Posts by Yet Another Commentard 449 publicly visible posts • joined 27 May 2011
I bought an iPAQ from them years ago (yes children, that long ago) and they still send me several e-mails a week. That alone consigned them to both the spam filter and the "don't ever shop there again" bin.
Maybe a tactic of not irritating your customers and wasting time on endless publicity e-mails nobody reads could be a helpful way out of the mess?
Many years ago we used to have a dog license for, er, dogs. Sadly it was all a bit backwards and not like a driving license and more like a dog tax. The Isle of Man still has something similar. It was abandoned as nobody really bothered.
Therein lies the point. I don't have to ask the RSPCA's permission before I go and get a dog, cat, goldfish, or even bees. I just go and get them. The RSPCA gets involved if and when a complaint is made.
Seeing as they instigate the "must not keep animals again" items, surely they have their OWN database of the names. Even if they don't (which is better IMHO) then all they have to ask is "has John Doe of 999 Letsbee Avenue been banned for keeping animals. If yes, for how long." They don't need to know the rest of the guff they ask for. It's not proportionate.
The most recent audited (as in looked at by an audit firm) accounts are for the year to 31 December 2011. In that year of about 160,000 investigations just over 2,000 were referred to the prosecutions department, but there is no data on how many prosecutions were attempted. I'd guess at less than that from the RSPCA's claims that hunting accounted for 49 prosecutions (more than badgers and deer combined) of which 73% were successful. I don't know what happened to the poor person who was 0.77% prosecuted. My point is that if they are shouting about this then it must be a material number of prosecutions, so the total number would be in the hundreds, most likely under 1,000.
What I don't see is the reason for collecting the police data on some/all of those 160,000 people. That's a lot of data requests if it hits all of them!
It has income from prosecutions, I guess that is "contributions towards costs" by those found guilty, of about £1.1M but it spent over £8M prosecuting. This is before the epic £320k odd it spent going after David Cameron's local hunt on which it recovered £15k or so from the success.
Source - http://apps.charitycommission.gov.uk/Accounts/Ends99%5C0000219099_ac_20111231_e_c.pdf
I know it's a plot device here, but the bird book in question sounds interesting. The problem is that most are the wrong way around.
If I am sitting out on the patio with Mrs YAC at YAC Towers we often hear birdsong, and want to know what the bird is. Some we know (wood pigeon, tawny owl, barn (screech) owl, cuckoo etc), others we have no clue about. So we bought a CD of birdsong, and the problem is you have to listen to all 150 or so to get to the one you are after, and by then you've forgotten it.
If the book under review was more like a reverse sound lookup for birdsong, a sort of tineye for birds, then I'm in for one.
I am sure some of our overseas friends will be a bit confused why Gas smart meters are measuring electricity. Well, thanks to the opening up of the energy market in the UK the (ex)Gas Board now sells electricity as well as gas. As do the many electric companies. Don't even start to think about water.
It would be interesting to see similar mortality (or even injury) data for the UK too.
Farms are dangerous places, much of the machinery will kill you and operators often spend hours isolated using lethal things where there is patchy mobile coverage at best.
I seem to recall that suicide is also very high amongst farmers.
It's also not just people who live there, but those visiting. There's a good, twisty, nicely surfaced and reasonably clear bit of road near us that attracts cars and bikers just to drive down it really quickly (I mean really quickly, think TT type speeds), ignoring speed limits and little villages with pubs and no pavements. These drivers get impatient behind farm vehicles or more pedestrian drivers and overtake. They scream around blind bends not realising there could be a combine waiting for them, or just a bunch of cyclists. As a result, sunny days attract many casualties from outside the area and residents (some locals drive like nutters too, claiming they "know the road" so can get away with it). This isn't a call against speeds, more an appeal to use speed appropriately and within the driver's skill limit.
There was an article on the Today Programme this morning tangentially mentioning this, and amongst the usual gripes about broadband a very interesting point was made - as mobile coverage is so poor in rural areas anyone in distress (such as a car accident, a fall whilst walking etc) can be utterly isolated, increasing response times (nobody can respond until they know there's a problem) and increasing the chances of death as a result. In urban areas one is seldom too far from reasonable enough mobile coverage or a fixed landline, in the sticks it's very hit and miss. Perhaps death rates could be reduced by the improvement of mobile coverage?
@AC 12:12 I think intervention at the PARENTAL level is required, not at the child level.
The more you make parents think that "society" (whatever that is) is responsible for parenting the less parents will care, causing a positive feedback loop.
An analogy - down the road from me is a house with a dog. Said dog keeps escaping and digging up other neighbours' gardens. So they took to returning the dog. The owner thought this was great, the dog defaecated elsewhere, had a good walk without supervision, may get fed by another family, in other words "society" looks after him.
Now the neighbours have had enough and all the owner will say is "if you can make him stay in our backyard then we'll keep him here." This is likely to lead to the dog getting killed by a passing car as he's chased out of various gardens. Do you think the owner is doing the right thing?
"but just as we feel confident sitting them in front of the TV before nine..."
The TV is not a babysitter. Do things with your children, sure watch TV with them, but don't dump them infront of it. As for the "confident" bit I assume that you have never accidentally strayed up into the channels 900+ on Sky, and no child has ever watched their parents putting in a four digit PIN on 12 rated films before the watershed?
"so we should be able to log them onto the internet without having to look over their shoulder the whole time"
I would suggest having the PC in a public room into which you randomly wander, noticing a panicked ALT-TAB or whatever should be pretty obvious. Or if you like having a router log and every Sunday morning you and the children go through every website accessed by them so you feel a part of their world?
"(which limits their freedom in other ways)" care to list three? Why is everyone else's freedom to be curtailed just to make you think your kids are not looking at smut? Note the word "think". We have all grown up, and while this makes life a little more difficult for them somehow every generation has found a way to look at pictures of naked people. THIS WON'T HELP FOR MORE THAN AN HOUR. Once the first kid at school learns how to circumvent it, every kid in school will know. In my day we had jazz mags at school from the kid whose dad owned a newsagent, there will just be the electronic equivalent.
"becomes impractical as the number of children increases)." Your choice to have more kids than you can deal with, not mine. Why should that inconvenience me to get back some websites that will inadvertantly get blocked (and some will, witness notes on Flickr and Tumblr above).
"As for the idea that ISPs, and by extension the UK government, will get a list of those who like porn that makes no sense. " Citation needed. It makes perfect sense, imagine Percy Dribblemouth is accused of child molestation. Added in will be the prejudicial "AND he wanted porn on his laptop." It makes as much sense as the Government wanting to record each and every internet dealing each of us have. Luckily that makes no sense either, oh wait...
Responsibility for what your children do online, or offline vests with parenting. They are your children, and your responsibility. Just because you can't be bothered to parent them, or you don't trust them (now, who is to blame for a lack of trust), does not mean that every other soul in the country has to be inconvenienced.
Reading the linked page it does at present seem to force the offline copy folders to be on the C: drive. Which is a dealbreaker in many systems where SSDs are used and there's C: for system stuff and D: for data stuff, D: being quite huge.
I have a feeling this is tied to the TIKAMisation of Windows, as the tablet devices only have one partition (I think, I don't have one) and MS seem intent on forcing desktop users out of the desktop. I assume they will say "just use our wizzy drive extender technology to make one massive C: drive" but that utterly defeats the point of having my data on a separate physical drive.
My reading of "default" was similar to IE being the default browser, if you don't like it, change it.
Skydrive is useful like dropbox for sharing photos and other items, but I have grave reservations about putting any actual personal data on there, such as anything from work, or my bank spreadsheet etc. I don't care if anyone sees a picture of some hill I took while on holiday.
As others note, this isn't a backup service. It's more like having your files sync to a server. Delete them in one place they are deleted from them all once connected to the service. Personally, of the MS solutions, I preferred "Mesh" as a means of syncing files across devices.
Stu
Sadly "it doesn't work like that." I do think that evolution is one of the worst taught areas of science, despite the fact that it is one of the most complete and elegant theories (in the proper, scientific, form) there is.
Consider this post. It is in English. I am assuming you can read and understand it. Now consider the following sentence:"Whan that Aprill with his shoures soote, The droghte of March hath perced to the roote," which is a random quote from Chaucer. Do you know what he is on about?
It is reasonable to assume his contemporaries could understand that (even if they could not read it, they could listen to it). It's also reasonable to assume his generation's children could understand, and his grandchildren. Over time the language has drifted, changed, evolved if you will. The population speaking the language has adopted new words, changed existing ones, dropped useless ones. That is more how evolution works, you must think populations and not individuals.
Charles
Sort of, yes. But it's not that simple. If you wish to tax at the turnover line then you will destroy utterly many of our manufacturers who are not multi-national. They can have huge turnovers but only a tiny profit because of the marginal cost of making [product X] can be vast. Think of a generic beige box PC, it's a commodity with pennies in profit per unit but quite a high intrinsic selling price. You sell bucketloads to make any real money. Taxing turnover would wipe out those pennies, and kill the maker, then the sector. That's a bigger problem than Google doing a Dutch Sandwich.
You need to bear in mind that corporate taxation is very different, for very sound reasons, from personal taxation. Most of the things you would call "tax deductible" are common sense, such as the material used in making [product X]. The problem comes with multinationals who, as another notes, simply send bills to high tax regime outposts from low tax regimes to move profit there.
In theory you could sort this by having one global tax rate, the same in every last jurisdiction. It would work, but there is no way all 200+ jurisdictions would agree to it. Ever.
Indeed.
There seems to be a sound business plan there, and the exec knows where he is going. They need to integrate better; I recall there being difficult times with the ATi purchase, almost as if AMD hadn't appreciated the sheer complexity of GPUs. I think SeaMicro was a good purchase, and I thought ATi was a good purchase.
Sadly that didn't stop a share price dip yesterday,
I see your point, but there are three issues:
1) it's not transparent, because they have not given us all of "both figures". They have not disclosed the "good news" that came with the acquisition, just the bad. Any income/cost reduction from the amortised assets should be excluded in the non-GAAP too, and it's not. Hence I am still not comparing like with like. Why not have a whole column headed "acquisitions in the period" and strip it all out.
2) They have still incurred the restructuring costs, so they should ell me those and why they believe they will reduce costs in the future, by how much. Why should restructuring costs be excluded anyway? It's a cost this quarter for savings in the future. It can't be amortised as it's not an asset, so it should be put in. By all means tell me "we spent $xmillion restructuring" but don't present it as a non-cost. Will, next quarter they be excluding the cost savings from the restructuring to allow me to see how it went - no, they won't, so again I am not comparing like with like.
3) As a result of the spurious presentation method the press release and this article focused on the non-GAAP figure, purely because AMD's spin meisters want to keep attention on something they can show off to be good. It's funny how all non-GAAP disclosures make the world seem a better place for the company doing it, isn't it?
I sound a lot more worked up than I really am about this, as I'm not even an investor in AMD!
It's annoying that companies do this. GAAP (Generally Accepted Accounting Principles) is there for several reasons, one of which is to be consistent between companies. That way you can compare AMD to Intel, to Apple, heck even to Exxon or McDonalds.
But as ever you can make your profits look better if you just exclude some things. Restructuring costs ARE a cost. Amortisation (this is a method by which you write off an intangible asset, such as a patent, over its estimated useful economic life rather than having all the cost in one lump) is a cost. Ignoring costs will, obviously, improve the apparent position. Problem is, the costs are still there.
They say "it makes it easier to understand", but it's just not consistent, and makes it harder to understand. I assume the acquired intangibles are either from ATi or SeaMicro. Now, those will have been acquired for a reason, and I am guessing to increase sales (and a flow into profits) or to give some other benefit to the AMD (such as IP). So, AMD takes the credit for the good stuff (GAAP and non-GAAP sales are the same), but says "no, no, ignore the bad stuff".
If they are to claim there is no good stuff, then why make the acquisition? Then ALL of the value of the intangible should be written off, as it's now worthless.
It made a loss of $0.10 per share, the rest is spin.
AMD is not alone, most of these releases do some similar stunt.
We know what baseball is, we invented it (pretty much) as rounders, and just really couldn't see the point. We used to play it. Older readers will recall Derby County FC's old ground.
Like that other big American sport Basketball, being invented by a Canadian. We don't really see the point of that either.
I won't even bother to think about American Armoured Catchball which is essentially another English sport - Rugby, but with helmets and stupid team sizes.
Had the article been about a UK chap who said he would buy "The Baggies" it would probably need a reciprocal explanation.
When I saw "Phillies" I thought he meant the Philippines, which would be a nice thing to buy but it did seem a bit random.
An old joke:
A man takes a new CEO position, and on his first day sits at his big desk in his corner office, and with little else to do opens the drawers in the desk. To his surprise in amongst the bits of pencil shavings he sees three envelopes. They are numbered in sequence, and the first one is labeled simply "in case of emergency, open me".
He forgets about them for about a week, and the first crisis at the firm happens. In despair he recalls the envelopes, and opens the first. It reads simply "Blame the other guy". So the exec does that, the trouble passes, he is exonerated and he continues.
Some time passes and another disaster befalls the organisation. Realising he can't blame anyone else, and again in despair he decides to open the other envelope. It says "Have a reorganisation." so, to cover his own incompetence he reorganises everything.
Sadly that was not a permanent distraction, and in the dark hours one night, alone in his office he decides to bite the bullet and open the final one. The message is simply "prepare three envelopes..."
"Is there anything else you'd like to contribute to the debate?"
Yes. Us straw suckers produce the food that you townies eat. Yet to get it we have to go to a supermarket and pay the same price as you for it, despite it potentially coming from a field half a mile away.
As another above states we do this because (aside from having to) there is a recognition that for the greater good I pay more than I should for my food so you pay a fair amount for yours.
We can, if you like, stop giving you food.
Fihart
Careful there. IIRC in the UK bin diving is still theft, even if the previous owner has discarded the item. Once discarded it belongs to the waste collection agent, so you are removing property from them with an intent to permanently deprive. You may be able to make a point about being honest not dishonest.
Of course, prosecution is dependent upon someone being bothered to spot/stop/report/prosecute. That is unlikely as the police are pretty busy doing lots of other things.
Not that simple. Government should be, and BE SEEN TO BE independent of those companies with whom it contracts. By the same token I would be appalled if (say) Fred the Shred was given a significant post within the PRA/FCA given he is simply too close to those he would be policing.
This is nothing about bribes, its about perception.
Yes, I see that there is usefulness in getting private/public sector crossover of experience, but that should not carry with it anything put the perception of experience. If you are precluded from helping your ex-employer in your new employment and you decide not to take the job as a result, are you really considering the job for the right reasons?
A comparison would be audit firms. For good and sound reasons auditors can't hold shares in the companies they audit. They can't leave the audit firm and join a company they audited without going through this type of "cooling off" and pain for the ex-employer. This is simply a "being seen to be" independent, not merely being independent. This is sensible, and necessary following from previous audit scandals. It's not foolproof, but it helps, and seems to work. Why won't it work with Government?.
My query on the process is simple - are UK taxpayers paying BT for BT to obtain an asset that it will then seek to charge taxpayers for the use of?
If BT is saying that it won't because it will make no money off the infrastructure, then keep it in public ownership (BT becomes a hole digger) and charge BT (and others) for its use as and when they get customers on the end.
Or, if this is an incentive to build, make it a cheap loan to be repaid such that a proportion of each subscriber's bill (from any telco) is given back to HM Government until the loan is repaid. Obviously the subscriber pays the same no matter where he/she is located, consider the loan repayment a cash version of depreciation on something BT had self-financed.
It's the same argument that one could put to Starbucks - if you make no profit in the UK why do you do business here?
We, as in, the TaxPayer pays BT to install broadband on the basis that BT quotes us some unauditable cost of installation on a timescale of its choosing.
Once complete BT then owns the aforementioned kit that we paid for and it charges its customers for using it.
Is that really correct - we are paying to give BT an asset it can keep free to make cash of us, the taxpayer?
As another notes above, BT will always win, look at who Dave C has in his office these days. There has to be some new rule that states that any person moving to a Government job must declare all prior employment. Any company on the list cannot do any Government work for ten years. Any extant projects will be subject to a public inquiry, paid for by the firm in question. There should be some reciprocal arrangement too, where Government employees moving to a private firm preclude that firm from bidding for Government work for ten years.
That would sort this revolving door nonsense out.
@Aristotle
A pedantic point, and getting well off topic, but - reinsurance is the process by which an insurer (called a cedant) insures itself from another insurance company, called a reinsurer. In turn that reinsurer can insure the the risk with another reinsurer (a process called retrocession). This can, accidentally, become incestuous where a reinsurer can end up reinsuring itself if the retrocession chain is long/complicated enough.
You can spot these companies easily as they usually have a suffix of "Re" at the end of the name, such as Swiss Re, Ace Re etc.
When you insure your car your insurance company will most likely bundle the policy up with a load of others and then insure the whole package with a reinsurer.
Satellite insurance is really, really expensive. As a result many launches are self-insured. One of my old university friends had a satellite on the first Ariane 5 flight, not insured as they couldn't afford it. Not a good day at the office.
Is already available for Opera 12.X (and possibly prior) as an extension, having it won't be new.
I see the point of engine change, I hit a lot of websites that won't work in Opera and I have to switch to Chrome anyway, so I get all the stuff I like together with better compatibility.
I hope the rest of the missing stuff comes back, I really do.
TMH - this is the problem, I cannot see a natural successor. Gabe Newall, possibly, but still to MS. I would be inclined to look outside MS and get some fresh thinking unencumbered by the ghosts of MS past, but my shortlist is so short as to be empty.
Apple has the same issue, its just that at the moment Cook has had insufficient time to demonstrate it properly, but he is showing the same signs of keeping the status quo, exactly what Jobs didn't do.
The same will happen to Google as and when Larry/Sergy step down too.
Is the chair-thrower in chief. He has to go. Over the last few years he's called nearly every shot wrongly:
-Windows 8 to be touch centric when 2% of users can take advantage of it
-The whole touch-based future on desktop, based upon one guy seeing people touching screens at a conference - really?
- Windows 8 leverage to force people to get used to Windows Phone, and then buy that - for that to work people have to buy Windows 8 in the first place
- Windows Phone - too little too late
- X-Box One, and all the issues around that launch
-Office 365 "software as a service" rather than "buy it use it forever"
- Interface redesigns on all the software, users don't want them or need them
I am struggling to find a good decision he's made, but I don't deal with enterprise cloudy stuff so there maybe something there.
He can say "oh it was Sinovski" (sp?) but he, Ballmer, is the boss. He is the man in charge, he is responsible for every decision.
What amazes me most is that on each failed decision the Internet At Large was busy yelling "this is the wrong way to do it. We hate it. We won't buy it." but he ignored it every time.
He saw the outcry against EA over "always on", against Adobe for the Software as a Service model
He must have heard the feedback on the W8 previews saying it's too jarring, too different, and nobody uses touch on the desktop where most of your sales will be.
Surely he was aware that when the iPhone came out he needed to match it and quickly. Even if not at launch then a couple of months later. Instead he laughed at it and tried to keep with WinCE. Windows Phone is too little too late, sure it's a good system by most accounts, but it is far too late to market because he called the key decision wrongly.
He failed to grasp the tablet idea, even though MS had tablet type things for years.
Instead he has it in his head that by making all things Windows people will buy all things Windows. No, there has to be a compelling reason to do that.
What is his strategy to deal with BYOD? He can't rely on the old model ("nobody ever got sacked for buying MS/IBM") in that space, he has to make a case for MS software/hardware to stand on its own.
MS' board/stockholders have to bite the bullet, and sack Ballmer sooner rather than later, and put in his place someone who can read the future rather than believing they can just bully customers to buy his stuff because they did last time.
That would send a clear "we are listening" to MS' partners. Adding a start button FFS, it's barely a start.
I'm just curious - do these things exist on a server somewhere and the owner has some form of code to retrieve them/prove ownership?
Can he just have them transfered to another person from his mobile while sitting in the back of the copcar? Could law enforcement have saved a trip down the road and just served notice on bitcoin (the company) to freeze this guy's account?
I mean, it's not like they'd be sitting on the table, or down the back of the sofa to be physically seized.
@Charles 9
IIRC the cricket dismissal method of "hit ball twice" is a player safety one - whereby in days of yore batsmen could hit the ball again as a catcher was about to catch, leading to one or two fatalities from the bat.
Interesting how a US term for a headbound delivery is a beaner, and the cricket equivalent would be a beamer (non bouncing ball above waist height, not a legal delivery). In cricket it's bad because as a batsman you expect the ball to hit the ground at some point, and it's easy to lose the ball's path if it comes directly at you, increasing the chances of a hit to the chest or head. Ouch. It's not seen to often, and every time I have seen it happen it's an accident, with the bowler immediately apologising. Mind you, doing it deliberately could get you banned.
"Users require an indication that there is some functionality available, this is a basic, fundamental aspect of good user interface design."
This. 1,000 times this. There are no cues for discoverability. In TIFKAM there is no indication that right-clicking does something in most applications, for example.
The installation "point your mouse at the top right" instructions are useless and tell the user nothing. The fact that when you press F1 for help (assuming you know that shortcut) it tells you how to do it on a touch interface first is stupid - MOST OF US DON'T HAVE A TOUCH INTERFACE.
Here's an example:
End of day one using Win8. Mostly okay, as once in the desktop it's just the same as all the other windows versions, save the crappy default applications dumping me in TIFKAM. Anyhow, time to go home, turn off the computer. A simple task usually, but...
After years of MS telling me NOT to use the power button to turn off the machine, I am sat facing the W8 screen looking for "turn off". I think "Oh, I know, in the last iteration it was in Start". I now know to press the Windows button for that, and up comes the start screen. No "turn power off". So next I think, how about if it's where my logon ID is up in the top right, that would make sense, maybe a series of options "switch user, log off, power off, restart, sleep etc". No dice.
So I press F1 type in "shutdown" and am told "Swipe in from the right edge of the screen, then tap Search."
WTF???
I don't know the proportion of users with touch, but I am guessing the non-touch ones slightly outnumber them. Also why do I have to search for a "turn it off" button?
So I read the rest of it and eventually discover I should use the hardware button, for the first time since I had my Amiga.
Where is it discoverable that I should now, after years of conditioning NOT to use the power button, I should now use the physical power button?
Then, and I still can't work this out, using the power button to turn it off keeps my NUMLOCK on reboot, using the software one (move mouse to bottom right of screen, click on the settings cog, then on the power symbol, obvious really. Yep, hidden in an unobvious place in a hidden menu. Yessir, that's a good spot for something used at the end of every day) turns NUMLOCK off, so I can't use the numberpad to login the next time I turn it on. Which I forget, so my alphanumeric password fails every morning.
This drove me nuts, I thought there was some BIOS/UEFI problem, turns out it's just crap windows coding.
Was someone paid to design this stuff? What logic were they using?
I know I can make a shortcut for it - but here's the point - WHY SHOULD I HAVE TO? This is a basic operation, not some complex only 1% of all users ever do it thing.
I think I need to go and lie down somewhere for a while...
Yep, my MBA (late 2011) is always the first to drop/last to connect, and most persistent in trying to attach to the wrong access point (no matter how many times I try and stop it, delete that point in settings etc etc) out of quite a variety of hardware.
Maybe I'm holding it wrong.
See also "regression to mean" which is that people take <treatment> at their lowest point, and get better. They would have done anyway, but correlate the "treatment" with health improvement.
There is an ethical issue with placebo prescription. As in, you can't knowingly prescribe something that has no discernible clinical effect.
My biggest gripes are that my taxes fund the NHS to waste cash on this nonsense, and that the snake oil purveyors exploit desperate and vulnerable people who will try "anything" to help them with their suffering.
Oh, a good article on acupuncture here - http://www.sciencebasedmedicine.org/acupuncture-doesnt-work/ in short, it's pretty much rubbish too.
As for psychics, if they could really tell the future, why not just invest in the stock market, or live off gambling winnings rather than exploiting the gullible on TV?
The "complicated" bit is keeping "your" battery.
Surely it would be better to buy a Tesla which has a battery in. That battery is not yours, it belongs to "the pool". Part of the Tesla's cost to you is adding to that pool. That battery may be new, maybe old. When it goes flat, swap it out. You get a replacement to keep until it goes flat, the charge station keeps your old one. Repeat.
When charged each battery is tested. Below a certain level of "not charging fully" it is retired.
Chances are you never see your "first" battery again, but as it was never yours, it does not matter.
"Next year I may look at replacing the processor and possibly upgrading the graphics card."
I thought like that, until I noticed that the upgraded processor would need some new slot, which required a new motherboard, which often couldn't use the RAM from the old one...
So I stopped upgrading the processor. Playing games with some resource monitoring was instructive, even big, fast 3D things use at most 30% of my CPU - the graphics cards do the heavy lifting. Assuming there's not some new-fangled AGP/PCI thing I've missed that the new cards use, my advice would be to just upgrade that bit.
Of course, as you suggest, a console may well be the answer anyway. Depends what games/other functionality you want.
It’s a mix of things, but comes down to Windows 8 not offering what is wanted or needed, and hardware not requiring the same aggressive upgrade schedule as prior:
1) The competition for W8 is W7 and XP. 7 still works, and for me is the best Windows version. XP still works, albeit that MS support will die soon. This leaves a choice (bar the expensive pay for support route) for business or consumer – go from XP to 7 (evolution of interface) or go to 8 (revolution of interface). The latter does not appeal for the pain of “retraining”, hence 7 will “win”. 8 is wrong for that demographic
2) Touch is stupid on anything but a tablet/slate, I hate moving my hands off a keyboard to put grease on the screen, moving to a mouse (or trackpad) is easy, and doesn’t leave fingerprints to drive you nuts. 8’s Big Thing is the thing that hampers it.
3) Touch screens are not cheap, so putting it (pointlessly) on a laptop adds significantly to the cost for minimal usability gains, so why buy one?
4) Last year’s hardware is still easily good enough to run just about anything you’d care to throw at it. Hardware upgrades are now either on lease expiry or damage, not “we don’t have the processing power, and that “Turbo” button is fooling nobody”.
5) People are not spending money unless there is no alternative. Most of them have an adequate desk/lap top
MS needs to sort this out, just make a new OS that gives a compelling reason to upgrade. It will then sell. Sure, make it look stylistically similar across phones, tablets, desk/laptops, but don’t force a mobile OS into a desktop OS to try and lever your monopoly somewhere on an area you are weak in. Just make them similar enough to be recognisable. That’s something iOS/OSX seems to do well, they are clearly the same “family” but serving different purposes. The way to sort this – drop the Windows name and sack Ballmer. Find someone who knows what to do and will actually listen to the guys who know (and have the money) – the users.
The alcohol in vodka is, well, alcohol (ethanol, ethyl hydroxide, call it what you will). It has quite an effect on various efficacies of food ingestion, usually negative. There's a lot of research about it.
The main problem is that alcoholics tend to neglect their actual food intake in favour of alcohol.
Making some bizarre alcoholic cocktail with this goop will reduce, but not remove, the amount of available useful nutrition.
Many alcoholic drinks are a little nutritious (beer, for example is, and has been called, liquid bread). Vodka, being distilled loses much of the other stuff that pops along in beer.
An interesting thought. We already have a machine to turn grass and water into milk (and meat, and even self replicate into a new machine). It's called a cow (or goat, or sheep, or mammal of choice). We already have vegan milk, soya milk. Now (to paraphrase Red Dwarf) soya milk is useful because it lasts longer than any other form of milk. Mostly because no bugger wants to drink it.
Next, consider the insane furore over genetically engineered crops. Despite most modifications just being an acceleration of the selective crop breeding humans have been doing for the past few thousand years.
With that in mind, how would you market your 100% synthesised milk substitute? Can you imagine the anti Monsanto brigade and what they'd say about this abhorrent franken-milk. This is part of the whole problem, green thinkers want us to be "natural" often not realising that "unnatural" sometimes does less environmental damage. The fact you could easily make lactose free "unnatural" milk would be a further boon, but nobody would buy it because it was "unnatural".
I have never eaten badger, but living on an (arable) farm I can confirm they stink. We have quite a few corpses on the roads from interactions with traffic. The main use of them seems to be dog amusement - ours make a beeline for corpses to roll in the remains. Trust me, they stink. No matter how tasty they may be preparing one would make you gag.
Maybe they could be recycled as dog distraction devices.
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