Why do I suddenly want to play Kerble Space program?

I've stood in the middle of a long unmown wheatfield as baby wild boar played all around my ankles, licked my boots, and even stretched up to sniff my kneecaps, and the whole dozen of them looked rather well fed beneath that black bristly hair they had. Mama looke pretty well fed for a wild creature too, 15 feet away, and close to 230 lbs. I had both an M-16 and a 45 at the time, and no intention what-so-ever of shooting mama unless I absolutely had to try, because I would bet it would take at least 3 rounds to stop her, but I can assure you, she was quite likely to survive in the absence of humans, and maybe even in their presence, while my own survival seemed to just possibly hinge on not stepping on junior's trotters. (Me, I wasn't there to hunt boar, rather venomous snakes, which were spreading away from a nearby dam project as the waters rose.).
            Equally likely, every wild boar in the continental USA is descended from a domestic pig. These were brought over by Columbus, De Soto and De la Salle. The earliest escape or release of an actual European wild boar in the USA was probably not until the early 20th century, so all boar mentioned by such people as Crockett and Lewis and Clark are presumably descended from escaped domestic pigs.Turning a pig back into a boar is not a matter of generations of selective breeding, but a matter of an escaped one surviving for the first six months or so. They are currently wild in at least 36 states and the numbers are growing, with popualtion totals estimated at around 500,000, and several states that have them are considering broadening their hunting seasons or bag limits, if any. It is actually illegal to kill a boar in some jurisdictions unless you ritually chant "Oh My Ghod, it's A-Chargin!!!." first. Unlike just about every other invasive species, they do not taste like chicken. My guess is without human culling, they would level out at upwards of a million population in the US.

Would you initaite interspecies contact with a species that wonders whether you go with white wine or red? Would you invade a world where the inhabitants are as likely to reach for a jar of brown sauce as a weapon? Omnivorism - keeping Earth first contact free for over 500,000 years.

Obligatory - "A moose ate my sister..."

Because the air traffic controllers were unskilled labor in your world?

Google's chief way of restricting adult search terms is to deactivate autocomplete, so their engine will suddenly stop suggesting anything as the user types in certain cases. You can see this by slowly typing in "Linda Lovelace" - at some point the engine will be suggesting terms like "Luna Lovegood" that assume you may have misspelled something, but simply won't take the logical guess as you get closer to the end. This is not a system that is constantly updated with every new name in porn or every adult website, by any means, and Google relies a lot on websites self identifying. Hard core sites usually do, merely nude sites often don't bother to make it easier for the Google spiders.

Actually, lots of people wanted an Xbox One at launch. The XB1's sales curve has been really weird.

It had pretty great month-1 sales. It would have had the fastest month-1 sales of any console in history - if it hadn't launched alongside the PS4 (which broke the previous records by an even larger margin). But some time shortly after Christmas, the sales basically flatlined. First MS switched to talking about "units shipped" rather than "units sold" and then it stopped issuing new numbers at all.

By piecing together bits and pieces of retailer and regional sales data, it's possible to get a broad understanding of where the console stands now. Having originally been tipped to pass the Wii-U and take second-place in current gen sales somewhere around April, it appears that it probably only did so some time in September (and indeed, it certainly hasn't officially been announced yet, so there's at least an outside chance it's still in third). It's had several significant sales blips, driven first by the price cut when Kinnect was removed and then again by Destiny, but background sales outside of these blips have been generally very slow throughout 2014.

It's actually pretty similar to (though marginally better than) the sales profile for the Wii-U. That console actually sold well during its first 6 weeks or so on sale, before flatlining. Each first-party Nintendo game since then has caused a small 1-week spike in sales, but after Mario Kart, diminishing returns appear to be kicking in.

In regional terms, The Xbox One appears to be in a fairly solid second place in the US (behind the PS4), a distant second place in Europe (again behind the PS4) and third place in Japan. Indeed, the PS4 is also doing badly in Japan - home console gaming is dying in that market and even the Wii-U (which holds first place there) is doing badly compared to the last gen consoles.

The Xbox One does still have a few big irons in the fire and isn't quite in a Wii-U style Last Chance Saloon yet (if Smash Bros and Bayonetta 2 don't turn around the Wii-U's fortunes this Christmas, the console essentially can be considered dead). Forza Horizon 2 is a fairly big draw and Halo 5 will be a bigger one. But MS have certainly gone backwards since the days of the 360, when they dominated the US and managed a reasonable draw with Sony in Europe. In marketshare terms, the Xbox One looks a lot more like the original Xbox.

Though in general terms, this has been an extremely boring year for console games anyway. People get excited about new console releases, forgetting that they tend to be followed by 12 months during which there isn't much worth playing for them. It's always the later years of the cycle that are more fun in terms of game releases.

Unlike the above books, it's non-fiction, and people were actually killed for the crime of reading it. ("In Soviet Russia...")

By any measurable metric, the US economy has rebounded from recession far better than the Eurozone. GDP growth, unemployment... take your pick.

And the comparable growth rates you cite since 1989 are based, in Argentina's case on a "percentage of fuck all".

Military coups are the kind of thing that happen in a society that does not abide by the rule of law and respect property rights - which is exactly the kind of society you have been advocating. The moment the US embarked upon a programme of nationalisation of industries like Microsoft would be the moment that the US economy crashed with a speed (and irreversibility) that would take the world by shock. You think you have new solutions? They're the same failed "solutions" that have been tried for a hundred years or so around the world, leaving nothing but disaster in their wake.

Back in the first half of the 20th Century, Argentina was tipped to become one of the wealthiest countries in the world.

Then the people who think like you do got into power...

Yes! Why not kill off all of the major companies in one of the shrinking number of industries in which the US remains a world leader?

That will help massively.

And 20 years later, the Indians will be complaining about cheap illegal immigrants from the US taking all of the menial jobs in their country.

Currency has nothing to do with it.

Or rather, a Government which showed it was happy to nationalise a private company's assets on such flimsy pretences as you put forward would forfeit its nation's ability to do any kind of business on the world stage. Nobody would care about doing business in the US when it became clear that the moment the US Government didn't like them, it would nationalise their assets.

So the US dollar would quickly reach (and then fall below) parity with the Mexican Peso.

It will, of course, never happen. Thank god.

Nintendo OS?

I hope you're looking forward to only being able to post to slashdot using a sequence of happy-face emoticons.

Sad-face emoticons might upset people, so those are banned.

And words? Words?!?! Won't somebody think of the children?

Because that wouldn't have any wider consequences at all...

Like perhaps a total flight from the US of almost every other significant business (on the grounds that "we might be next"), a total economic collapse and a catastrophic reduction in living standards.

Certain parts of South America are performing this particular experiment for our education at the moment. Watch how that pans out before wishing to see it replicated in your own country.

I'm going to claim there's prior art on that cubic water thing. I have several copies of a device that produces cubic water in dozen lots, in the bottom of my refrigerator.