Sure, there is. All you have to do is send me $500 and I will test them according to some protocols which I have developed. I'd like to share them with you, but unfortunately due to proprietary business secrets which must remain undisclosed, I will be unable to publish them.
Regardless if which you buy, the actual artist gets next to nothing. The indie labels probably have a better deal, but there are still a lot of artists that aren't on iTunes. Maybe things have changed more recently, but there was a time where you couldn't find anything that wasn't from a major label through them and it's been pretty well established how badly they screw over the artists. They might not be getting paid either way given the usual studio accounting practices and all of that 'expensive studio time' and other costs that went into making the album.
So the point still stands. For a lot of bands or artists, if you actually want them to see any money you're far better off going to a show or buying some merchandise. Otherwise it's not exactly easy to tell if someone is signed to a label that isn't completely shafting them.
And let's not pretend that buying through iTunes or any other competitor is doing the content producers any better. They're still getting pennies on the dollar. If you have $20 and want as much of that to go the artist as possible, go see them live or buy a shirt at a show. They'll make far more money from that than they'll ever see from proceeds from subscription or album sales.
No, it won't. Here's what will happen: That revenue will stay in the U.S. and be used to purchase other goods and services within the U.S. Bringing it back to China probably subjects it to all kinds of taxes. That's why Apple, Google, Microsoft, and every other large multi-national company have loads of money sitting around outside the U.S. Trying to bring it back in results in a lot of it being lost to taxes.
The same may well not be true for China, but there's still a benefit for the company to leave some of their U.S. made profits in the U.S.
Precious metals are just as worthless as fiat currencies in most scenarios where a collapse occurs. Unless there's another fiat currency to exchange your lump of gold for, it won't do you any more good than paper money. No one will want it and you won't be able to easily exchange it for anything that's actually useful. Any currency is just a proxy for the idea of wealth. If shit hits the fan hard enough that the several local currencies become heavily devalued, it will probably happen on a global scale as everything is so intertwined at this point.
Precious medals will eventually become valuable again over a long enough period of time, but they won't guarantee that you'll see that time. Depending on the severity of the collapse, means of protecting yourself, food, and other basics to ensure survival are far more valuable, but knowledge is probably the most valuable currency available. What good is a mound of money if you're dying and don't know how to stop it?
Precious metals suffer from the same problem as any other form of currency: it's only as valuable as everything considers it to be or as someone will pay to use it to produce something else.
CoH is so old that the servers they're using to run it will probably be retired. They're probably quite specialized for the needs of the game and anything new is going to offer an order of magnitude better performance. They could probably reduce the support staff at this point, or have them support multiple games. The player base that's sticking around at this point probably aren't griping or reporting bugs that they know will never get fixed anymore and there's no reason that the existing staff can't be transitioned to also work on another game.
As long as it was making money they should just keep it around. Some pencil-head MBA who has not actual understanding of the customer base probably made this decision. It's just going to alienate a lot of their longtime customers.
I found both Reverse Cowgirl and A Scause for Applause to be pretty good as well. Cartman Finds Love was pretty good, and Cash for Gold wasn't too bad either, although I can understand that one isn't for everyone. I've also heard that Going Native is a hell of lot more funny if you actually live in Hawaii. Really the only episode that I didn't care for at all was Faith Hilling. The rest were just par for the course.
Compared to the last season, this one has a had a lot of good episodes.
A) If this were the only criteria, then Sony, Mircosoft, and Nintendo would have already been replaced by the existing cheap products that are already on the market. This is obviously better than what's come before it, but I doubt it's going to change much.
B) This assumes that first of all, a whole lot of people are going to be excited to develop for it. Most who buy it won't do any development at all. Second it assumes that 95% of the stuff that actually does get developed for this won't be crap.
I honestly don't think that this will have much lasting impact on the industry as it exists now. I wouldn't mind being wrong, but I have some doubts about this turning into the wild success that you think it will become. It's not going to get the big exclusives that a lot of people want, so this thing isn't going to be replacing the incumbants any time soon. I have a feeling it will be used mostly for casual games and emulators.
Maybe I'm just feeding trolls on this (and honestly with the hyperbole in your post, I can't help but think that) but I don't see it that way. I generally lean more towards the right, at least fiscally, and Romney wasn't our last chance, and Obama is not some kind of super red socialist. By most objectives, he's still fairly right of center and a lot of his policies aren't something that hasn't been proposed by Republicans at some point with in the last half-century.
If anything, Otellini was smart enough to play both sides of the isle, ensuring that no matter who came out on top, IBM had friends with benefits or markers to call in. And honestly, who cares who he supported or endorsed. If you're basing your entire assessment of a person on who they endorse for President, it makes you look narrow-minded.
That's great and all, but Sony doesn't care about them. If they're just in it for the hardware (which at certain points of the consoles lifecycle is subsidized) the manufacturer (Sony in this case, but it applies to all of them) doesn't want you as a customer as they really need you to buy games. Also, while it's nifty that there are some hobbyists out there who get a lot of joy out of tinkering with the technology and discovering how to bend it to their will, the vast majority of the people who would use these results are just going to do so to pirate games. They don't give a damn about the free software movement, open source, or anything else. They're just cheapskates who don't want to pay for a game.
Yeah, Sony probably shouldn't sell the hardware at a loss, and it's really stupid to expect any security to hold up for very long if someone really wants to crack it, but that's the way the market is right now and no console manufacturer could survive if they couldn't subsidize the hardware, especially early on when it's rather expensive to make.
Sony understands perfectly well how hackers think. They just make poor customers for Sony's business model so there's no interest at all to cater to them. That's why you're not going to see the kinds of features that hackers want.
Maybe you don't know this, but Google does advertising through their email. They have a computer reading your emails and targeting ads based on their content. I wouldn't be surprised if other major competitors are doing similar things. Outside of that, the majority of remaining email providers are either businesses where email is a valuable communication tool, a few small pay-for service providers, and some personal email systems run by people who either don't want to pay or don't want to have anyone or anything else going through their mail, even if it is just an automated computer program.
Most businesses don't play anywhere near as much value on social networks as a communication program, and the type of people who tend to use social networks the most probably are neither willing to use a pay-for service nor have the ability to run and maintain their own servers. So outside of a few side cases, the only group that would be really interested in running a social network is the type that's going to monetize it through harvesting user information to sell to advertisers.
Also, unlike email where it doesn't matter who the provider is, most social networks aren't cross-compatible. Given that the main sell of the social network is the network itself, anything less than a large centralized network or a smaller one that targets a specific niche isn't going to be worth much. Having dozens of small competing networks is worth a lot less than having them all as one large network. With email, it really doesn't matter.
It also assumes that there aren't any energy advancements that are so far out of our understanding right now that they wouldn't seem like magic if we possessed them. Our assumptions are limited by our current understanding. In the next thousand years we could see all kinds of advancements that render building a Dyson sphere completely unnecessary.
Interesting. I think that this font also makes it easier for me to read more quickly, but I wouldn't consider myself dyslexic as I've never felt as though I've had difficulties reading almost any font and read quite frequently. Maybe I'm just thinking that I can read that font more quickly, but for some reason it does seem easier to read. Perhaps it's something that's true for people in general. I'd be curious to see if there have been any studies to determine if this font also improves reading speed for people who haven't been diagnosed or probably wouldn't be diagnosed as dyslexic.
All that aside, stuff like this is really awesome. Even though a lot of people like to say or think that the world is going to shit, it's also getting better in a lot of ways for a lot of people.
That's just standard studio bullshit to capitalize as much as possible on the franchise. You're going to see that with any property.
I'd be much more worried if Peter Jackson goes batshit insane and gives us an uninspired story with shallow and boring characters. Then it would be going in the same direction as Star Wars.
Honestly there's a whole lot of the Tolkien universe left to go and I honestly don't mind them making movies out of it; however, I do wish that they wouldn't drag the Hobbit out so much, especially when there're stories such as the Silmarillion that would be incredibly amazing to see done.
If you read the description section, they provide more details and it becomes quite evident what is meant by the term "scroll bar". Here's a bit from the application: "In some portable devices, scroll bars are used to indicate the position in the document or list of the displayed portion. But scroll bars are fixed user interface features that take up valuable display screen area on an already small display screen." Given that, I doubt even the most gifted legal expert could argue that traditional scroll bars are covered by this patent.
You're correct that anyone can be sued at any time for just about any reason, but I doubt Apple will go after anyone with this. As far as I'm aware, no one else is doing scrolling like this. If they suddenly changed to this method, I can see Apple sending lawyers after them. If someone is hit with a frivolous lawsuit, they have legal recourse available and could conceivably countersue Apple for court fees.
If you don't think that this patent is valid, find some prior art. Otherwise if no one else has up to this point been using this idea, perhaps its more novel than most would consider now that it has been patented.
Actually you're wrong. In the first claim of the patent they explicitly state the following: "and the vertical bar is not a scroll bar;"
Essentially if you have a scroll bar in your implementation, you can't be sued with this patent as it's explicitly stated that it's not a scroll bar.
Also, it was filed in March of this year. It would be pretty damned easy to show prior art or that in fact your own implementation of this existed prior to Apple's filing of their application.
The Galaxy Tab 10.1 is over a year old at this point and probably not selling in large volume any longer. Other competing Android tablets have already supplanted it in nearly every area and it will probably be replaced by Samsung's next offering in the near future. Unless this ruling also makes it a lot easier for Apple to get an injunction against any of Samsung's future tablet products, I can't see this making a difference at all.
I haven't read the ruling yet, but in several past cases, usually the injunction prevents Samsung from importing additional product. That would mean that inventory already in the US and in the hands of retailers could continue to be sold so long as Apple doesn't pursue legal action against retails, which they won't as many of those retailers also likely sell Apple's products. Given that Samsung will probably have a new tablet out soon, I can't see them even caring if they can't restock supplies of the Galaxy Tab 10.1.
I'd be interested in hearing the full implications from this ruling from someone more versed in the relevant laws. Is this victory as hollow as I think it is, or is there actually some value in this for Apple?
I don't think there have been any large pieces of malware released for iOS, but they're possible. Charlie Miller had snuck an app into the app store that could have functioned as malware if here weren't just doing it as a proof of concept. Also, every time a new jailbreak is released for iOS, it could potentially be used for malware, especially some of the older jailbreaks that simply required loading a PDF or visiting a web page.
Apple's security model does help to prevent some cases where it's easier for Android to be targeted, but otherwise iOS could be infected. I'm sure we'll see one eventually. Whether it's someone slipping something by a reviewer or someone who develops a jailbreak deciding that they can get a lot of money selling it on the black market, it's bound to happen given the popularity of the platform and how much data is available on a person's mobile device these days.
Do those parties advocate for a capitalistic society without government intervention?
If not, they probably shouldn't be labeled as a far-right party. The left-right dichotomy is about ownership of the means of production and the distribution of wealth. I feel as though lumping in extremist groups, which have little or nothing to say about economic policy, with other right or left-leaning groups to be a disingenuous attempt to make the more mainstream, non-extremeist parties look bad by association. Whether it's lumping in a group of racial bigots with the right or eco-terrorists with the left, it doesn't accomplish anything and just detracts from meaningful conversation by providing for easily constructed straw men for people on both sides of the isle.
That your comment has turned into the usual Europe vs. US crapfest just goes to show why lumping in extremist groups is a bad idea. It just fosters additional rhetoric and generalizations that aren't conducive for civil discourse.
The later versions of Civ, at least Civ IV, did better in these regards. If you were at war for prolonged periods of time, the unhappiness made it difficult to keep things perfectly stable at home. Additionally, even if you managed to capture enemy cities, the amount of culture that the enemy exerted over them was sometimes enough to cause the cities to revolt and revert to their control after a few hundred years.
I remember one game where another super power and I were essentially fighting a giant proxy war through our allies and other nations, simply because it was too expensive for us to wage war directly. Also, we both had a load of nuclear weapons, so the end results of a direct conflict probably would have started to look similar to this. I was losing at first simply because I couldn't support my allies as well, but I eventually managed to damage his economy so much through espionage and my trade corporations that he couldn't afford to hold a large amount of his cities and was forced to turn them into a vassal state, which broke away from the parent nation a later.
Apparently, there are three main super powers left and they have been locked in constant war with each other for the past thousand years or more. Every time someone moves beyond the relatively stable front lines, their armies just get nuked into oblivion so no one can really push the attack too far beyond a set border. Spies constantly plant nuclear devices in cities, wiping out the population and spreading pollution. Engineers are generally kept busy building roads to keep moving troops to the front lines so there's not really enough time to clean up the pollution or improve the terrain.
Basically it's reached a point where it's almost impossible to gain an advantage. Everyone is armed to the teeth and nuclear weapons will demolish just about any army in the field that gets to far across the lines. Everyone is also so committed to the war effort that there's not enough resources to devote to fixing things up and anytime something does get fixed up, it's generally just nuked back to oblivion.
This has already been discussed to death on Slashdot. I'm not going to dig for a link, but some other poster came up with a good solution. If you wildly swing through something physically, when your virtual sword has stopped, your character becomes staggered until they physically reposition their weapon to sync up with the virtual representation. Eventually you'll become good enough at recognizing how your virtual sword will interact with the enemy's virtual sword (or body) and you won't be wildly swinging through as though you could slice through them. Eventually you'll train your muscles to anticipate the impact of the virtual swords and stop mid-swing (at the point where the virtual swords would clash) and begin the next move, possibly pulling back for another strike or pushing forward to knock back the enemy.
Hell, add the Kinect so that you can kick or so the game can incorporate other body movements as well.
No, they're the only one that talk about it all the damned time. Remember all of the Courier "leaks" from a year or so ago, and all of the talk about the Surface?
Other companies also spend a lot on R&D, but they just don't publicize it. Do you think Apple pulled the iPhone out of a hat or something? Hell, here's a recent blog post where the author tore down Apple's power adapter for the phone and found some interesting design work. Google probably does a lot of stuff to improve their search algorithms that they don't talk about much either and probably have stuff they've been working on for years that won't be announced or released until it's ready.
It's really hard to prove the "cause" of a suicide other than the means in which the deceased chose to end their life. If I were to commit suicide and leave a note that said you were the cause of it (your comment greatly offended me and made me give up my will to live) should you go to jail over it? If your friend were to have actually caused an accident, there's a direct physical link that's easily to demonstrate and follow. It's much more complicated with a suicide. Was this event the only cause or is it just the straw that broke the camel's back? I don't know.
Honestly, I don't know what to make of it all either. I've only loosely followed the story through/. so it's likely that I'm not even informed enough to make a decision, but it seems a bit presumptuous to go around saying the defendant in this case "caused" a suicide. He's certainly a shitty person by most definitions, but that generally doesn't qualify people for jail time.
Slashdot Mirror
Sure, there is. All you have to do is send me $500 and I will test them according to some protocols which I have developed. I'd like to share them with you, but unfortunately due to proprietary business secrets which must remain undisclosed, I will be unable to publish them.
Regardless if which you buy, the actual artist gets next to nothing. The indie labels probably have a better deal, but there are still a lot of artists that aren't on iTunes. Maybe things have changed more recently, but there was a time where you couldn't find anything that wasn't from a major label through them and it's been pretty well established how badly they screw over the artists. They might not be getting paid either way given the usual studio accounting practices and all of that 'expensive studio time' and other costs that went into making the album.
So the point still stands. For a lot of bands or artists, if you actually want them to see any money you're far better off going to a show or buying some merchandise. Otherwise it's not exactly easy to tell if someone is signed to a label that isn't completely shafting them.
And let's not pretend that buying through iTunes or any other competitor is doing the content producers any better. They're still getting pennies on the dollar. If you have $20 and want as much of that to go the artist as possible, go see them live or buy a shirt at a show. They'll make far more money from that than they'll ever see from proceeds from subscription or album sales.
No, it won't. Here's what will happen: That revenue will stay in the U.S. and be used to purchase other goods and services within the U.S. Bringing it back to China probably subjects it to all kinds of taxes. That's why Apple, Google, Microsoft, and every other large multi-national company have loads of money sitting around outside the U.S. Trying to bring it back in results in a lot of it being lost to taxes.
The same may well not be true for China, but there's still a benefit for the company to leave some of their U.S. made profits in the U.S.
Precious metals are just as worthless as fiat currencies in most scenarios where a collapse occurs. Unless there's another fiat currency to exchange your lump of gold for, it won't do you any more good than paper money. No one will want it and you won't be able to easily exchange it for anything that's actually useful. Any currency is just a proxy for the idea of wealth. If shit hits the fan hard enough that the several local currencies become heavily devalued, it will probably happen on a global scale as everything is so intertwined at this point.
Precious medals will eventually become valuable again over a long enough period of time, but they won't guarantee that you'll see that time. Depending on the severity of the collapse, means of protecting yourself, food, and other basics to ensure survival are far more valuable, but knowledge is probably the most valuable currency available. What good is a mound of money if you're dying and don't know how to stop it?
Precious metals suffer from the same problem as any other form of currency: it's only as valuable as everything considers it to be or as someone will pay to use it to produce something else.
CoH is so old that the servers they're using to run it will probably be retired. They're probably quite specialized for the needs of the game and anything new is going to offer an order of magnitude better performance. They could probably reduce the support staff at this point, or have them support multiple games. The player base that's sticking around at this point probably aren't griping or reporting bugs that they know will never get fixed anymore and there's no reason that the existing staff can't be transitioned to also work on another game.
As long as it was making money they should just keep it around. Some pencil-head MBA who has not actual understanding of the customer base probably made this decision. It's just going to alienate a lot of their longtime customers.
I found both Reverse Cowgirl and A Scause for Applause to be pretty good as well. Cartman Finds Love was pretty good, and Cash for Gold wasn't too bad either, although I can understand that one isn't for everyone. I've also heard that Going Native is a hell of lot more funny if you actually live in Hawaii. Really the only episode that I didn't care for at all was Faith Hilling. The rest were just par for the course.
Compared to the last season, this one has a had a lot of good episodes.
Longshot.
A) If this were the only criteria, then Sony, Mircosoft, and Nintendo would have already been replaced by the existing cheap products that are already on the market. This is obviously better than what's come before it, but I doubt it's going to change much.
B) This assumes that first of all, a whole lot of people are going to be excited to develop for it. Most who buy it won't do any development at all. Second it assumes that 95% of the stuff that actually does get developed for this won't be crap.
I honestly don't think that this will have much lasting impact on the industry as it exists now. I wouldn't mind being wrong, but I have some doubts about this turning into the wild success that you think it will become. It's not going to get the big exclusives that a lot of people want, so this thing isn't going to be replacing the incumbants any time soon. I have a feeling it will be used mostly for casual games and emulators.
Maybe I'm just feeding trolls on this (and honestly with the hyperbole in your post, I can't help but think that) but I don't see it that way. I generally lean more towards the right, at least fiscally, and Romney wasn't our last chance, and Obama is not some kind of super red socialist. By most objectives, he's still fairly right of center and a lot of his policies aren't something that hasn't been proposed by Republicans at some point with in the last half-century.
If anything, Otellini was smart enough to play both sides of the isle, ensuring that no matter who came out on top, IBM had friends with benefits or markers to call in. And honestly, who cares who he supported or endorsed. If you're basing your entire assessment of a person on who they endorse for President, it makes you look narrow-minded.
That's great and all, but Sony doesn't care about them. If they're just in it for the hardware (which at certain points of the consoles lifecycle is subsidized) the manufacturer (Sony in this case, but it applies to all of them) doesn't want you as a customer as they really need you to buy games. Also, while it's nifty that there are some hobbyists out there who get a lot of joy out of tinkering with the technology and discovering how to bend it to their will, the vast majority of the people who would use these results are just going to do so to pirate games. They don't give a damn about the free software movement, open source, or anything else. They're just cheapskates who don't want to pay for a game.
Yeah, Sony probably shouldn't sell the hardware at a loss, and it's really stupid to expect any security to hold up for very long if someone really wants to crack it, but that's the way the market is right now and no console manufacturer could survive if they couldn't subsidize the hardware, especially early on when it's rather expensive to make.
Sony understands perfectly well how hackers think. They just make poor customers for Sony's business model so there's no interest at all to cater to them. That's why you're not going to see the kinds of features that hackers want.
Maybe you don't know this, but Google does advertising through their email. They have a computer reading your emails and targeting ads based on their content. I wouldn't be surprised if other major competitors are doing similar things. Outside of that, the majority of remaining email providers are either businesses where email is a valuable communication tool, a few small pay-for service providers, and some personal email systems run by people who either don't want to pay or don't want to have anyone or anything else going through their mail, even if it is just an automated computer program.
Most businesses don't play anywhere near as much value on social networks as a communication program, and the type of people who tend to use social networks the most probably are neither willing to use a pay-for service nor have the ability to run and maintain their own servers. So outside of a few side cases, the only group that would be really interested in running a social network is the type that's going to monetize it through harvesting user information to sell to advertisers.
Also, unlike email where it doesn't matter who the provider is, most social networks aren't cross-compatible. Given that the main sell of the social network is the network itself, anything less than a large centralized network or a smaller one that targets a specific niche isn't going to be worth much. Having dozens of small competing networks is worth a lot less than having them all as one large network. With email, it really doesn't matter.
So I don't think it will work out like email.
It also assumes that there aren't any energy advancements that are so far out of our understanding right now that they wouldn't seem like magic if we possessed them. Our assumptions are limited by our current understanding. In the next thousand years we could see all kinds of advancements that render building a Dyson sphere completely unnecessary.
Interesting. I think that this font also makes it easier for me to read more quickly, but I wouldn't consider myself dyslexic as I've never felt as though I've had difficulties reading almost any font and read quite frequently. Maybe I'm just thinking that I can read that font more quickly, but for some reason it does seem easier to read. Perhaps it's something that's true for people in general. I'd be curious to see if there have been any studies to determine if this font also improves reading speed for people who haven't been diagnosed or probably wouldn't be diagnosed as dyslexic. All that aside, stuff like this is really awesome. Even though a lot of people like to say or think that the world is going to shit, it's also getting better in a lot of ways for a lot of people.
That's just standard studio bullshit to capitalize as much as possible on the franchise. You're going to see that with any property.
I'd be much more worried if Peter Jackson goes batshit insane and gives us an uninspired story with shallow and boring characters. Then it would be going in the same direction as Star Wars.
Honestly there's a whole lot of the Tolkien universe left to go and I honestly don't mind them making movies out of it; however, I do wish that they wouldn't drag the Hobbit out so much, especially when there're stories such as the Silmarillion that would be incredibly amazing to see done.
If you read the description section, they provide more details and it becomes quite evident what is meant by the term "scroll bar". Here's a bit from the application: "In some portable devices, scroll bars are used to indicate the position in the document or list of the displayed portion. But scroll bars are fixed user interface features that take up valuable display screen area on an already small display screen." Given that, I doubt even the most gifted legal expert could argue that traditional scroll bars are covered by this patent.
You're correct that anyone can be sued at any time for just about any reason, but I doubt Apple will go after anyone with this. As far as I'm aware, no one else is doing scrolling like this. If they suddenly changed to this method, I can see Apple sending lawyers after them. If someone is hit with a frivolous lawsuit, they have legal recourse available and could conceivably countersue Apple for court fees.
If you don't think that this patent is valid, find some prior art. Otherwise if no one else has up to this point been using this idea, perhaps its more novel than most would consider now that it has been patented.
Actually you're wrong. In the first claim of the patent they explicitly state the following: "and the vertical bar is not a scroll bar;"
Essentially if you have a scroll bar in your implementation, you can't be sued with this patent as it's explicitly stated that it's not a scroll bar.
Also, it was filed in March of this year. It would be pretty damned easy to show prior art or that in fact your own implementation of this existed prior to Apple's filing of their application.
Does it really matter at this point?
The Galaxy Tab 10.1 is over a year old at this point and probably not selling in large volume any longer. Other competing Android tablets have already supplanted it in nearly every area and it will probably be replaced by Samsung's next offering in the near future. Unless this ruling also makes it a lot easier for Apple to get an injunction against any of Samsung's future tablet products, I can't see this making a difference at all.
I haven't read the ruling yet, but in several past cases, usually the injunction prevents Samsung from importing additional product. That would mean that inventory already in the US and in the hands of retailers could continue to be sold so long as Apple doesn't pursue legal action against retails, which they won't as many of those retailers also likely sell Apple's products. Given that Samsung will probably have a new tablet out soon, I can't see them even caring if they can't restock supplies of the Galaxy Tab 10.1.
I'd be interested in hearing the full implications from this ruling from someone more versed in the relevant laws. Is this victory as hollow as I think it is, or is there actually some value in this for Apple?
I don't think there have been any large pieces of malware released for iOS, but they're possible. Charlie Miller had snuck an app into the app store that could have functioned as malware if here weren't just doing it as a proof of concept. Also, every time a new jailbreak is released for iOS, it could potentially be used for malware, especially some of the older jailbreaks that simply required loading a PDF or visiting a web page.
Apple's security model does help to prevent some cases where it's easier for Android to be targeted, but otherwise iOS could be infected. I'm sure we'll see one eventually. Whether it's someone slipping something by a reviewer or someone who develops a jailbreak deciding that they can get a lot of money selling it on the black market, it's bound to happen given the popularity of the platform and how much data is available on a person's mobile device these days.
I wasn't aware that Macs were running iOS now.
Do those parties advocate for a capitalistic society without government intervention?
If not, they probably shouldn't be labeled as a far-right party. The left-right dichotomy is about ownership of the means of production and the distribution of wealth. I feel as though lumping in extremist groups, which have little or nothing to say about economic policy, with other right or left-leaning groups to be a disingenuous attempt to make the more mainstream, non-extremeist parties look bad by association. Whether it's lumping in a group of racial bigots with the right or eco-terrorists with the left, it doesn't accomplish anything and just detracts from meaningful conversation by providing for easily constructed straw men for people on both sides of the isle.
That your comment has turned into the usual Europe vs. US crapfest just goes to show why lumping in extremist groups is a bad idea. It just fosters additional rhetoric and generalizations that aren't conducive for civil discourse.
The later versions of Civ, at least Civ IV, did better in these regards. If you were at war for prolonged periods of time, the unhappiness made it difficult to keep things perfectly stable at home. Additionally, even if you managed to capture enemy cities, the amount of culture that the enemy exerted over them was sometimes enough to cause the cities to revolt and revert to their control after a few hundred years.
I remember one game where another super power and I were essentially fighting a giant proxy war through our allies and other nations, simply because it was too expensive for us to wage war directly. Also, we both had a load of nuclear weapons, so the end results of a direct conflict probably would have started to look similar to this. I was losing at first simply because I couldn't support my allies as well, but I eventually managed to damage his economy so much through espionage and my trade corporations that he couldn't afford to hold a large amount of his cities and was forced to turn them into a vassal state, which broke away from the parent nation a later.
Here's a Reddit post describing the situation made by a guy who started the game.
Apparently, there are three main super powers left and they have been locked in constant war with each other for the past thousand years or more. Every time someone moves beyond the relatively stable front lines, their armies just get nuked into oblivion so no one can really push the attack too far beyond a set border. Spies constantly plant nuclear devices in cities, wiping out the population and spreading pollution. Engineers are generally kept busy building roads to keep moving troops to the front lines so there's not really enough time to clean up the pollution or improve the terrain.
Basically it's reached a point where it's almost impossible to gain an advantage. Everyone is armed to the teeth and nuclear weapons will demolish just about any army in the field that gets to far across the lines. Everyone is also so committed to the war effort that there's not enough resources to devote to fixing things up and anytime something does get fixed up, it's generally just nuked back to oblivion.
Sounds like a really fun game of Civ II.
This has already been discussed to death on Slashdot. I'm not going to dig for a link, but some other poster came up with a good solution. If you wildly swing through something physically, when your virtual sword has stopped, your character becomes staggered until they physically reposition their weapon to sync up with the virtual representation. Eventually you'll become good enough at recognizing how your virtual sword will interact with the enemy's virtual sword (or body) and you won't be wildly swinging through as though you could slice through them. Eventually you'll train your muscles to anticipate the impact of the virtual swords and stop mid-swing (at the point where the virtual swords would clash) and begin the next move, possibly pulling back for another strike or pushing forward to knock back the enemy. Hell, add the Kinect so that you can kick or so the game can incorporate other body movements as well.
No, they're the only one that talk about it all the damned time. Remember all of the Courier "leaks" from a year or so ago, and all of the talk about the Surface?
Other companies also spend a lot on R&D, but they just don't publicize it. Do you think Apple pulled the iPhone out of a hat or something? Hell, here's a recent blog post where the author tore down Apple's power adapter for the phone and found some interesting design work. Google probably does a lot of stuff to improve their search algorithms that they don't talk about much either and probably have stuff they've been working on for years that won't be announced or released until it's ready.
It's really hard to prove the "cause" of a suicide other than the means in which the deceased chose to end their life. If I were to commit suicide and leave a note that said you were the cause of it (your comment greatly offended me and made me give up my will to live) should you go to jail over it? If your friend were to have actually caused an accident, there's a direct physical link that's easily to demonstrate and follow. It's much more complicated with a suicide. Was this event the only cause or is it just the straw that broke the camel's back? I don't know.
/. so it's likely that I'm not even informed enough to make a decision, but it seems a bit presumptuous to go around saying the defendant in this case "caused" a suicide. He's certainly a shitty person by most definitions, but that generally doesn't qualify people for jail time.
Honestly, I don't know what to make of it all either. I've only loosely followed the story through