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beseku

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Designer of digital things based in Valencia. Former inhabitant of Sidcup, Tokyo and London.

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I've just come back from Europe (Spain) for the the first time with my operator and their new free roaming plan - it was amazing.

I pay Three £15 p/m for unlimited data, lots of intra-Three calls and some messages/calls to other networks (in the country I'm in at the time) and can now do that not just in the UK but in Spain, the US, Australia and more (http://www.three.co.uk/Discover/Phones/Feel_At_Home). That's cheaper than most local operators and a much better example than whats offered here.

I'd wager it won't be long before Three sims are being picked up by tourists and used as their main operator back at home.

At the speed we run, it would make no difference I would imagine. The benefits of shaving your legs only really come into effect for cyclists at the pro level ... those of us who can manage a steady 25km/h see far less benefit.

I always thought it was an urban myth that it made you go faster, and that the real reason was that road rash was easier to treat.

I'm assuming you don't live or visit the UK often, as that poster is everywhere and is used in various forms by huge numbers of companies. There is absolutely no political subtext to its use anymore.

It's a meme, the equivalent to using a cat image.

I'm not an accountant (about as far as could be from it) but in a discussion with an accountant friend of mine he suggested that there really is nothing that can be done about these avoidance schemes. He posited that the only real way to ensure all tax is paid for is to have no 'income tax' and then add a steep tax (30-40%) on everything that people buy. It seems like a hell of a large percentage to add on to everything, but then at least all money spent in a country would stay in the country.

I'm sorry if you feel it's unfair, but it's hard not to jump to such conclusions when the Twitter account is dead and nothing (visibly) changes.

It would certainly make people feel better if, with slowly progressing software, it was made easier for these testers to feel like they could properly test such software with the full knowledge that they can get their investment out in the form of a reasonable export function - they are after all providing a service to you by testing the software and providing feedback.

Interesting that this is written by one half of the Analog Folk/Fictive Kin co-op.

These guys are responsible for Mapalong, a (formally great) mapping service that they abandoned early last year and for which they ignore any requests for exported data (I've been asking for a .KML file for a year to move my points somewhere else).

"... they even managed to kinda lift the old DN icon ..."

I think you misunderstand. I'm not arguing as to whether the Flat UI guys copied them or not, but like the larger argument, the icon he is putting forward as copied work is itself conceptually very similar to other existing icon work(s). As a designer I would be more than a little miffed if that design appeared if I had created the Noun Project's version and not openly licensed it.

If that is the case, it somewhat undermines the claim that the assets are fully owned by them or even that ownership can be so quickly claimed.

I think you are hitting the nail on the head - with styles/aesthetic arguments like this, when is it a copy? Adding a leaf of paper into the icon? Colouring it in? Adding a line of faux text below the faux image? Which came first? Which was the origin?

My only point was that when you are getting hammered by people and the evidence you provide is that, it looks poorly thought out.

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Meeting A Troll 14 years ago

When I think back to the decisions I made as a 17 year old (and an 18, 19, 20 ... year old) I think it is perfectly valid to call a 17 year old a child.

At that age I would guess a large proportion can barely cook for themselves, have never lived alone, probably never paid a bill or shopped at supermarkets.

What was traded in? The infrastructure couldn't have been built without the sponsors and restrictive agreements which, after the event, didn't have much of an effect on creating a huge party spirit throughout the city.

The only trade was sponsors for any kind of event at all and I'm glad that happened, as it was a fantastic fortnight of sport.

It's interesting, as I live in London and, even after getting a bit angry about how strong the copyright police were being, would have to admit that the Olympics were a resounding success. Everybody I met who was previously cynical grew to love the event, the city was absolutely rocking, the park was tremendous and the worst thing about it was the subsequent downer the city is now on.

Ruined is a bit strong, I guess is what I mean.

What a walk down memory lane. I built my first website on one of these 14+ years ago as a coursework component (it was a fan site for the UK dance band The Prodigy). The browser (Fresco?) was awful and didn;t support frames, which was a huge bug-bear when Hotmail begun using them in its new mode.

I also remember playing Lander for hours at the back of computing class. And upgrading our home system to 2MB RAM and adding a HDD so we could install a game instead of swapping between the 12 floppy disks (it was a flight sim called Birds of Prey/War I think).

I think that depends on the angle you approach the issue from. Having spent the last three years in Japan after growing up in the UK, I find the general lack of respect towards electricity as a deadly force that is encapsulated in the flimsy plug design quite startling.

While the UK plug design is unwieldy in comparison, it also features a huge number of cleverly designed elements intended to provide the utmost protection to the everyday user.

Put another way, no. of shocks in Japan: 3 in 3 years. No. of shocks in the UK: 0 in 27 years (16 of which were as a child).

You know whats absolutely stunning about this baseline and every discussion on here about it? Not a single mention of any kind of understanding of design. Thats nothing short of ridiculous.

I'd take ten front-enders who knew about baselines and typographic rhythm, relative font-sizes etc. before I took one of these guys. Why? Because these are the people translating your designs into the final medium, so you have to be damned sure they will get it right. Without knowing how to use CSS to represent designs you are pretty much useless to me.

If you've ever had to hold an HTML guys hand through properly aligning the type or matching up colours then you would understand how painful it can be, and how vital this knowledge is.

It's only a violation in so far as its less of a violation to a persons free speech than blocking the whole service.

Users can be creative with what they want to express with this approach - with no Twitter at all, where is the wiggle room?

Exactly this - the UK banks tried to move closer to their US cousins a number of times, but each time consumers managed to stop a lot of these charges becoming commonplace, particularly with regard to charges or ATM fees.

If you want a really convoluted banking system, try Japan. Its not that you get charged for using another bank's machine, you just can't, with the ned result being that you are always on the hunt for the convenience store that contains your banks machine. My bank also offers no automated payments, and entering payment details is a sea of impenetrable numbers.

This is a massive sticking point for me as an Englishman living in Japan. The huge delay in getting films and, especially, TV over here coupled with the IP address and other restrictions in place by certain providers is a huge encouragement to me to Bittorrent instead. Luckily I now have a UK and US iTunes account that serves me well for most things.

My biggest gripe is with the UK sports companies - a lot of American friends can legally stream NBA, MFL and baseball via a global site that charges for high quality content. The English Premier League and cricket bodies are absolutely blind to this - there is no way for me to legally watch these sports via the web (and cable TV here isn;t possible in my apartment), even though I'd happily pay through the nose to get a fix. Because of this, I'm endlessly looking for ways to catch games via means that they spend huge amounts trying to chase and shut down.

Now that language and communication face such a low barrier, staggered releases and restrictions by market make no sense.

The website is nice with one small but massively important exception. The line height of the text is far too small, it should be around 1.5 times the font size at that size.

This article makes me very angry because the guy is coming across as looking for an excuse not to do the work. When I was building websites for IE 5 + 6 there was very little help out there - the bugs weren't documented and often you would be finding something completely new. I remember discovering an issue with HTML comments (!) after floating elements that seemed to not exist anywhere in Google.

Nowadays there are a ton of resources documenting all of the bugs out there because hundreds of people have already found and documented them. The site http://www.positioniseverything.net/ is a bible for developing through browser bugs, everyone knows about conditional comments, (not used until IE7 came out) and using Javascript is considered acceptable for so many more solutions or fixes. More importantly, there are a load of people who can offer help via many mediums, (Stack Overflow?) who have been there and done that.

Just because you don't agree with a business decision, don't invent excuses like this, you sound lazy.

Edit: In case I'm coming across as a grumpy old man, I started in the industry when I left University, so six years ago. I'm 29, not exactly a dinosaur.

I scored far lower than I thought I would, and am genuinely surprised given that I tend to write a lot and have always thought I had a decent vocabulary.

I would love to be able to compare my score to what it would have been before moving to a non-English country and learning/speaking a new language. I definitely feel that a large part of my memory is now dedicated to Japanese and not English...