There's a weird "it can't work" vibe floating around here today.
Of course something like this could work. You could program the system to be smart and redundant enough to avoid buildings and other restricted airspace. Sure, you'd have to program it intelligently and be really, really careful with the testing, but so what else is new?
There are instances where computers do things better than pilots -- watch an FA-18 do a carrier take-off sometime and note where the pilot's hands are
It's only a felony if they get convicted, and no jury in the land is going to convict a newspaper that discovered that a school was spooging out private information of minors to the world. That's why we have juries -- to provide a check on the government.
Of course, they might just be declared enemy combatants and all this silly due-process thing could be avoided...
I've said it before, and it's generally gotten a negative (or even angry) response, but let me say again:
It's time to introduce some level of legal accountibility for institutions which allow sensative data to be stolen.
The simple truth here is that pointy-hairs and beaurocrats understand one thing: Money. If you threaten to kick them in their budget, they'll respond; otherwise, you'll just keep seeing these articles.
I mean, this is *negligence* or the sort that could easily result in at least a major violation of privacy, or at worst a stolen identity or blackmail. These institutions with faulty IT -- and it's not as if this was some complex cracking job, this is just carelessness -- need to be taught a serious lesson.
(shakes head) It kills me that a college can lose piles of cash for buying shoes for one of their basketball players and a business can get fined for having workers like a box that's 5 lbs. too heavy, but when they expose the private, valuable data of their students/customers, there's no sanction whatsoever....
I think you are misunderstanding Fight Club. Fight Club is more about consumerism, and how ridiculous it's getting, which is expressed through the main character
No, I agree. I suppose I was pointing to Tyler's attitude as a good example of the attitude the original poster was accusing the Matrix series of taking.
For what it's worth, I also don't think that Fight Club was just about consumerism (although the term "Ikea nesting instinct" struck me close to home). I look at the book as two sections, one flowing into the other as fight club transitions into Project Mayhem.
The initial Fight Club portion had some interesting things to say about the diminishing nature of manhood. It points out, and I agree, that the pendulum of society has swung too far towards a classically "woman" oriented society (and I use "woman" for lack of a better term here) which suppresses a lot of the things that Men naturally do and are good at.
The idea that I took away from that is that there's not necessarily anything wrong with fighting, that society's relentless push to get us to "work out our problems" is in many respects a supression of the natural way things work, and that leads us to the point where we find outselves living a third of our lives in a 8x8' cubicle staring at a CRT, and that this is not necessarily progress in any sense of the work except the one that society has locked us into assuming.
Anyhow, you're right: Fight Club does have some good stuff to say about consumerism (ask yourself if "the things you own end up owning you" applies to your life). In that vein, since we're talking about summer reading, I would suggest that anyone who hasn't read American Psycho by Bret Ellis do so immediately -- I look A.P.and F.C. as essential to the understanding of each other.
Given that this is just another "Look that we can do now with interesting molecules!" thread, I suggest a side discussion:
Will the Diamond Age begin in our lifetimes?
I'm personally of the opinion that when the nanotech revolution starts, it'll happen so shockingly fast that applications, society and governance will take decades to catch up -- think internet x10.
In a world of pervasive nanotech, I suspect the next really big industry will be power generation; it'll require a step up in juice unlike any seen since the start of the century. Fortunately, nanotech will hopefully solve some technical problems (superconducting power transmission, materials suited to support fusion, etc) at the same time it's demanding this huge level of power generation.
Of course, in a world of pervasive nanotech, our existing governmental and societal structures are in a lot of trouble... We live, as the ancient Chinese said, in interesting times (and I mean that in the spirit in which they did).
Even our beloved Matrix is more about how tech is bad for people, than about freeing the storyline to explore other areas that aren't possible with today's tech.
If Reloaded had any deeper meaning at all, I think it was that humans and technology need each other, not that tech is bad. If you want a real "tech is no good" attitude, Fight Club might be a better example...
"In the world I see -- you're stalking elk through
the damp canyon forests around the ruins of Rockefeller Center.
You will wear leather clothes that last you the rest of your
life. You will climb the wrist- thick kudzu vines that wrap
the Sears Tower. You will see tiny figures pounding corn and
laying-strips of venison on the empty car pool lane of the
ruins of a superhighway."
Skyshadow's Summer Reading Recommendations:
on
The Cassini Division
·
· Score: 4, Informative
While you're out buying the new Harry Potter (stop pretending it's for your nonexistant cousin, loser), I highly recommend picking up:
Jennifer Government by Max Barry.
Very near-future society where multinationals have been carried to their logical conclusion. Funny, interesting and thought provoking and highly reminiscent of Neal Stephenson's earlier work (in a good way).
A Fire Upon the Deep by Vernor Vinge.
Entertaining story along with two extremely interesting concepts: the intragalactic usenet and well-executed small group-minded aliens. If you like it, A Deepness in the Sky by the same author is a definate next stop. Vinge reminds me a lot of Larry Niven, again in a good way.
Harry Potter
Just go ahead and buy it -- you know you want to. Don't let the disapproving looks from the book snob working the checkout counter at Borders deter you -- they're working at Borders, few chrissake, who are they to criticise? A little fluff reading never hurt anyone.
Smoke and Mirrors by Neil Gaiman
A lot of people are crazy about American Gods, and I agree it's a good read. However, Neil Gaiman's real strongpoint is his short stories, of which this is a collection. "Murder Mysteries", "Only the End of the World Again" and "Don't Ask Jack" are my personal favorites, although there's really good stuff throughout.
With hard-drive costs less than $1 a GIGABYTE (you younger folks have NO IDEA how impossible that sounds) I'm not sure that keeping file deltas is worth the effort any longer.
I gotta disagree -- while the hard drive price to size thing is absolutely jaw-dropping (I remember looking on my first 100 MB drive with absolute awe), it doesn't make sense to waste space if you can come up with a reasonably efficiant alternative.
I don't know what strategy Reiser has in mind, but even after just a few minutes of mulling it over I was able to come up with a couple of promising-seeming methods for keeping your data intelligently without slowing down filesystem access -- you're always going to use more CPU, but unless your processers are pegged 100% of the time there's no reason that the versioning can't be run as a background job.
The easiest way I can think of would be to have the user work with a "snapshot" of his latest files, which would be updated as he worked and user to create a delta'ed version in the repository. This seems much more effective than trying to constantly recreate each file dynamically like MVFS does...
It's worth mentioning that both ClearCase and a couple of other version control systems (like Perforce) have had "second gen" features for a few years now.
Basically, it revolves around using the tools to encourage/compell best practices, hopefully avoiding a lot of the classic pitfalls that people encounter when they try using a version control system on a large-scale basis (hopelessly fragmented file trees, users conflicting with each other's checkouts unnecessarily, an overcomplexity in the use of the version selection tools, etc).
The big difference between those tools and the Reiser filesystem, at least as I understand it, is that Reiser is straight versioning, while the VC tools include powerful functionality like branching, aimed at allowing several users to work on several versions of the same file at the same time. This extra functionality is what brought around the need for second-gen version control practices.
...I would imagine that he pictures versions being kept until explicitly dealt with.
This isn't actually as big a deal as it might sound -- really, at least from a user level (as opposed to system), most people have a ton of static files and a few that are updated with any regularity. Assuming that the evolving versions are stored in a halfway intelligent manner (such as ClearCase's file deltas), the amount of "extra" space such a filesystem would consume should be reasonable when put in the context of the rate of size expansion in modern drives.
If they can create a (much) more efficiant version of ClearCase's MVFS, it would obviously be tremendously valuable on several fronts other than simple backups, such as tracking overall FS changes, metrics gathering (from a bid'ness client POV), etc.
Other advantages to hiring young
on
Ageism in IT?
·
· Score: 1
Besides being cheap and generally hip to the newest tech, young people are perhaps most importantly relatively unencumbered by family.
Most 35 year-olds have a spouse and kids. Most 25 year olds do not. Which is going to be able to work 70 hour weeks and focus?
While this is a Bad Thing from an open-standards standpoint, does anyone actually use the security features on zip? I'd think anyone concerned enough to protect their archives would want to use a serious encryption format.
So, if a fork occurs in a feature which nobody uses, does it make a sound?
The Gollum speach was the best one of the evening. The Yoda speech was lame -- looked terrible trying to do it live, no emotion, even the jokes were flat (not unlike Episodes 1&2, come to think of it).
But hacking? You can't hack into something with just training...
So you're saying it's tougher to be a script kiddie than it is to, say, fly a commercial airliner?
You can teach anybody just about anything, and given a large enough population of people you can even find those who are naturally good at certain things to begin with. Or maybe you don't think that smart people would ever be opposed to America and its allies?
But according to a story at Wired News, North Korea can barely keep its electrical grid up - not to mention feed its people.
While that's true, they've also managed to turn out atomic weapons, which is quite a bit more complicated than training someone to use nmap. So, really, a lack of a reliable national power grid and insufficiant will to feed the masses does not necessarily exclude the possibility that they're training script kiddies....
I knew we shouldn't have let George W Bush appoint the head of the interstellar OSHA....
Re:What the CIA needs:
on
IT at the CIA
·
· Score: 4, Insightful
I agree that there has been way too much dependance on electronic survailance in the past couple of decades. This has left us in a uniquely bad position to deal with threats from decentralized terrorist-type outfits. That's hard to argue.
On the other hand, there's a lot more to technical assets than just spy satellites and evesdropping on phone calls. Specifically, the intelligence community needs to concentrate on technologies that will let them "know what they know", especially in the face of an exponential amount of available data.
Example: Knowing that a terrorist is about to strike and knowing who and where they are is useless if one person knows about the threat, one person knows who the terrorist is and the location is in some obscure database (which is pretty much what happened on 9-11). It's only when that information is brought together that it becomes useful.
Again, however, the CIA has dropped the ball on human assets in recent years, mostly because they (and the people who fund them) lacked the imagination to envision the new threats in the post-Soviet era. Hopefully, this is something that's being corrected as we speak.
I interned at SGI (Chippewa Falls '98), I have friends who work at SGI, I surfed/. from SGI...
It seems to me that SGI's major problem is that they were always a one-trick pony -- they made the decision to stick with graphics machines at a time when that particular niche was sliding towards being a commodity, or at least commodity-doable. When Jurrasic Park came out, it was like a birth cry. When Titanic came out, it was a death toll.
They tried to branch out, but their directionless, clueless management (I'm looking at you, Chainsaw Rick Belluzo) flailed around towards one ill-concieved scheme after another, and all the while powerful PC-based workstations were dropping in price.
IMO, they should have concentrated on appliances. I remember pilot programs floating around to do things like massive network storage (a la NetApp) and other similarly promising things, but they never went anyplace.
Oh, and I had a Herman Miller Areon and an office. As an intern. Might have been a symptom of part of the problem, on reflection...
Your history degree isn't worthless. I speak with authority here being in the exact same position as you.
Now, knowing that Richard the Lionheart and King Phillip II were an item probably isn't useful except as trivia. However, knowing how to research primary source documents, interpret what they say and write a well-reasoned and supported paper on the subject has served me well outside of academia. Not to mention the usefulness of adaptible frameworks for understanding situations, etc...
I don't think the situation is that bad. What we've done is weeded out a lot of the people who didn't have the skills to compete. I know some out of work programmers, but the ones that are actually good at what they do always seem to manage to find a job quickly.
I wasn't talking about the people who've been forced out of the industry because they weren't "real" programmers.
In my opinion, the reality of the situation is that US-based programmers won't be able to compete in any sort of value to cost comparison with their counterparts overseas, who are in many cases both very well educated and english speaking. It'll break down to simple balance sheet work, and there isn't a boss in the world who will choose to pay $80k a year when he could get the same value for $20k a year.
With more reliable networking and the improving tools for supporting overseas development, it's only a matter of time before the "hassle" factor is outbalanced by the "money" factor. Programming isn't special -- in the final analysis it's just like any other industry. It someone else can do a competent job for less, they will.
This is assuming the government doesn't step in to protect the US industry, but I imagine that (a) they'll be very hesistant to piss off their corporate masters, and (b) it'd be a hard thing to regulate given that there's no physical goods crossing borders.
I completely agree that love of computers != being a good programmer.
I myself am an excellent example. I've used computers forever, am extremely comfortable with them, yadda yadda yadda. But I hate programming -- how anyone sits staring at code 8+ hours a day is beyond me.
That said, being a programmer != all computer jobs. I have a history degree, but I work in the computing industry and make a fair amount of money doing so. How? Because I do what I do best: Make shit work. There has always been a huge need for people like me, and I suspect there always will be, and most CS grads don't have my skill set.
If my younger sister were still in CS, I'd be encouraging her to change majors. There was a time when a CS degree meant a good job and high earning potential. I'm pretty sure this time is over -- the US software development industy is being nailed into its coffin as we speak.
I don't see the current trend toward off-shoring programming jobs slowing down in the future -- rather, I foresee an acceleration as tools and processes for performing overseas work improve. Consider how poorly the American car, steel and manufacturing industries are doing, and remember that they (unlike software development) are at least protected by tariffs which level the playing field somewhat.
Sure, there will always be some development and QA jobs in the US if for nothing else than to avoid "all your base"-style situations. But that's going to provide a fraction of a percent of the jobs that even our currently depressed industry does.
If you *do* get a CS degree, you'd better plan on grad school. You're going to need an advanced degree or at least a double major to tread water (I imagine that business/CS will be in huge demand).
I think a terrific spin-off would be to have Caleb (easily the coolest new character this year) survive the final episode, then to follow him around the US as he goes around doing bad in a sort of American Gothic-ish manner.
I think it'd fly if you could find the right writers... I wonder if Neil Gaiman would be up for a season of episodic TV writing...
The Lone Gunmen are DEAD?!? Thanks for the spoiler, prick. I guess I should really catch up on the shows stored on my TiVO.
Seriously: I think that Buffy has taken a serious step down this year. It's disappointing that the last few episodes end up concentrating on insignificant new characters (Kennedy, Wood) and got away from the things which made the scoobies a cool group of heros in the first place (how many superheroes prepare for battle by doing research?).
But oh well. Must be a universal truth that while all good stories deserve an ending, and not all good stories have good ones (Neil Stephenson fans, represent!).
Slashdot Mirror
Of course something like this could work. You could program the system to be smart and redundant enough to avoid buildings and other restricted airspace. Sure, you'd have to program it intelligently and be really, really careful with the testing, but so what else is new?
There are instances where computers do things better than pilots -- watch an FA-18 do a carrier take-off sometime and note where the pilot's hands are
Of course, they might just be declared enemy combatants and all this silly due-process thing could be avoided...
It's time to introduce some level of legal accountibility for institutions which allow sensative data to be stolen.
The simple truth here is that pointy-hairs and beaurocrats understand one thing: Money. If you threaten to kick them in their budget, they'll respond; otherwise, you'll just keep seeing these articles.
I mean, this is *negligence* or the sort that could easily result in at least a major violation of privacy, or at worst a stolen identity or blackmail. These institutions with faulty IT -- and it's not as if this was some complex cracking job, this is just carelessness -- need to be taught a serious lesson.
(shakes head) It kills me that a college can lose piles of cash for buying shoes for one of their basketball players and a business can get fined for having workers like a box that's 5 lbs. too heavy, but when they expose the private, valuable data of their students/customers, there's no sanction whatsoever....
No, I agree. I suppose I was pointing to Tyler's attitude as a good example of the attitude the original poster was accusing the Matrix series of taking.
For what it's worth, I also don't think that Fight Club was just about consumerism (although the term "Ikea nesting instinct" struck me close to home). I look at the book as two sections, one flowing into the other as fight club transitions into Project Mayhem. The initial Fight Club portion had some interesting things to say about the diminishing nature of manhood. It points out, and I agree, that the pendulum of society has swung too far towards a classically "woman" oriented society (and I use "woman" for lack of a better term here) which suppresses a lot of the things that Men naturally do and are good at.
The idea that I took away from that is that there's not necessarily anything wrong with fighting, that society's relentless push to get us to "work out our problems" is in many respects a supression of the natural way things work, and that leads us to the point where we find outselves living a third of our lives in a 8x8' cubicle staring at a CRT, and that this is not necessarily progress in any sense of the work except the one that society has locked us into assuming.
Anyhow, you're right: Fight Club does have some good stuff to say about consumerism (ask yourself if "the things you own end up owning you" applies to your life). In that vein, since we're talking about summer reading, I would suggest that anyone who hasn't read American Psycho by Bret Ellis do so immediately -- I look A.P.and F.C. as essential to the understanding of each other.
Will the Diamond Age begin in our lifetimes?
I'm personally of the opinion that when the nanotech revolution starts, it'll happen so shockingly fast that applications, society and governance will take decades to catch up -- think internet x10.
In a world of pervasive nanotech, I suspect the next really big industry will be power generation; it'll require a step up in juice unlike any seen since the start of the century. Fortunately, nanotech will hopefully solve some technical problems (superconducting power transmission, materials suited to support fusion, etc) at the same time it's demanding this huge level of power generation.
Of course, in a world of pervasive nanotech, our existing governmental and societal structures are in a lot of trouble... We live, as the ancient Chinese said, in interesting times (and I mean that in the spirit in which they did).
If Reloaded had any deeper meaning at all, I think it was that humans and technology need each other, not that tech is bad. If you want a real "tech is no good" attitude, Fight Club might be a better example...
"In the world I see -- you're stalking elk through the damp canyon forests around the ruins of Rockefeller Center. You will wear leather clothes that last you the rest of your life. You will climb the wrist- thick kudzu vines that wrap the Sears Tower. You will see tiny figures pounding corn and laying-strips of venison on the empty car pool lane of the ruins of a superhighway."
Jennifer Government by Max Barry.
Very near-future society where multinationals have been carried to their logical conclusion. Funny, interesting and thought provoking and highly reminiscent of Neal Stephenson's earlier work (in a good way).
A Fire Upon the Deep by Vernor Vinge.
Entertaining story along with two extremely interesting concepts: the intragalactic usenet and well-executed small group-minded aliens. If you like it, A Deepness in the Sky by the same author is a definate next stop. Vinge reminds me a lot of Larry Niven, again in a good way.
Harry Potter
Just go ahead and buy it -- you know you want to. Don't let the disapproving looks from the book snob working the checkout counter at Borders deter you -- they're working at Borders, few chrissake, who are they to criticise? A little fluff reading never hurt anyone.
Smoke and Mirrors by Neil Gaiman
A lot of people are crazy about American Gods, and I agree it's a good read. However, Neil Gaiman's real strongpoint is his short stories, of which this is a collection. "Murder Mysteries", "Only the End of the World Again" and "Don't Ask Jack" are my personal favorites, although there's really good stuff throughout.
End of story.
I gotta disagree -- while the hard drive price to size thing is absolutely jaw-dropping (I remember looking on my first 100 MB drive with absolute awe), it doesn't make sense to waste space if you can come up with a reasonably efficiant alternative.
I don't know what strategy Reiser has in mind, but even after just a few minutes of mulling it over I was able to come up with a couple of promising-seeming methods for keeping your data intelligently without slowing down filesystem access -- you're always going to use more CPU, but unless your processers are pegged 100% of the time there's no reason that the versioning can't be run as a background job.
The easiest way I can think of would be to have the user work with a "snapshot" of his latest files, which would be updated as he worked and user to create a delta'ed version in the repository. This seems much more effective than trying to constantly recreate each file dynamically like MVFS does...
Basically, it revolves around using the tools to encourage/compell best practices, hopefully avoiding a lot of the classic pitfalls that people encounter when they try using a version control system on a large-scale basis (hopelessly fragmented file trees, users conflicting with each other's checkouts unnecessarily, an overcomplexity in the use of the version selection tools, etc).
The big difference between those tools and the Reiser filesystem, at least as I understand it, is that Reiser is straight versioning, while the VC tools include powerful functionality like branching, aimed at allowing several users to work on several versions of the same file at the same time. This extra functionality is what brought around the need for second-gen version control practices.
This isn't actually as big a deal as it might sound -- really, at least from a user level (as opposed to system), most people have a ton of static files and a few that are updated with any regularity. Assuming that the evolving versions are stored in a halfway intelligent manner (such as ClearCase's file deltas), the amount of "extra" space such a filesystem would consume should be reasonable when put in the context of the rate of size expansion in modern drives.
If they can create a (much) more efficiant version of ClearCase's MVFS, it would obviously be tremendously valuable on several fronts other than simple backups, such as tracking overall FS changes, metrics gathering (from a bid'ness client POV), etc.
Most 35 year-olds have a spouse and kids. Most 25 year olds do not. Which is going to be able to work 70 hour weeks and focus?
Not saying it's right, however.
So, if a fork occurs in a feature which nobody uses, does it make a sound?
The Gollum speach was the best one of the evening. The Yoda speech was lame -- looked terrible trying to do it live, no emotion, even the jokes were flat (not unlike Episodes 1&2, come to think of it).
So you're saying it's tougher to be a script kiddie than it is to, say, fly a commercial airliner?
You can teach anybody just about anything, and given a large enough population of people you can even find those who are naturally good at certain things to begin with. Or maybe you don't think that smart people would ever be opposed to America and its allies?
While that's true, they've also managed to turn out atomic weapons, which is quite a bit more complicated than training someone to use nmap. So, really, a lack of a reliable national power grid and insufficiant will to feed the masses does not necessarily exclude the possibility that they're training script kiddies....
I knew we shouldn't have let George W Bush appoint the head of the interstellar OSHA....
On the other hand, there's a lot more to technical assets than just spy satellites and evesdropping on phone calls. Specifically, the intelligence community needs to concentrate on technologies that will let them "know what they know", especially in the face of an exponential amount of available data.
Example: Knowing that a terrorist is about to strike and knowing who and where they are is useless if one person knows about the threat, one person knows who the terrorist is and the location is in some obscure database (which is pretty much what happened on 9-11). It's only when that information is brought together that it becomes useful.
Again, however, the CIA has dropped the ball on human assets in recent years, mostly because they (and the people who fund them) lacked the imagination to envision the new threats in the post-Soviet era. Hopefully, this is something that's being corrected as we speak.
It seems to me that SGI's major problem is that they were always a one-trick pony -- they made the decision to stick with graphics machines at a time when that particular niche was sliding towards being a commodity, or at least commodity-doable. When Jurrasic Park came out, it was like a birth cry. When Titanic came out, it was a death toll.
They tried to branch out, but their directionless, clueless management (I'm looking at you, Chainsaw Rick Belluzo) flailed around towards one ill-concieved scheme after another, and all the while powerful PC-based workstations were dropping in price.
IMO, they should have concentrated on appliances. I remember pilot programs floating around to do things like massive network storage (a la NetApp) and other similarly promising things, but they never went anyplace.
Oh, and I had a Herman Miller Areon and an office. As an intern. Might have been a symptom of part of the problem, on reflection...
Now, knowing that Richard the Lionheart and King Phillip II were an item probably isn't useful except as trivia. However, knowing how to research primary source documents, interpret what they say and write a well-reasoned and supported paper on the subject has served me well outside of academia. Not to mention the usefulness of adaptible frameworks for understanding situations, etc...
I wasn't talking about the people who've been forced out of the industry because they weren't "real" programmers.
In my opinion, the reality of the situation is that US-based programmers won't be able to compete in any sort of value to cost comparison with their counterparts overseas, who are in many cases both very well educated and english speaking. It'll break down to simple balance sheet work, and there isn't a boss in the world who will choose to pay $80k a year when he could get the same value for $20k a year.
With more reliable networking and the improving tools for supporting overseas development, it's only a matter of time before the "hassle" factor is outbalanced by the "money" factor. Programming isn't special -- in the final analysis it's just like any other industry. It someone else can do a competent job for less, they will.
This is assuming the government doesn't step in to protect the US industry, but I imagine that (a) they'll be very hesistant to piss off their corporate masters, and (b) it'd be a hard thing to regulate given that there's no physical goods crossing borders.
I myself am an excellent example. I've used computers forever, am extremely comfortable with them, yadda yadda yadda. But I hate programming -- how anyone sits staring at code 8+ hours a day is beyond me.
That said, being a programmer != all computer jobs. I have a history degree, but I work in the computing industry and make a fair amount of money doing so. How? Because I do what I do best: Make shit work. There has always been a huge need for people like me, and I suspect there always will be, and most CS grads don't have my skill set.
So it's all good.
I don't see the current trend toward off-shoring programming jobs slowing down in the future -- rather, I foresee an acceleration as tools and processes for performing overseas work improve. Consider how poorly the American car, steel and manufacturing industries are doing, and remember that they (unlike software development) are at least protected by tariffs which level the playing field somewhat.
Sure, there will always be some development and QA jobs in the US if for nothing else than to avoid "all your base"-style situations. But that's going to provide a fraction of a percent of the jobs that even our currently depressed industry does.
If you *do* get a CS degree, you'd better plan on grad school. You're going to need an advanced degree or at least a double major to tread water (I imagine that business/CS will be in huge demand).
I think it'd fly if you could find the right writers... I wonder if Neil Gaiman would be up for a season of episodic TV writing...
Seriously: I think that Buffy has taken a serious step down this year. It's disappointing that the last few episodes end up concentrating on insignificant new characters (Kennedy, Wood) and got away from the things which made the scoobies a cool group of heros in the first place (how many superheroes prepare for battle by doing research?).
But oh well. Must be a universal truth that while all good stories deserve an ending, and not all good stories have good ones (Neil Stephenson fans, represent!).