Posts by Rich Lock
Last ←Newer Page 1 2 3 4 5 Older→ First
-
Hard News: Community standards, in reply to Emma Hart,
The British approach to porn is just fucking hopeless.
Steady chaps. Emotional female in the area. Appears to be on the verge of ranting. Hold steady, don't make eye contact. Twirl mustache and stare at curtains, and on my command, Repress! Repress! Repress!
-
Hard News: Community standards, in reply to George Darroch,
Coca Cola doesn't want to be set down beside penetration close-ups, no matter how they're curated.
-
Weather here very nice indeed, thanks for asking. At the moment the beer supplies are holding steady, so no need to declare that emergency yet.
I shall, however, be DJing a large gathering of friends and family in a couple of weeks somewhere in a field in Herefordshire. We are sorted for teas and fizz, and the setlist vibe is wedding disco tunes of the early/mid 90's for hipsters. Leftfield suggestions and ideas for floor fillers are most welcome.
-
Muse: Worthwhile Literature, Worthless Newspaper, in reply to Lucy Stewart,
a bad working assumption for humanity in general, at that
Humanity is a sex joke? Yeah, sounds about right.
There's an old Irish joke that says that God invented sex as a joke. When nobody laughed, He made it a sin.
I've just re-read my comment on Emma's thread
I have a teacher friend who teaches at a fairly deprived school in Scotland. When you have a bunch of 14-15 year old boys in your class refusing to read the set text because one of the main characters is 'a fucking paedo', then you don't really have a choice except to open the discussion.
Realised on re-reading that it's not exactly clear that it was 'Romeo and Juliet' that I was alluding to as the set text in question.
-
Up Front: Somebody Think of the Young Adults!, in reply to Russell Brown,
Oh, wow. This editorial. You know "Don't read the comments"?
Caitlin Moran has a new book out. I know this because there's an online ad rammed right into the middle of one of the most frothy and hysterical comments in that thread.
'Rammed', as in, right through the middle, completely taking over and disrupting the formatting, making the comment nearly impossible to read.
It would have been better if it were 'how to be a woman', but it still made me chuckle.
-
'Brave New World' was a set text for the years 14-16 at my in-very-many-ways-not-at-all-progressive all-boys school. A book that contains, among very many other sexy sextime sexysex scenes, some fairly graphic descriptions of drug-fuelled orgies.
'1984' was also a set text. The Herald may need reminding that major portions of the plot revolve around the active enjoyment of sex and state suppression thereof.
I have a teacher friend who teaches at a fairly deprived school in Scotland. When you have a bunch of 14-15 year old boys in your class refusing to read the set text because one of the main characters is 'a fucking paedo', then you don't really have a choice except to open the discussion.
Where did your copy fall open?
Well, the copy of the novelisation of 'The Terminator' in the school bookshop would fall open at pg 63, a graphic description of Sarah Connor's roommate enthusiastically receiving and greatly enjoying cunnilingus from her boyfriend. The fact that both were shot to death shortly afterwards by a killer robot from the future is neither here nor there, I think.
Anyway, tone lowered, mission accomplished.
-
Hard News: The United States of Surveillance?, in reply to anth,
-
Hard News: The United States of Surveillance?, in reply to BenWilson,
What a ridiculous way to organize things.
Well, yes. But also ridiculous to expect humans to act dispassionately, logically and reasonably rather than treating absolutely everything as some sort of adrenaline-fuelled game of one-upping brinksmanship.
Ironically, the government could deploy secure comms on an ordinary smartphone, but don’t, because they don’t trust the platform. So then the principals use fully insecure comms anyway.
Anyone else recall stories from around 3-4 years ago about an NZ delegation to China for some big trade pow-wow (details in my memory are a bit hazy). There was a lot of chat around how their phones, laptops, etc. were attacked (spyware, etc.) more or less as soon as they stepped of the plane, something that was continuous for the duration of their stay. There was talk of banning electronic items from the delegation and providing throw-away phones and laptops. One of the underlying implicit thrusts of the stories was 'well, it's the Chinese: repressive, secretive, don't play a straight bat, hit below the belt you know. Can't expect anything better from them'. Yeah, those fiendish Chinese, eh.....
-
Hard News: The United States of Surveillance?, in reply to Ian Dalziel,
enjoy it while it is still allowed
Blocked on copyright grounds. Curse you, erm...Someone!
-
What have you been watching?
Mostly I use youtube as online radio to listen to music in the background. So, recently: Chopin, Rachmaninov, drum’n’bass, dubstep, old-school goa trance, sludge/stoner/doom, thrash. Also for watching the IoM TT races and some martial arts stuff. And cartoons with my daughter.
you the target and someone willing to pay for you being targetted. The fallback for not having someone want to pay to target you is generic ads.
I like to kid myself that there’s enough random spanners in the works there to blow a few fuses, and it’s defaulted to thinking I’m a stay-at-home mum based on the cartoons. Unacceptably sexist, Youtube. See me after class.
So then we still don’t have any evidence that data mining has had any success in this regard. I mean what you’re describing above was how people have been busted since the ancient world, well before there was any such thing as data mining. Someone informs on you, you’re investigated, and some real evidence is then found.
Yeah, that’s what I find disturbing about it. It’s a massive amount of resource, and a potentially massive intrusion on privacy and civil liberties, which seems to be more or less completely ineffective.