In order to really fix things requires going back in time. They either should have released the Wii U a year or two earlier, or they should have made it much more powerful. A year or two earlier and a Wii that was effectively on par with the PS3 and 360 would have seemed great. Coming out just a year before the much more powerful PS4 and XBOne made it seem pretty weak. On the other hand if they could have gotten it at least into the same ballpark as the PS4 and XBOne in terms of specs they might have been okay. The PS2 was the weakest console of its generation in terms of power, but it was "good enough" and it was the earliest of the surviving consoles to come out so got a big head start.

Of course the only way they could have aforded to do that however would be to ditch the Wii U tablet controller, which is consuming far too much of the cost per console. It's an interesting idea, and there are some cool things you can do with it, but the evidence seems to indicate that it just wasn't worth it. The Wii was revolutionary when it came out, and everyone else copied Nintendo. With the Wii U it was pretty clear that now Nintendo was the one doing the copying.

Maybe there's some other gimick they could have come up with which would have re-created the Wii frenzy all over again, but a pseudo-tablet wasn't it.

And overarching all of this, they need better third party support. They've needed better third party support since the N64 days, and if anything the problem has only gotten worse. People keep telling them they need better third party support, and occasionally they admit they need better third party support and announce some plan to get better third party support, and yet somehow it never gets fixed. Part of the problem is that they've gotten themselves stuck in a viscious circle, no one expects good third party games on Nintendo consoles (as opposed to handhelds) so no one buys third party games, so third parties judge that making games for Nintendo consoles isn't profitable, so no on expects good third party games... But of course Nintendo isn't helping with their often counter-productive approaches toward third parties. I ahve no idea what Nintendo could do to dig them out of the pit they've gotten themselves into in this regard.

Unless things turn around on the Wii U really soon, the best they can possibly do is have a short generation. About three years from now release the Wii U 2, with better stats than the PS4 and XBOne. (Releasing it two years from now would be better, except they'd risk really pissing off everyone who already bought a Wii U, cf. Dreamcast. A 4 year cycle is short, but not unreasonable.) Make it backwards compatible with the Wii and Wii U, but don't include the tablet controller. The only new gimick i can think of that _might_ go over well would be a VR type system, but then they'd be going up against Oculus Rift. (I'm also not convinved that a VR system would be good for gaming. On the other half i didn't think the Wii motion controller or Wii U tablet controller would be good for gaming, so as far as the market is concenred i'm running about 50/50 on my predictions.)

TLDR: For once actually do _something_ to fix relations with third party developers and release a simple but powerful console three years from now.

Actually, here's another idea. When they announce that future console, make it a joint project with Sega. Even if Sega only had a small share (say, 10%) the news that Sega was getting back into the console business would generate a ton of PR. But that's even less likely to happen than Nintendo getting the next console right on their own.

How is he supposed to serve as a lesson to others if they're busy purging all records of him?

"Remember what happened to Jang Song Thaek before you think about crossing me!"
"Who? I don't remember him at all."
"Exactly!"

Sounds a bit more like bad comedy than a real threat.

Hey, maybe _your_ universe only has ten dimensions, but _my_ universe goes to eleven!

"two years ago Richard Dawkins and Lawrence Krauss set off on a barnstorming tour to save the world from religion and promote science."

That is exactly the wrong way to do things. I'm not going to argue whether it is reasonable or not to believe in both science or religion, because regardless of that if you frame an argument as A is wrong and B is right then everyone who already believes in A is going to get defensive and angry and be even _less_ likely to accept B.

If that's not actually a misrepresentation and he's actually approaching the perceived problem by trying to bludgeon the opposing side into adopting his beliefs then he's doomed to failure, and the whole things is really just a "feel good" tour for atheists to feel superior about their "enlightened" beliefs.

This is all an overreaction. Everyone knows that a single isolated incident of a car bursting into flames after some kind of impact is no big deal. We shouldn't be concerned until at least three reports surface in the news. At which point it instantly becomes SERIOUS BUSINESS and must be investigated!

Every time there's a story about the trend of automating everything people worry that all the jobs are going to go away and there will be nothing left for anyone who isn't a brilliant scientist or talented artist. Well it actually makes sense to outlaw the automation of C&D letters by bots like the media industry is currently doing. One can make an entirely reasonable argument that this kind of legal activity needs to be performed by a human, not a machine. (At least up up until the point where we get true AI at least, and then everything goes out the window anyways.)

All we have to do is get a law passed saying that each C&D claim has to be reviewed by a real human who is employed by the company whose content is supposedly being infringed, plus specify a minimum amount of time necessary for the review. Huzah! At a minimum of one minute per C&D review (which could certainly be increased to five or even ten minutes if necessary,) 6.5 million C&Ds per week is at least 2,700 new jobs, and if the number keeps doubling every year... In less than two decades we could have an entire economy based around C&D letters!

I learned about a number of Black Friday and Cyber Monday sales through my Android phone. And in each case i then went and looked it up again on my PC for review before deciding whether or not to make a purchase.

Yet another thing, along with self-driving cars, Google Books, and Google Glass, that Vernor Vinge's 2006 novel seems to be on track for.

"I liked the fact that the active playlist was held completely separate from the library (as opposed to say...struggling with itunes)."

And perhaps even more importantly, both of them aren't intimately tied to the file system! I still remember the first (and only) time i accidentally added a file to iTunes and then immediately deleted it from iTunes only to find out that the actual file had been deleted in windows! It was also the last time i ever used iTunes for anything other than downloading podcasts.

And i still use the winamp. And as other people have mentioned elsewhere, i've had others comment on the fact. Twice in the past month or two coworkers have wandered by my desk and exclaimed "wow, you still use winamp?!" Everyone else seems to have moved on to streaming music players, but i've already got most of my music locally and don't see any reason to waste bandwidth downloading it over and over again.

I believe, given what's said in the comic, that what Munroe was objecting to was not quotations in general, but quoting, fur humorous purposes, material whose foundation for humor was its surreality. And _personally_ i would say that although some xkcd comics are certainly surreal, that is not actually the founding principle of xkcd. I'm sure opinions vary however. The comic in question here certainly has some surreal elements, but the comic itself is about a non-surreal topic, which is why it was referenced in the first place.

http://xkcd.com/16/

So hopefully they'll give us some new spontaneous material to drive into the ground with endless repetition for decades to come? (And i admit, i'm as guilty of that as the next geek.)

I actually went to see Gravity twice. Once in 2D, and then again in 3D because my company organized a trip. If i'd actually had to pay for the 3D version i would have been sorry. I stopped noticing the 3D effect about 5 minutes in. Then during the ISS scene a couple things flew directly at my face and made me flinch (which i do not count as a positive experience) and then i stopped noticing it again for the entire rest of the movie.

To be fair i've said the same thing about every other 3D movie i've seen (with the possible exception of How to Train Your Dragon, where at least the "let's show off the 3D in the middle" scene made me go "ooohh" rather than flinch) but Gravity isn't necessarily going to cure everyone of a preexisting case of 3D apathy.

Any value the movie has as social commentary is overshadowed by its total misuse of the source material. The claims by Verhoeven and other critics that the novel supports fascism are shallow at best. The characters in the novel engage in a number moral debates about the values of their system of government, which you can certainly disagree with but can't just wave away with a simple accusation of fascism. In fact there's evidence that Heinlein got the idea of universal service in the novel from Switzerland, which as we all know is a hotbed of fascism. [/sarcasm]

I'm pretty sure the first half of that isn't true, though you may be right on the second half. The lion's share of space taken up internally is by the battery. However the thing that uses the most power is generally the screen, so if you reduce the screen size you don't need as much battery.

The Droid Mini came very close to matching its larger cousin's specs. The only shortcoming, and it's a pretty large one, is that it only has 16 GB of storage. I don't know what the form factor is for internal flash memory but i doubt there's a significant difference in size between 16 GB and 32 GB, or even 64 GB. If they'd just included a decent amount of storage, and it wasn't exclusive to Verizon, i would have bought one instantly. But going by what seems to be the standard cell phone pricing scheme, the extra 16 GB of storage would have cost $50 more, and i guess they didn't think enough people would have been willing to pay that to make it worthwhile.

After all those weeks of rumors, how did they manage to still get the wrong specs _after_ the device was announced? According to the order page the CPU is 2.3 GHz, not 2.2.

It looks like a really nice phone, i just wish it wasn't so large. I know it's only "slightly" larger than the Nexus 4 due to the reduced bevel, but the Nexus 4 was already too large. I really want a nice phone with a 4.0" or 4.3" screen. (And no, the "Mini" versions of the HTC One, Galaxy S4 and Droid don't count. They reduced the CPU and/or RAM and/or Storage for all of those when they made them "Mini".)