If that was true, then ad blocking tools would not be very popular. They are, so this isn't true.

That's a pretty big logical fail. Firstly he said 'almost everyone' is happy and installation figures for adblock software back that up. Secondly, he is making the point that most people prefer free sites with ads over pay sites, which again is pretty obvious given the lack of pay sites for most content. The fact that a small subset of people are willing to ignore the wishes of the people producing the content they consume by blocking their revenue mechanic just shows that self-entitlement is alive and well.

The fact it's a rental service and they make that clear isn't an issue. Clearly some people don't want that, which is fine. Personally I like the subscription model. Both Spotify and Netflix work for me, and at $5 a month I'd consider a games rental subscription. I would however be interested to see how they handle DLC etc and just how much of their newer library they put online.

Sure I wouldn't 'own' anything but then all the music I bought on tape isn't exactly useful, nor are VHS videos etc. I don't care if I still 'own' BF4 in 10 years time when I likely wouldn't have a console to play it on and the servers it needs were turned off.

I stopped playing them back in the '70s (I think), so I really don't know.

First Madden was released in 1988 so either you've got a time machine or whatever you were actually doing in the 70s has fucked your memory ;)

It's certainly possible that companies are misunderstanding the market, however if that's the case then there's a considerable opportunity for disruption that you would expect one or more challenger manufacturers to try and exploit. There are certainly companies out there making phones that vary considerably from the iPhone after all.

Apple, Samsung, HTC, and probably all other major manufacturers have pretty much settled on a single generic form factor. You could argue that this is due to them blindly assuming that this is what customers want; however, many manufacturers offered a range of alternative designs until well after the iPhone was a huge hit (while obviously releasing their me too products as well). If there was a big market out there for phones that didn't fit this cookie cutter then I find it unlikely that they would have stopped producing models which were selling well, when they could keep selling those alongside new models.

It's about cost really. It's cheaper to manufacture phones without a physical keyboard.

A bit over-simplistic, especially as the article itself goes on about the only physical keyboards left being on cheap phones.

Ultimately it's pretty simple. Potentially the majority of people may prefer a physical keyboard to a virtual one, but they also prefer a smaller phone to a bigger one etc. Without two full products to compare it's pretty nonsensical to ask people for preference on one feature that vastly alters the rest of the product. Many people prefer an electric car to a petrol one so why aren't all the cars being sold electric? Perhaps it's because they also don't want to pay more and want to be able to quickly refuel to travel longer distances...

Absolutely true, although I'm not sure want the government stepping in and banning all meat production. If water cost something slightly less comically low then we'd see consumption of 'wasteful' products fall due to the price differential. The reason I don't like blanket bans is that in many cases they punish a small subset of negative behaviours. I'd expect the water waste of someone with a huge lawn, or a large open air pool in a hot arid area is wasting vastly more water than someone who eats the odd chicken ;)

Stop subsidising water and waste will go down, without restricting personal choice or haphazardly punishing certain negative choices and not others.

Aside from the validity of your satire, one of the issues is that water is too cheap. Corporations wouldn't have the right motives (long term enough) but water should be more expensive because price is one of the best ways to control demand. Perhaps it shouldn't be affordable to grow extremely thirsty crops is areas with water shortages when the land could be used to grow less thirsty crops and more demanding crops could be grown elsewhere.

Poverty does not cause obesity. It causes unhealthy diets which can cause obesity. Stay home and eat a 7 dollar lean steak or a 12 dollar healthy omega3 rich fish fillet with about 4 dollars in trimmings or get filled up with a 6 dollar super sized big mac meal and not have to fix the crap.

Not an overly persuasive argument when thought through. It isn't hard to eat cheap and eat healthily. Swap the massive coke in that McDonalds meal with a sugar free drink (or if you don't trust sugar alternatives stick with water) and for no extra cost you've just made a huge difference.

Poor people tend to be fatter for many reasons, ranging from being less bothered about societies opinion of them to being less educated on the risks. Yes money is relevant (how many poor people can hire personal trainers or decent gym memberships for example) but you could easily take an unhealthy diet and make it vastly better without spending more.

Also, what type of asshole employee would separate a man from his two young children?

What kind of asshole doesn't pay for a premium service then tries to demand it anyway? He could board with his kids as normal or he could have paid for his kids to have priority boarding, nobody was separating him. Any more than a strip club is separating a parent from a child if they don't let children in and the parent goes in anyway.

Obviously doesn't mean he shouldn't be allowed to treat his opinion, or that it is remotely appropriate for the agent to respond to the tweet in that way.

You mean like the urgent notices I get about my accounts at banks I've never done business with or the "invoices" from companies I've never heard of before, let alone done business with?

What exactly's your point? Obviously emails about accounts with banks you don't use aren't going to catch many people (although if they're threatening consequences like fines or rewards it'll catch some of the more naive), but when it gets to someone who does use that bank/business the effectiveness increases considerably. What you're doing is the equivalent of laughing at advertising billboards, roughly 3/4s of the people who see an add for female deoderant aren't the target market but the company knows that and doesn't care because the cost is worth it to reach the 25% it wants.

Or just ban the cunts quickly when they are reported for abuse. It always amazed me years ago when xbox live was invariably filled by racist/sexist/abusive chumps who the reporting system clearly wasn't enforced. Every time a girls voice (or a possibly female gamertag) was heard in a game there'd be 1+ twat making sexual remarks, telling them to get back in the kitchen incessently. People are paying MS decent money for live and MS ignoring that crap was basically a big fuck you to anyone female, asian, black or whatever who wanted to game online without constant abuse.

Or vanish back to the imagination that created. The simplest way for 9/10 men who don't think there's an issue to get a better understanding of the difference in harassment between genders is to think about how much abuse (if any) they get for being male, then ask a female friend to tell them about examples of harrasment they have been subjected to and the effect.

Anecdotals have plenty of flaws but with something as inherently personal as sexual harrasment it's a lot easier to appreciate the importance if you realise the universality of it and the impact on a real person.

If I write a gaming opinion piece called "Mens world: why game devs should ignore all whining women and focus on their main demographic" I'd also get a lot of angry mail and spiteful messages.

And Martin Luther King got a whole lot of shit for highlighting the plight of black people; it doesn't mean he didn't have a point or that threatening to sexually assault or kill him should be brushed off as the inevitable consequence of his actions.

I've seen enough sexist, aggressive or verbal, abuse of women by men which had nothing to do with the woman being a 'feminist' (like that could justify it regardless) to appreciate that sexism is an real issue that needs addressing. Obviously not everything that every man does is sexist, but when women have to put up with orders of magnitude more harrassment just because they're female, us men need to put aside our desire to defend our own reputation and realise that this shit has to stop.

You should know that Israelis mourn Gazan casualties as well. We hate the Hamas, but certainly not the people of Gaza.

Many Israelis don't even if you do, and you certainly don't respond to suffering on both sides in the same way. As a Brit I know the rocket attacks the Israelis are coming under are terrible compared to my cosey little existence, but they're almost comical compared to the suffering of the Palestinians: Hundreds of dead, thousands of injured, hundreds of thousands forced to flee their homes and over a million without basic utilities, struggling to find food and water.

People wonder why so many Palestinians support Hamas when they 'bring these attacks upon the Palestinian people' but they're missing the point. The existence of the French resistance during WW2 led to thousands of the French suffering in response, but they considered the resistance as the only way to fight back against an oppressor. In Palestine the Israelies are seen as that oppressor, and even if the resistance is largely ineffective and leads to reprisals, they will be supported because people support those they see as fighting for them against an oppressor.

Israelis constantly make the point that Hamas targets civilians when they don't. Firstly, given the vastly larger number of Palestinian civilians killed it's a pretty arbitrary point and secondly Israel can effectively strike at Palestinian military organisations with minimal risk, how exactly do you suggest that Hamas fights a conventional war agains the IDF? Lastly, look back at the post WW2 period and the founding of Israel and the acts of terrorism, including many targetting civilians, by Jews at the time. Back when your country didn't have overwhelming military power your ancestors were perfectly happy to use terrorism to achieve its goals; which makes this protest agains the same methods 60 years later look more than a little hypocritical.

I'm not saying he's necessarily right, but he didn't disprove him own point.

I said he contradicted his own data source. Which he clearly, and emphatically did. There are certainly arguments that could be made for why Americans need bigger cars for safety, and if they could be backed up with evidence I'd welcome them? I could come up with a dozen reasons why driving in Europe could be more dangerous than the US but without any evidence it's just speculation, which is all your musing on road complexity is unless there's any evidence to support it.

For American cars to be safer than European cars you'd need to demonstrate that driving on the roads in America is roughly 3 times as likely to lead to a fatality in equivalent vehicles to fit with the source he used.