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No wonder so many people get trapped in a cycle of poverty.

You think eating out is what traps people in poverty? You might want to learn about poverty traps and their causes. There are lots of causes of poverty. Eating out is not a meaningful cause.

That's more than every other day! And the latest figure is still more than every other day.

If you look at the number of restaurants out there (and the obesity statistics) this should not surprise anyone. People like to look down their nose publicly at McDonalds and the like but the simple fact is that vast numbers of people eat at these places routinely regardless of what they actually say. You think they stay in business because people are eating at home? People LIKE to eat out, they like fast food, and honestly a lot of the food tastes better than what many people can cook themselves.

WTF people, the fastest way to save money is to not eat out; doesn't everyone know that??

Several points on that. Basically your thesis isn't necessarily supported by the facts.
1) There is plenty of evidence to suggest that eating healthy tends to be more expensive than eating badly, at least in the short term. Even if you do manage to save money (which can be done) it's going to come at the cost of an investment of time and energy.
2) There is also evidence to suggest that eating out can be cheaper than eating at home for many.
3) Eating at home requires having the time to prepare the food. Speaking as someone with a young child and a working wife this time can be hard to come by for many people even if you would prefer it.
4) Eating at home does not necessarily equal eating healthier nor does it necessarily equal costing less. It CAN but it often doesn't.
5) Many people don't know how to shop economically in grocery stores and grocery stores have no incentive to help.
6) Food culture is as subject to fads as anything else. One should expect to see variation over time in where and how people eat their food.

You need to remember that Mozilla is a non-profit charitable organisation which is a miniscule mouse compared to its competition, especially from one of the world's biggest multi-billion dollar spying corp empire Google (who are coincidentally, the biggest bribers ("lobbyist") to the US Government).

Since no one ever donates to Mozilla, how else are their full-time staff and devs supposed to live in a world run by money?!

But you do make a good last point however, which is that since they can't appeal to the masses like the billions Google spends on Chrome adverts, Mozilla could however go down a different direction. But to be fair to Mozilla, they are trying to become more privacy focused, but again, they can only do so much because that's like going against the hand that feeds them!

Chill out troll, you're going to have an aneurysm.

caniuse.com is a pretty rubbish place to get stats,
here, go direct to the source instead: http://gs.statcounter.com/

I'd like to remind you, Firefox is a non-profit charitable organisation with a miniscule amount of funding for how much they have contributed to the open web and privacy!
Remember, they championed web standards compliance and the importance of the W3C and accessibility guidelines at a time when Microsoft wanted to make the web into a proprietary model, a bit like what Google is trying to do now.

And now Mozilla along with Opera are the ones who are championing the latest web standards, especially HTML5, CSS3 and 4, and especially Javascript (EMCAScript) upon which the entire web is built.

I shouldn't need to remind you that Google is a multi-billion dollar spying corp empire who's pumped an enormous amount of marketing power into their reskinned Apple Safari (AppleWebKit) rip-off, and you're comparing goliath to david's little baby kid?!

What I also find amazing is that Microsoft were heavily fined for bundling IE into Windows, but when Google advertises their browser all over Google.com (the window to the web for most people), and bundles Chrome into Android OS or their laptop OS, that's perfectly fine!
Perhaps it has something to do with the fact that Google is one of the biggest bribers... errr, I mean, "lobbyist" to the US Government?

Wake up retard.

It's interesting how freedom of association can be applied very selectively. Sure, union members are associating with each other supposedly freely, but if a shop is a closed union shop you can't get a job there without being 'freely associated' and if a union is established the employer in many cases cannot avoid having to 'associate with it' (well, employer can shut down the shop and move on, which sometimes happens and for a good reason).

> Outside of Valve I don't think many developers ... pay enough attention to game design to consistently produce quality games

That's because a game is too dependent on Art + Tech. You can have the world's greatest designer but if they don't understand how to capitalize on Tech & Art _tailored_ for their project you're dead in the water.

There are few Game Designers that are recognized as delivering the goods. Sid Meier, Shigeru Miyamoto, Will Wright, etc. How many of these game designers do the general public even know??
http://www.businesspundit.com/...

> Games are an awkward state of limbo these days,

AAA games maybe, but not indie. Content creation costs are spiraling out of control. People are getting fed up with grind-for-gear ooh shiny with shallow gameplay.

Minecraft just reach 54 million across all platforms.
https://twitter.com/pgeuder/st...

Stop re-posting the propaganda from the bulletin board at the compound.

Congress may be 'backdoored' by lobbyists, but AIPAC is hardly the one you should be concerned about. The ones with bigger influence include:
the tech lobby
the mining industry
the defense industry
the agribusiness industry
big oil
the financial lobby
big pharma
the AARP

Each one of those is trying harder to screw you over than AIPAC is (except AARP if you're old enough). Why do you not worry about any of them? AIPAC is miniscule compared to the top ones.

Continuing the list:
the pro-Israel lobby
the NRA

Are you also worried about the influence the NRA has? Why not? Hypocrite much? Is it because it does not work as an excuse to cover up your latent anti-Semitism?

This comic sums it up nicely.

Regardless of the method of transmission, television is dying, and the culprit is dumb content. People have more entertainment choices than ever before and television just can't keep up.

One major problem is that television content is dumbed down. Advertisers know that their commercials have less effect on intelligent people who are better at critical analysis, so they instead target kids, teens, seniors and the unwashed masses. Broadcast networks need content that will pull in those demographics. Make your content too complex and nuanced and you'll lose your targeted demographics. The result is a partnership between networks and advertisers that aim for the lowest common denominator sitting in front of the screen.

For a few decades, we had niche programming channels that offered something that wasn't stupid, but those channels have mostly been bought out by networks that have discovered that the LCD model is more profitable. Now those stations are content deserts, filled with little else besides reality shows about midgets, vagina clown cars, crabs and motorcycles. PBS is still around, but their programming is a niche within a niche. So we get this downward spiral where smart people are turned off by television, content gets dumber, more mainstream people are turned off by television, content gets dumber, and the IQ bar keeps falling.

The other major problem is that the way we receive content is dumb. Intelligent people have been buying gadgets for years that give us on-demand access to information. As the price has come down and those systems became more mainstream, everyday people got used to it as well. But television content mostly comes from unintelligent sources. On-demand IPTV might change that, but the content owners are fighting it. It is why streaming sites like Hulu and Netflix, as well as cable TV on-demand systems are hodge-podge patchworks of content.

I can't count the number of times that I have been frustrated because of the distribution methods of media. Netflix will have a series available for streaming, but then you hit one episode that is available only via disc rental. Hello, Bittorrent. Hulu will have content for streaming, but then you missed the cutoff for how long a new episode remains up. Hello, Bittorrent. I'll want to record two shows to my DVR that play the same time/night, but I only have one tuner card in my PVR. Know where I'm going by now?

The last problem is more of an issue limited to North America, but our OTA DTV system just doesn't play well with small, portable devices. We have too many channels that broadcast on VHF bands that require large antenna. The ATSC standard doesn't work well in areas bombarded with multipath interference or with moving devices (although it has gotten much better). Granted, the VSB standard was picked because it is more efficient over large areas, but it would be nice if any ATSC extensions would add OFDM as well. Large cities could have a low power UHF OFDM SFN (single frequency network) mesh for mobile handsets and apartment dwellers, while suburban and rural areas would still receive the main transmitter on the VHF-Hi VSB bands with their roof mounted aerials. Too bad that DTV for the VHF-Lo bands sucks and that the military occupies the area right above channel 13 on the VHF-Hi band.

You will create disasters worse than that of any communist dictator if you think that you can just remove all regulation and have the free market spring into existence, like a maiden from the lake.

I was ready to take exception to this comment, until I decided to check my theory with Google...:

Time's Top 10 Environmental Disasters
Lenntech.com's Top 10 Anthropogenic Environmental Disasters
Business Pundit's "World's Worst Environmental Disasters Caused by Companies

Just off the cuff, it looks like most of these were caused by corporations operating in nominally democratic countries rather than by communist states. I guess maybe you're right on this one...

Yes, I'm sure that corporations left to their own devices would never cause us any harm.

You're going to have unwind that for me, I am only aware of the standard definitions of these terms, to wit:

Hard money policies are those which are opposed to fiat currency and thus in support of a specie standard, usually gold or silver, typically implemented with representative money. (thus)

2. Describes gold/silver/platinum (bullion) coins. A government that uses a hard money policy backs the value of the currency it uses with a hard, tangible and lasting material that will retain its relative value over time. (thus)

The term “hard money” usually refers to one of two things. It can, first of all, be used for actual gold or silver coins, for example. Using this definition, we can say that a hard money policy is one in which the government recognizes currency which is based on an actual, fixed item which is considered valuable.(thus)

I'm just grabbin' the first few out of Google, here, maybe you have some sort of non-standard definition of these terms.

Oh, my I must disagree. Carly started a set of corporate disasters that are still dragging down HP, ranging from their purchase of Compaq (which was an amazing mismatch with HP's former reputation for quality hardware in many fields, and the loss of manufacturing quality by preserving any products or personnal from Compaq is still hurting HP).

There is a good article at http://www.businesspundit.com/10-reasons-people-hate-carly-fiorina/. It points out, correctly, that HP made money _despite_ Carly's misguided decisions, not because of them: HP's printer business continued to be quite profitable for reasons that were in place before Carly's reign.

Of course, Foxconn's employee suicide rate is less than that of the rest of the Chinese population taken as a whole, but don't let that derail your derp.

Gates hasn't been hurt too badly...

Freedom is hard fought for and easily lost. Those that try and take rights and freedoms away try and do so under the radar. For instance who would have thought that RIPA would be used to spy on half a million uk citizens a year [itpro.co.uk]. Most uk citizens I speak to don't know about the eborders scheme [bbc.co.uk], where everyone is catalogued each time they enter or leave the country (with up to 2.5 billion journeys stored at any one time).

That's given. However the underlying problem with this picture is not the surveillance, it's the motives of the government. The UK is one of many countries in the world, and whatever the UK does doesn't reflect humanity. I disagree with a lot of the Brittish way of doing things, but in the end I don't live in the UK thus it's not my problem to deal with. I'm not saying though that ultimately we all benefit from a surveyed society -- I'm saying that I don't know if we do. What we do know without speculating is that we already live in a surveyed society and that we are already using this technology to survey eachother. I agree thought that I don't have the information about cell phone locations, but perhaps one day I will.

The vast amount of information being gathered, as you say via your phone, cards, internet, etc, is worrying. You merge this into one coherent database and you have no privacy left.

Now you see you can call me a pedantic fool or a semantic wizard or whatever, but that right there is not true. Even with this information I still have some privacy. There are things I have done that nobody knows, but me. The same goes for you. The same goes for all of us. If you don't understand that you are merely oversimplifying the concept then there's no use in continuing this as I already know this will be the focus point of the discussion no matter what we say. If we come to the point where we have absolutely no privacy, and right now we're far from it, I would be the first one to call for a revolution. But privacy is a relative term, and I don't feel like my privacy is invaded, not yet at least.
Still once again your mistake, just like any other frightened person here, is that you assume that the totalitarian state is inevitable. Why is it inevitable? Because George Orwell wrote a book about it? Because the UK government has tricked its citizens? This not evidence, this is speculation. Don't let your fear come in the way of your rationalisation.

Many laid down their lives to earn the freedoms we take for granted today, and it would be disrespectful to give them away for temporary convenience.

Now you see that's just flag waving, patriotic, nonsensical rhetorics. I don't fall for that kind of nonsense, that's the kind of bullshit that justifies war. It truly pains me to see that you repeat that like a brainwashed parrot.

Clearly the OP does not really understand what advertising is usually about. Most mass market advertising does not try to provide information, it is providing associations. It presents something enjoyable (here it is assumed that Seinfeld+Gates==Enjoyable) and then presents the branding that they want to be associated with that enjoyable feeling. The crazy part is that this works, and in a weird way can be suggested as actually improving the product. Since the next time the subject of the advertising uses/sees the product, they will subconsiously access that association with enjoyment ... therefore the product is more enjoyable as a result of the advertising.

I am not saying that this is a good thing, but it is how things work in the real world.

Now you can argue either way as to whether Seinfeld+Gates=Delicious ... I didn't actually watch the comercial myself ... but they might be reaching as far a transitive association all the way back to the Seinfeld show, which almost everyone agrees was enjoyable. In any case I don't think there was ever any intent to have actual informative content in the comercial ... they are just "building the brand".

See Seth Godin's book "All Marketers Are Liars"
http://sethgodin.typepad.com/all_marketers_are_liars/

or a quick review of it here:
http://www.businesspundit.com/lying-marketing-and-perception/

http://www.businesspundit.com/sub-prime/

I've worked for many different companies, privately owned and public, and I would disagree with this a somewhat; but I would agree that being ruthless and totally pragmatic is an absolute necessity, as is a willingness to play god with people's lives.

I think it's the culture of an organisation which can encourage that sort of ruthlessness, I saw it in one employer (who were very ruthless when they cut 20 people earlier this year, including me), by the way they dealt with people who were "let go".

The first completely robotic fast food restaurant opened in 2031

It won't be anything like that long:

http://www.techdirt.com/articles/20030801/1345236_ F.shtml
http://www.businesspundit.com/archives/000463.html
http://onenews.nzoom.com/onenews_detail/0,1227,211 026-1-454,00.html

Mr. Viscusi argues that using a flat value discriminates against young people. A study he conducted puts a $7 million value on a human life. But applying that figure to both the 12-year old saved by an auto-safety rule and the 70-year old whose life has been slightly prolonged by clean-air rules "creates a severe inequity," he says.

1 human == $7 million (that's a lot more than the UK government says a human costs).

Now, the MPAA would say a DvD costs about $20, and a downloaded movie directly relates to a lost sale.

Do the math and it works out that a human life is worth about 5000 downloads of all seven movies.