Posts by SisterClamp 92 publicly visible posts • joined 2 Apr 2009
Good point @Peter2. Turning it around in blackly humorous fashion, I had the Head of Foundation at *koff koff* &eading *koff koff* University tell me that the course requirements on their website (sans an official handbook) are "for marketing purposes only" and not to be taken literally! (Still have the email.) So there. Wish I could sue for that one.
My youngest just finished her (I)GCSEs, so I'm not toooo far distant from this. I worked, I breastfed, Hubby & I watched Christian evangelicals at 3am on workdays (foreign country, no grandparents, no babysitters, no other help) because Blessed Child #1 had chronic colic for months. I feel your pain. In no particular order:
(1) Back in our day (and before), chums, the cartoons were pretty suggestive as well, with Sylvester the Cat after all kinds of curvy female felines, not to mention Pepe LePeu (sp), so this is not a new problem.
(2) If you think video is bad, try buying clothes for a young girl without making her look like a slut.
(3) The real issue here is communication. Communicate with your child CONSTANTLY and you have a chance of dodging this mess, regardless of what they watch. Ours went through a very scary SlenderMan episode ::eye-roll:: not to mention the stuff on creepypasta, so you're not going to catch it all, but they need to know they can come to you with their problems, and they can't do that if you don't COMMUNICATE with them. Which means...
(4) Switch off the damned wireless throughout your house. Carry wired to your work machines and make it obvious that wireless is a privilege to be rationed out. Because...
(5) If the kids see inappropriate stuff at **home**, they're going to assume it's okay because YOU are the Home Authority. If they see it outside, there's no obvious parental imprimatur, so they're not going to be so receptive.
(6) Buy/download/save videos that you think are okay and have them on a USB stick that the kids can access while the wireless is OFF. Our kids learnt drawing, painting, yes even f**king opera with the wifi off. If you at least acknowledge their presence every now and then /sarc they will work with you and not think you're some irrelevant old fart.
Right now, your kids have the same degree of respect for you as you would have for a boss who sits you in front of a screen watching badly-written, derivative, angst-ridden, emotionally immature post-apocalyptic generational in-fighting films for hours every day. Without pay. Think about it.
But that doesn't mean they haven't preemptively provided such facilities. As a non-US citizen, I assume that my usage of any Google service is fully monitored, recorded, analysed and data mined. It's getting harder to find an internet service that is not connected somehow to Google, Microsoft, Apple, Facebook or Amazon. (Just try telling an elderly relative to switch from Skype to Asterisk, for example!)
...if only I could get me some of that pie! I promise I'd only overcharge by 100%.
Y'know, I reckon we have enough competence in the El Reg readership to get that integrator gig. And we'd do a damn sight better than The Usual Suspects. If only there was a way... (looking for Blue Sky icon)
I think you had better start doing some serious reading about the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation and:
* the Common Core curriculum in the USA (doesn't apply to rich kids, natch)
* expired/tainted vaccines in Africa
* their views on the benefits of eugenics, etc.
Just try to keep up, will you?
Did you mean Andrei Tarkovsky (Solaris, Stalker)? Actually, I thought it was his cinematographer, Vadim Yusov, who was the superior image-maker. Wasn't really impressed by Andrei Arsenyevich himself.
But if you're talking inner-space, puzzles within puzzles and general chaos, then you can't go past Terry Gilliam. My fav director for this sort of thing by far.
You should see what the District Court is doing to Argentina!
"Judge Griesa even ruled that a payment by Argentina to holders of a euro-denominated restructured bond was also illegal, even though that particular bond is denominated under English law, and not under U.S. jurisdiction."
"In 2012, [US company NML Capital] hired mercenaries to detain and try to seize an Argentine ship where it was docked off the coast of Ghana; at another time it even attempted to grab the Argentina Presidential plane from an airport—as “collateral” for its supposed holding of debt."
http://www.nakedcapitalism.com/2014/07/argentina-debt-case.html for the full story.
Wow, how the lies accumulate. The DoJ suit had nothing to do with Amazon. Amazon did not "pull" any strings. The investigation began when a DoJ employee was reading Jobs' autobiography and came across a passage which detailed a meeting Jobs had with executives from the Big 5 publishers. If Jobs hadn't opened his big mouth, the suit would never have happened. This is all part of the public record, ffs!
(Oh, and speaking of public record, I would like to disclose that I trust Amazon as far as I can spit...which isn't far. But that doesn't mean I blame them for everything bad that happens to publishing.)
Amazon isn't trying to cut out the middle-person. Amazon is trying to MONETISE the middle-person. It is doing this by (it seems*) pushing to charge for publisher perks, such as pre-orders, personalised recommendations, and for having a dedicated Hatchette representative working at Amazon (a Hatchette Account Manager (HAM), if you will). Reference is here: http://the-digital-reader.com/2014/06/21/new-leak-reveals-amazon-wants-increased-co-op-fees-hachette/
Amazon believes in the long tail and is quite content to leave indie writers alone for as long as it makes sense for it to do so. (Yes, Amazon may well screw over indie writers in the future but, here and now, that's not what's happening.) What YouTube is doing is completely different, going after indies proactively by penalising them while offering better terms to the large recording companies on the same platform.
The only similarity is that Amazon is big and YouTube is big. Other than that, the two are playing completely different games. I agree about finding indie music, though. It's a lot tougher, but ultimately more satisfying, than listening to the dross that currently passes as Top Twenty "music".
* I say "it seems" because, as Nate Hoffelder points out (link above), all the leaks so far have come from Hatchette, and we know that a company will never knowingly "leak" information detrimental to its own position.
The key point being "outsiders".
If you've been following the case (as I have, as I'm in publishing), it's beyond obvious that several meetings were held between publishers and Apple in order to discuss what "they were going to do" about Amazon. They decided on price-fixing. It was in emails, it was in Jobs' book, it was admitted in court. READ THE TRANSCRIPT!
Of course, if you're an "outsider" who hasn't bothered to read up on the case, then I'd agree that you might not agree with Judge Cote.
We used to look at places in Beverly Hills and think they were affordable!!!
You're right...ish, but Silicon Valley had its own problems; i.e. the people needed to maintain the Real World (teachers, electricians, plumbers, etc.) couldn't afford to live there.
Personally, I imagine that person to be very Larry Ellison in appearance, wearing infants for shoes, bare legged except for gold boxer shorts, wearing a rhinestone smoking jacket and a platinum captains hat poised jauntily on his head.
And with no eyebrows. Don't forget that bit.
"I have met zero women in a technical role."
My first degree was technical, in Computer Science, back in the 80s and I'll put my knowledge of software (and a bit of hardware) up against anyone. None of this modern Informatics, Business Technology shite, but real bloody PDPs with assembly languages (note the plural), LISP, hands-on electronics, and microprocessor control systems. Imo, you can't even find a knowledgeable MALE in a technical role nowadays, present El Reg reader generation excluded. ;) The young men, particularly those not in OSS development, have got a fine line on the bullshit, but not much else.
As for female entrepreneurs, it's culture. I'm seeing it here in s-e Asia. The weekend papers keep blaring about "encouraging" women to "start businesses", but if you don't give them basic respect and equality to begin with (societal expectations of the way women should dress, learn, talk and behave), then you aren't going to get a lot of females poking their heads above the battlements. Sometimes guys, it's just too damn exhausting merely reading the newspaper.
PS Note the latest book on Ada Lovelace. "A Female Genius". OMFG!
How do you think the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation got started? Now they're supporting "Common Core" ("an educational initiative in the United States that details what K-12 students should know in English language arts and mathematics at the end of each grade" -- teh pedia of Wiki) with MEEEELLIONS of dollars. Interestingly, their own children don't attend schools that use the curriculum that they're pushing, er, promoting. Interesting, eh?
PS C'mon, el Reg, how many times do we have to ask for a tinfoil hat icon before we get one?
Totally agree. The only people who would be surprised by this are those who know no history. Western Europe only began to overtake China as an economic powerhouse at the tail-end of the 19th century (Britain first as that's where the Industrial Revolution got kickstarted). The USA didn't get a look in till after WWII and that's because Europe had been bombed to hell and back.
All we're seeing now is the balance being tipped back to where it had been until, as Arnaut says, fairly recently.
...but, tbh, I couldn't give a damn. Not after seeing how the industry was decimated, and wages driven down, by Brainless Talking Heads constantly touting the benefits of offshoring all those years ago. So how does it feel, Chennai? (As an aside, IBM India only gave their staff 2 hours notice to vacate the premises.) There's more where that came from. Pass it along while I get my popcorn, pull up a pew and settle in....
...you only had to peruse the IT news for the past few years to know that Dropbox plays nice with government intelligence. The entry below is from 2011, for chrissakes:
http://www.zdnet.com/blog/igeneration/dropbox-deceived-users-over-security-files-are-open-to-government-searches/9959
Rice joining doesn't do anything for a service I wouldn't trust in the first place.
Exactly. Aussies don't realise just how bad the "intellectual property right" laws are. Many years ago (VHS tape days), laws were passed that would net you, e.g., a 2-yr jail sentence if the police spotted a TV recording of an Ashes tournament in your video library. As far as I know, that law is still in place. Even Apple(!) told the govt to hold on a sec and not be so gung-ho.
There are already laws in place to put you in an Aussie jail for the most trivial of reasons. They slipped past when most weren't looking, just waiting for the right "Pearl Harbour" event....
PS Can we conspiracy theorists get another icon, instead of just the Alien? How about the All Seeing Eye?
Africa seems to be the happenin' place at the moment, what with major IT companies eyeing the continent and even suggesting that certain employees might like to relocate there. (Where exactly, I'm not even sure the companies know yet. Africa is bigger than you can even think you can imagine.)
Now Zucks says he's doing it "for the poor"? Yes, of course we believe you, Mark. A lot of idiotic liberal twats are going to fall for it though. "The stupid, like German tourists, are everywhere."
Who goes to OpenOffice? LibreOffice is the ticket. Calligra is coming along fine. I'm not an Abiword fan but I know there are lots of them around. On Windows, you have Office and...?
"You want to install some software? You just have to recompile the kernel."
Wow, are you using a fresh install of Gentoo every time you want to run a programme? Maybe you should leave Linux to the people who actually know something about computers, sweetheart.
Also, "your" > "you're"; "doggy" > "dodgy"; "role" > "roll" but I noticed you spelt "Microsoft" correctly. Good for you!
It was the name. Fancy calling something "DrawQuest". Lame.
My extensive experience has taught me that successful apps have a few keywords mentioned upfront. Thus, I'm developing an app called SmashBoxFish, Cow-Hacker Edition. I don't know what the app will do, nor do I care. The name itself will be enough to get the money rolling in. Jeez, you think 4chan would have thought of that.
Just to bring Syria and Apple together, the Australians have proven themselves, over and over, to be a bunch of whores. Don't expect much.....
Obligatory link: http://www.reuters.com/article/2013/08/28/us-syria-crisis-australia-idUSBRE97R03O20130828 ("Australia backs action against Syria, with or without U.N. approval") Democracy, eh? Wunnerful stuff.
....who RUNS the Marketing depts of these companies???? And I thought it was mostly the HR goons (goonesses?) who excelled at obfuscatory incompetence. Oh, and the overpaid, overfed Sales grunts. And, now that I mention it, how about most CEOs? (Where's Leo gone, btw? Anyone know?)
...I think I'm in love with you.
Meanwhile, I've already told hubby to wait, pick up two at bargain basement prices and we'll give them to the kids as Christmas presents. They are good kit, just half-baked at release and now a stupid knee-jerk reaction from incompetent twat managers is sending them to product hell. What can you expect though? Leo flunked programming (it was in his official SAP bio if anyone took time to read it) and is now head of one of the biggest IT companies in the world. WTF much? He probably thinks a pre-test loop is something you do in a cul-de-sac with a car you want to buy.
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