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Against that are the successful animated versions and the successful comic versions (including All Star Superman) which are hopeful and upbeat.
So no, the characters don't start strong and then feel stale when portrayed that way skillfully.

I think we're just going to disagree on this. I always found Superman to be stale. In the comics, in the few well-received animated versions, etc. But that's just my opinion, lots of other people like him, and I (usually) like what they like, so this is just one character that just never resonates with me. I think we agree for the most part otherwise.

The M.O.S. ending meant, I would not pay top dollar at a theater to see BvS

I didn't see BvS until it was on HBO for the following reasons:

*) Ben Affleck as Batman. He's gotten better as an actor since the days of Armageddon when I really detested him, but he should stay behind the director's chair. Hell, maybe he should have directed Justice League.

*) The DCEU art direction. God damn, I can't see anything that's going on. I was very disappointed with the color palette choice in MoS, and they continued that with BvS and then Justice League. Live action color grading is a tool that is abused so much now that I think its use should be strictly curtailed, if not retired. It turned Superman's nice red S into a murky maroon, and his blue to... well, pretty close to grey.

*) Advanced warning about the plot. BvS felt like it had a similar problem to the most recent Fantastic Four movie -- separately written stories that they just sortof jammed together. The Doomsday plot in particular was just tacked on at the end. The "Batman vs Superman" thing felt more logical when Ballistic: Ecks vs. Sever did the same plot, and you never want to be negatively compared to that movie. The only way the writers could think of to get the two of them to come to blows was to make both of them, especially Batman, much much stupider than they had been previously portrayed. I hate Idiot Ball plots. There really is no worse plot device. When the whole "Martha" thing made them do a characterization 180, I threw up my hands and lost all hope.

*) Zach Snyder. If he has good characters played by actors who really know how to play them (say, Gerard Butler, Lena Headey, and David Wenham in 300), he can do a great job, and only if the source material fits his aesthetic style already. If your writers can't write dialogue or credible character interactions, though, then there probably isn't any saving it. Snyder is flash without substance. 300 was good, Watchmen was ok, the rest of his work looks pretty bad.

Right now, DC is going through its dark age/dork age. Marvel somehow survived the anti-hero 90s and is now maybe better for it. Hopefully DC survives the teens and comes out stronger, somehow.

And people decide "super hero moves are not profitable!"

I don't think anyone makes that claim, given how ridiculously successful Christopher Nolan's Batman series was, and how well the MCU is still doing. Hell, Wonder Woman (DCEU) did fantastic business over the summer. I think super heroes are certainly overexposed at the moment, and that's led to a mild backlash. IMO, Marvel shouldn't be putting out more than one tentpole a year, and neither should DC.

There are some excellent stories centered around liberal/socialist/not clear plots to force birth control of some kind on people. Usually it's a disease of some kind that renders 95% of people sterile. Of course there's usually a twist that the right "kind" of people are excluded.

Ferret

It's funny, the clearest example that I can remember of that was written by a Tea Party activist author. Strangely enough in his version all the liberals are bombed from space, and (almost) all the non-whites are killed by a genetically engineered plague that also turns white women blond and into unthinking and insatiable nymphomaniacs. Of course, in his fantasy world, the destruction of all the world's cities, the murder of three quarters of the earth population and turning women into uncontrollable rutting animals triggers the biggest economic boom in history, because apparently the earth only needs rural white conservative men.

I actually wish that was the worst thing about that novel, but the main character was also an unbearable Mary Sue (Gary Stu) and the author became bored halfway through the novel's climactic battle (which wasn't very climatic anyway, because of the Mary Sue) and basically finished with "and then they killed the other half of the alien fleet". Sigh.

Not a fan. But it might be up your alley.

http://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmw...

"...Point is, I'm still not sure what the [Trade Federation] ships were there to do. And don't any of you f[beep]gots tell me it was explained more in the novelization or some Star Wars BOOK! What matters is the MOVIES! I ain't never read one them Star Wars books, or any books in general for that matter, and I ain't about to start. Don't talk about them stupid video games, or novels, comic books or any of that fucking crap. I seen enough of that shit."

Brother Sister Incest / Music

Apple thinks people aren't going to like it.

If you trust their judgement, you should avoid buying this one. (But c'mon, you're probably not surprised. The chances that any one particular manufacturer model is a good fit for any particular person, is pretty damn small. Everyone has differing opinions of what makes a good phone, which is why there are probably hundreds of possible "best phones" and any two people almost never agree.)

OTOH if you think they don't have a clue what users want, then this particular product may still possibly be good for you. They are merely thinking it's a bad phone, but that's a matter of opinion.

Purely out of mischeviousness, I will now link to tvtropes' article on this subject.

I'm always distracted trying to decide if I need to read a foot note right at the moment I come across it, or finish the current paragraph, often going on to the next page. For this reason I prefer endnotes.

The problem of too many links or their misuse has been discussed in depth at TV Tropes.

Personally I find the worst offense is when the links are apparently automatically generated from randomly-picked keywords. Phys.org does this, and the links merely redirect to a "news tagged with" search, which is IMO worse than useless.

This is just the Left's dolchstoss-legende being solidified. Trump didn't win, it was a stab in the back by TEH ROOSHINS. (Seriously, "blame the foreigner"? It's like the oldest trick in the book) In years to come, this will become a bedrock belief of the Left, that all these bad things happened because dirty foreigners made them happen. I can understand why! Having to come to terms with the fact that ordinary Americans are hurting would be emotionally devastating. It would be having a heel realization, and having to completely rethink things, and humans will do anything to avoid that.

Being forced to realize that Americans, having not benefited at all from the government policies of the last 30 years, voted for the only change they could see would mean that they were wrong all along. So, the stab-in-the-back legend, right alongside blame-the-foreigners, is being embraced by a lot of educated people who tell us they know better than to fall for such fallacies.

This even has a tvtropes page: Caps Lock, Num Lock, Missiles Lock

Here you go. See, the Internet can be a useful, informative place.

Ok, sold. How do we infect the hot chicks of the planet?

So now, you finally understand how the internet can both at the same time be
- only for porn
- only for kitten

You're witnessing our Machiavellian ploy unfold.

Review sites try to compensate for this by normalizing scores (basically grade the movie on a curve). But for anonymous reviews this means that my "Ok" rating of 7 gets turned into a "poor" rating.

It seems like they should be normalizing based on a curve that is specific for each user, not on aggregate. With anonymity turned on, I DEFINITELY wouldn't trust review votes (way too gameable), but even with it off, user reviews are self-selecting. You're more likely to rate a movie higher if you've seen it because you were already pre-disposed to liking it because you had an interest in seeing it. So the people who might think the new Iron Man movie is shit might not rate the movie at all because they hadn't seen it because they had no interest in it. And then you'll get a bunch of people who say 'I hated that trailer, I'm not wasting my time with that movie, so I'll give it a low rating.' User ratings are absolute chaos.

Complaining about Shows You Don't Watch

"Because guess what? You might not know everything about a genre you refuse to listen to."

The internet has spoken. Soon, 43% of this country will be labeled a Neo-Nazi.

Nah, even if you labelled every Trump voter a Neo-Nazi, as unlikely as that is, you'd barely crack 23% of Americans, because only half of eligible voters voted. However, given that there are many Americans who are not eligible voters, we need to refine that number further. There are 323.1 million Americans, but only about 248 eligible voters. Since we know Trump received exactly 62,984,825 votes, we can calculate an upper level of denouncement of approximately 19.5% of Americans based on voting behaviour.

Having said that, there are no credible claims that all Trump voters are Neo-Nazis, however it is entirely accurate to note that the Neo-Nazis love Trump. Some people may be confused by that statement but it's similar very similar to the situation with David Hasselhoff. Germans love Hasselhoff, but that doesn't mean that if you love Hasselhoff that you're German.

Alternatively, you could calculate the upper limit at 34%, which is Trump's approval rating, though that's also sketchy since people could, in theory, approve of Trump for reasons other than his courting of white supremacists. I will now let you get back to your self-pity and bemoaning about how it's so unfair that old white men only have most of the power now, instead of all of it.

Yep, simple fix - no more http://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/UsefulNotes/HollywoodAccounting

"Darling! This is the Industry! The really creative people are the accountants. A big studio got over half the profit, after setting breakeven at about three times the cost, taking twenty-five percent of income as an overhead charge, and taking thirty percent of income as a distribution charge, plus rental fees, and prime interest on what they advanced."
â" John D. MacDonald, Free Fall in Crimson

a - Dude, it's Disney. You don't outlawyer the House of the Mouse.

b - Portals and various teleportation gates are older than dirt.
It's a generic concept of a magical doorway into another world. And you can't copyright that.
There's a reason Disney slapped a TM on EVERYTHING Star Wars once they bought it. Cause all the shit in Star Wars is generic.
Only thing they CAN do is slap a name on "Generic Storm Trooper" and add a TM to it.
You can still make your own "Generic Storm Trooper" - just not one which is called and looks like exactly like the one trademarked by Disney.

c - Trope of portals to another world is literally from pre-burial times.
Pick up When They Severed Earth from Sky when you find the time.
But not before you go through The Hero with a Thousand Faces if you haven't already and are planning to.
Cause while there are SOME useful things in Campbell's work, his basic premises are Jungian bullshit.
Thus, it sounds like ramblings of a loon after going through work which explains actual historical purpose of myths.

Do you have problems to get context/sarcasm right?

In this particular case, I didn't, because you managed to be so over the top that even poe's law doesn't apply, but, in general, yes. Sarcasm is indistinguishable from cluelessness, and there is plenty of cluelessness around, even here in the genius-level posts of genius-among-geniuses slashdot geniuses.

Ideally, you should know something about the background/knowledge/personality/expectations/etc. of the given person

You got it. You could have stopped posting there, that is 90% of the the reason cluelessness is indistinguishable from irony on the net.

You turn out to be so fucking brilliant that you only write posts that are clear and unambiguous because you can instantly figure out how other people decode your posts even though you don't know anything about them or they about you. That's because your brilliance is almost like telepathy, you understand where everybody is coming from. But, you know, a lot of slashdotters aren't quite at your level of perfection, and only think that they understand how everyone is able to decode text that says the opposite of what is actually meant.

While I'm a strictly windows and android guy, I have to give apple some credit. Their cannot reasonably be considered to make "knock offs" given what they did with smartphones and tablets. I can't think of one of their products I'd consider "bland" objectively.

You appear to be suffering from the Seinfeld is unfunny disease.

Starship Troopers is a major disappointment, but it was intended to be Starship Troopers from Heinlein from very early on - I followed its development, it wasnt shot or even pitched as a different film.

I thought it was originally a different movie called Bug Hunt:

It originally started out as an unrelated script called Bug Hunt, before the studio acquired the rights to the novel and Verhoeven, disgusted by what little he was able to stomach of Heinlein's book, had the script rewritten to deepen the satire.

TBH, I didn't follow it very closely but much of the information about this movie says it was originally called bughunt, and that the script was written before they decided to "base" it on the book.The link I gave above is one of many (IIRC, this info was also in a book written by the films producer/scriptwriter/someone).

Sorta like Slashdot with the intelligence factor decreased by an order of magnitude.

Conservation of Ninjutsu?

"Parallel universe" makes people think of the trope.

I think "perpendicular universe" would be better, and it's probably more accurate since parallel things don't intersect.

In fact it was the Dark Age that lowered sale comic books, before that readership was higher AND more diverse, so you can't blame SJW's.

http://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmw...

http://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmw...

Besides comic sales today are HIGHER than they were in 2001.

In fact it was the Dark Age that lowered sale comic books, before that readership was higher AND more diverse, so you can't blame SJW's.

http://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmw...

http://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmw...

Besides comic sales today are HIGHER than they were in 2001.

This sounds like American film trailers are becoming more like Japanese film trailers. The trailers are often cut to tell much of the plot, and since there's more of a focus on the interests of Japanese women (as opposed to the obsession with American teen boys) they tend to add more emotion to the trailer itself. This is maybe most stark in the trailers for animated films which have a long history in Japan as adult fare, but are still often relegated to the animation ghetto in the USA.

Compare these two trailers for Inside Out. The American version focuses on slackstick humor, while the Japanese trailer kicks you right in the feels and isn't afraid to spoil the plot.

Also, the Trailers Always Spoil trope from TV Tropes is always a good read on this.

Ah somebody's upset that Captain America has been pointing out the flaws in America since the 1970s, eh?

I bet you haven't even read the comic.

I bet you don't like Superman: Red Son? Mirror Universe Kirk? Owlman? Abe Lincon, Tyrant of the Potomac? Well, that makes you a fool.

Of course, it is â" the costs of the infrastructure are largely fixed. It (almost) does not matter, whether the network is used by 100 or 100000 people. So, as the number of users dwindles, the costs born by the remaining users go up.

40 dollars a month is less than I was paying in the Nineties. I pay a little more now, but I get a ton of features and it is through fiber anyway, so...it is far less than I would have paid for the same thing back then.

Your analysis is flawed, and that isn't even considering the home lines that are wireless now.

Watching some old cartoons the other day, I had to explain to my older kid, what "payphone" used to be... The younger one may need the same explanation for a "landline".

Here, use this reference.

Seriously, if you told someone, you "left your phone at home" in the 1980ies (or even early 90ies), they would've thought, you are crazy... Is not technology wonderful?

Not according to Hitler.

As I said above, I never exonerated Fox. I simply said that they at least portray the left and allow them on shows making them not as bad as the two shows which are pure leftist propaganda. CNN and MSNBC will not have a Conservative on their show. They may cherry pick some video but there is never a debate, it's always leftist talk.

Seems to me that you are praising Fox News, when actually, they are criticized for the opposite while adding a gratuitously false claim about CNN and MSNBC

The obvious bias you have for Fox News is a problem. You would be more convincing if you made an effort to denounce them as well.

Remember, they are the channel that thought Palm Trees grew in Wisconsin.

Fair point about OJ, but it's a bit harder to demonstrate as Youtube was not around back then.

YouTube isn't necessary, just a sense of history. You could go back even further. Try watching Citizen Kane, then examine the history behind it.

However the Maine sunk, the war was started by the papers.

Even older, the War of Jenkins Ear. Or the Crusades. Which even if you ignore the propaganda against the Turks, managed to slaughter Jews in Germany and overthrow a Byzantine emperor.

Also I'm pretty sure Paris never abducted Helen.

Some better-quality anime has a formula that works quite well with a 10-13 hour series: the first third to half of the series is episodic, while they introduce the characters and establish what "normal" is - key in some SF or fantasy setting. The serialized story is then maybe 8 hours of content. That works well and doesn't get stale, and you know who the characters are and how the setting works before the real conflict begins.

I wish that formula would become more common - I really like it.

Whereas to me, I feel that it is perhaps a bit too prevalent. Seems like a lot of such shows pop up every season.

It's not that I think it's terrible or horrible, but to some extent I find it hard to stand, it's like it feels rushed as they suddenly pack in plot development and a climax into a few rushed moments, and wasted the prior episodes with a trip to the beach, a cooking contest, the school festival and the occasional outright clip show.

I suppose in some limited instances, it works, like Madoka, but how often can you repeat that? It'd be like trying to pull off Endless Eight again. They got away with it once, because it was so crazy awesome, and even then, it leaves some people in a fit. (And yes, I know there are Madoka clones, just like there are Evangelion clones. Such is the way of things.)

Of course, on the other end, we have the long-runners, and their tendency to get into really bad filler. One Piece manages to generally deliver, but DBZ, Bleach, Naruto, Gintama, have occasionally hit the bottom of the barrel.

Oddly, some of the best have been the sports-related anime. Yowamushi Pedal manages to not be boring, despite its relative length, and the Saki anime managed to get decent timing, though the manga has production issues that complicate it. And Story of Side-A was a bit opposite, the beginning was rushed, but it was the oddity of a flashback episode in a spinoff series that is going to expand on content in the main.

This is probably an intractable problem, which is likely the reason why so much sci-fi deals with a future USA that is divided into various political entities, instead of remaining united.

Nope, it's just relatively interesting. Of course, so are the alternatives, but there is also a vanilla version, so to speak.

But works of entertaining fiction aside, showing maps in stark red and blue is a lie, a deeper one that most realize.

This is probably an intractable problem, which is likely the reason why so much sci-fi deals with a future USA that is divided into various political entities, instead of remaining united.

Nope, it's just relatively interesting. Of course, so are the alternatives, but there is also a vanilla version, so to speak.

But works of entertaining fiction aside, showing maps in stark red and blue is a lie, a deeper one that most realize.

This is probably an intractable problem, which is likely the reason why so much sci-fi deals with a future USA that is divided into various political entities, instead of remaining united.

Nope, it's just relatively interesting. Of course, so are the alternatives, but there is also a vanilla version, so to speak.

But works of entertaining fiction aside, showing maps in stark red and blue is a lie, a deeper one that most realize.

This is probably an intractable problem, which is likely the reason why so much sci-fi deals with a future USA that is divided into various political entities, instead of remaining united.

Nope, it's just relatively interesting. Of course, so are the alternatives, but there is also a vanilla version, so to speak.

But works of entertaining fiction aside, showing maps in stark red and blue is a lie, a deeper one that most realize.

Seems like someone thought of that in 1991.

Damn good movie, by the way.

We've seen long-established characters changed to a different race or gender or sexual preference or some other trait just to make the content more "inclusive"

Hey, I liked Spock! And Leonard Nimoy was just weird-looking enough to remind you he was an alien.

we've seen new characters created with a trait like their gender, race, or sexual preference as their main defining characteristic, solely so focus can be put on it, and the rest of the character pretty much ignored.

Hey, if you don't like 1930s movies, then stop watching them. It's not my fault you get "triggered" whenever you see a black maid flanderized in a movie. The casting director needed someone to play "the help," and they chose a black woman. Get over it, or if you really can't stand the sight of that, then maybe movies aren't for you. At least there's a lot less of the thing you're complaining about happening these days, than in your great grandparents' days.

The American public, at least, is getting sick and tired of having this sort of crap forced on them at every opportunity by the media.

Nobody has anything forced on them. The left always mis-uses the word "force." Get over it, kid: you opted in to your entertainment. People who don't opt into that, are probably watching something else. I think you may be a closet SJW. If you weren't, you would have pressed the channel-up or channel-down button on your remove long ago. Own up to your guilty pleasure; you'll feel better. Come out. I'm not into what you're into, but like I always say, different strokes for different folks. (If you people on left would adopt that attitude, we'd get along a lot better.)

America is swinging to the right.

Apparently you missed our most recent election, where American voters chose a New-Dealer for president, and while whiners complain that the more conservative candidate won the popular vote, the New-Dealer understood the electoral game and won fair'n'square. He ran on tariffs and other things whereby the government is going to become a lot more involved in micro-managing the economy than it had been back in the (relatively) anarcho-capitalist free-market Obama days.

The election showed that America was getting tired of, or more likely scared of, the right wing's "race to the bottom." So the voters went left and demanded more government intervention in life. (Personally, I still advocate what they call the "race to the bottom," because "bottom" totally misses that cheapness itself is a measure of increased productivity, and ultimately productivity is what makes an economy strong. Also, laissez-faire in the economy translates to laissez-faire in domestic policy too, so that's how you maximize civil rights.) But Trump says we're too productive, too free, and the left (using the amusing label "alt right," I guess because you can't get much more alternative to the right than this) ate that up and said "we can change!"

The result: prepare to see a lot more of what you just complained about. The "help" will be a black woman again.

I'll be impressed when you write an AI that can competently play Civ5.

Knowingly or not, you actually wrote a very legitimate (and probably harder) problem in AI. How do you make a good AI opponent? Note this is a different question than what was done in Go recently, which is "make a computer program as skilled as possible."

You need to make an AI which will make mistakes, pretend like it doesn't know everything about the universe, including the player's civilization state (see The Computer Is A Cheating Bastard trope and related tropes within that article), have multiple civilizations acting independently of each other, be "good" enough to provide a challenge but not good enough to be unbeatable, act "realistically" given the supposed limited information it has, etc...

Making an unbeatable AI in a game in many ways is easier than making a good AI opponent. As a thought experiment, consider the game tic-tac-toe. I'm sure I could make an unbeatable AI pretty easily... but I don't think I could make an AI which was hard-yet-beatable, especially if somebody would be playing against it dozens of times so I couldn't just hard-code moves.

You sir, sound like an idiot. If you were 'so talented' you'd have had no problem finding a job. In fact your story smells like such bullshit I had to check my shoes to make sure I didn't walk in anything before I sat down.

Then you need to check your eyesight. You missed the cowardly brain matter leaking from you anonymous ears.

The story is so common and well-known in the United States that it even has a name: hard luck story.

The skills for doing a job and getting a job are different for everyone but a corporate recruiter.

Thus RubberDogBone was probably busy doing the job when working and not dedicating large amounts of time to finding the next one. Deep experts tend to be like this by definition. They gave up other time and tasks to dedicate to learning and performing one thing. It's also why going to conferences and user groups in an important part of professional work.

The skills for doing a job are tied to the application(s) and industry worked in. The skills of getting such a job are those for establishing and maintaining a large network of people. These people get you job referrals and job offers by getting past the HR filter. In instances where you are well known they can create jobs to get your limited skills for themselves. At the least they connect available jobs with available potential employees.

This is exactly like dating. There is a hidden information problem with lots of questions. Can you do the job? Can you fit in with the existing team or deal with the family? Are you wiling to work for the money available? The tools to resolve the problem are limited to writing about, talking to and meeting people. All of these fall into the trap of trust and reliability. Was this person just lucky at their last job or relationship? Are they bullshitting about their ability? Is this person just a presidential-class conman or con-woman?

In both cases lots of new tools have been developed to work around the problem. You have dating sites, prostitution and Churches on one side. On the other you have Linked-in, personal consulting and out-sourcing firms like Capgemini.

However, large layoffs like this are different from just losing a job like RubberDogBone did. In large layoffs the employment vultures circle. The most desirable employees get picked off early. The rest are filtered through so those with the top amount of connections get hired out. Stereo-typically in IT, a lot of employees are going to have limited social networks outside of work. Now those networks are gone. With a sudden glut of potential employees the market saturates in an area for a while. The suddenly unemployed and underemployed won't have the resources to go to conferences or spend time networking with peers. That network is gone so their duration of unemployment will be long as they compete on even ground with every conman and crook in the general labor market to get past HR.

Company unions aren't the solution to this. They start out fine. But because humans must run them it just devolves into another kind of business you have to get hired into. Unions "solve" the hiring problem with a worse old boys network than the original company. Taken to an extreme you cannot find work in some industries unless you are either already skilled or you are related to someone who does the work. Trade guilds are slightly better - being industry wide - but again depend on corruptible fail-able and limited humans to do the work. Maybe in the future machine run guilds could prevent this but I don't trust the people programming the machines. They are still human.

made of skulls. I recommend lava and/or pools of sharks or piranha (whichever's in season). For security nothing beats savage panthers, but you can use tigers in a pinch. You'll probably want to invest in a pool of acid and winch/pulley system to lower intruders into. There's a pretty good guide over here.

So do your eyeballs get cut out if you watch a "pirated" movie? That's some grade-A Eye Scream material right there.

Why is slashdot covering a story on how a reporter is being treated by the state? There is nothing high technology in that. There is nothing high technology about protesting construction of an oil pipeline, unless some robots were protesting. This story shouldn't be here.

It's Network Decay in action. The same reason why the Sci-Fi Channel started airing professional wrestling. 18-24 year old males like Star Trek, and 18-24 year old males also like professional wrestling. Therefore, in an effort to make the channel appeal to MORE 18-24 year old males, start showing wrestling on your Sci-Fi Channel, even rebrand it to Syfy to show how much you're branching out.

Slashdot is the same way. Newer viewers (and I really noticed this happening when Jon Katz started writing his tangentially-related Columbine Massacre articles here) like to pretend that Slashdot was "News For Nerds, Stuff That Matters" as if that comma was big OR. But it wasn't. It was a tech-related website. Then the occasional politics-related story crept in and editors noticed it would get a lot of views and a ton of comments! And the slide began, and it still continues.

Tada: it's a micronation... in space!

Of course it's unrealistic armchair-libertarian drivel: the magnetosphere is a harsh mistress, after all.

What's interesting about this development is that it isn't a nearly-entirely American endeavour, which is often the case with such ambitions; Asgardia seems to be Russian and the AIRC supporting it is Viennese. I suspect we'll see a lot more anti-authoritarian behaviour from Europeans in the coming years as a) the EU weakens, b) the Internet transmits political memes that were previously comparatively contained by media limitations like talk radio and poor English literacy, and c) people already exposed to (b) come of age.

The much more feasible version of "let's get off the Earth so we can get away from our countries' laws" is called seasteading, and generally involves a platform in international waters. There's one clear non-Libertarian, non-American example of seasteading (Sealand, UK) which is fairly old and unusually successful by micronation standards. These days, however, the idea is generally associated with these guys, who have been funded by Peter Thiel. They, unquestionably, are primarily concerned with ways to dodge regulation. Without a realistic means of building such a gigantic physical presence, though, they certainly aren't going to be doing much of that; at best they'd end up creating their own passports that no one would accept.

Why are you referring to her as "him"?

Oh dear Goddess, you're not a man-hating lesbian separatist radfem are you? ... No of course not, it's just the horseshoe effect.

Strange, to me it looks a lot like those endless rock quarries used in the innumerable low-budget sci-fi shows produced by the BBC in the '70s and '80s.

I mean, I am as excited as the next guy to see pictures of Mars and all, but "amazing vistas" these are not. It's grungy, dusty rocks not that dissimilar to what you might find on Earth, without even any funky colors we've been trained to expect from space (they need to use more red filter so people "know" its Mars ;-). Who knew that the universe subscribed to the Real is Brown philosophy?

Strange, to me it looks a lot like those endless rock quarries used in the innumerable low-budget sci-fi shows produced by the BBC in the '70s and '80s.

I mean, I am as excited as the next guy to see pictures of Mars and all, but "amazing vistas" these are not. It's grungy, dusty rocks not that dissimilar to what you might find on Earth, without even any funky colors we've been trained to expect from space (they need to use more red filter so people "know" its Mars ;-). Who knew that the universe subscribed to the Real is Brown philosophy?

It depends on what you mean by "good." If you mean it in the sense of moral judgment, then you are correct. If you are mean "good" in the sense of "accurate to real life" then you absolutely can measure this.

For example, see XKCD... and/or tvtropes.

Of course this raises the question of if a "good" portrayal is a good movie. Who wants to see a movie of a woman sitting at a computer, programming, getting coffee, and occasionally posting to Slashdot for 2 hours?

And, as others noted, people focus on bad female portrayals... but how many fat/ugly/etc. male characters get cast as the hero of a story?

An undiverse workforce is like watching the same boring tv plots over and over again. Even the disaster and conclusion are predictable. Compare that to a diverse workforce. Things don't seem so much like idiocracy, office space, dilbert, etc, anymore. That's the difference. If you don't know that, you haven't experienced both.

The people who made the trailer managed to showcase the worst parts of the film.

Don't forget, Trailers Always Lie.I've lost count of the number of trailers where the tone of the movie was radically different from what was presented in its official trailer. Pixar makes pretty good films, but the trailers are crafted (with extra sound effects and out-of-context statements) to get the 8-year-old boys to drag their families to the theater.

Nice to see anti-vaxxers, creationists, and flat-earth-society conspiracy theorists haven't completely displaced more-traditional idiots.

I think the name "autopilot" starts to suffer the same fate as the name "hacker": they both have a precise meaning, but in the general use by the public, the meaning has shifted

Hacker used to be someone who is good at McGuyvering, at finding creative uses, etc.
But the press ended up using it for Cracker, someone who just breaks into things, not necessarily showing any creativity.

Same happenned with Autopilot: in aviation, it is a very precise thing - an apparatus which can take care automatically of the small minute details of flying the plane. The human need to provide it an order (a destination) and then only watch over it and control that everything is going well, but not actually hold the commands themselves.
Nobody has ever deigned this for the whole crew to take a nap while it is on.

Same in a boat: the autopilot will keep a destination, so you don't need to hold the wheel. That doesn't mean that you should be napping, you still need to whatch out for dangers, obstacles, etc.

But suddenly, the general public has taken a different meaning: as you say, now the think of it as Chauffeur: the Chauffeur (not necessarily electronic, it can be a human) takes care of everything, while you can safely take a nap or whatch some harry potter.

Elon should have called it "Ship's Commander mode" (as the one which gives orders instead of holding the wheel) sound both mor awesome and a little bit less passive role for the driver.

Trump could have been a good choice from a "true outsider not beholden to the machine" perspective, but unfortunately the fact that he's crossed the moral event horizon with his NAZI-esque campaign "trumps" that.

Alas, I'll have to throw my vote away on a Gary Johnson or Jill Stein instead.

...because vandalism and destruction of city property is what heroes do!

30 comments and no one's brought up Blipverts yet? What is this world coming to... >.