maximusprime

If adverts have more of an influence on your kids than you do, then you're a terrible parent.

(Speaking as a father of a daughter who has a massive Lego collection and plays with it lots).

It's depressing to see so many comments that seem to believe we're all powerless to go against marketing and advertising. YOU are the problem.

If you're a parent, BUY YOUR KIDS SOME LEGO.

If brains are just "general" "maleable" "matter", then why as a man am I attracted to women and not men? I certainly didn't "learn" that. I'm attracted to women, because my brain was hard wired like that.

So you don't think people are "born gay"?

Given the way evolution works, doesn't that seem ridiculously unlikely?

Given the way we evolved to have clearly defined roles, and how we have obvious physical differences to enable that, doesn't it seem pretty obvious that we evolved our brain power differently also? eg men lots of brain power for spacial awareness for hunting etc.... women caring nuturing, far more brain power for language, communication etc

The other funny thing is that it's usually the same set of people who firmly believe that you are born homosexual, and that you can't be made homosexual by your upbringing. They believe sexual orientation to be biological. But at the same time claim that being 'girl' or 'boy' is something that you've been taught by culture??

I play Lego star wars the game, and obviously I now want all the characters in real Lego.

Doing movie/character tie ins, gives customers what they want.

I was pretty excited to see http://www.legosuperheroes.com/ (Lego are making a new superhero range in January).

And for people who don't want the movie tie ins, there are still tons of generic building sets you can buy.

We evolved to have specific gender roles. We have obvious physical differences related to those roles. We have obvious psychological differences as well.

I can only imagine that to some people, the truth is inconvenient to them in their "everyone is absolutely identical" utopia.

Do people want an end to gender specific toys? Certainly some do. But the vast majority do not.

I firmly believe, through interacting with people in general, and my own children, that female and male brains are completely different. They are hard wired to like different things, and behave differently. I don't see anything wrong with that, and don't see any reason to pretend there aren't those differences.

Go back 50 years and it was dolls and toy guns. Nothing has changed, boys still like building and destroying, and girls still like caring about things and craft things.

You can try all you want to make boys play with dolls, and girls play at killing each other, but they won't in general, because it's not in their biological makeup to do so.

Yes LEGO make LEGO "sets" that make a specific model. They also make a ton of generic building sets which teach you a ton of stuff. They even have walls of bricks in the shops where you can pick and choose which individual bricks you need.

If you don't like the specific building sets, don't buy those ones.

Every so often some people start moaning about how Lego is not the same as it was in their day. Stop whining.

(I've been a massive Lego fan for the last 30 years).

Oh and AWESOME NEWS! New DC sets coming in January! Now we can have Batman Lego sets again!!!!!

Are you serious? Most popular on Reddit and other liberal political communities maybe. I don't think anyone would claim he's the most popular comedian working today.

The story here is how to market to Reddit/HN rather than anything else.

IMHO It would also be a stretch to call him a comedian.

Yeah nothing bad could happen there could it rolleyes

AdBlock filters and censors content. Personally, that's why I don't use it. I don't want to see a censored internet, I want to see it as it was intended to be seen. If that means I get pissed with a website doing intrusive advertising and never go back there, then that's a good thing, as it's good feedback for that website. There is more than enough choice on the internet which means I will go to websites that play nice.

Adblock usage has been around 1% for the last few years, so I don't see any sign it'll increase.

</rant>

The distinction between ads and content is one that is ridiculously easy to close if needed.

The only reason that adblock works on a good number of adverts is that they're usually served from an external source. If you serve them from exactly the same place the content is coming from, and make no distinction between the two, then filtering becomes more problematic.

  * try websocket
  * on failure, fallback to comet

Edit: Come on... life is full of distraction. When you go shopping do you shut your eyes in case you see "SALE AT PENNYS!!!", or do you just ignore things that don't interest you? Jeez

Let's not pretend this is a "early adopter tech people know how to block ads, the masses will surely follow in time" thing. It's not.

You'd find similar massive disconnects if you asked who has a TV, who loves "Transformers" movies, and so on.

I don't think you can compare to the music industry. Blocking all 'advertising', regardless of whether it's intrusive, useful, etc, is a stupid and naive move by adblock users. Not to mention bad for the free open internet. Thankfully though most people agree that blocking all advertising is not the way forward.

  * It's not becoming popular. It's about 1% of users.
  * It's trivial to get around. Other options would be for
    webmasters to give Adblocking users a watered down
    version or just serve them up crapply encoded
    videos/images etc
    If adblock ever became popular, webmasters would quickly
    work around it, and you'd have an arms race, with the
    webmasters winning.
  * Adblock probably blocks 50% of adverts. The other 50%
    people don't realize are adverts.

Success isn't related to having top talent.

Most of the people buying smartphones can'e even spell "patent".

The answer is to tell everyone how much of a ridiculous unfair idiotic idea most patents are.

You shouldn't be able to patent software - it's trivial. You shouldn't be able to patent things like "Touchscreen used on mobile device" - It's obvious.

Patents should be reserved for things that aren't obvious, take a lot of research, and can be done many ways. For example drugs research. They should be denied and ruled null and void for most things related to software/consumer technology.