Tropes

BBC 00404.txt

The worst video game ever madedesert Bus Simon Parkin New yorker 9 july 2013 Magicians Penn and Teller set out in 1995 to create the worst video game ever. And it sounds like they succeeded. The storyline consists of driving across an American desert, in real time.""Players earn a single point for each eight-hour trip completed between the two cities, making a Desert Bus high score perhaps the most costly in gaming. Â But it's found a semi-ironic second life as a fund-raising instrument for charities. The wastefulness of automation Frances Coppola Pieria 8 july 2013 If robots put more and more workers out of jobs, will governments have to provide basic incomes for everyone, in place of wages? That will put upward pressure on tax rates; but even for the rich, heavy taxation may be preferable to an economy in which there is little or no demand for the goods which they and their robots produce. Then again, maybe it would be better just to stop building robots, and keep people working. Government builds free cloud-based backup for ungrateful nation Totient Medium 8 july 2013"The cloud backup program, called Prism, safely stores all American's phone and email contacts so that they can be retrieved at any time in the future. A few thousand Americans are enrolled currently in a beta phase version of the program that would successfully backup all of their data including the contents of their calls, emails, and documents, for years in a completely secure, state of the art data centre located in Utah. Â The joy of old age (no kidding) Oliver Sacks New york times 6 july 2013 On turning 80.""One can take a long view and have lived a vivid sense of history. I can imagine, feel in my bones, what a century is like. I do not think of old age as an ever grimmer time that one must somehow endure and make the best of, but as a time of leisure and freedom, freed from the factitious urgencies of earlier days, free to explore whatever I wish, and to bind the thoughts and feelings of a lifetime together. Â Lockdown Marco Arment 3 july 2013 Thoughts provoked by the shuttering of Google Reader. It's part of a much bigger problem. All of the big five oe Apple Amazon, Facebook, Google, Microsoft oe are turning against interoperability.""They want to lock you in, shut out competitors, and make a service so proprietary that even if you could get your data out, it would be either useless (no alternatives to import into) or cripplingly lonely (empty social networks). Â Would you like cucumber with that? Susan Berfield Business week 3 july 2013 Story behind the introduction of the Mcdonald's Mcwrap,"a 10-inch, white-flour tortilla wrapped around 3 ounces of chicken, lettuce, spring greens , sliced cucumbers, tomatoes, and cheddar jack cheese Â. Everything was focus-grouped, from the name to the dressing. First time cucumbers have been used in a Mcdonald's product. Gently does it.""We talked a lot about the veggies. But we went too far. People thought it was a salad. Â America's artificial heartland Venkatesh Rao Aeon 11 july 2013"The modern system of retail oe distant large-scale production facilities coupled with local human-scale consumption environments oe was the first piece of what I've come to think of as the Ëoeamerican cloud':'the vast industrial back end of our lives that we access via a theatre of manufactured experiences. If distant tea and coffee plantations were the first modern clouds, A&p stores and mail-order catalogues were the first browsers and apps. Â For more articles worth reading, visit The Browser. If you would like to comment on this article or anything else you have seen on Future, head over to our Facebook page or message us on Twitter

< Back - Next >