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No, but they’re going to come out with Sim City 2, which will address all the problems in the current game.

City size will be limited to 50 square tiles and you can freely zone low-density residential and commercial. Industrial zoning as well as higher-density zoning or civic construction are premium features that can be bought in-app, for only 2 cent per tile or 50 cent per police station / hospital. A total bargain! Saving your game is also really easy and will cost only 20 cents. Of course, the best features of the current Sim City will be retained – it will be fully online-only and can only be played when Jupiter is in conjunction with Venus.

4 days ago on Electronic Arts is no longer developing games for Nintendo's Wii U 4 recommends

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You can, however, say “Mass Effect 1 and 2 were amazing. Then EA bought Bioware, and Mass Effect 3 was a complete turd when compared to the genius of the first 2.”

I know enough hardcore ME gamers who are of exactly this opinion.

EA is where some of the best video game franchises of all time have gone to die.

4 days ago on Electronic Arts is no longer developing games for Nintendo's Wii U 3 recommends

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What about smartphones? I can already take videos and pictures of people on the train without them noticing. I HAVE done that, a few times, for example to show my girlfriend a guy who looked absolutely exactly like her uncle.

Smartphones should be banned.

In fact, that doesn’t go far enough – has nobody considered the dire privacy violations made possible by the human mind’s basic capacity of remembering things?

I think the fact that the US Government is already actively reading all of our emails, and checking on all of our bank transfers, is way worse than the possibility of somebody snapping pictures in public – which is apparently OK as long as the camera is in your hand, and not OK as soon as it’s on your head. But government-sponsored privacy invasion is perfectly accepted by most people.

4 days ago on Congress asks Google CEO if Glass infringes 'on the privacy of the average American'

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Yeah, he was Shinzon, but I don’t think he’d be able to pull off actually playing Jean-Luc Picard, who constantly treads the fine line between cultured intellectual, salomonic diplomat and total badass.

But I’d gladly let him try if it means I’m actually getting more TNG.

4 days ago on ‘Star Trek Into Darkness’ review: boldly going back to the future

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I’m an actual Star Trek fan and will eat gagh to prove it.

I enjoyed the 2009 movie. What we need is a TV show, though. Star Trek is at its best when it doesnt have the tight constraints of a movie. A new show would have much more leeway to go into what makes Trek Trek. Movies are for the action-packed romps.

Look no further than Insurrection to see what happens when you try to make a movie that feels like a TV episode.

4 days ago on ‘Star Trek Into Darkness’ review: boldly going back to the future 1 reply 3 recommends

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His intelligence and prowess that required a ten-year-old to remind him that he could build stuff to fight back?

Iron indeed. Just a bit rusty.

I got the moral of the story, but that doesn’t mean I can’t be disappointed with it on some level. I’m absofuckinglutely not the kind of guy who’s only out for explosions in movies – my favorite movie of all time continues to be 2001: A Space Odyssey.
But in this case, I paid to see a mechanical man kick ass. And what I got was a buddy comedy with romcom flourishes and a few action sequences.

4 days ago on ‘Star Trek Into Darkness’ review: boldly going back to the future

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I love how the pop-up card metaphor is slowly but steadily invading all of Google.

Matias Duarte’s influence is growing. And that’s a really good thing.

To think that just a few short years ago, Android fans everywhere were sneering at how dumb the card metaphor on webOS was. Ah, good times.

5 days ago on Google Maps for desktop: hands-on with the world's most-advanced web app

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I hope you get that too much negativity will result in this being the last regular phone with stock android made by google.

Googorola is no doubt hard at work creating a lineup of nice stock android phones. Let other manufacturers produce phones with hardware buttons in weird-ass layouts like (back, comedy logo that looks like a button but does nothing, home) or (comedy eclair menu button, home, back) if they want.

A fully-stock S4 is certainly a step in the right direction. Too bad that the decision to use hardware buttons – and which buttons – was a sprint in the wrong direction. Oh you want Google Now, perhaps one of the most interesting features on Android today? No problem, just hold down the center button for two seconds and tap the Google button. Swiping up is so 2013. We don’t need no 2013. We need a menu button. Yeah

5 days ago on This is the new Nexus: a first look at Samsung's Galaxy S4 with stock Android 6 recommends

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Music streaming services would be great.

If they wouldn’t exhaust my monthly mobile bandwidth within less than an hour.

5 days ago on Google Play Music All Access hands-on: should you switch from Spotify or Rdio? 1 reply

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Just when I finally giddied up and paid for three years of Whatsapp service.

Good timing, Google. Good timing.

5 days ago on Exclusive: Inside Hangouts, Google's big fix for its messaging mess

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Am I the only one hoping against hope that they’ll make another Star Trek movie with Chris Kirk and Zachary Spock before moving on to make three Next Generation movies to show how the future of the alternate reality pans out? I could totally see Jude Law with a shaven head take on the role of Jean-Luc Picard.

Oh, and we’re gonna need a new TV show. Are you listening, Paramount?

6 days ago on ‘Star Trek Into Darkness’ review: boldly going back to the future 2 replies 1 recommend

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Iron Man 3 wasn’t an Iron Man movie, though. They should just have called it “Man”.

It’s weird, but this review – negative as it was – only makes me want to watch the movie more.

6 days ago on ‘Star Trek Into Darkness’ review: boldly going back to the future 2 replies 3 recommends

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I agree, but only to perhaps 50%.

Yes, Google makes its money by serving tailored ads. No, Google won’t break down your door just because they know where you live.

The issue is that governments worldwide have been rolling back civil rights for a while now, and are becoming increasingly totalitarian. If Google knows where you are and what you’re searching for, and if they have all of your electronic communications, it’s really easy for a government to just use them as a one-stop-shop to learn everything about you before they decide to ship you off to gitmo.

It’s not a big issue right now because Google is – as far as i know – resisting as many requests as they can, but believe me when I say that laws will become more stringent, eventually requiring Google to give government agencies full access to all data if Google wants to do business in a country.

That’s what people are worried about. Google itself hiring a hitman to kill them, not so much.

This is coming from an Android user who is completely naked – Google has everything on me.

6 days ago on Google Maps overhaul leaks ahead of I/O conference 1 reply 3 recommends

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Tell me more about this tent you speak of. I’m going to need coordinates.

6 days ago on Google Maps overhaul leaks ahead of I/O conference 3 replies 10 recommends

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“The market” isn’t monolithic and consumers don’t exist in a vacuum. The best marketing doesn’t come from ad agencies but from reviews. I’m not saying that reviewers should push a product they don’t believe in, but this is a case in point: the product itself isn’t half bad, and neither is Windows Phone – at least in my opinion.
But Nokia and WinPho are in a vicious cycle. No matter how good the product is, reviews bash it, so people reading the reviews won’t like it, so developers don’t adopt it, so reviews bash it and so on until the platform goes away.

Imagine what would’ve happened if a broadside of respected tech journalists hadn’t freaked out about pinch-to-zoom and had written “multitouch is awesome but it’s simply not enough. Windows Mobile and Palm have hundreds of thousands of apps, and a newcomer like Apple needs more than a new touchscreen to sway people. They need feature parity at the very least. The software just isn’t there yet. Maybe in a few generations.”

Again, I’m not saying reviews should in any way push a product. But they should be fair, and centered about the merits of the product itself. And something in my gut tells me that people aren’t being fair with Windows Mobile, even though I don’t use it myself. iPhone reviews never go on about what features are missing when compared to Android. Windows Phone reviews never seem to go on about anything else.

7 days ago on Nokia's aluminum Lumia 925 is the best Windows Phone yet, but that's not enough (hands-on) 2 replies 7 recommends

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Nokia could release a 1080p phone with a photonic quantum CPU and 8 terabytes of RAM, and people would say “interesting but not good enough: Windows Phone doesn’t have enough apps, so nobody should buy one, so there won’t ever be enough apps.”

I use Android, but it’s sad how big-platform fans in high places are making sure that smaller platforms can’t gain traction and become threats to their platforms of choice.

7 days ago on Nokia's aluminum Lumia 925 is the best Windows Phone yet, but that's not enough (hands-on) 1 reply 15 recommends

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About time. This will streamline feedback quite nicely.

7 days ago on Google Play now lets all developers respond to user reviews

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It’s only called criminal theft if you’re a person. If you’re a country with an army, it’s called honorable conquest.

Nation states can do a lot of things people can’t. If you kill three people, you’ll be tried for murder. If 100.000 Americans kill 300.000 brown people, a lot of them will get decorated for valor.

Also, if you owe your bank $1.000 and can’t pay it, they’ll just take away your car or your house. If a bank owes $1 billion to the taxpayer, the taxpayer will have to come up with that money.

It’s just power. If you have it, you can do whatever you want. If you don’t have it, you can do whatever the people in power want you to do, or else.

7 days ago on Ill-gotten gains: how many museums have stolen objects in their collections?

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I kinda wish people had treated Zuckerberg’s little Myspace wannabe social network the same way.

Or Brad Greenspan’s little LiveJournal wannabe Myspace for that matter.

8 days ago on Google Play Games allegedly leaks with achievements, cloud saves, and in-game chat

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Well, I’m sure I’d feel much better about this if I wasn’t under such heavy sedation

8 days ago on 'This is Spinal Tap' album reissued on vinyl for the first time in 30 years

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So Europe doesn’t put a few hundred meters worth of antenna on top of their skyscrapers just to be able to call it the tallest without actually building them that high?

Looks like /somebody/ doesn’t have anything to compensate for.

YURP #1

9 days ago on Is One World Trade Center really the tallest building in the West? 1 recommend

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World Trade Center 3GS
The tallest World Trade Center ever.
This changes everything. Again.

9 days ago on Is One World Trade Center really the tallest building in the West?

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Yes.

It’s the Murcia’n way. Or so somebody a bit further up would say.

9 days ago on Is One World Trade Center really the tallest building in the West? 1 reply 9 recommends

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Dammit.

Time to burn those reels, Cuaron.

10 days ago on Panic in space: Alfonso Cuaron returns with terrifying 'Gravity' teaser

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So, um, you’re equating a handful of people going to Mars in a specially desigd ship with all the equipment necessary to start a self-sustaining colony…

…with two people adrift in their spacesuits crashing into the moon?

10 days ago on Panic in space: Alfonso Cuaron returns with terrifying 'Gravity' teaser 1 reply

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And that, gentlemen, is why the world should’ve gone with the motherfucking Russians in the first place.

But we went with America because the Russians were totalitarian tyrants that kept their citizens under constant surveillance – and America now keeps the entire world under surveillance.

Americans still dont have guns in their spaceships to fight off wolves after landing. They’re just thinking about issuing guns to elemtary school teachers.

10 days ago on Panic in space: Alfonso Cuaron returns with terrifying 'Gravity' teaser 1 reply

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looks left
looks right
unzips pants

10 days ago on Panic in space: Alfonso Cuaron returns with terrifying 'Gravity' teaser 4 recommends

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What’s more, is that George Clooney??

10 days ago on Panic in space: Alfonso Cuaron returns with terrifying 'Gravity' teaser