What's
the ladies' version of Zoo, called?
1555 publicly visible posts • joined 28 Apr 2010
and I do sometimes leave him unsupervised online. However, I am well aware of a) what is on the internet and b) his level of computer literacy, such that whilst I may leave him alone perusing CBeebies, I watch him like a hawk on YouTube.
It is a fact that computers are everywhere (Martha Lane Fox exists to make sure we all get online) but many people know very little about them, so I have no problem with tools being made available that could help parents regulate what their children will see online (something as simple as the 9pm watershed wouldn't work here), and ISPs are probably best placed to deliver such tools. But they must be opt in, and that is the responsibility of parents (TV doesn't turn itself off a 9 on the off chance that someone unsuitable might be watching).
None of this is difficult, nor should it be controversial.
Gabe Newell, or the die-hard loonies who spend their whole lives on-line? I can probably live without the approval of either.
Much like the music industry, maybe Valve should concentrate on producing quality games, that people will be prepared to pay for? This endless shift to on-line play, subscriptions and DLC (for a extra fee), leaves me rather cold.
providing you live in London, or some other large city. I could even see it worthwhile as a second car, for commuting to work (my total daily mileage is just under 50).
We're still some way off proper electric cars though - my wife was looking at the Nissan Leaf at the dealer's last week, as was advised by the salesman to steer well clear.
which implies weakness, thus easily overpowered.
In women, this would make them easy to impregnate, in a man, this would make them unlikely to impregnate anything.
Having typed that, it's clearly a load of bollocks - I'll bet Mick Hucknall has had plenty of opportunities to impregnate things (*shudder*) - which must mean that evolution is a load of rubbish, and the fundamentalists were right all along.
with people just picking up a cheap, PAYG, predominantly to be use for voice calling, from Tesco, and shopping around the operator shops for anything more complicated.
Whichever it is, the operators appear to be doing a fine job of driving customers away from their stores. Places like Phones4U strike me as not being much better, so the market is likely being handed to the supermarkets on a plate.
I honestly don't see why this would be useful. Likewise, any sort of high-end camera functions (does anyone use a phone as anything other than a backup camera?).
I have a camera and a camcorder, which both have TV-Out, but only the camcorder ever gets hooked up to the TV, and even that's a rarity as editing footage before display is always welcome. With photos, surely you'll want to remove all the blurry, mis-timed shots before showing them to anyone?
Still, nice looking device. Maybe it'll be what the N-Gage should have been...
as an advertising strategy?
It's bad enough when network operators do it (yes, I mean you, Orange), so I can't imagine a company is going to win many friends/customers with this. SMS adverts already reek of "I have your mobile numbers and am trying to steal all your personal information".
Granted, companies will always have advertising budgets, and I will inevitably consume adverts at some point, be it actively or passively. But I can live with that (twas ever thus).
As for privacy, nothing particularly sensitive gets passed through either my facebook or gmail, so, yeah, I'm still happy (the ads I get served by facebook have so little relevance to me, I have to wonder if facebook system is really working!). The vast majority of people most likely couldn't care less, I expect.
I may well be ignorant, but I am content, and so very unlikely to abandon these services for a paid alternative - if paid were the only option, I'd just as likely abandon them, altogether.
Somewhere, somebody is paying for it, obviously. Is it costing me money? No, so why would I care?
No one cares enough about these services to want to pay for them, so the chance of setting up a viable business model based on subscriptions is practically nil.
Then again, plenty of people fork over good money for something like SkyTV, so I may well be completely wrong.