Pfft... that's old hat in the UK. As you can see from this advert, Sellafield were clearly disposing of their unwanted nuclear waste as part of a children's breakfast cereal back in the 70s.
FWIW, that advert is guaranteed to confirm Yanks' stereotype of "English" children as all having upperclass "British" accents and enduring lousy weather. All that's missing is rotten teeth.:-)
If your going to troll as an AC, don't Preveiw under your UID then post Anonymously, because your sig is inserted into the post,
No, not unless she intentionally pastes or types it there manually.
"Proper" Slashdot sigs are inserted dynamically at page load time, they're not part of the text. Indeed, while I can see your sig from this page while I was logged in, if I log out and reload, your sig (and everyone else's) disappears.
Christ, I forgot about the iPad. So yeah; that's another thing that, while they clearly didn't invent the original concept, they were the first to break through and popularise in a remotely mass-market way.
So it was pure luck that the iMac, iPod, iPhone and iPad were all major successes (two of them stealing and transforming markets Apple had no previous success in)? Yeah, right.
Even if it *had been* purely down to Jobs' skill as a hawker, it'd still have been down to, er... Jobs' skill as a hawker rather than "luck". (^_^)
US mile, Irish mile, Scot mile, nautical mile, statute mile? Which one. There are >50 different mike definitions.
Yes, but the distance everyone means by the plain "mile" (as opposed to "nautical mile", "Irish mile", "Underwater Kiwi-centric mile" or whatever) *is* standard.
Unlike "pint" or "ton" which can refer to significantly different quantities in (e.g.) the US versus the UK- and where you might have had a point- "mile" on its own virtually always refers to the regular international "statute mile" at 1760 yards. (*)
(*) Well, apparently the pre-1959 US mile still in use in some contexts varies from the international mile by a whopping... wait for it... 3.2mm. Which obviously makes a big difference in everyday discussion.;-)
Miles are for retarded
Did you mean "for retards" or "for retarded people"?
I've ridden some trains in Europe which were nicer, but the tickets were 3-5 times as much. It was cheaper to hop Ryan air than go by train and many times faster.
When you say "Europe", do you mean the UK? Because quite frankly, our trains are obscenely overpriced and a damning indictment of the failure of the privatisation of the rail network, offering service no better than in many other European countries but at a vastly higher price.
I didn't really mean that they just simply dump-luck stumbled into their current position - I'm just sort of amazed that the prior smartphones sucked so badly. They are lucky that Microsoft, RIM, Nokia, and the others didn't get their act together before they had a chance to swoop in and do it right.
"Doing it right" actually deserves more credit than it gets, though. It's easy to see how it should have been in hindsight, but so many companies seem not to do it, and Apple seem to have the discipline to do so.
It's quite possible that Microsoft et al could have taken years more to "get it right" (*). And- to be fair- that's something else to be said about Apple. They might have realised this and prolonged the iPod cash-cow era a few more years, keeping the iPhone in reserve for as long as possible. That's a risky game, of course, but one that- at the time- would seem more attractive to a back-covering, status-quo, risk-averse CEO.
(*) And remember, of course, that Microsoft didn't end up monopolising the PC market because their products "did it right". They "did it"... and that's about all. PC-DOS/MS-DOS- which essentially sealed their dominance- was little more than a 16-bit knockoff of CP/M that betrayed its 1970s 8-bit origins and required increasingly unwieldy and architecturally messy hacks to get around the design limitations as time went on. MS won because they piggybacked onto IBM's then-dominant position, leveraging that to their own benefit and then exploiting the power gained to retain that dominance.
I think that Sony's downfall was that they got hung up in the content business and gimped their products in order to keep the content side happy. Things like the MD player should have been the first sweet MP3 player, but they insisted on keeping it locked to ATRAC. This also factored in their decision to stick with non-standard technology like Memory Stick (which could be protected).
You're pretty much right about that- I've said much the same thing myself about how Sony's conflict of interest, NIHism and general arrogance caused them to throw away the MP3 market. However, this goes back further, to the hobbling of the (potentially far more powerful) Mini Disc format in the early 90s. (Probably not coincidentally the first major format they'd released since their takeover of Columbia's record and film divisions in the late 80s got them into the content business in a big way).
Apple became profitable on the back of iMacs, Powermacs and Powerbooks.
All things considered, it's surprising how easily forgotten the original iMac seems to be nowadays, given its success at the time as their big comeback product following years in the doldrums and the return of Steve Jobs- but more importantly, as the product that really established Apple as the "cool/fashionable" brand we know today (good or bad). Its transparent styling was influential enough to kick off the (admittedly short-lived) fad for see-through computer accessories around the turn of the millennium.
It's the iMac that started their current reign of success that's still ongoing 15 years later, and paved the way for the iPod and then the iPhone. And perhaps that's *why* it's forgotten- the later, and even more influential (*) "i" products that the iMac arguably made possible have overshadowed it. Even so, it can't be ignored without giving a false impression of where today's "iPhone company" came from.
(*) No, the iPod wasn't the first MP3 player by a long way, just as the iPhone wasn't the first smartphone. But they were both well-enough designed to break both product categories through to mainstream popularity and fashionability- and in doing so, to dominate those newly-opened markets.
Apple is very lucky that they created the first smartphone with mass-market appeal - otherwise the new guy would have completely wrecked their iPod business.
Well, I'm pretty sure "luck" doesn't enter into it. Firstly, while I'm no fanboy, Apple had already demonstrated their skill in taking the MP3 player from geek toy to user-friendly, desirable mass-market device, and that was at a time when they had no track record outside the computer industry (and nor did many computer companies). Apple- the computer manufacturer known for Macs- stole the portable music market from the once dominant Sony (who- to be fair- equally squandered their techncial lead and mindshare and deserved to lose it) and the established consumer electronics manufacturers.
So the fact that they- with no real previous mobile phone experience- were able to enter a market dominated by mobile phone companies (like Nokia) and *again* steal that market by popularising a paradigm shift suggests that it being pure "luck" is unlikely.
Secondly, it's been observed (and is common sense) that Apple would have known very well that a device like the iPhone would be likely to decimate sales of the iPod, which was around its peak at that time. But Apple would also have known that (just like the MP3 player) if they hadn't done it, someone else would- though perhaps later rather than sooner. So rather than have someone else eat their lunch, it made sense to do it themselves. (They may also have guessed that the smartphone market would have been even more lucrative and with potential for expansion).
It's to Apple's credit that they had the foresight to do the opposite of what most companies in their position would have, i.e. not released the iPhone for fear of damaging their current cash cow, sat on their laurels and only done something when it was too late, the market had shifted and the new leaders were companies that'd had no such entrenched interests to protect.
"Goblin Force" sounds like either (a) a really goofy, family-oriented fantasy movie that's the favourite of the kid who always gets beaten up in middle school (*), or (b) a pornographic movie that has absolutely *nothing* to do with mythical creatures.
(*) Partly because he's the kind of kid geeky enough to like "Goblin Force" and partly because he was naive enough to actually *admit* that "Goblin Force" was his favourite film.
That said, even if it had been, I don't like the principle of absolution of guilt by takeover. If being taken over absolves the company of moral guilt, that raises the possibility of moral hazard, since a company can do evil stuff and get taken over by another who don't have to worry about its reputation- hence the original owners/managers still get paid a high market value for their actions. If the immorality of the original company is more likely to tarnish the purchaser, that will reduce its market value and hence punish the original owners.
(*) I was almost going to say the PDF was dated July 2012- which seemed quite a long gap- which I might have taken to mean the chain of events was possibly set in motion before the takeover. Then I realised "11/07/2012" was in the ass-backwards US format and it *was* November!
I went [to the Ministry of Sound club] before it was popular. Twice! And I regret it. Twice! It was all about owning the most expensive shirt when, at the time, everyone in the scene was wearing jeans, t-shirts and trainers.
Doesn't surprise me. The Ministry of Sound was a major part of the corporate appropriation and commercialisation of the UK dance music scene. It rose to prominence around the same time (early to mid 90s) that the Tories were trying to outlaw the "underground" egalitarian Ecstasy-related house music and rave culture that had taken off here in the late 1980s- via the likes of the Criminal Justice and Public Order Act 1994 (with its infamous "repetitive beats" definition)- and the "superclubs" like them were on the rise.
Shouldn't be surprising that MoS was founded and owned by James Palumbo, a privileged, Eton-educated son of a Conservative peer, then.
To be fair, I never liked most Ecstasy-related dance music full stop and wasn't into that culture, but I could respect some of that early stuff for its energy as a youth culture. MoS et al, OTOH, seems to be responsible for the endless, life-sapping, unoriginal recycled "heard it before 5, 10, 15 and 20 years ago and it was toss then" stagnated chart fodder we still have today.
If you cut the chaff (Marketing infant formula? What the Fuck? That's supposed to be "evil?")
Yes, it is. In fact, it's probably the biggest reason many people dislike (and boycott) Nestlé by far, and something that goes back almost 40 years.
Nestlé promotes powdered formula as being superior to breast feeding to poor mothers in countries where they know very well that (a) there's insufficient access to clean, uncontaminated water and (b) people often lack the ability to maintain the standards of hygiene required.
Under such circumstances, both these significantly increase the risk of disease and infant death compared with breast feeding (which would normally have been the method used otherwise). (*) Nestlé clearly knows this, and has been the subject of fierce criticism from countless charities and health bodies, but continues promoting its formula this way.
(*) There's also the fact that such poor mothers are more likely to over-dilute the formula to save money, leading to the risk of malnutrition
This runs the risk of such information being used against them if it beomes politically expedient for those in power- now, *or in the future*, and for whoever is in power- like them or not.
True. But this is hardly new either.
Please re-read it in its original context. What I was talking about was the fact that the technology now makes it practical to- if desired- record and retain vast amounts of information about the entire population (either intentionally or by acquiring data originally used for other purposes)- and then to mine it.
Even if people weren't known to be of interest at the time it was recorded, it's relatively straightforward to go through it if this changes in the future. And the large amounts of data make it simple to automatically spot connections if it's mined correctly.
For all the evils of Hoover and Nixon you describe, they were limited in this respect by the amount of resources necessary to spy on people. Digital technology makes it cheap and easy to do this in a near-unlimited manner, in a way that even George Orwell didn't envisage in Nineteen Eighty-Four. Add (e.g.) an always-on Kinect camera into the mix and you're already way beyond the latter in panopticon terms.
The spy agencies used to be far more aggressive in violating our rights - the big thing that's changed recently is that they have more technology at their disposal than ever before.
Technology that- combined with the public's mass adoption of related technologies- makes it orders of magnitude easier to spy on them, violate their privacy and (relatively) cheaply gather intelligence en masse about virtually everyone, even if they're not currently a target. This runs the risk of such information being used against them if it beomes politically expedient for those in power- now, *or in the future*, and for whoever is in power- like them or not.
Obviously, there are checks and balances against this, and if it was revealed by someone that such bodies were breaking those rules, I'm absolutely *sure* that person would be deemed a hero by the American public and the offenders punished harshly. *cough*
Deluxe Paint was the only good thing they ever published, and they didn't even make it.
They are the anti-Midas. Everything EA touches turns to shit.
From what I understand, they were generally quite highly-regarded in their early years (take a look at the ratings for their C64 games at Lemon 64). They also placed great importance on giving credit to authors and programmers- which is ironically the antithesis of their later "EA Widow"-era reputation.
My understanding is that it was during the early 1990s when they started concentrating on the 16-bit Mega Drive/Genesis and SNES consoles and becoming more sequel/franchise-focused (i.e. Madden sequels, then FIFA) that they began mutating into the company that people know- and hate- today. Possibly not coincidentally, this was also the point at which founder Trip Hawkins ended his day-to-day involvement with the company in order to get 3DO up and running.
Unions tend to (try to) get monopolies on (certain types of) workers, so in most cases, the scare quotes around "free market" are very apt. Not that monopolies are any less "free market" than government solutions are.
And companies tend to (try to) get monopolies on both markets and workers, so by the same token many "free markets" aren't, even if they became that way through "free" means. But my point was that someone apparently on the American right- who tend to be comfortable with the latter and still consider it a free market, can't turn around and oppose the former, which is just another grouping of people, albeit not in favour of the companies. Especially if they're arguing against that and in favour of a solution that requires more government intervention (which the US right traditionally opposes... well, until it's in their favour, that is).
Well, I agree that American unions have the potential to become just as abusive and self-serving at the expense of others. I've heard that one of the prison workers unions was pushing for stronger sentences and more jail time because it was in *their* members' interests. That's beneath contempt and every bit as evil as a company doing the same thing.
But that's my point- if one is comfortable with companies doing this sort of thing and leveraging their size and power to manipulate the government, then it's (in principle) no worse for unions to be doing it, if- as the American right seems to be- they're comfortable with the latter. That's not that I approve of it personally, but those that do shouldn't have double standards.
(Disclaimer; I'm not American and don't have any plans to live there).
Re:If by "looking good", you mean "looking like iO
on
Inside OS X Mavericks
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· Score: 3, Insightful
I remember Jobs way back in the cat era poking fun at Vista's pre production name "Longhorn" and now they name their own OS "Mavericks" which as every QI watcher knows was originally a term describing unbranded cattle.
They had no choice; if they'd kept up the feline naming scheme, the only one left was "OS X Domestic Cat".
Which still would have been better than "Mavericks".
Liberals and democrats in the USA are not left wing Obama would be a Tory (wet/One nation) or center right politician in Europe.
Yes, I'm well aware of that personally.
Fact remains though, that AFAICT your average Republican (in the US party political sense) or right-winger thinks- or at least claims- that Obama is a "socialist". The fact they believe this shows how laughably skewed American politics are to the right. (They wouldn't know a real socialist if they hit them with a wet fish). But judgements of "left" and "right" in that situation are implicitly relative.
The fact remains that in this case, the person I was replying to is clearly to the right of Obama and it's ironic that he berates unions as a "liberal" (read: "left wing", "socialist", "commie", "whatever") solution and advocates lawmaking, despite the former being far more free-market (for the reasons I gave) than the latter, government-centric solution he advocates.
Yet, since we have a liberal, union happy president then such laws will never happen.
I assume you're using "liberal" in the US sense, i.e. to mean "left-wing"...
The same thing can be accomplished with labor laws, and not have to resort to adding the inefficiency of a union. The last thing we need is another entity with an outstretched hand taking for employees.
...which would make it ironic that you're advocating the government-created-and-enforced solution and criticising the "free market" one of one group of self-organised-people (i.e. unions) competing for their interests against another group of self-organised people (i.e. companies).
It's just a shame he could only make 7p/minute from it.
7p per minute is 60 x 7 = £4.20 an hour (US $6.52). That's only two-thirds of the UK national minimum wage of £6.19 and below even the lowest US minimum wage of $7.52.
Of course, if he could leave them hanging on the phone at that rate, or not bothering him, that'd be different.
The nice thing about Nintendo portables for a long time has been the pocketability (depending on your definition of pocket). But the 2DS looks like a disaster. Squares don't fit in pockets nicely, especially not big squares.
Well, there is the bulk- to me, there's also the fact that the flat design looks a bit naff aesthetically, but mainly that the inability to angle the second screen *looks* un-ergonomic (whether or not it is).
But regarding those screens and the inability to fold the device, there is a very telling comment after the Ars Technica article (emphasis mine):-
Actually, according to USgamer it is a single screen, masked by the case design:
This explains the hingeless design. A single screen is cheaper and more power efficient than two screens with the same area. The case merely makes it look (and function) as if it had 2 screens.
Regarding your other point:-
The D pad and buttons are halfway up the machine, making the lower touch screen a real PITA to use
I agree; I'm no gamer (though I own a DS Lite that I don't use often) and my first thought was that the buttons should have been a *quarter* of the way up (i.e. halfway up the lower screen as they would be on the original DSes and the 3DS).
Slashdot Mirror
Pfft... that's old hat in the UK. As you can see from this advert, Sellafield were clearly disposing of their unwanted nuclear waste as part of a children's breakfast cereal back in the 70s.
:-)
FWIW, that advert is guaranteed to confirm Yanks' stereotype of "English" children as all having upperclass "British" accents and enduring lousy weather. All that's missing is rotten teeth.
If your going to troll as an AC, don't Preveiw under your UID then post Anonymously, because your sig is inserted into the post,
No, not unless she intentionally pastes or types it there manually.
"Proper" Slashdot sigs are inserted dynamically at page load time, they're not part of the text. Indeed, while I can see your sig from this page while I was logged in, if I log out and reload, your sig (and everyone else's) disappears.
Christ, I forgot about the iPad. So yeah; that's another thing that, while they clearly didn't invent the original concept, they were the first to break through and popularise in a remotely mass-market way.
So it was pure luck that the iMac, iPod, iPhone and iPad were all major successes (two of them stealing and transforming markets Apple had no previous success in)? Yeah, right.
Even if it *had been* purely down to Jobs' skill as a hawker, it'd still have been down to, er... Jobs' skill as a hawker rather than "luck". (^_^)
US mile, Irish mile, Scot mile, nautical mile, statute mile? Which one. There are >50 different mike definitions.
Yes, but the distance everyone means by the plain "mile" (as opposed to "nautical mile", "Irish mile", "Underwater Kiwi-centric mile" or whatever) *is* standard.
;-)
Unlike "pint" or "ton" which can refer to significantly different quantities in (e.g.) the US versus the UK- and where you might have had a point- "mile" on its own virtually always refers to the regular international "statute mile" at 1760 yards. (*)
(*) Well, apparently the pre-1959 US mile still in use in some contexts varies from the international mile by a whopping... wait for it... 3.2mm. Which obviously makes a big difference in everyday discussion.
Miles are for retarded
Did you mean "for retards" or "for retarded people"?
(The irony...)
I've ridden some trains in Europe which were nicer, but the tickets were 3-5 times as much. It was cheaper to hop Ryan air than go by train and many times faster.
When you say "Europe", do you mean the UK? Because quite frankly, our trains are obscenely overpriced and a damning indictment of the failure of the privatisation of the rail network, offering service no better than in many other European countries but at a vastly higher price.
I didn't really mean that they just simply dump-luck stumbled into their current position - I'm just sort of amazed that the prior smartphones sucked so badly. They are lucky that Microsoft, RIM, Nokia, and the others didn't get their act together before they had a chance to swoop in and do it right.
"Doing it right" actually deserves more credit than it gets, though. It's easy to see how it should have been in hindsight, but so many companies seem not to do it, and Apple seem to have the discipline to do so.
It's quite possible that Microsoft et al could have taken years more to "get it right" (*). And- to be fair- that's something else to be said about Apple. They might have realised this and prolonged the iPod cash-cow era a few more years, keeping the iPhone in reserve for as long as possible. That's a risky game, of course, but one that- at the time- would seem more attractive to a back-covering, status-quo, risk-averse CEO.
(*) And remember, of course, that Microsoft didn't end up monopolising the PC market because their products "did it right". They "did it"... and that's about all. PC-DOS/MS-DOS- which essentially sealed their dominance- was little more than a 16-bit knockoff of CP/M that betrayed its 1970s 8-bit origins and required increasingly unwieldy and architecturally messy hacks to get around the design limitations as time went on. MS won because they piggybacked onto IBM's then-dominant position, leveraging that to their own benefit and then exploiting the power gained to retain that dominance.
I think that Sony's downfall was that they got hung up in the content business and gimped their products in order to keep the content side happy. Things like the MD player should have been the first sweet MP3 player, but they insisted on keeping it locked to ATRAC. This also factored in their decision to stick with non-standard technology like Memory Stick (which could be protected).
You're pretty much right about that- I've said much the same thing myself about how Sony's conflict of interest, NIHism and general arrogance caused them to throw away the MP3 market. However, this goes back further, to the hobbling of the (potentially far more powerful) Mini Disc format in the early 90s. (Probably not coincidentally the first major format they'd released since their takeover of Columbia's record and film divisions in the late 80s got them into the content business in a big way).
As I said, they deserve no sympathy for that.
Apple became profitable on the back of iMacs, Powermacs and Powerbooks.
All things considered, it's surprising how easily forgotten the original iMac seems to be nowadays, given its success at the time as their big comeback product following years in the doldrums and the return of Steve Jobs- but more importantly, as the product that really established Apple as the "cool/fashionable" brand we know today (good or bad). Its transparent styling was influential enough to kick off the (admittedly short-lived) fad for see-through computer accessories around the turn of the millennium.
It's the iMac that started their current reign of success that's still ongoing 15 years later, and paved the way for the iPod and then the iPhone. And perhaps that's *why* it's forgotten- the later, and even more influential (*) "i" products that the iMac arguably made possible have overshadowed it. Even so, it can't be ignored without giving a false impression of where today's "iPhone company" came from.
(*) No, the iPod wasn't the first MP3 player by a long way, just as the iPhone wasn't the first smartphone. But they were both well-enough designed to break both product categories through to mainstream popularity and fashionability- and in doing so, to dominate those newly-opened markets.
Apple is very lucky that they created the first smartphone with mass-market appeal - otherwise the new guy would have completely wrecked their iPod business.
Well, I'm pretty sure "luck" doesn't enter into it. Firstly, while I'm no fanboy, Apple had already demonstrated their skill in taking the MP3 player from geek toy to user-friendly, desirable mass-market device, and that was at a time when they had no track record outside the computer industry (and nor did many computer companies). Apple- the computer manufacturer known for Macs- stole the portable music market from the once dominant Sony (who- to be fair- equally squandered their techncial lead and mindshare and deserved to lose it) and the established consumer electronics manufacturers.
So the fact that they- with no real previous mobile phone experience- were able to enter a market dominated by mobile phone companies (like Nokia) and *again* steal that market by popularising a paradigm shift suggests that it being pure "luck" is unlikely.
Secondly, it's been observed (and is common sense) that Apple would have known very well that a device like the iPhone would be likely to decimate sales of the iPod, which was around its peak at that time. But Apple would also have known that (just like the MP3 player) if they hadn't done it, someone else would- though perhaps later rather than sooner. So rather than have someone else eat their lunch, it made sense to do it themselves. (They may also have guessed that the smartphone market would have been even more lucrative and with potential for expansion).
It's to Apple's credit that they had the foresight to do the opposite of what most companies in their position would have, i.e. not released the iPhone for fear of damaging their current cash cow, sat on their laurels and only done something when it was too late, the market had shifted and the new leaders were companies that'd had no such entrenched interests to protect.
"Goblin Force" sounds like either (a) a really goofy, family-oriented fantasy movie that's the favourite of the kid who always gets beaten up in middle school (*), or (b) a pornographic movie that has absolutely *nothing* to do with mythical creatures.
(*) Partly because he's the kind of kid geeky enough to like "Goblin Force" and partly because he was naive enough to actually *admit* that "Goblin Force" was his favourite film.
If you bought a company that did something prior to your buying it, are you evil?
The takeover was apparently completed in May 2012; the story above links to another that goes back to *November* 2012, and the filing date on the PDF of the court filing that original story links to is also November 2012. (*)
That said, even if it had been, I don't like the principle of absolution of guilt by takeover. If being taken over absolves the company of moral guilt, that raises the possibility of moral hazard, since a company can do evil stuff and get taken over by another who don't have to worry about its reputation- hence the original owners/managers still get paid a high market value for their actions. If the immorality of the original company is more likely to tarnish the purchaser, that will reduce its market value and hence punish the original owners.
(*) I was almost going to say the PDF was dated July 2012- which seemed quite a long gap- which I might have taken to mean the chain of events was possibly set in motion before the takeover. Then I realised "11/07/2012" was in the ass-backwards US format and it *was* November!
I went [to the Ministry of Sound club] before it was popular. Twice! And I regret it. Twice! It was all about owning the most expensive shirt when, at the time, everyone in the scene was wearing jeans, t-shirts and trainers.
Doesn't surprise me. The Ministry of Sound was a major part of the corporate appropriation and commercialisation of the UK dance music scene. It rose to prominence around the same time (early to mid 90s) that the Tories were trying to outlaw the "underground" egalitarian Ecstasy-related house music and rave culture that had taken off here in the late 1980s- via the likes of the Criminal Justice and Public Order Act 1994 (with its infamous "repetitive beats" definition)- and the "superclubs" like them were on the rise.
Shouldn't be surprising that MoS was founded and owned by James Palumbo, a privileged, Eton-educated son of a Conservative peer, then.
To be fair, I never liked most Ecstasy-related dance music full stop and wasn't into that culture, but I could respect some of that early stuff for its energy as a youth culture. MoS et al, OTOH, seems to be responsible for the endless, life-sapping, unoriginal recycled "heard it before 5, 10, 15 and 20 years ago and it was toss then" stagnated chart fodder we still have today.
If you cut the chaff (Marketing infant formula? What the Fuck? That's supposed to be "evil?")
Yes, it is. In fact, it's probably the biggest reason many people dislike (and boycott) Nestlé by far, and something that goes back almost 40 years.
Nestlé promotes powdered formula as being superior to breast feeding to poor mothers in countries where they know very well that (a) there's insufficient access to clean, uncontaminated water and (b) people often lack the ability to maintain the standards of hygiene required.
Under such circumstances, both these significantly increase the risk of disease and infant death compared with breast feeding (which would normally have been the method used otherwise). (*) Nestlé clearly knows this, and has been the subject of fierce criticism from countless charities and health bodies, but continues promoting its formula this way.
(*) There's also the fact that such poor mothers are more likely to over-dilute the formula to save money, leading to the risk of malnutrition
Unfortunately, the event took place on "Thursday afternoon", i.e. the 29th of August. Good luck making that rhyme ;'-(
This runs the risk of such information being used against them if it beomes politically expedient for those in power- now, *or in the future*, and for whoever is in power- like them or not.
True. But this is hardly new either.
Please re-read it in its original context. What I was talking about was the fact that the technology now makes it practical to- if desired- record and retain vast amounts of information about the entire population (either intentionally or by acquiring data originally used for other purposes)- and then to mine it.
Even if people weren't known to be of interest at the time it was recorded, it's relatively straightforward to go through it if this changes in the future. And the large amounts of data make it simple to automatically spot connections if it's mined correctly.
For all the evils of Hoover and Nixon you describe, they were limited in this respect by the amount of resources necessary to spy on people. Digital technology makes it cheap and easy to do this in a near-unlimited manner, in a way that even George Orwell didn't envisage in Nineteen Eighty-Four. Add (e.g.) an always-on Kinect camera into the mix and you're already way beyond the latter in panopticon terms.
The spy agencies used to be far more aggressive in violating our rights - the big thing that's changed recently is that they have more technology at their disposal than ever before.
Technology that- combined with the public's mass adoption of related technologies- makes it orders of magnitude easier to spy on them, violate their privacy and (relatively) cheaply gather intelligence en masse about virtually everyone, even if they're not currently a target. This runs the risk of such information being used against them if it beomes politically expedient for those in power- now, *or in the future*, and for whoever is in power- like them or not.
Obviously, there are checks and balances against this, and if it was revealed by someone that such bodies were breaking those rules, I'm absolutely *sure* that person would be deemed a hero by the American public and the offenders punished harshly. *cough*
Deluxe Paint was the only good thing they ever published, and they didn't even make it. They are the anti-Midas. Everything EA touches turns to shit.
From what I understand, they were generally quite highly-regarded in their early years (take a look at the ratings for their C64 games at Lemon 64). They also placed great importance on giving credit to authors and programmers- which is ironically the antithesis of their later "EA Widow"-era reputation.
My understanding is that it was during the early 1990s when they started concentrating on the 16-bit Mega Drive/Genesis and SNES consoles and becoming more sequel/franchise-focused (i.e. Madden sequels, then FIFA) that they began mutating into the company that people know- and hate- today. Possibly not coincidentally, this was also the point at which founder Trip Hawkins ended his day-to-day involvement with the company in order to get 3DO up and running.
Unions tend to (try to) get monopolies on (certain types of) workers, so in most cases, the scare quotes around "free market" are very apt. Not that monopolies are any less "free market" than government solutions are.
And companies tend to (try to) get monopolies on both markets and workers, so by the same token many "free markets" aren't, even if they became that way through "free" means. But my point was that someone apparently on the American right- who tend to be comfortable with the latter and still consider it a free market, can't turn around and oppose the former, which is just another grouping of people, albeit not in favour of the companies. Especially if they're arguing against that and in favour of a solution that requires more government intervention (which the US right traditionally opposes... well, until it's in their favour, that is).
Well, I agree that American unions have the potential to become just as abusive and self-serving at the expense of others. I've heard that one of the prison workers unions was pushing for stronger sentences and more jail time because it was in *their* members' interests. That's beneath contempt and every bit as evil as a company doing the same thing.
But that's my point- if one is comfortable with companies doing this sort of thing and leveraging their size and power to manipulate the government, then it's (in principle) no worse for unions to be doing it, if- as the American right seems to be- they're comfortable with the latter. That's not that I approve of it personally, but those that do shouldn't have double standards.
(Disclaimer; I'm not American and don't have any plans to live there).
I remember Jobs way back in the cat era poking fun at Vista's pre production name "Longhorn" and now they name their own OS "Mavericks" which as every QI watcher knows was originally a term describing unbranded cattle.
They had no choice; if they'd kept up the feline naming scheme, the only one left was "OS X Domestic Cat".
Which still would have been better than "Mavericks".
Liberals and democrats in the USA are not left wing Obama would be a Tory (wet/One nation) or center right politician in Europe.
Yes, I'm well aware of that personally.
Fact remains though, that AFAICT your average Republican (in the US party political sense) or right-winger thinks- or at least claims- that Obama is a "socialist". The fact they believe this shows how laughably skewed American politics are to the right. (They wouldn't know a real socialist if they hit them with a wet fish). But judgements of "left" and "right" in that situation are implicitly relative.
The fact remains that in this case, the person I was replying to is clearly to the right of Obama and it's ironic that he berates unions as a "liberal" (read: "left wing", "socialist", "commie", "whatever") solution and advocates lawmaking, despite the former being far more free-market (for the reasons I gave) than the latter, government-centric solution he advocates.
My mistake; I looked it up on Wikipedia, but obviously memorised or typed it out wrong.
Yet, since we have a liberal, union happy president then such laws will never happen.
I assume you're using "liberal" in the US sense, i.e. to mean "left-wing"...
The same thing can be accomplished with labor laws, and not have to resort to adding the inefficiency of a union. The last thing we need is another entity with an outstretched hand taking for employees.
...which would make it ironic that you're advocating the government-created-and-enforced solution and criticising the "free market" one of one group of self-organised-people (i.e. unions) competing for their interests against another group of self-organised people (i.e. companies).
It's just a shame he could only make 7p/minute from it.
7p per minute is 60 x 7 = £4.20 an hour (US $6.52). That's only two-thirds of the UK national minimum wage of £6.19 and below even the lowest US minimum wage of $7.52.
Of course, if he could leave them hanging on the phone at that rate, or not bothering him, that'd be different.
This means the entire screen is by necessity a touchscreen, with the upper screen protected by a layer of plastic that sits above it.
(Points about resolution apparently addressed in other poster's reply to your comment)
The nice thing about Nintendo portables for a long time has been the pocketability (depending on your definition of pocket). But the 2DS looks like a disaster. Squares don't fit in pockets nicely, especially not big squares.
Well, there is the bulk- to me, there's also the fact that the flat design looks a bit naff aesthetically, but mainly that the inability to angle the second screen *looks* un-ergonomic (whether or not it is).
But regarding those screens and the inability to fold the device, there is a very telling comment after the Ars Technica article (emphasis mine):-
Actually, according to USgamer it is a single screen, masked by the case design:
... -next-move
http://www.usgamer.net/articles/oh-so-t
This explains the hingeless design. A single screen is cheaper and more power efficient than two screens with the same area. The case merely makes it look (and function) as if it had 2 screens.
Regarding your other point:-
The D pad and buttons are halfway up the machine, making the lower touch screen a real PITA to use
I agree; I'm no gamer (though I own a DS Lite that I don't use often) and my first thought was that the buttons should have been a *quarter* of the way up (i.e. halfway up the lower screen as they would be on the original DSes and the 3DS).