design and fashion is always such a cycle. I don't know why you feel these are " 256 color, flat, windows 3 style icons". They look far better than the old windows 3 icons do. To me they just look like the next evolution.
And seeing people freak out over icons that pretty much look as expected seeing current gui practices... yes, it makes me feel people are just opposing change. To me they look like a nice new set of icons, and if you prefer another set, put that on your windows :).

They're more in line with current gui design. They want to appear a bit more modern i guess. Every windows does some changes to the icons, is it a surprise this one does too?

I was thinking the same. But change must always be met with a lot of opposition it seems.

If this means nothing can ever get changed... no.
Why can't they change the look of things a bit from time to time? i think it's a nice look, and if you don't... you'll still get used to it :p.

I just had to think about a little "customer riot" here in belgium. A big chain wanted to change the name of their cheap beer. It was apparantly a huge riot because people wanted the name to remain the same, and not just be renamed to the cheap brandname they use for all their cheap products. I was reading it and really wondering "wtf is wrong with the people complaining about this"...

And i've got a similar feeling about this. It's a fresher design, you may or may not like what the current gui design standards are. But is it really worth all this effort? i honestly think the screenshot in that article looks great. Probably better than the win7 icons i'm currently looking at.
But change must always be shot down it seems. And then afterwards we can all complain that nothing ever changes (or changes far too slowly).

Lol XD
But i'm wondering the same. I looked at those icons, and don't see the issue. Yes they're different, a bit more like a lot of modern things are styled. You'll get used to it...

And to answer your question: everybody wants the world to change, but nobody wants to change themselves :p. That's the nice paradox our society is stuck in :).

And i'm probably going to kill any chances of getting modded up by saying this: I had the same feeling with windows 8. I heard all these terrible things about it, how the UI sucks. Did install it, and gave it a try. It's certainly different, but i don't see the issue. I looked up how to configure the new screen, grouped my icons on the metro screen nicely in a way i find convenient.

Now we've said our thing, the microsoft bashing may continue :).

did i anywhere imply it's the current staff that needs to add this to their huge list of tasks?
Dedicated people trained to handle this who bridge the gap between the science part and the person would probably be a far better idea.

I mean in common treatment. Unless you complain about psychological issues (or act really really weird), you won't see anyone who really cares about your mental status. People with serious illnesses who go to modern medicine for treatment end up in a pharmacological & scientific world where their body will be scanned, probed, checked, double checked, analysed, etc.... they'll be given substances & treatments to cure whatever they find. But psychological assistance to go along with this just doesn't belong in that world it seems. You're here for cancer, not for feeling good about yourself.
And i think we still vastly underestimate how much also feeling good actually helps us get trough things, and helps our body going in such grave situations.

I'm actually wondering what the result would be if they began implementing this.

From a pure biological point of view it's ofcourse pure bullshit.

But we can hardly deny that our current doctors just suck with the psychological side of feeling bad/illnesses. A lot of the power in "alternative medicine" is to support the people mentally, which as the placebo effect shows also helps quite a bit. It doesn't cure your cancer, but adding some spiritual side to the process that doesn't treat the people as patient #145563255 might actually give quite a positive result.

I think that no longer ignoring the psychological needs of people who are ill is one of the next big medical challenges. I've read people who fought cancer who said that the interaction with doctors & staff is also one of the hardest things. They seem to think you should be able to deal with all the shit that comes with it yourself and be fully informed and pay attention to every detail etc... while you're feeling like shit due to chemotherapy and are trying to resolve everything in your life before it's too late.

Now we seem to have 2 branches of "medicine". One that cures your body, but doesn't care much about your mind. And one that's full of "you should feel good and be happy" but doesn't know shit about your body (well, depending on the alternative medicine. there are some that do know some things, but still won't cure cancer).

Even more incredible is how the summary is written to make it sound a lot worse than it is.
looking at the kickstarter page, the game reminds me a bit of aye evil overlord, passing the buck around, trying to get other people to explode. Sounds like fun. It's nothing like "take turns drawing cards until someone draws an exploding kitten and loses the game.". You can make anything sound bad by taking a single sentence out of context. There are cards to prevent exploding, to pass exploding cards to other players, etc...

Sounds like fun :).

I'm really starting to wonder why i'm still on this site. Even more than it used to be, it's just a stream of clickbait and articles containing half truths just to make it sound controversial...

It's even better than this, the mic apparantly is only on when you press the voice command button to make the tv listen to a voice command. The mic is only on for a short period when you ask it explicitly. Then it sends whatever you said to the speech recognition server (just like every other speech recognition system atm), and the tv will get an answer as to what it's supposed to do.

The reason they have this in their terms and conditions is because the tv doesn't know what it'll send when you push that button, so it could be personal information. They're just covering their asses. And i would never use such a system, but i'm wondering what the big value is of encrypting data that would probably just contain someone saying "channel 77" or whatever the voice commands like that are.

This is just a lot of fuss about nothing, and a lot of people complaining because the summary makes it sound far worse than it actually is...
The first article was ridiculous. Ofcourse the voice commands get sent to a third party service. That's also how siri and whatever other such systems exist work. And it's not always on, you have to request it via the remote. So there's no privacy implication at all... It's just covering their asses.
And now it's that this data, which is very very unlikely to be sensitive isn't encrypted. If the hackers want to hear people name channels and other commands from the users of said tv's... good for them.

I can't deduce from the article how it works with these tv's.
But even if it has that feature, it's bound to fail from time to time, and send personal conversations to its server. So even with that feature i would expect the EULA to mention this.

I'm also wondering the same for when i'll buy my next tv. I don't want some smart tv, but will i find something decent that is not smart? I would love high end dumb a as a brick tv's/screens, but us technical minded folks are probably a minority? I can't really imagine who uses the smart tv functionalities. All i've seen from it so far is tv's being able to play a lot of files, but still a lot of other files don't work for any number of reasons. They'll support a lot of services, probably not all the ones you want. Maybe you can browse the internet on them. On a strange browser, and after you've seen it work an though "this is great" you'll never do it again since your pc is way superior to it.
Maybe i'm just not the average consumer XD.

how is it remotely avoidable when your tv has voice recognition? like systems like siri it'll send it off to a remote server for analysis and to see what it has to do :). It will pick up random conversations and try to see if it's a command. I'm not endorsing things like this, i would never want a smart tv, i'll attach a htpc or raspberry pi or whatever to it if i want such features. But i can understand that things like that are pretty unavoidable with voice commands, and don't sound that much like a spying nightmare, just a logical result of voice recognition...

and most importantly: free shipping.

i'm wondering, can there be anything in there that justifies this cost?
most of the hardware isn't stellar (the software is android, probably not the fastest chip, some decent batteries and screen on it, some audiodecoding software that is probably already available for all android devices)
So all that is left is the hardware for actually creating the audio signal, which should be worth a lot in this thing, is there really hardware that is so suberb in quality that it's worth this price?