I'd argue that Luke's characterization make perfect sense; from a certain point of view.
Look what happens to him:
Ep 4: He starts out as the idealist with lots of faith, sure. Then, one day, with no expectation it's be any different than any other; his surrogate parents are murdered. He sees their bodies freshly dead and realizes it was only dumb luck that he wasn't there and killed too. So he latches onto an alternate father figure who converts him to a new religion and lead him off to save the princess. Next thing you know, he's flying into the scene of the mass-murder of several billion people. He rescues the princess, sure, but then he sees his new farther figure murdered right before his eyes. He then joins the war and fires the shot that destroys the Death Star; and incidentally kills its crew of several million. That's a LOT of death to see and cause over the course of... what?... a couple of days?
Ep 5: He's been running for his life for a few years from Vader and the empire. He gets into a love triangle between Han and (unknown to him yet) his sister. He almost dies, sees the ghost of his father figure, sees many rebels slaughtered by Vader's forces, and takes off to meet Yoda. Yoda continues Luke's indoctrination into the Jedi religion, scares the living bejeezus out of him at the tree, shows him that his friends are in deadly peril, and tries to prevent him from going to help them. He goes anyway, is totally ineffectual, and gets his ass kicked and hand cut off by Vader. Then he finds out that Vader, who is basically space Hitler, is actually his father. Luke attempts suicide and only survives through stupid luck.
Ep 6: Luke rescues his friends. Great. But he's already using dark side powers to do it as he romps around force-choking guards. He also personally racks up a fair body count in the process. Then he goes back to Dagobah, sees his THIRD father figure die, and finds out from FF#2's ghost that the girl he's been lusting after, and sometimes making out with, all this time is actually his sister. He endangers his friends by going with them to Endor and lets himself get captured. Palpatine torments him psychologically, has DS2 start blowing the rebel fleet into atoms, and lets him know that his friends on Endor are doomed. Luke snaps to the dark, tried to kill Palpatine, and then goes dark with anger again when his dad threatens his sister. He nearly kills his own father, is then saved by him, and then watches dad die anyway. He escapes the Death Star, with millions more deaths (Imperials plus civilian construction workers.) in his wake.
At this point alone, Luke should, by all rights, be a barely-functional quivering mass of PTSD, survivor's guilt, brain injury (Near-electrocution isn't good for you. One of the SW novels actually brought this up.), depression, and who knows what else. He wouldn't just be seeing a therapist at this point. He'd be making a whole team of psychologists and psychiatrists rich for life. And he's not the only one. Leia should be in nearly as dire straits. And the rest of the heroes hardly got off lighten the psychological trauma department. But Luke also has the pressure and burden of being the one tasked with (and the only one who can) rebuilding the Jedi order.
He would have been barely hanging-on when he did go out to train more Jedi. And, setting aside whether the details of the Luke/Ben/Kylo bit were well thought-out; he did fail and many of his students did die. That failure pushed him over the edge; so he took off to the island of the Jedi, quit using the force (ie. abandons his religion) intending never to return and to die there. For all intents and purposes, he attempts suicide a second time here. He's out there, living like a hermit for years, maybe a decade or more. That sort of solitude erodes the social graces, part of which is the concern for others.
Personally? Considering what he's been though, I'd cut the dude some slack.
You mean the plot holes and illogical character actions that have been there since the original trilogy? Or perhaps you mean the "in-universe lore" that Lucas himself publicly stated that while he liked some of it and found it interesting, he nevertheless reserved the right to contradict any time he liked?
What long-running franchise does NOT have plot holes and illogical character actions? I won't hold my breath waiting for you to come up with one.
And as for "in-universe lore" that was always one of the major problems that arose when the Star Wars crowd invented their own "anything with the logo is canon" definition. The traditional Usenet definition of canon: "If it's filmed, it's canon. If not, it's apocryphal." presents far fewer problems. You do not, after all, see Star Trek fans getting all butthurt because TNG presents warp drive working differently than it was presented in "The Entropy Effect", presents the transporter working differently than was stated in "The Kobayashi Alternative", or that everything save fan-produced YouTube works ignores FASA's "Four Years War" RPG materials. Or, for that matter, even though Enterprise's "stolen human augment DNA" plot line is kind of a dumb way to explain the changes in various Klingon appearances; there's no general Trek fan outcry of: "How DARE Paramount contradict FASA's Imperial and Hybrid Klingons!?!?!" the way Wars fans rant and rage about the Star Wars sequels not being the Thrawn Trilogy or ignoring the whole Sun Crusher nonsense, or not including the Yuuzhan Vong and Fel Empire.
Far better to just consider secondary and un-filmed miscellanea to be "entertaining but disposable", as was the usenet standard back in the r.a.s.t days; and only hold filmed material to be legitimate. It makes for fewer of these sort of headaches.
And no true Scotsman puts sugar in his porridge either.
In a word: Bullshit.
According to wikipedia, you people had a field of 17 major candidates in your primaries. As awful as many of them were, literally any one of them would have been a better choice. And some, like George Pataki and John Kasich, would actually have done a pretty good job as POTUS, and been fairly palatable. And I say the last as a fairly liberal democrat who voted for Sanders in my state's primary and only reluctantly pivoted to Clinton once it was clear that Sanders was not going to get the votes for the nomination.
Did you select any of the reasonable candidates? Did you give one of the unknowns like Jindal or Gilmore a chance? Did you even go for one of the harmless bumblers like Carson or Jeb? No. You people chose the most despicable shitstain of the whole lineup to represent you. And you can't claim ignorance or bait-and-switch. 45 was completely open... vainglorious even... the entire campaign about just how loathsome he is. And he's been just as open and just as loathsome since LONG before the 2016 primaries began.
No. Trump is YOUR man. YOU choose him. YOU own him. Don't think for a second otherwise. Because the rest of us will not forget.
Also: "more evil than satan himself", "French military victories", and "Santorum".
BFD.
As you say, screwing with search results has been possible since forever; and was never limited just to Google either. All it takes is a number of like-minded pissed-off people, and you can turn a bigot into a frothy mixture of lube and fecal matter.
Most of the time, the malingering burnouts doing the delivering are too damn lazy to so much as ring the doorbell. Does Amazon *really* think these loafers are willing (and able) to learn to use this new system? Does Amazon really think that someone who's unwilling to delay their next bong hit the 10 seconds it takes to walk the extra few feet and push the doorbell button are going to wait an extra 45 seconds on top of that to deal with the garage door and the remote system? Does Amazon actually believe that I'd trust these clods alone in any part of my home at any time for any reason?
We've a Ring doorbell plus security cameras covering the porch & garage areas. So when a package is updated in the Amazon/USPS/UPS/FedEx/etc. systems as "delivered", I know 100% with zero doubt if it has, in fact, actually been delivered; or if they're lying through their teeth. Right about now, they're collectively running about 50/50. Hell, I try not to have stuff delivered at home at all unless I know someone will be in the house. So 90% of the time, if the driver could be arsed to expend that tiny bit of effort to push the damn button on the damn doorbell; there'd be a human being to hand the package off to 30 seconds later; no house or garage access or any integration with Amazon's systems necessary at all.
I would submit that there's a huge difference between enjoying a... spirited, shall we say... drive down Skyline's curves & hills on your leisure time; versus a daily trudge down 101 for work. The former, yes, I enjoy it greatly. The latter? If my commute included, in any capacity, the misery that is a peninsula commute on 101; I'd be pinching every penny to get myself into an autopilot-equipped Tesla.
You might try checking out the pricing of pickup trucks.
I had a quick look over at ford.com today. And unless you're settling for the most bare-bones Ranger (Which is already ridonklously overpriced at $25K.); you're spending quite a pretty penny. With the F-series, which the googles tell me is the best-selling pickup of the lot of them; a middle-of-the-pack setup will put you well into the pricing of a nicely equipped BMW 2, 3, or 4-series, mid-range Infinitis or Lexuses (Lexuii???), or a very nice 370Z. And a fully-equipped F-series? Try $95K. At that point, you're spending as much on your pickup truck as one would on a Model S 100D w/ autopilot, a nicely-equipped M-series, or even a low-end 911.
Oh, and that $25K Ranger? That is, as I said, only the most basic bare-bones model you can get. Equipped, the Ranger averages $35K and can hit $45K fully-loaded.
So I'm not, for a second, buying into the "not doing so hot economically since blue collar types got hammered in the last recession and never really recovered" line. People who aren't doing so hot economically aren't dropping $35K-$60K, and higher, on trucks so they can sit around (not working) at Superchargers to harass and threaten Tesla owners. Hell, I AM doing pretty well financially right now; and I'm still driving my $17.5K Mazda3, and the only way I see myself upgrading to *anything* else in the near-term is if the redesign includes a new Speed3 or if Subaru brings back the hatchback WRX.
Well, I had a quick look at ford.com. And their cheapest truck, the Ranger... which you used to be able to buy for $15K-$20K depending on options... now *starts* at $25K, bare-bones, and can push $50K equipped. So, right off, if you choose more wisely you're already in Civic Si and BRZ territory, and really close to an MX-5. Go up on the options list, and you could easily be in a 370Z instead. Fully-loaded, and you could be in a Type-R, a decent 2, 3, or 4-Series, or even a RWD Model 3.
And their more-popular F-series just gets worse from there. I was able to use Ford's configurator tool to spec an F-series, fully-equipped, at $94,965. That is not a joke. And that would put you into a nicely-specced M-Series, a midrange Model S, or a low-end 911. Hell, you're just *barely* short of GT-R money at those prices.
So... this whole blue-collar "working class hero" in opposition to those rich and arrogant "liberal technocrat elites" business? I'm not buying it for a second.
> think that electric vehicles pose a very real threat to > the jobs
BFD. To use the buzzword... cloud computing posed a "very real threat" to traditional "rack 'em & stack 'em"-style IT & operations jobs. In fact, it basically killed them; unless you want to be a datacenter tech for Amazon or Google. But who cares? We all just learned our ways around AWS, GCP, and Terraform. Problem solved. Hell... I call it an improvement. I'd not realized, before updating my own skill set, how much Id grown to view mucking about with hardware to be the least-fulfilling and most-annoying part of the job.
It's not, after all, like Teslas never break down or malfunction. The skillset needed when the do is simply different; that's all. It's not like mechanics, and the like, can afford not to keep their skills up already. Working on a modern Mercedes turbo-diesel is a far different deal from keeping a '95 Civic on the road. Moving up to a Tesla is just the next step up or right on the skills tree.
Oh, that's just everyday annoyance. Try being a foot/MUNI commuter and getting trapped by critical mass, not once but twice... once while walking to my bus, and once on the bus when the biker assholes looped back.
That was the day I decided I'd never be a bike commuter. And every critical mass I've witnessed or experienced has reinforced that decision. They're a massive pack of raging assholes, and I have zero desire to ever join their ranks; or even to be mistaken for one of them. And yes, likewise, I hate cyclists as well.
If you check their support forums, people had been begging for a "dark mode" setting literally for most of a decade. Users requested it over and over and over, and even came up with hacky workarounds to approximate it. Evernote would occasionally post some "we take feature requests seriously" platitude. But they refused this most simple request. I'd actually given up for quite a while and was using Sublime Text to take notes. Unfortunately, there's no iPhone app for Sublime to sync to; and I found myself in need of multiple-device solution so I had to go back. Even after Apple themselves finally forced the issue by creating a system-wide dark mode; Evernote dragged their heels for months, continuing to blast that awful bright white rectangle in our faces. Why? Who the hell knows? Some asshat at EN just decided that their personal preference should trump those of their users; eyestrain be damned.
Plus, they refuse to fix even the most simple bugs. Lately, I've had to fight with the damn thing to keep my plain text notes (With code snippets that get borked by bullshit unicode garbage characters like "smart" quotes, emdashes, and ellipses.) in plain text mode. I'll frequently add to an old note and lo-and-behold; Evernote switches back to "rich" text and Helvetica and "smart" formatting; no matter how many times I try to kill all that crap. Bug reports and support requests? Ignored.
The stink of it is, for what it is, Evernote is still unfortunately the best solution... hell... the only decent solution, really. But as arrogant and unresponsive as the company is; they're a prime target for some startup to come and do it better. I, for one, will not likely weep a single tear when they fall to their own hubris.
> Example- we have RUNAWAY spending and a > MASSIVE debt. A conservative would typically want > to rework that existing system to reduce the debt > and deficit. That obviously requires change.
Oh, that's rich. The only time in my own lifetime when the country had a balanced budget... hell, was running a surplus and paying down the debt even... it was under a liberal president. Then you conservatives took over and pissed away that surplus into a series of pointless multi-trillion dollar wars.
Cry me a goddamned river about debts and deficits. You like both as much as any "liberal" you attack. You just want to waste money on different things, that's all.
Obviously it's possible. Life and civilization existed before them. And no one would drop dead of apoplexy if they gave it up. But why should we? Yeah... I know it's the hip and trendy thing nowadays... even on Slashdot for some strange reason... to hate on technology, the fruits of the same, and those of us, people and companies, who make our living creating it. But frankly: to hell with that. Your newfound luddist pseudo-spirituality doesn't make you any better than those of us who enjoy our modern conveniences.
And that's what it is: convenient. Giving up my iPhone would not be the death of me. But it would sure be inconvenient. And it's not just being out of touch that would be a drag. Phone calls, and even texting, are a small portion of the use I get out of the thing. It's real value is in the various other things I used to own that the iPhone replaces. If I gave it up, I'd have to go back to owning (And carrying some combination of):
- An iPod (Does Apple actually even still make them?) for music on-the-go. - A Kindle, for reading while commuting on MUNI - A Switch or GBA for when I want something more interactive than a book. - An alarm clock, which my iPhone has also replaces - A sleep tracker. Yup, also on the iPhone now - A GPS for the car - A pager (Are these even still made?) for on-call duty. - A WiFi hotspot, for when I have to respond to a page when I'm neither at the office or home. - A camera - A camcorder - A garage door opener fob - A city transit map - A road atlas - A city street map - A kitchen timer - A rolodex (Actually, I never owned one; but went straight to a Palm Pilot back in the day.) - The aforementioned Palm Pilot (Oops. These don't exist anymore. So... rolodex.) - Business cards - All of the credit cards that I leave at home but use with ApplePay to maximize my points - Remote control for my home lighting - Remote control for my vacuum cleaner - Remote control for my humidifier/aromatherapy - And most mundane: a pen and notebook
And that's all just off the top of my head, without graphing the phone and going through my most-used apps. And why should I give up the convenience of a single device replacing all of the above? Because you've decided to adopt some pretentious "You're not really living if you don't unplug." ideology? Screw that. If you don't like them or want one; where's an idea: DON'T BUY ONE FOR YOURSELF. You do you. And stop trying to force your ideology on others who want no part of it.
And you're equally adept at completely missing points. The rest of us are under no obligation whatsoever to give up our modern conveniences just because you've picked up some pseudo-spiritual "back to basics" Luddism and are such a self-righteous pretentious git that you feel the need fo attack people who don't share your newfound "insight". If YOU don't like smartphones, don't have a smartphone, don't want a smartphone; lovely. You're under no obligation to buy one. You do you. But that in no way makes you better than those of us who do like our technological convenience. Stop trying to force your decision on others who want no part of it.
San Francisco never had a "street food" scene, the likes of which you'd find in Thailand, Vietnam, or the like, in the first place. We never even had Singapore-style hawker centers; though SOMA StrEATs and Spark Social may come close. We had the Tamale Lady, Virginia Ramos, who literally died. And she was in the process of opening an actual restaurant when she passed. So she'd no longer have counted as street food anyway. We have the bacon-wrapped hot dog vendors, who are far from dead; but can easily be found all over the place. We had the guys who'd roam parks and street fairs selling edibles. And legalized pot put many of them, and not a few other drug dealers, out of business even when it was just "medical" and not recreational.
And then there are the food trucks. While they literally drive to their locations on the street, they, in no way, resemble "street food". Plus, they're thriving too. They're very popular and all over town. And there're even apps to help you find your favorite truck.
It was actually just one guy. And he wasn't using his clothing to brake his descent. He was using it to stabilize his descent so that he would hit the water feet-first with his legs crossed. Also, if I recall correctly, Rama did not spin fast enough to produce a full Earth gravity at even the lowest level of the cylinder. And the plot point was that the jumper had crashed after flying down the zero-g axis of Rama to explore the top of an otherwise unscalable mesa (And, therefore, would be under even less initial acceleration owing to his hight.).
Not taking the word of any rando on the internet as gospel fact without verification from a more legitimate source is damn near the first lesson one learns when getting on the internet for the first time. And that's been the case since the days of usenet, when it was mostly university and industry people who ostensibly should have been more reliable in their veracity than the general public. If, after the first week, you've not noticed that BS abounds, and you're not verifying or disregarding claims that don't pass the smell test and have no citation; the problem is with you; not whatever site you're browsing.
I've had plenty of "4G" devices... iPhones, my Apple Watch, a couple of WiFi hotspots and Android test phones for work, and even a Blackberry that I won in a drawing at a conference. Between them, I've seen the performance of all four mobile carriers' networks in the US. And not a one of them has actually met the promised data rates of, as per Wikipedia and ITU Report M.2134-0:
100 megabits per second (Mbit/s)(=12.5 megabytes per second) for high mobility communication (such as from trains and cars) and 1 gigabit per second (Gbit/s) for low mobility communication (such as pedestrians and stationary users).
Since they all lied about providing "4G" in the first place, but still used it in their marketing to jack up their pricing; I'm not particularly confident that the carriers will bother to actually roll out the 20GB capacity that's mandated for 5G. But I'm pretty sure they'll lie again, and use the 5G name to raise prices... again.
Yeah, I know it's laughable with this administration. But I, for one, think that the carriers should be forced... through severe sanctions and crippling fines topped off with a revocation of their licenses if they still fail to comply with the spec... to fix their 4G networks to deliver those promised rates, before they're allowed to jump into the "5G" game. (And needless to say, they should be severely sanctioned again if they fail to meet the 5G spec once they start selling the service and devices.)
Again... I know... pipe dreams, and all that. But one can still *HOPE* for the telecoms corps to be held accountable for their malfeasance.
Drug dealers are not, by preference, killers. They're business owners. And they don't want corpses. They want repeat customers. And you can't go back for more if you're dead from an overdose.
Well... The only reason that humans are cheap and dispensable is that the productions costs are externalized. Companies don't have to worry about them at all for the first 18-26 years. According to Nerdwallet, that's a cost savings of $260K-$745K per-unit, depending on the desired capabilities. And even after the Human Resources are acquired, they still attend to the bulk of their own maintenance and energy requirements.
Take that externalization away though; and force companies to pay the true per-unit cost... say, by taxing them to support the UBI proposals being tossed around... and the equations change quite a bit. $0.25-0.75 million buys you a fair amount of robot, you know; especially when the acquisition time is significantly less. 18-26 years is a *LONG* time to wait for a CapEx purchase to be received, and can lead to the loss of significant business opportunities; particularly the way shareholders want to see so much growth quarter-to-quarter these days. And as an extra cherry on top; they can open Soylent factories to actually make additional profit from the surplus Human Resource units.
Well, on the plus side, now my uncle will know it will only take another 817 years for Fiat to fix the smoking and randomly-stalling engine and rusted-out floorboards in his X19.
There's no conspiracy theorizing about it; just recollection of past observed behavior on the part of the single most malignant and malfeasant actor in all of tech, and extrapolating said pattern of behavior to predict future actions.
Or perhaps you've forgotten their actions wrt/ Hotmail, Kerberos, Bungie, VirtualPC, Java, ActiveX, Office file format interoperability, Java, and so on; or the Halloween documents, or "Windows isn't done until Lotus doesn't run", or their "open source is a cancer" ideology?
But that's okay. Most of the rest of us haven't forgotten.
Nice quote from your nice little right wing rag. Too bad you didn't include the meat of the article further down, which was advocating turning over the forests to logging companies. Though I guess it is true that you can't have forest fires without forests. And then there's this nice little tidbit:
Conservative columnist Andrea Seastrand is a former representative for the 22nd Congressional District, a longtime grass-roots activist and current president of the Central Coast Taxpayers Association.
Being a sack of shit trumpian shill work out well for you?
Setting aside the ethical quagmire you descend into when you take on that work... especially under the current administration... it's just in every way awful all-around.
I worked for a government contractor my first job out of college. Yah, I was young and dumb and had student loans that were going to need to be repaid. And no. Just... no. I'm never going to make that mistake again... not for 45, not for his successor, not for Obama if they were to amend the constitution so he could run again, not for Kennedy or Lincoln if they could raise the dead. It's just awful in every conceivable way.
The culture is toxic. You're a tiny cog in a gigantic machine without any way for your own contributions to be meaningful. It's cubes as far as the eye can see in warehouse-sized buildings. The technology, both hardware and software, is older-than-dirt and will serve you nowhere in any other job. It's super-political. And I don't mean R vs D. I mean every single little person who attains the slightest bit of power is king of his little hill and will require tribute if you need access to any resource in their domain, productivity be damned. It's like those old adventure games where you might be tasked with saving the kingdom, world, or galaxy. But every... single... NPC... wants you to do stupid shit before they'll aid you in the smallest way. Tasked with going to person A to get item X? Before A will give you access to X, he will require you to goto person B to get item Y. B will require you to get Z from C before giving you Y. And C will make you go out and grind, killing orcs or boars or womprats or something similarly stupid and pick up 100 item drops before giving you Z. And a task that should take no more than a day winds up taking up two weeks. (That two weeks, by the way, is BEFORE administrative overhead. Expect to do about a page and a half of paperwork for every line of code.) And there'd better actually be a god to help you if you need to deal with procurement to get something from a vendor.
And all of the even remotely interesting work is reserved for people with security clearances. These force you to submit to being investigated and treated like a criminal before-the-fact. And they take anywhere between 6-18 months to attain, depending on how backed-up the government is, and how hard your employer is inclined to push for you. And until then, you're stuck doing boring scut-work that builds neither your skill set nor your resume.
That's government work. And I don't blame a single Google engineer, or anyone else, for wanting no part of it; both from a work environment AND a "don't be evil" (Remember that? Remember how/. used to admire and celebrate that sentiment?) standpoint.
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I'd argue that Luke's characterization make perfect sense; from a certain point of view.
Look what happens to him:
Ep 4: ... a couple of days?
He starts out as the idealist with lots of faith, sure. Then, one day, with no expectation it's be any different than any other; his surrogate parents are murdered. He sees their bodies freshly dead and realizes it was only dumb luck that he wasn't there and killed too. So he latches onto an alternate father figure who converts him to a new religion and lead him off to save the princess. Next thing you know, he's flying into the scene of the mass-murder of several billion people. He rescues the princess, sure, but then he sees his new farther figure murdered right before his eyes. He then joins the war and fires the shot that destroys the Death Star; and incidentally kills its crew of several million. That's a LOT of death to see and cause over the course of... what?
Ep 5:
He's been running for his life for a few years from Vader and the empire. He gets into a love triangle between Han and (unknown to him yet) his sister. He almost dies, sees the ghost of his father figure, sees many rebels slaughtered by Vader's forces, and takes off to meet Yoda. Yoda continues Luke's indoctrination into the Jedi religion, scares the living bejeezus out of him at the tree, shows him that his friends are in deadly peril, and tries to prevent him from going to help them. He goes anyway, is totally ineffectual, and gets his ass kicked and hand cut off by Vader. Then he finds out that Vader, who is basically space Hitler, is actually his father. Luke attempts suicide and only survives through stupid luck.
Ep 6:
Luke rescues his friends. Great. But he's already using dark side powers to do it as he romps around force-choking guards. He also personally racks up a fair body count in the process. Then he goes back to Dagobah, sees his THIRD father figure die, and finds out from FF#2's ghost that the girl he's been lusting after, and sometimes making out with, all this time is actually his sister. He endangers his friends by going with them to Endor and lets himself get captured. Palpatine torments him psychologically, has DS2 start blowing the rebel fleet into atoms, and lets him know that his friends on Endor are doomed. Luke snaps to the dark, tried to kill Palpatine, and then goes dark with anger again when his dad threatens his sister. He nearly kills his own father, is then saved by him, and then watches dad die anyway. He escapes the Death Star, with millions more deaths (Imperials plus civilian construction workers.) in his wake.
At this point alone, Luke should, by all rights, be a barely-functional quivering mass of PTSD, survivor's guilt, brain injury (Near-electrocution isn't good for you. One of the SW novels actually brought this up.), depression, and who knows what else. He wouldn't just be seeing a therapist at this point. He'd be making a whole team of psychologists and psychiatrists rich for life. And he's not the only one. Leia should be in nearly as dire straits. And the rest of the heroes hardly got off lighten the psychological trauma department. But Luke also has the pressure and burden of being the one tasked with (and the only one who can) rebuilding the Jedi order.
He would have been barely hanging-on when he did go out to train more Jedi. And, setting aside whether the details of the Luke/Ben/Kylo bit were well thought-out; he did fail and many of his students did die. That failure pushed him over the edge; so he took off to the island of the Jedi, quit using the force (ie. abandons his religion) intending never to return and to die there. For all intents and purposes, he attempts suicide a second time here. He's out there, living like a hermit for years, maybe a decade or more. That sort of solitude erodes the social graces, part of which is the concern for others.
Personally? Considering what he's been though, I'd cut the dude some slack.
You mean the plot holes and illogical character actions that have been there since the original trilogy? Or perhaps you mean the "in-universe lore" that Lucas himself publicly stated that while he liked some of it and found it interesting, he nevertheless reserved the right to contradict any time he liked?
What long-running franchise does NOT have plot holes and illogical character actions? I won't hold my breath waiting for you to come up with one.
And as for "in-universe lore" that was always one of the major problems that arose when the Star Wars crowd invented their own "anything with the logo is canon" definition. The traditional Usenet definition of canon: "If it's filmed, it's canon. If not, it's apocryphal." presents far fewer problems. You do not, after all, see Star Trek fans getting all butthurt because TNG presents warp drive working differently than it was presented in "The Entropy Effect", presents the transporter working differently than was stated in "The Kobayashi Alternative", or that everything save fan-produced YouTube works ignores FASA's "Four Years War" RPG materials. Or, for that matter, even though Enterprise's "stolen human augment DNA" plot line is kind of a dumb way to explain the changes in various Klingon appearances; there's no general Trek fan outcry of: "How DARE Paramount contradict FASA's Imperial and Hybrid Klingons!?!?!" the way Wars fans rant and rage about the Star Wars sequels not being the Thrawn Trilogy or ignoring the whole Sun Crusher nonsense, or not including the Yuuzhan Vong and Fel Empire.
Far better to just consider secondary and un-filmed miscellanea to be "entertaining but disposable", as was the usenet standard back in the r.a.s.t days; and only hold filmed material to be legitimate. It makes for fewer of these sort of headaches.
And no true Scotsman puts sugar in his porridge either.
In a word: Bullshit.
According to wikipedia, you people had a field of 17 major candidates in your primaries. As awful as many of them were, literally any one of them would have been a better choice. And some, like George Pataki and John Kasich, would actually have done a pretty good job as POTUS, and been fairly palatable. And I say the last as a fairly liberal democrat who voted for Sanders in my state's primary and only reluctantly pivoted to Clinton once it was clear that Sanders was not going to get the votes for the nomination.
Did you select any of the reasonable candidates? Did you give one of the unknowns like Jindal or Gilmore a chance? Did you even go for one of the harmless bumblers like Carson or Jeb? No. You people chose the most despicable shitstain of the whole lineup to represent you. And you can't claim ignorance or bait-and-switch. 45 was completely open... vainglorious even... the entire campaign about just how loathsome he is. And he's been just as open and just as loathsome since LONG before the 2016 primaries began.
No. Trump is YOUR man. YOU choose him. YOU own him. Don't think for a second otherwise. Because the rest of us will not forget.
Also: "more evil than satan himself", "French military victories", and "Santorum".
BFD.
As you say, screwing with search results has been possible since forever; and was never limited just to Google either. All it takes is a number of like-minded pissed-off people, and you can turn a bigot into a frothy mixture of lube and fecal matter.
Most of the time, the malingering burnouts doing the delivering are too damn lazy to so much as ring the doorbell. Does Amazon *really* think these loafers are willing (and able) to learn to use this new system? Does Amazon really think that someone who's unwilling to delay their next bong hit the 10 seconds it takes to walk the extra few feet and push the doorbell button are going to wait an extra 45 seconds on top of that to deal with the garage door and the remote system? Does Amazon actually believe that I'd trust these clods alone in any part of my home at any time for any reason?
We've a Ring doorbell plus security cameras covering the porch & garage areas. So when a package is updated in the Amazon/USPS/UPS/FedEx/etc. systems as "delivered", I know 100% with zero doubt if it has, in fact, actually been delivered; or if they're lying through their teeth. Right about now, they're collectively running about 50/50. Hell, I try not to have stuff delivered at home at all unless I know someone will be in the house. So 90% of the time, if the driver could be arsed to expend that tiny bit of effort to push the damn button on the damn doorbell; there'd be a human being to hand the package off to 30 seconds later; no house or garage access or any integration with Amazon's systems necessary at all.
I would submit that there's a huge difference between enjoying a... spirited, shall we say... drive down Skyline's curves & hills on your leisure time; versus a daily trudge down 101 for work. The former, yes, I enjoy it greatly. The latter? If my commute included, in any capacity, the misery that is a peninsula commute on 101; I'd be pinching every penny to get myself into an autopilot-equipped Tesla.
You might try checking out the pricing of pickup trucks.
I had a quick look over at ford.com today. And unless you're settling for the most bare-bones Ranger (Which is already ridonklously overpriced at $25K.); you're spending quite a pretty penny. With the F-series, which the googles tell me is the best-selling pickup of the lot of them; a middle-of-the-pack setup will put you well into the pricing of a nicely equipped BMW 2, 3, or 4-series, mid-range Infinitis or Lexuses (Lexuii???), or a very nice 370Z. And a fully-equipped F-series? Try $95K. At that point, you're spending as much on your pickup truck as one would on a Model S 100D w/ autopilot, a nicely-equipped M-series, or even a low-end 911.
Oh, and that $25K Ranger? That is, as I said, only the most basic bare-bones model you can get. Equipped, the Ranger averages $35K and can hit $45K fully-loaded.
So I'm not, for a second, buying into the "not doing so hot economically since blue collar types got hammered in the last recession and never really recovered" line. People who aren't doing so hot economically aren't dropping $35K-$60K, and higher, on trucks so they can sit around (not working) at Superchargers to harass and threaten Tesla owners. Hell, I AM doing pretty well financially right now; and I'm still driving my $17.5K Mazda3, and the only way I see myself upgrading to *anything* else in the near-term is if the redesign includes a new Speed3 or if Subaru brings back the hatchback WRX.
Well, I had a quick look at ford.com. And their cheapest truck, the Ranger... which you used to be able to buy for $15K-$20K depending on options... now *starts* at $25K, bare-bones, and can push $50K equipped. So, right off, if you choose more wisely you're already in Civic Si and BRZ territory, and really close to an MX-5. Go up on the options list, and you could easily be in a 370Z instead. Fully-loaded, and you could be in a Type-R, a decent 2, 3, or 4-Series, or even a RWD Model 3.
And their more-popular F-series just gets worse from there. I was able to use Ford's configurator tool to spec an F-series, fully-equipped, at $94,965. That is not a joke. And that would put you into a nicely-specced M-Series, a midrange Model S, or a low-end 911. Hell, you're just *barely* short of GT-R money at those prices.
So... this whole blue-collar "working class hero" in opposition to those rich and arrogant "liberal technocrat elites" business? I'm not buying it for a second.
> think that electric vehicles pose a very real threat to
> the jobs
BFD. To use the buzzword... cloud computing posed a "very real threat" to traditional "rack 'em & stack 'em"-style IT & operations jobs. In fact, it basically killed them; unless you want to be a datacenter tech for Amazon or Google. But who cares? We all just learned our ways around AWS, GCP, and Terraform. Problem solved. Hell... I call it an improvement. I'd not realized, before updating my own skill set, how much Id grown to view mucking about with hardware to be the least-fulfilling and most-annoying part of the job.
It's not, after all, like Teslas never break down or malfunction. The skillset needed when the do is simply different; that's all. It's not like mechanics, and the like, can afford not to keep their skills up already. Working on a modern Mercedes turbo-diesel is a far different deal from keeping a '95 Civic on the road. Moving up to a Tesla is just the next step up or right on the skills tree.
Oh, that's just everyday annoyance. Try being a foot/MUNI commuter and getting trapped by critical mass, not once but twice... once while walking to my bus, and once on the bus when the biker assholes looped back.
That was the day I decided I'd never be a bike commuter. And every critical mass I've witnessed or experienced has reinforced that decision. They're a massive pack of raging assholes, and I have zero desire to ever join their ranks; or even to be mistaken for one of them. And yes, likewise, I hate cyclists as well.
If you check their support forums, people had been begging for a "dark mode" setting literally for most of a decade. Users requested it over and over and over, and even came up with hacky workarounds to approximate it. Evernote would occasionally post some "we take feature requests seriously" platitude. But they refused this most simple request. I'd actually given up for quite a while and was using Sublime Text to take notes. Unfortunately, there's no iPhone app for Sublime to sync to; and I found myself in need of multiple-device solution so I had to go back. Even after Apple themselves finally forced the issue by creating a system-wide dark mode; Evernote dragged their heels for months, continuing to blast that awful bright white rectangle in our faces. Why? Who the hell knows? Some asshat at EN just decided that their personal preference should trump those of their users; eyestrain be damned.
Plus, they refuse to fix even the most simple bugs. Lately, I've had to fight with the damn thing to keep my plain text notes (With code snippets that get borked by bullshit unicode garbage characters like "smart" quotes, emdashes, and ellipses.) in plain text mode. I'll frequently add to an old note and lo-and-behold; Evernote switches back to "rich" text and Helvetica and "smart" formatting; no matter how many times I try to kill all that crap. Bug reports and support requests? Ignored.
The stink of it is, for what it is, Evernote is still unfortunately the best solution... hell... the only decent solution, really. But as arrogant and unresponsive as the company is; they're a prime target for some startup to come and do it better. I, for one, will not likely weep a single tear when they fall to their own hubris.
> Example- we have RUNAWAY spending and a
> MASSIVE debt. A conservative would typically want
> to rework that existing system to reduce the debt
> and deficit. That obviously requires change.
Oh, that's rich. The only time in my own lifetime when the country had a balanced budget... hell, was running a surplus and paying down the debt even... it was under a liberal president. Then you conservatives took over and pissed away that surplus into a series of pointless multi-trillion dollar wars.
Cry me a goddamned river about debts and deficits. You like both as much as any "liberal" you attack. You just want to waste money on different things, that's all.
Obviously it's possible. Life and civilization existed before them. And no one would drop dead of apoplexy if they gave it up. But why should we? Yeah... I know it's the hip and trendy thing nowadays... even on Slashdot for some strange reason... to hate on technology, the fruits of the same, and those of us, people and companies, who make our living creating it. But frankly: to hell with that. Your newfound luddist pseudo-spirituality doesn't make you any better than those of us who enjoy our modern conveniences.
And that's what it is: convenient. Giving up my iPhone would not be the death of me. But it would sure be inconvenient. And it's not just being out of touch that would be a drag. Phone calls, and even texting, are a small portion of the use I get out of the thing. It's real value is in the various other things I used to own that the iPhone replaces. If I gave it up, I'd have to go back to owning (And carrying some combination of):
- An iPod (Does Apple actually even still make them?) for music on-the-go.
- A Kindle, for reading while commuting on MUNI
- A Switch or GBA for when I want something more interactive than a book.
- An alarm clock, which my iPhone has also replaces
- A sleep tracker. Yup, also on the iPhone now
- A GPS for the car
- A pager (Are these even still made?) for on-call duty.
- A WiFi hotspot, for when I have to respond to a page when I'm neither at the office or home.
- A camera
- A camcorder
- A garage door opener fob
- A city transit map
- A road atlas
- A city street map
- A kitchen timer
- A rolodex (Actually, I never owned one; but went straight to a Palm Pilot back in the day.)
- The aforementioned Palm Pilot (Oops. These don't exist anymore. So... rolodex.)
- Business cards
- All of the credit cards that I leave at home but use with ApplePay to maximize my points
- Remote control for my home lighting
- Remote control for my vacuum cleaner
- Remote control for my humidifier/aromatherapy
- And most mundane: a pen and notebook
And that's all just off the top of my head, without graphing the phone and going through my most-used apps. And why should I give up the convenience of a single device replacing all of the above? Because you've decided to adopt some pretentious "You're not really living if you don't unplug." ideology? Screw that. If you don't like them or want one; where's an idea: DON'T BUY ONE FOR YOURSELF. You do you. And stop trying to force your ideology on others who want no part of it.
And you're equally adept at completely missing points. The rest of us are under no obligation whatsoever to give up our modern conveniences just because you've picked up some pseudo-spiritual "back to basics" Luddism and are such a self-righteous pretentious git that you feel the need fo attack people who don't share your newfound "insight". If YOU don't like smartphones, don't have a smartphone, don't want a smartphone; lovely. You're under no obligation to buy one. You do you. But that in no way makes you better than those of us who do like our technological convenience. Stop trying to force your decision on others who want no part of it.
San Francisco never had a "street food" scene, the likes of which you'd find in Thailand, Vietnam, or the like, in the first place. We never even had Singapore-style hawker centers; though SOMA StrEATs and Spark Social may come close. We had the Tamale Lady, Virginia Ramos, who literally died. And she was in the process of opening an actual restaurant when she passed. So she'd no longer have counted as street food anyway. We have the bacon-wrapped hot dog vendors, who are far from dead; but can easily be found all over the place. We had the guys who'd roam parks and street fairs selling edibles. And legalized pot put many of them, and not a few other drug dealers, out of business even when it was just "medical" and not recreational.
And then there are the food trucks. While they literally drive to their locations on the street, they, in no way, resemble "street food". Plus, they're thriving too. They're very popular and all over town. And there're even apps to help you find your favorite truck.
It was actually just one guy. And he wasn't using his clothing to brake his descent. He was using it to stabilize his descent so that he would hit the water feet-first with his legs crossed. Also, if I recall correctly, Rama did not spin fast enough to produce a full Earth gravity at even the lowest level of the cylinder. And the plot point was that the jumper had crashed after flying down the zero-g axis of Rama to explore the top of an otherwise unscalable mesa (And, therefore, would be under even less initial acceleration owing to his hight.).
Perhaps not. But there is the old proverb about "the enemy of my enemy."
Bullocks.
Not taking the word of any rando on the internet as gospel fact without verification from a more legitimate source is damn near the first lesson one learns when getting on the internet for the first time. And that's been the case since the days of usenet, when it was mostly university and industry people who ostensibly should have been more reliable in their veracity than the general public. If, after the first week, you've not noticed that BS abounds, and you're not verifying or disregarding claims that don't pass the smell test and have no citation; the problem is with you; not whatever site you're browsing.
I've had plenty of "4G" devices... iPhones, my Apple Watch, a couple of WiFi hotspots and Android test phones for work, and even a Blackberry that I won in a drawing at a conference. Between them, I've seen the performance of all four mobile carriers' networks in the US. And not a one of them has actually met the promised data rates of, as per Wikipedia and ITU Report M.2134-0:
100 megabits per second (Mbit/s)(=12.5 megabytes per second) for high mobility communication (such as from trains and cars) and 1 gigabit per second (Gbit/s) for low mobility communication (such as pedestrians and stationary users).
Since they all lied about providing "4G" in the first place, but still used it in their marketing to jack up their pricing; I'm not particularly confident that the carriers will bother to actually roll out the 20GB capacity that's mandated for 5G. But I'm pretty sure they'll lie again, and use the 5G name to raise prices... again.
Yeah, I know it's laughable with this administration. But I, for one, think that the carriers should be forced... through severe sanctions and crippling fines topped off with a revocation of their licenses if they still fail to comply with the spec... to fix their 4G networks to deliver those promised rates, before they're allowed to jump into the "5G" game. (And needless to say, they should be severely sanctioned again if they fail to meet the 5G spec once they start selling the service and devices.)
Again... I know... pipe dreams, and all that. But one can still *HOPE* for the telecoms corps to be held accountable for their malfeasance.
Drug dealers are not, by preference, killers. They're business owners. And they don't want corpses. They want repeat customers. And you can't go back for more if you're dead from an overdose.
Well... The only reason that humans are cheap and dispensable is that the productions costs are externalized. Companies don't have to worry about them at all for the first 18-26 years. According to Nerdwallet, that's a cost savings of $260K-$745K per-unit, depending on the desired capabilities. And even after the Human Resources are acquired, they still attend to the bulk of their own maintenance and energy requirements.
Take that externalization away though; and force companies to pay the true per-unit cost... say, by taxing them to support the UBI proposals being tossed around... and the equations change quite a bit. $0.25-0.75 million buys you a fair amount of robot, you know; especially when the acquisition time is significantly less. 18-26 years is a *LONG* time to wait for a CapEx purchase to be received, and can lead to the loss of significant business opportunities; particularly the way shareholders want to see so much growth quarter-to-quarter these days. And as an extra cherry on top; they can open Soylent factories to actually make additional profit from the surplus Human Resource units.
Well, on the plus side, now my uncle will know it will only take another 817 years for Fiat to fix the smoking and randomly-stalling engine and rusted-out floorboards in his X19.
There's no conspiracy theorizing about it; just recollection of past observed behavior on the part of the single most malignant and malfeasant actor in all of tech, and extrapolating said pattern of behavior to predict future actions.
Or perhaps you've forgotten their actions wrt/ Hotmail, Kerberos, Bungie, VirtualPC, Java, ActiveX, Office file format interoperability, Java, and so on; or the Halloween documents, or "Windows isn't done until Lotus doesn't run", or their "open source is a cancer" ideology?
But that's okay. Most of the rest of us haven't forgotten.
Nice quote from your nice little right wing rag. Too bad you didn't include the meat of the article further down, which was advocating turning over the forests to logging companies. Though I guess it is true that you can't have forest fires without forests. And then there's this nice little tidbit:
Being a sack of shit trumpian shill work out well for you?
Setting aside the ethical quagmire you descend into when you take on that work... especially under the current administration... it's just in every way awful all-around.
I worked for a government contractor my first job out of college. Yah, I was young and dumb and had student loans that were going to need to be repaid. And no. Just... no. I'm never going to make that mistake again... not for 45, not for his successor, not for Obama if they were to amend the constitution so he could run again, not for Kennedy or Lincoln if they could raise the dead. It's just awful in every conceivable way.
The culture is toxic. You're a tiny cog in a gigantic machine without any way for your own contributions to be meaningful. It's cubes as far as the eye can see in warehouse-sized buildings. The technology, both hardware and software, is older-than-dirt and will serve you nowhere in any other job. It's super-political. And I don't mean R vs D. I mean every single little person who attains the slightest bit of power is king of his little hill and will require tribute if you need access to any resource in their domain, productivity be damned. It's like those old adventure games where you might be tasked with saving the kingdom, world, or galaxy. But every... single... NPC... wants you to do stupid shit before they'll aid you in the smallest way. Tasked with going to person A to get item X? Before A will give you access to X, he will require you to goto person B to get item Y. B will require you to get Z from C before giving you Y. And C will make you go out and grind, killing orcs or boars or womprats or something similarly stupid and pick up 100 item drops before giving you Z. And a task that should take no more than a day winds up taking up two weeks. (That two weeks, by the way, is BEFORE administrative overhead. Expect to do about a page and a half of paperwork for every line of code.) And there'd better actually be a god to help you if you need to deal with procurement to get something from a vendor.
And all of the even remotely interesting work is reserved for people with security clearances. These force you to submit to being investigated and treated like a criminal before-the-fact. And they take anywhere between 6-18 months to attain, depending on how backed-up the government is, and how hard your employer is inclined to push for you. And until then, you're stuck doing boring scut-work that builds neither your skill set nor your resume.
That's government work. And I don't blame a single Google engineer, or anyone else, for wanting no part of it; both from a work environment AND a "don't be evil" (Remember that? Remember how /. used to admire and celebrate that sentiment?) standpoint.