The globalists wouldn't want to have another Trump on their hands in the most powerful nation in Europe!
The only people who you really have to worry about hacking the vote are based out of Brussels, not Moscow.
Don't worry about the "Globalists", or whichever conspiracy theory they came from. Trump has ensured that there isn't going to be a Trump in Europe. Far right parties have been doing spectacularly badly in recent European elections, Centre right and centre left are doing well.
I expect this to be a comfortable win for Merkel. That evil witch who has managed to keep the German economy strong throughout terrible economic conditions. Only the centre-left SPD has the chance to unseat her and they need to pick up over 100 more seats to do that so I don't see that happening. Last election the far right AfD didn't get a single seat.
I should applaud Trump for what he's done, he's made other countries realise just how stupid it is to vote in extremists and idiots. He's been a great boon for mainstream parties in Europe.
What ClickBait, This has nothing to do with customROMs.
Yes, but the problem is that the headline "OMG! New Iphone" just isn't bringing in the clicks like they used to, so running a scare non-story about Android is the best they can do. It seems the announcement of a new Iphone now brings in as much fanfare as Toyota, announcing a new Camry.
The 2 minutes Android hate is a regular occurrence on/. now.
We own them. Turn off the f*cking notifications unelss you're paid to have them on and are willing to do so.
This, I don't believe in "phone addiction" or any other such bollocks. You only have weak people who lack the self control to put the damn thing down or the intelligence to set up predefined DND period (Do Not Disturb, not Dungeons and Dragons for the contextually impaired).
A phone is a controllable object you are in charge of. If its ruling your life its because you're not disciplined enough to own one.
"So... why were these productivity reductions made in the first place?"
Because UX/UI designers now days obviously never read a book regarding the subject of user interface design.
What do you expect?
The entire field of "UX" was made up to justify bad design decisions that flew in the face of proven HMI/HCI.
The idea of presenting 3D buttons with graphical bas-relief has been around for decades, I remember it clearly from Windows 3.1 and it was probably around before then. It worked well in Windows 3.1 and just about every Windows since (and almost all the successful Linux GUI's.
However then Apple and UX came along and ignored decades of proven research to because they replaced UI designers with Graphic Designers.
The worst thing from Apple, still to this day, is the smooth plastic connectors to connect anything. Other companies have texturized plastic or even rubberized connectors, making them easier to handle and to pull.
That isn't the worst thing to come from Apple, but it is pretty bad.
There are basically no more 'skilled trade' jobs near the Mexican border. They aren't actually very skilled, but they work cheap. Which isn't to say the average American 'skilled tradesman' is particularly skilled.
Megra could fill their deportation pipelines easily by raiding construction sites. They don't, basically never, filing complaints is futile. Construction workers don't bother, for 20 years now.
In Europe (Germany to be specific) the fines for employing someone without work papers is five figures/illegal, first offence. Plus constant checks for subsequent years. That's what we need, the wall is unnecessary.
You see, in Europe they fixed that problem by making the Illegals, legal. Basically allowing German companies to import cheap labour from eastern Europe. Now Germany is pretty much dependent on ensuring that there is a steady supply of cheap labourers coming into Germany from other parts of the EU.
They do this because the German leadership knows that if they got rid of all the Poles, Romanians and Bulgarians these jobs will not be taken up by Germans, rather they'll disappear. it's the same with the US. No American will work for what you pay a Mexican. This means you'll have to mow your own lawns, wash your own cars, pack your own bags at the supermarket (like we do here in Europe) and construction will now cost so much it'll be unaffordable for most Americans because you'll have to pay an American bricklayer wages an American would accept.
Kindly learn a bit about other countries, before you comment on them.
He doesn't have to deport a single one if he removes all benefits given to illegals and enforces the laws against hiring them in the first place. They'll leave on their own. Many already have since he was elected.
Good luck with that.
I think you missed the point, the idea _IS_ to create a huge underclass that can be exploited. Also to make it look like Trump is doing something to distract people from what he's really doing, selling the US down the river.
I hope Trump gets rid of the Green Card Lottery. I don't understand why we give away 50000 green cards every year to people who may only have a high school degree.
We're not "giving away" green cards. Green cards are not free. The fees are higher than many can afford, and is a source of income. The bare minimum fees are:
US$1,500 is actually pretty cheap.
Want to get a ILR (Indefinite Leave to Remain) for the UK, that's £2,400 thanks.
A Canadian I know moved to Australia and spent upwards of US$8,000 at the time and still wasn't finished with permanent residency.
The idea of Green Cards isn't to resettle refugees (each country has different policies for that) but to attract low to moderately skilled workers. People who can hold down a decent job but the skills are common enough not to be on a list of in-demand professionals.
Which where only released after the iPhone was announced. Cool trick.
LG Prada was announced in December 2006
Iphone was announced in January 2007
Given it was released in may, are you honestly suggesting that they redesigned an entire phone in less than 3 months? We must apply Fanboy logic, therefore LG must have sent an agent into the future steal the Iphone. Its the only explanation that makes sense.
For the rest of us, this is a case of parallel development due to different people recognising the same use for new technologies. Apple tried to sue LG and lost spectacularly.
Doesn't CBC stand for Canadian Broadcasting Corporation? Much the same as BBC stands for British Broadcasting Corporation. Is it actually broadcast for anywhere else (even then shouldn't it be called the CBC World Service like the BBC).
For me, the importance of radio is current affairs and news. But then, I might be an old fogey at this point, as my car's radio is pretty much stuck on CBC Radio One (I'm Canadian), or one of the local NPR affiliates when I'm south of the border.
This kind of thing only goes to show the age of commercial radio is pretty much over.
Commercial radio only provides 3 things people want, music, news and talk-back. 1. News: With far more sources of news, live traffic updates on our GPS's, so on and so forth radio stations are now behind most sources of news. In the olden days before the interwebs this used to be the only way to find out live game scores but that's no longer the case.
2. Talk back radio: pretty much the only thing that keeps them in business, angry old people who aren't savvy enough with computers to use the comments section of the Daily Mail. This is literally a dying business, as younger angry racists/xenophobes are capable of draging their knuckes across the keyboard to produce a badly spelled, all caps locked, badly thought out rant based on myths, propaganda and a warped world view.
3. Music. Long since overtaken by these little devices in our cars that play music from other sources like round plastic discs, portable memory devices and our telephones. Beyond this we have satellite radio that has many more stations that can be tailored to our tastes and streaming services that allow us to pick our music. I want to labour on the point of music, commercial radio now only plays the same 10 odd songs on repeat, this will be the latest pop crap straight from mass production. This is the main reason that they're losing audiences, I have an eclectic mix of rock, metal (from hair to death), Latin jazz and classical on a USB stick in my car. Ignoring the fact I wont ever hear Megadeth, let alone Marilyn Manson on the radio (the poor old Christian Conservatives shit kittens all the way to the stations owner), I doubt I'll even hear the Foo Fighters from FM most stations because they aren't in the top 10 charts that are made up each week despite Everlong being a legendary classic.
These three things are only there to bring our ears to the one thing they want us to listen to, advertisements. These over the years have become louder, more obnoxious and more insulting. After the crappy music repeats, this is what is driving away customers. People who still want the randomness of new music are switching to satellite and DAB stations where it's not so commercially controlled, similarly there are those who have moved to Spotify, Pandora and the like and the rest of us have MP3's in our cars and on our portable devices which we listen to. Commercial radio is a dying industry and that is entirely because they are unwilling to change. Ultimately they're the start of an entire dying content industry, dying because it is unwilling to change.
The A/B/CBC's will likely be the last to turn off the FM transmitters because they provide better and local content without the constant and extreme annoyance of commercials.
Live music is cool when you're actually there. Listening to "live" music through a radio is sort of pointless.
The problem there is that live music isn't live for the most part. Most artists you hear on the radio these days are so auto-tuned that they are physically incapable of reproducing the same sounds. So they end up miming everything, concerts have become a carefully choreographed pantomime rather than live music.
Most concerts I go to are for rock/metal (occasionally the odd jazz, latin jazz or even to the orchestra) and you know it's live because you can hear the artist make a mistake. They'll drop a note, miss a word or line or do something spontaneous, like dropping a random solo into a song. No one cares if they drop a note or make a mistake either.
The stories I've heard from my in-laws lend evidence that men were not terribly involved in the lives of the young children or even at-times the family. My FIL didn't get married until his forties, and most of his friends that did marry young still went out drinking with the guys, even as their wives became pregnant and raised children.
If expectations now are shifting more toward participation with the family then it would follow that men might be more inclined themselves to hold-off having kids until they're ready. Also, the use of birth control being more acceptable means that people generally have more options to entertain themselves without having kids.
Actual studies have show than male parents have always played a large role in raising children, right back to the prehistoric age. The idea that women raised children exclusively is a myth that has developed in very recent times.
It may also shock those who believe in old fashioned gender myths that women served aboard ships in Nelson's Navy.
I think the problem is that people now are working longer hours to have the same quality of life as they had in the 1950's. The fact that it takes years to save for a house deposit after completing your 4 year degree to get an entry level job means that raising a family tends to be put on the back burner for a while. I dont think it's just fathers either, women are also choosing to have children later for the same reason.
Hey, but wait a little while and I'm sure some baby boomer who got given a good job after high school, a house on $5,000 deposit, lived through the halcyon days of the 80's and 90's, got a good inheritance and now has a secure high paying job and government pension will be along to tell us kids have it too good these days.
It is fun to hypothesize about robots taking over, and how society is going to adapt to post-scarcity, but that is theoretical conjecture, and not based on the reality of what is actually happening today.
Folks have been whining about how automation will destroy our civilization tomorrow . . . since about when it started, back in the 1700's. That tomorrow never seems to come.
Human beings, unlike some other living creatures on Earth, are not evolved and adapted to any specific environment. If the environment changes, we'll pick up our marbles and go play somewhere else. The history of humanity is a series of great disruptions and changes . . . sure, a lot of folks die prematurely along the way, but the vast majority seems to just muddle on.
Human beings are like toenail fungus . . . very difficult to get rid of completely.
Actually, automation has steadily been destroying jobs at a pretty good rate. The thing is, and what we humans are good at, that we're adapting to new conditions. Take garbage collection, previously you had 4 people, 2 operators and two collectors. Now that's down to 1 or 2 operators and realistically, the 2nd operator is only required by union or OH&S rules. As I've said, we've been adapting, university participation rates amongst young people in 1950 were 3.4% of the UK population, in 2013 it's over 50%. We've been replacing the automated jobs with higher skilled opportunities.
Now this robot isn't going to replace any jobs here in the developed world because we either outsourced clothing manufacturing to the developing world decades ago... or bought it back in recent years to be done by robots. The only real clothing industry in the west that requires staffing, are the high end tailors (read: completely bespoke, the cost of which makes your made to measure Armani look positively peasant in comparison) and that isn't a huge industry. So this robot will only affect developing nations with large manual seamstress operations (I.E. China, Honduras, Bangladesh).
That being said, advances in technology are looking to put a fair few industries out of human employment. Not just manual labour, but a lot of what used to be considered, safe careers will be replaced by soft AI's. Particularly ones that don't require a great deal of problem solving and rely on applying situations to rules (I.E. accounting, legal services) and there's no stopping it. So its a good thing we're considering what happens in the near future where the number of workers far outpaces the number of opportunities available to them. This kind of thing has happened in the past, if it wasn't dealt with in advance (like in the UK and US) it usually ended with the leaders and aristocrats being hoisted from balconies (I.E. Russia).
I would like the phone to provide control over what apps do.
If could say "Install app but don't give it GPS access" (or explicitly request permission), then I would know their app is not doing anything bad.
I believe the latest versions of both Android and IOS provide this function (I have savings instead of an Iphone, but my Nexus 5x has allowed this since Android version 6/Marshmallow). However the restrictions are easy to get around by the app saying "this application cannot work unless you grant Uber Spy permissions, press here to somnambulantly do this now".
The OS is secure, it's the user that is the primary source of insecurity.
There are still laggards who dont know how to do the internet, dont get down to a B&M store often and have disposable income. Typically we call them seniors or senior citizens depending on the state or country in question (old bag may also be appropriate).
Sure it's ultimately a dying market, but old people are more easily pressured into a sale by a person than an advertisement.
Too bad this news is US only. I have a Canadian PayPal account and the page to sign up is not accessible.
When I hear "WOW!!! Amazing CARD gives you X back and provides Y FREEE!!!" I immediately ask, "who is paying for it"?
If no simple, reputable answer is forthcoming, I assume that I am.
As with all credit cards, the merchant pays fees to accept it. As credit card companies in the US have made it pretty much illegal for a merchant to pass this on in the form of a surcharge, the do so by simply raising prices. So in the end, I'm paying more than 2% to get 2% cash back... However because most people don't ever ask "who is paying for it" they never see the negative feedback look that are credit card rewards.
If it's cheaper to buy over the life of the item you use than to rent, BUY. Appreciating Asset or not.
This.
Leasing costs more over buying. No-one lends money for free, 0% deals always have a catch (I.E. large administration fee, forcing you to buy at RRP (looking at you, car dealers)). Leasing should only be done when you either cant afford it outright or you gain some other advantage out of it (I.E. tax benefits).
I've never seen a lease deal that is better than buying outright, I doubt I ever will because the person lending the money isn't doing it out of the kindness of their heart, they expect a return on investment.
And like you said, if you go into a finance arrangement, make sure you can pay it off, even if your financial conditions were to dramatically worsen (which is a distinct possibility in today's climate). I've got a leased car, but its a debt I can easily afford and I've got other reasons for leasing (primarily to get a credit history in the UK, also my employer pays £:105 a month of my lease). I've structured it that if I ever need to terminate it, I can hand the car back with no future monies owed (I.E. I'm staying ahead of the depreciation curve), beyond that, I have enough in savings to pay off the remainder of the lease (but I'm thinking of buying it out at the end of the lease).
With phone leases, I associate these with predatory street peddlers in developing nations. Having lived in Thailand and the Philippines for a stint, 9 times out of 10 when you saw a young girl with a high end phone, chances are she got it on an insanely overpriced lease deal. An Iphone 5 would cost 800 THB a week, that's US$1,200 over the year, if you didn't pay up, they'd take the phone back and you'd better hope it was in good condition as they weren't like the gentle, caring creatures we call bankers here in the west.
This was a lease. If it's a lease, it's still the dealer's car. Hence the whole reason the GPS was installed in the first place. It stops being the dealer's car once the dealer is paid in full. The naughty part is that the dealer probably didn't tell him about the tracker and the removal fee. The client should be informed, and the removal fee should be built into the lease price.
Wrong.
Canada is a Common Law country like most of the commonwealth. In fact their legal system closely aligns with the UK and most of the commonwealth.
If the vehicle is under a lease, the leasee is the legal owner responsible for insuring and taxing the vehicle. The vehicle is security for the leasor. If the lease falls into arrears, there steps permitted to be taken are spelled out clearly in law (and the lease agreement). The leasor is only permitted to take legal possession of the vehicle after it has been made clear to a court that the terms of the lease have been breached, I've got a leased car in the UK, the V5 and Registration is in my name, as is the contract with BMW Finance. A lease is not a rental contract, which is what you're thinking of.
Disabling the vehicle remotely is completely illegal and a violation of consumer rights.
However that is pointless because the vehicle in question was not under finance. The owner had paid off the finance, including the penalty and the dealer was trying to impose a C$200 extra charge for removing a GPS tracker. So the vehicle was completely under the ownership of the former leasee which gives them absolutely no legal cause to remotely disable the vehicle. This is extortion by the dealer, pure and simple.
You'll never have that kind of fun again playing computer games, because you're not 19 anymore.
I know because I went ahead and played the games I played when I was young, and it's just not as fun anymore. Games haven't changed, I have.
Speak for yourself.
I'm in my mid 30's like most gamers and I still enjoy games as much as I did when I was a teen.
In fact, I have a huge back catalogue of games to choose from.
I enjoy playing Endless Space 2 as much as I enjoyed playing Civ II back when I was a wee-un. You're also wrong about games changing, games have changed a lot but change is not always a bad thing. Game design, especially at the AAA level has become lazier, but thats cool as I've got a lot of options being a PC gamer. Not to say that all of the AAA games are buggy, short, cliche ridden, consolised, covershooter crap, some good games do slip through the cracks.
Gaming is not as constrained by hardware or drivers as it once was, this has made some developers lazy but it's opened up more possibilities in games. AI has gotten a lot better, especially with strategy games. Whilst nostaliga is fun and it's good to look back (and replay) games from yore that you enjoyed, you cant let it prevent you from enjoying the future. System Shock was great but I'm not going to wait for the "next" System Shock because that only ends in disapointment, the next big thing will be something completely different.
The biggest problem I have with being a middle aged gamer is that my adult responsibilities encroach upon my gaming time.
Damn straight. I've already been labeled a "free speech nazi" and have had people try to dox me on there (Good thing I paid attention in school and never use any identifiable information, back when that was taught).
If advocating for free speech and railing against censorship of any political opinion or ideology makes me a Nazi, sign me up for the SS.
The problem is, using the defence of free speech to defend neo-nazis is ultimately self defeating.
Firstly, Nazi's are people who want to deny a large number of inalienable rights to people because they have the wrong colour skin or believe in the wrong sky faerie. And we're not just talking about free speech, of your So claiming their having their rights taken away (especially when they aren't) is hypocritical in the extreme. Of your bill of rights, white supremacists and nazis wish to see numbers 1, 2, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8 and 9 of your bill of rights denied to those they view as subhuman (and I'm assuming that 3 and 10 don't apply to the situation).
Secondly, if the best defence you can think of to justify what a group is saying is that it is literally not illegal to say it, you've defeated your own argument. You've admitted that their points have no merit.
Finally, their right to free speech is not being taken away, they wont be arrested for being hateful little shits. However that does not mean everyone else has to listen to their bullshit and silently agree. They're being told that no-one wants to hear their bollocks and to go away (#9 on aforementioned bill of rights). Just because they can say something, does not mean everyone else should be forced to listen.
It'll not work because every year more and more people are getting pissed off at those that label everything they disagree with as racist
You do know that the term "alt-right" was coined by a white supremiscist to disguise the fact that he was a racist.
The problem today isn't that people are upset with people being called racist. The problem is that people are sick of people like you who are trying to play the victim card by pretending their being called names unfairly when they really aren't.
We're sick of people trying to force feed us bullshit, we're sick of having to pretend racism and neo-Nazism are "legitimate political views", we're sick of having to hear racist and bigoted bollocks and then being expected not to call it racist/xenophobic/etc... Thats what people are really sick of, we're sick of these piss poor attempts to poison the well. Just because you've got an opinion, does not make it worthwhile. It definitely does not mean that everyone has to listen to your opinion and silently agree with it. As the old saying goes, opinions are like arseholes.
If anything, the censoring is coming from the alt-right who want to use the pretend victim card to silence their opposition.
Finally, if a large number of people are calling you racist... Maybe you need to critically evaluate what you're saying.
Slashdot Mirror
The globalists wouldn't want to have another Trump on their hands in the most powerful nation in Europe!
The only people who you really have to worry about hacking the vote are based out of Brussels, not Moscow.
Don't worry about the "Globalists", or whichever conspiracy theory they came from. Trump has ensured that there isn't going to be a Trump in Europe. Far right parties have been doing spectacularly badly in recent European elections, Centre right and centre left are doing well.
I expect this to be a comfortable win for Merkel. That evil witch who has managed to keep the German economy strong throughout terrible economic conditions. Only the centre-left SPD has the chance to unseat her and they need to pick up over 100 more seats to do that so I don't see that happening. Last election the far right AfD didn't get a single seat.
I should applaud Trump for what he's done, he's made other countries realise just how stupid it is to vote in extremists and idiots. He's been a great boon for mainstream parties in Europe.
What ClickBait, This has nothing to do with customROMs.
Yes, but the problem is that the headline "OMG! New Iphone" just isn't bringing in the clicks like they used to, so running a scare non-story about Android is the best they can do. It seems the announcement of a new Iphone now brings in as much fanfare as Toyota, announcing a new Camry.
/. now.
The 2 minutes Android hate is a regular occurrence on
We own them. Turn off the f*cking notifications unelss you're paid to have them on and are willing to do so.
This, I don't believe in "phone addiction" or any other such bollocks. You only have weak people who lack the self control to put the damn thing down or the intelligence to set up predefined DND period (Do Not Disturb, not Dungeons and Dragons for the contextually impaired).
A phone is a controllable object you are in charge of. If its ruling your life its because you're not disciplined enough to own one.
I halfway expect Godzilla to emerge from Tokyo Bay, at this rate (grin)
Picturing a Nissan GTR being dragged up from Tokyo harbour.
"So... why were these productivity reductions made in the first place?"
Because UX/UI designers now days obviously never read a book regarding the subject of user interface design.
What do you expect? The entire field of "UX" was made up to justify bad design decisions that flew in the face of proven HMI/HCI.
The idea of presenting 3D buttons with graphical bas-relief has been around for decades, I remember it clearly from Windows 3.1 and it was probably around before then. It worked well in Windows 3.1 and just about every Windows since (and almost all the successful Linux GUI's.
However then Apple and UX came along and ignored decades of proven research to because they replaced UI designers with Graphic Designers.
The worst thing from Apple, still to this day, is the smooth plastic connectors to connect anything. Other companies have texturized plastic or even rubberized connectors, making them easier to handle and to pull.
That isn't the worst thing to come from Apple, but it is pretty bad.
There are basically no more 'skilled trade' jobs near the Mexican border. They aren't actually very skilled, but they work cheap. Which isn't to say the average American 'skilled tradesman' is particularly skilled.
Megra could fill their deportation pipelines easily by raiding construction sites. They don't, basically never, filing complaints is futile. Construction workers don't bother, for 20 years now.
In Europe (Germany to be specific) the fines for employing someone without work papers is five figures/illegal, first offence. Plus constant checks for subsequent years. That's what we need, the wall is unnecessary.
You see, in Europe they fixed that problem by making the Illegals, legal. Basically allowing German companies to import cheap labour from eastern Europe. Now Germany is pretty much dependent on ensuring that there is a steady supply of cheap labourers coming into Germany from other parts of the EU.
They do this because the German leadership knows that if they got rid of all the Poles, Romanians and Bulgarians these jobs will not be taken up by Germans, rather they'll disappear. it's the same with the US. No American will work for what you pay a Mexican. This means you'll have to mow your own lawns, wash your own cars, pack your own bags at the supermarket (like we do here in Europe) and construction will now cost so much it'll be unaffordable for most Americans because you'll have to pay an American bricklayer wages an American would accept.
Kindly learn a bit about other countries, before you comment on them.
He doesn't have to deport a single one if he removes all benefits given to illegals and enforces the laws against hiring them in the first place. They'll leave on their own. Many already have since he was elected.
Good luck with that.
I think you missed the point, the idea _IS_ to create a huge underclass that can be exploited. Also to make it look like Trump is doing something to distract people from what he's really doing, selling the US down the river.
I hope Trump gets rid of the Green Card Lottery. I don't understand why we give away 50000 green cards every year to people who may only have a high school degree.
We're not "giving away" green cards. Green cards are not free. The fees are higher than many can afford, and is a source of income. The bare minimum fees are:
US$1,500 is actually pretty cheap.
Want to get a ILR (Indefinite Leave to Remain) for the UK, that's £2,400 thanks.
A Canadian I know moved to Australia and spent upwards of US$8,000 at the time and still wasn't finished with permanent residency.
The idea of Green Cards isn't to resettle refugees (each country has different policies for that) but to attract low to moderately skilled workers. People who can hold down a decent job but the skills are common enough not to be on a list of in-demand professionals.
This is a non-story. iOS
Yep, they must of run out of Android ideas that were ideologically compatible to copy, so it's only natural they'd move onto another OS.
Apple copied LG Prada and other phones
Which where only released after the iPhone was announced. Cool trick.
LG Prada was announced in December 2006
Iphone was announced in January 2007
Given it was released in may, are you honestly suggesting that they redesigned an entire phone in less than 3 months? We must apply Fanboy logic, therefore LG must have sent an agent into the future steal the Iphone. Its the only explanation that makes sense.
For the rest of us, this is a case of parallel development due to different people recognising the same use for new technologies. Apple tried to sue LG and lost spectacularly.
CBC Canada
Surely saying CBC Canada is a bit redundant?
Doesn't CBC stand for Canadian Broadcasting Corporation? Much the same as BBC stands for British Broadcasting Corporation. Is it actually broadcast for anywhere else (even then shouldn't it be called the CBC World Service like the BBC).
For me, the importance of radio is current affairs and news. But then, I might be an old fogey at this point, as my car's radio is pretty much stuck on CBC Radio One (I'm Canadian), or one of the local NPR affiliates when I'm south of the border.
This kind of thing only goes to show the age of commercial radio is pretty much over.
Commercial radio only provides 3 things people want, music, news and talk-back.
1. News: With far more sources of news, live traffic updates on our GPS's, so on and so forth radio stations are now behind most sources of news. In the olden days before the interwebs this used to be the only way to find out live game scores but that's no longer the case.
2. Talk back radio: pretty much the only thing that keeps them in business, angry old people who aren't savvy enough with computers to use the comments section of the Daily Mail. This is literally a dying business, as younger angry racists/xenophobes are capable of draging their knuckes across the keyboard to produce a badly spelled, all caps locked, badly thought out rant based on myths, propaganda and a warped world view.
3. Music. Long since overtaken by these little devices in our cars that play music from other sources like round plastic discs, portable memory devices and our telephones. Beyond this we have satellite radio that has many more stations that can be tailored to our tastes and streaming services that allow us to pick our music. I want to labour on the point of music, commercial radio now only plays the same 10 odd songs on repeat, this will be the latest pop crap straight from mass production. This is the main reason that they're losing audiences, I have an eclectic mix of rock, metal (from hair to death), Latin jazz and classical on a USB stick in my car. Ignoring the fact I wont ever hear Megadeth, let alone Marilyn Manson on the radio (the poor old Christian Conservatives shit kittens all the way to the stations owner), I doubt I'll even hear the Foo Fighters from FM most stations because they aren't in the top 10 charts that are made up each week despite Everlong being a legendary classic.
These three things are only there to bring our ears to the one thing they want us to listen to, advertisements. These over the years have become louder, more obnoxious and more insulting. After the crappy music repeats, this is what is driving away customers. People who still want the randomness of new music are switching to satellite and DAB stations where it's not so commercially controlled, similarly there are those who have moved to Spotify, Pandora and the like and the rest of us have MP3's in our cars and on our portable devices which we listen to. Commercial radio is a dying industry and that is entirely because they are unwilling to change. Ultimately they're the start of an entire dying content industry, dying because it is unwilling to change.
The A/B/CBC's will likely be the last to turn off the FM transmitters because they provide better and local content without the constant and extreme annoyance of commercials.
Live music is cool when you're actually there. Listening to "live" music through a radio is sort of pointless.
The problem there is that live music isn't live for the most part. Most artists you hear on the radio these days are so auto-tuned that they are physically incapable of reproducing the same sounds. So they end up miming everything, concerts have become a carefully choreographed pantomime rather than live music.
Most concerts I go to are for rock/metal (occasionally the odd jazz, latin jazz or even to the orchestra) and you know it's live because you can hear the artist make a mistake. They'll drop a note, miss a word or line or do something spontaneous, like dropping a random solo into a song. No one cares if they drop a note or make a mistake either.
The stories I've heard from my in-laws lend evidence that men were not terribly involved in the lives of the young children or even at-times the family. My FIL didn't get married until his forties, and most of his friends that did marry young still went out drinking with the guys, even as their wives became pregnant and raised children.
If expectations now are shifting more toward participation with the family then it would follow that men might be more inclined themselves to hold-off having kids until they're ready. Also, the use of birth control being more acceptable means that people generally have more options to entertain themselves without having kids.
Actual studies have show than male parents have always played a large role in raising children, right back to the prehistoric age. The idea that women raised children exclusively is a myth that has developed in very recent times.
It may also shock those who believe in old fashioned gender myths that women served aboard ships in Nelson's Navy.
I think the problem is that people now are working longer hours to have the same quality of life as they had in the 1950's. The fact that it takes years to save for a house deposit after completing your 4 year degree to get an entry level job means that raising a family tends to be put on the back burner for a while. I dont think it's just fathers either, women are also choosing to have children later for the same reason.
Hey, but wait a little while and I'm sure some baby boomer who got given a good job after high school, a house on $5,000 deposit, lived through the halcyon days of the 80's and 90's, got a good inheritance and now has a secure high paying job and government pension will be along to tell us kids have it too good these days.
It is fun to hypothesize about robots taking over, and how society is going to adapt to post-scarcity, but that is theoretical conjecture, and not based on the reality of what is actually happening today.
Folks have been whining about how automation will destroy our civilization tomorrow . . . since about when it started, back in the 1700's. That tomorrow never seems to come.
Human beings, unlike some other living creatures on Earth, are not evolved and adapted to any specific environment. If the environment changes, we'll pick up our marbles and go play somewhere else. The history of humanity is a series of great disruptions and changes . . . sure, a lot of folks die prematurely along the way, but the vast majority seems to just muddle on.
Human beings are like toenail fungus . . . very difficult to get rid of completely.
Actually, automation has steadily been destroying jobs at a pretty good rate. The thing is, and what we humans are good at, that we're adapting to new conditions. Take garbage collection, previously you had 4 people, 2 operators and two collectors. Now that's down to 1 or 2 operators and realistically, the 2nd operator is only required by union or OH&S rules. As I've said, we've been adapting, university participation rates amongst young people in 1950 were 3.4% of the UK population, in 2013 it's over 50%. We've been replacing the automated jobs with higher skilled opportunities.
Now this robot isn't going to replace any jobs here in the developed world because we either outsourced clothing manufacturing to the developing world decades ago... or bought it back in recent years to be done by robots. The only real clothing industry in the west that requires staffing, are the high end tailors (read: completely bespoke, the cost of which makes your made to measure Armani look positively peasant in comparison) and that isn't a huge industry. So this robot will only affect developing nations with large manual seamstress operations (I.E. China, Honduras, Bangladesh).
That being said, advances in technology are looking to put a fair few industries out of human employment. Not just manual labour, but a lot of what used to be considered, safe careers will be replaced by soft AI's. Particularly ones that don't require a great deal of problem solving and rely on applying situations to rules (I.E. accounting, legal services) and there's no stopping it. So its a good thing we're considering what happens in the near future where the number of workers far outpaces the number of opportunities available to them. This kind of thing has happened in the past, if it wasn't dealt with in advance (like in the UK and US) it usually ended with the leaders and aristocrats being hoisted from balconies (I.E. Russia).
Uber was tracking you when you weren't riding / hailing one of their cars. Then they got found out.
And now they promise to do it in a way that is more difficult to find out.
Glad I've never installed it.
I'm interested in what they actually do.
I would like the phone to provide control over what apps do.
If could say "Install app but don't give it GPS access" (or explicitly request permission), then I would know their app is not doing anything bad.
I believe the latest versions of both Android and IOS provide this function (I have savings instead of an Iphone, but my Nexus 5x has allowed this since Android version 6/Marshmallow). However the restrictions are easy to get around by the app saying "this application cannot work unless you grant Uber Spy permissions, press here to somnambulantly do this now".
The OS is secure, it's the user that is the primary source of insecurity.
Oh, wait...
HAHAHAHAHAHAHAHA!!
Man, thanks for the laugh. I needed that today!
Actually it makes sense.
There are still laggards who dont know how to do the internet, dont get down to a B&M store often and have disposable income. Typically we call them seniors or senior citizens depending on the state or country in question (old bag may also be appropriate).
Sure it's ultimately a dying market, but old people are more easily pressured into a sale by a person than an advertisement.
Too bad this news is US only. I have a Canadian PayPal account and the page to sign up is not accessible.
When I hear "WOW!!! Amazing CARD gives you X back and provides Y FREEE!!!" I immediately ask, "who is paying for it"?
If no simple, reputable answer is forthcoming, I assume that I am.
As with all credit cards, the merchant pays fees to accept it. As credit card companies in the US have made it pretty much illegal for a merchant to pass this on in the form of a surcharge, the do so by simply raising prices. So in the end, I'm paying more than 2% to get 2% cash back... However because most people don't ever ask "who is paying for it" they never see the negative feedback look that are credit card rewards.
If it's cheaper to buy over the life of the item you use than to rent, BUY. Appreciating Asset or not.
This.
Leasing costs more over buying. No-one lends money for free, 0% deals always have a catch (I.E. large administration fee, forcing you to buy at RRP (looking at you, car dealers)). Leasing should only be done when you either cant afford it outright or you gain some other advantage out of it (I.E. tax benefits).
I've never seen a lease deal that is better than buying outright, I doubt I ever will because the person lending the money isn't doing it out of the kindness of their heart, they expect a return on investment.
And like you said, if you go into a finance arrangement, make sure you can pay it off, even if your financial conditions were to dramatically worsen (which is a distinct possibility in today's climate). I've got a leased car, but its a debt I can easily afford and I've got other reasons for leasing (primarily to get a credit history in the UK, also my employer pays £:105 a month of my lease). I've structured it that if I ever need to terminate it, I can hand the car back with no future monies owed (I.E. I'm staying ahead of the depreciation curve), beyond that, I have enough in savings to pay off the remainder of the lease (but I'm thinking of buying it out at the end of the lease).
With phone leases, I associate these with predatory street peddlers in developing nations. Having lived in Thailand and the Philippines for a stint, 9 times out of 10 when you saw a young girl with a high end phone, chances are she got it on an insanely overpriced lease deal. An Iphone 5 would cost 800 THB a week, that's US$1,200 over the year, if you didn't pay up, they'd take the phone back and you'd better hope it was in good condition as they weren't like the gentle, caring creatures we call bankers here in the west.
This was a lease. If it's a lease, it's still the dealer's car. Hence the whole reason the GPS was installed in the first place. It stops being the dealer's car once the dealer is paid in full. The naughty part is that the dealer probably didn't tell him about the tracker and the removal fee. The client should be informed, and the removal fee should be built into the lease price.
Wrong.
Canada is a Common Law country like most of the commonwealth. In fact their legal system closely aligns with the UK and most of the commonwealth.
If the vehicle is under a lease, the leasee is the legal owner responsible for insuring and taxing the vehicle. The vehicle is security for the leasor. If the lease falls into arrears, there steps permitted to be taken are spelled out clearly in law (and the lease agreement). The leasor is only permitted to take legal possession of the vehicle after it has been made clear to a court that the terms of the lease have been breached, I've got a leased car in the UK, the V5 and Registration is in my name, as is the contract with BMW Finance. A lease is not a rental contract, which is what you're thinking of.
Disabling the vehicle remotely is completely illegal and a violation of consumer rights.
However that is pointless because the vehicle in question was not under finance. The owner had paid off the finance, including the penalty and the dealer was trying to impose a C$200 extra charge for removing a GPS tracker. So the vehicle was completely under the ownership of the former leasee which gives them absolutely no legal cause to remotely disable the vehicle. This is extortion by the dealer, pure and simple.
Yes, I read the article.
You'll never have that kind of fun again playing computer games, because you're not 19 anymore.
I know because I went ahead and played the games I played when I was young, and it's just not as fun anymore. Games haven't changed, I have.
Speak for yourself.
I'm in my mid 30's like most gamers and I still enjoy games as much as I did when I was a teen.
In fact, I have a huge back catalogue of games to choose from.
I enjoy playing Endless Space 2 as much as I enjoyed playing Civ II back when I was a wee-un. You're also wrong about games changing, games have changed a lot but change is not always a bad thing. Game design, especially at the AAA level has become lazier, but thats cool as I've got a lot of options being a PC gamer. Not to say that all of the AAA games are buggy, short, cliche ridden, consolised, covershooter crap, some good games do slip through the cracks.
Gaming is not as constrained by hardware or drivers as it once was, this has made some developers lazy but it's opened up more possibilities in games. AI has gotten a lot better, especially with strategy games. Whilst nostaliga is fun and it's good to look back (and replay) games from yore that you enjoyed, you cant let it prevent you from enjoying the future. System Shock was great but I'm not going to wait for the "next" System Shock because that only ends in disapointment, the next big thing will be something completely different.
The biggest problem I have with being a middle aged gamer is that my adult responsibilities encroach upon my gaming time.
Damn straight. I've already been labeled a "free speech nazi" and have had people try to dox me on there (Good thing I paid attention in school and never use any identifiable information, back when that was taught).
If advocating for free speech and railing against censorship of any political opinion or ideology makes me a Nazi, sign me up for the SS.
The problem is, using the defence of free speech to defend neo-nazis is ultimately self defeating.
Firstly, Nazi's are people who want to deny a large number of inalienable rights to people because they have the wrong colour skin or believe in the wrong sky faerie. And we're not just talking about free speech, of your So claiming their having their rights taken away (especially when they aren't) is hypocritical in the extreme. Of your bill of rights, white supremacists and nazis wish to see numbers 1, 2, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8 and 9 of your bill of rights denied to those they view as subhuman (and I'm assuming that 3 and 10 don't apply to the situation).
Secondly, if the best defence you can think of to justify what a group is saying is that it is literally not illegal to say it, you've defeated your own argument. You've admitted that their points have no merit.
Finally, their right to free speech is not being taken away, they wont be arrested for being hateful little shits. However that does not mean everyone else has to listen to their bullshit and silently agree. They're being told that no-one wants to hear their bollocks and to go away (#9 on aforementioned bill of rights). Just because they can say something, does not mean everyone else should be forced to listen.
It'll not work because every year more and more people are getting pissed off at those that label everything they disagree with as racist
You do know that the term "alt-right" was coined by a white supremiscist to disguise the fact that he was a racist.
The problem today isn't that people are upset with people being called racist. The problem is that people are sick of people like you who are trying to play the victim card by pretending their being called names unfairly when they really aren't.
We're sick of people trying to force feed us bullshit, we're sick of having to pretend racism and neo-Nazism are "legitimate political views", we're sick of having to hear racist and bigoted bollocks and then being expected not to call it racist/xenophobic/etc... Thats what people are really sick of, we're sick of these piss poor attempts to poison the well. Just because you've got an opinion, does not make it worthwhile. It definitely does not mean that everyone has to listen to your opinion and silently agree with it. As the old saying goes, opinions are like arseholes.
If anything, the censoring is coming from the alt-right who want to use the pretend victim card to silence their opposition.
Finally, if a large number of people are calling you racist... Maybe you need to critically evaluate what you're saying.