Some societies need a good turning upside down.

Egypt is one of them. There is value in most of the value being in the shock value. Egypt has already done the sorts of things you suggest. It doesn't work. Putting up porn actually makes a lot of sense from a decision matrix perspective here. First of all despite the pretense otherwise Egyptians watch a lot of porn (like most countries). It's sort of a great "in your face" mirror to a country rife with hypocrisy.

It's not like the authorities give much breathing room for more nuanced protest anyway. They're already in for a very unwelcome visit to the slammer if they are caught. Might as well go as transgressive as possible while you still can.

Generally agree. However, I wonder if their intent was to draw attention to women's rights, or antagonize people regarding women's rights, in those nations. Porn was the wrong choice. Instead of pet photos, they could have shown women in positions of power and not wearing tradional clothes.

I guess this is done simply to grab as much of people's attention as possible. And I mean all groups of people:

– for observers on the road, make them more likely to film this and share on social media;

– for news agencies, make them allocate as much coverage as possible for this incident;

– for regular readers, simply to more likely grab theirs attention.

This is hilarious and harmless. Who cares?

I find it far more offensive that you wouldn't even be able to post this headline without self-censoring in the major social media apps for fear of The Algorithm. How far the internet has fallen.

> And you might say, "Not everyone wants to see ads!" And totally agree! But like, the people who have to look at this eyesore now have to deal with a different eyesore.

That’s why across the world we should ban blanket advertisements like these. They’re a dumb eyesore.

Porn just exposes what is obviously annoying. But advertisements themselves are a sort of mind-virus you can’t opt out of. I can choose to not buy cable TV. I can’t (reasonably) choose to not walk outside in the public space.

It's all about consent, isn't it, we don't consent to advertising in every public space and yet we can't get away from it.

For it to work it has to be unpleasant. In fact, the more unpleasant it is, the more it works. It has to be more unpleasant than making the decision to remove the billboards altogether.

Showing a nice animal or a 'you're welcome' message achieves the goal of removing the ad, but falls short of fixing the root of the problem: the billboard existing. As long as it exists, the temptation and incentive to put ads on it also exists.

My mind went straight to goatse and yes, it was goatse.

> According to Olkkonen, the light board has been broken into. It is not a hacking incident.

> – It was clear what had been done. The media player's cord had been ripped out and its own content had been played.

To me, it's more an act of vandalism than hacking.

I don’t think I would ever stop laughing if I was driving down the highway at night and saw hello.jpg shining brightly from an LED billboard.

Even the Max Headroom hacker thought it was neat to broadcast some dominatrix (very) soft porn.

Hackers gotta hack.

We did the same thing back in the 80's.

The scenario was usually "Oh, wow! We got access! What do we do before someone notices in the next ten minutes?!"

Political people want to make statements. Hackers just want their hacks to be noticed.

It's just a computer running windows + big screen + app in full-screen mode that show the images/videos on a loop and can be controlled from a central server

Some version of Windows + custom software

Hopes, dreams and FM.

What do you mean by the use of the triple parentheses?

To be fair, both high speed trains and planes are very safe forms of transportation, with deaths numbering in less than 1000 per year.

Currently the yearly global death toll for cars is at 1.16 million and climbing

That speed and connectedness increases GDP by vastly more though.

Slow is good, not sometimes, but always.

Ask any cowboy. The fastest way to move a cow is slow.

Easy to say when you’re not, oh idk, waiting on a helicopter to deliver a life-saving organ transplant, or freezing your bones off because you don’t have electric heat.

The trade-offs are worth it and humankind continues to accept those trade-offs. Yea 60+ people died in a train crash. So what? Tens of millions ride high-speed trains on a weekly/monthly basis without any issues. So why would we overreact to anomalies when by and large the technologies we’ve invented are pretty awesome?

I’m no opponent to the “slow life” and I have a lot of critical comments regarding modernity (cars, social media, modernist art) and overpopulation but we don’t need to throw the baby out with the bath water here.