Astronomers are smart enough to be able to compensate for a known few seconds of arc offset between the astronomical time and clock time. For the rest of us, having the timezone drift to the side is not going to cause any noticeable difference in the position of the sun for several centuries.
Exactly, and it REALLY doesn't matter if summer comes in June or December. We're just used to it a certain way but that doesn't mean it has to stay that way. Folks living 1000 years from now wouldn't know the difference anyway.
Did find this on wikipedia though Under the proposal, leap seconds would be technically replaced by leap hours as an attempt to satisfy the legal requirements of several ITU-R member nations that civil time be astronomically tied to the Sun. So I guess these nations might still be causing problems, disliking this clunky workaround.
Then those folks can handle the workaround themselves or get on board with the program. If they want to be a special snowflake then they can deal with the problems that causes. The rest of the world uses the metric system even though the US insists on sticking with US Customary Units and that works out ok (mostly).
NO! I really don't. The number is just arbitrary. I don't care if noon occurs at night or during the day. I don't care if winter occurs in June or December. I think all of that is pointless complication to keep the calendar matched to rotations of the Earth and orbits of the Sun. Keep the time keeping simple
I actually like the idea of time being counted as orders of magnitude of seconds. A kilo-second is roughly 1/4 hour. 100kilo-seconds is just over a day. A mega-second is about 11 days. Basically a metric sort of approach. The only unit that should really matter is the second and there is no reason to adjust our timepieces or calendars to match arbitrary astronomical events.
Frankly if we really wanted to keep synchronized to orbits we should have defined the second to be (close as possible) some divisible fraction of the time of revolution of the earth. (pick the kind that you like - sidereal, stellar, whatever...) But since we didn't, we either need to use a second order number (some multiple of a second) to define time or just not worry about it.
How close do we need to be to the astronomical time?
My argument would be that we don't. Who cares if the seasons shift to different months over a few hundred years? It's not going to be important within the lifetime of anyone reading this. If it snows in June instead of December I just don't see that as an actual problem. Pick an epoch and count from there. No need to keep the seasons matched to the calendar for eternity. In fact if we leave Earth, doing that will quickly become highly impractical.
My taxes take about 15-20 min and I have a investment portfolio, dividend income etc.
Then you have very simple taxes. Mine take considerably longer than that and mine aren't even especially complex compared to some.
And yes I'd rather do my taxes than negotiate with a car dealer. There is WAY more leg work involved with buying a car if you plan to not get ripped off. Determining a good price for a car involves far too much work in most cases.
But that's just it- I don't negotiate. I let them beat each other to death and when they've hit rock bottom, then I swoop in.
That is negotiating. Playing two vendors off against each other IS a form of negotiating. I do it all the time too.
Sure there's a markup, and I don't begrudge them a reasonable fee
I do. The dealer provides me NO value whatsoever. They are merely a middleman taking a cut that they haven't earned by providing me anything I need. I could just as easily buy a car from a dealer if I were allowed to do so. I begrudge the dealers every penny I pay them and they are not entitled or deserving of any profit from me unless they provide me actual value. Haven't had one do that yet.
Lol, I love beating the dealers to pieces. I game the hell out of them and they can't do a thing about it.
Some people do enjoy the negotiation. Most Americans very much do not and I am one of them. And frankly for most people, car dealers are better negotiators. They do it all day every day and they are well practiced. Plus it frankly is a huge time sink and an annoying one at that. I've negotiated plenty of car buys but the experience is never painless or fun.
And honestly no matter what price you get from a dealer, there is a markup involved. They aren't selling it to you at a loss. I would rather deal directly with the manufacturer and I'd even be ok with splitting the dealer markup between us. Both the manufacturer and I would be better off. Dealers cannot go away soon enough in my opinion.
a third of people say doing taxes is less annoying than working with a car dealer.
The other two thirds are people who have never bought a car from a dealer.
Car dealers are useless middlemen that provide little to no value to car buyers. The only reason they still exist in the new car market is because they are protected by law. The sooner they go away the better. If they could provide actual value I wouldn't object to their existence but 99%+ of them are nothing more than a needless markup to the price of the car and add a lot of irritation to the process. Not to mention that many have a well earned reputation for being crooks.
But it allows you to create guarantee because you can audit it.
Only if you compile it yourself and have the actually ability to audit the software. (and you have a compiler you trust)
For closed source software, you have to trust the supplier and their guarantee.
This is true of most open source software as well with the exceptions mentioned above. If Mozilla provided a warranty for firefox, I have no actual ability to audit their software and even if I did, such an audit would be meaningless unless I compiled the software myself. For any non-trivial piece of open source software, this means that functionally there is little difference between trusting closed or open source software. The only real difference is that with open source I can hope that someone else might figure out that there is a problem but that is just a hope, not a certainty.
Do you trust yourself or your proprietary software vendor more?
Irrelevant since I am not a programmer. And even if I was it is not as if I could realistically audit all the source code for a project the size of the linux kernel. Don't get me wrong I think there are great advantages to open source software but this particular one is hugely overblown.
If drugs were legalised, do you think they'd all re-train as accountants?
I have news for you. A lot of them ARE de-facto or even actual trained accountants. If you want to do something illegal on a big scale and not go to jail for it, you had better have a more than passing familiarity with accounting. All that money has to be accounted for same as with any other business and it has to be moved around and used to pay bills, buy materials and stored somewhere. Who do you think does all that? The tooth fairy?
He does if he wants a suggestion that better meets his needs. He didn't need to justify his decision until it became an Ask Slashdot.
The reason why he wants to change doesn't matter. What matters is what his needs are going forward. All he needs to do is to outline what his projected use case is. Help or don't but your opinion about his reasons for switching are irrelevant.
Emphasis mine. Also note that it is present tense.
Emphasize away. Something can work and you can like it and it still doesn't meet your needs. For example I like GIMP and it works fine but I have photo editing needs that it simply cannot handle so I have to use Photoshop instead. I like plenty of tools that I no longer use for one reason or another. Might be lacking needed/desired features. Might be a security problem. Might be incompatible with a particular operating system. Etc.
This mindset is ridiculous. Why do you "feel a need to change" if it still works for you?
Please point out where he said that it still works for him. Obviously he feels it is not meeting his needs (whatever they are) in some way. He doesn't have to justify changing software to any of us even if there is no objective reason.
You have to be biased against walmart to feel that way. It's just like any other supermarket.
I have no particular beef against Walmart but I don't like shopping in their stores for groceries. If it comes in a box they can handle it ok but fresh produce or meats? I wouldn't touch most of what they sell with a barge pole. We have a Walmart a few miles south of my house and their selection of fresh produce is pathetic to say the least and usually not very good quality either. Their meat counter is similarly useless. If I want to get Doritos and soft drinks then it's not bad but "just like any other supermarket"? Only of you are comparing it to the bad ones.
Maybe whole foods makes you feel better
Nope. I rarely shop there and while they have MUCH better produce and meat than Walmart (not exactly a high bar to clear), I don't really care if stuff is organic and the mark up at Whole Foods is pretty outrageous in a lot of cases.
- Amazon usually has better prices and the selection is much bigger.
My experience is that the prices are usually comparable but you are right that the selection at Amazon is WAY bigger. I don't really have much interest in Walmart.com because they don't provide anything I cannot get at Amazon except in rare cases.
They do when that is a sane thing to do. Sometimes a precise notion of time isn't important. But many activities are impossible without a rather precise determination of the time across multiple devices.
It's not like you couldn't include your idea of your local time (whatever it is) in your NFS requests, and then have the server take its idea of its local time, generate a delta, and apply that to all the timestamps that you are trying to set on a file.
The only way to ensure the local time on your clock is correct is to synchronize with another clock. A clock providing arbitrary time stamps is worse than useless. In fact for many activities what you suggest would lead to accidents, fraud and all sorts of confusion.
Any time you have a measuring device where you care about its accuracy you have to compare it to a reference standard. That's why we have highly accurate atomic clocks maintained by standards organizations to calibrate our clocks to.
Non-synchronized clocks are only a problem if you let them be a problem/make them a problem.
Sorry my friend but that's simply not true for a lot of problems.
i was not in a lab connect, i was in a suit. i didn't know this nurse and she had no idea who i was. she simply removed one cable and plugged in mine.
Shouldn't have mattered if she did. In my wife's office if you plug in an unknown machine to an ethernet port it simply won't work. The MAC address and some other stuff has to be registered to that particular port before it can connect. If I brought my laptop into her office, it would require non-trivial amounts of hacking to get it to connect to anything. While no security is bulletproof, lots of places don't even take basic precautions.
I'm so confused. I like to barbecue on my grill, or a hibachi at my girlfriends house. I use hardwood briquets exclusively because they make my food taste magical. It takes about 30 mins to cook corn or these nice sausages from the butcher, less than that for fish or asparagus. I cover things so they come out tasting quite smoky.
Technically speaking, in the US what you are describing is is grilling rather than barbecue. If it doesn't take a long time at low heat it isn't technically correct to call it barbecue. But don't worry about it too much. Most people use the terms interchangeably and (almost) nobody really cares.
Interestingly the British use the term barbecue for what the Americans call broiling - high direct heat. They also use grilling as something close to a synonym. But barbecue (in the low and slow American sense) is really an American style of cooking and I think it's useful to allow for the distinction because the cooking methods are hugely different. Grilling doesn't work well for cuts of meat with a lot of connective tissue.
What am I allowed to call this? I'm scared to think about it too much, what I do now is fun, comes naturally, and tastes super amazing.
Call it whatever you want. It doesn't really matter. But if you want to be pedantic you are grilling and/or smoking.
eBay's is non-existent if the seller is a lying scumbag.
I used to make my living selling on eBay. Doesn't matter if the seller is a liar or not, you can pretty much return anything if you just utter the magic words "Not As Described". Unless they have changed thing dramatically it doesn't really matter if the seller doesn't accept returns or not. You just tell eBay it was "Not As Described" and they'll almost certainly authorize a refund if you ship it back. My little company got screwed by a number of shady buyers despite us have a no-returns-ever policy.
I'm not saying there aren't shady sellers out there but returns aren't a problem if you know how to play the game.
Actually, around 90% of aviation accidents are caused by pilot error.
Your statistics are wrong. Pilot error accounts for 38% of major airline crashes, 75% of commuter/air-taxi crashes and 85% of general aviation crashes. So the least experienced pilots crash the most which is not at all surprising. This strongly supports my need-better-training thesis. Among the most experienced pilots with (presumably) the best quality and best maintained equipment, pilot error accounts for a minority of crashes. I stand by my thesis that a well designed human/computer system can be more robust than either part independently. The data largely seems to back me up on this though I will concede that future technology advances may shift things in favor of computer only someday.
Humans are really poor troubleshooters.
Untrained humans are poor troubleshooters though I agree that people in general have faults. And computers have different limitations, not the least of which is their inability to deal with unexpected circumstances.
Also, maybe many don't know the distiction between BBQ and grilling. When you grill things like burgers, steaks, etc...over hot, high quick heat, that is grilling...it is NOT Barbecue.
I know the difference very well. BBQ is as your say low and slow and it routinely ALSO involves utilizing smoke. BBQ pork and one of the hallmarks can be the pink smoke ring that permeates the meat. There is little better to eat in this world than some BBQ with a nice smokey crust.
Not sure why you went off on that tangent since nothing I said had anything to do with calling grilling BBQ or vice-versa.
This is why people follow particular reviewers, like Siskel OR Ebert back in the day.
I only found Ebert helpful because I almost always seemed to disagree with the guy. Nothing against him personally but whenever I watched the show I routinely found myself having a very different opinion if I had also seen the movie.
Better to find a handful of thoughtful reviewers whose opinions you trust.
Haven't found any yet, at least when it comes to movies. Seriously, I haven't found a reviewer yet that I agree with consistently. And frankly I don't really care about specific opinions. Basically I just want to know A) is the movie of generally good quality and well told and B) is the premise and story likely to interest me.
I've found Rotten Tomatoes to be an ok (though imperfect) proxy evaluation of general quality though it tends to overrate certain types of movies. For example Rotten Tomatoes tends to overrate animated movies for some reason. Animated movies (esp Disney/Pixar) that are merely good often get 90%+ ratings when a 75%-85% might be more appropriate. For instance Wall-E is a very good movie but no way in hell should it have a 96% - it just wasn't THAT good. 96% should be for stuff that wins academy awards for best picture. Frozen got 89% and even though it is wildly popular, I think its score is also far too high. It was an ok-good (60-75%) but not great movie. But I'm aware of that bias so I can adjust mentally for it.
But Rotten Tomatoes isn't good at telling me if *I* will like the movie. There are some great quality movies that I find boring and some admittedly second-rate movies that I very much enjoy. I walked out of the movie The Aviator for example because it bored the crap out of me even though I'll acknowledge it is a pretty well made film and probably is rated appropriately on Rotten Tomatoes.
The big ones include but aren't limited to: Transistors & Integrated circuits Refrigeration/air conditioning Jet engines Mass air travel Nuclear power/weapons Birth control pills Antibiotics & vaccines Genetic analysis and therapy Telecom networks (including the internet) Containerized shipping Email Lasers Electrical grids Superhighways Nitrogen based fertilizers Pesticides/herbicides And some more I've forgotten
Can you rank these? Not meaningfully. I suppose you could study economic impact but that's going to be very imprecise and is only one measure of disruption. If I had to vote for just one it would probably be either the transistor or birth control. But it really doesn't matter.
Slashdot Mirror
Astronomers are smart enough to be able to compensate for a known few seconds of arc offset between the astronomical time and clock time. For the rest of us, having the timezone drift to the side is not going to cause any noticeable difference in the position of the sun for several centuries.
Exactly, and it REALLY doesn't matter if summer comes in June or December. We're just used to it a certain way but that doesn't mean it has to stay that way. Folks living 1000 years from now wouldn't know the difference anyway.
Did find this on wikipedia though Under the proposal, leap seconds would be technically replaced by leap hours as an attempt to satisfy the legal requirements of several ITU-R member nations that civil time be astronomically tied to the Sun. So I guess these nations might still be causing problems, disliking this clunky workaround.
Then those folks can handle the workaround themselves or get on board with the program. If they want to be a special snowflake then they can deal with the problems that causes. The rest of the world uses the metric system even though the US insists on sticking with US Customary Units and that works out ok (mostly).
But do you care if high noon is at midnight?
NO! I really don't. The number is just arbitrary. I don't care if noon occurs at night or during the day. I don't care if winter occurs in June or December. I think all of that is pointless complication to keep the calendar matched to rotations of the Earth and orbits of the Sun. Keep the time keeping simple
I actually like the idea of time being counted as orders of magnitude of seconds. A kilo-second is roughly 1/4 hour. 100kilo-seconds is just over a day. A mega-second is about 11 days. Basically a metric sort of approach. The only unit that should really matter is the second and there is no reason to adjust our timepieces or calendars to match arbitrary astronomical events.
Frankly if we really wanted to keep synchronized to orbits we should have defined the second to be (close as possible) some divisible fraction of the time of revolution of the earth. (pick the kind that you like - sidereal, stellar, whatever...) But since we didn't, we either need to use a second order number (some multiple of a second) to define time or just not worry about it.
How close do we need to be to the astronomical time?
My argument would be that we don't. Who cares if the seasons shift to different months over a few hundred years? It's not going to be important within the lifetime of anyone reading this. If it snows in June instead of December I just don't see that as an actual problem. Pick an epoch and count from there. No need to keep the seasons matched to the calendar for eternity. In fact if we leave Earth, doing that will quickly become highly impractical.
My taxes take about 15-20 min and I have a investment portfolio, dividend income etc.
Then you have very simple taxes. Mine take considerably longer than that and mine aren't even especially complex compared to some.
And yes I'd rather do my taxes than negotiate with a car dealer. There is WAY more leg work involved with buying a car if you plan to not get ripped off. Determining a good price for a car involves far too much work in most cases.
But that's just it- I don't negotiate. I let them beat each other to death and when they've hit rock bottom, then I swoop in.
That is negotiating. Playing two vendors off against each other IS a form of negotiating. I do it all the time too.
Sure there's a markup, and I don't begrudge them a reasonable fee
I do. The dealer provides me NO value whatsoever. They are merely a middleman taking a cut that they haven't earned by providing me anything I need. I could just as easily buy a car from a dealer if I were allowed to do so. I begrudge the dealers every penny I pay them and they are not entitled or deserving of any profit from me unless they provide me actual value. Haven't had one do that yet.
Lol, I love beating the dealers to pieces. I game the hell out of them and they can't do a thing about it.
Some people do enjoy the negotiation. Most Americans very much do not and I am one of them. And frankly for most people, car dealers are better negotiators. They do it all day every day and they are well practiced. Plus it frankly is a huge time sink and an annoying one at that. I've negotiated plenty of car buys but the experience is never painless or fun.
And honestly no matter what price you get from a dealer, there is a markup involved. They aren't selling it to you at a loss. I would rather deal directly with the manufacturer and I'd even be ok with splitting the dealer markup between us. Both the manufacturer and I would be better off. Dealers cannot go away soon enough in my opinion.
a third of people say doing taxes is less annoying than working with a car dealer.
The other two thirds are people who have never bought a car from a dealer.
Car dealers are useless middlemen that provide little to no value to car buyers. The only reason they still exist in the new car market is because they are protected by law. The sooner they go away the better. If they could provide actual value I wouldn't object to their existence but 99%+ of them are nothing more than a needless markup to the price of the car and add a lot of irritation to the process. Not to mention that many have a well earned reputation for being crooks.
But it allows you to create guarantee because you can audit it.
Only if you compile it yourself and have the actually ability to audit the software. (and you have a compiler you trust)
For closed source software, you have to trust the supplier and their guarantee.
This is true of most open source software as well with the exceptions mentioned above. If Mozilla provided a warranty for firefox, I have no actual ability to audit their software and even if I did, such an audit would be meaningless unless I compiled the software myself. For any non-trivial piece of open source software, this means that functionally there is little difference between trusting closed or open source software. The only real difference is that with open source I can hope that someone else might figure out that there is a problem but that is just a hope, not a certainty.
Do you trust yourself or your proprietary software vendor more?
Irrelevant since I am not a programmer. And even if I was it is not as if I could realistically audit all the source code for a project the size of the linux kernel. Don't get me wrong I think there are great advantages to open source software but this particular one is hugely overblown.
If drugs were legalised, do you think they'd all re-train as accountants?
I have news for you. A lot of them ARE de-facto or even actual trained accountants. If you want to do something illegal on a big scale and not go to jail for it, you had better have a more than passing familiarity with accounting. All that money has to be accounted for same as with any other business and it has to be moved around and used to pay bills, buy materials and stored somewhere. Who do you think does all that? The tooth fairy?
He does if he wants a suggestion that better meets his needs. He didn't need to justify his decision until it became an Ask Slashdot.
The reason why he wants to change doesn't matter. What matters is what his needs are going forward. All he needs to do is to outline what his projected use case is. Help or don't but your opinion about his reasons for switching are irrelevant.
Emphasis mine. Also note that it is present tense.
Emphasize away. Something can work and you can like it and it still doesn't meet your needs. For example I like GIMP and it works fine but I have photo editing needs that it simply cannot handle so I have to use Photoshop instead. I like plenty of tools that I no longer use for one reason or another. Might be lacking needed/desired features. Might be a security problem. Might be incompatible with a particular operating system. Etc.
This mindset is ridiculous. Why do you "feel a need to change" if it still works for you?
Please point out where he said that it still works for him. Obviously he feels it is not meeting his needs (whatever they are) in some way. He doesn't have to justify changing software to any of us even if there is no objective reason.
You have to be biased against walmart to feel that way. It's just like any other supermarket.
I have no particular beef against Walmart but I don't like shopping in their stores for groceries. If it comes in a box they can handle it ok but fresh produce or meats? I wouldn't touch most of what they sell with a barge pole. We have a Walmart a few miles south of my house and their selection of fresh produce is pathetic to say the least and usually not very good quality either. Their meat counter is similarly useless. If I want to get Doritos and soft drinks then it's not bad but "just like any other supermarket"? Only of you are comparing it to the bad ones.
Maybe whole foods makes you feel better
Nope. I rarely shop there and while they have MUCH better produce and meat than Walmart (not exactly a high bar to clear), I don't really care if stuff is organic and the mark up at Whole Foods is pretty outrageous in a lot of cases.
- Amazon usually has better prices and the selection is much bigger.
My experience is that the prices are usually comparable but you are right that the selection at Amazon is WAY bigger. I don't really have much interest in Walmart.com because they don't provide anything I cannot get at Amazon except in rare cases.
So design things to not require synced clocks.
They do when that is a sane thing to do. Sometimes a precise notion of time isn't important. But many activities are impossible without a rather precise determination of the time across multiple devices.
It's not like you couldn't include your idea of your local time (whatever it is) in your NFS requests, and then have the server take its idea of its local time, generate a delta, and apply that to all the timestamps that you are trying to set on a file.
The only way to ensure the local time on your clock is correct is to synchronize with another clock. A clock providing arbitrary time stamps is worse than useless. In fact for many activities what you suggest would lead to accidents, fraud and all sorts of confusion.
Any time you have a measuring device where you care about its accuracy you have to compare it to a reference standard. That's why we have highly accurate atomic clocks maintained by standards organizations to calibrate our clocks to.
Non-synchronized clocks are only a problem if you let them be a problem/make them a problem.
Sorry my friend but that's simply not true for a lot of problems.
i was not in a lab connect, i was in a suit. i didn't know this nurse and she had no idea who i was. she simply removed one cable and plugged in mine.
Shouldn't have mattered if she did. In my wife's office if you plug in an unknown machine to an ethernet port it simply won't work. The MAC address and some other stuff has to be registered to that particular port before it can connect. If I brought my laptop into her office, it would require non-trivial amounts of hacking to get it to connect to anything. While no security is bulletproof, lots of places don't even take basic precautions.
Improbable in computer security means inevitable. Impossible means it cannot be done - yet.
I'm so confused. I like to barbecue on my grill, or a hibachi at my girlfriends house. I use hardwood briquets exclusively because they make my food taste magical. It takes about 30 mins to cook corn or these nice sausages from the butcher, less than that for fish or asparagus. I cover things so they come out tasting quite smoky.
Technically speaking, in the US what you are describing is is grilling rather than barbecue. If it doesn't take a long time at low heat it isn't technically correct to call it barbecue. But don't worry about it too much. Most people use the terms interchangeably and (almost) nobody really cares.
Interestingly the British use the term barbecue for what the Americans call broiling - high direct heat. They also use grilling as something close to a synonym. But barbecue (in the low and slow American sense) is really an American style of cooking and I think it's useful to allow for the distinction because the cooking methods are hugely different. Grilling doesn't work well for cuts of meat with a lot of connective tissue.
What am I allowed to call this? I'm scared to think about it too much, what I do now is fun, comes naturally, and tastes super amazing.
Call it whatever you want. It doesn't really matter. But if you want to be pedantic you are grilling and/or smoking.
eBay's is non-existent if the seller is a lying scumbag.
I used to make my living selling on eBay. Doesn't matter if the seller is a liar or not, you can pretty much return anything if you just utter the magic words "Not As Described". Unless they have changed thing dramatically it doesn't really matter if the seller doesn't accept returns or not. You just tell eBay it was "Not As Described" and they'll almost certainly authorize a refund if you ship it back. My little company got screwed by a number of shady buyers despite us have a no-returns-ever policy.
I'm not saying there aren't shady sellers out there but returns aren't a problem if you know how to play the game.
Actually, around 90% of aviation accidents are caused by pilot error.
Your statistics are wrong. Pilot error accounts for 38% of major airline crashes, 75% of commuter/air-taxi crashes and 85% of general aviation crashes. So the least experienced pilots crash the most which is not at all surprising. This strongly supports my need-better-training thesis. Among the most experienced pilots with (presumably) the best quality and best maintained equipment, pilot error accounts for a minority of crashes. I stand by my thesis that a well designed human/computer system can be more robust than either part independently. The data largely seems to back me up on this though I will concede that future technology advances may shift things in favor of computer only someday.
Humans are really poor troubleshooters.
Untrained humans are poor troubleshooters though I agree that people in general have faults. And computers have different limitations, not the least of which is their inability to deal with unexpected circumstances.
My post wasn't targeted at YOU...it was more to clarify to other readers out there, that too often today confuse the two terms.
Ahh, understood. Yes many people do conflate the two terms though technically speaking there is a big difference. Both in process and in results.
Also, maybe many don't know the distiction between BBQ and grilling. When you grill things like burgers, steaks, etc...over hot, high quick heat, that is grilling...it is NOT Barbecue.
I know the difference very well. BBQ is as your say low and slow and it routinely ALSO involves utilizing smoke. BBQ pork and one of the hallmarks can be the pink smoke ring that permeates the meat. There is little better to eat in this world than some BBQ with a nice smokey crust.
Not sure why you went off on that tangent since nothing I said had anything to do with calling grilling BBQ or vice-versa.
This is why people follow particular reviewers, like Siskel OR Ebert back in the day.
I only found Ebert helpful because I almost always seemed to disagree with the guy. Nothing against him personally but whenever I watched the show I routinely found myself having a very different opinion if I had also seen the movie.
Better to find a handful of thoughtful reviewers whose opinions you trust.
Haven't found any yet, at least when it comes to movies. Seriously, I haven't found a reviewer yet that I agree with consistently. And frankly I don't really care about specific opinions. Basically I just want to know A) is the movie of generally good quality and well told and B) is the premise and story likely to interest me.
I've found Rotten Tomatoes to be an ok (though imperfect) proxy evaluation of general quality though it tends to overrate certain types of movies. For example Rotten Tomatoes tends to overrate animated movies for some reason. Animated movies (esp Disney/Pixar) that are merely good often get 90%+ ratings when a 75%-85% might be more appropriate. For instance Wall-E is a very good movie but no way in hell should it have a 96% - it just wasn't THAT good. 96% should be for stuff that wins academy awards for best picture. Frozen got 89% and even though it is wildly popular, I think its score is also far too high. It was an ok-good (60-75%) but not great movie. But I'm aware of that bias so I can adjust mentally for it.
But Rotten Tomatoes isn't good at telling me if *I* will like the movie. There are some great quality movies that I find boring and some admittedly second-rate movies that I very much enjoy. I walked out of the movie The Aviator for example because it bored the crap out of me even though I'll acknowledge it is a pretty well made film and probably is rated appropriately on Rotten Tomatoes.
Star Ratings Meaning according to XKCD
The big ones include but aren't limited to:
Transistors & Integrated circuits
Refrigeration/air conditioning
Jet engines
Mass air travel
Nuclear power/weapons
Birth control pills
Antibiotics & vaccines
Genetic analysis and therapy
Telecom networks (including the internet)
Containerized shipping
Email
Lasers
Electrical grids
Superhighways
Nitrogen based fertilizers
Pesticides/herbicides
And some more I've forgotten
Can you rank these? Not meaningfully. I suppose you could study economic impact but that's going to be very imprecise and is only one measure of disruption. If I had to vote for just one it would probably be either the transistor or birth control. But it really doesn't matter.