Comment Re:Spread Disease even faster! (Score 1) 43
They're presumably using an HMD with removable face gaskets.
America's Elderly Seem More Screen-Obsessed Than the Young (economist.com) 38
An anonymous reader quotes a report from The Economist: Many parents and grandparents will grumble about today's screen-obsessed youth. Indeed, researchers find that millennials look at their phones more than 150 times a day; half of them check their devices in the middle of the night; a third glance at them immediately after waking up. And yet, when all screens are accounted for, it is in fact older folk who seem most addicted. According to Nielsen, a market-research firm, Americans aged 65 and over spend nearly ten hours a day consuming media on their televisions, computers and smartphones. That is 12% more than Americans aged 35 to 49, and a third more than those aged 18 to 34 (the youngest cohort for whom Nielsen has data). American seniors "spend an average of seven hours and 30 minutes in front of the box, about as much as they did in 2015," the report says. "The spend another two hours staring at their smartphones, a more than seven-fold increase from four years ago."
Millennials have increased the time they spend on their mobile devices, but it's been largely offset by their dwindling interest in TV. As for teenagers, a report from 2015 by Common Sense Media "found that American teens aged 13-18 spent about six hours and 40 minutes per day on screens: slightly more than Nielsen recorded for 18- to 34-year-olds that year, but less than older generations."
Millennials have increased the time they spend on their mobile devices, but it's been largely offset by their dwindling interest in TV. As for teenagers, a report from 2015 by Common Sense Media "found that American teens aged 13-18 spent about six hours and 40 minutes per day on screens: slightly more than Nielsen recorded for 18- to 34-year-olds that year, but less than older generations."
Advertisers Are Blacklisting News Stories That Contain Forbidden Words (wsj.com) 77
Zorro shares a report from The Wall Street Journal: Companies are increasingly insisting their ads do not appear near articles or videos that contain any of a long list of words. Like many advertisers, Fidelity Investments wants to avoid advertising online near controversial content. The Boston-based financial-services company has a lengthy blacklist of words it considers off-limits. If one of those words is in an article's headline, Fidelity won't place an ad there. Its list earlier this year, reviewed by The Wall Street Journal, contained more than 400 words, including "bomb," "immigration" and "racism." Also off-limits: "Trump." Some news organizations have had difficulty placing Fidelity's ads on their sites, ad-sales executives said, because the list is so exhaustive and the terms appear in many news articles. Top 15 Forbidden Words: Dead, Shooting, Murder, Gun, Rape, Bomb, Died, Attack, Killed, Suicide, Trump, Crash, Crime, Explosion, Accident. "The ad-blacklisting threatens to hit publications' revenue and is creating incentives to produce more lifestyle-oriented coverage that is less controversial than hard news," reports The Wall Street Journal. "Some news organizations are investing in technologies meant to gauge the way news stories make readers feel in the hopes of persuading advertisers that there are options for ad placement other than blacklisting."
The use of lengthy keyword lists "is going to force publishers to do lifestyle content and focus on that at the expense of investigative journalism or serious journalism," said Nick Hewat, commercial director for the Guardian, a U.K. publisher. "That is a long-term consequence of this sort of buying behavior."
The use of lengthy keyword lists "is going to force publishers to do lifestyle content and focus on that at the expense of investigative journalism or serious journalism," said Nick Hewat, commercial director for the Guardian, a U.K. publisher. "That is a long-term consequence of this sort of buying behavior."
Comment Re:Ban India and China instead (Score 1) 292
Bo'ss, of course.
Comment Let Them Eat Pork (Score 1) 292
At least they got chicken.
Comment Re:Ban India and China instead (Score 3, Insightful) 292
Every word with an 's' at the end should get an apostrophe. No exception's!
Comment Re:Feldi Juan (Score 1) 64
If my wife says I can go without it, then the pussy DEFINITELY can.
Comment Re:Supplements are mostly snake oil (Score 1) 90
If you're trying to get Vitamin A from oranges, you're doing it wrong.
I'm curious if fortified food is as useless as vitamin pills have turned out to be, though.
WeWork IPO Reveals It Lost $1.9 Billion Last Year, and Is Losing About $5,200 Per Customer (cbsnews.com) 59
WeWork, the office-sharing, kegger-hosting phenomenon that has redefined the modern workspace, is also raising the bar for how much money a startup can lose and still be considered a buzzy investment. From a report: WeWork's corporate parent, the We Company, which released its IPO documents on Wednesday, loses roughly $5,197 per customer who inhabits its office space per year. That's considerably more than newly public companies like Uber or Beyond Meat are losing on their growing customer bases. WeWork, which says in the offering document that its corporate mission is no less than to "to elevate the world's consciousness," is on track to lose $2.7 billion this year from its operations, up from nearly $1.7 billion last year. The company's revenue in the first six months of the year nearly doubled from last year's first half, to $1.5 billion. The company said its losses rose just 10% from a year ago, but that includes a $470 million non-operating, and likely non-recurring, gain. Exclude that, and losses from the We Company, which says it will trade under the ticker symbol "WE," rose 60%. "If you work at WeWork, drive home with Uber, and then order food by DoorDash, you're engaging with three companies that are projected to lose about $13 billion this year," tweeted Derek Thompson, a staff writer at The Atlantic.
Further reading: WeWork Files For IPO After Losing $1.9 Billion Last Year.
Further reading: WeWork Files For IPO After Losing $1.9 Billion Last Year.
Comment Fuck Cramming (Score 1) 19
Prepaid FTW. Can't put shit on my bill if I HAVE no bill.
The Banana Is One Step Closer To Disappearing (nationalgeographic.com) 195
An anonymous reader quotes a report from National Geographic: A fungus that has wreaked havoc on banana plantations in the Eastern Hemisphere has, despite years of preventative efforts, arrived in the Americas. ICA, the Colombian agriculture and livestock authority, confirmed on Thursday that laboratory tests have positively identified the presence of so-called Panama disease Tropical Race 4 on banana farms in the Caribbean coastal region. The announcement was accompanied by a declaration of a national state of emergency. The discovery of the fungus represents a potential impending disaster for bananas as both a food source and an export commodity. Panama disease Tropical Race 4 -- or TR4 -- is an infection of the banana plant by a fungus of the genus Fusarium. Although bananas produced in infected soil are not unsafe for humans, infected plants eventually stop bearing fruit. First identified in Taiwanese soil samples in the early 1990s, the destructive fungus remained long confined to Southeast Asia and Australia, until its presence was confirmed in both the Middle East and Africa in 2013. Experts feared an eventual appearance in Latin America, the epicenter of the global banana export industry. No known fungicide or biocontrol measure has proven effective against TR4.
Comment Re:But it provides a useful contrast (Score 1) 42
They could've made a single 'compare and contrast' post that offered more than two possibilities.
Comment If They Court Toxicity (Score 1) 265
There's a difference between moderators being asleep/inconsistent/slow to remove stuff that violates their TOS; and a policy/tendency of moderators to welcome certain content, or to look the other way when they find it.
Google etc. not hiring enough 3rd-world mods to stare at horrible stuff all day is different from, say, 8-chan mods allowing everything and anything.
It might be most useful for the govt. to fund research into machine learning software to detect stuff that violates a given site's TOS (whatever it is), and make that open-source. Smaller sites won't be able to afford to develop that themselves, nor pay mods, because there's just too much content and not enough income (think Tumblr, Etsy, Deviantart etc.)
Comment Unnecessary For Most Games (Score 1) 42
Video games are too ubiquitous now for there to be popular support for a general ban on them, so it's redundant to try to justify their existence. Pokemon Go, DDR, & Beat Saber are good for exercise, for some low-hanging fruit. Certain violent games (that upcoming CoD I could see getting delayed a year), perhaps might need some justification, though. Probably the best justification for violent video games is to demonstrate the fact that acting out one's desires for aggression and retribution is rewarding/fulfilling, and that even if one is peaceful in real life, that cognitive bias is still there. It's the safest way to learn that aggressive instincts can be misleading, in the sense that they enable scapegoating.
Comment Re:I'm not sure. (Score 1) 179
The protagonist fulfills the prophecy, gets the girl, and becomes hopelessly overpowered. How exactly do you start with that to make an interesting sequel? Your options are either to find a reason to bring him to the real world, where he has no special powers, or to find some reason why he might get gimped in the Matrix (that doesn't seem like bullshit). Or to have a nonstop beatdown with no dramatic tension because of the boring invincible hero.
