Month: May 2018

Enlarge / Don't expect to see a screen like this on the Switch.

With Nintendo offering a selection of 20 downloadable NES games as part of its newly announced Nintendo Switch Online service starting in September, many have been wondering if the company is planning to revive its Virtual Console selection of emulated classic game downloads for the Switch as well. The answer to that question seems to be no, as Nintendo told Kotaku that "there are currently no plans to bring classic games together under the Virtual Console banner as has been done on other Nintendo systems."

That doesn't mean individual downloads for games from older consoles will be completely absent from the Switch, of course. Nintendo already offers up arcade games like Punch-Out!! and Vs. Super Mario Bros. as part of the Switch's Arcade Archives series. Hamster has similarly released ports of a variety of Neo Geo classics on the system, and Sega has plans to do the same for many of its older titles.

But the announcement seems to cut off the possibility of the same kind of unified, system-level, one-stop clearinghouse for hundreds of emulated titles that became available on the Wii in 2006 and later moved to the Wii U and 3DS under the Virtual Console name. It also seems to cut off the faint possibility that players might be able to carry forward Virtual Console purchases on previous Nintendo consoles to the Switch in the future.

Enlarge / The keyboard on the 2016 Touch Bar MacBook Pro. (credit: Andrew Cunningham)

An AppleInsider article has stoked some consumer frustration over Apple's butterfly keyboards. In it, AppleInsider combed through a limited dataset of warranty events from participating Apple Genius Bars and third-party repair shops. The site determined that, in that data, the 2016 MacBook Pro's keyboard accounted for twice the percentage of all warranty events in that machine's first year on the market as its predecessors from 2014 and 2015 did.

These keyboards already have plenty of detractors. They have very short travel, which serves two functions: it frees up a tiny bit of space in the machine for other components (every nanometer counts), and it can make typing considerably faster since not as much effort is needed to register a key press. I like these keyboards, but a lot of other people feel strongly that they're terrible to type on.

The AppleInsider report has resulted in Apple customers expressing frustration in forums and on Reddit. Detractors have even started a Change.org petition asking Apple to recall all MacBook Pros from 2016 and later and replace their keyboards with a new design that is less prone to failure. That's not likely to happen—partly because it's not practical and partly because the data is not as conclusive as it might seem.

Enlarge (credit: Tomás Del Coro / Flickr)

The following is an excerpt of Habeas Data, which shows how the explosive growth of surveillance technology has outpaced our understanding of the ethics, mores, and laws of privacy.

(credit: Melville House)

The intersection of Euclid and Imperial avenues is fairly unremarkable. It's comprised of wide Southern California streets, with at least two lanes of traffic (more if you include the left-turn lanes) in each quadrant. On one corner is an Arco gas station, just in front of St. Rita's Catholic Church. On the northeast corner is Greene Cat Liquors, a strip mall liquor store, adjacent to Jaquin Mexican Food, which advertises $1 tacos ("w/ onion and cilantro only"). Along the southwest corner is El Real Mexican Food, a single-story green-and-white building with a small balcony. Its sandwich board advertises "5 rolled tacos—$4.25."