An amusing little time-waster.
H/T to Jason Ciastko for the link.
Update: I didn’t do as well as Liam did (in the comments), but he’s right that the upper left seems to provide much more opportunity for scoring:
December 21, 2009
Persuasion having failed, they now turn to emotional blackmail
Frank Furedi looks at how modern educators have adopted the methods of Soviet-era authorities to try to turn children into a home-based fifth column:
There is a long and sordid tradition of trying to socialise children by scaring them. The aim of such socialisation-through-fear is twofold: firstly, to get children to conform to the scaremongers’ values; secondly, to use children to influence, or at least to contain, their parents’ behaviour.
When I was a schoolchild in Stalinist Hungary, we were frequently warned about the numerous threats facing our glorious regime. I also recall that we were encouraged to lecture our errant parents about the new wonderful values being promoted by our brave, wise leaders. The Big Brothers of the 1940s saw children as tools of moral blackmail and social control. Today, in the twenty-first century, scaremongers see children in much the same way, exploiting their natural concern with the wonders of life to promote a message of shrill climate alarmism.
If you want to know how it works, watch the official opening video of the Copenhagen summit on climate change (see below). Titled ‘Please Help The World’, the four-minute film opens with happy children laughing and playing on swings. A sudden outburst of rain forces them all to rush for cover. The message is clear: the climate threatens our way of life. It then cuts to a young girl who is anxiously watching one TV news broadcaster after another reporting on impending environmental catastrophes. Then we see the young girl tucked into bed, sweetly asleep as she embraces her toy polar bear… but suddenly we’re drawn into her nightmare. She’s on a parched and eerie landscape; she looks frightened and desolate; suddenly the dry earth cracks and she runs in terror towards the shelter of a distant solitary tree. She drops her toy polar bear in a newly formed chasm and yells and screams as she holds on to the tree for dear life. The video ends with groups of children pleading with us: ‘Please help the world.’ You get the picture.
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The evolution of the smart phone
Charles Stross looks at the rapid changes in the mobile computing and telephone markets brought about by the smart phone:
Pre-2005, digital mobile phones typically ran on GSM, with GPRS data limited to 56kbssec, or Verizon’s CDMA. This badly choked their ability to do anything useful and internet-worthy. By 2005, the first 3G networks based on WCDMA (aka UMTS) began to open up. By 2009, 3G HSDPA networks can carry up to 7.2mbps. The modem-grade data throughput of the mid-noughties smartphone experience has been replaced by late-noughties broadband grade throughput, at least in the densely networked cities where most of us live. (I am not including the rural boondocks in this analysis. Different rules apply.)
To the mobile phone companies, 3G presented a headache. They typically offered each government billions for the right to run services over the frequencies freed up by the demise of old analog mobile phone services and early TV and other broadcast systems; how were they to monetise this investment?
They couldn’t do it by charging extra for the handsets or access, because they’d trained their customers to think of mobile telephony as, well, telephony. But you can do voice or SMS perfectly well over a GSM/GPRS network. What can you do over 3G that justifies the extra cost?
Version 1 of their attempt to monetise 3G consisted of walled gardens of carefully cultivated multimedia content — downloadable movies and music, MMS photo-messaging, and so on. The cellcos set themselves up as gatekeepers; for a modest monthly fee, the customers could be admitted to their garden of multimedia delights. But Version 1 is in competition with the internet, and the roll-out of 3G services coincided (and competed) with the roll-out of wifi hotspots, both free and for-money. It turns out that what consumers want of a 3G connection is not what a mobile company sees fit to sell them, but one thing: bandwidth. Call it Version 2.
Becoming a pure bandwidth provider is every cellco’s nightmare: it levels the playing field and puts them in direct competition with their peers, a competition that can only be won by throwing huge amounts of capital infrastructure at their backbone network. So for the past five years or more, they’ve been doing their best not to get dragged into a game of beggar-my-neighbour, by expedients such as exclusive handset deals (ever wondered why AT&T in America or O2 in the UK allowed Apple to tie their hands and retain control over the iPhone’s look and feel?) and lengthening contractual lock-in periods for customers (why are 18-month contracts cheaper than 12-month contracts?).
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Vikings put on terrible performance, get beaten badly by Carolina Panthers
In another late game on Sunday, the Vikings didn’t do anything right. The offensive line was terrible, making it impossible for Adrian Peterson to get any kind of running game going, and putting lots of pressure on Brett Favre. With no running game, the Panthers defensive backs were able to concentrate on stopping the pass — and did. Favre was sacked four times, and Carolina’s Julius Peppers made both Phil Loadholt and Bryant McKinnie look helpless and lost.
If the loss to Arizona was bad (and it was), this was easily much worse. There were no indications that the Vikings cared about this game, and Carolina took the game to them.
The defensive line had nearly as bad a night as the offensive line did, giving up a 100 yard rushing performance for the first time in 36 games. The loss of middle linebacker E.J. Henderson was painfully apparent, as the linebackers were far too frequently caught out of position or, even worse, failing to wrap up on tackles. Steve Smith totally dominated Antoine Winfield, who had a forgettable night.
And, just to complete the night, Brad Childress and Brett Favre got into an argument that the network TV cameras caught:
“Yeah, there was a heated discussion, I guess you would call it,” said Favre, who finished 17 of 27 for 224 yards with no touchdowns and an interception. “We were up 7-6 at the time. No secret, I was getting hit a little bit. I felt the pressure on a lot of plays. We had seven points. So I think everyone in the building was like, ‘They’re not moving the ball, they’re not getting points.’ Brad wanted to go in a different direction and I wanted to stay in the game.
“We were up 7-6. Yeah, it’s not 70-6, but we’re up 7-6. So I said, ‘I’m staying in the game, I’m playing.’ I don’t know if it was exactly to protect me, or we had seven points, I’m not sure. That’s his call. But we talked it out. We didn’t have time, I didn’t have time to sit there and say why or what. My response was, we’ve got to win this ballgame and I want to stay in and do whatever I can. Now, unfortunately, I didn’t do that, but that was my intention.”
Despite losing, the Vikings benefitted from an earlier game where the Steelers beat Green Bay on a last-second TD, which gives the Vikings the NFC North title for the second year in a row.
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