Not quite. The slight difference here is that Mildura refers to the City or the county depending on the context. If people frequently referred to Arizona City as Arizona, you would end up with the same kind of bogus police warnings.
This is not to discount Apple's fault (or Google's, for that matter), far from it. If you ask for directions to Mildura (respectively Arizona), then -- duh! -- you almost certainly mean the city; and if not you want to reach its border, as opposed to the precise middle of it.
At any rate, the sensationalist stories that surround this police report amount to click-hungry journalists who are collectively making a mountain out of a mole hill.
This seems like a non-story. Open Street Map correctly locates Mildura. When you do a search for Mildura on it, though, GeoNames offers three potential locations: Mildura, Mildura Airport, and Mildura Shire, which OSM locates where iOS6 reportedly locates Mildura:
Put another way, it's as if mindless users followed Google Map directions to Arizona, instead of Arizona City, and ended up in the middle of Tonto National Forest, and issued a warning that Google Maps are inaccurate. Well, duh, how about suggesting to zoom in instead, so as to make sure you're not heading in the middle of nowhere?
Don't pretend the US administration, donkey or elephant regardless, doesn't want this.
I wouldn't be as sure as you are. The current situation is in their best political interest, in every manner you can possibly imagine, and they've no material reason to make the slightest concessions. Think about it for a moment, and forget for a moment that they wouldn't mind banning an islamic website or three...
They currently control ICANN et al. If they cave in to the demands of authoritarian States, they'll need to forfeit ICANN. So this is dead in the water to start with. Not to mention the NSA.
Also, consider that for every website or page that the US seeks to take down through courts (e.g. torrent sites, hacker sites, the occasional prophet caricature, etc.), there are millions upon millions of other pages that the likes of China or Iran can do absolutely nothing about. These broadcast the Western lifestyle in its full glory, complete in its individualism and variety, its freedom of speech, its demands for democracy and transparency, its shameless cult of wealth and well being, its abundance of scientific knowledge and know how, its undaunted religion bashing, its supremely libertine sex practices, its borderline-rabid feminists, et cetera, ad nausea. Adding insult to injuries, pesky plebeians who question their situation to the point of deciding to take down (and occasionally shoot) their oppressors do so live over the internet. Yuck. Yuck. Yuck.
Except that, I didn't claimed PHP is a good language. I happen to know all three, and in some idealized world, I wouldn't be bothered to write a line of PHP except at gun point. Regardless, at the end of the day, it doesn't matter much. Write your code, deliver, get paid.
There's little point in trolling about which language is best or most beautiful. In real life, the best language for the job is a language you know well, or the one that your customer is already using and expects you to use; not some ideal language specifically designed to deal with whatever you're doing then and there.
Ruby is fine for shell scripting in my experience. Or for simple programs. As long as you don't need to do anything that might interact with a not-so-well written third party's ruby code (of which there are plenty), you're fine. The minute you do, you're not.
When you do, the mutable nature of its data structures can turn an otherwise elegant language into a hugely verbose minefield. You also quickly find that threading support is a joke. That fibers are an absolute mess. That UTF support is arguably better than in other languages (PHP chief among them), but still lags far behind languages that eat UTF for breakfast. That is has hugely inconsistent quirks (and occasional side effects) that you get when using procs and lambdas interchangeably -- many of which are out there in the ruby bug tracker, but not fixed yet because deemed rare, low priority bugs. And it's dreadfully slow -- even with JRuby or Rubinius.
If you're not seeing where I'm coming from, give your ruby code a cold hard look. Ask yourself how safe it plays with whatever is tossed at it. If your answer is something like "Not safe, but don't send me your internal state FFS!" (which is very likely), then welcome to the club -- thousands upon thousands of Ruby coders, and I am no exception, follow this exact same policy. In fact, nearly all of them. Including the developers of widely used gems such as Rake, Rack, Bundler, Thor, and of course Rails. (The only noteworthy exception I've noted is the guy who develops Sequel -- but then, I've never audited his code in its entirety, let alone recently.) Which, evidently, is fine. Until it bites your ass. Hard.
In defense of PHP, Python and Ruby suck in their own ways too -- plain and simple. Maybe not as much, or in the same ways, but they still suck. Try them, and see for yourself; if you haven't seen why yet, it means you're doing it wrong or sticking to writing trivial code where they remain beautiful and all encompassing and what not.
In the case of Python, since it's on topic, try recent versions of Python's hex() function for instance. Assume it works like it does for other languages, and use it to shovel through a Core Dump and see how it works out for you -- it's not a pretty sight.
Just use whatever you're most comfortable with, and get your job done. Deliver, get paid, and get a life.
So what you're saying is he stupidly set his sights and expectations too high.
Nope... Merely pointing out, for all intents and purposes, that (paying) RT customers are even fewer and farther in between than (paying) Linux customers. And that there are greener fields out there if you want to actually make money.
In order to play a game you need a decent CPU and graphics card
Imho, four decades of game development prove you wrong, again and again. Many of the very best games that came out during that time span had little to no need for a decent CPU or graphics card. Only remakes and rehashes did. Think Pac-Man, Breakout, M.U.L.E., Elite, Donkey Kong, Mario, Mario Cart, Gauntlet, Dungeon Master, The Bard's Tale, Wasteland, King's Quest, Leisure Suit Larry, Sim City, Civilization, Master of Orion, Lemmings, WarCraft, and so many others... This being a matter of taste, there are many great games I'd fail to mention that others would argue should make it into this list.
The point is, most of these games had little to no needs for out of the ordinary CPU or GPU performance; rather, they introduced something new and original to the game play, or outclassed precursors in many ways. Each are landmarks. When these games needed strong GPUs, it was chiefly due to the development team being perfectionist in their time and figured that by the time they released gamers would have more powerful PCs anyway -- nothing else. In the latter cases, the game would have worked just as well with not-as-good graphics or sounds, and you'll encounter many an old-time gamer who will argue that games -- RPG and TBS in particular -- went downhill just around the time that graphics and sounds became more important than game play. I'd place this somewhere in the mid-90s; we've been eating dog food since then, with very few exceptions.
There arguably were a few interesting projects on Kickstarter of late, which will hopefully reshuffle the whole industry and turn it upside down. But I'm not crossing my fingers. The truth is that today's mass-market gamers have very different expectations from yesterday's gamers, and as much as it's fun to periodically crack Cut the Rope puzzles or help your kid crack one, it's nothing like the thrill you could get from playing M.U.L.E. or Lords of Conquest with your family.
You do know, that since Windows RT can't run Android java code, or iPhone objective C code, they most likely had to rewrite large parts of the game.
I Think that 10.000£ development sounds low, considering it is a game which have sold over 100.000 units on Android.
That's true for iOS to Java, but I doubt it's true for iOS to Win RT. In most iOS game, you're doing C++ code and wrapping it in Obj-C. Porting to Java means porting C++ to Java. I'm honestly unfamiliar with recent Windows APIs, but I wouldn't be surprised the slightest if porting to Win RT merely meant changing the Obj-C wrappers into C# wrappers for the C++ code, and dealing with the couple of hardware or driver related bugs that showed their ugly face in the process. The 10k pounds figure doesn't seem unreasonable at all; if anything, seems high.
In Rubicon's defense: don't discount the hardware, which also has very real potential for bugs.
Rubicon had severe issues with Android related to graphic chipsets, if one of the discussion threads in their forum from a few months ago is anything to go by. From a device to the next they were different, and even on the same devices (the S3 was mentioned by one user), they occasionally differed in their behavior -- crash on one, no crash on the other. In essence, perfectly syntactically correct shaders worked fine on iOS and went haywire on some Android devices. So they had to introduce a number of hacks in their Android port to work around these issues, which broke compatibility with other Android devices in the process, and so forth. (I suppose they fixed them since then.)
Maybe -- just maybe -- you're merely grown accustomed to catering to a tiny user base of paying customers, but he isn't.:-)
It's a numbers game, really. A 0.01% market penetration per month on iOS, for instance, means roughly 40k new paying customers. 0.01% of the 500k WinRT at the same price point is, in contrast, only a few notches above zero.
Sincere question because just "spent $10k on it" does not tell much.
Yeah, it was. Great Big War Game is, simply put, one of the best TBS games that came out this year on mobile platforms. The 10k figure likely represents the cost of hooking existing C++ code into the Win API (instead of the Cocoa API), so it doesn't seem unreasonable.
Regarding the game itself, the single-player campaign will keep you busy for evenings or weeks, depending on how frequently you play it. There also are a variety of skirmish maps, which you can play vs the AI outside of the campaign, but I'd suggest that the AI doesn't play well enough to be much of a challenge.
These same skirmish maps, that said, also allow to play against other players online, and this is where things get the most interesting if you're into that kind of stuff. It's not limited to a single platform, since they rolled out their own servers. You get to play players on iOS, Android, Windows Phone, Mac and (I assume) Windows RT, complete with ELO rankings and leaderboards. It's turn by turn; most players play a few turns on their way to work and back. Depending on whether your opponents are online at the same time and as long as you are, games can be a single commute business or a whole week business.
Overall, it's a good time waster if you like TBS games, and it's easily worth the pittance that they ask for it. It's also well worth getting the extra maps and units through IAP where applicable (the Windows Phone version has no such thing due to lack thereof, and thus a higher initial price).
As TFA points out, disclosing to 200k people should maybe count as a press release (especially if anyone can see the page), but uh... it might not.
Methinks that the SEC has a genuine case here. You can't reasonably count on investors to follow the CEOs and CFOs of companies they invest in on corporate blogs and news feeds, Facebook, Twitter, Google+, Linked In, and wherever else. Information with material value to investors needs to be made available to all investors at the same time through the usual channels: SEC filings, letters to the investors, and press releases.
I could envision a situation where someone could disclose to their friends work related successes that count as material investor information, and that could cause trouble. A lot of it.
Not just could. Does. People get fines and occasionally go to jail over this, for insider trading. Picture one of those friends subsequently leaking that information to a hedge fund.
Yeah, heavens forbid that executives ever be given information that they might disagree with. Shame on this person for thinking that executives should be exposed to a wide variety of ideas and opinions.
So: more sticking it to the working class and the poor rather than the rich and the banks who actually caused the financial problems in the first place....
I suspect that former French Prime Minister Michel Rocard gave the correct outline in an interview to Libération on the economic situation in Europe during the campaign. In essence, he then suggested that taxes would get raised regardless of who was in charge; the only real question was who would foot the bill. Time will tell if he was right, but I'd wager that he was and that this applies to most other countries with deficit problems.
I feel your pain, but I can also see a few benefits in that piece of regulation.
For instance, less kids would injure or kill themselves on tuned up 50cc bikes. Doing so is now illegal where I spent my youth, but back then a guy I know lost his foot at age 15; his bike went twice as fast as it originally could. A fucking life wasted to gain a few minutes per day...
The same could be said for young adults who have the lunacy of tuning their 250cc bike so it goes even faster than it already does (which is already way faster than you're allowed to drive anyway), while forgetting that they also need to give their brakes a *very* serious upgrade when doing so. Especially when they top it off by causing accidents on highways due to reckless driving.
Anyway, I wouldn't be surprised at all if people whose friends or family had had bike accidents were amongst the vested party. Or that more than a few commissioners and members of parliament belong to the latter group. Whoever pushed this through knew the data all too well, in the sense that they experienced the hardships associated with it -- personally. And frankly, as a parent, I'd be delighted that my kids won't be able to tune their bikes until they're several years into driving one; by then they'll hopefully know how dangerous it can be.
I'll give you one for free: the original video of "Science: It's a girl thing!"
The execution was laughable, but that's actually a good idea imho -- IT departments could use more chicks. Plus, the laughable execution made it get more attention that it may have had otherwise, meaning that they may have gotten the message through regardless.
The European Commission do indeed do lots of stupid things but I think anything aimed at giving users greater privacy and control over their personal information is a good thing.
The EC makes shit tons of good stuff that you never hear about. A lot more than bad stuff, in fact.
The EC's biggest problem stems from EU governments that actively lobby it to pass regulations and directives on unpopular topics. Local politicians seldom mention that their great new reform is a mere transcription into local law of an EU directive (aka something they're obligated to do). In contrast, they'll sure as hell blame EU technocrats (which, incidentally, they named) for coming up with directives that force them to pass much needed yet highly unpopular reforms.
A case in point is the recent lashing out at the EU over deficit reduction. No politician gets elected in the EU by promising to axe the public sector, axe entitlement programs, raise taxes, and so on. The EU stability pact, in this light, is a blessing: they get to do all that with a convenient scapegoat. Hollande's position on it during the French presidential campaign, in this regard, was exemplary of EU demagoguery. He posed for voters, promising that he'd renegotiate the pact. Upon being elected, he quacked around for a few weeks, in an effort to disguise his pig of a bluff into a not-too-ugly princess. And, now, he can now freely blame his predecessor and the EU to pass the highly unpopular reforms that he knew were much needed from the start. (Whether he actually does remains an open question, but I'd opine that he has little choice.)
Slashdot Mirror
How did real estate in Florida ever get so overpriced in the run up to 2008, if anyone out there is taking rising sea levels seriously?
Not quite. The slight difference here is that Mildura refers to the City or the county depending on the context. If people frequently referred to Arizona City as Arizona, you would end up with the same kind of bogus police warnings.
This is not to discount Apple's fault (or Google's, for that matter), far from it. If you ask for directions to Mildura (respectively Arizona), then -- duh! -- you almost certainly mean the city; and if not you want to reach its border, as opposed to the precise middle of it.
At any rate, the sensationalist stories that surround this police report amount to click-hungry journalists who are collectively making a mountain out of a mole hill.
This seems like a non-story. Open Street Map correctly locates Mildura. When you do a search for Mildura on it, though, GeoNames offers three potential locations: Mildura, Mildura Airport, and Mildura Shire, which OSM locates where iOS6 reportedly locates Mildura:
http://www.openstreetmap.org/?mlat=-34.1770076751709&mlon=142.1488380432129&zoom=11
Put another way, it's as if mindless users followed Google Map directions to Arizona, instead of Arizona City, and ended up in the middle of Tonto National Forest, and issued a warning that Google Maps are inaccurate. Well, duh, how about suggesting to zoom in instead, so as to make sure you're not heading in the middle of nowhere?
Oh my... Now I can't stop picturing a naughty Siri giving me turn by turn navigation in the middle of nowhere.
"Take the next right."
[Stops and scratches head upon seeing it's a dirt road.]
"For real. Get onto that dirt road."
[Proceeds and drives a few miles.]
"At the next kangaroo, turn left."
[WTF?!?]
The future might include pee brains in addition to pea brains.
It's. Not. Dead. Yet.
It'll return as a zombie... process?
Don't pretend the US administration, donkey or elephant regardless, doesn't want this.
I wouldn't be as sure as you are. The current situation is in their best political interest, in every manner you can possibly imagine, and they've no material reason to make the slightest concessions. Think about it for a moment, and forget for a moment that they wouldn't mind banning an islamic website or three...
They currently control ICANN et al. If they cave in to the demands of authoritarian States, they'll need to forfeit ICANN. So this is dead in the water to start with. Not to mention the NSA.
Also, consider that for every website or page that the US seeks to take down through courts (e.g. torrent sites, hacker sites, the occasional prophet caricature, etc.), there are millions upon millions of other pages that the likes of China or Iran can do absolutely nothing about. These broadcast the Western lifestyle in its full glory, complete in its individualism and variety, its freedom of speech, its demands for democracy and transparency, its shameless cult of wealth and well being, its abundance of scientific knowledge and know how, its undaunted religion bashing, its supremely libertine sex practices, its borderline-rabid feminists, et cetera, ad nausea. Adding insult to injuries, pesky plebeians who question their situation to the point of deciding to take down (and occasionally shoot) their oppressors do so live over the internet. Yuck. Yuck. Yuck.
Except that, I didn't claimed PHP is a good language. I happen to know all three, and in some idealized world, I wouldn't be bothered to write a line of PHP except at gun point. Regardless, at the end of the day, it doesn't matter much. Write your code, deliver, get paid.
There's little point in trolling about which language is best or most beautiful. In real life, the best language for the job is a language you know well, or the one that your customer is already using and expects you to use; not some ideal language specifically designed to deal with whatever you're doing then and there.
Ruby is fine for shell scripting in my experience. Or for simple programs. As long as you don't need to do anything that might interact with a not-so-well written third party's ruby code (of which there are plenty), you're fine. The minute you do, you're not.
When you do, the mutable nature of its data structures can turn an otherwise elegant language into a hugely verbose minefield. You also quickly find that threading support is a joke. That fibers are an absolute mess. That UTF support is arguably better than in other languages (PHP chief among them), but still lags far behind languages that eat UTF for breakfast. That is has hugely inconsistent quirks (and occasional side effects) that you get when using procs and lambdas interchangeably -- many of which are out there in the ruby bug tracker, but not fixed yet because deemed rare, low priority bugs. And it's dreadfully slow -- even with JRuby or Rubinius.
If you're not seeing where I'm coming from, give your ruby code a cold hard look. Ask yourself how safe it plays with whatever is tossed at it. If your answer is something like "Not safe, but don't send me your internal state FFS!" (which is very likely), then welcome to the club -- thousands upon thousands of Ruby coders, and I am no exception, follow this exact same policy. In fact, nearly all of them. Including the developers of widely used gems such as Rake, Rack, Bundler, Thor, and of course Rails. (The only noteworthy exception I've noted is the guy who develops Sequel -- but then, I've never audited his code in its entirety, let alone recently.) Which, evidently, is fine. Until it bites your ass. Hard.
In defense of PHP, Python and Ruby suck in their own ways too -- plain and simple. Maybe not as much, or in the same ways, but they still suck. Try them, and see for yourself; if you haven't seen why yet, it means you're doing it wrong or sticking to writing trivial code where they remain beautiful and all encompassing and what not.
In the case of Python, since it's on topic, try recent versions of Python's hex() function for instance. Assume it works like it does for other languages, and use it to shovel through a Core Dump and see how it works out for you -- it's not a pretty sight.
Just use whatever you're most comfortable with, and get your job done. Deliver, get paid, and get a life.
Best I'm aware, Python was important for Google long before Guido got hired by Google. He was the cherry on the pie, if anything.
As such, it means absolutely nothing for Google, bar that they lost someone who they may have wanted to keep in-house.
So what you're saying is he stupidly set his sights and expectations too high.
Nope... Merely pointing out, for all intents and purposes, that (paying) RT customers are even fewer and farther in between than (paying) Linux customers. And that there are greener fields out there if you want to actually make money.
In order to play a game you need a decent CPU and graphics card
Imho, four decades of game development prove you wrong, again and again. Many of the very best games that came out during that time span had little to no need for a decent CPU or graphics card. Only remakes and rehashes did. Think Pac-Man, Breakout, M.U.L.E., Elite, Donkey Kong, Mario, Mario Cart, Gauntlet, Dungeon Master, The Bard's Tale, Wasteland, King's Quest, Leisure Suit Larry, Sim City, Civilization, Master of Orion, Lemmings, WarCraft, and so many others... This being a matter of taste, there are many great games I'd fail to mention that others would argue should make it into this list.
The point is, most of these games had little to no needs for out of the ordinary CPU or GPU performance; rather, they introduced something new and original to the game play, or outclassed precursors in many ways. Each are landmarks. When these games needed strong GPUs, it was chiefly due to the development team being perfectionist in their time and figured that by the time they released gamers would have more powerful PCs anyway -- nothing else. In the latter cases, the game would have worked just as well with not-as-good graphics or sounds, and you'll encounter many an old-time gamer who will argue that games -- RPG and TBS in particular -- went downhill just around the time that graphics and sounds became more important than game play. I'd place this somewhere in the mid-90s; we've been eating dog food since then, with very few exceptions.
There arguably were a few interesting projects on Kickstarter of late, which will hopefully reshuffle the whole industry and turn it upside down. But I'm not crossing my fingers. The truth is that today's mass-market gamers have very different expectations from yesterday's gamers, and as much as it's fun to periodically crack Cut the Rope puzzles or help your kid crack one, it's nothing like the thrill you could get from playing M.U.L.E. or Lords of Conquest with your family.
You do know, that since Windows RT can't run Android java code, or iPhone objective C code, they most likely had to rewrite large parts of the game.
I Think that 10.000£ development sounds low, considering it is a game which have sold over 100.000 units on Android.
That's true for iOS to Java, but I doubt it's true for iOS to Win RT. In most iOS game, you're doing C++ code and wrapping it in Obj-C. Porting to Java means porting C++ to Java. I'm honestly unfamiliar with recent Windows APIs, but I wouldn't be surprised the slightest if porting to Win RT merely meant changing the Obj-C wrappers into C# wrappers for the C++ code, and dealing with the couple of hardware or driver related bugs that showed their ugly face in the process. The 10k pounds figure doesn't seem unreasonable at all; if anything, seems high.
In Rubicon's defense: don't discount the hardware, which also has very real potential for bugs.
Rubicon had severe issues with Android related to graphic chipsets, if one of the discussion threads in their forum from a few months ago is anything to go by. From a device to the next they were different, and even on the same devices (the S3 was mentioned by one user), they occasionally differed in their behavior -- crash on one, no crash on the other. In essence, perfectly syntactically correct shaders worked fine on iOS and went haywire on some Android devices. So they had to introduce a number of hacks in their Android port to work around these issues, which broke compatibility with other Android devices in the process, and so forth. (I suppose they fixed them since then.)
Maybe -- just maybe -- you're merely grown accustomed to catering to a tiny user base of paying customers, but he isn't. :-)
It's a numbers game, really. A 0.01% market penetration per month on iOS, for instance, means roughly 40k new paying customers. 0.01% of the 500k WinRT at the same price point is, in contrast, only a few notches above zero.
Sincere question because just "spent $10k on it" does not tell much.
Yeah, it was. Great Big War Game is, simply put, one of the best TBS games that came out this year on mobile platforms. The 10k figure likely represents the cost of hooking existing C++ code into the Win API (instead of the Cocoa API), so it doesn't seem unreasonable.
Regarding the game itself, the single-player campaign will keep you busy for evenings or weeks, depending on how frequently you play it. There also are a variety of skirmish maps, which you can play vs the AI outside of the campaign, but I'd suggest that the AI doesn't play well enough to be much of a challenge.
These same skirmish maps, that said, also allow to play against other players online, and this is where things get the most interesting if you're into that kind of stuff. It's not limited to a single platform, since they rolled out their own servers. You get to play players on iOS, Android, Windows Phone, Mac and (I assume) Windows RT, complete with ELO rankings and leaderboards. It's turn by turn; most players play a few turns on their way to work and back. Depending on whether your opponents are online at the same time and as long as you are, games can be a single commute business or a whole week business.
Overall, it's a good time waster if you like TBS games, and it's easily worth the pittance that they ask for it. It's also well worth getting the extra maps and units through IAP where applicable (the Windows Phone version has no such thing due to lack thereof, and thus a higher initial price).
As TFA points out, disclosing to 200k people should maybe count as a press release (especially if anyone can see the page), but uh... it might not.
Methinks that the SEC has a genuine case here. You can't reasonably count on investors to follow the CEOs and CFOs of companies they invest in on corporate blogs and news feeds, Facebook, Twitter, Google+, Linked In, and wherever else. Information with material value to investors needs to be made available to all investors at the same time through the usual channels: SEC filings, letters to the investors, and press releases.
I could envision a situation where someone could disclose to their friends work related successes that count as material investor information, and that could cause trouble. A lot of it.
Not just could. Does. People get fines and occasionally go to jail over this, for insider trading. Picture one of those friends subsequently leaking that information to a hedge fund.
Yeah, heavens forbid that executives ever be given information that they might disagree with. Shame on this person for thinking that executives should be exposed to a wide variety of ideas and opinions.
FTFY
Because:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thorium#Reserve_estimates
So: more sticking it to the working class and the poor rather than the rich and the banks who actually caused the financial problems in the first place....
I suspect that former French Prime Minister Michel Rocard gave the correct outline in an interview to Libération on the economic situation in Europe during the campaign. In essence, he then suggested that taxes would get raised regardless of who was in charge; the only real question was who would foot the bill. Time will tell if he was right, but I'd wager that he was and that this applies to most other countries with deficit problems.
+1 Informative
I feel your pain, but I can also see a few benefits in that piece of regulation.
For instance, less kids would injure or kill themselves on tuned up 50cc bikes. Doing so is now illegal where I spent my youth, but back then a guy I know lost his foot at age 15; his bike went twice as fast as it originally could. A fucking life wasted to gain a few minutes per day...
The same could be said for young adults who have the lunacy of tuning their 250cc bike so it goes even faster than it already does (which is already way faster than you're allowed to drive anyway), while forgetting that they also need to give their brakes a *very* serious upgrade when doing so. Especially when they top it off by causing accidents on highways due to reckless driving.
Anyway, I wouldn't be surprised at all if people whose friends or family had had bike accidents were amongst the vested party. Or that more than a few commissioners and members of parliament belong to the latter group. Whoever pushed this through knew the data all too well, in the sense that they experienced the hardships associated with it -- personally. And frankly, as a parent, I'd be delighted that my kids won't be able to tune their bikes until they're several years into driving one; by then they'll hopefully know how dangerous it can be.
I'll give you one for free: the original video of "Science: It's a girl thing!"
The execution was laughable, but that's actually a good idea imho -- IT departments could use more chicks. Plus, the laughable execution made it get more attention that it may have had otherwise, meaning that they may have gotten the message through regardless.
The European Commission do indeed do lots of stupid things but I think anything aimed at giving users greater privacy and control over their personal information is a good thing.
The EC makes shit tons of good stuff that you never hear about. A lot more than bad stuff, in fact.
The EC's biggest problem stems from EU governments that actively lobby it to pass regulations and directives on unpopular topics. Local politicians seldom mention that their great new reform is a mere transcription into local law of an EU directive (aka something they're obligated to do). In contrast, they'll sure as hell blame EU technocrats (which, incidentally, they named) for coming up with directives that force them to pass much needed yet highly unpopular reforms.
A case in point is the recent lashing out at the EU over deficit reduction. No politician gets elected in the EU by promising to axe the public sector, axe entitlement programs, raise taxes, and so on. The EU stability pact, in this light, is a blessing: they get to do all that with a convenient scapegoat. Hollande's position on it during the French presidential campaign, in this regard, was exemplary of EU demagoguery. He posed for voters, promising that he'd renegotiate the pact. Upon being elected, he quacked around for a few weeks, in an effort to disguise his pig of a bluff into a not-too-ugly princess. And, now, he can now freely blame his predecessor and the EU to pass the highly unpopular reforms that he knew were much needed from the start. (Whether he actually does remains an open question, but I'd opine that he has little choice.)