This is literally more than a decade overdue. The very first "sucks" site I ever heard of was none other than paypalsucks.com way back in the early 2000s, and even at that time it heavily documented this and many other issues with PayPal's service.
Yeah I think the lighting in the scenes that take place in Bilbo's home tends to look bad even in the 2D standard-def 24fps trailers you can find online. It really doesn't have anything to do with HFR.
From now on, frame rate will be just like aspect ratio: another choice for the filmmaker. Some movies will still be in 24fps, some will be 48fps (or some other value), and eventually some will probably be variable from scene to scene.
As for the Hobbit, I think HFR could certainly have used a better "ambassador" film. Maybe James Cameron (who has also talked about 48fps from time to time) will do a better job of it in his next movie.
People say the same things about the DEA and IRS quite frequently. (Short-sighted people also say it about things like NPR, NASA, and the EPA.) Complaining about government waste is one of the great American pastimes.
I think there is some "vocal minority" stuff going on here, particularly with regard to the look and feel of Google's app.
For starters, far from being "fluid", Google's app consistently has a much lower framerate when scrolling or adjusting zoom level than Apple's maps app. It never even approaches 60fps even when running on the latest hardware, whereas Apple's old (and new) map application has always been really good about this, even on old & low-end hardware. So I'm really confused as to what people are talking about when they say it's "fluid". Compared to what?
As for the UI, the way Google's search input bar is positioned actually results in more of the screen being wasted than Apple's standard search bar UI. Those little slivers of the map which stick out above and on the sides are too small to be useful, so what's the point? Just pin it to the top of the screen and make it standard height like all the other apps do, thus giving the maximum amount of contiguous real estate to the actual map itself. There is a reason why Apple does it the way they do, and it's not just for looks.
I have mixed feelings about the detail view being at the bottom. I understand the idea of one-handed operation and I appreciate what they're trying to do here -- optimize for the case of browsing search results with your thumb via a combination of horizontal and vertical swipes, however I'm dubious of the value of it since you still sometimes have to reach awkwardly across the screen for certain things. Not to mention the detail view takes up more real estate than necessary, much like the search bar. It also feels somewhat disconnected from the currently selected pin due to being at the bottom, which is a problem Apple doesn't have since they put the details directly on the annotation.
Oh and of course you cannot blink without this app bugging you to log in.
> Not to mention that iPads don't really have any private browsing mode.
Safari on iOS certainly does have "private browsing". Just go to the Settings app and select "Safari" from the top level and it's the first setting under the "Privacy" (just below the "General" section). When it's enabled, the browser looks different to let you know -- the normally gray bezel UI becomes black. This has been a feature ever since iOS 5.0 was released in 2011.
Santorum is "unelectable" in the same way as Sarah Palin. Since they are so extreme, there will always be a small, dedicated swath of people who like them, and they can even get enough local support to get elected to an office, however once they hit the national stage they're toast.
Also, I completely agree it is ludicrous how the Republicans chose to nominate someone less popular than McCain and are now acting surprised that he got fewer votes. Gee, no one could have predicted that!
Romney lost because he was a terrible candidate, simple as that. Even the Republican base hated him.
Right now the GOP leadership is busy flailing around trying to figure out why they didn't win. The ones who have gotten closest to the truth are the ones who have zeroed in on this year's lower-than-normal turnout of traditionally Republican voters (as this article touches upon). However, the underlying reason for that wasn't a failure of software or a lack of last-minute "get out the vote" campaigning, it's because people just plain didn't like Romney.
Remember the primaries? For months the Republican primaries were a game of "anybody but Romney". The primary voters at times even gave consideration to total crackpots like Santorum and Cain. Think about it -- they sent the message that they'd rather have some unelectable whackjob like Rick Santorum than be stuck with Romney. That's how much they didn't like him. But when it was all said and done, the Republicans finally gritted their teeth and accepted Romney as the nominee, despite the fact that they really, really didn't like the idea. Then on election day, many Republicans simply stayed home rather than hold their nose and vote for the guy.
Even if this "Orca" thing had worked perfectly it's doubtful it would have changed much. Republican voters' dislike of Romney just ran too deep.
The "big corps vs. the little guy consumers" notion is cute but I think the problem is more along the lines of very few advertisers wanting to be on a site with areas like /r/jailbait and /r/creepshots (or whatever took their place this week).
How exactly is this a "secret weapon"? Obama did not carry any of the states in this region except perhaps Florida (it's still being counted), which is not even among the states with these swatches of ancient plankton deposits.
Also, if you look at the map it's clear the blue patches are clustered around major highways and rivers, which is where the population centers will obviously be. As we've seen before, the Democratic / Republican divide is very strongly along the lines of urban vs. rural. There doesn't seem to be any mention in the article of how that factors into this. Obviously there is a bit of chicken & egg thing going on with population and highways, but you would think there could at least have been some discussion of this.
Meanwhile, I saw a Microsoft Surface demo at the mall yesterday and their approach to photo sharing via "SkyDrive" is FAR simpler and easier to use than Apple's. You know you're in trouble when MS has better usability than you. Not a good sign.
There are problems but it's not all bad. Sure, some of Apple's technology pushes have turned out to be half-baked, especially those which seem to be more marketing or management driven, such as iCloud syncing, and of course the subject of this article, Game Center. On the other hand, Apple has added some nice incremental improvements recently which will no doubt make life considerably easier once everything is running on iOS 6 as the minimum. Examples include the UIView "auto-layout" system, NSAttributedString support throughout UIKit, UICollectionView, and so on.
Things aren't all that different from the OS X days, where there was often a mixture of good and bad. Letting Apple know when things aren't working right is the first step to improvement.
Further proof: http://youtube.com/watch?v=WlsahuZ_4oM