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Makes me wonder who's behind the massive publicity behind this non-story.

Recently all the media, even 'respectable' ones like the New York Times, have become desperate for anything to bring in page views. If there is a story that brings eyes to someone else's page, they all want a piece of it.

My God, it's like the news media version of Network Decay! Among other things, it's the trope where various disconnected channels try to aggressively chase the same demographic, and end up showing the same shows. So you'll have Spike TV, A&E, the Sci Fi Channel, and Bravo all showing Law and Order reruns, because that show brings in viewers, even if it has nothing to do with the channel's once-core mission.

You, your wife and me are part of a minority. Some people just don't enjoy movies with threadbare logic, even if "everyone else" loves them.

See also the "Mohs Scale Of Science Fiction Hardness" (http://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Main/MohsScaleOfScienceFictionHardness).

For me, a Science Fiction movie or book should fall under Mohs: Physics Plus or a higher degree of consistency to be considered good. Which tends to disqualify Star Wars and most of Star Trek, and thus eliminates a lot of the available Science Fiction flicks.

One of the reasons I usually read books rather than watching movies.

In older movies and cartoons, inheritance of haunted estates was often held pending On One Condition as a plot device to get people inside spooky mansions for ghostly shenanigans (ie the second-in-line trying to scare protagonists away and claim the inheritance). You may have seen it parodied more recently in, say, Futurama/Simpsons.

Or maybe your post was just a roundabout crack at the linguistic ties my handle will exhibit in various languages. Believe it or not, I had no idea it did when I picked it for an SNES RPG. But it amuses me now, if not as much as actually seeing someone make a penis in minecraft blocks, custom decals, spray tags, guild logos, spaceships, Spore creatures, etc etc etc

That's Redheaded Counselor Juggs, though she is not quite up to Christina Hendricks level as redheaded eye-candy. She's actually older than La HenDDricks. Sad to say, Hendricks died her hair blonde recently which is total wrong-thinking that should be punished, no quatloos for her. There are two actresses who were born to be redheads that should stay redheads now and forever....Hendricks and Emma Stone. What was Emma Stone thinking....why play doomed-to-die Gwen Stacy when she could have the opportunity to play Mary Jane Watson if she just stayed red.

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

The word is "dyed", not "died", you pseudo-literate inbecilic fuck-ass. It's amazing the way Slashdotters will try to make a broad statement, and then fail to do the most simple things correctly.

She probably dyed her hair blonde because any man who's been hot and heavy with a redhead has learned that they are inherently evil, psychotic, and manipulative. Possibly being one of the few good ones, she wanted to distance herself from this well-earned reputation. If you have a thing for redheads, then you are like the cigarette smoker or the crack addict: addicted to something that is toxic and definitely bad for you.

The Case for the Empire
Are the "Rebels" in the Star Wars universe terrorists?
10 Reasons The Galactic Empire Wasn’t As Bad As Everyone Thinks
Who were the bad guys in Star Wars' original trilogy?
Your Terrorists Are Our Freedom Fighters (Warning: TVTropes link)

That's Redheaded Counselor Juggs, though she is not quite up to Christina Hendricks level as redheaded eye-candy. She's actually older than La HenDDricks. Sad to say, Hendricks died her hair blonde recently which is total wrong-thinking that should be punished, no quatloos for her. There are two actresses who were born to be redheads that should stay redheads now and forever....Hendricks and Emma Stone. What was Emma Stone thinking....why play doomed-to-die Gwen Stacy when she could have the opportunity to play Mary Jane Watson if she just stayed red.

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

It's [solar energy] going to be enough for those who will remain after the Generational Purge. The One Percenters will find those figures quite satisfactory, since the plans for California is to turn it into a state-size vacation area anyway.

Suicide carried off many. Drink and the devil took care of the rest.
~Robert Louis Stevenson

Sorry Bob, the devil is looking elsewhere to fill quota, and even good drink will be scarce during the Generational Purge due to a loss of the 'Just In Time' food supply chain. Modern cannibals will find scarcely a week's worth of cans on the grocery shelf and perhaps another few weeks in distribution centers, but this will serve only to swell the ranks of the migrant Cannibal Armies that will actually conduct the Purge.

The Cannibal Army is the ultimate (and last) achievement of any failed modern civilization. The only reason the history books are not chock full of 'em is that historians are delicious, and there has never been enough population to achieve the necessary critical mass, collapsed societies to this point have always left numbers few enough to live off the land, and retained enough know-how to do so. That is not true today.

Ask anyone on the street if they know how to solder a joint, sow seed, plant a cow or where delivery pizza comes from and they haven't a clue. But ask them if they could figure out how to eat someone and they will quickly nod assent. It is not only instinctive it is infused into the culture. The recurring theme of pursuit and car chases in popular movies expresses the primal knowledge necessary for cannibalism.

The cannibals will be ruthless, they will employ cleverness and the use of technology to scour the land. Your stationary survival enclaves will be the favorite feast of the first wave, where all the cherished ideals of small sustainable energy, and those who practice it, go into the cooking pot. Domestic cattle and other animals will be mere appetizers in this Moveable Feast, because cannibal armies have no patience to raise them. Disease from improper preparation will claim some, but the critical mass will persist until there is only one Cannibal Army left in California.

That last cannibal army, great in number, will then march on the Diablo Canyon Nuclear Plant to absorb and consume the small group of engineers and scientists who have gathered there to preserve the remaining fruits of civilization, and for hot showers. Cannibals are easily swayed by reason, you might say they are even attracted to it, because wherever reason exists there are yummy people to consume. And consume they will until the last corn-fed game is exhausted. And then they will turn on each other and feast until human population levels out and reaches a sustainable level of -1.

The fate of California's energy policy is foretold in Lucifer's Hammer. Devour this book.

India gives up nuclear weapons.

Agreed. Those "story arc avoiding episodes" are commonly referred to as the Monster of the Week and were always the most enjoyable X-Files episodes.

Stop the presses a bug found in a large complex program.

No Browser is safe : Chrome, Firefox, Internet Explorer, Safari all hacked at Pwn2Own contest

It's not "a bug" in "a program". It's every major browser. And it's pretty much like this every time they do pwn2own. If a group of hackers are able to bring down every major browser with previously unknown* exploits every year just for a chance to win a laptop, what can better motivated (financed) groups do?

* unknown to the browser developers anyway... 17 seconds to pwn IE, yeah right... like they say on the cooking shows "here's one I prepared earlier"

It's more of a TV trope:
http://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmw...
http://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/dis...

I don't think anyone's suggesting it's reality anywhere but TV/media.

It's more of a TV trope:
http://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmw...
http://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/dis...

I don't think anyone's suggesting it's reality anywhere but TV/media.

I suspect that If the producers maximize profit by some combination of good writing/acting, product placements, syndication / iTunes / Google Play / etc. fees, it's a win.

I don't see technical accuracy as an explicit factor anywhere in that formula. Heck, I loved The Office, and I'm just guessing they weren't realistically depicting life at a paper company.

This reminds me of vehicles traveling at the speed of plot.

Sounds a bit reminiscent of the Eschaton...

Yes, lets go back to the caves and live like Noble Savages.

For another point of view, see this talk by David Deutsch from 2005. He rambles for a while (in an entertaining way) before getting to the point. Here's the ending:

So let me now apply this to a current controversy, not because I want to advocate any particular solution, but just to illustrate the kind of thing I mean. And the controversy is global warming. Now, I'm a physicist, but I'm not the right kind of physicist. In regard to global warming, I'm just a layman. And the rational thing for a layman to do is to take seriously the prevailing scientific theory. And according to that theory, it's already too late to avoid a disaster. Because if it's true that our best option at the moment is to prevent CO2 emissions with something like the Kyoto Protocol, with its constraints on economic activity and its enormous cost of hundreds of billions of dollars or whatever it is, then that is already a disaster by any reasonable measure. And the actions that are advocated are not even purported to solve the problem, merely to postpone it by a little. So it's already too late to avoid it, and it probably has been too late to avoid it ever since before anyone realized the danger. It was probably already too late in the 1970s, when the best available scientific theory was telling us that industrial emissions were about to precipitate a new ice age in which billions would die.

Now the lesson of that seems clear to me, and I don't know why it isn't informing public debate. It is that we can't always know. When we know of an impending disaster, and how to solve it at a cost less than the cost of the disaster itself, then there's not going to be much argument, really. But no precautions, and no precautionary principle, can avoid problems that we do not yet foresee. Hence, we need a stance of problem-fixing, not just problem-avoidance. And it's true that an ounce of prevention equals a pound of cure, but that's only if we know what to prevent. If you've been punched on the nose, then the science of medicine does not consist of teaching you how to avoid punches. (Laughter) If medical science stopped seeking cures and concentrated on prevention only, then it would achieve very little of either.

The world is buzzing at the moment with plans to force reductions in gas emissions at all costs. It ought to be buzzing with plans to reduce the temperature, and with plans to live at the higher temperature -- and not at all costs, but efficiently and cheaply. And some such plans exist, things like swarms of mirrors in space to deflect the sunlight away, and encouraging aquatic organisms to eat more carbon dioxide. At the moment, these things are fringe research. They're not central to the human effort to face this problem, or problems in general. And with problems that we are not aware of yet, the ability to put right -- not the sheer good luck of avoiding indefinitely -- is our only hope, not just of solving problems, but of survival. So take two stone tablets, and carve on them. On one of them, carve: "Problems are soluble." And on the other one carve: "Problems are inevitable." Thank you. (Applause)

Maybe they will be more moral than us.

At least their morals will be more colorful.

(Yes, I've thought about this too much.)

A HOA is upfront about the fact that they don't want a TARDIS in your driveway? I doubt it.

This may be the reason why so few Doctor Who episodes are set in the States...

And I thought it was because the BBC Quarry doesn't look like the woods around Vancouver ...

Seems to me that the exact opposite is true. Women are regularly criticised for what they wear, or don't wear on TV.

Your perception contradicts other empirical observations

Anita Sarkessian herself has observed that society loves seeing scantly clad women. It's in our TV, movies, and video games. When wardrobe malfunctions happen, when a celeb's nekkid pix or sex tapes pop up, the misogynists doesn't shame or blame the woman, but rather ask for a copy ("torrent where?").

You can't have it both ways. It's logically inconsistent to say society loves to see women with little clothes or have accidents, and say society often criticize women who do just that at the same time.

From wardrobe malfunctions to newsreaders showing a bit too much cleavage, it's not uncommon to read about it in the news.

It's actually very uncommon. In the news, what is common is this - women are depicted sexually all the time, and all the men and misogynists just accept that as the norm. Showing skin being an issue is the exception, mostly raised by housewives (not misogynists or the patriarchy)

TV Tropes found some cute prior art for the spokesperson's snarky comment; it's the page image for Cross-Cultural Kerfluffle, since not every culture sees the monkey comparison as racist.

TV Tropes found some cute prior art for the spokesperson's snarky comment; it's the page image for Cross-Cultural Kerfluffle, since not every culture sees the monkey comparison as racist.

Yes

I will **woosh** you and educate you:
http://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmw...

There is no reasoned point, no subtantiation, no reference, not even an anecdote that attempts to convince as to why 'one must note' this.

Why? Well, how else can one excuse ignoring this warning? Play for time until climate change goes beyond the point of no return, and then say it's too late to do anything. Status quo is god to a lot of people outside of fiction, too.

Yep. It's a bane to magic, and bags of holding are magical. There's a saying with nethack: "The Dev Team Thinks of Everything" Half of the source code is probably taken up by easter eggs. Check out a random assortment of them here. Some of my favorites are how a Quantum Mechanic can drop a box containing Schrodinger's Cat which - unlike all other objects in the game - doesn't have its life / death state determined until you open the box; and tricking gods into killing creatures for you by ticking them off into trying to kill when you're engulfed by a monster (which gives you the experience ;) ). There's even some things in the source code that players never see, like a commentary about why angry gods don't notice certain details, relating it to how some nuns would shower clothed so that God wouldn't see them naked - as if God is a peeping tom with X-ray vision that can penetrate convent walls but not a bathrobe.

Yep. It's a bane to magic, and bags of holding are magical. There's a saying with nethack: "The Dev Team Thinks of Everything" Half of the source code is probably taken up by easter eggs. Check out a random assortment of them here. Some of my favorites are how a Quantum Mechanic can drop a box containing Schrodinger's Cat which - unlike all other objects in the game - doesn't have its life / death state determined until you open the box; and tricking gods into killing creatures for you by ticking them off into trying to kill when you're engulfed by a monster (which gives you the experience ;) ). There's even some things in the source code that players never see, like a commentary about why angry gods don't notice certain details, relating it to how some nuns would shower clothed so that God wouldn't see them naked - as if God is a peeping tom with X-ray vision that can penetrate convent walls but not a bathrobe.

If you read them later, it's interesting to see where the blind spots were. My grandfather had a bunch of 50's-era scifi books that I'd read while visiting. In one series they had faster than light spacecraft but would do all the calculations to go to light speed with slide rules.

Actually, I've heard that computers are merely faster, while slide rules are more accurate, which might actually make doing those calculations at least in part with slide rules (using a computer to set them up) a very good idea with FTL--accuracy probably will be more useful than speed, and you might also train people still to do the calculations by hand even when computers can handle much of it, much like how people still learn celestial navigation.

If your navigational computer going down doesn't strand you (a nightmare in and of itself), then being able to figure out which direction to point yourself and how long to run the engines so you can reach a place where it can be fixed is vital. And remember, its problem may not be that it's merely needing a reboot...

Earlier authors would often be set on Mars, Venus or the Moon, which all naturally had perfectly breathable atmospheres and Earth-like gravity. That doesn't mean the stories were in any way bad. Often they were written to provide some commentary on some aspect of the society of the time.

Actually, at the time people honestly believed that Mars, Venus and/or the Moon really did have perfectly breathable atmospheres and Earth-like gravity, so it's not really social commentary as much as it's what TV Tropes calls Science Marches On.

Hello FreeBSD. A pure Unix operating system run by grownups only interested in technical excellence.

...because no infighting ever happens with FreeBSD and causes it to fork off other distributions such as OpenBSD and NetBSD.

Make a game with only female lead roles who are portrayed in a very positive manner and have all the men in the game be bumbling idiots who are constantly causing problems.

So basically, like most American sitcoms.

Only if one of those links goes to TV Tropes.

While I can't speak for everyone, when I say I'm proud to be a geek, I mean it in the sense that I think it is better to be a geek than to not be a geek. More people should be geeks. It's not only not a bad thing, it's a good thing. If you're not a geek, you ought to be one.

Hopefully people who are "proud" of their orientation (or gender or race or anyone else) don't mean it in that same sense, but just misuse the word to mean "not ashamed", which is not all it means. I'm not ashamed to be white, but neither am I proud of it; it just doesn't really matter to me, as it shouldn't to anyone.

And before anyone gives me the you're-not-part-of-that-demographic-you-don't-get-a-say-in-the-matter speech, I'm pansexual — call it bisexual if you want, I don't really care — and also don't give a fuck about that. Most people have no idea because I'm a very private person and most people know very little about me that isn't immediately visible, but I'm also not afraid of anyone finding out. If life were fiction, the Bi The Way trope would apply to me. And I think ideally that would be true of everyone's orientation.

Please note that I'm not criticizing Tim Cook for anything here. (Though I am surprised at this announcement; I thought this was general common knowledge already).

You've probably seen these guys before without realizing it. They also manufacture Hollywood OS and keyboards without space bars.

You've probably seen these guys before without realizing it. They also manufacture Hollywood OS and keyboards without space bars.

She gets away with playing victim because she's a girl.

And if it was a man, he'd find refuge in audacity and just get to be a trolling asshole. The people hating him would only add to his mystique. Women can't do that, but they can play on paternalism to make you feel sorry for them. Kind of a sad trade, if you ask me.

If 500 people each use the "correct horse battery staple" approach to generating pass phrases, then an attacker who wants to compromise 5 of those 500 accounts is going to have to break 5 passwords.

If 500 people each use the same password manager, then an attacker who wants to compromise 5 of those 500 accounts needs to break just one security mechanism -- the password manager itself. In addition, that attacker may have help in doing so, from all the other attackers that want to compromise a different set of 5 accounts from that group of 500.

If the security for that password manager is sufficiently stronger than the security of those pass phrases (think Fort Knox versus your local bank branch) then attacking the individual accounts will be easier. But if the password manager's security has a vulnerability (a back door into Fort Knox, manned by a guard who's just two days away from retirement) then that leaves not just one person vulnerable, but all 500.

And when was the last time you plugged two to four USB controllers into your gaming PC or played a game in the "platform fighter" genre?

I'm seriously tired of this Recycled in CyberSPACE bullshit.

My prediction is that the last chapter will be two sentences long:

    Snow falls. Everyone dies.

Whether the first word is "snow" or "Snow" is left as an exercise to the reader.

The answer to "why ain't it realistic?" is: Rule of Cool.

We already knew Lightning Can Do Anything. :)

Wrong. Also, the phrase originated in America.

Now lets say some well meaning and compassionate politicians decided to take care of them and built high rise apartments for all of them who were having trouble paying their rent to live in. Sounds good and compassionate right?

By Hanlon's razor as modified by Clark's law, this is more likely a simple backfire of what was intended to be a helpful act rather than some sort of evil plot; nothing deliberately planned would have gone so horribly right.

"I'm pro-science, but I'm against what I'll call "Spock-ism," after the character from the TV show Star Trek. I reject the idea that science is logical, purely rational, that it is detached and value-free, and that it is, for all these reasons, morally superior.

"Spock-ism" is really a Straw Vulcan where logic is forcefully neutered.

For example, Counceller Troi beats Lieutenant Data in a game of chess, claiming that it's a game of intuition. This ignores that computers can consistently win games of chess against anyone relying on intuition, and where intuition needs to be first built up on logic. (Really, just play chess intuitively against modern AIs on their maximum setting.)

As most of the people I know who actually are in the science or technical fields *ARE* pathologically awkward, abrasive, and antisocial, I only see BBT's portrayal of them as such as an example of truth in television

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

Which works, though I would have had more fun going the other direction, being like "This was a FANTASTIC HOTEL. Its food was DEFINITELY NOT TERRIBLE, and when I went to check in, the guy at the front desk definitely did NOT spend half an hour ignoring me to instead post pictures on facebook. There was NOT a roach problem, and the toilet in the bathroom definitely did NOT stop up a bunch of times."

Peter Hoddie is a time lord!

QR codes are write once and take a lot of processing power to read, the article is talking about reusable, electronically accessible memory.

Obviously written by someone without a powerful enough LASER.
All you need is a webcam, a LASER and proper archival media.

CHA

I think it's referring to this.

Yes, exactly.

I think it's referring to this.

You do not need the skill to program. You just need the leverage to make someone who has the skills do it for you.

Yeah, just like in the movie. Swordfish.

Why "swordfish"? Because the password is always "swordfish".

Once it is done once, it becomes much easier to do a second time.

You are still postulating a hacker that can crack the protections that Google's programmers have put around the code already.

Additionally, now you are also required to:

a. learn which of the hackers in the world is capable of defeating those protections/re-programming the vehicle

b. force/entice that hacker to do so

c. prevent that hacker from selling the exploit to Google before you've completed your crime(s)

And once it is done it will become MORE difficult because Google will issue a patch or recall to prevent it.