I'd wager all that statement means is that they're making plenty of money via the Steam store, and don't see VR as a big moneymaker either way. Hell, they apparently don't even need to release games anymore.
The internet is not to blame for humanity's failings. Neither can we realistically expect it to solve them. I'll still take, on balance, the world's information at our fingertips and global communication and commerce over whatever alternative you think would be better.
the failure of Arab Spring, which was touted as an example of how the internet would liberate people
Only by incredibly naive, overly-optimistic pundits. For those of us living in reality, it turned out pretty much as expected.
Hmm... wasn't that about when the "war on drugs" kicked into high gear? How convenient for the government, not worrying about pesky Constitutional protections when searching for booty.
I keep hearing about how Wikipedia is so "toxic", but that really doesn't impact the vast majority of people who simply use it as a resource. Personally, I've only made minor corrections and edits to mostly technical articles, and haven't run into any issues.
I absolutely don't doubt that there are problems with "fiefdoms", as you see this all the time in places you wouldn't expect (local school board politics, overzealous home owners association, etc) where people somehow need to lord their "authority" over others. This problem certainly isn't exclusive to Wikipedia though.
Now, if you want to build a log cabin on the top of a mountain, fine, maybe you're fine with no connection to the modern world. But a number of people live out in the "middle of nowhere" because their work requires a lot of open space in the "middle of nowhere". You know... like farming. Those are the 1% that feed the rest of the 99%. I think we can reach some reasonable compromise that ensures reasonable free market competition while still ensuring our farmers and ranchers, and those that support them, have access to technology and services everyone else takes for granted without being bankrupted in the process.
Anyone who thinks it's easy to do complicated things in space isn't really worth the effort to argue with. As it turns out, just about *everything* done in space has a huge host of unique challenges and hurdles to overcome. I'm pretty confident that we'll eventually be smelting in space, as that's the logical way to bootstrap massive in-space construction projects, but I'd imagine we're basically going to have to completely re-invent the technology for automation and zero-G environments.
I've found that when someone starts a phrase with "All you have to do is..." (or other arrogantly dismissive phrase), 9 times out of 10 they haven't a clue how involved some of those processes are, or what circumstantial complications prevent a "simple" back-of-the-napkin solution. If you happen to have deep knowledge in a specific field or speciality, and then hear Slashdotters talking about it, it's invariably face-palm frustrating at the wrong assumptions made. It's happened often enough to me, so that I generally assume that's true of most other fields as well.
Yes, I'd much rather the article had said "when Netflix was pressured to block the known IPs of VPN providers". They've publicly stated that they'd much prefer to have a single, global catalog, which makes sense from their perspective. I hope at some point they're influential enough to put enough pressure to demand global licensing for movies and shows, or tell the content producers to hit the road. Unfortunately the studios are also at war with Netflix, forcing them to turn into a studio themselves, so I'm not certain that's going to be happening soon.
One could argue that both piracy and attempts to work around geo-blocking (using a VPN service typically) are both economic pressure on Hollywood studios as well, but I'm not sure they see it that way. Think about this when they complain about lost sales thanks to piracy, and remember how long these major industries resisted new technologies, historically speaking. Hollywood should be ecstatic that consumers are willing to pay subscription fees for digital content, but instead, they're clinging to the illusion that they can still charge premium access rates in the days of the internet+torrents. If the legal market charges too much, the black market will happily step in and correct the situation.
Wait!... You don't think the punishment may be a bit... draconian?!!! What is wrong with you people?
The headline is inaccurate clickbait, which unfortunately, seems to be happening a lot more with Slashdot lately.
That the maximum sentence based on the law - 10 counts of wire fraud of 20 years each. He's not going to be sentenced for 200, or even 20 years. Sentences anywhere from one to four years seems to be the norm for similar spam-related cases.
By the way - how's that custom audio jack working out for you?
It doesn't bother me at all. Some whiners complain about not being able to charge the phone and listen to music at the same time. Hell, I'm rocking my tunes and posting this from my new iPhone as we speak. I don't see what the b
I've always thought that Battlestar Galactica could have been an excellent series had it been rebooted in a slightly less radical way, as it's got a simple but compelling formula. Update the tech, eliminate some of the cheese, but keep the basic premise and characters largely intact. While I'm sure many people enjoyed the 2004 series, it sort of lost me when it decided on "cylons are identical to humans" (which might have been fine in limited doses, but I was a fan of actual robotic cylons), and then veered into bizarre quasi-religious territory. I finally quit watching when I realized that I disliked all the humans enough that I was subconsciously rooting for the Cylons to just kill them all and be done with it.
I actually owned a computer with 64K RAM, and I'd argue that yes, my modern computer is easily 30,000 times better than my original Apple II, especially if you compare on a dollar-per-dollar cost. That doesn't mean you can write a novel 30,000 time faster. Not all productivity scales up that way. However, my modern's computers photo-editing capabilities is infinitely better, because... hey, I couldn't even do that with my original machine. Nor could I render 3D graphics, or listen to digital audio, nor could I do thousands and thousands of other things that I can easily do with my modern computer. You just happened to pick a few capabilities that the old system *could* do.
I think that we sometimes lose sight of the absolutely insane improvements in system performance over the last 20-30 years - and the complete lack of progress that we see at the human interface.
Okay, this is a puzzling complaint. Have you missed the whole "touch-first UI" revolution with phones and tablets? What exactly is that but a massive improvement of human interface design and technology? My parents can pick up a smartphone and intuitively figure out how to use it. They were NEVER able to do with with CLI systems (which is why I got that Apple II), and only with difficulty with Windows, but have far few problems with smartphones.
Maybe you're talking exclusively about desktop interfaces? I'd argue we don't need significant improvements much beyond our existing paradigms. A mouse-type cursor, windows, menus, toolbars, buttons, and dialog boxes... these design elements work well for desktop systems. Attempts to "simplify" it have been nearly universally disastrous.
In other words, "If you can't do it in 1Gb of RAM, you are doing it wrong."
Except for editing images larger than 1GB, of course. Or composing music with extremely large sample sets (often dozens of GBs). Or rendering extremely detailed, high-fidelity 3D virtual worlds, like with modern videogames. Or many other examples I could come up with off the top of my head.
Sorry for sounding so contrary, as I do understand your point, but I think you're also neglecting to acknowledge the vast gaps in system capabilities, and not just the technical specs. Just because both systems could edit text doesn't put them anywhere in the same league. Old techies love to complain about "bloat", but one users "bloat" is another user's feature.
Gotos in C are like operator overloading in C++. It's a handy mechanism when used judiciously, in very specific circumstances. If GOTO is abused, used to jump all over the place (which it can literally do), yeah, of course it's bad. But then again, you can always name a function:
int AddTwoNumbers(int x, int y);
when it actually multiplies two numbers. Does this mean named functions are bad, because they could be misused? Why would you purposefully abuse the language like that?
Generally speaking, the rule of thumb with GOTO seems to be to use it in exceptional circumstances, such as error handling. I don't see anything wrong with that. Honestly, it would be better if there were a more specific and constrained mechanism for doing that, but you use the tools you have.
Well, I'm a Republican, and I'm fine with local governments, maybe even state governments deciding to create universal fiber infrastructure. I think that, going forward, we'll want to consider this as critical infrastructure, just like power, water, sewer, and street access. My only caveat would be to let people decide regionally how they want to handle this, rather than making some mess of a Federal bureaucracy to decide these things for everyone, and probably do it badly and expensively, just like the giant telcos.
Running fiber out to remote locations is a bit tricky, of course. This may be where the local or state coverments wants to come in, if other citizens are willing to subsidize the cost of rolling out fiber to these homes as part of a general rollout. I don't think it's a bad idea, because this is largely one-time infrastructure costs, and a single fiber line isn't going to be oversaturated for quite a long time. Alternately, some people in local regions are forming their own co-ops and doing a lot of the labor of running fiber themselves, which dramatically reduces the costs.
At the moment, there are municipalities who want to do this and are blocked. That really needs fixing. Once the way is open (legally speaking), I think many (most?) people will flee from these companies that are abusing their customers. I'm not really happy about this, but I think the net neutrality issue is only one of many issues that needs fixing, and eliminating the monopolies of the ISPs is the only real way to solve those issues.
P.S. Thanks for at least engaging me rationally instead of modding me a Troll for... hell, I don't even know why. For having a contrary opinion to someone else, I guess? Apparently, that's the definition of a "troll" these days.
Well, we said the same thing about Wheeler, who had similar credentials, and he ended up being a pretty decent consumer advocate. Pai is not interested in net neutrality, but in removing regulation and barriers to actual competition - or so he says. That could work as well as FCC regulation in theory, or maybe even better.
Let's face it, not much had improved with the telco/ISP situation, after all, and there are a lot of problems beyond net neutrality that more competition could fix. Here's my simple litmus test for a free market solution, as he claims he wants: Any community should be allowed to form a local co-op to provide broadband services and tax themselves to do it, and there should be no barriers to other private competitors from entering a market and bidding for services.
If those two conditions aren't enforced nationwide, then the new FCC head is full of shit, and the current telcos will have near free reign to do whatever they want in their monopoly markets (at least 30% of the US, last I heard).
Given that the patient is "watched carefully", I'm guessing this is one of the things that they're looking for. You'll also notice that a relatively benign VR program was chosen - not a virtual rollercoaster ride, for instance.
They're in a hospital, so I'd imagine they have access to some reasonably effective anti-nausea medicine, even if the patient is slightly prone to that. Anecdotally, I've heard that most people don't seem to suffer from motion sickness, so it still seems worthwhile even if you have to exclude one out of ten patients or so.
nobody has ever fully explained to me what "good faith" means, let alone what they have "good faith" in.
Maybe it means lawyers have "good faith" in a legal system created by and run entirely by other lawyers. I'm pretty sure we have the most lawyers per capita than any other major industrialized nation on earth. And they all want to make a living. And so, we pay more for products to cover the costs of absurd lawsuits like this.
I suppose the benefit is that it's not hard to find a cheap lawyer when you really need one, huh? Oh, wait, no, most lawyers still charge you absurd hourly rates. I wonder how they manage that?
US companies generally don't want to set up shop in some foreign country. They want the comfort, safety, infrastructure, and lifestyle that comes from living in the US. They just want to import cheap code-monkeys to work locally, rather than pay full price for local code-monkeys.
If they decide to relocate to another country, that's fine. Let them move to China or India. They can let us know how easy it is for an American company to set up shop and take local jobs away from local tech companies. I'm going to guess that'll be a bit harder than they thought. Or if they can outsource all their coding/IT away and get the results they like, fine with me as well. That's legitimate global competition, but you have to take the bad with the good. In other words, they'd just better not cry to me when all their code or data mysteriously turns up in competing products and services, or on the black market, similar to what hardware makers face these days in China.
And the notion that Trump is doing this simply for political reasons? You guys don't get him. I don't think Trump is a deep or complicated person. He often speaks off the cuff, and said what he was going to do, and now he's doing it. It's pretty simple, but some people can't wrap their brains around it because they see the back-room double-dealings of Clinton as normal and expected behavior for a politician, and so, naturally, expected the same from him. He still has nearly four years to disappoint everyone, so we'll see.
On the PS3, at least, Sony only gives you an Allow/Prompt setting. Since I don't want it, I have to select NO every time I start a BluRay. It's a minor thing, but it's such a petty, arrogant thing to do to customers, it just really annoys me. If it was a standalone player, I'd just disconnect it from my network.
Agreed, Windows RT was such a smashing success that they're now releasing version 2? Who wants this again? This has been tried once and failed miserably. Windows dominates the desktop because it has about a billion Win32 apps that people actually find useful or essential to their work. And I'd argue Windows is successful in spite of Modern/Store Apps, certainly not because of it.
It's hard to believe Microsoft doesn't know this, so I don't know what they're thinking. Then again, this is the company that released Windows 8. Sometimes common sense gets thrown out of the Windows.
Detroit is one of the most dangerous / violent city in the US. It's not all that surprising that your police department reflects its environment. If you live in an area with a more serious crime problem, I'd expect the police will focus their limited resources on solving things like murders, assaults, rapes, etc. Or maybe they just suck - I can't really judge from the outside.
In my neck of the woods, the police show up, investigate, and even solve relatively trivial property crimes, like when someone performs a hit-and-run on one of your lawn's shrubs. No, I'm not kidding.
It very much depends on the department, apparently. Some kid lost control of his vehicle and drove into my lawn, damaging some of my landscaping. He then foolishly fled the scene, and my local police (my neighbors called them after hearing the crash and seeing what happened) did due diligence and tracked him down a day or two later, even though it was such a trivial case. I guess not all police departments are incompetent or corrupt, as I've been rather impressed with the few times I've interacted with them.
Another answer is: giving "style" more preference than "usability". In no less than TWO of my streaming video apps, I've seen progress bars implemented as light grey on white, making them more difficult to distinguish, but looking much more sophisticated than using some "garish", easy to see color scheme like, say, green on white.
Amazon recently re-designed their video streaming app on Xbox One, and while the rest of the app seems reasonably well thought out, they screwed up their transport controls. If you use the left or right triggers, it acts like a hotkey for fast forward or rewind as you'd expect, but then it brings up the transport controls as buttons you have to directly manipulate, and you have to use the keypad or thumbstick to navigate if you want to pause. It's a ridiculous scheme, and so counter-intuitive, it's hard to believe this is what they came up with. The first time I used it, I started fast forwarding, and couldn't figured out how to stop until I ended up halfway through the show.
It really makes me wonder if companies no longer do basis usability tests, watching first-time users stumble over their inane design decisions and getting actual feedback. It's horribly painful, watching as users can't figure out your brilliant design you've spent months crafting, but it's an absolute necessity, as you lose the ability to judge the usability of your own interface after working on it for such a long time.
Slashdot Mirror
I'd wager all that statement means is that they're making plenty of money via the Steam store, and don't see VR as a big moneymaker either way. Hell, they apparently don't even need to release games anymore.
The internet is not to blame for humanity's failings. Neither can we realistically expect it to solve them. I'll still take, on balance, the world's information at our fingertips and global communication and commerce over whatever alternative you think would be better.
the failure of Arab Spring, which was touted as an example of how the internet would liberate people
Only by incredibly naive, overly-optimistic pundits. For those of us living in reality, it turned out pretty much as expected.
Hmm... wasn't that about when the "war on drugs" kicked into high gear? How convenient for the government, not worrying about pesky Constitutional protections when searching for booty.
I keep hearing about how Wikipedia is so "toxic", but that really doesn't impact the vast majority of people who simply use it as a resource. Personally, I've only made minor corrections and edits to mostly technical articles, and haven't run into any issues.
I absolutely don't doubt that there are problems with "fiefdoms", as you see this all the time in places you wouldn't expect (local school board politics, overzealous home owners association, etc) where people somehow need to lord their "authority" over others. This problem certainly isn't exclusive to Wikipedia though.
Now, if you want to build a log cabin on the top of a mountain, fine, maybe you're fine with no connection to the modern world. But a number of people live out in the "middle of nowhere" because their work requires a lot of open space in the "middle of nowhere". You know... like farming. Those are the 1% that feed the rest of the 99%. I think we can reach some reasonable compromise that ensures reasonable free market competition while still ensuring our farmers and ranchers, and those that support them, have access to technology and services everyone else takes for granted without being bankrupted in the process.
Anyone who thinks it's easy to do complicated things in space isn't really worth the effort to argue with. As it turns out, just about *everything* done in space has a huge host of unique challenges and hurdles to overcome. I'm pretty confident that we'll eventually be smelting in space, as that's the logical way to bootstrap massive in-space construction projects, but I'd imagine we're basically going to have to completely re-invent the technology for automation and zero-G environments.
I've found that when someone starts a phrase with "All you have to do is..." (or other arrogantly dismissive phrase), 9 times out of 10 they haven't a clue how involved some of those processes are, or what circumstantial complications prevent a "simple" back-of-the-napkin solution. If you happen to have deep knowledge in a specific field or speciality, and then hear Slashdotters talking about it, it's invariably face-palm frustrating at the wrong assumptions made. It's happened often enough to me, so that I generally assume that's true of most other fields as well.
Yes, I'd much rather the article had said "when Netflix was pressured to block the known IPs of VPN providers". They've publicly stated that they'd much prefer to have a single, global catalog, which makes sense from their perspective. I hope at some point they're influential enough to put enough pressure to demand global licensing for movies and shows, or tell the content producers to hit the road. Unfortunately the studios are also at war with Netflix, forcing them to turn into a studio themselves, so I'm not certain that's going to be happening soon.
One could argue that both piracy and attempts to work around geo-blocking (using a VPN service typically) are both economic pressure on Hollywood studios as well, but I'm not sure they see it that way. Think about this when they complain about lost sales thanks to piracy, and remember how long these major industries resisted new technologies, historically speaking. Hollywood should be ecstatic that consumers are willing to pay subscription fees for digital content, but instead, they're clinging to the illusion that they can still charge premium access rates in the days of the internet+torrents. If the legal market charges too much, the black market will happily step in and correct the situation.
Also, just fyi, it's "eke", not "eek".
Wait!... You don't think the punishment may be a bit... draconian?!!! What is wrong with you people?
The headline is inaccurate clickbait, which unfortunately, seems to be happening a lot more with Slashdot lately.
That the maximum sentence based on the law - 10 counts of wire fraud of 20 years each. He's not going to be sentenced for 200, or even 20 years. Sentences anywhere from one to four years seems to be the norm for similar spam-related cases.
By the way - how's that custom audio jack working out for you?
It doesn't bother me at all. Some whiners complain about not being able to charge the phone and listen to music at the same time. Hell, I'm rocking my tunes and posting this from my new iPhone as we speak. I don't see what the b
I've always thought that Battlestar Galactica could have been an excellent series had it been rebooted in a slightly less radical way, as it's got a simple but compelling formula. Update the tech, eliminate some of the cheese, but keep the basic premise and characters largely intact. While I'm sure many people enjoyed the 2004 series, it sort of lost me when it decided on "cylons are identical to humans" (which might have been fine in limited doses, but I was a fan of actual robotic cylons), and then veered into bizarre quasi-religious territory. I finally quit watching when I realized that I disliked all the humans enough that I was subconsciously rooting for the Cylons to just kill them all and be done with it.
He has forgotten what bored young people do.
Play videogames? Or shoot some hoops?
Maybe that was just me.
I actually owned a computer with 64K RAM, and I'd argue that yes, my modern computer is easily 30,000 times better than my original Apple II, especially if you compare on a dollar-per-dollar cost. That doesn't mean you can write a novel 30,000 time faster. Not all productivity scales up that way. However, my modern's computers photo-editing capabilities is infinitely better, because... hey, I couldn't even do that with my original machine. Nor could I render 3D graphics, or listen to digital audio, nor could I do thousands and thousands of other things that I can easily do with my modern computer. You just happened to pick a few capabilities that the old system *could* do.
I think that we sometimes lose sight of the absolutely insane improvements in system performance over the last 20-30 years - and the complete lack of progress that we see at the human interface.
Okay, this is a puzzling complaint. Have you missed the whole "touch-first UI" revolution with phones and tablets? What exactly is that but a massive improvement of human interface design and technology? My parents can pick up a smartphone and intuitively figure out how to use it. They were NEVER able to do with with CLI systems (which is why I got that Apple II), and only with difficulty with Windows, but have far few problems with smartphones.
Maybe you're talking exclusively about desktop interfaces? I'd argue we don't need significant improvements much beyond our existing paradigms. A mouse-type cursor, windows, menus, toolbars, buttons, and dialog boxes... these design elements work well for desktop systems. Attempts to "simplify" it have been nearly universally disastrous.
In other words, "If you can't do it in 1Gb of RAM, you are doing it wrong."
Except for editing images larger than 1GB, of course. Or composing music with extremely large sample sets (often dozens of GBs). Or rendering extremely detailed, high-fidelity 3D virtual worlds, like with modern videogames. Or many other examples I could come up with off the top of my head.
Sorry for sounding so contrary, as I do understand your point, but I think you're also neglecting to acknowledge the vast gaps in system capabilities, and not just the technical specs. Just because both systems could edit text doesn't put them anywhere in the same league. Old techies love to complain about "bloat", but one users "bloat" is another user's feature.
Gotos in C are like operator overloading in C++. It's a handy mechanism when used judiciously, in very specific circumstances. If GOTO is abused, used to jump all over the place (which it can literally do), yeah, of course it's bad. But then again, you can always name a function:
int AddTwoNumbers(int x, int y);
when it actually multiplies two numbers. Does this mean named functions are bad, because they could be misused? Why would you purposefully abuse the language like that?
Generally speaking, the rule of thumb with GOTO seems to be to use it in exceptional circumstances, such as error handling. I don't see anything wrong with that. Honestly, it would be better if there were a more specific and constrained mechanism for doing that, but you use the tools you have.
Well, I'm a Republican, and I'm fine with local governments, maybe even state governments deciding to create universal fiber infrastructure. I think that, going forward, we'll want to consider this as critical infrastructure, just like power, water, sewer, and street access. My only caveat would be to let people decide regionally how they want to handle this, rather than making some mess of a Federal bureaucracy to decide these things for everyone, and probably do it badly and expensively, just like the giant telcos.
Running fiber out to remote locations is a bit tricky, of course. This may be where the local or state coverments wants to come in, if other citizens are willing to subsidize the cost of rolling out fiber to these homes as part of a general rollout. I don't think it's a bad idea, because this is largely one-time infrastructure costs, and a single fiber line isn't going to be oversaturated for quite a long time. Alternately, some people in local regions are forming their own co-ops and doing a lot of the labor of running fiber themselves, which dramatically reduces the costs.
At the moment, there are municipalities who want to do this and are blocked. That really needs fixing. Once the way is open (legally speaking), I think many (most?) people will flee from these companies that are abusing their customers. I'm not really happy about this, but I think the net neutrality issue is only one of many issues that needs fixing, and eliminating the monopolies of the ISPs is the only real way to solve those issues.
P.S. Thanks for at least engaging me rationally instead of modding me a Troll for... hell, I don't even know why. For having a contrary opinion to someone else, I guess? Apparently, that's the definition of a "troll" these days.
Well, we said the same thing about Wheeler, who had similar credentials, and he ended up being a pretty decent consumer advocate. Pai is not interested in net neutrality, but in removing regulation and barriers to actual competition - or so he says. That could work as well as FCC regulation in theory, or maybe even better.
Let's face it, not much had improved with the telco/ISP situation, after all, and there are a lot of problems beyond net neutrality that more competition could fix. Here's my simple litmus test for a free market solution, as he claims he wants: Any community should be allowed to form a local co-op to provide broadband services and tax themselves to do it, and there should be no barriers to other private competitors from entering a market and bidding for services.
If those two conditions aren't enforced nationwide, then the new FCC head is full of shit, and the current telcos will have near free reign to do whatever they want in their monopoly markets (at least 30% of the US, last I heard).
Given that the patient is "watched carefully", I'm guessing this is one of the things that they're looking for. You'll also notice that a relatively benign VR program was chosen - not a virtual rollercoaster ride, for instance.
They're in a hospital, so I'd imagine they have access to some reasonably effective anti-nausea medicine, even if the patient is slightly prone to that. Anecdotally, I've heard that most people don't seem to suffer from motion sickness, so it still seems worthwhile even if you have to exclude one out of ten patients or so.
Interesting. Another interesting stat I found. Most litigious countries:
Germany: 123.2/1,000.
Sweden: 111.2/1,000.
Israel: 96.8/1,000.
Austria: 95.9/1,000.
U.S.: 74.5/1,000.
Well, it's not a great thing that we're still near the top in these types of lists.
nobody has ever fully explained to me what "good faith" means, let alone what they have "good faith" in.
Maybe it means lawyers have "good faith" in a legal system created by and run entirely by other lawyers. I'm pretty sure we have the most lawyers per capita than any other major industrialized nation on earth. And they all want to make a living. And so, we pay more for products to cover the costs of absurd lawsuits like this.
I suppose the benefit is that it's not hard to find a cheap lawyer when you really need one, huh? Oh, wait, no, most lawyers still charge you absurd hourly rates. I wonder how they manage that?
US companies generally don't want to set up shop in some foreign country. They want the comfort, safety, infrastructure, and lifestyle that comes from living in the US. They just want to import cheap code-monkeys to work locally, rather than pay full price for local code-monkeys.
If they decide to relocate to another country, that's fine. Let them move to China or India. They can let us know how easy it is for an American company to set up shop and take local jobs away from local tech companies. I'm going to guess that'll be a bit harder than they thought. Or if they can outsource all their coding/IT away and get the results they like, fine with me as well. That's legitimate global competition, but you have to take the bad with the good. In other words, they'd just better not cry to me when all their code or data mysteriously turns up in competing products and services, or on the black market, similar to what hardware makers face these days in China.
And the notion that Trump is doing this simply for political reasons? You guys don't get him. I don't think Trump is a deep or complicated person. He often speaks off the cuff, and said what he was going to do, and now he's doing it. It's pretty simple, but some people can't wrap their brains around it because they see the back-room double-dealings of Clinton as normal and expected behavior for a politician, and so, naturally, expected the same from him. He still has nearly four years to disappoint everyone, so we'll see.
On the PS3, at least, Sony only gives you an Allow/Prompt setting. Since I don't want it, I have to select NO every time I start a BluRay. It's a minor thing, but it's such a petty, arrogant thing to do to customers, it just really annoys me. If it was a standalone player, I'd just disconnect it from my network.
Agreed, Windows RT was such a smashing success that they're now releasing version 2? Who wants this again? This has been tried once and failed miserably. Windows dominates the desktop because it has about a billion Win32 apps that people actually find useful or essential to their work. And I'd argue Windows is successful in spite of Modern/Store Apps, certainly not because of it.
It's hard to believe Microsoft doesn't know this, so I don't know what they're thinking. Then again, this is the company that released Windows 8. Sometimes common sense gets thrown out of the Windows.
We're not big fans of A-Rod here in Seattle.
Detroit is one of the most dangerous / violent city in the US. It's not all that surprising that your police department reflects its environment. If you live in an area with a more serious crime problem, I'd expect the police will focus their limited resources on solving things like murders, assaults, rapes, etc. Or maybe they just suck - I can't really judge from the outside.
In my neck of the woods, the police show up, investigate, and even solve relatively trivial property crimes, like when someone performs a hit-and-run on one of your lawn's shrubs. No, I'm not kidding.
It very much depends on the department, apparently. Some kid lost control of his vehicle and drove into my lawn, damaging some of my landscaping. He then foolishly fled the scene, and my local police (my neighbors called them after hearing the crash and seeing what happened) did due diligence and tracked him down a day or two later, even though it was such a trivial case. I guess not all police departments are incompetent or corrupt, as I've been rather impressed with the few times I've interacted with them.
Another answer is: giving "style" more preference than "usability". In no less than TWO of my streaming video apps, I've seen progress bars implemented as light grey on white, making them more difficult to distinguish, but looking much more sophisticated than using some "garish", easy to see color scheme like, say, green on white.
Amazon recently re-designed their video streaming app on Xbox One, and while the rest of the app seems reasonably well thought out, they screwed up their transport controls. If you use the left or right triggers, it acts like a hotkey for fast forward or rewind as you'd expect, but then it brings up the transport controls as buttons you have to directly manipulate, and you have to use the keypad or thumbstick to navigate if you want to pause. It's a ridiculous scheme, and so counter-intuitive, it's hard to believe this is what they came up with. The first time I used it, I started fast forwarding, and couldn't figured out how to stop until I ended up halfway through the show.
It really makes me wonder if companies no longer do basis usability tests, watching first-time users stumble over their inane design decisions and getting actual feedback. It's horribly painful, watching as users can't figure out your brilliant design you've spent months crafting, but it's an absolute necessity, as you lose the ability to judge the usability of your own interface after working on it for such a long time.