Nail. Head.

The very MINUTE a celebrity turns 18 (sometimes even earlier), they're hung on the Daily Mail's wall of shame, often with a headline in the vein of: "Ooh! Look! Celebrity X is all grown up! Here's some hawt pix!!!".

You can practically hear the heavy breathing in articles like this where the young age of the actress is the focus of the article. Seems odd for a newspaper that claims to campaign against the sexualization and commercialization of childhood, right?

Then there's the straight up porn stories. I mean.. wtf?

Just have a scroll down the "FEMAIL" column on the right of any page. The "articles" listed there really say it all.

They're hypocritical bastards of the worst kind.

This approach would not work for the other aspects you listed, but we are talking about schoolyard bullying here, not murder or rape.

As has been pointed out so many times here already, people like yourself are under the impression that bullying is trivial when it's clear that the results can be catastrophic. If an adult did to another person, child or adult, what some bullies do to their peers, they'd be locked up.

Its not as simple as saying that some evil kids are being nasty to some innocent child.

Actually, it is. We criminalize antisocial behaviour in adults. We should do everything in our power to stamp it out in children. Adults have supreme power to stop bullying, but society allows it to continue, and people like you just harp about "giving the victims the tools to blah blah..." while in any situation other than the schoolyard, we'd be talking about fines and jail sentences, and the people blaming the victims would be rightly ostracized.

All I am saying is, you are not doing these kids any favors by telling them they are victims powerless to defend themselves from bullying.

Powerless? I never said that. Victims, yes, but victimhood doesn't automatically imply powerlessness. I agree that the victims should stand up for themselves. I just don't think that's where responsibility should begin and end. The bully is to blame. Always. No exceptions.

I don't think I'm going to convince you, so I'll leave you with your belief that the bullying made you stronger. I'm sure it helps.

If this turns out to be some organic matter that accidentally made the trip to mars with the rover itself, I'll be very disappointed.

Also, whoever tagged the article with the misspelled "curiousity"... great job.

From a cursory examination of the texts you don't actually have to pay for, Izzy's ideas amount to "just don't give 'em the satisfaction", which in my experience does not work at all.

I'm also instantly skeptical of the fact that this program is a commercial enterprise, but perhaps that's common in the US. I dunno.

But hey, if it works for a few kids then it's better than nothing... at least he admits in the text that his methods won't actually stop all bullying.

Today, I do not blame the people who bullied me because I accept that seeking to establish your social rank in the pack this is a natural part of the social dynamics of humans ( as well as other social mammals ).

You don't blame them because they were just doing what animals do? You think so highly of your new friends!

Ridiculous comparisons to other social mammals aside, your post reeks of Stockholm Syndrome. The rationalization you mention in your post is alive and well in your own comments. To me, it looks like you've fabricated this framework of acceptance after the fact as a way to rationalize what happened to you.

Accepting it, and acting accordingly is the most efficient way of stopping bullying.

The problem is, when you replace the word "bullying" in that sentence with other "ugly aspects" of human nature, it begins to unravel.

Accepting it, and acting accordingly is the most efficient way of stopping emotional abuse.

Accepting it, and acting accordingly is the most efficient way of stopping physical assault.

Accepting it, and acting accordingly is the most efficient way of stopping sexual assault.

Accepting it, and acting accordingly is the most efficient way of stopping murder.

Oh yeah, while we're at it.... self-deprecating humor is when you willingly make fun of yourself. What you're talking about is verbal abuse.

Hope that difference isn't too subtle for you. I suspect it might be.

"Some kids are bully magents" [sic]

You really believe that? You believe that if a bully "smells your fear" that gives them carte blanche to attack? That the person being bullied is culpable because they didn't react with the secret "anti-bullying" dance?

You're wrong. Life isn't a fucking movie where the underdog protagonist finally uses his intellect/superpower/whatever to embarrass the bully and win the approval of his peers. This is reality, where there will ALWAYS be a weakest kid in the group, and some kids are just fucking bullies for any number of reasons, and no amount of laughing it off or keeping it cool will cause them to stop or switch targets.

So, you're either incredibly stupid or you're just a cunt.

... either that or I've just fallen for a really clever troll.

My plan is to keep XP in a VM for web page testing and to soon get 8 into a VM so that I can use whatever useless version of IE it has for more testing. The only thing that Windows does to me is cause me to write: if($browser.msie){do stupid code;}

I agreed with a lot of what you said, but I think you might actually be pleasantly surprised by IE10. IE is far from useless anymore. They have come a LONG way since the bad old days of IE6.

I mean, you could only tear Firefox out of my cold dead hands... but when I'm forced to use IE9 or IE10, I don't actually mind. It's no longer an abomination.

Anecdote: Classic Shell completely hosed my W8 install after some Windows Updates. Most desktop functions simply stopped operating. I grudgingly reinstalled Windows 8 and paid the $5 for Start8 instead, which has been a good investment so far. YMMV, of course, but in this case the free app was more hassle than it was worth.

The example in TFS is stupid. In what sense is technology or Silicon Valley responsible for the way in which information or opinion is suppressed?

Individual companies set their own content standards, tune their own algorithms and make their own bad decisions. There's no digital conspiracy here.

TFA complains about Google's selective autocomplete. What's the big deal? It doesn't actually stop you from searching for terms that will potentially turn up material that some people might find offensive. It simply makes you type the whole term yourself.

Basically, the article seems to insinuate that the companies implementing these filters are maneuvering to become our de facto moral guardians, deciding for society what is "good" and "safe" to read or search for. This is backwards. The companies are merely responding to the demands of an already easily-offended society.

No way! I never get up before 3AM in the afternoon...

wait...

Would you say the awkward attempt was... awkward?

They had sufficient passengers to make operation viable until all the airlines were squeezed post-9/11.

It was that coupled with the increasing costs of maintaining the aging Concorde fleet that doomed them.

I believe there is plenty of demand for faster air travel. My brother lives in Dallas, I live in Scotland, and the thing I hate most about visiting him (insert Texas joke here) is the 10-11 hour flight between Heathrow and DFW.

If I could pay a bit more and shave several hours off that time, I would do it in a heartbeat.

...exist.

So Samsung finally release a phone that hits all the marks, that reviewers and consumers go crazy for, that actually has decent software on it.

So OBVIOUSLY to maintain this level of success they should go and fork Android and create a crappy customized version that nobody wants... yeah, that makes PERFECT sense.

I think Samsung (and TFA's author) are seriously overestimating the appeal of Samsung's own apps. I've got an S3 (the first smartphone I've owned, because it's the first one I've ever really wanted) and the Samsung apps and features are just bloatware:

• AllShare Play seems to be a cloud storage service for media files, with the curious limitation that it can only be used on the S3 and Windows computers. So in other words, it sucks. Dropbox or a similar service would seem to be a far better option.
• ChatOn is one of the stronger apps that Samsung bundle with the S3. It's a chat/messaging service that works cross-platform (it's available for Android, iOS, Blackberry and Windows Phone) and it's actually not too bad at what it does. Still, there are lots of other communications apps out there, so it's not exactly a killer app.
• S Memo is a simple note/sketch app with sync capabilities. It can sync up nicely with...
• S Planner is a decent calendar app, and it can import/export and sync with most calendar sources (Exchange, Google, Samsung account, etc.). It's not too bad. Shame the default (perhaps only?) skin is a brown/beige colour scheme that really doesn't fit with the rest of the phone. Again, there are LOADS of good calendar/task planning apps out there.
• S Suggest is like a social frontend to an app store. It integrates with Facebook (though I haven't tried that feature) and lets you see what apps your friends download and recommends new apps based on your preferences. I looked at a bunch of featured apps, and none of them had any comments whatsoever, so perhaps without FB integration enabled it's useless. I wouldn't go near this app, tbh.
• I haven't used S Voice. It certainly looks like a ghetto Siri, but I don't know how functional it is. Personally, I think Siri on iOS is a gimmick, which would make this a knock-off of a gimmick. I have no desire to use it.

What I actually love about the S3 is that it runs ICS like a dream, has a nice large, bright, vibrant screen, lots of connectivity options and a reasonable battery life. That, and the best content of the Google Play store are what attracted me, not Samsung's own apps which range in quality from "ok" to "why even bother?".