The one exception to this union employees, since their contracts are usually tied to minimum wage.
Usually in real life? Or usually in what you post?
It would be pretty funny if the government passed two minimum wages. Say one for regularly scheduled work during regular working hours, and a different one for jerk-around shift work. Go, unions, go.
Even with a PhD in economics, it's hard to sort out the wins from the losses concerning minimum wage—at least not without first applying a clarifying, buttery lens of ideology.
Every economic scheme redraws the map of winners and losers, both in the short term during the adjustment period, and in the long term in the equilibrium condition. Your analysis of the winners and losers strikes me as being about as reliable as a Magic Eight Ball. It's a Potemkin village of a model of a simplification.
With some actual lumber, you could also have pointed out that many contractual elements of society make a sharp distinction between "employed" and "not employed", neither of which is an entirely appropriate term when you're making $3/hour.
All of their workers are full-time, and never arrive late or are absent because of family problems; moreover, if they don't like the pay of 25 cents an hour and refuse to work, they are locked up in isolation cells.
Employed, or not employed? Are they counted in the jobs statistics, or not counted in the jobs statistics?
Maybe we should split the difference and settle on a minimum wage at which your economic relationship counts as having a real job. Then we could have the jobless rate as one statistic (including everyone stuck in a McJob), and the McJobless rate counting only those who don't even have a proper McJob (the truly unemployed, as well as the private prison workforce compensated in derisive glass beads).
I, for one, would dearly enjoy hearing some politician explain how the jobless rate went up by 5%, while the McJobless rate when down by 10% in the same reporting period. For the third consecutive time.
Sure, pay the underclass like shit. We don't need no stinking minimum wage. But integrate it into the political discourse until the facts of life in upwardly mobile America are discussed regularly on Fox News in all their naked glory.
Three displays: a 22" in landscape (fits my desk better), and a pair of 24" displays in portrait.
I'm running PC-BSD on my desktop, so my hardware choices are conservative.
Lately the 8 GB limit of my aging desktop box (though extremely quiet and reliable) is proving problematic, so I'm in the process of flipping my ZFS server box (Sandy Bridge Xeon with 32 GB ECC) to become my new desktop. The server itself will downgrade slightly to a second-hand box I picked up recently, a quad core Xeon with 24 GB of ECC.
I expect to use DTrace fairly heavily under Bhyve once 11 comes out, and I've heard rumours that this is only 99.99% stable, so I don't intend to use my server for this purpose, and only one of my two Xeons has the nested page table extensions required by Bhyve, so the fancier machine becomes my new desktop per force, not that my greedy side is complaining much.
Now that I've suffered through the PC-BSD / TrueOS transition all around (not painful, but not exactly free either) you'll pry boot environments out of my cold, dead hands.
But the simplest summary is this: wide + tall + tall + ZFS + boot environments.
My desktop is running a ZFS mirror with two 500 GB drives (both with five years power-on time) and just a couple of weeks ago ZFS started to autocorrect a block or two from one of the drives on each scrub. Nothing shows up in Smartmon, except the age.
No sudden rush to finish this transition project. I've got backups, and early warning, and verified live data.
Agreed. But sadly a lot of coders think comments are for sissies, so given that I'd sooner have to read their uncomment mess in python than perl.
Every language debate on Slashdot eventually winds up here.
Some programmers hate their peers. These programmers choose languages that are good for hating your peers (Java, Python).
Some programmers admire their peers. These people write "in my shop we've been using C++ for a decade now, and while it's far from a perfect language, we've never really had a problem with it".
Thesis: Many of the people who hate their peers suck as teachers.
True? False? Hard to say.
Personally, I know that I like my peers a lot more when I unselfishly contribute to their growth as programmers. But, hey, suit yourself. Sit in the corner all alone reading 50 lines of pablum, where 10 lines of well judged code would have done the job instead, without even lapsing into arcane idiom.
If I embraced this standard of discourse, I'd probably agree with you.
But I don't. Your post is indistinguishable from FUD. That's a serious problem, regardless of the validity of your argument. Nothing is ever that pure. Not even pessimism or despair.
STV is not the only want to fix the system. Just about any type of ranked/preferential voting would be 1,000 times better than what we use now.
Yes, first-past-the-post is the worst form of voting, including all the others (modulo coercion).
But really, you can't fix the electoral process without also fixing how legislation is tabled (death to the omnibus bill), otherwise a truly representative congress becomes gridlocked on process.
Second, the greenhouse gases alluded to are real but are mostly the result of volcanoes, hurricanes and underwater geologic displacements.
That's not how we normally talk about drilling for oil, but I take his point. Most of the recently emancipated geocarbon comes from ancient sea beds, as all solvent petroleum engineers know.
The 135 billion tonnes of liberated petroleum since the beginning of the industrial revolution (to name just one figure out there), where did it go? To properly conceal a giant object roughly 5 km cubed, I figure you'd need a magician's white hanky 15 km to a side.
That's either a small city, or a very large sleeve.
Conservation of substance: I think we're supposed to begin grasping this concept around the age of three, in the normally developed.
The whole problem with modern physics is that we think these are physical problems.
Physics had a run (for about thirty years) where it was so spectacularly successful in the merger of theory with experiment (in the realm of elucidating the sub-atomic zoo) that we forget all about the surrounding social contract.
Just like shrinking the silicon transistor, it was always apparent that the good times would ultimately hit an economic limit, if not an actual physical limit. The value of a new CERN times ten is vanishingly small compared to a new LIGO times anything. I say this even in off chance that CERN discovers new physics.
The social contract that enabled us to fund CERN was the old falsifiability construct. You really knew whether the emperor was wearing clothes.
Not so with the multiverse. It may be that physics needs an infusion of new philosophy, having so spectacularly squeezed out the QED/QCD motherlode (at viable economic scale).
But society can no longer tell whether the multiverse emperor is wearing any clothes, so greater society needs to get out of the funding game.
By all means, continue supplying Sheldon with a blackboard and chalk, if he insists on delving into the multiverse perspective. But no billion dollar toys.
Falsifiability = publicly funded billion dollar toys
No falsifiability = living in your mother's basement eating ramen noodles, with the exiting possibility of cracking the code and earning eternal glory
Falsifiability is as much about the social contract as it ever was about physics.
OK, if not, then explain to me why there are three generations of leptons, not two or four or some other number.
Even if you got a (somewhat) good answer to this, your notion that this is a killer question (from a killer lineage without end) is idiocy on steroids. I can't think of a nicer way to put that.
Dude, you're on a collision course with "42".
By the time you stop yapping over the existence of constant values in the physical theory of the universe, you'll be in proud possession of an explanation so dense it explains nothing.
Let me see if I can't put your idiocy on a proper philosophical footing.
Why is the universe empirical?
I think I nailed it. Good luck with that one, you're going to need it.
Just resting: APL In my sleep: C/C++, template metaprogramming Intermediate: R Passable: Perl, Python, shell Long past: BASIC At least once: Java, Pascal, OpenCL, Lua, VHDL, Snobol, Prolog, Forth, Lisp, TeX Thoroughly evaluated: JavaScript
A few months back I looked at that list and decided I needed to add some tools more concurrency oriented, and something from the functional camp.
Learning rapidly: Elixir/Erlang/ELM, Go
My strategy in learning a language is to consume as much material as possible from the language designers, from during the language's actual design process.
YouTube makes my learning style ten times less difficult to arrange than it used to be. I keep a personal wiki, and I'm an extraordinarily efficient note-taker, so I care very little precisely what sticks in the first pass, so long as I manage to identify the language's motivating ideals and community norms.
As someone with a clearance, one thing that gets drilled into your head through constant reminders is that carelessness with classified material is NOT an excuse. That if you accidentally leak classified information through simple negligence, you are as guilty as someone who does it intentionally.
You need to study your propaganda manual, because the use here of "as guilty as" crowds several elephants into the room, unless you really believe that stating "I did it deliberately" during trial (imp of the perverse as inflamed by invisible elephants) would have zero bearing on A) the outcome of your trial; B) your reputation either professionally or privately; C) the size of the internal investigation to replicate and review your every keystroke.
Or perhaps you just paraphrased from the official version which reads "your goose is as cooked as" along with a tiny footnote "sucks to be you, in the common case where you just made one tiny mistake dealing with a relentless compliance burden".
Trust your propaganda manual.
Anything with elephants inside repeated this often reeks of a double standard upwind, from 50 meters.
When a story embeds the same link three times in a row (once in the mast, then twice in the article text) pretty please with sugar on top display the redundant links with "[register.com]" following the link, just like it does in my configured article view.
Or, clever idea, you could display "[repeat link]" in each case where a link is repeated.
If you're feeling extra ambitious—but you don't wish to interrupt your feverish efforts to deliver proper Unicode support one minute more than absolutely necessary—you might choose, in the short term, to combine both solutions as [repeat link; most probably The Register again]".
The problem of inference is that the information in hand is usually not enough, whether or not you succeed in determining it's accuracy, considered in isolation.
The gap between a smattering of accurate information and assembling an accurate world view is a real doozy.
You can't assess the representativeness of your "smattering" without also considering your sources and the net they weave.
The mindlessness of this technology is it's number one selling point.
As rumour goes around (you're soaking in it), dutiful employees will onboard yet another reason to paint within arbitrary and demeaning corporate lines like good passionless drones (have I flunked the test?)
At the conclusion of the conference, a tribute to Comrade Stalin was called for. Of course, everyone stood up (just as everyone had leaped to his feet during the conference at every mention of his name).... For three minutes, four minutes, five minutes, the stormy applause, rising to an ovation, continued. But palms were getting sore and raised arms were already aching. And the older people were panting from exhaustion. It was becoming insufferably silly even to those who really adored Stalin.
However, who would dare to be the first to stop?... After all, NKVD men were standing in the hall applauding and watching to see who would quit first! And in the obscure, small hall, unknown to the leader, the applause went on — six, seven, eight minutes! They were done for! Their goose was cooked! They couldn't stop now till they collapsed with heart attacks! At the rear of the hall, which was crowded, they could of course cheat a bit, clap less frequently, less vigorously, not so eagerly — but up there with the presidium where everyone could see them?
The director of the local paper factory, an independent and strong-minded man, stood with the presidium. Aware of all the falsity and all the impossibility of the situation, he still kept on applauding! Nine minutes! Ten! In anguish he watched the secretary of the District Party Committee, but the latter dared not stop. Insanity! To the last man! With make-believe enthusiasm on their faces, looking at each other with faint hope, the district leaders were just going to go on and on applauding till they fell where they stood, till they were carried out of the hall on stretchers! And even then those who were left would not falter...
Then, after eleven minutes, the director of the paper factory assumed a businesslike expression and sat down in his seat. And, oh, a miracle took place! Where had the universal, uninhibited, indescribable enthusiasm gone? To a man, everyone else stopped dead and sat down. They had been saved!
The squirrel had been smart enough to jump off his revolving wheel. That, however, was how they discovered who the independent people were. And that was how they went about eliminating them. That same night the factory director was arrested. They easily pasted ten years on him on the pretext of something quite different. But after he had signed Form 206, the final document of the interrogation, his interrogator reminded him:
This is the first time since the beginning of time that I've come back to a thread a second time, more than a day later.
And, so far as I'm concerned, Star Trek Continues is the true heir of TOS. Excellent scripts, better acting than you'll find in the reboots. They just work so damned well, and it's unfortunate it looks like that kind of project is dead in the water now.
STC was the only one I've become invested in, and it's the main reason I'm burned up about the new "guidelines".
On this week's episode of Engage: The Official Star Trek Podcast, Jordan Hoffman welcomes John Van Citters of CBS, a lifelong Star Trek fan, to give some much needed context on the recently released Star Trek fan film guidelines issued by CBS and Paramount Pictures.
Unfortunately, this is an in-house affair, with both the host and the guest hewing to the official CBS / Paramount story line. Van Citters seems like a nice enough guy, but then the length restriction comes up, and I wanted to put a brick through my monitor.
48m40
I've heard from a lot of people and seen a lot of chatter online in recent days about the length guideline and people feeling that that is untenable and that they can't tell a Star Trek story in fifteen minutes or thirty minutes.
I think that's a bit insulting to Star Trek and to the creativity of the fans I've met and to some of the fan filmmakers I've met.
The idea that Star Trek is capable of only telling one type or length of story that that is kind of ludicrous. There are dozens of winners of the Strange New Worlds competition who would disagree...
Certainly, a creative person can compose shorter works. For example, Tolstoy composed a novella by the title (in English) The Death of Ivan Ilyich. This was later adapted by Akira Kurosawa as the movie Ikiru, with a a running time of 143 minutes. Oops, perhaps that was a bad example.
Let's try again.
Nobody ever accused Mozart of not being able to compose a Divertimento. Turns out he actually composed 17 numbered Divertimenti, but the performance times seem to range around the hour mark for the ones with their own Wikipedia pages. Oops, perhaps that's another bad example.
I could go on, but I think that's enough.
What made the original Star Trek captivating for me back when I was ten years old was that the stories involved having an actual attention span. No fanfic production will recapture my childhood with a crappy fifteen minute performance length.
I saw "Ikiru" first in 1960 or 1961. I went to the movie because it was playing in a campus film series and only cost a quarter. I sat enveloped in the story of Watanabe for 2 1/2 hours, and wrote about it in a class where the essay topic was Socrates' statement, "the unexamined life is not worth living."' Over the years I have seen "Ikiru" every five years or so, and each time it has moved me, and made me think. And the older I get, the less Watanabe seems like a pathetic old man, and the more he seems like every one of us.
Did Kurosawa make it too long? You be the judge. I personally don't think you're going to pack a whole lot of "examined life" into fifteen minutes unless you're fricking Tolstoy.
I'm trying to figure out why that entire interview pussyfoots around the subject matter (I could only handle the first 50 minutes on my first pass). I started to wonder if the real problem with STC is that damn redhead, Elise McKennah, played by Michele Specht. At first I didn't like the character (or character idea), but her spunk eventually grew on me.
At some point, some enlightened civilization of the future will have a culture that accepts that men and women are different, and that's perfectly okay and not due to any sort of nefarious mythical patriarchy.
Only if you think, for reasons unjustified by biology, that homophobia has no evolutionary basis.
In all likelihood, both homosexuality and homophobia have an evolutionary basis (neither amenable to the reductive-analysis puppet show that many people think evolution ought to obey).
Even if we manage—collectively—to evict the puppet show from our notions of patriarchy, gender attitudes and abilities will remain hopelessly tangled, in much the same way that homosexuality and homophobia are not likely to shake hands any time soon (even when both are present in the same individual).
As for "nefarious", the Catholic Church has proven to be an extraordinarily durable institution, and no stranger to power, either. With two thousand years of patriarchal precedent tilting the cultural landscape (covering pretty much the whole of Europe and South America), ye olde puppet show will be with us for a long while yet.
The fan production must be less than 15 minutes for a single self-contained story, or no more than 2 segments, episodes or parts, not to exceed 30 minutes total, with no additional seasons, episodes, parts, sequels or remakes.
Good grief. This is a geek genre, for people with honest-to-god attention spans. Fifteen minutes is not a bad length of time to reach the opening credits.
Slashdot Mirror
Usually in real life? Or usually in what you post?
It would be pretty funny if the government passed two minimum wages. Say one for regularly scheduled work during regular working hours, and a different one for jerk-around shift work. Go, unions, go.
Even with a PhD in economics, it's hard to sort out the wins from the losses concerning minimum wage—at least not without first applying a clarifying, buttery lens of ideology.
Every economic scheme redraws the map of winners and losers, both in the short term during the adjustment period, and in the long term in the equilibrium condition. Your analysis of the winners and losers strikes me as being about as reliable as a Magic Eight Ball. It's a Potemkin village of a model of a simplification.
With some actual lumber, you could also have pointed out that many contractual elements of society make a sharp distinction between "employed" and "not employed", neither of which is an entirely appropriate term when you're making $3/hour.
The Prison Industry in the United States: Big Business or a New Form of Slavery?
Employed, or not employed? Are they counted in the jobs statistics, or not counted in the jobs statistics?
Maybe we should split the difference and settle on a minimum wage at which your economic relationship counts as having a real job. Then we could have the jobless rate as one statistic (including everyone stuck in a McJob), and the McJobless rate counting only those who don't even have a proper McJob (the truly unemployed, as well as the private prison workforce compensated in derisive glass beads).
I, for one, would dearly enjoy hearing some politician explain how the jobless rate went up by 5%, while the McJobless rate when down by 10% in the same reporting period. For the third consecutive time.
Sure, pay the underclass like shit. We don't need no stinking minimum wage. But integrate it into the political discourse until the facts of life in upwardly mobile America are discussed regularly on Fox News in all their naked glory.
ChemChina to buy Syngenta in $43 billion deal, from February 2016.
Haven't heard of ChemChina?
Says more about you than ChemChina.
Haven't heard of Syngenta?
Says more about you than Syngenta.
Bet you have heard of Monsanto, which tried to buy Syngenta twice in 2015.
Says more about your paranoid, eco-aunt than it says about you.
Three displays: a 22" in landscape (fits my desk better), and a pair of 24" displays in portrait.
I'm running PC-BSD on my desktop, so my hardware choices are conservative.
Lately the 8 GB limit of my aging desktop box (though extremely quiet and reliable) is proving problematic, so I'm in the process of flipping my ZFS server box (Sandy Bridge Xeon with 32 GB ECC) to become my new desktop. The server itself will downgrade slightly to a second-hand box I picked up recently, a quad core Xeon with 24 GB of ECC.
I expect to use DTrace fairly heavily under Bhyve once 11 comes out, and I've heard rumours that this is only 99.99% stable, so I don't intend to use my server for this purpose, and only one of my two Xeons has the nested page table extensions required by Bhyve, so the fancier machine becomes my new desktop per force, not that my greedy side is complaining much.
Now that I've suffered through the PC-BSD / TrueOS transition all around (not painful, but not exactly free either) you'll pry boot environments out of my cold, dead hands.
But the simplest summary is this: wide + tall + tall + ZFS + boot environments.
My desktop is running a ZFS mirror with two 500 GB drives (both with five years power-on time) and just a couple of weeks ago ZFS started to autocorrect a block or two from one of the drives on each scrub. Nothing shows up in Smartmon, except the age.
No sudden rush to finish this transition project. I've got backups, and early warning, and verified live data.
Every language debate on Slashdot eventually winds up here.
Some programmers hate their peers. These programmers choose languages that are good for hating your peers (Java, Python).
Some programmers admire their peers. These people write "in my shop we've been using C++ for a decade now, and while it's far from a perfect language, we've never really had a problem with it".
Thesis: Many of the people who hate their peers suck as teachers.
True? False? Hard to say.
Personally, I know that I like my peers a lot more when I unselfishly contribute to their growth as programmers. But, hey, suit yourself. Sit in the corner all alone reading 50 lines of pablum, where 10 lines of well judged code would have done the job instead, without even lapsing into arcane idiom.
My personal hell is paved with pablum.
If I embraced this standard of discourse, I'd probably agree with you.
But I don't. Your post is indistinguishable from FUD. That's a serious problem, regardless of the validity of your argument. Nothing is ever that pure. Not even pessimism or despair.
Recursive oxymoron alert alert.
Yes, first-past-the-post is the worst form of voting, including all the others (modulo coercion).
But really, you can't fix the electoral process without also fixing how legislation is tabled (death to the omnibus bill), otherwise a truly representative congress becomes gridlocked on process.
Dear Newt: the sick and the tired need to get out of government.
Please hand over the matches and head for the nearest exit, and don't get cranky if security decides to perform a strip search.
Just a question. What's Arabic for "glasnost?"
That's not how we normally talk about drilling for oil, but I take his point. Most of the recently emancipated geocarbon comes from ancient sea beds, as all solvent petroleum engineers know.
The 135 billion tonnes of liberated petroleum since the beginning of the industrial revolution (to name just one figure out there), where did it go? To properly conceal a giant object roughly 5 km cubed, I figure you'd need a magician's white hanky 15 km to a side.
That's either a small city, or a very large sleeve.
Conservation of substance: I think we're supposed to begin grasping this concept around the age of three, in the normally developed.
That would be the story submission, instantaneously discredited by the Slashdot effect, in vitro. Wish that happened more often.
What a buffoonish POV shill to stick in there.
The whole problem with modern physics is that we think these are physical problems.
Physics had a run (for about thirty years) where it was so spectacularly successful in the merger of theory with experiment (in the realm of elucidating the sub-atomic zoo) that we forget all about the surrounding social contract.
Just like shrinking the silicon transistor, it was always apparent that the good times would ultimately hit an economic limit, if not an actual physical limit. The value of a new CERN times ten is vanishingly small compared to a new LIGO times anything. I say this even in off chance that CERN discovers new physics.
The social contract that enabled us to fund CERN was the old falsifiability construct. You really knew whether the emperor was wearing clothes.
Not so with the multiverse. It may be that physics needs an infusion of new philosophy, having so spectacularly squeezed out the QED/QCD motherlode (at viable economic scale).
But society can no longer tell whether the multiverse emperor is wearing any clothes, so greater society needs to get out of the funding game.
By all means, continue supplying Sheldon with a blackboard and chalk, if he insists on delving into the multiverse perspective. But no billion dollar toys.
Falsifiability = publicly funded billion dollar toys
No falsifiability = living in your mother's basement eating ramen noodles, with the exiting possibility of cracking the code and earning eternal glory
Falsifiability is as much about the social contract as it ever was about physics.
Even if you got a (somewhat) good answer to this, your notion that this is a killer question (from a killer lineage without end) is idiocy on steroids. I can't think of a nicer way to put that.
Dude, you're on a collision course with "42".
By the time you stop yapping over the existence of constant values in the physical theory of the universe, you'll be in proud possession of an explanation so dense it explains nothing.
Let me see if I can't put your idiocy on a proper philosophical footing.
Why is the universe empirical?
I think I nailed it. Good luck with that one, you're going to need it.
Just resting: APL
In my sleep: C/C++, template metaprogramming
Intermediate: R
Passable: Perl, Python, shell
Long past: BASIC
At least once: Java, Pascal, OpenCL, Lua, VHDL, Snobol, Prolog, Forth, Lisp, TeX
Thoroughly evaluated: JavaScript
A few months back I looked at that list and decided I needed to add some tools more concurrency oriented, and something from the functional camp.
Learning rapidly: Elixir/Erlang/ELM, Go
My strategy in learning a language is to consume as much material as possible from the language designers, from during the language's actual design process.
YouTube makes my learning style ten times less difficult to arrange than it used to be. I keep a personal wiki, and I'm an extraordinarily efficient note-taker, so I care very little precisely what sticks in the first pass, so long as I manage to identify the language's motivating ideals and community norms.
Start your day with a new punctuation mark: the scare possessive—twice as tight and idiosyncratic and unreasonable as the regular possessive.
Amazon Wants People to Pay for Podcasts
The Onion called. They want their headline back.
No charges will be laid if returned within 48 hours.
You need to study your propaganda manual, because the use here of "as guilty as" crowds several elephants into the room, unless you really believe that stating "I did it deliberately" during trial (imp of the perverse as inflamed by invisible elephants) would have zero bearing on A) the outcome of your trial; B) your reputation either professionally or privately; C) the size of the internal investigation to replicate and review your every keystroke.
Or perhaps you just paraphrased from the official version which reads "your goose is as cooked as" along with a tiny footnote "sucks to be you, in the common case where you just made one tiny mistake dealing with a relentless compliance burden".
Trust your propaganda manual.
Anything with elephants inside repeated this often reeks of a double standard upwind, from 50 meters.
When a story embeds the same link three times in a row (once in the mast, then twice in the article text) pretty please with sugar on top display the redundant links with "[register.com]" following the link, just like it does in my configured article view.
Or, clever idea, you could display "[repeat link]" in each case where a link is repeated.
If you're feeling extra ambitious—but you don't wish to interrupt your feverish efforts to deliver proper Unicode support one minute more than absolutely necessary—you might choose, in the short term, to combine both solutions as [repeat link; most probably The Register again]".
If this constitutes "news for nerds", I can't even comprehend what an active embrace of ignorance would look like.
The problem of inference is that the information in hand is usually not enough, whether or not you succeed in determining it's accuracy, considered in isolation.
The gap between a smattering of accurate information and assembling an accurate world view is a real doozy.
You can't assess the representativeness of your "smattering" without also considering your sources and the net they weave.
No intelligence here.
The mindlessness of this technology is it's number one selling point.
As rumour goes around (you're soaking in it), dutiful employees will onboard yet another reason to paint within arbitrary and demeaning corporate lines like good passionless drones (have I flunked the test?)
Here is a rather chilling passage from The Gulag Archipelago by Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn.
This is the first time since the beginning of time that I've come back to a thread a second time, more than a day later.
STC was the only one I've become invested in, and it's the main reason I'm burned up about the new "guidelines".
Unfortunately, this is an in-house affair, with both the host and the guest hewing to the official CBS / Paramount story line. Van Citters seems like a nice enough guy, but then the length restriction comes up, and I wanted to put a brick through my monitor.
48m40
Certainly, a creative person can compose shorter works. For example, Tolstoy composed a novella by the title (in English) The Death of Ivan Ilyich. This was later adapted by Akira Kurosawa as the movie Ikiru, with a a running time of 143 minutes. Oops, perhaps that was a bad example.
Let's try again.
Nobody ever accused Mozart of not being able to compose a Divertimento. Turns out he actually composed 17 numbered Divertimenti, but the performance times seem to range around the hour mark for the ones with their own Wikipedia pages. Oops, perhaps that's another bad example.
I could go on, but I think that's enough.
What made the original Star Trek captivating for me back when I was ten years old was that the stories involved having an actual attention span. No fanfic production will recapture my childhood with a crappy fifteen minute performance length.
Roger Ebert:
Did Kurosawa make it too long? You be the judge. I personally don't think you're going to pack a whole lot of "examined life" into fifteen minutes unless you're fricking Tolstoy.
I'm trying to figure out why that entire interview pussyfoots around the subject matter (I could only handle the first 50 minutes on my first pass). I started to wonder if the real problem with STC is that damn redhead, Elise McKennah, played by Michele Specht. At first I didn't like the character (or character idea), but her spunk eventually grew on me.
The thing
Only if you think, for reasons unjustified by biology, that homophobia has no evolutionary basis.
In all likelihood, both homosexuality and homophobia have an evolutionary basis (neither amenable to the reductive-analysis puppet show that many people think evolution ought to obey).
Even if we manage—collectively—to evict the puppet show from our notions of patriarchy, gender attitudes and abilities will remain hopelessly tangled, in much the same way that homosexuality and homophobia are not likely to shake hands any time soon (even when both are present in the same individual).
As for "nefarious", the Catholic Church has proven to be an extraordinarily durable institution, and no stranger to power, either. With two thousand years of patriarchal precedent tilting the cultural landscape (covering pretty much the whole of Europe and South America), ye olde puppet show will be with us for a long while yet.
Good grief. This is a geek genre, for people with honest-to-god attention spans. Fifteen minutes is not a bad length of time to reach the opening credits.
Paramount Pictures can FOAD.
We're not even talking Idaho.
How many LTE towers does it take to cover a McMansion suburb?
Only one, if you use Texas-sized radio waves. (Bandwidth may suffer in your area.)
When Snowden finally gets his fair trial (ha ha ha ha ha ha), the first witness called by the defense will be one Doctor Puffystein.