When it gets colder people complain about wanting a white Christmas.
When it snows people complain that the snow is causing the natural ice to be bad which lowers chances of decent ice skating.
When the snow melts and freezes over again people complain about slippery roads.
When people complain about these things it gets other people complaining about people complaining.
In short: people complain and people love it.
Obese people and airplanes, comedians love that one. Airlines not so much. Then again maybe they do. KLM figured large people can pay for two seats. Their argument, safety.
First off I’d like to say it’s up to the owners of KLM to deal with these issues and up to the passengers to cope with them. The final say most definitely is with the KLM. And it’s the passenger’s job to fight these kinds of things in court.
Having said that…
how does that work out? Last time I was in a plane the size of the seats wasn’t all that great. I’m tall enough to have my knees embedded into the tray table thing and fat enough to be just about uncomfortable between those two standard-sized arm rests made of armour plated plastic or whatever. Fine, it fits. Sort of. Let’s go ahead and put someone bigger in that seat, bigger in all possible dimensions. How would it be safer for that person in two seats? The arm rest doesn’t move. Surely it can’t be two seats next to each other. That leaves that you’re paying for your second seat ahead of you. That’d work for people who need the leg room provied they are willing to REMOVE the seat, but not if you’re a particularly wide specimen of the human species.
Ok, so I can’t work out for you why they want you to buy two seats. I also don’t know how this would improve safety.
Since you’re buying two seats, do you get two meals, two blankets, twice the amount of luggage on board? If the plane crashes and you die a horrible death, is your charred corpose with the chair number attached to it noted as yours on the passenger list? Well whatever. What the KLM is getting from this is an excuse to sell two chairs for one person if they are big, less weight on the same amount of seats (read: less fuel etc) and on the whole less uncomfortable passengers.
Here’s what I think they should do. Stop using people as a unit. Have people, just like luggage, factored in as weight. That’s all they are anyway to an airline company. At least be honest about it. That way everyone pays the same amount for the trip, since it’s based on their total weight. Add people on the luggage weigh in.
Did anyone else notice that the date when this starts is april 1st. This seems like a very well planned april fools joke to me.
Where as files on your computer go in the recycle bin, in real life that is not a good idea. I suppose that and a severe hatred of neck ties prompted some people to invent the paper shredder. Those things come with the best warning labels! Anyway, that’s not why I was posting this.
I don’t know what’s more disturbing here, judges throwing out files or people going through other people’s “household rubbish”. I think the first might be an honest but very big mistake and the second is very disturbing indeed.
The postman doesn’t go through your mail, the garbageman damn well shouldn’t go through your garbage…
Not too long ago the following book hit my doorstep… And Another Thing, the “sixth book” in the Hitchhiker’s “trilogy” by Eoin Colfer.
Read it, though not as quickly as I would have liked and well. The only impression it left with me is “this is a radio script”. Now in HHG terms that is not necessarily a bad thing as any HHG fan might know, this is how it started after all. But for a novel, it’s diet-HHG at best. The basic story is pretty entertaining, I’m a fan of Wowbagger the Infinitely Prolonged so that was a decent enough choice. It was also stitched onto the story as it ended in Mostly Harmless. Zaphod has two heads, sort of, as opposed to that horrible pop-up head thing being used in the movie (yeah I know, DNA’s idea. Doesn’t make it a good idea). So all in all, yeah, it’s HHG.
So why do I consider it HHG light rather than fullblown HHG. Why did I call it a radio script rather than a novel? Well. It lacks details. I wasn’t hearing the surroundings in my head. Less descriptions of the look and feel of the tech I suppose. And more importantly it lacks endless diversions and sidetracking into the infinite depths of some random culture on a random planetoid in a random nebula of a random galaxy with a very random history indeed. In short it lacks striking guide narrative. It is there, but they’re pretty short injections of tiny factoids rather than side-stories in a nutshell. Oh and there isn’t a single “dingo’s kidneys” in there. In stead we get “buffa biscuit” which just plain reminded me too much of the Star Wars “Bantha poodoo” remark (at the very least present in SWKOTOR1).
All in all not a bad read though. It’ll make a more entertaining radio play should it ever be produced than it does a novel though, if you’ve read DNA’s books religiously.
TPB to be made inaccessible to The Netherlands before the 9th of August 2009…
Though some suggest (in Dutch) that the court case got nerfed. Another perfect example of Pinky & the BREIN I guess. But they are getting close, I suppose.
Fox is doing a bit of hating again. Amusingly enough someone made a response to Fox. Be sure to check it out.
Mr. Nieuwenhuijs, thank you.
And just as a sidenote, there are many more examples of Fox doing this kind of idiotic false reporting such as this one. Does freedom of the press mean they can just plain pull shit out of their arses? And how do they manage to squeeze it all past that large rough-finished oak crucifix up there… I may need some time to get that image out of my head.
http://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/news/2009/07/northern-europe-provides-perfect-climate-for-drama-llamas.ars
I laughed, I’m not touching this one with a 10ft flaming pole though.
Stop wasting [insert resource here] BREIN.
Mouthwatering and a little grmblz.
I just thought WTF.
Then I thought I’ve seen shows about all sorts of far worse stuff. They didn’t moan about documentaries on whale killing or seal clubbing, hell, commercials for hardwood garden sets, and who knows what else like the airing of I don’t know, Fear Factor or for those old Dutchies among us possibly Wedden Dat…
Why now? Why at all? What will it accomplish? Are they so desperate for some media attention?
I’ll just return to my state of WTF.
Internet subscriptions should come with an additional cost for… not subscribing to a newspaper…? I don’t make this shit up, honestly. A government committee has (possibly googled) this conclusion together.
Clearly the Internet is to blame for the drop in newspaper sales. Just like TV would be the death of the newspaper a mere few decades ago. And yet your cat can still do its dirty work on the printed word. So the newspaper isn’t gone yet. Good. I like newspapers. Even if they’re a 1 time read more often then not. They’re good for keeping people off the seat next to you on trains. So is peeling an orange, but I digress.
The downfall of newspapers has come and gone several times. We’ve seen the rise of free newspapers, and not just the local rags. I don’t have anything against the free papers as such. They read well enough, all be it a bit full of advertising but hey, that’s why they’re free. I am not too fond of their public transport distribution, bunch of people stuffing free papers in your hands like you want them. But wouldn’t the free paper be the competition of a subscription paper? Sure the Internet has some impact, but why should every Internet user pay for something they don’t use? Do you charge pedestrians road taxes? And besides, if the Internet is your nemesis, use it! Be a better news site, you have the damned sources already, so in stead of going to print… let’s see if you can guess what I’m going to say next… oh yeah I remember… put them online. Oh but wait, you already are. So you’re competing with yourself and blaming yourself for it. Shit, I lost my train of thought now… but I’m sure you can see the random droplet of amusement here.
The grand scheme behind this is, apparently, conserving the diversity of the Dutch press. Which seems to me like all sorts of media. Word, image and sound. Fuck me, but I think the Internet combines those perfectly? Oh my gawd, the Internet is a medium too! That makes it part of the diversity and besides, the word and its meaning doesn’t change just because it’s no longer printed on paper. The only change is that you now have to put sheets of printed out bleached A4 paper in your parakeet’s cage! They’re not nearly as absorbant as newspaper, that’s for sure.
On top of all that, we could really do with a lot less newspapers. Is it really worth it to hang on to the lemmings of newspapers? To each their own paper, but I find a lot of the daily newspapers really hard to read. Not because they’re writting in a certain way or printed in a wonky font, but because they’re so good god damned full of advertisements and every page is complete and utter chaos. Half the pages look like the aftermath of a suicide terrorist clown after having bombed a paint store… but that’s just my 2 cents.
The Utrecht police are stepping up their fight against crime by using the internet. From Monday information on all break-ins in the city will be published online.
I wonder what this will do… Will it make people more aware of lacking security in their neighbourhoods. Probably. But then the locals chat enough with one another so that grape vine will do its job just fine in “spreading the word”. As far as I know people want to protect their fortress of sollitude, their castle, their home.
Seems to me a smart burglar can take advantage of this site in a few ways. After a burglary people tend to get more security measures. But since the time of burglary is known, you will also have an indication of the minimum age those security measures have. You can scan for probability of weaknesses. Maybe not this year, but in a few years sure. Plan ahead, why not.
But even if that’s a little far fetched, you can get a similar probability from looking around where a fair amount of burglaries has happened and with which method (they add it to the burglary posting!). This seems a likely problem with a lot of houses there. The locks and such will probably stem from the same period on most. The time they were built or last massively fixed up. Again, this seems useful to me if you think like a burglar.
And of course the plain and simple fact of “Oh I don’t need to go there to break in, they’ve already been burgled and are now without much useful things to steal.”
Who knows, maybe it will work. But I think it would work a lot better with a little less information…
DutchNews.nl