Hang on, what?

What is stopping you doing that via EFT (electronic funds transfer)? It's free in the UK, and most of Europe, and far more secure than sending a cheque! What does the cheque do that an electronic transfer can't? I literally cannot think of a single thing!

I can pay companies in other countries, either for free (if they're EEC) or for a £5 fee if they aren't. I'm pretty sure that most situations where you want to pay a foreign company, a fiver on the bill is pretty much nothing.

As one poster above mentioned, the English banking system is FAR older than your new-fangled all-American one, and yet cheques are so rare here that most small businesses refuse to take them (the fees are high enough to put us off). So... if we can do immediate, secure transfers for free within a continent, and for a fiver everywhere else, what's stopping the US? I'm genuinely interested to know your answer from the point of a small business.

First we were told that Ukraine needed to DEFEND her territory. And we were told weapons we sent would only be used for defence. Now, every day, I'm reading news reports about Ukrainian drones (UK supplied, mostly) hitting targets in MOSCOW. Doesn't sound much like "only for defence" to me. And now indiscriminate killing. Nice.
Sure, Russia aren't exactly the most moral or ethical country out there. And yes, if they weren't to stop advancing their forces into Europe I'd agree with stopping them at some point. But that doesn't include using drones to kill *everyone in the area* autonomously, or to strike Boris-the-normal-member-of-the-Russian-public's apartment building in Moscow because... retaliation makes the Ukrainian ex-comedian (no-one's laughing now) feel better?
Or is it just me, and going on the offensive against Russia is perfectly OK?

Absolutely Banksy should be identified. Not for "fans" though, but so he can be prosecuted for every single instance of vandalism that he has conducted over the years. Many people in the UK have been imprisoned for just one instance of graffiti, let alone multiple offences over decades. There is absolutely no reason one man should get a free pass just because some people think his art is "clever" or "good". I'm super impressed by some of London's street artists, yet I still feel it's wrong to deface a train carriage with one's tag.

I've always vowed that should I ever come across an unprotected Banksy "work", I would deface it with your classic spunking cock motif. That would be my own "commentary", and there can be no argument that it is not as equally (in)valid as the posh Bristol bugger's illegal scrawlings. I'd challenge anyone to define exactly why one man can deface a wall with a shitty picture of a girl holding a balloon, but another cannot add a spunking cock to it.

But, of course, I'll never come across (pun intended) an unprotected Banksy, because rather than hosing the vandalism away and charging the idiot for the cost of doing so, they immediately stick up plexiglass until they can remove the entire wall and sell it.

Either make graffiti legal for people of all ethnicities, talents and social class, or punish everyone the same. But to have a two-tier system where one man's crimes are praised and others are jailed is the most telling 'commentary' of all.

Sorry Banksy, you're a cunt, regardless of your real name (that most people have known for 20 years anyway).

So... there is a great deal about America that I love and respect. However, here are my safety-related reasons for never wanting to actually visit the United States:
- A sizeable number of police and other law enforcement agents don't seem to know the law, or ride roughshot over it. Sure, some people receive compensation for wrongful arrest, but I'd rather not go through the trauma in the first place. And we're not talking one or two here, but thousands or more such incidents, to the point where wrongful arrests don't even make national news headlines.
- In many states, random people are allowed to walk around with guns on them - either hidden or in plain sight. Not sure which is worse.
- In addition to the above, there seems to be a not insignificant chance of being killed in a mass shooting event. Sure, I'm not a student nor am I a teacher, so my chances are a little decreased due to that, but... America has mass shootings at concerts, casinos, supermarkets, in the street... and often, too.
- You can be arrested for crossing a road. A normal, basic non-motorway road. What is that all about?!
- Racism is very much still a thing. Coming from the UK - a country that never even had to abolish slavery because it was never legal here (yes, that's true) - it seems like America still has a way to go before people of different skin colours treat each other with the same respect.
- Prisons are run for profit, encouraging an increase to the prison population.
- If you DO happen to break the law, American sentences are insane. In the UK, no-one recieves four-hundred-year-sentences, or life terms without parole for smoking a joint.
- The whole shooting-people-who-are-running-away thing.
- The whole shooting people thing.
- This recent situation where people demonstrating get shot thing.
I mean... just ONE of these issues would make me feel a little unsafe, but all of them combined? Count me out. Sure, many of my problems above are about guns. I don't like guns outside of suitable facilities such as a shooting range. There's literally no argument for needing a gun in a supermarket, other than "our country is so unsafe that you might need a gun in a supermarket for self-defence". Quod erat demonstrandum, IMHO.

My old school currently costs over $80,000 at today's exchange rate...

Teddies Fees

Even back in the 90s, my parents couldn't afford the fees. Luckily (?) I was smart enough to get a scholarship...

For those suggesting employing a private teacher for the same money... no, you'd need a teacher for each subject (very few are multi-disciplined at secondary level) plus you'd miss out on social development... which seems to be a thing for many home schooled kids...

This. 100%. It's a bit like people who don't get vaccinated (without a very good reason). A few of them and it's no problem, we (and they) still benefit from herd immunity. But if everyone acted as selfishly, then we'd be back in Victorian times with a third of children dying before they reach five years old. To say that he'll only watch a film if he gets it for free by copying it from someone else is such a dick move. It's not like saying "I wouldn't have bought it anyway so no one is losing out", because he isn't paying for ANY of the films he's watching. His barrier to payment is not financial (he can easily afford such expenses) and is not due to hassle... in fact, copying a file from a friend - requiring time, effort, a USB drive or suchlike - is clearly more hassle than a torrent download. Not that I believe his assertion that this is what he does. Nope, his entire *reason* for not paying for the media he consumes is "I don't want to pay. *YOU* can pay for it, and *I* will reap the benefits. Thank you dickheads for paying for my lifestyle". That kind of personality element - expecting others to pay to support you when you could easily pay yourself - is, frankly, obnoxious.

I'd love to walk into his house, cook and eat some of his food, piss in the toilet (and not flush) and sit in his favourite chair. Then, when he asks what the fuck I'm doing, tell him that I don't believe in paying for such luxuries, and instead prefer for other people to pay for them with me simply reaping the benefits. And he would have to accept it - or, as I suspect, admit that he's just a massive hypocrite bell end.

So yeah I used to work in sales when I was younger, and did well. In fact, to blow my own trumpet (parp) purely for the purposes of backing up my viewpoint, I was in the top 5% of salespeople in every company I worked for over that 10-year period, winning plenty of "best X" prizes along the way. So I must have known something about sales. One thing I know for sure is that scripts don't make a good salesperson. Sure, you can roughly map out how to overcome each objection a client may have, but if you stick to the "actual language" of a script, or even a "flowchart" of one, all you end up doing is pissing people off by repeating yourself, not listening to what people are actually saying, and failing to understand why they aren't saying "yes, please, take my money now!". If your product needs selling (which, having AI sales agents, I'm assuming this knob's company does) rather than people flocking to you off their own backs, then the most important thing is that the salesperson must be flexible enough to understand the client's individual position, and how your offering meets their needs. Because the range of human emotion and buying criteria is infinite - and the fact that people like people, not machines - a good salesperson needs to be able to genuinely empathise with the person to whom they're selling.

Once your AI sales agent can empathise, demonstrate feelings of their own and have a true understanding of emotions and what affects them, then sure, replace humans with bots. But... I'm pretty sure AI isn't both sentient and empathetic quite yet, so... good luck selling whatever shitty "service" your shitty company is trying to sell, dickhead.

I'll have to try this... though my facial recognition is so bad I'm not sure it'll help. Put it this way... if I saw my own mother in a place I didn't expect her to be, I wouldn't know it was her. I cannot picture anyone I know "in my head" - in fact, I don't seem to be able to picture ANYTHING in my head. People say "picture an apple in your mind"... and the best I can do is to think of a blurry green blob - I can "see" the colour of the apple, but no detail whatsoever. So faces are just way too complex. I could not tell you what anyone's face looks like - I couldn't even help put one together with a photo fit, not even of those closest to me. On the other hand, I have crazy musical abilities (e.g. being able to play along with a song the very first time I'm hearing it... I just seem to know where it's going to go next 99% of the time) so obviously just had my character ability points allocated differently when I was generated. My only concern about the above technique is that I'd end up calling everyone with a big nose "Albert", i.e. the name of one person with that particular trait that I've learned...

Wow. I *might* just about accept that Somalia isn't a place that currently attracts too many tourists, and the current political climate in Myanmar makes seeing such a beautiful country difficult.

But Papua New Guinea has some of the world's most beautiful unspoiled natural areas, Vietnam is a number one destination for many Brits (and plenty of other nations) and Brazil? BRAZIL? Have you not seen the beaches there?

With respect, perhaps the behaviour and attitude of those like you who cannot appreciate such incredible natural and cultural wonders might be the very reason some of the world's countries wish to discourage Americans from visiting?

As someone who knows how to solve a cube, but isn't very fast, I thought this might be quite a good thing to buy. My assumption was that it might help me learn some algorithms for faster solving. That was until I figured out what was nagging me... 24 displays? But.. a cube has 54 faces, not 24? And then, clicking on the link, I saw it. It's a 2x2 cube, not a 3x3. Who would be "puzzled" by a 2x2 cube? Awful.

Come back when it's 3x3 and I'll buy one.

I’m not sure I really get the intention of trigger warnings for non-extreme individuals as you mention; I'm genuinely interested to know why they exist, and if they actually work in practice.

The most common examples of trigger warnings (particularly when they are literally called and labelled as “trigger warning”) I see are 1) in a YouTube video about (say) unsolved crimes that start with a trigger warning saying "this video deals with subjects including suicide and child sexual assault"... or 2) a news article about the trial of (say) an accused violent rapist that says underneath the headline "this article covers violent sexual assault".

Surely by mentioning the "trigger", anyone who doesn't want to think about that stuff is now thinking about that stuff?! It's the whole "don't think of a blue elephant" thing.

Sure, you might say "ah no, it's for people who don't want to hear about those subjects *in depth*... but then why have they clicked on a video about the suspicious suicide of a diddler or a news article about Pakistani rape gangs in the first place if the subject matter is likely to upset them? Someone wants to read about the rape gangs as long as the subject of rape is completely avoided? It's a literal impossibility to do that.

As I say, I'm talking about trigger warnings in the way they are commonly used. I totally believe that (for instance) a TikketyTok video should warn people that it's about to show a man being beheaded before launching into the gruesome 4k slo-mo gore. The majority of people would surely want to be warned so they could say “no”. But that's not a TRIGGER warning, it's a CONTENT warning (and an “unexpected upcoming content warning” at that. The two are very different. The whole "triggering" thing is about the SUBJECT MATTER, not the content itself.

So... does anyone here at all actually react to a trigger warning labelled as such? Have you clicked on a news article about a subject that is something you want to avoid, and then shut down the browser window when the trigger warning tells you that, yes indeed, the article you have clicked on does actually discuss the subject matter that you already knew you would want to avoid? What factor have I missed here?

So, pretty much as expected, everyone here is saying the same thing - how damn annoying DJs are, and how as consumers we DO NOT WANT THIS.

But what we really need to happen is for the ARTISTS to get involved. We need THEM (at least those with integrity) to realise that playing something over their music that they did not themselves include is an insult to their artistic vision, a distraction from the experience they had planned for their fans.

Maybe if these tech companies get pressure from BOTH ends of the business supply chain, as it were, they'll realise that they are destroying any goodwill that might be left out there...

I (genuinely) have a couple of hundred books of mine that are/were "pirated into" the LibGen database... so... does anyone know how I can go about claiming my settlement cash?

registrations_suck you've made quite a few similar comments on this thread, and I get your point completely. However, may I ask you this: what about when an artist has decided (as many of them DO) that they want ALL of their fans - rich and poor - to be able to see them, and set the ticket price at a level that enables this. They are protected by law against scalpers... but in reality, scalpers get 80% of the tickets. In this scenario, your "poor people shouldn't cry about not being able to afford luxury goods" doesn't apply. It's more a case of "Taylor Swift made it wholly possible for me to see her, but a criminal got hold of the ticket I would have had, and illegally sold it for profit".

What is your view on that? Should someone not be policing the law as it stands? Is the law incorrect in your opinion? Who should enforce it if it IS a good law? What can be done to enforce it? Is there no place for kind-hearted artists who see a picture bigger than instant profit in your world? Should society be all about who can make the most profit, and no charitable or kind decisions should be permitted?

I really would be interested to read your answers.

How about this:

- When you turn up at the venue, to get "through the barrier", you have to put into a machine the card that you used with which to purchase the ticket. And you're not allowed to hand it back to someone behind the barrier. You have to put it back in the machine to come out, too.

- If someone can't attend, then they get a refund and any spare tickets go back on sale in a second wave.

If you look how the touting works, it's normally a case of people with multiple credit cards and multiple accounts, often using humans (rather than bots) to buy as many tickets as possible.

I'm sure there are problems with this method, but how many touts are going to be cool with handing over *their own credit card* to the random Swiftie who buys that particular ticket from them and only getting it back after the concert? I wouldn't, for sure! Maybe they'll cancel the cards before the gig. Trust me, after opening and closing 30 credit accounts every 2 months, the banks will stop giving them new cards. And if they've somehow used the same card to buy multiple tickets (which is supposed not to happen anyway), you either go in as a group or not at all... and stadium staff would easily spot a group of 40 completely unrelated people all going in on the same credit card (breaching the "non resale" rule and thus being refused entry).

Essentially, you're preventing the main mechanism of touting, by ensuring that the original purchaser of the ticket HAS TO attend the venue, or at least trust the attendee of their ticket with their credit card... whilst giving genuine "I can't attend" people the option of a full refund, with a second wave of ticket sales perhaps they day before the event for any that were refunded.

Note that no additional information here is collected other that what you provide ANYWAY, so people concerned about IDs and privacy need not worry! Sure, you could make it more secure by having to present [any form of] ID that matches the name on the card... but I reckon just the above might be enough to stop 90% of the touts.

Go on, rip my "great idea" apart now... please...