You don't, but that's not the problem. What happens if her husband decides to buy a ticket anyway? Are they going to throw him in jail? That's my problem here.
And that's fine; that's no different from being a family member of a McDonald's employee and winning their monopoly promotion or whatever. McD's will simply refuse to pay out. They have that right.
That's not what's being discussed here. The prior poster asserted that it was **illegal** for family members to play. That means you go to jail! That's unconstitutional IMO. (Or, the poster was incorrect about it being illegal.)
What is McDonald's or a radio station going to do if a family member ignores this and plays anyway? Simple: they do nothing unless they win. Then if they do win, the company simply rejects them, and moves to the runner-up. The radio station or McDonald's do NOT have the power to throw someone in jail for ignoring their rule. These are not laws, they're rules.
According to the prior poster, this thing about the lottery is a *law*; he specifically said it was *illegal* for family members to play. That sounds like unconstitutional BS to me. (Remember, the lotteries are actually run under the auspices of the state governments.) Private companies can make up whatever rules they want for the most part, but their enforcement of them is limited mainly to simply refusing to award payouts (or give discounts to etc.) people who they deem disqualified. Things are different for governments; the idea that someone could go to *jail* because they decided to buy a lottery card is quite repugnant.
I would say that the Merchant ships are less structured than the US Navy is. I would also say that the Merchant ships have less training than the US Navy does.
I thought this quote from the last link was quite important:
The over 100 Facebook and forum comments from 100% civilian mariners, however, most agreed that they have a low degree of confidence predicting the response and/or communicating with US Navy warships in busy shipping lanes.
Excelsia above (a Royal Canadian Navy officer) says you're a bunch of amateurs, and considering that you've wrecked 4 ships now just this year alone seems to prove it.
Also, why would you give distances in nm when you're close enough to be using yards or meters?
And why don't you use AIS?? You didn't address that point did you?
I'd love to see you refute the gCaptain article.
Here's another good article from gCaptain that discusses some of the ways the US Navy fails to produce decent captains, and here's yet another that discusses how basic seamanship simply isn't a focus in the US Navy training programs (instead, officers brag about their lack of sleep!! WTF!). It sure looks to me like the US Navy has no business piloting their own ships, and should instead outsource that job to *real* captains who are actually competent to do the job. You've proven now, over and over, that you aren't.
Err, isn't this about giving GAMERS a helping hand, or have you forgotten about them , you know, the people who ultimately pay your wages?
Why should they give two shits about the gamers? The gamers are all happy to line up to pay $$$ for these systems and games, no matter how badly they're treated.
Indeed, whoever is so STUPID as to give SONY their money deserves all their grief. Stop supporting companies that have no respect for you or the law, ie: SONY.
Agreed. That also goes for Microsoft. Don't give money to either one of them. They're both equally bad; arguing over which is worse is like arguing Hitler vs. Stalin.
What's "immediate family'? Are adult children included? How did they waive their right to play? They're not benefiting from the compensation.
It's simple: if you want to play the lottery, don't work for the lottery commission.
This is fine logic for the employee. For other adults, not so much. If my nearly elderly mother got a job with the lottery compensation tomorrow, why would that preclude me from buying a lottery ticket? I had nothing to do with that choice of hers. And the lottery isn't a private company anyway, it's run by the state government, so I don't buy the idea that they can choose who's allowed to play. Remember also, the previous poster said it was **illegal** for family members to play, which is far beyond a private business refusing to do business with particular people.
The problem with INTEGRITY is that there's almost no one left who still knows how to work with it. It's only used in the military anyway, and even there it's been dying out. You can't use people skilled in Linux to work with it, because companies only want to hire people who already are experts at something, so the talent pool is now nearly elderly and retiring. All the young engineers are familiar with Linux so that's what ends up getting used even if it isn't the greatest choice.
On top of all that, the US Navy does all kinds of dumb stuff no one else does. First, they use English units for stuff, so when they're communicating with other ships, they'll give them distances in yards instead of meters. They also give bearings in a completely different way: absolute instead of relative like everyone else. Also, merchant ships have something called AIS so they can see where other ships are. The Navy routinely turns theirs off so people can't see where their ships are on ship-tracking websites. Merchant ships have a small crew and short chain of command, and captains can just call each other on the radio and discuss their intentions, but the Navy has a long chain of command between the captain and the helmsman and the captain never talks to other captains on the radio. Finally, merchant captains mainly just worry about navigation and such, and don't have to deal with stuff like discipline problems for a crew of hundreds. Navy captains don't have that much time actually running a ship, and frequently do it for a short time before being shuffled off to desk duty somewhere.
Basically, the US Navy's entire structure for managing a ship is optimized for war-fighting with young recruits, and not at all for navigating a ship in crowded channels with merchant vessels. And the people who become merchant captains are people who have sea-going and captaining a ship in their blood and dedicate their lives to it. The people who become US Navy captains are there because being a military officer is a stable career and it's a stepping stone to a cushy desk job as an admiral or at least a cushy retirement package after only 20 years in the service.
There was a really good opinion piece about this recently by a some captain I think, but I can't seem to find it now.
2) In Pennsylvania, it is illegal for employees of the Lottery Commission, and their immediate families, to play any lottery games, even the small(er) daily drawings and scratch off tickets.
That sounds like an unconstitutional law there. Prohibiting an employee is one thing, but prohibiting other people, especially adults, is quite another. Does that include parents or adult children? It wasn't their choice for the employee to take that job, and has no bearing on them.
You're not going to get that law in the US, so you might as well just get used to it, and realize that any time you buy something internet-connected that uses software that updates over the internet, they can change anything they want at any time, and you have no recourse. The only answer is top stop buying this crap. If you already bought one, consider it an expensive lesson-learned.
These speakers were internet-connected devices before they were purchased. As the parent said, that's a show-stopper. Don't buy this crap and you won't have this problem.
So you spent tens of thousands of dollars on a product based on its marketing claims, and were disappointed when they didn't deliver.
I hope this is a good lesson to you and others about purchasing products in America. Marketing claims are just that: claims, and companies are not required to live up to those claims. There's no law that will punish a company if they outright lie to you. If you feel you've been wronged, your redress is that you can sue, but that's not going to be cheap. Hiring an attorney on retainer will cost you thousands of dollars, and their time is worth hundreds of dollars per hour. The prudent course of action is to stick to less-expensive mass-market stuff where you can go by numerous owner reviews to guide your purchase decision. Leave the risky high-end purchases to rich people who don't care too much if a $100k purchase doesn't live up to its claims, or to people in other countries where they have laws protecting them.
While Tesla does not provide any information to allow visualizing the size of the battery pack in the vehicle, the best evidence presented is that the car contains an 80.7 kWh battery pack, with only 77 kWh usable.
Actually for this point, I thought that Tesla intentionally limited how much you could use out of the pack, because Lithium-ion cells suffer significant degradation when they're completely run down. So just like a hard drive will advertise a certain capacity, but after formatting will only have a certain percentage of that capacity available for your files, the same goes here.
Also, for your claims 3 and 4, close-to-economy level Mazdas now have speed limit sign recognition (not all traffic signs; it sees the speed limit signs and shows you on the nav screen), and ones with radar cruise control will come to a full stop if you're using cruise. The newest ones will also come to a full stop (regardless of cruise) if you're driving 49mph or less and a collision is imminent (called "smart city braking"; pre-'17 models could only do this at 19mph or less using Lidar; note this option is only available on some trim levels). I'm sure a lots of other inexpensive mass-market cars now have this stuff as standard or optional. So the lesson here is: don't be the first adopter. Let other people try out the initial versions and pay through the nose, and wait a bit until it filters down to the mid-level or lower.
Finally, for your claim 1, you have a lot of complaints about Autopilot and how it's basically not working the way *you* think it should (won't go over the speed limit on some roads, nags you to have your hands on the wheel and apply torque, disables if you're not obedient enough, and subsequent updates have made it even worse, etc.). This is a good lesson on why closed-source software is bad, and you shouldn't spend more money on it than you absolutely have to. It will not work the way you want, and you can't modify it to do so, and worse, these days, they can reduce or remove functionality with an automatic update. The best way to win this game is to not play at all, or stick with cheaper options so you don't feel quite so shafted when this happens to you. (i.e., If you spend $10 for something with closed-source software and it sucks, you're only out $10, and if it at least does some of what you want, it's not that bad. But if you spend $100k for something with closed-source software and it sucks, now you're really mad unless you're a billionaire because that's a very large amount of money to you and for such a princely sum you expected all your expectations to be met and then some.)
So I guess in summary, stick with cheap stuff so you don't get mad when it doesn't live up to your expectations, plus you can more easily resell it.
The negative publicity will probably result in more sales.
While this won't fly legally in Europe, it will fly here in the US, and since Americans are more than happy to buy devices that require constant cloud connectivity to work, and in fact are quite happy to purchase products that spy on them, this is a case where the laws are a good reflection of the attitudes of society.
You misunderstand. These are still, and will remain "smart TVs". While they may not have many apps that you find really useful, they will continue to spy on you using the built-in camera and microphone and report detailed information about you to the company, and whoever that company chooses to share the info with. If you're OK with that, more power to you, but I suspect you might not be.
It's very simple when you think about this from a cost/benefit point-of-view. These apps like Facebook etc. cost the company money to produce or acquire, and to maintain on all the deployed devices, so they need to make up for that and more by increasing sales. The company has decided apparently that some of these apps are costing more than they're worth in increased sales, so they've axed them. However, spying on users has very low cost (mainly just the added hardware, which is really cheap these days, and hardware is a one-time cost that doesn't require continual support), and some amount of profit from selling the data, so it'd be stupid to eliminate that feature. There is the element of lost sales, but so few Americans actually care about being spied on that it's negligible.
We should send a message to potential future criminals that if they hijack, kidnap and threaten, then we won't stop hunting them down.
Ever? Witnesses say the man was in his mid-40s. Should we keep hunting him down after the case is 60 years old (another 14 years from now)? But that time, he'll be well over 100 years old. How about when the case is 80 years old? By that time, he'll be around 125. At what point do you think we should give up "hunting him down" because there's no way he's still alive?
Most likely, he didn't even survive the hijacking, and either died during the parachuting from exposure, or shortly after on the ground since he jumped at night, during a rainstorm, over a dense forest, with no protective clothing. His body was probably eaten by animals. I like to think that he somehow made it anyway, but even if he did, he's probably over 90 years old now if he's still alive.
Do you want to keep trying to hunt down Jack the Ripper too? Maybe he's still alive! He'd be over 150 now though, but we should never stop, right?
He's still very much alive, and doesn't look nearly as old as he is. His current alias is "Tommy Wiseau", and is infamous for making a bad movie named "The Room" using the money he stole in the hijacking.
There's a big, big difference between changing an elf into a dwarf, and making a fat character less fat or even in-shape. They could easily have made Sam some in-shape short guy, or just some guy who's not very confident and sucks at fighting, and not many people would have noticed or complained. There's nothing about Sam that really requires him to be fat.
No, I never read the books. But I'm not sure how that's relevant anyway; we're talking about how fat people are portrayed in movies and TV. The source material coming from a book doesn't change that; it's not like they're bound to keep it the way it's written in the book version. I was just pointing out one exception I've seen recently in an extremely popular show.
You know, I usually don't care for the whole derision of "sensitive snowflake Millennials" that I read a lot on places like here, but in the case of Hacker News I think you might be onto something. You're absolutely right about it being one of the most thin-skinned communities out there. However, I will say that I've seen a lot of not-nice discussion there, directed to me when I posted but also to others, and the moderators happily allowed it: it entirely depended on what was being said and who was saying it. In other words, the moderation is not only tyrannical but also extremely biased. So if one of their long-time in-group people insults you, it's OK, but if you (as a newbie outsider) insults them back, it's a warning or a ban.
But most fat people, including me, just want to see fat people that are regular people. Who are the fat characters in...
Yeah, most of the time they're either comic relief, incompetent, evil, or stupid. However, I would like to point out Game of Thrones: Sam may not be much of a fighter, but he's a rather smart and very virtuous character, and best buds with the most attractive guy on the show (Lord Snow). And he killed a White Walker.
Instead, what if you had brought in a bikini babe calendar? That would be pretty hard to argue against, as it's directly comparable to the beefcake calendar.
but as I teen I thought stuff like Austin Powers was disgusting
He was *supposed* to be disgusting; he even intentionally had horribly ugly and crooked teeth. That was part of the comedy; they were poking fun at the James Bond franchise, and replacing suave and attractive Bond with a dorky guy with bad teeth (because British people are infamous for crooked teeth) and still having him beat the bad guys. They even had a scene in one of them discussing his bad teeth. It wasn't any kind of attempt at making people accept ugliness. Mike Myers wasn't the most attractive guy in 1997, but he looked a lot better than his Austin Powers character.
the pushback shows up in one-star ratings of likes of Amy Schmer movies and the all-girl Ghost Busters flop.
Maybe, maybe not. That movie can easily be argued to be a flop because it was so clearly obvious why it was done, and why it wasn't needed: the original GB movie was a wonderful classic, and didn't need a remake, and then they come along and replace the 4 nerdy men (well, 3 nerdy men and one normal guy) with 4 women. It didn't matter what the women looked like (and at least one of them was hot IIRC); it was so obvious that this the whole raison d'etre of this movie was to co-opt a successful classic and stick women into men's roles rather than make a genuinely good movie, and then on top of that the asshole director publicly said that anyone who didn't like the movie must be a sexist. The women could all have been models and it still would have bombed. Instead it wasn't even believable; a hottie playing an uber-nerd, a loud, fat black woman playing the loud, fat black woman stereotype, etc.
I know a lot of luggage is lost because there's a store in Alabama that sells stuff from lost airline luggage that couldn't be returned to the owner.
However I've been on way more than 10 flights too, and have never lost anything, or even had it delayed. I've known other people who've had it delayed (sometimes with the airline sending a courier to deliver it to them personally), and I knew one guy who actually had it stolen in the ticketing area before he checked it in.
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You don't, but that's not the problem. What happens if her husband decides to buy a ticket anyway? Are they going to throw him in jail? That's my problem here.
And that's fine; that's no different from being a family member of a McDonald's employee and winning their monopoly promotion or whatever. McD's will simply refuse to pay out. They have that right.
That's not what's being discussed here. The prior poster asserted that it was **illegal** for family members to play. That means you go to jail! That's unconstitutional IMO. (Or, the poster was incorrect about it being illegal.)
I don't buy it, sorry.
What is McDonald's or a radio station going to do if a family member ignores this and plays anyway? Simple: they do nothing unless they win. Then if they do win, the company simply rejects them, and moves to the runner-up. The radio station or McDonald's do NOT have the power to throw someone in jail for ignoring their rule. These are not laws, they're rules.
According to the prior poster, this thing about the lottery is a *law*; he specifically said it was *illegal* for family members to play. That sounds like unconstitutional BS to me. (Remember, the lotteries are actually run under the auspices of the state governments.) Private companies can make up whatever rules they want for the most part, but their enforcement of them is limited mainly to simply refusing to award payouts (or give discounts to etc.) people who they deem disqualified. Things are different for governments; the idea that someone could go to *jail* because they decided to buy a lottery card is quite repugnant.
First off, do you have any clue how to properly quote? It doesn't look like it. Your message is very hard to read. Anyway...
Because if you had been, you would realize that every single ship in the world, operates their ships the same way the Navy does.
This Canadian Navy officer disagrees:
https://it.slashdot.org/commen...
I would say that the Merchant ships are less structured than the US Navy is. I would also say that the Merchant ships have less training than the US Navy does.
These guys both disagree:
http://gcaptain.com/us-navy-lo...
http://gcaptain.com/separate-e...
Navy officers are generalists rather than specialists, so all that extra training doesn't help much with basic seamanship.
Finally, here's that article I was looking for, written by an actual captain:
http://gcaptain.com/uss-fitzge...
plus his follow-up article:
http://gcaptain.com/uss-fitzge...
I thought this quote from the last link was quite important:
Excelsia above (a Royal Canadian Navy officer) says you're a bunch of amateurs, and considering that you've wrecked 4 ships now just this year alone seems to prove it.
Also, why would you give distances in nm when you're close enough to be using yards or meters?
And why don't you use AIS?? You didn't address that point did you?
I'd love to see you refute the gCaptain article.
Here's another good article from gCaptain that discusses some of the ways the US Navy fails to produce decent captains, and here's yet another that discusses how basic seamanship simply isn't a focus in the US Navy training programs (instead, officers brag about their lack of sleep!! WTF!). It sure looks to me like the US Navy has no business piloting their own ships, and should instead outsource that job to *real* captains who are actually competent to do the job. You've proven now, over and over, that you aren't.
Err, isn't this about giving GAMERS a helping hand, or have you forgotten about them , you know, the people who ultimately pay your wages?
Why should they give two shits about the gamers? The gamers are all happy to line up to pay $$$ for these systems and games, no matter how badly they're treated.
Indeed, whoever is so STUPID as to give SONY their money deserves all their grief. Stop supporting companies that have no respect for you or the law, ie: SONY.
Agreed. That also goes for Microsoft. Don't give money to either one of them. They're both equally bad; arguing over which is worse is like arguing Hitler vs. Stalin.
What's "immediate family'? Are adult children included? How did they waive their right to play? They're not benefiting from the compensation.
It's simple: if you want to play the lottery, don't work for the lottery commission.
This is fine logic for the employee. For other adults, not so much. If my nearly elderly mother got a job with the lottery compensation tomorrow, why would that preclude me from buying a lottery ticket? I had nothing to do with that choice of hers. And the lottery isn't a private company anyway, it's run by the state government, so I don't buy the idea that they can choose who's allowed to play. Remember also, the previous poster said it was **illegal** for family members to play, which is far beyond a private business refusing to do business with particular people.
The problem with INTEGRITY is that there's almost no one left who still knows how to work with it. It's only used in the military anyway, and even there it's been dying out. You can't use people skilled in Linux to work with it, because companies only want to hire people who already are experts at something, so the talent pool is now nearly elderly and retiring. All the young engineers are familiar with Linux so that's what ends up getting used even if it isn't the greatest choice.
On top of all that, the US Navy does all kinds of dumb stuff no one else does. First, they use English units for stuff, so when they're communicating with other ships, they'll give them distances in yards instead of meters. They also give bearings in a completely different way: absolute instead of relative like everyone else. Also, merchant ships have something called AIS so they can see where other ships are. The Navy routinely turns theirs off so people can't see where their ships are on ship-tracking websites. Merchant ships have a small crew and short chain of command, and captains can just call each other on the radio and discuss their intentions, but the Navy has a long chain of command between the captain and the helmsman and the captain never talks to other captains on the radio. Finally, merchant captains mainly just worry about navigation and such, and don't have to deal with stuff like discipline problems for a crew of hundreds. Navy captains don't have that much time actually running a ship, and frequently do it for a short time before being shuffled off to desk duty somewhere.
Basically, the US Navy's entire structure for managing a ship is optimized for war-fighting with young recruits, and not at all for navigating a ship in crowded channels with merchant vessels. And the people who become merchant captains are people who have sea-going and captaining a ship in their blood and dedicate their lives to it. The people who become US Navy captains are there because being a military officer is a stable career and it's a stepping stone to a cushy desk job as an admiral or at least a cushy retirement package after only 20 years in the service.
There was a really good opinion piece about this recently by a some captain I think, but I can't seem to find it now.
2) In Pennsylvania, it is illegal for employees of the Lottery Commission, and their immediate families, to play any lottery games, even the small(er) daily drawings and scratch off tickets.
That sounds like an unconstitutional law there. Prohibiting an employee is one thing, but prohibiting other people, especially adults, is quite another. Does that include parents or adult children? It wasn't their choice for the employee to take that job, and has no bearing on them.
You're not going to get that law in the US, so you might as well just get used to it, and realize that any time you buy something internet-connected that uses software that updates over the internet, they can change anything they want at any time, and you have no recourse. The only answer is top stop buying this crap. If you already bought one, consider it an expensive lesson-learned.
These speakers were internet-connected devices before they were purchased. As the parent said, that's a show-stopper. Don't buy this crap and you won't have this problem.
So you spent tens of thousands of dollars on a product based on its marketing claims, and were disappointed when they didn't deliver.
I hope this is a good lesson to you and others about purchasing products in America. Marketing claims are just that: claims, and companies are not required to live up to those claims. There's no law that will punish a company if they outright lie to you. If you feel you've been wronged, your redress is that you can sue, but that's not going to be cheap. Hiring an attorney on retainer will cost you thousands of dollars, and their time is worth hundreds of dollars per hour. The prudent course of action is to stick to less-expensive mass-market stuff where you can go by numerous owner reviews to guide your purchase decision. Leave the risky high-end purchases to rich people who don't care too much if a $100k purchase doesn't live up to its claims, or to people in other countries where they have laws protecting them.
While Tesla does not provide any information to allow visualizing the size of the battery pack in the vehicle, the best evidence presented is that the car contains an 80.7 kWh battery pack, with only 77 kWh usable.
Actually for this point, I thought that Tesla intentionally limited how much you could use out of the pack, because Lithium-ion cells suffer significant degradation when they're completely run down. So just like a hard drive will advertise a certain capacity, but after formatting will only have a certain percentage of that capacity available for your files, the same goes here.
Also, for your claims 3 and 4, close-to-economy level Mazdas now have speed limit sign recognition (not all traffic signs; it sees the speed limit signs and shows you on the nav screen), and ones with radar cruise control will come to a full stop if you're using cruise. The newest ones will also come to a full stop (regardless of cruise) if you're driving 49mph or less and a collision is imminent (called "smart city braking"; pre-'17 models could only do this at 19mph or less using Lidar; note this option is only available on some trim levels). I'm sure a lots of other inexpensive mass-market cars now have this stuff as standard or optional. So the lesson here is: don't be the first adopter. Let other people try out the initial versions and pay through the nose, and wait a bit until it filters down to the mid-level or lower.
Finally, for your claim 1, you have a lot of complaints about Autopilot and how it's basically not working the way *you* think it should (won't go over the speed limit on some roads, nags you to have your hands on the wheel and apply torque, disables if you're not obedient enough, and subsequent updates have made it even worse, etc.). This is a good lesson on why closed-source software is bad, and you shouldn't spend more money on it than you absolutely have to. It will not work the way you want, and you can't modify it to do so, and worse, these days, they can reduce or remove functionality with an automatic update. The best way to win this game is to not play at all, or stick with cheaper options so you don't feel quite so shafted when this happens to you. (i.e., If you spend $10 for something with closed-source software and it sucks, you're only out $10, and if it at least does some of what you want, it's not that bad. But if you spend $100k for something with closed-source software and it sucks, now you're really mad unless you're a billionaire because that's a very large amount of money to you and for such a princely sum you expected all your expectations to be met and then some.)
So I guess in summary, stick with cheap stuff so you don't get mad when it doesn't live up to your expectations, plus you can more easily resell it.
The negative publicity will probably result in more sales.
While this won't fly legally in Europe, it will fly here in the US, and since Americans are more than happy to buy devices that require constant cloud connectivity to work, and in fact are quite happy to purchase products that spy on them, this is a case where the laws are a good reflection of the attitudes of society.
Sounds good to me - where can I buy one?
You misunderstand. These are still, and will remain "smart TVs". While they may not have many apps that you find really useful, they will continue to spy on you using the built-in camera and microphone and report detailed information about you to the company, and whoever that company chooses to share the info with. If you're OK with that, more power to you, but I suspect you might not be.
It's very simple when you think about this from a cost/benefit point-of-view. These apps like Facebook etc. cost the company money to produce or acquire, and to maintain on all the deployed devices, so they need to make up for that and more by increasing sales. The company has decided apparently that some of these apps are costing more than they're worth in increased sales, so they've axed them. However, spying on users has very low cost (mainly just the added hardware, which is really cheap these days, and hardware is a one-time cost that doesn't require continual support), and some amount of profit from selling the data, so it'd be stupid to eliminate that feature. There is the element of lost sales, but so few Americans actually care about being spied on that it's negligible.
We should send a message to potential future criminals that if they hijack, kidnap and threaten, then we won't stop hunting them down.
Ever? Witnesses say the man was in his mid-40s. Should we keep hunting him down after the case is 60 years old (another 14 years from now)? But that time, he'll be well over 100 years old. How about when the case is 80 years old? By that time, he'll be around 125. At what point do you think we should give up "hunting him down" because there's no way he's still alive?
Most likely, he didn't even survive the hijacking, and either died during the parachuting from exposure, or shortly after on the ground since he jumped at night, during a rainstorm, over a dense forest, with no protective clothing. His body was probably eaten by animals. I like to think that he somehow made it anyway, but even if he did, he's probably over 90 years old now if he's still alive.
Do you want to keep trying to hunt down Jack the Ripper too? Maybe he's still alive! He'd be over 150 now though, but we should never stop, right?
He's still very much alive, and doesn't look nearly as old as he is. His current alias is "Tommy Wiseau", and is infamous for making a bad movie named "The Room" using the money he stole in the hijacking.
https://xkcd.com/1400/
There's a big, big difference between changing an elf into a dwarf, and making a fat character less fat or even in-shape. They could easily have made Sam some in-shape short guy, or just some guy who's not very confident and sucks at fighting, and not many people would have noticed or complained. There's nothing about Sam that really requires him to be fat.
No, I never read the books. But I'm not sure how that's relevant anyway; we're talking about how fat people are portrayed in movies and TV. The source material coming from a book doesn't change that; it's not like they're bound to keep it the way it's written in the book version. I was just pointing out one exception I've seen recently in an extremely popular show.
You know, I usually don't care for the whole derision of "sensitive snowflake Millennials" that I read a lot on places like here, but in the case of Hacker News I think you might be onto something. You're absolutely right about it being one of the most thin-skinned communities out there. However, I will say that I've seen a lot of not-nice discussion there, directed to me when I posted but also to others, and the moderators happily allowed it: it entirely depended on what was being said and who was saying it. In other words, the moderation is not only tyrannical but also extremely biased. So if one of their long-time in-group people insults you, it's OK, but if you (as a newbie outsider) insults them back, it's a warning or a ban.
But most fat people, including me, just want to see fat people that are regular people. Who are the fat characters in...
Yeah, most of the time they're either comic relief, incompetent, evil, or stupid. However, I would like to point out Game of Thrones: Sam may not be much of a fighter, but he's a rather smart and very virtuous character, and best buds with the most attractive guy on the show (Lord Snow). And he killed a White Walker.
That seems a bit rude and uncalled for.
Instead, what if you had brought in a bikini babe calendar? That would be pretty hard to argue against, as it's directly comparable to the beefcake calendar.
but as I teen I thought stuff like Austin Powers was disgusting
He was *supposed* to be disgusting; he even intentionally had horribly ugly and crooked teeth. That was part of the comedy; they were poking fun at the James Bond franchise, and replacing suave and attractive Bond with a dorky guy with bad teeth (because British people are infamous for crooked teeth) and still having him beat the bad guys. They even had a scene in one of them discussing his bad teeth. It wasn't any kind of attempt at making people accept ugliness. Mike Myers wasn't the most attractive guy in 1997, but he looked a lot better than his Austin Powers character.
the pushback shows up in one-star ratings of likes of Amy Schmer movies and the all-girl Ghost Busters flop.
Maybe, maybe not. That movie can easily be argued to be a flop because it was so clearly obvious why it was done, and why it wasn't needed: the original GB movie was a wonderful classic, and didn't need a remake, and then they come along and replace the 4 nerdy men (well, 3 nerdy men and one normal guy) with 4 women. It didn't matter what the women looked like (and at least one of them was hot IIRC); it was so obvious that this the whole raison d'etre of this movie was to co-opt a successful classic and stick women into men's roles rather than make a genuinely good movie, and then on top of that the asshole director publicly said that anyone who didn't like the movie must be a sexist. The women could all have been models and it still would have bombed. Instead it wasn't even believable; a hottie playing an uber-nerd, a loud, fat black woman playing the loud, fat black woman stereotype, etc.
I know a lot of luggage is lost because there's a store in Alabama that sells stuff from lost airline luggage that couldn't be returned to the owner.
However I've been on way more than 10 flights too, and have never lost anything, or even had it delayed. I've known other people who've had it delayed (sometimes with the airline sending a courier to deliver it to them personally), and I knew one guy who actually had it stolen in the ticketing area before he checked it in.