required.
Realistically, seeing as the engineering problem is the loss from dropping salt in it's solid form wouldn't any kind of brine or saline solution do as long as it didn't freeze. It doesn't necessarily have to be from cheese. Not that this matters to me where I live, it was 32 Degrees Celsius here in Perth, Australia today.
Just curious, would brine reuse be done at factories that mass produce the yellow plastic masquerading as cheese at the supermarket? I'm not a cheesemaker but have a bit of experience with beer, a national mass producer has a radically different brewing style to a local producer.
Wow, what sort of imaginary Chinese history have you been reading. How do you think China gained such a large empire, if not through conquest? They've been ruthless, both historically and present day, in using whatever violence necessary to suppress any sort of cultural dissent. We take some shit in the US because we still have the death penalty, but China has purpose-built mobile execution vans, because there are just too many executions to perform from a few central locations.
The one you're clearly ignoring.
The US and other western powers openly supported the Chinese Nationalist government lead by Chiang Kai-Shek against the communists. If it weren't for that little Japanese invasion the Maoists would have continued to be oppressed by Kai-Shek's forces fully backed by the US. Chiang Kai-Shek wasn't particularly gentle with his oppression of the Maoists either. However after WWII the Maoists found themselves receiving equipment and their numbers were bolstered by new recruits who joined the Maoists to fight the Japanese, so they went to war and well lets face it, Chiang Kai-Shek was a complete moron which is why the nationalists ended up having to retreat to this little island you may have heard of, Taiwan.
The Chinese spent decades in cold war against the US and NATO as well. Even after the Sino-Soviet split which only served to make them feel more vulnerable than before as they'd lost the protection of the USSR against the western powers.
Yes the British did some nasty things over a hundred years ago. That's a pathetic excuse to justify China's modern brutal oppression.
And the western powers continued to do quite nasty things to them for another 50, 80 if we include the cold war. Not that I agree with China, but you have to be pretty ignorant to think that everything have been peachy between China and the US for the last 100 years.
It's not that, though. It's that the game allows players to (gasp) imagine attacking China.
Perhaps the Chinese government are actually astute and realise that their ability to control the Chinese people is fragile and anything, even a fictional representation of insurrection could tip them over the edge into thinking 'hey, why not actually do this!?'... or perhaps they're simply paranoid. Either way, it doesn't bode well for them, if this is what they consider a threat. If it's the former it will happen sooner or later. And if it's the latter, paranoia, they'll create a self-fulfilling prophecy by doing things like this (and, of course, much worse).
Flexible democracy is the best systems for a stable society, not a brittle authoritarian regime.
Try asking EA to develop a game where the US masses rise up against the legitimate authority in Washington DC (that takes place in our time) and see how well that goes.
I have no doubt the US govt wont stop them or ban the game because they dont need to... The game also wont sell.
The western powers prefer a soft approach to their propaganda. Instead of outright banning of anything potentially subversive they start smear campaigns to alienate and disenfranchise anyone who might use the product. They would simply start to insunuate that anyone who plays the game "hates 'Murica". They'll be huge segments on all news channels about how video games are destroying the youth of today and I have no doubt a school shooting or seven will be blamed on it. This is just as effective as outright banning, sometimes even more effective. Look at how many people irrationally hate labour unionism without realising that the only thing that keeps us from the working conditions of China was the advent of labour unions earlier in our history.
Another company that sees its IT department as a cost center only and not a part of the company responsible for bringing in revenue?
Now, perhaps, its management will have another thought about that, but probably not -- probably they are thinking about assigning blame and who should get fired.
I have no doubt Coles/Myer do that but the problem is far, far worse.
Coles/Myer deliberately dont want Australians shopping online, not just at Myer but anywhere online because products are so ridiculously overpriced in Australian retail stores it's not funny. You're looking at paying 50-250% more just by purchasing the product in Australia rather than from an overseas vendor or even an Australian vendor that practices drop shipping who pays Australian wages and taxes (so there goes the wages and taxes arguments).
Retailers and distributors deliberately keep prices high because historically Australians have never had a choice. Then along came the internet with overseas shipping and all of a sudden revenue dropped. The golden cow they've milked to a husk finally stopped giving milk. Now the old box retailers like Coles/Myer are upset about it. They've been doing everything from trying to raise a tax on overseas sales to suing dropshippers, pretty much everything except competing in an attempt to go back to the glory days when Australians had no choice but to suck up their stupidly high prices.
So it's less incompetence on Myer's planning part and more a complete failure in Coles/Myer's business model.
Yes, this huge volume of traffic totally makes their overage charge of $1.99 per MEGABYTE if you go over your 2 GB monthly limit. Why do I fucking pay 15 dollars per gig for the first 2 and then 2 thousand dollars for the next one? Is it to lull me to sleep and then ram a huge charge up my ass? Because it feels like it.
Its because there is a maximum bandwidth the network can handle before it becomes overloaded. So having no limits is an ideal way to make sure that the towers are maxed out 100% of the time. So what they do is give you a portion cheaply but charge excessively for anything beyond that because they want to discourage people from using up all the towers bandwidth. The high per MB cost is a disincentive.
I've seen this in third world nations where they simply dont care. You can basically forget about mobile internet because everyone is using their phone to download half the internet. There are a lot of charges that make no sense (like SMS's where it costs telco's a fraction of a cent to send dozens of them) but this isn't one of them.
The AK-47's only purpose is to assist in killing people
Primary purpose is killing, that's what an assault rifle is designed for, but it is not the only purpose.
One purpose is: to be able to kill people, often in the hope that it will not be necessary, indeed with the hope that having a credible ability will avoid needing to actually do it.
Yet another purpose is to just have fun with target practice, without killing anyone.
And technically speaking, suppressive fire is not really intended for killing the enemy, it is intended for making it harder for the enemy to shoot and kill you.
However the assault rifle doesn't really fill a civilian application. It's considerably less practical for hunting than other rifles (and with the advent of farming, hunting has pretty much been relegated to a sport anyway so a fully automatic rifle is hardly sporting).
Guns in general dont really fill non-violent applications unlike say knives, explosives or axes.
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Uhhh...did everybody forget those ubuntu netbooks and laptops already? Wow, short memories here. I can't say as i blame ya though as Dell has hell with Canonical, with them even having to keep their own fork because default ubuntu kept crapping on the drivers.
That said while I was all jazzed up about Steamboxes, now? Its a big meh. i mean the STARTING price is the same as the Xbone, and that is for the LOW END bottom o' the line system? Really? When you can get the octocore PS4 for $100 cheaper? I have a feeling this will go over like a lead balloon, the PC gamers already have Win 7 and DIY, the console gamers aren't gonna pay $100 more than a PS4 for an i3 unit that frankly if it weren't for the stylish case would go for $350 at Worst Buy, and the icing on the fail cake is just how little of the Steam catalog actually runs on the thing. I mean who is gonna want to pay $500 for a machine that gives you a worse catalog than just buying a $299 i3 Worst Buy special and adding an $80 HD7750?
Hmmm, the congitive dissonance has kicked in early.
The latest generation of consoles has been lack lustre at best. I'm still betting on a mobile phone OS based console taking out the low end, but I'll now bet the high end will be slaughtered by the steamboxes.
For people on a budget, a $200 console will be more appealing than a $400 PS4, for people who want to play games the variety and massive back catalogue on Steam would be the clincher. Lets not forget that PC games are cheaper then Console games (especially when a Steam sale gets involved). So despite a higher initial cost, total cost of ownership would be much less.
There's some cow in Oklahoma who shares the same last name and first initial as me, but yet manages to give MY gmail address to all of these various opt-in mailings. Consistently. Spanning years. Not sure how someone can be consistently wrong.
Have you ever tried typing with hooves?
This. Domains are cheap, and hosting/forwarding is cheap. Plus you get some level of personalization.
Also easier to remember. bobsmith@bobsmith.com is catchy while bobsmith@gmail.com is generic and easily forgotten.
The problem is, cheap hosting is crap.
I have several domains but still use Gmail as my primary email because it's a hell of a lot more functional than the email provided by the hosting company (which has a limit of about 250 MB per mailbox). I've got a gig and a half in my Gmail account, indexed and easily searchable. If I need to find an invoice from 2-3 years ago, I can find it using the product I purchased (or even just the brand sometimes).
I used to get some misdirected email (was meant for some saffa bird) as my email address was NotMyEmail@gmail.com and her address was NotMyEmail2@gmail.com but this has seriously tapered off since she realised she wasn't getting her mail. I just ignored it as 1) it might be a phishing trap and 2) if it was legit, it's her own damn fault for giving them the wrong email address.
So OP, just ignore them and set up a rule to bin them as they come in. Simples.
My only real problem with getting signed up for things I didn't want (sometimes its hard to tell if it's proper spam or just someone fat fingering their email address). Unsubscribes normally work, otherwise its a rule to bin it, I've had was someone signing me up for corn growing tips from a US midwestern university which seem to be sent via SMS so no unsubscribe link. But I've set up rules to bin these as soon as I get them (another thing my hosting provider doesn't offer, server side rules). However using my own domain is no real defence against this.
If I ran a business, I'd pay for a proper commercial service (and these get expensive fast, sure only $5 for a mailbox but they get you on spam filtering, backups, maintenance, SLA, and all the other "options" that you end up needing down the track) but I dont and Gmail is a hell of a lot better than any cheap hosting service I've used. I haven't seen any that could get away from POP3/SMTP which makes the damned thing near unusable.
I'd go along with that, but the tech support analogy is flawed. Users (generally) aren't lying to the help desk for the same reasons that patients lie to their doctors.
Help desk lies are often efforts to avoid blame or ridicule. Doctors get some of that too, but IME it is more often that patients are lying because they believe that if they are honest, they will be blown off or misdiagnosed. Whether or not that's a justified belief is probably differs by physician.
Actually you'll find the reason is the same. Patients lie to doctors to avoid judgment, the same as they lie to helpdesk. The fear isn't from misdiagnosis, it's from the fear that the ways they've deviated from the social norm will be discovered and exposed.
People who lie to helpdesk believe their lies just as much as the ones they tell to their doctor. Cognitive dissonance is very strong especially combined the desire to avoid judgement.
Isn't keeping the PC game industry healthy by putting SteamBoxes in the living room the same thing as a console-killer?
Not quite. The primary goal is the protection of the PC platform (which is Valve's revenue source).
The console killing properties are just an added bonus.
We're talking human body here. Unlike pieces of paper or plastic, human bodies have metabolism that removes various toxins from the body with time.
Not all the trace chemicals are metabolized. In the case of THC it can be detected years later when it's released from body fat. Also drugs can be detected from other trace chemicals that aren't toxins and can stay in the body much longer.
MD here. They lie. They lie all the time. Usually not all that important, sometimes it is. We almost always know anyway.
This.
I'm not a doctor, but the last time I went to one I got the weirdest look after a brief examination. I asked him what the problem was and all he said was he doesn't get many patients who tell him the truth. I've worked in tech support, so I know when a user lies to me it just makes the whole thing longer and more painful for everyone. So I dont lie to people who I'd like to help me (especially when I'm in pain).
So, essentially, Dr. Haider Javed Warraichis is suggesting patients to lie, because doctors are more prone to misdiagnose if they have more information?
Erm... because doctors would never make a misdiagnosis based on wrong information.
Has Dr. Javed Warraichis been self prescribing a wee bit too much?
One of the big reasons doctors (or anyone) turns to other sources of information beyond the horses mouth is because the horse fucking lies.
Those of us who've survived their time in tech support know that what the user tells you is never to be trusted. The same is true for patents. The big difference is that doctors dont have the luxury of finding out what is actually wrong from another source. So they have to rely on their intuition, external observation and the ability to tell what someone isn't saying.
I'm willing to bet that in the case of 95%+ of all misdiagnosis the cause was the patient either didn't tell the doctor what was actually wrong or worse, lied about it.
A good manager deals with the paperwork of requisitions, financing, and getting "buy in" from "customer" departments and management.
A good manager makes sure your projects have visibility, and that their successes and ROI are broadcast through the company so your department doesn't end up downsized.
Having technical knowledge is good for a manager to understand what their team is doing and what they're saying in meetings, but "technical knowledge" is not and never has been what the manager's job is about. A good manager doesn't need to understand the details, because they're not micro-managing their staff.
This,
A non technical manager should serve as a layer of abstraction between technical staff and the business.
The best non-technical managers I've worked under have had a good understanding of the basics and the theory without becoming involved in the details. Most often these people started out in the technical area and moved to management later on.
Do they not have eBay or Amazon where you live?
Amazon refuse to ship to my country (Australia) so I'll have to buy it using a US credit card to a freight forwarder.
EBay, although I wont have to pay for the freight forwarder I'd still have to pay shipping and take the risk with dodgy products (or getting damaged in transit).
These aren't alternatives.
They didn't say there was *not* an NSA backdoor. All they said was that they didn't work with the NSA to create one.
So a backdoor already existed, they didn't need to work with anyone to create it.
The bigger question Android users should ask themselves - why do Androids not come with full device encryption enabled by default? Why are Androids, by default, still vulnerable to the kind of attack that Apple fixed in 2009?
What good is encryption if Google can remotely install any software it damn well pleases on your handset without your knowledge or approval?
The same can be said for Apple and Apple devices. Apple reserve the right to screw with your device without warning or explanation. At the very least Google is open about what it does and why, Apple just says "do not question us".
Beyond this, if you wanted to you can install a non-Google AOSP ROM and you are outside Googles reach. Can you do that with IOS?
Sorry if facts dont agree with your sad sounding Google bash, carry on regardless.
Of course there's an inherent bias there, in that the most desirable prize is for cracking the Apple product.
Actually it isn't.
The higher cash prizes were for the non-Apple products.
Uh, yeah, I'm gonna need some proof on that. Everything I've read about US prisons have indicated that they're a barbaric hell of inhumanity and sadism. Given the current political and legal climate, that's what I'm inclined to believe until evidenced otherwise.
Most pen's will be like that, the places where they send really dangerous criminals like drug users to be educated by thugs, gang bangers and other people convicted of crimes slightly less serious than using drugs, like aggravated assault, assault with a deadly weapon and armed robbery.
But we're talking about a minimum security prison, this is where they send the white collar criminals who's only infraction was ripping millions off unsuspecting people or violating safety codes that resulted in several deaths. Clearly nowhere near as dangerous as smoking a bong. Here the white collar criminals are looked after and afforded the dignity they deserve. There probably isn't even a lock on the gate as we all know white collar criminals are trustworthy, forthright and honest souls who'd never think of abusing the trust we place in them like uncaring sociopaths.
Teenagers want and need to find a place of their own, to form their own subculture.
Back in the day, subcultures formed around actual cultural items and ideas, like music, games, movies, TV and books. Music was always a big one, you had the mods and the rockers of the 60's, disco in the 70's, pop and metal in the 80's, grunge in the 90's and many more. But I guess they cant do that with Nikki Minaj, Lady Gaga and Kanye having no culture beyond the a possible yeast infection. TV?, well Honey Boo Boo and other reality junk so they youth of today have nothing there. Books and movies? Erm, the Hunger Games so again not really much to base a subculture around.
So understandably I can see why the subculture has evolved not to include any actual culture.
A clean, intuitive interface would do wonders for both services.
Be careful when asking for "clean".
The newer generation of "UI designers" (and I use that phrase lightly) thinks that clean means adding more whitespace and blowing everything up full screen.
You can blame the pseudoscience of User Experience (UX) for that one.
UX has almost nothing to do with the actual sciences of HMI or HCI (Human Machine Interface and Human Computer Interaction). It was created by Apple to fool people into believing their bad interfaces were somehow good or useful despite being the opposite of good HCI. Well it worked fantastically and we're all suffering for it.
Nobody goes there anymore; it's too crowded.
And trust me, it's not because it's "uncool", its because the little shits are afraid of getting caught.
This.
They added their mothers, teachers and bosses to Facebook and now are scared of getting caught. There are good reasons I keep my Facebook friend list short, it doesn't include family or employers for very good reasons.
But what do you then pay for shipping to Australia? I know to ship a book (1 lb) from the US to the UK generally costs about $50 each way.
Sorry but you seem to be getting ripped on shipping. To ship 1 KG from the US to Australia via the slow post is about A$20. Shipping is cheap compared to buying locally here in Australia. I regularly get books shipped from the Book Depository (UK) for half the price of buying them here in Oz. It costs me about A$10 per book from the UK compared to buying it here online for A$20. Shipping included as buying the same book from a brick and mortar store is A$25.
Express post from the US costs a bit though. But for 100 grams (about 1/5 for those archaic pounds) is still $20.
It is typical practice in many cheese factories (and all of those in which I've worked) to keep and re-use brine (sometimes for decades), with routine and simple maintenance such as topping up salt levels, adjustment of pH, filtration to remove solids and occasional pasteurisation if required.
Realistically, seeing as the engineering problem is the loss from dropping salt in it's solid form wouldn't any kind of brine or saline solution do as long as it didn't freeze. It doesn't necessarily have to be from cheese. Not that this matters to me where I live, it was 32 Degrees Celsius here in Perth, Australia today. Just curious, would brine reuse be done at factories that mass produce the yellow plastic masquerading as cheese at the supermarket? I'm not a cheesemaker but have a bit of experience with beer, a national mass producer has a radically different brewing style to a local producer.
Wow, what sort of imaginary Chinese history have you been reading. How do you think China gained such a large empire, if not through conquest? They've been ruthless, both historically and present day, in using whatever violence necessary to suppress any sort of cultural dissent. We take some shit in the US because we still have the death penalty, but China has purpose-built mobile execution vans, because there are just too many executions to perform from a few central locations.
The one you're clearly ignoring.
The US and other western powers openly supported the Chinese Nationalist government lead by Chiang Kai-Shek against the communists. If it weren't for that little Japanese invasion the Maoists would have continued to be oppressed by Kai-Shek's forces fully backed by the US. Chiang Kai-Shek wasn't particularly gentle with his oppression of the Maoists either. However after WWII the Maoists found themselves receiving equipment and their numbers were bolstered by new recruits who joined the Maoists to fight the Japanese, so they went to war and well lets face it, Chiang Kai-Shek was a complete moron which is why the nationalists ended up having to retreat to this little island you may have heard of, Taiwan. The Chinese spent decades in cold war against the US and NATO as well. Even after the Sino-Soviet split which only served to make them feel more vulnerable than before as they'd lost the protection of the USSR against the western powers.
Yes the British did some nasty things over a hundred years ago. That's a pathetic excuse to justify China's modern brutal oppression.
And the western powers continued to do quite nasty things to them for another 50, 80 if we include the cold war. Not that I agree with China, but you have to be pretty ignorant to think that everything have been peachy between China and the US for the last 100 years.
It's not that, though. It's that the game allows players to (gasp) imagine attacking China.
Perhaps the Chinese government are actually astute and realise that their ability to control the Chinese people is fragile and anything, even a fictional representation of insurrection could tip them over the edge into thinking 'hey, why not actually do this!?' ... or perhaps they're simply paranoid. Either way, it doesn't bode well for them, if this is what they consider a threat. If it's the former it will happen sooner or later. And if it's the latter, paranoia, they'll create a self-fulfilling prophecy by doing things like this (and, of course, much worse).
Flexible democracy is the best systems for a stable society, not a brittle authoritarian regime.
Try asking EA to develop a game where the US masses rise up against the legitimate authority in Washington DC (that takes place in our time) and see how well that goes.
I have no doubt the US govt wont stop them or ban the game because they dont need to... The game also wont sell.
The western powers prefer a soft approach to their propaganda. Instead of outright banning of anything potentially subversive they start smear campaigns to alienate and disenfranchise anyone who might use the product. They would simply start to insunuate that anyone who plays the game "hates 'Murica". They'll be huge segments on all news channels about how video games are destroying the youth of today and I have no doubt a school shooting or seven will be blamed on it. This is just as effective as outright banning, sometimes even more effective. Look at how many people irrationally hate labour unionism without realising that the only thing that keeps us from the working conditions of China was the advent of labour unions earlier in our history.
Another company that sees its IT department as a cost center only and not a part of the company responsible for bringing in revenue?
Now, perhaps, its management will have another thought about that, but probably not -- probably they are thinking about assigning blame and who should get fired.
I have no doubt Coles/Myer do that but the problem is far, far worse.
Coles/Myer deliberately dont want Australians shopping online, not just at Myer but anywhere online because products are so ridiculously overpriced in Australian retail stores it's not funny. You're looking at paying 50-250% more just by purchasing the product in Australia rather than from an overseas vendor or even an Australian vendor that practices drop shipping who pays Australian wages and taxes (so there goes the wages and taxes arguments).
Retailers and distributors deliberately keep prices high because historically Australians have never had a choice. Then along came the internet with overseas shipping and all of a sudden revenue dropped. The golden cow they've milked to a husk finally stopped giving milk. Now the old box retailers like Coles/Myer are upset about it. They've been doing everything from trying to raise a tax on overseas sales to suing dropshippers, pretty much everything except competing in an attempt to go back to the glory days when Australians had no choice but to suck up their stupidly high prices.
So it's less incompetence on Myer's planning part and more a complete failure in Coles/Myer's business model.
Yes, this huge volume of traffic totally makes their overage charge of $1.99 per MEGABYTE if you go over your 2 GB monthly limit. Why do I fucking pay 15 dollars per gig for the first 2 and then 2 thousand dollars for the next one? Is it to lull me to sleep and then ram a huge charge up my ass? Because it feels like it.
Its because there is a maximum bandwidth the network can handle before it becomes overloaded. So having no limits is an ideal way to make sure that the towers are maxed out 100% of the time. So what they do is give you a portion cheaply but charge excessively for anything beyond that because they want to discourage people from using up all the towers bandwidth. The high per MB cost is a disincentive.
I've seen this in third world nations where they simply dont care. You can basically forget about mobile internet because everyone is using their phone to download half the internet. There are a lot of charges that make no sense (like SMS's where it costs telco's a fraction of a cent to send dozens of them) but this isn't one of them.
The AK-47's only purpose is to assist in killing people
Primary purpose is killing, that's what an assault rifle is designed for, but it is not the only purpose.
One purpose is: to be able to kill people, often in the hope that it will not be necessary, indeed with the hope that having a credible ability will avoid needing to actually do it.
Yet another purpose is to just have fun with target practice, without killing anyone.
And technically speaking, suppressive fire is not really intended for killing the enemy, it is intended for making it harder for the enemy to shoot and kill you.
However the assault rifle doesn't really fill a civilian application. It's considerably less practical for hunting than other rifles (and with the advent of farming, hunting has pretty much been relegated to a sport anyway so a fully automatic rifle is hardly sporting).
Guns in general dont really fill non-violent applications unlike say knives, explosives or axes.
It might be distasteful to think so, but most technological developments are created by and for the war machine.
Quite true, but unlike many of the things we've weaponised (knives, axes, explosives) guns dont really have a non violent application.
But Kalashnikov seemed to be mature about his invention.
"I'm proud of my invention, but I'm sad that it is used by terrorists."
For that, I can respect the man. KMay he rest in peace.