The sad thing is, the official office apps are probably the worst ones to use. Word does some ridiculous scaling which wraps text, making it impossible to actually view a document as it was intended, meanwhile excel has an extremely reduced function set, to the point that any spreadsheet with some more useful formulas will no longer work.

I'd say it's a just too late. The Windows phone timeline is rocky, to say the least. While I like the OS, people who entered with WP7 got sold the dump, meanwhile, with WP8, there were some really good features, but the OS had severe limitations. Most of them got fixed with WP8.1, but they then got rid of some of the best features, and changed other things which really didn't need changing.

I think that if MS is happy to persist, the best windows phone can hope for is always going to be distant third. I say that as a rather happy user of it. The problem was, they were way too late to the party, and they brought too little. Where the other platforms had already sorted out most of their issues and were working on new tech and polish, MS still had to bring in rudimentary functions.

That's what I reckon, for what it's worth. The platform may be able to gain some market share, but if it does, it will be a slow hard grind.

I never got XP mode to run anything properly anyway.

Somehow militaries across the world have enforced the policy of not using frangible bullets and blinding lasers. However, more recently snipers have been watering it down at the peripheries by using hollow point match projectiles. While they technically are hollow points, they aren't the same as what most people think are hollow points, in that they are done so because they are consistent and accurate, and aren't designed with terminal ballistics in mind.

Furthermore, frangible projectiles are still manufactured, for hunting, and blinding lazers do exist.

So I'm not sure what you're saying, because I get the feeling that in both those instances, there isn't really any sort of countering technology that could minimise or mitigate against the effects of those weapons.

This is probably why 'they' would want it banned; purely because it's a weapon that they can't guarantee control over, or can't guarantee that they can counter this technology. So it would make sense to use diplomacy to try to make sure no one uses it.

MS's translator is generally good, I like using it on my phone, the camera translation is a particularly nice feature, but the one language which I'm constantly having to go to google for translations is latin. Why won't they add it in? For a lot of educated disciplines, science, law, latin is a used, and sometimes it's helpful for some decent translating.

Also forgot to add that the game sites also tend to gloss over issues which plague a lot of games. Namely debilitating DRM, day one DLC and early access. If they don't stand up for the consumer, then what are they for?

A big part of the problem recently is that 'consuming opinions' means that you are getting all the internal bias of the reviewer, warts and all. That means if they get all antsy about not having a playable female character, then the game is toast. If the game has been criticised by Anita Sarkeesian (or will be) then it's awful. If it doesn't cater to alphabet soup people, then it's sucking up to the privileged white males and therefore bad.

So when you have opinions, all you end up with is the game 'media' pushing drivel such as depression quest and gone home. While review scores have plenty of problems, it also allows the consumer to also compare review sites. With a subjective opinion piece, where you have plenty of writers who make a point of not being objective, it just becomes a piece on what's bothering the writer this week.

People like totalbiscuit have proven that you can review games, and still be objective and fair. So while reviews are intrinsically an opinion, some are far more valid than others, and most of these game sites, are best forgotten about.

I've never used it for one simple reason; Bad Rats...

I'm of a similar opinion. Score aggregation is a far more reliable method of determining the quality of a game, very quickly. It's not perfect, but it works rather nicely for me.

The problem that has been happening is the stupid score of 7/10, which demonstrates the stupid offset that game reviewers have been applying to their scores. 7/10 is more or less the average game, and anything below is usually crap (or niche) and anything above is ok. The dumbest thing about it is scores 0-5 essentially are varying levels of garbage. I think some review sites have copped flack over this, as it's rather ridiculous. There has also been pressure to get good reviews, otherwise reviewers get dropped out of the "club", and won't get free review copies, access to people for interviews or taken to junkets.

So while I don't always look at individual scores, because, especially now, they tend to be meaningless on their own, aggregating them makes heaps of sense, that is until many review sites stop providing scores to aggregate. This is what I think it's about. A lot of review sites are being attacked on a couple of fronts, there's the people who don't bother with them, and then there's 'let's plays' on youtube. I guess these websites try to make out that it's their writing which should be consumed. The problem with this is that with the gradual push for yellow journalism in gaming media, it means that they can't be scrutinesed for piling on games that don't fit in with their world view, like polygon did with bayonetta 2. I don't read eurogamer anyway, so it's no problem for me.

The question that really should be asked is why is the department of homeland security giving out so much military gear to police departments?

My first (and only) experience with android was heavily coloured by optus. Similar to telstra, they just don't release updates. What I learnt is, if you buy a carrier locked android phone, you're going to have a bad time. You never ever get a carrier locked android phone, it just adds another piece to the chain, and while the manufacturers are slow to release the updates, the carriers are even worse, and what for? They only install bloatware anyway.

The more complex analysis I've been reading about is that this is all stemming from a creep of 'cultural marxism' from academia. The thinking behind much of this is definitely marxist because as you say, it's about equal outcomes. For much of this cultural issues relating to gender or sexuality, the minorities are very much so, minorities, and market forces are essentially forcing them out. People aren't interested in products for that minority, so they don't get made because they don't sell.

Unfortunately what has crept in is the idea that every minority must be represented. This is particularly prominent in the video game industry where there's a race to the bottom to force in various minority figures, not because it makes any artistic sense, but because well, they need to be represented. As a result, we get fairly ridiculously contrived characters that do nothing except pander to those minorities, and generally annoy the mainstream market. A case in point is the developer bioware, who have gone out of their way to force their political viewpoints through their characters, and as a result, they've suffered.

So going back to cultural marxism, it's a case of forcing parity, as you have identified, rather than allowing it happen on its own and stabilise according to market demands. When it comes to something like this topic of male dominance in technical fields, well it's clear, there's absolutely no barrier preventing females from doing CS or programming, or any other male dominated fields, such as engineering. Therefore, the thinking is that clearly, capitalist ideology has failed to achieve their desires, so they need to force competing ideologies to counter it. Marxist ideologies are particularly useful for them because it enables authoritarian attitudes ahead of libertarian ones. They see the privileged people as controlling the means of production (i.e. the majority determine the market) and therefore need to take that away from the majority by making the market pander to the minorities and remove market forces from the equation. This is precisely what we are seeing here; structure things so that the majority can't participate.

The thing is, people have researched the topic in more depth, and you can find that while girls do play games, the games they do play are not the same as boys. This is why, in spite of this 50% are female, the main market is the one dominated by males, which is why the industry works quite hard in targeting that audience.

I was taught that you treat "air" as an ideal gas when there's no phase change. This was thermodynamics though. There may be an issue with humidity, but I have my doubts whether that will play a large role.