Western countries have an interesting dilemma, how do you reconcile an open world with any form of control. The issue is this, people have gained an unprecedented amount of freedom to travel and communicate. Take the recent French shootings, the terrorist had traveled all over the world with ease at a very low cost. This simply wouldn't have been possible a century ago and even 50 years ago it would have been costly. Mean time, during all those travels he was in constant contact with the rest of the world in an instant.
It means that those who wish to do wrong have far more capacity to do so then before.
There is a relatively new BBC program "Angels and Saints" that takes a look at benefit fraud. It is an odd program for the BBC as it shows a very negative picture of immigrants. (BBC is rather liberal usually) A lot of the criminals in it are immigrants, either permanent or temporary, using the ease of travel and communication to create multiple identities. The way to combat is to link all the different administations together and run matches across them to see that a person with the same parameters is getting benefits in multiple places. PRIVACY!
There are three solutions:
No benefits, since someone might abuse it, nobody gets it.
You accept that in a permissive society, there will be abusers but that is a price you are willing to pay.
You introduce measures to allow investigators to detect abusers at the cost of privacy to everyone.
Pick one. All of them are electoral suicide. The first would just lead to a hellish world in which out of control capitalism would be warm fuzzy memory. The second survives right up until the moment the tax man comes around (and gosh, won't it be hard to collect all the needed taxes to pay for all the abusers if the taxman has no investigative powers)
And three... well that is what this article is about and it doesn't seem to popular.
Greece has run with the number 2 option and it didn't and doesn't work. They have been on the dole for generations and the rest of Europe has grown tired of feeding their relaxed nature to tax collection.
How do you run a modern country western country anyway? Note that in EVERY single god game, taxes just show up by magic. Not a single game I ever played ever had the population lying about their income. Imagine Civilization with a Greek setting, build a granary, food production mysteriously drops while some fat cats get richer. Would be rather hard to win the game right?
Actually, what really is needed is self-humor, the capacity to look at yourself and see the joke. This isn't always as straight forward as it seems. Take the series, Yes Prime Minister. In it hacker does the list of how the nature of the average EU civil servant. The generosity of the dutch, the organization of the Italians, the humanity of the Germans, etc etc. But conspicuous by its absence is any reference to a British trait. The series make a lot of fun of politicians and civil servants but not of Brits themselves. The voter is barely touched upon despite that they are obviously idiots for electing Hacker in the first place.
There are Italian films where a catholic priest talks to Jesus and has a friendly rivalry with the communist major. It shows how Italy is often surprisingly liberal in its actual laws because while the church is important, it isn't taken entirely serious. As in, people know that while obviously life should be as the church dictates, it isn't and that is alright. It is the different between someone who has cut down on meat and a PETA activist who frots at the mouth at the sign of a human owning a cat.
Most religious groups have learned to take themselves not to serious. Jews are best known for this, you can't move for Jewish comedians. Muslim comedians? Not so much. And gosh, that certainly seems to be a religion represented in a lot of conflicts around the world. It is not as if other fates have never been to bloody serious but Islam right now is at a stage incompatible with the rest of the world. To be fair, no other religion has had to deal with such complexities. Most religions learned to adjust to a multi-cultural world early on with their main group contained within their own region. Sure there were Christian missionaries during the renaissance but they were easily digested.
Islam suddenly spread into a world where religious identity has had to be suppressed because there are just to many others, while at the same time exposing the radical differences within the religion itself. Take Erdogans warmongering with Israel. Complains about 9 Turks killed so that the press is to busy being spoonfed to notice that dozens are killed each day in Turkish occupation of Kurdish lands. Syria is not about human rights but about which faction within Islam has control over the other. The countries that are for or against intervention are neatly divided along these faction lines.
It creates a real identity crisis, who are you as a Muslim? And that doesn't work well with someone poking fun at you, either from inside or outside. Note how carefully western media avoids making jokes about Muslims. Nothing new, blacks were treated the same at some point. Kids gloves so as not to offend those who were not mature enough as a group to handle a joke. No, someone being PC is often not doing it out of a sense of equality in my opinion.
But the PCness leads to cultural isolation. Watch a program like QI, it is awfully white. Most TV is. I can remember only one black person, a comedian. This again leads the group condemned with PCness to have even a greater identity crisis. Where are the role models? The people to show there is an alternative then the models shown by the sattelite tv from back home?
When your identity is lost and no new one is available, you tend to defend what little remains with a vengance.
See Muslims in Europe purposefully dressing the same despite most being fully well aware it will only increase the perception of themselves in a negative way if you pressed them on it. Better belong to your own small marginalized group then be part of the greater anonymous void.
Lets not forget that movies like a "Life of Brian" saw plenty of protest. Peaceful to be sure but that was just because this movie was at the END of the process. Not the beginning. The beginning wasn't nice at all and plenty died so that we can laugh about western religions.
Why shouldn't games have this uproar? Movies, music, books and comics/strips/manga have had and often continue to have the same response. Rap anyone? Strips (European comics) were considered to rot the minds of youths (only the good ones) before they became accepted as an art in their own right (only the boring ones).
Doom and Mortal combat had their opposition but that doesn't mean that was done and over with. By that logic, after people stopped having a heart attack of Elvis Presley's hip movements, all other music forms should have come and gone without a problem.
And all of this is part of democracy, the rule of the majority, whether you like what the majority votes for or not. To often people think that because they approve of something that should end the public debate. And then those same people are outraged others think EXACTLY the same but with an opposing view.
Democracy is a constantly moving, never finished project where people who really don't like each other very much try to figure out how to get the other to live by their standards.
Don't forget, if you want games to go unrated, you are just as much forcing YOUR view on others, as those who want to rate games. And unless you are sure you have an easy majority, you better be a little bit more mature about it then calling the other side a bunch of booger heads.
He names himself by the nickname nigga, that suggests to me a person with an attitude problem. They are not unknown to try to start a fight knowing that the moment things go wrong, the other person will back down since no-one wants to take things to far. This is a dog who barked at a cyclist hoping to scare him off. This cyclist stood his ground.
Is the above true?
The left is claiming the right is trying to make the black kid look bad by posting a posing picture he himself made. No mention of how it came to be that the ORIGINAL picture was half a decade out of date and showed someone who didn't look at all like the young adult at all.
Same with weight. Lots is made by the bleeding hearts that Zimmerman was twice as heavy. Nothing about that the black kid was far taller and far younger and far more fit. Gosh, a self proclaimed gangsta nicka, 2 meters tall, shot FROM THE FRONT, so he wasn't running away, is a purely innocent little boy hunted down by an old white oops, wait, latino man.
I used to like to think that these cases were clear cut but I am to used to both sides lying their ass off.
Oh and basically you are saying that intimidating behavior is okay, just as long as you don't do it with people who won't take it anymore.
For every real racist incident, there are 10 where so called minorities hide behind excuses. The first non-white non-christian president of the US is a black man with a muslim family background. Not a jew, not a hindy, not a native american, not an asian, not an atheist. Black. And still blacks are the biggest complainers of racism. I think people should have learned from the Simpson trial, the same lawyer is even involved for crying out loud.
IF Apple had REALLY refused to honor the 2 year minimum warranty (devices are supposed to work for their expected life) then IF the customer knew his rights, he would simply have demanded his rights and Apple would have lost the case on every level.
The PSP had a very bad screen and Sony tried to make claims that cheap devices could have a number of defective sub-pixels. In Holland, the consumer program Kassa ("Cash register but also what we say when Americans say "Caching") arranged that Sony had to replace them. With even ONE dead sub-pixel. Mine had already been replaced by that time however since I simply demanded my right in the store and made it bloody clear that I would not leave before I got it.
You got to remember that EU citizens on the whole are not as enamored with big businesses as Americans.
Apple can try what it wants but if anyone makes a simple complaint, Apple is going to lose. Even this new thing is meaningless. In Europe, you got two years warranty at least. Take Apple to court, you will win since the law leaves no room for interpretation. At least none that Apple would like. A shorter warranty is allowed, for devices so cheap and crap that nobody could reasonably expect two years of use before it breaks.
Our blacks are Moroccans and the hoody is the fur colored coat. Anyway, a person who claimed to have been mugged killed one of them on a moped by slamming their car in to them. RACIST. Then tiny details started to emerge. First the family claiming that he was just an normal muslim kid doing normal every day things... THEN it emerged that the person who claimed to be mugged was not only female, but a BLACK female. Oops, so much for the white man ganging up on a poor kid.
THEN it turned out that the kid was on his way back from court, where he had been involved in a mugging case.
Conclusion? The woman was not prosecuted and a new "joke" was born.
Kid committing a robbery on his way back from court for robbery? Heel normaal, voor een marrokaan. (Very normal, for a Morrocan).
Most people in the beginning were willing to believe that the person in the car had overreacted, Holland is a liberal nation but we are not fools. More incidents like this have now made it perfectly normal for any story along these lines to question any report in favor of the minority person. The media and the minorities have lied so often about the real truth that they fully well knew.
In the US, this case will do nothing but divide the races further. A lot of people try to focus on their favorite points, like the fact this happened in a gated community and ignore the counter points (the black kid was there to visit relatives, who I can only presume are black so the attempt to make Zimmerman a racist for living in a gated community falls flat).
It is like the shootings in France, the image of Muslims in France would have been a LOT better after the shooting if the father hadn't acted like a self-righteous asshole in making demands while he full well knew one of his sons was a mass child killer and another a thief (other son stole the moped). Just a few seconds of keeping your mouth shut can do an awful lot of good will. Instead, the entire Muslim family and by extension all Muslims in France are shown to be criminals with zero sense of values or morals.
At this point I very much doubt that the outcome of the case will really matter. It is more like the Simpson trial all over again. People divided along racial lines with a desperate few to try to hide their own bigotry behind attempts to see the other sides point of view without really doing so.
The black kid was in the gated community too, since the entire story is that he was not there as a criminal but as a visitor of family, his BLACK family was living in the same gated community as the white man that this BLACK family KNEW was part of the neighborhood watch. Do you have any evidence that Zimmerman ever protested this residence of this BLACK family?
Gosh, how easy it is to point out your bigoted nature. Clearly a white man living in a gated community is a racist but a black family doing the same is.... well is just what? Why are they different?
It wouldn't matter if Obama was the choice against human candidates but it seems to be that it is going to be Obama against a republican. None of them are sane or human. Obama needs just one slogan, (nixons voice) "I am not a republican".
There seems to be a large movement in the US that wants to tear the country apart with some kind of weird idea that you can turn back the clock to somekind of fantasy land from the past that never existed.
Let a republican win and the US will let the bankers run rampant again, let healthcare spending grow out of control while getting less healthcare in return, let the infrastructure collapse because who needs roads anyway and burden the average family with more kids then the family can support or the nation needs.
So far, Romney is the most sensible republican NOT because he is actually sensible but because he is the least crazy. The only risk of a republican winning the election is if Obama gets lazy and people think they can savely vote republican as a balance mechanism since surely everyone else will vote Obama.
Mind you, this is assuming that voters don't actually hate themselves and their country. In America, this is not a given.
This applies to Canada from the UK, if you had a brain and ever got out of your mothers basement you would know that you fly to the American continent via a northern route even if you got to go to the South of USA. Now, Canada is WHERE on the American continent? Why would you fly PAST Canada into the US on your way to Canada?
This is NOT about passing over a country or landing at an airport, this is about a flight that doesn't cross US territory and the US demanding to have anything to do with it. These UKCanada flights won't even appear on US traffic control radar screens.
It shows just how much of a control freak the US has become and how of a lapdog the UK is.
The site you linked to is a joke. It has zero functionality and is nothing more then a graphics designer wank. Sure, some people can make their living with it and a good living too. Perhaps I should have been clearer, when I talk about web development, I am talking applications. Things closer to google maps then a flash movie.
I simply won't ever get an assignment asking me for full screen animation, that is not what I do. And you are a flash developer. Doesn't it make sense that you would never be asked to make a website that works on the iPad since that is not within your skill set?
We work in the same industry but in completely different sections of it. I would use the link you provided NOT as a point for or against HTML5 vs flash but as a showcase of a REALLY bad design that violates every usability guideline out there.
For me, the removal of flash means the removal of flash forms and flash menu's. If you think those can't be done with HTML5 just as well, you need to talk to better developers. I am not giving advice on how to make games or such stuff as you linked because that is not my business.
Note that typical Timothy insanity in the summary. PC's meeting the PC97 spec and their internal mic. I have motherboards that meet that spec, even entire PC's. None of them have a mic. Most don't even come with a speaker. You can plug a mic in but I would be highly intrested in how some spook can instruct my PC to go out, buy a mic, plug it in and start recording me, all without me noticing it.
"But AHA! How do I know there isn't a mic", the true paranoid asks me.
"Well because I can't see any", I reply.
"How do you know what one looks like, nano genetic engineered cyber tech can make things very very small, they can put mic's inside chips and camera's inside pixels", the paranoid rants.
And... he has a point. There are certainly occasional press releases about screens that can see and you could certainly mistake a PC on a chip new story as it including a microphone and camera. Am I that certain that the needs of either a mic or a camera preclude it from being to small, or indeed being covered by a cooling fan? Yes, I am but I have not always been right (Once I thought I was wrong and I was wrong about that).
I can certainly see how those for whom tech is close to witchcraft and who have a limited understanding of how government works that and have guilty conscious might get worried.
Take the old, the TV is watching me, that has now been revived. People have believed this since the days of cathode ray tube tv's with rabbit ear antenna's. How would such a device possibly watch you? There is no technical way, you would have to believe the government has immensely advanced tech that nobody else knew about to hide a camera in there without it being obvious OR just plain not understand how TV works. Never mind how the hell the signal is supposed to get back to the spy headquarters.
With modern electronics and computers, this will only get worse. You can reason out why an old TV can't send anything back. But how can you proof a laptop visibly equipped with the tools to spy and the means to transmit them, isn't doing it? You could measure the network connection but how do you proof that there isn't a hidden signal that goes unreported? The led beside the camera is probably software controlled, at least that is what a paranoid could claim, so how do you proof it isn't recording when it isn't? Take it apart and measure electric flow but that is far to techy to satisfy the paranoid. If you believe lightbulbs can record and transmit a mere No current will not satisfy you.
A lot of people believe the moon landings never happened. An AWFUL lot of people. Not just ignorable people in trailer parks. That the moon landings really did happen is beyond obvious, the most simple proof is that the Russians never even bothered to cast doubt on it. If you think the Russians and Americans are in cahoots on this... well... that is the nature of paranoia, secret world government and every government on the world IS working together after all. See how neatly it all fits when you don't need actual evidence and facts?
It doesn't help that there are real spy projects like Echelon that show that some governments are willing to sift through a huge amount of drivel for... well... god knows what... it certainly doesn't seem to have given the US any intelligence to stop them blundering so often on the world stage.
When a population who doesn't trust their government meets a government that can't be trusted, you have the end of democracy.
It is like with doctors, at a simple basic level, you got to trust your doctor. If you don't, how can you take your medicine? Ask for a second opinion? How do you know that doctor is not in cahoots with the first? At a basic level, we should trust our government. And to ensure this, come down like a ton of brick on any in government that break this trust. But that would have required a lot of US presidents to hang from a rope during their term. And you can't have that can you?
So people cover their TV to stop it watching them, and get to vote on the next leader they don't trust. Long live western democracy.
Sorry, Apple (crosses himself to ward of the evil one) has shown that Flash is overrated. Adobe itself already acknowledged defeat on that front and stopped development for mobile devices. Those lucky Android devices that got flash support have it crash or slow the device to a crawl. The mobile device on which regular web pages make sense, tablets, seem to give Android no advantage at all in sales.
Adobe is really shooting itself in the foot here again. Web development is my trade and I have noticed a very high adaptation of Linux in this industry. Not just the obvious servers but desktops as well. A few years ago, if you wanted one, it was a negotiation. Now, I have even seen it as a requirement. Flash is universally despised in the LAMP development area which also seems (but I admit to being prejudiced) to be the place where new things are attempted rather then the 1 millionth intra-net site.
Will this make a huge difference? Not at first but unless a customer absolutely demands flash, I code a requirement in HTML5 and show something that is smoother and better supported and Hey, works on the iPad. So much easier for the initial demo to just hand a tablet to show how nice the site works... especially if you noticed the customer has an iPhone or iPad themselves. And a lot do. I am not convinced the world is moving to the tablet for browsing but the customer does so demoing the product on the product of the future just seems smart to me.
When the iPad (or was it the iPhone itself) launched, a lot of people like the parent claimed that the lack of flash would kill it... I would like a product that gets killed like that. I would dry my tears with million dollar bills.
Adobe got lazy with flash, it is slow, buggy, a resource hog and crashes every two seconds all so that webpages can't be indexed and look like the creation of a 12 year old Japanese girl. It lost support of the people who are capable enough of working around it and now, thank to the evil one, customers are demanding that their site works without it to.
HTML5 is the new thing and with mobile devices becoming bigger and bigger (who would you rather please with your website, an iPad user or a user running IE6, I think I know the bigger sucker... eh, the customer with more disposable income) the finicky, slow websites must go. Have you tried YOUR websites menu with a touchscreen yet?
Odd, I thought the fantasy worlds of Final Fantasy had a distinct Japanese accent. It would be odd to hear cat girls speak with an American accent. British might work, in a maid uniform... French maid... ooooooooh.
Oh wait, the article mentions British fantasy worlds and then wonders why the accents are British... the Shire is rather obviously British, it would be hard to read Lotr and think it was set in Australia. The Mad Max fantasy world however would be hard to imagine without thinking Australia, the complete and utter desolation of a post nuclear world where humanity is but a dying memory. Australia! Right?
There are lots of fantasy worlds set with the distinct flavor of all parts of the world. That you never heard of any but Lotr, that says more about you then the state of fantasy.
So basically, your claim is that if you had a penis, it would be the largest?
I seen fanboys make up some weird figures before, but claiming you are the top seller if you would be selling, that is a new one.
Apple is a big mobile maker, but it is not the biggest. About the only claim that stands is that of single model high-end smartphone, Apple sells the most. That is not a bad title to hold but it has rather a lot of qualifiers.
Mandatory car anology, Ferrari would be the biggest car maker, if they sold small cheap cars.
It has been a desperate struggle for all in the computer business to come up with the least usable software ever! Apple had a good long run with their 1 mouse button because options just give users options. MS for a long time stayed with its tried and tested "crash more often then the stockmarket" while Unix just had to rely on making even the manual an arcane command line.
But then stupid users tried to improve. Apple was forced to accept that with the PC, users could always just buy a multi-buttoned mouse! Can't have that Jobs said and have the word iOS, to get rid of not just right-click but double click in one go.
Aha! MS said, we can beat that, behold, the RIBBON, a beautifull piece of AI that ensures whatever command you want, you won't be able to find it.
Oops, said Linux, we started to lag. Quickly, upgrade the desktops so that whatever one you pick, you get the worsed ideas ever combined in a buddy alpha package!
But unbeknown to all, queitly working away were the OpenOffice people, show casing just how utterly evil you can get with opensource code... TADA! The text editor with NO USER INTERFACE AT ALL! MWAHAHAHAHAA!
Even Nintendo who gave us the handheld you got to move to control the game but hold still to be able to see can't top that.
What are the long term costs of anything? But that goes for all other industries just as much. Lets not forget the Santorum frot after the BP oil disaster. What are the long term costs of that? Coal isn't clean either and all that dust is another long term hassle. Will the tar sands really be cleaned up by mining it or will it create an even worse environmental area. What are the costs of mining the minerals needed for solar plants? Just how many birds are killed by wind farms. Just how sustainable is a hydro plant when a river fills it with silth and the fish can no longer migrate?
Every advocate of any scheme will ignore long term risks on his own pet scheme and highlight them for the rest. Up to you to make sense of it all. Good luck.
Airlines are operating on a hairline profit margin and often go below. When you buy in bulk prices QUICKLY add up into gigantic figures. Really, basic stuff as a cherry on top is a HALF MILLION DOLLARS in hard costs on the scale of airline food for a single airline. Fresh herbs? An airline meal is 2 bucks.Maybe 3 if you are at a small airline. How much does a ground served meal cost you to get fresh herbs? I know, a microwave steam meal starts at 4.50 euro maybe 4 with a discount bought at a local low rent supermarket.
The food you get in cattle class is the cheapest food you can get. There is a reason business class is so much more expensive. People really just don't seem to get that there is a price difference between small can of soda and a small bottle of decent wine. Between a piece of meat that has to come out of 2 dollar budget and a 50 or even 100 dollar budget.
I don't get what is so hard to understand. Do the same people that complain about a airplane food while bragging about how cheap a ticket they got also complain that a free coffee refill does NOT include an Irish coffee?
Nothing you get as part of your airplane ticket is "free" EVERYTHING cost money. Free headphones? They cost money, yes, it is just a few cents but it all adds up. That is the reason when you buy a 500 dollar iPad it barely comes with anything and a cover costs an insane portion of the price considering the tech difference.
If everyone was willing to pay twice the price for a ticket, the service would be a lot better. But people are not. An asian company is trying again, many others have failed, with business only travel. Very nice seats. Good luck getting people to pay for it.
When people book a ticket, they only see the price. They don't realize just how bad 14 hours of misery is. I have told employers to either pay up for business class or forget it. I also want a day before and after off. Anything else, and you might as well get roaring drunk before going to work. Actually, that is a lot more fun but you will be just as effective.
But then someone finds out that someone bucking for a promotion is willing to sacrifice comfort and sleep and alertness and they can save a few bucks and voila, an industry that was known for luxury is now known for discomfort. All to squeeze just one more penny of the ticket price and end up at our destination more wrecked and miserable then ever before.
Good luck. Because even business class is not all that comfortable, I am perfectly happy for a younger person to go instead and save some money.
Travel has always been about paying through the nose for barely reaching the comforts of your own house. I even travel in private jets as a guest in the past. It is exciting the first time, the second time you just want to sleep in your own bed without a horrid atmosphere cramped roof and noisy engine. If you were to put a child raping puppy kicker kitten eater in couch, even the most right wing politician up for re-election would cry foul. Did it a couple of times and stopped when I learned that it was not the norm to have an entire row to yourself because it was off season... ONE seat is what you get on a normal flight? ONCE, 1 hour flight. NEVER EVER AGAIN. If I have to board a tram for 5 minutes that is that crammed, I walk.
But hey, you gotta travel and you gotta save money. Enjoy being miserable, would be fun to actually do the math of just how badly cheap air travel affects people and costs them in cranky holidays or lost productivity during business travel.
In Europe? I take the train. Yes, it is slower on many routes but the difference in comfort is worth it.
You are the one who is to cheap to pay for good quality food. Everything in life costs money and if you want the cheapest possible ticket, you get the cheapest possible food. The food budget in the cattle section is that of the cheapest deep frozen micro-wave meal you can find. Really 2 bucks would be on the high end.
People have made it amazingly clear by voting with their dollars that they want cheap, cheaper, cheapest but then whine their ass of when there are no "free" luxuries. You have to wonder if these people ever had any education involving complex math like sums. When an airline ticket costs less then dining in a decent restaurant, how can you expect decent food? What next, you pay a dime for the toilet and wonder why virgin handmaides don't clean your ass with their silky tongues? PAY up and they will, don't pay and you can eat with the rest of the cows in a space smaller then a real cow gets when it needs to be moved.
Consider yourself lucky, you might live. The cow does not.
Oops, you are out of date, another company is trying all business air travel again. Nobody really managed to do it but somewhere in Asia someone is trying... the US? Sorry, to poor.
It would be REALLY humiliating for the west if an Asian company succeeds in luxury air travel. Time to learn Chinese.
I remember one documentary on an aircrash where the experts just couldn't find what had happened. Or rather, one of them had an idea what might have happened but couldn't prove it. A fuel filter had somehow clogged up with ice even with a working anti-icing system and they couldn't reproduce the icing in any case.
Turns out, that it could happen very easily but only under a very special set of circumstances and if just one variable was off, the problem corrected itself.
It is not whether an iPhone can cause interference. It is whether any gadget build at any time at any point in time can affect any still flying aircraft under the most extreme and unprecedented conditions, ever. Aircraft don't crash under normal conditions, they are pretty safe BUT they are always operating on the edge. Just rain on the runway can turn a comfortable landing with plenty of space into a disaster. Aircraft are supposed to land at the beginning of the runway but at high speed (and an incident might easily force a higher then recommended landing speed) it is the work of seconds to land halfway. Then a split second error, braking to late, brakes not firing etc etc may cause a disaster.
Do gadgets have an influence? Imagine an aircraft flying blind and having to be talked down, the well known interference on radio bands might cause a vital instruction to be missed. Needing a repeat, causing confusion and distraction and BAM. Bad radio protocol HAS caused fatal crashes.
More over, if you don't draw the line somewhere, someone will cross it. Why not a walkie-talkie? Why not a satelite phone? Why not a HAM radio set? Why not a radar dish? Someone, somewhere will push the line no matter where you put it.
No food in the cinema, pretty common rule OBVIOUSLY only enforced to protect the cinema's expensive food stall... yes... and believe it or not to stop people bring in bread. Not sandwhiches, bread and butter and meat to be prepared during the movie. And how do you stop that if you don't ban all food?
Air travel is a miserable business filled with the dregs of humanity. The same people who put 5 tons of water in an ordinary car and don't even think safety as the axel grinds over the road are also the ones who bring a drum of petrol on their flight. Really, the things people do will astound you. Forget terrorists, the average unchecked passenger is way more dangerous. Not necessarly through malice but through unthinking selfish stupidity. No, you cannot bring a throw away grill to a crowded rock concert, thank you very much.
I do not want my airsafety to be risked by the kind of person who has alcohol poured into their mouth and then set on fire. Do you? There are 300-400 people on the biggest planes, do you trust every single one of them NOT to do something incredibly stupid?
It is a VERY simple piece of research that is also obviously flawed and out of date. Reason? The iPad 3. That device will probably sell millions and raise tablet screen sizes ( tablets are a target for Windows 8) to a size rarely seen on PC's, even those with multiple screens. It is a gigantic pixel size.
So... either Windows tablet hardware will lag behind in screen resolution which won't help them sell (although MS should be used to that) or they have to ignore their "evidence" and realize that any statistic you record now is outdated data by the time you analysed it. Those rotters at Apple just refuse to stand still.
Since this screen now clearly exist, its production will no doubt scale up and it will become available for others. There is no reason it can't be added to laptops. Might Apple put it or a similar sexy screen in their laptops? I don't think it is impossible.
And MS will be unable to cope because their next-generation OS, still not out has been build for what people have been using, not what they are going to use.
It is very difficult to get it right, you can easily produce a product so far ahead of itself that nobody can run it. But making a product for the past... that is not possible either.
Mind you, Windows 8 is touchscreen, that is futuristic because the fast majority of screens out right now are NOT touch sensitive. Intresting choice, build for the resolutions of yesterday and the input device of the day after tomorrow. SMART!
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Western countries have an interesting dilemma, how do you reconcile an open world with any form of control. The issue is this, people have gained an unprecedented amount of freedom to travel and communicate. Take the recent French shootings, the terrorist had traveled all over the world with ease at a very low cost. This simply wouldn't have been possible a century ago and even 50 years ago it would have been costly. Mean time, during all those travels he was in constant contact with the rest of the world in an instant.
It means that those who wish to do wrong have far more capacity to do so then before.
There is a relatively new BBC program "Angels and Saints" that takes a look at benefit fraud. It is an odd program for the BBC as it shows a very negative picture of immigrants. (BBC is rather liberal usually) A lot of the criminals in it are immigrants, either permanent or temporary, using the ease of travel and communication to create multiple identities. The way to combat is to link all the different administations together and run matches across them to see that a person with the same parameters is getting benefits in multiple places. PRIVACY!
There are three solutions:
Pick one. All of them are electoral suicide. The first would just lead to a hellish world in which out of control capitalism would be warm fuzzy memory. The second survives right up until the moment the tax man comes around (and gosh, won't it be hard to collect all the needed taxes to pay for all the abusers if the taxman has no investigative powers)
And three... well that is what this article is about and it doesn't seem to popular.
Greece has run with the number 2 option and it didn't and doesn't work. They have been on the dole for generations and the rest of Europe has grown tired of feeding their relaxed nature to tax collection.
How do you run a modern country western country anyway? Note that in EVERY single god game, taxes just show up by magic. Not a single game I ever played ever had the population lying about their income. Imagine Civilization with a Greek setting, build a granary, food production mysteriously drops while some fat cats get richer. Would be rather hard to win the game right?
Actually, what really is needed is self-humor, the capacity to look at yourself and see the joke. This isn't always as straight forward as it seems. Take the series, Yes Prime Minister. In it hacker does the list of how the nature of the average EU civil servant. The generosity of the dutch, the organization of the Italians, the humanity of the Germans, etc etc. But conspicuous by its absence is any reference to a British trait. The series make a lot of fun of politicians and civil servants but not of Brits themselves. The voter is barely touched upon despite that they are obviously idiots for electing Hacker in the first place.
There are Italian films where a catholic priest talks to Jesus and has a friendly rivalry with the communist major. It shows how Italy is often surprisingly liberal in its actual laws because while the church is important, it isn't taken entirely serious. As in, people know that while obviously life should be as the church dictates, it isn't and that is alright. It is the different between someone who has cut down on meat and a PETA activist who frots at the mouth at the sign of a human owning a cat.
Most religious groups have learned to take themselves not to serious. Jews are best known for this, you can't move for Jewish comedians. Muslim comedians? Not so much. And gosh, that certainly seems to be a religion represented in a lot of conflicts around the world. It is not as if other fates have never been to bloody serious but Islam right now is at a stage incompatible with the rest of the world. To be fair, no other religion has had to deal with such complexities. Most religions learned to adjust to a multi-cultural world early on with their main group contained within their own region. Sure there were Christian missionaries during the renaissance but they were easily digested.
Islam suddenly spread into a world where religious identity has had to be suppressed because there are just to many others, while at the same time exposing the radical differences within the religion itself. Take Erdogans warmongering with Israel. Complains about 9 Turks killed so that the press is to busy being spoonfed to notice that dozens are killed each day in Turkish occupation of Kurdish lands. Syria is not about human rights but about which faction within Islam has control over the other. The countries that are for or against intervention are neatly divided along these faction lines.
It creates a real identity crisis, who are you as a Muslim? And that doesn't work well with someone poking fun at you, either from inside or outside. Note how carefully western media avoids making jokes about Muslims. Nothing new, blacks were treated the same at some point. Kids gloves so as not to offend those who were not mature enough as a group to handle a joke. No, someone being PC is often not doing it out of a sense of equality in my opinion.
But the PCness leads to cultural isolation. Watch a program like QI, it is awfully white. Most TV is. I can remember only one black person, a comedian. This again leads the group condemned with PCness to have even a greater identity crisis. Where are the role models? The people to show there is an alternative then the models shown by the sattelite tv from back home?
When your identity is lost and no new one is available, you tend to defend what little remains with a vengance.
See Muslims in Europe purposefully dressing the same despite most being fully well aware it will only increase the perception of themselves in a negative way if you pressed them on it. Better belong to your own small marginalized group then be part of the greater anonymous void.
Lets not forget that movies like a "Life of Brian" saw plenty of protest. Peaceful to be sure but that was just because this movie was at the END of the process. Not the beginning. The beginning wasn't nice at all and plenty died so that we can laugh about western religions.
Why shouldn't games have this uproar? Movies, music, books and comics/strips/manga have had and often continue to have the same response. Rap anyone? Strips (European comics) were considered to rot the minds of youths (only the good ones) before they became accepted as an art in their own right (only the boring ones).
Doom and Mortal combat had their opposition but that doesn't mean that was done and over with. By that logic, after people stopped having a heart attack of Elvis Presley's hip movements, all other music forms should have come and gone without a problem.
And all of this is part of democracy, the rule of the majority, whether you like what the majority votes for or not. To often people think that because they approve of something that should end the public debate. And then those same people are outraged others think EXACTLY the same but with an opposing view.
Democracy is a constantly moving, never finished project where people who really don't like each other very much try to figure out how to get the other to live by their standards.
Don't forget, if you want games to go unrated, you are just as much forcing YOUR view on others, as those who want to rate games. And unless you are sure you have an easy majority, you better be a little bit more mature about it then calling the other side a bunch of booger heads.
He names himself by the nickname nigga, that suggests to me a person with an attitude problem. They are not unknown to try to start a fight knowing that the moment things go wrong, the other person will back down since no-one wants to take things to far. This is a dog who barked at a cyclist hoping to scare him off. This cyclist stood his ground.
Is the above true?
The left is claiming the right is trying to make the black kid look bad by posting a posing picture he himself made. No mention of how it came to be that the ORIGINAL picture was half a decade out of date and showed someone who didn't look at all like the young adult at all.
Same with weight. Lots is made by the bleeding hearts that Zimmerman was twice as heavy. Nothing about that the black kid was far taller and far younger and far more fit. Gosh, a self proclaimed gangsta nicka, 2 meters tall, shot FROM THE FRONT, so he wasn't running away, is a purely innocent little boy hunted down by an old white oops, wait, latino man.
I used to like to think that these cases were clear cut but I am to used to both sides lying their ass off.
Oh and basically you are saying that intimidating behavior is okay, just as long as you don't do it with people who won't take it anymore.
For every real racist incident, there are 10 where so called minorities hide behind excuses. The first non-white non-christian president of the US is a black man with a muslim family background. Not a jew, not a hindy, not a native american, not an asian, not an atheist. Black. And still blacks are the biggest complainers of racism. I think people should have learned from the Simpson trial, the same lawyer is even involved for crying out loud.
IF Apple had REALLY refused to honor the 2 year minimum warranty (devices are supposed to work for their expected life) then IF the customer knew his rights, he would simply have demanded his rights and Apple would have lost the case on every level.
The PSP had a very bad screen and Sony tried to make claims that cheap devices could have a number of defective sub-pixels. In Holland, the consumer program Kassa ("Cash register but also what we say when Americans say "Caching") arranged that Sony had to replace them. With even ONE dead sub-pixel. Mine had already been replaced by that time however since I simply demanded my right in the store and made it bloody clear that I would not leave before I got it.
You got to remember that EU citizens on the whole are not as enamored with big businesses as Americans.
Apple can try what it wants but if anyone makes a simple complaint, Apple is going to lose. Even this new thing is meaningless. In Europe, you got two years warranty at least. Take Apple to court, you will win since the law leaves no room for interpretation. At least none that Apple would like. A shorter warranty is allowed, for devices so cheap and crap that nobody could reasonably expect two years of use before it breaks.
Our blacks are Moroccans and the hoody is the fur colored coat. Anyway, a person who claimed to have been mugged killed one of them on a moped by slamming their car in to them. RACIST. Then tiny details started to emerge. First the family claiming that he was just an normal muslim kid doing normal every day things... THEN it emerged that the person who claimed to be mugged was not only female, but a BLACK female. Oops, so much for the white man ganging up on a poor kid.
THEN it turned out that the kid was on his way back from court, where he had been involved in a mugging case.
Conclusion? The woman was not prosecuted and a new "joke" was born.
Kid committing a robbery on his way back from court for robbery? Heel normaal, voor een marrokaan. (Very normal, for a Morrocan).
Most people in the beginning were willing to believe that the person in the car had overreacted, Holland is a liberal nation but we are not fools. More incidents like this have now made it perfectly normal for any story along these lines to question any report in favor of the minority person. The media and the minorities have lied so often about the real truth that they fully well knew.
In the US, this case will do nothing but divide the races further. A lot of people try to focus on their favorite points, like the fact this happened in a gated community and ignore the counter points (the black kid was there to visit relatives, who I can only presume are black so the attempt to make Zimmerman a racist for living in a gated community falls flat).
It is like the shootings in France, the image of Muslims in France would have been a LOT better after the shooting if the father hadn't acted like a self-righteous asshole in making demands while he full well knew one of his sons was a mass child killer and another a thief (other son stole the moped). Just a few seconds of keeping your mouth shut can do an awful lot of good will. Instead, the entire Muslim family and by extension all Muslims in France are shown to be criminals with zero sense of values or morals.
At this point I very much doubt that the outcome of the case will really matter. It is more like the Simpson trial all over again. People divided along racial lines with a desperate few to try to hide their own bigotry behind attempts to see the other sides point of view without really doing so.
The black kid was in the gated community too, since the entire story is that he was not there as a criminal but as a visitor of family, his BLACK family was living in the same gated community as the white man that this BLACK family KNEW was part of the neighborhood watch. Do you have any evidence that Zimmerman ever protested this residence of this BLACK family?
Gosh, how easy it is to point out your bigoted nature. Clearly a white man living in a gated community is a racist but a black family doing the same is.... well is just what? Why are they different?
It wouldn't matter if Obama was the choice against human candidates but it seems to be that it is going to be Obama against a republican. None of them are sane or human. Obama needs just one slogan, (nixons voice) "I am not a republican".
There seems to be a large movement in the US that wants to tear the country apart with some kind of weird idea that you can turn back the clock to somekind of fantasy land from the past that never existed.
Let a republican win and the US will let the bankers run rampant again, let healthcare spending grow out of control while getting less healthcare in return, let the infrastructure collapse because who needs roads anyway and burden the average family with more kids then the family can support or the nation needs.
So far, Romney is the most sensible republican NOT because he is actually sensible but because he is the least crazy. The only risk of a republican winning the election is if Obama gets lazy and people think they can savely vote republican as a balance mechanism since surely everyone else will vote Obama.
Mind you, this is assuming that voters don't actually hate themselves and their country. In America, this is not a given.
The UK is a sovereign country, sure, but Canada is more like the 51st state.
ummm, no. we are not.
He is right, silly AHuxley. Thinking the UK is a sovereign country. The correct term is vassal state.
This applies to Canada from the UK, if you had a brain and ever got out of your mothers basement you would know that you fly to the American continent via a northern route even if you got to go to the South of USA. Now, Canada is WHERE on the American continent? Why would you fly PAST Canada into the US on your way to Canada?
This is NOT about passing over a country or landing at an airport, this is about a flight that doesn't cross US territory and the US demanding to have anything to do with it. These UKCanada flights won't even appear on US traffic control radar screens.
It shows just how much of a control freak the US has become and how of a lapdog the UK is.
The site you linked to is a joke. It has zero functionality and is nothing more then a graphics designer wank. Sure, some people can make their living with it and a good living too. Perhaps I should have been clearer, when I talk about web development, I am talking applications. Things closer to google maps then a flash movie.
I simply won't ever get an assignment asking me for full screen animation, that is not what I do. And you are a flash developer. Doesn't it make sense that you would never be asked to make a website that works on the iPad since that is not within your skill set?
We work in the same industry but in completely different sections of it. I would use the link you provided NOT as a point for or against HTML5 vs flash but as a showcase of a REALLY bad design that violates every usability guideline out there.
For me, the removal of flash means the removal of flash forms and flash menu's. If you think those can't be done with HTML5 just as well, you need to talk to better developers. I am not giving advice on how to make games or such stuff as you linked because that is not my business.
Note that typical Timothy insanity in the summary. PC's meeting the PC97 spec and their internal mic. I have motherboards that meet that spec, even entire PC's. None of them have a mic. Most don't even come with a speaker. You can plug a mic in but I would be highly intrested in how some spook can instruct my PC to go out, buy a mic, plug it in and start recording me, all without me noticing it.
"But AHA! How do I know there isn't a mic", the true paranoid asks me.
"Well because I can't see any", I reply.
"How do you know what one looks like, nano genetic engineered cyber tech can make things very very small, they can put mic's inside chips and camera's inside pixels", the paranoid rants.
And... he has a point. There are certainly occasional press releases about screens that can see and you could certainly mistake a PC on a chip new story as it including a microphone and camera. Am I that certain that the needs of either a mic or a camera preclude it from being to small, or indeed being covered by a cooling fan? Yes, I am but I have not always been right (Once I thought I was wrong and I was wrong about that).
I can certainly see how those for whom tech is close to witchcraft and who have a limited understanding of how government works that and have guilty conscious might get worried.
Take the old, the TV is watching me, that has now been revived. People have believed this since the days of cathode ray tube tv's with rabbit ear antenna's. How would such a device possibly watch you? There is no technical way, you would have to believe the government has immensely advanced tech that nobody else knew about to hide a camera in there without it being obvious OR just plain not understand how TV works. Never mind how the hell the signal is supposed to get back to the spy headquarters.
With modern electronics and computers, this will only get worse. You can reason out why an old TV can't send anything back. But how can you proof a laptop visibly equipped with the tools to spy and the means to transmit them, isn't doing it? You could measure the network connection but how do you proof that there isn't a hidden signal that goes unreported? The led beside the camera is probably software controlled, at least that is what a paranoid could claim, so how do you proof it isn't recording when it isn't? Take it apart and measure electric flow but that is far to techy to satisfy the paranoid. If you believe lightbulbs can record and transmit a mere No current will not satisfy you.
A lot of people believe the moon landings never happened. An AWFUL lot of people. Not just ignorable people in trailer parks. That the moon landings really did happen is beyond obvious, the most simple proof is that the Russians never even bothered to cast doubt on it. If you think the Russians and Americans are in cahoots on this... well... that is the nature of paranoia, secret world government and every government on the world IS working together after all. See how neatly it all fits when you don't need actual evidence and facts?
It doesn't help that there are real spy projects like Echelon that show that some governments are willing to sift through a huge amount of drivel for... well... god knows what... it certainly doesn't seem to have given the US any intelligence to stop them blundering so often on the world stage.
When a population who doesn't trust their government meets a government that can't be trusted, you have the end of democracy.
It is like with doctors, at a simple basic level, you got to trust your doctor. If you don't, how can you take your medicine? Ask for a second opinion? How do you know that doctor is not in cahoots with the first? At a basic level, we should trust our government. And to ensure this, come down like a ton of brick on any in government that break this trust. But that would have required a lot of US presidents to hang from a rope during their term. And you can't have that can you?
So people cover their TV to stop it watching them, and get to vote on the next leader they don't trust. Long live western democracy.
Sorry, Apple (crosses himself to ward of the evil one) has shown that Flash is overrated. Adobe itself already acknowledged defeat on that front and stopped development for mobile devices. Those lucky Android devices that got flash support have it crash or slow the device to a crawl. The mobile device on which regular web pages make sense, tablets, seem to give Android no advantage at all in sales.
Adobe is really shooting itself in the foot here again. Web development is my trade and I have noticed a very high adaptation of Linux in this industry. Not just the obvious servers but desktops as well. A few years ago, if you wanted one, it was a negotiation. Now, I have even seen it as a requirement. Flash is universally despised in the LAMP development area which also seems (but I admit to being prejudiced) to be the place where new things are attempted rather then the 1 millionth intra-net site.
Will this make a huge difference? Not at first but unless a customer absolutely demands flash, I code a requirement in HTML5 and show something that is smoother and better supported and Hey, works on the iPad. So much easier for the initial demo to just hand a tablet to show how nice the site works... especially if you noticed the customer has an iPhone or iPad themselves. And a lot do. I am not convinced the world is moving to the tablet for browsing but the customer does so demoing the product on the product of the future just seems smart to me.
When the iPad (or was it the iPhone itself) launched, a lot of people like the parent claimed that the lack of flash would kill it... I would like a product that gets killed like that. I would dry my tears with million dollar bills.
Adobe got lazy with flash, it is slow, buggy, a resource hog and crashes every two seconds all so that webpages can't be indexed and look like the creation of a 12 year old Japanese girl. It lost support of the people who are capable enough of working around it and now, thank to the evil one, customers are demanding that their site works without it to.
HTML5 is the new thing and with mobile devices becoming bigger and bigger (who would you rather please with your website, an iPad user or a user running IE6, I think I know the bigger sucker... eh, the customer with more disposable income) the finicky, slow websites must go. Have you tried YOUR websites menu with a touchscreen yet?
Odd, I thought the fantasy worlds of Final Fantasy had a distinct Japanese accent. It would be odd to hear cat girls speak with an American accent. British might work, in a maid uniform... French maid... ooooooooh.
Oh wait, the article mentions British fantasy worlds and then wonders why the accents are British... the Shire is rather obviously British, it would be hard to read Lotr and think it was set in Australia. The Mad Max fantasy world however would be hard to imagine without thinking Australia, the complete and utter desolation of a post nuclear world where humanity is but a dying memory. Australia! Right?
There are lots of fantasy worlds set with the distinct flavor of all parts of the world. That you never heard of any but Lotr, that says more about you then the state of fantasy.
So basically, your claim is that if you had a penis, it would be the largest?
I seen fanboys make up some weird figures before, but claiming you are the top seller if you would be selling, that is a new one.
Apple is a big mobile maker, but it is not the biggest. About the only claim that stands is that of single model high-end smartphone, Apple sells the most. That is not a bad title to hold but it has rather a lot of qualifiers.
Mandatory car anology, Ferrari would be the biggest car maker, if they sold small cheap cars.
It has been a desperate struggle for all in the computer business to come up with the least usable software ever! Apple had a good long run with their 1 mouse button because options just give users options. MS for a long time stayed with its tried and tested "crash more often then the stockmarket" while Unix just had to rely on making even the manual an arcane command line.
But then stupid users tried to improve. Apple was forced to accept that with the PC, users could always just buy a multi-buttoned mouse! Can't have that Jobs said and have the word iOS, to get rid of not just right-click but double click in one go.
Aha! MS said, we can beat that, behold, the RIBBON, a beautifull piece of AI that ensures whatever command you want, you won't be able to find it.
Oops, said Linux, we started to lag. Quickly, upgrade the desktops so that whatever one you pick, you get the worsed ideas ever combined in a buddy alpha package!
But unbeknown to all, queitly working away were the OpenOffice people, show casing just how utterly evil you can get with opensource code... TADA! The text editor with NO USER INTERFACE AT ALL! MWAHAHAHAHAA!
Even Nintendo who gave us the handheld you got to move to control the game but hold still to be able to see can't top that.
What are the long term costs of anything? But that goes for all other industries just as much. Lets not forget the Santorum frot after the BP oil disaster. What are the long term costs of that? Coal isn't clean either and all that dust is another long term hassle. Will the tar sands really be cleaned up by mining it or will it create an even worse environmental area. What are the costs of mining the minerals needed for solar plants? Just how many birds are killed by wind farms. Just how sustainable is a hydro plant when a river fills it with silth and the fish can no longer migrate?
Every advocate of any scheme will ignore long term risks on his own pet scheme and highlight them for the rest. Up to you to make sense of it all. Good luck.
Two right there! How can I filter them?
And we all know how those countries attitudes are towards optional ingredients.
Most here can easily afford brand name medicine. We are the 1%, enjoy it.
Give me an appetizer, a main meal including meat, a dessert and some fruit. 2 dollars. DOLLARS, not pounds.
Do you know what the prices of those spices are?
Airlines are operating on a hairline profit margin and often go below. When you buy in bulk prices QUICKLY add up into gigantic figures. Really, basic stuff as a cherry on top is a HALF MILLION DOLLARS in hard costs on the scale of airline food for a single airline. Fresh herbs? An airline meal is 2 bucks.Maybe 3 if you are at a small airline. How much does a ground served meal cost you to get fresh herbs? I know, a microwave steam meal starts at 4.50 euro maybe 4 with a discount bought at a local low rent supermarket.
The food you get in cattle class is the cheapest food you can get. There is a reason business class is so much more expensive. People really just don't seem to get that there is a price difference between small can of soda and a small bottle of decent wine. Between a piece of meat that has to come out of 2 dollar budget and a 50 or even 100 dollar budget.
I don't get what is so hard to understand. Do the same people that complain about a airplane food while bragging about how cheap a ticket they got also complain that a free coffee refill does NOT include an Irish coffee?
Nothing you get as part of your airplane ticket is "free" EVERYTHING cost money. Free headphones? They cost money, yes, it is just a few cents but it all adds up. That is the reason when you buy a 500 dollar iPad it barely comes with anything and a cover costs an insane portion of the price considering the tech difference.
If everyone was willing to pay twice the price for a ticket, the service would be a lot better. But people are not. An asian company is trying again, many others have failed, with business only travel. Very nice seats. Good luck getting people to pay for it.
When people book a ticket, they only see the price. They don't realize just how bad 14 hours of misery is. I have told employers to either pay up for business class or forget it. I also want a day before and after off. Anything else, and you might as well get roaring drunk before going to work. Actually, that is a lot more fun but you will be just as effective.
But then someone finds out that someone bucking for a promotion is willing to sacrifice comfort and sleep and alertness and they can save a few bucks and voila, an industry that was known for luxury is now known for discomfort. All to squeeze just one more penny of the ticket price and end up at our destination more wrecked and miserable then ever before.
Good luck. Because even business class is not all that comfortable, I am perfectly happy for a younger person to go instead and save some money.
Travel has always been about paying through the nose for barely reaching the comforts of your own house. I even travel in private jets as a guest in the past. It is exciting the first time, the second time you just want to sleep in your own bed without a horrid atmosphere cramped roof and noisy engine. If you were to put a child raping puppy kicker kitten eater in couch, even the most right wing politician up for re-election would cry foul. Did it a couple of times and stopped when I learned that it was not the norm to have an entire row to yourself because it was off season... ONE seat is what you get on a normal flight? ONCE, 1 hour flight. NEVER EVER AGAIN. If I have to board a tram for 5 minutes that is that crammed, I walk.
But hey, you gotta travel and you gotta save money. Enjoy being miserable, would be fun to actually do the math of just how badly cheap air travel affects people and costs them in cranky holidays or lost productivity during business travel.
In Europe? I take the train. Yes, it is slower on many routes but the difference in comfort is worth it.
You are the one who is to cheap to pay for good quality food. Everything in life costs money and if you want the cheapest possible ticket, you get the cheapest possible food. The food budget in the cattle section is that of the cheapest deep frozen micro-wave meal you can find. Really 2 bucks would be on the high end.
People have made it amazingly clear by voting with their dollars that they want cheap, cheaper, cheapest but then whine their ass of when there are no "free" luxuries. You have to wonder if these people ever had any education involving complex math like sums. When an airline ticket costs less then dining in a decent restaurant, how can you expect decent food? What next, you pay a dime for the toilet and wonder why virgin handmaides don't clean your ass with their silky tongues? PAY up and they will, don't pay and you can eat with the rest of the cows in a space smaller then a real cow gets when it needs to be moved.
Consider yourself lucky, you might live. The cow does not.
Oops, you are out of date, another company is trying all business air travel again. Nobody really managed to do it but somewhere in Asia someone is trying... the US? Sorry, to poor.
It would be REALLY humiliating for the west if an Asian company succeeds in luxury air travel. Time to learn Chinese.
I remember one documentary on an aircrash where the experts just couldn't find what had happened. Or rather, one of them had an idea what might have happened but couldn't prove it. A fuel filter had somehow clogged up with ice even with a working anti-icing system and they couldn't reproduce the icing in any case.
Turns out, that it could happen very easily but only under a very special set of circumstances and if just one variable was off, the problem corrected itself.
It is not whether an iPhone can cause interference. It is whether any gadget build at any time at any point in time can affect any still flying aircraft under the most extreme and unprecedented conditions, ever. Aircraft don't crash under normal conditions, they are pretty safe BUT they are always operating on the edge. Just rain on the runway can turn a comfortable landing with plenty of space into a disaster. Aircraft are supposed to land at the beginning of the runway but at high speed (and an incident might easily force a higher then recommended landing speed) it is the work of seconds to land halfway. Then a split second error, braking to late, brakes not firing etc etc may cause a disaster.
Do gadgets have an influence? Imagine an aircraft flying blind and having to be talked down, the well known interference on radio bands might cause a vital instruction to be missed. Needing a repeat, causing confusion and distraction and BAM. Bad radio protocol HAS caused fatal crashes.
More over, if you don't draw the line somewhere, someone will cross it. Why not a walkie-talkie? Why not a satelite phone? Why not a HAM radio set? Why not a radar dish? Someone, somewhere will push the line no matter where you put it.
No food in the cinema, pretty common rule OBVIOUSLY only enforced to protect the cinema's expensive food stall... yes... and believe it or not to stop people bring in bread. Not sandwhiches, bread and butter and meat to be prepared during the movie. And how do you stop that if you don't ban all food?
Air travel is a miserable business filled with the dregs of humanity. The same people who put 5 tons of water in an ordinary car and don't even think safety as the axel grinds over the road are also the ones who bring a drum of petrol on their flight. Really, the things people do will astound you. Forget terrorists, the average unchecked passenger is way more dangerous. Not necessarly through malice but through unthinking selfish stupidity. No, you cannot bring a throw away grill to a crowded rock concert, thank you very much.
I do not want my airsafety to be risked by the kind of person who has alcohol poured into their mouth and then set on fire. Do you? There are 300-400 people on the biggest planes, do you trust every single one of them NOT to do something incredibly stupid?
It is a VERY simple piece of research that is also obviously flawed and out of date. Reason? The iPad 3. That device will probably sell millions and raise tablet screen sizes ( tablets are a target for Windows 8) to a size rarely seen on PC's, even those with multiple screens. It is a gigantic pixel size.
So... either Windows tablet hardware will lag behind in screen resolution which won't help them sell (although MS should be used to that) or they have to ignore their "evidence" and realize that any statistic you record now is outdated data by the time you analysed it. Those rotters at Apple just refuse to stand still.
Since this screen now clearly exist, its production will no doubt scale up and it will become available for others. There is no reason it can't be added to laptops. Might Apple put it or a similar sexy screen in their laptops? I don't think it is impossible.
And MS will be unable to cope because their next-generation OS, still not out has been build for what people have been using, not what they are going to use.
It is very difficult to get it right, you can easily produce a product so far ahead of itself that nobody can run it. But making a product for the past... that is not possible either.
Mind you, Windows 8 is touchscreen, that is futuristic because the fast majority of screens out right now are NOT touch sensitive. Intresting choice, build for the resolutions of yesterday and the input device of the day after tomorrow. SMART!
Forget Vista and ME, this is going to Bo(m)b