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I basically knew where this was going—at the franchise level—the moment Rey had the telepathic dream sequence after first touching Luke's light saber (the whole point of which was to be profoundly pointless and thereby encourage mass Stockholm-syndrome cud chewing) and I haven't given a shit about the rest of that movie, about this movie, or about the next movie ever since, though I do find it amusing to check in on how others are reacting to the Disney Matrix.

Almost every big movie these days is a pastiche of three or more genres (sometimes obviously so, other times mildly concealed).

I was watching the commentary track for Russian Ark last night, and at one point the cameraman panics and tells the guy beside him "I can't do it", because he's got such a bad groin spasm that he worries he'll become crippled permanently. (The entire movie is a single 90-minute take, with a very heavy Steadicam.) But then he sees the 300 actors in period costumes all in perfect position through the next door and he gets a shot of adrenaline and heroically makes it to minute 84. Cut! This breaks a tension so thick that 1000 actors and 1000 assembled extras almost begin to cry.

Well, that lightsaber dream sequence was the screenwriting team confessing "we can't do it"—noooooo!—about finding a principled way to combine all the necessary genres together in the mandatory Disney stew pot.

Fuck it, we'll use telepathy.

A conversation with Martin Amis — 2 December 2016

Does writing get any easier?

Yeah, in some ways. It's an artificial distinction but I think quite a useful one. If every novelist comes with some genius and some talent, it's the genius bit that gets weaker. Genius being that sort of God-given quality of perception and articulacy. Talent is technique, and that gets stronger. So a lot of stuff that you used to have to think about when you were younger about pacing and modulation and what goes where, it's very interesting just to look at novelists to see how they get their characters across town. It's very onerous business, getting your characters across town, how you do it reveals technique, and someone like Nabokov, who has a lot of genius and a lot of talent is wonderful—they're suddenly across town and either the journey was very interesting in itself, or they're just across town. It's very unlaborious. That's technique. So your genius, which is the slightly wild, pyrotechnic art of what you do gets weaker, but you get people across town more efficiently than you used to.

Fuck no, not onerous at all, not after The Great Force Vending Machine in the Sky pukes out, faster than light, lady-in-waiting telepathic midichlorians (of course, this minor capability would have barely figured in the outcome until movie number eight).

You can make an argument that football players, CEOs and bond traders are underpaid rather than overpaid because their salary seems a lot compared to minimum wage but if you look at at as a percentage of what they make for the people who pay them they're getting screwed.

For a startup with a few people you can make the case for IT people getting paid a tonne of cash, provided they can meet brutally tough performance goals.

Of course it's harder to justify this sort of thing for the average computer janitor when you can get someone in on a H1B to do it for a lot less.

Of course if you're a computer janitor you should support legislation like this

http://www.livemint.com/Politi...

Washington: A legislation has been introduced in the US House of Representatives which among other things calls for more than doubling the minimum salary of H-1B visa holders to $130,000, making it difficult for firms to use the programme to replace American employees with foreign workers, including from India.

The High-Skilled Integrity and Fairness Act of 2017 introduced by California Congressman Zoe Lofgren prioritises market based allocation of visas to those companies willing to pay 200% of a wage calculated by survey, eliminates the category of lowest pay, and raises the salary level at which H1B dependent employer are exempt from non displacement and recruitment attestation requirements to greater than $130,000. This is more than double of the current H1B minimum wage of $60,000 which was established in 1989 and since then has remained unchanged.

It's probably fair to say this is effectively raising the de facto minimum wage for IT work.

Brahmin are the most racist/casteist people from India; 90% black money in India is with Brahmins; http://www.livemint.com/Leisur...

Inevitable because Indians are exporting their uncivilized Caste system to USA http://www.livemint.com/Opinio...

I'm sure the residents enjoy their coal powered buses from behind their gas masks.

Ok, so why are nuclear equipment builders and suppliers running away from having to pay compensation if equipment is found to have caused the accident ? In fact the "global standard" is for builders to have no liability!

"Palida" is a traditional Bohri dish (e.g. see this recipe).

Seeing how the Bohras are an islamic sect that did originate in Yemen that reference is probably intentional-

The mint has a humorous post on one of the worst jobs in that list.

You seem to have a lot of faith in government (or in your government).

The reason Slashdotters (and others) are skeptical of government power is that power corrupts, and absolute power corrupts absolutely.

FYI, India is at 74 on the corruption index.

By the way, an ad that pops up when searching for india corruption index is: http://indiaunheard.videovolunteers.org/?s=corruption&x=0&y=0&gclid=CLm1qair-aMCFQtN5wod2T5cGw, which details a lot of corruption. The more tools you give government, the more harm they can do.

It's naive to think that government officials won't use the awesome amount of cross-linked information for their own purposes.

Also, you must likely not be a member of any kind of minority or repressed group (there are such in every country).

There's always something, and this bill's got quite a "something" in it. This is India's very own version of our Mickey Mouse Copyright Perpetuation Act (ostensibly having something to do with Sonny Bono, but we all know who it really was for...), and extends a fixed 60-year term to life plus 60 (see sidebar here.

Why in the world would we want to see copyrights get longer, anywhere? They obviously already provide an incentive at current levels. Even ten years should be an adequate incentive for 99.9% of cases, and you never want to write law based on the edge cases. With digital distribution speeding up how quickly a work can have its initial distribution, copyright terms should be shrinking, not growing.

A link to boingboing that links to a blog that links to the WSJ blog post that actually talks about the topic. Way to go.

Scientists Discover Smallest Exoplanet

French scientists have discovered the smallest planet yet located out of our solar system, a celestial find less than twice the size of Earth and which orbits a Sun-like star.

That's with the technology we've got in operation now (also referenced in TFA). In the next decade we're set to put up even better technology. You can bet that if Earth-like habitable planets are at all common in our neck of the woods we'll have found one within the decade.