Speaking as someone who has indeed read the article and tried the demo, I can say that it makes a pretense of doing things you claim, but does them exceptionally poorly.
Text selection does not obey any of the standard text selection behaviours for my platform:
Selected text cannot be dragged.
Triple-clicking does not select and entire line.
The highlight color is one chosen by the author, not my local standard.
That selection highlight is not antialiased, unlike all other text.
Shift-clicking for fill selection does not work.
Command-clicking for discontinuous selection does not work.
Clicking on real text while faux-text is selected does not de-"select" the faux text, it results in them both being selected, once in a real local manner and once in the faux-selection manner. What happens if I hit "copy" now?
Options in the contextual menu are the ones that the page author has chosen to put there, which are quite unrelated to the ones that appear normally in my browser.
The fundamental problem here is that the technology's author has decided that replacing real text is acceptable as long as he manually recreates all the features he expects real text to have. This is, I'm afraid, painfully naive; there's no way for him to know and account for all the ways in which standard text behaves on my platform, and it's unacceptable for him to decide that his content alone gets to behave inconsistently with everything else in my environment.
It's also a lot of wasted work. If you want services like flexible selection, good antialiasing, relevant contextual menus, and inline spellchecking, just provide plain, standard text. My OS will do the rest from there or it won't, and it's none of your concern. These services are not the responsibility of content providers.
The best use of AJAX, that I see, is with improving user interactivity with a web application. Web applications are becoming more and more of a need, and I think this is where AJAX is gaining the most ground.
Hooray for begging the question.
I, on the other hand, find the whole notion of "web application" to be a malformed one. Any technology that exists solely to serve this anti-goal can only be of negative utility.
Users don't like having to wait for a full page load to make a small request within an application. There is complaint about the time it takes. Granted, this is largely a perception thing, but it is the reality of users.
Know what makes those page loads take so long? Javascript, flash, superfluous tables, and all the rest of the crap layered on by the same designers who claim that they need such heavyweight monstrosities to improve responsiveness. Try just putting together simple pages in pure, flexible html some time, and be amazed at just how quickly they load and render.
A best practice is to take length articles and break them up into multiple pages.
Bahahah. This is a "best practice" only for site maintainers who want more pages on which to display more ads. It is incredibly unhelpful for everyone else, most notably the reader.
Old browsers are likely unpatched browsers. With the vulnerabilities and security issues today, compatibility with AJAX is the least of their problems. Upgrade!
"Non-ajax browsers" does not mean the same thing as "old browsers." I'm posting this from the currrent version of w3m, which does not and never will support ecmascript in any form.
Which is good, because it saves me the trouble of disabling it. Which is another place at which your "old browsers" assumption falls down: many of us explicitly disable nonsense like ecmascript in any browser we use, however current. I have never yet seen anything done with ecmascript that I wanted to have happen to my browser, so I find that I'm vastly better off without it.
Mobile browsers have problems with MOST page content. Websites are designed for a minimum of 800x600 these days, if not 1024 wide. Websites still need to provide special pages to serve up content to mobile devices anyway.
Oh dear fuck no. "This web page designed for 800x600!" wasn't cool in 1995, and it's not cool now. The whole bloody point of the Web, the whole thing that made it successful in the first place, was the design goal of delivering content in a presentation-flexible manner. If you write markup that breaks in the presence of something so mundane as a window size you didn't expect, then you have failed.
Tossing about meaningless phrases like "information complexity has evolved" do not give you an excuse to ignore usability standards that are every bit as valid today as they were fifteen years ago.
Most seasons of recent television on DVD cost somewhere around $40-$50 for about 22 episodes. I'm having a hard time finding the "much cheaper" there.
And that of course requires me to wait a year after the television in question, buy the DVDs, store the DVDs, and haul out the correct DVD any time I want to show a particular episode. Which sounds like considerably more of a pain in the ass than clicking a couple of times to acquire content speedily or to then play it later.
So explain to me again how "somewhat cheaper and notably more convenient" translates into "suckers"?
And wasn't it Gygax himself who once said that the use for dice was to make noise behind the DM's screen?:)
I've heard stories of a DM who carried among his dice a very large ball bearing. He referred to it as a d1.
Whenever a player would ask to do something clearly impossible, he would solemnly glance down, roll the d1--which made a very recognizable sound--look back up at them, and deadpan, "you failed."
If you haven't, read Greg Egan's Permutation City. It's a great work, and discusses exactly this.
Complete "simulation" of a brain makes cognitive process not only possible, but indeed inevitable. Really, if you do a sufficiently thorough job of it, it isn't a simulation, it's a reimplementation.
Huh, I hadn't been familiar with that phrase. It does seem to be far from universal; even the link you provided includes pages describing it as referring to "Jews or Freemasons," which is a bit of a spectrum.
So I guess I hope that you're wrong about putko's meaning. But if you're right, I appreciate you calling him on it.
Really? Maybe it's because shadowrun was the first game I ever played or ran, but that hasn't been my experience.
That especially doesn't seem to come up in light of that fact that "archetypes" are just vague suggestions for areas of specialization that characters might--or might not--have. The basic rules of skills, attributes, combat, magic, hacking, driving, etc are not hugely complex, and are consistent across all characters that may use them.
This seems much simpler than a d&d-style system with "classes" that have pages of arbitrary and inconsistent abilities. ("Saving throws are made with these values plus these attribute modifiers. Oh, but paladins also get their charisma modifier to all their throws, in addition to their other modifiers. Why? They just do.")
After being spoiled by shadowrun, I can't help by see any game that involves classes or levels as being hopelessly broken.
Re:Sensationalist Journalism?
on
A Flu Pandemic?
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· Score: 1
Well, that just turns right the hell into a pointless semantic distinction right away, doesn't it?
(If they hadn't had AIDS, they wouldn't have died. Arguments can be made either way about whether that constitutes "killing" them, but it's a pretty silly discussion either way.)
What, pray tell, was this "correction" intended to add to the conversation?
Well, the usual reason is that the same density that makes New Jersey easier to cover also makes it easier to wire. So the problem of getting high-speed net access is pretty much solved there already.
Cotton Plant Arkansas, however, is just too much in the middle of nowhere to get effective wired data, so wireless really is the only choice.
I'd rather spend $200 on OSX for my workstation, than $200 for Windows anything -- especially if it worked properly.
But there's the problem: it costs far, far more than $200 per license to develop and maintain an operating system.
Apple's OS loses them money, but they subsidize this with profits from hardware sales. Microsoft's OS loses them money, but they subsidize this with profits from their application sales, mostly Office. (Think about the relative pricing of Windows and Office: $100-$200, and $400-$600. Even as bloated as it's become, do you seriously think it takes four times as much work to develop and maintain an office suite as an entire operating system?)
To run a business solely on OS sales, you'd need to charge something more like $1,000 per license. (And make sure that people actually pay that, rather than pirating it, which would be even more tempting at that price.) Unfortunately, Microsoft has leveraged their monopoly to fix the OS market price at around $200.
It's just not feasible in the current market to maintain a profitable company from desktop operating system sales. Microsoft has forced all competitors to adopt their same tactics: dump the OS, as a loss-leader to get people to buy your actually-profitable product. The history of companies that have attempted to survive on desktop OS sales alone is, you will note, not rife with success stories.
Indeed, in general, the car analogy is really very poor.
I make a point of ceasing to read any thread in which anyone uses cars as an analogy to talk about computers in any way. It's an awful habit, and it never, ever adds anything meaningful to the discussion.
(I happened to see this beacon of sense in your comment as I was skimming downward looking for the next thread.)
When I'm king of the world, right after Godwin's Law will come Onan's Law, which holds similar consequences for car analogies as for nazi analogies. (Also, there will be more donuts.)
Mark this a flamebait--every time I criticize darlin' Apple it happens.
Well, if this post is representative, I'd say that might have something to do with you randomly making shit up.
Batteries exploding, products cutting users? Where are you getting this stuff? The closest I can think of to any Apple product matching either of those descriptions was the Powerbook 5300, which had a problem with batteries overheating. That was... ten years ago now, a single product within the span of the company's twenty-five years, and was recalled and replaced at the time. I have a pretty hard time imagining holding that seriously against the company, especially a decade later.
Tie up the industry? Sure do. Tell me how I can legally run Mac 68K
software. I need a bootleg ROM. Bootleg because the machines I *can* get a
ROM from are getting scarce. Oh, I can download the OS for sure, but still
can't use it to run the old software.
So Apple sold you the machines at the time, and now even allows you to download the OS for free and you still complain that they... what, don't continue manufacturing and selling 68k machines for both people in the world who still want them? Or do you even think selling them would be a crime, and they should be giving you free hardware as well?
I honestly can't imagine what it is you think that Apple should be doing with 68k machines. Hardware becomes obsolete, and eventually the manufacturers move on and stop making it. This is not a terribly troubling situation, and certainly not one unique to Apple.
Microsoft software is also (arguably) superior. At least the server isn't
dog slow, and a full software stack is available from a single vendor.
I guess I don't know what "a full software stack" means, and I certainly don't know why getting it from a single vendor would be an important issue.
In short: daring people to mod you flamebait doesn't make your post not flamebait.
A program could be designed that would help you, but that's an expected and encouraged portion of the game design.
A mathematician, physicist, and engineer are asked to fence in a flock of sheep using the smallest amount of fencing possible.
The engineer takes out a roll of fencing, and constructs a circle that just barely encompasses the space in which the sheep are currently grazing, and proudly declares that a circle has the lowest ratio of perimeter to area.
The physicist sneers, and approaches the now-fenced flock. He tightens the fence circle, first eliminating all open space around the sheep in which they can move or graze, and finally squishing them into a dense mutton cylinder. This manages to reduce the needed fencing by 85%.
The mathematician pulls out three feet of fence, plants it in a small circle around himself, and declares, "I define myself to be on the outside."
In other words... it sounds as if you have "made cheating impossible" simply by defining the behaviour that everyone else finds to objectionable as not cheating. That's an interesting exercise, but it seems very disingenous to describe it as solving the fundamental problem.
I'm quite a fan of Apple and osx, and filled with loathing for Microsoft and Windows, but I think it's fair to admit that this is an area in which Apple has been guilty of exactly the type of behaviour about which the grandparent was concerned.
Yes, Apple happens to have never updated iTunes as part of a system software package. But they regularly update Safari, Mail, Terminal, and the like without them being separately-selectable packages. Indeed, the very update we're discussing alters Mail and Safari.
here is probably the easiest way, since I don't know if you're using Apple's Finder or not. Path Finder (which I use instead of Apple's Finder) allows you to look at the contents of a package or app, which would be easier for this edit if you want to use the GUI all the way.
Actually, the stock Finder is happy to give you access to the contents of bundles as well. Right-click on any bundle, and the contextual menu will include "Show Package Contents".
Re:What will it be for early downloaders...
on
Mac OS X 10.4.3 Released
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· Score: 3, Informative
Unfortunately there are more than a few stories about OS X updates that broke peoples machines around the internet.
I actually think that "few" is a pretty good characterization of the number of complaints I've heard about machines broken by osx updates. Not "none", but "few" seems fair. (Especially complaints that are consistent across multiple people, rather than just correlation-without-causation instances of that reboot just being the time that somebody's hard drive or power supply didn't come back up and so on.)
The only two that I remember are a version of--I think--10.2.8 that broke ethernet interfaces on one non-current model of powermac, and a recent 10.4 update that broke fat applications (which mostly don't exist yet). I may very well be forgetting a couple, but twoish instances of very limited breakage in the span of every osx update ever released does strike me as "few".
To directly answer your query, I've never personally had an OS X update go bad on me, but a data set of one is no data set at all.
Certainly true. Unfortunately, the more common data set is "all the people that had problems and complained", which of course isn't any more useful for predicting failure rates.
So while yes, there have been complaints in the past, my best judgement still leads me to happily installing updates as soon as they're available, rather than waiting for other people to guinea pig them. Neither I nor anyone I know directly have had any cause to regret this yet.
I guess this puts me with the grandparent, sans jest.
It's all about convenience and immediacy of gratification.
Most obviously, you can buy each episode through the itvs the day after it first airs--as opposed to the year after on dvd.
But equally importantly, buying things on dvd requires me to either physically travel to a store just to do so, or to order it and wait days or weeks for it to be delivered. Neither of those allows me to realize that I have a bit of free time, and have some new television in front of me in fifteen effort-free minutes.
And lastly, if I buy dvds, I then have to putz around with physical discs: I want to watch to show someone the Buffy episode that I know is titled "Hush". So I have to dig out the box of dvds, open up the ginormous packaging, pull out the booklet in the back, and look through it to figure out which disc that's on, then put that in, and remember to take it out and put it away later. That's a whole lot more of a pain in the ass than just typing "open video/television/buffy/*hush*".
I have a pretty hard time taking seriously the claims of a company that appears to consider the POWER and PowerPC chips interchangeable. Yes, they are related, but they're pretty substanially different beasts--especially when it comes to power consumption. I seem to recall that current POWER units consume over a kilowatt each. Yes, really.
1. This is an opt-OUT program. Fundamentally, this is flawed. I mean even webpage search engines are opt-in. Your website doesn't get indexed unless you submit it, yet Google are using the webpage parallel as an example of why they should be allowed to proceed with the Print program.
I'm afraid that's simply incorrect. Every search engine of which I've ever heard will spider and index everything it can find from any links anywhere. You can opt out by way of robots.txt. The notion of web site owners needing to explicitly "submit" every one of the billions of sites in existence is somewhat absurd, and would certainly destroy most of the utility of search engines.
3. The real reason that publishers have to pursue this, even if it is ascertained that the program IS legal, is that copyright can be reneged if you are not seen to be defending your rights. It sets a precedent.
I'm not familiar with Australian copyright law, but this is at least not true in the US. Something similar is true for trademarks, but that's one of many ways in which those are handled differently from copyright.
How much more generic than "data in neutral form" can you get?
If the writeup is accurate (a big supposition), this is pretty absurd. I'm amused by the very notion of patenting doing things not in any particular way.
If such patents are held to be enforcable you americans really need to start shooting the judiciary to help them get a sense of priorities sorted.
I have always held that the second ammendment has been broadly misunderstood: its goal was to allow people to overturn the government as necessary, not shoot burglars in their homes. Thus, using a gun on a criminal should still be classed as vigilanteism and a crime itself, but shooting any government official or law enforcement officer should be a constitutionally-protected right.
Re:The show will need local humor appeal
on
Homer Becomes Omar
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· Score: 4, Funny
Look, I know we don't have a "Racist" moderation option, but it turns out that "Funny" is not a close enough approximation.
Or how about evangelical Christians? There are more of
those around than gays, so why not a character who's always talking about
Jesus? Because it would cause much of your audience to squirm, without
adding anything to the story (unless that was the story, and who wants
science fiction about hygiene or evangelicals?).
I think it's very possible for being openly religious to also be an interesting personality trait for a character to possess, that can add to the depth of character and complexity of story. In fact, I can think of a couple of examples of it being done in quite recent scifi:
Shephard Book from Firely/Serenity was both religious and evangelical. Other characters on the show had varying reactions to that, but it never descended to simply mocking his belief or overtly glorifying it. It wasn't a joke, it wasn't evil, it wasn't capital-G Good, it was just a trait that he had that informed his relationships with others.
Nightcrawler in the second X-Men movie was deeply Christian, though not especially evangelical. Again, the movie managed to depict this as an interesting, fairly positive thing--without doing so at the expense of other characters who were less (or less visibly) religious.
So to answer your question, yes, I do think this is a perfectly reasonable thing to include as a trait in a fictional character, and that it can add depth to the story, not just "make the audience squirm". I'm firmly an atheist myself, but that doesn't mean that I find any mention of religion squirm-inducing, or can't appreciate it being used to enhance the story.
That seems fair; if a main character really is depicted as having exactly one personality trait, that's a failure of writing, regardless of what that one trait is.
I rather got the impression that the complaint from the person to whom I responded went beyond that, though. Few people complain about "agenda" when their real issue is just that a character is too one-dimensional.
Okay, it's been about twenty years since I've seen any Doctor Who, so I can't comment specifically on this character, but...
How does having a bisexual character constitute an "agenda" or "uncomfortable sexual baggage"? Isn't that just sort of a fairly realistic inclusion of the fact that actual people are sometimes gay or bisexual? In much the same way that people are sometimes female, or tall, or left-handed, and thus characters in stories sometimes also have these traits?
Were you made similarly uncomfortable by Tom Baker's curly-haired-people agenda and baggage?
Slashdot Mirror
The one that I, the reader, have chosen.
Uniqueness is not a virtue in design.
Text selection does not obey any of the standard text selection behaviours for my platform:
Options in the contextual menu are the ones that the page author has chosen to put there, which are quite unrelated to the ones that appear normally in my browser.
The fundamental problem here is that the technology's author has decided that replacing real text is acceptable as long as he manually recreates all the features he expects real text to have. This is, I'm afraid, painfully naive; there's no way for him to know and account for all the ways in which standard text behaves on my platform, and it's unacceptable for him to decide that his content alone gets to behave inconsistently with everything else in my environment.
It's also a lot of wasted work. If you want services like flexible selection, good antialiasing, relevant contextual menus, and inline spellchecking, just provide plain, standard text. My OS will do the rest from there or it won't, and it's none of your concern. These services are not the responsibility of content providers.
I, on the other hand, find the whole notion of "web application" to be a malformed one. Any technology that exists solely to serve this anti-goal can only be of negative utility.
Know what makes those page loads take so long? Javascript, flash, superfluous tables, and all the rest of the crap layered on by the same designers who claim that they need such heavyweight monstrosities to improve responsiveness. Try just putting together simple pages in pure, flexible html some time, and be amazed at just how quickly they load and render. Bahahah. This is a "best practice" only for site maintainers who want more pages on which to display more ads. It is incredibly unhelpful for everyone else, most notably the reader. "Non-ajax browsers" does not mean the same thing as "old browsers." I'm posting this from the currrent version of w3m, which does not and never will support ecmascript in any form.Which is good, because it saves me the trouble of disabling it. Which is another place at which your "old browsers" assumption falls down: many of us explicitly disable nonsense like ecmascript in any browser we use, however current. I have never yet seen anything done with ecmascript that I wanted to have happen to my browser, so I find that I'm vastly better off without it.
Oh dear fuck no. "This web page designed for 800x600!" wasn't cool in 1995, and it's not cool now. The whole bloody point of the Web, the whole thing that made it successful in the first place, was the design goal of delivering content in a presentation-flexible manner. If you write markup that breaks in the presence of something so mundane as a window size you didn't expect, then you have failed.Tossing about meaningless phrases like "information complexity has evolved" do not give you an excuse to ignore usability standards that are every bit as valid today as they were fifteen years ago.
Most seasons of recent television on DVD cost somewhere around $40-$50 for about 22 episodes. I'm having a hard time finding the "much cheaper" there.
And that of course requires me to wait a year after the television in question, buy the DVDs, store the DVDs, and haul out the correct DVD any time I want to show a particular episode. Which sounds like considerably more of a pain in the ass than clicking a couple of times to acquire content speedily or to then play it later.
So explain to me again how "somewhat cheaper and notably more convenient" translates into "suckers"?
Whenever a player would ask to do something clearly impossible, he would solemnly glance down, roll the d1--which made a very recognizable sound--look back up at them, and deadpan, "you failed."
Complete "simulation" of a brain makes cognitive process not only possible, but indeed inevitable. Really, if you do a sufficiently thorough job of it, it isn't a simulation, it's a reimplementation.
Huh, I hadn't been familiar with that phrase. It does seem to be far from universal; even the link you provided includes pages describing it as referring to "Jews or Freemasons," which is a bit of a spectrum.
So I guess I hope that you're wrong about putko's meaning. But if you're right, I appreciate you calling him on it.
Putko, care to clarify?
Really? Maybe it's because shadowrun was the first game I ever played or ran, but that hasn't been my experience.
That especially doesn't seem to come up in light of that fact that "archetypes" are just vague suggestions for areas of specialization that characters might--or might not--have. The basic rules of skills, attributes, combat, magic, hacking, driving, etc are not hugely complex, and are consistent across all characters that may use them.
This seems much simpler than a d&d-style system with "classes" that have pages of arbitrary and inconsistent abilities. ("Saving throws are made with these values plus these attribute modifiers. Oh, but paladins also get their charisma modifier to all their throws, in addition to their other modifiers. Why? They just do.")
After being spoiled by shadowrun, I can't help by see any game that involves classes or levels as being hopelessly broken.
Well, that just turns right the hell into a pointless semantic distinction right away, doesn't it?
(If they hadn't had AIDS, they wouldn't have died. Arguments can be made either way about whether that constitutes "killing" them, but it's a pretty silly discussion either way.)
What, pray tell, was this "correction" intended to add to the conversation?
Well, the usual reason is that the same density that makes New Jersey easier to cover also makes it easier to wire. So the problem of getting high-speed net access is pretty much solved there already.
Cotton Plant Arkansas, however, is just too much in the middle of nowhere to get effective wired data, so wireless really is the only choice.
Apple's OS loses them money, but they subsidize this with profits from hardware sales. Microsoft's OS loses them money, but they subsidize this with profits from their application sales, mostly Office. (Think about the relative pricing of Windows and Office: $100-$200, and $400-$600. Even as bloated as it's become, do you seriously think it takes four times as much work to develop and maintain an office suite as an entire operating system?)
To run a business solely on OS sales, you'd need to charge something more like $1,000 per license. (And make sure that people actually pay that, rather than pirating it, which would be even more tempting at that price.) Unfortunately, Microsoft has leveraged their monopoly to fix the OS market price at around $200.
It's just not feasible in the current market to maintain a profitable company from desktop operating system sales. Microsoft has forced all competitors to adopt their same tactics: dump the OS, as a loss-leader to get people to buy your actually-profitable product. The history of companies that have attempted to survive on desktop OS sales alone is, you will note, not rife with success stories.
(I happened to see this beacon of sense in your comment as I was skimming downward looking for the next thread.)
When I'm king of the world, right after Godwin's Law will come Onan's Law, which holds similar consequences for car analogies as for nazi analogies. (Also, there will be more donuts.)
Batteries exploding, products cutting users? Where are you getting this stuff? The closest I can think of to any Apple product matching either of those descriptions was the Powerbook 5300, which had a problem with batteries overheating. That was... ten years ago now, a single product within the span of the company's twenty-five years, and was recalled and replaced at the time. I have a pretty hard time imagining holding that seriously against the company, especially a decade later.
So Apple sold you the machines at the time, and now even allows you to download the OS for free and you still complain that they... what, don't continue manufacturing and selling 68k machines for both people in the world who still want them? Or do you even think selling them would be a crime, and they should be giving you free hardware as well?I honestly can't imagine what it is you think that Apple should be doing with 68k machines. Hardware becomes obsolete, and eventually the manufacturers move on and stop making it. This is not a terribly troubling situation, and certainly not one unique to Apple.
I guess I don't know what "a full software stack" means, and I certainly don't know why getting it from a single vendor would be an important issue.In short: daring people to mod you flamebait doesn't make your post not flamebait.
The engineer takes out a roll of fencing, and constructs a circle that just barely encompasses the space in which the sheep are currently grazing, and proudly declares that a circle has the lowest ratio of perimeter to area.
The physicist sneers, and approaches the now-fenced flock. He tightens the fence circle, first eliminating all open space around the sheep in which they can move or graze, and finally squishing them into a dense mutton cylinder. This manages to reduce the needed fencing by 85%.
The mathematician pulls out three feet of fence, plants it in a small circle around himself, and declares, "I define myself to be on the outside."
In other words... it sounds as if you have "made cheating impossible" simply by defining the behaviour that everyone else finds to objectionable as not cheating. That's an interesting exercise, but it seems very disingenous to describe it as solving the fundamental problem.
Well...
I'm quite a fan of Apple and osx, and filled with loathing for Microsoft and Windows, but I think it's fair to admit that this is an area in which Apple has been guilty of exactly the type of behaviour about which the grandparent was concerned.
Yes, Apple happens to have never updated iTunes as part of a system software package. But they regularly update Safari, Mail, Terminal, and the like without them being separately-selectable packages. Indeed, the very update we're discussing alters Mail and Safari.
The only two that I remember are a version of--I think--10.2.8 that broke ethernet interfaces on one non-current model of powermac, and a recent 10.4 update that broke fat applications (which mostly don't exist yet). I may very well be forgetting a couple, but twoish instances of very limited breakage in the span of every osx update ever released does strike me as "few".
Certainly true. Unfortunately, the more common data set is "all the people that had problems and complained", which of course isn't any more useful for predicting failure rates.So while yes, there have been complaints in the past, my best judgement still leads me to happily installing updates as soon as they're available, rather than waiting for other people to guinea pig them. Neither I nor anyone I know directly have had any cause to regret this yet.
I guess this puts me with the grandparent, sans jest.
Most obviously, you can buy each episode through the itvs the day after it first airs--as opposed to the year after on dvd.
But equally importantly, buying things on dvd requires me to either physically travel to a store just to do so, or to order it and wait days or weeks for it to be delivered. Neither of those allows me to realize that I have a bit of free time, and have some new television in front of me in fifteen effort-free minutes.
And lastly, if I buy dvds, I then have to putz around with physical discs: I want to watch to show someone the Buffy episode that I know is titled "Hush". So I have to dig out the box of dvds, open up the ginormous packaging, pull out the booklet in the back, and look through it to figure out which disc that's on, then put that in, and remember to take it out and put it away later. That's a whole lot more of a pain in the ass than just typing "open video/television/buffy/*hush*".
I have a pretty hard time taking seriously the claims of a company that appears to consider the POWER and PowerPC chips interchangeable. Yes, they are related, but they're pretty substanially different beasts--especially when it comes to power consumption. I seem to recall that current POWER units consume over a kilowatt each. Yes, really.
Look, I know we don't have a "Racist" moderation option, but it turns out that "Funny" is not a close enough approximation.
Shephard Book from Firely/Serenity was both religious and evangelical. Other characters on the show had varying reactions to that, but it never descended to simply mocking his belief or overtly glorifying it. It wasn't a joke, it wasn't evil, it wasn't capital-G Good, it was just a trait that he had that informed his relationships with others.
Nightcrawler in the second X-Men movie was deeply Christian, though not especially evangelical. Again, the movie managed to depict this as an interesting, fairly positive thing--without doing so at the expense of other characters who were less (or less visibly) religious.
So to answer your question, yes, I do think this is a perfectly reasonable thing to include as a trait in a fictional character, and that it can add depth to the story, not just "make the audience squirm". I'm firmly an atheist myself, but that doesn't mean that I find any mention of religion squirm-inducing, or can't appreciate it being used to enhance the story.
That seems fair; if a main character really is depicted as having exactly one personality trait, that's a failure of writing, regardless of what that one trait is.
I rather got the impression that the complaint from the person to whom I responded went beyond that, though. Few people complain about "agenda" when their real issue is just that a character is too one-dimensional.
Okay, it's been about twenty years since I've seen any Doctor Who, so I can't comment specifically on this character, but...
How does having a bisexual character constitute an "agenda" or "uncomfortable sexual baggage"? Isn't that just sort of a fairly realistic inclusion of the fact that actual people are sometimes gay or bisexual? In much the same way that people are sometimes female, or tall, or left-handed, and thus characters in stories sometimes also have these traits?
Were you made similarly uncomfortable by Tom Baker's curly-haired-people agenda and baggage?