With Metro I think that Microsoft did something really unique, it had a digital design language that spoke to a lot of UI designers. Thats not to say they executed it particularly well, because even if it looks good that doesn't mean it is particularly easy to navigate.
It didn't look like any UI that had come before it mostly because it striped everything out of the design, and it that way it was really interesting. Designers had still be struggling with the move from page design to digital design and flat seemed like a good answer.
Side note: Its interesting that everybody is shouting about it looking like Android when they should really be saying that everything looks like Metro
It would just give the defense even more evidence. The decision was about whether or not Zimmerman shot him in self-defense, NOT whether or not Zimmerman was responsible for creating the situation that resulted in Trayvon Martin being shot.
Maybe it would have or maybe it would give the prosecutor more evidence. At this point we will never know. The only fact we do know is that it would have provided more total evidence for both sides to interpret what happened.
Yes, but to be Orwellian the self-censorship must be borne out of government intimidation. In this case the government hasn't intimidated anyone, we were just leaked information.
Unless you want to argue that Snowden intentionally leaked the PRISM slides so that society would be intimidated by the governments reach, thus giving way to society censoring itself without them having to publicly punish people that were guilty of thought crimes. But that's getting into Alex Jones territory.
>In this case the government hasn't intimidated anyone...
I disagree, with the government having the 'you're with us or against us' polarizing attitude since 9/11 along with Gitmo and an official kill list I think the U.S. gov't is pretty intimidating for anyone who doesn't fall into line.
Just look at what happened in Boston. A whole city shut down, house to house searches, an unprecedented reaction in the west for a bombing. No where else has that kind of reaction been seen, even in the UK when the IRA was blowing shit up, at no time was a curfew imposed and houses illegally searched by a militarised police.
The US is an incredibly intimidating place at times.
Sorry, instead of anyone, I should have said "average citizens".
Yes after 9/11 the government has a "your with us or your against us" attitude, promoted by Bush. However, your examples of Gitmo and kill lists are not evidence that this has continued. Those two examples only pertain to the ongoing war effort, not an intimidation campaign aimed at the average citizen, and the Americans that were involved were in the current warzone, not shipped off to Gitmo from the US.
I would address the Boston situation, but I don't think it is relevant. Sure shutting down the city is intimidating, but so is any other active shooter situation like a school shooting. You might feel intimidated by the police presence but ultimately the police are not focused on you.
But more to the point, of course the US is an intimidating place at times, everywhere is, but the key is that the intimidation is not focused on citizen self-censorship, which I think is the key to saying that we live in an Orwellian society.
Whether or not the US is an intimidating place, or debates about the validity of the Boston searches and curfew is a different discussion. They are not forms of intimidation aimed at self-censorship, and thus not valid reasons that we should assume that we live in an Orwellian surveillance state.
If you would like to have a debate about the role, or non-role of self-censorship in an Orwellian society, and you believe that some other form of intimidation is a valid criteria then I am all ears, but the discussion isn't about intimidation in general, only intimidation whose ultimate goal is self-censorship.
> not an intimidation campaign aimed at the average citizen...
> but ultimately the police are not focused on you.
This is exactly what is wrong. As long as these massive injustices don't affect the 'average' middle class unit it's all ok. As long as the military police thrashing through your house on their latest manhunt aren't actually after you, that's ok. It all seems pretty Orwellian to me, right down to the citizens actually justifying it all.
This seems pretty intimidating to me. It would certainly make me think twice about attending even the most peaceful of protests. Pepper spray and tazing is a common response to people objecting to the status quo. Hell, if you want to protest a political rally you have to actually go to a 'free speech zone', if that isn't Orwellian enough for you I don't know what is. Than again, the 'average' citizen probably is ok with a two party 'choice' and so doesn't need free speech.
And then you have Obama's HR347 'anti protest' bill which could potentially be used to lock people up for many years for protesting in an area which the Secret Service/DHS etc. has secretly declared a heightened area of security.
It's really frightening how much potential leeway there currently is for arbitrarily locking U.S. citizens up. All these loosely defined laws are sitting around just waiting for someone to come in and abuse them. While things are quiet and everyone is behaving it all seems ok, but as soon as there is a bit of trouble, another Occupy protest for example it will be a different story.
Watch how you see your right to due process being eroded away next, it's already not needed when hunting down suspects on foreign soil. You watch as language is changed, terms subtly augmented to make it ok to execute US citizens with a drone - you know, for your protection. Maybe you, the average citizen, aren't intimidated yet, but perhaps tomorrow you might be.
Ok, here's a real life example then. My parents were on Skype to me today, and my Dad was talking about some controversial topic or another - a couple of times my mum said "you can't say that over the internet, people are listening".
Furthermore I actually disagree that self censorship is the key component of an Orwellian society. I think surveillance itself is the key component. Reading the interpretation below I challenge you to deny that the US and many other governments aren't well on their way to the dystopia described by Orwell.
Police charging through your house without permission whist you sit back and say 'they are just doing their job' is the epitome of an Orwellian society.
I'm not quite sure about that, people feel quite intimidated when they see how this government treats people like Snowden and Manning. I would argue that the self-censorship is one way to avoid being treated like them.
While I agree that the government is trying to intimidate people with their treatment of Snowden and Manning, I think the goals of the intimidating are very different. In these cases the people they are trying to intimidate are potential leakers, not average citizens. The goal is not to promote self-censorship, but keep existing government employees from leaking classified information.
No. OP is saying that he is not outraged because he wasn't surprised. He may not like the fact that it is happening, but he is not outraged. That was the point of the comment. A little bit of 'I told you so', and a little more of 'stop getting so upset, because if you really cared you would have known.' The only thing that changed with Snowden is that now you know about it.
But lets be honest, we are talking about spying. If we didn't already know, we should have assumed, because the point of spying is to know everything. What did everybody thing spying was? Because it certainly isn't legal. And now that everybody understands what spying entails I am supposed to be outraged? Yawn. Wake me up when the secret police ACTUALLY start taking people away. Because until till then, the NSA is doing its job, and that is spying however legal or illegal it may be.
But when that day comes, if history serves as any precedent, I'll know about it before you do.
Absolutely. Unlike computer science topics art does not transfer well onto the internet. While one could learn a number of techniques for drawing and painting online, none of these make students into better artists, only better drawers or painters. Being technically better than your peers has some merit, but will not get you very far in the artistic community if the meaning of a piece is not conveyed well.
I think the primary mistake that the author makes is boiling art down into a collection of techniques. With this view they can easily argue that each of these techniques can be easily learned and replicated through online education. No reasonable artist would go to RISD and pay that much just to learn better techniques. If they wanted to do that they could just stay home and watch Bob Ross. Instead they to work with and be taught by the very good artists and students. And its these connections that make a RISD education worth 245k.
But to come to some kind of conclusion, art is not just a skill, at a very low level stops being about the artists technique and about its meaning, or communicative properties. Art education thrives on peer review, and the community around it. As a form of communication, you need to do and present art to other people, because without review, you can never understand how well you are communicating.
Art doesn't transfer well over any medium. That's why there are thousands upon thousands of Art School students that are not producing art after Art School. They go into different fields. You can't teach someone to become an artist in 4 years. For some people, you won't be able to teach them ever, not even in a 25-year rigorous art school program.
I made a ton of digital art. Some of it decent enough to be appreciated by snobby art school people. Especially the stuff that looks painted like http://detrus.nivr.net/art/photos/01/styx.jpg
All of my feedback was through the internet. There were entire genres of digital art fed by the internet and absent from art schools.
I also went to a cheap state art/design school after. Doing the same critique/feedback stuff I did online IRL is nothing special. Especially when people surrounding you are years behind making presentable work. It's probably harder to achieve aesthetic mastery with non-digital art, which some peers did in art high schools.
I'm not trying to say that its impossible, not by any means, but the RT article presents the statement as something that is assumed to be true, whereas the HuffPo article presents it among a large list of conspiracy theories. The RT article is clearly written to act a propaganda, and the article from the post gives a more objective view, where there is a slim possibility that the car was hacked, but it is just as unlikely as any other.
