Rioting is already illegal.

What if they wear face paint, or have facial tattoos, or fell in the mud, or got sunburned, or have a skin condition?

Suppose the rioters are a lynch mob, and their victim wears a mask to hide. Is that target guilty of wearing a mask in a riot?

Adding a bunch of arbitrary metrics on top of a game makes it worse, not better. It motivates people to do something they used to like like until they really hate it or they "complete" the task list, and completionism is basically OCD. Non-game activities aren't better subjects for being gamed. Why bother?

If you want a better job done, pay for better help. Don't pretend it's something it isn't.

People are motivated by things that interest and engage and matter to them, and also by money. Gamification, essentially a Skinner box, is none of these.

Recommending exercise is not nutritional advice.

I think you mean 1,298.

Locality rules the universe. Networked storage and communications are subject to the same laws of physics as everything else.

Astronauts in space partly lose their sense of smell: http://www.npr.org/blogs/thesalt/2012/02/23/147294191/why-astronauts-crave-tabasco-sauce

MS may well have written more technical documentation than any other company ever, but when I see this book title, I think of things like "The Pompeii Manual of Architecture" or "The Hindenburg Guide of Dirigibles" or "The Atlantis Treatise on Waterfront Properties."

Feynman on textbooks: http://www.textbookleague.org/103feyn.htm

Please don't feed the troll.

I suppose in theory you could. The downside is they're under 10" and you'd have to buy them in lots of multiple millions.

> Why is 4:3 such a useful aspect ratio?

I don't know, but I agree with the question's implied premise (4:3's high utility).

It's a good question and I wish I knew the answer to it. I couldn't find any historical reference as to why 4:3 was originally chosen for televisions (the details behind the NTSC format are brilliant, but that's a separate topic). I don't feel anything like "boxed in" when computing on a 21" 1600x1200 CRT, and I don't want to give up vertical resolution for a widescreen of the same size. Lets speculate.

The closer the ratio is to square, the more usable area you have for the size of the device. If wider screens were better, why wouldn't we keep making them wider, why not 3:1 or 4:1 or 5:1 ratios? Maybe 3:4 is just a sweet spot for compromise between high area and our forward facing binocular vision. It's a mistake to even call them wider than conventional displays, as aspect ratio is independent of physical size. Have laptops really gotten wider, or have they gotten shorter? I think wider ratios are actually mis-marketed short-screens, with their prevalence reflecting cost (smaller area) in pushing HDTV sales, and not quality.

I know newspapers print in short columns for readability, as its easier to keep your place with short lines than with very wide ones, and computer screens were dominated by text long before graphics. Books too are mainly tall rather than wide ratios. Wider aspects are preferred for landscapes and juxtapositions of people in films, but whatever we gain in video game FOV we're losing in visible detail under our feet (and performance is lost to render peripheral objects you barely see, at increasingly skewed projection angles, versus more sky and ground in a taller ratio, which are virtually free performance-wise).

The bottom line is always useability. Do you really want to squeeze every vertical pixel out of an interface (browsers for instance), to deal with displays that are just too short? I sure don't, and I don't care to move a physical setup around when resizing display elements is sufficient. It may even just be tribalism or convention, but I know I like it. Long live 4:3!

I'm looking forward to desktop displays getting increased resolution and 4:3 aspect ratios back some day. It's mildly ridiculous that we'll have the mobile device market to thank for it.

> Interesting how the original headline reads "Apple Best at Auditing Factories, Still Not Doing Enough" while Slashdot's reads "Apple May Be Terrible, But All Others Are Worse". From best to terrible in the flash of a Slashdot submission.

Best and terrible are not mutually exclusive.