This is correct. The business I work for had to do the same thing. We had different divisions that had different core competencies that synergized well, but having them joined at the hip made it impossible to diversify. Customers looked at you with disdain because they thought you'd treat them like a second class citizen to your sister company. Truth was we wanted to diversify because all parts of the business were simply too reliant on the one big customer, and it made the companies worse. Separating our company learn to compete with others in their core competencies more effectively and be less effected by the downswing of one specific division. It also removed preferential treatment.

Power and manufacturing limits of today are usually self-imposed on future tech. In the cases of current sci-fi, there's usually a main 'battery' similar to old school battleships. Whose to say they couldn't have an array of 100 lasers of different sizes for different ranges, or have adaptable optics able to change the aperture size? Only the future will tell.

They become so invested in their delusions that their delusions are what make up a significant portion of their identity. When they think about themselves, they think about their stance on the conspiracy first and foremost. For them to recant is to recant a portion of their identity. This same behavior happens with severe addiciton and in some cases depression where they grow to embrace their dark/morbid personalities. Its also why its practically impossible to discuss religion with the religious.

The further you go down the rabbit hole, the harder the walls of the echo chamber become.

This is correct. There are laws in place that regulate this, plus as the parent said, a good percentage of ships are now fitted with shore power and the trend is growing.

My company does some business in Argentina, and that's the primary concern. I remember a meeting some years ago where the risk factor in Argentina was so high entirely because of politics. The best comparison would be like doing business in Venezuela. You never know if your assets are going to be randomly seized tomorrow and your company dissolved and turned into public assets.

Seems like a good switch.

While this is somewhat of a party pooper, he's been apple-focused for several years now, including a pretty significant and obvious bias towards their products. I'm glad he is finally leaving the reviewing arena because he lost his nonpartisan mindset and I felt his staying on was damaging the reputation of the site and indirectly the other reviewers at the site.

I really enjoyed reading his reviews over the past decade. From 2010 on, not so much, but fortunately the site is well staffed now with other reviewers.

I'm curious whether Skype changed to a more centralized service primarily because of the mobile world. Skype used to be a huge connection and battery hog on phones primarily because of the decentralized nature. Skype used to send messages through that were 'pending' to a contact even when your phone was in standby, because it was constantly trying to push the message to the user.

After microsoft acquired Skype, one of the first changes was this was removed, but it made it difficult to send messages sometimes because you had to pop your phone out of standby and switch to the app for it to send messages to people who were offline at the time you sent it. It made for some strange broken conversations. Now it just goes to pending and seems to go through right away, and the drag on phone performance is minimal.

Of course, microsoft has also made some really shitty and annoying changes. I can live with and understand the whole 3-way video chat becoming a premium feature to monetize the service if they're gonna use central servers, but I can't understand the awful UI choices doing their best to remove any possibility of signing out of skype on mobile devices.

Great show, just running out of stuff to do

This is partly influenced by the local climate. Finland is COLD, usually between 70-80 during the summer, and it gets unbearably cold during the winter. Colder environments favor centralized populations. Northern Finland is also a marshy mess of lakes that can't evaporate due to the climate, covered in mosquitos, similar to Canada which also has very desolate northern areas.

Trolls will even pop up in small communities of 20 or less given enough time. All it takes is someone convinced enough in their view, at odds with the majority in the community, and stubborn enough to stand their ground and ignore rational argument (common among people backed into a corner). Human nature creates trolls, ananymity only makes the problem more visible.

The city has an endemic culture of corruption, officials should be treated with skepticism in all affairs.

I understand the frustration, hell, my first course in egineering, they devoted a big chunk to unit conversions. I just get aggrivated when year after year, story after story, someone starts complaining about units and we get a huge back-patting session where everyone congratulates each for not being from the US. It takes less time to press ctrl+t and type '5ft 6in to cm' in the top bar for a translation than it does to type out a whiny soap-box post like the type we commonly get.

There are two facts that need to be taken into acount when it comes to unit conversions. First, a story that targets a local demographic is usually going to be in the units that demographic relates to. This was a UK story, but even still, imperial units are commonly used even if they are 'officially' converted, hence the yards. A different matter could be made for asking the Slashdot editors to add them to summaries, but that's another tree to bark up. Also, partially in relation to the first point, a unit conversion of the US will probably not be fully implemented in our lifetime. Canada and the UK converted decades ago and the non-standard measures are still fairly common in everyday language and food.

I just get aggrivated when a story's comment section gets overrun with this crap. I find it obnoxious and off-topic. I don't ask for a conversion for perspective when people's heights or temperatures are posted in metric, I convert myself and expect others to not be lazy.

Most large leagues, at least in the US sans MLB, have some sort of salary cap structure. This means one team can't spend beyond a certain amount on players in order to keep competition closer to parity, which makes the games/tournaments more exciting and hence drives revenue through more involved fanbases.

If you want rough estimates, its simple. If its in feet, divide by 3 for meters. If its in yards, yards = meters. No, its not perfect, but its close enough, within 2% margin of error.

Its not going to change any time soon, and no amount of bitching is going to make it change any time soon, so get over it. I find it funny that the bitching usually comes from Europe, where language is about 'cultural identity' but you have to speak english to be functional in larger businesses. Using the same logic, we should eliminate Dutch, Italian, Greek, Finnish, Swedish, and so on because they're a minority method of communication.