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Submission + - This 'SimCity 4' Region With 107 Million People Took Eight Months of Planning

Submitted by Jason Koebler
Jason Koebler writes: Peter Richie spent eight months planning and building a megacity in vanilla SimCity 4, and the end result is mind-boggling: 107.7 million people living in one massive, sprawling region.
"Traffic is a nightmare, both above ground and under," Richie said. "The massive amount of subway lines and subway stations are still congested during all times of the day in all neighborhoods of each and every mega-city in the region. The roadways are clogged at all times, but people still persist in trying to use them."

Comment Re:The Discovery channel? (Score 4, Insightful) 103

Hey at least the Sci-Fi channel had the courtesy to change its name to "Syfy" when they realized they had strayed far from their roots, kind of like how food products that don't really contain the ingredient they purport to be based on will change that ingredient's name slightly in their name(Cheez, etc.).

At the very least the History Channel should put ironic quotes around the word "History."

Submission + - Microsoft is paying US$ 2,00 to users set Bing as Default Search engine in Brazi

Submitted by perplexing.reader
perplexing.reader writes: Microsoft is paying US$ 2,00 in skype vouchers to set Bing default search engine and MSN default home page on Brazil, translated from the site:
"Make MSN your homepage and Bing your default search engine and earn up to 60 minutes * of calls to mobiles and landlines in Skype."
- the Rules:
"After receiving the voucher, this should be used until July 31, 2014. Once on Skype, the credits do not expire. The minutes are based on a rate of $ 0.023 per minute, but the number of minutes may vary depending on the destination of the call and the number of calls you make. The current value of the voucher is $ 2.00. A once rescued, the voucher will appear in your Skype account."
Original URL: https://www.msnbingoffers.com/...

Comment What about radar? (Score 4, Insightful) 382

Something I don't understand is how the plane disappeared from radar yet kept flying. Switching off a transponder does not make a plane disappear from radar, it just means there is a blip on the radar without the data a transponder provides. The fact that no one is bringing this up leads me to believe I'm missing something big here, because as far as I know the only way that plane could have disappeared completely from radar was if it disintegrated.

Submission + - Are You a Competent Cyborg?

Submitted by Anonymous Coward
An anonymous reader writes: Beyond your smartphone screen lies an infinitely more interesting world, if only you could get past the myopic app view you're currently bound to. Glen Martin ponders the existential unease lying at the root of the Internet of Things "We're already cyborgs: biological matrices augmented by wirelessly connected silicon arrays of various configurations. The problem is that we're pretty clunky as cyborgs go. We rely on screens and mobile devices to extend our powers beyond the biological. That leads to everything from atrophying social skills as face-to-face interactions decline to fatal encounters with garbage trucks as we wander, texting and oblivious, into traffic.
So, if we're going to be cyborgs, argues Breseman, let's be competent, sophisticated cyborgs. For one thing, it's now in our ability to upgrade beyond the screen. For another, being better cyborgs may make us — paradoxically — more human."
GUI

Windows 8 Metro: The Good Kind of Market Segmentation? 389

Posted by timothy from the keyboards-with-giant-letters dept.
nk497 writes "A UX designer working at Microsoft has taken to Reddit to explain why Windows 8's Metro screen isn't designed for power users — but is still good news for them. Jacob Miller, posting as 'pwnies,' said Metro is the 'antithesis of a [power user's desktop],' and designed for 'your computer illiterate little sister,' not for content creators or power users. By splitting Windows into Metro and the desktop, Microsoft has created space for casual users as well as power users." Update: 02/18 18:14 GMT by S : Further explanations from Miller are available now.

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