It's worth noting that dev company has made mainly city traffic sims before, so its understandable that a lot of the city building is based around traffic modelling. It's an area where they have a lot of expertise.

I think this has come from real life examples. Specifically the company that made the game is in my home city of Tampere, and we had a couple of cases about a year ago where a dead person was discovered in their apartment because of the smell coming from their apartment.

Their head designer said that quite a few of their various features were inspired by events in their home city.

The main advantage is hygiene. That is less diseases spread by parasites in the faeces and no need to empty out the outhouse getting people into direct contact with faeces.

It takes having lived a really comfortable life to not understand this basic issue with hygiene.

I don't think you quite understand how relative numbers such as "down to historic lows" work. Especially since you happened to accidentally agree with his statement in yours.

1. Discrimination against lower castes is illegal in India under Article 15 of its constitution. It is however still prevalent. Not sure how your example of British rule which ended many decades ago has any more relevance to current situation than, for example, the fact that during the same period rape within marriage was completely legal everywhere Europe.

2. The obvious elephant in the room that you chose to ignore to get to claim that "I'm wrong in every way" on this one is that it's a well known and documented fact that there have been several programmes that allowed almost any Indian person to get a running water toilet for minimal price. It was widely rejected by people who preferred to put money in things like buying slightly more expensive smartphones instead. This was noted all the way up to the prime minister of India.

I'm not sure why you're so hell bent on making the "you're wrong in every way" claim as to ignore things like Indian constitution, well documented charity programmes and even PM statements.

Most of the people in India agree with him, including women. That is the main problem with Indian society in relation to rape. It's not just "policemen, politicians and lawyers" but average people as well. Views like "women are responsible for what (rape) happens to them if they dress in a certain way and go out in the evening alone" are commonplace.
Those opposed are mainly educated people in the cities, and even among them, there's no real consensus. Remember, this is a huge country with a large portion of rural dwellers, caste system that persists in spite of being banned by government and very conservative views on many issues.
It's also a country where most people will rather buy a slightly more expensive phone than replace their outhouse with a running water toilet.

Streisand effect is working in his favour on this one, even though his intentions are obviously impossible to achieve, simply because it shows his constituents that he shares their world view.

Because they also had two "distinctly different user interfaces in windows 8". The rest as they say is history.

The problem is dissonance with interfaces. Neither microsoft nor third party application makers are ready for step you're suggesting that needs to be taken (completely separate interface for each input method). That would increase workload on application makers who would need to make specifically different interface optimizations and microsoft has shown in windows 8 that their approach is hybridization aiming for lowest common denominator.

Their angle is that they went with too high of a common denominator and went for something that worked with touch but not with mouse/keyboard and now they're going even lower. Which would certainly make 10 an objectively *better* OS for mouse/keyboard combination.

What it would not make it is a *good* one. Because they are still going for lowest common denominator, which is very clearly visible in everything they do down to the latest announcement of "xbox for PC" (yes, yet another games for windows live for n+1st time where n is a large number). Better than trainwreck that was 8, yes. Better than the real competition, which is 7, no.

Which is why they halted non-pro/ultimate editions of 7 again. They know that if they were offering 7 and 10, hybrid lowest common denominator OS would have all the chance of a snowball in hell of surviving the competition with a proper desktop OS which doesn't have to make touch-related concessions on its UI elements. That is the same move they did when 8 tanked hard in effort to boost its success. This resulted in little increase of 8's sales and a massive nosedive of entire PC market. Which started recovering when 7 became widely available after MS reversed the decision under massive pressure from OEMs.

Which is why it's very telling that they making the same move now, as well as yet another "GFWL" move. Smell of desperation is strong once again.

Except that then you need to have two clearly distinct interfaces. I.e. windows 7 interface for mouse and keyboard and windows 8 interface for touch, which would switch when you connect different devices. Which would be confusing, but way better than current jury-rigged taped together version of "touch plus sorta kinda mouse and keyboard" that you have on 8.

Considering that 10 has been nothing but a slightly less touch friendly 8's interface so far, I'm not seeing this going much better. The main drive behind 10 being better was on PR side (windows for ALL devices, i.e. lowest common denominator for everyone in reality), and that may work - as it has before. You put out a bad product, hammer in that "no guys really, it's good" for a couple of years, polish off the worst corners on the turd and people start believing you. It's still going to be a turd, but people will swallow it anyway.

Is this a joke? Current Iraq, sans IS territory is basically a de facto vassal state of Iran. It's very difficult to imagine a change where Iraq would be any more pro-Iranian than it is today in such a short period of time. Vice news had a really good video on their reporter who went embedded with Iraqi Shiite militias. Unlike government which has to at least maintain plausible deniability, militiamen themselves are fairly open about who their support and materiel comes from and who they see as their own.

While it's true that current Middle East situation is not "as bad as it could get", that's only because "as bad as it could get" is a nuclear exchange between Israel and Iran or one sided nuclear strikes into Iran by Israel. And the current situation is not that far away from it now that Iran became a true regional hegemon after Iraq became it's vassal state and feels quite empowered by it. If anything, IS actually serves as a dam containing Iran's influence's westward expansion in the region.

That's quite incorrect, because there will be no US for Europe to help in your scenario, nor Russia to help against. Both would be irradiated no-go land.

This is something many US residents tend to forget because they didn't have a war against an aggressor capable of fighting on their land for centuries. To them, war is something that happens far away with no real impact on their lives. A war with Russia on the other hand would be a war against a foe capable of unleashing the real consequences of the war against the people of US.

And mind you, US is doing a lot against Assad. The real problem is that people in White House right now are not quite as "american cliche" in their utter ignorance of situation on the ground and understand that any help against Assad equals improving Iran's position in the region, one way or another. Just like Iraq intervention ended up being nothing more than surrendering Iraq, the former anti-Iran bastion straight to Iranian hands. As a result most of anti-Assad action taken is typically in the form that avoids straight up supporting Iran's position in the region, which severely limits potency of any measures taken. It's mainly undercover support of semi-independent Sunni militias and support for the only anti-Iranian force in the region - ethnic Kurds. And then there's of course the political pressure on allies of Allawites.

If privacy is your end goal, buying an iphone over android is proverbial shoving head in the sand I'm afraid. While apple certainly isn't quite as bad at violating your privacy as google, it's does it in incredible amounts regardless.

To paraphrase, your choice is between anal rape with a baseball bat or with a crowbar. One may be thinner than other, and one may have less sharp edges than other, but both will hurt so much that difference is largely inconsequential.

In fact, ALL major current smartphone OSs and their applications do. It's an inherent part of their business model. In fact one of the major attractors of non-major operating systems in mobile world is privacy (I include privacy-minded android forks in this particular group).

You are misinterpreting the numbers in a fairly hilarious way. According to the tables you link, their actual market share is around 10%, which matches IDC's numbers.

And as I noted above, their profit margins are exceedingly high simply because they found their extremely successful niche which enables them to pull far higher profit margins, as they target audience simply doesn't demand as much for their money as those of others. If anything, we have seen based on 5C debacle that apple's target audience demands an overly expensive product and attempts to expand into more cost efficient products doesn't produce results anywhere near their success in the top end market.

That is the apple's niche, and their main limiter - to those outside that specific target audience, apple's appeal is massively stunted by their appearance of extremely expensive product with extreme profit margins, meaning less product for the money spent by the customer. But as long as wealthy people are willing to overspend on apple's products for whatever reason they choose to do so and retain the means to do so, apple will do very well.

http://www.idc.com/prodserv/sm... They're sitting on their 10-15%. The way apple fan crowd does it is by applying "no true scotsman" fallacy to numbers to exclude as many smartphones as possible. This results in lower total smartphone shipments, meaning apple's fairly small share starts to appear much larger.

That's what Nokia did back in their symbian 3 phones before Elop/Microsoft killed them. HDMI out on the phone and phone can have keyboard and/or mouse plugged in via USB or BT, functioning as a portable desktop machine or set top box for a TV.

Problem is that this sort of usage, even when hardware and software for it is actually in place is quite uncomfortable because UI has to be optimized for one of the human interfaces, making it extremely awful for others. Reference: windows 8's failure.

It still is. It markets to a very specific niche and has little to no traction outside it. The reason why they are so fabulously financially successful is that their niche represents some of the most economically successful demographics of our time.

When you cater to the specific very successful niche that happens to be growing steadily and you manage to lock them into your products as apple does, you tend to become wildly successful.