LOL, and the fact his comment title and first paragraph say 'strike a zero' from coin values but in the last half of his comment reverses it to ADDing a zero to their value. LOL again. and then ROFL to points 2) (what previous AC said) and 3) umm, no you would have to change the face value to mean the literal value of the coin. the minting process would most definitely need to change to represent actual face value for future runs, so that's a new engraving for each side of each coin. There's probably some law or code that states the face value must be the actual value. Even if not, people are dumb; face value will need to be changed or updated at some point for all coins.
But then I get thinking (dangerous, I know) and the fact that 'get rid of dollar/cent' debate has arisen several times in recent decades and the current dangerous state of, not just the US but, worldwide economies has me guessing that we're headed for some sort of drastic market REvaluation, to what purpose is hard to say, but istartedi's wish might come true sooner than anyone's psychologically prepared for.
The only problem with those headlines is the repeated use of the usually derogatory terms 'nerd' and 'geek'. Believe me, the media is not helping in this case.
Why did they not use terms like 'whiz' or 'genius' I wonder? Oh, because they're the jackhats that make most of their money from thuggish american sports and their C average constituents.
Despite all that has been said on this particular topic, I wonder why this is news is classified with a skull and crossbones, not under YRO, and tagged as piracy.
What? You can always quit if the job sucks THAT bad. Believe me, I wouldn't have lasted a day at my current Level before happily walking out the door, flipping birds. But as an idealistic fresh-outta-college twenty-something? Well...
A better question might be: What the hell was the official Google 'handler' saying to these contractors to compel them to keep on as long as they did? What kind of "You are protecting children and people all over the world", etc. BS were they spewing? You better believe there was at least some of it. But as an another astute poster mentioned, their job is also to hear NONE of it, natch - Hear No Evil.
Dear, Sweet, 'Do No Evil' Google: Please stop plugging your eyes, ears and mouth and get a psych support staff on board for these operatives and Start Speaking Out about this horrific garbage. The only way human society will ever cure this problem is with honest discussion so we can ALL get 'onboard' and start snitching on the creeps doing this horrific BS and posting the crap online.
He'd written about two dozen novels before his untimely death in 1996, but an amazing writer with both a gifted imagination and gift for words. I was never bored reading any of his books.
My favorites are:
Han Solo Trilogy: The best Star Wars novels, hands down.
Adventures of Alacrity Fitzhugh and Hobart Floyt: Fun space opera trilogy with lots of heart, amazing back story and plenty of action. Sadly, out of print but easy enough to obtain 99cent copies online.
GammaLAW: Epic science fiction series about a group of super soldiers sent to a distant world that has fallen out of communication with the rest of the settled worlds hoping to solve the mystery of an alien race threatening mass invasion. He once likened GammaLAW to 'War and Peace in space, with a cast of characters in the hundreds', he was working on the manuscript at the time of his passing, and his longtime friend and pseudonym sharing author, James Luceno, pulled the final script together which was released in 4 paperbacks in the late 1990's. Sadly, also out of print.
Other fun things he worked on were the novelizations of (and serious improvements on) the Harmony Gold Robotech animated television series, where apparently he and Jim Luceno took turns writing 3 books each of the initial 12 book series and alternating on the 5-book Sentinels novels and writing each section of the final 'wrap-up' novel.
The tongue-in-cheek Black Hole Travel Agency quartet of novels show how far out he and Jim could go in their world building and plot scenarios, which is pretty far out.
I've never found a comparable author that I have enjoyed to read so much, and I sure have tried. Iain Banks is as close as I've gotten, but he still falls short in the storytelling, humor and wit departments.
I agree, this comment's OP is clearly insane or possibly not an every-day, front-end web developer.
Kidding aside, this whole debate is definitely a case of one person's awesome is another persons craptastic. I for one can't STAND the new whiz-bang built in Firefox element inspector, which was pretty buggy the first release of FF they shoehorned it into. And now to add insult to injury they've managed to bork the about:config parameters to disable this horrible new feature from right-click menu. Talk about a wholly 'unhandy' feature, First Prize!
Firebug has consistently been the best javascript, DOM and CSS debugging tool I've ever used in an open source browser, hands down. Drosera, Web Inspector, whatever the fuck is in Safari / Chrome doesn't compare, and certainly doesn't save me time in my daily development tasks.
Chrome = daily email, reading browser; rarely shut it down because I rarely need to Firefox = development browser set to clear cache, history, etc upon restart; restarted several times a day and shut down at the end of every workday. It used to consume memory like nuts, but it's gotten markedly better at releasing memory since R12 Safari, IE, etc = rarely used for compatibility testing only
If you host all your cloud services at Rackspace in Texas and a tornado happens to rip apart their datacenter, well expect a few hours/days downtime. And you better have offsite backups of mission critical data or that's a long bet that is getting shorter every day.
Slightly off-topic from the TFA, but Howard Hughes' Genius was associated with having contracted syphilis when he was younger. Not sure how, but he was known to be a lusty fella with the ladies.
Hughes and many famously smart people were covered in the book Pox: Genius, Madness, And The Mysteries Of Syphilis where their genius was correlated with having the disease.
Perhaps you've forgotten the old Slashdot slogan: "News for Nerds, Stuff that Matters". This kind of stuff was on Slashdot since before I had a Slashdot user ID.
I too was reading here back in the 90's and can't say I can recall non-tech articles of Fear and Loathing with any frequency.
The thing that's changed on Slashdot is that there are now professional Slashdot astroturfers working for big tech companies.
This comment is of course a better answer to my comment above which has already been labeled as troll, which I suppose is deserved given it's brevity and offtopic closure. So, in light of that I will attempt to give a better answer why this article has no place on/. :
This is not tech news, and does not 'matter' at all to the tech community, period. I can read this immediately on any other mainstream news source in minutes, including non-news sources like Facebook, Twitter, etc. so posting it here is not adding to my daily news experience. I assert this is obvious, so what use does this article have here?
Simple. Articles of Fear and Loathing are like a train wreck that is impossible to not watch. It serves the purpose to engage and distract you from what you should / could be doing positively with your life. This is the primary objective of any mainstream media outlet, which/. has obviously become. Of course the Media says their motive is to generate discussion on how we might possibly 'solve' problems like this in the future, but in actuality all it does is anger or sadden most people and distract them from the positive things in their lives.
I used to read/. regularly because they generally avoided nonsense like this in favor of genuine geek news topics. I have learned to get my informative reading from other sources, especially using a news reader of my own selection of curated bloggers who share my sentiments of mainstream media.
What if I am just trying to get laid? Seriously, how does one determine from chat text whether a person is a 'sexual predator' vs. someone who is just looking for a casual hookup? Wouldn't the approach be similar if not identical? I smell a FAIL.
Of course, the results of this 'competition' will likely get support from conservative, big brother regimes as a way to ring up innocent and horny people - particularly targeting young men - online.
Gender based stereotyping, convictions and punishment coming soon to the interwebs and country you live in. That's just wonderful!
Would much rather have seen a sequel to Starflight!
And with none of this 2D grassroots bs, either. But I would settle for Oolite grade 3D space travel as long as it has decent storyline and atmospheric reentry sequences with super-fine planetary exploration missions.
I lost way more than 40hrs to both Starflight and the sequel each.
waitaminute... so the US Gvt can redefine the meaning of the word 'person' to include corporations so corporations can donate millions to candidates and not be called out for it, but they can't redefine the phrase 'price fixing' to mean what it really should mean?
I was going to recommend PostgreSQL as your DBMS as it has plenty of spatial and geometric data types and corresponding functions, although I have never used PostGIS and can't vouch for it.
However, if your devs want to use MS tech, I don't think you are in a position to strong-arm them into something they are not comfortable. Not unless you are comfortable with sourcing an entirely new dev team who wants to do it your way.
Yeah, stick it out for a while and do what you can, you will learn a LOT more than you already have and will help develop your own crib sheet of tips, tricks and best practices. I've worked as an employee (not contractor) for two companies that were train wrecks waiting to happen. One wrecked (stayed there 9 months) the other was bought (stayed there 2.5 years, left a year before the sale). At both places I made good friends who I still have to this day and who've gotten me more work since then, not to mention good recommendations for my CV. One of those leads recently morphed from an amazing 8 month contract where I learned a LOT with a great company that has now hired me to work remotely (that's right, home office in my soft pants.) The CEO actually founded the company under the principles of 37 Signal's manifesto Getting Real (read that.) Dream Job if I ever knew one.
In my case, 10 years of weird contracts and small company employment disasters got me yards more than any 3 year IT BA and quitting will ever get anyone.
overnight, same 'sector' delivery has been touch and go for 5+ years here in new england. Used to be that we could send a birthday card the day before a normal delivery day and it would arrive on time. Not so much the past few years, and it's never really annoyed me either.
Would rather they drop Satyrnday delivery in favor of keeping up with regional deliveries, even if they are 1-2 days.
There's nothing wrong with using a 'free' email account to register for domain services or any other product or service for that matter. I would however recommend some recursion, i.e. create a unique freemail account with a very high security password and set it up to forward (while still saving emails) to your master email account(s). Of course, it's a good idea to rotate a high security password on your master email account(s) as well. It's not rocket science, it's security. These crafty bastards have been at it for a good 10+ years now. If you haven't been paying attention to current security flaws on the intertubes and get hacked then you are part to blame, too.
Do you rotate high security passwords at least yearly? Monthly would be a better idea. Do you use a password agent/app to manage your passwords? There are dozens available, try one or two with a Really Good Password. Do you keep multiple, offsite backups of your encrypted password file? Make sure it's well encrypted with a 10 to 16 byte password that you can realistically memorize and rotate it at least once a year.
I remember thinking the same thing, and then I thought, was that a point he was trying to make? An allegory to today's society of manipulative secondary officers / secret masterminds manipulating simpletons into high office and after?
Once that thought kicked in, I re-watched the prequels and carefully noted the plot points and political dialogue. There is a lot in there that completely passes over the heads of the common viewer/voter who are just waiting for the next lightsaber fight. Maybe Lucas piled so many special effects on the thing to detract from the actual storyline? A storyline that could have been told in a much better way, but maybe that was also the point.
You realize US citizens have Sarah Palin looming on the horizon. The fact that she don't know sh*t about US politics or history and isn't sore on the eyes must have a million GOP high-rollers chomping at the bit for election. What a wonderful puppet to master! And they sure as hell know the voters will go for whatever they see on TeeVee, because it's the truth, dammit!
In about 10 years some undergrad will write of the hidden gems in the 'oft-maligned Star Wars prequel trilogy.' Perhaps not like they've been doing with Kubrick's stuff, but I bet it will be pretty close.
Gotta mod this up, as it was the same for me. True story: discovered The Hobbit in 1984 visiting a friend who's family was housesitting an old New England farmhouse. In one of the summer guest rooms I found a 1965 paperback version of The Hobbit, the Ballantine Books edition with the pink border and the simple watercolor of Hobbiton on the front. The thing that got me was the map in the beginning and the occasional art throughout. I was hooked. I had to smuggle it home because anything D&D related was strictly taboo in our uber-christian family, and so it took me a while to get through it. I tried to convince a good friend of mine at the time to read it, so psyched about all the adventures contained within, but he could never get past the first chapter of hibbity hobbit nonsense. Still not sure how I got through it the first time, but man, once you are at Chapter 3 there is no going back.
To address some of the nonsense comments above about a movie adaptation, LOTR could have easily been 6+ two hour movies, albeit 50% boring and rife with backstory flashbacks required just to depict the passages within. I think the Jackson team did a fine job with the trilogy content, and even threw in a bit of the Silmarillion just so it made some canonical sense. The modifications and attention to the very understated female elements of the novels were some of the better changes they made for the movies.
* SPOILER *
That said, there is easily enough content for two feature length movies in the Hobbit. In my many re-reads of the book, I was always looking for more information about the Party's journey from Under the Mountain to Laketown, which seemed far too quick, because it was. There was a bit with song and poem and a shapeshifting lumberjack sort at the edge of Mirkwood. And oh boy, I can't wait to see Mirkwood, the wood elves' kingdom, the hall of the Wood Elf king! Apparently Legolas was from the elves of Mirkwood and there at the time of Bilbo's initial passing but never actually made an appearance in the novel; I am sure team Jackson could make excellent use of this fact if they can get Bloom back for another round. Laketown could be fun, too.
The prose isn't great for the epic battle in the fields outside (below?) Erebor where several of the Party meet their end. But I feel that segment, as with many other passages in The Hobbit, truly deserve a proper depiction, especially for such a marvelous tale told well before its time.
Possibly, but remember the Kinect has depth sensing capabilities and has much higher resolution. I am willing to bet the patent(s) applied for by Microsoft incorporate this detail.
Slashdot Mirror
LOL, and the fact his comment title and first paragraph say 'strike a zero' from coin values but in the last half of his comment reverses it to ADDing a zero to their value. LOL again. and then ROFL to points 2) (what previous AC said) and 3) umm, no you would have to change the face value to mean the literal value of the coin. the minting process would most definitely need to change to represent actual face value for future runs, so that's a new engraving for each side of each coin. There's probably some law or code that states the face value must be the actual value. Even if not, people are dumb; face value will need to be changed or updated at some point for all coins.
But then I get thinking (dangerous, I know) and the fact that 'get rid of dollar/cent' debate has arisen several times in recent decades and the current dangerous state of, not just the US but, worldwide economies has me guessing that we're headed for some sort of drastic market REvaluation, to what purpose is hard to say, but istartedi's wish might come true sooner than anyone's psychologically prepared for.
The only problem with those headlines is the repeated use of the usually derogatory terms 'nerd' and 'geek'. Believe me, the media is not helping in this case.
Why did they not use terms like 'whiz' or 'genius' I wonder? Oh, because they're the jackhats that make most of their money from thuggish american sports and their C average constituents.
Despite all that has been said on this particular topic, I wonder why this is news is classified with a skull and crossbones, not under YRO, and tagged as piracy.
What? You can always quit if the job sucks THAT bad. Believe me, I wouldn't have lasted a day at my current Level before happily walking out the door, flipping birds.
But as an idealistic fresh-outta-college twenty-something? Well...
A better question might be: What the hell was the official Google 'handler' saying to these contractors to compel them to keep on as long as they did? What kind of "You are protecting children and people all over the world", etc. BS were they spewing? You better believe there was at least some of it. But as an another astute poster mentioned, their job is also to hear NONE of it, natch - Hear No Evil.
Dear, Sweet, 'Do No Evil' Google: Please stop plugging your eyes, ears and mouth and get a psych support staff on board for these operatives and Start Speaking Out about this horrific garbage. The only way human society will ever cure this problem is with honest discussion so we can ALL get 'onboard' and start snitching on the creeps doing this horrific BS and posting the crap online.
I assert this News is Provenance!
He'd written about two dozen novels before his untimely death in 1996, but an amazing writer with both a gifted imagination and gift for words. I was never bored reading any of his books.
My favorites are:
Han Solo Trilogy: The best Star Wars novels, hands down.
Adventures of Alacrity Fitzhugh and Hobart Floyt: Fun space opera trilogy with lots of heart, amazing back story and plenty of action. Sadly, out of print but easy enough to obtain 99cent copies online.
GammaLAW: Epic science fiction series about a group of super soldiers sent to a distant world that has fallen out of communication with the rest of the settled worlds hoping to solve the mystery of an alien race threatening mass invasion. He once likened GammaLAW to 'War and Peace in space, with a cast of characters in the hundreds', he was working on the manuscript at the time of his passing, and his longtime friend and pseudonym sharing author, James Luceno, pulled the final script together which was released in 4 paperbacks in the late 1990's. Sadly, also out of print.
Other fun things he worked on were the novelizations of (and serious improvements on) the Harmony Gold Robotech animated television series, where apparently he and Jim Luceno took turns writing 3 books each of the initial 12 book series and alternating on the 5-book Sentinels novels and writing each section of the final 'wrap-up' novel.
The tongue-in-cheek Black Hole Travel Agency quartet of novels show how far out he and Jim could go in their world building and plot scenarios, which is pretty far out.
I've never found a comparable author that I have enjoyed to read so much, and I sure have tried. Iain Banks is as close as I've gotten, but he still falls short in the storytelling, humor and wit departments.
I agree, this comment's OP is clearly insane or possibly not an every-day, front-end web developer.
Kidding aside, this whole debate is definitely a case of one person's awesome is another persons craptastic. I for one can't STAND the new whiz-bang built in Firefox element inspector, which was pretty buggy the first release of FF they shoehorned it into. And now to add insult to injury they've managed to bork the about:config parameters to disable this horrible new feature from right-click menu. Talk about a wholly 'unhandy' feature, First Prize!
Firebug has consistently been the best javascript, DOM and CSS debugging tool I've ever used in an open source browser, hands down. Drosera, Web Inspector, whatever the fuck is in Safari / Chrome doesn't compare, and certainly doesn't save me time in my daily development tasks.
Chrome = daily email, reading browser; rarely shut it down because I rarely need to
Firefox = development browser set to clear cache, history, etc upon restart; restarted several times a day and shut down at the end of every workday. It used to consume memory like nuts, but it's gotten markedly better at releasing memory since R12
Safari, IE, etc = rarely used for compatibility testing only
Add 'tornado zone' to that list.
If you host all your cloud services at Rackspace in Texas and a tornado happens to rip apart their datacenter, well expect a few hours/days downtime. And you better have offsite backups of mission critical data or that's a long bet that is getting shorter every day.
Slightly off-topic from the TFA, but Howard Hughes' Genius was associated with having contracted syphilis when he was younger. Not sure how, but he was known to be a lusty fella with the ladies.
Hughes and many famously smart people were covered in the book Pox: Genius, Madness, And The Mysteries Of Syphilis where their genius was correlated with having the disease.
Perhaps you've forgotten the old Slashdot slogan: "News for Nerds, Stuff that Matters". This kind of stuff was on Slashdot since before I had a Slashdot user ID.
I too was reading here back in the 90's and can't say I can recall non-tech articles of Fear and Loathing with any frequency.
The thing that's changed on Slashdot is that there are now professional Slashdot astroturfers working for big tech companies.
This comment is of course a better answer to my comment above which has already been labeled as troll, which I suppose is deserved given it's brevity and offtopic closure. So, in light of that I will attempt to give a better answer why this article has no place on /. :
This is not tech news, and does not 'matter' at all to the tech community, period. I can read this immediately on any other mainstream news source in minutes, including non-news sources like Facebook, Twitter, etc. so posting it here is not adding to my daily news experience. I assert this is obvious, so what use does this article have here?
Simple. Articles of Fear and Loathing are like a train wreck that is impossible to not watch. It serves the purpose to engage and distract you from what you should / could be doing positively with your life. This is the primary objective of any mainstream media outlet, which /. has obviously become. Of course the Media says their motive is to generate discussion on how we might possibly 'solve' problems like this in the future, but in actuality all it does is anger or sadden most people and distract them from the positive things in their lives.
I used to read /. regularly because they generally avoided nonsense like this in favor of genuine geek news topics. I have learned to get my informative reading from other sources, especially using a news reader of my own selection of curated bloggers who share my sentiments of mainstream media.
What does this have to do with /.?
absolutely nothing.
Proof that the original /. is dead and gone and all we are left with is this crap-pile of AJAX and bad design.
What if I am just trying to get laid? Seriously, how does one determine from chat text whether a person is a 'sexual predator' vs. someone who is just looking for a casual hookup? Wouldn't the approach be similar if not identical? I smell a FAIL.
Of course, the results of this 'competition' will likely get support from conservative, big brother regimes as a way to ring up innocent and horny people - particularly targeting young men - online.
Gender based stereotyping, convictions and punishment coming soon to the interwebs and country you live in. That's just wonderful!
Would much rather have seen a sequel to Starflight!
And with none of this 2D grassroots bs, either. But I would settle for Oolite grade 3D space travel as long as it has decent storyline and atmospheric reentry sequences with super-fine planetary exploration missions.
I lost way more than 40hrs to both Starflight and the sequel each.
I've always had a hard time sympathizing with this sort of attitude toward reality. What a case!
waitaminute... so the US Gvt can redefine the meaning of the word 'person' to include corporations so corporations can donate millions to candidates and not be called out for it, but they can't redefine the phrase 'price fixing' to mean what it really should mean?
Sorry, but that's bullshit.
I was going to recommend PostgreSQL as your DBMS as it has plenty of spatial and geometric data types and corresponding functions, although I have never used PostGIS and can't vouch for it.
However, if your devs want to use MS tech, I don't think you are in a position to strong-arm them into something they are not comfortable. Not unless you are comfortable with sourcing an entirely new dev team who wants to do it your way.
Excuse me, but how is this tagged 'Idle'? And what's with the Planet Of The Ape jokes which is derivative of complete fiction?
This is a real country with a real populace.
Seems like a significant research technique for an original scenario, mutation jokes be damned.
Yeah, stick it out for a while and do what you can, you will learn a LOT more than you already have and will help develop your own crib sheet of tips, tricks and best practices. I've worked as an employee (not contractor) for two companies that were train wrecks waiting to happen. One wrecked (stayed there 9 months) the other was bought (stayed there 2.5 years, left a year before the sale). At both places I made good friends who I still have to this day and who've gotten me more work since then, not to mention good recommendations for my CV. One of those leads recently morphed from an amazing 8 month contract where I learned a LOT with a great company that has now hired me to work remotely (that's right, home office in my soft pants.) The CEO actually founded the company under the principles of 37 Signal's manifesto Getting Real (read that.) Dream Job if I ever knew one.
In my case, 10 years of weird contracts and small company employment disasters got me yards more than any 3 year IT BA and quitting will ever get anyone.
overnight, same 'sector' delivery has been touch and go for 5+ years here in new england. Used to be that we could send a birthday card the day before a normal delivery day and it would arrive on time. Not so much the past few years, and it's never really annoyed me either.
Would rather they drop Satyrnday delivery in favor of keeping up with regional deliveries, even if they are 1-2 days.
There's nothing wrong with using a 'free' email account to register for domain services or any other product or service for that matter. I would however recommend some recursion, i.e. create a unique freemail account with a very high security password and set it up to forward (while still saving emails) to your master email account(s). Of course, it's a good idea to rotate a high security password on your master email account(s) as well. It's not rocket science, it's security. These crafty bastards have been at it for a good 10+ years now. If you haven't been paying attention to current security flaws on the intertubes and get hacked then you are part to blame, too.
Do you rotate high security passwords at least yearly? Monthly would be a better idea. Do you use a password agent/app to manage your passwords? There are dozens available, try one or two with a Really Good Password. Do you keep multiple, offsite backups of your encrypted password file? Make sure it's well encrypted with a 10 to 16 byte password that you can realistically memorize and rotate it at least once a year.
I remember thinking the same thing, and then I thought, was that a point he was trying to make? An allegory to today's society of manipulative secondary officers / secret masterminds manipulating simpletons into high office and after?
Once that thought kicked in, I re-watched the prequels and carefully noted the plot points and political dialogue. There is a lot in there that completely passes over the heads of the common viewer/voter who are just waiting for the next lightsaber fight. Maybe Lucas piled so many special effects on the thing to detract from the actual storyline? A storyline that could have been told in a much better way, but maybe that was also the point.
You realize US citizens have Sarah Palin looming on the horizon. The fact that she don't know sh*t about US politics or history and isn't sore on the eyes must have a million GOP high-rollers chomping at the bit for election. What a wonderful puppet to master! And they sure as hell know the voters will go for whatever they see on TeeVee, because it's the truth, dammit!
In about 10 years some undergrad will write of the hidden gems in the 'oft-maligned Star Wars prequel trilogy.' Perhaps not like they've been doing with Kubrick's stuff, but I bet it will be pretty close.
and I thought the in-laws visiting with their two pre-school kids was foreboding enough...
Gotta mod this up, as it was the same for me. True story: discovered The Hobbit in 1984 visiting a friend who's family was housesitting an old New England farmhouse. In one of the summer guest rooms I found a 1965 paperback version of The Hobbit, the Ballantine Books edition with the pink border and the simple watercolor of Hobbiton on the front. The thing that got me was the map in the beginning and the occasional art throughout. I was hooked. I had to smuggle it home because anything D&D related was strictly taboo in our uber-christian family, and so it took me a while to get through it. I tried to convince a good friend of mine at the time to read it, so psyched about all the adventures contained within, but he could never get past the first chapter of hibbity hobbit nonsense. Still not sure how I got through it the first time, but man, once you are at Chapter 3 there is no going back.
To address some of the nonsense comments above about a movie adaptation, LOTR could have easily been 6+ two hour movies, albeit 50% boring and rife with backstory flashbacks required just to depict the passages within. I think the Jackson team did a fine job with the trilogy content, and even threw in a bit of the Silmarillion just so it made some canonical sense. The modifications and attention to the very understated female elements of the novels were some of the better changes they made for the movies.
* SPOILER *
That said, there is easily enough content for two feature length movies in the Hobbit. In my many re-reads of the book, I was always looking for more information about the Party's journey from Under the Mountain to Laketown, which seemed far too quick, because it was. There was a bit with song and poem and a shapeshifting lumberjack sort at the edge of Mirkwood. And oh boy, I can't wait to see Mirkwood, the wood elves' kingdom, the hall of the Wood Elf king! Apparently Legolas was from the elves of Mirkwood and there at the time of Bilbo's initial passing but never actually made an appearance in the novel; I am sure team Jackson could make excellent use of this fact if they can get Bloom back for another round. Laketown could be fun, too.
The prose isn't great for the epic battle in the fields outside (below?) Erebor where several of the Party meet their end. But I feel that segment, as with many other passages in The Hobbit, truly deserve a proper depiction, especially for such a marvelous tale told well before its time.
Really? From the Flattr FAQ at https://flattr.com/support/faq
How do I get money in and out of the Flattr system?
- [...] To get money out of the system, we currently support PayPal only.
I went to a Benihana in Atlanta, Georgia (US) after a day at Dragon*Con a few years back and it was alright. 3 stars.
Sue me for that, bitchez!
Possibly, but remember the Kinect has depth sensing capabilities and has much higher resolution. I am willing to bet the patent(s) applied for by Microsoft incorporate this detail.