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While the Korean Air Lines executive who demanded that a flight crew member leave the flight she was on because she was served macadamia nuts in a bag instead of on a plate has since apologized for her behavior, there’s one party involved in the incident that is sitting mighty pretty right about now. The macadamia nut, of course.

Because any publicity is good publicity, the sales of macadamia nuts have spiked this week in South Korea, reports the Wall Street Journal.

Sales of the nuts in the first part of the week were up 14% over the same period last week at one of the country’s top online marketplaces, and sales overall jumped about 36%, reported Edaily.

The airline was the first to apologize earlier this week, while still noting that Cho Hyun-ah, the now-former vice president in charge of cabin services at the airline, was just doing her job.

Today she apologized to Korean media as well, reports Reuters, for behavior that critics in the country see as proof of her snobby, elite status in society as the daughter of the airline’s chairman.

“I sincerely apologize for causing trouble for everyone. I’m sorry,” she said, adding that she would also apologize in person to the cabin crew chief.

Macadamia Sales Take Off After Korean Air Nut Row [Wall Street Journal]
Korean Air executive apologizes after nuts incident sparks national outrage [Reuters]

Please take a moment to put on some headphones, switch to full-screen view, and be transported by this beautifully animated music video created by 23-year-old animator Balázs Simon for Nils Fram’s ‘Re’ off his recent album Screws. This came out earlier this summer, apologies for missing it until now.

submitted by RogansMomma
[link] [130 comments]

(via tastefullyoffensive:delightfullysquishy)

colinneagle writes: Who's old enough to remember when the best technology was found at work, while at home we got by with clunky home computers and pokey dial-up modems? Those days are gone, and they don't look like they're ever coming back. Instead, today's IT department is scrambling to deliver technology offerings that won't get laughed at — or, just as bad, ignored — by a modern workforce raised on slick smartphones and consumer services powered by data centers far more powerful than the one their company uses. And those services work better and faster than the programs they offer, partly because consumers don't have to worry about all the constraints that IT does, from security and privacy to, you know, actually being profitable. Plus, while IT still has to maintain all the old desktop apps, it also needs to make sure mobile users can do whatever they need to from anywhere at any time. And that's just the users. IT's issues with corporate peers and leaders may be even rockier. Between shadow IT and other Software-as-a-Service, estimates say that 1 in 5 technology operations dollars are now being spent outside the IT department, and many think that figure is actually much higher. New digital initiatives are increasingly being driven by marketing and other business functions, not by IT. Today's CMOs often outrank the CIO, whose role may be constrained to keeping the infrastructure running at the lowest possible cost instead of bringing strategic value to the organization. Hardly a recipe for success and influence.

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

via http://blog.yimmyayo.com/

2014 was the best year for local multiplayer gaming since online multiplayer gaming became the industry default.

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It appears that Steam's annual Holiday Sale promotion will begin on December 18, assuming you trust Reddit users and the claims of PayPal Japan. A few days ago, word began to circulate online that a number of Japanese PayPal users had received an em...

As the saying goes, when at first you succeed at feeding people taco fillings inside a shell made from a popular brand of chips, try it again and see if you can get more people to buy your food. At least, that must be a motto at Taco Bell, which could be following the success of the Doritos Locos line of taco fare with a new Fritos shell.

Business Insider spotted the inclusion of what appears to be a taco inside a bag of Fritos, a design often used by the company to advertise its Doritos Locos Tacos using corresponding Nacho or Cool Ranch bags.

The image appears in yesterday’s presentation by Yum! Brands to its investors. When BI asked about whether or not we can accept to see some Fritos Tacos Locos or whathaveyou, a Taco Bell spokesperson played coy, saying only, “We’re always innovating and testing new concepts.”

Fritos are a natural choice of chip for fast food snacking — though it was Subway, and not Taco Bell that used them in a crunchy chicken enchilada last year, The Bell features Fritos in its new Beefy Fritos burrito, which is exactly what it sounds like.

And as my esteemed colleague Kate Cox points out — aren’t ALL hard shells, in essence, Fritos shells? Corn tortillas all, with just extra salt on Fritos. Literal food for thought.

We'll drink cocktails any time of year, but it's especially festive to celebrate the holidays with a communal bowl of punch or a big batch of eggnog. These delicious prep-ahead options take the stress out of hosting a party, and fill your guests with plenty of winter cheer.

VIEW SLIDESHOW: 35 Punches, Eggnogs, and Big Batch Cocktails for Your Holiday Crowd

If your definition of a bad day includes gourmet chocolate, then yeah you’re having a terrible day.

The popular torrent site Isohunt just launched a new fully functional website—oldpiratebay.org— that lets you search through the Pirate Bay archives. This is a little bit silly, since Pirate Bay's archives have been public for years. But it's also a little bit useful if you've been having Pirate Bay withdrawal since the site got raided by Swedish police .

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The iPad release of Papers, Please will have nudity after all — Apple rejected the original unedited version due to a "misunderstanding," said developer Lucas Pope on Twitter today.

Papers, Please puts players in the shoes of a border patrol agent for the fictional, vaguely Eastern European country of Arstotzka. The original PC release of Papers, Please — a game with a deliberately low-resolution pixelated art style — contains nudity in situations where people looking to cross into Arstotzka are put through body scanning machines (see screenshot above). Players can toggle nakedness on or off in the game's settings.

Pope launched Papers, Please on iPad today. In announcing the release date for the iPad version earlier this week, he said...

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Most people who start playing video games do so with whatever is trending at the time that they start. Same goes for other forms of entertainment as well. I’d wager that no music listeners began their journeys by hearing a primitive human banging two rocks together rhythmically, and then slowly worked his/her way through prehistory and history to the modern day. Video gaming’s history is significantly shorter than music’s, and that’s why Andy Baio could do what he did to/with his son, Eliot.

When he started his four-year-old out with games it was on one of those plug-and-play systems that comes loaded with a handful of arcade classics. Once he had gotten good at Pac Man, Rally X, Dig Dug, Galaxian, and the like, he graduated to the Atari 2600. He kicked butt in Asteroids, Kaboom!, Adventure, Combat, and E.T. Next came the NES, where Elliot beat the OG Legend of Zelda, Mega Man 2, and Mario. By the time he was six he was beating difficult side scrollers and complicated adventure games on his own. Next came the SNES, the N64, and eventually the Playstation 2.

The end result is a kid who loves rougelikes with retro graphics along with more technically advanced modern games and, more interestingly, loves mastering brutally difficult games like Spelunky. The kid’s dad admits that he doesn’t think he’ll ever be able to beat it, even though Eliot didn’t just beat the game, but also managed to get to hell. Hell is only accessible by performing a specific set of rituals in a specific order that are dependent on finding unique items that are never in the same places twice and then performance a miraculously difficult and “audacious” kill of the final boss. It’s one of the most difficult things to do in all of gaming, and an eight-year-old did it.

What I realized reading Baio’s article was that he didn’t just condition his son to like old school gaming elements, he trained his son. I’m a ballet dancer, and my training didn’t start with this, it started with some really, really basic stuff. Training for anything else is exactly the same. You start with the fundamentals and slowly build up from there. The technical limits of early game systems meant that the games relied on simple mechanics, and Eliot mastered those basics before moving on to slightly more difficult material. We’re looking at our next E-sports champion right here.

[via Medium]