I’m a bit confused about the claim that the image was altered.

Sometimes skies look like that and grass looks like that and (the right) film is more than capable of capturing that with the appropriate saturation. Especially Velvia. Velvia is probably even cranking up the saturation, to levels you would not see like that with the naked eye.

Here is a landscape photographer showing their own favorite Velvia photographs: https://www.macfilos.com/2022/12/02/vivid-velvia-ten-fujifil...

Look at that first Tuscany image. The colors are a near perfect match. With the others the colors - especially the greens – can also be a lot more muted, however that seems to be down to darker greens as a starting point and also the light/weather (less saturation when it’s overcast and there is no direct light).

On close examination of the wallpaper (to a level of detail not visible on early 2000s screens) also shows all the hallmarks of a real photograph with remarkably little retouching.

On the left and especially the right you can see ugly clutter behind the hills which is only not distracting if you don’t examine the photo to closely. Anyone who photographs landscapes knows the issue of hard to hide clutter that nevertheless from my perspective also grounds the photograph in the real world.

Also clearly visible on the hills: tracks/paths through the hills. This is also something hard to avoid in landscape photography, though you try to minimize it with perspective. The same applies as to the clutter: my view is that this grounds the photograph as an actual photo.

Third hallmark of photography: the foreground grass is all out of focus! This is often hard to avoid. Techniques like focus stacking now exist, but as a single photograph that is often a trade off you have to make if your landscape shows both things close by and far away.

So, yeah, looks 100% like a real photograph and shows what a look Velvia is, mostly.

https://archive.is/D0FOH "Microsoft did admit to darkening the green hill" in the caption for image 1 (Bliss).

Based on the borders of the image shown being extended from the actual wallpaper file (take a close look at the top and left) it was probably cropped as well.

It's entirely possible the color was edited by mistake (i.e. converted poorly) - IIRC the color profile on the tiff was not sRGB.

It is interesting to consider what we talk about when we talk about whether an image was photoshopped because I do actually think that is a fuzzy line and different people may think of different things.

I always assumed this discussion was about exceedingly crass color shifts, the removal or creation of elements not in the original image, not some dodging and cropping.

It looks a little popped even for Velvia. He may not have enhanced it, but what are the odds no one at Microsoft did?

I always thought it was selected because it references the curve and most of the colours of the old Windows logo.

https://www.cleanpng.com/png-windows-7-microsoft-clip-art-wi...

Dresden is truly blessed with cinemas and has four European Network cinemas. Three of those have assigned seating, though none do price discrimination based on where you sit. Culturally the assigned seating isn’t taken very seriously in those four cinemas, though, to the point where staff in one cinema sometimes tells visitors that they can sit somewhere else if they want to. In practice we still try to get seats where we want to sit and stick to them (front/middle, away from other people), though if people come in and sit right behind us we might change rows.

With new ticketing systems and online booking being introduced I think there has been a shift towards assigned seating. I remember the first time I was in a Dresden European Network cinema (Schauburg in 2015, that’s the oldest cinema in Dresden, 1927) and there either being no assigned seating or a seat printed on the ticket that no one cared about. We also weren’t asked where we wanted to sit. That has changed with a new ticketing system and now we are always asked about where we want to sit.

I think these ticketing systems come with assigned seating and that’s also a factor in assigned seating being introduced.

Notably, the one cinema that doesn’t have assigned seating also doesn’t offer online booking or reservations at all.

The four big multiplex cinemas in the city have assigned seating and do price discrimination based on where you sit – so it’s taken somewhat more seriously there.

So, yeah, my guess would be that the role online ticketing and the respective software/service/devices those cinemas use for that do all play a role in what role assigned seating plays and those can also trigger a cultural shift from sit where you want to assigned seating. (I have vivid childhood memories of my hometown long before online booking with price discrimination sections but no assigned seating in cinemas.)

Just goes to show the power of his art. I don’t find that bit the least bit surprising but this inconsistency always has been at the heart of his art for me and to a large extent also what his work is about.

Yeah, and that is precisely the point.

This contradiction at the heart of it does a lot of work and is a very valuable part of the art. This contradiction has led me to think a lot about rules and their role in society and to what extent pure strict rules based societies are a worthwhile goal and on the other hand what it means of we make exceptions.

This is a joke right? If elon musk had done the same thing (which he obviously could) i don't understand what is the value

If Elon Musk did this because he wanted to (not make a statement, just to achieve some other goal he has) then that‘s not really art. If he did it to make a statement about how different rules apply to billionaires and he wanted to point that out then that to me would be an interesting artistic expression, sure (though he probably wouldn’t do that).

For well more than a century artists like Duchamp (e.g. Fountain from 1917) have been playing around with what turns something into art and makes it valued and where then line between art/not art is and what that has to do with explicit and implicit rules.

To me graffiti in its contemporary form in general but also specifically Banksy is a pretty natural continuation from that discourse that fits right in. That to me has always been the additional layer to any work by Banksy, whatever other (often obvious) statement the artwork might make.

What evidence is this claim based on?

I‘m a bit confused by your statement. In Afghanistan a NATO coalition fought in the war. 456 British, 301 French, 158 Canadian and 54 German soldiers died.

Besides that I’m really unsure why you think that more military power would have helped. I really do believe that in a general sense this is true: since WWII the US has won every battle but lost every war. And that’s not down to an inability to be tactically extremely successful. It‘s down to taking on war aims that are impossible to achieve or at least extremely difficult and (most notably currently) being strategically totally lost.

> Besides that I’m really unsure why you think that more military power would have helped.

More troops on the ground means more resources to help keep the peace. I think that's just something we can take at face value to prove more military power would have helped.

But the issue was political power, not military power. The US performed exceptional - we kept at it in Afghanistan for 20 years, through a financial crises, and more. But without the rest of the world signing on to help politically and even militarily, instead choosing to jeer and strut their rooster feathers from the sidelines, there was only so much we could do. And now even today folks seem to like to cheer that the US "lost" Afghanistan without realizing what the repercussions are for those who live there.

The US actually won quite a few wars since World War II. Iraq being a very good recent example. That one is kind of funny because for a long time the consensus has been America screwed up, but the last I checked Iraq is doing much better, has a functioning parliamentary style government, and the only real negative thing to say is to ask whether it was worth it or not to have that come to be. I would say yes.

> It‘s down to taking on war aims that are impossible to achieve or at least extremely difficult and (most notably currently) being strategically totally lost.

It's been like 2 months and we've decimated Iran's military, killed a lot of their leadership, and neutered their nuclear program and the best they can do is threaten to lob missiles at oil tankers like the Houthis. It's unfortunate but time will tell whether this was a "strategic failure", and it's even more so unfortunate we can't in real life run the counter-factual where Iran continues to build missiles until we actually can't do anything, then they close the Straight and that's the end of maritime trade as we know it.

The amount of suffering the regime in Iran and the US administration are willing to accept and can bear is probably wildly disproportionate and much higher on the side of Iran.

That also substantially weakens any leverage the US has.

A mere slight increase in gas prices and slight threat to the economy can already substantially weaken US will to fight …

Fighting people who think they are divine leaders with a mandate from God is the worst. No logic, no possibility of logic, and they will burn everything and anything to stay in power.

Doxxing (and the moral judgements attached to it) is a relatively new and not widespread concept.

You can’t just say “but this is doxxing” and expect people to know what you are talking about and also attach the same negative label to it as you do the same way you would when you call out murder or theft.

I personally don’t find “doxxing” that useful as a concept and as a guidepost to what I consider ethical or not. People who use the concept tend to be extremely zealous with at, to a point where anything identifying anyone is doxxing (and doxxing is to those people self-evidently unethical) and that just doesn’t seem useful or practical to me at all.

As to this particular case: if you create something as corrosive, destructive and powerful as Bitcoin society should know you. You don’t get to hide in anonymity at all.

It seems unlikely to me that this conspiracy (conducting a war intent on closing the strait while communicating something else) is anything more than a post-hoc rationalization.

Obviously all actions the US takes have knock on effects elsewhere but those effects tend to become quite unpredictable and also weaker the further you are away from the place where the action happens.

We could talk for days about the knock on effects of the Iran war and sort through them and how all the different actors in the world will react and whether that’s on balance good or bad for the US … but it’s all a bit cute, right?

Making up sources as a journalist and being found out will result in a professional death sentence. It’s simply completely irredeemably unacceptable. That’s why it can be a convention that journalists don’t provide their raw sources.